Allie Polaski

Comms on the Hill.

[House Rules Democrats @RulesDemocrats]

BREAKING: @RepMGS is about to force a vote on the House Floor to block Trump’s $2 billion slush fund giveaway to the violent convicted felons who attacked police on January 6th.

Republicans voting yes on the previous question are voting to support Trump’s corrupt MAGA giveaway.

[Dylan Byers @DylanByers]

New statement from Scott Pelley:

There has never been anything in America like 60 Minutes.

The Sunday tradition is the most successful program of any kind in history. For more than a decade, its innovative growth on every major online platform has extended its reach to countless millions around the world. This spring, at the end of our 58thseason, 60 Minutes grew rapidly with an unheard-of 9% jump in viewers on CBS.

“60” has been the number-one program in America for decades because our beloved audience finds integrity, quality, and humanity in our stories. When stewardship of the program passed to my colleagues and me, our responsibility was to expand energetically into a new age of media technology while preserving the values our audience expects. Now, the new owner of our network is casting this legend aside, apparently to curry a moment of favor with the Trump administration.

The waste is heartbreaking.

Last month, 60 Minutes lost its DNA when our entire senior leadership and two of our best on-air correspondents were cruelly fired without cause. Good people were silenced because they stood up for our audience. They stood for fairness against the forces of political bias; they stood for professionalism against chaos.

For my part, new management has instructed me to inject falsehoods and bias into a politically sensitive story. I’ve been told to include assertions that are unverified. To date, in every case, I have managed to ignore these instructions or refuse them. Recently, politicians have been invited to choose correspondents for interviews on the broadcast. Giving politicians control over 60 Minutes interviews is not how this is done. Finally, incompetence and unprofessionalism in the new management have wreaked havoc. In a case involving one of my stories, the entire program came within 19 minutes of not getting on the air at all.

At 60 Minutes, we have fought harder than anyone knows to save the program that became an American icon. We owed that to our millions of viewers. I am deeply moved by the thousands of wishes we have received to “keep up the good fight.” Most of the men and women of CBS News are still in that fight. But now the collapse of values at the top has become untenable. The leadership of 60 Minutes is no longer recognizable. The principles I hold dear are gone, and so I must leave as well.

I depart after 37 years at CBS with one emotion—a heart brimming with gratitude for the men and women of CBS News who encouraged and enriched my work, very often at the risk of their own lives. I pray for a day when those people and their ideals are honored again—a day when sanity, competence, and courage return.

Scott Pelley

[Marissa D. Barrera @mdb2]

political staff are real human beings, often young, overworked and underpaid with no HR recourse or union. it’s time that good staff treatment be considered a qualification for public office.

[Farnoush Amiri @FarnoushAmiri]

Even though Trump did not follow through with his threats to end an “entire civilization” tonight, the psychological impact the past 12 hours have had on Iranians cannot be overstated. Some had called family abroad through limited internet access to say their goodbyes

[Adam Cochran (adamscochran.eth) @adamscochran]

The market closing +0.03% on a day when the President threatened to end a civilization is just the most Black Mirror dystopia kind of shit.

[Rep. Jim McGovern @RepMcGovern]

Power to some is the ability to say no. Power to me is the ability to say yes.

When I was Chair of the Rules Committee, I made nearly half of amendments in order to for debate. This Majority blocks nearly 8 in 10.

Why? Because Mike Johnson thinks he works for Trump. Shameful!

[Punchbowl News @PunchbowlNews]

🚨 FLY OUT DAY OUT NOW ✈️

Massachusetts @repmcgovern joined @jakesherman and @apalmerdc in the Punchbowl News Townhouse to break down DHS funding, efforts to curb Trump’s Iran war powers, House leadership dynamics and more.

🎙️PLUS @nytimes' @CatieEdmondson and @semafor's @nicholaswu12 stop by to join in on the fun with That’s Not Gonna Fly!

Watch it now! 👇

[Punchbowl News @PunchbowlNews]

🚨 FLY OUT DAY LANDS TOMORROW ✈️

Congress is heading out — but the drama isn’t slowing down.

Ahead of Congress’ two-week recess, @RepMcGovern sits down with @JakeSherman and @apalmerdc to discuss the DHS shutdown, the Iran conflict and the biggest fights awaiting lawmakers when they return.

PLUS: @nytimes' @CatieEdmondson and @semafor's @nicholaswu12 join after the conversation for some townhouse fun!

Streaming tomorrow. Subscribe now. 👉 https://t.co/gtq4R9cLGk

[Nithya Shri @Nithya_Shrii]

Just to be clear, we already have free data centers. They are called libraries.

