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These feelings of warmth toward Jews aren't just fond personal memories of Mrs. Rosenberg from down the street, who makes an excellent kugel; they're a sign of a broad acceptance and appreciation of Jewish culture. Outside of New York City, Jews are generally rare in terms of numbers. Yet in spite of this, they've become seen as normal—and popular—by the population at large.

A century ago, when Jewish emigration from Central and Eastern Europe was at its peak, American anti-Semitism was common and fierce.

The world at large is full of anti-Semites and Holocaust deniers. Jews, it seems, are not universally accepted; their cool-kid status is unique to America. So why is it different here? Why, despite the anti-Semitism that still exists in the United States, are Americans mostly down with the Jews?

At the time, Watson was investigating the secretary of state's office and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation's audit of more than 15,000 signatures in Cobb County, outside Atlanta. Results of the audit found no evidence of fraudulent mail-in ballots and Biden was declared winner of Georgia in the election.close dialogSign up for CNN's CNN's Chris Cillizza cuts through the political spin and tells you what you need to know. Sign Me UpNo ThanksBy subscribing, you agree to ourprivacy policy.Sign up for CNN's CNN's Chris Cillizza cuts through the political spin and tells you what you need to know. Please enter above Sign Me UpNo ThanksBy subscribing, you agree to ourprivacy policy.You're on the list for CNN'sCNN's Chris Cillizza cuts through the political spin and tells you what you need to know. close dialog/* effects for .bx-campai

"I hope you are going back two years as opposed to checking one against the other," Trump can be heard saying on the call. "Because that would just be a signature check that didn't mean anything."

"But if you go back two years, and if you can get to Fulton, you are going to find things that are going to be unbelievable," the then-President said. "The dishonesty that we've heard from. But Fulton is the mother lode."

Investigators in both probes are interested in Trump's call to Watson, according to sources familiar with the probes.

One is the January phone call where Trump pushed Raffensperger to "find" votes to overturn the election results after his loss to Biden. The other involves the call Trump made on December 23 to Watson.

"If Mr. Raffensperger didn't want to receive calls about the election, he shouldn't have run for secretary of state," Miller said in the statement.

ast summer hospitals said it was too hard to comply with the new rule while they were dealing with the pandemic. They still managed to continue the appeal of their lawsuit against the measure, which failed in December. The rule took effect, but the penalty for not complying is just $300 a day — a pittance for hospitals — and there is no meaningful mechanism for active enforcement. The hospitals have asked the Biden administration to revise the requirement.

In September his health secretary, Alex Azar, certified that importing prescription medicine from Canada “poses no additional risk to the public’s health and safety” and would result in “a significant reduction in the cost.” This statement, which previous health secretaries had declined to make, formally opened the door to importing medication. Millions of Americans, meanwhile, now illegally purchase prescription drugs from abroad because they cannot afford to buy them at home.

The Trump administration’s attempted market-based interventions shined some light on dark corners of the health market and opened the door to some workarounds. They are not meaningful substitutes for larger and much-needed health reform. But as Americans await the type of more fundamental changes the Democrats have promised, they need every bit of help they can get.

Finally, shortly before the election, Mr. Trump issued an executive order paving the way for a “most favored nation” system that would ensure that the prices for certain drugs purchased by Medicare did not exceed the lowest price available in other developed countries. The industry responded with furious pushback, and a court quickly ruled against the measure.

Biden may want to continue the previous administration’s efforts to lower drug prices and make medical costs transparent.

But the Trump administration did attempt to rein in some of the most egregious pricing in the health care industry. For example, it required most hospitals to post lists of their standard prices for supplies, drugs, tests and procedures. Providers had long resisted calls for such pricing transparency, arguing that this was a burden, and that since insurers negotiated and paid far lower rates anyway, those list prices didn’t really matter.

ut the drug lobby will no doubt prove a big obstacle: The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, an industry trade group, filed suit in federal court in November to stop the drug-purchasing initiatives. The industry has long argued that importation from even Canada would risk American lives.

Streaming services are often said to have “saved” the music industry, which is no doubt true, notwithstanding persistent complaints from artists about the paltriness of their streaming paychecks. Revenue from the sale of recorded music in the United States declined for almost two decades before streaming services began turning the business around in 2016. In 2020, recorded music grew to $12.2 billion in sales, the vast majority from streaming (still well below the industry’s peak sales year, $14.6 billion in 1999).

For me, the clearest way that streaming has altered my relationship to music is in its steady blurring of the boundaries between genres. I

If you’re under 35 or so, my paean to the mind-altering magic of ubiquitous digital audio might sound more than a bit outdated; Farhad, do you also get goose bumps when considering the TV remote?

The number of artists in the service’s most-played 10 percent of streams keeps growing — that is, there are many more artists at the top. “Gone are the days of Top 40, it’s now the Top 43,000,” Spotify crowed.

But you don’t need stats to show that music is increasingly breaking through staid genre boundaries — you can tell in the music itself.

