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B Mannke

Where Free Speech Collides With Abortion Rights - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ides-with-abortion-rights.html

shared by B Mannke on 13 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • But she has to watch her step. If she crosses a painted yellow semicircle outside the clinic’s entrance, she commits a crime under a 2007 Massachusetts law.
  • The Supreme Court will hear arguments on Wednesday in her challenge to the law.
  • The Supreme Court’s 2000 decision upheld a complicated law that established 100-foot buffer zones outside all health care facilities, not just abortion clinics. Inside those larger zones, the law banned approaching others within eight feet for protest, education or counseling without their consent.
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  • “This law is access balanced with speech balanced with public safety,” Ms. Coakley said. “It has worked extremely well.”
  • “The government does not have the ability to decide,” he said, “that its public sidewalks are open for speakers on one side but not speakers on the other side.”
  • The buffer zone is small, she said. (It is the length of two parking spaces and takes just seconds to traverse.) “The only thing that’s before the court,” she said, “is the last seven seconds of a patient’s or a staff member’s walk to the door.”
  • “When you make people stand behind a line and make them shout,” he said, “that can diminish them in the eyes of the audience.”
  • “The protections of the First Amendment do not evaporate the closer one comes to an abortion clinic,” he wrote in an email. “Access must be protected; so must speech.”
  • “a law which bars a private citizen from passing a message, in a peaceful manner and on a profound moral issue, to a fellow citizen on a public sidewalk.”
Javier E

Obama's Leadership in War on Al Qaeda - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ership-in-war-on-al-qaeda.html

foreign policy assassination presidency leadership

shared by Javier E on 09 Aug 13 - No Cached
  • They describe a paradoxical leader who shunned the legislative deal-making required to close the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba, but approves lethal action without hand-wringing. While he was adamant about narrowing the fight and improving relations with the Muslim world, he has followed the metastasizing enemy into new and dangerous lands.
  • When he applies his lawyering skills to counterterrorism, it is usually to enable, not constrain, his ferocious campaign against Al Qaeda — even when it comes to killing an American cleric in Yemen, a decision that Mr. Obama told colleagues was “an easy one.”
  • A few sharp-eyed observers inside and outside the government understood what the public did not. Without showing his hand, Mr. Obama had preserved three major policies — rendition, military commissions and indefinite detention — that have been targets of human rights groups since the 2001 terrorist attacks.
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  • Though President George W. Bush and Senator John McCain, the 2008 Republican candidate, had supported closing the Guantánamo prison, Republicans in Congress had reversed course and discovered they could use the issue to portray Mr. Obama as soft on terrorism. Walking out of the Archives, the president turned to his national security adviser at the time, Gen. James L. Jones, and admitted that he had never devised a plan to persuade Congress to shut down the prison. “We’re never going to make that mistake again,” Mr. Obama told the retired Marine general.
  • When the administration floated a plan to transfer from Guantánamo to Northern Virginia two Uighurs, members of a largely Muslim ethnic minority from China who are considered no threat to the United States, Virginia Republicans led by Representative Frank R. Wolf denounced the idea. The administration backed down. That show of weakness doomed the effort to close Guantánamo, the same administration official said. “Lyndon Johnson would have steamrolled the guy,” he said. “That’s not what happened. It’s like a boxing match where a cut opens over a guy’s eye.”
  • Mr. Obama has several reasons for becoming so immersed in lethal counterterrorism operations. A student of writings on war by Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, he believes that he should take moral responsibility for such actions. And he knows that bad strikes can tarnish America’s image and derail diplomacy.
  • “The president accepts as a fact that a certain amount of screw-ups are going to happen, and to him, that calls for a more judicious process.”
  • But the control he exercises also appears to reflect Mr. Obama’s striking self-confidence: he believes, according to several people who have worked closely with him, that his own judgment should be brought to bear on strikes.
  • “He’s a president who is quite comfortable with the use of force on behalf of the United States.”
  • Mr. Obama has done exactly what he had promised, coming quickly to rely on the judgment of Mr. Brennan. Mr. Brennan, a son of Irish immigrants, is a grizzled 25-year veteran of the C.I.A. whose work as a top agency official during the brutal interrogations of the Bush administration made him a target of fierce criticism from the left. He had been forced, under fire, to withdraw his name from consideration to lead the C.I.A. under Mr. Obama, becoming counterterrorism chief instead.
  • “If John Brennan is the last guy in the room with the president, I’m comfortable, because Brennan is a person of genuine moral rectitude,” Mr. Koh said. “It’s as though you had a priest with extremely strong moral values who was suddenly charged with leading a war.
  • he wants to make sure that we go through a rigorous checklist: The infeasibility of capture, the certainty of the intelligence base, the imminence of the threat, all of these things.”
  • Today, the Defense Department can target suspects in Yemen whose names they do not know. Officials say the criteria are tighter than those for signature strikes, requiring evidence of a threat to the United States, and they have even given them a new name — TADS, for Terrorist Attack Disruption Strikes. But the details are a closely guarded secret — part of a pattern for a president who came into office promising transparency
  • “Once it’s your pop stand, you look at things a little differently,” said Mr. Rizzo, the C.I.A.’s former general counsel. Mr. Hayden, the former C.I.A. director and now an adviser to Mr. Obama’s Republican challenger, Mr. Romney, commended the president’s aggressive counterterrorism record, which he said had a “Nixon to China” quality. But, he said, “secrecy has its costs” and Mr. Obama should open the strike strategy up to public scrutiny. “This program rests on the personal legitimacy of the president, and that’s not sustainable,”
  • His focus on strikes has made it impossible to forge, for now, the new relationship with the Muslim world that he had envisioned. Both Pakistan and Yemen are arguably less stable and more hostile to the United States than when Mr. Obama became president.
  • Justly or not, drones have become a provocative symbol of American power, running roughshod over national sovereignty and killing innocents. With China and Russia watching, the United States has set an international precedent for sending drones over borders to kill enemies. Mr. Blair, the former director of national intelligence, said the strike campaign was dangerously seductive. “It is the politically advantageous thing to do — low cost, no U.S. casualties, gives the appearance of toughness,” he said. “It plays well domestically, and it is unpopular only in other countries. Any damage it does to the national interest only shows up over the long term.”
B Mannke

