Browsed by
Category: Politics

No Labels using dark money to fund campaign for unnamed third party candidate

No Labels using dark money to fund campaign for unnamed third party candidate

Politico reports: No Labels’ bid to run a third party presidential candidate in 2024 has sparked a number of questions about political motivations. Chief among them: Who, exactly, is paying for this thing? The centrist group consists of a constellation of entities, some of which disclose donor names. But the main one is a nonprofit which, unlike political parties, does not have to reveal the names of its funders. And in an interview with POLITICO, its CEO, Nancy Jacobson, declined…

Read More Read More

Pro-RFK Jr. Super PAC has deep ties to Marjorie Taylor Greene, George Santos

Pro-RFK Jr. Super PAC has deep ties to Marjorie Taylor Greene, George Santos

Rolling Stone reports: Last month, supporters of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s presidential bid created a Super PAC titled Heal the Divide. On its website, the group — whose name is borrowed from Kennedy’s own campaign slogan — advises voters that “Only Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. can unite the Nation to start healing America,” and allows visitors to donate both in dollars and cryptocurrency. There’s nothing abnormal about a candidate getting a Super PAC, even a candidate making a long-shot bid…

Read More Read More

IRS agent told Congress of Hunter Biden invoking his father in business deal

IRS agent told Congress of Hunter Biden invoking his father in business deal

The New York Times reports: The lead I.R.S. agent investigating whether Hunter Biden committed tax crimes told Congress his team uncovered evidence that Mr. Biden had invoked his father, who was then out of office, while pressing a potential Chinese business partner in 2017 to move ahead with a proposed energy deal, House Republicans said. In testimony made public on Thursday, Gary Shapley, an I.R.S. agent since 2009 who supervised the tax agency’s investigation into Hunter Biden, said his team…

Read More Read More

How Andrew Tate and the far right made common cause with Islamists

How Andrew Tate and the far right made common cause with Islamists

Rasha Al Aqeedi and Lydia Wilson write: Tommy Robinson has come a long way on the subject of Islam. Born Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, he rose to prominence as the leader of the anti-immigrant and anti-Islamic English Defence League. In a speech in Denmark in 2016, he claimed that there was an ongoing “military invasion” of Europe, referring to the increasing numbers of refugees from Muslim countries. In his self-published book, “Mohammed’s Koran: Why Muslims Kill for Islam,” Robinson instructs any potential…

Read More Read More

Dictators’ dark secret: They’re learning from each other

Dictators’ dark secret: They’re learning from each other

An editorial in the Washington Post says: In the spring of 2012, Vladimir Putin was feeling the pressure. For months, anti-Putin protests had surged through the streets of Moscow and other cities following fraudulent parliamentary elections the previous December. Mr. Putin, who was about to be sworn in for a third term as president, harbored a fear of “color” revolutions — the 2003 Rose Revolution in Georgia, the 2004-2005 Orange Revolution in Ukraine — as well as other popular revolts…

Read More Read More

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. claims Russia acted in ‘good faith’ in Ukraine invasion

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. claims Russia acted in ‘good faith’ in Ukraine invasion

HuffPost reports: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said Wednesday he believes Russia acted in “good faith” amid the Kremlin’s invasion of Ukraine, adding the U.S., in fact, bore heavy responsibility for the ongoing war. Kennedy, who announced his bid for the Democratic nomination in April, made the comments on SiriusXM’s “The Briefing with Steve Scully.” Scully asked about Russian President Vladimir Putin’s continued effort to seize part of Ukraine despite international condemnation. Kennedy claimed the way forward involved “baby steps” toward…

Read More Read More

Will Judge Cannon give Trump a favorable jury?

Will Judge Cannon give Trump a favorable jury?

Jeffrey Abramson, Eugene R. Fidell, and Dennis Aftergut write: On Tuesday, Federal District Court Judge Aileen Cannon launched the Florida trial for Donald Trump’s national security case on a “rocket docket,” setting the trial date on August 14. That date will likely not hold, but it might reassure those who have worried about her assignment to the case, concerned that she might, among other things, slow-walk it. That reassurance won’t end the concerns, of course. Legal experts (among others) lost…

Read More Read More

Dobbs turned abortion into a huge liability for Republicans

Dobbs turned abortion into a huge liability for Republicans

FiveThirtyEight reports: When Theresa M. started attending a support group for breast cancer survivors, she didn’t expect political issues like abortion to be a part of the conversation. But since last summer, when her home state of Florida — freed from the requirements of Roe v. Wade by the Supreme Court — began imposing new abortion restrictions, younger women who were newly diagnosed with breast cancer started to voice concerns. “They worry if you find out you’re pregnant, you might…

