The oil industry has taken over the GOP but nature is intervening, says Al Gore

The oil industry has taken over the GOP but nature is intervening, says Al Gore

David Remnick interviews Al Gore: Gore: [I]t now seems obvious to almost everyone that the severity of the crisis has reached a new level of intensity. Climate-related extreme events have become so common and so dangerous that people who wanted to dismiss it are now waking up to the reality that we’re facing. And, of course, the underlying substance is shocking. We’re still using the sky as an open sewer for the heat-trapping, gaseous pollution that we spew into it…

Read More Read More

Amazon’s Alexa has been claiming the 2020 election was stolen

Amazon’s Alexa has been claiming the 2020 election was stolen

The Washington Post reports: Amid concerns the rise of artificial intelligence will supercharge the spread of misinformation comes a wild fabrication from a more prosaic source: Amazon’s Alexa, which declared that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. Asked about fraud in the race — in which President Biden defeated former president Donald Trump with 306 electoral college votes — the popular voice assistant said it was “stolen by a massive amount of election fraud,” citing Rumble, a video-streaming service favored…

Read More Read More

Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric echoes Hitler’s in Mein Kampf

Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric echoes Hitler’s in Mein Kampf

The New York Times reports: Former President Donald J. Trump said undocumented immigrants were “poisoning the blood of our country” in a recent interview, language with echoes of white supremacy and the racial hatreds of Adolf Hitler. Mr. Trump made the remark in a 37-minute video interview with The National Pulse, a right-leaning website, that was posted last week. It drew broader scrutiny on Wednesday after the liberal MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan surfaced the quote in a post on X….

Read More Read More

This isn’t democracy. It’s the heartbeat of authoritarianism

This isn’t democracy. It’s the heartbeat of authoritarianism

Joanne Freeman writes: Without a doubt, the Republican ousting of Republican Speaker Kevin McCarthy is a banner of dysfunction. Sifting through the chaos for its meaning is more complex. It certainly signals that something is broken, but what? It’s not the Republican Party’s fracture in and of itself. Fractured political parties are hardly new; the 19th century was the great age of splintering parties. We’ve had contentious speakerships before (though a party ousting its own speaker is something special). Extremism…

Read More Read More

How much of Trump’s ‘wealth’ might secretly belong to Russian oligarchs?

How much of Trump’s ‘wealth’ might secretly belong to Russian oligarchs?

  Former Forbes reporter Jonathan Greenberg: “I think another shoe is going to drop very soon, which is, in the order today, they ordered him to disclose secret equity partners in any of the interests in his New York properties. Now, I’ve been theorizing for years now, to editors and to other journalists that Trump has these investors — that his piece of the equity is not really his piece; that he has loaned it out. We will see what…

Read More Read More

Compromises on territory, legal order, and world peace: The fate of international law lies on Ukraine’s borders

Compromises on territory, legal order, and world peace: The fate of international law lies on Ukraine’s borders

Maksym Vishchyk and Jeremy Pizzi write: As Russia’s war against Ukraine persists, officials in Ukraine, Russia, and beyond have differing visions of how hostilities should end. Ukraine has consistently made its position clear that no peace negotiations with Russia are possible before the complete restoration of Ukrainian territorial integrity, that is, a return to Ukraine’s 1991 internationally recognized borders. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy laid down that marker when he first outlined his 10-point Peace Formula in November 2022. In contrast, Russia has repeatedly stated that…

Read More Read More

Ukraine is ‘freaking out’ as McCarthy chaos threatens U.S. aid

Ukraine is ‘freaking out’ as McCarthy chaos threatens U.S. aid

Politico reports: After a year and a half of war, Ukraine’s leaders now have a new reason to worry: Mounting political chaos in America is threatening to derail their supply of money and weapons. Days after lawmakers shelved a vital U.S. plan to send billions of dollars in aid to Kyiv, U.S. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy was ousted by his own Republican Party colleagues. Aid to Ukraine was named as one of the reasons. In Kyiv, officials are at a…

