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The National Weather Service described the conditions as “the strongest since the 2017 wine country fires and potentially a historic event given the strength and duration of the winds”.

The Kincade fire broke out late on Wednesday night and has so far destroyed nearly 50 structures.

Meanwhile, millions across the state will have their power cut again as California’s largest utility, Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E), said it would shut off electricity for the third time in as many weeks. PG&E said it would begin blackouts in the afternoon for about 940,000 homes and businesses in 36 counties for 48 hours or longer throughout the San Francisco Bay Area, wine country and Sierra foothills. An estimated 2.35 million people are due to be affected, thousands more than previously predicted.

Another blaze that forced evacuations of 50,000 residents in suburbs north of Los Angeles grew to 4,615 acres overnight. The Tick fire, which started on Thursday, has destroyed nine homes and businesses while threatening 10,000 more, according to firefighters.

The Tick fire is currently 25% contained, while the Kincade fire is 10% contained.

California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, has declared a local emergency to assist with battling the blazes, and thousands of firefighters have been deployed to both locations.

The power shutoff in Geyserville created a dangerous challenge when it came time to evacuate residents as the blaze crept nearer. Typically during evacuations, local authorities deploy reverse 911 calls to alert individual residents. With the power out, evacuees reported being awakened in the early hours by frantic knocks on their front doors.

Though nine wildfires are currently burning throughout the state, none have reached the level of death and destruction witnessed in the past few years. Nevertheless fears remain, especially among those who lived through the devastation of the previous fires. The Kincade fire was starting to skirt along the path of the 2015 Valley fire, which killed four people and burned through more than 76,000 acres.

The harsh fire weather conditions have spread beyond the state, kicking up flames in parts of Baja California, just across the border from San Diego in Mexico.

the imperial government deliberately exploited these guilds in the interests of public authority and social order. The government tried to restrict the membership of the guilds to a hereditary caste of skilled artisans, but the increasing financial demands made upon the guilds by the government in the waning days of the Roman Empire had reduced most guilds to a precarious position by the 4th century ce

Some historians have contended that the guilds of medieval Europe derived from the collegia of the Byzantine Empire, but no direct connections have been established between these different institutions

Guilds came to control the distribution and sale of food, cloth, and other staple goods and thereby achieved a monopoly over the local commerce. Such guilds compelled foreign merchants or traders to pay a fee if they wanted to participate in the local trade, and some outside merchants were prohibited altogether from participating in that trade.

The guild tended to be an extremely hierarchical body structured on the basis of the apprenticeship system. (See apprenticeship.) In this structure, the members of a guild were divided into a hierarchy of masters, journeymen, and apprentices.

Yet the guilds’ exclusivity, conservatism, monopolistic practices, and selective entrance policies eventually began to erode their economic utility. Apprenticeships became almost entirely hereditable, and masters set ridiculously high standards for apprentices to become journeymen and for journeymen to become masters. The guilds worked exclusively for their own interests and sought to monopolize trade in their own locality.

In the end, most U.S. officials agreed that Trump’s anger with Ukraine, like many of his grievances, was connected with the 2016 election and his feeling that Ukraine was responsible for the humiliating fall of Paul Manafort, Trump’s former campaign chairman. Trump’s hatred, they concluded, was ingrained, irrational and possibly irreversible.

Roughly half of the housing units built in California between 1990 and 2010 are in the WUI, which has expanded by roughly 1,000 square miles.

As a result, 2 million homes, or one in seven in the state, are at high or extreme risk for wildfire, according to one estimate from the Center for Insurance Policy and Research. That’s three times as many as in any other state.

human behavior is primarily to blame for the destruction. People start more than nine in 10 fires, according to reliable estimates.

built structures—houses, cars, hospitals, utility poles, barns—act as the most potent fuel, researchers have found. A house burns a lot hotter than a bush does; a propane tank is far more combustible than a patch of grass.

If building in the WUI is so dangerous, why do it? In part because building new housing is so very difficult in many urban regions in California, due to opposition from existing homeowners and strict building codes.

So housing sprawls into the periphery. And each time major fires happen—in the WUI, as well as in unpopulated regions and urban areas—the state’s housing crisis gets a little worse.

