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“There’s a statement made by a witness, or an interaction with a lawmaker, and users are able to put together a counternarrative in real time.”

Cameron described the live comment streams as laboratories of right-wing talking points, most likely to attract viewers who already share a certain bias. These viewers are unlikely to change their minds, and thus shift opinion polling on impeachment, which has remained relatively stable.

Social media once held out promise to connect the world. But in a polarized climate, the firmest bonds appear to be forming among those who already share the same views, allowing partisans to choose not simply their own coverage but the community with which they process it. Self-selected information nourishes identity, experts said, reducing politics to entertainment and blood sport.

the Democratic approach rests on more traditional means of persuasion. What committee leaders described as a solemn process, compelled by the president’s own admissions and propelled by “ample facts,” Trump and his congressional allies decried as a charade.

But the talking points are then exported through other channels, he added, and eventually reach persuadable voters. Social media, he said, does not just echo but serves as an “amplifier, with powerful cross-pollination on the different platforms, until the talk eventually reaches the office water cooler or coffee machine, or the Thanksgiving table.”

“The more social media allows for those kinds of communities that make you feel like you’re part of a group that you aren’t physically in, it can give you the illusion that your opinions are more widely held than they really are,”

“That’s a powerful feeling, to be part of a community watching and interpreting something in the same way.”

Discussions about the hearing also appeared on YouTube, where live streams similarly became flooded with conspiracy theories and racist vitriol

The sort of news consumption enabled by the tech giants remains a largely unstudied phenomenon

The phenomenon bears some relationship to talk radio, she said, which allows listeners to call in and share their observations — and to feel as though they’re part of the coverage.

That sense of participation became pronounced over the last few weeks, as the watch parties turned into cheering sections for Republican lawmakers who delivered especially impassioned rebuttals for the president

I spent much of that year as an industry spokesman, my last after 20 years in the business, spreading AHIP’s “information” to journalists and lawmakers to create the impression that our health-care system was far superior to Canada’s, which we wanted people to believe was on the verge of collapse.

The campaign worked. Stories began to appear in the press that cast the Canadian system in a negative light. And when Democrats began writing what would become the Affordable Care Act in early 2009, they gave no serious consideration to a publicly financed system like Canada’s.

Today, the respective responses of Canada and the United States to the coronavirus pandemic prove just how false the ideas I helped spread were.

There are more than three times as many coronavirus infections per capita in the United States, and the mortality rate is twice the rate in Canada.

The most effective myth we perpetuated — the industry trots it out whenever major reform is proposed — is that Canadians and people in other single-payer countries have to endure long waits for needed care.

While it’s true that Canadians sometimes have to wait weeks or months for elective procedures (knee replacements are often cited), the truth is that they do not have to wait at all for the vast majority of medical services.

And, contrary to another myth I used to peddle — that Canadian doctors are flocking to the United States — there are more doctors per 1,000 people in Canada than here. Canadians see their doctors an average of 6.8 times a year, compared with just four times a year in this country.

Most important, no one in Canada is turned away from doctors because of a lack of funds, and Canadians can get tested and treated for the coronavirus without fear of receiving a budget-busting medical bill.

In America, exorbitant bills are a defining feature of our health-care system. Despite the assurances from President Trump and members of Congress that covid-19 patients will not be charged for testing or treatment, they are on the hook for big bills, according to numerous reports.

That is not the case in Canada, where there are no co-pays, deductibles or coinsurance for covered benefits. Care is free at the point of service. And those laid off in Canada don’t face the worry of losing their health insurance. In the United States, by contrast, more than 40 million have lost their jobs during this pandemic, and millions of them — along with their families — also lost their coverage.

Then there’s quality of care. By numerous measures, it is better in Canada. Some examples: Canada has far lower rates than the United States of hospitalizations from preventable causes like diabetes (almost twice as common here) and hypertension (more than eight times as common).

And even though Canada spends less than half what we do per capita on health care, life expectancy there is 82 years, compared with 78.6 years in the United States.

