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“I will not sign a bill into law that does not lower costs for middle-class families,” she said at last week’s debate.

Responding to the latest evidence published by CNN last week, a UAE official said: "There were no instances when US-made equipment was used without direct UAE oversight. Except for four vehicles that were captured by the enemy." The Saudi government has not responded to CNN's requests for comment on this issue.

Saudi Arabia has led a coalition, in close partnership with the UAE and including various militia groups, to fight the Iranian-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen since 2015. But, in a clear break with its Saudi partners, the UAE said in July that it was reducing its forces in the country, and fighting escalated between separatists and government forces on the ground in August. The UAE has since thrown its support behind the separatist movement.

In June 2019 the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED) reported that the total number of reported fatalities in Yemen is more than 91,000 since 2015.

As Nate Cohn points out, in the past few cycles the polls one year out from the election have been approximately as accurate as those one day before.

the very people I keep hearing are extinct—center-right swing voters. It is on their backs the Biden eeks out a hypothetical victory while Warren and Sanders fall to defeat.

Looking at the 2016 results, Hillary’s defeat was due in large part to four key groups:

(a) Voters who didn’t like either candidate but voted third party (there was a massive jump in this group from 2012-2016);

(b) Voters who didn’t like either candidate but supported Trump overwhelmingly;

(c) Voters who didn’t turn out (who were disproportionately non-white);

(d) The much ballyhooed white working-class Obama-to-Trump voter.

who did the New York Times poll show as supporting Biden against Trump, but not Warren and Sanders? It wasn’t the Obama-to-Trump voters. It was the human scum.

Mr. Biden holds the edge among both registered voters and likely voters, and even among those who cast a ballot in 2016. He has a lead of 55 percent to 22 percent among voters who say they supported minor-party candidates like Gary Johnson and Jill Stein, and among those who say they voted but left the 2016 presidential race blank. It comes on top of a slight shift—just two points in Mr. Biden’s favor—among those who say they voted for either Mrs. Clinton or Mr. Trump.

An analysis of the 205 respondents from the six core battleground states who support Mr. Biden but not Ms. Warren suggests that she might struggle to win many of them over… [They] are relatively well educated and disproportionately reside in precincts that flipped from Mitt Romney in 2012 to Mrs. Clinton four years later. They oppose single-payer health care or free college, and they support the Republicans’ 2017 tax law. They are not natural Democratic voters: 41 percent consider themselves conservative; 20 percent say they’re Republican; 33 percent supported Mr. Trump or Mr. Johnson in 2016.

Conservative. Pro tax-cut. Living in suburban Romney-to-Clinton precincts. These are your classic Never Trumpers—and it certainly is not the voter profile being targeted by either the Democratic primary candidates nor the president.

They can’t stand MSNBC; their attitude toward Russia, Ukraine and impeachment tended toward indifference; and don’t get them started on “The West Wing.”

Ocasio-Cortez credited Sanders for what she described as one of the best Democratic presidential primary fields in a generation and touted his influence on the freshman Democratic congressional class.

"It wasn't until I heard of a man by the name of Bernie Sanders that I began to question and assert and recognize my inherent value as a human being that deserves health care, housing, education and a living wage," she said. 

"The only reason that I had any hope in launching a long-shot campaign for Congress is because Bernie Sanders proved that you can run a grassroots campaign and win in an America where we almost thought it was impossible," Ocasio-Cortez said. 

Ocasio-Cortez told CBS News on Saturday endorsing Sanders was "the most authentic decision to let people know how I feel and where I am," and said it was not based on a political calculation.

The ad, which is now inactive, accuses the 2020 Democratic presidential candidate of "blackmailing" US allies, alleging impropriety while he was vice president and his son Hunter served on the board of a Ukrainian energy company. There is no evidence of wrongdoing by Joe or Hunter Biden. The ad ends with the narrator saying, "Send Quid Pro Joe Biden into retirement."

Warren recently ran a false ad on Facebook deliberately to draw attention to the issue. Facebook then tweeted at Warren that the "FCC doesn't want broadcast companies censoring candidates' speech." It continued, "We agree it's better to let voters -- not companies -- decide."

Under current policy, Facebook exempts ads by politicians from third-party fact-checking -- a loophole, both Biden and Warren allege, that allows Zuckerberg to continue taking money from President Donald Trump's campaign and its supporters despite Trump's ads spreading lies about Biden and his son. While it allows politicians to run ads with false information, its policy does not allow PACs to do so. Facebook does not fact check ads from PACS before they run on the platform.

Should our politicians fail to reform regulations for internet platforms and digital advertising, our political future will be at risk. The 2016 election revealed the tremendous harm to the American democratic process that can result from coordinated misinformation campaigns; 2020 will be far worse if we do nothing to contain the capacity for politicians to lie on social media.

