Group items tagged

I’d bet she is going to get a more serious challenge than people now expect.

Clinton speaks as a Truman-Kennedy Democrat. She’s obviously much, much more multilateral than Republicans, but there’s a certain muscular tone, a certain assumption that there will be hostile ideologies that threaten America. There is also a grand strategic cast to her mind. The U.S. has to come up with an “overarching” strategy, she told Goldberg, to contain, deter and defeat anti-democratic foes. She argues that harsh action is sometimes necessary. “I think Israel did what it had to do to respond to the rockets, “ she declared, embracing recent Israeli policy. “There’s no doubt in my mind that Hamas initiated this conflict. ... So the ultimate responsibility has to rest on Hamas.”

Bush also destroyed centrist Democrats intellectually, by making it impossible for them to credibly critique liberalism from the right.

. In the late ’80s and the ’90s, centrist Democrats had also argued that Reagan’s decision to boost defense spending and aid the Afghan mujahideen had helped topple the Soviet empire. But in 2003, when Bush invaded Iraq, he sparked the greatest foreign-policy catastrophe since Vietnam.

If the lesson of the Reagan era had been that Democrats should give a Republican president his due, the lesson of the Bush era was that doing so brought disaster.

In the Senate, Bush’s 2001 tax cut passed with 12 Democratic votes; the Iraq War was authorized with 29. As the calamitous consequences of these votes became clear, the revolt against them destroyed the Democratic Party’s centrist wing

With the Dean campaign came an intellectual revolution inside the Democratic Party. His insurgency helped propel Daily Kos, a group blog dedicated to stiffening the liberal spine. It energized the progressive activist group MoveOn. It also coincided with Paul Krugman’s emergence as America’s most influential liberal columnist and Jon Stewart’s emergence as America’s most influential liberal television personality.

All of this has shaped the Clinton campaign’s response to Sanders. At the first Democratic debate, she noted that, unlike him, she favors “rein[ing] in the excesses of capitalism” rather than abandoning it altogether. But the only specific policy difference she highlighted was gun control, on which she attacked him from the left.

Whereas the party’s most respected thinkers had once urged Democrats to critique liberal orthodoxy, they now criticized Democrats for not defending that orthodoxy fiercely enough. The presidency of George W. Bush had made Democrats unapologetically liberal, and the presidency of Barack Obama was the most tangible result.

that’s only half the story. Because if George W. Bush’s failures pushed the Democratic Party to the left, Barack Obama’s have pushed it even further. If Bush was responsible for the liberal infrastructure that helped elect Obama, Obama has now inadvertently contributed to the creation of two movements—Occupy and Black Lives Matter—dedicated to the proposition that even the liberalism he espouses is not left-wing enough.

Todd Gitlin quotes Jeremy Varon, a close observer of Occupy who teaches at the New School for Social Research, as saying, “This is the Obama generation declaring their independence from his administration. We thought his voice was ours. Now we know we have to speak for ourselves.

Occupy. The movement may have burned out, but it injected economic inequality into the American political debate

The same anger that sparked Occupy—directed not merely at Wall Street but at the Democratic Party elites who coddled it—fueled Bill de Blasio’s election and Elizabeth Warren’s rise to national prominence. And without Occupy, it’s impossible to understand why a curmudgeonly Democratic Socialist from Vermont is seriously challenging Hillary Clinton

the Democracy Alliance, the party’s most influential donor club, which includes mega-funders such as George Soros and Tom Steyer, has itself shifted leftward during the Obama years. In 2014, it gave Warren a rapturous welcome when she spoke at the group’s annual winter meeting. Last spring it announced that it was making economic inequality its top priority.

By the time Barack Obama defeated Hillary Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008, in part because of her support for the Iraq War, the mood inside the party had fundamentally changed.

“Black Lives Matter developed in the wake of the failure of the Obama administration,” argues the Cornell sociologist Travis Gosa, a co-editor of The Hip Hop & Obama Reader. “Black Lives Matter is the voice of a Millennial generation that’s been sold a ba

Moreover, the Occupy-Warren-Sanders axis has influenced Clinton’s own economic agenda, which is significantly further left than the one she ran on in 2008. She has called for tougher regulation of the financial industry, mused about raising Social Security taxes on the wealthy (something she opposed in 2008), and criticized the Trans-Pacific Partnership (a trade agreement she once gushed about).

Had Black Lives Matter existed when Bill Clinton was seeking the presidency, he probably would have run against the group

Today, by contrast, the Democratic Establishment has responded to Black Lives Matter much as it responded to Occupy: with applause

what’s most remarkable isn’t Hillary Clinton’s move to the left, or the Democratic Party’s. It’s the American public’s willingness to go along.

Much of this shift is being driven by a changing mood among whites. Between January and April alone, according to a YouGov poll, the percentage of whites who called deaths like those of Michael Brown and Freddie Gray “isolated incident[s]” dropped 20 points. There’s even been movement within the GOP. From 2014 to 2015, the percentage of Republicans saying America needs to make changes to give blacks an equal chance rose 15 points—more than the percentage increase among Democrats or Independents.

Most interesting—because he is the Republican candidate with the keenest sense of how to appeal to the general electorate—has been the approach of Senator Marco Rubio. In August, a Fox News anchor asked him about Black Lives Matter. Instead of condemning the movement, Rubio told the story of an African American friend of his whom police had stopped eight or nine times over the previous 18 months even though he had never broken the law. “This is a problem our nation has to confront,” Rubio declared. Then he talked about young African Americans who get arrested for nonviolent offenses and pushed into plea deals by overworked public defenders. The government, he said, must “look for ways to divert people” from going to jail “so that you don’t get people stigmatized early in life.”

