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Category: Politics

Don’t blame shadowy foreign hackers for the chaos in Iowa

Don’t blame shadowy foreign hackers for the chaos in Iowa

Zeynep Tufekci writes: The [Democratic] party paid [the for-profit tech firm] Shadow $60,000 to develop an app that would tally the [Iowa caucus] results, but gave the company only two months to do it. Worried about Russian hacking, the party addressed security in all the wrong ways: It did not open up the app to outside testing or challenge by independent security experts. This method is sometimes dubbed “security through obscurity,” and while there are instances for which it might…

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Evangelical opponents of equality tried to get U.S. ambassador to Ukraine fired

Evangelical opponents of equality tried to get U.S. ambassador to Ukraine fired

BuzzFeed reports: In the summer of 2018, an American evangelical pastor and dozens of Ukrainian Christian groups prayed for Marie Yovanovitch to be fired from her job as the US ambassador to Kyiv. With their prayers still unanswered a few months later, they put their faith in fellow evangelical Christian Mike Pompeo instead, sending a letter to the US secretary of state via a trusted Republican political appointee at the State Department. A copy of the letter was provided to…

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Humans are hardwired to dismiss facts that don’t fit their worldview

Humans are hardwired to dismiss facts that don’t fit their worldview

What’s behind this natural tendency? Zhou Eka/Shutterstock.com By Adrian Bardon, Wake Forest University Something is rotten in the state of American political life. The U.S. (among other nations) is increasingly characterized by highly polarized, informationally insulated ideological communities occupying their own factual universes. Within the conservative political blogosphere, global warming is either a hoax or so uncertain as to be unworthy of response. Within other geographic or online communities, vaccines, fluoridated water and genetically modified foods are known to be…

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The bank that props up Trump’s shaky finances

The bank that props up Trump’s shaky finances

David Enrich writes: One Day in early 2017, Mike Offit went to the Yale Club in Manhattan for a lunch hosted by a group called Business Executives for National Security. Offit, who has a craggy face and shoulder-­length hair, had spent much of his career in banking, but that had ended nearly two decades earlier. Since then, he had puttered around the outskirts of finance, dabbled in journalism and even published a novel about a pair of murders at a…

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Social media was a cesspool of toxic Iowa conspiracy theories last night. It’s only going to get worse

Social media was a cesspool of toxic Iowa conspiracy theories last night. It’s only going to get worse

Margaret Sullivan writes: Nature abhors a vacuum. And so does Twitter. As it became obvious late Monday night that a technical glitch would dramatically hold up the results of the long-anticipated Iowa caucuses, social media exploded with dark ideas about what had happened. The hashtag “MayorCheat” was trending, a nasty shot at Democratic candidate Pete Buttigieg promoted by Mike Cernovich, the rabble-rousing pro-Trump media personality, who tweeted out his conspiracy theory in the early hours Tuesday about connections between the…

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The Democratic Party’s crisis of legitimacy may be just beginning

The Democratic Party’s crisis of legitimacy may be just beginning

Jonathan Chait writes: We are living in an era of what political scientists describe as “strong partisanship and weak parties” — or, alternatively, as “negative partisanship.” The electorate is polarized into opposing camps, but their emotional impetus is driven by hostility to the other party rather than trust in their own. The Republican Party’s solution to this predicament has been to fashion itself as a cult of personality devoted to Donald Trump. The Democratic Party’s solution has been a series…

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The only election safe for democracy is a low-tech election

The only election safe for democracy is a low-tech election

Kevin Roose writes: After Monday’s Iowa caucus debacle, I’ve decided that Americans should vote by etching our preferred candidate’s name into a stone tablet with a hammer and chisel. Or maybe by dropping pebbles into a series of urns, as the ancient Greeks did. Or possibly just by voting the way we voted for much of the 20th century, on punch-card machines that spit out paper ballots to be hand-counted by election workers, with zero iPhones in sight. Basically, we…

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Congress has lost its power over Trump

Congress has lost its power over Trump

Kim Wehle writes: If the nation’s Founders didn’t want to constrain the president’s power, they wouldn’t have put impeachment in the Constitution. “They gave us the tools to do the job,” Representative Adam Schiff declared yesterday in his closing argument in Donald Trump’s trial. The president’s camp, meanwhile, insists that the legislative branch still has several levers of power against Trump. The defense attorney Patrick Philbin argued last week, “Congress has numerous political tools it can use in battles with…

