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Kirby said the military still had "a lot of work to do" to become "more inclusive, more respectful of everyone — especially women."

"We pledge to do better, and we will," Kirby said. "What we absolutely won't do is take personnel advice from a talk show host, or the Chinese military. Maybe those folks feel like they have something to prove. That's on them."

"Women lead our most lethal units with character. They will dominate ANY future battlefield we're called to fight on," tweeted the Sergeant Major of the Army, Michael A. Grinston. "@TuckerCarlson's words are divisive, don't reflect our values. We have THE MOST professional, educated, agile, and strongest NCO Corps in the world."

"They are beacons of freedom and they prove Carlson wrong through determination and dedication," Funk added. "We are fortunate they serve with us."

Carlson regularly makes incendiary comments on his primetime show. He was also called out by The New York Times this week for encouraging harassment against one of its journalists. And, in the past, he has seen large-scale advertiser boycotts over comments on the Black Lives Matter movement and immigration.

Carlson's top writer quit his job last year after a CNN report revealed he had for years used a pseudonym to post racist and sexist remarks on an online forum.

“Trump is using the same approach he did to subvert the Mueller report: undermining the legitimacy of the messenger, assigning political motives to those who testify and relying on the Fox News firewall to serve up propaganda to his base,”

Earlier in the week Republicans attempted to censure Adam Schiff, chair of the House intelligence committee, for his handling of the impeachment inquiry, only for the Democratic majority to set the resolution aside. On Thursday Lindsey Graham, chairman of the Senate judiciary committee and a Trump loyalist, introduced a resolution condemning the inquiry as an unfair, secretive and designed to embarrass the president.

Taylor, a respected Vietnam war veteran with half a century of public service, also described an “irregular, informal policy channel” by which the Trump administration was pursuing objectives in Ukraine “running contrary to the goals of longstanding US policy”

about 30 House Republicans barged into the secure facility where the impeachment depositions are being taken and ordered pizza. The testimony of a Pentagon official was postponed by more than five hours. The members complained about lack of transparency as evidence is being given behind closed doors.

House Democrats’ impeachment inquiry is a month old. Unlike Mueller it has moved at warp speed, subpoenaing witnesses, gathering testimony and building evidence against the president some say makes it inevitable he will be impeached by the House and put on trial by the Republican-controlled Senate.

Public opinion does not favour removing Trump from office, Ruddy argued, so the White House should avoid a politically costly battle.

.

Chief strategist Steve Bannon is long gone. Press secretary Stephanie Grisham has never given a formal briefing to reporters in the west wing. Trump does not have a permanent chief of staff, only Mick Mulvaney in an acting capacity. Earlier this month Mulvaney held a disastrous briefing in which he blurted out a confession of a quid pro quo with Ukraine, only to issue a retraction later.

“We’re in a political payback system where everyone is trying to out up each other. If you look at the poll numbers, he’s actually holding up, although there’s a hardening of people who favour impeachment and removal. He’s not actually in a bad situation.”

Trump has openly encouraged Ukraine – and China – to investigate Biden and his son, Hunter. With Taylor’s compelling evidence, it appears to be case closed. Some problems are unspinnable.

Rick Tyler, a Republican strategist and Trump critic, said the president’s exertion of pressure on the leader of Ukraine had been tantamount to blackmail and extortion.

It was such an abuse of power. I can’t think of a president who’s done anything more impeachable or worse than that. It’s indefensible and anyone who defends it is going to face some liabilities because it’s so egregious.”

He described the Republican fightback as “lawlessness, disorder and chaos. Undermining the process and smearing the witnesses and engaging in ‘whataboutism’ is the main strategy.

Republicans said little about the substance of the allegations.

Democrats are gearing up for televised hearings that could begin next month and feature dramatic and damaging testimony from the likes of former national security adviser John Bolton. Republicans are hamstrung by a torrent of revelations that makes today’s deniable rumour tomorrow’s smoking gun.

Trump retains two not so secret weapons to amplify his message: fiery rallies, which he is holding with greater frequency, and conservative media

More than half of Republicans whose primary news source is Fox said almost nothing could change their approval of Trump. For Republicans who get their news elsewhere, the figure is considerably lower.

The Australian, one of News Corp's papers and a target of critics who say it's been downplaying the link between climate change and the fires, defended itself in an editorial over the weekend, writing "in our coverage, The Australian's journalists report facts about how to tackle bushfires and about how to deal with the impact of climate change. Second, we host debates reflecting the political division that exists in Australia about how to address climate change without destroying our economy."

deniers around, I can assure you."And on Monday, the company announced it was donating $5 million AUD (approximately $3.45 million USD) to the Australian bushfire relief, in addition to the $4 million AUD (around $2.76 million USD) that both Rupert and his older son Lachlan Murdoch have donated to relief efforts.

Even the Mongols, famed for their brutality in conquest, realized the necessity for coexistence. In the 13th century, after creating the largest contiguous land empire the world has ever known, they established the “Pax Mongolica” — the Mongol Peace — that guaranteed religious freedom to all Mongol subjects.

