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Category: Politics

Jim Jordan is about to lead Republicans into a dangerous trap

Jim Jordan is about to lead Republicans into a dangerous trap

Greg Sargent writes: House Republicans are planning a long-running extravaganza of hearings designed to dramatize the notion that the “deep state” is persecuting conservatives. In one sense, this will find a receptive audience: A new Post-ABC News poll finds that 55 percent of conservative respondents believe federal agencies are “biased against conservatives.” But among all American adults, only a measly 28 percent believe this, and solid majorities of independents and moderates do not. Therein lies a trap that could prove…

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Conservatives want to control what kids learn, but it may backfire

Conservatives want to control what kids learn, but it may backfire

Adam Laats writes: When Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) blocked the first draft of an Advanced Placement African American studies course, he insisted he did not want to eliminate Black history, but only to control it. It might seem that his campaign has succeeded: The College Board announced a new watered-down curriculum that transformed resistance figures such as Frederick Douglass into “Black Conservatives,” even as they insisted the changes had nothing to do with political blowback. Yet history tells us…

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Outnumbered and worn out, Ukrainians in east brace for Russian assault

Outnumbered and worn out, Ukrainians in east brace for Russian assault

The New York Times reports: In a tiny village in eastern Ukraine at the epicenter of the next phase of the war, Lyudmila Degtyaryova measures the Russian advance by listening to the boom of incoming artillery shells. There are more and more of them now. And they are coming more frequently, as Russian troops grind their way forward. “You should see the fireworks here,” said Ms. Degtyaryova, 61, as the sounds of artillery howled all around. “It is like New…

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The madness behind the battle for Bakhmut

The madness behind the battle for Bakhmut

David Patrikarakos reports: “The objective for today is to come back alive.” Yevgeny is a young commando from the “Mad Pack”, a special forces unit that has been fighting in Bakhmut since November. His words are familiar — lacquered with that mix of emotions common to almost all soldiers fighting on the frontlines of war: laughter and unease. We clamber into a Land Cruiser and head toward the city. “The situation is always changing,” he continues. “But one thing remains…

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Federal judge says constitutional right to abortion may still exist, despite Dobbs

Federal judge says constitutional right to abortion may still exist, despite Dobbs

Politico reports: A federal judge in Washington, D.C., suggested Monday that there may be a constitutional right to abortion baked into the 13th Amendment — an area she said went unexplored by the Supreme Court in its momentous decision last year overturning Roe v. Wade. In a pending criminal case against several anti-abortion activists, U.S. District Court Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly said the Supreme Court’s ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization concluded only that the 14th Amendment included no right to abortion but stopped…

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Suspects arrested in plot to attack power stations, destroy Baltimore

Suspects arrested in plot to attack power stations, destroy Baltimore

ABC News reports: A Florida man and a Maryland woman have been arrested on federal charges of plotting to attack multiple energy substation with the goal of destroying Baltimore, the U.S. Department of Justice announced Monday. The suspects, Sarah Clendaniel of Catonsville, Maryland, and Brandon Russell of Orlando, Florida, were allegedly fueled by a racist extremist ideology as they “conspired to inflict maximum harm” on the power grid with the aim to “completely destroy” Baltimore, U.S. Attorney Erek Barron and…

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The defiance of Salman Rushdie

The defiance of Salman Rushdie

David Remnick writes: When Salman Rushdie turned seventy-five, last summer, he had every reason to believe that he had outlasted the threat of assassination. A long time ago, on Valentine’s Day, 1989, Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, declared Rushdie’s novel “The Satanic Verses” blasphemous and issued a fatwa ordering the execution of its author and “all those involved in its publication.” Rushdie, a resident of London, spent the next decade in a fugitive existence, under constant police protection. But…

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What happens when Israel’s lawbreakers become lawmakers

What happens when Israel’s lawbreakers become lawmakers

Yair Rosenberg writes: It’s a little after 8 p.m. on a frigid hill in the West Bank village of Beita, and Sa’ed Hamayyel is sitting in front of a crackling outdoor fire, his face framed by smoke, telling me how his son was killed. “He was 16 years old,” the Palestinian father says. “He was a student.” On June 11, 2021, Israeli soldiers “shot him from afar … He couldn’t have posed any threat to them.” Hamayyel is intimately familiar…

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‘It has started’: Russia prepares new Ukraine offensive as Western allies approve more weapons

