Group items tagged

Trump's appointment of a new Supreme Court justice marks the third of his tenure in office, giving Republicans a historic opportunity to deliver on the key conservative priority and campaign promise of transforming the federal courts through lifetime appointments.

Barrett, who is 48 years old, is likely to serve on the court for decades and will give conservatives a 6-3 majority on the Supreme Court, a shift in its makeup that could have dramatic implications for a range of issues that could come before it, including the future of the Affordable Care Act and any potential disputes regarding the 2020 election.

They moved to confirm Barrett over the objections of Democrats who have argued that the process has been a rushed and cynical power grab that threatens to undermine Ginsburg's legacy.

Senate

Senate Republicans, who hold a majority in the cham

Senate Republicans, who hold a majority in the chamber, pushed ahead with one of the quickest nomination proceedings in modern times following the death of the late Justice and liberal icon Ruth Bader Ginsburg last month

"By any objective standard, Judge Barrett deserves to be confirmed to the Supreme Court. The American people agree. In just a few minutes, she'll be on the Supreme Court," Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said ahead of the final confirmation vote

The confirmation battle has played out in a bitterly-divided Senate, but the outcome has not been in question for much of the fight. With few exceptions, Senate Republicans quickly lined up in support of Barrett after her nomination by President Trump, while Democrats united in opposition.

Two Republican senators crossed party lines to vote with Democrats in opposition to a key procedural vote on Sunday -- Collins and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska.Murkowski announced that she would ultimately vote to confirm Barrett in the final vote

Senate Republicans largely rallied around the nomination, however, praising Barrett as exceedingly qualified to serve on the Supreme Court

Senate Democrats, in contrast, have decried the nomination and the confirmation process. Democrats have warned that Barrett's confirmation will put health care protections and the Affordable Care Act in jeopardy. They have argued that the confirmation process has been rushed and accused Republicans of hypocrisy in moving ahead with the nomination after blocking consideration of former President Obama's Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland in 2016.

Democrats, who are in the minority, have been limited in their ability to oppose the nomination, but have protested the process in a variety of ways.

When the Senate Judiciary Committee voted to advance the nomination, Democratic senators on the panel boycotted the vote, filling their seats instead with pictures of people who rely upon the Affordable Care Act in an effort to draw attention to an upcoming case on the health care law's constitutionality and their arguments that Barrett's confirmation would put the law at risk.

During confirmation hearings, Democrats sought to elicit answers from Barrett on a number of controversial topics the Supreme Court could take up. Barrett repeatedly declined, however, to specify how she might rule on a range of topics, from the Affordable Care Act to Roe v. Wade and the high court's ruling legalizing same-sex marriage.

Barrett explained during the hearings that she shared a philosophy with the late conservative Justice Antonin Scalia, whom she clerked for, but argued she would not be an identical justice if she is confirmed.

Ms. Collins, the lone New England Republican remaining in Congress and one of her party’s most politically endangered members, has been a pivotal swing vote in filling vacancies on the Supreme Court, and all eyes are on her in the battle to come.

Republicans hold a 53-to-47 majority in the Senate, meaning they can lose only three votes

— or at least the effort to consider one so close to the presidential election —

Opposing a drive by Mr. Trump to swiftly install a successor to Justice Ginsburg could be a powerful way for her to repair her reputation with moderate voters who turned against her after her vote in 2018 to confirm Brett M. Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court.

wait the results of the November presidential election, and the appointmen

In a carefully worded statement on Saturday, Ms. Collins, who is trying to defend her reputation as a m

the first Republican to explicitly say she would oppose a confirmation vote before the election. Any such vote, she said, should await the results of the November presidential election, and the appointment should ultimately be made by the person who won

the decision on a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court should be made by the president who is elected on Nov. 3,”

She said Mr. Trump had the right to choose a nominee and that she had no objection to the Senate beginning to consider the person

She is one of two Republican senators who support abortion rights, and has said she would not vote to confirm a nominee who would strike down the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade

Sara Gideon, her Democratic opponent, has already received millions of dollars raised based on Ms. Collins’s support for Justice Kavanaugh, and after Justice Ginsburg’s death, progressive groups were gearing up to pour more money into targeting voters there.

Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska was the lone Republican to oppose the confirmation of Justice Kavanaugh in 2018. Like Ms. Collins, she is one of the few remaining Republicans on Capitol Hill who supports abortion rights and has shown a willingness to break with her party in the past.

she joined Ms. Collins in saying that she would not support a confirmation vote before the Nov. 3 election.

Ms. Murkowski noted that she had also objected to filling the vacancy left by Justice Antonin Scalia’s death early in the final year of President Barack Obama’s second term. Now, less than two months before the November election, she said, “I believe the same standard must apply.”

Ms. Murkowski is not up for re-election until 2022

Senator Mitt Romney, Republican of Utah, had not yet been elected to Congress when the fight to confirm Justice Kavanaugh became a partisan brawl in the Senate.

has shown a willingness to break with the administration and the Republican Party.

Most notably, Mr. Romney became the first senator in American history to vote to remove a president of his own party from office during an impeachment trial — and the only Republican to vote to remove Mr. Trump.

he made no mention of his position in a statement and instead focused on paying tribute to Justice Ginsburg.

Senator Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, who led the Judiciary Committee in 2016, has said that he would not conduct Supreme Court confirmation hearings in a presidential election year, particularly given the Republican blockade of Merrick B. Garland,

But Mr. Grassley no longer oversees the committee. He gave no hint of his intentions in a statement after news of Justice Ginsburg’s death, praising her “sharp legal mind, tenacity and resilience.”

