Mark Halperin used to be a top political journalist at ABC, MSNBC, and Bloomberg News. Now his "Morning Meetings" and 2Ways on Zoom and YouTube are the best source I've discovered for intelligent, well-sourced, fair takes on the election. In his Morning Meetings, Halperin is accompanied by former Trump spokesman Sean Spicer, and until recently, Dem strategist Tim Hogan, now replaced by another Dem strategist, Dan Turrentine. The conversations are lively, but fun and respectful. Halperin always reserves time for his viewers to weigh in with comments and questions, under his mantra of "peace, love, and understanding." These are conversations, not food fights. Halperin typically begins sessions with his own take on the day's top campaign stories. He doles out compliments and criticisms of the Trump and Harris campaigns with evenhandedness. If he leans one way or the other, it is undetectable to me.  With that preamble, Halperin's comments on last night's VP debate are all the more noteworthy. As the headline indicates, he saw it as a near-total triumph for JD Vance. Halperin also denounced the CBS moderators, Norah O'Donnell and Margaret Brennan, for their anti-Vance bias. The YouTube of his post-debate 2Way is available here. Excerpts of Halperin's comments: "Without a doubt, a total mismatch [in favor of Vance.]" Abortion and J6 are tough issues for Republicans, but Vance "handled them as well as I've heard any Republican handle them." "[Vance] was obviously extremely well prepared, but didn't seem rehearsed." Walz' answer about lying about being in Hong Kong during Tiananmen was "ridiculous." "I just can't understand, if you looked at the topics chosen by the moderators. If you looked at their fact-checking. If you looked at the way they allowed one candidate [Walz] to respond and not the other at times. [The moderators were] completely one-sided in how they ran the thing. They chose, as the previous moderators do, to gang up on one side." "I thought Vance was the runaway winner. An overall drubbing." Halperin continued the barrage at the beginning of today's Morning Meeting, which you can view here. Halperin: Called the bias of the CBS moderators “disgusting.” Said Walz’s answer on Tiananmen might be “the worst debate answer ever.” Said that in calling Walz the winner, Rachel Maddow “must be living in a parallel universe.” And as you will see in the screencap, described the debate as a “shellacking.“ Do yourself a favor, and check out Morning Meetings, which run for about 30 minutes, every weekday at 9 am EDT. The 2Ways are typically longer, and their airtime varies in accordance with events. If you miss either session in its live version, they're always available shortly thereafter on YouTube. Tomorrow, it could be Trump's turn in the Halperin barrel. But for today, Trump/JD supporters will surely enjoy Halperin's commentary.

Bloomberg's reporting today that Google is working on AI software that can reason like a human, in a kind of expansion of its ongoing battle with OpenAI, almost made me do a spit-take. That's because, setting aside the AI cult that seems to be in charge of the Googleplex these days, this is the same Google that's routinely failing at so many of the simple things -- we're talking the lowest of the low-hanging fruit. Seriously, Google, you're going to recreate the complexity of the human mind when you can't even handle something as basic as zapping the Hawk Tuah spam that's all over Google Maps? If what I just wrote comes as a surprise to you, by the way, I certainly understand. Apple Maps was a buggy mess back in the day, and the blogosphere had a field day dunking on Apple because of it. But a dumb, easily fixable, and stupidly obvious issue with Google Maps like schools and other locations getting renamed to some iteration of Hawk Tuah (and pranksters even working in Diddy references here and there)? Crickets. https://twitter.com/lilyraynyc/status/1839934376890576967 Unless I've missed it, I don't think there's been any major media coverage of this, never mind that people have been all over social media about talking about Google Maps' mind-boggling shoddiness vis a vis Hawk Tuah for a while now. There's been some sporadic coverage of the issue here and there (one good example), and I can only attribute the radio silence to one of two things: Most people don't know about it, which is its own issue, or it's that no one cares -- specifically, because people are just increasingly accustomed to core Google products like Search slowly rotting, even as the company carps incessantly about how amazing its AI-focused future will be. Along those lines, I want to pause here and encourage everyone to read Ed Zitron's The Man Who Killed Google Search, one of the most fantastic pieces of writing about this subject that I've encountered online in recent weeks. The Google Maps Hawk Tuah spam, meanwhile, doesn't seem to be localized to just one part of the country (or even the world). I'm currently seeing a number of locations in regions like Europe, while this is a current snapshot of the US: Image source: Google Here's what one school district in Pennsylvania told a local news station there about working with Google to get one of their schools' appropriate names restored: "We appreciate that many community members promptly brought this matter to our attention. Once we were informed of the name change on Google, the district’s technology department took immediate action. However, addressing this issue required significant time and resources as we responded to emails and calls related to the situation." Honestly, between this idiocy with Google Maps, the ad- and AI-filled hellscape that is now Google Search, its AI drawing ethnically diverse Nazis, those glue on pizza AI hallucinations, the way Google generally lets parasite SEO run wild -- why does anyone think the company is going to successfully nail its wholesale embrace of AI? Don't Miss: AI is going to make an already-mediocre Google Search so much worse The post Maybe Google’s new ‘reasoning AI’ can address the Hawk Tuah spam all over Google Maps appeared first on BGR. Today's Top Deals Today’s deals: $2.75 smart plugs, $79 Ninja air fryer, $6.49 Anker USB-C chargers, $219 Dreo ChefMaker, more Today’s deals: First Apple Watch Series 10 discount, $20 Amazon credit, $318 HP laptop, more Today’s deals: $50 off Eureka E20 Plus robot vac, $1,100 off LG C4 OLED TV, Blink cameras from $20, more Today’s deals: $449 Apple Watch Ultra, first deal on iPhone 16 Pro official Apple cases, $179 Roomba, more

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