In the meantime, California isn’t doing enough to discourage building in fire-prone areas. “I cannot recall any development project that was denied, or where the density was substantially reduced, because of known wildfire hazards,

In short, the report demonstrates that Trump’s profiting off Russian sabotage last time, and his efforts to extort Ukraine into helping him again, are the same story — one that will continue.

On top of this, the report demonstrates how numerous cabinet officials and extensive government resources — and the conditioning of multiple official acts — were placed at the disposal of the whole corrupt scheme.

we should think about “Putinism” as a “worldwide movement” that allies various ethno-nationalist and illiberal authoritarian leaders against Western liberal democracy, the rule of law, international institutions and the commitment to empiricism in the face of disinformation.

Trump hasn’t been duped into spreading it. He explicitly recognizes an alliance of his own interests with those of Russia in doing so (and in procuring whatever other outside help he can) in corrupting U.S. liberal democracy for his own malevolent self-interested purposes.

“Trump, his administration and the GOP have made a conscious choice to align themselves with Putinism,” Rothkopf told me. “It is not unwitting.”

it’s obvious that Trump — and, increasingly, many of his GOP defenders — are to some untold degree operating in sync with Putinism and are acting against the interests of our liberal democracy.

party leaders must argue that the GOP’s “embrace of the Ukraine fiction” is not merely a matter of domestic political expediency. Rather, it’s time to ask whether we’re seeing the beginnings of a “realignment” with this global right wing movement against the values and even the interests of “the United States and the West.”

Keep your spirits up, don’t get down, it’s not all on you. “God is in charge of history.”

in 2002. Zevon was dying of mesothelioma, and Mr. Letterman asked how his illness had changed him.

“From your perspective now,” Mr. Letterman asked, “Do you know something about life and death that maybe I don’t know now?” Mr. Zevon answered: “I know how much you’re supposed to enjoy every sandwich.”

from the writer Laurens van der Post in 1961: “We live not only our own lives but, whether we know it or not, also the life of our time.” We are all making history together, we are part of an era, and we are responsible to each other and to this great project.

The Democratic primary field is still flailing and doesn’t see it’s flailing. At the moment their theory of the country is wrong, and it’s wrong because it’s a theory, not a cold-eyed look at circumstances and facts on the ground.

It isn’t true that America will never go socialist. Maybe it will, but not under current conditions—full employment, rising wages.

Maybe all this will be settled at an open convention. But they ought to know by now they went too far left too quickly. And sometimes you have to stand up to the base.

Underlying his eventual decisions will be an unspoken theme of his re-election campaign: I’ve been president three years and the world didn’t blow up. My critics said it would because I’m crazy. I’m crazy like a fox! I kept things cool. That theme is about to be put to a test.

The belief that big tech needs to be corralled—to be broken up or declared public utilities—will grow on the left and right

Largely an office procedure when widespread screening was first recommended, colonoscopies have moved into surgery centers — which were created as a step down from costly hospital care but are now often a lucrative step up from doctors’ examining rooms — where they are billed like a quasi operation.

The high price paid for colonoscopies mostly results not from top-notch patient care, according to interviews with health care experts and economists, but from business plans seeking to maximize revenue; haggling between hospitals and insurers that have no relation to the actual costs of performing the procedure; and lobbying, marketing and turf battles among specialists that increase patient fees.

While several cheaper and less invasive tests to screen for colon cancer are recommended as equally effective by the federal government’s expert panel on preventive care — and are commonly used in other countries — colonoscopy has become the go-to procedure in the United States. “We’ve defaulted to by far the most expensive option, without much if any data to support it,”

Hospitals, drug companies, device makers, physicians and other providers can benefit by charging inflated prices, favoring the most costly treatment options and curbing competition that could give patients more, and cheaper, choices. And almost every interaction can be an opportunity to send multiple, often opaque bills with long lists of charges: $100 for the ice pack applied for 10 minutes after a physical therapy session, or $30,000 for the artificial joint implanted in surgery.