Department employees have said that Judge Garland’s performance at his confirmation hearing, a largely amicable affair, made them hopeful that he would restore honor to the agency and lift up its 115,000-person work force demoralized by the Trump-era rancor.

“I’m voting to confirm Judge Garland because of his long reputation as a straight shooter and legal expert,” Mr. McConnell said o

He was chosen by President Barack Obama in 2016 to join the Supreme Court only to see his nomination held up for eight months in an audacious political maneuver by Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the majority leader at the time. The move ultimately allowed Mr. Trump to choose his own nominee to fill the seat.

His first briefings this week were expected to be with the F.B.I. director, Christopher A. Wray, to discuss the threat and with Michael R. Sherwin, the departing top prosecutor in Washington who has led the Justice Department inquiry.

“I supervised the prosecution of the perpetrators of the bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building, who sought to spark a revolution that would topple the federal government,” he said. “I will supervise the prosecution of white supremacists and others who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, a heinous attack that sought to disrupt a cornerstone of our democracy, the peaceful transfer of power to a newly elected government.”

The investigations helped cement Judge Garland’s reputation as a fair-minded centrist. After his appeals court confirmation, he did not make major headlines again until 2016, when Mr. Obama nominated him to serve on the Supreme Court, a choice that won bipartisan support, including from conservative stalwarts like the former Whitewater prosecutor Ken Starr.

Indeed, one of the big stories of Supreme Court nominations this century is how divisive they've generally been with the American public. Since 2005, nominees who either got a Senate vote or withdrew their nominations averaged only a +10-point net popularity rating in their final polls. Compare that with nominees from 1986 to 1994, who averaged a +26-point net popularity rating in their final polls before their Senate vote or withdrawal of their nomination. This strong popularity for earlier nominees helps, at least in small part, to explain why most of them flew through their confirmation hearings and why many this century have generally had a harder time.

Still, it would be surprising if Jackson didn't get at least a few Republican votes. Sens. Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Rob Portman of Ohio seem the most likely given how often they've voted with Biden this Congress. The good news for Democrats is that even if Jackson doesn't get any Republican votes, the polarization would still help her. It is unlikely that any Democrat will vote against her. With the Senate Democratic Caucus controlling 50 seats and Vice President Kamala Harris breaking any tie votes, all Jackson needs for confirmation is Democratic support.

There were just 220 mentions of inflation by comparison. Yet, that's what voters care the most about. In a CBS News/YouGov poll from earlier this month, 46% said the "economy and jobs" or "inflation" were the most important issues facing the country. No other issue came close. This could explain why there's been a minimal "rally around the flag" effect for Biden following the Russian invasion of Ukraine. While the President's approval rating seemed to rise by a point or two initially, any rise has since flattened out. Biden's average approval rating stands in the low 40s with a disapproval rating in the mid 50s.

The fact that the economy has remained important to determining the temperature of the electorate shouldn't be surprising. Even with a global pandemic, the 2020 election result tracked well with what would have been expected with a lackluster, though not awful, economy. It's a reminder that what

Helping others: A Gallup study found strong growth across the world in people helping strangers, volunteering time to organizations and donating money to charities over the course of the pandemic, with participation in such activities increasing by nearly 25%.

the psychological tendency to favor information that confirms our beliefs

If this explanation is right, then there is a relatively straightforward solution to political polarization: We need to consciously expose ourselves to evidence that challenges our beliefs to compensate for our inclination to discount it.

But what if confirmation bias isn’t the only culprit? It recently struck us that confirmation bias is often conflated with “telling people what they want to hear,” which is actually a distinct phenomenon known as desirability bias, or the tendency to credit information you want to believe.

we decided to conduct an experiment that would isolate these biases

. In contrast, those people who received undesirable evidence barely changed their belief about which candidate was most likely to win.

The results, which we report in a forthcoming paper in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, were clear and robust. Those people who received desirable evidence — polls suggesting that their preferred candidate was going to win — took note and incorporated the information into their subsequent belief

we observed a general bias toward the desirable evidence.

What about confirmation bias? To our surprise, those people who received confirming evidence — polls supporting their prior belief about which candidate was most likely to win — showed no bias in favor of this information.

They tended to incorporate this evidence into their subsequent belief to the same extent as those people who had their prior belief disconfirmed. In other words, we observed little to no bias toward the confirming evidence.

Our study suggests that political belief polarization may emerge because of peoples’ conflicting desires, not their conflicting beliefs per se

This is rather troubling, as it implies that even if we were to escape from our political echo chambers, it wouldn’t help much. Short of changing what people want to believe, we must find other ways to unify our perceptions of reality.

Garland will soon face politically charged questions at the Justice Department, including whether the Justice Department should wade into former President Donald Trump's role in the Capitol riot, and how to handle a federal probe into Biden's son, Hunter Biden.

Garland also could oversee the investigation of the FBI's Russia probe. But he said in his nomination hearing that he didn't have "any reason to think" that special counsel John Durham "should not remain in place."

"I come from a family where my grandparents fled anti-Semitism and persecution," said Garland. "The country took us in and protected us. I feel an obligation to the country to pay back."

"When confirmed, Judge Garland must not back other constitutionally-corrosive efforts to effectively repeal laws just by ignoring them," said McConnell.

Garland said at his hearing that the current threat from White supremacists is a "more dangerous period than we faced at that time." He also gave a brief, yet emotional, anecdote in response to a question about his family's history in confronting hate and discrimination. Garland fought back tears as he explained why leading the Justice Department was important to him.

McConnell said he voted to confirm Garland's nomination as attorney general "because of his long reputation as a straight-shooter and legal expert," calling his "left-of-center perspective" within "the legal mainstream."