Effort to Help Filipino Women Falters, U.N. Says - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ino-women-falters-un-says.html

shared by B Mannke on 11 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • “We’re on a big learning curve,” said Justine Greening, Britain’s international development secretary. “What we’re trying to do is make sure that going forward we put the real focus on women and girls and keeping them safe in a way that hasn’t happened in the past enough.”
  • The United Nations Population Fund has asked its donor nations and agencies to contribute $30 million to give Filipino women hundreds of thousands of kits with hygiene supplies, hire staff at 80 temporary maternal wards and counsel victims of rape. So far, it has commitments for only about $3 million.
  • “That requires specialized, specific gender-based violence programming.” It is not realistic, she said, “to think that you can add a bullet point to the shelter guy’s job description.”
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  • In Tacloban, the hardest-hit major city, the city administrator, Tecson Lim, said last week that the police had been unable to confirm rumors of rapes and sexual assaults in the days and weeks following the typhoon
Javier E

They Told You So: Economists Were Right to Doubt the Euro - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...through-greek-debt-crisis.html

europe economics policy austerity Euro monetary

shared by Javier E on 22 Jul 15 - No Cached
  • the problems facing Europe today are not sui generis. They are merely the latest installment of a story that has been unfolding for many decades.
  • In 1997 he wrote: “Europe’s common market exemplifies a situation that is unfavorable to a common currency. It is composed of separate nations, whose residents speak different languages, have different customs and have far greater loyalty and attachment to their own country than to the common market or to the idea of ‘Europe.’ ”
  • Mr. Friedman concluded that the adoption of the euro “would exacerbate political tensions by converting divergent shocks that could have been readily accommodated by exchange rate changes into divisive political issues.”
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  • Why can’t Europeans enjoy the conveniences of a common currency?Two reasons. First, unlike Europe, the United States has a fiscal union in which prosperous regions of the country subsidize less prosperous ones. Second, the United States has fewer barriers to labor mobility than Europe. In the United States, when an economic downturn affects one region, residents can pack up and find jobs elsewhere. In Europe, differences in language and culture make that response less likely.
  • As a result, Mr. Friedman and Mr. Feldstein contended that the nations of Europe needed a policy tool to deal with national recessions. That tool was a national monetary policy coupled with flexible exchange rates. Rather than heed their counsel, however, Europe adopted a common currency for much of the Continent and threw national monetary policy into the trash bin of history.
  • The motive was more political than economic. Europeans believed that their continent, once united with a common market and currency, would provide a better counterweight to American hegemony in world affairs. They also hoped that a united Europe in the 21st century would damp down the nationalist sentiments that led to two world wars in the 20th.
  • Flash-forward to today. Greece finds itself overwhelmed by its accumulated debts. To be sure, it bears primary responsibility. The Greek government borrowed too much, and for years it hid its fiscal problems from its creditors. Once the truth came to light, a large dose of austerity was the only course left. The result was an economic downturn with a quarter of the Greek labor force now unemployed. Continue reading the main story 136 Comments Making matters worse, however, was the common currency. In an earlier era, Greece could have devalued the drachma, making its exports more competitive on world markets. Easy monetary policy would have offset some of the pain from tight fiscal policy. Mr. Friedman and Mr. Feldstein were right: The euro has turned into an economic liability that has exacerbated political tensions. For this, the European elites who pushed for the currency union bear some responsibility
Javier E

The Right Way to Remember the Confederacy - WSJ - 1 views

www.wsj.com/...ber-the-confederacy-1436568855

civil war confederacy history historiography

shared by Javier E on 23 Jul 15 - No Cached
  • Symbols matter. They say at a glimpse what words cannot, encapsulating beliefs and aspirations, prejudices and fears. Having no intrinsic value, they take meaning from the way we use them, changing over time along with our actions. The most obvious example is the ancient “gammadion,” which in early Eastern cultures meant “god,” “good luck,” “eternity” and other benign conjurations. We know it today as the swastika, and a quarter-century of usage by the Nazis forever poisoned it in Western culture.
  • Southern “heritage” groups who oppose removing the battle flag are reluctant to acknowledge that this same dynamic has tainted their cherished emblem. But it has.
  • Whatever the flag meant from 1865 to 1940, the flag’s misuse by a white minority of outspokenly bigoted and often violent people has indelibly shifted that meaning. It is now remembered around the world with images of defiant governors standing in schoolhouse doors, with the snapping dogs of Birmingham, with police barricades to keep black youths out of classrooms, with beatings and lynchings in the night, with churches set ablaze, with fear, intimidation, hatred and the constant reminder that the descendants of slaves were not welcome in their own country.
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  • Defenders of the battle flag often further assert that Southern secession and the resultant Civil War had little or nothing to do with slavery, arguing that only a tiny fraction of people in the seceding states—usually cited as 3% to 6%—actually owned slaves. Thus, they say, the flag’s opponents are wrong to condemn it is a symbol of slavery and oppression.
  • But somebody owned the 3.5 million slaves in the Confederate states in 1861. In fact, census records reveal that 31% of all Confederate households held one or more slaves. The same records show that on farms large enough to avail themselves of slave labor, as many as 70% of planters owned their workers. Such ownership defined wealth and social status, regional culture and economic survival. The prospect of abolishing slavery threatened to upend the slave states’ societies and economies
  • My fellow white Southerners today need feel no shame in confronting the motivations of our ancestors. The Confederates were men and women of their era; we can only judge them legitimately in that context. Otherwise, we could reject virtually all of human history on one currently unacceptable ground or another. As with symbols, standards, norms and mores change over the ages. We could be shocked indeed were we to live long enough to see how Americans 150 years from now might judge us by the measures of their time.
  • Moreover, defending the battle flag with appeals to pride in ancestry and heritage evades the issue, deliberately and unsubtly. Black and white Americans today do not reject this emblem primarily because of what happened in the 1860s. They object because of what the flag has come to symbolize in the U.S. and around the world in our own lifetimes.
  • When we remember that common tax revenues support every expense connected with flying that flag or with displaying Confederate emblems on federal, state or municipal property, we confront the cruel irony of African-American taxpayers being forced to subsidize constant reminders of past and present injustices. Whatever private individuals and groups choose to do on their persons and their private property—and as Americans, they must be allowed their freedom of expression—the battle flag should disappear from display on public property
  • Lee understood symbols. After the war, he opposed efforts to place monuments on the Confederacy’s battlefields. In 1869, he counseled that Southerners ought to “obliterate the marks of civil strife and to commit to oblivion the feelings it engendered.”
  • All of which demands that we ask: Can we ever separate the memory of the Confederate experience from the memory of slavery? Is there any positive legacy to be drawn from the Confederacy? Can we admire Confederate leaders, even the all-but-deified Lee, without tacitly endorsing their cause? Ultimately, can we make the Confederacy worth remembering for the descendants of the slaves and those following generations of freedmen whom the whole nation betrayed by ignoring their new rights and liberties for a century?
  • Such an exercise can come only by directly and honestly addressing the Confederacy and the war it fought, and owning up to the ways they are remembered—both of which are vital to understanding America’s course since 1860. To that end, the Confederacy’s monuments and symbols can be vital learning tools if placed in context. They must be preserved, not expunged. They must be understood, not whitewashed.
  • The shibboleth that “state rights” caused secession is a suit of clothes desperately lacking an emperor. Only slavery (and its surrounding economic and political issues) had the power to propel white Southerners to disunion and, ultimately, war. Ironically, by taking a course that led to a war that they lost, the Confederates themselves launched the juggernaut that led to emancipation. To understand how freedom and justice came, why it was delayed for a century after the Civil War and why today so much mistrust and misunderstanding persists between black and white Americans, the vital starting point remains the Confederacy.
  • In the end, Americans cannot afford to forget the Confederacy. It is a good thing that the Confederacy failed—not least because a permanently divided America would have had neither the strength nor the worldliness to confront the next century’s totalitarian menaces. But the Confederate experience also teaches lessons about Americans themselves—about how they have reacted in crisis, about matters beyond just bravery and sacrifice that constitute the bedrock of our national being.
  • The Confederates were seen at the time as traitors by the North, and they are seen as racists down to the present day, but in the main, they sincerely believed that they were holding true to the guiding principles of democracy.
  • To paraphrase Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, America has ever been a laboratory for that democracy. The Confederacy is its most notable failed experiment. The debate over the relation of the states to the federal government had been present since independence. The idea that secession was an alternative if conflicts over sovereignty couldn’t be resolved arose often enough that it was likely to be tried eventually, and so the Confederates tried. They failed. But good scientists don’t erase their laboratory failures; they learn from them.
Javier E

