. The bad news is that a form of doomsday-machine politics — in which you threaten to blow up things that you care about, because you think your rivals care about them more — is playing out in Washington right now, courtesy of the Republican Party.
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The G.O.P.'s Doomsday-Machine Politics - The New York Times - 0 views
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Doomsday-machine politics made its first U.S. appearance in the 1990s, when Republicans shut down the federal government in an attempt to extract concessions from Bill Clinton.
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Republicans tried again, with more success, in 2011, using the threat of refusing to raise the debt ceiling — forcing the U.S. government into default, with possibly catastrophic effects on the world economy — to win policy concessions from Barack Obama.
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And even though they now control the White House as well as Congress, Republicans are still in the doomsday-machine business — and what they’re currently threatening to blow up is health care for nearly nine million children.
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Now, however, G.O.P. leaders are in trouble. They need to pass a “continuing resolution” in order to maintain funding for the government and avoid a shutdown. But despite control of both houses of Congress, they don’t have the votes.
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passing the bill in the Senate will require 60 votes. With only 51 Republicans Democratic votes are needed.
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Protecting the Dreamers is, by the way, enormously popular, even among Republicans, who oppose deporting them by a huge margin. So it’s not as if the G.O.P. would be giving up a lot. But Donald Trump torpedoed the deal, apparently because he doesn’t want immigrants from “shithole countries.”
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Yet G.O.P. leaders seem to believe that they can bully Democrats by threatening to hurt millions of children — because Democrats care more about those children than they do. They also believe that if this tactic fails they can frame it as an exhibition of callousness by Democrats.
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Forget about small government. Republicans support big debt. - The Washington Post - 0 views
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To recap then, with no public appetite for small government, the domination of the donor and business class (who were the impetus behind tax cuts) and the passage of tax-and-spending measures that unleash a torrent of red ink, the GOP is now firmly committed to very big government
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The Democrats are, too, so the debate then boils down to where and how we’re going to spend the money.
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That’s actually a positive political development, for it enables deal-making (as we saw from the Senate majority and minority) leaders and defangs the extreme-right wing, which can no longer hold the country and Congress hostage.
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Democrats, who have been the party of robust, active government are surely the winners here. Having tossed aside fiscal virtue, the GOP is now left only to haggle over the price and the distribution of taxpayers’ money
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A few months back, Larry Summers and other center-left economists made the case that we need more revenue for the foreseeable future.
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Bizarre as it may seem, a fiscally irresponsible tax cut begat a huge spending bill, which eventually will require tax hikes. Democrats calling for taxes to pay for the spending Republicans demand now can rightly claim to be more fiscally serious than Republicans.
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Combined with the gargantuan gap between rich and poor and the wealth accumulation by the rich, the politically popular solution that Democrats might offer (albeit with some questionable math) is their own balanced budget (or more-balanced budget) with increased taxes on the rich.
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At least it has the virtue of intellectual honesty: If we want big government, we have to pay for it.
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How Russia Hacked America-And Why It Will Happen Again - The Atlantic - The Atlantic - 0 views
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During the 2016 presidential campaign, Russian hackers attacked the U.S. on two fronts: the psychological and the technical. Hackers used classic propaganda techniques to influence American voters, bought thousands of social media ads to propagate fake news, and broke into Democratic party email servers to steal information. And it won't be the last time. Russian-backed psychological cyber warfare will only get better, and its methods more sophisticated.
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Even now, Republicans are ignoring the storm clouds - The Washington Post - 0 views
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Not so long ago, Republican leaders prided themselves on protecting middle-American minds from the liberal intellectual rot being spread by politicians and college professors they viewed as being hostile to law enforcement, contemptuous of constitutional traditions, indifferent to personal morality and accommodating to Russian tyrants.
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They claimed to be the intellectual heirs of Edmund Burke, Russell Kirk and William F. Buckley Jr. Now those same politicians debase themselves daily in service to Trump.
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As a storm gathers over Washington and the world, Donald Trump’s Republican Party remains complicit in his frenzied efforts to undermine the American institutions and established values that conservatives once claimed to share.
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Andrew Sullivan: When Two Tribes Go to War - 0 views
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And the tactics Cohn once deployed are now all around us: throw back the exact same charges you’re facing against those investigating you. Invent a conspiracy theory to rival a collusion theory. Throw sand in everyone’s eyes. Get your allegations out first, in as inflammatory and scandalous a way as possible. Ransack people’s private lives and communications to more effectively demonize them.
