Attention to the Unseen

The Daily Beast reports: A south Texas butterfly conservationist has a message for Steve Bannon and three others arrested on Thursday for fraud and money laundering in what the feds describe as a border wall fundraising scheme. “I just wish them well in their cavity searches,” says Marianna Treviño-Wright, executive director of the National Butterfly Center. Treviño-Wright was targeted by We Build the Wall late last year, when she sought to stop the construction of a barrier beside the center’s…

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Zack Beauchamp writes: The defining moment of the 2020 Democratic National Convention was neither a slickly produced policy video nor a speech from a former president. Democratic nominee Joe Biden’s address, arguably the best oration of his long career, wasn’t it either. Instead, it was a testimonial from a 13-year-old boy from New Hampshire named Brayden Harrington. Harrington, like Biden, has a stutter. The two met at a CNN town hall in Concord this February, where Harrington told the candidate…

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David Ignatius writes: As Democrats accelerate their drive to defeat President Trump in November, they have a potent new weapon in a report by a Republican-led Senate committee that chronicles the “grave counterintelligence threat” posed by the extensive contacts between Trump’s former campaign chairman and a Russian intelligence operative. The final volume of the report by the Senate Intelligence Committee’s Russia investigation arrives late in the game. Still, it offers the detailed accounting of how Russian spies worked with the…

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Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny (L) poses for a photo at a Moscow rally in support of political prisoners on September 29, 2019. Dmitri Chirciu/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images By Regina Smyth, Indiana University The harrowing videos of Alexei Navalny, a blogger who has captured popular frustration in Russia, screaming in agony on Aug. 20, 2020 before being removed unconscious from a plane to a waiting ambulance, demonstrate the Kremlin’s increasing reliance on coercion to control dissent. This attack is…

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Joshua Green writes: Steve Bannon’s arrest on charges that he defrauded donors to a right-wing immigration group for $1 million marks the end of a political era—the era when a Trumpian admixture of economic populism and nativist immigration policy looked as if it could, as Bannon once put it to me, deliver the Republican Party “a hammerlock on the Electoral College.” At the time he made this assessment, in the days after Trump’s 2016 victory, it seemed entirely plausible that…

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CNN reports: President Donald Trump on Thursday said he would send law enforcement officials to polling locations to guard against voter fraud in November’s election, although it’s not clear he has the authority to do so. “We’re going to have sheriffs, and we’re going to have law enforcement, and we’re going to have, hopefully, US attorneys, and we’re going to have everybody and attorney generals (sic),” Trump said during an interview on Fox News with Sean Hannity. Trump’s comments come…

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Motherboard reports: Shortly after USPS Postmaster General Louis DeJoy issued a public statement saying he wanted to “avoid even the appearance” that any of his policies would slow down election mail, USPS instructed all maintenance managers around the country not to reconnect or reinstall any mail sorting machines they had already disconnected, according to emails obtained by Motherboard. “Please message out to your respective Maintenance Managers tonight. They are not to reconnect / reinstall machines that have previously been disconnected…

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The New York Times reports: Four years after 50 of the nation’s most senior Republican national security officials warned that Donald J. Trump “would be the most reckless president in American history,” they are back with a new letter, declaring his presidency worse than they had imagined and urging voters to support former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. The new letter, released just hours before Mr. Biden formally accepts the nomination, lays out a 10-point indictment of Mr. Trump’s…

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The Daily Beast reports: Vladimir Putin’s nemesis, corruption fighter Aleksey Navalny, is fighting for his life in a Siberian hospital after allegedly being poisoned at an airport while travelling to Moscow. Navalny’s closest aide, Kira Yarmysh, said Navalny was poisoned after drinking a cup of tea at Tomsk airport early Thursday morning. He then boarded a flight to the Russian capital but fell violently ill en route. Taken from the aircraft on a stretcher after it was diverted to the…

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Richard L. Hasen writes: The threat to the 2020 election’s legitimacy finally broke through into everyday conversation last week. People who pay little attention to politics started talking about whether President Trump was looking to mess with the United States Postal Service to slow down the receipt of mail-in ballots. Mr. Trump was not shy about it. He told Maria Bartiromo on Fox Business Network last Thursday that he was pushing back against Democrats’ demand for further U.S.P.S. funding in…

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Benjamin Wallace-Wells writes: On Day Two of the Democratic National Convention, the Party’s recent past kept ghosting in and out. Before the networks had even begun their broadcasts, the Party rolled through half a century of its own history: Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter, from Georgia, and then Caroline Kennedy and her son in front of the unpainted shingles of a Cape Cod home, and, finally, Bill Clinton, sitting on a flowered couch at his home in Chappaqua, New York. Clinton…

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