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Category: Politics

‘The Republicans are the problem’

‘The Republicans are the problem’

John Harwood writes: The essay described congressional extremists, their rejection of truth, a party turning into authoritarians or “an apocalyptic cult.” It bore a striking headline: “Let’s just say it: The Republicans are the problem.” It didn’t mention Marjorie Taylor Greene, the deadly January 6 insurrection or Donald Trump’s Big Lie. In fact, the words “Donald Trump” did not appear at all. Published in 2012, that Washington Post piece demonstrates more than the foresight of its political scientist authors, Tom…

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QAnon is spreading amongst evangelicals. These pastors are trying to stop it

QAnon is spreading amongst evangelicals. These pastors are trying to stop it

CNN reports: When Pastor James Kendall stepped on to the stage of his small church in Madera, California he knew that day’s sermon was going to take him in a direction unlike most. He had seen some troubling Facebook posts from members of his congregation. God, he says, was telling him speak out and warn his flock. “I don’t like to get off track and off the Bible,” Kendall said during a sermon on March 7. “But as a pastor…

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Intelligence on sick staff at Wuhan lab fuels debate on Covid-19 origin

Intelligence on sick staff at Wuhan lab fuels debate on Covid-19 origin

The Wall Street Journal reports: Three researchers from China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology became sick enough in November 2019 that they sought hospital care, according to a previously undisclosed U.S. intelligence report that could add weight to growing calls for a fuller probe of whether the Covid-19 virus may have escaped from the laboratory. The details of the reporting go beyond a State Department fact sheet, issued during the final days of the Trump administration, which said that several researchers…

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Belarus carries out ‘state hijacking’ to seize dissident from European airliner

Belarus carries out ‘state hijacking’ to seize dissident from European airliner

The New York Times reports: The strongman president of Belarus sent a fighter jet to intercept a European airliner traveling through the country’s airspace on Sunday and ordered the plane to land in the capital, Minsk, where a prominent opposition journalist aboard was then seized, provoking international outrage. The stunning gambit by Aleksandr G. Lukashenko, a brutal and erratic leader who has clung to power despite huge protests against his government last year, was condemned by European officials, who compared…

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In Washington, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is coming to be understood as a human rights issue

In Washington, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is coming to be understood as a human rights issue

Yasmeen Serhan writes: In a conflict where words matter (so much so that even using the word conflict invites disagreement), it’s notable when the words used begin to change. And when it comes to discussing Israel and Palestine in the United States, the words have changed. The first, most obvious shift has come from Congress, where more and more (predominantly progressive) voices have criticized Israel’s human-rights abuses, as well as the U.S. government’s role in sustaining a status quo that…

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Jewish Americans are at a turning point with Israel

Jewish Americans are at a turning point with Israel

Arielle Angel writes: On Nakba Day, 15 May, amid the outbreak of war in Israel/Palestine, I attended a rally in Bay Ridge in Brooklyn, to commemorate the expulsion of more than 700,000 Palestinians from the new Israeli state in 1948, and to protest against the oppression of the Palestinian people in the land between the river and the sea. From the signs I saw as part of that crowd – “This Jew will not stand by” or “Another Jew for…

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Antisemitic incidents heightened across U.S. amid Israel-Gaza fighting; mosques were damaged, too

Antisemitic incidents heightened across U.S. amid Israel-Gaza fighting; mosques were damaged, too

NBC News reports: Rabbi Shaoul Hamaoui’s synagogue, the Persian Hebrew Congregation in suburban Chicago, had never been defaced while he’s served as spiritual leader for more than a decade. But that changed Sunday afternoon when a window was shattered and surveillance video captured two people, one carrying a stick and another holding a “Freedom for Palestine” sign. No one was at the synagogue at the time, and police in Skokie, Illinois, said they are investigating the vandalism as a hate…

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World’s worst pandemic leaders: 5 presidents and prime ministers who badly mishandled COVID-19

World’s worst pandemic leaders: 5 presidents and prime ministers who badly mishandled COVID-19

Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko visits a hospital for COVID-19 patients, unmasked, in Minsk on Nov. 27, 2020. Andrei Stasevich\TASS via Getty Images By Sumit Ganguly, Indiana University; Dorothy Chin, University of California, Los Angeles; Elizabeth J King, University of Michigan; Elize Massard da Fonseca, Fundação Getulio Vargas; Salvador Vázquez del Mercado, Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas, and Scott L. Greer, University of Michigan COVID-19 is notoriously hard to control, and political leaders are only part of the calculus when…

