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By TCR Staff | February 8, 2021

A number of progressives appear to be heading toward a showdown with President Joe Biden over a new commission that will study changes to the Supreme Court, underscoring the tricky politics at play for an administration that is aiming for bipartisanship but also hoping to retain support from the left flank, reports USA Today. Biden proposed the commission in October to head off a push by liberals to expand the number of justices on the nine-member court an effort prompted by the quick confirmation of Associate Justice Amy Coney Barrett days before the Nov. 3 election. Her narrow approval gave conservatives a 6-3 advantage, the most lopsided split since the 1930s. Several progressives said they remain hopeful about the commissions work but are also sounding early alarms over its composition and timeline. The panel itself was widely seen as a way for Biden to punt on a proposal that has been politically poisonous since President D. Franklin Roosevelts failed attempt to pack the court in his second term.

The pressure for some kind of overhaul has not come exclusively from left-leaning groups. Eric Holder, who served as attorney general under Obama, said during a recent Brookings Institution event that federal courts badly need reforms and asserted that Democrats are uncomfortable with using their power in a way that Republicans have not been. Expanding the size of the Supreme Court wont win Republican support and it has already made some centrist Democrats squeamish. Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.V., a key swing vote, said in October he opposes adding justices.

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Progressives and Biden Square Off on Supreme Court Expansion - Crime Report

The progressive political action committee No Excuses has started a campaign to try to oust conservative U.S. Senate Democrats Joe Manchin, of West Virginia, and Krysten Sinema, of Arizona.

Politico reports the PAC is starting to search for candidates to challenge incumbent Democrats they say are standing in the way of ambitious action to end the coronavirus pandemic and revive the economy.

In an email to supporters, the PAC says, Help us find the next AOC to replace Manchin and Sinema.

I will leave it up to the political wags in the Grand Canyon State to weigh in on the chances of a successful primary against Sinema, but it is a safe bet in the Mountain State that Manchin cannot be taken out in a Democratic Party primary when he is up for reelection in 2024.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez represents the 14th Congressional District of New York, an urban district of New York City where 40% of the residents are immigrants. The district voted overwhelmingly for Joe Biden over Donald Trump, some areas by as much as 70 or 80 points.

That is a long way from West Virginia, but it did get me thinking about where progressive Democrats are in our state based on the last election.

The New York Times put together an interactive map with 2020 presidential election results in 1,922 of the 3,143 counties in 42 states. It includes a specific breakdown of counties, and even voting precincts, in West Virginia.

Bidens limited success in West Virginia was almost exclusively in the states few urban areas. He dominated Charlestons West Side, where he received 85% of the vote in one precinct. Biden beat Trump by 64 points in Institute and 58 points in the neighborhoods around the state Capitol Complex.

Bidens best performance in Huntington was the district between Hal Greer Boulevard and 20th street, where nine out of 10 voters supported him.

The map shows Beckleys voting precincts were divided between Trump and Biden, although Biden did get 93% of the vote in one precinct. Biden won by 67 points in a downtown Bluefield precinct.

One exception to the urban trend was in Southern West Virginia. Trump won McDowell County, but Biden got more votes in a couple of precincts along U.S. 52 between Welch and the Mercer County line.

Wood County is Republican and, there, Biden managed to win the downtown only by a couple of votes. In the Northern Panhandle, Biden carried downtown Wheeling and one precinct in Edgewood.

Biden had some success in the I-79 Corridor in north-central West Virginia. He carried Morgantown, winning eight of the citys precincts by an average of 38 points. He also picked up a few precincts in Fairmont.

Biden split with Trump in Martinsburg. In Shepherdstown, Biden outdistanced Trump 87% to 11%. Biden got 77% of the vote in Harpers Ferry, but he won just narrowly in Charles Town. Biden also won two precincts in Elkins and one in the Canaan Valley of Tucker County.

Even though Biden outperformed Trump significantly in many of the urban areas of the state, Trump still won statewide by 39 points. The New York Times map shows where the progressives are in West Virginia they are the sources of the blue geysers in an otherwise red state.

However, the map also shows there simply are not enough of them to make a significant political impact statewide, and clearly not enough for a progressive Democrat to take out Joe Manchin.

Hoppy Kercheval is the host of Talkline, on MetroNews.

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Hoppy Kercheval: Progressive Dems will never oust Manchin (Opinion) - Charleston Gazette-Mail

President Biden likes to talk about healing and unity, but he also keeps pledging to prioritize the supposed interests of certain favored minority groups. When is he going to realize that his goals of racial unification and racial favoritism are at cross-purposes?

Last week Mr. Biden signed an executive order on racial equity. He said that George Floyds death last summer marked a turning point in this countrys attitude toward racial justice and is forcing us to confront systemic racism and white supremacy. He added that this nation and this government need to change their whole approach to the issue of racial equity and make it not just an issue for any one department. It has to be the business of the whole government.

