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The school’s power structure is strange to me. The school prefects are not appointed by staff, or elected via secret ballot by their own year. Instead they are chosen by the prefects in the year above. The result is that if a boy wishes to be socially prominent at school, there are only twenty people whose approval he truly needs

I watch boys campaign for election as prefects with a vigour that I will later see in the world of politics, and I will realise that this is the kind of place where these politicians learned it, that this is what they mean by networking

Networking is the art of laughing a little longer and louder than necessary at the jokes of the person whose patronage you seek, of standing silently by their shoulders when they are making a nonsensical argument, of hanging around just in case they need an extra pint, of strategically making sure you are in the same place as them on holiday. It is the least dignified behaviour I can imagine, but I will see boys carry it out with such ease that it appears to be genetic.

I think a great deal about the English concept of fair play: the idea that there are some things that are simply not done. The older I get, the more I wonder how much that concept was created to keep people of a certain social class in their place

I look at the most confident people in my year and I realise that the greatest gift that has been bestowed upon them is that of shamelessness.

Shamelessness is the superpower of a certain section of the English upper classes. While so many other people in the country are hamstrung by the deference and social embarrassment they have been taught since birth, the upper classes calmly parade on through the streets and boardrooms to claim the spoils

They don’t learn shamelessness at Eton, but this is where they perfect it.

“This is a population of people who have been historically ignored, abused and mistreated,” said Dr. Mike Wasserman, a geriatrician and former president of the California Association of Long Term Care Medicine. “It is laziness on the part of anyone to force these folks to take a vaccine. I believe that we need to be putting all of our energy into respecting, honoring and valuing the work they do and educating them on the benefits to them and the folks they take care of in getting vaccinated.”

At Jackson Health System in Miami, a survey of about 5,900 employees found that only half wanted to get a vaccine immediately, a hospital spokeswoman said.

Henry Ford Health System, which runs six hospitals in Michigan, said that as of Wednesday morning, about 22 percent of its 33,000 employees had declined to be vaccinated.

At Houston Methodist, a hospital system in Texas with 26,000 employees, workers who take the vaccine will be eligible for a $500 bonus. “Vaccination is not mandatory for our employees yet (but will be eventually),” Dr. Marc Boom, the hospital’s chief executive, wrote in an email to employees last month.

Both have been found to be safe and highly effective. So why are so many hospital and long-term care workers reluctant to get inoculated?

Underlying the hesitancy is a lack of trust in authorities — the federal government, politicians, even their employers — that have failed for the past year to get the virus under control.

“We are left behind in the dust — no one sticks up for us,”

Another concern about forcing workers to get vaccinated is that it could prompt hesitant employees to resign. That’s a particular worry in long-term care, where the pandemic has exacerbated a shortage of certified nursing assistants.

Gov. Mike DeWine of Ohio said last month that roughly 60 percent of nursing home staff members offered the vaccine in his state had declined it.

At Norton Healthcare, a health system in Louisville, Ky., workers who refuse the vaccine and then catch Covid-19 will generally no longer be able to take advantage of the paid medical leave that Norton has been offering to infected employees since early in the pandemic.

At Juniper — which has 20 senior living communities in New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Colorado — officials have tried to educate workers about the safety and benefits of Covid-19 vaccines, including hosting a webinar with a registered nurse who was enrolled in a clinical trial of the Moderna vaccine. Officials told staff last month that vaccines would be mandatory.

But the most important, most dangerous part of all this was Trump’s successful attempt to convince millions of his supporters that he’d won and was being cheated out of his win—and the fact that many leaders of the Republican Party, at all levels, went along. That claim is somewhat akin to a charge of child abuse—the very accusation is also a demand for immediate action to stop it. The mob that gathered last Wednesday took that accusation seriously, and acted to “stop the steal.”

There is a great desire to blame Trump—who is certainly very much to blame—and move on, without recognizing and responding to the dire reality: that much of the GOP enlisted in his attempt to steal an election.

The legislators were there to count the votes certified by the states—after months of review by election officials, and after endless court challenges were rebuffed—and, instead, they voted to throw them out. They did this after months of lying to the public, saying that the election had been stolen. They crossed every line a democracy should hold dear. To my knowledge, not one of them has yet apologized or recanted for their participation in what even some Republican senators are openly calling the “big lie.”

