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Category: Politics

My job was to keep Americans safe and Trump was my biggest obstacle

My job was to keep Americans safe and Trump was my biggest obstacle

Elizabeth Neumann writes: Everything we saw during the first presidential debate is indicative of how President Donald Trump behaves in the White House. His business model is chaos. He has no organization, no leadership, and sees every interaction as a contest or a battle, even when it doesn’t have to be. Chris Wallace now knows how so many administration staffers feel — and how I felt when the president got in the way of me doing my job. He is…

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Facebook rolls out a new vaccine misinformation policy — but leaves out misinformation super-spreaders

Facebook rolls out a new vaccine misinformation policy — but leaves out misinformation super-spreaders

STAT reports: Facebook rolled out a new policy on Tuesday aimed at cracking down on vaccine falsehoods, a ballooning problem for the social network as a growing number of users with neutral views about vaccines appear to turn into vocal opponents. The new policy prohibits formal advertisements that discourage people from getting vaccinated, reversing a years-long trend in which such ads were widely permitted. The site also said it will amplify factual messages from international public health authorities including the…

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Republican hypocrisy is destroying trust in Supreme Court

Republican hypocrisy is destroying trust in Supreme Court

Donald B. Ayer and Alan Charles Raul write: When a vacancy on the Supreme Court arose nine months ahead of the election in 2016, Sen. Mitch McConnell said in no uncertain terms: “The American people should have a voice in the selection of their next Supreme Court Justice. Therefore, this vacancy should not be filled until we have a new President.” Now, after the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg less than two months before Election Day, as voters are…

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On Facebook, misinformation is more popular now than in 2016

On Facebook, misinformation is more popular now than in 2016

The New York Times reports: During the 2016 presidential election, Russian operatives used Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and other social media platforms to spread disinformation to divide the American electorate. Since then, the social media companies have spent billions of dollars and hired tens of thousands of people to help clean up their act. But have the platforms really become more sophisticated at handling misinformation? Not necessarily. People are engaging more on Facebook today with news outlets that routinely publish misinformation…

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Microsoft takes down massive hacking operation that could have affected the election

Microsoft takes down massive hacking operation that could have affected the election

CNN reports: Microsoft has disrupted a massive hacking operation that it said could have indirectly affected election infrastructure if allowed to continue. The company said Monday it took down the servers behind Trickbot, an enormous malware network that criminals were using to launch other cyberattacks, including a strain of highly potent ransomware. Microsoft said it obtained a federal court order to disable the IP addresses associated with Trickbot’s servers, and worked with telecom providers around the world to stamp out…

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Syrians ravaged by war are now dying from a pandemic the Assad government has downplayed

Syrians ravaged by war are now dying from a pandemic the Assad government has downplayed

Asser Khattab writes: A few days after Abu Maher was admitted to a hospital in one of Syria’s coastal cities, he felt like he was suffocating. He had managed to secure the small, private room after exhibiting serious COVID-19 symptoms. After struggling to get out of bed, he made his way to the door, where he cried out for someone to help him. Not long afterward, Abu Maher (not his real name) was found lying on the floor by the…

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Trump campaign ad twists Fauci comment to wrongly suggest praise of the president

Trump campaign ad twists Fauci comment to wrongly suggest praise of the president

CNN reports: Dr. Anthony Fauci did not consent to being featured in a new advertisement from the Trump campaign touting President Donald Trump’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic. Instead, the nation’s leading infectious disease expert told CNN his words were taken out of context. “In my nearly five decades of public service, I have never publicly endorsed any political candidate. The comments attributed to me without my permission in the GOP campaign ad were taken out of context from a…

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‘I feel like I have dementia’: Brain fog plagues Covid survivors

‘I feel like I have dementia’: Brain fog plagues Covid survivors

The New York Times reports: After contracting the coronavirus in March, Michael Reagan lost all memory of his 12-day vacation in Paris, even though the trip was just a few weeks earlier. Several weeks after Erica Taylor recovered from her Covid-19 symptoms of nausea and cough, she became confused and forgetful, failing to even recognize her own car, the only Toyota Prius in her apartment complex’s parking lot. Lisa Mizelle, a veteran nurse practitioner at an urgent care clinic who…