Universities Seeking Out Students of Means - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...21admissions.html

university admissions income wealth foreign

shared by Javier E on 22 Sep 11 - No Cached
  • More than half of the admissions officers at public research universities, and more than a third at four-year colleges said that they had been working harder in the past year to recruit students who need no financial aid and can pay full price, according to the survey of 462 admissions directors and enrollment managers conducted in August
  • we’re seeing a fundamental change in the admissions process,
  • “Where many of the older admissions professionals came in through the institution and saw it as an ethically centered counseling role, there’s now a different dynamic that places a lot more emphasis on marketing.”
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  • the full-pay students they were admitting, on average, had lower grades and test scores than other admitted applicants.
  • More than a quarter of the admissions directors said they had felt pressure from senior-level administrators to admit certain applicants, and almost a quarter got pressure from trustees or development officers.
  • Mr. Thacker said his own research had found students becoming more cynical about higher education. “Students say, ‘They’re cheating us, so we can cheat them,’ ” he said. “The cheat they see is that colleges are out for themselves, not for them as students. Our research, with 2,500 students, found that of all the sources of information students get about higher education, they thought the least trustworthy sources are the colleges
  • Admissions directors at many public universities said in the survey that recruiting more out-of-state and international students, who pay higher tuition, was their top strategy.
Javier E

John Yoo: If the Torture Report Is True, CIA Officers Are at Legal Risk - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...383790

torture report cia policy legal

shared by Javier E on 17 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • defenders cite guidance that the spy agency got from the Bush Administration. Former CIA Director Michael Hayden phrased it this way: "It needs be said that on multiple occasions all of the techniques were determined lawful by the Department of Justice and judged appropriate for the circumstances."
  • John Yoo, a primary author of the torture memos, took a surprising position. Although the former Office of Legal Counsel lawyer isn't sure that the Senate torture report is accurate, he says that if all of the interrogation tactics it describes were really deployed by CIA officers, some of them broke the law and are vulnerable to prosecution.
  • , if these things happened as they are described in the report, as you describe them, those were not authorized by the Justice Department. They were not supposed to be done and those people who did those are at risk legally because they were acting outside their orders.  
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  • we have a rather extraordinary development. Even the attorney who famously said that it might be legal for the president to order an innocent child's testicles to be crushed thinks that some of what the CIA did was illegal. He's just a step away from acknowledging that the law compels a prosecution.
jlessner

A License to Say Anything? - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...a-license-to-say-anything.html

license free speech politics US culture

shared by jlessner on 10 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • SPECIALTY license plates — which bear the logo of a college or a sports team, or a slogan like “Save Our Seas” or “Stop Child Abuse” — bring in lots of money for state governments, as well as the schools, nonprofit groups, professional organizations and other entities that sponsor them. But these vehicular tags have also become a new frontier in debates over freedom of speech.
  • It wants Texas to issue a specialty plate showing the Confederate battle flag, which a state panel rejected. The group argues that if Texas allows plates that express some opinions, it also must allow the battle flag, even if the symbol offends many people. Anything less, the group says, amounts to discrimination against its viewpoint, in violation of the First Amendment.
  • In 2011, the State Legislature approved a specialty plate with the slogan “Choose Life.” Those who seek this specialized plate pay $25, $10 of which goes to the state’s highway fund and $15 of which goes to a pregnancy counseling organization. But when the Legislature refused to issue an abortion-rights plate, the American Civil Liberties Union sued.
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  • So, oddly, liberal supporters of abortion rights are allied, on this issue, with the conservative descendants of Confederate veterans. Both argue that license plates are private, not state, messages and are therefore protected.
  • We don’t agree. We think that Texas was right to reject the Confederate plates, but that North Carolina should have issued the abortion rights plates.How can this be? Are we merely siding with liberals in both cases? No.
  • Under constitutional doctrine, when private individuals express themselves, the government cannot discriminate based on their opinions. But when government is speaking (as in messages on public monuments, for example) it can and in fact must pick and choose.
  • Texas rightly sought to avoid the perception that the state was speaking in a way that is contrary to constitutional values like equal protection under the law. It wanted to avoid even the risk of seeming complicit in official nostalgia for the institution of slavery.
  • Why is the North Carolina case different? Unlike in the Texas case, there is no strong government interest in denying pro-choice messages. The right to terminate a pregnancy is currently enshrined in law; the government does not have an important interest in preventing citizens from advertising their existing rights.
Hannah Caspar-Johnson

