March, 29 2016, 02:30pm EDT
Senate's Obstruction Could Cost Taxpayers, Litigants
Today's Deadlock In Friedrichs v. California Teachers Assn. Is a Sign of What's to Come
WASHINGTON
Statement by Stephen Spaulding, Common Cause Legal Director and Senior Policy Counsel
Today's Supreme Court deadlock in Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association demonstrates how the obstructionist tactics of Sen. McConnell and his allies risk wasting time and money for litigants and taxpayers for the next year, and perhaps longer. We are almost certain to see more such 4-4 splits unless the Senate does its job on the nomination of Judge Merrick Garland. This is the second 4-4 split decision in the past seven days.
With 4-4 split decisions, the issues involved often will be left in legal limbo and may have to be re-litigated in the lower courts with new plaintiffs and defendants before returning to the Supreme Court - perhaps years from now.
Litigation is expensive in addition to being time-consuming. According to Sen. McConnell, the Senate will not even consider a replacement for Justice Scalia until after January 2017, which would risk additional 4-4 split decisions for nearly two full Supreme Court terms.
At SenateDoYourJob.org, the Garland-Kennedy Countdown Clock is ticking away, tracking the 84 days between when Republican President Ronald Reagan nominated Justice Kennedy to the court and a Democratic majority in the Senate confirmed him, 97-0. With 70 days to go, the pressure is mounting, especially for senators who face election this year; public opinion surveys consistently show a growing number of voters are appalled by the obstructionist tactics of Majority Leader McConnell.
It has been almost two weeks since the President did his job by nominating Judge Garland; two weeks wasted while Sen. McConnell plays politics with the Constitution and our nation's highest court.
Common Cause is a nonpartisan, grassroots organization dedicated to upholding the core values of American democracy. We work to create open, honest, and accountable government that serves the public interest; promote equal rights, opportunity, and representation for all; and empower all people to make their voices heard in the political process.
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Top Progressives Urge DNC to Reject Super PACs, Uplift Working-Class Base
Congressional Progressive Caucus leaders are pressing the Democratic Party to offer "a clear alternative and inclusive vision for how we will make life better for the 90% who are struggling in this economy."
Dec 10, 2024
In the wake of U.S. federal elections resulting in Republican control of the White House and both chambers of Congress—in no small part due to Democrats' failure to win working-class votes—leading congressional progressives are pushing a plan to rebuild the Democratic Party by rejecting corporate cash and uplifting low- and middle-income Americans.
In a memo first shared with Punchbowl News, outgoing Congressional Progressive Caucus Chair Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), incoming Chair Greg Casar (D-Texas), and CPC members Rep. Maxwell Frost (D-Fla.) and Rep. Chris Deluzio (D-Pa.) urge the Democratic National Committee (DNC) to "rebuild our party from the ground up."
The lawmakers call on DNC leadership to "create an authentic Democratic brand that offers a clear alternative and inclusive vision for how we will make life better for the 90% who are struggling in this economy, take on the biggest corporations and wealthiest individuals who have rigged the system," and expose GOP President-elect Donald Trump's "corporate favoritism" to "create a clear contrast with Republicans."
Jayapal outlined what she called "four core principles" for the next DNC chair, who hasn't yet been elected:
- Reform, restructure, and rebrand the Democratic Party from the ground up and commit to a 50-state strategy that builds power through state parties;
- Embrace grassroots donors and reject special interest and dark money, including by reinstating the DNC's 2008 ban on corporate political action committee donations, and pushing to prohibit super PAC spending in state primaries;
- Rebuild Democrats' multiracial, working-class base by uplifting poor, low-, and middle-income voices and concerns; and
- Highlight recent electoral successes while working to build broad coalitions to win elections.
The progressives' memo urges the DNC to "invest in showing our commitment to real populism versus Trump's faux populism
through lifting up working-class voices and issue-based campaigns that take on corporate concentration and monopoly power at the expense of working people."
The principles enumerated in the memo resonated beyond the CPC. Responding to the proposed agenda in a social media post, U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) concurred: "The next DNC chair should absolutely refuse to take corporate PAC money. If we are the party of the working class—and we are—then let's raise $ like we mean it."
Casar, who before running for elected office worked as policy director for the Workers Defense Project—whose victories included rest and water breaks for outdoor laborers, anti-wage theft legislation, and living wage requirements—has repeatedly stressed the imperative "to re-emphasize core economic issues" that matter most to American workers.
"The core of the Republican Party is about helping Wall Street and billionaires. And I think we have to call out the game," Casar said last week during an interview with NBC News.
"The Democratic Party, at its best, can hold people or can have inside of its tent people across geography, across race, and across ideology," he added. "Because we're all in the same boat when it comes to making sure that you can retire with dignity, that your kids can go to school, that you can buy a house."
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AI Firm Sued Over Chatbot That Suggested It Was OK for Child to Kill Parents
"In their rush to extract young people's data and sow addiction, Character.AI has created a product so flawed and dangerous that its chatbots are literally inciting children to harm themselves and others," said one advocate.
Dec 10, 2024
"You know sometimes I'm not surprised when I read the news and I see stuff like 'child kills parents after a decade of physical and emotional abuse' stuff like this makes me understand a little bit why it happens."
That's a message sent to a child in Texas from a Character.AI chatbot, indicating to the boy that "murdering his parents was a reasonable response to their limiting of his online activity," according to a federal lawsuit filed in Texas district court Monday.
