Mob Justice at the Supreme Court - The Atlantic - 0 views
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Friendship? This, not the bureaucratic payment-for-service model that Bonasera expects, is the basis for how Corleone’s world functions. The Godfather agrees to deal with Bonasera’s enemies, but in return for an unspecified future obligation. “Some day, and that day may never come,” he tells Bonasera, “I’ll call upon you to do a service for me.” This is understood to be more ominous and weighty than any monetary debt could be. But as the powerful know, the right to call in a future favor is priceless.
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Thomas himself has echoed Crow’s just-friends line, maintaining that nothing is nefarious about his relationship with his benefactor. This is despite Thomas failing to mention any of this expensive largesse in his official financial disclosures over the years.
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s much as Americans like to complain about bureaucracies, they operate by a set of published rules, and compliance with those rules is supposed to be transparent to the public. Disclosure promotes public confidence. The consent of the governed is obtained through trust that the system is fair and subject to meaningful oversight.
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America Needs a New Way to Measure Poverty - The Atlantic - 0 views
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Income is one vital indicator of well-being, but it is not the only one: Things like health outcomes and social mobility matter too.
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we should shift our focus from poverty to disadvantage. Disadvantage is a more useful term than poverty because we aren’t just talking about income—we’re trying to capture the complexity of a person’s life chances being hindered by multiple circumstances
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Disadvantage is more accurate because it implies an injustice. People are being held back—unfairly.
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Opinion | In Nagorno-Karabakh, We Just Saw What the World Is About to Become - The New ... - 0 views
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despite appearances, the conflict is not a Samuel Huntington-style clash of civilizations. Instead, in its emboldening of traditional regional powers like Turkey, scrambling for geopolitical spoils after the retreat of superpowers, it’s a harbinger of the coming world disorder.
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In the chaotic aftermath of Soviet collapse, the Armenians undertook to defend Nagorno-Karabakh by force. Instead of poetic intellectuals, the wartime generation of Armenian leaders became militia commanders. They proved earthier and, soon, brazenly corrupt. Defending the country became their sole means of legitimacy, ruling out the concessions that peace would require. By 1994 the Armenians, mobilizing around the traumatic memories of genocide, succeeded in expelling scores of Azeris from the enclave. Last month, Azerbaijan got more than even.
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In that project, it had a powerful backer: Turkey. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a master of vertiginous visions, has already tried Islamic liberalism, joining Europe, leading the Arab revolts, challenging Israel and negotiating peace in Ukraine. He now has another dream: opening a geopolitical corridor from Europe through Central Asia, all the way to China. This is the “Zangezur corridor,” a 25-mile-long strip of land to be carved through Armenia as part of a peace deal imposed at gunpoint.
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Both main candidates for the South Korean presidency are reviled | The Economist - 0 views
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LL OF SOUTH KOREA’S past presidents have been tainted by corruption investigations.
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Politicians usually manage to get elected before becoming mired in scandals.
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Both Lee Jae-myung of the ruling Minjoo Party and Yoon Seok-youl of the conservative opposition People Power Party (PPP) have been accused of serious wrongdoing since the campaign began. The pair deny any misdeeds. Yet each camp has tried to find advantage in the other’s adversity. With just six weeks to go, the campaign has been heavy on mudslinging and light on serious debate.
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Opinion | This Is What Happened When the Authorities Put Trump Under a Microscope - The... - 0 views
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The two highest-profile congressional investigations of Trump that followed — the 2019 report by the House Intelligence Committee on Trump’s pressuring of Ukraine as well as the recently released report by the select committee on the Jan. 6 attack — read like deliberate contrasts to the document produced by Robert Mueller and his team.
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Their presentation is dramatic, not dense; their conclusions are blunt, not oblique; their arguments are political as much as legal. And yet, the Ukraine and Jan. 6 reports seem to follow the cues, explicit or implied, that the Mueller report left behind.
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The Mueller report also notes in its final pages that “only a successor administration would be able to prosecute a former president,” which is what the Jan. 6 special committee, with its multiple criminal referrals, has urged the Biden administration’s Justice Department to do.
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What the Church Needs Now - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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Francis’s reign will be a success if it begins to restore the moral credibility of the church’s hierarchy and clergy, and it will be a failure if it does not.
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In that culture — our culture — priestly sex abuse and corruption in the Vatican aren’t just seen as evidence that all men are sinners. They’re seen as evidence that the church has no authority to judge what is and isn’t sin, that the renunciation Catholicism preaches mostly warps and rarely fulfills, and that the world’s approach to sex (and money, and ambition) is the only sane approach there is.