Warren responded to the Trump ad with a cheeky point: In an ad she has circulated over Facebook, she claims that "Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook just endorsed Donald Trump for re-election." Later in the ad, she acknowledges this is a falsehood, and contends that "what [Mark] Zuckerberg has done is given Donald Trump free rein to lie on his platform — and then to pay Facebook gobs of money to push out their lies to American voters."

It is disconcerting to think that by fiat, Facebook can deem a political ad to be dishonest because it contains fake buttons (which can deceive the viewer into clicking on a survey button when in fact there is no interactive feature in the ad), but the company will refuse to take action against ads containing widely-debunked political lies, even during an American presidential election.

Facebook has one principal counterargument against regulation: that the company must maintain strong commitments to free speech and freedom of political expression. This came across in Mark Zuckerberg's speech at Georgetown University on Thursday, in which he described social media as a kind of "Fifth Estate" and characterized politicians' calls to take action as an attempt to restrict freedom of expression. Quoting at times from Frederick Douglass and Supreme Court jurisprudence, Zuckerberg said "we are at a crossroads" and asserted: "When it's not absolutely clear what to do, we should err on the side of free expression."

Unfortunately for Facebook, this argument holds little water. If you determine that an ad containing a fake button is non-compliant because it "[entices] users to select an answer," then you certainly should not knowingly broadcast ads that entice voters to unwittingly consume publicly-known lies -- whether they are distributed by the President or any other politician. Indeed, as one official in Biden's presidential campaign has noted, Zuckerberg's argumentation amounts to an insidious "choice to cloak Facebook's policy in a feigned concern for free expression" to "use the Constitution as a shield for his company's bottom line."

If Facebook cannot take appropriate action and remove paid political lies from its platform, the only answer must be earnest regulation of the company -- regulation that forces Facebook to be transparent about the nature of political ads and prevents it from propagating political falsehoods, even if they are enthusiastically distributed by President Trump.

Ms. Warren did highlight her status as the top-polling female contender at several points in the debate, ending her closing statement with a reference to the possibility of electing the first woman president.

Warren makes her electability pitch.

One of Ms. Warren’s biggest political obstacles is the perception among some voters that she would face daunting challenges in a general election — both thanks to her boldly progressive outlook, and to societal sexism that many Democrats believe damaged Mrs. Clinton in 2016. @charset "UTF-8"; /*********************** B A S E S T Y L E S ************************/ /************************************* T Y P E : C L A S S M I X I N S **************************************/ /* Headline */ /* Leadin */ /* Byline */ /* Dateline */ /* Alert */ /* Subhed */ /* Body */ /* Caption */ /* Leadin */ /* Credit */ /* Label */ /********** S I Z E S ***********/ /******************** T Y P O G R A P H Y *********************/ .g-headline, .interactive-heading, .g-subhed { font-family: "nyt-cheltenham", georgia, "times new roman", times, serif; } .g-alert, .g-alert.g-body, .g-alert_link, .g-byline, .g-caption, .g-caption_bold, .g-caption_heading, .g-chart, .g-credit, .g-credit_bullet, .g-dateline, .g-label, .g-label_white, .g-leadin, #interactive-leadin, .g-refer, .g-refer.g-body, .g-table-text { font-family: nyt-franklin, arial, helvetica, sans-serif; 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And she invoked her 2012 victory over then-Senator Scott P. Brown, Republican of Massachusetts, as she declared herself “the only person on this stage who has beaten an incumbent Republican anytime in the past 30 years.”

Klobuchar throws punches.

Yet while she described herself as a winner tethered to the Midwest, somebody whose friends and neighbors hail from flyover country, she didn’t come out of Tuesday’s debate with any significant headlines of her own.

The only vetting of Buttigieg came from the moderator Abby Phillip on race.

Mr. Buttigieg deftly dodged by suggesting that the black voters who “know me best” — in his native South Bend — chose him twice to lead the city. And he cited recent endorsements from Representative Anthony Brown of Maryland and Mayor Quentin Hart of Waterloo, Iowa, who this week became the two most prominent African-American elected officials to back him.

Biden avoids attacks.

Mr. Biden, who flew under the radar particularly at the last debate, often stayed in his comfort zones — discussing foreign policy and health care — and he was not the center of the kind of memorable exchanges that had dealt his campaign blows earlier in the race.

Arzt brushed aside concerns that early state primary campaigns might suffer with the candidates bottled up on Capitol Hill.

“They’ll have surrogates in the early states, they will make appearances when they are freed up on a weekend.”

Getting the limelight may not be easy for the trio because, unlike more garden-variety hearings where grandstanding is the norm, senators will be forbidden from speaking during the trial.

Other experts disagree.

