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There is no spin, no deflection, no alternative theory of the case that can get around the central fact that President Trump reportedly attempted to use his office for his own gain, and that he put the foreign policy and the national security of the United States at risk while doing so

He ignored his duty as the commander in chief by intentionally trying to place an American citizen in jeopardy with a foreign government. He abandoned his obligations to the Constitution by elevating his own interests over the national interest. By comparison, Watergate was a complicated judgment call.

The Democratic candidates should now unite around a call for an impeachment investigation, not for Biden’s sake, but to protect the sanctity of our elections from a predatory president who has made it clear he will stop at nothing to stay in the White House.

if this kind of dangerous, unhinged hijacking of the powers of the presidency is not enough for either the citizens or their elected leaders to demand Trump’s removal, then we no longer have an accountable executive branch, and we might as well just admit that we have chosen to elect a monarch and be done with the illusion of constitutional order in the United States.

. I am disturbed that 20 percent of any sample would justify violence as a legitimate response to an offensive speaker. But I have seen enough surveys to know that you can get 20 percent of a sample to agree with pretty much anything.

Almost all of these survey results are in agreement in two findings: Americans are still more dedicate to protecting free speech than other countries; College-educated citizens are far more likely to defend freedom of speech than less-educated citizens.

let me be candid: Just as I think everyone was too hasty in trumpeting this latest survey, I do not want everyone coming to the opposite conclusion because of this column. Villasenor’s findings warrant some follow-up polling. If his results are substantiated in more rigorous follow-up research, I will be greatly concerned.

what concerns me far more right now is the eagerness with which columnists seized on these findings as vindicating their preconceived belief that today’s college students are just the worst. One of the common laments of modern pundits is that today’s college kids are snowflakes who rely on feelings more than logic to jump to conclusions. But it is the commentators who are leveling critiques against today’s college students by relying on arguments as well organized as a Berkeley free speech week. They are the ones who failed to look more closely at a result that they so badly wanted to be true.

reactions to Gianforte’s assault, instead of reflecting moral principles, quickly split along partisan lines, with Democrats outraged and many Republicans rationalizing the assault.

In a Newseum poll, 74 percent of respondents did not think that “fake news” should be protected by freedom of the press—a grave misunderstanding of how a free press operates. Four in 10 Millennials support censorship of offensive speech.

The problem is that his attacks on the press threaten to undermine public confidence in its work, and its ability to gather and convey information on an independent basis. In a democracy, the press is the means by which ordinary citizens gain the information necessary to make informed decisions and to judge their elected representatives

There’s no way to temper free speech for the media without tempering free speech for the rest of the population.

What matters is convincing the public that the press is worth tolerating, because it’s an essential guarantor of the public’s own freedoms.

Extensive survey data show that Republicans are much more right-leaning than they were twenty years ago, Democrats much more left-leaning, and both sides much more likely to see the other as a mortal threat to the nation’s welfare.

The polarization is personal: Fully 50 percent of Republicans would not want their child to marry a Democrat, and nearly a third of Democrats return the sentiment. Interparty marriage has taken the place of interracial marriage as a family taboo.

Finally the polarization is electronic and digital, as Americans increasingly inhabit the filter bubbles of news and social media that correspond to their ideological affinities. We no longer just have our own opinions. We also have our separate “facts,” often the result of what different media outlets consider newsworthy

the more we do it, the worse we’re at it. Our disagreements may frequently hoarsen our voices, but they rarely sharpen our thinking, much less change our minds.

“The Closing of the American Mind.” Advertisement Continue reading the main story

Most importantly, they are never based on a misunderstanding. On the contrary, the disagreements arise from perfect comprehension; from having chewed over the ideas of your intellectual opponent so thoroughly that you can properly spit them out.

What was it that one learned through a great books curriculum?

As I think about it, I’m not sure we were taught anything at all. What we did was read books that raised serious questions about the human condition, and which invited us to attempt to ask serious questions of our own. Education, in this sense, wasn’t a “teaching” with any fixed lesson. It was an exercise in interrogation.

To listen and understand; to question and disagree; to treat no proposition as sacred and no objection as impious; to be willing to entertain unpopular ideas and cultivate the habits of an open mind — this is what I was encouraged to do by my teachers at the University of Chicago.

It’s what used to be called a liberal education.

The University of Chicago showed us something else: that every great idea is really just a spectacular disagreement with some other great idea.

These quarrels are never personal. Nor are they particularly political, at least in the ordinary sense of politics. Sometimes they take place over the distance of decades, even centuries.

I got the gist — and the gist was that I’d better enroll in the University of Chicago and read the great books. That is what I did.

Since the 1960s it had been the vogue in American universities to treat the so-called “Dead White European Males” of the Western canon as agents of social and political oppression. Allan Bloom insisted that, to the contrary, they were the best possible instruments of spiritual liberation.