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Dominate the news cycles. Do anything to muddy the conflict and to sow suspicion. Lie, if you have to. Exercise not the slightest concern for the stability of the system as a whole — because tribe comes first.
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The tax bill has become proof, in their eyes, of the potential success of this strategy. They think they can hold back a Democratic wave in November by rallying the tribe behind their leader, and by giving an economy at peak employment a stimulus of over $1 trillion in tax cuts. And, for all their cynicism and fiscal irresponsibility, they may be right.
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I see tribalism deepening and the constitutional crisis intensifying. It’s quite clear now that the GOP has thrown itself in completely with the Trump movement. (Paul Ryan is pledging to “cleanse” the FBI!)
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Trump, to make things worse, sees no distinction between the tactics he deployed as a private citizen in lawsuits for decades and the tactics he is deploying as president, because he has no conception of a presidency committed first of all to the long-term maintenance of the system rather than the short-term pursuit of personal interest. He simply cannot see the value of institutions that might endure through time, under both parties, as a way to preserve objective fact-finding and the neutral enforcement of justice.
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Since the tax law passed, the Democratic lead in the generic congressional polling has been more than halved from 13 points to a mere 6. Trump’s own approval ratings were negative 20 points in mid-December. Now they are negative 15.
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If you keep an eight-year recovery going artificially — through massive deregulation and tax cuts — the very bottom of the workforce is going to feel the dividends simply because of supply and demand. And they will react accordingly.
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I think these tax cuts are extraordinarily fiscally irresponsible, and are already creating a bubble. But if the bubble doesn’t burst before Election Day this year, whatever Mueller finds may well be moot.
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The Rainbow Coalition is now ever more indistinguishable from mainstream Democratic politics, as the Dems find themselves defending more porous borders, and designating any position to the right of them on immigration as “racist.
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We are in a different zero-sum political world. This is a tribal scorched-earth war, underpinned by racial and gender divides, thriving regardless of the consequences for our democratic institutions, discourse, and way of life.
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When the president is already suspected of having had ties with the Russian government during an election when that government tried to tilt the results to Trump, his refusal to obey Congress’s specific intent to punish Moscow is more than troubling.
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Can we truly expect this presidency to exist within the framework the Founders constructed? Can we trust our elections anymore? Or is tribalism getting closer and closer to something we used to call treason?
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shared by Javier E on 13 May 18
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Stop saying the Trump era is 'not normal' or 'not who we are.' We've been here before. ... - 0 views
www.washingtonpost.com/...o-we-are-weve-been-here-before
History US crisis culture nativism authoritarian racism populism
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“normalizing” President Trump has become a mortal sin, and “that’s not who we are” a rallying cry for those who view today’s anti-democratic and nativist compulsions as aberrations along that long arc toward justice. Except this is normal. And it is who we are.
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Jon Meacham’s “The Soul of America,” though it intends to uplift, nonetheless offers a necessary and sobering corrective. America’s past is “more often tragic” than otherwise, the historian writes, “full of broken hearts and broken promises, disappointed hopes and dreams delayed.” In times of fear, our leaders “can be as often disappointing as they are heroic.”
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And if the soul of America is found in those attempts to expand the space for more people to live freely and pursue happiness, Meacham also points to a “universal American inconsistency” — even as we uphold life and liberty for some, we hold back others deemed unworthy.
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Slavery, the Klan, Jim Crow, the Klan again. Internment of Japanese Americans. Gender discrimination and scientific racism. McCarthyism. George Wallace. All leading to a president whom Meacham considers “an heir to the white populist tradition,” a leader eager to undermine the law, the truth and “the sense of hope essential to American life.
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Trump is normal in that he embodies recurring maladies of American public life; perhaps the main anomaly is that he brings so many of them together
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every generation considers itself under siege and that, with the right leadership, Americans usually find a way forward rather than back. “The good news is that we have come through such darkness before,” he writes.
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if you’re living in the gloom, awareness of historical patterns bestows limited consolation. It might, however, inject small doses of those qualities that latter-day resistance requires: Inspiration. Patience. Even humility.