Conservative Republicans didn’t talk this way in the ’90s. They didn’t talk this way even in the early Obama years. The fact that Rubio does so now is more evidence that today, unlike in the mid-’60s, the debate about race and justice isn’t moving to the right. It’s moving further left

What’s different this time? One difference is that in the 1960s and ’70s, crime exploded, fueling a politics of fear and vengeance. Over the past two decades, by contrast, crime has plummeted. And despite some hyperbolic headlines, there’s no clear evidence that it’s rising significantly again.

When the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law examined polls, it found that between two-thirds and three-quarters of Americans now support barring discrimination against transgender people.

Most Americans, in other words, having decided that discriminating against lesbians and gay men was wrong, have simply extended that view to transgender people via what Flores describes as a “mechanism of attitude generalization.”

Millennials are also sustaining support for bigger government. The young may not have a high opinion of the institutions that represent them, but they nonetheless want those institutions to do more

This intervention has sparked an angry response on the Republican right, but not among Americans as a whole.

On health care, the story is similar: no public backlash. When Obama signed the Affordable Care Act in March 2010, most polls showed Americans opposing it by about eight to 10 points. Today, the margin is almost identical

Little has changed on taxes, either, even though Obama allowed some of the tax cuts passed under George W. Bush to expire. The percentage of Americans who say they pay more than their fair share in taxes is about the same as it was in the spring of 2010 (

in an era when government has grown more intrusive, African American activists have grown more confrontational, and long-standing assumptions about sexual orientation and gender identity have been toppled, most Americans are not yelling “stop,” as they began doing in the mid-1960s. The biggest reason: We’re not dealing with the same group of Americans.

On issue after issue, it is the young who are most pleased with the liberal policy shifts of the Obama era, and most eager for more

It is largely because of them that the percentage of Americans who want government to “promote traditional values” is now lower than at any other time since Gallup began asking the question in 1993, and that the percentage calling themselves “socially liberal” now equals the percentage calling themselves “socially conservative” for the first time since Gallup began asking that question in 1999.

In polling, Americans typically say they favor smaller government in general while supporting many specific government programs. When Bill Clinton took office in 1993, Americans said they favored “a smaller government providing fewer services” over “a bigger government providing more services” by 37 percentage points. When Obama took power in 2009, the margin was a mere eight points. And despite the president’s many economic interventions, the most recent time Pew asked that question, in September 2014, the margin was exactly the same.

They were also 25 points more likely than those 65 and older to approve of Occupy Wall Street and 36 points more favorable toward socialism, which they actually preferred to capitalism, 49 percent to 46 percent. As the Pew report put it, “Millennials, at least so far, hold ‘baked in’ support for a more activist government.

The press often depicts American politics as a battle pitting ever more liberal Democrats against ever more conservative Republicans. Among the young, however, that’s inaccurate. Young Democrats may be more liberal than their elders, but so are young Republicans. According to Pew, a clear majority of young Republicans say immigrants strengthen America, half say corporate profits are too high, and almost half say stricter environmental laws are worth the cost—answers that sharply distinguish them from older members of the GOP.

Asked how they categorize themselves ideologically, more than two-thirds of Republican Millennials call themselves either “liberal” or “mixed,” while fewer than one-third call themselves “conservative.” Among the oldest Republicans, that breakdown is almost exactly reversed.

Millennials are not liberal primarily because they are young. They are liberal because their formative political experiences were the Iraq War and the Great Recession, and because they make up the most secular, most racially diverse, least nationalistic generation in American history. And none of that is likely to change.

America is not governed by public-opinion polls, after all. Congressional redistricting, felon disenfranchisement, and the obliteration of campaign-finance laws all help insulate politicians from the views of ordinary people, and generally empower the right. But despite these structural disadvantages, Obama has enacted a more consequential progressive agenda than either of his two Democratic predecessors did

If Clinton does win, it’s likely that on domestic policy, she will govern to Obama’s left. (On foreign policy, where there is no powerful left-wing activist movement like Occupy or Black Lives Matter, the political dynamics are very different.) Clinton’s campaign proposals already signal a leftward shift. And people close to her campaign suggest that among her top agenda items would be paid family leave, debt-free college tuition, and universal preschool

Clinton will face this reality from her first day in office. And she will face it knowing that because she cannot inspire liberals rhetorically as Obama can, they will be less likely to forgive her heresies on policy. Like Lyndon B. Johnson after John F. Kennedy, she will have to deliver in substance what she cannot deliver in style.

it’s likely that any Republican capable of winning the presidency in 2016 would govern to the left of George W. Bush. In the first place, winning at all would require a different coalition. When Bush won the presidency in 2000, very few Millennials could vote. In 2016, by contrast, they will constitute roughly one-third of those who turn out

In 2000, African Americans, Hispanics, and Asians constituted 20 percent of voters. In 2016, they will constitute more than 30 percent.

even if the 2016 Republican nominee wins 60 percent of the white vote (more than any GOP nominee in the past four decades except Reagan, in 1984, has won), he or she will still need almost 30 percent of the minority vote. Mitt Romney got 17 percent.

