Cuban lawmakers on Sunday approved a draft of a new Constitution that would seek to modernize the nation by recognizing the right to own private property and opening the door to the possible legalization of same-sex marriage, among other economic, political and social changes.The document would also encourage foreign investment and strengthen the judicial system, including recognizing the presumption of innocence.The draft Constitution would significantly reorganize the government. It calls for creating the position of a prime minister, who would share power with the president, and governorships for the nation's provinces.
Wrapping up its business before a long summer recess, the right-wing, religious coalition that rules Israel's Parliament moved aggressively this week to push through its polarizing agenda, piling up points at the expense of its already weakened foes.On Monday, it empowered the education minister to bar some groups that criticize the Israeli occupation of the West Bank from speaking in public schools. On Tuesday, it accelerated what critics call the creeping annexation of the West Bank by cutting off Palestinians' access to the Supreme Court in land disputes. On Wednesday, it blocked single men and gay couples from having children through surrogacy.The capstone, though, came Thursday, with passage of a law granting the Jewish people an exclusive right to national self-determination. [...]On Monday, the chairman of Brandeis University, Meyer G. Koplow, was interrogated by airport security on his way back to New York because, after attending a bridge-building session organized by the educational organization Encounter on the West Bank, he had thrown a brochure articulating the Palestinian point of view into his checked luggage.He later received an apology from the government.But in an online post, Michael J. Koplow, Mr. Koplow's son and an executive at the Israel Policy Forum, a liberal think tank, publicized his father's run-in over what he said was "the most rudimentary evidence of basic engagement with the Palestinians," calling the interrogation "yet another example in a seemingly never-ending string of the massive problem that Israel is having with American Jews."Israeli Jewish values and American Jewish values increasingly diverge," Mr. Koplow wrote in the post, "and for many American Jews, the values of openness, empathy, and non-discrimination are ones that are harder and harder to find in Israel."Then, on Thursday, a Conservative rabbi in Haifa was awakened at his home and arrested by the police. He was charged with officiating at a wedding between a Jewish man and woman.
In Hannah Gadsby's highly acclaimed comedy special Nanette, she announces that she's quitting comedy. Jokes are too simplistic, she says: they convert her trauma into humor and obscure the ugly truth of her story. Comedy, says Gadsby, has prevented her from evolving.Gadsby isn't the only comedian taking at least an occasional break from humor. The Daily Show host Trevor Noah recently used his platform to make a lengthy speech about the nature of national identity, arguing that he's right to celebrate the French World Cup players as both French and African. Last Week Tonight, hosted by ostensible comedian John Oliver, typically features straight, serious journalism, such an investigation into Miss America pageant's scholarships or discussions of Shariah law in Brunei. And the phenomenon of talk show hosts making earnest, quite un-funny political pleas is now so common that comedian Michelle Wolf recently did a skit parodying these monologues."I am gonna throw my pen down on the desk, and I'm gonna shake my head in crestfallen bewilderment. I'm gonna look you in the eye, and I'm gonna tell you that Trump is bad!," she cried. "Children in cages, gun reform yesterday, nevertheless I persisted, this is comedy now. And finally, the meticulously crafted clippable GIFable takedown that will fix everything, change minds, and save the republic."
Ethiopia has "no option" but to pursue multi-party democracy, the reformist new prime minister said Sunday, again shaking up Africa's second most populous nation that for decades has been ruled by a single coalition.Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed's chief of staff announced the remarks on Twitter, saying they were made during a meeting with leaders of more than 50 national and regional parties, including ones from overseas, who demanded reforms in election law.A multiparty democracy would need strong institutions that respect human rights and rule of law, Abiy said, according to chief of staff Fitsum Arega.The 42-year-old prime minister has announced sweeping reforms since taking office in April, including the release of opposition figures from prison and the embrace of a peace deal that led to the surprising restoration of diplomatic ties this month with longtime rival Eritrea.Just months ago Ethiopia, a nation of more than 100 million people, faced widespread anti-government protests demanding wider freedoms, with the U.N. human rights chief and others expressing concern over hundreds of reported deaths and tens of thousands of people detained. The economy, one of Africa's fastest-growing, suffered.
