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Category: Politics

Who planted the January 6 Capitol Hill pipe bombs?

Who planted the January 6 Capitol Hill pipe bombs?

Elaine Godfrey writes: The security-camera footage is grainy and gray with no sound, like an old silent film. Night has fallen in Washington, and a person wearing a light-colored hoodie, a face mask, and Nike Air Max Speed Turf sneakers strides down the sidewalk along South Capitol Street carrying a backpack. The person stops and stands idly in front of a house while someone passes, walking their dog on a leash. The person continues on, sitting for a while on…

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Jimmy Carter: I fear for American democracy

Jimmy Carter: I fear for American democracy

Jimmy Carter writes: One year ago, a violent mob, guided by unscrupulous politicians, stormed the Capitol and almost succeeded in preventing the democratic transfer of power. All four of us former presidents condemned their actions and affirmed the legitimacy of the 2020 election. There followed a brief hope that the insurrection would shock the nation into addressing the toxic polarization that threatens our democracy. However, one year on, promoters of the lie that the election was stolen have taken over…

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McConnell cracks door open to Electoral Count Act reform

McConnell cracks door open to Electoral Count Act reform

Politico reports: Mitch McConnell is signaling he’s open to reforming the Electoral Count Act, one year after a mass of Republicans objected to certification of President Joe Biden’s win ahead of an attempted insurrection. Democrats are pursuing more sweeping election reforms and federalization of elections, but some lawmakers in both parties are also suggesting there may be more modest reforms that could pass on a bipartisan basis. Centrist Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema both endorsed pursuing work on…

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The ridiculous hypocrisy of Sean Hannity hiding behind ‘freedom of the press’

The ridiculous hypocrisy of Sean Hannity hiding behind ‘freedom of the press’

Margaret Sullivan writes: The House Jan. 6 committee asked this week that Fox News host Sean Hannity appear and answer investigators’ questions about his text messages to President Trump’s aides before, during and after the attack on the U.S. Capitol. The response from Hannity’s lawyer was every bit as predictable as it was laughable. “We remain very concerned about the constitutional implications especially as it relates to the First Amendment,” wrote Jay Sekulow, the Trump-team lawyer who represents Hannity. He…

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EU’s Borrell: Europe cannot be left out of Russia-U.S. talks

EU’s Borrell: Europe cannot be left out of Russia-U.S. talks

Politico reports: The EU’s chief fear is no longer that it will be squeezed onto the diplomatic sidelines by the U.S. and China — because it is now more afraid of being squeezed out by the U.S. and Russia. Washington is leading talks on defusing tensions with Moscow after Russia moved about 100,000 troops to its border with Ukraine and says it wants legally-binding guarantees from the NATO military alliance about its weapons deployment and its eastern expansion. At a…

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What if the January 6 insurrection had succeeded in illegally installing Trump?

What if the January 6 insurrection had succeeded in illegally installing Trump?

David Rothkopf writes: As we approach the first anniversary of the Jan. 6 insurrection on the U.S. Capitol, many questions remain. Among these, one of the most important is, “What if?” What if the coup attempt had succeeded? What if the election results had been overturned? What if Donald Trump were illegally installed for a second term as president of the United States? It could have happened several different ways. Capitol Police officer Eugene Goodman might have been out sick…

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Navarro: Trump distributed bogus election fraud research to ‘every’ Congressional Republican

Navarro: Trump distributed bogus election fraud research to ‘every’ Congressional Republican

Rolling Stone reports: When the 2020 election didn’t go Trump’s way, Peter Navarro did something dangerous. He began to do his own research. Navarro, an economist whom Donald Trump tapped to lead his trade war against China, didn’t stay in his lane at the White House. He’d already inserted himself in the administration’s botched pandemic response, pushing the unproven hypothesis that Covid-19 escaped from a Wuhan lab. And after the 2020 vote, Navarro began compiling a series of inflammatory dossiers…

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How January 6 spawned a new right

How January 6 spawned a new right

Jonathan Chait writes: January 6, 2021, may be the most contentious date in American history. To Democrats and the surviving remnant of anti-Trump Republicans, the event was a spasm of right-wing political violence aimed at terminating the republican experiment. To most Republicans, it was something ranging from a noble uprising to a prank gone somewhat awry to, at worst, a minor lapse in judgment. We do not yet have a common language to describe this event: Its critics call it…

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For the silent majority, it’s time to come out of hiding

For the silent majority, it’s time to come out of hiding

How can the silent majority find its voice? The phrase, silent majority, often conjures up an image of moderation and sanity — a population hemmed in from either side by the strident voices of extremists. The problem with this characterization is that it reinforces the self-imposed impotence of those who survey the political landscape while believing that as individuals, they have no capacity to be instruments of change. But the silent majority hasn’t been silenced. It is silent by choice….