Some, like Senator Ted Cruz, have tried to cover up their attempt to overturn the election by saying that their constituents (and indeed tens of millions of Americans) believe that the election was stolen, and that they were merely honoring their beliefs. However, it was they, along with the president, who convinced those millions of people that the election was stolen in the first place, and that Joe Biden was not the legitimate president-elect

Some legislators have since tried to argue that they didn’t mean to “overturn” the election, that their action was more akin to a protest vote. This cannot be taken seriously. That’s like pulling a gun on somebody, walking away with their wallet, and then claiming that you never intended to shoot them if they hadn’t turned over their wallet.

A mugging is a mugging, and a mass of legislators claiming that the election was stolen and rejecting the results is an attempt to overturn the election. When the president himself refuses to concede, voting against the recognition of electoral votes cannot simply be a protest, and we don’t have to accept such absurdity at face value.

Some Republicans have raised the fact that the 2016 Democratic presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton, referred to Trump’s presidency as “illegitimate.” That may well be, but that happened long after the election was over and the transition was complete. She called Trump to concede less than 12 hours after the polls closed, and the Obama administration immediately started the transition process. There was no formal challenge that required suspending the session to debate whether to accept the actual results.

Today, by contrast, many GOP legislators have claimed for months that the election was fraudulent or stolen, and have explicitly and repeatedly called on their supporters to stop this fraud. The president not only refused to concede before they took their vote, but even as the storming of the Capitol was still under way, he once again claimed that he had won in a landslide.

A great misunderstanding about democracy is that it can be stolen or damaged only if formal rules are suspended or ignored. In fact, many authoritarian regimes are sticklers about formal rules, even as they undermine their meaning

We’ve already witnessed the hollowing out of some of the core tenets of liberal democracy—equal representation of voters, unimpeded access to the ballot—in many aspects of our electoral system. Republicans have pursued a project of minority rule for decades, exploiting structural features of American politics and opportunistically shaping rules in their own favor.

The Senate is structurally dominated by a minority—less than 20 percent of the population elects a majority of its members. Through gerrymandering and the uneven distribution of the population, the GOP does about 6 percent better in the median House district than it does in the national popular vote.

Already, there are signs that many in the GOP intend to respond to their loss in the Senate by doubling down on disenfranchising voters in the name of fighting the “election fraud” they falsely convinced millions is widespread

The Republicans who backed Trump’s effort to overturn the election may have known that it didn’t have a high chance of success, but that doesn’t change the nature of the attempt, especially given their lack of remorse or apology. Unless they are convinced that it was a mistake—unless they pay such a high political price for it that neither they nor anyone else thinks of trying again—they are likely to seize the next available opportunity to do the same. If a future election comes down to one state instead of three, if a future presidential candidate uses lawsuits and coercion more competently, or if a few election officials succumb to threats more easily, they’ll be in the game.

A line must be drawn. The increasing entrenchment of minority rule and democratic backsliding in almost every level of government was terrible enough, but now we’ve even moved past that.

Democrats will soon control the House, the Senate, and the presidency, making it possible for them to undertake crucial reforms on voting rights and electoral integrity. Perhaps some Republicans will decide to join them; if there ever were a time for putting country over party, this is surely it.

"These viruses may be able to infect people who are further than 6 feet away from the person who is infected or after that person has left the space," the CDC said.

Many hospitals are now filled beyond capacity,

pandemic fatigue.

And many of those who are sick of taking precautions are getting sick.

, more people are socializing indoors.

"linger in the air for minutes to hours,"

A variant first detected in South Africa

Gathering with multiple friends indoors can be dangerous.

"If you go to a party with five or more people, almost certainly there's going to be somebody with Covid-19 at that party,"

more than 50% of all infections are transmitted from people who aren't showing symptoms.

That's an average of 3.5 people getting infected every second.Read More

The United States has confirmed at least 76 cases of a highly transmissible variant of the coronavirus that was first detected in the United Kingdom.