Of the many regrets I have about what I once did for a living, one of the biggest is slandering Canada’s health-care system. If the United States had undertaken a different kind of reform in 2009 (or anytime since), one that didn’t rely on private insurance companies that have every incentive to limit what they pay for, we’d be a healthier country today.

Living without insurance dramatically increases your chances of dying unnecessarily. Over the past 13 years, tens of thousands of Americans have probably died prematurely because, unlike our neighbors to the north, they either had no coverage or were so inadequately insured that they couldn’t afford the care they needed. I live with that horror, and my role in it, every day.

here were more specific reasons to be skeptical of those claims. We didn’t know, for example, who conducted that 2004 survey or anything about the sample size or methodology — or even what criteria were used to determine who qualified as a “business leader.” We didn’t know if the assertion about imaging equipment was based on reliable data or was an opinion. You could easily turn up comparable complaints about outdated equipment at U.S. hospitals.

Another bullet point, from the same book, quoted the CEO of the Canadian Association of Radiologists as saying that “the radiology equipment in Canada is so bad that ‘without immediate action radiologists will no longer be able to guarantee the reliability and quality of examinations.’ ”

Here’s an example from one AHIP brief in the binder: “A May 2004 poll found that 87% of Canada’s business leaders would support seeking health care outside the government system if they had a pressing medical concern.” The source was a 2004 book by Sally Pipes, president of the industry-supported Pacific Research Institute,

We enlisted APCO Worldwide, a giant PR firm. Agents there worked with AHIP to put together a binder of laminated talking points for company flacks like me to use in news releases and statements to reporters.

Clearly my colleagues and I would need a robust defense. On a task force for the industry’s biggest trade association, America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), we talked about how we might make health-care systems in Canada, France, Britain and even Cuba look just as bad as ours.

That summer, Michael Moore was preparing to release his latest documentary, “Sicko,” contrasting American health care with that in other rich countries. (Naturally, we looked terrible.) I spent months meeting secretly with my counterparts at other big insurers to plot our assault on the film, which contained many anecdotes about patients who had been denied coverage for important treatments.

Democratic states and the House, which intervened in the case to defend the health law, asked the Supreme Court to intervene, saying a prompt decision was needed to remove the uncertainty caused by the lower courts’ decisions.

In a 2017 law review article, she questioned the chief justice’s 2012 opinion. “Chief Justice Roberts pushed the Affordable Care Act beyond its plausible meaning to save the statute,” Justice Barrett wrote.In an interview after the 2015 decision, she said, “I think the dissent has the better of the legal argument.”“That’s not to say the result isn’t preferable,” Judge Barrett said at the time. “It’s clearly a good result that these millions of Americans won’t lose their tax subsidies.”

Tens of millions of Americans gained insurance coverage under the 2010 law, which includes popular provisions on guaranteed coverage for pre-existing medical conditions, emergency care, prescription drugs and maternity care. Republican state officials, backed by the Trump administration, say that a key provision of the law is unconstitutional, and that this means the whole law must fall.

The law’s defenders are hoping that the Republican challengers cannot run the table on three separate legal arguments they would need to win: that they have suffered the sort of injury that gives them standing to sue; that the zeroing out of the tax penalty made the individual mandate unconstitutional; and that the rest of the law cannot stand without the individual mandate.

The Republicans also face the challenge of the enormous practical effects of striking down the law. Doing so would increase the ranks of the uninsured in the United States by more than 20 million people — a nearly 70 percent increase — according to new estimates from the Urban Institute.

The biggest loss of coverage would be among low-income adults who became eligible for Medicaid under the law after all but a dozen states expanded the program to include them. But millions would also lose private insurance, including young adults whom the law allowed to stay on their parents’ plans until they turned 26 and families whose income was modest enough to qualify for subsidies under the law that help pay their monthly premiums.

Tuesday’s arguments, which will be heard by telephone, are scheduled for 80 minutes but are likely to last two hours or longer. Michael J. Mongan, the solicitor general of California, representing a coalition of liberal-leaning states, will defend the law; Kyle D. Hawkins, the solicitor general of Texas, representing a coalition of conservative-leaning states, will urge the justices to strike it down.

