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the lawyer to the president of the United States claimed in court that the president can’t be charged with a crime while he’s in office — even if shot someone dead on Fifth Avenue.

Nine.That's the number of GOP senators who have not yet signed on to a resolution penned by Lindsey Graham to condemn the House's impeachment inquiry.

The move isn’t surprising given Biden’s cash situation (just $9 million in the bank as of Sept. 30), and given the paid Trump TV ads already hitting the former vice president.

That said, Barack Obama certainly accepted Super PAC help during his 2012 re-election bid. So did Hillary Clinton in the 2016 general

Pete Buttigieg clarified a statement that he’d like to see more Supreme Court justices like Anthony Kennedy, if he were elected president.

The Justice Department is moving its administrative inquiry into the Russia probe to a criminal investigation

Sanders said Israel must sit down with the Palestinians and negotiate peace. And, in a direct assault on Israel’s current extremist government, he said the $3.8 billion of aid the US gives to Israel annually should be made conditional on it respecting human rights and democracy.

We believe in democracy. We will not accept authoritarianism or racism and we demand that the Israel government sit down with the Palestinian people and negotiate an agreement that works for all parties

3.8 billion is a lot of money, and we cannot give it carte blanche to the Israeli government, or for that matter to any government at all. We have a right to demand respect for human rights and democracy.

He said that Israel needs “a radical intercession in Gaza to allow for economic development, a better environment and to give people hope there.”

absolutely inhumane. It is unacceptable. It is unsustainable.”

All of the candidates spoke in favor of peace, but Sanders was the most explicit and clear in supporting Palestinian rights and holding Israel’s government accountable for its policies that have undermined the peace process.

Both South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg and Sen. Elizabeth Warren also suggested leveraging US aid to push Israel toward peace with the Palestinians, but not in explicit terms.

, Sanders is helping to redefine more accurately the tenor of the debate over Israel’s policies. Many politicians and activists who have challenged Israeli policies or criticized the actions of the Israeli government have been denounced as being “anti-Semitic.” Sanders, however, is Jewish. “I think being Jewish may be helpful in that regard. It is going to be very hard for anybody to call me, whose father’s family was wiped out by Hitler and who spent time in Israel, an anti-Semite,” Sanders said.

What J Street, Sanders and the Palestinians who attended this week’s convention are doing is significantly altering the substance of the debate that is taking place in America over Israel’s policies.

It is very possible that a new, more moderate political party led by Benny Gantz will soon take over in Israel. While many note that Gantz is not moderate enough, the fact is that, despite his rhetoric, he is moving away from Netanyahu’s extremism to a more moderate agenda.

If Sanders were to be elected president in 2020, we would be assured of a substantive change in US foreign policy toward Israel.

His approach would be more action than empty rhetoric, which was the case during the Obama administration.

Win or lose in 2020, Sanders will have contributed significantly to redefining the debate over Israel and Palestine to one that is more accurate, realistic and fair.

He thinks Democrats are making a huge mistake in the campaign so far – by telling voters who they really are. The main candidates are veering too far left, he thinks, away from the disaffected Trump voters they will have to turn.

to Wilson, Democratic “policy is the enemy”, whether it concerns Medicare for All, gun control or women’s right to choose.

“Guys like me who still work on the Trump side of the fence can always turn it into something that is a millstone around their neck. It’s not even that hard. Elizabeth Warren produces a 600-page healthcare plan and my research geeks can’t find, I don’t know, 30 things in there that I can’t demagogue the hell out of? Because I can. Or the guys that are me now can.”

Away from the coasts and the college towns, Wilson contends, America is still a conservative place. Accordingly, Running Against the Devil contains a lot of what its author calls “tough love”, telling harsh truths and demanding Democrats put party purity aside

“No matter how much they want to talk about choice and reproductive rights, when you go into Catholic communities it is still a burden on them and they don’t have this ability to say, ‘Maybe rural Michigan isn’t the same thing as San Jose, California.’”

Wilson insists Trump’s defeat in the popular vote in 2016 – by nearly 3 million votes to Hillary Clinton – didn’t matter. Nor will it matter if Trump wins in the electoral college again. Them’s the rules, they ain’t changing soon and if a state doesn’t help paint the college blue, no Democrat should visit it for anything other than dollars.