As war has devastated Syria­­­­­­­ in the past nine years, the conflict has taken on an overtly sectarian dimension, and it’s not uncommon for observers to issue fatalistic comments along the lines of K.T. McFarland’s. Sectarian conflict has been said to date back 1,400 years to the founding of Islam, and we frequently hear, as Fox news viewers did this week, that somehow people in the region are irrational, stubbornly embroiled in ancient conflicts and unable to join the modern world. There were sectarian identities in the medieval era, of course, and these sometimes led to conflict. But the intensity of current sectarian cleavages is a surprisingly recent development, effectively beginning with the arrival of European political modernity and only made worse by the post-WWII rise of the authoritarian Arab state. Later, tensions were aggravated by the Lebanese Civil War and by the post-2003 U.S. occupation of Iraq, which remade its sectarian landscape.

Half of voters, 50 percent, say coronavirus is “not at all” under control, up 17 points from 33 percent who felt that way six months ago (June 2020)

Far more favor how Dr. Anthony Fauci responded to the pandemic than President Donald Trump.  By a 50-point margin, voters approve of Fauci (73 percent approve vs. 23 percent disapprove).  By an 11-point margin, they disapprove of Trump (44-55 percent). 

  The increase toward inoculation comes mostly from women (+11), those ages 65 and over (+14), and Black voters (+25). 

More men (66 percent) than women (57 percent), more Whites (63 percent) than Blacks (52 percent), and more seniors (74 percent) than those under age 35 (49 percent) plan to get the shot. 

Democrats (75 percent) are much more likely than Republicans (49 percent) to report they will get vaccinated

the top reasons include that its development was rushed (23 percent), a lack of trust it will work (21 percent), opposition to vaccines generally (13 percent), distrust of the government (10 percent), and concern about side effects (9 percent).

Views are mixed on the $900 billion dollar coronavirus relief package being considered by Congress.  Twice as many think that is too little (35 percent) as say too much (19 percent).  One-third (33 percent) thinks the amount is “about right.” 

“But ... I can’t blame somebody for not supporting my perspective if they have literally never heard it,” he continued. “So it’s my job to get that view in front of viewers who are tuning in in good faith.”

“The virus doesn’t care if you’re a Democrat or a Republican. ... It’s a threat to all of us, so we’ve got to build some common ground here,” he said.

“And to me, finding common ground doesn’t mean watering down your values or pretending to be something you’re not. It just means taking other people seriously and sharing why you care so much.”

showdown takes place in Minnesota, which suggests that a state long carried by Democrats in presidential elections may be in play.

President Richard Nixon was the last Republican to win the state – during his 1972 landslide re-election.

But four years ago Trump narrowly lost Minnesota and its 10 electoral votes to 2016 Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, and for over a year the president and his re-election campaign have been eyeing the state in hopes of breaking the losing streak and flipping it from blue to red.

An average of the latest public opinion polls in the state indicate the former vice president with a mid-single digit advantage over Trump, but the surveys suggest that Trump’s gained ground over the past month

Biden’s strength is concentrated in the Twin Cities and the surrounding suburban counties, while Trump polls best in the more rural areas across the rest of the state, which is known as Greater Minnesota.

the location of the event was moved twice due to the state’s coronavirus restrictions on large crowds. And the event will be dramatically smaller than the president's typical rallies, where supporters are packed together with out social distancing, and there's limited wearing of masks.

Taking aim at the state's Democratic governor and attorney general, the Trump campaign said Thursday night that "thanks to the free speech-stifling dictates of Gov. Tim Walz and Attorney Gen. Keith Ellison, only the first 250 people will be admitted."

On Thursday afternoon, the Biden campaign announced that the former vice president would hold a socially distanced drive-in car rally

“We’re getting presidential visits four days out. That means we’re in play,” Minnesota based GOP strategist Amy Koch told Fox News.

Koch, the first and only woman elected as the state senate majority leader in Minnesota, emphasized that Democrats “always take Minnesota for granted. No one can ever believe that Minnesota’s in play and that was a mistake that Hillary Clinton’s camp made in 2016 and it very nearly cost them. Biden’s camp at least seems to be heeding that, but they always seem to be playing catch up.”

But Democratic strategist Mike Erlandson said that the trips Friday by the two national party standard bearers “tells me that the Trump campaign is a little bit desperate and that Biden is feeling good enough that he can come to a state that looks to be pretty blue at the moment.”

The former state Democratic Party chair told Fox News that “it’s close,” but that “all the early voting indicates that it’s going very well in Minnesota” for Biden

The Trump campaign started building resources in Minnesota early in the 2020 cycle. Biden’s campaign has been catching up in recent months and both teams have shelled out big bucks to run ads in the state in the closing two months of the campaign.

Before arriving in Minnesota, Biden campaigns in neighboring Iowa, another swing state. And following his Twin Cities stop, the former vice president campaigns in another neighboring battleground, Wisconsin.The president also campaigns Friday in Wisconsin, as well as the battleground of Michigan.