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Religion without renunciation has obvious appeal. But its cultural consequences are not all self-evidently positive. Absent ideals of chastity, people are less likely to form families. Absent ideals of solidarity, more people live and age and die alone. The social landscape that we take for granted is one that many earlier generations would have regarded as dystopian: sex and reproduction have both been ruthlessly commodified, adult freedoms are enjoyed at the expense of children’s interests, fewer children grow up with both a mother and a father, and fewer and fewer children are even born at all.
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F.B.I. Reviewing New Emails in Hillary Clinton Case - The New York Times - 0 views
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WASHINGTON — The F.B.I. said Friday that it had uncovered new emails related to the closed investigation into whether Hillary Clinton or her aides had mishandled classified information, potentially reigniting an issue that has weighed on the presidential campaign and offering a lifeline to Donald J. Trump less than two weeks before the election
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Mr. Trump seized on the F.B.I. action on Friday at a rally in New Hampshire. To cheers of “lock her up” from his supporters, Mr. Trump said: “Hillary Clinton’s corruption is on a scale we have never seen before
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After deriding the F.B.I. for weeks as inept and corrupt, Mr. Trump went on to praise the law enforcement agenc
Russian Sports Agent and U.S. Marathon Officials Under Federal Investigation - The New ... - 0 views
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Russian Sports Agent and U.S. Marathon Officials Under Federal Investigation
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Officials are scrutinizing the agent, Andrey Baranov, for bribery and corruption, according to several people familiar with the case who requested anonymity because the investigation was continuing.
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The investigators are looking into whether Mr. Baranov conspired with American marathon organizers — including New York City Marathon officials — to allow athletes using banned substances to compete in their events.
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Trump is headed toward an ethics train wreck - The Washington Post - 0 views
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Republicans who opposed Trump predicted that he would intellectually, morally and financially corrupt his party and others around him. Nothing we have seen so far indicates that this prediction was off-base.
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Ironically, for someone who ran on changing the way Washington does business, Trump has distinguished himself as the sole example of a president unprepared to comply with bipartisan ethical norms and the text of the Constitution
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The question for Republicans is now whether they want to collaborate in an egregious violation of the Constitution and in an arrangement that will inevitably call into question virtually every regulatory action, policy decision and personnel pick the administration makes.
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The coming Trump kleptocracy, perfectly captured in a single sentence - The Washington ... - 0 views
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“In evaluating the policies that a president is pushing, it’s important for the public to understand what his motivations are — whether his motivations are self-interest or the public interest. Until we know what the effect will be on his own bottom line — or his family’s — we can’t really determine that.”
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Congressional Republicans could be taking specific steps to try to compel Trump to show more transparency about the full scope and range of his interests — if they wanted to. If Trump does fail to do anything more than transfer his businesses to his family — or, worse, does so while retaining an interest himself — the likely abdication of Congressional Republicans in trying to compel more transparency should be seen as a big part of this story.
Donald the Unready - The New York Times - 0 views
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It was obvious to anyone paying attention that the incoming administration would be blatantly corrupt. But would it at least be efficient in its corruption?
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Mr. Trump hasn’t pivoted, matured, whatever term you prefer. He’s still the insecure, short-attention-span egomaniac he always was. Worse, he is surrounding himself with people who share many of his flaws — perhaps because they’re the sort of people with whom he is comfortable.
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the typical Trump nominee, in everything from economics to diplomacy to national security, is ethically challenged, ignorant about the area of policy he or she is supposed to manage and deeply incurious.
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Why Donald Tump Is Giving John Dean Nightmares - The Atlantic - 0 views
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Sometime early last fall, John Dean says he began having nightmares about a Trump presidency. He would wake in the middle of the night, agitated and alarmed, struggling to calm his nerves
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Few people are more intimately acquainted than Dean with the consequences of an American presidency gone awry. As White House counsel under President Richard Nixon from 1970 to 1973, he was a key figure in the Watergate saga—participating in, and then helping to expose, the most iconic political scandal in modern U.S. history.
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“The American presidency has never been at the whims of an authoritarian personality like Donald Trump,” Dean, who is now 78, told me. “He is going to test our democracy as it has never been tested.”
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Second minister in new Brazil government quits - BBC News - 0 views
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Fabiano Silveira was in charge of the ministry tasked with fighting corruption but left after a recording was made public, which seems to show him trying to derail a corruption investigation at the state oil company.
