Alabama Republicans approve resolution calling for Ilhan Omar to be expelled from Congress https://t.co/8z5grt9rRq pic.twitter.com/9mOxditTlX
— The Hill (@thehill) August 27, 2019
Coming February 6, 2024 . . . MURDER, POLITICS, AND THE END OF THE JAZZ AGE by Michael Wolraich Pre-order at Barnes & Noble / Amazon / Books-A-Million / Bookshop |
When filing the suit, Nunes stated that the tweets were so mean that "no human being should ever have to bear and suffer in their whole life." Perhaps that hyperbole is what led to Nunes's attorney, Steven Biss, being so ridiculous in the case's first hearing on Friday. First, Biss told the court that giving Mair and the parody accounts Twitter access at all was akin to negligently giving them a gun
By Nate Silver @ FiveThirtyEight.com, Aug. 26
If you’ve been following our coverage of the Democratic primary, you’ll know that I don’t think much of media really understands Joe Biden’s popularity among Democrats. That doesn’t mean that Biden is destined to win the primary. In fact, I’d regard him as an underdog relative to the field — that is, I think he has a less than 50 percent chance of getting the nomination — partly for reasons I’ll outline later on in this column. But there have already been several occasions when despite widespread predictions of Biden’s demise, the former vice president rebounded or held steady in the polls.
Furthermore — not totally unlike Donald Trump four years ago — Biden’s support comes mostly from the type of Democrats who are sometimes relatively invisible in media coverage of the campaigns, such as black Democrats and older Democrats without college degrees. That’s another reason to be skeptical about claims that Biden isn’t as popular as polls seem to imply. They sometimes reflect narratives that are filtered through journalists’ college-educated social environments — or conditioned by conversations on social media — with all the implicit biases those can introduce.
So this article about Biden in The New York Times, which alleged a disconnect between the polls and conditions on the ground In Iowa, was a little dismaying for me. Here’s a representative snippet [....]
The state and its top insurer are pushing to pay health care providers based on whether they keep people healthy, not for each service they provide.
By Steve Lohr from Raleigh, NC @ NYTimes.com, Aug. 26
Photo captions:
By Jonathan Martin @ NYTimes.com, Aug. 26
With calls, texts and handwritten notes to party officials, Senator Elizabeth Warren is pushing to convey a desire for a revival, not a revolution.
By Peter Baker & Michael D. Shear @ NYTimes.com, Aug. 26
By Rebecca Klar @ TheHill.com, Aug. 23
[....] Of the 59 percent of Americans who said they do not support formal impeachment, 27 percent said it's because they think Trump has done nothing wrong, according to Monmouth. Another 13 percent said the impeachment inquiry would be a partisan “witch hunt,” echoing the president’s own language on the matter.
If the House were to pass articles of impeachment, just 20 percent of respondents said they think there is a chance the Senate would vote to oust Trump, according to the poll. It would require two-thirds of the Republican-controlled Senate to impeach the president.
Some voters, 31 percent, said an impeachment process without a conviction could put Trump in a stronger position to be reelected. Just 23 percent said such an outcome would put him in a weaker position, and 36 percent said it would have no significant outcome.
Only 39 percent of respondents said Trump should be reelected next year [....]
By Conor Friedersdorf @ TheAtlantic.com, Aug. 25
If elected, can the candidate be trusted to hold government officials accountable and oversee a progressive criminal-justice system? Her past says no.
By Michael Birnbaum and Toluse Olorunnipa @ WashingtonPost.com, Aug. 25
BIARRITZ, France — Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif made a surprise visit to the city hosting the Group of Seven summit Sunday, a move that caught President Trump off-guard and added another element of tension to the meeting of world economic leaders.
Zarif's arrival in Biarritz appeared to be a covert initiative by French President Emmanuel Macron, a senior European official said, and at least some other leaders were not informed ahead of time.
President Trump, whose antics have often left other world leaders searching for words, had little to say about the unexpected guest. “No comment,” Trump told reporters [....]
Hundreds of thousands of guns sold in the United States vanish because of loose American gun laws. Many reappear in Jamaica, turning its streets into battlefields.
By Azam Ahmed with photographs by Taylor Hicks, @ NYTimes.com, Aug. 25
CLARENDON, Jamaica — She came to Jamaica from the United States about four years ago, sneaking in illegally, stowed away to avoid detection. Within a few short years, she became one of the nation’s most-wanted assassins.