Nothing quickens the pulse of progressives like talk of systemic racism and white supremacy, so its hard to know if Mr. Biden is just telling leftists what they want to hear. But if its more than thatif the president is serious about focusing on equal outcomes instead of equal opportunitiesthen heaven help us. Milton Friedman said the society that puts equality before freedom will end up with neither, while the society that puts freedom before equality will end up with a great measure of both. Of course, Friedman had a constrained view of the governments capabilities that isnt shared by very many Democrats today. For them, good intentions are what matter most.

The political left has long used racism as an all-purpose explanation for racial disparities. This ignores that disparities down through history have been the norm, not the exception, and that they exist even in regions of the world where most people are of the same race. The per capita income gap between people in Eastern Europe and Western Europe, for example, is wider than the gap between whites and blacks in the U.S. Moreover, racial disparities have both grown and narrowed over time, even though racism has been constant. If Mr. Biden wants to change the governments approach to racial inequality, this history ought to inform his actions.

The greatest success of the civil-rights movement wasnt a new government program but getting government off the backs of blacks by defeating Jim Crow. Nothing the government has done since then in the name of advancing blacks has been more effective than simply ending government-sponsored discrimination. Black poverty fell by 40 percentage points between 1940 and 1960. It continued to decline in the wake of Lyndon Johnsons Great Society interventions, but at a much slower pace.

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Progressives Put the Racial Equity Squeeze on Biden - The Wall Street Journal

The usually sunny Flo is perturbed with Mara (yet again) during a work-from-home Progressive Insurance staff meeting over video. While seated at the computer, Mara is busy talking to someone at home. Mara, you know youre not on mute, right? says Flo. Oh, theres a mute button? the laconic Mara replies with genuine surprise.

During these months of work-from-home meetings, we all can relate. And Flo, of course, makes everything more relatable.

Progressive Insurances iconic spokesperson, portrayed by actress Stephanie Courtney, has not only been the star of Progressives TV ads since 2008, but also has a strong social media presence, including more than 4 million followers on Facebook. In fact, Progressive created a Flo chatbot to enable customers to interact with Flo on Facebook Messenger, as well as other channels, to help customers with basic insurance questions.

Now, Flos voice is being added to the chatbot, creating an even more personal experience for customers who adore the personable lady in the white apron.

Flo obviously has been a staple and a highly recognized brand icon for Progressive, says Matt White, technology and innovation manager in Progressives acquisition experience group. We wanted the chatbot persona to be friendly and helpful to consumers in their path to purchasing insurance, and ultimately, in becoming customers of Progressive for what we hope will be decades.

The Flo Chatbot runs on Microsoft Azure. Azure Bot Service and Azure Cognitive Services are among the services used to create the Flo Chatbot in 2017 and now, to give her a voice.

You can banter with the virtual version of Flo, if you like, and youll find shes just as polite and matter-of-fact as she is in Progressives ads.

Ask Flo what her favorite movie is, and she responds, I could try to pick a favorite, but wed be here until next Tuesday. Want to know her favorite food? I could go for a taco right about now but was told I could only have one every hour.

To get a behind-the-scenes look, we spoke with White to learn more about the Flo Chatbot with voice, Progressives work with Microsoft and whats important when it comes to helping customers.

TRANSFORM: Tells us about the origins of the journey for Progressive, Flo and Microsoft.

WHITE: We began the journey with Microsoft three years ago, when we wanted to embark on building a chatbot. But more importantly than building a chatbot was really to build a conversational experience, and frankly, learn about the potential power of having conversational experiences available in a variety of digital channels.

As weve continued to learn about what it takes to build and maintain, and ideally excel, at conversational experiences, we wanted to learn: What does it take to integrate text to speech in a voice component?

The foundation of the bot itself is the Microsoft Bot Framework. What weve done is layered on another cognitive service, so we could take all that existing architecture and foundation, and layer in the text-to-speech service.

TRANSFORM: How does the Flo Chatbot help people now, and how will adding voice change things?

WHITE: The Flo chatbot is capable of a variety of different things. Theres a large question-and-answer functionality, from Insurance 101 kind of questions What does comprehensive mean? What does collision mean in terms of car insurance coverage? to if you have policy servicing questions, we can point you in the right direction.

If youd like to get an insurance quote for a variety of products, with our subsequent releases of the Flo Chatbot, well fully build out the ability for people to get a car insurance quote through the experience.

TRANSFORM: What are some of the wackiest questions the Flo chatbot has been asked?

WHITE: I guess it depends on your perception of wacky. Theyll ask for jokes. They ask, Whats your favorite movie? Whats your favorite food?