This need to win the votes of Millennials and minorities, who lean left not just on cultural issues but on economic ones, will shape how any conceivable Republican president campaigns in the general election, and governs once in office.

If America’s demographics have changed since the Bush presidency, so has the climate among conservative intellectuals. There is now an influential community of “reformocons”—in some ways comparable to the New Democratic thinkers of the 1980s—who believe Republicans have focused too much on cutting taxes for the wealthy and not enough on addressing the economic anxieties of the middle and working classes.

The candidate closest to the reformocons is Rubio, who cites several of them by name in his recent book. He says that partially privatizing Social Security, which Bush ran on in 2000 and 2004, is an idea whose “time has passed.” And unlike Bush, and both subsequent Republican presidential nominees, Rubio is not proposing a major cut in the top income-tax rate. Instead, the centerpiece of his economic plan is an expanded child tax credit, which would be available even to Americans who are so poor that they don’t pay income taxes

it’s likely that were he elected, Rubio wouldn’t push through as large, or as regressive, a tax cut as Bush did in 2001 and 2003. Partly, that’s because a younger and more ethnically diverse electorate is less tolerant of such policies. Partly, it’s because Rubio’s administration would likely contain a reformocon faction more interested in cutting taxes for the middle class than for the rich. And partly, it’s because the legacy of the Bush tax cuts themselves would make them harder to replicate

A key figure in passing the Bush tax cuts was Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, who in 2001 warned that unless Washington lowered tax rates, surpluses might grow too large, thus producing a dangerous “accumulation of private assets by the federal government.” Greenspan’s argument gave the Bush administration crucial intellectual cover. But the idea now looks laughable. And it’s hard to imagine the current Federal Reserve chair, Janet Yellen, endorsing large upper-income tax cuts in 2017.

the kind of centrist, Chamber of Commerce–friendly Democrats who helped Bush pass his tax plan in 2001—including Max Baucus, John Breaux, Mary Landrieu, Zell Miller, Max Cleland, Tim Johnson, Blanche Lambert Lincoln—barely exist anymore. The Democrats’ shift left over the past decade and a half means that a President Rubio would encounter more militant opposition than Bush did in 2001

the next Republican president won’t be able to return the nation to the pre-Obama era.

That’s what happened when Dwight Eisenhower followed Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry Truman. Ike moderated the growth in government expansion that had begun in the 1930s, but he didn’t return American politics to the 1920s, when the GOP opposed any federal welfare state at all. He in essence ratified the New Deal

It’s also what happened when Bill Clinton followed Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush. By passing punitive anticrime laws, repealing restrictions on banks, signing NAFTA, cutting government spending to balance the budget, reforming welfare, and declaring that the “era of big government is over,” Clinton acknowledged that even a Democratic president could not revive the full-throated liberalism of the 1960s and ’70s. He ratified Reaganism.

Barack Obama sought the presidency hoping to be the Democrats’ Reagan: a president who changed America’s ideological trajectory. And he has changed it. He has pushed the political agenda as dramatically to the left as Reagan pushed it to the right, and, as under Reagan, the public has acquiesced more than it has rebelled.

The decision extended a 2012 ruling, which invalidated future life-without- parole sentence for juvenile murderers, to all such offenders who were given life sentences in the past.

Monday's opinion was written by Justice Anthony Kennedy and joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and the court's four liberals, Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan.

A total of 2,341 people are now serving mandatory sentences of life without parole for juvenile offenses. Roughly 1,000 of them would be affected by a decision in this case, according to a study by The Phillips Black Project, a non-profit law group that represents prisoners facing severe sentences. The remainder, the study concluded, were imprisoned in states that have already applied the ruling retroactively.

Monday's decision said the states do not have to hold new sentencing hearings if they allow juvenile homicide offenders the opportunity to be released on parole. Such a step "ensures that juveniles whose crimes reflected only transient immaturity -- and who have since matured -- will not be forced to serve a disproportionate sentence" in violation of the Constitution's ban on cruel and unusual punishment.

That requirement even applies to “medical abortions”—meaning abortions achieved by giving a pregnant woman two pills, spaced between two and seven days later.

The district court had concluded that the regulations were not imposed for any real medical purpose. Thus, it held, they imposed an “undue burden” (also called a “substantial obstacle”) on the right to choose abortion in Texas. The Fifth Circuit panel, however, reversed that judgment.

Justice Stephen Breyer noted that a colonoscopy (which doesn’t need to be done in an ASC) is 28 times more dangerous than a pre-viability abortion.

“If … this law is upheld,” Verrilli told the Court, “what you will be saying is that this right exists only in theory.”

It had actually been in the possession of a firm called Platte River Networks, which was keeping it at a data center in New Jersey, since June.

The State Department official who oversees the production of documents under the Freedom of Information Act, Undersecretary Patrick Kennedy, battled the inspectors general of the State Department and the combined US intelligence agencies over who had access to review documents for the purposes of finding and censoring potentially classified information in the email set.

Clinton gave the State Department email messages her team determined to be work-related on December 5. Her aides attempted to wipe her personal email from her server. She gave thumb drives containing her work emails to her lawyer, David Kendall.

It should also be noted that officials in George W. Bush's White House, including political adviser Karl Rove, used a server controlled by the Republican National Committee for email, circumventing archiving rules.