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even the exemplars are imperfect. Woodrow Wilson, who signed women’s suffrage into law, also resegregated the federal workforce, suppressed free speech and screened “The Birth of a Nation” in the White House.
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Franklin Roosevelt, who saved the country from the Great Depression, also sought to pack the Supreme Court and, more damning, detained Americans for no other cause than their Japanese ancestry. “A tragic element of history is that every advance must contend with forces of reaction,” Meacham writes.
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For all his emphasis on elected leaders, however, Meacham argues that “what counts is not just the character of the individual at the top, but the character of the country.”
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King would marvel that it took a white Southerner, Lyndon Johnson, to help fulfill that vision. Progress in America, Meacham explains, “comes when the whispered hopes of those outside the mainstream rise in volume to reach the ears and hearts and minds of the powerful.”
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In the 1920s, Klansmen held 11 governorships and 16 U.S. Senate seats, while more than 300 delegates at the 1924 Democratic National Convention were Klan members.
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The opposition of the press “had the perverse effect of boosting the Klan rather than undercutting it,” Meacham notes. “Hostility from the journalists of the East convinced a number of middle Americans that a cause under such assault must have something to recommend it.” The elite news media as the enemy of real America is hardly just a Trumpian conceit.
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When industrial upheaval and urbanization upended rural life, Meacham recalls, the Ku Klux Klan promised “racial solidarity and cultural certitude” — an apt summation of white-nationalists’ appeal a century later.
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Trump-like figures are most evident among the latter forces. It is difficult to read Meacham’s descriptions of politicians such as President Andrew Johnson, Sen. Joseph McCarthy and Gov. George Wallace and not feel the current president looming.
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The Surprisingly Disorderly History of the US Presidential Succession Order | Britannic... - 0 views
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Thus it is somewhat surprising that presidential succession in the United States has often been unclear and problematic. Delegates to the Constitutional Convention (1787) spent little time on succession
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if the president is unable to complete his term—either by removal, death, resignation, or inability to discharge the office’s duties—the vice president would assume the post. The lack of details raised questions—notably, who determines if the president is unable to serve? In addition, no provisions were made for a case in which the vice president could not take office
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Congress passed the Presidential Succession Act in 1792. The legislation placed the president pro tempore of the Senate and then the speaker of the House of Representatives as next in line after the vice president
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The secretary of state was bypassed largely because Federalists of the time opposed that office’s holder, Thomas Jefferson, a vocal anti-Federalist.)
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when Pres. James A. Garfield was shot in July 1881, doubts arose over who should be president. Although severely incapacitated, Garfield lived for 80 days. During this time, it was uncertain if Vice Pres. Chester A. Arthur should serve as acting president or if he should officially replace Garfield
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Congress set out to resolve some of these issues, and a new Presidential Succession Act was officially enacted in 1886
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Later notable modifications included the Twenty-fifth Amendment, which was ratified in 1967. It explicitly stated (unlike the Constitution) that if the vice president assumes the Oval Office, he or she would be the president—not the acting president
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Taliban officials 'in talks with Afghan government', US says - BBC News - 0 views
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The Taliban have held secret meetings with Afghan officials to discuss a ceasefire, the US military says.
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However, the Taliban rejected the claims, saying the group did not "want to waste time in the name of talks" with the Afghan government "in the presence of the occupying forces".Afghan President Ashraf Ghani has previously proposed negotiations with the Taliban, saying they could be recognised as a political party if they accepted a ceasefire and recognised the country's constitution.
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The Taliban have shown an openness to talks in the past, suggesting that, in addition to the armed struggle, negotiations were a "legitimate" way of achieving their main objective: an end to what they call the "occupation by foreign forces".
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On the other hand, the US insists that the Taliban must talk to the Afghan government. US officials say that the war in Afghanistan is primarily between the two Afghan sides, and that the US cannot substitute for direct negotiations between the ruling government in Kabul and the Taliban.
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It is estimated that about 15 million people - half the population - are living in areas that are either controlled by the Taliban or where the Taliban are openly present and regularly mount attacks.
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The hardline Islamic Taliban movement swept to power in Afghanistan in 1996 after the civil war that followed the Soviet-Afghan war, and were ousted by the US-led invasion five years later.
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In 2016, Afghan civilian casualties hit a new high - a rise attributed by the UN largely to the Taliban.