Professor Samuel H. Beer of Harvard, once a speechwriter for Franklin Roosevelt, lived nearly a century, from 1911 to 2007. If he'd lived a bit longer, he might have made a good speechwriter for Donald Trump.In 1979 (about the time of my first political memories: inflation and gasoline rationing), Professor Beer took to the pages of The New Republic to advise a struggling President Jimmy Carter, offering him a way forward: nationalism. Nationalism, he wrote, was the real theme of FDR's administration and of the New Deal. What Roosevelt was after wasn't a socialist-style redistribution of income but a redistribution of power: among competing economic and social groups, to be sure, but, most important, to Washington, with the national government guiding the nation in an unprecedentedly direct manner toward the national ends defined by the president. Professor Beer wrote:Franklin Roosevelt's nationalism was, first, a doctrine of federal centralization. The principle of federal activism, which some have seen as the principal dividing line in American politics since the 1930s, was introduced by the New Deal. But Roosevelt called not only for the centralization of government, but also for the nationalization of politics.Those masochists familiar with the grotesque thing currently calling itself The New Republic will be surprised to learn that, in the view of one of its most distinguished contributors, the great hope for progressive victories was to be found in nationalism, and that the great obstacle to progressive achievement was identity politics -- "pluralism," in the language of the time. As I have said on too many occasions, more Beer:In recent years American politics has been distracted by a new and destructive pluralism. This new pluralism disorganizes public policy and sets group against group. Its paralyzing and disorienting effects challenge citizens, leaders and above all the president to elicit and affirm a new nationalism that will again put us in mind of what makes us a people and again give direction to our public affairs.It is significant that my National Review colleague Conrad Black has in these pages and elsewhere made original and eloquent defenses of two American presidents: Franklin D. Roosevelt and Donald J. Trump. Black's biography Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom is one of the finest things ever written about Roosevelt, who emerges in Black's telling not as a lefty antecedent to Bernie Sanders but as a thoroughgoing nationalist, one committed to that "principle of federal activism" that Professor Beer wrote about, whose purpose was to bend the fractious political, regional, and economic blocs to a unified national purpose: recovering from the Depression, first, and then beating back savagery abroad. [...]Goldberg's argument in Liberal Fascism was scorned by progressives (many of whom obviously had not actually read the book) who took his connection of progressivism to fascism as serving a merely pejorative purpose rather than a substantive one. But as Professor Beer wrote a generation ago, the question of federal activism is central to our politics, and nationalism is the spiritual energy of such activism. President Trump understands the federal government not as a guarantor of liberty but as an activist champion for American business interests, and nationalist hocus-pocus is deployed to prevent such inconvenient questions as why the interests of Americans who sell steel should trump the interests of Americans who buy steel, or why we should encourage automobile manufacturing rather than software engineering, commercial space exploration, or medical research.
Sergei Magnitsky was representing Browder when the tax lawyer was arrested after blowing the whistle on government corruption in Moscow.He died in 2009, after almost one year in a Russian prison.Seeking to avenge his late lawyer and hold Putin's government accountable for its human rights abuses, Browder pushed the U.S. government to adopt the tough sanctions against Moscow.Sens. Ben Cardin (D-Md.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.) took up the cause, sponsoring the Magnitsky Act, which targeted numerous Russian officials believed to be responsible for the anti-corruption attorney's death.Former President Barack Obama signed it into law in 2012, and the Global Magnitsky Act was passed in 2016 sanctioning foreign government officials involved in human rights abuses. Several other countries have adopted similar sanctions since.The Magnitsky Act has long been reviled by Putin, as it hits the wealthy Russian strongman's government where it hurts. It could also imperil the money he's believed to have overseas, according to Browder."The Magnitsky Act puts his entire wealth at risk," Browder said. "It's personal for him and that's why he hates it."The law blocks the targeted Russians and other human rights abusers from entering the U.S., freezes their U.S. assets and prevents them from doing business with American banks. As Browder has explained, this hurts Russian government officials who have long stashed stolen money in Western bank accounts."In Russia, after all, officers and bureaucrats could steal it again, the same way they had stolen it in the first place: a raid, an extortion racket, a crooked court case with forged documents -- the possibilities are endless," the Atlantic's Julia Ioffe explained in 2017. "Protecting the money meant getting it out of Russia. But what happens if you get it out of Russia and it's frozen by Western authorities?"But it doesn't only hurt Putin and his cronies economically. According to Nina Jankowicz, a D.C.-based writer and analyst who specializes in Russian politics, the sanctions also undercut Putin's government on the world stage."What's most important is that [the sanctions are] a blow to the image Russia wants to project as a great power," Jankowicz, a global fellow at the Wilson Center's Kennan Institute, said in an email. "Instead it is one being chastised by a growing number of countries for its human rights abuses."Fighting the sanctions have been a major focus of Putin's government -- including in some of its dealings with the Trump team that are currently being investigated by special counsel Robert Mueller.