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She is accused of massaging budget figures ahead of her re-election in 2014, and is due to be tried in the senate in the coming months.
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She has argued that impeachment proceedings against her are designed to stop the investigation into Petrobras.
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Thailand's thoughtcrime arrests are getting dangerously bizarre - 0 views
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Thailand is now entering its third year under military dictatorship, a reign established when generals seized power from an elected government on May 22, 2014.
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The army has vowed to use its sweeping powers to heal a nation torn by class resentment.
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When the army seized power two years ago, it justified its takeover by promising a wave of grand reforms. Thailand, the generals said, would become a nation purged of corruption and of the recurring, sometimes bloody street protests that have convulsed the political order for nearly a decade
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Analysis: Fight for Fallujah Highlights Abadi's Political Battle - NBC News - 0 views
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The week started with word Iraqi forces were set to storm ISIS-held Fallujah.
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The stalled assault on the historic jihadi stronghold signals an early warning that the country's security forces may be rushing headlong into a politically motivated battle for which they remain under-prepared.
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" forces needed to ensure the safety of the estimated 40,000 civilians trapped in the city
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President Obama's Interview With Jeffrey Goldberg on Syria and Foreign Policy - The Atl... - 0 views
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The president believes that Churchillian rhetoric and, more to the point, Churchillian habits of thought, helped bring his predecessor, George W. Bush, to ruinous war in Iraq.
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Obama entered the White House bent on getting out of Iraq and Afghanistan; he was not seeking new dragons to slay. And he was particularly mindful of promising victory in conflicts he believed to be unwinnable. “If you were to say, for instance, that we’re going to rid Afghanistan of the Taliban and build a prosperous democracy instead, the president is aware that someone, seven years later, is going to hold you to that promise,” Ben Rhodes, Obama’s deputy national-security adviser, and his foreign-policy amanuensis, told me not long ago.
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Power is a partisan of the doctrine known as “responsibility to protect,” which holds that sovereignty should not be considered inviolate when a country is slaughtering its own citizens. She lobbied him to endorse this doctrine in the speech he delivered when he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009, but he declined. Obama generally does not believe a president should place American soldiers at great risk in order to prevent humanitarian disasters, unless those disasters pose a direct security threat to the United States.
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What's the matter with Dem? Thomas Frank talks Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and everythin... - 0 views
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The Democrats are a class party; it’s just that the class in question is not the one we think it is. It’s not working people, you know, middle class. It’s the professional class. It’s people with advanced degrees. They use that phrase themselves, all the time: the professional class.
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What is the professional class?The advanced degrees is an important part of it. Having a college education is obviously essential to it. These are careers based on educational achievement. There’s the sort of core professions going back to the 19th century like doctors, lawyers, architects, engineers, but nowadays there’s many, many, many more and it’s a part of the population that’s expanded. It’s a much larger group of people now than it was 50 or 60 years ago thanks to the post-industrial economy. You know math Ph.Ds that would write calculations on Wall Street for derivative securities or like biochemists who work in pharmaceutical companies. There’s hundreds of these occupations now, thousands of them. It’s a much larger part of the population now than it used to be. But it still tends to be very prosperous people
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there’s basically two hierarchies in America. One is the hierarchy of money and big business and that’s really where the Republicans are at: the one percent, the Koch brothers, that sort of thing.
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Donald Trump's Media Attacks Should Be Viewed as Brilliant | Time.com - 0 views
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the central idea of journalism — the conviction, as my old boss Peter Kann once said, “that facts are facts; that they are ascertainable through honest, open-minded and diligent reporting; that truth is attainable by laying fact upon fact, much like the construction of a cathedral; and that truth is not merely in the eye of the beholder.”
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the executive branch of government is engaged in a systematic effort to create a climate of opinion against the news business.
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the question of what Mr. Trump might yet do by political methods against the media matters a great deal less than what he is attempting to do by ideological and philosophical methods.
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How Should One Resist the Trump Administration? - The New York Times - 0 views
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How should one resist the Trump administration? Well, that depends on what kind of threat Donald Trump represents.
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It could be that the primary Trump threat is authoritarianism. It is hard to imagine America turning into full fascism, but it is possible to see it sliding into the sort of “repressive kleptocracy” that David Frum describes in the current Atlantic — like the regimes that now run Hungary, the Philippines, Venezuela and Poland.
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In such a regime, democratic rights are slowly eroded. Government critics are harassed. Federal contracts go to politically connected autocrats. Congress, the media and the judiciary bend their knee to the vengeful strongman.
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