Новости за 10.05.2017

President Donald Trump’s firing of FBI Director James Comey on Tuesday increasingly looks like a preemptive coverup. The New York Times reports that in the days before Comey was fired, he requested “a significant increase in resources for the bureau’s investigation into Russia’s interference in the presidential election.” This adds to the growing body of evidence that the main cause of Comey’s dismissal was not, as the Trump administration claims, his handling of Hillary Clinton’s email scandal... Читать дальше...

Snatched is what happens if you come up with a super-high-concept idea—Amy Schumer and Goldie Hawn are a daughter and mother kidnapped in a foreign country!—and then stopped, pretty much cold, right there. The movie stretches and crawls and creaks its way barely past the 90-minute mark, gasping and coughing all the way.

Amazon has long ceased to simply be “Earth’s Biggest Bookstore,” which was how it described itself back when it launched in 1994. It’s now the Everything Store, a place where you can buy underwear and bananas. It is the largest e-retailer in the world, accounting for more than half of all e-commerce growth in 2016. But that does not mean that books have ceased to be important to Amazon—and it certainly does not mean that Amazon, which dominates the book industry in the United States, has ceased to be important to publishers. Читать дальше...

The day after Trump signed an unconstitutional ban on travelers from Muslim majority nations, thousands of CPB agents showered, ate breakfast, and drove to their jobs at airports across the country, where they proceeded to harass, humiliate, handcuff, and detain hundreds of residents, students, tourists, workers, women, men, and children—all of whom they would have let pass, perhaps with a smile, twenty-four hours earlier. It’s difficult to empathize with these workers, but one imagines that they... Читать дальше...

Less than a month ago, President Donald Trump told Fox Business Network it wasn’t “too late” for him to fire FBI Director James Comey. At the time, I argued that while Trump was correct in a narrow, legalistic sense, “for all practical purposes it is almost certainly false—unless the White House believes that mass FBI resignations, or the appointment of a special prosecutor, or impeachment for obstruction, or some combination thereof, would be an improvement on the status quo.”

Pat Buchanan has a new book out on President Richard Nixon, and veteran political analyst Joe Klein uses it as an occasion to make grand, and ultimately myopic, claims about Buchanan’s own importance. Writing in the New York Times Book Review, Klein argues that Buchanan is “one of the most consequential conservatives of the past half-century. Indeed, he’s a reactionary who was also an avatar: the first Trumpist.” This is an accurate assessment: Buchanan’s mixture of “America First” isolationism... Читать дальше...