Pressler and Patterson were heroes within the movement. Patterson led Baptist seminaries and became president of the convention. Pressler was a Texas state judge and a former president of the Council for National Policy, a powerful conservative Christian activist organization.

Both men are now disgraced. In 2018, the board of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary fired Patterson after it found that he’d grossly mishandled rape allegations — including writing in an email that he wanted to meet alone with a woman who had reported being raped to “break her down” — at both Southwestern and another Baptist seminary.

Pressler’s story is in some ways eerily similar to that of Harvey Weinstein. Both were powerful men so brazen about their misconduct that it was an “open secret” in their respective worlds. Yet they were also so powerful that an army of enablers coalesced around them, protecting them from the consequences of their actions.

The suit set off a sprawling investigation into S.B.C. sexual misconduct by The Houston Chronicle and The San Antonio Express-News. Their report, called “Abuse of Faith,” documented hundreds of sex abuse cases in the S.B.C. and led to the denomination commissioning an independent investigation of its handling of abuse.

The American right exists in a news environment that reports misconduct on the left or in left-wing institutions loudly and with granular detail. When Weinstein fell and that fall prompted the cascade of revelations that created the #MeToo moment, the right was overrun with commentary on the larger lessons of the episode, including scathing indictments of a Hollywood culture

the coverage, or lack thereof, of Pressler’s fall also helps explain why we’re so very polarized as a nation.

the bottom line is clear: For decades, survivors of sex abuse “were ignored, disbelieved or met with the constant refrain that the S.B.C. could take no action due to its polity regarding church autonomy — even if it meant that convicted molesters continued in ministry with no notice or warning to their current church or congregation.”

the coverage on the right also fit a cherished conservative narrative: that liberal sexual values such as those in Hollywood invariably lead to abuse.

stories such as Pressler’s complicate this narrative immensely. If both the advocates and enemies of the sexual revolution have their Harvey Weinsteins — that is, if both progressive and conservative institutions can enable abuse — then all that partisan moral clarity starts to disappear

We’re all left with the disturbing and humbling reality that whatever our ideology or theology, it doesn’t make us good people. The allegedly virtuous “us” commits the same sins as the presumptively villainous “them.”

How does a typical conservative activist deal with this reality? By pretending it doesn’t exist.

Shortly after the Pressler settlement was announced, I looked for statements or commentary or articles by the conservative stalwarts who cover left-wing misconduct with such zeal. The silence was deafening.

I’m reminded of the minimal right-wing coverage of Fox News’s historic defamation settlement with Dominion Voting Systems, the largest known media defamation settlement of all time. I consistently meet conservatives who might know chapter and verse of any second-tier scandal in the “liberal media” but to this day have no clue that the right’s favorite news outlet broadcast some of the most expensive lies in history.

t’s more like a cultivated ignorance, in which news outlets and influencers and their audiences tacitly agree not to share facts that might complicate their partisan narratives.

the dynamic is even worse when stories of conservative abuse and misconduct break in the mainstream media. Conservative partisans can simply cry “media bias!” and rely on their followers to tune it all out. To those followers, a scandal isn’t real until people they trust say it’s real.

If it dropped the employer mandate, the Obama White House would be fully committed to a more disruptive future, in which exchanges and subsidies gradually replaced the employer-based system.  And since those exchanges and subsidies are going to be implemented by this administration no matter what — barring a Martian invasion or a zombie apocalypse, at least — the sooner we find out if they really work and what they really cost the better.

“if you like Obamacare, and you want it to work, you don’t need the employer mandate.” And if you don’t like Obamacare (as Roy doesn’t), and don’t expect it to work, then all the mandate does is delay a necessary reckoning with the new system’s flaws.

Either way, the White House’s decision is a step toward honesty in policy-making. It takes us a little closer to a world where politicians of both parties actually level with the public, and acknowledge that employer-provided health insurance is an idea whose time has passed.

