The Senate Democrats' resolution of disapproval comes as House Democrats plan to introduce a similar resolution disapproving of Trump's emergency declaration on Friday."This issue transcends partisan politics, and I urge all senators -- Democrats and Republicans -- to support this resolution to terminate the president's emergency declaration when it comes up for a vote in the Senate," Schumer said in a statement, referring to the House resolution. "Identical companion legislation to the House resolution will soon be introduced in the Senate."
In the July-through-September quarter of last year, the average domestic airfare was $343, according to data released Thursday. Adjusted for inflation, that's the lowest average price in any quarter since the U.S. Bureau of Transportation Statistics began keeping track in 1995.
First: "Although President Donald Trump tweeted that he had ordered his administration to cut off disaster aid to wildfire victims in California, federal officials confirmed on Wednesday that they never received any such directive." Political scientist Brendan Nyhan gets it right: "Weakest president in contemporary times. 'Ordered' likely means he said something to a staff member who ignored him."Second: "Bowing to bipartisan concerns in Congress, President Trump retreated Tuesday from his plan to create an independent 'space force' in the Pentagon, proposing instead to consolidate the military's space operations and personnel in the Air Force." Kevin Drum at Mother Jones explains: "So now it's just a branch of the Air Force, which is more-or-less what it already is since the Air Force Space Command already exists. It's just going to get a little bigger now."In both cases, it's as if Trump had carefully read Richard Neustadt's classic study of presidential power and then chosen to do the exact opposite of what it advises.
The party is an offshoot of the Kach party, a faction that was banned in Israel and designated a terrorist organization by the Israeli government, the US State Department, and the FBI.The Kach party was led by the late US-born Rabbi Meir Kahane, an ultranationalist who advocated for barring non-Jews from Israel and called for Arabs and Jews to be segregated.
Remember when Michael Avenatti shared Michael Cohen's bank records on Twitter and no one had a clue how that came to pass? An IRS analyst identified as John C. Fry now faces the charge of unlawful disclosure of Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs).In the complaint, it is alleged that Fry, a San Francisco, committed the major no-no of disclosing Cohen's records to Avenatti. Fry was also identified as the anonymous "law enforcement official" who told the New Yorker he "immediately became concerned" when he discovered two of Cohen's finance-related files were missing.
thanks, UR!Sometimes, I am gobsmacked when I watch conservatives talk to each other. Take, for example, Kevin Williamson of the National Review trying to explain why Republicans should examine some European health care systems. [...]Here's the thing: Republicans, and most Americans, say they want a system in which insurance companies are obliged to cover expenses associated with preexisting conditions. They also want insurance to be provided privately in the market. I have a very hard time seeing how you can have both of those things without having an individual mandate, without which the underlying incentives all but ensure a dysfunctional insurance market. You'd have no incentive to sign up for a plan and pay premiums until you came down with something expensive. [...]If the Republicans hadn't demonized the Affordable Care Act, they could use it for their alternative model to what the many Democrats will be pushing for on the 2020 campaign trail. This shouldn't surprise us. The Affordable Care Act was modeled on the Massachusetts health care law that was established while Mitt Romney was serving as governor of the Bay State. And the Massachusetts law was based on a 1993 plan the Heritage Foundation promoted (very disingenuously) as an alternative to HillaryCare.
Was Karl Marx an anti-Semite? Are Jews money-worshippers? Does anyone even remember that Marx wrote an essay "On The Jewish Question"? Jonah is interviewed by Jonathan Silver of the Tikvah Fund for an episode of the Tikvah Podcast that we have cross-posted here.
A U.S. Coast Guard lieutenant and self-identified white nationalist was arrested after federal investigators uncovered a cache of weapons and ammunition in his Maryland home that authorities say he stockpiled to launch a widespread domestic terrorist attack targeting politicians and journalists.Christopher Paul Hasson called for "focused violence" to "establish a white homeland" and said, "I am dreaming of a way to kill almost every last person on the earth," according to court records filed in U.S. District Court in Maryland.
[M]cCabe believes that Rep. Devin Nunes--who participated as chair of the House Intelligence Committee--was acting as a mole for the president in the briefings. The steps McCabe took to open an investigation after Trump fired Comey were immediately relayed to the White House by Nunes.That is not something that comes as a surprise to any of us who have been watching all of this unfold. But it is important that McCabe shares those suspicions. If fits perfectly with Nunes' history of disclosing classified information whenever it suits his purposes.For example, Rep. Nunes was the subject of an ethics investigation in 2017 when he held a press conference to announce that intelligence agencies incidentally collected information about some of President Trump's associates. In January, he became the subject of another ethics complaint.The complaint, filed by the Campaign for Accountability, ...calls on the Office of Congressional Ethics to investigate whether Nunes or committee staff leaked closed-door testimony of the head of the company that produced the bombshell dossier of Russian information on Donald Trump.Parts of the confidential testimony apparently were "selectively leaked" to discredit Fusion GPS and to "retaliate against Fusion for its role in investigating" Trump and his campaign's ties to Russia, according to the complaint. It alleges the leak further aimed to "deter the firm from engaging in any continued investigation."