Xi's Selective Punishment - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-xis-selective-punishment.html

china

shared by Hannah Caspar-Johnson on 17 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • A Chinese government official I know was put under
  • shuanggui, the secretive system of internal Communist Party investigation in which victims are detained, questioned without counsel and sometimes tortured
  • the most probable reason for his travails with the authorities was that his political patron also got in trouble.
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  • A huge number of top officials have been either arrested or placed under investigation.
  • Whenever a top official falls, people aren’t concerned about what he has done, but with those he might bring down with him.
  • In the past two years, President Xi Jinping’s anticorruption drive has burnished his reputation with the Chinese media
  • the anticorruption push is more of a Stalinist purge than a genuine attempt to clean up the government
  • Most telling of all, the purge has mainly targeted specific party factions, while those groups that support and pledge loyalty to Mr. Xi appear untouched.
  • Mr. Xi’s most important supporters are the so-called second generation reds — descendants of senior Communist Party founders. (Mr. Xi himself is one of them.)
  • This privileged tribe enjoys almost unimaginable power
  • High officials in China exercise unchecked power (until they don’t)
  • Recently the question was raised in a post on the Internet: Why have no “big tigers” been found in Fujian and Zhejiang? The message was almost immediately deleted.
  • This professor seemed to think that Mr. Xi might use his authority to guide China toward democracy. But this notion is wishful thinking. For a dictator, power is not a means to an end, power is the end.
  • Besides, anticorruption campaigns don’t guarantee real justice.
  • When the government media runs reports about cases that are still under investigation and gloats about how severely corrupt officials are being punished, it seems improbable that the accused will get a proper defense
  • He is just another dictator
  • They may well have committed crimes, but they have rights too, even if they have denied them to others.
  • Hannah Caspar-Johnson on 17 Jan 15
     
    An opinion article that equates Chinese President Xi's recent attack on corruption in the government (directly almost completely towards politicians not from his party) to a dictatorial action such as that of Stalin.  
Javier E

U.N.C. Investigation Reveals 'Shadow Curriculum' to Help Athletes - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...rriculum-to-help-athletes.html

sports university corruption

shared by Javier E on 22 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • for nearly two decades two employees in the African and Afro-American Studies department ran a “shadow curriculum” of hundreds of fake classes that never met but for which students, many of them Tar Heels athletes, routinely received A’s and B’s.
  • Nearly half the students in the classes were athletes, the report found, often deliberately steered there by academic counselors to bolster their worrisomely low grade-point averages and to allow them to continue playing on North Carolina’s teams. The existence of the classes — though not necessarily how blatantly nonexistent they were — was common knowledge among the academic counselors, and in some cases among coaches of the university’s sports teams
  • Until now, the university has been at pains to emphasize that the scandal was a purely academic one; on Wednesday, for the first time, it acknowledged that it was also an athletic one, with athletes being steered specifically into and benefiting disproportionately from the fraudulent classes.
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  • Though the report found no evidence that high-level university officials knew about the fake classes, it faulted the university for missing numerous warning signs about what was going on and said it had “failed to conduct any meaningful oversight” over the increasingly out-of-control African studies department.
  • Ms. Crowder required that students turn in only a single paper, but the papers were often largely plagiarized or padded out with “fluff” like page after page of quotations, the report said. She generally gave the papers A’s or B’s after a cursory glance. The classes were widely known as “paper classes” because of the one requirement for completion.
  • In the meeting, two members of the football counseling staff explained to the assembled coaches that the classes “had played a large role in keeping underprepared and/or unmotivated players eligible to play.” To emphasize this point, they presented a PowerPoint demonstration in which one of the slides asked and then answered the question, “What was part of the solution in the past?”“We put them in classes that met degree requirements in which … they didn’t go to class … they didn’t have to take notes, have to stay awake … they didn’t have to meet with professors … they didn’t have to pay attention or necessarily engage with the material,” the slide said. “THESE NO LONGER EXIST!”
  • Indeed, the report said, “the fall 2009 semester — the first in over a decade without Ms. Crowder and her paper classes — resulted in the lowest football team G.P.A. in 10 years, 2.121.” Forty-eight players, it went on, earned semester G.P.A.'s of less than 2.0.
Javier E

An Ancient Civics Lesson - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...an-ancient-civics-lesson.html

class conflict inequality poor rich politics model

shared by Javier E on 20 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • This range of ancient options suggests that it is pointless to imagine a politics in which no class is dominant or one in which the interests of different classes don’t sometimes conflict. History and philosophy alike counsel that the most practical course is to moderate class conflict, not by pretending it away, but through the self-assertion of the weaker classes and institutionalized recognition of their interests.
  • ANCIENT Greek and Roman politics rested on a conundrum. Lest they undermine social peace, the poor could not routinely threaten the lives or property of the rich. But unless the laws were fair enough to the poor, why should the plebs respect them?
  • Greeks and Romans addressed this challenge — one that we continue to face — with three distinct models. Athenian democracy empowered the poor, while employing the rich to serve; Roman republicanism empowered the rich, while building in special protections for the poor; and the political theory of Aristotle imagined a new politics of what he called the “middling” class.
Javier E