You could say, well, its not really worth training answers on that, but people ask. The Microsoft tools certainly make it easy enough to train answers for those kinds of persona-based questions, or just chit-chat kind of questions. I think those are opportunities to delight consumers, so why wouldnt we?

TRANSFORM: Is incorporating Flos personality and sense of humor in the chatbot difficult to do?

WHITE: No, not from a technical perspective. Thankfully, we have some very talented copywriters who are used to writing in the voice of Flo for various purposes.

You always want to be on the lookout for opportunities to delight, but not unintentionally create frustration. You want to be able to acknowledge frustration, too. There are times where some wit or humor is appropriate, depending on the users engagement and what theyre asking. And then therere times when it should be just the facts, or empathy, to help. If someone chats with us and says they had a car accident, thats not the time for talking about tacos and unicorns. You still want to be friendly and helpful but get them the information they need.

TRANSFORM: What have you learned about chatbots based on communications so far from customers?

There are lots of repetitive questions that a chatbot can certainly handle well informational questions, point people to the right information. I frankly think its just as important to recognize the kinds of things where you really want customers connected to a live person.

One of the things we try and think about, too, is that we always want to provide an off-ramp; we want to avoid user frustration. So if the bot doesnt understand, or doesnt comprehend what the user might be asking, we have logic built in such that, rather than getting stuck in a loop, we offer a connection to a person who can help.

In addition to dealing with some of those repetitive questions and repetitive transactions, the chatbot has also helped surface those more complicated questions that you could envision potentially training the bot to handle, but you may not want to. It might make more sense to have a licensed insurance agent from Progressive handle those questions.

TRANSFORM: What are the benefits of using Azure Cognitive Services for the Flo chatbot?

WHITE: One advantage for us is the decoupled nature of the services. In other words, you can use what you need to use. You dont have to use everything. We use a variety of services for natural language understanding the LUIS service as well as QnA Maker. Those are two stand-alone services. We use them together, depending on the nature of the users question. Now were using the neural text-to-speech service that weve been able to kind of bolt on, if you will, to this so that we can bring voice to the experience.

Being able to integrate the bot framework, which lives in Azure, into our own kind of Progressive APIs to help answer questions or execute transactions has been one of the key advantages. Youre not locked into a huge suite of products. You can use the products that you need, and then you can layer in other products your own or others, if needed.

Another advantage with the open-source nature of the Microsoft Bot Framework is that all these services are but an API call away. If you want to layer in a new experience, or tailored experience, or use a service, its easy to integrate those pieces on the foundation theyve already built.

TRANSFORM: Are there other features that Progressive might want to add to the Flo chatbot in the future?

WHITE: We dont have any near-term plans, but as you might imagine theres a variety of other cognitive services that, depending on where our conversational journey takes us, you could envision potentially layering in things like computer vision, or machine vision, and other cognitive services.

For example, if we needed pictures of documents, if we needed pictures of anything where people could load them up into the chatbot experience we could use the machine vision service to help identify what is in the image and then process it accordingly.

I think one of the things well find as people get used to chatbots, and engage with them, theyre going to want to be able to do more things. So as those consumer demands grow, well certainly grow with it.

TRANSFORM: Its crucial to Microsoft that machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) be used responsibly and ethically. What was your experience in those areas in developing the Flo chatbot?

WHITE: I appreciate Microsofts partnership on this front as well. The technology that is out there is incredibly powerful. You can train chatbots to do a lot of things that people can do, but just because we can, doesnt mean we should. As I mentioned before, there are questions we could reasonably train the chatbot to answer, but that doesnt mean that we should. It still might be better to get people to a live Progressive Insurance consultant to discuss their particular issue, concern or question.

I think thats particularly true when you start introducing a characters voice but still a voice and I thought Microsofts approach to that in ethics and AI has been very upfront and straightforward in terms of how we use it. Its certainly been an approach consistent with Progressives own core values.

One of the things I appreciate from some of the disclosure thats required we want to make it sound real, we want to make it sound authentic, but we also want to be transparent that its not. And thats actually a requirement from Microsoft that even when you initially engage with the voice font on Google Assistant, as an example, we say upfront that this is a virtual version of Flo.

We want it to sound and act like Flo as much as it can, being a machine, but we want to be very transparent about what it is and what it isnt. So when people ask, is this a bot, is it a person, we dont try and pretend its a person. Right up front. We offer help if they want to speak to a live person, we can certainly get them there.

(Photos and audio files courtesy of Progressive.)

Visit the AI Blog to learn how Custom Neural Voice is bringing to life other iconic characters, like Bugs Bunny and the Duolingo crew.

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Progressive gives voice to Flo's chatbot, and it's as no-nonsense and reassuring as she is | Transform - Microsoft

Once upon a time, the filibuster was part of a uniquely American idea of standing up for principle even if you're outnumbered. That theme was at the heart of Frank Capra's 1939 movie, "Mr. Smith Goes To Washington": Jimmy Stewart plays the young, idealistic Sen. Jefferson Smith, who tries to block passage of a corrupt appropriations bill with a talking filibuster refusing to give up the U.S. Senate floor.