Even doctors often do not know the costs of the tests and procedures they prescribe. When Dr. Michael Collins, an internist in East Hartford, Conn., called the hospital that he is affiliated with to price lab tests and a colonoscopy, he could not get an answer. “It’s impossible for me to think about cost,” he said

The more than $35,000 annually that Ms. Yapalater and her employer collectively pay in premiums — her share is $15,000 — for her family’s Oxford Freedom Plan would be more than sufficient to cover their medical needs in most other countries. She and her husband, Jeff, 63, a sales and marketing consultant, have three children in their 20s with good jobs. Everyone in the family exercises, and none has had a serious illness.

A major factor behind the high costs is that the United States, unique among industrialized nations, does not generally regulate or intervene in medical pricing, aside from setting payment rates for Medicare and Medicaid, the government programs for older people and the poor. Many other countries deliver health care on a private fee-for-service basis, as does much of the American health care system, but they set rates as if health care were a public utility or negotiate fees with providers and insurers nationwide, for example.

“In the U.S., we like to consider health care a free market,” said Dr. David Blumenthal, president of the Commonwealth Fund and a former adviser to President Obama. ”But it is a very weird market, riddled with market failures.”

Consumers, the patients, do not see prices until after a service is provided, if they see them at all. And there is little quality data on hospitals and doctors to help determine good value, aside from surveys conducted by popular Web sites and magazines. Patients with insurance pay a tiny fraction of the bill, providing scant disincentive for spending.

The United States spends about 18 percent of its gross domestic product on health care, nearly twice as much as most other developed countries. The Congressional Budget Office has said that if medical costs continue to grow unabated, “total spending on health care would eventually account for all of the country’s economic output.”

Instead, payments are often determined in countless negotiations between a doctor, hospital or pharmacy, and an insurer, with the result often depending on their relative negotiating power. Insurers have limited incentive to bargain forcefully, since they can raise premiums to cover costs.

“People think it’s like other purchases: that if you pay more you get a better car. But in medicine, it’s not like that.”

Prompted by the chief executive, supporters laid siege to, invaded, and occupied the Capitol building, deploying weapons and subjecting members of both chambers of Congress to intimidation and violence in an effort to produce a particular decision by force.

We have all been taught about “checks and balances” in school. The Constitutional strategy for limiting power requires that officeholders defend the institutions they occupy against what the framers called “encroachments” by the other branches. Usually encroachments are understood metaphorically, and there is time to allow the branches to work out their differences in the back and forth of political negotiation and occasional court battles. The president’s attempted encroachment on the constitutional rights of Congress this past Wednesday was anything but metaphorical

The president aimed to reverse the decision that Congress was making on a question that the Constitution expressly reserved for the legislature.

At Wednesday’s rally, Mr. Trump gave some prepared remarks on the so-called evidence of election fraud, but he worried aloud that the crowd would be bored by those details. The more powerful thread running through his speech was an argument that constitutional constraints were forms of weakness, that Vice President Mike Pence and Congress should not be allowed to certify the election, and that it was time to take the gloves off and fight.

If the cabinet and vice president decided to remove the president temporarily from his duties through the 25th Amendment, they would protect us against some immediate dangers, but their action would do nothing to stand up for the integrity of Congress as a coequal branch of government. In fact, it would reinforce the notion that true power is concentrated only in the executive branch. Impeachment and conviction offer the only constitutionally appropriate response to the president’s encroachment on the legislative branch.

When James Madison described the checks and balances in Federalist No. 51, he wrote that “ambition must be made to counteract ambition” and that “the interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place.” This means that members of Congress should feel that their personal interests and ambitions are intertwined with the power of the institution they occupy.

Members who said they wanted to satisfy popular sentiment questioning the election results by channeling it through a congressional commission should see that the president’s actions have made a mockery of their procedural efforts. Their place in history depends on whether they counteract the president’s ambition and resist the humiliation of Congress in the way the constitutional framers assumed any self-respecting legislator would.

Not so long ago, the Republican Party described itself as “the party of Lincoln” and flaunted its commitment to constitutionalism. Now, the question is whether enough Republican senators will do what is necessary to help the country step away from what Lincoln called the “mobocratic spirit,” which he identified as the greatest threat to our political institutions.