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The rise of Gen Z could foretell the fall of Trumpism

The rise of Gen Z could foretell the fall of Trumpism

Laura Barrón-López reports: The evidence all points in one direction: Americans born after 1996, known as Generation Z, could doom not only Trumpism but conservatism as the country currently knows it. Members of Generation Z who are of voting age — 18- to 23-year-olds — want more government solutions. They rank climate change, racism and economic inequality consistently in their top issues, according to polls, and they participated in greater numbers during their first midterm (in 2018) than previous generations…

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Inspired by ruthless authoritarians, Trump turns power of state against political rivals

Inspired by ruthless authoritarians, Trump turns power of state against political rivals

David Sanger writes: President Trump’s order to his secretary of state to declassify thousands of Hillary Clinton’s emails, along with his insistence that his attorney general issue indictments against Barack Obama and Joseph R. Biden Jr., takes his presidency into new territory — until now, occupied by leaders with names like Putin, Xi and Erdogan. Mr. Trump has long demanded — quite publicly, often on Twitter — that his most senior cabinet members use the power of their office to…

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Amateur hour at the Trump White House

Amateur hour at the Trump White House

John F Harris and Daniel Lippman write: Nearly everyone remembers the old cliché: If you can’t trust someone to get the little things right, how can you ever count on them to do the big things? President Donald Trump had better hope that bromide, invoked everywhere from youth sports teams to sales-force training sessions, doesn’t apply to him. As his presidency lurches toward a climactic judgment on Nov. 3, the little things lately have rarely gone more pervasively or embarrassingly…

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QAnon is thriving in Germany. The extreme right is delighted

QAnon is thriving in Germany. The extreme right is delighted

The New York Times reports: Early in the pandemic, as thousands of American troops began NATO maneuvers in Germany, Attila Hildmann did a quick YouTube search to see what it was all about. He quickly came across videos posted by German followers of QAnon. In their telling, this was no NATO exercise. It was a covert operation by President Trump to liberate Germany from Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government — something they applauded. “The Q movement said these are troops that…

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Mortality: ‘I could be one of the diers,’ said Trump

Mortality: ‘I could be one of the diers,’ said Trump

Olivia Nuzzi writes: Donald Trump was on the phone, and he was talking about dying. It was Saturday, October 3, and while his doctor had told the outside world that the president’s symptoms were nothing to worry about, Trump, cocooned in his suite at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, was telling those close to him something very different. “I could be one of the diers,” he said. The person on the other end of the line…

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Trump’s grip on Republicans is loosening amid a coronavirus backlash and fears of an electoral bloodbath

Trump’s grip on Republicans is loosening amid a coronavirus backlash and fears of an electoral bloodbath

Politico reports: For Republicans, fearful of a possible electoral disaster just weeks away, it has become safe at last to diss Donald Trump — or at least to distance themselves from him in unmistakably purposeful ways. A barrage of barbed comments in recent days shows how markedly the calculus of fear has shifted in the GOP. For much of the past four years, Republican politicians were scared above all about incurring the wrath of the president and his supporters with…

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Covid-19 cases in Arizona dropped 75% after mask mandates began, report says

Covid-19 cases in Arizona dropped 75% after mask mandates began, report says

Arizona Republic reports: COVID-19 cases in Arizona spiked 151% after a statewide stay-at-home order expired and dropped 75% following local mask mandates, a new report says. The report, published this week by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, was authored by officials with the Arizona Department of Health Services, including director Dr. Cara Christ. A stay-at-home order in Arizona expired May 15 and two weeks later — between June 1 and June 15 — the daily average number…

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White House blocked CDC from requiring masks on public transportation

White House blocked CDC from requiring masks on public transportation

The New York Times reports: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention drafted a sweeping order last month requiring all passengers and employees to wear masks on all forms of public and commercial transportation in the United States, but it was blocked by the White House, according to two federal health officials. The order would have been the toughest federal mandate to date aimed at curbing the spread of the coronavirus, which continues to infect more than 40,000 Americans a…

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