And the United States ranks 61st in how quickly virus samples are collected from patients, analyzed and then posted to an international database to find new variants.

While it may be more transmissible, there's no evidence this variant first detected in the UK is deadlier or causes more severe disease, the CDC said.

Some patients have been put in hospital break rooms, parking garages and gift shops.

As of Thursday, it has not been detected in the United States.

That didn't happen. Not even close.

As of Thursday morning, about 10.2 million vaccine doses had been administered, out of roughly 29.3 million doses that have been distributed across the United States, according to the CDC.

You can test

negative

but still be infected and contagious.

And don't think you're invincible -- even if you're young and healthy.

"We see severe illness among healthy, young adults with no apparent underlying causes," Hotez said.

"Our moderators are reviewing an increased number of reports related to public posts with calls to violence, which are expressly forbidden by our Terms of Service," Telegram spokesperson Remi Vaughn told CNN in a statement on Wednesday. Vaughn added: "We welcome peaceful discussion and peaceful protests, but routinely remove publicly available content that contains direct calls to violence."

In public and private chats there are common messages about plotting to "take back America" or rallying together against supposed censorship, according to Angelo Carusone, president and CEO of Media Matters for America. Carusone and his team have been tracking extremist language and posting in a variety of media landscapes.

"The FBI cannot open an investigation without a threat of violence or alleged criminal activity. However, when that language does turn to a call for violence or criminal activity, the FBI is able to undertake investigative activity," the agency said.

"It is more and more important to know where they're going, especially if they're moving even further and further behind the veil," Carusone said. "If you lose track of them entirely, you lose that that information pipeline, you lose the ability to identify those indicators, which means it's harder to prevent harm."

In many messaging apps and boards, some are calling for a boycott of events this weekend and the inauguration. Michael Edison Hayden, the Southern Poverty Law Center senior investigative reporter and spokesperson, says high-profile names and podcasters Mike Peinovich and Nick Fuentes have told their followers not to go to rallies. The ADL says that White supremacist Peinovich, known as Mike Enoch, and the far-right Fuentes have been rallying voices of discontent for years.

Segal said extremists might move cautiously in coming days, from both paranoia and knowing they're being watched.

"It's not before inauguration that we need to be concerned about them trying to spark another civil war -- it's after," Segal told CNN.

Trump was very much a part of that, too. He repeatedly criticized Gov. Gretchen Whitmer about her Covid-19 restrictions before and after the news of the plot against her.

Experts note that at the protests against her moves, there too was a cross-pollination of people who showed up -- self-declared militia members, anarchists, those with anti-government beliefs and anti-vaxxers.

Carusone says this is just the beginning of the country heading "into a buzzsaw" due to divisiveness, extremist actions and political rhetoric. "Trump has gift-wrapped the narrative for the next four years," Segal explains.

"All of those new people being brought into these communities creates new opportunity for expanding the ranks," Carusone said. "There's going to be a lot of new people ... organized and exposed to a set of prescriptions that ultimately bring us back to the same place ... leading up to the attack on the Capitol. "Except in this case, it'll be more of them."

That’s why the story was so appealing to Fox hosts like Sean Hannity and Lou Dobbs, who kept hyping it for days after it collapsed under the faintest scrutiny. There has never been a shred of credible evidence that Seth Rich had contact with WikiLeaks, and a series of bipartisan investigations found that the D.N.C. had been breached by Russian hackers.

It was like “throwing gasoline on a small fire,” Mr. Rich’s brother recalled in a telephone interview from his home in Denver. “Fox blew it out of everyone’s little echo chamber and put it into the mainstream.”

The story collapsed immediately, and in spectacular fashion. The former Washington, D.C., police detective whom Fox used as its on-the-record source, Rod Wheeler, repudiated his own quotes claiming ties between Mr. Rich and WikiLeaks and a cover-up, and said in a deposition this fall that the Fox News article had been “prewritten before I even got involved.”

“He never got back to me to say, sorry for ruining your family’s life and pushing something there’s no basis to,” he said. “Apparently, ‘sorry’ is a hard five-letter word for him.”

Gutenberg died penniless, his presses impounded by his creditors.