If Congress does not utilize the constitutional means of defending itself and deterring future attacks, this moment will come to be regarded by historians as a decisive capitulation, not just to President Trump, but to a dangerous new mode of presidential action. The precedent that a president can stir up mobs to intimidate the other branches will be set, and even if it recedes into the background for a while, eventually that precedent will be followed.

many hospitals across the country have said worker safety is already their top priority, and unions are taking advantage of a difficult situation to divide staff and management, rather than working together.

Recognizing that, some workers — like the nurses at Mission Hospital — are forming new unions or thinking about organizing for the first time. Others, who already belong to a union, are taking more active leadership roles, voting to strike, launching public information campaigns and filing lawsuits against employers.

Labor experts say it's too soon to know if the outrage over working conditions will translate into an increase in union membership, but early indications suggest a small uptick. Of the approximately 1,500 petitions for union representation posted on the National Labor Relations Board website in 2020, 16% appear related to the health care field, up from 14% the previous year.

Stephanie Felix-Sowy said her team is fielding dozens of calls a month from nonunion workers interested in joining. Not only are nurses and respiratory therapists reaching out, but dietary workers and cleaning staff are as well, including several from rural parts of the state where union representation has traditionally been low.

Research shows that health facilities with unions have better patient outcomes and are more likely to have inspections that can find and correct workplace hazards. One study found New York nursing homes with unionized workers had lower COVID-19 mortality rates, as well as better access to PPE and stronger infection control measures, than nonunion facilities.

The nurses at Mission Hospital say administrators have minimized and disregarded their concerns, often leaving them out of important planning and decision-making in the hospital's COVID-19 response.

Early in the pandemic, staffers struggled to find masks and other protective equipment,

The hospital discouraged them from wearing masks one day and required masks 10 days later. The staff wasn't consistently tested for COVID-19 and often not even notified when exposed to COVID-positive patients.

the concerns persisted for months. And some nurses said the situation fueled doubts about whether hospital executives were prioritizing staff and patients, or the bottom line.

Although the nurses didn't vote to unionize until September, Waters said, they began acting collectively from the early days of the pandemic. They drafted a petition and sent a letter to administrators together. When the hospital agreed to provide advanced training on how to use PPE to protect against COVID transmission, it was a small but significant victory

Even as union membership in most industries has declined in recent years, health workers unions have remained relatively stable:

But with another surge of COVID cases approaching, the nurses decided not to wait any longer to take action

Intrinsic motivation is extremely useful, giving even serious work a sense of effortlessness.

often fails to take hold when they feel controlled, pressured or unsure.

Intrinsic motivation is the one that tends to be prized in educational circles, and with good reason. It is linked to higher levels of academic achievement and greater psychological well-being.

etting tweens and teenagers decide the order in which they tackle their assignments, how they want to prepare for tests or where they feel they study most effectively, even if that means that their papers carpet their bedroom floors.

the utility of praise depends on how it’s done.

This is such a hard year. So long as we do it right, there’s no reason for adults to be stingy with praise.

Teachers and parents should keep a close eye for students who are checking out because they feel lost and work to recalibrate the material or the expectations.

This year, even more than usual, adults are asking so much of adolescents. One way to help is by talking openly about strategies that help muster motivation. These conversations will help teenagers now, and also long after the virus is gone.

In Pennsylvania, for instance, election officials can't do anything with early ballots until Election Day

The Election Day vote is expected to look better for Trump than the early vote in part because Democrats have encouraged their voters to utilize mail-in, absentee and early voting options.

Trump is betting the votes cast on Election Day will look better for him.

a disproportionate amount of early results will be from day-of votes, likely giving Trump an extra bump.

Democrats have improved their vote totals as more votes were counted. That happened in 2016, when Clinton's popular vote margin grew as more mail-in ballots were counted

If there's a disputed election and a state can't determine who should win its electoral votes, expect a court battle, like the one that made George W. Bush president in 2000.

In this way the US election is really 51 smaller elections. And each state has its own rules.

Nebraska and Maine each award two electoral votes to the statewide winner and the rest of their votes proportionally to the presidential candidate who gets more votes in individual congressional districts

According to CNN's electoral map, there are 125 electoral votes already safely in Trump's column.