The Senate voted to confirm attorney general nominee Merrick Garland on Wednesday, sending the appellate judge on his mission to uphold the integrity of the Justice Department after its actions over the past years threatened to undermine it.

the US Senate must move quickly to confirm Alejandro Mayorkas to serve as Secretary of Homeland Security.

This is no time for delays or political gamesmanship -- not when American lives, and the American way of life, are on the line.

As deputy secretary of the agency, he helped lead a successful effort to guard against terror attacks, enhance our nation's cybersecurity and strengthen cooperation between the federal national security apparatus and state and local agencies

Under former President Barack Obama, Mayorkas served as both the DHS deputy secretary and the head of the US Citizenship and Immigration Services, an agency within the department. And prior to his time in DHS, he was a US attorney in the Central District of California.

Congress can send a clear message to all those who seek to intimidate or inflict violence upon our nation: that they can no longer exploit our political divisions to assault the principles that unite us

it is crucial that we have a highly qualified, capable Homeland Security secretary in place on Day 1 to safeguard our nation and protect us against all manner of threats.

It's no mystery why nominees to lead our national security agencies are historically given confirmation votes no later than Inauguration Day -- as Obama's and President Donald Trump's Homeland Security nominees were confirmed on January 20 of 2009 and 2017, respectively.

America's enemies, both foreign and domestic, thrive on and are emboldened by any inkling of chaos, dysfunction or vacuums of vigilant leadership in our security capabilities. Having a qualified, competent secretary of Homeland Security at the helm right away is critical even at times when threats are relatively quiet. Having one at the helm under today's conditions may well be an existential necessity.

Given the blaring threat of further violence following last week's attack -- to say nothing of ongoing foreign terrorism threats, a pending crisis at our border and the massive cyberattack recently perpetrated by Russia against our government and private sector -- there is simply no excuse to delay a vote on the confirmation of Mayorkas.

Graham called the Democratic decision to boycott the vote "a choice they are making. I believe it does a disservice to Judge Barrett who deserves a vote, up or down."

"I will move forward," he said Wednesday evening. "She deserves a vote."

Graham rejected the Democratic assertion that at least two minority members were needed to proceed with the nomination.

"We're not giving the quorum they need to provide it. The rules require it."

"The nomination process took a dark turn in 2013 when the Democrats changed the rules of the Senate for District and Circuit court nominees requiring a simple majority vote. My Democratic colleagues chose to engage in a partisan filibuster of Justice [Neil] Gorsuch for the first time in U.S. history requiring the changing of the rules regarding Supreme Court nominations."

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has indicated he is planning a full Senate vote on the nomination on Monday.

The maneuver would ensure that Barrett could be sworn in before the Nov. 3 election and that she could participate in election questions that are already pending before the Supreme Court.

President Trump has said he wanted Barrett confirmed before the election so she could be there to rule on cases that might arise in the aftermath of the election. Barrett, for her part, refused at her confirmation hearings to say whether she would recuse herself in light of Trump's statements. But it is unlikely that she would do so. Nothing in the judicial ethics rules would appear to require such a recusal unless it presents the appearance of impropriety.

Questions of recusal are ultimately decided by each justice for himself or herself, and at the Supreme Court, recusal can sometimes result in a tie vote. Should that happen, the lower court decision in the case stands.

the progressive wing of the party is leaning on the Democratic Senate leadership to do more to call attention to what is widely viewed on the Democratic side of the aisle as an "outrageous" power play to get Barrett confirmed in record time for a nominee in modern times.

Barrett's confirmation hearings began just 16 days after her nomination. In contrast, the average time between nomination and hearings for each of the current justices on the Supreme Court was 56 days.

The result of the rushed confirmation process has been little time to explore Barrett's record, both on and off the bench. Indeed, this week The Associated Press published a long investigative piece disclosing that "Barrett served for nearly three years on the board of private Christian schools that effectively barred admission to children of same-sex parents." But the article was published too late for senators to ask questions of Barrett at her confirmation hearings.

There has been little tension about Barrett's nomination since a sufficient number of members of the Senate majority suggested they would go along generally and support her specifically, and she appears on track to be confirmed.

These

"These are lifetime appointments. They last for decades. What is done here will affect policies long after our lifetimes end," she said. "There's never been a situation quite like this."

as I have a headache because (of) shrapnel in my head."

Search »U.S. Edition+U.S.InternationalArabicEspañolSet edition preference:U.S.InternationalConfirmU.S. Edition+U.S.InternationalArabicEspañolSet edition preference:U.S.InternationalConfirmHomeU.S.Crime + JusticeEnergy + EnvironmentExtreme WeatherSpace + ScienceWorldAfricaAmericasAsiaEuropeMiddle Easthpt=aGVhZGVyXzE0Y29sX21pZGRsZWVhc3RfYXJ0aWNsZV9wb2xpdGljc19uby12YWx1ZS1zZXRfbm8tdmFsdWUtc2V0X3pvbmUtbGV2ZWxfbm8tdmFsdWUtc2V0;hpt2=aGVhZGVyXzE0Y29sX21pZGRsZWVhc3RfYXJ0aWNsZV9wb2xpdGljc19uby12YWx1ZS1zZXRfb

The words include answers to simple questions such as the would-be militant's birth date, blood type, address, marital status and countries visited.

German intelligence officials said they, too, have similar if not identical documents, though they didn't detail how they got them.

That means the people questioned could have gone into ISIS-controlled territory, have been turned away or perhaps fought for the terror group in Syria and Iraq and then perhaps left. If they aren't in the war zone, one fear is that they may bring their ISIS approach, tactics and mindset elsewhere -- perhaps proving a threat to other countries.

