"Let me reiterate my sincere apology for any actual hurt my words have caused," Omar, a freshman Democratic congresswoman from Minnesota, said on Tuesday afternoon, according to someone present on the call."I know there are a lot of people who in the last weeks have expressed support in trying to say this isn't anti-Semitic or this shouldn't be looked at in that way," she added.But Omar said it is up to the Jewish community to define anti-Semitism."I do not want to give space or energy to anyone who wants to minimize the hurt," she said. [...]The call Tuesday included a range of centrist and liberal Jewish groups including the Anti-Defamation League, the Jewish Democratic Council of America, the refugee resettlement agency HIAS, Americans for Peace Now and Bend the Arc.Omar kept her remarks brief but promised to meet face to face with the groups in the near future.She said the call was an opportunity "for you all to directly hear from me how I feel about my actions and for us to start the process of not only healing but building a relationship and getting to the process of politicking on our viewpoints on this."
Moore failed first grade twice and then every grade after that. He was socially promoted until he dropped out of school in ninth grade. At 13, he lacked a basic understanding of time and math. In 2013, he got the lowest score on an executive functioning test that the expert evaluating him had ever recorded.But despite the Supreme Court's opinion and the new DA's agreement that Moore shouldn't be executed, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals--the state's highest court for criminal cases--insisted Moore must die when it ruled against him again last year.The justices reversed that latest state decision Feb. 19, admonishing the state court for "too many instances" in which it repeated the analysis previously rejected by the high court in 2017.The Supreme Court majority therefore agreed "with Moore and the prosecutor that, on the basis of the trial court record, Moore has shown he is a person with intellectual disability."In his concurrence, Roberts noted that, while he still disagrees with the way that the 2017 majority articulated how to apply the high court's intellectual disability precedent, he joined the majority here because the Texas court repeated its improper analysis and emphasized Moore's adaptive strengths rather than his deficits."That did not pass muster under this Court's analysis last time," Roberts wrote. "It still doesn't." [...]And though it's unclear which way Kavanaugh voted here, another noteworthy aspect of Moore's case is that it attracted an outside brief from the justice's former boss, Kenneth Starr, the independent counsel who enlisted Kavanaugh in his pursuit of then-President Bill Clinton in the 1990s.Signed by Starr and other conservatives, the brief argued that the Texas court's failure to follow "the rule of law" was so great that the justices didn't even need to hold oral arguments before siding with Moore again.
In a video published on the Facebook page of the Israel Advocacy Movement, founder Joseph Cohen displayed a screen capture of the code used for Tlaib's website which showed it was created using Wix.com."That's right, the Palestinian queen of BDS has a website that was built and bought from Israel," Cohen says.
This year's speech comes with a recent poll showing public trust in Putin has fallen to its lowest level in 13 years amid continuing economic woes. More than one in five Russians now lives in poverty, according to recent research by an institute with links to the Kremlin. Nationwide protests broke out in 2018 over the government's plans to raise the age of eligibility for pensions.Russia still faces international sanctions for its annexation of Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula in March 2014, as well as its support for separatists in eastern Ukraine, where more than 10,300 have died since the conflict erupted in April 2014.
Perhaps the most striking thing about those explanations is that, even as each draws only a partial picture of reality, they are mathematically perfect. Take general relativity. Physicists know that Einstein's theory is incomplete. Yet it is a spectacular artifice, with a spare, taut mathematical structure. Fiddle with the equations even a little and you lose all of its beauty and simplicity. It turns out that, if you want to discover a deeper way of explaining the universe, you can't take the equations of the existing description and subtly deform them. Instead, you must make a jump to a totally different, equally perfect mathematical structure. What's the point, theorists wonder, of the perfection found at every level, if it's bound to be superseded?It seems inconceivable that this intricate web of perfect mathematical descriptions is random or happenstance. This mystery must have an explanation. But what might such an explanation look like? One common conception of physics is that its laws are like a machine that humans are building in order to predict what will happen in the future. The "theory of everything" is like the ultimate prediction machine--a single equation from which everything follows. But this outlook ignores the existence of the many different machines, built in all manner of ingenious ways, that give us equivalent predictions.