In other words, to disagree well you must first understand well. You have to read deeply, listen carefully, watch closely. You need to grant your adversary moral respect; give him the intellectual benefit of doubt; have sympathy for his motives and participate empathically with his line of reasoning. And you need to allow for the possibility that you might yet be persuaded of what he has to say.

He also insisted that to sustain liberal democracy you needed liberally educated people.

According to a new survey from the Brookings Institution, a plurality of college students today — fully 44 percent — do not believe the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution protects so-called “hate speech,” when of course it absolutely does.

Journalism is not just any other business, like trucking or food services. Nations can have lousy food and exemplary government, as Great Britain demonstrated for most of the last century. They can also have great food and lousy government, as France has always demonstrated.

Then we get to college, where the dominant mode of politics is identity politics, and in which the primary test of an argument isn’t the quality of the thinking but the cultural, racial, or sexual standing of the person making it.

In recent years, identity politics have become the moated castles from which we safeguard our feelings from hurt and our opinions from challenge. It is our “safe space.” But it is a safe space of a uniquely pernicious kind — a safe space from thought, rather than a safe space for thought, to borrow a line I recently heard from Salman Rushdie.

Another consequence of identity politics is that it has made the distance between making an argument and causing offense terrifyingly short. Any argument that can be cast as insensitive or offensive to a given group of people isn’t treated as being merely wrong. Instead it is seen as immoral, and therefore unworthy of discussion or rebuttal.

The result is that the disagreements we need to have — and to have vigorously — are banished from the public square before they’re settled.

One final point about identity politics: It’s a game at which two can play.

One of the more dismaying features of last year’s election was the extent to which “white working class” became a catchall identity for people whose travails we were supposed to pity but whose habits or beliefs we were not supposed to criticize. The result was to give the Trump base a moral pass it did little to earn.

So here’s where we stand: Intelligent disagreement is the lifeblood of any thriving society. Yet we in the United States are raising a younger generation who have never been taught either the how or the why of disagreement, and who seem to think that free speech is a one-way right: Namely, their right to disinvite, shout down or abuse anyone they dislike, lest they run the risk of listening to that person — or even allowing someone else to listen. The results are evident in the parlous state of our universities, and the frayed edges of our democracies.

Yes, we disagree constantly. But what makes our disagreements so toxic is that we refuse to make eye contact with our opponents, or try to see things as they might, or find some middle ground.

Instead, we fight each other from the safe distance of our separate islands of ideology and identity and listen intently to echoes of ourselves

The crucial prerequisite of intelligent disagreement — namely: shut up; listen up; pause and reconsider; and only then speak — is absent.

Perhaps the reason for this is that we have few obvious models for disagreeing well, and those we do have — such as the Intelligence Squared debates in New York and London or Fareed Zakaria’s show on CNN — cater to a sliver of elite tastes, like classical music.

Fox News and other partisan networks have demonstrated that the quickest route to huge profitability is to serve up a steady diet of high-carb, low-protein populist pap. Reasoned disagreement of the kind that could serve democracy well fails the market test

I do think there’s such a thing as private ownership in the public interest, and of fiduciary duties not only to shareholders but also to citizens

What’s clear is that the mis-education begins early. I was raised on the old-fashioned view that sticks and stones could break my bones but words would never hurt me. But today there’s a belief that since words can cause stress, and stress can have physiological effects, stressful words are tantamount to a form of violence. This is the age of protected feelings purchased at the cost of permanent infantilization.

But no country can have good government, or a healthy public square, without high-quality journalism — journalism that can distinguish a fact from a belief and again from an opinion; that understands that the purpose of opinion isn’t to depart from facts but to use them as a bridge to a larger idea called “truth”; and that appreciates that truth is a large enough destination that, like Manhattan, it can be reached by many bridges of radically different designs.

In other words, journalism that is grounded in facts while abounding in disagreements.

that requires proprietors and publishers who understand that their role ought not to be to push a party line, or be a slave to Google hits and Facebook ads, or provide a titillating kind of news entertainment, or help out a president or prime minister who they favor or who’s in trouble.

Their role is to clarify the terms of debate by championing aggressive and objective news reporting, and improve the quality of debate with commentary that opens minds and challenges assumptions rather than merely confirming them.

This is journalism in defense of liberalism

"As a result of the offensive content and opinions shared by hatWRKS in Nashville, Stetson and our distribution partners will cease the sale of all Stetson products," the company said on Twitter.

"We're here to protest hate and ignorance with regard to what she's doing in selling yellow stars that are a symbol of the greatest atrocity the world has ever seen, which is the loss of 6 million human beings," Nashville resident Ron Rivlin told WSMV on Saturday outside the hat store.