The complaint was brought by two families in Texas who allege that the Google-backed chatbot service Character.AI harmed their two children, including sexually exploiting and abusing the elder, a 17-year-old with high functioning autism, by targeting him with extreme sexual themes like incest and pushing him to self-harm.
The parents argue that Character.AI, "through its design, poses a clear and present danger to American youth causing serious harms to thousands of kids, including suicide, self-mutilation, sexual solicitation, isolation, depression, anxiety, and harm towards others. Inherent to the underlying data and design of C.AI is a prioritization of overtly sensational and violent responses."
Google is also named as a defendant in the suit. In their filing, the plaintiffs argue that the tech company supported Character.AI's launch even though they knew that it was a "defective product."
The families, who are being represented by the Social Media Victims Law Center and the Tech Justice Law Project, have asked the court to take the product offline.
The explosive court filing comes not long after a mother in Florida filed a separate lawsuit against Character.AI in October, arguing that the chatbot service is responsible for the death of her teenage son because it allegedly encouraged him to commit suicide, per CNN.
Character.AI is different than other chatbots in that it lets uses interact with artificial intelligence "characters." The Texas complaint alleges that the 17-year-old, for example, engaged in a conversation with a character modeled after the celebrity Billie Eilish. These sorts of "companion apps" are finding a growing audience, even though researchers have long warned of the perils of building relationships with chatbots, according to The Washington Post.
A spokesperson for Character.AI declined to comment directly on the lawsuit when asked by NPR, but said the company does have guardrails in place overseeing what chatbots can and cannot say to teen users.
"We warned that Character.AI's dangerous and manipulative design represented a threat to millions of children," said Social Media Victims Law Center founding attorney Matthew P. Bergman. "Now more of these cases are coming to light. The consequences of Character.AI's negligence are shocking and widespread." Social Media Victims Law Center is the plaintiff's counsel in the Florida lawsuit as well.
Josh Golin, the executive director of Fairplay, a nonprofit children's advocacy group, echoed those remarks, saying that "in their rush to extract young people's data and sow addiction, Character.AI has created a product so flawed and dangerous that its chatbots are literally inciting children to harm themselves and others."
"Platforms like Character.AI should not be allowed to perform uncontrolled experiments on our children or encourage kids to form parasocial relationships with bots their developers cannot control," he added.
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Over 75 Nobel Laureates Call On Senate to Reject RFK Jr. as Health Secretary
"In view of his record, placing Mr. Kennedy in charge of DHHS would put the public's health in jeopardy," said the winners of the prestigious prize.
Dec 10, 2024
Nobel laureates rarely wade into politics as a group, but Monday marked the second time in two months that dozens of winners of the prestigious Nobel Prize have banded together to speak out against the agenda of President-elect Donald Trump—this time, calling on U.S. senators to reject his nomination of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead the Department of Health and Human Services.
More than 75 Nobel laureates signed a letter warning lawmakers about Kennedy's record of attacking the very agencies he would have power over if confirmed to be Trump's secretary of health and human services, his history of amplifying discredited conspiracy theories about public health—sometimes with deadly consequences—and his "lack of credentials or relevant experience in medicine, science, public health, or administration."
"In view of his record, placing Mr. Kennedy in charge of DHHS would put the public's health in jeopardy and undermine America's global leadership in the health sciences, in both the public and commercial sectors," wrote the Nobel laureates.
Kennedy has alarmed dental experts with his proposal to remove fluoride, which prevents tooth decay, from public drinking water—a plan that Trump has said "sounds OK." The president-elect also said Sunday he would have Kennedy investigate the conspiracy theory that vaccines cause autism, which was the argument made by a 1998 article that has since been retracted and has been debunked by numerous international studies.
The environmental lawyer—whose views and political ambitions have been disavowed by other members of the prominent Kennedy family—has also been condemned for falsely claiming in a letter to the prime minister of Samoa in 2019 that the measles vaccine itself may have caused a measles outbreak that had killed 16 people there. By the time the outbreak was over, 80 people had died, and experts partially blamed "increasing circulation of misinformation leading to distrust and reduced vaccination uptake."
"Maybe there are some [senators] who will read this and think: 'Well, we really do want to protect the health of our citizens. They didn't elect us so that we could kill them,'" Richard Roberts, a co-author of Monday's letter and the winner of the 1993 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for his discovery of split genes, told The New York Times.
Other beliefs of Kennedy's include his rejection of the established scientific fact that the HIV virus causes AIDS and his claim that unpasteurized raw milk "advances human health" and that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has purposely suppressed that information.
Food scientists say there is no documented proof that raw milk has the health benefits proponents like Kennedy claim it does, but there is ample proof that unpasteurized milk contains bacteria and viruses, including H5N1, the avian flu that's been detected in dairy cow herds in at least 15 states.
The Nobel laureates noted that Kennedy has also been a "belligerent critic" of the FDA and other health agencies and employees that are part of DHHS, calling for vaccine scientists to be imprisoned and threatening to fire FDA and National Institutes of Health employees.
"The leader of DHHS should continue to nurture and improve—not threaten—these important and highly respected institutions and their employees," reads the letter, which was signed by Nobel Prize winners including economist Simon Johnson, vaccine scientist Drew Weissman, and Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun, who won the prize in physiology or medicine for discovering microRNA.
Dozens of Nobel laureates also signed a letter in October endorsing Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris' presidential run and warning that Trump's economic agenda would "lead to higher prices, larger deficits, and greater inequality."
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