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Neo-Nazis gain parliamentary seats in Slovakia

The leftist ruling party has won the parliamentary election in Slovakia, after campaigning on an anti-migrant ticket, but will need coalition partners to form a majority government, according to results announced on Sunday.

In a surprising development, a neo-Nazi party gained parliamentary seats for the first time.

A culture lives or dies based on its allegiance to unwritten rules of conduct and unstated norms, on the signals sent about what kind of conduct constitutes good character and honor and what kind of conduct constitutes dishonor and corruption

But that reality can’t make us indifferent or cynical when it comes to holding those in authority to reasonable moral standards. After all, cultures are shaped by the words and deeds that leaders, including political leaders, validate or invalidate.

the other reason we should pay attention to the tweets and other comments by the president is that they are shafts of light that illuminate not only his damaged soul, but his disordered personality.

'I've faced some tough adversaries' Arizona Republican Senator John McCain brushes off a threat by US President Donald Trump to "be careful".

Senator Jeff Flake, the Arizona Republican who has tangled with President Trump for months, announced on Tuesday that he would not seek re-election in 2018

The announcement appeared to signal a moment of decision for the Republican Party. Last week, Senator John McCain, the senior senator from Arizona, spoke in Philadelphia, denouncing the “half-baked, spurious nationalism” that he saw overtaking American politics

Those positions stood in marked contrast to Mr. Trump’s inward-looking, anti-immigration nationalism.

Politics is downstream of culture. Trump’s election would never have been possible without systemic cultural shifts, enabled by reality TV and social media, that increased the premium average Americans place on celebrity for celebrity’s sake.

What’s changed is that celebrity is no longer a dirty word in politics. In 2008, John McCain ran a brutal attack ad against Barack Obama that melded footage of him greeting huge crowds with b-roll of Britney Spears and Paris Hilton. “He’s the biggest celebrity in the world,” a narrator noted. “But is he ready to lead?” The Obama team saw this as a potent line of attack and ran a response ad that described McCain as a “Washington celebrity.”

President Trump has announced that transgender Americans will not be allowed to serve “in any capacity” in the U.S. military, a move that could affect thousands of people serving in the armed forces and which resulted in almost immediate pushback from influential Republicans.

Trump’s announcement is the latest in a set of steps his administration has taken to walk back Obama-era policies on transgender Americans. The biggest shift is the reasoning: Rather than framing his decision in the language of rights or morality, as Obama-era officials did, Trump spoke about the new transgender policy in terms of military efficiency. The decision is likely to trigger major blowback from Democratic legislators and LGBT activists who long pushed for full acceptance of transgender service members. It will also bring gender identity back into the spotlight, reigniting a culture-war debate surrounding a president who has tried to sell himself as a friend of LGBT rights.  

While there has not been much research done on this question, according to Rand, policies welcoming lesbian, gay, and bisexual Americans to serve openly in the military did not diminish units’ effectiveness. The Rand researchers expected “little or no impact on unit cohesion, operational effectiveness, or readiness” resulting from Obama’s policy.

Alabama GOP Sen. Richard Shelby is confronting a fierce backlash from conservatives over his refusal to support Roy Moore in last month’s special election — with Moore backers pushing a censure resolution and robocall campaign targeting the powerful lawmaker. Moore’s supporters are furious with Shelby over his remark days before the Dec. 12 election that he “couldn’t vote for Roy Moore,” a controversial former state judge who was facing allegations of child molestation. Instead, Shelby said he would write in the name of another unnamed Republican.

The censure resolution is unlikely to gain traction against Shelby, an iconic figure in Alabama politics who skated to a sixth and probably final term in 2016. But it shows how a race that dominated national politics for months and badly embarrassed President Donald Trump, who gave Moore his full-throated endorsement, continues to tear at the party.

“It is unfortunate to hear that instead of unifying the party ahead of its important 2018 election cycle, people within the Alabama GOP are making a shortsighted attempt to divide the party over Sen. Shelby’s noble stance,” said the senator's spokeswoman Blair Taylor. The censure resolution is expected to come before the state Republican Party’s resolutions committee later this month. A majority of the seven-person panel is needed for it to pass. If it fails, Moore supporters can bring it up at next month’s Alabama Republican Party executive committee meeting, where it would need two-thirds support.

And while a number of relatives said they were subject to verbal punches dressed up as sympathy, none came from the presidents who sent their sons and daughters to war.

This year, 11 American service members have been killed in Afghanistan and 14 in Iraq. Seventeen sailors were killed in accidents involving two Navy warships, the John S. McCain and the Fitzgerald. A member of the Navy SEALs was killed in Somalia and four American soldiers in the Niger ambush. Mr. Trump said this week that he had called “every family of somebody that’s died, and it’s the hardest call to make.”

“He said he was sorry, and he said he and I had something in common,” she said. “And I thought, ‘Oh dear, what is this?’ He said, ‘You and I cry when they play the national anthem.’”

(CNN)Early Friday morning, CNN reporter Omar Jimenez and his crew were arrested while covering the protests that have sprung up in Minneapolis following the death of George Floyd.