“You’ve got to run where the game is played and fight where the fight is, which is these 15 electoral college swing states, and those states are not as woke and liberal as other parts of the country.”

“This isn’t rocket science. How did we Republicans elect guys in Wisconsin and Vermont and other places in recent years? We did it because we weren’t running them as national Republican figures. We helped elect a Republican governor in Vermont, four times. And you’re thinking, ‘Wow, Vermont, super liberal, how did that happen?’ Well, our guy was out there saying the Bush administration was wrong on climate change.

Asked which Democrat is best suited for the fight, Wilson admits to being impressed by Warren’s willingness to work hard and how she champions the little guy. But he still goes for Joe Biden.

“I think it will be Biden because name ID is very powerful,” he says of the former senator and vice-president. “He is the one candidate who has shown the most ability to contrast with Trump in terms of a broader, bigger picture that isn’t just locked into what’s the hot flavor of Democratic messaging this year.

“He’s talking about that big American sense of unity and reconciliation and saying we’ve got to work with Republicans too.”

“There’s nothing in Joe Biden that scans as evil or dark or weird or out of touch,” Wilson says. “He can be a little goofy but that’s not bad, not the worst thing in the world right now

“I think neither Warren nor Sanders and certainly not Pete Buttigieg have ever had a breakthrough with African American voters sufficient to eliminate Biden’s advantage. And also, Biden’s got the secret weapon.

“If Barack Obama is free to get out there and do the campaigning that only he can do in American political life, I think that would be a meaningful lift for the Democrats.”

Wilson is a co-founder of the Lincoln Project, a Super Pac named for the party’s greatest leader and meant to persuade loyalists away from a man many consider its worst

“You sometimes need hard men and hard women to do tough things,” he says. In that sense, the name of his project is fitting. Lincoln saved the union and ended slavery with all the guile and will of the most ruthless, when necessary the most dirty politician.

I am putting my ideological priors and my preferences aside, because I think that Donald Trump is an existential threat to the Republic. I’ll do anything I can to help ensure that he is not president for another four years.”

Warren, in an illustration of her new willingness to bash Sanders, confirmed the report’s account.

“Among the topics that came up was what would happen if Democrats nominated a female candidate,” Warren said in a statement about the meeting. “I said that a woman could win; he disagreed.”

“Let’s get real here: who’s going to beat Donald Trump? Every poll that you look at today of the nation shows that Joe Biden’s the only person that consistently beats him in every state except for a couple where he’s tied,” Kerry said. “Nobody else does that.”

2. Here's your debate primer: The last debate before the Iowa caucuses is set for Tuesday night at 9 p.m. Eastern on your favorite network. (That's CNN, if you were wondering!)

1. Race for second choice in Iowa: By now, you've likely seen the new CNN-Des Moines Register poll out of Iowa; it's a statistical four-way tie between Sanders (20%), Warren (17%), Buttigieg (16%) and Biden (15%).

While Biden may characterize his warmth toward conservative policy as proof he could win enough Republican support to defeat Trump, that strategy may prove ineffective. A December Gallup poll found an 89% approval rating among Republicans for Trump. Hillary Clinton also attempted to court Republicans in her bid for the White House, but, according to a CNN exit poll, only 8% of Republicans voted for her, and she also lost among independents.

There's far too much at stake for progressives who support Sanders and Warren to allow their own personal preferences for any one candidate to jeopardize progressives' chances to win the White House. Sanders' Green New Deal and Medicare for All proposals, along with Warren's wealth tax and universal child care proposals, would make either candidate the most progressive president in history.

Here's why. Sanders and Warren are two of the three or four Democrats with the best chance of winding up as the party's presidential nominee this November. There is an active disagreement between the two over whether, at a meeting in December 2018, Sanders told Warren that he did not believe a woman could be elected president. Warren says he did. Sanders says he didn't.

That's where I come down, too. If this was former Vice President Joe Biden and former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg calling each other liars over a disputed meeting, it's hard for me to believe supporters of Sanders and Warren would be similarly disinterested in pursuing who is right and who is lying. Or if you want to be charitable about it: Why there is such a clear misunderstanding of what happened in that meeting in December 2018?