Polling suggests he's in the lead in the Rust Belt sates that put Trump over the hump in 2016. He needs to hold the Rust Belt states.

If Trump wins Florida, Georgia, Iowa, North Carolina and Ohio along with Pennsylvania, Maine's second congressional district and Nebraska's second congressional district, both candidates will have 269 electoral votes.

. Trump probably has an edge in a tie since Republicans control more state congressional delegations.

Each state and Washington, DC, all have at least three and as many as 55 votes (that's California).

The real question is whether Republicans can hang onto their slim majority in the Senate.

They're pretty much guaranteed to lose a Senate seat in Alabama, so Democrats are looking for 4-5 seats elsewhere. There are plenty of opportunities.

Control of state governments is more important this year than usual since it's a Census year

Even if Democrats don't win the Texas electoral votes, they're hoping to get a say in how the state draws these districts.

As part of the order, USPS must send a memo by 9 p.m., local time, Sunday evening to processing plant managers and division directors saying the extraordinary measures "must be put in place to ensure we delivery every ballot possible by the cutoff time on Election Day."

In addition to the USPS' daily sweeps for election mail, USPS processing plant managers must also certify that all local ballots have been sent to the local election or post office by 10 a.m., local time, on Monday and Tuesday.

In New Jersey and three key states in the election -- Minnesota, North Carolina and Pennsylvania -- USPS must issue "targeted written communication, and make all reasonable efforts to orally convey" to plant managers and division directors that ballots should be processed prior to the deadline in which they need to arrive at election offices on Election Day.

And by 9 a.m., local time, on Monday, USPS is required to send a memo to every local post office reiterating that they must postmark all ballots they receive. Properly postmarked ballots are important because some states allow for pre-Election Day postmarked ballots to arrive after Election Day.

In a document filed in US District Court Sunday, USPS said that on a national level, they moved fewer ballots on time on Saturday than on Friday and their processing score dropping from 93% to 91%

More critical battlegrounds states are now experiencing a drop in scores -- below 90% -- and those already below that did not improve substantially and some dropped even lower.

I'm bringing this lawsuit to bring about change on behalf of a community that deserves the inherent dignity to simply exist."

"Ms. Diamond repeatedly notified GDC officials ... of her sexual assaults and begged to be transferred to a safer facility. Rather than heed her urgent requests for safe housing, GDC officials instructed Ms. Diamond to 'guard her booty'

openly acknowledged that GDC was unable to keep Ms. Diamond safe so long as she remained a transgender woman housed in men's facilities."

instances of abuse during her time in GDC custody, including one where an inmate hid waiting for her in a utility closet to assault her, and a corrections officer allegedly admitted she had been warned that the incarcerated man had been hiding there before the attack

one employee who allegedly locked her in a room on two occasions and allegedly sexually harassed her for hours.

Diamond filed her first lawsuit against the department in 2015 while incarcerated. The case was ultimately settled, but during litigation the court ruled that it was unconstitutional for the department to fail to protect her.

Despite a GDC psychologist concluding that denying her treatments would jeopardize Diamond's physical and psychological well-being, she was again denied hormone therapy

"The fabric of trust that I have for authorities has been broken, especially with those who the state has designated as my care takers,"

"My hope is that the future is brighter for people like me," Diamond said in the release. "I hope this lawsuit forever changes the way transgender people in Georgia are treated. This fight is not just my fight, it's our fight."

What would Mill have said if England had had then, as it does now, a public health system in which everyone shared the cost of treatment for alcoholism? What would he have said about smoking if he knew about the effects of secondhand smoke? Indeed, secondhand smoke is rapidly becoming a metaphor for our time.

Am I being too alarmist? Possibly. Sweeping legislative proposals like the Green New Deal places virtually all of the burden on utilities and industry, rather than end-users like us, by imposing a price on carbon

The other obvious objection to my scenario would be, in effect, so what? The First Amendment doesn’t protect your right to eat steak

Yet that’s not quite right. Very few of us care so much about our rights of speech or conscience

in 1819, Constant wrote that the democrats of Greece and Rome, like the revolutionaries of his own day, “admitted as compatible with this collective freedom the complete subjection of the individual to the authority of the community.”

