Don’t lie with AI in Michigan political ads. Your weekly non-Beltway stories.
The Michigan legislature wants disclosures when political ads use artificial intelligence, and penalties when they’re deceptive. In Vermont, hospital workers are under literal attack. Florida’s prisons need an overhaul. New Jersey may update Prohibition-era laws about alcohol.
These are your weekly non-Beltway political stories, where we bring you a mix of pieces with significant local, national or international importance.
But we need your help to know what we’re missing! Please keep sending your links to news coverage of political stories that are getting overlooked. (They don’t have to be from this week, and the submission link is right under this column.) Make sure to say whether we can use your first name, last initial and location. Anonymous is okay, too, as long as you give a location.
Michigan votes to contain AI in political ads
Michigan’s legislature has sent Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) legislation requiring disclosures on political ads that use artificial intelligence (AI) and punishing campaigns for using intentionally deceptive AI materials known as “deepfakes,” per Kyle Davidson at the Michigan Advance.
- Failure to disclose the use of AI to generate an ad would carry a maximum fine of $250 for a first offense, while each subsequent violation would cost $1,000.
- “Each advertisement that is distributed or aired would be considered a separate violation with some exemptions for parody or satire ads and the media,” Davidson reported.
Using “deepfakes” — using AI to generate images of someone saying something they never said, for instance — would be a little more expensive.
- A maximum fine of $500 and up to 90 days in prison for a first offense. And another violation within five years would be a felony carrying up to five years in prison and a fine of up to $1,000.
The politics: AI is going to disrupt our world. Michigan’s trying to safeguard the integrity of their elections — especially from deepfakes, which have become scarily good.
Vermont health staff face soaring workplace violence
Staff at the University of Vermont Medical Center — the Green Mountain State’s only level-one trauma center — face an unprecedented level of workplace violence. They’ve reported more than 2,100 incidents since the start of 2021, Colin Flanders reported over at Seven Days VT.
Here’s the lead: “The people who work in Vermont’s busiest emergency department have been punched in the face. They’ve been bitten, stabbed with kitchen shears and battered with metal food trays. They’ve had their lips split open, noses broken and eyes blackened.” Sheesh.
- Most of those happened in the emergency department, “where employees treat patients who are in the throes of drug withdrawal, severe pain and psychiatric crisis,” Flanders reported.
The politics: It’s wild to read all the steps the hospital has taken to try to protect its staff. It’s also wild to read about workers pressing charges only to have the cases go nowhere. So now they are trying to raise awareness of the crisis — in effect, asking the public to pressure government to fix it.
Florida prisons need an overhaul
Florida’s prison system is in dire shape, with deep staff shortages and a battered physical infrastructure that requires billions of dollars in spending over the next two decades as the inmate population is expected to grow by 108,000-124,000 from the current 90,000.
Auditing firm KPMG, hired in late 2022 to draft a 20-year plan, delivered three options, with costs running from $6 billion to $12 billion, the Miami Herald’s Romy Ellenbogen reported.
- $582 million for new air conditioning systems, $2.2 billion for immediate repairs, and $200 million to $700 million a year to fill staffing shortfalls and increase overall personnel.
- “In each plan, the firm said Florida needs to build at least one new prison, create hundreds of hospital beds and reopen dorm beds that have been closed because of short staffing,” Ellenbogen wrote.
The politics: “The report did not examine whether changing certain criminal justice policies could help reduce the inmate population.” Right. This is a broader policy problem than just prisons. It’s the broader judicial system, and whether workable alternatives to the current enforcement can be found.
New Jersey looks to overhaul booze laws
It’s always interesting when a state moves to reform or eliminate laws passed more than a century ago. This time, it’s New Jersey, looking to change liquor laws adopted back during Prohibition, via Nikita Biryukov of the New Jersey Monitor.
- The state currently limits liquor licenses given to bars and restaurants — just one per 3,000 residents in a locality. The proposed legislation would ease that limit and ultimately abolish it.
BUT. “[T]hat push has faced opposition from existing license holders who have paid hundreds of thousands of dollars — or more than $1 million, in some cases — for their licenses, which will decrease in value once towns can issue more of them,” Biryukov reported.
The politics: We highlighted the existing license holders to underline how this sort of modernization pits stakeholders against each other, a defining feature of politics at every level.
See an important political story that doesn’t quite fit traditional politics coverage? Flag it for us here.
George Santos faces new motion to expel him from Congress
“Rep. Michael Guest (R-Miss.), chairman of the Ethics Committee, filed a motion Friday to expel Santos. The House can consider the motion after its return from its Thanksgiving holiday break on Nov. 28,” Amy B Wang reports.
Trump leads big in New Hampshire as Haley rises, Post-Monmouth poll finds
“Donald Trump holds a commanding 28-point lead in New Hampshire in his bid to capture the party’s 2024 presidential nomination, according to a Washington Post-Monmouth University poll,” Scott Clement, Dan Balz and Emily Guskin report.