"No, sir. I will not yield," Smith declared in one of the film's pivotal scenes.

Smith held the floor for 24-straight hours until he collapsed with exhaustion. But his efforts exposed the corruption and blocked the bill. That was Hollywood's view of how Washington could work, and according to Adam Jentleson, "[The film was] an accurate depiction of how the filibuster was deployed in those days."

Jentleson, a progressive strategist who worked for Democratic Sen. Harry Reid, is the author of "Kill Switch: The Rise of the Modern Senate and the Crippling of American Democracy."He argues that over time, the filibuster changed from a procedure to give one senator a chance to persuade his colleagues across the aisle, to a legislative sledge hammer that allows the minority to kill legislation supported by the majority. That's because in the modern Senate, it takes 60 votes rather than a simple majority to stop debate and move a bill to an up or down vote.

"We've come to accept that the 60-vote threshold is sort of a normalized part of the Senate," Jentleson said. "But this is a recent thing."

'The Filibuster Must Go'

As Jentleson pointed out, throughout most of the Senate's existence, simple majorities determined if bills passed or died. But that changed in a big way during the push for civil rights when southern senators used the filibuster to block civil rights legislation.

"That was the major contribution of the Jim Crow era by the southern white supremacist senators, to finally use the filibuster to actually stop bills altogether by raising the threshold for passage from a simple majority to a super-majority," Jentleson explained. "And this is sort of the principal source of gridlock in our federal government today."

With a series of executive orders addressing everything from climate change to immigration to COVID-19, President Biden has quickly begun to push his agenda forward. But progressives like Jentleson argue that unless the Senate does away with the filibuster, Biden's more ambitious legislative goals will stall.

"The filibuster must go," Sen. Ed Markey told WBUR recently. "It's something that's rooted in a racist past, and it's used today as a way of blocking the progressive agenda, which President Biden is proposing [including] environmental justice, racial justice, economic justice."

Sen. Elizabeth Warren said she also favors ending the filibuster, which she argues cripples any effort to pass progressive legislation.

"The filibuster is giving a veto to the gun industry," Warren said in a Democratic presidential debate last year. "It gives a veto to the oil industry. It's going to give a veto on immigration. ... We are willing to roll back the filibuster, go with the majority vote and do what needs to be done for the American people."

The politics around this are fraught. With the filibuster gone, Senate Democrats could pass everything from the Green New Deal to Medicare for All with a simple majority. But Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said they would pay a price.

"When Republicans next control the government, we'd be able to repeal every bill that had just been rammed through," McConnell said recently on the Senate floor. "And we'd set about defending the unborn, exploring domestic energy, unleashing free-enterprise, defunding sanctuary cities. You get the picture."

'You Need Some Buy-In From The Other Side'

A number of moderate Democrats also oppose killing the filibuster, including academicRichard Arenberg, who takes McConnell's warning seriously. Arenberg teaches at Brown University and is co-author of "Defending the Filibuster: The Soul of the Senate," a book he wrote with former Senate parliamentarian Robert Dove.

After working on CapitolHill for more than 30 years with three different senators, including Paul Tsongas of Massachusetts, Arenberg said he believes calls to kill the filibuster are "short-sighted."

"[Every time] I brought any kind of legislative proposal to one of those senators the first question [they asked] was, "'Who's my Republican co-sponsor?' " he recalled. "Because every senator understands if you're going to get anywhere with your legislative proposals, you need some buy-in from the other side."

With regard to how those segregationist senators used the filibuster, he said: "It was evil. Immoral." But, he argued, that doesn't make the procedure itself evil, adding "I don't accept that."

Instead, Arenberg argued the filibuster cools the legislative temperature and offers a degree of protection for whichever party is out of power.

"Progressives, at least the ones in the Senate who are now clamoring to get rid of the filibuster, weren't doing that in 2017 when Trump took office with majorities in the House and the Senate," he said. "So that's why I say it's short-sighted."

According to Arenberg, polarization is at the root of the crisis in Washington and killing the filibuster would only make it worse.

On the other hand, use of the filibuster spiked in the past decade particularly by Republican minorities. And Democrats like Markey are ready to push back.

"I believe that ultimately it's inevitable that we have to repeal the filibuster," Markey said.

Moderates might need convincing. But they'll face a tough choice: give up on key parts of the Biden agenda or kill the filibuster.

Correction: An earlier version of this story misidentified the co-author of Richard Arenberg's book. The post has been updated to reflect that his co-author was former Senate parliamentarian Robert Dove. We regret the error.

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Sens. Markey And Warren Are Part Of A Progressive Push To Kill The Filibuster - WBUR