By contrast, Constant wrote, “the aim of the moderns is the enjoyment of security in private pleasures, and they call liberty the guarantees accorded by institutions to those pleasures.”

One man’s meat is another man’s poison, as F.D.R. put it, more prescient than he knew. In the cataclysm of the Depression, the president was able to summon up the sense of collective purpose needed to embark on large-scale change

We moderns build institutions, and establish tacit norms, to guarantee the security of such private pleasures. That’s liberal individualism.

But what do we do once we see that some of those choices threaten the health and lives of others? We will have to strike a new equilibrium between what society has the right to demand of us and what we have a right to retain for ourselves.

F.D.R. was a liberal — that was the word he used to describe himself — but he was willing to restrict some liberties in order to advance larger ones. A liberal, as he once put it, was prepared to use government to ensure the ordinary citizen “the right to his own economic and political life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

Liberal societies, in short, have always faced the problem of secondhand smoke, but what once was exceptional has now become endemic.

Constant wasn’t thinking of Marie Antoinette’s right to play at shepherdess while her subjects starved, but the right to open a shop and build yourself a home rather than be drafted into Napoleon’s army

Our own crisis, of course, still appears to many far too remote for any such call to sacrifice.

Can we forge a new equilibrium before Miami is under water?

The Dutch can reach consensus on painful social questions because they’ve spent the last thousand years working cooperatively to build dikes; the climate accord adopted last year came after a full year of discussion among representatives of all interest groups.

That’s not how American democracy works, and especially so in recent years. We allow those interest groups to wage a pitched battle using all the money and influence they can muster against one another. Legislation emerges only after a war of attrition.

Heiting says burning that methane is a way of reducing the greenhouse gas emissions that are currently contributing to climate change. Methane released from dairy farms, for example, has far more global warming potential than the carbon dioxide released when that methane is burned.

So the company would then mix that lower-carbon gas with hydrogen gas, which has no carbon emissions when it's burned.

"This is not going to happen without policy support," she says. "We need production tax credits for renewable natural gas and hydrogen just like we put in place for wind and solar."

"Hydrogen is pretty well suited to solve a lot of problems at once and really be this unifier between renewable energy and our society's energy needs," Ramsey says. "This is a big opportunity for oil and gas companies, but also for electric utilities and renewable developers."

Biden, over the course of his first month in office, has relentlessly pressed lawmakers to pass his cornerstone legislative proposal, which includes funding for schools, vaccine distribution and infrastructure, states and localities, direct payments and extensions of expiring unemployment insurance programs.

Among those signed onto the letter are bold faced names including David Solomon, chairman and chief executive officer at Goldman Sachs; Stephen Schwartzman, the chairman and CEO of Blackstone; Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google; John Zimmer, the co-founder and president of Lyft; Brian Roberts, the chairman and CEO of Comcast and John Stankey the CEO of AT&T.Read More

Republican support, to this point at least, has remained non-existent, with even moderate GOP senators amenable to talks calling Biden's proposal too large in scale and scope given the trillions in emergency aid deployed over the first year of the pandemic.

Biden, however, has been steadfast that his mandate is to "go big," and in recent days has challenged opponents of his plan to outline specifically what they'd like to strip from the package.

"Now critics say the plan is too big," Biden said at the White House on Monday. "Let me ask the rhetorical question -- what would you have me cut? What would you have me leave out?"

"Strengthening the public health response to coronavirus is the first step toward economic restoration," the executives wrote. "The American Rescue Plan mobilizes a national vaccination program, delivers economic relief to struggling families, and supports communities that were most damaged by the pandemic."

At the time, Mr. Trump described his action as a way to protect Americans, millions of whom lost their jobs as the threat of the coronavirus shut down the economy.

“By pausing immigration, we will help put unemployed Americans first in line for jobs as America reopens. So important,” Mr. Trump said. “It would be wrong and unjust for Americans laid off by the virus to be replaced with new immigrant labor flown in from abroad. We must first take care of the American worker.”

Critics of Mr. Trump accused him of using the pandemic as an excuse to further advance his agenda of severely restricting immigration.