Former acting FBI director Andrew McCabe said Tuesday that "no one objected" when he briefed congressional leaders about the counterintelligence probe he had recently opened into President Trump in May 2017."That's the important part here, Savannah," McCabe told Savannah Guthrie on NBC's Today show. "No one objected. Not on legal grounds, not on constitutional grounds, and not based on the facts."
Time was, socialism meant thorough collectivism: state ownership of the means of production (including arable land), distribution and exchange. When this did not go swimmingly where it was first tried, Lenin said (in 1922) that socialism meant government ownership of the economy's "commanding heights" -- big entities. After many subsequent dilutions, today's watery conceptions of socialism amount to this: almost everyone will be nice to almost everyone, using money taken from a few. This means having government distribute, according to its conception of equity, the wealth produced by capitalism. This conception is shaped by muscular factions: the elderly, government employees unions, the steel industry, the sugar growers, and so on and on and on. Some wealth is distributed to the poor; most goes to the "neglected" middle class. Some neglect: The political class talks of little else.Two-thirds of the federal budget (and 14 percent of GDP) goes to transfer payments, mostly to the non-poor. The U.S. economy's health care sector (about 18 percent of the economy) is larger than the economies of all but three nations, and is permeated by government money and mandates. Before the Affordable Care Act was enacted, 40 cents of every health care dollar was government's 40 cents. The sturdy yeomanry who till America's soil? Last year's 529-page Agriculture Improvement Act will be administered by the Agriculture Department, which has about one employee for every 20 American farms.Socialists favor a steeply progressive income tax, as did those who created today's: The top 1 percent pay 40 percent of taxes; the bottom 50 percent pay only 3 percent; 50 percent of households pay either no income tax or 10 percent or less of their income. Law professor Richard Epstein notes that in the past 35 years, the fraction of total taxes paid by the lower 90 percent has shrunk from more than 50 percent to about 35 percent.
[T]he Nordic countries practice mostly free market economics paired with high taxes exchanged for generous government entitlement programs.First, it is worth noting that the Nordic counties were economic successes before they built their welfare states. Those productive economies, generating good incomes for their workers, allowed the governments to raise the tax revenue needed to pay for the social benefits. It was not the government benefits that created wealth, but wealth that allowed the luxury of such generous government programs.Second, as evidence of the lack of government interference in business affairs, there is the fact that none of these countries have minimum wage laws. Unions are reasonably powerful in many industries and negotiate contracts, but the government does nothing to ensure any particular outcome from those negotiations. Workers are paid what they are worth, not based on government's perception of what is fair.A third example of Nordic commitment to free markets can be found in Sweden which has complete school choice. The government provides families with vouchers for each child. These vouchers can be used to attend regular public schools, government-run charter schools, or private, for-profit schools. Clearly, the use of government funds to pay for private, for-profit schools is the opposite of socialism.We can also confirm these isolated facts by looking at a comprehensive measure of capitalism relative to socialism. The Fraser Institute, a Vancouver-based, pro-free market, think tank, compiles a worldwide ranking of countries called the economic freedom index. Its website explains that its ranking "is an effort to identify how closely the institutions and policies of a country correspond with a limited government ideal, where the government protects property rights and arranges for the provision of a limited set of "public goods" such as national defense and access to money of sound value, but little beyond these core functions." Clearly, a socialist country should perform poorly in any ranking based on these principles.What we find, however, is the Nordic countries rank quite high on this index of economic freedom. In fact, while Hong Kong and Singapore top the list and the U.S. ranks 12th, we can find the Nordic countries in quite respectable rankings. Denmark ranks 15, Finland 17, Norway 25, and Sweden 27. In terms of numerical scores, Sweden is only 5% lower than the U.S. For further comparison, South Korea and Japan, both considered fairly pro-free market, rank 32 and 39, respectively.