The consensus among experts, including some who have been critical of Clinton, is that, based on what's known now, she is not likely to be prosecuted under the Espionage Act or the law prohibiting the removal and retention of classified information

Republican Party has moved far to the right over the past few decades. Some controversial statements that got Goldwater in trouble in 1964 would now find support in red parts of the country.

They roared with approval when Goldwater responded: "Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. Moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue."

The GOP's choice turned out to be a total disaster: Johnson ran a devastating campaign that effectively portrayed Goldwater as far off center.

viewers saw Ku Klux Klan members marching in their regalia and burning crosses, a reference to an endorsement Goldwater received from a leader of the Alabama Ku Klux Klan.

Johnson won re-election by a massive landslide with 486 electoral votes to Goldwater's 52. Johnson's popular vote, 61%, was the biggest in American history, bigger than FDR in 1936.

But will a Trump candidacy be a repeat of 1964? That outcome is far from clear.

biggest difference between then and now is the polarization of the electorate. Over the past few election cycles, there has been remarkably little movement of voters between parties in most states

It's also important to remember that when Goldwater ran, Democrats were in good shape: The death of a popular Democratic president, John F. Kennedy, had been devastating to many Americans

With Trump, the optimists believe, Republicans might have another Barry Goldwater on their hands. This is a reference to the right-wing Arizona senator who ran in 1964 against President Lyndon Johnson, urging his party to embrace conservatism

a Trump candidacy would allow Democrats to make huge gains in the House, the base of conservative power.

The only opponents who have a chance are those who are even more conservative than current officeholders.

The best opportunity would be for Democrats to win control of the Senate, given that there are a number of competitive seats where a Trump candidacy could make a difference

Trump is also a very different kind of candidate than Goldwater. Goldwater's candidacy grew out of a growing conservative movement that had a clear set of principles: limited government, strong anti-communism, and opposition to federal civil rights legislation.

Trump's campaign, on the other hand, is far more about style than actual policy.

Though Goldwater was an effective senator, he was a terrible campaigner, constantly stumbling over his words and making statements that didn't play well with the media. According to one Johnson adviser, Goldwater "scattered his shots too widely, hit too many issues, and thus diffused his impact.

Trump, by contrast, is extremely effective with the media. He seems to have a genuine feel for articulating the anger that exists in the electorate

Trump is not as much of an outlier as Goldwater was perceived to be in 1964.

In this general election, the connection will be more problematic for Hillary Clinton, given Obama's middling approval rating

Democrats should thus be careful in thinking through what a Trump candidacy might

“We have an opportunity to do it now with the height of  everything happening,” Manchin said. “For us not to do anything, just sit here and be mum would be just as bad.”

“We need to renew the assault weapons ban. We need to end the sale of high capacity magazines. We need to make gun trafficking a federal crime and give law enforcement the tools they need to get illegal guns off of the streets. We need to close the gun show loophole as well as loopholes that allow gun purchasers to buy a gun after the waiting period expires without a completed background check.”

That episode remains the closest the Senate has come to a consensus on gun control and will likely remain a big part of the debate.

“The problem with these mass shootings, which seem to be happening with increasing frequency, is too often we propose either more restrictions on gun ownership or more background checks for gun purchasers, versus mental health reform — when in fact we need both. That’s what I would like to see.”

To counter Feinstein’s amendment, Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn (R-Texas) proposed a measure that would give the attorney general the power to impose a 72-hour delay for individuals on the terror watch list seeking to purchase a gun and it could become a permanent ban if a judge determines there is probable cause during that time window.

“To use Sen. Kennedy – let him be on the watch list, he’s not going to go buy a gun and hurt anybody,” Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) argued, calling Cornyn’s alternative “dangerous” and “ridiculous.”

Democratic leaders said Grassley’s proposal would roll back gun laws, not improve them

Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.), Collins and Pat Toomey (R-Pa.) also voted in favor of Manchin’s amendment to expand background checks. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.), who is facing a tough reelection campaign in 2016, abstained from the vote on Manchin’s proposal, though he voted with Republican Party on the other gun control amendments Thursday.

Pelosi said she believes there are sufficient votes in the House to expand background checks to Internet sales and gun shows and to block individuals on the terrorist watch list from purchasing weapons.

Senate Democratic Policy Committee Chair Charles E. Schumer (N.Y.) pledged Democrats won’t give up the battle.

With the San Bernardino rampage marking the 355th mass shooting this year, Congress has repeatedly talked about action but hasn’t taken it. Senate Democrats recently tried unsuccessfully to jump-start a campaign to pass gun control legislation in the wake of a deadly shooting at a college campus in Roseburg, Ore.

“To be honest with you, I don’t see it moving now,” said Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.), who noted he has been sponsoring the bill for the last nine years.

Overall, Democrats do not support the budget reconciliation package, which would repeal large portions of Obamacare and defund Planned Parenthood.

“What could possibly be the argument for allowing a terrorist suspect to buy a semiautomatic weapon?” Mr. Obama said. “This is a matter of national security.”

“Seems to me that the greatest importance of this is to get the ball rolling so more people follow, and ideally the federal government,” Mr. Webster said. “I suspect more states will do this.”

own a gun.

Connecticut has passed some of the strictest gun laws in the country, including measures enacted after the 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, when a gunman killed 20 schoolchildren and six staff members before killing himself.

The National Rifle Association “does not want terrorists or dangerous people to have access to weapons,” said Jennifer Baker, a spokeswoman for the organization’s lobbying arm. “But this is a constitutional issue,” she said, adding that mere suspicion should not be enough to take away the righ

The no-fly list is a subset of the watch list.

