Music: Ivan Lins — ‘Abre Alas’
Message to email subscribers – updated – again
July 4: Sorry for the recent interruption in email updates. They will resume on July 12. Meanwhile, I’m still updating the site as usual. June 10: Since starting War in Context and then Attention to the Unseen, everyone who signed up to receive email updates has received these via Feedburner (which was acquired by Google in 2007). Since its acquisition, Feedburner has suffered death by a thousand cuts — the latest of which is that they are about to end…
Republicans are fighting against a multiracial democracy
Thomas B. Edsall writes: Determined to enforce white political dominance in pivotal states like Georgia, Arizona, Texas and North Carolina, Republicans are enacting or trying to enact laws restricting the right to vote, empowering legislatures to reject election outcomes and adopting election rules and procedures designed to block the emergence of multiracial political majorities. Republicans “see the wave of demography coming and they are just trying to hold up a wall and keep it from smashing them in,” William Frey,…
My fellow Republicans, stop fearing this dangerous and diminished man
Barbara Comstock writes: Many Republicans want to move on from the Jan. 6 attack. But how is that possible when the former president won’t move on from the Nov. 3 election and continues to push the same incendiary lies that resulted in 61 failed lawsuits before Jan. 6, led to an insurrection and could lead to yet more violence? If you doubt that a threat of violence exists, look at the recent poll from the Public Religion Research Institute and…
America still undervalues public health
Ed Yong writes: During a pandemic, no one’s health is fully in their own hands. No field should understand that more deeply than public health, a discipline distinct from medicine. Whereas doctors and nurses treat sick individuals in front of them, public-health practitioners work to prevent sickness in entire populations. They are expected to think big. They know that infectious diseases are always collective problems because they are infectious. An individual’s choices can ripple outward to affect cities, countries, and…
An open letter on U.S. media coverage of Palestine
An open letter on U.S. media coverage of Palestine: Finding truth and holding the powerful to account are core principles of journalism. Yet for decades, our news industry has abandoned those values in coverage of Israel and Palestine. We have failed our audiences with a narrative that obscures the most fundamental aspects of the story: Israel’s military occupation and its system of apartheid. For the sake of our readers and viewers — and the truth — we have a duty…
Is Biden risking a Cold War with China?
Thomas Wright writes: In Biden’s view, the United States and other democracies are in a competition with China and other autocracies. This is being exacerbated by a period of rapid technological change that could give China an opportunity to leapfrog the United States in certain areas. Biden regularly invokes his many conversations with Xi Jinping to observe that the Chinese leader is deeply ideological in his personal commitment to authoritarianism. Biden’s top Asia adviser, Kurt M. Campbell, has echoed that…
Biden has never trusted Putin
Politico reports: When President George W. Bush first met Vladimir Putin, he seemed smitten, describing the still-new Russian leader as “very straightforward and trustworthy,” even claiming he got “a sense of his soul.” A certain Democratic senator from Delaware had a very different reaction. “I don’t trust Putin,” Joe Biden said in the days after the June 2001 Bush-Putin summit in Slovenia. “Hopefully, the president was being stylistic rather than substantive.” Twenty years later, Washington has come around firmly to…
Astronomers find secret planet-making ingredient: magnetic fields
Robin George Andrews writes: We like to think of ourselves as unique. That conceit may even be true when it comes to our cosmic neighborhood: Despite the fact that planets between the sizes of Earth and Neptune appear to be the most common in the cosmos, no such intermediate-mass planets can be found in the solar system. The problem is, our best theories of planet formation — cast as they are from the molds of what we observe in our…
Music: Ivan Lins & Simone — ‘Começar De Novo’
How the wealthiest Americans avoid paying their fair share of income tax
ProPublica reports: In 2007, Jeff Bezos, then a multibillionaire and now the world’s richest man, did not pay a penny in federal income taxes. He achieved the feat again in 2011. In 2018, Tesla founder Elon Musk, the second-richest person in the world, also paid no federal income taxes. Michael Bloomberg managed to do the same in recent years. Billionaire investor Carl Icahn did it twice. George Soros paid no federal income tax three years in a row. ProPublica has…
Democrats should act like they believe their own rhetoric on Republican extremism
Alex Pareene writes: The average consumer of political news can be forgiven for not being entirely sure how much to panic about the state of our democracy. On the one hand, one can read in the mainstream press that “more than 100 scholars of democracy have signed a new public statement” warning that “the future of our democracy itself” is in jeopardy. The president, a kindly old moderate who touted his ability to work across the aisle, even echoed this…
Manchin is opposing big parts of Biden’s agenda under pressure from the Koch network
CNBC reports: The political advocacy group backed by billionaire Charles Koch has been pressuring Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., to oppose key parts of the Democratic agenda, including filibuster reform and voting rights legislation. That lobbying effort appears to be paying off. Manchin, in a recent op-ed, wrote that he opposed eliminating the filibuster and that he would not vote for the For the People Act, which, advocates say, would limit the influence of big donors on elections. President Joe Biden…
The evangelical politician who doesn’t recognize his faith — or his party
Emma Green writes: Bill Haslam is not a natural fit for the Donald Trump–era Republican Party. The former Tennessee governor checks certain GOP boxes: He favors low taxes and opposes abortion rights; his background is in business, including an executive role in his family’s highly successful truck-stop chain. But during his time in office, Haslam also got in trouble with his base for vetoing a bill that would have declared the Bible Tennessee’s official state book. He successfully championed Tennessee…
Why the GOP just got blown out in a NM Congressional race
Politico reports: Two weeks before the GOP had its first chance to pick up a seat in Congress since Joe Biden became president, the Republican Party of New Mexico hosted a three-day event dubbed “Operation Freedom.” State Sen. Mark Moores, who was running for the open seat, addressed a crowd of a few hundred party leaders, activists and donors in a hotel conference center. Afterwards, he left the hotel and drove nearly 300 miles back to Albuquerque, where he was…
Biden Justice Department seeks to defend Trump in defamation lawsuit over rape denial
The New York Times reports: During the presidential campaign, Joseph R. Biden Jr., then the Democratic candidate, slammed his opponent, Donald J. Trump, for a highly unusual legal move: bringing in the Justice Department to represent him in a defamation lawsuit stemming from a decades-old rape allegation. At one of their debates, Mr. Biden accused Mr. Trump of treating the Justice Department like his “own law firm” in the suit, filed against him by the writer E. Jean Carroll. “What’s…