Yep. Block early, block often.
— Noah Smith (@Noahpinion) July 22, 2018
The replies to your tweets are a web forum, and you are the moderator of that forum. https://t.co/ZvSpI2Eep8
The South Carolina Republican suggested that some members of the administration may need to consider leaving if Trump continues to disregard their advice to stand firm against Russia.That concern has dominated discourse in Washington since Trump's summit with Putin in Helsinki last week, at which he spoke more harshly of the FBI than of Russia."It can be proven beyond any evidentiary burden that Russia is not our friend and they tried to attack us in 2016," Gowdy told host Bret Baier. "So the president either needs to rely on the people that he has chosen to advise him, or those advisers need to reevaluate whether or not they can serve in this administration. But the disconnect cannot continue."
A GOP Congressman and former FBI agent says he thinks President Trump was manipulated by Russian President Vladimir Putin. Brian Fitzpatrick told NPR's Michel Martin on All Things Considered that he drew that conclusion after the two leaders appeared in Helsinki."The president was manipulated by Vladimir Putin," Fitzpatrick said. [...]The Helsinki summit came days after Special Counsel Robert Mueller issued an indictment for 12 Russian intelligence agents accused of hacking Democratic emails and sowing confusion around the 2016 elections.Fitzpatrick sits on the House committees on Foreign Affairs and Homeland Security. In his previous role as an FBI special agent, he said he was assigned to Ukraine and worked on counterintelligence, collecting Russian propaganda reports.He told Martin he was "frankly sickened by the exchange" between Trump and Putin.The congressman, who represents Pennsylvania's 8th District, said he shared his view with former CIA agent and fellow House Republican Will Hurd of Texas. Hurd wrote recently in The New York Times that Trump "actively participated in a Russian disinformation campaign."
Many Republicans have rationalized their support for Trump by pointing to tax cuts, rollbacks in regulation and Trump's appointments of conservative judges. But last week reminded us how many of their values they have been willing to surrender. Moral relativism and its cousin, moral equivalency, are not bugs of the Trump presidency; they are central to its diplomatic philosophy. Unfortunately, polls suggest that many conservatives are OK with that, despite the betrayal of what were once deeply held beliefs. [...]Perhaps the best way to think about Trump's nativism and isolationism is to see them as recessive genes in conservatism that had been kept in check for generations. That also suggests another tradition exists, even if it is now in eclipse.While it's easy (and tempting) to define a political movement by its worst aspects, it bears noting that modern conservatism also gave rise to Charles Krauthammer, Ross Douthat, Peter Wehner, Ben Sasse and Jeff Flake. In other words, it didn't have to be this way, and it doesn't have to continue in the future.The real danger, however, in seeing Trump as the logical, organic product of conservatism is that it normalizes him. Discounting the peculiarity of his rise ignores the uniqueness of the danger he poses and the urgent need to confront the damage he is doing to the body politic and our political culture. If he is merely another Republican, there no cause for more than the usual alarm.But last week reminded us that there is nothing normal about Donald Trump or the existential threat he represents. It is long past time for conservatives and Republicans to recognize that.
Even based on what was known then, the hype surrounding Nunes's memo seemed to oversell the point. In short order, other revelations about the warrant application made it clear that the contents of the memo were iffy. It was the second time in two years that Nunes had gone to bat in defense of one of Trump's pet theories, and neither time worked out that well.As it turns out though, Nunes's efforts to raise questions about the surveillance warrant, granted by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, were even less robust than they seemed at the time. With the release Friday of a redacted copy of both the initial warrant application targeting Page in October 2016 and the three 90-day extensions of the warrant, we can get a better sense of just how far from the mark the Nunes memo actually was.
