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Category: Politics

What Fiona Hill learned in the White House

What Fiona Hill learned in the White House

Adam Entous writes: The Brookings Institution is one of many think tanks in Washington, D.C., where scholars and bureaucrats sit in quiet offices and wait by the phone. They write op-eds and books, give talks and convene seminars, hoping that, when reputations falter or Administrations shift, they will be rescued from the life of opining and contemplation and return to the adrenaline rush and consequence of government. Nearly always, the yearning is to be inside. Strobe Talbott, who became the…

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Trump’s Oklahoma debacle

Trump’s Oklahoma debacle

Politico reports: Following an uproar over the initial decision to hold the rally on Juneteenth, a holiday celebrating the emancipation of slaves, the president pushed the event a day later. Still, interest in the event was high. About 1.1 million people registered to attend, forcing aides to begin making plans to stage an added outdoor event. Aides knew the 1.1 million figure was inflated: After sorting through the sign-ups — a process that included looking at registrants’ voting histories —…

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How many needless Covid-19 deaths were caused by delays in responding? Most of them

How many needless Covid-19 deaths were caused by delays in responding? Most of them

Isaac Sebenius and James K. Sebenius write: More than 120,000 Americans have now perished from Covid-19, surpassing the total number of U.S. dead during World War I. Had American leaders taken the decisive, early measures that several other nations took when they had exactly the same information the U.S. did, at exactly the same time in their experience of the novel coronavirus, how many of these Covid-19 deaths could have been prevented? That isn’t a hypothetical question. And the answer…

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N.Y.C. hired 3,000 workers for contact tracing. It’s off to a slow start

N.Y.C. hired 3,000 workers for contact tracing. It’s off to a slow start

The New York Times reports: New York City’s ambitious contact-tracing program, a crucial initiative in the effort to curb the coronavirus, has gotten off to a worrisome start just as the city’s reopening enters a new phase on Monday, with outdoor dining, in-store shopping and office work resuming. The city has hired 3,000 disease detectives and case monitors, who are supposed to identify anyone who has come into contact with the hundreds of people who are still testing positive for…

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Vehicle attacks rise as right-wing extremists target protesters

Vehicle attacks rise as right-wing extremists target protesters

NPR reports: Right-wing extremists are turning cars into weapons, with reports of at least 50 vehicle-ramming incidents since protests against police violence erupted nationwide in late May. At least 18 are categorized as deliberate attacks; another two dozen are unclear as to motivation or are still under investigation, according to a count released Friday by Ari Weil, a terrorism researcher at the University of Chicago’s Chicago Project on Security and Threats. Weil has tracked vehicle-ramming attacks, or VRAs, since protests…

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Trump allies see a mounting threat: Biden’s rising evangelical support

Trump allies see a mounting threat: Biden’s rising evangelical support

Politico reports: It was June 10, 2008. Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama had gathered with dozens of evangelical leaders — many of them fixtures of the religious right — at the urging of campaign aides. If he could offer genuine glimpses of his own abiding faith, they insisted he could chisel away at the conservative Christian voting bloc. At a rally in the Bible Belt, he talked about the church he’d attended for two decades in Chicago. Calling for…

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Bill Barr, not Geoffrey Berman, should have been fired this weekend

Bill Barr, not Geoffrey Berman, should have been fired this weekend

Preet Bharara writes: President Trump has long made clear that, for him, “rule of law” is a limited-utility slogan. By word and deed, he has demonstrated his belief that the law and its instrumentalities exist to serve him, personally and politically. He has pressured individuals and institutions to pervert their usual independent government missions to comply with a mandate of pure self-interest to protect the president’s friends and pursue the president’s adversaries. This explains Trump’s ire at his former attorney…

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The Confederacy was an antidemocratic, centralized state

The Confederacy was an antidemocratic, centralized state

Stephanie McCurry writes: Americans are now debating the fate of memorials to the Confederacy—statues, flags, and names on Army bases, streets, schools, and college dormitories. A century and a half of propaganda has successfully obscured the nature of the Confederate cause and its bloody history, wrapping it in myth. But the Confederacy is not part of “our American heritage,” as President Donald Trump recently claimed, nor should it stand as a libertarian symbol of small government and resistance to federal…

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U.S. Attorney investigating Trump cronies gets fired by Trump who nevertheless claims he was ‘not involved’