Read More Read More

The government must say what it knows about Covid’s origins

The government must say what it knows about Covid’s origins

Zeynep Tufekci writes: Three researchers at a laboratory in Wuhan, China, who had fallen ill in November 2019 had been experimenting with SARS-like coronaviruses under inadequate biosafety conditions, The Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday, citing current and former U.S. officials. The Journal had reported in 2021 that some researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology had sought hospital care that November, around the time that evidence suggests Covid first began to spread among people. It was not publicly known,…

Read More Read More

Ex-FBI analyst who, like Trump, kept classified documents in her bathroom, receives nearly four-year prison sentence

Ex-FBI analyst who, like Trump, kept classified documents in her bathroom, receives nearly four-year prison sentence

The Kansas City Star reports: A former FBI intelligence analyst from Dodge City, Kansas, who kept hundreds of classified documents at her home, including in her bathroom, was sentenced to nearly four years in prison by a federal judge in Kansas City on Wednesday for violating the same part of the Espionage Act that former President Donald Trump is accused of breaking. The sentencing for willful retention of national defense information was the first since a federal grand jury indicted…

Read More Read More

Inside Moms for Liberty’s close relationship with the Proud Boys

Inside Moms for Liberty’s close relationship with the Proud Boys

Vice News reports: Alexandra Caballero was already well-known in Miami’s far-right scene as an organizer of anti-mask protests at school board meetings when, in August 2021, she joined the city’s chapter of the extremist “parental rights” group known as Moms for Liberty. For six months, Caballero told VICE News that she was happy to be a member of the group. Founded in 2020, Moms for Liberty portrays itself as a wholesome, grassroots movement that is focused on protecting students. However,…

Read More Read More

Justice Alito doth protest too much

Justice Alito doth protest too much

The New York Times reports: Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. took the unusual step late Tuesday of responding to questions about his travel with a billionaire who frequently has cases before the Supreme Court hours before an article detailing their ties had even been published. In an extraordinary salvo in a favored forum, Justice Alito defended himself in a pre-emptive article in the opinion pages of The Wall Street Journal before the news organization ProPublica posted its account of a…

Read More Read More

There is no shared American value system

There is no shared American value system

Dahlia Lithwick and Michael Podhorzer write: In another least-surprising surprise of our times, last week Donald Trump expressed his intent, if elected to a second term as president, to utilize his Justice Department to destroy his political opponent. The New York Times reported that Trump had promised, in a speech after his arraignment, to “appoint a real special prosecutor to go after the most corrupt president in the history of the United States of America, Joe Biden, and the entire…

Read More Read More

Ukraine’s counteroffensive against Russia slowly makes progress

Ukraine’s counteroffensive against Russia slowly makes progress

Michael Weiss and James Rushton report: Ukraine might be a victim of its own success. Last year, Kyiv launched a surprise operation to recapture territory in Kharkiv Oblast from Russian forces, liberating territory roughly the size of Denmark in the space of five days. That campaign, a closely guarded secret, was unforeseen by just about everyone — especially the Russians. But it set high expectations for Ukraine’s long anticipated spring counteroffensive. That spring has finally arrived, and Ukraine has gone…

Read More Read More

Pentagon says Ukraine accounting error revealed last month is much bigger than previously stated

Pentagon says Ukraine accounting error revealed last month is much bigger than previously stated

CNN reports: The Pentagon announced Tuesday that the accounting error revealed last month was significantly more than previously stated and aid provided to Ukraine was overvalued by $6.2 billion rather than $3 billion. The accounting error includes fiscal years 2022 and 2023 and occurred because “in a significant number of cases,” when the US transferred weaponry, military officials counted the value of replacing the weapon instead of the value of the actual weapon, deputy Pentagon press secretary Sabrina Singh explained…

Read More Read More

The movement that sees Trump as an instrument of God leading a spiritual war

The movement that sees Trump as an instrument of God leading a spiritual war

Stephanie McCrummen writes: Convergence. Spiritual warfare. Demonic strongholds. These were the kinds of terms that Tami [Barthen] tossed off easily, and knew could make the movement seem loopy to outsiders. But they were part of a vocabulary that added up to a whole way of seeing the world, one traceable not so much to ancient times but rather to 1971. That was when an evangelical missionary named C. Peter Wagner returned to California after spending more than a decade in…

Read More Read More