Attention to the Unseen

Silas House writes: When I worked as a rural mail carrier in the hills of southeastern Kentucky in the early 2000s, my route snaked along the most mountainous parts of the county. I forded creeks and climbed steep dirt roads. Sometimes I’d have to drive for five miles to get to the next house. I delivered everything, including cages full of baby chickens and new sets of tires. I saw the joy that a parcel of books, clothing, or music…

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The New York Times reports: In early February, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin invited two Republican members of the Postal Service’s board of governors to his office to update him on a matter in which he had taken a particular interest — the search for a new postmaster general. Mr. Mnuchin had made clear before the meeting that he wanted the governors to find someone who would push through the kind of cost-cutting and price increases that President Trump had publicly…

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The Daily Beast reports: A south Texas butterfly conservationist has a message for Steve Bannon and three others arrested on Thursday for fraud and money laundering in what the feds describe as a border wall fundraising scheme. “I just wish them well in their cavity searches,” says Marianna Treviño-Wright, executive director of the National Butterfly Center. Treviño-Wright was targeted by We Build the Wall late last year, when she sought to stop the construction of a barrier beside the center’s…

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Zack Beauchamp writes: The defining moment of the 2020 Democratic National Convention was neither a slickly produced policy video nor a speech from a former president. Democratic nominee Joe Biden’s address, arguably the best oration of his long career, wasn’t it either. Instead, it was a testimonial from a 13-year-old boy from New Hampshire named Brayden Harrington. Harrington, like Biden, has a stutter. The two met at a CNN town hall in Concord this February, where Harrington told the candidate…

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David Ignatius writes: As Democrats accelerate their drive to defeat President Trump in November, they have a potent new weapon in a report by a Republican-led Senate committee that chronicles the “grave counterintelligence threat” posed by the extensive contacts between Trump’s former campaign chairman and a Russian intelligence operative. The final volume of the report by the Senate Intelligence Committee’s Russia investigation arrives late in the game. Still, it offers the detailed accounting of how Russian spies worked with the…

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Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny (L) poses for a photo at a Moscow rally in support of political prisoners on September 29, 2019. Dmitri Chirciu/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images By Regina Smyth, Indiana University The harrowing videos of Alexei Navalny, a blogger who has captured popular frustration in Russia, screaming in agony on Aug. 20, 2020 before being removed unconscious from a plane to a waiting ambulance, demonstrate the Kremlin’s increasing reliance on coercion to control dissent. This attack is…

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Joshua Green writes: Steve Bannon’s arrest on charges that he defrauded donors to a right-wing immigration group for $1 million marks the end of a political era—the era when a Trumpian admixture of economic populism and nativist immigration policy looked as if it could, as Bannon once put it to me, deliver the Republican Party “a hammerlock on the Electoral College.” At the time he made this assessment, in the days after Trump’s 2016 victory, it seemed entirely plausible that…

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CNN reports: President Donald Trump on Thursday said he would send law enforcement officials to polling locations to guard against voter fraud in November’s election, although it’s not clear he has the authority to do so. “We’re going to have sheriffs, and we’re going to have law enforcement, and we’re going to have, hopefully, US attorneys, and we’re going to have everybody and attorney generals (sic),” Trump said during an interview on Fox News with Sean Hannity. Trump’s comments come…

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