Koths said. "We are taking these into consideration of our law enforcement measures and security. "

We have seen the attacks perpetrated on mainland Europe over the past year,"

That is why it is so important for us to work together to counter this threat."

Form has 23 items

The Covid relief plan is meanwhile stretching the papered over unity observed by Democrats in their election-year zeal to beat Donald Trump, with a split widening over including a minimum wage hike in the huge plan.

The Republican Party is even more divided than Democrats. While some senators like Mitt Romney are working through principled objections to Biden's policies and nominees, Trump loyalists like Sens. Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley and Ron Johnson are performing for their watching leader in exile and, perhaps more critically, his base of supporters.

"These criminals came prepared for war," said former US Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund.The next big point of tension between the President and his Capitol Hill adversaries comes Wednesday when two key Senate committees are expected to vote on whether to advance Tanden's nomination.

Another under pressure Biden nominee, New Mexico Rep. Deb Haaland, who would become the first Native American Cabinet member if she makes it to the Interior Department, faced fierce attacks from Republicans during her confirmation hearing Tuesday.

The GOP, with a clear eye on midterm elections that are usually tough for first-term presidents, is driving a case that Biden's climate policies -- including a pause on new leases for oil and gas extraction on federal lands -- are a massive job killer.

In a fresh sign of tensions inside the Democratic Party, New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a standard bearer for the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, rebuked Manchin after his office said he had "remaining questions" for Haaland, noting that the West Virginian voted to confirm Trump's first Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who she called "openly racist."

Elsewhere in the Capitol on Tuesday, Republican senators worked through the intricacies of the budget procedure known as reconciliation, which Democrats plan to use to ease the Covid rescue bill past filibuster attempts.

In one possible troublemaking maneuver that would double as points on the board ahead of congressional elections in November 2022, Romney and Arkansas Republican Sen. Tom Cotton are working on a plan to raise the minimum wage to $10 an hour on condition that there are mandatory requirements on business to discourage the hiring of undocumented migrants.

Their gambit followed Manchin's proposal to hike the rate to $11 per hour over two years. Neither suggestion is likely to be acceptable to progressive Democrats who are seeking to include a $15 per hour minimum wage in the Covid rescue plan. This could all be academic -- at least for now -- since both sides are waiting from a ruling from the Senate parliamentarian on whether including minimum wage changes is allowed under reconciliation rules.

Tugs of war over economic policy and the shape of relief legislation -- and ideological fault line issues like abortion -- are necessary features of the adversarial democratic process. But some Republicans, who abetted the ex-President's assault on America's political system fraud, can't break the habit

Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley, who led the charge in the Senate to stop Biden's legitimate election win, tried to re-up Trump's misleading claims that Biden wanted to "defund the police"

"I would say that's absolutely outrageous and an utter lie and no one I think who knows any of the facts alleges any such thing," he said.

And Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, one of Trump's favorite senators, on Tuesday used the Senate hearing into the insurrection to imply on the thinnest of evidence that the rioters who desecrated the Capitol were not Trump supporters at all, in referring to an article that suggested that security forces might have overreacted to the violence.

versky died in 1996. Kahneman won the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economics for the work the two men did together, which he summarized in his 2011 best seller, Thinking, Fast and Slow. Another best seller, last year’s The Undoing Project, by Michael Lewis, tells the story of the sometimes contentious collaboration between Tversky and Kahneman

Another key figure in the field is the University of Chicago economist Richard Thaler. One of the biases he’s most linked with is the endowment effect, which leads us to place an irrationally high value on our possessions.

In an experiment conducted by Thaler, Kahneman, and Jack L. Knetsch, half the participants were given a mug and then asked how much they would sell it for. The average answer was $5.78. The rest of the group said they would spend, on average, $2.21 for the same mug. This flew in the face of classic economic theory, which says that at a given time and among a certain population, an item has a market value that does not depend on whether one owns it or not. Thaler won the 2017 Nobel Prize in Economics.

“The question that is most often asked about cognitive illusions is whether they can be overcome. The message … is not encouraging.”

Kahneman and others draw an analogy based on an understanding of the Müller-Lyer illusion, two parallel lines with arrows at each end. One line’s arrows point in; the other line’s arrows point out. Because of the direction of the arrows, the latter line appears shorter than the former, but in fact the two lines are the same length.

In this context, his pessimism relates, first, to the impossibility of effecting any changes to System 1—the quick-thinking part of our brain and the one that makes mistaken judgments tantamount to the Müller-Lyer line illusion

that’s not so easy in the real world, when we’re dealing with people and situations rather than lines. “Unfortunately, this sensible procedure is least likely to be applied when it is needed most,” Kahneman writes. “We would all like to have a warning bell that rings loudly whenever we are about to make a serious error, but no such bell is available.”

Because biases appear to be so hardwired and inalterable, most of the attention paid to countering them hasn’t dealt with the problematic thoughts, judgments, or predictions themselves

Is it really impossible, however, to shed or significantly mitigate one’s biases? Some studies have tentatively answered that question in the affirmative.

what if the person undergoing the de-biasing strategies was highly motivated and self-selected? In other words, what if it was me?

I met with Kahneman

Over an apple pastry and tea with milk, he told me, “Temperament has a lot to do with my position. You won’t find anyone more pessimistic than I am.”

Confirmation bias shows up most blatantly in our current political divide, where each side seems unable to allow that the other side is right about anything.

