‘They’re getting killed among women’: Skeptical female voters stand in way of GOP Senate

‘They’re getting killed among women’: Skeptical female voters stand in way of GOP Senate

Politico reports: Republicans this election cycle thought they had finally achieved a breakthrough with suburban women after years of losing support. Now, as the primary season has all but ended, the GOP is back where it once was: Appealing directly to skeptical female voters, the women whose support will make or break the party’s drive to retake the Senate majority. A sure sign: One after the other, Republican nominees in top Senate battlegrounds have softened, backpedaled and sought to clarify…

Read More Read More

Belarusian volunteers fighting against Russia in Ukraine

Belarusian volunteers fighting against Russia in Ukraine

Anne Applebaum writes: No revolutionary posters line the streets, “flaming from the walls in clean reds and blues,” as they did when George Orwell left Barcelona to fight in the Spanish Civil War. Nor can you hear loudspeakers “bellowing revolutionary songs all day and far into the night,” as Orwell did in 1936. Instead, gathered in a basement on a quiet, tree-lined street, the Belarusians preparing to leave Warsaw to join the Ukrainian army look more like a bunch of…

Read More Read More

Anatomy of an exodus from Russia

Anatomy of an exodus from Russia

Nick Foretek writes: On March 1, in a Moscow therapist’s office, Alevtina “Alya” Borodulina chose to leave Russia. The invasion of Ukraine had begun five days earlier. People called the new world “After 24,” marking the invasion’s date and the ruthless and irrevocable division of time it had created. Daily routines no longer structured life but instead gave way to existential concerns. Nostalgia now tinted the immediate past. It was her first therapy session, scheduled prior to the war’s outbreak…

Read More Read More

Indigenous Americans ruled democratically long before the U.S. did

Indigenous Americans ruled democratically long before the U.S. did

Bruce Bower writes: On sunny summer days, powerboats pulling water-skiers zip across Georgia’s Lake Oconee, a reservoir located about an hour-and-a-half drive east of Atlanta. For those without a need for speed, fishing beckons. Little do the lake’s visitors suspect that here lie the remains of a democratic institution that dates to around 500 A.D., more than 1,200 years before the founding of the U.S. Congress. Reservoir waters, which flooded the Oconee Valley in 1979 after the construction of a…

Read More Read More

A good memory or a bad one? One brain molecule decides

A good memory or a bad one? One brain molecule decides

Yasemin Saplakoglu writes: You’re on the vacation of a lifetime in Kenya, traversing the savanna on safari, with the tour guide pointing out elephants to your right and lions to your left. Years later, you walk into a florist’s shop in your hometown and smell something like the flowers on the jackalberry trees that dotted the landscape. When you close your eyes, the store disappears and you’re back in the Land Rover. Inhaling deeply, you smile at the happy memory….

Read More Read More

Should the Justice Department appeal Judge Cannon’s incredibly flawed Trump special master ruling?

Should the Justice Department appeal Judge Cannon’s incredibly flawed Trump special master ruling?

Norman L. Eisen and Fred Wertheimer write: On Aug. 27, Judge Aileen Cannon issued a preliminary order indicating that she was inclined to grant Donald Trump’s request that she appoint a special master to review the documents that the government seized during its court-approved search of Mar-a-Lago last month. So her order on Monday enjoining the Department of Justice from using those materials in its ongoing criminal investigation until a special master completes his or her review was in some…

Read More Read More

Judge Cannon’s ruling is untethered to the law

Judge Cannon’s ruling is untethered to the law

Andrew Weissmann writes: One of the most dispiriting aspects of the decision yesterday by Federal District Court Judge Aileen Cannon—which granted former President Donald Trump’s request to appoint a special master to review the evidence seized from Mar-a-Lago by the FBI—is that it undermines the work of all the other judges who have tried to adhere to their oath to “administer justice without respect to persons, and do equal right to the poor and to the rich, and … faithfully…

