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FBI examining Hunter Biden’s laptop as foreign op, contradicting Trump’s intel czar

FBI examining Hunter Biden’s laptop as foreign op, contradicting Trump’s intel czar

The Daily Beast reports: The FBI is investigating the purloined laptop materials from Joe Biden’s son as part of a possible foreign disinformation operation, a congressional source told The Daily Beast—an investigation at odds with a statement from President Trump’s director of national intelligence. John Ratcliffe, the director of national intelligence, told Fox Business on Monday that the dissemination of materials from Hunter Biden’s alleged laptop was not part of a Russian disinformation campaign. “The intelligence community doesn’t believe that…

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Six Russian military officers charged in vast hacking campaign

Six Russian military officers charged in vast hacking campaign

The Associated Press reports: Six current and former Russian military officers sought to disrupt through computer hacking the French election, the Winter Olympics and U.S. hospitals and businesses, according to a Justice Department indictment unsealed Monday. It details destructive attacks on a broad range of targets and implicates the same Kremlin unit that interfered in the 2016 U.S. election. The indictment accuses the defendants, all said to be officers in the Russian military agency known as the GRU, in hacks…

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Trump’s retread campaign isn’t getting traction

Trump’s retread campaign isn’t getting traction

The Associated Press reports: President Donald Trump stood before a crowd in a state that had once been firmly in his grasp. There were fewer than three weeks left in the campaign, one reshaped by a virus that has killed more than 215,000 Americans, and he was running out of time to change the trajectory of the race. He posed a question. “Did you hear the news?” the president asked the hopeful crowd. “Bruce Ohr is finally out of the…

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American traitors from Benedict Arnold to Donald J Trump

American traitors from Benedict Arnold to Donald J Trump

Charles Kaiser writes: One of the most important qualities a good reporter can have is a very low threshold for outrage. Useful, critical coverage of your subject becomes impossible once nonchalance or indifference has inured you to scandal. This has become a huge problem during Donald Trump’s presidency. Inside the souls of far too many Washington reporters, a never-ending wave of scandals, crimes, indictments and assorted obstructions of justice has washed away this essential capacity for indignation – just when…

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Trump ‘inciting domestic terrorism’ with ‘Lock her up!’ rally chant, says Gov. Gretchen Whitmer

Trump ‘inciting domestic terrorism’ with ‘Lock her up!’ rally chant, says Gov. Gretchen Whitmer

The Guardian reports: Gretchen Whitmer, the governor of Michigan who was the subject of a rightwing plot to kidnap and possibly kill her over coronavirus lockdown measures, has accused Donald Trump of “inspiring and incentivising domestic terrorism”. Whitmer spoke after Lara Trump, a campaign surrogate for her father-in-law, insisted the president was merely “having fun” when he attacked Whitmer and responded to chants of “Lock her up!” at a rally in Muskegon. “Lock ’em all up,” the president said. On…

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Trump continues bizarre appeals to suburban women as he campaigns in Covid hotspots

Trump continues bizarre appeals to suburban women as he campaigns in Covid hotspots

Maeve Reston writes: If President Donald Trump loses his reelection bid in November, it will be in part because of his fundamental misunderstanding of the beliefs of “suburban women,” whom he has tried to win back with a series of bizarre and racist appeals that seem more targeted to a stereotype from the 1950s and 1960s than the American women who actually live in those areas today. Many of the female voters who have abandoned Trump recoil from his divisive…

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After Trump, the Republican Party may become even more extreme

After Trump, the Republican Party may become even more extreme

Stanley Greenberg writes: Trump built his base in the insurgent anti-government, anti-immigrant movement that, during the last recession, came to prominence as the Tea Party. Then he forged a pact with evangelical Christians, to whom he promised a steady supply of socially conservative federal judges, including on the Supreme Court. He also built a strong alliance with his party’s anti-abortion-rights observant Catholics—a constituency epitomized by Attorney General William Barr. So Trump campaigns unbowed atop a coalition that, by my estimate,…