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France - Charles VI | Britannica.com - 0 views
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In 1392 the king lost his sanity, a shocking event that aroused popular solicitude for the crown. His recurrent lapses into insanity, however, played into the hands of his uncles. Philip the Bold again dominated the council. Fortunately for France, England was incapable of renewing the war.
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When conflict with England was renewed in the 15th century, circumstances had changed. Henry IV of England was committed to the recovery of English rights in France
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John’s dangerous response was to encourage the new king of England, Henry V, to claim the French throne for himself.
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the civil war in France enabled Henry V to exploit his strength, as Edward III had not been able to do. In 1418 the Burgundian party recovered control of Paris, and the dauphin Charles embarked on a long exile
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By the Treaty of Troyes (1420) the deranged Charles VI was induced to set aside the dauphin’s right of succession in favour of Henry V, who married Charles VI’s daughter. The ancient dream of a dynastic union between France and England seemed to be realized; and, when Henry and Charles died within weeks of each other in 1422, the infant Henry VI became king in both lands.
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'We Cannot Save Everything': A Historic Neighborhood Confronts Rising Seas - The New Yo... - 0 views
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According to a 2014 report by the Union of Concerned Scientists, sea level rise threatens sites ranging from Faneuil Hall, where the Sons of Liberty planned the Boston Tea Party, to the launchpads of Cape Canaveral.
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The National Park Service says a quarter of its properties are on or near the coast, and most of them contain historic structures — many of them Civil War forts vulnerable to sea level rise.
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Since then, experts in preservation have gathered in Annapolis, Md., whose Colonial Annapolis Historic District is threatened; in St. Augustine, Fla., where the Castillo de San Marcos, a 17th-century fort built of light and porous coquina limestone, is highly vulnerable; and last month in Nantucket. That entire island is designated a National Historic District, and much of it is subject to flooding and erosion.
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So architects, planners and engineers are devising novel approaches, such as allowing water to flow through threatened structures; turning basements into cisterns; installing building-size flotation systems; or re-plumbing entire neighborhoods to direct storm water and high tides out of the way.
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The Point was settled in the 17th century by Quaker refugees from Massachusetts. Then, it was little more than a spit of land sticking out into what became Newport Harbor. Soon, as its edges were filled in, a marsh became Marsh Street, and a wet area became Water Street; the path of a span that once linked The Point to the rest of Newport turned into Bridge Street
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Trump's Favorite Ambassador Makes a Very Trumpian Splash in Berlin - WSJ - 0 views
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During a meeting with Angela Merkel, Vice President Mike Pence praised Richard Grenell, the blunt-spoken U.S. ambassador to Germany, eliciting a characteristically dry comment from the chancellor.
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Mr. Grenell, a confidant of the president and former adviser to his campaign, embodies both the diplomatic doctrine of the Trump administration and its new posture toward U.S. allies in Europe: engagement, public criticism that rankles host nations, some achievements and some unbridgeable divides.
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On his first day in his new post, Mr. Grenell, 52 years old, sparked outrage in Germany with a tweet demanding German companies wind down their operations in Iran. The acrimony was compounded by his call in a Breitbart News interview for empowering conservatives across Europ
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Mr. Trump has often privately praised Mr. Grenell’s TV appearances and his social media presence—peppered alternately with criticism of German policy and pictures of his dog, Lola—and described the ambassador as someone who “gets it.”
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Mr. Grenell “understands what his mission is—his mission is what my father gives him,” Donald Trump Jr.
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Thanks to his direct access to the president, Mr. Grenell has extended his remit beyond Germany, holding meetings with conservative leaders such as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and former Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz. The president views Mr. Grenell “not just as his man in Germany, but his man in Europe,
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Trump's Conspiracy Theory About the Clintons and Epstein - The Atlantic - 0 views
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Today, President Trump accused his predecessor, Bill Clinton—or possibly his 2016 campaign opponent, former First Lady and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton—of complicity in the death of the accused sex-trafficker, Jeffrey Epstein.
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Reactions to actions by Trump are always filtered through the prism of the ever-more-widely accepted view—within his administration, within Congress, within the United States and around the world—that the 45th president is a reckless buffoon, a conspiratorial racist moron, whose weird comments should be disregarded by sensible people
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By now, Trump’s party in Congress, the members of his Cabinet, and even his White House entourage all tacitly agree that Trump’s occupancy of the office held by Washington, Lincoln, FDR, and Eisenhower must be a bizarre cosmic joke, not to be taken seriously.