All of his faults, real as they were, fade into insignificance compared with the crippling defects of his successor. And his strengths -- seriousness, dignity, intellect, probity, dedication to ideals larger than self -- shine all the more clearly in retrospect.Those thoughts are prompted by watching Obama's speech in South Africa on the 100th anniversary of Nelson Mandela's birth. I was moved nearly to tears by his eloquent defense of a liberal world order that President Trump appears bent on destroying.The first thing that struck me was what was missing: There was no self-praise and no name-calling. Obama has a far better claim than Trump to being a "very stable genius," but he didn't call himself one. The sentences were complete and sonorous -- and probably written by the speaker himself. (Imagine Trump writing anything longer than a tweet -- and even those are full of mistakes.) The tone was sober and high-minded, even if listeners could read between the lines a withering critique of Trump's policies.Obama denounced the "politics of fear and resentment," the spread of "hatred and paranoia and propaganda and conspiracy theories," and "immigration policies based on race, or ethnicity, or religion." Gee, wonder who he had in mind? He rightly noted that "we now stand at a crossroads -- a moment in time at which two very different visions of humanity's future compete for the hearts and minds of citizens around the world." He then rejected the dark vision propagated by Trump and the dictators he so admires. [...]Can you believe that an Obama-era scandal was that the president wore a tan suit or put his feet up on the desk? (Actual Washington Times headline from Sept. 4, 2013: "Obama's foot on Oval Office desk sends shockwaves around the world.") Oh, to have those days back again -- before we had a president who was involved in indecent relationships with a Russian despot and (allegedly) a porn star.What was supposedly the worst abuse of power committed by the Obama administration -- the IRS investigations of conservative organizations -- has been revealed as "fake news": It turns out that the IRS was also investigating liberal organizations.
Samu Fuentes' The Skin of the Wolf, newly released into the digital wild by Netflix, is about the dangers of re-wilding. Some of us are already familiar with them: coyotes eating your pets, bears rifling through your trash cans, files of hikers spoiling your view by walking pointlessly from nowhere to nowhere, gangs of squirrels lounging under the street lights as they work out who gets which room in your home when they take over.Civilization means de-wilding, said Freud, and re-wilding is the end of us. Freud knew all about this, because he took an annual walking holiday. Note the doctor's terminology. He went 'walking' in civilized garb--tweed plus-fours and coat--not 'hiking' in sweat-wicking plastic t-shirts and GoreTex trousers with too many pockets. He also wrote the case study of the Wolf Man, his analysis of the Russian aristocrat Sergei Pankejeff. It turned out that Freud, in his mythologizing zeal, misdiagnosed Pankejeff's dream.The Skin of the Wolf is set in Asturias, in the Spanish Pyrenees, sometime in the nineteenth century. It concerns the domestic arrangements and allegorical fate of Martinon, a brutal wolf-hunter who survives by the skin of his teeth as the last and only inhabitant of a ruined village high in the mountains. Martinon (Mario Casas) has no one to speak to, except when he walks down to the village in the valley, a round trip of four days. He keeps his spirit up by grunting.Martinon protects the villagers from the wolves, and the villagers pay Martinon by the pelt. When people lived among wolves, we had the good sense to despise and fear them. Now, living in cities, we romanticize them. When the wolves read White Fang and The Call of the Wild, they recognized our weakness for the myth of noble savagery. For decades, they have exploited our susceptibilities, and advanced towards the cities under cover of their propaganda unit, the huskies. The Skin of the Wolf is a setback for the advocates of the vulpine lifestyle.
Known in the trade as "additive manufacturing", 3D printing was first developed in the 1980s. Due to more sophisticated types of printers, we can now print things like houses, clothes and spare parts for planes. Artificial limbs and internal organs are also among the latest list of uses for 3D printing.[3D printing in manufacturing] suits itself quite well to disaster areas or developing nations where the houses can be built very rapidly and built with a minimum of skills. All you actually need is the skilled people to maintain the printer.Simon Hart, senior innovation lead, Innovate UKUltimately, not only could this manufacturing method revolutionise the way global goods are made, but some say it could even change how we live and construct homes. Advocates believe low-cost 3D homes could even help end homelessness, and in an eco-friendly manner.So how do you print a house? And what are the potential implications for global economics and trade?Simon Hart, senior innovation lead in smart infrastructure at Innovate UK, talks to Counting the Cost."The technology is relatively mature on a smaller scale," says Hart. "Small-scale domestic 3D printers have been available, even for home use, for many years. What you're doing with a large scale 3D printer is extending the size and scale of the printer."
Trump further grumbled about the tough question he was asked by Jonathan Lemire, an Associated Press correspondent, wondering why that reporter had been called on rather than someone who might have asked an easier question.Lemire asked whether Trump would denounce Russia's election interference to Putin's face, "with the whole world watching," and the president demurred. Aides tried to explain to Trump that nearly any journalist would have asked a similarly pointed question in that moment.But, as one White House official said, "If you don't like the answer, you don't like the question."