‘It has started’: Russia prepares new Ukraine offensive as Western allies approve more weapons

Michael Weiss and James Rushton report: “We are again being threatened by German Leopard tanks,” Russian President Vladimir Putin declared Thursday on a visit to Volgograd, where he commemorated the 80th anniversary of the Red Army’s World War II victory over Nazi forces in Stalingrad. As he so often has in the past year, Putin made a direct comparison between his attempted conquest of Ukraine and what Russians refer to as the Great Patriotic War. “Again and again we are…

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Another Putin foe meets a grim Soviet-era fate

Another Putin foe meets a grim Soviet-era fate

Anne Applebaum writes: Sixteen months after his arrest, Mikheil Saakashvili has lost more than 90 pounds and needs a walker to move around his prison hospital. The former Georgian president was for a time, on a hunger strike, which helps explain his weight loss and his exhaustion. But it does not explain the traces of arsenic, mercury, and other toxins that a doctor found in his hair and nail clippings. It does not explain the beatings he has described to…

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Koch network to back alternative to Trump after sitting out recent primaries

Koch network to back alternative to Trump after sitting out recent primaries

The Washington Post reports: The network of donors and activist groups led by conservative billionaire Charles Koch will oppose Donald Trump for the 2024 Republican nomination, mounting a direct challenge to the former president’s campaign to win back the White House. “The best thing for the country would be to have a president in 2025 who represents a new chapter,” Emily Seidel, chief executive of the network’s flagship group, Americans for Prosperity (AFP), wrote in a memo released publicly on…

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Yes, Chinese spy balloons flew over the U.S. when President Trump was in office too

Yes, Chinese spy balloons flew over the U.S. when President Trump was in office too

Matt Novak writes: [S]everal reports have been published in the past two days that give us a better sense of when spy balloons operated by New Cold War adversaries have sailed into U.S. airspace. Bloomberg News reported on Friday that Chinese balloons flew over the U.S. while President Trump occupied the White House. “The balloon spotted this week over Montana was not the first time the U.S. has detected Chinese balloons over their territory—with previous incursions occurring during the Trump…

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The inside story of how the U.S. shot down the Chinese balloon

The inside story of how the U.S. shot down the Chinese balloon

David Ignatius writes: The Chinese have been dispatching intelligence-collection balloons for years. The Pentagon official said Saturday night that five Chinese balloons have circumnavigated the globe, and China has conducted 20 to 30 balloon missions globally over the past decade. The balloons don’t appear to gather much more intelligence than could Chinese satellites in low Earth orbit. Balloons can hover longer over collection targets like the ICBM field in Montana that was overflown a few days ago, but they’re not…

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An investigation into The Nation that CJR commissioned but refused to publish

An investigation into The Nation that CJR commissioned but refused to publish

In 2018, Duncan Campbell was commissioned by the “voice of journalism” and “watchdog of the press”, Columbia Journalism Review, to write an investigation into the venerable New York magazine The Nation, and its apparent support for Russia’s territorial ambitions. In 2020, after a full fact check, legal review and edit, the article was cancelled two days before the scheduled publication. In 2022, months after Putin’s full invasion of Ukraine, the CJR again refused to publish the article. Duncan Campbell wrote:…

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Supreme Court justices used personal emails for work and ‘burn bags’ were left open in hallways, sources say

Supreme Court justices used personal emails for work and ‘burn bags’ were left open in hallways, sources say

CNN reports: Long before the leak of a draft opinion reversing Roe v. Wade, some Supreme Court justices often used personal email accounts for sensitive transmissions instead of secure servers set up to guard such information, among other security lapses not made public in the court’s report on the investigation last month. New details revealed to CNN by multiple sources familiar with the court’s operations offer an even more detailed picture of yearslong lax internal procedures that could have endangered…

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Soaring death toll gives grim insight into Russian tactics

Soaring death toll gives grim insight into Russian tactics

The New York Times reports: The number of Russian troops killed and wounded in Ukraine is approaching 200,000, a stark symbol of just how badly President Vladimir V. Putin’s invasion has gone, according to American and other Western officials. While the officials caution that casualties are notoriously difficult to estimate, particularly because Moscow is believed to routinely undercount its war dead and injured, they say the slaughter from fighting in and around the eastern Ukrainian city of Bakhmut and the…

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