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CNN’s Jake Tapper on August 2 quoted a “senior national security official” as saying: "Everyone at this point ignores what the president says and just does their job. The American people should take some measure of confidence in that.”
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But cosmic joke or no cosmic joke, Donald Trump is the president of the United States. You may not like it. I don’t like it. Mike Pompeo doesn’t like it. Mitch McConnell doesn’t like it. Kevin McCarthy doesn’t like it. But it’s still a fact, and each succeeding outrage makes it no less a fact
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The certainty that Trump will descend ever deeper into sub-basements of “new lows” after this new low should not numb us to its newness and lowness
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shared by Javier E on 11 Aug 19
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What Makes an American? - The New York Times - 0 views
www.nytimes.com/...ration-assimilation-texas.html
american immigration American idea youth assimilation culture
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the Trumpian view that immigration was failing and that this failure posed an existential threat. The fear that foreigners refuse to adapt is widespread among immigration critics, and even Americans with more welcoming views sometimes worry that assimilation is proceeding less surely than it once did.
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In a country of 44 million immigrants, no family stands for the whole. The Villanuevas merely stand for the substantial immigrant success missing from the Trump Twitter feed.
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I got to see the process of becoming American through the eyes of Lara and her older sister, Kristine, who assimilated rapidly, in surprising and contrasting ways.
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The classic version of Americanization is called straight-line assimilation. It’s a three-generation tale as central to America’s mythology as the Boston Tea Party: The immigrants struggle amid poverty and bias; their children awkwardly juggle two cultures; the third generation completes the rise, with a white-collar job and a house in the suburbs. The story imparts two lessons: The descendants of immigrants advance and do so by blending in.
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Straight-line assimilation was the reigning narrative of the mid-20th century. Half a century had passed since immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe had poured through Ellis Island. Learned men had warned that they would never adapt, but they did so decisively. A unified country had beaten the Nazis, with Mayflower descendants sharing foxholes with Kowalskis and Mancinis. Groups that warred abroad lived as neighbors in New York and Chicago. A Catholic became president.
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Sometime in the 1960s, this assimilation story fell from favor. It overstated the acceptance that immigrants had won and understated the hardships they had faced. It idealized WASP culture and slighted the satisfactions of the ethnic community. It overlooked race — the lengths to which the country had gone to prevent the assimilation of blacks.
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Leftist scholars condemned “the blight of assimilationist ideology” and celebrated ethnic struggle. Ozzie and Harriet gave way to Kojak and Columbo, heritage travel and klezmer bands. Assimilation seemed wrong as an explanation of what did happen and offensive as an explanation of what should happen.
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But some scholars warn that Americanization carries risks, especially for the poor. The longer newcomers are in the United States, the more likely they are to smoke, grow obese or commit crimes. Two prominent scholars, Alejandro Portes and Ruben Rumbaut, have warned that the children of the most disadvantaged immigrants may assimilate downward, joining the native poor in a “rainbow underclass.”
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Given the difficulties that immigrants and their descendants faced, Gans rightly called their assimilation “bumpy line” rather than straight. But bumps and all, assimilation prevailed
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It’s possible that Kristine’s generation will find assimilation harder. Economic mobility has waned; a quarter of the foreign-born lack legal status; and most of today’s immigrants are racial minorities, which could attract more enduring bigotry. Mass media once encouraged common identity. In today’s narrowcast world, pluribus triumphs over unum.
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Trumpism itself may impede assimilation: If you constantly tell immigrants they’re unwanted, they may come to believe it.
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But other differences between the eras could ease assimilation. Immigrants have civil rights their predecessors lacked. (Sicilians did not have affirmative action.) Many arrive like Rosalie, already middle-class. And mainstream culture is much more diverse, making it easier to fit in.
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Two academic camps have shaped debate about the children of immigrants. Both see the majority succeeding — advancing in school, securing jobs and integrating. Intermarriage is high, and English is near universal. “Today’s immigrants are actually learning English faster than their predecessors,” the National Academy of Sciences concluded in 2015.