“Iowa and New Hampshire loves to kick the tires and candidates,” Siegfried added

Sanders told reporters he wasn’t thrilled about heading off the trail.

“I’d rather be in Iowa today. There’s a caucus there in two-and-a-half weeks.

A Warren volunteer said, “I wish she didn’t have to leave the campaign trail but our country and our constitution comes first.”

Obama has been like a foreign policy version of Warren Buffett, a proudly pragmatic value investor less concerned with appearances and the whims of the moment, focused instead on making solid investments with an eye to long-term success

think back to 2008, with the U.S. economy shedding as many as 500,000 jobs a month and on the cusp of a second Great Depression, the U.S. military was stretched to the breaking point through fighting two wars, and many parts of the world associated the United States with militarism, Guantanamo Bay and torture. The picture looks very different today.

Considering the extent of today’s global disorder, it is tempting to succumb to a narrative of grievance and fear — sharpening the divisions between “us” and “them,” building walls longer and higher, and lashing out at enemies with force. Or to think it better that, to reduce exposure to such geopolitical risk, the United States should divest from its alliances. Despite all the talk of “strength,” what these impulses reflect is a core lack of confidence.

As Obama’s presidency nears its end, the state of the world is indeed tumultuous and ever changing, but we have good reason to be confident. The United States’ global position is sound. The United States has restored a sense of strategic solvency. Countries look to it for guidance, ideas, support and protection. It is again admired and inspiring, not just for what it can do abroad but also for its economic vitality and strong society at home.

This time, by contrast, Sanders arguably talks about foreign policy more than any other declared candidate does. Of the four senators who launched their candidacies via video—Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker, Kamala Harris, and Sanders—only his mentioned foreign policy

What distinguishes Sanders is the same quality that distinguished him on domestic policy in 2016: his willingness to cross red lines that have long defined the boundaries of acceptable opinion

He’s produced videos that call Gaza an “open-air prison,” he’s depicted Benjamin Netanyahu as part of the “growing worldwide movement toward authoritarianism,” and, most controversially of all, he’s suggested cutting U.S. military aid to Israel.

He’s the only presidential candidate in recent memory who regularly describes the Cold War not as a heroic American victory, but as a cautionary tale

Sanders doesn’t just warn against U.S. military intervention in Venezuela, as Warren and Gillibrand have. He warns against it while invoking the United States’ “long history of inappropriately intervening in Latin American countries.

he wants America to shun the quest for global supremacy that leads it to overthrow regimes it can’t control and to instead pursue a foreign policy based on “partnership, rather than dominance.”

He called for putting the United Nations—which he called “one of the most important organizations for promoting a vision of a different world”—near the heart of American foreign policy

Sanders challenged the domestic side of the exceptionalist creed: the belief that American capitalism—buttressed by modest regulations and welfare provisions—provides upward mobility.

Now Sanders is poised to challenge exceptionalism in foreign policy: the belief that America, as a uniquely virtuous nation, can substitute its own self-interest and moral intuition for international institutions and international law

A 2017 Pew Research poll found that Americans over the age of 30 were far more likely to say that the “U.S. stands above all other countries in the world” than to say, “There are other countries that are better than the U.S.” But among adults under 30, the latter view predominated by a margin of more than two to one.

For a presidential candidate, challenging American exceptionalism would, until recently, have seemed like a sure path to political oblivion

In 2020, Americans will learn whether there’s a market for his anti-imperial heresies too.

A young adult — a member of the demographic supposedly most sympathetic to socialism — who attended Sanders’s exegesis of socialism told the Times: “In America we embrace a lot of socialist policies already, like public education and parks.” This understanding of socialism as any government provision of public goods puts Horace Mann (1796-1859), an advocate of public education, and Frederick Law Olmsted (1822-1903), designer of New York City’s Central Park, in the socialist pantheo

Many young people who supposedly are making socialism a “major force” think it is sociability: everyone being nice to everyone.

Sen. Elizabeth (“I have a plan for that”) Warren (D-Mass.), who describes herself as a “capitalist to my bones,” is a more authentic socialist than Sanders because she has more granular plans for government power (a.k.a. politics) to supplant market forces in the allocation of wealth and opportunity

In the moderate story, global capitalism is a challenge but also an opportunity field. Over the past generation more people have been lifted out of poverty than ever before. For the first time we have a mass global middle class. This opens up new opportunities, liberates masses of talent and leads to more creativity than ever before.

In the moderate story, government has a bigger role than before, but it is not a fighting, combative role. It is a booster rocket role. It is to give people the skills needed to compete and flourish in this open, pluralistic world. It is to give people a secure base, so they can go off and live daring adventures. It is to mitigate the downsides of change, and so people can realize the unprecedented opportunities.