Read More Read More

Legal experts question judge’s ‘deeply problematic’ intervention in Trump inquiry

Legal experts question judge’s ‘deeply problematic’ intervention in Trump inquiry

The New York Times reports: A federal judge’s extraordinary decision on Monday to interject in the criminal investigation into former President Donald J. Trump’s hoarding of sensitive government documents at his Florida residence showed unusual solicitude to him, legal specialists said. This was “an unprecedented intervention by a federal district judge into the middle of an ongoing federal criminal and national security investigation,” said Stephen I. Vladeck, a law professor at University of Texas. Siding with Mr. Trump, the judge,…

Read More Read More

Video shows fake Trump elector escorted operatives into GA county’s elections office before voting machine breach

Video shows fake Trump elector escorted operatives into GA county’s elections office before voting machine breach

CNN reports: A Republican county official in Georgia escorted two operatives working with an attorney for former President Donald Trump into the county’s election offices on the same day a voting system there was breached, newly obtained video shows. The breach is now under investigation by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation and is of interest to the Fulton County District Attorney, who is conducting a wider criminal probe of interference in the 2020 election. The video sheds more light on…

Read More Read More

Putin aims to triumph in battle against the liberal West for ‘cultural supremacy’

Putin aims to triumph in battle against the liberal West for ‘cultural supremacy’

Bloomberg reports: President Vladimir Putin sought to position Russia as leading the defense of “traditional” cultural values against the liberal West in a new Kremlin decree. “The battle for cultural supremacy is growing on the world stage,” according to the statement Putin signed Monday on Russia’s “humanitarian policy” abroad. “Centuries of history have given Russia a rich cultural heritage and spiritual potential that has put it in a unique position to successfully spread traditional Russian moral and religious values.” The…

Read More Read More

Putin scrambles for high-tech parts as his arsenal goes up in smoke

Putin scrambles for high-tech parts as his arsenal goes up in smoke

Politico reports: It’s the microchips that look set to get Vladimir Putin in the end. Six months into its invasion of Ukraine, Russia is being throttled by a severe technology deficit inflicted by sanctions. Having fired off (or lost in combat) way more of their missile firepower than they originally anticipated, Moscow’s soldiers are now increasingly relying on ancient stocks of primitive Soviet-era munitions while Western-armed Ukrainian forces are battling to turn the tide in a southern counteroffensive with pinpoint…

Read More Read More

Burning forests for energy isn’t ‘renewable’ — now the EU must admit it

Burning forests for energy isn’t ‘renewable’ — now the EU must admit it

Greta Thunberg et al write: Next week the future of many of the world’s forests will be decided when members of the European parliament vote on a revised EU renewable energy directive. If the parliament fails to change the EU’s discredited and harmful renewables policy, European citizens’ tax money will continue to pay for forests around the globe to literally go up in smoke every day. Europe’s directly elected representatives now have to choose: they can either save the EU’s…

Read More Read More

How liberals learned to appreciate the military

How liberals learned to appreciate the military

Dominic Tierney writes: In 1967, Martin Luther King Jr. spoke at Harlem’s Riverside Church to a crowd of thousands that flowed out the door as far as 120th Street. King publicly condemned the Vietnam War because it had “broken and eviscerated” the civil-rights and anti-poverty movements at home. The American government was “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.” In 2022, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky invoked another MLK speech while asking Congress to help his country repel the…

Read More Read More

A second constitutional convention? Some Republicans want to force one

A second constitutional convention? Some Republicans want to force one

The New York Times reports: Representative Jodey Arrington, a conservative Texas Republican, believes it is well past time for something the nation has not experienced for more than two centuries: a debate over rewriting the Constitution. “I think the states are due a convention,” said Mr. Arrington, who in July introduced legislation to direct the archivist of the United States to tally applications for a convention from state legislatures and compel Congress to schedule a gathering when enough states have…

Read More Read More