I do not see them fleeing in large numbers.”

premiums are set to rise an average of 25 percent next year. The selection of health plans on the exchanges is also shrinking.

Customers bolting the exchanges won’t necessarily avoid the rising premiums by shopping “off-marketplace.”

The big downside to shopping off the exchanges is that customers would not receive insurance subsidies. But for customers who wouldn’t qualify for subsidies anyway, shopping off the exchanges potentially gives them more options – including, in some cases, cheaper plans.

a total of 6.9 million people are getting insurance in the individual market outside the exchanges.

about 11.1 million people are enrolled in ObamaCare exchange plans, with 9.4 million of them getting premium subsidies.

HHS report seemed to be nudging people back toward the exchanges, noting that roughly a third of those avoiding the exchanges potentially could qualify for subsidies.

“millions of them may qualify for financial assistance that would let them purchase coverage and health care at lower cost” if they returned to the ObamaCare fold.

millions of them may qualify for financial assistance that would let them purchase coverage and health care at lower cost” if they returned to the ObamaCare fold.

Both marketplaces, for example, require covering individuals with pre-existing conditions.

The estimated number of insurance providers available on the exchanges for next year is 167, a net decrease of 68.

The decline in choice alone could result in more consumers leaving, even if they have to pay higher costs outside the market, in order to keep their doctor.

The HHS study noted that some of the 6.9 million shopping off-market also could qualify for Medicaid programs, which were expanded in many states.

Just for 2016, we know rates are going up in exchange plans,

(An early conclusion: while we were late to understand how angry white voters were, a perhaps even more serious lapse was in failing to recognize how many disaffected Democrats there were who would stay home rather than support their party’s flawed candidate.)

Stories that would have killed any other politician—truly worrisome revelations about everything from the federal taxes Trump dodged to the charitable donations he lied about, the women he insulted and allegedly assaulted, and the mob ties that have long dogged him—did not stop Trump from thriving in this election year

the Oxford Dictionaries announced that “post-truth” had been chosen as the 2016 word of the year, defining it as a condition “in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.”

Meantime, Trump personally blacklisted news organizations like Politico and The Washington Post when they published articles he didn’t like during the campaign, has openly mused about rolling back press freedoms enshrined by the U.S. Supreme Court, and has now named Stephen Bannon, until recently the executive chairman of Breitbart—a right-wing fringe website with a penchant for conspiracy theories and anti-Semitic tropes—to serve as one of his top White House advisers.

none of this has any modern precedent. And what makes it unique has nothing to do with the outcome of the election. This time, the victor was a right-wing demagogue; next time, it may be a left-wing populist who learns the lessons of Trump’s win.

This is no mere academic argument. The election of 2016 showed us that Americans are increasingly choosing to live in a cloud of like-minded spin, surrounded by the partisan political hackery and fake news that poisons their Facebook feeds.

To help us understand it all, there were choices, but not that many: three TV networks that mattered, ABC, CBS, and NBC; two papers for serious journalism, The New York Times and The Washington Post; and two giant-circulation weekly newsmagazines, Time and Newsweek. That, plus whatever was your local daily newspaper, pretty much constituted the news.

Whether it was Walter Cronkite or The New York Times, they preached journalistic “objectivity” and spoke with authority when they pronounced on the day’s developments—but not always with the depth and expertise that real competition or deep specialization might have provided. They were great—but they were generalists.

Eventually, I came to think of the major media outlets of that era as something very similar to the big suburban shopping malls we flocked to in the age of shoulder pads and supply-side economics: We could choose among Kmart and Macy’s and Saks Fifth Avenue as our budgets and tastes allowed, but in the end the media were all essentially department stores, selling us sports and stock tables and foreign news alongside our politics, whether we wanted them or not. It may not have been a monopoly, but it was something pretty close.

This was still journalism in the scarcity era, and it affected everything from what stories we wrote to how fast we could produce them. Presidents could launch global thermonuclear war with the Russians in a matter of minutes, but news from the American hinterlands often took weeks to reach their sleepy capital. Even information within that capital was virtually unobtainable without a major investment of time and effort. Want to know how much a campaign was raising and spending from the new special-interest PACs that had proliferated? Prepare to spend a day holed up at the Federal Election Commission’s headquarters down on E Street across from the hulking concrete FBI building, and be sure to bring a bunch of quarters for the copy machine.

