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Category: Politics

Trump targets Jewish Americans with antisemitic post during Rosh Hashanah

Trump targets Jewish Americans with antisemitic post during Rosh Hashanah

USA Today reports: Jewish groups criticized former President Donald Trump after he shared a post targeting “liberal Jews” following the start of Rosh Hashanah, one of the most important holidays for Jewish people around the world. Trump on Truth Social reshared a post on Sunday reading “Just a quick reminder for liberal Jews who voted to destroy America & Israel because you believed false narratives.” The post also included a list of the former president’s actions during his term in office centered…

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Trump attacked me. Then Musk did. It wasn’t an accident

Trump attacked me. Then Musk did. It wasn’t an accident

Yoel Roth writes: When I worked at Twitter, I led the team that placed a fact-checking label on one of Donald Trump’s tweets for the first time. Following the violence of Jan. 6, I helped make the call to ban his account from Twitter altogether. Nothing prepared me for what would happen next. Backed by fans on social media, Mr. Trump publicly attacked me. Two years later, following his acquisition of Twitter and after I resigned my role as the…

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Elon Musk likes to think he saved us from Armageddon. He’s just brought it closer

Elon Musk likes to think he saved us from Armageddon. He’s just brought it closer

Timothy Snyder writes: The Silicon Valley oligarch, perhaps the richest man in the world, extends a hand to his fellow oligarch, the man who has his finger on Russia’s nuclear button. They share a secret about the foolishness of the masses, and take action to save us all from ourselves. Thanks to the two of them, the world is saved from Armageddon. Not the precis of a favourably reviewed work of dystopian fiction but a scenario presented as though it…

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Dark money: The backstory of Alabama’s redistricting defiance

Dark money: The backstory of Alabama’s redistricting defiance

Alabama Political Reporter (APR) reports: The Alabama Legislature’s open defiance of the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Allen v. Milligan ordering the creation of a second majority-Black district baffled and infuriated the federal three-judge panel that initially ordered the state to redraw its 2021 congressional map.  APR has now identified connections between Alabama officials who led the 2023 redistricting process — which disregarded the U.S. Supreme Court’s order — with far-right power broker Leonard Leo’s dark money network, described this past week by Politico as…

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Paxton’s acquittal has nothing to do with justice — and everything with money

Paxton’s acquittal has nothing to do with justice — and everything with money

Joe Jaworski writes: Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who has spent his eight-year incumbency living on the political edge of scandal, was just acquitted in his historic Texas Senate impeachment trial. The Texas Senate voted largely along party lines, with only two Republican senators bravely voting to convict on virtually all sixteen articles of impeachment. The Texas Constitution requires a supermajority vote to convict on any article of impeachment, and the impeachment prosecutors came up short on each article. Kudos…

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The fight against climate change returns to the streets

The fight against climate change returns to the streets

Bill McKibben writes: Keeping movements alive is hard work—they run on volunteer energy, and they can be derailed by too much success, too much failure, too much internal strife, too many competing interests. Or they can be hindered by a pandemic, which largely brought the climate movement to a halt just months after its biggest single day, in September of 2019, when millions of people around the world, most of them young, took to the streets; in New York City,…

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Trump’s televised confession

Trump’s televised confession

Politico reports: Former President Donald Trump said Sunday that he didn’t respect lawyers and members of his campaign who told him he lost the 2020 presidential election, and that it was his decision to buy into the theory that the election was rigged. “In many cases, I didn’t respect them,” Trump said during an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” when asked why he decided to ignore his lawyers and advisers who told him he lost the 2020 election to…

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Top Democrats’ bullishness on Biden 2024 collides with voters’ worries

Top Democrats’ bullishness on Biden 2024 collides with voters’ worries

The New York Times reports: As President Biden shifts his re-election campaign into higher gear, the strength of his candidacy is being tested by a striking divide between Democratic leaders, who are overwhelmingly unified behind his bid, and rank-and-file voters in the party who harbor persistent doubts about whether he is their best option. From the highest levels of the party on down, Democratic politicians and party officials have long dismissed the idea that Mr. Biden should have any credible…

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Do liberals think this Supreme Court will save us from Trump?

Do liberals think this Supreme Court will save us from Trump?