For reasons neither of them could ever quite explain, young Norm Mineta and young Al Simpson hit it off immediately. Their alliance was rekindled in Washington, D.C., in the late 1970s. Simpson arrived as a Republican senator from Wyoming. Mineta was already here, one of the stars of the fabled "Watergate" class of House Democrats elected in 1974.Together, with help from Inouye, Matsui, and many others, the two men worked for a decade on passing the Civil Liberties Act of 1988. It compensated the survivors of the internment camps with $20,000 in a tax-free payment -- hardly enough -- along with an official apology.It was signed into law on Aug. 10, 1988 by President Reagan, who made a point of mentioning the tribulations of Norm Mineta and his family. As Mineta watched solemnly from the audience, the president described how the Minetas were taken from their homes in San Jose, sent by train to Santa Anita Racetrack, where they showered in the paddock, and then were shipped to Heart Mountain where the entire family lived in a one-room shack."The legislation that I am about to sign provides for a restitution payment to each of the 60,000 surviving Japanese-Americans of the 120,000 who were relocated or detained," Reagan said. "Yet no payment can make up for those lost years. So, what is most important in this bill has less to do with property than with honor. For here we admit a wrong; here we reaffirm our commitment as a nation to equal justice under the law."The president also paid homage to the famed all-nisei regiment, focusing on the central injustice: "The 442nd Regimental Combat Team, made up entirely of Japanese-Americans, served with immense distinction to defend this nation, their nation," he noted. "Yet back at home, the soldiers' families were being denied the very freedom for which so many of the soldiers themselves were laying down their lives."Here, Reagan wasn't just reading something drafted by his speechwriters. The 77-year-old president knew more about this than anyone on the White House staff. He knew about some of that ugly wartime prejudice because he was there. Reagan recalled the saga of Kazuo Masuda, a decorated veteran of the 442nd who was killed in Italy. While the 25-year-old Sgt. Masuda was giving his life for his country, his family was held behind the barbed wire at a relocation camp in Arizona. Even after the war, his sister Mary was threatened when she returned to her Southern California farm. An Orange County cemetery refused to inter Sgt. Masuda's remains.This did not go well down with the U.S. Army brass. An incensed Gen. Joseph W. Stilwell went personally to Orange County, where he publicly pinned Kazuo Masuda's Distinguished Service Cross on his sister's lapel. Other dignitaries attended the ceremony, too, including Robert Young, Will Rogers Jr. and a 34-year-old film star who'd served stateside during the war as a U.S. Army captain."Blood that has soaked into the sands of a beach is all one color," the actor said that day. "America stands unique in the world: the only country not founded on race, but on an ideal. Not in spite of that, but because of, our polyglot background, we have all the strength in the world. That is the American way."
In America, this intimidation results in large part from a revisionist interpretation of the evacuation, relocation, and internment of ethnic Japanese during World War II. Although more than 60 years past, these events matter yet deeply today, permitting the victimization lobby, in compensation for the supposed horrors of internment, to condemn in advance any use of ethnicity, nationality, race, or religion in formulating domestic security policy.Denying that the treatment of ethnic Japanese resulted from legitimate national security concerns, this lobby has established that it resulted solely from a combination of"wartime hysteria" and"racial prejudice." As radical groups like the American Civil Liberties Union wield this interpretation, in the words of Michelle Malkin,"like a bludgeon over the War on Terror debate," they pre-empt efforts to build an effective defense against today's Islamist enemy.