The point here is that both of these people can't be telling the truth. And we still haven't gotten to the bottom of who is lying (or misunderstanding) and why. So whether or not the candidates want to move on, we shouldn't. Because if you want to be the Democratic nominee against the most truth-challenged President in American history, then your commitment to honestly -- no matter how uncomfortable -- is of the utmost importance.

Some political reporters noticed that, on Twitter, Warren staffers and surrogates had started pitching her as the “unity candidate,” the figure who might span the breach between the party’s Sanders faction and its establishment one.

Warren had subtly deëmphasized the poverty of her upbringing—I did not hear a tale, which she often told earlier in her campaign, about how her family nearly lost its home, after her father suffered a heart attack, and her mother put on her best dress and psyched herself up for a job interview at Sears, pacing at home and repeating, “We will not lose this house.”

It might help her campaign to remind voters that she, with Amy Klobuchar, is one of just two Democratic candidates left on the debate stage who are not white men. And yet the news that Warren could plausibly lay claim to both the mantle of “unity” and to Clinton’s voters is a clear expression of a deep historical turn, in which the Party’s base is steadily becoming more female, more educated, more progressive. Sanders envisions a transformative coalition of the working class, and the two other leading candidates, Joe Biden and Buttigieg, each want to summon different versions of a bipartisan consensus.

For anyone who has paid attention to the past Democratic primary, “factionalism” carries a particular meaning: a repeat of the conflict between Sanders and Hillary Clinton, and between a left-populist alliance that relies on young working-class voters and a progressive one built around educated women.

Warren’s account begins with her humble beginnings in Oklahoma, where as a child, she says, she used to line her dolls up against a wall and conduct class; she says that her only ambition was to be a teacher.

Now Warren’s introduction is more focussed on her own path, and it is more obviously about the obstacles she has encountered as a woman. The gestures are the same—the fist in the air to emphasize a point, the aw-shucks quality that fades once the questions begin and her professorial persona resurfaces—but the story has a specificity that Clinton’s never really did.

The specificity of Warren’s campaign has won her a cadre of devoted, talented staffers and volunteers, many of them women in their twenties, that seems unmatched in the Democratic primary.

the irony of Warren’s candidacy is that, having spent her professional life describing the economic and legal burdens of the working class,

she is now, at the critical moment in her political career, struggling to win the support of voters without a college degree, who have generally favored Biden or Sanders.

shepherding the Democrats in the crowd toward a consensus. “If there is a decision made in Washington, I guarantee it has been influenced by money,” she said in Dubuque, and then circled back to emphasize the point again. “Money, money, money, money.”That used to sound like an outsider’s position, even a radical one. It doesn’t now. It’s not at all clear which Democrat will win the most in the early primaries, and stand to determine the future of the Party. But right now the most likely way to hold the Party’s center might be to combine a progressive policy vision that resembles Sanders’s with an educated electorate that borrows from Clinton.

But Democrats, including the presidential contenders, continue to argue for the Senate to accept the testimony of new witnesses, a precedent that was followed in 1999. The vote to hear witness testimony that year led to a five-day break to take depositions, another day to prepare and present evidence, and seven more days of trial on the Senate floor.

Democratic lawmakers have accused Trump of abusing his office by withholding hundreds of millions in assistance in order to pressure Ukraine to investigate his political rivals.

The Office of Management and Budget blocked the Defense Department from spending money designated by Congress on July 25,

a 1974 law that governs budget procedure within the government "does not permit OMB to withhold funds for policy reasons,"

Documents and testimony released during and after House impeachment hearings revealed some administration officials had raised concerns that the Ukraine hold might have violated the law known as the Impoundment Control Act.

If the White House wants to delay or deny funds, it must first alert Congress.

Sen. Chris Van Hollen, a Democrat from Maryland, asked the GAO to assess Trump's decisions to freeze the Ukraine aid.

Van Hollen said he thought the report vindicated Congress' decision to impeach Trump.

Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., opposes the introduction of fresh witnesses or evidence into a Senate trial, arguing the Senate's role is to assess the House's fact-finding, not to do new investigations on its own.

After release of the GAO report, the OMB said it disagrees with the findings.

"OMB uses its apportionment authority to ensure taxpayer dollars are properly spent consistent with the president's priorities and with the law," said OMB spokeswoman Rachel Semmel.

in early January that Defense Department emails showed repeated warnings from the department to OMB that the delays put its ability to distribute the aid at risk.