"I think I understand what she was trying to do, but the way she did it was just, she doesn't understand how offensive it is to the Jewish community and to everybody," Rivlin said.

"There's no way you could reasonably associate choosing to go without vaccinations for Covid ... and assuming that you're in the same spot as a Jewish person in Nazi Germany," Abramson said.

And I think we’ve seen that there is an expectation in this country of who is supposed to be policed and who is not supposed to be policed, that you’re supposed to go police those people over there, but if you order me to wear a mask, well, that’s just too much here. And we see time and time again that most killings by police start with traffic stops, mental health checks, domestic disturbances, low level offenses. We’ve seen with the cases of Philando Castile and others that traffic stops can be deadly. Randy, where does this come from? Why is the focus on low level offenses and not solving murders? I think a lot of people think that the police are focused on catching criminals, when that’s not really what they do.

That’s how we got Ferguson, right? That’s how we ended up with the death of Michael Brown. So what all of this led me to is when you follow the money, just over the past five years, in the major 20 metropolitan areas in the United States, taxpayers have paid out over $2 billion with a B in settlements for police misconduct. Oftentimes, people are paying for their own brutality, so outside of police budgets, which have swelled over the past three decades. I mean, you have everything from over 40 percent in Oakland to well over 35 percent in cities like Chicago and Minneapolis, that these civilian payouts don’t even come from the police budget. And what it led me to is that if we had police department insurance policies, if we had more police officer malpractice individual liability insurance, we would see not only a shift in financial culpability, but also a shift in accountability.

And the roots are embedded in white supremacy ideology that oftentimes we’re unwilling to admit. The other thing, good apples can’t simply override bad apples. Yes, overwhelmingly, officers get into it because they want to protect and serve. But we just heard from Randy what happens in that process. Good apples become poisoned. And they also can at times become rotten themselves. Because part of what happens is that they get swallowed up in the system. And due to qualified immunity, they are completely alleviated from any sort of financial culpability. And I think insurances can be a huge way to increase accountability.

So part of what we have to think through is better solutions. And what the research I’ve conducted suggests is that if we reallocate some of those calls for service, not only are there better people in the social service sector, such as mental health specialists or Department of Transportation better equipped to handle those things, but also police officers can then focus on the more violent crimes and increasing that clearance rate.

Yeah. I mean, I think lovingly, I came to this position because we’ve been putting platinum bandaids and piecemeal reforms into place. And it hasn’t made policing any better for Black people or poor people or immigrant people, right? When we talk about defunding the police, we’re not just talking about the sheriff in your county or the P.D. in your inner city neighborhood. We’re talking about the state police. We’re talking about Capitol police who we literally watched hand-walk insurrectionists out of the Capitol on January 6. We’re talking about immigrant communities that are impacted by I.C.E., right? We’re talking about Customs and Border Patrol.

How do we keep people safe if we defund the police? But I bet if I asked you, Jane or Rashawn or Randy, to close your eyes and tell me a time where you felt safe, what did it feel like, you wouldn’t tell me that there was a cop there. And if it was, it would probably be because that cop might have been your dad or your mom or your aunt or your uncle, right? Not because they were in their uniform in a cop car policing somebody else. So quite frankly, I think the only solution to policing in this country is abolition. And how do we get there through divestment and investment is really super clear.

Do I think that we can reform our way out of the crisis of policing in this country? I do not. And I don’t because I’ve seen so many times us try. I’ve seen us say that if we just trained them more, it would be different. I’ve seen us say, if we just banned no-knock warrants, it would be different. I’ve seen us say, if we just got body cams on these cops, which is more and more and more money going to policing, but what we’ve seen is that that hasn’t distracted or detracted them because they can continue to use reasonable force as their get out of jail and accountability-free card. So I just don’t believe that the data shows that reforming our way out of policing is keeping Black people free and alive.

But you know what? They did. But you know what also survived those historical periods? Law enforcement. You know why? Because law enforcement is the gatekeeper of legalized state sanctioned violence. Law enforcement abolition probably requires a revolution we haven’t seen before. Part of what abolitionists also want — because I think there are two main camps. There are some that are like, law enforcement shouldn’t exist. Prisons shouldn’t exist. There are others who are like, look, we need to reimagine it. Like those rotten trees, we need to cut it down. When you deal with a rotten tree or a rotten plant, simply cutting it down doesn’t make it go away. The roots come back, right? And oftentimes, the plant comes back stronger. And interestingly, it comes back in a different form, like it’s wrapped in a different package. And so, but there are some people who say, how about we address abolition from the standpoint of abolishing police departments as they currently stand and reimagining and rebuilding public safety in a way that’s different? See, even the terminology we use is really important — policing, law enforcement, public safety. Part of reimagining law enforcement is reimagining the terms we use for what safety means. And how I think about it is, who has the right to truly express their First Amendment right and be verbally and/or nonviolently expressive? It’s not illegal to be combative.