Since literacy rates were still very low in the 1490s, locals would gather at the pub to hear a paid reader recite the latest news, which was everything from bawdy scandals to war reports.

Italian emissaries spent years in the Ottoman Empire learning enough Ancient Greek and Arabic to translate and copy rare texts into Latin.

but publishing the texts had been arduously slow and prohibitively expensive for anyone other than the richest of the rich.

The largest European library in 1300 was the university library of Paris, which had 300 total manuscripts.

There’s a famous quote attributed to German religious reformer Martin Luther that sums up the role of the printing press in the Protestant Reformation: “Printing is the ultimate gift of God and the greatest one.”

As the legend goes, Luther nailed his “95 Theses” to the church door in Wittenberg on October 31, 1517. Palmer says that broadsheet copies of Luther’s document were being printed in London as quickly as 17 days later.

Thanks to the printing press and the timely power of his message, Luther became the world’s first best-selling author.

Not only were handwritten copies of scientific data expensive and hard to come by, they were also prone to human error.

The people most willing to take risks and make the effort to be early adopters are those who had no voice before that technology existed.

As critical and alternative opinions entered the public discourse, those in power tried to censor it. Before the printing press, censorship was easy. All it required was killing the “heretic” and burning his or her handful of notebooks.

During the Enlightenment era, philosophers like John Locke, Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau were widely read among an increasingly literate populace.

Even the illiterate couldn’t resist the attraction of revolutionary Enlightenment authors, Palmer says.

The Industrial Revolution didn’t get into full swing in Europe until the mid-18th century, but you can make the argument that the printing press introduced the world to the idea of machines “stealing jobs” from workers.

Before Gutenberg’s paradigm-shifting invention, scribes were in high demand. Bookmakers would employ dozens of trained artisans to painstakingly hand-copy and illuminate manuscripts. But by the late 15th century, the printing press had rendered their unique skillset all but obsolete.

Not if his lawyers have anything to say about it.

if he is impeached by the House, and convicted by the Senate of "treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors."

Throughout Trump's presidency, investigations into Russia's efforts to influence the 2016 election and other matters relating to his business dealings have made impeachment a possibility.

This summer's revelations that Trump asked Ukraine's president to investigate past and future political opponents made it probable, if not inevitable. 

"We believe the acts revealed publicly over the past several weeks are fundamentally incompatible with the president’s oath of office, his duties as commander in chief, and his constitutional obligation to 'take care that the laws be faithfully executed,'

"He’s taking care of himself, not taking care of the country."

What Trump did on July 25 was ask Ukraine's new president, Volodymyr Zelensky, to investigate the Democrats' leading presidential candidate at the time, Joe Biden, and his son Hunter.

Trump also asked indirectly for a probe of emails stolen from the Democratic National Committee in 2016.

In the same conversation, the president noted that "the United States has been very, very good to Ukraine. I wouldn’t say that it’s reciprocal, necessarily."

The president was referring at the time to financing his long-sought wall along the border with Mexico

That would be Article I, Section 9, Clause 8 of the Constitution, which bars federal officeholders from accepting gifts from foreign governments.

An eight-page letter from the White House counsel earlier this month basically declared war on House Democrats' impeachment inquiry. The president, Pat Cipollone said, won't cooperate.

But others defend the president's resistance.

Alexander Hamiton wrote extensively on impeachment in the Federalist Papers, but the Constitution gives it only six brief mentions. The references leave plenty of leeway.

"The Constitution gets violated all the time," Barnett says. "That doesn’t make the violation of the Constitution a high crime or misdemeanor."

Then there’s Elagabulus, whose biography is a veritable catalog of extreme pranks. He taunted his guests by serving them platters of faux food made from wax or wood or marble, while he feasted on real delicacies. Sometimes he served his guests paintings of meals, or napkins embroidered with pictures of the food he was eating. (Imagine walking away from a dinner with an empty stomach but loaded down with paintings of a Roman feast: flamingo tongues, peacock brains, combs cut from the heads of living roosters, etc.) Even when he served actual food, he delighted in mixing the edible and inedible, seasoning peas with gold nuggets, rice with pearls, and beans with glowing chips of amber.