The fabric of space and time is widely believed by physicists to be emergent, stitched out of quantum threads according to an unknown pattern. And for 22 years, they've had a toy model of how emergent space-time can work: a theoretical "universe in a bottle," as its discoverer, Juan Maldacena, has described it.The space-time filling the region inside the bottle -- a continuum that bends and undulates, producing the force called gravity -- exactly maps to a network of quantum particles living on the bottle's rigid, gravity-free surface. The interior "universe" projects from the lower-dimensional boundary system like a hologram. Maldacena's discovery of this hologram has given physicists a working example of a quantum theory of gravity.But that doesn't necessarily mean the toy universe shows how space-time and gravity emerge in our universe. The bottle's interior is a dynamic, Escheresque place called anti-de Sitter (AdS) space that is negatively curved like a saddle. Different directions on the saddle curve in opposite ways, with one direction curving up and the other curving down. The curves tend toward vertical as you move away from the center, ultimately giving AdS space its outer boundary -- a surface where quantum particles can interact to create the holographic universe inside. However, in reality, we inhabit a positively curved "de Sitter (dS) space," which resembles the surface of a sphere that's expanding without bounds.
On today's Bulwark Podcast, Lawfare editor-in-chief Benjamin Wittes joins host Charlie Sykes to discuss the rollout of Andrew McCabe's new book, a look at his tenure at the FBI, and an update on the Mueller Investigation and President Trump's transparent efforts to discredit law enforcement and his investigators. Also, a discussion about Justice Clarence Thomas and his views on stare decisis and Times v. Sullivan.
Trump often has groused about flies in the White House and has told groups that his aides have mixed luck killing them. "Swarming everywhere," he said at one point early in his presidency, according to a senior White House official, backing up an account in Sims's book.
Smollett doesn't need the money he would get from a court settlement, and he isn't trying to deny someone higher office. So why in the world would he fake something like that attack--if he did indeed fake it? The reason might be that he has come of age in an era when nothing he could have done or said would have made him look more interesting than being attacked on the basis of his color and sexual orientation.Racial politics today have become a kind of religion in which whites grapple with the original sin of privilege, converts tar questioners of the orthodoxy as "problematic" blasphemers, and everyone looks forward to a judgment day when America "comes to terms" with race. Smollett--if he really did stage the attack--would have been acting out the black-American component in this eschatological configuration, the role of victim as a form of status. We are, within this hierarchy, persecuted prophets, ever attesting to the harm that white racism does to us and pointing to a future context in which our persecutors will be redeemed of the sin of having leveled that harm upon us. We are noble in our suffering.None of this is to deny that racism exists, and that it is hardly limited to acts as baldly depraved as that of Dylann Roof, who attacked worshippers in a Charleston, South Carolina, church in 2015. However, one might argue--perhaps with the same kind of guilt I had in doubting Smollett's story--that there is a degree of exaggeration in how Americans today discuss and process race. We operate according to a larger narrative, as it were, that at times renders fussing too much with mundane facts improper, beyond a certain point.Certainly, the professional martyr is a race-neutral personality type. However, since the civil-rights victories of the 1960s, when whites became open in a new way to understanding black pain, that personality type has been especially useful to black Americans. With positive racial self-image possibly elusive after hundreds of years of naked abuse, the noble-victim position can seem especially, and understandably, comforting. It can also be handy, in a fashion quite unexpected to anyone who was on the front lines of race activism 50 years ago--as a road to stardom.Notable in smollett's account is that he sought to come off as an especially fierce kind of victim--the victim as hero, as cool. "I fought the fuck back," he told ABC's Robin Roberts in an interview. Smollett has long displayed a hankering for preacher status. His Twitter stream is replete with counsel about matters of spirit, skepticism, and persistence that sounds a tad self-satisfied from someone in his 30s. His mother associated with the Black Panthers and is friends with the activist Angela Davis, and in interviews Smollett has identified proudly with the activist tradition.The problem is that amid the complexities of 2019 as opposed to 1969, keeping the Struggle going is more abstract, less dramatic, than it once was. Angela Davis is on T-shirts; it seems less likely that, for example, the Black Lives Matter activist DeRay Mckesson will be. How do you make as stark and monumental a statement as a King or a Malcolm these days? With a touch too much thirst for glory, and a tad too little inclination for analysis, one might seek to be attacked the way they were.