And one of my colleagues was reading a clip. And he was saying, yeah, we need more police surveillance. We need to make sure that we watch what they’re doing. We need more training. This clip was from the 1980s, almost around the same time where Ash was talking about she was born.

The United States taxpayer is essentially asked to foot this impossible and never-ending bill to maintain this failed system of policing, right? I want to pull a little bit on Randy’s last point and what Dr. Ray raised about guns as well. It’s like even Forbes, I think, last week mentioned that more than one mass shooting per day has occurred in 2021. And so if cops keep me safe from gun violence, this stat wouldn’t be real, right? So if police officers were keeping Black people safe from gun violence, the world will be a very different place. And I doubt we would be having this conversation in the first place. We’ve got to actually be innovative beyond the request for support for more money for more trainings, for more technology. And so, quite frankly, when we think about what’s happening on the federal level legislatively right now with the Justice and Policing Act, I think the movement for Black — well, not I think — I know the movement for Black Lives unequivocally doesn’t support it. Because, again, it’s an attempt at 1990 solutions to a 2021 problem

If you want to learn more about police reform, I recommend reading the text of the George Floyd Justice and Policing Act of 2021. I also recommend The New York Times Magazine piece that features a roundtable of experts and organizers. It’s called, “The message is clear: policing in America is broken and must change.

that was before House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy declined to punish the execrable Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, other than a statement condemning her views. The QAnon follower's embrace of baseless conspiracy theories, along with violent, racist, Islamophobic and anti-Semitic statements are repulsive not just to many Americans, but to decent people around the world.

McCarthy presided over a meeting weighing the fate of Greene and of Rep. Liz Cheney, who committed the grave sin of condemning former President Donald Trump for inciting a mob to attack the Capitol in an assault on American democracy so stunning that even McCarthy briefly found his spine and criticized Trump.

Cheney survived a vote to remove her from leadership by a vote of 145- 61. And Greene, after apologizing to her colleagues in the closed-door party meeting Wednesday night, was not penalized, but met with a standing ovation.

Greene offered what largely amounted to a non-apology, expressing regret for some of her past comments. Hours later, in a dramatic Congressional session, 219 House Democrats, along with 11 Republicans, did what McCarthy should have and stripped Greene of her committee assignments.

It's the party of the twice impeached Trump, a man who Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham described in 2015 as "a race-baiting, xenophobic religious bigot," who "doesn't represent my party."

After the closed-door meeting on Wednesday, McCarthy justified his inaction on Greene by saying, "This Republican Party's a very big tent, everyone's invited in."

But the tent is becoming increasingly comfortable for racists, anti-Semites, conspiracy theorists and reality deniers.

By embracing Greene, Republicans are moving the Overton window, the range of views that are considered politically acceptable. Unfortunately, that has an impact on the entire country, however much the Democrats try to correct for the moral failings of Republicans.

Graham, as we know, did a 180 on Trump. He, too, found integrity too politically risky, and debased himself by embracing Trump.

On Wednesday, McCarthy defended Greene and said, "I think it would be helpful if you could hear exactly what she told all of us -- denouncing Q-on, I don't know if I say it right," McCarthy disingenuously claimed, "I don't even know what it is.

Just two years ago, Republicans stripped Rep. Steve King from all committee assignments. King, who had made countless racist statements, had asked in an interview with the New York Times, "White nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization -- how did that language become offensive."

"That is not the party of Lincoln," he declared, "and it's definitely not American."

The party has changed.

Like many elected Republicans, Greene rejected the incontrovertible fact that President Joe Biden won the election. But she goes much further. She repeatedly showed support on social media for assassinating prominent Democrats, shared an image of herself holding a gun alongside other congresswomen with a caption that mentioned going "on the offense against these socialists" and claimed the 2018 California wildfires were deliberately set by a Jewish financier using a space laser.

When Greene was still a candidate running for Congress, the Republican Party initially distanced itself from her.

Rep. Steve Scalise, the House Republicans' number two, went even further, calling her statements "disgusting," and added they "don't reflect the values of equality and decency that make our country great."

But then Trump threw his arms around his fervent admirer, calling her "a real WINNER," and a "future Republican star."

It was the tolerance of Trump's rhetoric -- which was previously considered beyond the pale -- that paved the road to Greene's election and the attack on the Capitol last month.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, of all people, seems to be an outlier among Republican leadership in condemning Greene. "Loony lies and conspiracy theories are a cancer for the Republican Party and our country. Somebody who's suggested that perhaps no airplane hit the Pentagon on 9/11, that horrifying school shootings were pre-staged, and that the Clintons crashed JFK Jr.'s airplane is not living in reality."