How Much Do Black Lives Matter to the Presidential Campaign? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...the-presidential-campaign.html

crime race Democratic party gop culture demographics

shared by Javier E on 11 Nov 15 - No Cached
  • the public has become more adverse to the use of force by government. The most obvious example, he wrote in response to my email inquiry, is war
  • Pinker cited 13 other examples in support of his position that people have become less tolerant of violence, including “concern over police violence. During the 1960s race riots, police would kill dozens of young black men in a single night, but the public barely noticed”; “Capital punishment is on the way out”; “Domestic violence (e.g., wife-beating) used to be a joke (as in Jackie Gleason’s “One of these days, Alice – Pow! Right in the kisser”), now it is an abomination”; “Corporal punishment (strapping and paddling) are on their way out of American schools”; “Bullying in the playground, once thought to be a normal or even desirable feature of boyhood, has become a national issue”; and “American football may soon be revolutionized by concern about concussions.”
  • Jonathan Haidt, a professor of social psychology at N.Y.U., noted in an email that for liberals, “compassion for those who are suffering is the most crucial virtue.” Conservatives, in contrast, “believe more in ‘just deserts’ and making criminals pay.”
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  • A study of responses from white male liberals and white male conservatives found that some of the biggest differences were in response to certain statements. Liberal men responded favorably to: “I believe offenders should be provided with counseling in aid of their rehabilitation” and “I often have tender, concerned feelings for people less fortunate than me.” Conservative men agreed with the statements: “I believe ‘an eye for an eye’ is the correct philosophy behind punishing offenders” and “It feels wrong when a person commits a crime and goes unpunished.
  • Historically, the crime issue has been a winner for Republicans and a loser for Democrats. Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush all profited from portraying their Democratic adversaries as soft on crime and, at an international level, not sufficiently resolute in fighting terrorism. (Before that, accusations of being “soft on communism” were a winning gambit for Republicans.)
  • If, however, crime rates shoot up and arrest rates drop in response to less vigorous law enforcement, as advocates of the “Ferguson effect” theory suggest, Democrats risk a repetition of events in the mid and late 1960s.
  • The critical factor that will test the viability of the Democratic Party’s liberalized stance on law enforcement and incarceration will be the trends in crime and arrests over the next 12 months leading up to the Election Day.
  • If the crime rate for 2015 and 2016 remains as low as during 2014, it will minimize blowback against Clinton’s stands in favor of minimizing incarceration, and, for that matter, against the Obama administration’s decision to release more than 6000 federal drug nonviolent offenders.
  • Allen Matusow, a professor of history at Rice, is the author of “The Unraveling of America: A History of Liberalism in the 1960s,” which chronicled the damage suffered by the political left at a time of riots and rising crime rates. He wrote in an email that he worriesabout the ability of the right to make a few videos and turn some portion of the amorphous middle in the direction of the police. I have acquired great respect for the ability of bad men to manipulate the public.
  • This points to one of the paradoxes confronting liberalism: the legislative reform agenda of the left, whether it’s criminal law or reducing unemployment, stands the best chance of passage when the need is small: in good times of high prosperity, lots of jobs, rising pay and declining crime rates. Voters are most generous when they are least threatened and least generous when most threatened.
johnsonma23

Neo-Nazis gain parliamentary seats in Slovakia - 0 views

www.usatoday.com/...81400716

Romney trump US politics

shared by johnsonma23 on 06 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • Neo-Nazis gain parliamentary seats in Slovakia
  • The leftist ruling party has won the parliamentary election in Slovakia, after campaigning on an anti-migrant ticket, but will need coalition partners to form a majority government, according to results announced on Sunday.
  • In a surprising development, a neo-Nazi party gained parliamentary seats for the first time.
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  • The prime minister favors a strong state role in the economy, has been critical of Western sanctions against Russia and is known for strong anti-Muslim rhetoric.
  • The party says NATO is a terrorist organization and keeps attacking the European Union and Europe's common currency, the euro, which Slovakia uses.
  • The ultra-nationalist Slovak National Party, Fico's potential partner, returned to Parliament after a four-year-absence with 8.6 percent while the traditional party in the predominantly Roman Catholic country of 5.4 million, the Christian Democrats, didn't get enough votes to be represented.
  • neo-Nazi People's Party — Our Slovakia — got 8 percent, or 14 seats.
  • The pro-business Freedom and Solidarity became the second strongest party with 12.1 percent, or 21 seats, ahead of another center-right party, the Ordinary People with 11.0 percent.
  • Fico said it is his duty as the winner to create a meaningful government. He said he will open a first round of informal consultations with other parties Sunday.
  • Mitt Romney jumps on #NeverTrump: Our view
  • Donald Trump's strong showing on Super Tuesday put prominent Republicans in a tight spot. They have three distinct choices: Jump on the Trump bandwagon. Stay silent, and try to save their own skins if they end up on the November ballot beneath Trump. Or denounce Trump as unfit for the GOP nomination or the presidency.
  • Only a few prominent Republicans have had the courage to take that third path, and on Thursday they were joined by Mitt Romney, the GOP's candidate in 2012
  •  Calling Trump "a phony" and "a fraud," Romney said the billionaire businessman is unsuited by temperament, character and judgment to occupy the Oval Office and represent America on the world stage.
  • Shortly before Romney spoke, dozens of Republican national security experts, including former Homeland Security secretary Michael Chertoff, added their voices to the emerging anti-Trump drive by the GOP establishmen
  • , bullying and bigotry is as familiar as it is appalling, and practically every day brings a new outrage. Early in the campaign, he denigrated Mexican immigrants and Arizona Sen. John McCain, one of the nation's iconic war heroes and the party's standard-bearer in 2008.
  • y, he talked about loosening libel laws to make it easier to sue news organizations, and on Sunday, two days before several primaries in the Deep South, he waffled over denouncing David Duke, a former Ku Klux Klan leader who had endorsed Trump.
  • Taking on a bully is much more unpleasant business, as Trump's rivals have discovered. After Romney's speech, Trump fired back with his usual fusillade of schoolyard insults, calling Romney a stiff, a choke artist, a lightweight, and a disaster as a candidate who ran a horrible campaign and begged for his endorsement in 2012.
  • But Americans can hope Romney's speech has the same effect as the confrontation that Army counsel Joseph Welch had in 1954 with Sen. Joseph McCarthy, another demagogue who took America down a dangerous and ugly road before a demand for decency stopped him.
redavistinnell

