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Category: Politics

Newsom’s anti-Trump recall strategy offers Republicans a warning for 2022

Newsom’s anti-Trump recall strategy offers Republicans a warning for 2022

The New York Times reports: California basks in its clairvoyance. “The future happens here first,” says Gov. Gavin Newsom, calling his state “America’s coming attraction.” By emphatically turning back the effort to recall him from office, however, Mr. Newsom made clear that California’s cherished role presaging the politics of tomorrow was not as significant as another, larger factor in Tuesday’s results: the tribal politics of today. The first-term Democratic governor will remain in office because, in a deeply liberal state,…

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Mercer family played bigger role in 2020 election than thought, giving nearly $20 million to dark money GOP fund

Mercer family played bigger role in 2020 election than thought, giving nearly $20 million to dark money GOP fund

CNBC reports: The wealthy family led by conservative megadonors Robert and Rebekah Mercer, whose money helped propel Donald Trump to victory in 2016, invested nearly $20 million last year into a GOP-friendly dark money fund that allows donors to keep secret the ultimate destination of their contributions. The Mercers’ donation, delivered through their family foundation, went to the Donors Trust, according to a new 990 disclosure form. The hefty contribution reveals the Mercers played a much bigger role in financing…

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Words matter. So these journalists refuse to call GOP election meddling an ‘audit’

Words matter. So these journalists refuse to call GOP election meddling an ‘audit’

Margaret Sullivan writes: There’s a simple but powerful idea behind the Philadelphia Inquirer’s recent decision not to use the word “audit” when referring to an effort by the state GOP to investigate the 2020 election: Words matter. The words that a news organization chooses to tell a story make a difference. If a journalist calls something a “lie,” that’s a deliberate choice. So is “racially tinged.” Or “pro-life.” Or “torture.” Such decisions carry weight. They have power. Acknowledging this power…

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Facebook tried to make its platform a healthier place. It got angrier instead

Facebook tried to make its platform a healthier place. It got angrier instead

The Wall Street Journal reports: In the fall of 2018, Jonah Peretti, chief executive of online publisher BuzzFeed, emailed a top official at Facebook Inc. The most divisive content that publishers produced was going viral on the platform, he said, creating an incentive to produce more of it. He pointed to the success of a BuzzFeed post titled “21 Things That Almost All White People are Guilty of Saying,” which received 13,000 shares and 16,000 comments on Facebook, many from…

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Claims that Milley made ‘secret’ calls to Chinese leaders exaggerated, sources say

Claims that Milley made ‘secret’ calls to Chinese leaders exaggerated, sources say

Politico reports: Claims in an upcoming book that a frantic Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Mark Milley made secret calls to his Chinese counterpart are greatly exaggerated, according to two people familiar with the discussions. A forthcoming book by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa claims that Milley grew concerned about then-President Donald Trump’s instability and the possibility that he might spark a war with China, prompting him to arrange a pair of secret phone calls with Gen. Li Zuocheng of the…

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Climate change could trigger internal migration of 216 million people says World Bank

Climate change could trigger internal migration of 216 million people says World Bank

Reuters reports: Without immediate action to combat climate change, rising sea levels, water scarcity and declining crop productivity could force 216 million people to migrate within their own countries by 2050, the World Bank said in a new report on Monday. The report, Groundswell 2.0, modeled the impacts of climate change on six regions, concluding that climate migration “hotspots” will emerge as soon as 2030 and intensify by 2050, hitting the poorest parts of the world hardest. Sub-Saharan Africa alone…

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Fears that Trump might launch military strike prompted top U.S. general to reassure China

Fears that Trump might launch military strike prompted top U.S. general to reassure China

The New York Times reports: The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff twice called his Chinese counterpart in the final months of the Trump administration to reassure him that Donald J. Trump had no plans to attack China in an effort to remain in power and that the United States was not collapsing, according to “Peril,” a new book by the Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Robert Costa. “Things may look unsteady,” the chairman, Gen. Mark A. Milley,…

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The fight to resettle Afghans in the U.S. has just begun