Under Roman law, a slave was not considered to be properly a human being. But the “masters” must have known on some level that their “property” was not really theirs, that subservience and subordination were acts put on under duress. In theory, absolute power is invulnerable; in practice, the emperor is always looking over his shoulder for the assassins in the shadows

But while the downpours were greeted warmly, they also caused problems. Sydney suffered train cancellations and heavy traffic. The hardened, dry ground in more rural areas could not handle the largess, leading to flash floods in some places.

Meteorologists and fire officials, like water officials, were quick to warn against viewing the storms as a cure for the country’s fire problem. Several large fires in Victoria “remain very active and unpredictable,” state fire officials said.

Last year, Australia experienced its hottest and driest year on record. One day of rain does not erase decades of data predicting that Australia’s fire seasons would do exactly what they have done this year — become longer and more intense.

observers at the time thought that the problem was that wealth was concentrated in so few hands that consumers did not have purchasing power to buy the goods that lay rotting in the fields. Increasing consumer purchasing power became the paradigm that drove economic policy during the New Deal and for decades after. A central element of this was increasing homeownership by encouraging citizens to take on large debts for the purchase of home

This history also explains the current resistance in Europe, especially Germany, toward Keynesian stimulus.

Understanding this fundamental divergence between the United States and Europe sheds new light on several episodes of recent history

It suggests that in the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan tried to deregulate industry, he was actually pushing the United States in the direction of Europe.

Where Europeans focused on restraining consumption, Americans saw consumption as the machine that drives growth — and we still do.

a consumption bias has distributional consequences that we are only beginning to understand. Some studies suggest that it undermines support for the welfare state, because as consumers come to depend on private assets — especially their homes — for their well-being, they appear to become less interested in providing for the welfare of others.

A consumption bias also focuses the efforts of the left on increasing private consumption.

But credit access does nothing for the truly poor, those who are not deemed creditworthy

Pointing out all the ways in which the American government has actually been more interventionist than European governments seems to alarm partisans on both the left and the right. Activists on the right can

o longer pretend that American history is about small government. Those on the left are equally alarmed, because pointing out the ways in which the government has been hostile to business can undermine their calls to be even more hostile to business.

poverty reduction is not about hostility to business. It’s about strategies like promoting saving over borrowing. We don’t need regulations as loose as postwar Europe’s, but if reducing poverty and inequality is the goal, we do need to rethink our love affair with consumption.

In fact, about 75% of all aluminum ever produced in the US is still in use today.

Action Recycling points out that the amount of aluminum Americans throw away every three months could rebuild our entire commercial air fleet.

Try using a reusable bottle instead, and only use the single-use bottles in emergencies, or when you do not have access to reusable bottle.

he current amount of energy saved in one year just from recycling aluminum cans in the United States could light the entire city of Denver for more than 10 years, according to the Action Recycling Center in Colorado.

When you answer a trivia question on the Free the Ocean website, the company will remove a piece of plastic from the ocean.

Albeit a little more expensive initially, swapping out old bulbs saves you money in the long run.

You can cut down on paper waste by asking for email receipts.

You can create a giant garden bed full of fruits and vegetables in your backyard, or have just a few small potted plants inside your home.

Some gift wrap is recyclable when it doesn't use foil or glitter or any other such additives that interfere with the recycling process.

Composting lowers the amount of garbage that ends up in a landfil

Did journalists and local election officials sufficiently prepare the public for red shifts, blue shifts and potential delays?

Were the major networks and The Associated Press able to practice what they preached, a/k/a patience?

Did the pollsters and forecasters get it right? If not, is the polling industry dead for good?

Did "shy Trump" voters materialize?

Can this election help the American media restore a little bit of the trust that's been eroded in recent years?

Will the Trump presidency go down in history as a one-term, one-off fluke or a fundamental realignment of American politics? (Or maybe both?)

Will QAnon adherents realize they were fooled when Trump does not win all 50 states, as a recent Q world narrative has claimed?

Will Fox News viewers feel misled if Biden wins?

Will Trump make a premature claim of victory, and if so how will the major networks handle it?

