Browsed by
Category: Politics

Victories by pro-Palestinian Democrats show the party’s shift on Israel

Victories by pro-Palestinian Democrats show the party’s shift on Israel

The New York Times reports: Three Democrats who made criticism of Israel central to their political identities swept to victory in House primary races in New York City on Tuesday, signaling a new era of skepticism in their party toward the Jewish state and its actions. The striking results reflected a fast-moving shift in liberal politics. Democratic voters are now more likely to be critical of Israel and its government than they are to be supportive, according to several recent…

Read More Read More

Federal judge bars Trump from implementing proof of citizenship requirement to vote

Federal judge bars Trump from implementing proof of citizenship requirement to vote

The Associated Press reports: A federal judge on Wednesday permanently barred President Donald Trump’s administration from implementing most of his first executive order on elections, part of which sought to require people to show documentary proof of citizenship when they register to vote. The ruling by U.S. District Court Judge Denise Casper in Boston effectively converts a preliminary injunction she issued a year ago, in which she temporarily blocked many of Trump’s efforts to overhaul elections, into a permanent ban….

Read More Read More

Bribery: How a $45 million donation brought Larry Ellison deeper into Trump’s circle

Bribery: How a $45 million donation brought Larry Ellison deeper into Trump’s circle

The Wall Street Journal reports: Larry Ellison didn’t join the gaggle of CEOs that traveled with President Trump on his state visit to China. He wasn’t among the guests at a White House dinner Trump hosted with tech titans. He also skipped the UFC event on Trump’s 80th birthday. The Oracle billionaire didn’t need to be at these public events. Ellison, 81, has developed a more-private friendship with Trump that has helped his tech company’s business as well as his…

Read More Read More

Democratic socialists aren’t taking over America

Democratic socialists aren’t taking over America

Adam Serwer writes: Candidates endorsed by New York City’s democratic-socialist mayor, Zohran Mamdani, swept the city’s primary elections yesterday, provoking alarm in both conservative and centrist circles over the future of the Democratic Party. The right-wing New York Post dubbed the winners, Brad Lander, Claire Valdez, and Darializa Avila Chevalier, the “hateful slate.” The Free Press quoted a supporter of one of the defeated candidates warning that it “doesn’t feel safe to be Jewish anymore,” notwithstanding the fact that one…

Read More Read More

Ten years after Brexit, every grim prediction has more than come true

Ten years after Brexit, every grim prediction has more than come true

Geoffrey Wheatcroft writes: “It was Game of Thrones,” says George Osborne. The former Tory chancellor of the exchequer was talking about the fateful referendum 10 years ago, on June 23, 2016, on whether the United Kingdom should remain in or leave the European Union. Or rather, he was talking about one man in particular, and Osborne’s comparison was just right. For Boris Johnson, the referendum—in fact, all of politics, even all of life itself—was a game, although also an opportunity….

Read More Read More

Trump’s Iran debacle could be a an unexpected gift for America

Trump’s Iran debacle could be a an unexpected gift for America

Robert Malley and Stephen Wertheim write: With Iran, Donald Trump has done the impossible once more. In attacking that country in February, he went where his predecessors never dared, joining with Israel in a bid to overthrow or incapacitate the regime in Tehran. Having achieved neither, he appears to have accepted worse terms than he could have obtained through diplomacy. His war was a political albatross as well, garnering, at the start, less support from the public than any other…

Read More Read More

Bernie Moreno and Elizabeth Warren: Our plan to save Social Security

Bernie Moreno and Elizabeth Warren: Our plan to save Social Security

Senators Bernie Moreno and Elizabeth Warren write: One of us is a Republican from Ohio who built a business that generated hundreds of jobs. The other is a Democrat from Massachusetts who built a career protecting consumers from financial tricks and traps. We don’t agree on everything, but here’s one thing we do agree on: Congress must act now to save Social Security for generations of Americans to come. Social Security is a core component of our nation’s promise —…

Read More Read More

New DOJ memo, pushed by Stephen Miller, questions decades of protections for people with disabilities

New DOJ memo, pushed by Stephen Miller, questions decades of protections for people with disabilities

  HuffPost reports: White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller was a driving force behind the Justice Department’s recent memo giving states authority to institutionalize people with disabilities rather than fund community-based care, according to an exclusive report from Bloomberg Law. Miller was reportedly instrumental to the DOJ Office of Legal Counsel’s Thursday opinion that said states may disregard decades of Supreme Court precedent that shields people with disabilities from being forcibly institutionalized. Instead, courts had been encouraged to…

Read More Read More

I cold-called President Trump. Here’s what he told me about an oil tycoon and major donor