Back in 2016, as she campaigned for Hillary Clinton, Laura Hubka could feel her county converting.

"People were chasing me out the door, slamming the door in my face, calling Hillary names," Hubka recalled.

In 2012, Howard County voted for then-President Barack Obama by 21 percentage points. In 2016, it voted for candidate Donald Trump by 20 points.

Of Iowa's 99 counties, 31 swung from voting for the Democrat Obama in 2008 and 2012 to the Republican Trump in 2016,

oward County, with its 41-point shift, saw the biggest swin

National reporters have descended on the county, trying to understand the massive shift

Whatever the reason, local Democrats want to make sure they can win back some voters.

they're torn on how to do that.

Hubka is not supporting the former vice president. Instead, she's backing Pete Buttigieg, the former mayor of South Bend, Ind. So is Dale Ernst.

"I think he's just kind of a calm voice in the middle of the chaos, which is what we're in the middle of now,

"I just don't think it's reasonable," he said. "I just really don't. I think for people younger than 65, they see this more free than, really, the cost of it."

The 66-year-old is skeptical of "Medicare for All."

"Amy Klobuchar is kind of right in the middle," Godwin said. "I like what she has to say."

"I will do my best to try to get this county back," said Hubka, the party chair. "I don't have high hopes. ... I don't know in November that it'll flip completely. I hope that I can get at least 10 of the points back or, you know, 15."

"Coming to a place like here, where the swing was 20 [for Obama] to 20 [for Trump], I think it steers the ship," he said. "It gives a good idea of where we should go."

The last time the county went for a Republican prior to Trump was in 1984 for Ronald Reagan. Four years later, it turned blue again.

Speaking to reporters in Conway, New Hampshire, on Sunday, Sanders said he was "very proud" to have Jayapal's endorsement while touting her advocacy of "Medicare for All."

The Sanders campaign also announced on Sunday that Jayapal will join the presidential hopeful in Des Moines, Iowa, on Monday for a campaign rally.

With an impeachment trial looming in the Senate, the presence of high-profile surrogates on the campaign trail has taken on an added importance to senators like Sanders, Warren, and Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar

Meanwhile, primary rivals like former Vice President Joe Biden and former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg are free to campaign across Iowa.

Her argument can be summarized as follows:

• The pandemic has made Medicare for All more substantively necessary — and politically possible — than ever before.

• Although AOC argues that the “opportunity cost” is “too high to waste on a floor vote for a bill that wouldn’t ultimately pass,” the extraordinary circumstances of the COVID pandemic make this the best chance that progressives are going to get to win Medicare for All for the foreseeable future

• Even if the vote fails, forcing the debate “could spark a referendum on our failing health-care system at a moment when no other issue takes credible priority,” heightening the salience of the left’s signature policy demand — and the contradictions between a corrupt Democratic leadership and its base,

• Ultimately, “the moral case for action requires no strategic justification.

If one posits that the strategic wisdom of a political tactic has no bearing on the morality of pursuing it, then whether Dore’s proposal would achieve what he says it would is immaterial. But that’s a strange thing to stipulate!

The core premise of Gray’s column is that single-payer health care enjoys overwhelming popular support

But if Gray and Kulinski are indeed consequentialists, then they should recognize that “strategic justification” is the only measure of a political tactic’s moral worth. If politics is a tool for minimizing needless suffering — rather than a theater for performing one’s personal convictions — then a tactic is only as morally sound as it is likely to succeed.

whether it is in AOC’s power to effect the outcome Kulinski demands is precisely the object of contention! And that question can only be answered by a debate over strategy.

Like most ardent Sanders supporters, they draw their moral fervor from a consequentialist analysis of public policy. Time and again, Berniecrats have accused opponents of universal health care of complicity in preventable deaths, as such loss of life is a predictable consequence of failing to extend health coverage to all Americans

Lamentably, support for single-payer simply is neither as widespread nor intense as Gray suggests. Medicare for All does poll well — but it polls best when respondents are given few details about what the policy actually entails.

Even when pollsters spell out the meaning of single-payer in explicit terms, voters still have a tendency to interpret the proposal as a strong public option

This point is made plain by a KFF survey from September 2019, which found a majority of Democrats voicing approval for single-payer — but also favoring “building on the Affordable Care Act” over “replacing the Affordable Care Act with Medicare for All.”

