Even worse than we expected In case you missed the fireworks, here’s Dana Milbank on the “weaponization” committee: One thing is clear after Thursday’s first hearing of the new “Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government”: The weaponization panel’s weapon of choice will be the blunderbuss. I don’t want to be conspiratorial about it, but House Republicans somehow turned Room 2141 of the Rayburn House Office Building, the Judiciary Committee hearing room, into the main ballroom of a QAnon convention. The witnesses — including world-class conspiracy purveyors Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Ivermectin) and former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (I-Ukraine bioweapons labs) — might as well have been auditioning to guest-host “Tucker Carlson Tonight.” It is possible that, by random chance, one of the witnesses may have said something that is factually true, but any pellet of accuracy was lost amid all the errant slugs that ricocheted crazily out of their muzzles. They revisited the “Russian collusion hoax” perpetrated by the “fake dossier,” Fusion GPS, Peter Strzok and Lisa Page.
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TST rejeita acordo e diz que empresa fornece serviços de transporte, não tecnologia. Uber fala em decisão 'ideológica'.
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One of the issues with seditious conspiracy charges against Trump is the matter of intent. Did he know that he had lost the election and went ahead with his plot anyway? Of course he did. And here is some external proof we haven’t seen before: Former president Donald Trump’s 2020 campaign commissioned an outside research firm in a bid to prove electoral fraud claims but never released the findings because the firm disputed many of his theories and could not offer any proof that he was the rightful winner of the election, according to four people familiar with the matter. The campaign paid researchers from Berkeley Research Group, the people said, to study 2020 election results in six states, looking for fraud and irregularities to highlight in public and in the courts. Among the areas examined werevoter machine malfunctions, instances of dead people voting and any evidence that could help Trump show he won, the people said. None of the findings were presented to the public or in court. About a dozen people at the firmworked on the report, including econometricians, who use statistics to model and predict outcomes, the people said.
Solidarity is power Many isms attempt to capture the divide between left and right both in the U.S. and abroad. A broad set of impulses fuel the personal, religious, cultural, class, and political clashes roiling society. Without naming it, Heather Cox Richardson examines the shortsightedness in the current appetite in some quarters for fascism: Over all the torrent of news these days is a fundamental struggle about the nature of human government. Is democracy still a viable form of government, or is it better for a country to have a strongman in charge? Democracy stands on the principle of equality for all people, and those who are turning away from democracy, including the right wing in the United States, object to that equality. They worry that equal rights for women and minorities—especially LGBTQ people—will undermine traditional religion and traditional power structures. They believe democracy saps the morals of a country and are eager for a strong leader who will use the power of the government to reinforce their worldview. But empowering a strongman ends oversight and enables those in power to think of themselves as above the law.
Democrats’ new direction? “There has to be a dream. We have to stand for a thing,” messaging consultant Anat Shenker Osorio tells students. That seems to have filtered up to top Democrats more accustomed to “being too reactive and too defensive when confronting Republican attacks,” writes Christian Paz at Vox. If President Joe Biden is, as he appears, already campaigning for a second term, it “is likely to be less oppositional and more optimistic, with less focus on highlighting how bad the other side is, and more attention on imagining how much more Democrats can accomplish with four more years in power,” Paz writes (although the White House declined comment). Negativity is out of fashion: That’s not necessarily how Democrats have run their campaigns in the Trump era and even into Biden’s presidency. Since the 2016 election, much of Democrats’ political strategy has been to run vocally and clearly anti-Trump, anti-MAGA Republican campaigns.
I’m a boomer and the Gen Zs are grandchild age so I suppose it’s natural that I relate to them. That whole “skip a generation” thing is often true. Certainly, when it comes to politics it seems to me that the Democratic new guard is much savvier than both their immediate predecessors and the old guard my age. They see the opposition for what it is in a way that many liberals my age took forever to recognize (and that’s assuming they ever have.) I’m not sure why I could see the truth when so many couldn’t but I’m super relieved to see the younger generation in electoral politics is moving beyond some of the more parochial types of infighting that has so often characterized the Democratic party to form a popular front against the fascist tide on the right. Maybe we’ll get through this after all. Note that I’m speaking specifically of elected politicians. The campus wars are something else and I would guess it’s at least partially attributable to the fact that these young people are not exposed to the right while the elected politicians are.
