Attention to the Unseen

Elaine Godfrey writes: It’s still early. There will be 16 more months of speech making and glad-handing and glitzy ballroom fundraisers before Election Day. Not committing to a presidential candidate just yet would make sense. But here at Netroots Nation, the premier annual convention for progressive activists, many attendees already seem fairly certain about their choice: They want Elizabeth Warren, the progressive senator from Massachusetts, to be their next president. And if they have to pick a second choice? It’s…

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The Miami Herald reports: Jeffrey Epstein’s arrest is reverberating in Israel, where Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his right-wing Likud party are calling for a criminal probe into former prime minister Ehud Barak’s personal and business ties with the accused sex trafficker, Israeli media is reporting. Barak, 77, served as prime minister from 1999 to 2001. This month he formed a new party to run for prime minister against Netanyahu, who called for new elections in September. Once political allies,…

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The New Yorker reports: Early next week, according to a D.H.S. official, the Trump Administration is expected to announce a major immigration deal, known as a safe-third-country agreement, with Guatemala. For weeks, there have been reports that negotiations were under way between the two countries, but, until now, none of the details were official. According to a draft of the agreement obtained by The New Yorker, asylum seekers from any country who either show up at U.S. ports of entry…

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Robert P. Jones writes: While white Christians composed only 43 percent of the population in 2016, they constituted an estimated 55 percent of voters. And although white evangelical Protestants composed only 17 percent of the public in 2016, they were 26 percent of voters. In other words, in the electorate, white Christians overall were 12 percentage points overrepresented, and white evangelical Protestants were nine percentage points overrepresented. When white Christians stepped into the voting booth in 2016, their electoral power…

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Politico reports: Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders are two of the most ideologically aligned candidates in the Democratic primary — both left-wing populists who rail against a “rigged” economic system. But the fellow enemies of the 1 percent have surprisingly different bases of support. In poll after poll, Sanders appeals to lower-income and less-educated people; Warren beats Sanders among those with postgraduate degrees. Sanders performs better with men, Warren with women. Younger people who vote less frequently are more often…

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The New York Times reports: [Following its first occurrence in 1820, then again in 1830 and 1870,] [t]he next time citizenship was on the form, in a question about naturalization in the 1890 census, it came with the rise of a virulent campaign against immigrants. Curiously, one of the campaign’s principal leaders was the superintendent of the 1870 and 1880 censuses, Gen. Francis Amasa Walker. General Walker, who was also president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, became increasingly obsessed…

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ABC News reports: Earlier this month, a chilling missive arrived at the Chicago office of the American Civil Liberties Union: a fake ACLU flier that had surfaced online, calling on immigrants to boycott the 2020 census. “If you get a census form, do not fill it out! ICE will find you and deport you!” it warned. The document went on to advise people to destroy any census form that arrives in the mail and to ignore knocks at the door…

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