Attention to the Unseen

The Associated Press reports: The polls had just opened for last year’s midterms in Pennsylvania when the phones began ringing at the election office in Luzerne County. Polling places were running low on paper to print ballots. Volunteers were frustrated, and voters were getting agitated. Emily Cook, the office’s interim deputy director who had been in her position for just two months, rushed to the department’s warehouse. She found stacks of paper, but it was the wrong kind — ordered…

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Rolling Stone reports: Donald Trump wanted to pull the United States out of NATO during his first term, but was repeatedly talked out of it by senior administration officials. For a possible second term in the White House, the 2024 Republican presidential frontrunner is already discussing how he could actually get it done, if his demands aren’t met by NATO. He and his policy-wonk allies are also gaming out how he could dramatically wind down American involvement to merely a…

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Aaron Blake writes: It’s not clear yet that House Republicans’ inability to elect a new speaker has significantly recast the political paradigm in this country. But the danger for the party is in a drawn-out process continuing to cast doubt on the GOP’s ability to actually govern when voters give it power. A poll released this weekend showed two-thirds of Americans agreed that “Congress needs to elect a speaker as soon as possible” to deal with issues such as Israel, Ukraine and…

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Noah Berlatsky writes: The ongoing GOP House speakership debacle has been a clownish, humiliating spectacle which has made basically every Republican involved look like a dunderhead unfit to look smug on Sean Hannity’s show, much less govern the country. So it’s all the more surprising that one legislator who has emerged as a figure of resolve is Colorado’s Ken Buck. Buck has not, up to now, been a figure of integrity, to put it mildly. He’s a radical right Freedom…

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Matthew Duss writes: In his popular 1998 book, The Dream Palace of the Arabs, the late scholar Fouad Ajami offered a critique of 20th-century Arab nationalists and intellectuals for having built what Ajami saw as a fictional sense of their own accomplishments, which he claimed in turn had promoted a chauvinistic and conspiratorial worldview. “In an Arab political history littered with thwarted dreams, little honor would be extended to pragmatists who knew the limits of what could and could not…

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Paul Kane writes: Rep. Jake Ellzey (R-Tex.) described his Monday meeting with Rep. Jim Jordan as “very cordial,” one that ended with the retired Navy fighter pilot explaining why he would quietly oppose the Ohio Republican’s bid for speaker. Three days later, as a group of Republicans opposed to Jordan’s candidacy met with the speaker-designate, Ellzey remained quiet, again. But he was restraining himself from yelling at Jordan. “I didn’t say anything. Because I would have said something to him,…

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