In America’s two-party system, voters who are unhappy with the incumbent Republicans have only one electoral alternative: vote for the Democrats they know will do the same thing.

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Conflict reporter/writer/cartoonist Ted Rall and political analyst Jamarl Thomas deprogram you from mainstream media every weekday at 9 AM ET.

Today we discuss:

• A big win for the gerontocracy as half-dead octogenarian Mitch McConnell returns to the US Senate.

• The Supreme Court refuses to let Trump’s U.S. Postal Service tighten the use of mail-in ballots ahead of the midterm elections. Homeland Security may have broken state laws as part of an expansive effort to find noncitizens on the nation’s voter rolls, according to a federal whistle-blower. The effort has relied on questionable data, and has likely improperly flagged U.S. citizens who are eligible to vote.

• The now-closed state-run Alligator Alcatraz ICE gulag in the Florida Everglades failed to comply with a host of federal detention standards, creating cramped conditions and “calming” migrants in tiny metal cages. Immigrants seeking documents from the government to prove that they are in the country legally are being ignored or provided paperwork that is heavily redacted.

• Star Wars! The United States has installed weapons in Earth’s orbit, Air Force Secretary Troy E. Meink admits.

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Live at 9 AM Eastern & Streaming 24-7 Thereafter:

Editorial cartoonist Ted Rall and political analyst Jamarl Thomas deprogram you from mainstream media every weekday at 9 AM Eastern time.

Today we discuss:

• Trump stands by his support for a united Ireland. Trump said in Dublin, sitting beside Irish Taoiseach Micheál Martin on Saturday, that he’d “love to see” Ireland unified and that it is “going to happen eventually,” so it “may as well happen now.” He described uniting Northern Ireland with the Republic of Ireland as “fantastic,” adding: “The U.K. would have something to say about it obviously, but I think it would be a great thing, I mean, how can it be bad?” Trump later said Irish reunification would be a “very cool thing” while noting that “no matter what you say or how you say it, there’s no good answer.” Trump told reporters: “It just seems to me that you have Northern Ireland and you have Ireland. It seems to me that one of the naturals of all time is to put them together.”

• The National Security Agency is set to undergo its most extensive internal restructuring in at least a decade. The new design for one of the most powerful U.S. intelligence agencies, the brainchild of Army Gen. Joshua M. Rudd, calls for the creation of five new organizations inside the agency, in artificial intelligence, China, cybersecurity, combat support or warfighting, and global intelligence.

• Saudi Arabia is caught in the middle of the war between the United States and Iran. Trump refuses to attack the Houthis. Now, unable to export its oil, the kingdom’s leadership has few options.

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The post Trump, the Irish Nationalist | DeProgram with Ted Rall and Jamarl Thomas appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

For the president and, presumably, his supporters, there is an alternative reality in which everything is going as well as possible. The polls show that most voters do not believe that, yet the strategy of speaking demonstrable falsehoods persists.

The post Trump World appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

From curbs on mail-in voting and the purging of voter rolls to widespread confusion about the validity of elections, the Trump Administration—dreading losses—is scuttling Americans’ opportunities to cast lawful ballots in the 2026 midterm elections.

The post Scramble for the Government You Deserve appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

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Conflict reporter/writer/cartoonist Ted Rall and political analyst Jamarl Thomas deprogram you from mainstream media every weekday at 9 AM ET.

Today we discuss:

• 25 years ago, 19 Al Qaeda terrorists hijacked 4 passenger jets and crashed them into the World Trade Center and Pentagon, killing more than 3,000 people. Hasan Piker has taken heat for saying America deserved it. (He has since retracted that.) Shortly before 9/11, Central Asian jihadis told Ted the war was about to come home for America. Given the aggressive nature of U.S. foreign policy, it’s a question we need to engage with: did the U.S. deserve 9/11?

• Facing dwindling weeks until the midterms, deepening unpopularity and darkening political prospects for his party, Trump is tossing out a new idea: a $5,000 check for every American adult if Republicans keep control of Congress in November.

• The Census Bureau suggests adding a citizenship question to the decennial questionnaire. The proposal argues that the census count should exclude any undocumented immigrants and noncitizens without permanent residency because they are “not true inhabitants, members of the body politic, or persons with a ‘usual residence’ in the United States due to their lack of a sufficient tie and allegiance to the United States.” Millions of residents could be excluded from the U.S. census, congressional representation could be reshaped and federal funds could be reallocated across states. Refugees and asylum seekers would be excluded from the population count. Trump administration officials also want to prohibit the Census Bureau from asking demographic questions, including about race, ethnicity or sexual orientation.