“I see the picture as unequal lines,” he said. “The goal is not to trust what I think I see. To understand that I shouldn’t believe my lying eyes.” That’s doable with the optical illusion, he said, but extremely difficult with real-world cognitive biases.

he most effective check against them, as Kahneman says, is from the outside: Others can perceive our errors more readily than we can.

“slow-thinking organizations,” as he puts it, can institute policies that include the monitoring of individual decisions and predictions. They can also require procedures such as checklists and “premortems,”

A premortem attempts to counter optimism bias by requiring team members to imagine that a project has gone very, very badly and write a sentence or two describing how that happened. Conducting this exercise, it turns out, helps people think ahead.

“My position is that none of these things have any effect on System 1,” Kahneman said. “You can’t improve intuition.

Perhaps, with very long-term training, lots of talk, and exposure to behavioral economics, what you can do is cue reasoning, so you can engage System 2 to follow rules. Unfortunately, the world doesn’t provide cues. And for most people, in the heat of argument the rules go out the window.

Kahneman describes an even earlier Nisbett article that showed subjects’ disinclination to believe statistical and other general evidence, basing their judgments instead on individual examples and vivid anecdotes. (This bias is known as base-rate neglect.)

over the years, Nisbett had come to emphasize in his research and thinking the possibility of training people to overcome or avoid a number of pitfalls, including base-rate neglect, fundamental attribution error, and the sunk-cost fallacy.

When Nisbett has to give an example of his approach, he usually brings up the baseball-phenom survey. This involved telephoning University of Michigan students on the pretense of conducting a poll about sports, and asking them why there are always several Major League batters with .450 batting averages early in a season, yet no player has ever finished a season with an average that high.

about half give the right answer: the law of large numbers, which holds that outlier results are much more frequent when the sample size (at bats, in this case) is small. Over the course of the season, as the number of at bats increases, regression to the mean is inevitabl

When Nisbett asks the same question of students who have completed the statistics course, about 70 percent give the right answer. He believes this result shows, pace Kahneman, that the law of large numbers can be absorbed into System 2—and maybe into System 1 as well, even when there are minimal cues.

Nisbett’s second-favorite example is that economists, who have absorbed the lessons of the sunk-cost fallacy, routinely walk out of bad movies and leave bad restaurant meals uneaten.

we’ve tested Michigan students over four years, and they show a huge increase in ability to solve problems. Graduate students in psychology also show a huge gain.”

, “I know from my own research on teaching people how to reason statistically that just a few examples in two or three domains are sufficient to improve people’s reasoning for an indefinitely large number of events.”

isbett suggested another factor: “You and Amos specialized in hard problems for which you were drawn to the wrong answer. I began to study easy problems, which you guys would never get wrong but untutored people routinely do … Then you can look at the effects of instruction on such easy problems, which turn out to be huge.”

Nisbett suggested that I take “Mindware: Critical Thinking for the Information Age,” an online Coursera course in which he goes over what he considers the most effective de-biasing skills and concepts. Then, to see how much I had learned, I would take a survey he gives to Michigan undergraduates. So I did.

he course consists of eight lessons by Nisbett—who comes across on-screen as the authoritative but approachable psych professor we all would like to have had—interspersed with some graphics and quizzes. I recommend it. He explains the availability heuristic this way: “People are surprised that suicides outnumber homicides, and drownings outnumber deaths by fire. People always think crime is increasing” even if it’s not.

When I finished the course, Nisbett sent me the survey he and colleagues administer to Michigan undergrads

It contains a few dozen problems meant to measure the subjects’ resistance to cognitive biases

I got it right. Indeed, when I emailed my completed test, Nisbett replied, “My guess is that very few if any UM seniors did as well as you. I’m sure at least some psych students, at least after 2 years in school, did as well. But note that you came fairly close to a perfect score.”

In 2006, seeking to prevent another mistake of that magnitude, the U.S. government created the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (iarpa), an agency designed to use cutting-edge research and technology to improve intelligence-gathering and analysis. In 2011, iarpa initiated a program, Sirius, to fund the development of “serious” video games that could combat or mitigate what were deemed to be the six most damaging biases: confirmation bias, fundamental attribution error, the bias blind spot (the feeling that one is less biased than the average person), the anchoring effect, the representativeness heuristic, and projection bias (the assumption that everybody else’s thinking is the same as one’s own).

For his part, Nisbett insisted that the results were meaningful. “If you’re doing better in a testing context,” he told me, “you’ll jolly well be doing better in the real world.”

The New York–based NeuroLeadership Institute offers organizations and individuals a variety of training sessions, webinars, and conferences that promise, among other things, to use brain science to teach participants to counter bias. This year’s two-day summit will be held in New York next month; for $2,845, you could learn, for example, “why are our brains so bad at thinking about the future, and how do we do it better?”

Nevertheless, I did not feel that reading Mindware and taking the Coursera course had necessarily rid me of my biases

One of the most important ingredients is what Tetlock calls “the outside view.” The inside view is a product of fundamental attribution error, base-rate neglect, and other biases that are constantly cajoling us into resting our judgments and predictions on good or vivid stories instead of on data and statistics

most promising are a handful of video games. Their genesis was in the Iraq War

Philip E. Tetlock, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, and his wife and research partner, Barbara Mellers, have for years been studying what they call “superforecasters”: people who manage to sidestep cognitive biases and predict future events with far more accuracy than the pundits

Together with collaborators who included staff from Creative Technologies, a company specializing in games and other simulations, and Leidos, a defense, intelligence, and health research company that does a lot of government work, Morewedge devised Missing. Some subjects played the game, which takes about three hours to complete, while others watched a video about cognitive bias. All were tested on bias-mitigation skills before the training, immediately afterward, and then finally after eight to 12 weeks had passed.

he said he saw the results as supporting the research and insights of Richard Nisbett. “Nisbett’s work was largely written off by the field, the assumption being that training can’t reduce bias,

“The literature on training suggests books and classes are fine entertainment but largely ineffectual. But the game has very large effects. It surprised everyone.”

even the positive results reminded me of something Daniel Kahneman had told me. “Pencil-and-paper doesn’t convince me,” he said. “A test can be given even a couple of years later. But the test cues the test-taker. It reminds him what it’s all about.”

