Karl Rove: Republicans must be held accountable for the January 6 violence

Karl Rove: Republicans must be held accountable for the January 6 violence

Karl Rove writes: What if in early January 2017, Democrats similarly attired and armed [as Trump supporters were on January 6, 2021] had stormed the Capitol and attempted to keep Congress from receiving the Electoral College results for the 2016 presidential election? What if Democrats claimed that Donald Trump’s razor-thin victories in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin resulted from extensive voter fraud and should be rejected, despite having failed to establish in a single court that extensive fraud had actually occurred?…

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Trump’s ‘web of lies’ threatens U.S. democracy, says Biden

Trump’s ‘web of lies’ threatens U.S. democracy, says Biden

Reuters reports: President Joe Biden on Thursday accused his predecessor Donald Trump of spreading a “web of lies” to undermine U.S. democracy in a speech on the anniversary of the deadly Capitol attack by Trump supporters who tried to undo his 2020 election defeat. Speaking at the white-domed building where rioters smashed windows, assaulted police and sent lawmakers fleeing for their lives on Jan. 6, 2021, Biden said Trump’s false claims that the election was stolen from him through widespread…

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Whether to prosecute Trump is becoming the defining issue of Attorney General Garland’s tenure

Whether to prosecute Trump is becoming the defining issue of Attorney General Garland’s tenure

David Rohde writes: In hindsight, Donald Trump’s intentions could not appear clearer. During the final months of the 2020 Presidential race, he systematically conducted a disinformation campaign that convinced many of his supporters the election would be stolen by Democrats. After losing, he doubled down on those false claims and repeatedly pressured state election officials, Justice Department prosecutors, federal and state judges, members of Congress, and the Vice-President to overturn the results. After those efforts failed, he appeared at a…

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Who planted the January 6 Capitol Hill pipe bombs?

Who planted the January 6 Capitol Hill pipe bombs?

Elaine Godfrey writes: The security-camera footage is grainy and gray with no sound, like an old silent film. Night has fallen in Washington, and a person wearing a light-colored hoodie, a face mask, and Nike Air Max Speed Turf sneakers strides down the sidewalk along South Capitol Street carrying a backpack. The person stops and stands idly in front of a house while someone passes, walking their dog on a leash. The person continues on, sitting for a while on…

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Jimmy Carter: I fear for American democracy

Jimmy Carter: I fear for American democracy

Jimmy Carter writes: One year ago, a violent mob, guided by unscrupulous politicians, stormed the Capitol and almost succeeded in preventing the democratic transfer of power. All four of us former presidents condemned their actions and affirmed the legitimacy of the 2020 election. There followed a brief hope that the insurrection would shock the nation into addressing the toxic polarization that threatens our democracy. However, one year on, promoters of the lie that the election was stolen have taken over…

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McConnell cracks door open to Electoral Count Act reform

McConnell cracks door open to Electoral Count Act reform

Politico reports: Mitch McConnell is signaling he’s open to reforming the Electoral Count Act, one year after a mass of Republicans objected to certification of President Joe Biden’s win ahead of an attempted insurrection. Democrats are pursuing more sweeping election reforms and federalization of elections, but some lawmakers in both parties are also suggesting there may be more modest reforms that could pass on a bipartisan basis. Centrist Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema both endorsed pursuing work on…

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The ridiculous hypocrisy of Sean Hannity hiding behind ‘freedom of the press’

The ridiculous hypocrisy of Sean Hannity hiding behind ‘freedom of the press’

Margaret Sullivan writes: The House Jan. 6 committee asked this week that Fox News host Sean Hannity appear and answer investigators’ questions about his text messages to President Trump’s aides before, during and after the attack on the U.S. Capitol. The response from Hannity’s lawyer was every bit as predictable as it was laughable. “We remain very concerned about the constitutional implications especially as it relates to the First Amendment,” wrote Jay Sekulow, the Trump-team lawyer who represents Hannity. He…

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EU’s Borrell: Europe cannot be left out of Russia-U.S. talks

EU’s Borrell: Europe cannot be left out of Russia-U.S. talks

Politico reports: The EU’s chief fear is no longer that it will be squeezed onto the diplomatic sidelines by the U.S. and China — because it is now more afraid of being squeezed out by the U.S. and Russia. Washington is leading talks on defusing tensions with Moscow after Russia moved about 100,000 troops to its border with Ukraine and says it wants legally-binding guarantees from the NATO military alliance about its weapons deployment and its eastern expansion. At a…

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Here’s the real deal on flurona

Here’s the real deal on flurona

Jaime Green writes: Two years of pandemic have us primed to panic at every headline. A new variant, a new complication, a new baffling policy move. Now, headlines have brought an alarmingly exotic new word to stoke our fears: flurona. On Sunday the Times of Israel published an article with the headline, “‘Flurona’: Israel Records Its First Case of Patient With COVID and Flu at Same Time.” The first wave of follow-up aggregation articles in other outlets was staid, merely…

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The therapeutic value of swearing

The therapeutic value of swearing

Stephen Tuffin writes: When I was a kid, swearing was taboo – except for that one time when my dad, a hulking great navvy of a man, took me down the yard where they kept all the equipment road workers used out on the roads, and I witnessed the cutting down of a tree. An elm, I am reliably told. At home, that evening, sat on the kitchen table of our council house, my mum scrubbing my hands and face,…

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One woman’s six-word mantra that has helped to calm millions

One woman’s six-word mantra that has helped to calm millions

Judith Hoare writes: [Dr Claire] Weekes distilled her understanding of ‘nervous illness’ into a six-word mantra for overcoming anxiety: face, accept, float, let time pass. In Self-Help for Your Nerves, she said that sufferers usually spent their time counterproductively: Running away, not facing. Fighting, not accepting. Arresting and ‘listening in’, not floating past. Being impatient with time, not letting time pass. The nervously ill person usually notices each new symptom in alarm, listens-in in apprehension, and yet at the same…

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Waste is central, not peripheral, to everything we design, make and do

Waste is central, not peripheral, to everything we design, make and do

Justin McGuirk writes: The opposition between ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ is problematic for many reasons, but there’s one that we rarely discuss. The ‘nature vs culture’ dualism leaves out an entire domain that properly belongs to neither: the world of waste. The mountains of waste that we produce every year, the torrents of polluting effluent, the billions of tonnes of greenhouse gases, the new cosmos of microplastics expanding through our oceans – none of this has ever been entered into the…

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What if the January 6 insurrection had succeeded in illegally installing Trump?

What if the January 6 insurrection had succeeded in illegally installing Trump?

David Rothkopf writes: As we approach the first anniversary of the Jan. 6 insurrection on the U.S. Capitol, many questions remain. Among these, one of the most important is, “What if?” What if the coup attempt had succeeded? What if the election results had been overturned? What if Donald Trump were illegally installed for a second term as president of the United States? It could have happened several different ways. Capitol Police officer Eugene Goodman might have been out sick…

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Navarro: Trump distributed bogus election fraud research to ‘every’ Congressional Republican

Navarro: Trump distributed bogus election fraud research to ‘every’ Congressional Republican

Rolling Stone reports: When the 2020 election didn’t go Trump’s way, Peter Navarro did something dangerous. He began to do his own research. Navarro, an economist whom Donald Trump tapped to lead his trade war against China, didn’t stay in his lane at the White House. He’d already inserted himself in the administration’s botched pandemic response, pushing the unproven hypothesis that Covid-19 escaped from a Wuhan lab. And after the 2020 vote, Navarro began compiling a series of inflammatory dossiers…

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