It’s well past time to bury the ‘Bernie is unelectable’ trope

It’s well past time to bury the ‘Bernie is unelectable’ trope

Kirsten Powers writes: There has been a mass freak-out among the Democratic establishment as Bernie Sanders continues to surge in the polls. In two surveys released Tuesday, the Vermont Senator has opened up a double-digit lead over his closest competitors in the Democratic primary. The desperation has caused many Democrats to set their sights on former New York City mayor Mike Bloomberg as the man who will save us all from Donald Trump. But first he’ll have to save us…

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Rohrabacher confirms he offered Trump pardon to Assange for proof Russia didn’t hack DNC email

Rohrabacher confirms he offered Trump pardon to Assange for proof Russia didn’t hack DNC email

Michael Isikoff reports: Former California Republican congressman Dana Rohrabacher confirmed in a new interview that during a three-hour meeting at the Ecuadorian Embassy in August 2017, he told Julian Assange he would get President Trump to give him a pardon if he turned over information proving the Russians had not been the source of internal Democratic National Committee emails published by WikiLeaks. In a phone interview with Yahoo News, Rohrabacher said his goal during the meeting was to find proof…

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A disaster in Syria as Russia and Turkey clash

A disaster in Syria as Russia and Turkey clash

Ishaan Tharoor writes: Almost a decade into its ruinous civil war, Syria is experiencing perhaps its single biggest humanitarian crisis. An offensive by the Syrian regime in the last remaining rebel-held enclaves in the country’s northwest has sparked an exodus of more than 800,000 civilians, mostly women and children, since Dec. 1. For some of them, it’s the third or fourth time they have fled bombardments in a war that has claimed close to 400,000 lives and displaced more than…

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Far-right shooting shatters an already fragile sense of security in Germany

Far-right shooting shatters an already fragile sense of security in Germany

The New York Times reports: Hanau, a small city in western Germany, considered itself a melting pot, an island of tolerance. That was before a racist extremist opened fire at a hookah bar Wednesday night, killing nine mostly young people in Germany’s worst attack in recent memory. A working-class community just outside Frankfurt, Hanau was ethnically diverse long before the issue of immigration began tearing apart German politics with the arrival of nearly a million asylum seekers five years ago….

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What the Taliban wants

What the Taliban wants

Sirajuddin Haqqani, the deputy leader of the Taliban, writes: We are aware of the concerns and questions in and outside Afghanistan about the kind of government we would have after the foreign troops withdraw. My response to such concerns is that it will depend on a consensus among Afghans. We should not let our worries get in the way of a process of genuine discussion and deliberation free for the first time from foreign domination and interference. It is important…

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Think the U.S. is more polarized than ever? You don’t know history

Think the U.S. is more polarized than ever? You don’t know history

Union dead at Gettysburg, July 1863. National Archives, Timothy H. O’Sullivan photographer By Gary W. Gallagher, University of Virginia It has become common to say that the United States in 2020 is more divided politically and culturally than at any other point in our national past. As a historian who has written and taught about the Civil War era for several decades, I know that current divisions pale in comparison to those of the mid-19th century. Between Abraham Lincoln’s election…

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Ancient ‘megasites’ may reshape the history of the first cities

Ancient ‘megasites’ may reshape the history of the first cities

Bruce Bower writes: Nebelivka, a Ukrainian village of about 700 people, sits amid rolling hills and grassy fields. Here at the edge of Eastern Europe, empty space stretches to the horizon. It wasn’t always so. Beneath the surface of Nebelivka’s surrounding landscape and at nearby archaeological sites, roughly 6,000-year-old remnants of what were possibly some of the world’s first cities are emerging from obscurity. These low-density, spread-out archaeological sites are known as megasites, a term that underscores both their immense…

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Quid pro quo: Trump offered Assange pardon if he covered up Russian hack, lawyer claims

Quid pro quo: Trump offered Assange pardon if he covered up Russian hack, lawyer claims

The Daily Beast reports: A lawyer for Julian Assange has claimed in court that President Trump offered to pardon Assange if the WikiLeaks founder agreed to help cover up Russia’s involvement in hacking emails from the Democratic National Committee. Assange’s lawyers said on Wednesday that former Republican congressman Dana Rohrabacher offered Assange the deal in 2017, a year after emails that damaged Hillary Clinton in the presidential race had been published. WikiLeaks posted the stolen DNC emails after they were…

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Trump is passing most of the checkpoints on the way to dictatorship

Trump is passing most of the checkpoints on the way to dictatorship

Stephen Walt writes: Trump has railed against the so-called Deep State ever since he became president, for one simple reason: He objects to any institution that might serve as a check on his own actions. That’s not how presidents behave; it’s what dictators do. Look what happened last year: Following well-established legal procedures, patriotic civil service members brought a case of questionable presidential conduct to light, beginning with the whistleblower’s report about Trump’s attempt to get the government of Ukraine…

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Post-impeachment, Trump declares himself the ‘chief law enforcement officer’ of America

Post-impeachment, Trump declares himself the ‘chief law enforcement officer’ of America

The Washington Post reports: During his Senate impeachment trial, Democrats repeatedly asserted that President Trump is “not above the law.” But since his acquittal two weeks ago, analysts say, the president has taken a series of steps aimed at showing that, essentially, he is the law. On Tuesday, Trump granted clemency to a clutch of political allies, circumventing the usual Justice Department process. The pardons and commutations followed Trump’s moves to punish witnesses in his impeachment trial, publicly intervene in…

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Michael Bloomberg’s polite authoritarianism

Michael Bloomberg’s polite authoritarianism

Alex Pareene writes: Over the course of the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York City, the New York Police Department arrested nearly 2,000 people at protests. The mass arrests were indiscriminate. Bystanders and journalists were among those hauled to a filthy bus depot terminal that served as a makeshift holding pen. Hundreds of people were charged with minor crimes so that they could be kept in jail for the duration of the convention. A judge held the city in…

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What is the ‘boogaloo?’ How online calls for a violent uprising are hitting the mainstream

What is the ‘boogaloo?’ How online calls for a violent uprising are hitting the mainstream

NBC News reports: An anti-government movement that advocates for a violent uprising targeting liberal political opponents and law enforcement has moved from the fringes of the internet into the mainstream in recent months and surged on social media, according to a group of researchers that tracks hate groups. The movement, which says it wants a second Civil War organized around the term “boogaloo,” now includes groups on mainstream internet platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Reddit as well as…

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Yes, Israel wants peace — after it gets rid of the Palestinians

Yes, Israel wants peace — after it gets rid of the Palestinians

Orly Noy writes: Over the last week, pedestrians and drivers in Tel Aviv caught a glimpse of an especially disturbing billboard that had been posted across the city. The billboard, erected by the far-right group, Israeli Victory Project, showed Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh blindfolded and on their knees on a backdrop of destruction. The caption read: “Peace is only made with defeated enemies.” By Sunday morning, Tel Aviv Mayor Ron Huldai had ordered the billboards…

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65,000-year-old plant remains show the earliest Australians spent plenty of time cooking

65,000-year-old plant remains show the earliest Australians spent plenty of time cooking

Researchers May Nango, Djaykuk Djandjomerr and S. Anna Florin collecting plants in Kakadu National Park. Reproduced with permission of Gundjeihmi Aboriginal Corporation. Elspeth Hayes, Author provided By S. Anna Florin, The University of Queensland; Andrew Fairbairn, The University of Queensland, and Chris Clarkson, The University of Queensland Australia’s first people ate a wide variety of fruits, vegetables, nuts and other plant foods, many of which would have taken considerable time and knowledge to prepare, according to our analysis of charred…

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