Morewedge told me that some tentative real-world scenarios along the lines of Missing have shown “promising results,” but that it’s too soon to talk about them.

In the future, I will monitor my thoughts and reactions as best I can

confirmation bias. This is the psychological tendency to favor information that confirms our beliefs and to disfavor information that counters them

We need to consciously expose ourselves to evidence that challenges our beliefs to compensate for our inclination to discount it.

desirability bias, or the tendency to credit information you want to believe

it can be hard to tell which bias is at work.

we decided to conduct an experiment that would isolate these biases. This way, we could see whether a reluctance to revise political beliefs was a result of confirmation bias or desirability bias (or both)

Those people who received desirable evidence — polls suggesting that their preferred candidate was going to win — took note and incorporated the information into their subsequent belief

In contrast, those people who received undesirable evidence barely changed their belief about which candidate was most likely to win

we observed a general bias toward the desirable evidence.

we observed little to no bias toward the confirming evidence.

study suggests that political belief polarization may emerge because of peoples’ conflicting desires, not their conflicting beliefs per se

it implies that even if we were to escape from our political echo chambers, it wouldn’t help much.

we must find other ways to unify our perceptions of reality.

On Thursday, we hit a grim watershed. The US overtook Italy and China as the country with the highest number of confirmed Covid-19 cases. This is a dire crisis and an extraordinary failure of President Donald Trump. Americans are suffering and dying because the Trump administration failed to act quickly and decisively to prevent the virus' spread. The US has now seen about 1,195 deaths and the number is rising rapidly.

No one knows exactly how many people died from influenza in 1918; estimates range from 15 million to 100 million globally. Historians estimate that the virus killed about 675,000 people in the United States across three waves of the pandemic

confirmed cases. But in this global crisis, both the numerator and the denominator are fuzzy.

the rising rate may reflect the disease’s gradual progression, combined with discoveries of additional deaths.

The disease is far more likely to cause severe outcomes in older people, with the oldest cohorts the most vulnerable. That said, in every age group — even 85-plus — most people who contract the disease will recover.

One scholarly estimate finds that the 1918-1920 pandemic killed 218 out of every 100,000 people living in the world at that time

In Spain, the death toll already stands at 41 out of 100,000 people; in Belgium the number is 45. In New York state, it is 63, and that number rises even higher if you consider the “probable” death toll in New York City.

So is the coronavirus as deadly? “This depends on how long this continues,”

The “virulence” of the virus — its ability to cause illness — has been steadily coming into focus.

But more than a month later, the WHO number has gone even higher: On April 16, the WHO showed a global fatality rate of 6.6 percent among confirmed cases.

Preliminary research indicates that the virus is not mutating significantly as it spreads, and so there is no evidence that some countries are dealing with a more virulent strain of SARS-CoV-2.

the median age of patients in Italy is 63 or 64 years; the median age of patients in Germany is 47. The mortality is much lower [in Germany] because they avoided having the older population affected.”

“If, in fact, the case fatality rate is higher than the 1918 flu, then this one has the potential to kill even more people,

“We saw it everyday. African Americans have three times the rate of chronic kidney disease that Caucasians have, and 25 percent higher heart disease. They’ve got higher rates of diabetes, hypertension and asthma,” Duggan said. “I fully expect that when people are hit hard and they are on a ventilator to breathe and their body needs to fight the infection, that people who already have compromised hearts or kidneys or lungs are that much more in jeopardy.”

Also critical is the nature, and robustness, of the national health system. For instance, Japan, where the current case fatality rate is 1.6 percent, and Singapore are reporting extremely high rates of hospitalization for coronavirus patients, at 80 percent and higher, figures that are unheard of in the United States. But this probably helps improve treatment and also reduces disease spread by isolating patients. The result is fewer deaths.

Several of the countries with low fatality rates — Germany, South Korea, Norway — have very high rates of coronavirus testing. This gave them a better look at the disease within their borders.

San Francisco General Hospital, noted that the hospital nearly tripled the capacity of its intensive care unit by adding doctors, nurses and technicians while the city adopted social distancing measures shortly ahead of New York.

“We were ready for a surge that never happened,” Balmes said. “They’re every bit as good as we are in intensive care in New York, but the system was overwhelmed. We did physical distancing just a few days earlier than New York, but it was a few days to the good.”

in a news conference that the global case fatality rate was 3.4 percent. That was treated as a revelation about the innate deadliness of the disease, but in fact was simply the WHO’s crude mortality ratio for confirmed covid-19 cases up to that point in time.

The other major factor in mortality is chronic disease. Most people hospitalized with severe cases of covid-19 have chronic health conditions such as diabetes, lung disease and heart disease. Where there is a high percentage of noncommunicable diseases like high blood pressure, the coronavirus will also be more deadly

A new study from researchers at Stanford, not yet peer-reviewed, looked for coronavirus antibodies in a sample population in Santa Clara County, Calif., and concluded that the actual infection rate in the county by early April was 50 to 85 times greater than the rate of confirmed cases.