What’s not going to change is the pre-eminent role audio now plays in our days. Once, I thought of my headphones as a conduit for music, and then they were for music and podcasts, but now they are something else entirely: They are the first gadget to deliver on the tech industry’s promise of “augmented reality” — the mashing up of the digital and analog worlds to create a novel, enhanced sensory experience.

Now that sound has been liberated from time, place and physical media — now that I can fly from the Nashville studio where Dylan recorded “Blonde on Blonde” to Taylor Swift’s Tiny Desk concert to the comforting, indistinct background murmur of a crowded coffee shop, all while on a walk in my suburban California neighborhood — my ears might never be bored again.

The industry is hoping that by winning battles on the state level, it can set a friendly precedent for a federal privacy bill, which could override any state law.

Some members of Congress have said privacy legislation is a priority this year. But until Washington acts, a hodgepodge of proposals for regulating data tracking are emerging from state to state.

The fight over data privacy in Connecticut provides a window into how the debate is playing across the country. Connecticut Senate Majority Leader Bob Duff, a Democrat, was frustrated that Congress was dragging its feet on the issue. Without any data protections, Duff said the country was in the grip of a "data privacy crisis."

He introduced a bill last year that would allow people in Connecticut to opt out of data collection and to sue tech companies if the tracking continued.

Duff recalls a packed hearing for the bill. But he did not see concerned citizens. Instead, he glimpsed seat after seat filled with lobbyists paid by Facebook, Google and other tech companies.

Now, Duff has re-introduced the bill — without the right to sue tech companies — with some similarities to Virginia's new law, but he said he plans to strengthen the provisions to favor consumers before its final passage.

Regulation on data privacy, and a host of other issues, has become something Silicon Valley now sees as inevitable, with companies like Facebook running advertisements saying the company actually welcomes new laws.

Soltani views this messaging effort with skepticism. "They're not doing it out the goodness of their heart," he said. "Kind of like a Taekwondo move, they want to capture that momentum and then direct it toward something that benefits them."

Nevertheless, many commentators have ignored this evidence. They conclude not only that there are widespread shortages, but that the culprit is pandemic unemployment insurance benefits. Governors in 25 Republican-led states have now said they will no longer accept federal unemployment benefits. This will cut aid to nearly four million impacted workers, despite the absence of compelling evidence that jobless benefits are causing problems in the labor market. Instead, we have considerable evidence that it is helpful.

But employers of low-wage workers typically have a great deal of power to suppress wages. Out of desperation, these workers often have no choice but to take any job no matter how bad the wages, unsafe the labor, or chaotic the schedule as they try to cobble together child care or elder care. Unemployment insurance isn’t keeping people out of the labor market en masse right now. But, when expanded benefits mean some individuals don’t feel the same pressure to accept a terrible job, that is what economists would call efficiency enhancing.

One may ask: why did it take so long to get around to executing search warrants? We don't know for sure, and likely never will given the confidentiality around internal deliberations involving criminal investigations at DOJ, but The New York Times is reporting that there may have been politically motivated action taken to delay and then refuse to approve the warrant under the Trump administration. Search warrants involving lawyers like Giuliani carry particularly onerous approval requirements, because of concerns around breaching the attorney-client privilege by gaining access to communications between a lawyer and his client.

That means that these particular warrants would have been sent through the chain of command at the US Attorney's Office, up to Acting US Attorney Audrey Strauss, and then down to the Justice Department in Washington for another set of approvals.

Thus, in this case, before presenting the warrant to a judge, the Giuliani and Toensing search warrants also would have been approved by DOJ's second-in-command, now Lisa Monaco. Once approval is given, prosecutors take the application to a federal judge, who must be satisfied that there was probable cause to believe that a crime has been committed and that the evidence sought would be relevant to proving that crime.

But I expect -- as we saw when another Trump personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, was served with a search warrant as part of his criminal investigation by SDNY -- that Giuliani will challenge them every step of the way.

Once the legal challenges are dispensed with and the investigative team is able to review the evidence they collected, they will conduct any necessary follow-up investigation before making a charging decision. And while the FARA charges described above may be the most likely at this moment, new and additional offenses often come to light as an investigation proceeds, so it's impossible to say where authorities may end up.

while executing a search warrant certainly was a major event in the already lengthy saga of the investigation of Rudy Giuliani, there remains a long road ahead before we will know whether Giuliani faces arrest and criminal prosecution

Like the Trump administration before it, the Biden team is now progressively chipping away at this bargain. Last summer, Democrats removed the phrase “one China” from their platform. In January, Mr. Biden became the first American president since 1978 to host Taiwan’s envoy at his inauguration. In April, his administration announced it was easing decades-old limitations on official U.S. contacts with the Taiwanese government.

These policies are increasing the odds of a catastrophic war. The more the United States and Taiwan formally close the door on reunification, the more likely Beijing is to seek reunification by force.

