Opinion | From Voodoo to MAGA to Buffalo - The New York Times - 0 views
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What has changed, however, is the behavior of Republican elites, who used to push back against conspiracy theories but now cheerfully embrace them whenever it seems politically expedient.
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Which, I’d argue, is where voodoo economics comes in — not as an idea but as a determinant of the kind of people who became Republican politicians.
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The rise of supply-side economics coincided with the rise of movement conservatism — an interlocking network of elected officials, media organizations, think tanks and lobbying firms. Because the movement’s core ideology involved reducing taxes on the rich, it was lavishly supported by billionaires and corporate interests, and this in turn meant that it offered job security to anyone who remained sufficiently loyal.
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To Keep Putin and His Oligarchs Afloat, It Takes a System - The New York Times - 0 views
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We tend to think of corruption as a failure of morality, when a greedy person decides to benefit by steering public resources toward private gain.
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But while that’s not exactly untrue, it misses the most important thing: namely, that corruption is a group activity. You need bribe-payers and bribe-takers, resource-diverters and resource-resellers, look-the-other-wayers and demand-a-share-of-the-takers.
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When that kind of corrupt network behavior becomes widespread, it creates its own parallel system of rewards — and punishments.
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Mark Esper's Duty to Speak - 0 views
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The risks of working for Trump were elaborated upon well in 2017 by my Atlantic colleague David Frum; our colleague Eliot Cohen also went back and forth on it and even changed his mind. The danger was obvious: You will end up selling your soul and you will likely fail to do much good
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The counterargument was also obvious: The interests of the United States of America require that this train wreck of an administration—staffed with the likes of Stephen Miller, Steve Bannon, and His Faux-Britannic Excellency Sebastian Gorka—should have at least some non-stupid, non-craven, non-nutball types in the executive branch.
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I argued at the time that there was no way to put child-safety bumpers on all the sharp edges of the White House, and that if Trump was going to drive the country into a ditch, the sooner we got on with it, the better. I am not sure now if I was wrong, but the best evidence against my position is that Esper may well have prevented a war with North Korea by averting Trump’s idiotic evacuation order for Americans in South Korea. If that’s the case, I’d have to say it was worth it to have someone in the right place.
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How Politics Poisoned the Evangelical Church - The Atlantic - 0 views
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in the spring of 2021, Brown told me his alarm had only grown. “The crisis for the Church is a crisis of discernment,” he said over lunch. “Discernment”—one’s basic ability to separate truth from untruth—“is a core biblical discipline. And many Christians are not practicing it.”
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Paul’s admonishment of the early Church contains no real ambiguity. Followers of Jesus are to orient themselves toward his enduring promise of salvation, and away from the fleeting troubles of humanity.
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To many evangelicals today, the enemy is no longer secular America, but their fellow Christians, people who hold the same faith but different beliefs.
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The One Parenting Decision That Really Matters - The Atlantic - 0 views
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Hillary Clinton, then the first lady of the United States, published It Takes a Village: And Other Lessons Children Teach Us. Clinton’s book—and the proverb the title referenced—argue that children’s lives are shaped by many people in their neighborhood: firefighters and police officers, garbage collectors, teachers and coaches.
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Dole said, “I am here to tell you: It does not take a village to raise a child. It takes a family to raise a child.” The crowd roared.
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So who was right, Bob Dole or Hillary Clinton?
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Opinion | Overturning Roe Is a Radical, Not Conservative, Choice - The New York Times - 0 views
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What is conservative? It is, above all, the conviction that abrupt and profound changes to established laws and common expectations are utterly destructive to respect for the law and the institutions established to uphold it — especially when those changes are instigated from above, with neither democratic consent nor broad consensus.
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As conservatives, you are philosophically bound to give considerable weight to judicial precedents, particularly when they have been ratified and refined — as Roe was by the 1992 Planned Parenthood v. Casey decision — over a long period.
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It’s also a matter of originalism. “To avoid an arbitrary discretion in the courts,” Alexander Hamilton wrote in Federalist No. 78, “it is indispensable that they” — the judges — “should be bound down by strict rules and precedents, which serve to define and point out their duty in every particular case that comes before them.”
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War in Ukraine Has Russia's Putin, Xi Jinping Changing the World Order - Bloomberg - 0 views
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at the beginning of 2022, many of us shared the assumptions of Keynes’s Londoner. We ordered exotic goods in the confident expectation that Amazon would deliver them to our doors the next day. We invested in emerging-market stocks, purchased Bitcoin, and chatted with people on the other side of the world via Zoom. Many of us dismissed Covid-19 as a temporary suspension of our global lifestyle. Vladimir Putin’s “projects and politics of militarism” seemed like diversions in the loonier regions of the Twittersphere.
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just as World War I mattered for reasons beyond the slaughter of millions of human beings, this conflict could mark a lasting change in the way the world economy works — and the way we all live our lives, however far we are from the carnage in Eastern Europe.
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That doesn’t mean that globalization is an unalloyed good. By its nature, economic liberalism exaggerates the downsides of capitalism as well as the upsides: Inequality increases, companies sever their local roots, losers fall further behind, and — without global regulations — environmental problems multiply
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