Big money can corrupt Democratic politicians. But it can also buy off public opinion.

Democratic voters were treated to a nationally televised debate over Medicare for All about a dozen times during the 2020 primary — and they proceeded to vote for the candidate with the least progressive health-care policy in the field

Progressives may argue that the primary debates over Medicare for All were distorted by the biases of corporate media (I would argue this). But where do we think most voters are going to get their information about a House vote on Medicare for All if not from corporate-media entities?

This gets at a conspicuous tension in progressive electoral analysis. Some left-wing pundits posit that (1) big money exerts a profound influence on American politics, (2) corporate media influences how voters see the world, (3) big money and corporate media are profoundly hostile to left-wing policies, and yet (4) Democrats have no electoral incentive to spurn left-wing policies, and only do so because they are personally reactionary or corrupt.

he left’s critique of corporate media implies that it is not necessarily irrational for Democrats to believe that antagonizing powerful interest groups might cost them elections

they can also influence voter behavior through propaganda campaigns. And on Medicare for All specifically, the health-care industry has demonstrated success in turning voters against the policy.

In Colorado four years ago, progressives and health-care lobbies did battle over a ballot referendum that would have brought a single-payer health-care system to the Rocky Mountain State. The referendum went down by a margin of 79 to 21 percent.

the collapse of Vermont’s attempt to establish single-payer through legislative action – and the subsequent election of a Republican to its governorship –lends further credence to this notion.

The reality that big money can thwart progressive aims — even when Democratic officials are supportive — was made plain by some of this year’s ballot measures. In Illinois, Democratic governor J.B. Pritzker backed a referendum that would have lifted the state’s constitutional prohibition on progressive taxation. Specifically, the measure would have enabled the state to raise taxes on residents who earn over $250,000 so as to limit budget cuts in the midst of a fiscal crisis. Opponents spent over $100 million propagandizing against the policy. Supporters spent roughly as much, but the combination of well-funded propaganda and the public’s aversion to higher taxes led to 53 percent of the deep-blue state’s voters opting to make it impossible for their representatives to tax the rich at a higher rate than the poor.

In a statement to the agency she led, Chao wrote that she will resign on Monday and was "deeply troubled" by the events at the Capitol building.

Unlike much of the administration, Chao came to her post with years of government experience. She served in both Bush administrations, acting as labor secretary for all eight years of President George W. Bush's tenure.

Chao had previously navigated the spats deftly. Standing alongside Trump in August 2017 in the midst of a dispute between the President and McConnell over health care, she was asked what she thought of the rift."I stand by my man," Chao said, "both of them."

Today, in the case of COVID-19, “all states face the same essential threat, and each government’s response is a kind of laboratory experiment,” Tierney said.

“The United States had the advantage of being struck relatively late by the virus, and this gave [us] a priceless chance to copy best practices and avoid the mistakes of others,” he noted.

When China began confining millions of people to their homes in January, the U.S. government should have gotten the message that the Chinese were grappling with a grave threat to the wider world, the Yale sociologist and physician Nicholas Christakis told me in March.

We lost six weeks” in the United States to prepare—“to build ventilators, get protective equipment, organize our ICUs, get tests ready, prepare the public for what was going to happen so that our economy didn’t tank as badly. None of this was done adequately by our leaders.”

By one estimate, from the epidemiologists Britta L. Jewell and Nicholas P. Jewell, if social-distancing policies had been implemented just two weeks earlier in March, 90 percent of the cumulative coronavirus deaths in the United States during the first wave of the pandemic might have been prevented.

Rather than using diagnostic tests that the World Health Organization had distributed to other countries early in the global outbreak, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention insisted on developing its own, only to botch the rollout of those tests.

Even now, as a number of countries have swum feverishly toward safer ground, the United States has spent the past couple of months of near-nationwide lockdown merely treading water. It has yet to roll out robust testing across the country

It has also failed to develop proper contact-tracing systems, as other nations have, and to meaningfully flatten the curve outside New York.