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Republicans move to restrict a grass-roots American tradition of direct democracy

Republicans move to restrict a grass-roots American tradition of direct democracy

The Wall Street Journal reports: In 2008, deep-blue California banned same-sex marriage. In 2018, steadfastly conservative Arkansas and Missouri increased their minimum wage. And last year, Republican-controlled Arizona and Montana legalized recreational marijuana. These moves were all the product of ballot initiatives, a century-old fixture of American democracy that allows voters to bypass their legislatures to enact new laws, often with results that defy the desires of the state’s elected representatives. While they have been a tool of both parties…

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America’s bluest state loves its Republican governor

America’s bluest state loves its Republican governor

Russell Berman writes: For a politician who’s never lost an election, Phil Scott is not much for campaigning. He didn’t formally announce his candidacy last year for a third term as Vermont’s governor until the state filing deadline in May. Scott ran his race, such as it was, out of a small garage on the outskirts of town that he rented to keep his motorcycles. The space had internet but no plumbing, so his two campaign staffers used porta-potties outside….

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The values that drive Biden

The values that drive Biden

David Brooks writes: Some people get their worldviews from ideological constructs or philosophical movements like “conservatism” or “progressivism.” Biden derives his worldview from lived experience, especially the world of his youth, and how his parents taught him to see that world. It created the moral underpinnings of the big legislative packages he is proposing. The story about his father includes the key elements of the Biden worldview. First, a social location. What matters is not only how a person sees…

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Israel is falling apart, because the conflict controls us

Israel is falling apart, because the conflict controls us

Dahlia Scheindlin writes: For a few days in early May, Israel appeared close to establishing a new government. After four elections in two years that failed to produce a decisive result, the country was poised for a surprising partnership of ideologically diverse parties including, for the first time, an independent Arab party — Raam. Such a government would have been fraught, even shaky, but it would have ended the two years of political chaos and replaced Israel’s right-wing prime minister,…

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Hamas breaks out of its Gaza cage

Hamas breaks out of its Gaza cage

Amjad Iraqi writes: A ceasefire between Israel and Hamas was finally announced Thursday night after 11 days of devastating bombardment and indiscriminate rocket fire that killed over 240 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and 12 people in Israel. As far as many observers are concerned, this deal — which, if it holds, will undoubtedly prevent countless more deaths, injuries, and wanton destruction — should finally put an end to the vicious saga. This desperate return to “calm,” however, remains a…

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Why conservatives want to cancel the 1619 Project

Why conservatives want to cancel the 1619 Project

Adam Serwer writes: Nikole Hannah-Jones is an award-winning Black journalist. She is also one of the developers of the 1619 Project, a journalistic examination of slavery’s role in shaping the American present. Last year, that work won her a Pulitzer Prize. Now it appears to have cost her a tenured chair at the University of North Carolina’s Hussman School of Journalism. The news outlet NC Policy Watch reported on Monday that the university’s dean, chancellor, and faculty had backed Hannah-Jones’s…

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Gaza conflict amplifies ‘identity crisis’ for young American Jews

Gaza conflict amplifies ‘identity crisis’ for young American Jews

The New York Times reports: Dan Kleinman does not know quite how to feel. As a child in Brooklyn he was taught to revere Israel as the protector of Jews everywhere, the “Jewish superman who would come out of the sky to save us” when things got bad, he said. It was a refuge in his mind when white supremacists in Charlottesville, Va., chanted “Jews will not replace us,” or kids in college grabbed his shirt, mimicking a “South Park”…

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Peaceful coexistence in Israel hasn’t been shattered – it’s always been a myth

Peaceful coexistence in Israel hasn’t been shattered – it’s always been a myth

Nimer Sultany writes: On Tuesday, in my hometown of Tira, which is inside Israel’s pre-1967 borders, the shops were closed and the streets were empty. A general strike had been declared in protest over Israel’s policies, whether the ethnic cleansing in Sheikh Jarrah, the storming of al-Aqsa mosque, or the onslaught on Gaza. As the Palestinian death toll continues to rise, commentators lament the shattering of coexistence inside Israel between Palestinian and Jewish citizens. Yet in my experience as a…

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