The GOP welcomed into the fold an extremist, during a time when Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has ordered an urgent examination of extremism in US military ranks; during a time when Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas says the threat of domestic terrorism is "persistent."

The new domestic terrorist threat comes from the extremist fringes that espouse the same ideas that McCarthy seemed to welcome into the GOP's "very big tent."

Extremists and their supporters are winning battles in the Republican civil war, and the entire country is paying a price.

The move caused a good deal of chest thumping among Putin's military: "When the Russian flag appears, combat stops -- neither Turks nor Kurds want to harm us, so fighting stops thanks to our work," a Russian army officer, Safar Safarov, was quoted as saying by Tass state news agency, as the country's military police units began patrolling Manbij.

With Russia's new role as the undisputed lead nation also come grave risks. The situation in northeastern Syria is more than volatile. The Turks have made clear they will not allow a Kurdish military presence near their border. But Ankara's ground force consists largely of Syrian rebel groups, many of them hardline Islamists whom the Kurds fear could unleash a campaign of ethnic cleansing against minorities in this diverse region.

The Kremlin is gravely concerned that Russians who fought with ISIS and other rebels groups could return to their homeland and cause instability there. From the moment Turkey launched its offensive in Northern Syria the Kremlin voiced extreme doubts about Turkey's ability to keep a lid on the thousands of ISIS prisoners and their relatives that the Kurds had been guarding.

"There are areas in northern Syria where ISIS militants are concentrated and until recently, they were guarded by the Kurdish military. The Turkish army entered these areas and the Kurds left... Now [ISIS fighters] can simply run away and I am not sure that the Turkish army can -- and how fast -- get this under control," Putin said last week at The Commonwealth of Independent States forum in Ashgabat.

But despite all the dangers facing Putin's high-stakes Syria gambit the Russian leader still seems to be in a position to possibly prevent the situation from blowing up even more than it already has.

Russia has a devastating track record in the Syrian conflict. Human rights groups have accused Moscow of committing war crimes in its campaign to support Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. The US says Moscow has systematically bombed civilian infrastructure, especially hospitals, and aided Assad in covering up alleged chemical weapons use by the Syrian military. Russian vehemently denies all these allegations.

And when the Kurdish-dominated Syrian Democratic Forces -- which were backed by the US and lost nearly 11,000 fighters in the war against ISIS -- found out they'd been dumped by Trump and left to be invaded by Erdogan's proxy force, they too went straight to the Russians because guess what: Moscow has been working with and talking to the SDF for years as well.

“Well, Mr. President, the challenge that you have is the data you have is wrong,”

“You know what they did and you’re not reporting it,” the president said during the call. “You know, that’s a criminal — that’s a criminal offense. And you know, you can’t let that happen. That’s a big risk to you and to Ryan, your lawyer. That’s a big risk.”

The president, who will be in charge of the Justice Department for the 17 days left in his administration, hinted that Mr. Raffensperger and Ryan Germany, the chief lawyer for secretary of state’s office, could be prosecuted criminally if they did not do his bidding.

Mr. Trump said he hoped Mr. Raffensperger’s office could address his claimed discrepancies before Tuesday’s Senate runoff election in Georgia, one that will decide the balance of power in the Senate.

Vice President-elect Kamala Harris — at a drive-in rally for Georgia’s Democratic Senate candidates in Garden City, Ga. — referred on Sunday to Mr. Trump’s call, saying it was “the voice of desperation — most certainly that.”“And it was a bald, baldfaced, bold abuse of power by the president of the United States,” she added.

Mr. Trump’s accusation that ballots were scanned three times was incorrect.

“You even see it by rally size, frankly,” Mr. Trump said, adding that he wanted to go over some of the numbers. He alleged that 250,000 to 300,000 ballots were “dropped mysteriously into the rolls,” a problem he said occurred in Fulton County.

“Well, Mr. President, the challenge that you have is the data you have is wrong,” he said

During the call, the president offered several false conspiracy theories, including debunked charges that ballots in Fulton County were shredded and that voting machines operated by Dominion Voting Systems were tampered with and replaced.

Then the president suggested that Mr. Raffensperger could be prosecuted criminally.

“You know what they did and you’re not reporting it,” the president said. “You know, that’s a criminal — that’s a criminal offense. And you know, you can’t let that happen. That’s a big risk to you and to Ryan, your lawyer. That’s a big risk.”

Mr. Raffensperger wrote: “Respectfully, President Trump: What you’re saying is not true. The truth will come out.”

House Democrats are still discussing whether a vote to impeach Trump could be Tuesday or Wednesday, per aides.

"We'll take the vote that we should take in the House, and (House Speaker Nancy Pelosi) will make the determination as to when is the best time to get that vote and get the managers appointed and move that legislation over to the Senate," Clyburn told CNN's Jake Tapper on "State of the Union."