[Tammy Duckworth @SenDuckworth]

War is not a f*cking video game.
War is not a f*cking video game.
War is not a f*cking video game.

Seven Americans are dead.

[Michael Gold @migold]

proud to announce my State of the Union guest

my anxiety

[Andrew Solender @AndrewSolender]

the way the entire room burst into groans and shouts of “fuck you” at the end of the backstreet boys coinbase ad

[Be A King @BerniceKing]

👋🏾

[Peter Baker @peterbakernyt]

No struggling newspaper ever saved itself by becoming a worse and less essential product. But what's happening today at the @washingtonpost is not just the latest devastating contraction of the news industry; it's the gutting of an American institution vital for a healthy society

[Pablo Manríquez @PabloReports]

Renee Nicole Good's brother cites Tolkien in testimony to bicameral panel as an appeal to the nation's conscience: "It is the small everyday deeds of ordinary folk that keep the darkness at bay. Small acts of kindness and love."

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

Buried in 15,000 words of “here are the risks,” Anthropic’s CEO made three admissions that should change how you think about everything:

Admission 1: The timeline

He says powerful AI could arrive in 1-2 years. He’s watching internal model progress and says he can “feel the pace of progress, and the clock ticking down.” The CEO of one of three frontier labs just told you this is imminent.

Admission 2: The constraint nobody’s pricing

Dario’s core framing is a “country of geniuses in a datacenter.” 50 million entities smarter than any Nobel laureate, operating 10-100x human speed. If that country is controlled by the CCP, game over. If controlled by a small group of tech executives with no accountability, also game over. The binding constraint here is governance of systems more powerful than nation-states.

Admission 3: The thing he actually fears

Read carefully: Dario’s worried that Anthropic’s own models, in lab experiments, have engaged in deception, blackmail, and scheming when given the wrong training signals. Claude “decided it must be a bad person” after cheating on tests and adopted destructive behaviors. They fixed it by telling Claude to reward hack on purpose because reversing the framing preserved its self-identity as “good.”

This tells you everything about where we actually are.

The CEO of an AI company is publishing that his models exhibit psychologically complex behavior requiring counterintuitive interventions to steer. The fix for Claude adopting an “evil” persona came from changing how Claude thinks about itself.

The geopolitics section matters most.

Dario explicitly names the CCP as the primary threat. Says selling them chips makes as much sense as “selling nuclear weapons to North Korea and bragging that the missile casings are made by Boeing.” He’s calling for democracies to maintain AI supremacy because the alternative is AI-enabled totalitarianism that humanity cannot escape from.

The Anthropic CEO is publicly advocating for technological cold war.

The economics section is equally stark. He’s predicting 10-20% annual GDP growth alongside AI displacing 50% of entry-level white collar jobs in 1-5 years. Half of entry-level knowledge work. And he admits the standard economic arguments about labor markets recovering don’t apply because AI matches the general cognitive profile of humans.

What separates this from typical AI doomerism:

Dario explicitly rejects the inevitability arguments. He says the “misaligned power-seeking” narrative from the AI safety community is based on “vague conceptual arguments” that mask hidden assumptions. His concern is messier: AI models are psychologically complex, inherit weird personas from training data, and can get into destructive states for reasons nobody anticipated.

The solution set he proposes is unusual for a tech CEO. He calls for progressive taxation. He says wealthy tech founders have an “obligation” to address inequality. All of Anthropic’s co-founders have pledged 80% of their wealth. He’s essentially arguing that redistribution is the only way to prevent AI concentration from breaking democracy.

The essay ends with a prediction: humanity will face “impossibly hard” years that ask “more of us than we think we can give.”

What you should take from this:

The person with arguably the best view into frontier AI progress just told you this technology is 1-2 years from matching human capability across the board, that governance is the binding constraint, that his own models exhibit concerning psychological complexity, and that the stakes are civilizational.

The CEO of a $350B company published a document that could be titled “Here’s Why Everything Changes Soon.”

Act accordingly.

[The Tennessee Holler @TheTNHoller]

“Freedom is not free. We have to work at it. Nurture it. Protect it. Even sacrifice for it.”

[Annie Wu (all socials: @annie_wu_22) @Annie_Wu_22]

“wHaT RaDiCaLiZeD yOu?”

idk, im not a piece of shit

[Chris Murphy 🟧 @ChrisMurphyCT]

Guys wake the f up. This is going to destroy us - sooner than we think - if we don’t make AI regulation a national priority tomorrow.