Music: Nils Petter Molvaer — ‘Kakonita’
The political-reform movement scores its biggest win yet
Russell Berman writes: Lisa Murkowski did not waste time, and she did not mince words. Just two days after former President Donald Trump provoked an insurrectionist mob to storm the Capitol on January 6, Alaska’s senior senator told her local newspaper: “I want him to resign. I want him out.” Murkowski was the first GOP senator to demand Trump’s exit after the deadly riot. The speed and bluntness with which she spoke out against the former president surprised her allies,…
The day we let Covid-19 spin out of control
Daniel P. Oran and Eric J. Topol write: Jan. 24 marks the one-year anniversary of a momentous but largely unnoticed event in the history of the Covid-19 pandemic: the first published report of an individual infected with the novel coronavirus who never developed symptoms. This early confirmation of asymptomatic infection should have set off alarm bells and profoundly altered our response to the gathering storm. But it did not. One year later we are still paying the price for this…
Roger Stone used Oath Keepers as security on the eve of the Capitol riot
Vice News reports: On the eve of the riot at the U.S. Capitol, Roger Stone walked out on stage before hundreds of cheering Trump supporters in Washington, D.C., flashed his signature Nixon Victory pose, and then danced to the Deplorable Choir’s girlpop anthem “Roger Stone Did Nothing Wrong.” But several members of his posse stayed backstage, their faces covered, wearing military tactical gear. They were members of Oath Keepers, a far-right militia steeped in anti-government conspiracies. And on that night,…
Oregon Republican Party falsely calls U.S. Capitol riot a ‘false flag’ meant to ‘discredit President Trump’
The Washington Post reports: Three weeks after hundreds of people stormed the U.S. Capitol in a violent rampage that left one police officer and four rioters dead and led to more than 100 arrests of the pro-Trump rioters, the House delivered an article of impeachment to the Senate, charging the former president with inciting the mob. In Oregon, the state Republican Party isn’t just backing former president Donald Trump — its official position falsely claims that the entire episode was…
How the KGB hooked Donald Trump
Craig Unger writes: There are boundaries in America’s political discourse—or at least there were until Donald Trump’s presidency. There were still taboos: One simply didn’t say that the president of the United States is a Russian asset. And yet according to Bob Woodward’s Rage, no less than former Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats, a Republican, had “deep suspicions” that Putin “had something” on Trump, seeing “no other explanation for his Behavior.” And Coats wasn’t the first highly placed intelligence…
Giuliani wasn’t just a Trump partisan but a shrewd marketer of vitamins, gold, lawsuit says
The Washington Post reports: As he outlined how “pervasive voter fraud” had turned the United States into “Venezuela or China or the old Soviet Union,” Donald Trump’s personal attorney, Rudolph W. Giuliani, paused his video podcast to offer his audience an incredible deal. For just $596, an online fraud-protection company that Giuliani called “the only folks to trust that I know of” was selling four years of online defense from home-stealing “cyber thieves.” “Use code ‘Rudy’ — that’s me —…
Trump’s pardon of Bannon could raise risk for three co-defendants
Benjamin Weiser reports: Of all the pardons former President Donald Trump granted in the hours before he left office, perhaps none was as galling to his critics, government watchdog groups and even some of his allies as the pardon of his former chief strategist, Stephen K. Bannon. Mr. Bannon, 67, had been charged with conspiring to swindle donors to a private fund to build a wall along the Mexican border, siphoning off more than $1 million for personal and other…
Music: Nils Petter Molvaer — ‘Softer’
U.S. suffers sharpest rise in poverty rate in more than 50 years
Bloomberg reports: The end of 2020 brought the sharpest rise in the U.S. poverty rate since the 1960s, according to a study released Monday. Economists Bruce Meyer, from the University of Chicago, and James Sullivan of the University of Notre Dame found that the poverty rate increased by 2.4 percentage points during the latter half of 2020 as the U.S. continued to suffer the economic impacts from Covid-19. That percentage-point rise is nearly double the largest annual increase in poverty…
As Trump seeks to remain a political force, new targets emerge
The New York Times reports: Former President Donald J. Trump, determined to remain a force in G.O.P. politics, is gaining new opportunities with a crucial Senate seat unexpectedly coming open in Ohio, an ally announcing for governor of Arkansas and rising pressure on Republicans in Congress who did not stand with him during this month’s impeachment vote. The surprise announcement on Monday by Senator Rob Portman of Ohio that he would not seek a third term sparked a political land…
John Roberts ducks the spotlight by skipping the second Trump impeachment trial
CNN reports: Chief Justice John Roberts has long been a student of history, but this is one part of history — presiding at the second trial of Donald Trump — he can do without. Roberts won a reprieve from another ordeal with Trump, a man who challenged judicial integrity, declared he could get his way at the Supreme Court and then called the justices “totally incompetent and weak” when he failed to prevail. Sen. Patrick Leahy, a Vermont Democrat and…
Watchdog probes if DOJ officials tried to overturn election
The Associated Press reports: The Justice Department’s inspector general is launching an investigation to examine whether any former or current department officials “engaged in an improper attempt” to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. Inspector General Michael Horowitz said Monday that the investigation will investigate allegations concerning the conduct of former and current Justice Department officials but will not extend to other government officials. The investigation comes after The New York Times reported that a former assistant attorney…
Rudy Giuliani sued by Dominion Voting Systems over false election claims
The New York Times reports: Dominion Voting Systems filed a defamation lawsuit on Monday against Rudolph W. Giuliani, the lawyer for Donald J. Trump and former mayor of New York City who played a key role in the former president’s monthslong effort to subvert the 2020 election. The 107-page lawsuit, filed in the Federal District Court in Washington, accuses Mr. Giuliani of carrying out “a viral disinformation campaign about Dominion” made up of “demonstrably false” allegations, in part to enrich…
In Aleksei Navalny protests, Russia faces biggest dissent in years
The New York Times reports: From the frozen streets of Russia’s Far East and Siberia to the grand plazas of Moscow and St. Petersburg, tens of thousands of Russians rallied in support of the jailed opposition leader Aleksei A. Navalny on Saturday in the biggest nationwide showdown in years between the Russian authorities and critics of the Kremlin. The protests largely drew young Russians and did not immediately pose a dire threat to President Vladimir V. Putin’s grip on power….
The dangers of seeing human minds as predictive machines
Joseph Fridman writes: The machine they built is hungry. As far back as 2016, Facebook’s engineers could brag that their creation ‘ingests trillions of data points every day’ and produces ‘more than 6 million predictions per second’. Undoubtedly Facebook’s prediction engines are even more potent now, making relentless conjectures about your brand loyalties, your cravings, the arc of your desires. The company’s core market is what the social psychologist Shoshana Zuboff describes as ‘prediction products’: guesses about the future, assembled…