BORDER POLITICS: Mexican President Andrés Manuel López yesterday pressured the US to improve US relations with Cuba and Venezuela as well as providing more aid for South America in trade for help stemming the tide of migrants passing through his country. Cuba and Venezuela is home to many of the migrants.

  Before meeting with Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said the US should offer more support to Latin America rather than putting up “barriers, barbed wire fences on the river or thinking about building walls.”

  Mexico also wants the US to re-open border crossings closed during the migration crisis. “We spoke about the importance of the border, and about the economic relationship … the importance of reopening the border crossings, that is a priority for us,” Mexico Foreign Relations Secretary Alicia Bárcena said after the meeting.

  The US Border patrol in recent weeks has dealt with as many as 10,000 illegal migrants a day. Mexico says about 680,000 migrants passed through the country in the first 11 months of 2023.

BALLOT ISSUES: The Michigan Supreme Court upheld a lower court decision saying that Donald Trump cannot be barred from the state’s Republican primary ballot despite his efforts to overturn the 2020 election. That is the opposite of the ruling by the Colorado Supreme Court, which found that under the 14^th Amendment, Trump was part of the January 6^th insurrection and cannot hold office.

  The Michigan court upheld an appeals court decision that said Trump’s eligibility is a political issue, not one for the courts. Neither court ruled on whether Trump can be on the 2024 presidential ballot.

  Trump immediately applauded the decision, saying on his Truth Social platform, “This pathetic gambit to rig the Election has failed all across the Country, including in States that have historically leaned heavily toward the Democrats.” 

  Also in Michigan, the only fake elector cooperating with prosecutors expressed regret in a recorded interview with the state attorney general’s office, according to the NY Times. James Renner, 77, one of 16 people who tried to usurp the legitimate electors, said, “I felt that I had been walked into a situation that I shouldn’t have ever been involved in.”

  Renner, a retired state trooper, admitted that he knew nothing about the electoral process and relied on people who seemed to know more. When the fake electors were sued, “It was only then that I realized that, hold it, there is an official state authorized process for this,” Renner said on the recording.

POLITICAL ARGUMENTS: The federal prosecutors in Donald Trump’s election meddling case have asked the judge to prevent the defense from claiming during trial that the case is political revenge against the former president brought by the current Democratic administration. Trump’s lawyers have already made such claims in their filings.

  “The court should not permit the defendant to turn the courtroom into a forum in which he propagates irrelevant disinformation and should reject his attempt to inject politics into this proceeding,” says the motion filed by Molly Gaston, one of the senior assistants to Special Counsel Jack Smith.

  The case is on hold for now while an appeals court weighs whether Trump is immune from prosecution because he was president at that time he attempted to overturn the 2020 election results. 

  Trump has also claimed that the election case was brought to knock him out of run for the presidency. But Haston says in her motion, “Much as the defendant would like it otherwise, this trial should be about the facts and the law, not politics.” 

THE GRAY LADY SUES: The New York Times yesterday sued OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement for their unauthorized use of published material to train artificial intelligence programs. The Times claims in its suit that millions of its articles were used to train chatbots that now compete with the paper as a source of news and reliable information.

  Newspapers are struggling to survive and the Times is fighting to prevent its own reporting from being used to replace itself.

  While not specifying a punitive dollar figure, the lawsuit says the defendants should be held responsible for “billions of dollars in statutory and actual damages.” Possibly the most extreme demand is for the artificial intelligence companies to destroy the chatbot models that use copyrighted material from the Times.

THE OBIT PAGE: Tom Smothers, the older of the folk-singing 1960s comedy duo The Smothers Brothers who played the dimwit but was really the brains of the act, has died in Santa Rosa, California at age 86.

  While Tom played guitar and the bumbling naïf, his brother Dick played bass and straight man in the act largely based on their bickering that coyly delivered social and political satire. Tom made his retort “Mom always liked you best” into a national catch phrase.

  “The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour” in the turbulent late 1960s paved the way for the edgier television humor of today both in serial shows and late night comedy. “During the first year, we kept saying the show has to have something to say more than just empty sketches and vacuous comedy,” Tom Smothers said in a 2006 interview. “So we always tried to put something of value in there, something that made a point and reflected what was happening out in the streets.”

  Smothers battled nervous network executives and censors until CBS, rained with complaints from rural affiliates, especially in the South, abruptly canceled the show in April 1969. 

THE SPIN RACK: A federal judge temporarily lifted the import ban on the latest Apple watches, which are under a patent infringement challenge. — The NBA has approved the sale of the Dallas Mavericks by Mark Cuban to casino mogul Miriam Adelson.   

BELOW THE FOLD: Facing a probable loss for a third term, Colorado conservative firebrand Rep. Lauren Boebert announced that she’s quitting the race in the state’s 3rd district and running instead in the 4^th. 

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