Correction: December 10, 2015 An earlier version of this article, using information from state officials, erroneously attributed a distinction to the proposed measure in Connecticut. It would not be the first such law in the nation; at least one other state has such a ban.

“These are everyday Americans that have nothing to do with terrorism,” Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, a Republican candidate for president, told CNN. “They wind up on the no-fly list, there’s no due process or any way to get your name removed from it in a timely fashion, and now they’re having their Second Amendment rights being impeded upon.”

Abe Mashal, a former Marine and a Muslim of mixed Palestinian-Italian background who lives in the Chicago area, was on the no-fly list until last year, for reasons he said were still a mystery to him.

“Never had any trouble with that,” he said of the gun purchase.

Since 2004, there have been 2,233 people who, like Mr. Mashal, landed on the government’s no-fly list because of terrorism suspicions and applied to buy a gun, according to a recent review of F.B.I. data by the Government Accountability Office.

But only rarely are legal reasons found to prohibit the sale, according to federal auditors. Since the F.B.I. began tracking the data, only 190 gun sales to people on the list — or 8.5 percent of all the attempted sales — have been blocked for other reasons, including mental illness or criminal convictions, auditors found.

But Democrats say increased fears of domestic terrorism stoked by the recent gun attacks in San Bernardino and in Paris are reason enough to stop people on a watch list from being able to buy a gun.

Mr. Malloy has lobbied federal lawmakers on the issue. “I have previously written to Congress on this matter,” he said. “But inaction is not an option. So here in Connecticut, we are acting.

The federal government’s terrorism watch list is a database maintained by the Terrorist Screening Center, an arm of the Federal Bureau of Investigation

“Like all Americans, I have been horrified by the recent terrorist attacks in San Bernardino and Paris,” Mr. Malloy, a Democrat, told reporters. “This should be a wake-up call to all of us. This is a moment to seize in America, and today I’m here to say that we in Connecticut are seizing it.”

With his decision, Mr. Malloy has stepped into a fiery debate that has stretched from the Oval Office to the contest to become its next occupant: Should being a terrorism suspect prohibit a person from buying firearms? At the moment, it does not.

With the mass shooting in California last week focusing attention on terrorism and guns, Gov. Dannel P. Malloy of Connecticut announced on Thursday that he intended to sign an executive order barring people on federal terrorism watch lists from buying firearms in the state.

President Obama has moved it to the front of his continuing push for stricter gun restrictions. “Congress should act to make sure no one on a no-fly list is able to buy a gun,” he said in

While Democrats in Congress have been calling almost daily for a fix to the so-called watch list loophole, Republicans have succeeded in defeating measures that would prevent people on the lists from buying guns. Democrats say they intend to keep pushing the issue, and on Thursday the House Democratic leader, Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, introduced a motion demanding a vote to restrict the sale of guns from anyone on a federal terrorism watch list. House Republicans swiftly shelved it.

What some critics have called a startling gap in the law has gnawed at counterterrorism officials for years. But it has now emerged as a flash point following the terrorist attack in San Bernardino, Calif., in which a married couple who the authorities believe were inspired by foreign extremists killed 14 people using legally obtained firearms.

But the argument, gun rights advocates say, is a matter of due process. They say that the no-fly list — with tens of thousands of names on it — is unreliable, with innocent people like Edward M. Kennedy, the Massachusetts senator who died in 2009, and other well-known Americans wrongly placed on the list.

While federal gun control legislation has gone nowhere in recent years, certain states have had more success. Connecticut has passed some of the strictest gun laws in the country, including measures enacted after the 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, when a gunman killed 20 schoolchildren and six staff members before killing himself.

Daniel Webster, the director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research, said it was unclear what the practical implications of Connecticut’s proposed ban would be in stopping someone who is determined to carry out an act of terrorism. That person could simply travel to another state.

If we did, we would know that this speech so deeply connected to the notion of a dream of a different America begins with a history lesson, tying modern America to President Abraham Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation.

But there is more in the "I Have a Dream" speech that is often ignored or forgotten. King used the term "police brutality" twice in this historic address, and here we are many seasons later wondering why police-community relations are so tainted.

"'When will you be satisfied?'

Yet they, too, will pause on the King national holiday and say they loved the man and his ideals, when we know that is not the truth.

But they heard about the March on Washington, they heard about these people, mostly black but also white sisters and brothers, too, who were making their way to America's capital to fight for freedom, equality and jobs for all people.

And as he instructed folks to go back to their home states to keep marching and fighting for what was righ

learn that King had been killed because he was fighting for the rights of black people, of all people. Doubly confused me that his words spoke of love and peace, yet he was gunned down in cold blood on the balcony of a motel.

To paraphrase the words Bobby Kennedy said to an Indianapolis crowd on the night King was assassinated, we've got to make an effort to be compassionate and show love, toward ourselves, toward each other, for the sake of ourselves and for the sake of America.

For it takes great courage to love any people who do not love you. It takes great courage to push for peace with every fiber of your being when violence is the language of those who believe in hate, division and fear.

And it takes great courage to see an America full of unity and togetherness even when fellow Americans cannot imagine it for themselves.

The killings of the prayer group in Charleston, South Carolina, echoes the four little girls killed in a Birmingham church the same year King delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech. That kind of trauma and shock makes you question America, makes you question humanity, and makes you question King's dream itself.