I am writing this in the immediate, shocking aftermath of a 2016 presidential election in which the Pew Research Center found that a higher percentage of Americans got their information about the campaign from late-night TV comedy shows than from a national newspaper. Don Graham sold the Post three years ago and though its online audience has been skyrocketing with new investments from Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, it will never be what it was in the ‘80s. That same Pew survey reported that a mere 2 percent of Americans today turned to such newspapers as the “most helpful” guides to the presidential campaign.

In 2013, Mark Leibovich wrote a bestselling book called This Town about the party-hopping, lobbyist-enabling nexus between Washington journalists and the political world they cover. A key character was Politico’s Mike Allen, whose morning email newsletter “Playbook” had become a Washington ritual, offering all the news and tidbits a power player might want to read before breakfast—and Politico’s most successful ad franchise to boot. In many ways, even that world of just a few years ago now seems quaint: the notion that anyone could be a single, once-a-day town crier in This Town (or any other) has been utterly exploded by the move to Twitter, Facebook, and all the rest. We are living, as Mark put it to me recently, “in a 24-hour scrolling version of what ‘Playbook’ was.”

These days, Politico has a newsroom of 200-odd journalists, a glossy award-winning magazine, dozens of daily email newsletters, and 16 subscription policy verticals. It’s a major player in coverage not only of Capitol Hill but many other key parts of the capital, and some months during this election year we had well over 30 million unique visitors to our website, a far cry from the controlled congressional circulation of 35,000 that I remember Roll Call touting in our long-ago sales materials.

I remained convinced that reporting would hold its value, especially as our other advantages—like access to information and the expensive means to distribute it—dwindled. It was all well and good to root for your political team, but when it mattered to your business (or the country, for that matter), I reasoned, you wouldn’t want cheerleading but real reporting about real facts. Besides, the new tools might be coming at us with dizzying speed—remember when that radical new video app Meerkat was going to change absolutely everything about how we cover elections?—but we would still need reporters to find a way inside Washington’s closed doors and back rooms, to figure out what was happening when the cameras weren’t rolling.

And if the world was suffering from information overload—well, so much the better for us editors; we would be all the more needed to figure out what to listen to amid the noise.

Trump turned out to be more correct than we editors were: the more relevant point of the Access Hollywood tape was not about the censure Trump would now face but the political reality that he, like Bill Clinton, could survive this—or perhaps any scandal. Yes, we were wrong about the Access Hollywood tape, and so much else.

Fake news is thriving In the final three months of the presidential campaign, the 20 top-performing fake election news stories generated more engagement on Facebook than the top stories from major news outlets such as The New York Times.

, we journalists were still able to cover the public theater of politics while spending more of our time, resources, and mental energy on really original reporting, on digging up stories you couldn’t read anywhere else. Between Trump’s long and checkered business past, his habit of serial lying, his voluminous and contradictory tweets, and his revision of even his own biography, there was lots to work with. No one can say that Trump was elected without the press telling us all about his checkered past.

politics was NEVER more choose-your-own-adventure than in 2016, when entire news ecosystems for partisans existed wholly outside the reach of those who at least aim for truth

Pew found that nearly 50 percent of self-described conservatives now rely on a single news source, Fox, for political information they trust.

As for the liberals, they trust only that they should never watch Fox, and have MSNBC and Media Matters and the remnants of the big boys to confirm their biases.

And then there are the conspiracy-peddling Breitbarts and the overtly fake-news outlets of this overwhelming new world; untethered from even the pretense of fact-based reporting, their version of the campaign got more traffic on Facebook in the race’s final weeks than all the traditional news outlets combined.