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The resurgence of ethnic identity was heartfelt but no sign that assimilation had failed. On the contrary, as scholars like Herbert Gans and Mary Waters argued, Americans could celebrate their heritage precisely because it meant so little. It did not affect where they could live, whom they could marry or what jobs they could get. “Symbolic ethnicity” flourished, but divisions faded: intermarriage rose, discrimination fell and residential enclaves dispersed
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A rival group is more optimistic. They found that children of immigrants not only outperformed children of natives (of similar races) but did so despite having parents with less income and education. How could that be? Philip Kasinitz and three colleagues argue that children of immigrants often enjoy a “second-generation advantage” over native peers.
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Two parts of the argument are familiar — immigrants, self-selected for ambition, pass along their drive, and the intensity of ethnic networks provides support that natives lack. But the researchers also argue that children of immigrants benefit intellectually from living at a cultural crossroads
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Children of immigrants, they wrote, often “combine the best of both worlds” — their parents’ and their peers’ — or innovate in ways that “can be highly conducive to success.’
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Curious about how she had grown curious, Lara formed her own assimilation theory: America had scared her into asking questions. Confused when she arrived and afraid of repeating second grade, “I told myself I should be interested right now.” Being interested became a habit. Put differently, blending cultures produced new thinking — Lara was simply repeating what the Kasinitz camp argues about the cultural crossroads.
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Opinion | The Authoritarian's Worst Fear? A Book - The New York Times - 0 views
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Wherever authoritarian regimes are growing in strength, from Brazil, to Hungary, to the Philippines, literature that expresses any kind of political opposition is under a unique, renewed threat. Books that challenge normative values, especially those with L.G.B.T. themes, have been hit especially hard. History textbooks crafted by independent scholars are being replaced with those produced by the state at a disturbing rate
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Last month, the Turkish strongman Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s education minister Ziya Selcuk revealed — proudly — that 301,878 books had been taken out of schools and libraries and destroyed. All these books were purportedly connected to Fethullah Gulen,
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At the extreme end of the scale, ISIS notoriously burned over 100,000 rare books and manuscripts housed in the Mosul Public Library, some dating back a millennium.
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Regimes are expending so much energy attacking books because their supposed limitations have begun to look like strengths: With online surveillance, digital reading carries with it great risks and semi-permanent footprints; a physical book, however, cannot monitor what you are reading and when, cannot track which words you mark or highlight, does not secretly scan your face, and cannot know when you are sharing it with others.
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There is an intimacy to reading, a place created in which we can imagine the experiences of others and experiment with new ideas, all within the safety and privacy of our imaginations
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Research has proved that reading a printed book, rather than on a screen, generates more engagement, especially among young people
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Books make us empathetic, skeptical, even seditious. It’s only logical then that totalitarian regimes have made their destruction such a visible priority. George Orwell knew this well: the great crime that tempts Winston in “1984” is the reading of a banned book.
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The tepid response of the Trump administration to the murder and dismemberment of the Saudi critic Jamal Khashoggi is just the most egregious example of why the global defense of freedom of the press and speech is no longer an American priority
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In classic dystopian novels of the near-future — “Brave New World,” “1984,” “Fahrenheit 451” — the digital world is ubiquitous. The ghostly absence of books, and the freethinking they seed, is the nightmare. For much of the world, it’s not an impossible fate
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shared by Javier E on 24 Jan 20
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Adam Schiff's remarks will be essential reading and viewing for years to come - The Was... - 0 views
www.washingtonpost.com/...-matter-not-senate-republicans
right truth impeachment speech Founding culture crisis politics gop
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“Here right matters. ... If right doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter how good the Constitution is," Schiff declared. "It doesn’t matter how brilliant the Framers were. It doesn’t matter how good or bad our advocacy in this trial is. It doesn’t matter how well-written the oath of impartiality is. If right doesn’t matter, we’re lost. If the truth doesn’t matter, we’re lost. The Framers couldn’t protect us from ourselves if right and truth don’t matter. And you know that what he did was not right.”
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Perhaps Schiff’s call to our better angels will provide the emotional lift and inspiration to banish Trump from the Oval Office in the November election. Whether they do or not, Schiff’s words will serve as a message in the bottle — a love letter to democracy and truth for future generations.
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When historians look back on this dreadful time, at a president devoid of humanity an decency and a party overtaken with cultish reverence for evil, they might ask: “Didn’t they know better? Couldn’t they see right through him?”