She preyed on the parish of Clarendon, carrying out nine confirmed kills, including a double homicide outside a bar, the killing of a father at a wake and the murder of a single mother of three. Her violence was indiscriminate: She shot and nearly killed a 14-year-old girl getting ready for church.
With few clues to identify her, the police named her Briana. They knew only her country of origin — the United States — where she had been virtually untraceable since 1991. She was a phantom, the eighth-most-wanted killer on an island with no shortage of murder, suffering one of the highest homicide rates in the world. And she was only one of thousands.
Briana, serial number 245PN70462, was a 9-millimeter Browning handgun.
An outbreak of violence is afflicting Jamaica, born of small-time gangs, warring criminals and neighborhood feuds that go back generations — hand-me-down hatred fueled by pride. This year, the government called a state of emergency to stop the bloodshed in national hot spots, sending the military into the streets [....]
By Hannah Knowles @ WashingtonPost.com, Aug. 24
A jury delivered the guilty verdict that Markeis McGlockton’s family didn't think was possible.
By Perry Bacon, Jr. @ FiveThirtyEight.com, Aug. 23
We’ve had a flurry of new polls about the 2020 presidential race released over the last week. The results confirm some broad dynamics that have been clear for months. President Trump’s poor job approval ratings make him vulnerable to defeat next year. Former Vice President Joe Biden leads the Democratic primary field, largely because of support from voters who are black, over the age of 50, more moderate and/or without college degrees. Democratic voters like many of the 2020 candidates but are particularly obsessed with “electability,” and many think Biden is the most likely candidate to defeat Trump.
But some of the other findings from these surveys1 were more surprising, so for this edition of Pollapalooza, let’s just run through a few of the numbers that stood out.
Hispanic Democrats don’t seem to have a favorite yet [....]
By Alan Rappeport & Keith Bradsher @ NYTimes.com, Aug. 23, Updated 9:24 p.m. ET
By Robert D. McFadden @ NYTimes.com, Aug. 23
A man-about-town philanthropist, he and his brother Charles ran a business colossus while furthering a libertarian agenda that reshaped American politics.
By Faith Karimi @ CNN.com, Aug. 23 (has individual narratives as examples)
[...] Thursday, US prosecutors charged 80 people -- mostly Nigerians -- in the widespread conspiracy that defrauded at least $6 million from businesses and vulnerable elderly women. Seventeen people have been arrested in the US so far and federal investigators are trying to track down the rest in Nigeria and other nations.
"We believe this is one of the largest cases of its kind in US history," US Attorney Nick Hanna said [....]
By Ruth Margalit @ NewYorker.com, Aug. 20
The fallout from Israel’s ban of Representatives Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar has exposed a growing rift in the country over how to respond to B.D.S. supporters.
By Michael Kruse @ Politico Magazine, Aug. 22, with audio version available
Turns out delivering a message of economic doom with a little self-deprecating humor can win over some people. Even a few disenchanted Trump voters.
By Arthur Allen @ Politico.com, Aug. 22
Emails from senior Veterans Affair staff released Thursday reveal the frustration and scorn they felt at having to deal with the intrusion of three wealthy members of President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club in the agency’s plans to create a new digital health platform.
The 2017 and 2018 emails, which Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, show the outsized influence of the Mar-a-Lago members, Marvel Entertainment Chairman Ike Perlmutter, attorney Marc Sherman and internist Bruce Moskowitz.
The emails reveal how senior staff responded to what they saw as unhelpful meddling in their work [....]
By Chelsea James, Dave Weigel & Holly Bailey @ WashingtonPost.com, Aug. 21
ALTOONA, Iowa — Sen. Bernie Sanders announced a key change to his Medicare-for-all insurance plan Wednesday, a move meant to assuage fears on the part of organized labor, whose support is being heatedly sought by all of the candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination.
Labor representatives have expressed concerns to candidates publicly and to campaign staffs privately that a single-payer system could negatively affect their benefits, which in many cases offer better coverage than private plans. The change announced Wednesday would effectively give organized labor more negotiating power than other consumers would have under his plan by forcing employers to pay out any money they save to union members in other benefits.
One of the primary concerns union members and leaders have raised about Sanders’s Medicare-for-all plan is that they negotiated health-care coverage under the current system, in some cases ceding salary in exchange for those benefits [....]