When we assigned a team of reporters at Politico during the primary season to listen to every single word of Trump’s speeches, we found that he offered a lie, half-truth, or outright exaggeration approximately once every five minutes—for an entire week. And it didn’t hinder him in the least from winning the Republican presidential nomination.

when we repeated the exercise this fall, in the midst of the general election campaign, Trump had progressed to fibs of various magnitudes just about once every three minutes!

By the time Trump in September issued his half-hearted disavowal of the Obama “birther” whopper he had done so much to create and perpetuate, one national survey found that only 1 in 4 Republicans was sure that Obama was born in the U.S., and various polls found that somewhere between a quarter and a half of Republicans believed he’s Muslim. So not only did Trump think he was entitled to his own facts, so did his supporters. It didn’t stop them at all from voting for him.

in part, it’s not just because they disagree with the facts as reporters have presented them but because there’s so damn many reporters, and from such a wide array of outlets, that it’s often impossible to evaluate their standards and practices, biases and preconceptions. Even we journalists are increasingly overwhelmed.

2016 suggests a different outcome: We’ve achieved a lot more transparency in today’s Washington—without the accountability that was supposed to come with it.

So much terrific reporting and writing and digging over the years and … Trump? What happened to consequences? Reporting that matters? Sunlight, they used to tell us, was the best disinfectant for what ails our politics.

That was both political and practical. Political because obviously they didn’t want to be seen as piling on President George W. Bush; practical because it wasn’t nearly as depressing.

Just as important, Mr. Ailes encouraged his hosts to let their personalities and patriotism show through in their coverage. “I” was a typical refrain. “We” and “us” often referred to the United States (something that most mainstream media entities dropped during the 1960s).

Media critics, amateur and professional, could, and did, assail him and his on-air talent, especially Bill O’Reilly. In response, Fox News would simply ignore them or hit back harder, on the air or through its relentless public relations department. There were no objective norms, no establishment rules, no journalistic sanctity. Just Roger’s rules.

even today, every cable network is, in many ways, a Roger Ailes production. The search for hosts with “something to say,” the talking heads, the talking head butting, the over-the-top breaking news graphics, the invocations of “America,” the saturation coverage of events — all of it was either created or fully exploited by Fox News.

So Ailes came up with a brilliantly cynical strategy. He created a conservative news channel that dispensed with objectivity, and sometimes with facts, while claiming it was more objective — “Fair and Balanced” — than the competition.

Baker believes that most media is hopelessly biased, Journal staffers say. He views his critics as liberal whiners, and his approach as the fair and balanced one.

I happen to agree that liberal bias can be a media problem. On important issues — abortion, education, parenting and religion, to name a few — left-leaning beliefs too often distort coverage. The Journal, and every newspaper, should indeed fight that problem.

But that’s very different from saying reporters protect any political party. They don’t. Journalists’ incentives and instincts all point the other way. Which is why the media reported so aggressively on Hillary Clinton’s emails, damaging her badly.

has there ever been a more important time for sophisticated and fearless financial journalism?

Mr. Uzumcu also thanked Italy, saying its contributions “exemplify the spirit of cooperation underpinning the vitally important international effort to rid Syria of chemical weapons.”

Sales at Gap stores open for at least a year, a closely watched figure in the retail industry, have fallen for 13 straight months. The company’s upmarket brand, Banana Republic, has also stumbled, though Gap’s cheaper Old Navy label has done well.

At a vibrant, three-story Uniqlo, Dhushyanthy Tharan of Hoboken, N.J., shopping on her 26th birthday for a long-sleeve button-down shirt, said she found the selection to be of higher quality and more stylish than at the Gap. “I love their materials, the cotton and linen, and their style,” she said. “It’s very young.”

the pre-Obamacare system put many Americans at the constant risk of going without insurance, many more than the number of uninsured at any given time, and limited freedom of employment for millions more. So health reform helps a much larger share of the population than those currently uninsured — and those beneficiaries have relatives and friends. This is not a policy targeted on a small minority.

Second, whenever someone says that Mr. Obama should have focused on the economy, my question is, what do you mean by that? Should he have tried for a bigger stimulus? I’d say yes, but that fight took place in the very first months of his administration, before the push for health reform got underway.