You can always tell how damaging revelations are by the level of Trumpbot hysteria over the Steele Dossier, FISA warrants and the FBI flunkies. When they bring up Hillary and the DNC you want to grab them some smelling salts.First, the filing discloses that the government has evidence of Stone's direct communications with Russian intelligence and WikiLeaks. This revelation goes much further than the Stone indictment itself and establishes a direct link between Russia and Stone, a Trump campaign adviser.Referring to these communications as "evidence" suggests that the special counsel considers the communications probative and relevant to proving Stone's guilt. Whatever these communications are, we can reasonably conclude that they are incriminating.Second, the filing indicates that search warrants were used to obtain these communications. Search warrants can be used to obtain email and social media accounts, including the content of every email or Twitter direct message a user has ever sent or received. These communications would help Mueller determine whether Stone was ever in direct contact with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, as Stone claimed in August 2016.In addition, a search warrant can be used to obtain emails from internet service providers doing business in the United States, even if the account user is overseas. If, for example, a Russian hacker were using a Gmail account, a search warrant to Google could provide every email ever sent or received on that account. And if the special counsel has obtained Stone's email communications, it seems likely that he has also obtained the email communications of others, such as Donald Trump Jr., who has admitted to sending email messages to set up a meeting with Russians to obtain dirt on Hillary Clinton in June 2016.Third, the phrase "to discuss the timing and promotion of their release" emphasizes that Mueller considers the conspiracy with which he has charged the Russian intelligence officers to include not just hacking and stealing emails, but also disseminating them. The GRU indictment provides a framework for adding as co-conspirators anyone else who conspired to promote the release of the stolen emails at a time that would be most beneficial to Trump's campaign.In fact, one batch of emails was released about an hour after news broke about the "Access Hollywood" tape in which Trump was heard disparaging women. If someone from the campaign suggested to WikiLeaks that stolen emails be released that day, that person could potentially be charged as a co-conspirator in the GRU case.
As federal prosecutors in Manhattan gathered evidence late last year about President Trump's role in silencing women with hush payments during the 2016 campaign, Mr. Trump called Matthew G. Whitaker, his newly installed attorney general, with a question. He asked whether Geoffrey S. Berman, the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York and a Trump ally, could be put in charge of the widening investigation, according to several American officials with direct knowledge of the call.Mr. Whitaker, who had privately told associates that part of his role at the Justice Department was to "jump on a grenade" for the president, knew he could not put Mr. Berman in charge because Mr. Berman had already recused himself from the investigation. The president soon soured on Mr. Whitaker, as he often does with his aides, and complained about his inability to pull levers at the Justice Department that could make the president's many legal problems go away.Trying to install a perceived loyalist atop a widening inquiry is a familiar tactic for Mr. Trump, who has been struggling to beat back the investigations that have consumed his presidency. His efforts have exposed him to accusations of obstruction of justice as Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel, finishes his work investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election. [...]White House lawyers wrote a confidential memo expressing concern about the president's staff peddling misleading information in public about the firing of Michael T. Flynn, the Trump administration's first national security adviser. Mr. Trump had private conversations with Republican lawmakers about a campaign to attack the Mueller investigation. And there was the episode when he asked his attorney general about putting Mr. Berman in charge of the Manhattan investigation.
[E]rc Abrahams - the radical Jamaican president of the Oxford Union (and a friend) - decided to invite Malcolm to participate in his farewell debate. The subject was a quote from Barry Goldwater, the alt-right Republican candidate for the presidency: "Extremism in the defence of liberty is no vice, moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue."To our astonishment, Malcolm agreed to come and defend the motion. A problem arose: the union did not have the funds to pay Malcolm's fare. Abrahams mentioned this to an acquaintance in the BBC. Within days, the Beeb agreed to buy his plane ticket, provided it had exclusive rights to filming and broadcasting the debate. We laughed a lot and agreed. Yes, the BBC was a different outfit in those times and its director-general, Hugh Greene, appeared mild-mannered but was fiercely independent-minded. As a result, the debate took place and is now part of Malcolm X's history: two books on his visit to the Oxford Union; a movie under way, and, later this week, a documentary to launch the Smithsonian Channel in the UK.I met him on the day of the debate. He greeted me with a huge smile as a "Muslim brother". I felt I had to disillusion him immediately. "Only in name," I whispered. "I'm an atheist." To my amazement, he roared. "I've just finished a trip to the Muslim world," he said, "and met many people like you." It had been an educative trip and he spoke of how the theologians at the al-Azhar mosque in Cairo had convinced him that, whatever else, the Nation of Islam was not a Muslim organisation. Islam was universalist, not separatist in any sense of the word. The sight of blue-eyed, fair-skinned pilgrims at Mecca, which pleased him, helped complete his ideological break with his former colleagues.His speech at the union was not one of his virtuoso performances in terms of rhythm, improvised cadences, silences and eruptions. At his peak, his speeches were like word-jazz, with gestures but no other accompaniment, except the response of the crowd. But that was reserved for his own people. In this, he was not unlike Fidel Castro, whom he had met and hosted in Harlem a few years previously.Here, in a foreign land at a famous location, he was slightly bemused, whispering to me: "I've never addressed such a well-dressed white audience before." The importance of his speech lay in its political content. He broke with black separatism in public, declaring that intermarriages between races were fine and that black and white people had to get together and fight the system.