Amid all this, Trump has exhibited more hubris than humility. The president has repeatedly claimed that the United States is leading the world in testing, which in part is an unflattering reflection of the U.S. outbreak’s huge scale and also is not true on a per-capita basis

As an example of ideas the United States could borrow from other countries, Tierney cited the fact that 750,000 people in Britain, which would be equivalent to nearly 4 million Americans, responded to the British government’s request to enlist in a “volunteer army” to help deliver food to vulnerable populations and provide other assistance.

A number of countries that have had more success against the coronavirus have demonstrated greater open-mindedness about learning from their peers. Taiwanese officials are watching Iceland’s mass-testing efforts, while the German government is explicitly modeling its response after South Korea’s “trace, test, and treat” campaign.

“Things have moved so quickly that there hasn't been much time for considered lesson-drawing,” he noted. Some countries were slow to institute strict lockdowns, despite witnessing the horrifying spread of the virus in Italy, while others “embraced approaches that broke with the broader consensus,” including “Sweden’s proposal

New Zealand’s record of learning

His colleague at the University of Otago, Michael Baker, told me that as a government adviser on the nation’s coronavirus taskforce, he was personally very influenced by a February 2020 WHO-China Joint Mission report, which suggested that the pandemic could be contained, and led him to advocate for New Zealand’s current strategy of eliminating the virus entirely from the country.

Yet Wilson added that New Zealand has lagged behind Asian countries in encouraging mass mask wearing, in rigorously quarantining incoming travelers, and in using digital technologies for contact tracing

In the United States too, even before the virus hit, attitudes toward learning from other countries were beginning to change

“The No. 1 place to live out the American Dream right now is Denmark,” Pete Buttigieg stated during one debate.

as a senator, Romney is urging the U.S. government to follow South Korea’s lead and “learn from those countries that were successful” in dealing with their outbreaks. Conservatives are championing Sweden’s laissez-faire approach as a blueprint for how to mitigate public-health damage while preserving freedom and the economy.

with the exception of the U.S. Paycheck Protection Program, “most of our economic-policy response has ignored useful lessons from abroad, explaining why our unemployment rate is skyrocketing above those in many other affected countries.”

Kelemen noted that the coronavirus crisis has led to a surge in interest among the American public and U.S. policy makers in harvesting lessons from other countries, most evident in the fact that everyone is following “the comparative charts of how countries are doing over time on infection rates or changes in year-on-year death counts.

A contest of ideas shouldn’t be used to legitimize disinformation. And I think it’s often taken advantage of. And I think at great news organizations, the mission really should be to introduce fact to disperse doubt — not to sow doubt, to obscure fact, if you will.

In 2017, President Trump’s praise for white supremacists in Charlottesville, Va., as “very fine people” spurred James Murdoch to give $1 million to the Anti-Defamation League. In an email to friends obtained by The New York Times, Mr. Murdoch rebuked Mr. Trump and wrote: “I can’t even believe I have to write this: standing up to Nazis is essential; there are no good Nazis. Or Klansmen, or terrorists.”

In January, James and his wife, Kathryn, expressed “frustration” about News Corp’s peddling of climate change denialism in the face of apocalyptic Australian wildfires that incinerated 46 million acres. Fox nighttime anchors picked up a false story line about arson from The Australian, a Murdoch-owned newspaper in Oz.

So it wasn’t possible to change News Corp from the inside?“I think there’s only so much you can do if you’re not an executive, you’re on the board, you’re quite removed from a lot of the day-to-day decisions, obviously,” he said. “And if you’re uncomfortable with those decisions, you have to take stock of whether or not you want to be associated and can you change it or not. I decided that I could be much more effective outside.”

Friends say that James has been on a collision course with his family for 15 years. His evolution has been profoundly influenced by his wife, a former communications executive. He is, as one friend puts it, “living much more in his own skin, realizing his better angels and his better instincts.”

But when your last name is Murdoch and those billions sloshing around in your bank account come from a juggernaut co-opting governments across the English-speaking world and perpetuating climate-change denial, nativism and Sean Hannity, can you ever start fresh? As a beneficiary of his family’s trust, James is still reaping profits from Rupert Murdoch’s assets. Can he be the anti-venom?

Murdoch watchers across media say James is aligned with his sister Elisabeth and his half sister, Prudence, even as he is estranged from his father and brother.