Ants and bees have reputations as efficient team players. In Temnothorax rugatulus--a small brown ant found in pine forests in North America--division of labor is common, with workers specializing in tasks like foraging, building, and brood care. But new research shows that many ants in a colony seem to specialize in doing nothing at all. To get a closer look at how these ants filled their time, researchers marked every member of five lab-based colonies with dots of colored paint. Over the course of 2 weeks, a high-definition camera recorded 5-minute segments of the ants in action six times a day, capturing their behavior (or lack thereof). Out of the "workers," 71.9% were inactive at least half the time, and 25.1% were never seen working. A small fraction of the ants, just 2.6%, were always active during observation, the researchers wrote last month in Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology.
Leftwing politicians are singing the praises of border control while rightwingers call for expanding the welfare state. Old political certainties could be turned upside down in Germany this summer as the far ends of the country's political spectrum both moot a "national social" turn.
#allcomedyisconservative https://t.co/eX7bpSsAJL
— brothersjudd (@brothersjudd) July 22, 2018
Food experts have had similar complaints over Americans' meal budgets: we spend less than 10 percent of our budget on food, and of that 10 percent, only 5.5 percent is allotted for cooking at home. We spend less of our cash on food than any other country--about half as much as French households do.
The pop-up Mr. Faulkner's Old Fashioned Hot Dogs goes far beyond the traditional neighborhood kid's lemonade stand. It's a business with a permit from the city of Minneapolis.Faulkner's venture, a tabletop of hot dogs, Polish sausages, chips, drinks and condiments, will travel around the North Side this summer, including stops at the Minneapolis Police Department's Fourth Precinct, the Minneapolis Urban League and Sanctuary Covenant Church. Eventually he hopes to move into a food truck.Sure, it's a chance for Faulkner to earn some extra spending money, but he says it's about more than that."I like having my own business," he said. "I like letting people know just because I'm young doesn't mean I can't do" anything.He operates Monday through Friday, 11 a.m. to 3 p.m., serving about 20 customers a day. He likes the sense of accomplishment and enjoys projecting a positive image of black youth in his community, something he's aware isn't always shown.The business started in 2016 when Faulkner saw an old hot dog grill at his uncle's house. After two years of starts and stops, Faulkner stuck with it this summer.Then he hit a snag: The Minneapolis Health Department called. Someone had complained to the city about the hot dog stand.But instead of shutting Faulkner down, the Health Department decided to help him meet its standards.Health Department staff made sure he had the necessary equipment -- thermometers, food containers, hand sanitizer and utensil-cleaning stations -- as well as knowledge about proper food handling. Once he passed his health inspection, inspectors paid the $87 for the special event food permit, and the city-sanctioned stand opened for business.
Sen. Rand Paul spent hundreds of donor dollars on shopping trips and thousands on meals, travel and other expenses abroad, according to a report from nonpartisan watchdog groups released this week.The spending was funneled through a political leadership committee, which are meant to enable lawmakers to donate to other political campaigns to secure leadership positions. But, according to the "All Expenses Paid" report, they're often used to fund "lavish lifestyles on their donors' dimes."Paul, Kentucky's junior senator, spent $11,043 at restaurants in Italy and Malta last year through his leadership PAC, Reinventing a New Direction, according to the report.In the same year, he spent $4,492 on limousine services in Rome and $1,904 on a hotel in Athens that boasts "breathtaking panoramic views."Column: Rand Paul's defense of Trump has demoted him from bulldog to poodleMore: Trump thanks Kentucky's Rand Paul for defending his Russia commentsHis PAC, known as RAND PAC, also spent $337 on apparel at a Nebraska Men's Wearhouse, $438 on apparel at a shoe store on Madison Avenue in New York City, $201 at TJ Maxx and $1,575 at a restaurant in the Trump Hotel.
Fifty years ago this Sunday, this paper devoted three broadsheet pages to an essay that had been circulating secretly in the Soviet Union for weeks. The manifesto, written by Andrei Sakharov, championed an essential idea at grave risk today: that those of us lucky enough to live in open societies should fight for the freedom of those born into closed ones. This radical argument changed the course of history.Sakharov's essay carried a mild title -- "Thoughts on Progress, Peaceful Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom" -- but it was explosive. "Freedom of thought is the only guarantee against an infection of mankind by mass myths, which, in the hands of treacherous hypocrites and demagogues, can be transformed into bloody dictatorships," he wrote. Suddenly the Soviet Union's most decorated physicist became its most prominent dissident. [....]Sakharov's decency made him a moral compass orienting not just the East, but also the West. He insisted that international relations should be contingent on a country's domestic behavior -- and that such a seemingly idealistic stance was ultimately pragmatic. "A country that does not respect the rights of its own people will not respect the rights of its neighbors," he often explained.As Sakharov and his fellow dissidents in the 1970s and '80s challenged a détente disconnected from human rights, Democrats and Republicans of conscience followed suit. Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan disagreed about many specific policies, but both presidents linked human rights and foreign policy. President Carter treated Soviet dissidents not as distractions but as respected partners in a united struggle for freedom. President Reagan went further, tying the fate of specific dissidents to America's relations with what he called the "evil empire."Approaching the fight to win the Cold War as a human rights crusade as well as a national security priority energized Americans. It reminded them that, regardless of the guilt and defeatism of the Vietnam War or the shame and cynicism of Watergate, the country remained a beacon of liberty.