An analysis by the Migration Policy Institute at the time estimated that the policy could affect as many as 660,000 people.

In his legislation, the president would provide an eight-year path to citizenship for most of the 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States.

So who’s right: Alston or Kim?

They are in a more important sense interpretive, about whether progress has been fast or slow, and whether today’s global poverty counts are laudable or tragic.

This is a realm of yes-ands and no-buts, not direct refutations.

“By being able to rely so heavily on the World Bank's flagship figure, they can say, ‘Look, progress has been consistent. We’ve been doing great,’” Alston told me. “The implication of that is that the triumph of neoliberalism has brought with it very significant benefits for poor people. In reality, that’s just not the case.”

Extreme poverty has declined rapidly, but the extreme-poverty line is very low: A person living below it spends no more than $1.90 a day, enough in many poor countries to cover some starch, a few fruits and vegetables, some cooking oil, a bit of protein, and that’s about it—with nothing left over for utilities, education, health care, transportation, or investment in wealth-generating assets, such as a cow or a motorbike

Alston takes issue with the fact that the World Bank’s extreme-poverty line is an absolute measure, not a relative one: It sets a line and sees how many people cross it, country by country, rather than pegging the poverty threshold to median income, country by country

But “relative poverty is what really counts these days,” Alston told me, as it captures social exclusion, and the way that living on a few dollars a day is more challenging in middle-income countries like India and Kenya than in low-income countries like Afghanistan and Chad.

Alston’s most controversial, and most important, argument is that the focus on progress measured against the $1.90-a-day line—the prevalence of “everything’s getting better” arguments, made by Davos types like Bill Gates and Steven Pinker—has hampered progress toward true poverty eradication, and toward civil rights, social inclusion, and a basic standard of living for all.

That poverty threshold represents “a staggeringly low standard of living, well below any reasonable conception of a life with dignity,” Alston argues—it is a catastrophic-destitution measure, not a poverty measure. He emphasizes the lack of progress made at the $3.20-a-day and $5.50-a-day poverty lines, too. Half the world lives on less than the latter figure.

What if the headline story were that half the world still qualifies as desperately poor, and poverty head counts remain stubbornly high in dozens of countries? What if the story were not that we are succeeding, but that we are failing?

it would hold the world accountable for the fact that poverty is, always and everywhere, a choice.

Alston’s view, and a necessary one, is that the world cannot wait for economic expansion to lift people above the poverty line. It cannot count on trade compacts and infrastructure projects and the ticking of GDP growth rates from 2.3 to 3.2 percent to do it. It needs direct interventions by governments, as fast as possible, to eliminate inequality and build safety nets, even in the poorest places.

Racism is the original sin of the modern Republican Party. While many Republicans today like to mourn the absence of an intellectual voice like William Buckley, it is often overlooked that Mr. Buckley began his career as a racist defending segregation.

That strategy has worked so well that it was copied by the Russians in their 2016 efforts to help elect Mr. Trump.

In the 2000 George W. Bush campaign, on which I worked, we acknowledged the failures of Republicans to attract significant nonwhite support. When Mr. Bush called himself a “compassionate conservative,” some on the right attacked him, calling it an admission that conservatism had not been compassionate. That was true; it had not been. Many of us believed we could steer the party to that “kinder, gentler” place his father described. We were wrong.

There is a collective blame to be shared by those of us who have created the modern Republican Party that has so egregiously betrayed the principles it claimed to represent. My j’accuse is against us all, not a few individuals who were the most egregious.

How did this happen? How do you abandon deeply held beliefs about character, personal responsibility, foreign policy and the national debt in a matter of months? You don’t. The obvious answer is those beliefs weren’t deeply held.

This collapse of a major political party as a moral governing force is unlike anything we have seen in modern American politics. The closest parallel is the demise of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union, when the dissonance between what the party said it stood for and what citizens actually experienced was so great that it was unsustainable.

I’ve given up hope that there are any lines of decency or normalcy that once crossed would move Republican leaders to act as if they took their oath of office more seriously than their allegiance to party

I’d like to say I’m hopeful. But that would be a lie and there have been too many lies for too long.