When Rupert, 89, finally leaves the stage and his elder children take over, that could make three votes in the family trust against one

Is there still time to de-Foxify Fox News — labeled a “hate-for-profit racket” by Elizabeth Warren — and other conservative News Corp outlets? Would Fox and its kin — downscale, feral creatures conjured by Rupert to help the bottom line — be the huge moneymakers they are if they went straight?

He is particularly excited about investing in start-ups created to combat fake news and the spread of disinformation, having found the proliferation of deep fakes “terrifying” because they “undermine our ability to discern what’s true and what’s not” and it “is only at the beginning as far as I can tell.”

He’s funding a research program to study digital manipulation of societies, hoping to curtail “the use of technology to promulgate totalitarianism’’ and undermine democracies.

“So everything from the use of mass surveillance, telephone networks, 5G, all that stuff, domestically in a country like China, for example,” he said.

I wonder if this is some sort of expiation, given all the disinformation that News Corp has spewed.

when I talked to Kathryn Murdoch over Zoom from their farm in Connecticut, where they live with their three teenagers, chickens and sheep, she was more direct about the issue of using money made from disinformation to combat disinformation.

“I think that what’s important about what we’re doing is that we’re in control of ourselves,” she said, adding: “I’m in control of what I do, he is in control of what he does. We should be held accountable for those things. It’s very hard to be held accountable for things that other people do or are in control of. And I think that’s what was untenable.”

Their foundation, Quadrivium, has supported voter participation, democracy reform and climate change projects. “I never thought that we would actually be at the point where we would have climate change effects and people would still be denying it,” Ms. Murdoch said.

Mr. Murdoch donated to Pete Buttigieg in the primary, and the couple has given $1.23 million to Joe Biden. So that’s who he’ll be voting for in November then? “Hell yes,” he said with a smile.

I noted to Ms. Murdoch that the effect of News Corp on the world is astounding when you think about it, from Brexit to Trump to the Supreme Court we may be heading toward.

After so much time in the executive suite, Mr. Murdoch seems genuinely excited to be in a smaller shop. He said last year, just for the hell of it, he thought of becoming an architect, going back to school.

“The outside world,” he continued, “it looks at you and says, ‘Well, these are the runners and riders. This person is up and down and this is success and this is failure.’ I think that that has to come much more from yourself. I’m incredibly grateful to be able to be just a totally free agent.”

I wondered what he made of Fox and Mr. Trump playing down the coronavirus, even after the president was hospitalized.“Look, you do worry about it and I think that we’re in the middle of a public health crisis,” Mr. Murdoch said. “Climate is also a public health crisis.” He continued: “Whatever political spin on that, if it gets in the way of delivering crucial public health information, I think is pretty bad.”

He added that Mr. Trump’s likening Covid-19 to the flu has been “his message from Day 1,” and is “craziness.” He thinks that “companies have a responsibility to their customers and their communities” and “that responsibility shouldn’t be compromised by political point scoring, that’s for sure.”

“I’m just concerned that the leadership that we have, to me, just seems characterized by callousness and a level of cruelty that I think is really dangerous and then it infects the population,” he said, referring to the Trump administration. “It’s not a coincidence that the number of hate crimes in this country are rising over the last three years for the first time in a long time.”

With Mr. Trump and Fox, who is the dog and who is the tail?“It looks to me, anyway, like it’s going to be a hard thing to understand because it probably goes back and forth,’’ he said. “I don’t think you’re going to get one pristine, consistent analysis of that phenomenon.”

Confirm or Deny

Most of your success has come from hard work, not luck.Isn’t that what they say — the harder you work, the luckier you get?

The Cabinet includes the vice president and the heads of 15 executive departments

Klain served as Biden's chief of staff in the Obama White House and was also a senior aide to the President.

Klain has been a top debate preparation adviser to Biden, Obama, Bill Clinton, Gore, John Kerry and Hillary Clinton.

O'Malley Dillon will join Biden's incoming administration as a deputy White House chief of staff. O'Malley Dillon was Biden's presidential campaign manager and has served numerous other political campaigns -- including former Rep. Beto O'Rourke's failed 2020 presidential primary campaign and both of Barack Obama's presidential campaigns.

Richmond is expected to leave Congress to join Biden's White House staff in a senior role.

Rice served in the Obama administration as UN ambassador and national security adviser.