Lunchtime reads from The Post
Failure at the fence: How Israel’s vaunted ‘Iron Wall’ crumbled
“In December 2021, Israel’s military said a high-tech upgrade to the barrier that had long surrounded the Gaza Strip would protect nearby Israeli residents from the threat of violence from militants,” Jon Swaine, Joyce Sohyun Lee, Sarah Cahlan, Imogen Piper, Brian Monroe, Evan Hill and Meg Kelly report.
- “But this Washington Post video shows how on Oct. 7, Hamas exploited vulnerabilities created by Israel’s reliance on technology at the ‘Iron Wall’ to carry out the deadliest single assault in Israel’s history. The video details how Hamas fighters neutralized long-range cameras, sophisticated sensors and remote-control weapons — a tactic known inside the group as the ‘blinding plan’ — to breach the high-tech fence.”
Tech leaders cheer China-U.S. thaw. But AI is still a sticking point.
“Tech leaders are cheering the thaw in relations between the United States and China, hoping that less tension between the two leading economies means lower risk to the billions of dollars companies make from Chinese consumers and the critical supply chains that crisscross the Pacific. The optimism led to shares of major tech giants from Nvidia to Google rising,” Gerrit De Vynck reports.
- “But among the pronouncements and well-wishes, a major issue is still boiling: control over cutting-edge artificial intelligence and access to the technology necessary to develop it.”
The generational divide over Israel and Palestine is widening
“Most Americans say they’re more sympathetic toward Israelis in the conflict, according to a Quinnipiac University poll released Thursday. But the number of voters sympathizing more with Palestinians increased by double digits compared to a Quinnipiac survey last month, from 13 percent to 24 percent,” Politico’s Brittany Gibson reports.
‘He didn’t deserve to die like this’: Supreme Court decision leaves family of a man killed at the border searching for justice
“A recent Supreme Court ruling means any effort to sue the agents individually for alleged constitutional violations is doomed to fail. The 2022 ruling is one in a line of cases that has decimated the ability of victims to file lawsuits, known as ‘Bivens claims,’ accusing Border Patrol agents of using excessive force or other constitutional violations,” NBC News’s Lawrence Hurley reports.
- “The court’s dismantling of Bivens has reverberated throughout the federal government and touched nearly every agency, but Border Patrol represents a large fraction of armed federal law enforcement.”
Biden and López Obrador are set to meet, with fentanyl, migrants and Cuba on the U.S.-Mexico agenda
“President Joe Biden and Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, two strong allies who don’t always get along personally, will talk migration, fentanyl trafficking and Cuba relations on Friday,” the Associated Press’s Colleen Long and Aamer Madhani report.
Biden removes sanctions from Chinese institute in push for fentanyl help
“The Biden administration on Thursday removed the Chinese Ministry of Public Security’s Institute of Forensic Science from a trade sanction list, part of a bid to convince Beijing to do more to halt the flow of the synthetic opioid fentanyl into the United States,” Reuters’s Alexandra Alper and Michael Martina report.
The imbalance of power in the U.S. Senate, visualized
“First, the disparities in power among voters in different states have widened as states have grown unevenly. Second, because of demographic distribution, White voters now have substantially greater influence than voters of color. And finally, in recent decades, Republican senators have maintained majority control even when they represent a minority of Americans. That’s because more Republicans than Democrats are elected in the least populous states,” Dan Balz, Clara Ence Morse and Nick Mourtoupalas report.
Protesters say they wanted Congress’s attention. Police saw a threat.
“The protesters wore black shirts that read ‘cease fire now’ and linked arms, their backs to the Democratic National Committee headquarters entrance, video and photos of the scene show. They knew it was risky; that people could be arrested for blocking the entryways,” Ellie Silverman and Peter Hermann report.
- “By the end of the night, the Capitol Police said, six officers were injured in clashes, while protesters tallied 90 among their ranks who suffered minor injuries. D.C. fire department spokesman Noah Gray said no one was taken to the hospital. Each side says the other was at fault. Capitol police arrested one man on charges of assaulting an officer.”
Has Nikki Haley figured out what no other Trump foe could?
“In the campaign for the estimated 60–70 percent of Not Trump voters, Haley has clearly emerged as the winner. Her strategy, people briefed on it said, is not to chase after the soft Trump voters, but to be the adult in the room, talking up the threats America faces and positioning herself as the person with the experience to deal with them,” David Freedlander writes for New York Magazine.
At 1 p.m. Biden will host a bilateral meeting with Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador at the Moscone Center in San Francisco.
Biden will host the APEC Leaders Retreat at 2 p.m.
At 4:20 p.m., Biden will depart San Francisco en route to Philadelphia.
Biden will depart Philadelphia for New Castle, Del., at 9:15 p.m., arriving there at 9:35 p.m.
Shutdown prep is exhausting Washington. At least the bartenders are happy.
“There is at least one place in Washington where government shutdowns are good news, though. At the Hawk ‘n’ Dove, the staff doesn’t mind when workers from nearby federal buildings are off work due to furloughs and could be called back to the office in a moment’s notice if a new spending law passes, said Tom Johnson, managing partner of the Hill Restaurant Group, which owns the establishment. That means workers don’t leave town — they just go to the bar,” Jacob Bogage and Jeff Stein report.
Thanks for reading. See you after Thanksgiving.