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The defense of democracy must become central for American journalists

The defense of democracy must become central for American journalists

Margaret Sullivan writes: [P]ro-democracy coverage is not being “centered” by the media writ large. It’s occasional, not regular; it doesn’t appear to be part of an overall editorial plan that fully recognizes just how much trouble we’re in. That must change. It’s not merely that there needs to be more of this work. It also needs to be different. For example, it should include a new emphasis on those who are fighting to preserve voting rights and defend democratic norms….

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Jamie Raskin, democracy’s defender

Jamie Raskin, democracy’s defender

Michael Tomasky writes: Most every night, just after he slips into bed, Jamie Raskin picks up a volume of the collected works of Shakespeare, thumbs through it, and reads a few pages before sleep takes him. He is not, he admits, a big reader of fiction; doesn’t have the time. But he loves his Shakespeare, he told me one October night as we sat in his kitchen. Two days later, I asked him for a quote from the Bard that…

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A free, prosperous, democratic Ukraine is a threat to Putin’s regime

A free, prosperous, democratic Ukraine is a threat to Putin’s regime

Anne Applebaum writes: Children twirled around a skating rink just outside the president’s office in central Kyiv last week, while tourists took pictures of themselves in front of onion-domed, snow-dusted churches. The stores were full of people shopping for the New Year’s holiday and Orthodox Christmas, just as they always are at this time of year. The airports were crowded. In other words, nothing unusual was happening in the Ukrainian capital—nothing except for the contingency plans being made for a…

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U.S. catches Kremlin insider who may have secrets of 2016 hack

U.S. catches Kremlin insider who may have secrets of 2016 hack

Bloomberg reports: In the days before Christmas, U.S. officials in Boston unveiled insider trading charges against a Russian tech tycoon they had been pursuing for months. They accused Vladislav Klyushin, who’d been extradited from Switzerland on Dec. 18, of illegally making tens of millions of dollars trading on hacked corporate-earnings information. Yet as authorities laid out their securities fraud case, a striking portrait of the detainee emerged: Klyushin was not only an accused insider trader, but a Kremlin insider. He…

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How the EU let Hungary become an illiberal model

How the EU let Hungary become an illiberal model

The New York Times reports: After long indulging him, leaders in the European Union now widely consider Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary an existential threat to a bloc that holds itself up as a model of human rights and the rule of law. Mr. Orban has spent the past decade steadily building his “illiberal state,” as he proudly calls Hungary, with the help of lavish E.U. funding. Even as his project widened fissures in the bloc, which Hungary joined…

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One year after January 6 insurrection, Trumpism isn’t gone. ‘It’s ‘almost a religion’

One year after January 6 insurrection, Trumpism isn’t gone. ‘It’s ‘almost a religion’

Politico reports: Donald Trump has already telegraphed the remarks he plans to give at Mar-a-Lago on Thursday, the anniversary of the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol. If he follows the script laid out in his announcement of the news conference, he will commit a whitewashing of the day, repeating the lie that the 2020 election was rigged and defending his part in fomenting the insurrection — all while a solemn prayer service is held at the Capitol, in a…

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American democracy is cracked, and could collapse

American democracy is cracked, and could collapse

Thomas Homer-Dixon writes: By 2025, American democracy could collapse, causing extreme domestic political instability, including widespread civil violence. By 2030, if not sooner, the country could be governed by a right-wing dictatorship. We mustn’t dismiss these possibilities just because they seem ludicrous or too horrible to imagine. In 2014, the suggestion that Donald Trump would become president would also have struck nearly everyone as absurd. But today we live in a world where the absurd regularly becomes real and the…

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