Read More Read More

Team Trump readies attacks on RFK Jr. as spoiler anxiety grows

Team Trump readies attacks on RFK Jr. as spoiler anxiety grows

Shelby Talcott reports: Members of Donald Trump’s team are quietly preparing to go on offense against Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as internal campaign polling suggests his expected third party bid could draw more votes from Trump than President Joe Biden in a general election. Semafor has not independently reviewed the polling. One person close to Trump’s campaign said it showed that Kennedy took more votes from Trump than left-wing independent Cornel West drew from Biden when both were tested. “It’s…

Read More Read More

Trump gave up the idea of running for speaker when he learned he’d probably lose — badly

Trump gave up the idea of running for speaker when he learned he’d probably lose — badly

Politico reports: It wasn’t that anyone seriously thought he’d win the 218 votes to be elected. In fact, most who were familiar with the conference’s internal dynamics believed he couldn’t even get the conference nomination, requiring a simple majority of Republicans. Centrist Republicans running in Biden districts were dreading the prospect of being tied to Trump as speaker. And even traditional and conservative Republicans were not happy about the idea of reporters peppering them with questions about whether they think…

Read More Read More

A broken Congress is what MAGA always wanted

A broken Congress is what MAGA always wanted

David Rothkopf writes: There have been MAGA true believers shitting on the floor of the Congress ever since Jan. 6, 2021. But the right wing’s active desecration of the U.S. government extends far beyond ugly recent events on Capitol Hill, and dates back long before the Trumpist insurrection of two and a half years ago. In fact, the origins of the attacks on the government date back at least four decades to the Reagan administration, when the former president popularized…

Read More Read More

From his ‘War Room,’ Steve Bannon stokes the Republican Party meltdown

From his ‘War Room,’ Steve Bannon stokes the Republican Party meltdown

The New York Times reports: On Wednesday morning, two Republicans who hours earlier had toppled Kevin McCarthy as speaker of the House made a well-worn trek to a 19th-century brick townhouse a few blocks away from the Capitol and entered the cluttered sanctuary of Stephen K. Bannon’s recording studio. Representatives Matt Gaetz of Florida, the instigator of the rebellion, and Nancy Mace of South Carolina, one of seven other Republican defectors, huddled with Mr. Bannon for a morning meeting ahead…

Read More Read More

The GOP wants power without responsibilities

The GOP wants power without responsibilities

Greg Sargent writes: What’s become clear now is there is no Republican majority in the House united behind any governing approach. The Gaetz faction is committed to a project that most House Republicans ultimately are not: eschewing consensus governing entirely wherever possible and making no concessions to Democrats whatsoever. In this, the Gaetz crew has been urged on by Trump, who wants Republicans to shut down the government to defund ongoing prosecutions of him, a Total War posture that would…

Read More Read More

Poland’s election is neither free nor fair

Poland’s election is neither free nor fair

Anne Applebaum writes: State capture is a clean, formal phrase that describes a messy, ugly process. A political party or clique typically consolidates control over a state’s institutions only after years of bad legislation, concentrated propaganda, and many different forms of corruption. In some cases, constitutions have to be broken. Occasionally violence is required. Whole swaths of the public have to be persuaded, bribed, or frightened into going along. In Poland, this process has been under way for eight years….

Read More Read More

Putin’s fleet retreats: Ukraine is winning the Battle of the Black Sea

Putin’s fleet retreats: Ukraine is winning the Battle of the Black Sea

Peter Dickinson writes: Russia has reportedly withdrawn most of its Black Sea Fleet from occupied Crimea in recent weeks following a series of successful Ukrainian attacks. The retreat of the Russian fleet is a serious setback for Vladimir Putin’s ongoing invasion and the latest indication that Ukraine is winning the Battle of the Black Sea. Satellite footage from early October indicates that Russian vessels including three Kilo-class submarines, two guided missile frigates, and a patrol ship have all been hastily…

Read More Read More