I lost respect for King, when I was in college, because I did not think he was as fearless as other black leaders of his time, like Malcolm X and the Black Panther Party.

If we did, we would know that King declared, matter-of-factly, that America had not made good on its promise of full citizenship rights to black people. We would acknowledge, 50 years later, how sad and unfortunate it is that we are still having the same conversations about equality for people of color, women, the LGBTQ community

a lesson some of us need to learn or relearn as we engage in civil disobedience in this new millennium. But those who say movements of today are disrupting their lives also fail to connect that the civil rights movement was completely about making the comfortable uncomfortable until real justice was served.

g's "I Have a Dream" speech. My mother and her family were so poor she interrupted her education for the first of many times when she was only 8 years old, to pick cotton on land owned by local whites that had been forcibly taken from her grandfather upon his death at their hands. The family was so poor there was no telephone, no television, no radio, and no indoor plumbing.

Nor do they love people like my mother, a woman born and bred in the backwoods of South Carolina, whose 20th birthday was the same day as Ki

"I have a dream that one day, down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of 'interposition' and 'nullification' — one day right there in Alabama little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers."

I sensed his sorrow when he talked about the need for a relevant ministry among the faith community, and how so many have moved so far away from being relevant in these times. I think of how King asked us to practice a dangerous kind of selflessness, to not put ourselves, our lives, our material things, before people. The dream cannot be only about individual success, individual progress, while ignoring the plight of others. Even if we have some form of privilege, as King himself had, we must never forget that the basics of life must be for all people.

"The Religious Right did not start because of a concern about abortion," says Ed Dobson, who as an associate pastor at Falwell's church, was present at the founding of the Moral Majority. "I sat in the non-smoke-filled back room with the Moral Majority, and I frankly do not remember abortion ever being mentioned as a reason why we ought to do something.

"In one fell swoop," writes political scientist Corey Robin, "the heirs of slaveholders became the descendants of persecuted Baptists, and Jim Crow a heresy the First Amendment was meant to protect."

Falwell would repudiate his segregationist past and his movement would pivot from race to "family values." Yes, abortion was murder and homosexuality was unnatural. But each also undermined family life.

Trump, who has been married three times and derives his language more from the vulgarities of bathrooms than from the niceties of the pulpit, has also taken stances on key cultural issues, including abortion and gay rights, that are at odds with the Republican Party's white evangelical base.

Other presidenti

al candidates, including Ted Cruz, Ben Carson, Jeb Bush and Bernie Sanders, have addressed Liberty stud

With this promise in sight, it seems like a good time to revisit what Falwell Sr. said about King before and after he co-founded the Moral Majority in 1979 as a "pro-life, pro-family, pro-moral, and pro-American" organization.

This ruling stripped tax-exempt status from all-white private schools formed in the South in reaction to the Brown v. Board of Education mandate to desegregate public schools.

Their intent was safeguard children from secularization, not racial integration, but their schools had been unfairly and illegally targeted by a federal government hell-bent on making secular humanism the nation's false faith.

"There was an overnight conversion," recalled Paul Weyrich -- the conservative strategist who coined the term "moral majority" -- as conservative Christians realized that "big government was coming after them as well."

Similarly, feminism was dangerous because it confused the distinct roles men and women and boys and girls were to play in the "traditional family," which Falwell and his fellow travelers understood to be of a singular sort: one male breadwinner and one female homemaker, married, with children, living under one roof and the patriarchal authority of the man of the house.

Nonetheless, he does have a story to tell that resonates not only with white evangelicals' complaints about the decline of a Christian America, but also with the broad contours of the Christian story, which runs from The Fall in Eden to redemption at the hands of the crucified and resurrected Christ. Both of these narratives get going with a fall from grace and point toward an upcoming revival.I know many evangelicals, and Trump is not one of them.

— Russia and China “possess precision-strike capabilities, integrated air defenses, cruise and ballistic missiles, advanced cyberwarfare and anti-satellite capabilities.”

— “If the United States had to fight Russia in a Baltic contingency or China in a war over Taiwan . . . Americans could face a decisive military defeat.”

“Air superiority, which the United States has taken for granted since World War II, is no longer assured. And, without control of the skies, U.S. ships and soldiers would be [highly] vulnerable.”

The slippage in our military power has at least three causes, only two of which we can influence.

The first is other countries’ decisions to beef up their militaries; we can’t change that. The second is the shifting nature of warfare, with the rise of cyberwarfare and other new technologies (communications satellites and the like). We can do better here by addressing the third cause: unwise cuts in defense spending.

The time has long passed since the Pentagon was the driving force behind the federal budget. In 1960, defense was 52 percent of federal outlays and 9 percent of overall economic activity (gross domestic product). In 2017, the comparable figures were 15 percent of outlays and 3 percent of GDP.

In truth, military spending is in a quiet competition with the American welfare state

he Pentagon is losing badly. Welfare programs have vast constituencies of voters. Defense has fewer. Politicians straddle the conflict. They vote for welfare while insisting that the U.S. military is still the world’s most powerful. This rationalizes inaction on defense but conveniently forgets that the military’s margin of superiority has dramatically shriveled

It’s hard to miss the parallels with the period before World War II, when England, France and the United States allowed Adolf Hitler to rearm Germany, altering the global balance of power. The delusional complacency recalls John F. Kennedy’s book, “Why England Slept.”

