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Category: Politics

I headed the FBI and CIA. There’s a dire threat to the country I love

I headed the FBI and CIA. There’s a dire threat to the country I love

William Webster writes: The privilege of being the only American in our history to serve as the director of both the F.B.I. and the C.I.A. gives me a unique perspective and a responsibility to speak out about a dire threat to the rule of law in the country I love. Order protects liberty, and liberty protects order. Today, the integrity of the institutions that protect our civil order is, tragically, under assault from too many people whose job it should…

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Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders have a problem: each other

Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders have a problem: each other

The New York Times reports: Diane Chojnowski and Denyce Rusch were among the Iowans who braved light snowfall and temperatures in the teens to see Senator Bernie Sanders on Sunday afternoon, a few hours before Senator Elizabeth Warren was also due in this liberal pillar of eastern Iowa. But after Ms. Chojnowski and Ms. Rusch praised Mr. Sanders, they turned to a predicament far more bothersome than the winter weather: choosing between the two progressive candidates. “You worry about Bernie…

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Judiciary Committee impeachment report alleges Trump committed ‘multiple federal crimes’

Judiciary Committee impeachment report alleges Trump committed ‘multiple federal crimes’

Politico reports: President Donald Trump committed criminal bribery and wire fraud, the House Judiciary Committee alleges in a report that will accompany articles of impeachment this week. The report, a 169-page assessment of the case for Trump’s removal from office, contends that Trump committed “multiple federal crimes” — ones that Democrats addressed under the broad umbrella of “abuse of power,” the first article of impeachment against the president. “Although President Trump’s actions need not rise to the level of a…

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Russia’s state TV calls Trump their ‘agent’

Russia’s state TV calls Trump their ‘agent’

Julia Davis reports: Sometimes a picture doesn’t have to be worth a thousand words. Just a few will do. As Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov returned home from his visit with President Donald Trump in the Oval Office last week, Russian state media was gloating over the spectacle. TV channel Rossiya 1 aired a segment entitled “Puppet Master and ‘Agent’—How to Understand Lavrov’s Meeting With Trump.” Vesti Nedeli, a Sunday news show on the same network, pointed out that it…

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Barack Obama: Women are better leaders than men

Barack Obama: Women are better leaders than men

BBC News reports: If women ran every country in the world there would be a general improvement in living standards and outcomes, former US President Barack Obama has said. Speaking in Singapore, he said women aren’t perfect, but are “indisputably better” than men. He said most of the problems in the world came from old people, mostly men, holding onto positions of power. He also spoke about political polarisation and the use of social media to spread falsehoods. Speaking at…

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The imminent end of Britain’s social democracy

The imminent end of Britain’s social democracy

Matt Seaton writes: The immediate, clear consequence of the UK election of December 12, 2019, is that Boris Johnson’s Conservative Party has succeeded where Theresa May’s failed in the last general election, in 2017—by winning an emphatic parliamentary majority that can pass the legislation necessary to facilitate Britain’s departure from the European Union. The faint irony of that two-year hiatus and the handover of party leadership from May to Johnson is that the latter’s deal is rather worse—from the Brexiteers’…

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A Labour revival must tap into the energy for change on the ground

A Labour revival must tap into the energy for change on the ground

John Harris writes: Ten days before the election, I was in the Dumbiedykes estate in Edinburgh, a high-rise scheme a few minutes’ walk from the Scottish parliament, where a shrinking working-class community is hanging on in the face of gentrification. The neighbourhood, which had a Labour MP until 2010, is the headquarters of an organisation called Edinburgh Helping Hands, whose motto is “Solidarity not charity”: its work runs from giving children in the city free bikes, through football and boxing…

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Donald Trump fears only one Democrat: Warren Sanders

Donald Trump fears only one Democrat: Warren Sanders

Robert Reich writes: There aren’t 20 Senate Republicans with enough integrity to remove the most corrupt president in American history, so we’re going to have to get rid of Trump the old-fashioned way – by electing a Democrat next 3 November. That Democrat will be Warren Sanders. Although there are differences between Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, I’m putting them together for the purpose of making a simple point. These two have most of the grassroots energy in the 2020…

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Centrists say Johnson’s victory is proof Sanders or Warren can’t win. They’re wrong