What will the election results mean for the future of the right-wing media economy?

If Biden wins, for how long after the election will the media uncover more wrongdoing from the Trump admin?

Did the press overcorrect from 2016, and if so in what ways?

My impression, as a reporter who covers the media industry every day, is that some journalists feel like they are limping to the finish line.

finally, Trump’s mendacious presidency and the spread of online conspiracy theories has encouraged liberals in a belief that the only way to safeguard democracy is for this consolidated establishment to become more aggressive in its attempts at cultural control — which is how you get the strange phenomenon of some journalists fretting about the perils of the First Amendment and demanding that the big social-media enterprises exert a kind of prior restraint over the American conversation.

Over the same period, in reaction to social atomization, economic disappointment and conspicuous elite failure, the younger members of the liberal upper class have become radicalized, embracing a new progressive orthodoxy that’s hard to distill but easy to recognize and that really is deployed to threaten careers when the unconvinced step out of line.

Let me try to elaborate on what this right is seeing. The initial promise of the internet era was radical decentralization, but instead over the last 20 years, America’s major cultural institutions have become consolidated, with more influence in the hands of fewer institutions. The decline of newsprint has made a few national newspapers ever more influential, the most-trafficked portions of the internet have fallen under the effective control of a small group of giant tech companies, and the patterns of meritocracy have ensured that the people staffing these institutions are drawn from the same self-reproducing professional class.

he right fears that what starts with bans on QAnon and Alex Jones will end with social-media censorship of everything from pro-life content to critiques of critical race theory to coverage of the not-so-peaceful style in left-wing protest.

writers anxious about soft totalitarianism on the left tend (not always, but too often) to underestimate how much of a gift the presidency of Donald Trump has been to exactly the tendencies they fear. Trump’s own authoritarian impulses and conspiratorial style are so naked, so alienating and frightening, that many people who might otherwise unite with conservatives against the new progressive establishment end up as its reluctant fellow travelers instead.

having offered these doubts about the diagnosis, let me stress that the mix of elite consolidation and radicalization that conservatives fear is entirely real

Power lies in many places in America, but it lies deeply, maybe ineradicably for the time being, in culture-shaping and opinion-forming institutions that conservatives have little hope of bringing under their control.

In January, a 52-year-old Asian American woman was shot in the head with a flare gun, also in Chinatown.

84-year-old Vicha Ratanapakdee was going for a morning walk in his San Francisco neighborhood. Surveillance cameras captured a man running at him full speed and smashing his frail body to the pavement.

The Oakland Anti Police-Terror Project has asked people "to wear yellow to show you're in support of Chinatown seniors and businesses."

The more than two dozen recent assaults and robberies in the Bay Area mirror a national rise in hate crimes against older Asian Americans during the pandemic. From last March through the end of 2020, Kulkarni's group has documented nearly 3,000 incidents of anti-Asian hate across 47 states and the District of Columbia.

Despite arrests in some of the high-profile attacks, the violence has prompted many Chinatown businesses to reduce hours during a normally bustling shopping period ahead of Friday's Lunar New Year holiday.

Separately, more than 200 people across the area have volunteered to serve as "community strollers" in Chinatown starting next week.

"These attacks taking place in the Bay Area are part of a larger trend of anti-Asian American/Pacific Islander hate brought on in many ways by COVID-19, as well as some of the xenophobic policies and racist rhetoric that were pushed forward by the prior administration,"

"Racist rhetoric from the pandemic has targeted us as being the reason for the coronavirus," Wu says, singling out phrases used by former President Trump to describe the outbreak's origins.

Civil rights advocate Kulkarni also shared criticism of politically charged speech. "Oftentimes, perpetrators have used the exact language of the prior president, words like 'human virus, kung flu, China virus, China plague,' "Kulkarni says. "And sometimes they have even weaponized the former president himself saying 'Trump is going to get you, go back to your country.'

Across the bay in Oakland, Calif., police say they've added foot and car patrols and set up a mobile command post in Chinatown, measures the community welcomes.

"It's not unique to Chinatown or to the Asian community the increase in crime we've seen across the city and across the county, but we have seen in the last several weeks and month a very specific increase in crimes committed against Asians," O'Malley told a press conference in Chinatown.