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• In the harrowing months that followed the attacks on the World Trade Center, New Yorkers were repeatedly assured that the air around the fallen towers was safe to breathe. But 10 months later, health officials were still finding evidence of asbestos as much as a half mile away according to documents released by Mayor Zohran Mamdani after decades of cover-ups.

• The Trump administration did not oppose a UK-led initiative to impose new sanctions on Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank. The White House’s decision not to push back on the UK effort is a signal of its frustration with the Netanyahu government’s policy in the West Bank. Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Iceland, Ireland, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Spain and Sweden joined.

• Israeli opposition politicians said that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was “unfit” for office after a newspaper reported he had been warned that Hamas was planning a major operation weeks before the Oct. 7, 2023, attack but did not alert security officials.

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The post EPA and NYC Lied About 9/11 Air Quality | DeProgram with Ted Rall and Jamarl Thomas appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

After the CIA overthrew Iran’s democratically elected leader, U.S. policymakers helped themselves to Iranian oil at discounted prices and smugly congratulated themselves. But the blowback was a bitch. Their puppet ruler, the Shah, was soon overthrown by revolutionaries who despised and resented the United States. Sanctions intended to soften the Islamic Republic had the opposite effect, hardening its resolve and prompting it to wage proxy wars against the U.S. and Israel throughout the Middle East. Fifty years later, the Middle East is a hot mess, Iran is its dominant regional power, and the United States has lost. So why is the U.S. pursuing similar policies against oil-rich, socialist-majority Venezuela?

The post Good to the Last Drop appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

Last week there occurred a watershed moment in the history of American political cartooning. A major American newspaper, the Baltimore Sun, published an editorial cartoon created not by a cartoonist or graphic artist, but by unidentified staffers using artificial intelligence.

One year ago, the Sun fired its Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist, Kevin “KAL” Kallaugher. (Disclosure: KAL and I are friends.)

Which AI model was used was not disclosed, but more likely than not it was ChatGPT by OpenAI.

Why do I think so? I asked various AI models. I’m not a Luddite!

As a cartoonist, my reaction was similar to that of most of my colleagues. I checked out the cartoon. It sucked.

What the Sun published as a cartoon sucked worse than any cartoon ever drawn by any professional cartoonist could or ever has sucked, which is to say, a lot. This lickspittle slop sucked up to the mayor—no good political cartoon ever supports a politician, only criticizes them—and it had all the compositional subtlety of a propaganda poster published by the government of Saddam Hussein. H.L. Mencken, the brilliant, ornery columnist who spent years at the Sun, is surely biting his editors’ shins in hell, where they certainly reside.

All things considered, the gross incompetence of the Sun’s wading into the lifestyle of the artiste manqué is as good as it gets for a profession that is no longer in danger of dying, or in process of dying, but well and truly dead after having been murdered by publications like the Sun.

A professional humorist might have prompted AI to create work with superb humor and insight, albeit relying on the generic sub-MAD look of AI slopart. Since the concept is 99% of what makes a good cartoon, a good idea with lame art would have been even more disastrous for human cartoonists.

This being America, though, there’s always a danger that we might be missing the point of this startling low-budget attack on journalistic quality.

Yes, it’s disgusting that a newspaper that can afford to pay rent on an office building can’t scrape up the cash to hire a real cartoonist, employ a freelancer to create real political cartoons, or purchase work by real people for pennies on the dollar from a syndicate. Yes, it’s ironic that a newspaper that clearly doesn’t value cartoonists nevertheless understands that readers expect to see cartoons in their newspaper, and thus chooses to fill the hole in this ridiculously undignified way. And yes, this is an insult to readers.

The real issue here, however, is one that everyone, regardless of their politics, ought to be able to get angry about: theft. The Baltimore Sun is stealing from hundreds of cartoonists. And it owes them compensation.

The vast majority of the widely used AI models—ChatGPT, Grok, Gemini, etc.—were “trained” on millions of articles and images scraped from the World Wide Web. This includes thousands, most likely hundreds of thousands, of political and other cartoons.

Neither cartoonists nor, for that matter, writers were approached by these giant multi-billion-dollar technology companies to rent or purchase the training rights. Operating under the “move fast and break things” dictum that it’s easier to beg forgiveness than ask permission, they stole copyrighted material worth billions of dollars without asking, much less obtaining, permission from the copyright holders.