Flynn was allegedly involved in the following proposal:The proposal, which involved enlisting the U.S. nuclear power industry to build nuclear plants across the Middle East, was backed by a group of retired generals who formed a firm called IP3. Flynn described himself in financial disclosure filings as an "advisor" to a subsidiary of IP3, IronBridge Group Inc., from June 2016 to December 2016 -- at the same time he was serving as Trump's national security adviser during the presidential campaign and the presidential transition, the report says.Not only was Flynn told he might have violated the law, the Trump administration's pursuit of this nuclear tech transfer, Cummings said, appears "ongoing."These goals may even raise new speculation about why President Donald Trump, for instance, responded the way he did in the aftermath of Saudi Arabian agents' assassination of journalist and permanent U.S. resident Jamal Khashoggi.
[F]or all the talk about the border, the biggest issue when it comes to immigration is not welfare or illegal immigration per se; it is the total number of immigrants settling in the country, legally or illegally. While Democrats focus on amnesty, business associations endlessly push for ever more guest workers -- and the media happily support both. But the president should always bring the discussion back to the numbers. Both the national interest and his political future depend on it.
Based on their responses to the General Social Survey, we found that immigrants and their children have levels of patriotism that are about the same as those of native-born Americans or that exceed them. Additionally, immigrants and their descendants have more trust in the three branches of American government than do native-born Americans. Immigrants bolster patriotism and national trust in American government institutions.
A new NPR/PBS/Marist College poll was launched when Trump declared his national emergency four days ago. And the verdict isn't a good one: The poll shows 61 percent of registered voters disapprove of Trump's national emergency declaration, vs. 36 percent who approve of it. [...]Perhaps more important in the Marist poll, though, is this question: "Does President Trump declaring a national emergency to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border make you more likely or less likely to vote for him for reelection in 2020?" On that question, a majority -- 54 percent -- says this is a motivator to vote against Trump, while just 33 percent say it's more likely to make them vote for Trump.
O'Rourke's score also reveals that, within the context of national Democratic politics, Beto is quite moderate, with a more centrist ideological position than those of more than three-quarters of all Democratic U.S. House members. Within the current context, where the Democratic Party is veering further to the left on issues ranging from health care to taxes, Beto's centrist track record could represent a liability in a race for president. On the other hand, with a Democratic left lane that is more congested than Houston freeways during rush hour, O'Rourke's centrist profile could give him room to maneuver in the comparatively uncongested center lane, where the potential number of candidates seeking the Democratic Party's presidential nomination is much smaller.
Years before President Donald Trump promised to build his wall, Homeland Security erected an 18-foot-high fence here in a botched land grab that serves as a warning for the future.An investigation by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune shows that Homeland Security cut unfair real estate deals, secretly waived legal safeguards for property owners, and ultimately abused the government's extraordinary power to take land from private citizens.The major findings:Homeland Security circumvented laws designed to help landowners receive fair compensation. The agency did not conduct formal appraisals of targeted parcels. Instead, it issued low-ball offers based on substandard estimates of property values.Larger, wealthier property owners who could afford lawyers negotiated deals that, on average, tripled the opening bids from Homeland Security. Smaller and poorer landholders took whatever the government offered -- or wrung out small increases in settlements. The government conceded publicly that landowners without lawyers might wind up shortchanged, but did little to protect their interests.The Justice Department bungled hundreds of condemnation cases. The agency took property without knowing the identity of the actual owners. It condemned land without researching facts as basic as property lines. Landholders spent tens of thousands of dollars to defend themselves from the government's mistakes.The government had to redo settlements with landowners after it realized it had failed to account for the valuable water rights associated with the properties, an oversight that added months to the compensation process.On occasion, Homeland Security paid people for property they did not actually own. The agency did not attempt to recover the misdirected taxpayer funds, instead paying for land a second time once it determined the correct owners.Nearly a decade later, scores of landowners remain tangled in lawsuits. The government has already taken their land and built the border fence. But it has not resolved claims for its value.The errors and disparities played out family by family, block by block, county by county, up and down the length of the border fence.