I’ve never seen any plausible explanation of how abandoning health reform would have made any difference at all to the political possibilities for economic policy.

Finally, we need to ask, what is the purpose of winning elections? The answer, I hope, is to do good — not simply to set yourself up to win the next election.

Democrats should be celebrating the fact that they did the right thing.

“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.

“Our business is so rooted in China, and touches so many aspects of the Chinese economy, that when people don’t really understand China and have the wrong perception of China, they also have a lot of misconceptions about Alibaba,” Joseph C. Tsai, Alibaba’s executive vice chairman, said in an interview.

“What’s good for China is also good for Alibaba,” Mr. Tsai added. He echoed a phrase often attributed to the former head of General Motors: What’s good for G.M. is good for America.

For Alibaba, the financial stakes are not significant. Estimated to be worth $100 million, the deal represents a relatively small amount for a company with more than $12 billion in annual revenue.

The bigger risk is reputational, as Alibaba leaps into the realm of politics. In owning The South China Morning Post, Alibaba will control a news organization that operates along a border that separates two systems, one in Hong Kong with a relatively free press and another in mainland China with strict censorship controls.

The newspaper, which is not subject to China’s strict censorship rules, has long jumped into controversial issues on the mainland like covering the anniversary of the 1989 pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square and last year’s Occupy Central movement in Hong Kong. The newspaper has delved into scandals among China’s elite, including Ling Jihua, who served as an aide to the former Chinese president Hu Jintao.

Willy Lam, a political commentator and former editor at the South China Morning Post, said an Alibaba takeover would most likely exacerbate a trend at the paper toward self-censorship on sensitive political issues.

Alibaba, however, said it had no intention of interfering with the day-to-day operations of the paper and would not censor articles. The company said it would ensure the paper’s journalistic independence and integrity.

But Mr. Tsai did not offer details about how Alibaba would execute its vision for more positive coverage on China without sacrificing editorial independence, two agendas that are seemingly at odds. He said that more “fair and accurate” articles would translate, over time, into a more positive image of the country.

With a print circulation of 100,000, The South China Morning Post is relatively small. But the newspaper, which is 112 years old, has outsize influence in the West because of its proximity to China and its English language format.

Alibaba said it planned to invest in the business, by expanding the staff and developing more digital ventures. The company is also looking to remove the website’s paywall, granting free access to its content. (In 2013, another e-commerce giant, Jeffrey Bezos, the founder of Amazon, purchased The Washington Post.)

baba’s move reflects a broader evolution in China, as some of the country’s biggest companies look to project a different image to the world.

The pressure on prices has been significant. Continue reading the main story Related Coverage China’s Slowdown Tarnishes Economic Boom in Copper-Rich ZambiaDEC. 2, 2015 A Global Chill in Commodity Demand Hits America’s HeartlandOCT. 23, 2015 Glencore Isn’t Out of the Woods YetOCT. 1, 2015 Prices for iron ore, the crucial steelmaking ingredient, have fallen by about 40 percent this year. The Brent crude oil benchmark is now hovering around $40 a barrel, down from more than a $110 since the summer of 2014.

Companies are caught in the downdraft.A number of commodity-related businesses have either declared bankruptcy or fallen behind in their debt payments

Even more common are the cutbacks. Nearly 1,200 oil rigs, or two-thirds of the American total, have been decommissioned since late last year. More than 250,000 workers in the oil and gas industry worldwide have been laid off, with more than a third coming in the United States.

The international mining company Anglo American is pulling back broadly, with a goal to reduce the company’s size by 60 percent. Along with the layoffs announced on Tuesday, the company is suspending its dividend, halving its business units, as well as unloading mines and smelters.

China looms large in the commodities equation.Between 2000 and last year, companies invested hundreds of billions of dollars to expand their production capacity to satisfy China in a period of rapid economic expansion. Much of the corporate growth was fueled by debt.

“the police refuse to go” because of radicalization.

Scarborough said, “You gotta let us ask questions, you can’t just talk. No, you gotta let us actually ask questions.”