"I believe there are some individuals in our community that have targeted people of different races," he says noting that some offenders may see Asian Americans as less likely report crimes to law enforcement.

The pandemic, chief Armstrong tells NPR, had certainly made it easier for criminals, with time on their hands, to mask up and often slip away unidentified. "That's why it's so important that businesses and others that have video that they share with us. The mask wearing, although it's required and I think very important for health reasons, it also is definitely a deterrence in identifying those that are responsible," he says.

President Biden, meantime, recently signed a memorandum pledging to combat anti-Asian and Pacific Islander discrimination. It was part of a series of racial equity-focused executive orders.

"What the incidents in the Bay Area remind us of is that action is needed now," Kulkarni says, "not a few months from now, not a few years from now."

slander charges that he has denounced as politically motivated.

Navalny, who narrowly survived a poisoning in August that is widely seen as an attempted assassination by the Kremlin, was jailed after his return from Germany, where he was receiving treatment after the attack.

The slander charges against Navalny stem from his alleged defamation of a World War II veteran who appeared in a video backing constitutional reforms aimed at allowing Putin to extend his stay in office past 2024.

Last week, the EU's high representative for foreign policy, Josep Borrell, visited Russia, reportedly to plead for Navalny's release and in hopes of easing tense relations with the Kremlin. Instead, he was rebuffed and embarrassed, with Russia expelling three EU diplomats while he was holding talks.

He said the Kremlin sees democracy as an "existential threat."

"Domestically, it reinforces official propaganda about hostile interference from abroad, incursions on Russia's sovereignty and the activity of foreign agents," Frolov wrote. "On the foreign policy front, it frees the Kremlin from having to stage what the West calls 'malicious actions' with the goal of provoking retaliatory anti-Russian actions that would consolidate Russian society around the flag of the ruling regime."

in the long arc of the Limbaugh era, you can see pretty clearly how success and self-marginalization can be effectively combined.

Reaganite conservatism in ’80s America was a 55 percent proposition, popular with younger voters, with only a mild version of today’s yawning gender gap.

But you don’t need 55 percent of the country to build a huge talk-radio audience or an incredibly successful cable news network or a vast online ecosystem. You need a passionate audience, a committed audience, a church of Dittoheads.That was what Limbaugh built for himself

then everyone else on the right went in the same direction: First, Limbaugh’s talk radio imitators, then Roger Ailes with Fox News, and then — disastrously — a great many Republican politicians, who realized that an intense ideological fan base was enough to win them elections in safe districts and might make them media celebrities in the bargain.

This pattern created problems that compounded one another. As Conservatism Inc. became more of a world unto itself, it sealed out bad news for conservative governance, contributing to debacles that doomed Republican presidents — Iraq for George W. Bush, Covid for Donald Trump

These debacles helped make conservatism less popular, closer to a 45 percent than a 55 percent proposition in presidential races, a blocking coalition but not a governing one.

And this in turn made the right’s passionate core feel more culturally besieged, more desperate for “safe spaces” where liberal perfidy was taken for granted and the most important reasons for conservative defeats were never entertained.

Such a system, predictably, was terrible at generating the kind of outward-facing, evangelistic conservatives who had made the Reagan revolution possible

to go back and watch Reagan and Buckley is to see an entirely different approach to politics — missionary and confident, with a gentlemanly comportment that has altogether vanished.

In its place today is a fantasy politics, a dreampolitik, that’s fed by a deep feeling of grievance and dispossession.

the right’s infotainment complex is itself a major reason for that consolidation. Conservatives have lost real-world territory by building dream palaces, and ceded votes by talking primarily to themselves.

Dan McLaughlin, in an instructive piece for National Review, counts Limbaugh as one of the right’s five most important 1990s-era figures, along with Ailes, Rudy Giuliani, Newt Gingrich and Antonin Scalia

as they grew old within the right’s infrastructure, Limbaugh and Ailes and Newt and Rudy all seemed to cede their individuality and converge into a single character, a single noisy voice.