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How Kevin Van Ausdal’s ‘voice of reason’ got silenced by QAnon and Marjorie Taylor Greene in 31 days

How Kevin Van Ausdal’s ‘voice of reason’ got silenced by QAnon and Marjorie Taylor Greene in 31 days

The Washington Post reports: Kevin was in his Honda heading west to Indiana as the campaign staff issued a statement on his behalf, titled “A Message from Kevin”: “I am heartbroken to announce that for family and personal reasons, I cannot continue this race for Congress. The next steps in my life are taking me away from Georgia …” And that was the end of 31 days. A week later, Marjorie Taylor Greene was arriving in her Humvee for a…

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Covid-19 is a class issue

Covid-19 is a class issue

John Harris writes: Just as [Britain’s] final exit from the EU comes into view, noise from the media and politics about Covid-19 is sounding discomfortingly similar to the furies that erupted around the 2016 referendum. On one side stands the political right, opposed to lockdown, apparently spurning the advice of experts, and seemingly convinced that a mixture of true-Brit common sense and derring-do will somehow see us through. The left, meanwhile, emphasises the importance of “the science”, and the prospect…

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Hannah Arendt saw totalitarianism rooted in loneliness

Hannah Arendt saw totalitarianism rooted in loneliness

Samantha Rose Hill writes: What prepares men for totalitarian domination in the non-totalitarian world is the fact that loneliness, once a borderline experience usually suffered in certain marginal social conditions like old age, has become an everyday experience … – From The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) by Hannah Arendt ‘Please write regularly, or otherwise I am going to die out here.’ Hannah Arendt didn’t usually begin letters to her husband this way, but in the spring of 1955 she found…

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Fastest-ever growth in global coronavirus cases as U.S. tops 8 million

Fastest-ever growth in global coronavirus cases as U.S. tops 8 million

AFP reports: Coronavirus cases in the United States topped eight million Friday as the world saw the highest-ever number reported in a single day, while European countries tightened measures to control the pandemic’s spread. The running US case tally from Johns Hopkins University is the highest in the world, followed by India at 7.4 million cases and Brazil with 5.1 million. America has also suffered the most coronavirus deaths of any country, at over 218,000. Worldwide, more than 400,000 new…

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279,700 extra deaths in the U.S. so far in this pandemic year

279,700 extra deaths in the U.S. so far in this pandemic year

A girl views the body of her father, who died of COVID-19, while mourners who can’t visit in person are onscreen. Joe Raedle/Getty Images News via Getty Images By Ronald D. Fricker Jr., Virginia Tech The Conversation, CC BY-ND The number of deaths in the United States through September 2020 is at least 10% and likely 13% higher than it would have been if the coronavirus pandemic had never happened, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data. Conservatively,…

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$421 million in debt: Trump calls it ‘a peanut,’ but challenges lie ahead

$421 million in debt: Trump calls it ‘a peanut,’ but challenges lie ahead

The New York Times reports: President Trump painted a rosy picture of his financial condition during a televised town hall on Thursday night, calling his hundreds of millions of dollars in debt coming due “a peanut” and saying he had borrowed it as a favor to lenders eager to take advantage of his financial strength. In fact, the loans, and the unusual requirement he had to accept to receive them, illustrate the financial challenges he faces and the longstanding reluctance…

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Rudy Giuliani: Only ‘50/50’ chance I worked with a ‘Russian spy’ to dig dirt on Bidens

Rudy Giuliani: Only ‘50/50’ chance I worked with a ‘Russian spy’ to dig dirt on Bidens

The Daily Beast reports: Rudy Giuliani thinks it’s hilarious. He says the questions mounting around him—including those about whether his efforts to dump Hunter Biden’s documents and photos are part of some foreign election-interference operation—are “a bunch of bullshit.” He’s unconcerned about intelligence assessments that one of his former associates was a Russian agent, a proposition that he gave more or less even odds. In fact, Giuliani said, he has been “laughing my head off” about the whole affair. Instead,…

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