“The story of this virus is turning out to be more about its contagiousness and less about its case fatality rate,” said David Rubin, director of PolicyLab at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and a University of Pennsylvania professor of pediatrics. “It’s less fatal than we thought, but it’s more contagious.”

Where extensive testing has been done, estimates for the case fatality rate are often below 1 percent, The Post has found, suggesting these countries are getting closer to a rate that takes into account all infections

In Iceland, which has tested over 10 percent of the population, vastly more than other countries, the fatality rate is just 0.5 percent.

Harvard epidemiologist Marc Lipsitch has written that he and most experts suspect the fatality rate is about 1 to 2 percent for symptomatic cases. A 1 percent fatality rate is 10 times the average fatality rate for seasonal flu.

“It’s probably about an order of magnitude higher for covid-19,” said Viboud, the NIH epidemiologist. “It’s more severe in terms of mortality than the pandemics we’ve seen since 1918.”

The truth, I suspect, was simultaneously about as bad as I suspected, and paradoxically anticlimactic. Trump was surrounded by all sorts of odious characters who manipulated him into saying and doing things that ran against the national interest. One of those characters was Putin. In the end, their influence ran up against the limits that the character over whom they had gained influence was a weak, failed president.

Ultimately, whatever value Trump offered to Russia was compromised by his incompetence and limited ability to grasp firm control even of his own government’s foreign policy. It was not just the fabled “deep state” that undermined Trump. Even his own handpicked appointees constantly undermined him, especially on Russia. Whatever leverage Putin had was limited to a single individual, which meant there was nobody Trump could find to run the State Department, National Security Agency, and so on who shared his idiosyncratic Russophilia.

Mueller even testified that this arrangement gave Russia blackmail leverage over Trump. But by the time these facts had passed from the realm of the mysterious to the confirmed, they had become uninteresting.

Shvets told Unger that the KGB cultivated Trump as an American leader, and persuaded him to run his ad attacking American alliances. “The ad was assessed by the active measures directorate as one of the most successful KGB operations at that time,” he said, “It was a big thing — to have three major American newspapers publish KGB soundbites.”

To be clear, while Shvets is a credible source, his testimony isn’t dispositive. There are any number of possible motives for a former Soviet spy turned critic of Russia’s regime to manufacture an indictment of Trump

This is what intelligence experts mean when they describe Trump as a Russian “asset.” It’s not the same as being an agent. An asset is somebody who can be manipulated, as opposed to somebody who is consciously and secretly working on your behalf.

A second reason is that reporter Craig Unger got a former KGB spy to confirm on the record that Russian intelligence had been working Trump for decades. In his new book, “American Kompromat,” Unger interviewed Yuri Shvets, who told him that the KGB manipulated Trump with simple flattery. “In terms of his personality, the guy is not a complicated cookie,” he said, “his most important characteristics being low intellect coupled with hyperinflated vanity. This makes him a dream for an experienced recruiter.”

If I had to guess today, I’d put the odds higher, perhaps over 50 percent. One reason for my higher confidence is that Trump has continued to fuel suspicion by taking anomalously pro-Russian positions. He met with Putin in Helsinki, appearing strangely submissive, and spouted Putin’s propaganda on a number of topics including the ridiculous possibility of a joint Russian-American cybersecurity unit. (Russia, of course, committed the gravest cyber-hack in American history not long ago, making Trump’s idea even more self-defeating in retrospect than it was at the time.) He seemed to go out of his way to alienate American allies and blow up cooperation every time they met during his tenure.

He would either refuse to admit Russian wrongdoing — Trump refused even to concede that the regime poisoned Alexei Navalny — or repeat bizarre snippets of Russian propaganda: NATO was a bad deal for America because Montenegro might launch an attack on Russia; the Soviets had to invade Afghanistan in the 1970s to defend against terrorism. These weren’t talking points he would pick up in his normal routine of watching Fox News and calling Republican sycophants.

there was a reasonable chance — I loosely pegged it at 10 or 20 percent — that the Soviets had planted some of these thoughts, which he had never expressed before the trip, in his head.

Trump returned from Moscow fired up with political ambition. He began the first of a long series of presidential flirtations, which included a flashy trip to New Hampshire. Two months after his Moscow visit, Trump spent almost $100,000 on a series of full-page newspaper ads that published a political manifesto. “An open letter from Donald J. Trump on why America should stop paying to defend countries that can afford to defend themselves,” as Trump labeled it, launched angry populist charges against the allies that benefited from the umbrella of American military protection. “Why are these nations not paying the United States for the human lives and billions of dollars we are losing to protect their interests?”

During the Soviet era, Russian intelligence cast a wide net to gain leverage over influential figures abroad. (The practice continues to this day.) The Russians would lure or entrap not only prominent politicians and cultural leaders, but also people whom they saw as having the potential for gaining prominence in the future. In 1986, Soviet ambassador Yuri Dubinin met Trump in New York, flattered him with praise for his building exploits, and invited him to discuss a building in Moscow. Trump visited Moscow in July 1987. He stayed at the National Hotel, in the Lenin Suite, which certainly would have been bugged. There is not much else in the public record to describe his visit, except Trump’s own recollection in The Art of the Deal that Soviet officials were eager for him to build a hotel there. (It never happened.)

In 2018, I became either famous or notorious — depending on your point of view — for writing a story speculating that Russia had secret leverage over Trump

Here is what I wrote in that controversial section:

He was chosen by President Barack Obama in 2016 to join the Supreme Court only to see his nomination held up for eight months in an audacious political maneuver by Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the majority leader at the time. The move ultimately allowed Mr. Trump to choose his own nominee to fill the seat.