A longtime Biden ally, Coons was one of the first members of Congress to endorse the former vice president when he declared his 2020 presidential candidacy.

Rice at one point was thought to be the clear choice to succeed Hillary Clinton as secretary of state, but in 2012 withdrew her name from consideration to avoid a bitter Senate confirmation battle.

Blinken served in the Obama administration as the deputy secretary of state, assistant to the president and principal deputy national security adviser.

During the Clinton administration, Blinken served as a member of the National Security Council staff at the White House, and held roles as the special assistant to the president, senior director for European affairs, and senior director for speechwriting and then strategic planning. He was Clinton's chief foreign policy speechwriter

Yates was fired by Trump from her role as acting attorney general.

Throughout his Senate career, Coons has been known for working across the aisle and forging strong relationships with high-profile Republicans who shared common interests.

Brainard currently serves as a member of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System

Brainard was the US representative to the G-20 Finance Deputies and G-7 Deputies and was a member of the Financial Stability Board. During the Clinton administration, Brainard served as the deputy national economic adviser and deputy assistant to the President.

Raskin was the deputy secretary of the US Department of the Treasury during the Obama administration. She was previously a governor of the Federal Reserve Board.

Outside of Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Raskin, a former deputy secretary at the department, would be the top choice for most progressives.

Rice was one of a handful of women on Biden's shortlist for a running mate.

During the mid-1990's, she served as principal deputy assistant secretary of defense for strategy and threat reduction, as well as deputy assistant secretary of defense for strategy

Mayorkas was deputy secretary of Homeland Security during the Obama administration, and served as the director of the Department of Homeland Security's United States Citizenship and Immigration Services

Monaco played a critical role in Biden's vice presidential selection committee, and served as Homeland Security and counterterrorism advisor to Obama.

Jones is the junior United States Senator from Alabama. He lost his reelection bid earlier this month to Republican Tommy Tuberville.

Jones was also involved in the prosecution of Eric Rudolph, whose 1998 attack on a Birmingham abortion clinic killed an off-duty police officer.

If chosen and confirmed, Flournoy would be the first female secretary of defense.

Yates had been appointed by Obama and was set to serve until Trump's nominee for attorney general was confirmed.

Haaland is a congresswoman from New Mexico, and is one of the first Native American women to serve in Congress. Biden has said he wants an administration that looks like the country. Haaland, the vice chair of the House Natural Resources Committee, would be the first Native American Cabinet secretary if she were to get an offer and accept it.

Yang is an entrepreneur and former 2020 Democratic presidential candidate. He rose from obscurity to become a highly-visible candidate, and his supporters are sometimes referred to as the "Yang Gang." His presidential campaign was centered around the idea of universal basic income, and providing every US citizen with $1,000 a month, or $12,000 a year.

Nelson is the international president of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA. She cemented her image as a rising star of the labor movement during a prolonged government shutdown that stretched from December 2018 to January 2019.

Sanders is reaching out to potential supporters in labor to ask for their support as he mounts a campaign for the job. But he is viewed as a long shot and so far has received mix reactions from labor leaders.

Walsh is AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka's pick for the job, a big endorsement in what could soon turn into a contentious debate between moderate Democrats and progressives, who will favor Sen. Bernie Sanders or Michigan Rep. Andy Levin

Levin is a popular progressive who is also growing his base of support with labor leaders, including at the Communications Workers of America.

But he also has credibility with climate activists for having helped create Michigan's Green Jobs Initiative.

Murthy, a doctor of internal medicine, is the co-chair of Biden's coronavirus advisory board

Bottoms is the mayor of Atlanta and is a rising star of the Democratic Party. Bottoms stepped into the national spotlight when she denounced vandalism in her city as "chaos" after demonstrations over the death of George Floyd, a Black man who was killed by police in Minneapolis. Bottoms is a former judge and city council member.

Weingarten is the president of the American Federation of Teachers, AFL-CIO and has long pushed for education reform

Inslee is the governor of Washington state, and previously served in the US House of Representatives.

Buttigieg is the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, and a former 2020 Democratic presidential candidate. Buttigieg's presidential bid was historic -- he was the first out gay man to launch a competitive campaign for president, and he broke barriers by becoming the first gay candidate to earn primary delegates for a major party's presidential nomination.