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Kay Bradley

Opinion | The Capitol Attack Shocks the World - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Around the world, the shock of Wednesday’s assault on Capitol Hill brought into sharp focus a question that has been smoldering for four years among America’s allies and adversaries. “And again the doubt,” wrote Emma Riverola in El Periódico de Catalunya, a Barcelona, Spain, daily, in painfully graphic terms. “Is this just a final burst of pus? Or has the infection spread, now threatening to cause a sepsis of the entire system?”
Kay Bradley

Opinion | Impeach and Convict Trump. Right Now. - The New York Times - 0 views

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    "Above all there is the president, not complicit but wholly, undeniably and unforgivably responsible. For five years, Republicans let him degrade political culture by normalizing his behavior. For five years, they let him wage war on democratic norms and institutions. For five years, they treated his nonstop mendacity as a quirk of character, not a disqualification for office. For five years, they treated his rallies as carnivals of democracy, not as training grounds for mob rule. For five years, they thought this was costless. On Wednesday - forgive the cliché, but it's apt here - their chickens came home to roost. Every decent society depends for its survival on its ability to be shocked - and stay shocked - by genuinely shocking behavior. Donald Trump's entire presidency has been an assault on that idea."
Kay Bradley

Opinion | Trump and His Party Made the Storming of the Capitol Possible - The New York ... - 0 views

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    "For years, there has been a mantra that Republicans have recited to comfort themselves about President Trump - both about the things he says and the support they offer him. Trump, they'd say, should be taken seriously, not literally. The coinage comes from a 2016 article in The Atlantic by Salena Zito, in which she complained that the press took Trump "literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not literally." For Republican elites, this was a helpful two-step. "
Kay Bradley

Opinion | Running Out the Clock on Trump Is Cowardly and Dangerous - The New York Times - 0 views

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    "This particular mob successfully breached the Capitol in an effort, however inchoate, to install Donald Trump as president for a second time, against the will of the majority of voters and their electors. The mob failed to change the outcome of the election, but it showed the world what was possible. If the mob and its enablers - the president and his allies - walk away unpunished, then the mob will return." Jamelle Bouie Comparison to white redemption in New Orleans in the 1870s
Kay Bradley

[Article] The Paranoid Style in American Politics, By Richard Hofstadter | Harper's Mag... - 0 views

  • By Richard Hofstadter
  • merican politics has often been an arena for angry minds. In recent years we have seen angry minds at work mainly among extreme right-wingers, who have now demonstrated in the Goldwater movement how much political leverage can be got out of the animosities and passions of a small minority. But behind this I believe there is a style of mind that is far from new and that is not necessarily right-wing. I call it the paranoid style simply because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind.
  • It is the use of paranoid modes of expression by more or less normal people that makes the phenomenon significant
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  • Of course this term is pejorative, and it is meant to be; the paranoid style has a greater affinity for bad causes than good. But nothing really prevents a sound program or demand from being advocated in the paranoid style.
  • But the modern right wing, as Daniel Bell has put it, feels dispossessed: America has been largely taken away from them and their kind, though they are determined to try to repossess it and to prevent the final destructive act of subversion
  • The old American virtues have already been eaten away by cosmopolitans and intellectuals; the old competitive capitalism has been gradually undermined by socialistic and communistic schemers; the old national security and independence have been destroyed by treasonous plots, having as their most powerful agents not merely outsiders and foreigners as of old but major statesmen who are at the very centers of American power. Their predecessors had discovered conspiracies; the modern radical right finds conspiracy to be betrayal from on high.
  • we may now substitute eminent public figures like Presidents Roosevelt, Truman, and Eisenhower, secretaries of State like Marshall, Acheson, and Dulles, Justices of the Supreme Court like Frankfurter and Warren, and the whole battery of lesser but still famous and vivid alleged conspirators headed by Alger Hiss.
  • Any historian of warfare knows it is in good part a comedy of errors and a museum of incompetence; but if for every error and every act of incompetence one can substitute an act of treason, many points of fascinating interpretation are open to the paranoid imagination.
  • First, there has been the now-familiar sustained conspiracy, running over more than a generation, and reaching its climax in Roosevelt’s New Deal, to undermine free capitalism, to bring the economy under the direction of the federal government, and to pave the way for socialism or communism.
  • The second contention is that top government officialdom has been so infiltrated by Communists that American policy, at least since the days leading up to Pearl Harbor, has been dominated by men who were shrewdly and consistently selling out American national interests.
  • Finally, the country is infused with a network of Communist agents, just as in the old days it was infiltrated by Jesuit agents, so that the whole apparatus of education, religion, the press, and the mass media is engaged in a common effort to paralyze the resistance of loyal Americans.
  • He has offered a full scale interpretation of our recent history in which Communists figure at every turn:
  • They started a run on American banks in 1933 that forced their closure;
  • they contrived the recognition of the Soviet Union by the United States in the same year, just in time to save the Soviets from economic collapse;
  • they have stirred up the fuss over segregation in the South;
  • hey have taken over the Supreme Court and made it “one of the most important agencies of Communism.”
Kay Bradley

Opinion | Choose a Gift That Changes Lives - The New York Times - 1 views

  • Educate a girl. My grand prize winner is Camfed (originally called the Campaign for Female Education), which helps girls in African countries get an education.
  • Send a young person to college. Another prize winner is OneGoal, which mentors low-income students in the United States, helping them graduate from high school and succeed in college. OneGoal ensures that Black lives matter: 96 percent of participants are students of color, and it provides a bridge for them to complete high school and get a solid start in college.
  • Restore a person’s sight. My final prize winner is the Himalayan Cataract Project, also known as Cure Blindness, which fights blindness in Asia and Africa. This, too, is a bargain: The surgery can cost as little as $25 per person, or $50 for both eyes.The Himalayan Cataract Project was founded by Dr. Sanduk Ruit, a Nepali ophthalmologist who helped develop a cataract microsurgery technique (the “Nepal method”), and Dr. Geoff Tabin of Stanford University Medical School
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    "Educate a girl. Send a young person to college. Restore a person's sight. By Nicholas Kristof Opinion Columnist"
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