Or sanctimonious right wing NY Times op-ed writers either This, from Eric Levitz in NY Magazine, is right on about Ron DeSantis: Ron DeSantis is the popular governor of a racially diverse state with a substantial Democratic population. He is also a reactionary. In the New York Times, Pamela Paul argues that liberals have a lot to learn from these two facts. The columnist implores her fellow Democrats to avoid writing DeSantis off as “another unelectable right-wing lunatic unfit for national office.” Rather than dismissing the Florida governor and his supporters as “racist, homophobic, transphobic, and xenophobic,” Paul advises liberals to reflect on his political strengths. She explains that, unlike Donald Trump, DeSantis was a star student at an Ivy League school. It’s therefore likely that he “knows what he’s doing” when he scandalizes progressives. He is a savvy political actor, if his approval rating is any guide. Democrats should therefore seek to learn from his example. It isn’t clear precisely what Paul believes we should learn.
DeSantis is running it I’ve been making this point for a while but here’s some direct evidence that DeSantis is consciously copying the Hungarian prime minister (and Tucker Carlson’s) “illiberal democracy” playbook from Media Matters: Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and anti-civil rights activist Christopher Rufo are waging a campaign against New College of Florida that strongly resembles actions taken by Hungary’s authoritarian prime minister Viktor Orbán in 2017 and 2018 to shut down Central European University. DeSantis appointed Rufo, known for his anti-Black and anti-LGBTQ messaging propaganda, to the board of trustees at New College of Florida in early January. Since then, Rufo has engaged in what amounts to a hostile takeover of the school, forcing the president out and attempting to reinvent the school as a conservative institution. The scheme echoes Orbán’s plot to force CEU out of Hungary just years earlier.
Stuart Stevens on Democrats and the usefulness of the culture wars: For decades it has been a given in American politics that Republicans are masters of “cultural wars” and Democrats should avoid engaging. That might have been true at one time, but as a long-time veteran of Republican campaigns, I think it’s time for Democrats to run toward the sound of the guns in cultural wars. Not only can Democrats win cultural wars, they are winning them, even if they don’t seem to understand their potential electoral benefits. In the Trump era, MAGA Republicans attacked Nike for supporting Colin Kaepernick and his campaign to highlight racial injustice with police. At a 2017 rally in Alabama for Senator Luther Strange, Trump thundered, “Wouldn’t you love to see one of these NFL owners, when somebody disrespects our flag, to say, ‘Get that son of a bitch off the field right now. Out! He’s fired. He’s fired!’” In September, before the 2018 midterms, Mitch McConnell’s long-time top political aide, DC lobbyist Josh Holmes, touted the political impact of attacking the NFL.
The cutest baby ever: Conservationists at Chester Zoo become the first in Europe to successfully breed a rare Coquerel’s sifaka lemur. The precious youngster arrived to parents Beatrice (10) and Elliot (10) – 18 months after the duo were translocated from the USA to Chester Zoo to begin a vital new conservation breeding programme, designed to protect the crtically endangered primates from extinction. Born with a thick fuzzy white coat and weighing just 119 grams, experts say the baby will cling tightly to mum’s belly for several weeks, before riding on her back like a backpack until around six months old. Currently only seven of the rare primates are cared for in three zoos in Europe and the family trio at Chester are the only Coquerel’s sifaka to live in the UK. Conservationists at the zoo say the birth is a ‘landmark moment’ for the species that is on the brink of extinction in the wild. “It’s really exciting to be the first team of conservationists in Europe to successfully breed this unusual and extremely rare primate. “While it’s still early days, both mum and baby are doing great.