Sikh Soldier Allowed to Keep Beard in Rare Army Exception - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...rd-in-rare-army-exception.html

sikh soldier allowed keep army exception

shared by redavistinnell on 14 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • Sikh Soldier Allowed to Keep Beard in Rare Army Exception
  • On his first day at the United States Military Academy at West Point, Simratpal Singh sat in a barber chair where new cadets get their hair buzzed short, forced to choose between showing his faith and living it.
  • “Your self-image, what you believe in, is cut away,” he said in an interview. For a long time after, he would shave without looking in the mirror.That was almost 10 years ago. The cadet graduated, led a platoon of combat engineers who cleared roadside bombs in Afghanistan and was awarded the Bronze Star.
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • “It is wonderful. I had been living a double life, wearing a turban only at home,” he said. “My two worlds have finally come back together.”
  • It is the first time in decades that the military has granted a religious accommodation for a beard to an active-duty combat soldier — a move that observers say could open the door for Muslims and other troops seeking to display their faith. But it is only temporary, lasting for a month while the Army decides whether to give permanent status to Captain Singh’s exception.
  • “This is a precedent-setting case,” said Eric Baxter, senior counsel at the Becket Fund, a nonprofit public interest law firm that specializes in religious liberty. “A beard is a beard is a beard. If you let one religious individual grow it, you will need to do it for all religions.”
  • The United States military has become increasingly inclusive, allowing gay men and lesbians to serve openly, and women to serve in combat roles. But it has held a stiff line on uniforms and grooming standards. Though over the centuries these standards have included powdered wigs and Civil War mutton chops, in recent decades the military has insisted on men being clean-shaven with hair shorn high and tight.
  • The general added that any break from uniformity could erode esprit de corps and “damage the esteem and credibility” of the entire officer corps.
  • This summer, a United States District Court judge rejected the safety argument, noting that more than 100,000 troops have been allowed to grow beards for medical reasons such as acne and sensitive skin. The judge ruled the Army’s denial was illegal. But the decision applied only to students enrolling in R.O.T.C., leaving the larger question of beards for active-duty troops untouched.
  • Bearded Sikhs fought in the United States Army in World War II and Vietnam. Today, Sikhs in full religious garb serve in militaries around the world.
  • “It was a way to identify the Sikhs, who became a sort of military order that stood up against oppression,” said Kamaljeet Singh Kalsi, a doctor who is a major in the Army Reserve.
  • The Army has used a procedural Catch-22 to sidestep the question of
  • whether regulations protecting religious freedom allow for beards. For years, it denied requests from incoming recruits, saying accommodations could be granted only after recruits had formally joined. Recruits could not formally join without conforming to grooming standards. In short, to get permission to not shave, you had to shave.
  • “A true Sikh is supposed to stand out, so he can defend those who cannot defend themselves,” he said. “I see that very much in line with the Army values.”
  • He has made his own camouflage turbans to wear to his first day of work at Fort Belvoir, Va., on Monday.“I hope this shows others that they can both serve their faith and serve their country,” he said.
katyshannon

E.P.A. Broke Law With Social Media Push for Water Rule, Auditor Finds - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-water-rule-auditor-finds.html

water social media push law rule lobbying auditor new york times epa clean obama politics US

shared by katyshannon on 15 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • WASHINGTON — The Environmental Protection Agency engaged in “covert propaganda” and violated federal law when it blitzed social media to urge the public to back an Obama administration rule intended to better protect the nation’s streams and surface waters, congressional auditors have concluded. From Our Advertisers .story-link { position: relative; display: block; text-decoration: none; padding: 6px 0; min-height: 65px; min-width: 300px; } .story-link:hover { background-color: #eeeeec; } .story-kicker, .story-heading, .summary { margin: 0; padding: 0; } .thumb { position: absolute; left: 0; top: 6px; } .thumb-hover, .story-link:hover .thumb-main { display: none } .thumb-main, .story-link:hover .thumb-hover { display: block } .story-body { padding-left: 75px; font-family: 'Source Sans Pro', sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 16px; font-weight: 400; color: #000; } .story-body .story-kicker { font-family: 'nyt-franklin', arial, helvetica, sans-serif; text-transform: uppercase; font-size: 11px; line-height: 11px; font-weight: 400; color: #5caaf3; } .story-heading { font-size: 13px; line-height: 16px; font-weight: 700; padding: 5px 0 0; } Bill &amp; Melinda Gates Foundation Changing Charity Younger donors are finding new ways to give. <noscript class=&quot;MOAT-nytdfp348531439194?moatClientLevel1=31074278&amp;amp;moatClientLevel2=343740158&amp;amp;moatClientLevel3=58584518&amp;amp;moatClientLevel4=94015704638&amp;amp;moatClientSlicer1=28390358&amp;amp;moatClientSlicer2=30706478&amp;amp;zMoatPR=n
  • The ruling by the Government Accountability Office, which opened its investigation after a report on the agency’s practices in The New York Times, drew a bright line for federal agencies experimenting with social media about the perils of going too far to push a cause. Federal laws prohibit agencies from engaging in lobbying and propaganda.
  • An E.P.A. official on Tuesday disputed the finding. “We use social media tools just like all organizations to stay connected and inform people across the country about our activities,” Liz Purchia, an agency spokeswoman, said in a statement. “At no point did the E.P.A. encourage the public to contact Congress or any state legislature.”
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • But the legal opinion emerged just as Republican leaders moved to block the so-called Waters of the United States clean-water rule through an amendment to the enormous spending bill expected to pass in Congress this week. While the G.A.O.’s findings are unlikely to lead to civil or criminal penalties, they do offer Republicans a cudgel for this week’s showdown.
  • The E.P.A. rolled out a social media campaign on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and even on more innovative tools such as Thunderclap, to counter opposition to its water rule, which effectively restricts how land near certain surface waters can be used. The agency said the rule would prevent pollution in drinking water sources. Farmers, business groups and Republicans have called the rule a flagrant case of government overreach.
  • The publicity campaign was part of a broader effort by the Obama administration to counter critics of its policies through social media tools, communicating directly with Americans and bypassing traditional news organizations.
  • At the White House, top aides to President Obama have formed the Office of Digital Strategy, which promotes his agenda on Twitter, Facebook, Medium and other social sites. Shailagh Murray, a senior adviser to the president, is charged in part with expanding Mr. Obama’s presence in that online world.
  • White House officials declined to say if they think Mr. Reynolds or other agency officials did anything wrong.
  • Federal agencies are allowed to promote their own policies, but are not allowed to engage in propaganda, defined as covert activity intended to influence the American public. They also are not allowed to use federal resources to conduct so-called grass-roots lobbying — urging the American public to contact Congress to take a certain kind of action on pending legislation.
  • As it promoted the Waters of the United States rule, also known as the Clean Water Rule, the E.P.A. violated both of those prohibitions, a 26-page legal opinion signed by Susan A. Poling, the general counsel to the G.A.O., concluded in an investigation requested by the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works.
Javier E