It's impossible to overstate deflationary pressures.The transition points to a larger, existential crisis for the multbillion dollar car insurance industry. If nobody's driving, why do we need auto insurance? Premiums--and company revenues--are based on a driver's likelihood of being in an accident and actual crash rates. With more than 90 percent of accidents caused by human error, taking the driver out of the equation is going to mean big changes for insurers.
She's got all of the rage and racialist attitudes of Ann Coulter but isn't burdened by any of Coulter's intellectualism. When she's not in attack mode, she's perfected the blank stare of Steve Doocy, which allows her to take on the aspect of tabula rasa conservativism. Is she for free markets? Crony capitalism? Outlawing abortion? Who can say. What matters is that she's into melting snowflakes. She's the perfect designated successor for Trumpism.Tomi didn't just emerge, fully-formed, from Ann Coulter's head. No, she was shaped and molded by the awesome power of the conservative media feedback loop mixing with her raw talent and ambition. She got her start in the ecosystem with One America News Network (of course) and then migrated to Glenn Beck's Blaze, where she was eventually fired for announcing that she was pro-choice while doing a guest spot on The View. The surprise conversion on a network show was a total coincidence and in no way an attempt to get out of her contract with a niche streaming service in order to break into the bigtime.It's interesting how smoothly Tomi's pro-choice views dovetail with the binary-choice pro-lifers who are always trying to talk themselves into believing that they have to support Trump, no matter what, in order to save babies. They seem unperturbed by Tomi's heterodoxy and not terribly interested in what it says about Trump's commitment to the cause of life that a pro-choice zealot is one of his biggest apologists. Perhaps this is a signal achievement of Trumpism, which seems to have crafted its own fusionism between the religious right and the libertarian wings of the party. Or maybe it's an achievement unique to Tomi's own brand in which she bridges the divide with anti-abortion crusaders by gleefully calling for the gassing of migrant children and rage tweeting about the "pathetic" "snakes" who were upset about a child dying in an ICE detention facility. She's a uniter, not a divider.
After the Cold War, the liberal order expanded dramatically. With the Soviet Union gone and China still weak, the states at the core of the order enjoyed a commanding global position, and they used it to expand their system. In the Asia-Pacific, the United States strengthened its security commitments to Australia, Japan, the Philippines, South Korea, and other partners. In Europe, NATO and the EU took on more and more members, widened and deepened cooperation among their members, and began intervening far beyond Europe's borders. The EU developed "neighborhood policies" to enhance security, prosperity, and liberal practices across Eurasia, the Middle East, and North Africa; NATO launched missions in Afghanistan, the Gulf of Aden, and Libya.For liberals, this is simply what progress looks like. And to be sure, much of the order's dynamism--say, the GATT's transformation into the more permanent and institutional World Trade Organization, or the UN's increasingly ambitious peacekeeping agenda--met with broad support among liberal and authoritarian countries alike. But some key additions to the order clearly constituted revisionism by liberal countries, which, tellingly, were the only states that wanted them.Most controversial were the changes that challenged the principle of sovereignty. Under the banner of "the responsibility to protect," governments, nongovernmental organizations, and activists began pushing a major strengthening of international law with the goal of holding states accountable for how they treated their own people. Potent security alliances such as NATO and powerful economic institutions such as the IMF joined the game, too, adding their muscle to the campaign to spread liberal conceptions of human rights, freedom of information, markets, and politics.Democracy promotion assumed a newly prominent role in U.S. grand strategy, with President Bill Clinton speaking of "democratic enlargement" and President George W. Bush championing his "freedom agenda." The United States and its allies increasingly funded nongovernmental organizations to build civil society and spread democracy around the world, blurring the line between public and private efforts. U.S. taxpayers, for example, have footed the bill for the National Endowment for Democracy, a nonprofit that