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“Twice a month, Democrats should force Republicans to cast an awful vote: either offend mainstream supporters or risk a primary challenge from the right.” Just as Senator Mitch McConnell made defeating President Obama his main political objective, Democrats seem likely to make winning back the House their primary political objective. Experts are divided on how plausible this is, but the G.O.P. is unpopular and the opportunity is there.

Many countries and a handful of American cities have more or less done away with this supposed convenience item, by discouraging its use through plastic-bag taxes at checkout counters or outright bans. Walk down the streets of Dublin or Seattle or San Francisco and there is barely a bag in sight. Life continues.

But in much of America we seem more addicted than ever. On a recent shopping trip to Target in Chicago for some dorm supplies while visiting my son, I emerged with what seemed to be more bags than socks or rolls of toilet paper (only a slight exaggeration). At my local supermarket, plastic bags are applied layer upon layer around purchases, like Russian nesting dolls.

“Plastic shopping bags are an enormous problem for New York City,” said Ron Gonen, the deputy commissioner of sanitation for recycling and waste reduction, noting that the city pays $10 million annually to send 100,000 tons of plastic bags that are tossed in the general trash to landfills

When you do it once, it’s just a victory. When you do it twice, it’s a realignment.The coalition that Barack Obama put together to win the presidency handily in 2008 looked a lot like the emerging Democratic majority that optimistic liberals had been discerning on the political horizon since the 1990s. It was the late George McGovern’s losing coalition from 1972 finally come of age: Young voters, the unmarried, African-Americans, Hispanics, the liberal professional class – and then more than enough of the party’s old blue collar base to hold the Rust Belt for the Democrats.But 2008 was also a unique political moment, when George W. Bush’s immense unpopularity was compounded by a financial collapse, and when the possibility of electing the country’s first black president fired the imagination of the nation (and the nation’s press corps). So it was still possible to regard the Obama majority of ’08 as more flukish than transformative – or at the very least, to see it as a fragile thing, easily shattered by poor choices and adverse developments.

the lesson of the election is that the Obama coalition was truly vulnerable only to a Republican Party that took Obama seriously as an opponent – that understood how his majority had been built, why voters had joined it and why the conservative majority of the Reagan and Bush eras had unraveled.Such understanding eluded the Republicans this year.

In part, that failure can be blamed on their standard-bearer, Mitt Romney, who mostly ran as a kind of vanilla Republican instead of showing the imagination necessary to reinvent his party for a new era.

What kind of president would Mitt Romney be?

I'll draw on the work of Yale political scientist Stephen Skowronek, who has argued that presidents' fortunes depend on how they establish their political legitimacy in the particular circumstances under which which they assume power.

Our current political regime emerged in the wake of Ronald Reagan's election in 1980, and it has continued even through the Democratic presidencies of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. It is politically conservative and skeptical of government, at least in contrast to the New Deal/civil-rights regime that preceded it. And the Republicans have been the dominant party. Skowronek's key insight is that a president's ability to establish his political legitimacy depends on where he sits in "political time": Is he allied with the dominant regime or opposed to it, and is the regime itself powerful or in decline?

If the rise of Trump has no obvious precedent, neither does an election like this. Clinton, whose buoyant favorable ratings in the State Department convinced some Democrats that she could

“In the history of polling, we’ve basically never had a candidate viewed negatively by half of the electorate,” wrote Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) in a widely shared note that asked someone, anyone, to mount a third-party run.

“Everybody likes her,” said Pamela Hatwood, 51, a nurse on disability leave who was fanning herself with an extra Clinton sign in a sweltering gym in Indianapolis last week

There is a law that governs the relations between the Jews and the rest of the world.

That law was articulated in one form at the time of the trial of Adolf Eichmann, when the great Jewish thinker Gershom Scholem faulted Hannah Arendt for falling short of “ahavat Israel” — for showing insufficient “love of the Jewish people.”