Which were the media impresarios and which were the political leaders? Which one was married four times, which ones only three, which was the office predator? Which one was most likely to say something indefensible in defense of Donald Trump?

Only Scalia, secure from certain temptations in his lifetime judicial appointment, retained both his individuality and his outward-facing influence to the end.

For the rest, for Limbaugh especially, we can say that their gifts were ample, their ascent remarkable, their influence enduring — and yet their most important legacy has been ashes and defeat.

These folks were not natural allies of the party of business or its wealthy donors. In exchange for pursuing the economic agenda of the wealthy, the GOP increasingly offered up a primal vision rooted in culture wars, contempt for government, and scapegoating blacks, immigrants, Muslims and other minorities.

The real causes of blue-collar woes were globalization, the Great Recession, the housing crisis, and an information society which marginalized the undereducated. About this, the GOP elite did nothing—not about student debt, stagnant wages, dwindling benefits, diminishing job security, retraining for the new economy, or the widespread unaffordability of quality medical care.

the new book Authoritarian Nightmare by Bob Altemeyer and John Dean presents “data from a previously unpublished nationwide survey showing a striking desire for strong authoritarian leadership among Republican voters.”

This squares with findings by Vanderbilt political scientist Larry Bartels summarized by the Post: “Many Republican voters hold strong authoritarian and anti-democratic beliefs, with racism being a key driver of those attitudes.”

In the Altemeyer-Dean survey, roughly half of Trump supporters agreed with this statement: “Once our government leaders and the authorities condemn the dangerous elements in our society, it will be the duty of every patriotic citizen to help stomp out the rot that is poisoning our country from within.”

As president, Trump has pushed the boundaries of our constitutional democracy to achieve unprecedented executive power. Not only do his followers support this, but elected Republicans have done nothing to stop him.

The GOP is no longer about ideas like limited government, or the higher ideals of inclusiveness and an American Dream open to all. Its toxic compound of raw anger and nativist passion is, at bottom, about subjugating the demographic “other.”

It is barely possible now to imagine the GOP had Trump been different. He came without ideology, propelled by a gift for embodying a potent but undefined populism

He might have become an agent of constructive reinvention, eschewing racism and xenophobia in favor of offering embattled middle-class and blue-collar workers genuine economic uplift. He could have reinstated fiscal responsibility by disdaining tax cuts for the wealthy. He might even have taken steps—if not to drain the swamp—at least to reform it.

But that would have required real talent, sustained attention, and a genuine interest in governance. Instead this irredeemably vicious, vacant, and narcissistic demagogue unleashed white identity politics and the endless overreach of Republican donors. This leads inexorably to the deadest of ends—a demographic death knell for his party and, for our democracy, the most grievous of wounds

what galls Gelernt now, after seeing the Times report about the inspector general’s investigation, is that his suspicions were right all along: Separating families was the objective of the Trump administration’s zero-tolerance policy, not a byproduct. The children were the targets of the policy, not collateral damage. “We need to take away children,” Sessions reportedly told the local U.S. attorneys.

When the number of immigrants surged at the border in 2014, President Barack Obama responded by building more detention facilities and holding families indefinitely — though still together — and faced a legal backlash.

But Trump’s policy was something altogether different. It was child abuse, plain and simple. “That’s why it’s so chilling,” Gelernt told me. “D.O.J. officials apparently declined to exempt even cases with a baby.

note what Rosenstein did not deny: That he refused his U.S. attorneys permission to automatically exempt undocumented immigrants with young children from prosecution.

what we have lately learned about Rosenstein is that he is a very canny political operator. He has a gift for threading needles that even a tailor would envy.

While serving in the Trump Justice Department, for instance, he wrote a memo recommending the removal of James Comey as the head of the F.B.I., and he later defended his boss, William Barr, after he misled the public about the results of the Mueller investigation

But he also had the presence of mind to appoint Robert S. Mueller in the first place — and, though he has denied it, to question Trump’s own presence of mind. (It has been reported that he suggested secretly recording Trump’s ravings in order to expose him as unfit to lead.)

when it was Rosenstein’s turn, he did nothing to stop government-orchestrated cruelty. Instead, he simply did his job.