“No, no, Joe, I’m not just talking. Joe, I’m not just talking. I’m giving you the facts,” said Trump, as Scarborough attempted to get him to shut up: “Donald, Donald, Donald, Donald.”

“Go to break then, Joe. All I’m doing is giving you the facts and you don’t want to hear the facts.”

Pressed by Scarborough to identify the zones of Paris where police fear to tread, Trump responded: “I will get you the information.”

“Did the internment of the Japanese Americans violate your sense of American values? Yes or no?”

The Muslim community is not reporting what’s going on. They should be reporting that their next-door neighbor is making pipe bombs and they’ve got them all over the place.

Nobody called the police.”

They would say, ‘Are you Muslim?’ ” responded Trump, in what may be the scariest soundbite yet from the candidate.

“We love you, we want to work with you, we want you to turn in the bad ones. We all want to get along.”

Cuomo pounded the guy again and again, citing falsehood after falsehood.

“Do you have to impress anybody but yourself with these ideas?”

Good Morning America” also brought the accountability to Trump, who, again, didn’t seem to care about the implications of his proposal.

As he did in both the “Morning Joe” and CNN sessions, Trump talked about these no-go zones in Paris, whose existence has been denied by Parisians.

ad stuff, that. But what’s the alternative? Not challenge him on ideas that threaten the Constitution?

"Senator Sanders wants to dismantle Obamacare, dismantle the [Children's Health Insurance Program], dismantle Medicare, and dismantle private insurance."

As Karen Tumulty noted in The Washington Post, Bernie Sanders has long been a champion of a single-payer health care system as the only way to assure that all Americans receive medical coverage.

This was Sanders' position as far back as 1993 when newly-elected President Bill Clinton put First Lady Hillary Clinton in charge of reforming our disheveled and unjust health care system.

During that 1993 quest for a health care plan, Secretary Clinton sent Sanders an autographed picture of the two of them, wishing him the best and thanking the senator "for your commitment to real health care access for all Americans."

All these years later, Sanders is still fighting the battle for single-payer, Medicare-like coverage for all, even as fellow Democrats capitulated to the siren songs of the health and insurance industries.

And look at former presidential candidate and single-payer advocate Howard Dean, Bernie's fellow Vermonter, who went on MSNBC this week and said that the Sanders plan "would in fact undo people's health care... That is something people should be concerned about."

As president of the Clinton Foundation, the richly endowed philanthropy that has become the family's private station for public causes, Chelsea Clinton must know this.

. But why would any of the family, their campaign team, advisors and supporters assume that the public would accept such a wild and irresponsible distortion?

This is not “letting” Obamacare fail. Many nonpartisan experts believe that these active measures are likely to undermine the pillars of the 2010 law and hasten the collapse of the marketplaces.

“Critics, who include state insurance commissioners, most of the health-insurance industry and mainstream policy specialists, predict that a proliferation of these other kinds of coverage will have damaging ripple effects, driving up costs for consumers with serious medical conditions and prompting more insurers to flee the law’s marketplaces.”

No matter how much it might be the previous guy’s fault, many voters won’t buy it. People have very short attention spans.

The uncertainty about what Trump would do has already driven premium prices higher for 2018. Now it’s going to get worse.

The Pottery Barn rule comes to mind: You break it, you own it

Beyond yesterday’s directives, Trump has been personally involved in undercutting the system.

Trump thinks his latest gambit will bring Democrats and Republicans to the table: The president suggested on Twitter this morning that he wants to negotiate now: 

He has just created an artificial political crisis by ending another Obama-era program. He believes that Congress will swing into action so that millions of vulnerable people are not harmed by his decision. Instead of undocumented immigrants who were brought to this country as children, this time it’s the poor and chronically ill who are pawns.

Even if a deal was reached in the Senate, conservatives in the House won’t want to vote for anything that their grass-roots supporters will see as protecting the status quo.

Democrats believe they are the ones with leverage.

“Make no mistake about it, Trump will try to blame the Affordable Care Act, but this will fall on his back and he will pay the price for it.”