Browsed by
Category: Politics

Bernie Sanders outranks other Democrats – and Trump – on values and empathy

Bernie Sanders outranks other Democrats – and Trump – on values and empathy

USA Today reports: Is Democratic candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders likable enough to win the White House? A new USA TODAY/Ipsos poll released Friday suggests a lot of voters think so. Asked for their views on the personal characteristics of several Democratic presidential contenders and of President Donald Trump, voters consistently gave Sanders the highest marks for his values and empathy. Trump and his allies have long said they believe the president could easily defeat Sanders if he faces off against…

Read More Read More

Bloomberg for years has battled women’s allegations of profane, sexist comments creating a hostile workplace

Bloomberg for years has battled women’s allegations of profane, sexist comments creating a hostile workplace

The Washington Post reports: As Mike Bloomberg celebrated his 48th birthday in 1990, a top aide at the company he founded presented him with a booklet of profane, sexist quotes she attributed to him. A good salesperson is like a man who tries to pick up women at a bar by saying, “Do you want to f—? He gets turned down a lot — but he gets f—– a lot, too!” Bloomberg was quoted in the booklet as saying. Bloomberg…

Read More Read More

AIPAC is helping fund anti-Bernie Sanders Super PAC ads in Nevada

AIPAC is helping fund anti-Bernie Sanders Super PAC ads in Nevada

The Intercept reports: The American Israel Public Affairs Committee is helping to fund a Super PAC launching attack ads against Sen. Bernie Sanders in Nevada on Saturday, according to two sources with knowledge of the arrangement. The ads are being run by a group called Democratic Majority for Israel, founded by longtime AIPAC strategist Mark Mellman. The Nevada attack ads, which will air in media markets in Reno and Las Vegas, follow a similar spending blitz by DMFI ahead of…

Read More Read More

Fearful of Trump’s attacks, Justice Dept. lawyers worry Barr will leave them exposed to political meddling

Fearful of Trump’s attacks, Justice Dept. lawyers worry Barr will leave them exposed to political meddling

The New York Times reports: In an email a few days ago to the 270 lawyers he oversees, Nicola T. Hanna, the United States attorney in Los Angeles, offered a message of reassurance: I am proud of the work you do, he wrote. Other U.S. attorneys in the Justice Department’s far-flung 93 field offices relayed similar messages of encouragement after President Trump’s efforts to influence a politically fraught case provoked the kind of consternation the department has rarely seen since…

Read More Read More

State Department keeps quiet as Pompeo reports to Lavrov in Munich

State Department keeps quiet as Pompeo reports to Lavrov in Munich

Poltico reports: U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo met Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference on Friday in an encounter the American side apparently wanted to keep under wraps. The State Department made no announcement of the meeting, which took place in Lavrov’s own dedicated meeting room at the Hotel Bayerischer Hof, where the major annual conference of politicians, policymakers and security experts is held. Pompeo’s aides also did not provide any readout…

Read More Read More

Wall Street fears the rise of Bernie Sanders. The rest of America has less to worry about

Wall Street fears the rise of Bernie Sanders. The rest of America has less to worry about

Annie Lowrey writes: Earlier this week, Lloyd Blankfein, the former head of Goldman Sachs, waded into the presidential race. “If Dems go on to nominate Sanders, the Russians will have to reconsider who to work for to best screw up the US,” he wrote on Twitter. “Sanders is just as polarizing as Trump AND he’ll ruin our economy and doesn’t care about our military. If I’m Russian, I go with Sanders this time around.” Gaining an anti-endorsement from one of…

Read More Read More

What happened to Elizabeth Warren?

What happened to Elizabeth Warren?

Benjamin Wallace-Wells writes: Certain Presidential campaigns have the texture of money—of organization, of talent, of intentionality. It’s an obvious kind of quality: the difference between shopping at a Whole Foods and a Pathmark. For the past year, in the Democratic primary, Elizabeth Warren’s campaign has had that texture. Some of this quality was expressed in obvious ways: Warren’s landmark nighttime speech in New York’s Washington Square Park in September, set against the lit white arch before a crowd estimated at…

Read More Read More

Sally Yates: Trump thinks the Justice Department is his personal grudge squad

Sally Yates: Trump thinks the Justice Department is his personal grudge squad

The former deputy attorney general, Sally Yates, writes: The imperative of Justice Department independence from political influence has deep roots. After the Watergate scandal, Attorney General Griffin Bell sought to reestablish Justice’s independence and ensure that the department would be “recognized by all citizens as a neutral zone, in which neither favor nor pressure nor politics is permitted to influence the administration of the law.” The nation had lost faith in the Justice Department and the rule of law, so…