Four federal judges separately approved the surveillance requests, each time saying the government had shown "probable cause" that Page was acting as an agent of the Russian government. Two of the four surveillance requests had been approved by top Trump appointees in the Justice Department, including Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein.The records released Saturday confirm that the FBI based its surveillance requests in part on the work of Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence officer hired by a research firm working for Trump's opponent, Hillary Clinton, who compiled the now-infamous "dossier" alleging links between Russia and the Trump campaign. The FBI said in the application that Steele wasn't told who had hired him to conduct that work, but that Steele "was likely looking for information that could be used to discredit" Trump's campaign. The FBI said it believed Steele's work to be "credible."But the records also show the FBI harbored broader suspicions - and broader evidence - about Page's possible ties to the Russian government. In applying for permission to wiretap him, investigators wrote that Page "has relationships with Russian Government officials, including Russian intelligence officers."More: Trump campaign adviser Carter Page acknowledges meeting with senior Russian officials: transcriptRep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., the ranking Democrat on the House intelligence committee and one of a handful of lawmakers who has previously reviewed the surveillance orders, said the records "affirm that our nation faced a profound counterintelligence threat prior to the 2016 election, and the Department of Justice and FBI took appropriate steps to investigate whether any U.S. persons were acting as an agent of a foreign power."
[F]or those who don't remember, the controversy about these FISA applications first arose in February when House intelligence committee Chairman Rep. Devin Nunes released a memo claiming that the FBI misled the FISA Court about Christopher Steele, the former British secret agent who compiled the "dossier" on Trump-Russia ties and who was a source of information in the FISA applications on Page. The main complaint in the Nunes memo was that FBI whitewashed Steele--that the FISA applications did not "disclose or reference the role of the DNC, Clinton campaign, or any party/campaign in funding Steele's efforts, even though the political origins of the Steele dossier were then known to senior and FBI officials."In response to the Nunes memo, the Democrats on the committee released their own memo. That memo quoted from parts of the FISA applications, including a footnote in which the FBI explained that Steele was hired to "conduct research regarding Candidate #1," Donald Trump, and Trump's "ties to Russia," and that the man who hired him was "likely looking for information that could be used to discredit [Trump's] campaign."Based on this back and forth between the HPSCI partisans, I wrote on Lawfare at the time that the FBI's disclosures on Steele "amply satisfie[d] the requirements" for FISA applications, and that the central irony of the Nunes memo was that it "tried to deceive the American people in precisely the same way that it falsely accused the FBI of deceiving the FISA Court." The Nunes memo accused the FBI of dishonesty in failing to disclose information about Steele, but in fact the Nunes memo itself was dishonest in failing to disclose what the FBI disclosed. I said then, and I still believe, that the "Nunes memo was dishonest. And if it is allowed to stand, we risk significant collateral damage to essential elements of our democracy."Now we have some additional information in the form of the redacted FISA applications themselves, and the Nunes memo looks even worse.
When the topic came up at the debate, Kaine said Congress had a role to play in protecting the independence of investigators like special counsel Robert Mueller.As part of his response, Stewart defended Trump and asserted, "We have a president who is standing up to the Russians."The obviously false assertion was a bridge too far for the audience, who laughed in shock at Stewart and his claim. [...]He wouldn't condemn the white supremacists who rioted in Charlottesville, Virginia. He called Paul Nehlen, the self-described "pro-white" candidate running for Paul Ryan's Wisconsin seat a "personal hero."And Stewart has repeatedly defended keeping up monuments to the pro-slavery Confederacy.Now on the campaign trail, Stewart has defended fellow traveler Trump from criticism about his weakness on Russia. And he was laughed at for doing so.This is the state of the Republican Party under Trump.