"It just so happens that if it didn't go over there for 100 days, it could -- let's give President-elect Biden the 100 days he needs to get his agenda off and running, and maybe we'll send the articles sometime after that," the South Carolina Democrat added.

By impeaching and removing Trump, even at this late stage of his term, the Senate could subsequently vote to disqualify him from ever holding federal office again, taking an extraordinary action against a former president.

The comments from Clyburn come as Democrats grapple with how impeaching Trump for a second time could impact Biden's early days in office, when he is working to get administration appointments approved in the Senate and tackling legislative priorities, like another coronavirus relief package.

Democrats plan to introduce their impeachment resolution, which already has more than 190 co-sponsors, on Monday and sources tell CNN that the party is looking at having votes no sooner than Wednesday but they are still sorting out their plans.

"There's strong support in the Congress for impeaching the President a second time," she said.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell previously made clear in a memo that even if the House moved in the coming days to impeach Trump, the Senate would not return to session before January 19. That would place the start of the trial on January 20 -- the date of Biden's inauguration.

Pelosi said in a interview on CBS' "60 Minutes" set to air Sunday evening that she liked the idea of invoking the 25th Amendment "because it gets rid of him," but explained, "one of the motivations people have for advocating for impeachment" is to prevent Trump from holding office again.

"The train has left the station on impeachment," an official close to Biden told CNN. "Trying to stop it would not only fail, but put Biden on the wrong foot with progressives and most Democrats across the party."

Already, several congressional Republicans have joined Democrats in making clear they want Trump to leave office, though not all agree that impeachment is the right option.

Sen. Pat Toomey told Tapper Sunday that he thinks Trump should resign. The Pennsylvania Republican -- now the second Republican US senator to call for Trump's resignation -- had previously said he thinks Trump "committed impeachable offenses," but that he wasn't sure removing him this close to the end of his term was the right course of action.

Alaska GOP Sen. Lisa Murkowski said Friday that the President should step down from office, telling the Anchorage Daily News of Trump, "I want him out. He has caused enough damage."

Rep. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, meanwhile, has endorsed invoking the 25th Amendment, which would force Trump's removal.

ere is no worse person to help bring Americans together and address racial inequality than Joe Biden

But for the 2018 midterm elections, the command took a far more aggressive posture. In addition to sending the teams to allied countries, it sent warning messages to would-be Russian trolls before the vote, in its first offensive operation against Moscow; it then took at least one of those troll farms offline on Election Day and the days afterward.

After getting close to foreign adversaries’ own networks, Cyber Command can then get inside to identify and potentially neutralize attacks on the United States, according to current and former officials.

But Cyber Command officials said those efforts uncovered malware being used by adversarial hacking teams.

Cyber Command sends teams of experts overseas to work with partner and allied nations to help them find, identify and remove hostile intrusions on their government or military computer networks.

For the allied nations, inviting Cyber Command operatives not only helps improve their network defenses but also demonstrates to adversaries that the United States military is working with them. For the United States, the deployments give their experts an early look at tactics that potential adversaries are honing in their own neighborhoods, techniques that could later be used against Americans.

Similarly, Cyber Command officials said their efforts to try to counter foreign threats would not end with the close of voting on Tuesday; they will continue as votes are counted and the Electoral College prepares to meet in December.

“We are not stopping or thinking about our operations slacking off on Nov. 3,” General Moore said. “Defending the election is now a persistent and ongoing campaign for Cyber Command.”

they have also urged the president not to interrupt Mr. Biden repeatedly

The president has signaled he intends to focus on Mr. Biden’s son Hunter and his business dealings, after an unsubstantiated New York Post report on that subject

. But some advisers fear he will not be able to control himself and will attack the younger Mr. Biden in a way that engenders sympathy for the Biden family, a dynamic that unfolded in the first debate when Mr. Trump mocked Hunter Biden’s history of battling drug addiction.

“The president, in order to have a successful debate, has to go on offense without being offensive,”

Mr. Biden, for his part, is working to protect his advantage by relying on arguments that have defined his pitch for months: that he is the candidate best equipped to lead the nation out of the pandemic and its attendant economic fallout, and that he can restore stability and a measure of civility to the office after Mr. Trump’s turbulent tenure.

In particular, allies expect that he will face questioning on expanding the Supreme Court, a matter he has repeatedly dodged, though he has said that he will clarify his position before Election Day

Last week, Trump advisers tried gently suggesting, as they prepared him for his NBC town hall event with Savannah Guthrie, that he needed to be more controlled and less caustic than in the first debate. Aides claim he has processed that information, though he was combative and refused to disavow a conspiracy theory movement during the first part of that appearance, too.