But Mr. McConnell, who said last year that he would support Judge Garland to serve as attorney general, was among the Republicans who voted for his confirmation and a day earlier to end debate over his nomination, paving the way for the full Senate to vote.

The Capitol riot investigation has grown closer to Roger J. Stone Jr., one of Mr. Trump’s allies, and the F.B.I. has found evidence of communications between right-wing extremists and White House associates, underscoring how closely Mr. Trump had aligned himself with such groups during his presidency.

“I supervised the prosecution of the perpetrators of the bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building, who sought to spark a revolution that would topple the federal government,” he said. “I will supervise the prosecution of white supremacists and others who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, a heinous attack that sought to disrupt a cornerstone of our democracy, the peaceful transfer of power to a newly elected government.”

But Mr. McConnell refused to consider his nomination, and Mr. Trump selected Neil M. Gorsuch to fill the vacant seat in 2017. Judge Garland stayed on at the appeals court.

Fudge, who has represented parts of Cleveland and Akron in the House since 2008, was praised by Democrats for her years of work in Congress toward bolstering federal safety net programs and fighting racial inequities in the economy.

She is the former chair of the Congressional Black Caucus and served as mayor of Warrensville Heights, Ohio, from 2000 until she was elected to Congress.

Fudge announced her resignation from the House on Wednesday afternoon after voting for Biden's $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief plan.

several Republicans fiercely opposed Fudge’s nomination over past heated criticisms of GOP lawmakers and her lack of expertise on housing policy issues.

Senators approved Fudge’s nomination to be HUD secretary on a 66-34 vote. She will be the first woman to hold the position since 1979 and the second Black woman and the third woman ever to lead the department.

More than 11 million U.S. households are facing homelessness after nearly a year of economic peril caused by the coronavirus pandemic.

The coronavirus pandemic has exacerbated the housing affordability crisis that began long before COVID-19 hit the U.S.

President BidenJoe BidenManchin cements key-vote status in 50-50 Senate The Memo: How the COVID year upended politics Post-pandemic plans for lawmakers: Chuck E. Cheese, visiting friends, hugging grandkids MORE is also seeking to dramatically expand public housing and make sorely needed maintenance upgrades to the country’s existing supply of federally supported homes, a longtime goal of Democrats and housing advocates.

Fudge will face those issues with a HUD staff depleted by years of attrition and insufficient hiring.

Fudge vowed during her confirmation process to turn HUD around at a critical moment for the U.S. with a special focus on narrowing the racial inequities in the housing market that have been deepened by COVID-19.

While 7 percent of white households reported being behind on rent or mortgage payments in December, 22 percent of Black households, 18 percent of Hispanic households and 13 percent of Asian households had missed payments,

And while roughly 75 percent of white Americans owned their homes in the fourth quarter of 2020, according to the Census Bureau, only 44 percent of Black Americans did.

"Nearly every Republican in this chamber led by the majority leader four years ago refused to even consider the Supreme Court nomination of a Democratic president on the grounds ... that we should wait until after the presidential election because the American people deserved a voice in the selection of their next justice," he said on Sunday.

President Trump is doubling down on claims that the results of the presidential election must be known on election night itself, falsely asserting "that's the way it's been and that's the way it should be."

The decision allows election officials in Pennsylvania to count absentee ballots received as late as Friday, as long as they are postmarked by Nov. 3. The president denied that he would try to declare victor

y prematurely.

"I think it's a terrible thing when people or states are allowed to tabulate ballots for a long period of time after the election is over," Trump said. "I think it's terrible when we can't know the results of an election the night of the election in a modern-day age of computers," he added.

"If people wanted to get their ballots in, they should have gotten their ballots in long before [Election Day]. They could have put their ballots in a month ago."

But that's not the way voting in America works.

For starters, no state ever reports its final results on election night.

Delaware, in fact, is the only state that will certify its results within the same week as Election Day. Most states will certify their results in the last two weeks of November, with some states even extending until the second week of December.

Americans are breaking early voting records, with more than 93 million votes already cast. Of that, 59 million mail-in ballots have been returned, with 32 million ballots still waiting to be mailed back, according to the U.S. Elections Project.

Election experts predicted that there would be a large increase in mail-in ballots this cycle because of concerns over the coronavirus pandemic.

"The counties are staffing up, have a ton of equipment, best practices in place, and are planning, for the most part, to count 24/7 until it's done."

FACT CHECK: Trump Falsely Claims That Votes Shouldn't Be Counted After Election Day

Trump released a list of 20 names

A successful vote in the Senate would increase the Supreme Court’s conservative majority to six

paying their respects to the second woman appointed to the Supreme Court.

I think the fastest justice ever confirmed was 47 days, and the average is closer to 70 days

they could afford to lose no more than three votes in order to push through a confirmation

several key Republican senators are facing uphill battles for re-election that have now been complicated by the prospect of a confirmation vote

he is less than enthusiastic about the political implications for his party of a bruising court battle on the eve of the election.

who is trailing her Democratic challenger in polls,

the next Supreme Court justice should be chosen by the winner of the November election

In those surveys he is running well behind Trump’s comfortable margins in the presidential race

a consequential vote to confirm a conservative judge could help Graham burnish his conservative bona fides with a wary base

support President @realDonaldTrump in any effort to move forward regarding the recent vacancy created by the passing of Justice Ginsburg

Graham will have to face down his own comments from 2016, when he argued that a vacancy in the Supreme Court should never be filled in an election year

“use my words against me

the same standard should apply” as it did in 2016, when Republicans thwarted the nomination of Merrick Garland

In-person voting is officially underway