This is not a call for war. It is a call for stopping many self-inflicted wounds. We need to stop underfunding the military, especially on research and cyberwarfare, even if that means less welfare. We need to keep our commitments — Trump’s abrupt withdrawal from Syria devalues our word. And we need to repair our alliances.

War is changing, and we need to change with it. Otherwise, we may drift into a large war impossible to win

“One of the greatest crises facing the Supreme Court since Marbury v. Madison was F.D.R.’s court-packing plan,” Chief Justice Roberts said in 2015 at New York University, “and it fell to Hughes to guide a very unpopular Supreme Court through that high-noon showdown against America’s most popular president since George Washington.”

“There are things to learn from it,” he said, and he has seemed to apply those lessons to a series of clashes with Mr. Trump, who has attacked the very idea of judicial independence.

. He insisted, against the weight of substantial evidence, that “we do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges

Political science data refute that assertion, as do the fights over judicial confirmations. Indeed, the most recent battle, over Justice Kavanaugh, damaged the court’s reputation precisely because the court was portrayed as a political prize.

he must view the idea that judging is wholly separate from politics as a useful fiction, a worthy aspiration and, most important, crucial to the court’s standing.

The court’s other four Republican appointees — Justices Kavanaugh, Clarence Thomas, Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Neil M. Gorsuch — sent a different message not long after, all attending the annual gala dinner of the Federalist Society, the conservative legal group

court watchers could not recall a show of force like the one by their conservative colleagues in 2018.

Enthusiasm among conservatives for the chief justice has tempered since President George W. Bush nominated him in 2005. They point to his two votes to uphold President Barack Obama’s health care law and a leftward drift documented by political scientists

In the term that ended in June, for instance, Chief Justice Roberts’s voting record was almost indistinguishable from that of Justice Kennedy.

There is no question, however, that Chief Justice Roberts’s voting record has been generally conservative. On issues of racial discrimination, religion, voting and campaign finance, his views are squarely in the mainstream of conservative legal thinking.

He voted with five-justice majorities in District of Columbia v. Heller, the 2008 Second Amendment decision that established an individual right to own guns; Citizens United, the 2010 campaign finance decision that amplified the role of money in politics; and Shelby County v. Holder, the 2013 voting rights decision that effectively gutted the Voting Rights Act.

But by casting the decisive vote to save Mr. Obama’s signature legislative achievement, the Affordable Care Act, he transformed his reputation. Liberals hailed him as a statesman. Conservatives denounced him as a traitor.

Mr. Trump, years before he ran for president, was in the second group. “I guess @JusticeRoberts wanted to be a part of Georgetown society more than anyone knew,” he wrote on Twitter, citing a fake Twitter handle. During his presidential campaign, Mr. Trump called Chief Justice Roberts “an absolute disaster.”

“Moderation, not just in terms of ideological moderation but also humility, is kind of his thing,” he said. “He seems to write limited opinions. He doesn’t reach any further than he has to. He clearly distinguishes between what he is doing as a judge and what he might believe in terms of policy.”

The court will have to soon decide whether to hear two sets of cases concerning Trump administration initiatives to revoke protections for unauthorized immigrants brought to the United States as children and to bar transgender people from military service.

While Chief Justice Roberts may be inclined to avoid politically charged issues and quietly rebuild his court’s authority, it takes only four votes to add a case to its docket

Moynihan was talking about political bosses of more than a century ago; he may as well have been discussing John Hughes. “The principle of Boss rule was not tyranny, but order,” he wrote. Hughes understood that an embattled people—and Irish Catholics certainly were that in his lifetime—required unity and solidarity, not division and chaos. They needed to fall in line, and they did. Mr. Loughery explains how and why that happened and leaves the reader to judge the results.

In a review of his book on Obama’s governing philosophy, The Weekly Standard castigated D’Souza for “misstatements of fact, leaps in logic, and pointlessly elaborate argumentation.” D’Souza’s later books received praise from some politicians, such as Newt Gingrich. Conservative intellectuals, however, largely disowned or ignored D’Souza’s theses

I discussed D’Souza’s (d)evolution in “The Ideas Industry” as “modern exemplar of a successful partisan intellectual.” To elaborate further:

Frum remains a well-read columnist in the Atlantic who frequently writes essays that engage intellectuals from all sides. D’Souza lost the respect of intellectuals across the political spectrum  more than a decade ago. The only reason any serious person engages with D’Souza in 2018 is to perform the intellectual equivalent of telling the loudmouth drunk at the end of the bar to shut up about his crackpot Kennedy assassination theories.

Once you migrate into the ultra-partisan corner, there really is no way out. D’Souza pretty much acknowledged this to The Washington Post during the Washington premiere of “Death of a Nation,” saying, “I would love to reach the middle-of-the-road guy, the guy on the fence. But I also am realistic enough to recognize that it’s going to be predominantly Republicans and conservatives who come to the film.”

D’Souza has morphed from an intellectual into an entrepreneur. He has had some success with his right-wing propaganda films.

Polarization put cracks in that confidence. And once people no longer believed the other side would observe the norm, the norm collapsed remarkably quickly.

here’s the problem: The breakdown of the norms that have traditionally induced restraint in the judicial-confirmation process will not end with the creation of polarized judicial nominations and confirmations. It will run deeper. A highly polarized Senate in interaction with a winner-take-all presidency picking judges on the basis of raw power alone and creating party factions on every court in the country is a contagion that will spread.