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Greta Thunberg nominated for Nobel Peace Prize

Greta Thunberg nominated for Nobel Peace Prize

The Associated Press reports: Two lawmakers in Sweden have nominated Swedish teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg for the 2020 Nobel Peace Prize. Jens Holm and Hakan Svenneling, who are both members of Sweden’s Left Party, said Monday that Thunberg “has worked hard to make politicians open their eyes to the climate crisis” and “action for reducing our emissions and complying with the Paris Agreement is therefore also an act of making peace.” The 2015 landmark Paris climate deal asks both…

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I can never forget the Bosnian genocide. But others are trying to rewrite history

I can never forget the Bosnian genocide. But others are trying to rewrite history

Janine di Giovanni writes: I covered the war in Bosnia in the mid-1990s, and I know what I saw. I traveled to besieged Sarajevo and to ethnically cleansed regions in eastern and central Bosnia where I interviewed victims of rape camps and bombing campaigns, mothers whose children were killed building snowmen, and the relatives of the elderly who were shot by snipers chopping wood to keep warm in the deep Balkan chill. It left a painful scar that I can…

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With acquittal certain, Trump plots revenge on Bolton and impeachment enemies

With acquittal certain, Trump plots revenge on Bolton and impeachment enemies

Gabriel Sherman writes: With Senate Republicans on track to acquit Donald Trump on Wednesday, Washington is bracing for what an unshackled Trump does next. Republicans briefed on Trump’s thinking believe that the president is out for revenge against his adversaries. “It’s payback time,” a prominent Republican told me last week. “He has an enemies list that is growing by the day,” another source said. Names that came up in my conversations with Republicans included Adam Schiff, Jerry Nadler, Mitt Romney,…

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Organisation of Islamic Cooperation rejects Trump ‘peace plan’

Organisation of Islamic Cooperation rejects Trump ‘peace plan’

Al Jazeera reports: The Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) has said it rejects US President Donald Trump ‘s recently unveiled Middle East plan. The 57-member body, which held a summit on Monday to discuss the plan in Saudi Arabia’s Jeddah, said in a statement that it “calls on all member states not to engage with this plan or to cooperate with the US administration in implementing it in any form”. Requested by the Palestinian leadership, the meeting of the body…

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Jacob Rees-Mogg says it could take 50 years to reap the benefits of Brexit

Jacob Rees-Mogg says it could take 50 years to reap the benefits of Brexit

HuffPost reports: A leading Brexiteer has suggested it could take 50 years to judge whether Brexit has been an economic success amid fears quitting the European Union will lead to a downturn. The influential Conservative MP Jacob Rees-Mogg, who chairs the European Research Group of backbench Tories, was pressed by Krishnan Guru-Murthy of Channel 4 News about whether he would quit if the “economy does take a hit next year” when Brexit happens. Rees-Mogg insisted the full impact will not…

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Coronavirus spreads, and the world pays for China’s dictatorship

Coronavirus spreads, and the world pays for China’s dictatorship

Nicholas Kristof writes: China’s leaders sometimes seem 10 feet tall, presiding over a political and economic juggernaut that has founded universities at a rate of one a week and that recently used more cement in three years than the United States did in the entire 20th century. President Trump has hailed China’s president, Xi Jinping, as a “brilliant leader,” and Michael Bloomberg says Xi is “not a dictator.” But we’re now seeing the dangers of Xi’s authoritarian model, for China…

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Fossil fuel greenwashing

Fossil fuel greenwashing

Climate Reality Project reports: It’s no secret that fossil fuel companies have cast doubt on climate science for decades. What’s more, it should be no surprise that they’ve spent billions lobbying against any serious regulation of their emissions. What might be less well known, however, is the extent of their greenwashing: the tactic oil, coal, and gas companies have increasingly turned to as public sentiment against their products has grown. What exactly is greenwashing, you may ask? It’s a form…

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Savaging Trump plan, Abbas says Palestinians cutting all ties with Israel and the U.S.

Savaging Trump plan, Abbas says Palestinians cutting all ties with Israel and the U.S.

The Times of Israel reports: Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas said he was cutting all ties, including security coordination, with both Israel and the US on Saturday, in a lengthy speech delivered at an Arab League meeting in Egypt’s capital denouncing the new White House plan for ending the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. “We’ve informed the Israeli side…that there will be no relations at all with them and the United States, including security ties,” Abbas declared. The PA leader said he’d stated…

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