Review: Charlie Savage's 'Power Wars' Dissects Obama's Evolution on National Security -... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...tion-on-national-security.html

Obama counterterrorism civil rights civil liberties policy history

shared by Javier E on 30 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • In the 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama repeatedly criticized President George W. Bush for his “war on terror,” including the use of torture, indefinite detention, warrantless surveillance, secrecy and expansive presidential power. Yet after nearly seven years of the Obama administration, many (though not all) of these Bush-era policies remain in effect.
  • Why was there no greater change?
  • Charlie Savage addresses that question exhaustively, describing how President Obama, his top aides and, above all, his lawyers grappled again and again with the many questions about counterterrorism they inherited when they took office.
  • ...16 more annotations...
  • in its 700-plus pages, the author catalogs virtually all the legal disputes over counterterrorism in the Obama era, all the justifications, procedural steps and bureaucratic battles, to the point where at times his book seems more like a compendium than a narrative
  • With the exception of torture, which President Obama prohibited on his first day in office, his administration managed mostly to provide new legal underpinnings for many of the national-security policies (including warrantless surveillance, indefinite detention at Guantánamo Bay and drone strikes) that were first adopted under Mr. Bush
  • President Obama will some day be seen “as less a transformative post-9/11 president than a transitional one.”
  • in some areas like surveillance, the Obama team never planned to outlaw the policies, despite what some of his supporters on the left may have thought
  • He has led a “lawyerly” administration, Mr. Savage writes, one that has added “an additional layer of rules, standards and procedures” to “the unsettling premise that the United States was still at war and would, of necessity, remain so with no end in sight.”
  • Power Wars” opens with an incident that Mr. Savage considers a fundamental turning point for the Obama administration: the attempt by the so-called underwear bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, to detonate explosives aboard a plane heading for Detroit on Christmas Day in 2009.
  • the political fallout from this incident, arguably including the Democrats’ loss of a Senate seat with Scott Brown’s upset victory in Massachusetts, effectively spooked the Obama team. It “profoundly hardened the Obama administration’s attitude towards counterterrorism,” he writes.
  • there are alternative ways of interpreting the Obama administration’s policy steps on national security in its early years. One is that well before that time, the administration was already spooked: It had retreated on counterterrorism issues throughout the president’s first year in office.
  • Gregory Craig, President Obama’s first White House counsel, who had pushed for quicker and more vigorous changes in counterterrorism policies, had already left the administration after a series of battles with other White House officials who were reluctant to take actions that might anger the C.I.A.
  • In short, the Obama White House was from the outset under pressure from the military and intelligence communities not to veer too sharply from the policies and decisions of the Bush era
  • during the Bush years, the Democrats mounted two strands of attack on the post-9/11 policies. The first was from the civil liberties perspective, to assert that policies like warrantless surveillance were inherently wrong. The second line of attack was to say that the Bush administration’s policies violated the rule of law because President Bush adopted them on his own without congressional or other legal authority.
  • President Obama’s “specific complaints” about the Bush programs and his promises “were heavily tilted towards fixing the legal process.”
  • the death of Osama bin Laden in a 2011 raid by Navy SEALs in Pakistan, a subject of renewed controversy
  • He concludes that the lawyers’ activities and the memos they wrote fit with the Obama administration’s account of the raid and not with the revisionist theories about it.
  • Mr. Savage writes that there is no simple judgment to be made on President Obama’s legacy on counterterrorism issues: His administration deeply disappointed defenders of civil liberties critics on the left but was also regularly attacked by hawks on the right.
  • “Obama’s record was irreducibly messy and complex, not unlike the world in which he tried to govern,”
Javier E

'Honorable, gracious and decent': In death, Bush becomes a yardstick for President Trum... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...8-8d64-4e79db33382f_story.html

bush president presidency trump culture

shared by Javier E on 03 Dec 18 - No Cached
  • Bush’s life and presidency “can be a reminder that what we’ve got is profoundly abnormal,” said Eliot Cohen, who served as a senior official in George W. Bush’s State Department. “The great danger of the Trump presidency is the normalization of character traits and behaviors that would have been an absolute abomination to his predecessors.”
  • Most presidential funerals have provided an opportunity for presidents past and present to stress their shared sense of patriotism, mission and purpose.
  • “It’s impossible to be in this job without feeling a special bond with the people who have gone before,” Clinton said in 1994 following the death of Richard M. Nixon, who in many ways represented Clinton’s polar opposite. From a darkened White House just hours after Nixon’s death, Clinton thanked the former president for his “wise counsel.”
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Three days before Bush’s death, Obama met with the former president at his home in Houston and “rekindled what was already a very warm friendship” in the words of a spokesman for Bush.
  • It’s hard to envision Trump even sitting in a room with Clinton, whom he has attacked as a corrupt abuser of women and a “hypocrite” or Obama, whom he labeled “bad (or sick) guy.” The two Democrats have been just as critical of Trump, branding him as a threat to American democracy. Trump’s relationship with George W. Bush has been similarly strained
  • He may be the last U.S. president who wasn’t despised by a big chunk of the American public. Some of that may have to do with the era in which Bush governed. He rose up through the Republican Party at a time when both parties were big tents, consisting of liberal and conservative wings, before Americans had sorted themselves out into warring ideological camps
  • “He was the epitome of preparation, process and due diligence,” said Peter Feaver, who served in the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations. “He believed in the importance of establishment expertise.”
  • Bush’s desire to include Trump at his funeral suggests that the president didn’t want his final send-off to be about the current occupant of the Oval Office, but rather about his life, his presidency and his country.
Javier E