Already, in response to the retirement of Kennedy and the nomination of Kavanaugh, some Democrats have begun talking about court packing. And why not? There’s no magic to the number nine

Why not break up courts that routinely do things that political majorities don’t like?

Even the Supreme Court is not immune from a much more activist Congress. We tend to think of the Supreme Court’s jurisdiction as vast, but it’s only vast because Congress makes it so.

If Congress doesn’t want the Supreme Court to hear abortion cases, it could strip it of appellate jurisdiction over them—or at least, it could try.

In a world of polarized partisan control over the gateways to courts and thus partisan factions on the courts themselves, I can see no reason why these things won’t eventually happen. And I won’t even be able to make a principled argument that they shouldn’t happen.

Charlemagne regarded himself as a lawgiver in the style of Moses or the ancient Jewish king Josiah. 

the caliphs relinquished legislative authority beginning in the 830s when a hard-nosed mullah named Ibn Hanbal argued that such powers belonged exclusively to the religious scholars.  Unable to make law in their own right, caliphs found themselves reduced to the role of enforcers of law that others formulated, interpreted, and adjudicated.  Muhammad’s successors were marginalized by their own society. 

while Kennedy, a professor at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London and the author of more than a dozen books about Muslim history, tells us what happened, he has much less to say about why.

this hardly describes the outrage of Muslim troops at irreligious upstarts whom they said had hijacked a divinely-sanctioned movement for their own purposes.

Donald Trump tells the opposite myth — about how those meritocrats are actually clueless idiots and full of drivel, and how virtue, wisdom and toughness is found in the regular people whom those folks look down upon.

For years, the meritocratic establishments in both parties told an implicit myth. The heroes of this myth were educated, morally enlightened global citizens who went to competitive colleges, got invited to things like the Clinton Global Initiative, and who have the brainpower to run society and who might just be a little better than other people, by virtue of their achievements.

When politics is used as a cure for spiritual and social loneliness, it’s harder to win people over with policy or philosophical arguments. Everything is shaped on a deeper level, through the parables, fables and myths that our most fundamental groups use to define themselves.

Trump’s supporters follow him because he gets his facts wrong, but he gets his myths right. He tells the morality tale that works for them.

people on the left and on the right who try to use politics to find their moral meaning are turning politics into an idol. Idolatry is what happens when people give ultimate allegiance to something that should be serving only an intermediate purpose, whether it is money, technology, alcohol, success or politics.

. In the memorable phrase of the psychiatrist Jeffrey Satinover, idols ask for more and more, while giving less and less, until eventually they demand everything and give nothing.”

Politics these days makes categorical demands on people. It demands that they remain in a state of febrile excitement caused by this or that scandal or hatred of the moment. But it doesn’t actually transform life or even fill the hole left by the lack of other attachments.

If politics is going to get better we need better myths, unifying ones that are built on social equality. But we also need to put politics in its place. The excessive dependence on politics has to be displaced by the expulsive power of more important dependencies, whether family, friendship, neighborhood, community, faith or basic life creed.

Finally, judges might need to frustrate not only the wishes of the powerful (including those who pick judges and those who may promote them) but also the yearnings of the powerless, who might have equity and justice, but not law, on their side.

That almost quarter millennium of law represents the collective wisdom of thousands of trial and appellate judges, supervised over the centuries by 114 Supreme Court justices. A judge’s job is to apply that precedent to new facts—and explain convincingly why a given result flows from it, or why courts should in this case break with it.

Men and women, for the APA, are not intrinsically or naturally different: “When researchers strip away stereotypes and expectations, there isn’t much difference in the basic behaviors of men and women.” As you keep reading, you begin to realize just how saturated psychology has now become with critical gender theory, and its profound rejection of anything we might call “nature.”

Because biology has no influence on sex and gender at all, and testosterone is thereby irrelevant in understanding the psychological nature of men (it is never mentioned in the report), everything is a social construct, and social constructs — a function of patriarchy and white supremacy — can be changed. “If we can change men,” one psychologist tellingly admits, “we can change the world.” If this sounds more like a political project than a guide to therapy, you’re not wrong

What is TMI? The definition varies throughout the document

Here’s one such definition: “anti-femininity, achievement, eschewal of the appearance of weakness, and adventure, risk, and violence.” Just weigh that list for a minute — and how expansive it is. Men are exhibiting a dangerous ideology when they seek to “achieve” things, when they risk their lives or fortunes, when they explore unfamiliar territory — and these character traits are interchangeable with violence

As you read the guidelines, you realize that the APA believes that psychologists should be informing men that what they might think is their nature is actually just a set of social constructs that hurt them, murders thousands, and deeply wounds the society as a whole.

There are indeed issues that men today need a help with, and emotional repression is definitely part of it. Aspects of maleness — aggression without virtue, glorification of violence, difficulties with communication and collaboration — are worth understanding better if men are to grapple with an economic and social environment where they are increasingly being left behind.

When you think of the last two Democratic presidents, Bill and Barack, you see the same thing: They both have charisma and, yes, likability, that they deployed to get elected and reelected. That’s how Kennedy beat Nixon; it’s how Reagan defeated Carter. And this is not a gendered thing

When I think back to the modern Democrats who lost, they all have something in common. They regard their unlikability as a kind of achievement, proof that they can win on substance alone, that the media is obsessed with trivia, and that most people are dumb and easily bamboozled.