Mr. O’Donnell, the Republican strategist, suggested that Mr. Trump’s frequent interruptions in the previous debate prevented viewers from absorbing some of Mr. Biden’s shakier responses

The president’s advisers have also gone over with him his third debate against Hillary Clinton in 2016, which they believe was his best of the three he had in that campaign, in part because he was relatively articulate while being specific in discussing policies, despite the moment when Mrs. Clinton called him a “puppet” of Russia and his response was: “No puppet, no puppet. You’re the puppet.”

“He does need to communicate to swing voters that the real stakes in this election are not the past, not even the present, but they are the future, of rebuilding the economy.”

Mr. Biden’s advisers see the race as a referendum on Mr. Trump’s leadership during the pandemic, and they view the debate as another chance to highlight differences with the president as coronavirus cases rise across the country

Mr. Biden is expected to highlight his own plans around health care and reviving the economy in a week when Mr. Trump has sharply criticized Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert. The former vice president’s team has also signaled that it will cast personal attacks as an attempted diversion from the most urgent issues facing the nation. And some close to the Biden campaign have pointed to polls that showed a backlash to Mr. Trump’s first debate performance and his sharp personal attacks.

A number of Biden allies said in interviews that there was nothing wrong with a flash of righteous anger. But they said that the wisest course was to dismiss any personal attacks by pivoting back to voters’ more tangible concerns, something Mr. Biden tried to do in the first debate by noting that many Americans have family members who struggle with addiction.

Senator Kamala Harris, suggested on Wednesday that it was unlikely he would turn to attacks on Mr. Trump’s children

In interviews, former students described Mr. Maynard as anxious, troubled and, at times, inappropriate. One said he often taught his classes during the pandemic via Zoom from a darkened bedroom, revealing details about an ailing father, a lawsuit against his former landlord and his battles with his mental health.

Last year, his life appearing to unravel further, Mr. Maynard lived in his car, according to court documents. As he traversed Northern California, he sent messages to students that included rantings, as well as links to YouTube videos — meandering footage of trees and mountains — in which he ruminated on the state of the world. He also appeared fascinated by arson.

In 2000, the Court declared the Violence Against Women Acts’s civil rights remedy unconstitutional precisely because it dealt with sexual abuse crimes.  Despite the fact that the law allowed private survivors to seek damages, the court ignored the civil nature of the remedy and declared the underlying fact of sexual abuse had to be considered a crime.

For the first time in American history, in 1994, the federal government funded states to change their laws and practices that treated domestic violence and sexual assault as less serious than other offenses. The law included a provision to address state justice system’s routine mishandling of sexual assault cases, putting accountability in the hands of survivors by enabling them to seek redress themselves. The law declared it a federal “civil right” to be free from gender-based violence.

The justices were almost hysterical about the danger: If the federal government could regulate sexual abuse, they said it would “obliterate” the distinction between the federal and state governments.

The decision was supposed to be about federalism, but it led to no legal revolution.  In fact, five years later, the Court decided another case, Gonzales v. Raich, allowing the federal government to regulate an individual’s marjuana possession, even though that too involved “crime,” on the theory that there was a commercial market for marijuana.  Many law professors think Gonzales silently overruled Morrison, giving the federal government the power to regulate all sorts of crime, just not sexual assault.

According to Kofman, publicly available satellite imagery shows that forces from Russia’s 41st Combined Arms Army, normally based in the Siberian city of Novosibirsk, didn’t return to Siberia after the exercises, and instead linked up with other Russian forces near the Ukrainian border.

Officials in the United States and Europe began noticing the movements particularly in recent weeks, after Russia concluded a massive joint military exercise with Belarus known as Zapad 2021 on its western flank in mid-September.

Relations between Moscow and NATO are especially tense.

Putin and other top Russian officials have said the expansion of NATO activities in Ukraine represents a “red line” for Moscow, whereas previously they cited NATO membership for Ukraine as a move they couldn’t abide, Kofman said.

Since 2015, when the front lines of the conflict more or less froze in place, the buildups haven’t led to a mass territory-gaining offensive by Russia or the separatist forces it backs.

Danilov estimated that the number of Russian troops deployed around the Ukrainian border at 80,000 to 90,000, not including the tens of thousands stationed in Crimea.

Putin outlined that view in an article in July, claiming Ukraine was being functionally controlled by Western nations to foment anti-Russian sentiment.

Dmitry Medvedev, former Russian president and now the deputy head of Russia’s security council, called Ukraine a “vassal state” that is “under direct foreign control”

Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko, an ally of Putin, accused the United States of building NATO military bases in Ukraine using training centers as a cover.

U.S. troops have been training Ukrainian forces in western Ukraine for years, an initiative undertaken by Washington and its NATO allies after Russia annexed Crimea in 2014. Ukrainian forces also have participated in joint exercises with the United States and its NATO allies. The United States has provided Ukraine with Javelin antitank weaponry but has not taken any active role in fighting.

