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Category: Politics

Despite his impeachment trial acquittal, Trump is clearly guilty of a high crime

Despite his impeachment trial acquittal, Trump is clearly guilty of a high crime

Judge Andrew P. Napolitano writes: The Senate impeachment trial of President Trump ended not with a bang but a whimper. What different outcome could one expect from a trial without so much as a single witness, a single document, any cross-examination or a defendant respectful enough to show up? Law students are taught early on that a trial is not a grudge match or an ordeal; it is a search for the truth. Trial lawyers know that cross-examination is the…

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In the end, Trump succeeded in doing precisely what he wanted in the first place: tarring a leading Democratic rival

In the end, Trump succeeded in doing precisely what he wanted in the first place: tarring a leading Democratic rival

Peter Beinart writes: The impeachment struggle is now over. Historians may one day vindicate Democrats for exposing Donald Trump’s abuse of power. But as of now, they have lost. Not only will Trump remain president, and not only does he appear stronger politically than before the impeachment battle began, but he has succeeded in doing precisely what he wanted in the first place: He tarred Joe Biden, who last year looked like Trump’s most formidable Democratic rival, with the kind…

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Ukraine says the U.S. is holding up $30M worth of guns and ammo — and it wants its money back

Ukraine says the U.S. is holding up $30M worth of guns and ammo — and it wants its money back

BuzzFeed reports: At the heart of the impeachment saga that ended on Wednesday in Donald Trump’s acquittal was $391 million in US military assistance for Ukraine that the president ordered be withheld. But that aid package, which was eventually released last September, wasn’t the only US arms transfer meant for the war-torn country that was held up. Several direct commercial sales of arms and ammunition to Ukraine faced significant delays at the same time — and they remain mysteriously frozen…

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Romney votes to convict Trump on abuse of power

Romney votes to convict Trump on abuse of power

Politico reports: Mitt Romney brought a stunning twist to the end of President Donald Trump’s impeachment trial: A bipartisan vote to convict the president on charges of abuse of power. The Wednesday announcement by the Utah Republican made him the only member of the GOP to break with the president and his party on the crucial question of whether Trump deserved to be removed from office. The 2012 Republican nominee said he was left with no other options, regardless of…

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Hundreds of Salvadorans deported by U.S. were killed or abused, HRW report reveals

Hundreds of Salvadorans deported by U.S. were killed or abused, HRW report reveals

The Guardian reports: At least 200 Salvadoran migrants and asylum seekers have been killed, raped or tortured after being deported back to El Salvador by the United States government which is turning a blind eye to widely known dangers, a new investigation reveals. Human Rights Watch has documented 138 deported Salvadorans murdered by gang members, police, soldiers, death squads and ex-partners between 2013 and 2019. The majority were killed within two years of deportation by the same perpetrators they had…

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Trump withholding $823 million for clean energy, Democrats say

Trump withholding $823 million for clean energy, Democrats say

Bloomberg reports: The Trump administration is withholding nearly a billion dollars for a clean energy program it has unsuccessfully tried to cut, congressional Democrats said Wednesday, raising the specter of political interference. The unspent funds now amount to $823 million in the Energy Department’s office that provides grants and other financial assistance for alternative energy, electric vehicles and energy efficiency, according to Democrats on the House Science Committee, which is holding a joint subcommittee hearing on the topic. The Office…

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The Trump administration has made the U.S. less ready for infectious disease outbreaks like coronavirus

The Trump administration has made the U.S. less ready for infectious disease outbreaks like coronavirus

Colorized scanning electron micrograph of filamentous Ebola virus particles (blue) budding from an infected cell (yellow-green). NIAID, CC BY By Linda J. Bilmes, Harvard Kennedy School As coronavirus continues to spread, the Trump administration has declared a public health emergency and imposed quarantines and travel restrictions. However, over the past three years the administration has weakened the offices in charge of preparing for and preventing this kind of outbreak. Two years ago, Microsoft founder and philanthropist Bill Gates warned that…

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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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