This love is precisely what is required of an American president in dealings affecting Israel.

Together we have over 50 years of experience working on and watching the American-Israeli relationship, and what concerns us most is the fraying of shared values that set it apart from other bilateral bonds. Without them, interests alone won’t be enough to maintain its special character. If the administration isn’t careful, it will hasten the unraveling.

truth be told, the two countries are an awkward strategic fit. America is Israel’s ultimate security guarantor, but Israel can’t come close to reciprocating. Israelis have their hands full at home, and the Israeli military would not be welcome in places America might be at war.

In the past, the weakening of the strategic pillar has been made up for by the strength of the values pillar. But Mr. Trump inherits a relationship with Israel at a critical juncture, in which both pillars are weakening at the same time.

The outlines of a meaningful blueprint for resisting Trump are now taking shape.

This applies both to the battle against Trump’s authoritarian impulses and serial shredding of our democratic norms, and to the battle against the various ways in which Trump will work with Republicans to advance a more conventional GOP agenda.

1) Have (guarded) faith in our system.

The White House recently sought to enlist the Departments of Homeland Security and Justice to build a case for its controversial and unpopular immigration ban, CNN reported on Thursday. Among intelligence professionals, the request to produce analysis that supports a favored policy—vice producing analysis, and allowing it to inform policy—is called politicization

An internal CIA post-mortem concluded that the CIA’s assessments of the Iraqi WMD program were a case of an effective denial-and-deception program that fed prevailing assumptions.

At the Central Intelligence Agency, where I served as director of strategy in the Directorate of Analysis, the subject of politicization is introduced to analysts almost as soon as they enter into service. There is good reason for this: Politicization is not an academic issue.

a market research firm, looked at online searches for flights into America, comparing the final weeks of the Obama administration with the first weeks of Mr Trump’s presidency. It found that these searches had declined by 17%.

The overwhelming majority of countries studied showed a drop in interest. The most notable exception was Russia

it is “hard to see any other short-term significant events that could be related,” other than Mr Trump’s assumption of the presidency and his travel ban.

an ideal climate policy would reduce carbon emissions, limit regulatory intrusion, promote economic growth, help working-class Americans and prove durable when the political winds change.

We have laid out such a plan in a paper to be released Wednesday by the Climate Leadership Council.

Our co-authors include James A. Baker III, Treasury secretary for President Ronald Reagan and secretary of state for President George H. W. Bush; Henry M. Paulson Jr., Treasury secretary for President George W. Bush; George P. Shultz, Treasury secretary for President Richard Nixon and secretary of state for Mr. Reagan; Thomas Stephenson, a partner at Sequoia Capital, a venture-capital firm; and Rob Walton, who recently completed 23 years as chairman of Walmart.

According to Friedman, the big challenge we face in the Arab and Islamic world is "the Narrative" -- his patronizing term for Muslim views about America's supposedly negative role in the region. If Muslims weren't so irrational, he thinks, they would recognize that "U.S. foreign policy has been largely dedicated to rescuing Muslims or trying to help free them from tyranny."

one of the other participants (a prominent English journalist) put it quite simply. "If the United States wants to improve its image in the Islamic world," he said, "it should stop killing Muslims."

How many Muslims has the United States killed in the past thirty years, and how many Americans have been killed by Muslims? Coming up with a precise answer to this question is probably impossible, but it is also not necessary, because the rough numbers are so clearly lopsided.

nearly half of the respondents now have less favorable opinion of Facebook than they used to simply because the IPO has been such a disappointment. Even thought the declining share price and frustrating technical troubles had zero affect on most Americans (or even the average investor) simply giving off the impression of a bumbling, unpopular company can change the customer's perception of it

Part of the reason the stock is struggling is because the public offering has exposed some of the cracks in the armor of Facebook's business model. Ads are awkward and under-performing and revenue is not growing at the rate it once was, particularly when matched against the site gigantic user base. (The site makes a little over a dollar per user, each quarter.) That makes consumers less interested in the site, which depresses the ad market even more, which drives down share prices, which turns off consumers... and so on. The stock opens on Tuesday at $26.90, still well below its IPO price of $38. 

