Attention to the Unseen

Vox reports: Sen. Bernie Sanders sold a lot of books and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez got an expensive haircut and now Sen. Elizabeth Warren was compensated for her legal services. All of these matters have generated a lot of chatter and media coverage in recent months, because progressive politicians apparently are supposed to eschew … money. It was Warren who ignited the latest iteration of this progressive impurity news cycle over the weekend when on Sunday she detailed how much she…

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HuffPost reports: Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) and a large group of Democratic senators have signed a letter that will be sent to the White House on Monday calling on President Donald Trump to fire senior adviser Stephen Miller in light of leaked emails showing the extent of his white nationalist beliefs. “We write to demand the immediate removal of Stephen Miller as your advisor,” states the letter, a copy of which was provided to HuffPost by Harris’ office. The leaked…

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The New York Times reports: India took a major step toward the official marginalization of Muslims on Tuesday as one house of Parliament passed a bill that would establish a religious test for migrants who want to become citizens, solidifying Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu-nationalist agenda. The measure would give migrants of all of South Asia’s major religions a clear path to Indian citizenship — except Islam. It is the most significant move yet to profoundly alter India’s secular nature…

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Masha Gessen has translated the final statement made by a twenty-one-year-old university student named Yegor Zhukov during his trial for “extremism”: This court hearing is concerned primarily with words and their meaning. We have discussed specific sentences, the subtleties of phrasing, different possible interpretations, and I hope that we have succeeded at showing to the honorable court that I am not an extremist, either from the point of view of linguistics or from the point of view of common sense….

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The New York Times reports: When a Saudi Air Force officer opened fire on his classmates at a naval base in Pensacola, Fla., on Friday, he killed three, wounded eight and exposed anew the strange dynamic between President Trump and the Saudi leadership: The president’s first instinct was to tamp down any suggestion that the Saudi government needed to be held to account. Hours later, Mr. Trump announced on Twitter that he had received a condolence call from King Salman…

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Elizabeth Warren writes: For seven decades, America’s strength, security and prosperity have been underpinned by our unmatched network of treaty alliances, cemented in shared democratic values and a recognition of our common security. But after three years of Donald Trump’s insults and antics, our alliances are under enormous strain. The damage done by the president’s hostility toward our closest partners was on full display at this week’s gathering of Nato leaders in London, which should have been an unequivocal celebration…

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The Times of Israel reports: US President Donald Trump told a pro-Israel conference Saturday night that some American Jews don’t love Israel enough. He also noting that he did not have to worry about getting his audience’s votes, because they would cast ballots with business interests in mind. Those comments, to the Israeli American Council advocacy group in Florida, drew quick criticism from opponents and were derided as anti-Semitic. In his 45-minute speech to an audience of over 4,300, the…

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Garry Kasparov writes: The totalitarian Soviet Union where I grew up tried to dominate the truth, to distort it and control it. Reality was whatever the Party put out on the nightly news, or in the official newspapers, Pravda, which means “Truth” and Izvestia, which means “News.” It was increasingly obvious back then, even to communist true believers, that what we were being told didn’t match the world we saw around us. As the joke went, “there is no news…

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William J. Burns writes: President Donald Trump’s October decision to withdraw U.S. troops from Syria produced a rare moment of bipartisanship in foreign policy. With a shared sense of alarm, Republicans and Democrats alike accused Trump of betrayal. Certainly, it was a betrayal of the Kurdish partners who bled for us in the fight against the Islamic State. It was also a betrayal of process—leaving our military leaders and diplomats struggling to keep up with tweets, our allies in the…

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Former United States representative, Katie Hill, writes: People have speculated that Speaker Pelosi or the party leadership asked me to resign because of the photos and the allegations about me. That could not be further from the truth. In fact, one of the most difficult moments during my resignation process was my phone call to the Speaker, a woman I admire more than anyone and whom I had come to love. She told me I didn’t have to do this,…

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Laurence H. Tribe writes: Of particular interest to me in this week’s House impeachment hearing was a moment when the chief counsel for the Republicans read aloud a quote about the dangers of a purely partisan, policy-based impeachment of a sitting president. This was from page 140 of my book with Joshua Matz, “To End a Presidency: The Power of Impeachment.” The passage continued by describing the even greater dangers posed by a purely partisan, personality-driven refusal to impeach and…

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John Cassidy writes: With the polls also showing that Democratic voters are overwhelmingly supportive of impeachment, independents are more narrowly in favor, and Republicans are overwhelmingly opposed, it is tempting to conclude that the over-all impact will be a wash. But focussing too much on polling data can be dangerous. Presidential elections aren’t merely bloodless exercises in eliciting public opinion on a given day; they are titanic, coast-to-coast struggles, in which turnout, activism, and civic engagement also matter enormously. Trump’s…

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Lawrence Lessig writes: In a study published last month, the research institute PRRI found that 55% of “Republicans for whom Fox News is their primary news source say there is nothing Trump could do to lose their approval, compared to only 29% of Republicans who do not cite Fox News as their primary news source.” That 26-point difference is driven not just by politics, but in part by the media source. Chart showing that disapproval of Nixon fell for both…

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Voice of America reports: Russian efforts to weaken the West through a relentless campaign of information warfare may be starting to pay off, cracking a key bastion of the U.S. line of defense: the military. While most Americans still see Moscow as a key U.S. adversary, new polling suggests that view is changing, most notably among the households of military members. The second annual Reagan National Defense Survey, completed in late October, found nearly half of armed services households questioned,…

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The Guardian reports: An anonymous online poster who disseminated documents later brandished by Jeremy Corbyn as evidence the Conservatives would put the NHS “on the table” in US trade talks was part of a campaign directed by Moscow, the site hosting the papers has said. On Friday evening, Reddit confirmed it has banned 61 accounts; including that of a user called Gregoriator, who it believes was part of a Russian information operation known as Secondary Infektion. The anonymous user posted…

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