As the Harvard political scientist Graham Allison has observed, “No Chinese national security official I have ever met, and no U.S. official who has examined the situation, doubts that China would choose war over losing territory it considers vital to its national interest.”

whether or not the United States officially pledges to come to Taiwan’s defense, it is deeply reckless to believe that it can both provoke Beijing by undoing the “one China” compact and deter it with the threat of military force.

It’s reckless because deterrence requires power and will, and when it comes to Taiwan, the United States is deficient in both. According to Fareed Zakaria, “The Pentagon has reportedly enacted 18 war games against China over Taiwan, and China has prevailed in every one.”

One reason is geography. Taiwan is roughly 100 miles from mainland China but 5,000 miles from Honolulu. Within 500 miles of the island, mainland China boasts 39 air bases. The United States possesses two

In the opening phase of a war over Taiwan, “the command and control networks that manage the critical flow of information to U.S. forces in combat would be broken apart and shattered by electronic attacks,”

American bases in Japan and Guam would be “inundated with waves of precise ballistic and cruise missiles” while U.S. aircraft carriers would be highly vulnerable to China’s “carrier-killers.”

U.S. casualties “could be staggering.”

There’s another reason deterrence alone won’t work: China cares more. In 2017, mainland Chinese said that Taiwan topped their list of “concerns about the U.S.-China relationship.” Among Americans, by contrast, Taiwan didn’t make the top seven.

while foreign policy elites in Washington overwhelmingly endorse going to war for Taiwan, ordinary Americans are deeply skeptical

while 85 percent of Republican leaders support sending U.S. troops to defend Taiwan from Chinese attack, only 43 percent of Republicans among the public agree

I suspect that figure would be even lower if respondents knew that some of America’s most experienced China experts — including former ambassador to Beijing J. Stapleton Roy and Chas Freeman, who served as Richard Nixon’s interpreter on his 1972 trip to China — believe such a conflict would risk nuclear war.

Recognizing the limits of America’s ability to deter Beijing does not mean abandoning Taiwan

smaller countries that sit in the shadow of superpowers often accept limitations on their external behavior. The United States would never allow Mexico to join a military alliance with Beijing.

What’s crucial is that the Taiwanese people preserve their individual freedom and the planet does not endure a third world war. The best way for the United States to pursue those goals is by maintaining America’s military support for Taiwan while also maintaining the “one China” framework that for more than four decades has helped keep the peace in one of the most dangerous places on earth.

Facebook and other social media sites’ caution about taking down posts or accounts in democratic elections may be understandable, but prominent people are more likely to be believed, which is why the company’s standards should be higher for them, not the other way around.

ut the law is clear that Facebook is exercising its own First Amendment rights to regulate speech on its own site, including from the president. Sadly, it took four years of Mr. Trump’s divisive posts and bald attempts to undermine our democracy — not to mention a new administration — for Facebook to act on that.

Iran is just one of several foreign policy issues frustrating Mr. Biden’s base two months into his presidency.

The Middle East, which Biden officials hope to de-emphasize as they turn America’s attention to China, is the source of many complaints. Topping the list is Mr. Biden’s decision not to unilaterally rejoin the Iran nuclear deal by reversing harsh sanctions imposed on Tehran by Mr. Trump after he abandoned the agreement in 2018.

After seeing Mr. Biden deliver a transformational $1.9 trillion stimulus bill, progressives are asking why his foreign policy feels so conventional.

Some prominent liberals call those moves welcome, but also low-hanging fruit, and say that on matters requiring harder trade-offs and political courage, Mr. Biden is too risk-averse.

On Wednesday, Mr. Biden fueled the discontent when he conceded in an interview with ABC News that it would be “tough” to meet a May 1 deadline, set under the Trump administration, to withdraw troops from Afghanistan, a high priority for liberals impatient to end what they call “endless” American wars.

“The Biden administration has bought the Trump analysis that these sanctions give America leverage, even though the sanctions didn’t give Trump any leverage on Iran,” said Joseph Cirincione, a longtime arms control expert who consulted closely with Obama administration officials over the nuclear deal.

Critics of Mr. Biden’s early Middle East policy have focused their attention on Brett McGurk, the National Security Council’s coordinator for the region.

Mr. McGurk helped shape Mr. Biden’s decision, decried on the left, not to directly punish Prince Mohammed even after the White House declassified an intelligence report that found that he, the de facto Saudi leader, approved the operation that led to the murder of Mr. Khashoggi in 2018.

Even before that disclosure, many liberals complained that “the Biden foreign policy team includes no one who has been a clear and consistent opponent of our disastrous interventions across the world,”

On Tuesday, a group of Democratic Senate and House members called for a $12 billion increase to the U.S. international affairs budget to fund diplomacy.

Ms. Lee is also among those weary of extended deadlines for withdrawals from Afghanistan like the one Mr. Biden hinted at on Wednesday.“We’ve got to bring our troops home,” she said, “and we’ve got to do that quickly.”