Centrists say Johnson’s victory is proof Sanders or Warren can’t win. They’re wrong

Cas Mudde writes: The exit polls for the UK general election had barely been published and US pundits were already tweeting out the lessons for next year’s US presidential election. It’s almost as if their conclusions had been reached before the results were known. “Right populism will always beat left populism,” tweeted Yascha Mounk. Perhaps that’s the case, but I don’t know of many elections in which right and left populism were up against each other. And that’s leaving aside…

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Devoid of agility, charisma and credibility, Corbyn has led Labour into the abyss

Devoid of agility, charisma and credibility, Corbyn has led Labour into the abyss

Polly Toynbee writes: Given the worst choice in history, the public preferred [Boris Johnson] to his opponent. How bad did Labour have to be to let this sociopathic, narcissistic, glutton for power beat them? That’s the soul-searching question every Labour member, office-holder and MP has to ask. Labour was disastrously, catastrophically bad, an agony to behold. A coterie of Corbynites cared more about gripping power within the party than saving the country by winning the election. The national executive committee,…

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A 1970s hard-left clique led the Labour Party into a dead end

A 1970s hard-left clique led the Labour Party into a dead end

Jonathan Freedland writes: Like anyone who travelled the country and listened to voters, candidates and canvassers, I heard with my own ears the Labour voters who said they couldn’t back the party this time, not because of Brexit but because of Corbyn. Indeed, Brexit was often cited not for its own sake – little of this campaign was spent debating customs zones and trade agreements – but rather for its confirmation of their view that Corbyn was irredeemably “weak”. This…

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A great big gift not on Trump’s disclosure form: Giuliani’s legal advice

A great big gift not on Trump’s disclosure form: Giuliani’s legal advice

The New York Times reports: For the past 20 months, President Trump has received free personal legal services from one of America’s highest-paid lawyers, who has traveled around the country and across the ocean to defend him in the special counsel’s inquiry and press Ukraine to investigate a political rival and unfounded conspiracy theories. The lawyer, of course, is Rudolph W. Giuliani, but Mr. Trump did not mention Mr. Giuliani or his unpaid labor on the annual financial disclosure he…

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Judge’s decision may shine light on secret Trump-Putin meeting notes

Judge’s decision may shine light on secret Trump-Putin meeting notes

Yahoo News reports: A district court judge in Washington, D.C., has ordered administration lawyers to explain why, for more than two years, the White House has refused to turn over to the State Department an interpreter’s notes from a meeting between President Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin. That meeting took place in the summer of 2017, during a summit of the G-20 nations in Hamburg, Germany. The two men got along so well that the meeting, which was supposed…

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The American conservatives who believe ‘Russia is on our side’

The American conservatives who believe ‘Russia is on our side’

Anne Applebaum writes: Sherwood Eddy was a prominent American missionary as well as that now rare thing, a Christian socialist. In the 1920s and ’30s, he made more than a dozen trips to the Soviet Union. He was not blind to the problems of the U.S.S.R., but he also found much to like. In place of squabbling, corrupt democratic politicians, he wrote in one of his books on the country, “Stalin rules … by his sagacity, his honesty, his rugged…

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Trump’s Ukraine plot appears to have been financed by Russia

Trump’s Ukraine plot appears to have been financed by Russia

Jonathan Chait writes: President Trump is facing impeachment primarily for abusing his power for political gain, extorting a foreign country to discredit his political rivals. The secondary aspect of the plot is that the target of his extortion is hardly random. Ukraine is the victim of Russian aggression, and Russia’s continuing incursions into Ukrainian territory is the muscle that gave Trump’s threats leverage. Trump’s domestic interests are one intended beneficiary of his scheme. The other is Vladimir Putin. Trump and…

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Eric Holder: William Barr is unfit to be attorney general

Eric Holder: William Barr is unfit to be attorney general

Eric Holder, writes: As a former U.S. attorney general, I am reluctant to publicly criticize my successors. I respect the office and understand just how tough the job can be. But recently, Attorney General William P. Barr has made a series of public statements and taken actions that are so plainly ideological, so nakedly partisan and so deeply inappropriate for America’s chief law enforcement official that they demand a response from someone who held the same office. Last month, at…

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