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Created
Sun, 19/03/2023 - 01:30
Does anyone doubt there’ll be trouble? NBC News reports: Law enforcement agencies are prepping for a possible Trump indictment as early as next week Meaning pro-Trump violence: Local, state and federal law enforcement and security agencies are preparing for the possibility that former President Donald Trump will be indicted as early as next week, according to five senior officials familiar with the preparations.  Law enforcement agencies are conducting preliminary security assessments, the officials said, and are discussing potential security plans in and around the Manhattan Criminal Court, at 100 Centre Street, in case Trump is charged in connection with an alleged hush money payment to Stormy Daniels and travels to New York to face any charges. The officials stress that the interagency conversations and planning are precautionary in nature because no charges have been filed.  The agencies involved include the NYPD, New York State Court Officers, the U.S. Secret Service, the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force, and the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, the officials said.
Created
Sun, 19/03/2023 - 07:00
Say it ain’t so! It seems as though every few years some Republican decides to unburden himself about the dirty tricks and sabotage he engaged in on behalf of a GOP candidate. Here’s the latest: It has been more than four decades, but Ben Barnes said he remembers it vividly. His longtime political mentor invited him on a mission to the Middle East. What Mr. Barnes said he did not realize until later was the real purpose of the mission: to sabotage the re-election campaign of the president of the United States. It was 1980 and Jimmy Carter was in the White House, bedeviled by a hostage crisis in Iran that had paralyzed his presidency and hampered his effort to win a second term. Mr. Carter’s best chance for victory was to free the 52 Americans held captive before Election Day. That was something that Mr. Barnes said his mentor was determined to prevent. His mentor was John B. Connally Jr., a titan of American politics and former Texas governor who had served three presidents and just lost his own bid for the White House. A former Democrat, Mr.
Created
Sun, 19/03/2023 - 00:00
The banality of Tiny D and Donald News outlets broadcast the Trumpist riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 live from coast to coast. An hours-long insurrection was underway. Against the U.S. government, against our government, not some remote country in Asia, Africa, or South America. As unsettling as watching that was asking who are these people battling police with their Trump and Confederate flags, Christian nationalist, and even Nazi symbols? Unsettling answer: They walk among us. The United States of America did not end that day. But reflecting on events in HBO’s postapocalyptic “The Last of Us,” Tom Nichols ponders “Who Would You Be If the World Ended?” In his newsletter for The Atlantic, Nichols drops a lot of spoilers I’ll try to avoid here. What’s different about the series is how it differs from the Cold War versions of the genre. Mostly lone-wolf “Radioactive Rambos” would “would wander the wasteland, killing mutants and stray Communists” while shooting everything in sight and “saving a girl, or a town, or even the world” along the way. Nichols observes: But we live in more ambiguous times.
Created
Sat, 18/03/2023 - 03:30
MAGA writes a new script on January 6th As the GOP presidential primary campaign gets underway it’s fascinating to see how the Republican Party has changed since Donald Trump descended onto the scene back in 2015. Ever since the successful White House runs of Ronald Reagan, virtually every Republican seeking higher office called themselves “conservative” and hewed to the Reagan revolution ideology — described as a “three-legged stool” — that centers global leadership and a strong national defense, traditional family values, low taxes and small government. Within that framework, there were minor differences on specific issues but generally speaking, in order to win the GOP nomination it was required that Republican candidates adhere to that basic philosophy. In hindsight, it’s clear that this may not have been the huge winner Republicans assumed it to be since the party’s nominee has won the popular vote for president only once in 35 years.
Created
Sat, 18/03/2023 - 06:30
I’ve been saying for a while that the Republicans could not pick a worse time to play their little game of debt ceiling chicken with the economy still fragile coming out of the pandemic. Now, it may be suicidal. Catherine Rampell writes: A plea to lawmakers: If it was a bad idea to threaten default on U.S. debt before, it would be astoundingly, colossally idiotic now. Recent financial-market turmoil — in regional U.S. banks, as well as some of the larger European institutions — suggests there might be much more fragility in the financial system than previously understood. In a sane world, politicians might respond to this new information constructively. They might, for instance, figure out what they could do to ensure that financial regulators detect vulnerabilities at significantly sized banks sooner. Politicians might also take some modest actions to combat inflation themselves, so that less of the burden of dampening demand falls on the Federal Reserve’s interest-rate increases — which are part of the reason we’re seeing stresses in the financial system today.
Created
Sat, 18/03/2023 - 09:30
I don’t have a strong opinion on this Wuhan Lab Leak brouhaha because I don’t think it’s knowable one way or the other. But polling says that most Americans believe the virus was caused by a lab leak even as most virologists think it’s far more likely to have been passed from animal to human. It’s now a political football being used by the right wing to persecute Dr. Fauci and others for the pandemic. The usual. Here’s the latest on the zoonotic transmission theory from a group of scientists: An international team of virus experts said on Thursday that they had found genetic data from a market in Wuhan, China, linking the coronavirus with raccoon dogs for sale there, adding evidence to the case that the worst pandemic in a century could have been ignited by an infected animal that was being dealt through the illegal wildlife trade. The genetic data was drawn from swabs taken from in and around the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market starting in January 2020, shortly after the Chinese authorities had shut down the market because of suspicions that it was linked to the outbreak of a new virus.
Created
Sat, 18/03/2023 - 05:00
Via the New Yorker: Two decades ago, Bush and the Republicans were nearly united in their embrace of a brash militarism that sought to topple Saddam and transform Iraq and the broader Middle East in the process. Iraq, after paying a terrible price in the death of hundreds of thousands and disruption of millions of lives, was indeed transformed. But so, too, was American politics, where the backlash to the conflict arguably gave rise to the Presidencies of both Barack Obama—who first rose to fame as an antiwar state legislator—and Donald Trump. Trump is a Bush-basher of long standing, and he often framed his takeover of the Republican Party as an explicit repudiation of the extended Bush family and its internationalist legacy. Trump has said Bush “lied” to start the war, that he should have been impeached for how badly it was conducted, and that, over all, Bush had a “failed and uninspiring Presidency.” Seven years after Trump won the White House by attacking the last Republican to hold the office, his views of foreign policy are now ascendant, if not yet dominant, in the G.O.P.