Ankush Khardori writes: The public debate over the applicability of the [14th] amendment kicked into high gear following the release last month of a law-review article written by William Baude and Michael Stokes Paulsen, two conservative constitutional law professors who argue that, under an originalist interpretation of the provision, Trump is barred from running for office. The notion picked up steam in some quarters of the press, as well as an endorsement from two prominent legal thinkers, but it has since drawn vocal objections from the right…

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My mother survived Hitler’s crimes; my father survived Stalin’s

My mother survived Hitler’s crimes; my father survived Stalin’s

Daniel Finkelstein writes: “Should I mention that I saw Anne Frank in Belsen? Do you think they’d be interested in that?” I was in my late teens when my mother was first asked to give a talk about her experiences as a German refugee and Dutch Jew in the Second World War. Until the late 1970s, people rarely asked her about it, and she didn’t want to be a bore. Then things began to change. Within a few years of…

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Libya’s unnatural disaster

Libya’s unnatural disaster

Frederic Wehrey writes: Footage and eyewitness accounts have conveyed harrowing scenes from the storm-struck Libyan town of Derna: overflowing morgues and mass burials, rescuers digging through mud with their bare hands to recover bodies, a corpse hanging from a streetlight, the cries of trapped children. Two aging dams to Derna’s south collapsed under the pressure of Storm Daniel, sending an estimated 30 million cubic meters of water down a river valley that runs through the city’s center and erasing entire neighborhoods. Some 11,300 people are…

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Princeton is accused of treating the abduction of graduate student as mainly a ‘PR problem’

Princeton is accused of treating the abduction of graduate student as mainly a ‘PR problem’

  PBS’s Amna Nawaz: [Elizabeth Tsurkov] was [in Iraq] doing work as part of her degree at Princeton. It was reviewed by Princeton in advance, approved by Princeton in advance. What have your conversations been like with them so far? Emma Tsurkov: Unfortunately, they have been very frustrating. I expected Princeton to be a strong ally of mine and help get my sister back. But, in fact, what they have done is treat it mainly as a P.R. problem. I…

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People are dramatically underestimating the prospect of a second Trump presidency

People are dramatically underestimating the prospect of a second Trump presidency

Benjamin Wallace-Wells writes: When the Republican Presidential-primary season began this spring, one element seemed different than in past cycles: the Party’s donors—its billionaires and multimillionaires and assorted invisible hands—were lining up against the front-runner, Donald Trump. Ron DeSantis’s super PAC, Never Back Down, raised an eye-popping hundred and thirty million dollars before the Florida governor’s campaign was two months old. Leaders from the Club for Growth, the influential small-government lobby, launched a pac devoted to moving the Party’s voters past…

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How should Judge Chutkan respond to Jack Smith’s request for a ‘narrowly tailored’ gag order on Trump?

How should Judge Chutkan respond to Jack Smith’s request for a ‘narrowly tailored’ gag order on Trump?

The 1st Amendment doesn’t protect witness intimidation, jury tampering, or threats to the presiding judge or the prosecution The narrowly tailored gag order that Special Counsel Smith has requested is well within the U.S. Constitution’s limits. About time!https://t.co/nXz0EQzXim — Laurence Tribe 🇺🇦 ⚖️ (@tribelaw) September 15, 2023 Jack Smith was smart to put Trump’s misconduct in front of the judge. She is not going to like it, and it certainly won’t make her more inclined to rule in his favor….

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Trump lawyer Jenna Ellis turns on ‘malignant narcissist’ ex-president

Trump lawyer Jenna Ellis turns on ‘malignant narcissist’ ex-president

The Guardian reports: Jenna Ellis – the Donald Trump lawyer who like the former president faces criminal charges regarding attempted election subversion in his defeat by Joe Biden in 2020 – says she will not vote for him in the future because he is a “malignant narcissist” who cannot admit mistakes. “I simply can’t support him for elected office again,” Ellis said. “Why I have chosen to distance is because of that frankly malignant narcissistic tendency to simply say that…

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California goes on legal offense against Big Oil

California goes on legal offense against Big Oil

Politico reports: Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom announced a lawsuit Saturday against five major oil companies and their subsidiaries, seeking compensation for damages caused by climate change. The suit, filed in San Francisco County Superior Court by Democratic Attorney General Rob Bonta, accuses the companies of knowing about the link between fossil fuels and catastrophic climate change for decades but suppressing and spreading disinformation on the topic to delay climate action. The New York Times first reported the case Friday….

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