promotes democracy and human rights in China, Russia, and elsewhere. Meddling in other states' domestic affairs is old hat, but what was new was the overt and institutionalized nature of these activities, a sign of the order's post-Cold War mojo. As Allen Weinstein, the co-founder of the National Endowment for Democracy, admitted in a 1991 interview, "A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA."As never before, state power, legal norms, and public-private partnerships were harnessed together to expand the order's--and Washington's--geopolitical reach. Perhaps the clearest example of these heightened ambitions came in the Balkans, where, in 1999, NATO harnessed its military power to the emerging "responsibility to protect" norm and coerced Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic to acquiesce to Kosovo's de facto independence--after which the United States and its allies openly joined forces with local civil society groups to topple him from power. It was a remarkably bold move. In just a few months, the United States and its allies transformed the politics of an entire region that had traditionally been considered peripheral, priming it for incorporation into the security and economic structures dominated by the liberal West.To say that all of this represented revisionism is not to equate it morally with, say, Beijing's militarization in the South China Sea or Moscow's invasion of Ukraine and electoral meddling in the United States and Europe. Rather, the point is that the order's horizons have expanded dramatically, with state power, new legal norms, overt and covert actions, and public-private partnerships together stretching the order wider and pushing it deeper. No country these days is consistently interested in maintaining the status quo; we are all revisionists now. Revisionism undertaken by illiberal states is often seen as mere power grabbing, but revisionism undertaken by liberal states has also resulted in geopolitical rewards: expanded alliances, increased influence, and more perquisites for the chief sponsors of the order, the United States above all. [...]One might wonder whether an order grounded in liberal principles can in fact practice restraint. In the mid-eighteenth century, the philosopher David Hume warned that the United Kingdom was prosecuting its wars against illiberal adversaries with "imprudent vehemence," contradicting the dictates of the balance of power and risking national bankruptcy. Perhaps such imprudence is part and parcel of the foundational ideology and domestic politics of liberal powers. As the political scientist John Mearsheimer has put it, "Liberal states have a crusader mentality hardwired into them."Indeed, the principles of liberalism apply to all individuals, not just those who happen to be citizens of a liberal country. On what basis, then, can a country committed to liberal ideals stand idly by when they are trampled abroad--especially when that country is powerful enough to do something about it? In the United States, leaders often try to square the circle by contending that spreading democracy actually serves the national interest, but the truth is that power and principle don't always go together.Because liberal convictions are part of their identity, Americans often feel they should support those who rise up against tyranny. Perhaps in the abstract one can promise restraint, but when demonstrators take to Tahrir Square in Cairo, Maidan in Kiev, or Bolotnaya Square in Moscow, many Americans want their government to stand with those flying freedom's flag. And when countries want to join the order's key security and economic institutions, Americans want the United States to say yes, even when there is scant strategic sense in it. Political incentives encourage this impulse, since politicians in the United States know that they can score points by bashing any leader who sells out lovers of liberty.
The editor of a small-town Alabama newspaper published an editorial calling for "the Ku Klux Klan to night ride again" against "Democrats in the Republican Party and Democrats [who] are plotting to raise taxes in Alabama." [...]Goodloe Sutton -- who is the publisher of the Democrat-Reporter newspaper in Linden, Alabama -- confirmed to the Montgomery Advertiser on Monday that he authored the Feb. 14 editorial calling for the return of a white supremacist hate group. [...]When asked if he felt it was appropriate for the publisher of a newspaper to call for the lynching of Americans, Sutton doubled down on his position."... It's not calling for the lynchings of Americans. These are socialist-communists we're talking about. Do you know what socialism and communism is?" Sutton said.