Progressives want to create a government caste that is powerful and a population that is safe but dependent

Moderates, by contrast, are trying to create a citizenry that possesses the vigorous virtues — daring, empowered, always learning, always brave.

learn from the Nordic countries

they can afford to have strong welfare policies only because they have dynamic free-market economies.

Nordic countries are more open to free trade than the U.S. They have fewer regulations on business creation, fewer licensing regulations.

Nordic countries show that social solidarity and economic freedom are not opposite, but go hand in hand

The Nordic countries tried wealth taxes of the sort Elizabeth Warren is proposing, and all except Norway abandoned them because they were unworkable

Nordic health plans require patient co-payments and high deductibles, in stark contrast to Bernie Sanders’s plan

Second, never coddle. Progressives are always trying to give away free stuff

Moderates want to help but not infantilize

a country that is not full of passive recipients but audacious pioneers

Third, drive decision-making downward. People become energetic, responsible adults by making decisions for themselve

Fourth, bring on the world. International competition is more rigorous than national competition

Fifth, ignite from below. Warren wants to centralize economic decision

Moderates emphasize tools that regular people can choose to build their own lives and maximize their own opportunities: wage subsidies, subsidies to help people move to opportunities, charter schools.

In looking at the political implications of this horror show, one need only recall the 2008 Great Recession. The causes of that financial collapse — e.g., unregulated financial instruments, negligence from ratings companies, lender deception, the Federal Reserve’s failure to act — were complicated.

the politicians who resisted warnings (from then-Harvard professor Elizabeth Warren, among other people) and favored a Wild West deregulated financial industry have unique culpability. And the party in charge at the time — the Republicans — bore the brunt of the voters wrath at the polls. Do we imagine this domestic debacle will play out differently?

Trump and his Republicans are vulnerable on three counts: failure to act to head off the pandemic, failure to respond adequately to the crisis and corruption in the response

Perhaps most important, Pelosi will set up a House select committee to oversee the entire coronavirus effort, much like then-Sen. Harry Truman did for World War II funding, to crack down on waste, fraud and abuse.

Trump will faces three major challenges: Did he do everything to head off a deep recession? Did he do enough to help those hurt? Did he prevent profiteering and corruption that diverted and from the needy? Unless the answer to all three is “yes,” Trump will have a hard time persuading Americans to leave him in charge of mitigation and recovery.

there is no evidence that Wall Street’s mega-expansion made the rest of the economy more efficient. On the contrary, growth in family incomes slowed down as finance rose — although a few people became immensely rich

the famous Bloomberg Terminal, a proprietary computer system that gives subscribers real-time access to large quantities of financial data. This access is incredibly expensive — a subscription costs around $24,000 a year. But it’s a must-have in the financial industry, because traders with Bloomberg Terminals can react to market events a few minutes faster than those without.It’s an extremely profitable business. But is it good for the economy? No

Bloomberg has, in effect, made his billions off a financial arms race that costs vast sums but leaves everyone pretty much back where they started.

Warren had made a name for herself as a crusader against financial industry fraud and excess.It wasn’t just talk. One key piece of the reforms instituted after the 2008 financial crisis, the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, was Warren’s brainchild. Furthermore, by all accounts the bureau was wildly successful, saving ordinary families billions, until the Trump administration set about eviscerating it.

I have no idea how or if Wednesday’s debate will affect the Democratic race. But it may have helped remind Democrats that corruption, fraud and the excesses of Wall Street in particular can be potent political issues — especially against a president who is both personally corrupt and so obviously a friend to fraudsters.

Biden has always had it in him. In 2012, he reset the trajectory of a sinking Obama re-election bid with an aggressive if occasionally smug performance in his vice presidential debate against the GOP pick of Paul Ryan. The Obama team had prepared exhaustive research into every piece of legislation Ryan — the Republican Party’s self-anointed ideas guy — touched.

“The politics of the past, I think, were not all that bad,” Biden responded

Buttigieg’s aptitude for talking his way out of tough spots has taken him from being a no-name mayor of South Bend, Indiana, to a top-tier presidential contender. But when confronted with the racial disparity in marijuana arrests in South Bend, Buttigieg’s eloquence hit its limit. “There is no question that systemic racism has penetrated every level of our system, and my city was not immune,” he said,

Warren finished third in Iowa, caught in the no-man’s land between Sanders’ liberal warriors and Buttigieg’s appeal to moderates and suburbanites. Her fate in the debate was similar: Always articulate, always prepared, she still seemed not to have a way to distinguish herself from the rest of the field

Warren gave sharp and persuasive articulations of her positions, but didn’t necessarily make the case that voters should prefer her over the other candidates. She did stand out on the question of race: asked if Buttigieg’s answer was “substantial,” she replied, flatly, “No,” and went on to make a passionate argument that racial justice must go beyond the criminal-justice system