When editors or staffers at the Baltimore Sun input their prompt to ChatGPT or whatever other model they used, it drew on that illegally purloined material to create their abomination of a cartoon. They also stole countless other cartoons—one-offs posted by individuals, stuff drawn by children and posted by their parents, there was no limit. If you ever drew or wrote anything on the Internet, you were almost certainly robbed too.

The newspaper, in other words, bought and published stolen material. At an incredible scale. Even though giant tech companies want you to think otherwise, there’s no practical difference between publishing AI work generated using pilfered intellectual property and buying a stolen TV out of the back of someone’s car.

Numerous lawsuits are working their way through the courts about these issues. (Disclosure: I am one of thousands of plaintiffs in the class-action lawsuit and settlement against Anthropic, owner of the Claude AI model.)

There are smaller, ethically sourced artificial intelligence models. In those models, an artist uploads only their own original material and the AI learns that material and can then, with considerable work, begin to generate images drawn in that style. If that’s what the Baltimore Sun did here, and they have an on-staff artist whose work was used to train an AI, it’s still wrong because they are refusing to employ flesh-and-blood cartoonists. But it’s not illegal.

I reached out to the Sun to find out if that’s what they did. They did not reply.

If, on the other hand, as seems exceedingly likely, they used unethically sourced AI, the copyright section of the United States federal code requires that they pay each cartoonist whose work was illegally scraped at least $750 per scraped cartoon. There are hundreds of cartoonists and estates of deceased cartoonists who would be included in this category. The Sun and the relevant AI company used here ought to be held jointly and severally liable for this total sum, which may exceed the total market capitalization of most newspapers.

Under its current editorial direction, the Baltimore Sun purports to be a conservative publication that respects property rights. Capitalism cannot function if workers can have their products stolen from them without recompense. If this is the Wild West, what will be the motivation for entrepreneurs, artists or anyone else to be creative?

Consider this a cease and desist, Baltimore Sun. Delete the cartoon from your online edition. Issue payments of at least $750 to each and every cartoonist whose work was illegally scraped by your AI model. Apologize to your readers and promise never to do anything like this again.

The Association of American Editorial Cartoonists, the only group of which I’m a member, issued an open letter calling on the Sun to do the right thing. I don’t share the sentiment that AI is evil or the belief that this genie can be shoved back into its bottle, but it’s a nice statement.

What we really need is to nip this wholesale theft of intellectual property in the bud and hit the bastards who profit from unethically-trained AI in the wallet. We need an enterprising lawyer to organize a class-action lawsuit.

I’d be happy to help organize the effort.

(Ted Rall, the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is a Pulitzer finalist, twice the winner of the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award, and a former president of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists. He is co-host of the podcast “DeProgram with Ted Rall and Jamarl Thomas.”)

The post Grand Theft A.I. appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

Live at 9 AM Eastern & Streaming 24-7 Thereafter:

Editorial cartoonist Ted Rall and political analyst Jamarl Thomas deprogram you from mainstream media every weekday at 9 AM Eastern time.

Today we discuss:

• There are major anxieties about interference in the 2026 midterm elections. Will the Trump administration use executive orders or declare a national emergency to sow confusion? Will there be federal agents at polls, ballot seizures, and restricted mail-in voting? Gerrymandering and eroded trust compound fears that results could be delegitimized or overridden. Investigative journalist Greg Palast joins Ted and Jamarl to tell us what fears are real.

Greg Palast is an investigative journalist and author whose reporting for the BBC, Guardian, and Rolling Stone has exposed voter-roll purges, Crosscheck programs, and suppression tactics since Florida’s 2000 election. His bestsellers The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and Billionaires & Ballot Bandits, plus films like Vigilantes Inc., document how officials and contractors have disenfranchised millions, especially voters of color.

• Middle East Escalation: A wave of Houthi attacks on Saudi Arabia wounds more than 70 people and ignited fires at several oil facilities and utilities in the kingdom’s southern region, raising oil prices and threatening to squeeze shipping through the Bab al-Mandeb strait. Iran plans to announce an “exclusion zone” outside the Strait of Hormuz aimed at vessels it believes are attempting to transit the waterway. The United Kingdom is expected to announce trade restrictions on illegal Israeli settlements, the latest sign that UK-Israeli relations have taken another downturn. And Israel orders settler outposts removed in the West Bank.

• The centrist-conservative Christian Democrats (CDU) was defeated by the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) in a Saxony-Anhalt state election. Friedrich Merz’s party lost more than half of its seats in the state parliament, while the AfD increased its count from 23 to 39.

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