Read More Read More

Barr sends outside prosecutors to review politically sensitive cases

Barr sends outside prosecutors to review politically sensitive cases

The New York Times reports: Attorney General William P. Barr has assigned an outside prosecutor to scrutinize the criminal case against President Trump’s former national security adviser Michael T. Flynn, according to people familiar with the matter. The review is highly unusual and could trigger more accusations of political interference by top Justice Department officials into the work of career prosecutors. Mr. Barr has also installed a handful of outside prosecutors to broadly review the handling of other politically sensitive…

Read More Read More

U.S. readied sanctions on Russian oligarch’s associates — then mysteriously backed off

U.S. readied sanctions on Russian oligarch’s associates — then mysteriously backed off

The Daily Beast reports: Something strange happened in mid-December involving Oleg Deripaska, the Russian oligarch. Late last year, the U.S. government signaled that it was about to level a new round of sanctions targeting people and entities linked to Deripaska, according to two Western officials with knowledge of the communication. Back in April 2018, the U.S. sanctioned the oligarch, who once lent millions of dollars to convicted Trump campaign chief Paul Manafort as part of a decades-long relationship between the…

Read More Read More

How Bernie Sanders can become the next president

How Bernie Sanders can become the next president

Michael Warren writes: It might sound strange, but Bernie Sanders right now has a lot in common with Donald Trump from 2016. Like Trump, after coming in a close second in Iowa and winning New Hampshire, Sanders is now his party’s front-runner for the presidential nomination. Like Trump, Sanders carries big momentum into a third contest in Nevada that already sets up well for him. His rallies are packed. His coffers are stuffed with cash. And yet, like Trump, there…

Read More Read More

Bloomberg and a moral double standard on human rights and legal equality

Bloomberg and a moral double standard on human rights and legal equality

Peter Beinart writes: The critics who think Bernie Sanders isn’t Jewish enough—or isn’t Jewish in the right way—now have a clear alternative in the Democratic presidential race: Michael Bloomberg. Not only is the former New York mayor rising in the polls; he’s also contrasting his Jewish identity with that of the senator from Vermont. Late last month, Bloomberg sprinkled a speech at the Aventura Turnberry Jewish Center in South Florida with the kind of religious references (the Ten Plagues, Moses…

Read More Read More

Barr’s rebuke of Trump is a distraction from blatant political interference in the administration of justice

Barr’s rebuke of Trump is a distraction from blatant political interference in the administration of justice

Aaron Blake writes: Attorney General William P. Barr offered his first public comments Thursday after a controversy erupted at the Justice Department this week. And while he offered a significant rebuke of President Trump, Barr’s comments seem as much geared toward creating a veneer of independence as addressing the root of the controversy. Barr told ABC News that Trump’s tweets about ongoing criminal matters — in this case, Roger Stone’s — “make it impossible for me to do my job.”…

Read More Read More

Trump lashes out at Judge Amy Berman Jackson ahead of her sentencing his felon friend, Roger Stone

Trump lashes out at Judge Amy Berman Jackson ahead of her sentencing his felon friend, Roger Stone

The Washington Post reports: First he went after the prosecutors who recommended a multiyear sentence for his friend Roger Stone. Then President Trump turned his Twitter ire to the “witch hunt disgrace” of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation, which led to Stone’s indictment. But perhaps most surprising was Trump’s decision to target U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson — who will determine Stone’s fate when he appears in her courtroom next Thursday. It was not the first time…

Read More Read More

When Trump turns the Justice Department into his own political weapon, no American remains safe

When Trump turns the Justice Department into his own political weapon, no American remains safe

Joyce White Vance writes: Among the Founding Fathers’ chief goals was to do away with a government where the king was above the law and had absolute power over the lives of his subjects. In our system, the President, like every other citizen, is meant to be subject to the law. The Founding Fathers were explicit about that intention when they debated the shape the new government they were creating would take. And that quintessentially American view that no man…

Read More Read More

Trump’s Justice Department on ‘deep state’ crusade targeting the CIA

Trump’s Justice Department on ‘deep state’ crusade targeting the CIA

The New York Times reports: Trump administration officials investigating the government’s response to Russia’s election interference in 2016 appear to be hunting for a basis to accuse Obama-era intelligence officials of hiding evidence or manipulating analysis about Moscow’s covert operation, according to people familiar with aspects of the inquiry. Since his election, President Trump has attacked the intelligence agencies that concluded that Russia secretly tried to help him win, fostering a narrative that they sought to delegitimize his victory. He…

Read More Read More