“What’s absolutely critical is for people to understand how long of a con this actually has been, that it is not the case that these narratives have only emerged in the wake of Biden’s victory,” Ms. Phillips said. “Donald Trump himself and all of his surrogates and the media that supports him have been seeding this narrative for months and months and months, talking about voting irregularities long before any votes were cast.”

The Federalist published an article on Tuesday stating that there was “increasingly good evidence of large-scale voter fraud in key states” and linked to four social media posts to support the claim.

The right-wing sites’ claims have been bolstered by Republican leaders and Trump administration officials, including Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who have declined to publicly recognize Mr. Biden’s victory at the polls.

Some right-leaning news outlets seemed to accept the Trump loss, but often inconsistently and halfheartedly.

Some of the right-wing sites’ postelection coverage has hit on the same theme: a frustration with Fox News, which projected Mr. Biden as the winner at 11:40 a.m. on Saturday and whose anchors have referred to him as the president-elect. “What is happening to Fox News?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

some sort of correction was probably due. Sex-positive feminism went from “hey, women shouldn’t feel ashamed about enjoying sex” to “it’s feminist to enjoy being choked while having lots of casual sex” alarmingly quickly.

What was meant to liberate women turned into a repackaging of the patriarchy. “It feels like we were tricked into exploiting ourselves,” one twentysomething told BuzzFeed, summing up the general vibe.

A new passion for celibacy among young women feels like a natural way of putting that chapter of feminism to bed.

The only word amiss in this analysis is “may.” The crisis described in Continetti’s essay was not created by the conservative intelligentsia alone. But three signal failures of that intelligentsia clearly contributed to the right’s disastrous rendezvous with Trumpism.

The first failure was a failure of governance and wisdom, under George W. Bush and in the years that followed. Had there been weapons of mass destruction under Iraqi soil and a successful occupation, or had Bush and his advisers chosen a more prudent post-Sept. 11 course, the trust that right-wing populists placed in their elites might not have frayed so quickly.

The second failure was a failure of recognition and self-critique, in which the right’s best minds deceived themselves about (or made excuses for) the toxic tendencies of populism, which were manifest in various hysterias long before Sean Hannity swooned for Donald Trump

But the same Bush-era failures that alienated right-wing populists from their own intelligentsia also discredited conservative ideas within the broader elite.

Some conservatives told themselves that Fox and Drudge and Breitbart were just the evolving right-of-center alternative to the liberal mainstream media, when in reality they were more fact-averse and irresponsible.

Both of these errors were linked to the most important failure of the right’s intellectuals: The failure to translate the power accrued through their alliance with populists into a revolution within the managerial class

Partial revolutions there were. Free-market ideas were absorbed into the managerial consensus after the stagflation of the 1970s. The fall of Communism lent a retrospective luster to Reaganism within the foreign policy establishment.

There was even a period in the 1990s — and again, briefly, after Sept. 11 — when a soft sort of social conservatism seemed to be making headway among Atlantic-reading, center-left mandarins.

What the intellectuals did not see clearly enough was that Fox News and talk radio and the internet had made right-wing populism more powerful, relative to conservatism’s small elite, than it had been during the Nixon or Reagan eras, without necessarily making it more serious or sober than its Bircher-era antecedents.

So it is that today, three generations after Buckley and Burnham, the academy and the mass media are arguably more hostile to conservative ideas than ever, and the courts and the bureaucracy are trending in a similar direction

Reflecting on this harsh reality has confirmed some conservatives in their belief that the managerial order is inherently left wing, and that the goal of a conservative politics should be to sweep the managerial class away entirely

This idea strikes me as fatuous and fantastical at once. But is there an alternative?

Continetti’s essay hints at one: to make intellectual conservatism a more elite-focused project, to seek “a conservative tinged Establishment capable of permeating the managerial society and gradually directing it in a prudential, reflective, virtuous manner respectful of both freedom and tradition.

To begin anew, at such steep disadvantages, what amounts to missionary work?

as another alternative, conservative elites might simply try to build a more intellectually serious populism out of the Trumpian wreckage and wait for a less toxic backlash against liberal overreach to ride back into power.

can the populist right actually be de-Hannitized, de-Trumpified, rendered 100 percent Breitbart-free? Or would building on populism once again just repeat the process that led conservatism to its present end?

The social realities of urbanization, race and deindustrialization are the true engines of change rumbling beneath our politics and driving these changes. But conservative media - Fox News, Talk Radio, Drudge, Breitbart - has been the mechanism of the transformation within the GOP.

Taylor is at least the 11th Fort Hood soldier to have died in the U.S. since Oct. 12.

Three other soldiers died from gunshot wounds. One of them, Pvt. Kevin Paulino, 24, died from a gunshot while he was in Indiana, Stars and Stripes reported. The Army said the soldiers' deaths were under investigation.

Three soldiers from Fort Hood died November 12 in a suicide bomb attack at Bagram air base in Afghanistan: Staff Sgt. John Perry, 30; Private First Class Tyler Iubelt, 20; and Sgt. 1st Class Allan Brown, 46. Brown died of injuries suffered in the attack at Walter Reade National Medical Center in Bethesda Dec. 6, the Houston Chronicle reported Friday.