Pick Your Poison: The Delaware Treasurer’s Democratic Primary: Rethugs vs. AI:
The upcoming Democratic primary election for state treasurer has broken funding records this month, with campaign spending likely to top $1 million on two candidates in the historically overlooked race.
And some of the money backing leading candidates Ted Lauzen and Michael A. Smith has come from curious sources: Republicans and artificial intelligence-backed donors, respectively.
Michael Smith:
About 80% of Smith’s individual donations came from out-of-state residents, compared with about 20% in Lauzen’s campaign. Those donors include employees at Anthropic, the company behind the artificial intelligence system Claude, and other artificial intelligence safety researchers from across the country.
Smith pointed to connections he made during his time with College Democrats of America to explain some of the out-of-state donations. He said he has also been involved in Effective Altruism, a social movement followed by many AI industry workers that aims to find the most efficient ways to solve global problems.
Effective Altruism came under scrutiny in 2022 after the arrest of Sam Bankman-Fried, the former CEO of the crypto exchange FTX, who was heavily involved in the movement. It has since rebounded, though, as many AI company employees have begun to join the movement and donate millions of dollars to charities and political campaigns.
Spotlight Delaware tried to contact many of Smith’s out-of-state donors who had donated the legal maximum limit to his campaign, but only one responded on the record.
Jeff Kaufman, a Massachusetts-based former Google employee and an active member of Effective Altruism forums, said he does not know Smith personally. Several people, however, told him to donate to Smith because he is “good on AI policy.”
Ted Lauzen:
Lauzen said his family decided to pull from their savings for the campaign because he believes it is an important position. He quoted Martin Luther King Jr., saying he believes in the “fierce urgency of now” to do the right thing right away.
“When our family is going to do something, we’re going to do it all in,” he said.
Smith also said he thinks Lauzen is “masquerading as a Democrat” because his father is a Republican politician in Illinois, and he has donated to Republican candidates in the past.
Lauzen said while he grew up in a Republican family, he became an independent in 2017 and registered as a Democrat two years ago. He said his values have changed with age.
He has previously donated to several Republican candidates, including Simpler, the former Republican treasurer, but has donated to more Democratic candidates.
Lauzen also has received donations from several prominent Republicans in this campaign, including former Republican Party Chairman Terry Strine and former State Rep. John Burris (R-Milford).
The First State Service PAC, which has received the majority of its $225,000 worth of donations thus far from two members of the Schell family, paid for several advertisements for Lauzen earlier this week, according to Google Ads Library.
Though the spending on those ads has only totaled $700 so far, it is unclear how much the developer-backed PAC plans to spend on Lauzen in the coming weeks.
Lauzen said he was not aware of the PAC or the advertisements, but that he knew members of the Schell family had donated individually to his campaign and was happy to gain their support.
Stating the obvious conclusion: Neither of these guys are Democrats in any sense of the word. Both are looking to jump-start their political careers. I can’t vote for either.
The META Settlement Deserves–A Golf Clap?:
The star witness in the US government’s landmark trial against Meta believes that a multibillion-dollar settlement reached on Wednesday does not go far enough to stop the social media giant’s harms to young users.
“The limitations that are in the agreement are the equivalent of saying: ‘Well you can smoke as many cigarettes as you can in two hours a day,’” said whistleblower and ex-Facebook employee Arturo Béjar. “It doesn’t make the cigarettes any safer.”
Dozens of states had sued Meta, alleging that it designed addictive products that led to mental health problems for young people such as disordered eating, depression and suicide. The states and the company reached a wide-ranging settlement agreement on Wednesday that will force Meta to make major changes to its platform, including putting strict limits on how much time teens are able to spend on apps like Instagram and Facebook.
While state attorneys general touted the settlement as a victory and Meta called on other platforms to institute similar policies, Béjar argues the settlement lacks independent oversight and does not necessarily make Meta’s platforms safer for young people.
Béjar says algorithmic design choices that make Facebook and Instagram addictive and harmful remain unchanged by the agreement and its time limits. He had hoped the agreement would have done more to address how social networks’ algorithms steer young users toward content, as well as instituted independent auditing and quantifiable obligations for reducing harm.
Kennedy Blames Biden For Measles Outbreak, Claims That Measles Deaths In Pa. Are Fabricated:
The HHS secretary also said that when he spoke to Shapiro on Tuesday, the governor told him, “‘Well, we’ve seen this big drop in vaccination rates in the state from 97 to 92.3.’ He admitted on the phone that it all happened during the Biden administration. Since I’ve been in office, since President Trump’s been in office, there’s been a one-10th of 1% diminishment. We are actually restoring faith in the public health agency, so people will take our advice, and our advice is that people should get the measles vaccination.”
Right, the guy who has publicly called into question the need for measles vaccinations is blameless. Trump put a guy who is insane in charge of public health. Who could have ever anticipated that this would happen? For RFK Jr., it was just another lie:
Newly obtained documents indicate that the US health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, lied during two congressional hearings last year, telling lawmakers who held the key to his confirmation that a 2019 visit to Samoa had “nothing to do with vaccines”.
Letters obtained by the Guardian and the Associated Press contradict that testimony. In one he wrote to the Samoan prime minister before the trip, Kennedy explicitly said he wanted to study the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine in the Pacific island nation. In it, he used the words vaccine or vaccination eight times.
“I am writing this letter to you in the hope that we might be helpful to the people of your great nation,” he wrote, adding that he believed the deaths of two children there after an MMR vaccine could have resulted from manufacturing issues.
“I would propose my team conduct detailed health informatics assessment in Samoa of what happened with your MMR vaccines,” Kennedy wrote.
Kennedy’s Samoa visit – just months before a measles outbreak swept through the island, killing 83 people – has become one of the most controversial events in his career. At the time, he was leading a nonprofit known for its anti-vaccine activism. The visit was seen by critics as having emboldened anti-vaccine activists in Samoa.
He’s now used the same playbook here. With alarmingly similar results.
What do you want to talk about?
I am casting my vote for Mike Miller. Yes, I’ve known him since his 2002 race where he famously put up beautiful 4×8 signs on the highways that were perfect except for displaying the wrong election date. If he is elected, he will do little to no damage to the state. The other 2 dudes and their naked ambition as well as their friends terrify me!
I interviewed Miller once, and he’s totally out of bounds for me. Not a person I’d want to encourage in any way.
The one who will do the least damage is Mike Ramone, because he’ll be a thorn in the side of the MAGA Republicans.
I think he would be hilarious but I get it. Ramone is certainly a break glass option as well.
I think of it as my protest against Vichy Democrats. The Democrat will win, but I want him to have as big a deficit vs. other Democrats as possible.