Want to save the GOP, Republicans? Vote for every Democrat on this year's ballot. - The... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...ery-democrat-this-years-ballot

gop vote election 2018 trump

shared by Javier E on 04 Sep 18 - No Cached
  • lock-step adherence to a party leader is why it’s now illogical to say: “I’m not a Trump supporter, but I’ll still vote Republican.” Every seat Republicans keep in 2018 will be a signal to the national party, and to GOP leaders in Congress, that they should continue supporting Trump, no matter how outrageous his antics, and no matter how much they privately disagree.
  • By definition, a vote for any Republican candidate in 2018 is a vote for family separation, tax cuts without corresponding budget cuts, daily insult theatrics in the Oval Office and porn-star payoffs. It’s a vote to ignore Russian corruption of our elections.
  • And make no mistake: It’s a vote giving Trump license to fire special counsel Robert S. Mueller III the day after Election Day.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • There are Republicans who’ll try to split the difference here, and say they’re still voting for Republicans only to maintain policies they like. But, this year, that is little more than a convenient dodge. Trump’s words and deeds — you can’t really call them “policies” — aren’t conservative. They’re statist, anti-law enforcement, anti-national security and run counter to American ideals.
  • Conservatives who insist on voting Republican this year are, in effect, arguing that Democrats are worse than a president who has prostrated himself to Putin, started trade wars with our allies, cruelly separated families at the border, failed to deliver adequate aid to Americans in Puerto Rico and who has, as retired admiral Bill McRaven recently wrote for The Post, “embarrassed us in the eyes of our children.
  • Yes, taking the road I’m proposing means that a lot of Republican projects, many of which I support, will come to a halt; that some laughable, maybe even destructive Democrats will come to Washington, possibly remaining there for a long time. So be it. When a political party loses its way, as the Republican Party has, and becomes the instrument of someone like Trump, divided government is the Constitution’s best remedy.
Javier E

'In all reality, there were three shooters.' Oklahomans kill an active shooter, and it'... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...its-not-as-simple-as-it-sounds

guns debate security

shared by Javier E on 15 Jul 18 - No Cached
  • police also noted that armed citizens can complicate volatile situations. The first of 57 uniformed police officers arrived just a minute after the initial 911 calls and found a complex scene with multiple armed people and no clear sense of what had happened or who was responsible.
  • “We don’t want people to be vigilantes,” Bo Mathews, a spokesman for the Oklahoma City Police Department, said in a recent interview. “That’s why we have police officers.”
  • Both men did what they believed was right, but that meant they had killed a man they did not know. Whittle wondered whether he was going to jail. Nazario went over ways that the confrontation could have ended differently — perhaps with his own death
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • They both marveled that amid the chaos, the result was as intended: The attacker was stopped before he could hurt anyone else
  • The FBI examined 160 shootings between 2000 and 2013 and found that most of the violence ended when the assailant stopped shooting, committed suicide or fled. Unarmed citizens successfully restrained shooters in 21 of those incidents, according to the FBI.
  • Two attacks stopped when off-duty officers shot and killed the attackers. Five ended in much the way the attack at Louie’s did — when armed civilians, mostly security guards, exchanged fire with the shooters.
  • “How is the officer going to discern who is the Good Samaritan and who is not?” Serpas said. “They don’t have placards on the front of their shirts that say ‘I’m the good guy’ or ‘I’m the bad guy.’&nbsp;
  • In videos, Tilghman complained that he was “under hardcore demonic attack,” noting in one recording: “I’m not doing well . . . doing really, really bad right now.
  • Gerald Konkler, general counsel of the Oklahoma Council on Law Enforcement Education and Training, confirmed that Tilghman was licensed to carry a weapon and had been through training that would have included a psychological evaluation. Tilghman’s relatives could not be reached for comment.
  • “It is what it is,” Whittle said. “You’d better be damn sure that what you are doing is right, because you’ll pay the consequences if you are wrong.
  • In the weeks since the shooting, he has replayed in his head different endings to the incident. What if instead of retreating to the grassy bank, the gunman had followed his initial shots through the broken glass door into the restaurant? And what if Whittle had followed the gunman inside? “Bryan would have entered the front,” Nazario said. “I would have entered the back.” There they would have been, two good guys with guns, face to face. “He could have thought I was the shooter,” Nazario said. Or vice versa. And if Nazario had asked — and Whittle refused — to drop his weapon, Nazario said, “I would have had to take action.”
Javier E

The moral rot is spreading - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...8-8fac-12e98c13528d_story.html

gop corruption

shared by Javier E on 23 Aug 18 - No Cached
  • Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) stood on the Senate floor Wednesday morning for his first public remarks since the seismic events of the day before: The president’s former personal lawyer pleaded guilty to fraud and breaking campaign finance laws, implicating the president in a crime; the president’s former campaign chairman was convicted on eight counts of financial crimes, making him one of five members of Trump’s team who have been convicted or have admitted guilt; and a Republican congressman was indicted, the second of Trump’s earliest congressional supporters to be charged this month.
  • McConnell’s counterpart in the House, Speaker Paul D. Ryan (Wis.), was equally cowardly. “We are aware of Mr. [Michael] Cohen’s guilty plea to these serious charges” was his office’s official statement. “We will need more information than is currently available at this point.”
  • What more do you need, Mr. Speaker? What more will it take, Republicans? It seems nothing can bring them to state what is manifestly true: The president is unfit to serve, surrounded by hooligans and doing incalculable harm.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • This intolerable silence of the Republicans — through “Access Hollywood,” racist outbursts, diplomatic mayhem and endless scandal — is what allows Trump and his Fox News-viewing supporters to dock their spaceship in a parallel universe where truth isn’t truth. At Tuesday night’s rally in West Virginia, Trump’s irony-challenged audience could be heard chanting “Drain the Swamp!” and “Lock her up!” (Hillary Clinton, that is), just a few hours after Paul Manafort’s conviction and Cohen’s guilty plea.
  • there doesn’t have to be collusion, or even speculation, to recognize that something is terribly wrong. There is no good answer to the question Cohen lawyer Lanny Davis posed after his client said under oath that Trump directed him to pay off two women to influence the election: “If those payments were a crime for Michael Cohen, then why wouldn’t they be a crime for Donald Trump?”
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