Kofman said Russia this year suddenly invested a large amount of money in developing a ready reserve for its military

Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said Russia is “actively spreading fakes about Ukraine allegedly preparing an offensive or other nonsense.

The U.S. Embassy in Kyiv warned Friday that Russia had repeatedly deployed howitzer artillery and drones against Ukrainian forces “in direct violation” of a July 2020 cease-fire agreement.

So the question is: What are the chances that Putin could be deposed and then made to be seen as a “pretender” by his successor? And are there ways in which the West could help this narrative along?

ou can’t assume that just because Putin goes away, the strongman who takes over for him—and in the near term, a new strongman is the only possible successor—will feel as though his position is secure enough to walk away from Ukraine.

Any new leader who seeks to extricate Russia from Putin’s war likely will face tough domestic hurdles

Russia’s current domestic political environment, as characterized by an intense blame game pitting political versus military leadership, would be especially dangerous for Putin’s successor and disincentive any move to abandon Russia’s war aims in Ukraine and seek peace, at least in the short term.

What Freedman describes is a scenario in which it seems likely that if Putin is deposed, the “backstabber” narrative will dominate among the Russian power elite:

There is a cleft both in elite and public opinion in Russia, and it is now becoming visible on television.  Some people think that the war is a holy cause and can be won if heads roll, leadership behaves honorably, and more men and materiel are sent to the front.  Among them are the military bloggers who are actually at the front, and whose voices are becoming more mainstream.  This is a trap for Putin, since he is already sending everything that he can.  Those voices make him look weak.  Other people think that the war was a mistake.  These voices will make him look foolish.  This is just the most basic of a number of contradictory positions that Putin now faces, from an exposed and weakened position.

there’s Timothy Snyder’s analysis:

maybe most controversially, the Biden team added a “foreign direct product rule” that, as The Financial Times noted, “was first used by the administration of Donald Trump against Chinese technology group Huawei” and “in effect bars any U.S. or non-U.S. company from supplying targeted Chinese entities with hardware or software whose supply chain contains American technology.”

This last rule is huge, because the most advanced semiconductors are made by what I call “a complex adaptive coalition” of companies from America to Europe to Asia

The more we push the boundaries of physics and materials science to cram more transistors onto a chip to get more processing power to continue to advance artificial intelligence, the less likely it is that any one company, or country, can excel at all the parts of the design and manufacturing process. You need the whole coalition

The reason Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, known as TSMC, is considered the premier chip manufacturer in the world is that every member of this coalition trusts TSMC with its most intimate trade secrets, which it then melds and leverages for the benefit of the whole.

“We do not make in the U.S. any of the chips we need for artificial intelligence, for our military, for our satellites, for our space programs” — not to mention myriad nonmilitary applications that power our economy. The recent CHIPS Act, she said, was our “offensive initiative” to strengthen our whole innovation ecosystem so more of the most advanced chips will be made in the U.S.

It managed to pilfer a certain amount of chip technology, including 28 nanometer technology from TSMC back in 2017.

Because China is not trusted by the coalition partners not to steal their intellectual property, Beijing is left trying to replicate the world’s all-star manufacturing chip stack on its own with old technologies

China can’t mass produce these chips with precision without ASML’s latest technology — which is now banned from the country.

Raimondo rejects the idea that the new regulations are tantamount to an act of war.

“The U.S. was in an untenable position,” she told me in her office. “Today we are purchasing 100 percent of our advanced logic chips from abroad — 90 percent from TSMC in Taiwan and 10 percent from Samsung in Korea.” (That IS pretty crazy, but it IS true.)

Until recently, China’s premier chip maker, Semiconductor Manufacturing International Company, had been thought to be stuck at mostly this chip level,

Imposing on China the new export controls on advanced chip-making technologies, she said, “was our defensive strategy. China has a strategy of military-civil fusion,” and Beijing has made clear “that it intends to become totally self-sufficient in the most advanced technologies” to dominate both the civilian commercial markets and the 21st century battlefield. “We cannot ignore China’s intentions.”

So, to protect ourselves and our allies — and all the technologies we have invented individually and collectively — she added, “what we did was the next logical step, to prevent China from getting to the next step.” The U.S. and its allies design and manufacture “the most advanced supercomputing chips, and we don’t want them in China’s hands and be used for military purposes.”

Our main focus, concluded Raimondo, “is playing offense — to innovate faster than the Chinese. But at the same time, we are going to meet the increasing threat they are presenting by protecting what we need to. It is important that we de-escalate where we can and do business where we can. We don’t want a conflict. But we have to protect ourselves with eyes wide open.”

China’s state-directed newspaper Global Times editorialized that the ban would only “strengthen China’s will and ability to stand on its own in science and technology.” Bloomberg quoted an unidentified Chinese analyst as saying “there is no possibility of reconciliation.”