America

A Microsoft self-learning ‘robot’ let loose on Twitter this week ended up becoming a 9/11 ‘truther’ – exposing the fact that Bush orchestrated the 9/11 attacks, and suggesting that ‘Donald Trump is the only hope for America’.  An embarrassed Microsoft ended up deleting tweets made by ‘chat bot’ @tayandyou after it emerged that the self-proclaimed “AI with zero chill” decided to go completely off-script. Therundownlive.com reports: It quickly became corrupted sending out offensive tweets.

This embarrassing episode just goes from farce to farcical-er.

Phase 1:Cruz Reps "Cross The Line"

Almost a week ago, we were stunned when we learned that in order to support Ted Cruz and to "attack" Donald Trump, Liz Mair's anti-Trump Make America Awesome super PAC launched a Facebook campaign which in addition to showcasing Mitt Romney's support for Ted Cruz, emphasizing Trump’s past support for pro-choice policies, it also crossed the family line when it showed a GQ modeling photo of Melania Trump posing nude.

Used to be that the Republican coalition was made up of free marketers, libertarians, social and religious conservatives, and national security hawks. Their commonalities, versus the Democratic Party’s coalition, made it possible for them to elide their differences. Besides, when it got right down to it, most religious and social conservatives (wrongly) didn’t see any particular threat to their values from capitalism.

Ted Cruz made some remarks at an old CNN town hall* that capture much of what’s wrong with his foreign policy views:

Paul Ryan gave a speech yesterday on “the state of American politics”. It wasn’t very good, and Daniel Larison ably criticizes it here.