I cold-called President Trump. Here’s what he told me about an oil tycoon and major donor

By Alex Cuadros This story was originally published by ProPublica My family’s morning routine is usually pretty ordinary. We wake up early, drink some coffee and get our 1-year-old ready for daycare. But one Wednesday morning last month, I found myself uttering to my wife a sentence that sounded frankly surreal to both of us: “Just to let you know, I’m about to call Trump.” Then, hoping to avoid any urgent diaper events, I ducked into the next room and…

Read More Read More

‘Blatantly unlawful’: Federal judge blocks DOJ subpoenas aimed at Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz

‘Blatantly unlawful’: Federal judge blocks DOJ subpoenas aimed at Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz

Politico reports: A federal judge has thrown out Justice Department grand jury subpoenas aimed at Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and his allies, calling them an abusive and retaliatory process to punish Walz based on his refusal to assist President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown. In a blistering ruling, U.S. District Judge Patrick Schiltz said there was “no doubt” that the subpoenas were issued to damage Walz — part of what he said was a pattern of Trump administration efforts to use…

Read More Read More

‘I’m out’: Tucker Carlson says he’s done with the GOP

‘I’m out’: Tucker Carlson says he’s done with the GOP

Axios reports: Conservative pundit Tucker Carlson says he’s “out” of the Republican Party moving forward, arguing the GOP no longer reflects his views. Why it matters: The public split underscores growing fractures inside the broad MAGA coalition President Trump built, as his Iran war and handling of the economy continue to divide Republicans. What they’re saying: “I’m out,” Carlson said on an episode of the “Can’t Be Censored” podcast that aired Thursday but gained traction online Monday. “And if I’m out, then I think a lot of other people are out.” “I…

Read More Read More

Federal judge blocks Trump admin’s database of Americans’ Social Security numbers and citizenship status

Federal judge blocks Trump admin’s database of Americans’ Social Security numbers and citizenship status

Politico reports: A federal judge has blocked the Trump administration from creating a database of millions of Americans’ private information — including Social Security numbers and citizenship status — saying the administration has fed knowingly inaccurate data to states that are now “actively” and “haphazardly” purging purported non-citizens from voter rolls. “The federal government has knowingly trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens in a manner that threatens the sacred right to vote,” U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan wrote…

Read More Read More

‘A huge grab of power’: Trump is defying Congress on foreign aid

‘A huge grab of power’: Trump is defying Congress on foreign aid

By Anna Maria Barry-Jester This story was originally published by ProPublica After the Trump administration upended the world’s largest foreign aid provider last year, terminating thousands of programs and firing nearly all of its staff, its plan for the agency was clear: Eliminate it entirely. But because it is a congressionally created agency, President Donald Trump needed lawmakers’ permission to do so. So this year, Trump officials asked Congress for permission to shutter the U.S. Agency for International Development and…

Read More Read More

Who is Andy Burnham, the ‘man of the people’ likely to be next UK prime minister?

Who is Andy Burnham, the ‘man of the people’ likely to be next UK prime minister?

Daniel Boffey writes: In the story that Andy Burnham tells about himself, “the turning point” in his political life came in 2009 when he was booed at a football ground in the north-west of England. He had been an ideologically reliable middle-ranking minister under Tony Blair, the centrist New Labour prime minister between 1997 and 2007, and had gone on to be appointed as secretary of state for culture, media and sport under Blair’s successor, Gordon Brown. On the 20th…

Read More Read More

Tulsi Gabbard, the Manchurian DNI

Tulsi Gabbard, the Manchurian DNI

Reporting for the Washington Post, Jon Swaine writes: [Rebecca] Saltzburg [former staffer for Tulsi Gabbard and former member of a breakaway Hare Krishna group to which Gabbard also belonged] told me [Chris] Butler [founder of the Science of Identity Foundation (SIF)] did not use a computer. Instead, he delivered his advice for Gabbard verbally, she said, sometimes to her directly over the phone and other times to his secretaries or other followers. The secretaries transcribed his remarks and turned them…

Read More Read More

Trump imagines that if Iran regime can’t be dislodged by force, maybe it can be bribed

Trump imagines that if Iran regime can’t be dislodged by force, maybe it can be bribed

Karim Sadjadpour writes: Donald Trump’s war against Iran began with one gamble and ended with another. Initially, the president bet that he could stop Iran’s nuclear ambitions by bombing Iran’s revolutionary regime out of existence. So he spent tens of billions of dollars, and upended the global economy, only to sign a memorandum of understanding undoubtedly weaker than any deal he could have struck before the war. Embedded in this document is a new gamble: that if Iran’s revolutionaries can’t…

Read More Read More