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The answer will be that most everyone saw Trump for what he was — a danger, a pathological liar, a self-serving demagogue with authoritarian aspirations. However, too few were willing to say it, and more important, to do something about it.
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“The truth about how massive moral crimes occur is both unsettling and comforting. It’s unsettling to accept how many people participated in appalling moral crimes but comforting to realize that we don’t have to be heroes to avoid genocides,” she wrote. “We just have to make sure not to help them along.”
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She argued: “Heroism is not morally obligatory, not teachable and not what we must demand of citizens in order to avoid catastrophic crimes against humanity. What we must emphasize is the cruelty and destructiveness of hate and the perils of collaborating with it.”
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Housing market frozen by government during coronavirus lockdown | Business | The Guardian - 0 views
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The government has put the brakes on the housing market until the coronavirus restrictions are over, telling people to delay their home moves if possible and not to allow new viewings.
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“Where the property is currently occupied, we encourage all parties to do all they can to amicably agree alternative dates to move, for a time when it is likely that stay-at-home measures against coronavirus will no longer be in place,” the guidance said.
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Renters have also been advised not to move by the government, which also banned any evictions for the next three months from Friday in England and Wales.
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Jenrick said neither cases currently in the system nor any about to go into it could progress to the stage where someone could be evicted.
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Shelter, the housing charity, said it would give “much-needed protection for renters at this critical time” and Jenrick “should take a lot of credit for having listened and taken further action – as a result many thousands of people can now stay safe in their homes”.
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Critics also pointed out that the government’s emergency legislation only extended the notice required for possession from two months to three.
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shared by Javier E on 14 Feb 20
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We're witnessing the reemergence of the moderate Democrat - The Washington Post - 0 views
www.washingtonpost.com/...a-9b5c-eac5b16dafaa_story.html
moderate Democratic party climate change environment Policy
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On Thursday, a broad coalition called the Climate Leadership Council — backed by leading environmentalists and some of the biggest energy companies and utilities — released a plan for a carbon tax and rebate that would radically cut emissions while also leaving most people better off economically.
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To win Republican and business support, the coalition also proposed cutting regulations that a carbon tax would make unnecessary.
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shared by Javier E on 06 Mar 20
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Elizabeth Warren calls out Bernie Sanders for 'organized nastiness' and 'bullying' by h... - 0 views
www.washingtonpost.com/...warren-sanders-maddow-bullying
demonization politics 2020 progressive Democratic party
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Sanders has denounced the attacks on Warren and her campaign by those claiming to support him, saying he was “aghast” and “disgusted” by them.That apparently did not satisfy Warren, who said that Sanders and all candidates “are responsible for the people who claim to be” supporters “and do really threatening and dangerous things,”
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“We need to reckon with this in our political discourse,” said Warren, adding that what’s needed is “an understanding that nobody puts somebody’s family at risk or puts you at risk.”
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She said that Democrats cannot “follow that same kind of politics of division that Donald Trump follows.”
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“He draws strength from tearing people apart, from demonizing people,” Warren added. " … It’s not who I want to be as a Democrat. It’s not who I want to be as an American.”
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Shinzo Abe, Japan's Political Houdini, Can't Escape Coronavirus Backlash - The New York... - 0 views
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Yoichi Masuzoe, who once served Mr. Abe as health minister and headed Japan’s fight against the 2009 swine flu pandemic, which killed dozens in the country, said the government’s handling of the outbreak had been “so disastrous” because Mr. Abe “has stayed too long in power.”
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Mr. Abe’s chokehold on authority has stifled dissent among officials, exacerbated the government’s tendency to hoard information and made the bureaucracy complacent,
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“Openness is very important in the fight against the virus,” he noted. “All of the ministers are under the control of Mr. Abe. They cannot say a word against him.”
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His handling of the coronavirus, however, has rapidly drained the reservoir of good will he had built up over seven years in office.Unlike his past scandals, the virus response “affects the health of all the people,” said Mieko Nakabayashi, a professor at Waseda University in Tokyo and a former member of the Japanese Parliament for a rival party. “It is something that is related to each individual.”
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“These kinds of mistakes make people question his priorities, whether he’s mature or a strong leader,” she added.
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owever, most experts agree that both possibilities are much less likely. Mr. Abe could even be forced to resign if the Olympics are canceled or Japan’s economy craters