About half of Americans say they believe God determines what happens to them all or most of the time: https://t.co/kYIZspStAw pic.twitter.com/85RiHltKse
— Pew Research Religion (@PewReligion) February 21, 2019
And they wonder that they've lost American Jews?Israeli far-right party Habayit Hayehudi has accepted an offer from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to join forces with Otzma Yehudit, a right-wing party led by followers of racist Rabbi Meir Kahane, in exchange for the education and housing ministries in addition to two seats in the security cabinet. Furthermore, the 28th slot on the Likud ticket will be given to the newly merged party according to the agreement.Otzma Yehudit is led by former lawmaker Michael Ben-Ari, together with Baruch Marzel, Itamar Ben-Gvir and Benzi Gopstein, all former disciples and political descendants of Meir Kahane - the infamous American-rabbi-turned-Knesset-member whose vitriolic racism against Arabs got his Kach party banned from running in the 1988 election.
Here's the fascinating part of this clash: Carlson starts out by bathing Bregman in praise for his remarks at Davos, which the video replays. "That's one of the great moments -- maybe the great moment in Davos history," Carlson said, chuckling about the hypocrisy of the folks who travel by private jet to talk about the world's problems in Switzerland. "If I was wearing a hat, I would take it off to you," Carlson said.Thus was established the planned rhythm of the interview. Bregman, you see, was brought in as a friendly voice, a fellow who would presumably play along with the host. That very status gave Bregman enough space to turn the whole conversation into a referendum on Carlson's own hypocrisy. "The vast majority of Americans, for years and years now, according to the polls, including Fox News viewers and including Republicans, are in favor of higher taxes on the rich. . . . It's all really mainstream but no one's saying that at Davos just as no one's saying that at Fox News," Bregman said in the discussion. Folks at Davos and at Fox News, he alleged, had been "bought by the billionaire class."Carlson didn't immediately anger, though he did try to steer the discussion elsewhere. When Bregman persisted in his critique of Fox News, Carlson said it would be "interesting" to know how much Fox News the historian had watched.After some more back-and-forth, Bregman showed that he'd really, really studied the programming values of "Tucker Carlson Tonight": "I think the issue really is one of corruption and of people being bribed and not talking about the real issues. What the Murdochs really want you to do to is scapegoat immigrants instead of talking about tax avoidance," he said.As Bregman continued showing a command of Fox News's pro-elite advocacy, Carlson blew up. He called Bregman a "moron" and couldn't figure out how this fellow had even viewed the network's programming. "Fox doesn't even play where you are," said Carlson. "Well, have you heard of the Internet?" replied Bregman. "I can watch things whatever I want."By this point, Bregman, thousands of miles away, was sitting where Carlson usually sits -- in complete command of the interview, setting the pace, putting his interlocutor on the defensive. The host was verily gasping for air. The most telling words of the interview came when Carlson said, "Wait -- but, but can I just say?" That was just shortly after Bregman said Carlson was a "millionaire funded by billionaires."
Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), the leader of the main congressional delegation, pressed Shanahan on whether he was telling European officials in Munich that the full U.S. withdrawal from Syria was a done deal."Are you telling our allies that we are going to go to zero by April 30?" he asked Shanahan, according to Graham."Yes, that's been our direction [from the president]," Shanahan replied."That's the dumbest f---ing idea I've ever heard," Graham responded.Graham then launched into a list of consequences he feared would result from a precipitous U.S. withdrawal from Syria without a follow-up plan: The Islamic State would return, Turkey would attack Kurdish forces, Iran would gain the advantage. Graham asked Shanahan if he disagreed with that analysis."That could very well happen," Shanahan said."Well, if the policy is going to be that we are leaving by April 30, I am now your adversary, not your friend," Graham told the acting Pentagon chief, according to Graham. (Several other lawmakers confirmed this exchange.)Graham's alternative idea, which he spent the weekend pitching in Europe, is for European countries to contribute hundreds of new troops to build a safe zone on the Syrian side of the Turkish border. This zone would keep the Islamic State from returning and provide a buffer between Turkish troops and the mostly Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces that the United States trained and armed (but now seems poised to abandon).The fact that Shanahan was telling European officials the United States was planning a full withdrawal undercut Graham's parallel message that a deployment of European troops would motivate President Trump to leave a couple hundred U.S. forces there to help.