Democratic Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz held a press briefing on the ongoing unrest in his state later Friday. Amid an update on how he would deal with the protests as well as the investigation into Floyd's death, Walz took a moment to address the arrest of Jimenez and his crew.

Now, Walz didn't tell those cops to arrest Jimenez and his crew. And had he known it was happening, he would have undoubtedly stopped it. But rather than look for a scapegoat, Walz owned the mistake. Because he is the governor of the state and the ultimate buck-stopper. If law enforcement in Minnesota makes a mistake, Walz understands that it, ultimately falls on him.

The politicians’ consensus is that health care reform shouldn’t alter or disrupt the way the majority of Americans get their insurance today

The policy consensus, though, is that the status quo is actually the problem, and that it deserves to be threatened, undermined and replaced as expeditiously as possible. Wonks of the left and right disagree on what that replacement should look like. But they’re united in regarding employer-provided coverage as an unsustainable relic: a burden on businesses, a source of perverse incentives for the health care market and an obstacle to more efficient, affordable and universal coverage.

Obamacare has an unwieldy, Frankenstein’s monster quality in part because the law is trying to serve both consensuses at once. The core of the bill, the subsidies for the uninsured and the exchanges where they can purchase plans, is designed to offer a center-left alternative to the existing system. But much of the surrounding architecture is designed to prop up existing arrangements — and in the process, protect Obama from exactly the kind of criticisms he once leveled against McCain.

Donald Trump has reportedly ceased raising money for the big dollar committee linking his campaign to the official Republican Party.

Presidential campaigns are supposed to provide a flush of cash for the party. But Trump’s effort has raised significantly less than previous Republican candidates even though he has been able to collect much larger checks. That has left the RNC in the worst financial shape it has been in at this point in a presidential election since the turn of the millennium.

The RNC has raised just $271 million through September, including the money brought in by Trump. This is the lowest amount the party has had at this point since the passage of the 2002 McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform law instituted higher contribution limits and banned party soft money. It is lower than the $332 million raised in 2012, the $310 million raised in 2008 and the $306 million raised in 2004 ― and that’s before adjusting for inflation.

Even Trump’s Kids Haven’t Donated to His Campaign

With less than two weeks until the election, Donald Trump has amassed an impressive army of small donors, fueling his bid with individual contributions of $200 or less. But noticeably absent from the list of contributors is basically anyone with the last name Trump, many of the surrogates who represent The Donald on national television, and members of his own campaign staff.

On Sept. 7, 2016, Eric Trump appears to have contributed $376.20 listed only as “meeting expense: meals.”

Congress may flip -- but dysfunction is here to stay

The Republican majority in the Senate -- and maybe even the House -- could be gone after this year's election.

With Donald Trump trailing in the polls, Hillary Clinton is increasingly turning her attention to down-ballot races -- particularly for the Senate, where Democrats are hoping to pick up at least the four seats they'd need to claim the majority if Clinton wins the White House.

Historically, Missouri has been a swing state, though is often assumed by pundits to be a Republican giveaway. In 2008, Republican John McCain won the state’s electoral votes by a margin of less than 1% – mere thousands of votes. In 2012, Republican Mitt Romney won the state by 10%, but liberal Democrat Claire McCaskill also kept her seat in the US Senate by more than 15%. The state also has a Democrat governor.

During 2014’s high-profile race for St Louis County executive following the unrest in Ferguson, Missouri, Democratic candidate Steve Stenger – who visited Bosnian mosques and distributed Bosnian-language campaign literature while his Republican opponent did not – won, but by fewer than 2,000 votes. Had Bosnian voters stayed home, he probably would have lost.

St Louis is home to one of the largest populations of Bosnian Muslims in the world outside Bosnia-Herzegovina itself. The community has its origins in the Balkan refugee crisis in the 1990s, when Yugoslavia was ripped apart at its seams, displacing millions. Bosnian refugees were resettled in St Louis by the thousands, and eventually the city became the anchor of the United States’ Bosnian diaspora

The last wrong explanation for Clinton's loss is one people both on the Left and the Right are making: The Clinton email scandal. Of course, the continuing cloud of the on again/off again FBI investigation into Clinton's illegal private email server didn't help her campaign

The largest single economic group in our country has been sold out and ignored by the leaders of both parties for more than a generation. They are the hourly wage-earning Americans who have been bounced around from good manufacturing jobs, to service jobs, to seasonal work without the rest of us noticing that much. And that's even though there are a lot more of them than the college-educated white collar office workers out there. You know the financial uncertainty you felt last night when you saw the Dow futures crash down by 750 points? That's the kind of emotion millions of your fellow Americans have been feeling every night for years even though they're not "poor" or even necessarily unemployed.

And it goes beyond economics. This is a divide that truly began in America during the Vietnam War, which was protested and defended by the rich and upper middle class while the lower middle class and poor actually did the fighting in country. That divide and the wounds from it have never really healed. I doubt we'll ever see an exit poll this specific, but I'd be willing to bet that Trump won 60 percent plus of the Vietnam veterans' vote because he spoke to their past and current pain in a way actual Vietnam vets like John Kerry and John McCain — guys who actually served in the war — never could