The fight to resettle Afghans in the U.S. has just begun

Vox reports: America’s evacuation of Afghanistan is over. But that doesn’t mean the US has fulfilled its obligation to vulnerable Afghans, some of whom are still trapped in their home country. Even if the decision to withdraw from the country was ultimately the right one, the ensuing humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan is the product of America’s ill-conceived and failed attempts at nation-building. The US therefore has a responsibility to ensure that Afghans facing danger or persecution as the Taliban reassert…

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A million Afghan children could die in ‘most perilous hour,’ UN warns

A million Afghan children could die in ‘most perilous hour,’ UN warns

The New York Times reports: Millions of Afghans could run out of food before the arrival of winter and one million children are at risk of starvation and death if their immediate needs are not met, top United Nations officials warned on Monday, putting the country’s plight into stark relief. Secretary General António Guterres, speaking at a high-level U.N. conference in Geneva convened to address the crisis, said that since the Taliban takeover in Afghanistan last month, the nation’s poverty…

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How Never Trumpers could change the Democratic Party

How Never Trumpers could change the Democratic Party

David Frum writes: Many of the conservatives and Republicans appalled by Donald Trump’s presidency clutched a hope through the bewildering years: Someday this would all be over and politics would return to normal. But normal has not returned. Those elected Republicans who stood for legality when Trump tried to overturn the 2020 election found themselves party pariahs in 2021, on their way to being out of politics altogether in 2022. And it’s not just a few politicians who have been…

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Republicans are settling on a strategy for election loses: It was rigged!

Republicans are settling on a strategy for election loses: It was rigged!

Eric Lutz writes: It’s hard to say exactly when Donald Trump started lying about widespread fraud in the 2020 election because he’d never really stopped lying about it in the 2016 election. But if you had to pinpoint when his outlandish, self-serving conspiracy theories really began to accelerate, it was probably around the late spring of last year, when polls indicated that he could lose to Joe Biden and that his desperate attempts to brand his opponent as a “sleepy”…

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The legacy of America’s post-9/11 turn to torture

The legacy of America’s post-9/11 turn to torture

Carol Rosenberg reports: Mohamedou Ould Slahi is almost clinical as he recalls details of the torture he endured in the summer of 2003 at Guantánamo Bay. There were the guards who menaced him with attack dogs and beat him so badly they broke his ribs. The troops who shackled him, blasted him with heavy metal music and strobe lights or drenched him in ice water to deny him sleep for months on end. The mind-numbing isolation in a darkened cell…

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Most people don’t need a Covid vaccine booster, new review says

Most people don’t need a Covid vaccine booster, new review says

The New York Times reports: None of the data on coronavirus vaccines so far provides credible evidence in support of boosters for the general population, according to a review published on Monday by an international group of scientists, including some at the Food and Drug Administration and the World Health Organization. The 18 authors include Dr. Philip Krause and Dr. Marion Gruber, F.D.A. scientists who announced last month that they will be leaving the agency, at least in part because…

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How 9/11 turned America into a half-crazed, fading power

How 9/11 turned America into a half-crazed, fading power

Michelle Goldberg writes: I’ll always remember Sept. 11 as something that happened in the evening. At the time I was living in a town in northern India, and I watched the towers fall on a TV someone had dragged into the street. Because I was so far away, I’ll never know the terror people in New York and Washington felt on that day, the fear that more attacks were coming, that the epic disaster movies so popular during the bored…

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For many American Muslims, the legacy of 9/11 lies in the battle for civil rights

For many American Muslims, the legacy of 9/11 lies in the battle for civil rights

NPR reports: Soon after [the attacks], like so many Muslims in the United States, a different fear set in [for Ali Malik]: that his faith would be associated with the 19 hijackers. What followed were two decades of policies that civil rights advocates say add up to the religious profiling and unlawful surveillance of Muslims in the U.S. under the broad banner of national security. “My life at that time was completely different I would say to my life afterwards,”…

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Can an omnipresent virus be turned into a manageable risk?

Can an omnipresent virus be turned into a manageable risk?

Scott Gottlieb writes: This pandemic will eventually be over, and the Delta surge—in which most of those not yet vaccinated against the coronavirus could become infected—may well be America’s last destructive wave. But just because we’re eager to move past the virus doesn’t mean it’s finished with us. In our large, open, and globally connected society, getting to zero COVID, the goal that Australia and New Zealand have pursued, is as politically unrealistic as it is biologically implausible. Americans are…

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