U.S. Attorney investigating Trump cronies gets fired by Trump who nevertheless claims he was ‘not involved’

The New York Times reports: President Trump on Saturday personally fired the United States Attorney in Manhattan, Geoffrey S. Berman, whose office has pursued one case after another that has rankled the president and his allies, putting his former personal lawyer in prison and investigating his current one. It was the culmination of an extraordinary clash after years of tension between the White House and New York federal prosecutors. In a letter released by the Justice Department, Attorney General William…

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When asked repeatedly to say ‘Black lives matter,’ Mike Pence refuses

When asked repeatedly to say ‘Black lives matter,’ Mike Pence refuses

CNN reports: Vice President Mike Pence declined to say the words “Black lives matter” during an interview with an ABC affiliate in Pennsylvania on Friday, instead saying that “all lives matter.” “Let me just say that what happened to George Floyd was a tragedy,” Pence told 6ABC Action News in Philadelphia when asked directly if he would say that Black lives matter. “And in this nation, especially on Juneteenth, we celebrate the fact that from the founding of this nation…

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Judge: Bolton can publish book despite White House efforts to block it

Judge: Bolton can publish book despite White House efforts to block it

The Associated Press reports: Former national security adviser John Bolton can move forward in publishing his tell-all book, a federal judge ruled Saturday, despite efforts by the Trump administration to block the release because of concerns that classified information could be exposed. The decision from U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth is a victory for Bolton in a court case that involved core First Amendment and national security issues, even as the White House pledged to keep pursuing the onetime top…

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In countries keeping the coronavirus at bay, experts watch U.S. case numbers with alarm

In countries keeping the coronavirus at bay, experts watch U.S. case numbers with alarm

The Washington Post reports: As coronavirus cases surge in the U.S. South and West, health experts in countries with falling case numbers are watching with a growing sense of alarm and disbelief, with many wondering why virus-stricken U.S. states continue to reopen and why the advice of scientists is often ignored. “It really does feel like the U.S. has given up,” said Siouxsie Wiles, an infectious-diseases specialist at the University of Auckland in New Zealand — a country that has…

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Intel report warns that violent far-right extremists ‘are routinely using peaceful protests as means of cover’

Intel report warns that violent far-right extremists ‘are routinely using peaceful protests as means of cover’

Politico reports: The Trump administration is warning law enforcement and public safety officials that a far-right extremist movement known as “boogaloo” may be setting its sights on the nation’s capital. On Monday, the National Capital Region Threat Intelligence Consortium (NTIC), a fusion center for Washington, D.C. that provides support to federal national security and law enforcement agencies, warned in an intelligence assessment that “the District is likely an attractive target for violent adherents of the boogaloo ideology due to the…

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Slave resistance brought about the end of slavery

Slave resistance brought about the end of slavery

Jamelle Bouie writes: Neither Abraham Lincoln nor the Republican Party freed the slaves. They helped set freedom in motion and eventually codified it into law with the 13th Amendment, but they were not themselves responsible for the end of slavery. They were not the ones who brought about its final destruction. Who freed the slaves? The slaves freed the slaves. “Slave resistance,” as the historian Manisha Sinha points out in “The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition,” “lay at the…

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Coronavirus cases rise sharply in prisons even as they plateau nationwide

Coronavirus cases rise sharply in prisons even as they plateau nationwide

The New York Times reports: Cases of the coronavirus in prisons and jails across the United States have soared in recent weeks, even as the overall daily infection rate in the nation has remained relatively flat. The number of prison inmates known to be infected has doubled during the past month to more than 68,000. Prison deaths tied to the coronavirus have also risen, by 73 percent since mid-May. By now, the five largest known clusters of the virus in…

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In Tulsa, Trump invites his followers inside a coronavirus petri dish

In Tulsa, Trump invites his followers inside a coronavirus petri dish

Virginia Heffernan writes: President Trump’s zeal for rally mode is rising almost as steeply as coronavirus cases in Tulsa, Okla., where his campaign plans to hold a little get-together on Saturday. The weather in Tulsa is expected to be muggy and nearly 90 degrees, with a high chance of thunder and lightning. You don’t say. “Bad idea” doesn’t begin to capture how reckless and vicious it is to pack an arena on a steamy night with thousands of rambunctious hotheads…

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