They describe a paradoxical leader who shunned the legislative deal-making required to close the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba, but approves lethal action without hand-wringing. While he was adamant about narrowing the fight and improving relations with the Muslim world, he has followed the metastasizing enemy into new and dangerous lands.

When he applies his lawyering skills to counterterrorism, it is usually to enable, not constrain, his ferocious campaign against Al Qaeda — even when it comes to killing an American cleric in Yemen, a decision that Mr. Obama told colleagues was “an easy one.”

A few sharp-eyed observers inside and outside the government understood what the public did not. Without showing his hand, Mr. Obama had preserved three major policies — rendition, military commissions and indefinite detention — that have been targets of human rights groups since the 2001 terrorist attacks.

If President Bashar al-Assad of Syria fails to comply with the agreement, the issue will be referred to the United Nations Security Council. Mr. Kerry said that any violations would then be taken up under Chapter 7 of the United Nations Charter, which authorizes punitive action. But Mr. Lavrov made clear that Russia, which wields a veto in the Security Council, had not withdrawn its objections to the use of force.

A significant sign of movement came Friday when the Obama administration effectively took force off the table in discussions over the shape of a Security Council resolution governing any deal with Syria

Mr. Lavrov said that he had not spoken with Syrian officials while he was negotiating in Geneva. Obama administration officials have argued that the Russia’s role was essential since it has been a major backer of the Assad government.

Republicans “turn from denouncing the health-care law for its lack of high-deductible insurance to denouncing the health-care law for its high-deductible insurance”:

The real difference between left and right now is the “other stuff” Obamacare does to the insurance market. And what’s that other stuff? It’s “guaranteed issue” and “community rating”—the requirements that insurers sell to anybody, regardless of pre-existing condition, with varying rates or benefits. It’s the creation of a minimum standard for coverage, so that all plans must cover at least 60 percent of the typical person’s medical bills and include a set of “essential health benefits” from hospitalization to mental health to rehabilitative services to maternity care. It’s the availability of generous tax credits, available to people with incomes as high as four times the poverty line and worth thousands of dollars a year in some cases. And it’s the individual mandate—the requirement that people pay a fine if they decline to get coverage when it is both available and affordable.

One option was for Republicans to build as many of their ideas into the Affordable Care Act and force Democrats to take partial responsibility for these hideously unpopular, but fairly reasonable, ideas. They didn’t do that. Then Democrats picked some of the ideas up anyway. So Republicans again had a chance to focus their fire on the parts of the law they hated — like the Medicaid expansion — in the hopes of moving the health-care system in the direction they prefer. Instead, they’re aiming at the least popular policies in the law — which just so happen to also be the exactly policies that they support.

President François Hollande of France announced the formation of a new government on Monday, after broad losses by his Socialist Party in recent nationwide city elections that were widely seen as a rebuke to the deeply unpopular president.

Mr. Hollande replaced Mr. Ayrault with Manuel Valls, currently the interior minister, who has made a name for himself as a stern proponent of law and order in a political party that is sometimes accused of leniency or naïveté.

“The message you’ve sent me, I’ve received it personally,” Mr. Hollande said in a televised address. He promised a “combat government” that would be charged with “giving strength back to the economy,” and announced reductions in corporate and payroll taxes.

Two Lithuanian teenagers facing the prospect of conscription into the army – to resume in the Baltic nation from September – were asked for their views on national service and the military.

The callup – to run for five years from September – will enlist young men from 19 to 27 to serve nine months each. When it was announced, the Lithuanian president said the measure was necessary because of Russia’s “growing aggression” in Ukraine.

“To have a different opinion about conscription and masculinity is absolutely unpopular. We wanted to say that there is nothing wrong with tears and expressing emotions.”