Новости за 16.05.2017

President Donald Trump’s reported disclosure of classified information about the Islamic State to Russian diplomats is, like many of his reckless acts, both shocking and entirely unsurprising. In fact, it was predicted even before Trump became president. In mid-January, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, relying on the reporting of investigative reporter Ronen Bergman, reported that “Israeli intelligence officials are concerned that the exposure of classified information to their American counterparts... Читать дальше...

There’s a certain kind of woman who looks like she’s made of solid gold. Golden women have hair that is about the same color as their skin, and light bounces from their cheekbones and lips and ponytails and earrings as if the whole package was carved from one gorgeous material. Golden women are gold all the way through, and that must be how Goldie Hawn got her name.

On March 8, the Center for American Progress, the preeminent Democratic-aligned think tank in Washington, D.C., announced the Ideas Conference, loosely modeled after the Conservative Political Action Conference. The idea, CAP President Neera Tanden told Politico at the time, was to attempt something that often seems impossible in the Donald Trump era: think about and discuss issues that were not wholly related to our attention-grabbing president. Just four days before CAP’s announcement, Trump... Читать дальше...

The speed and ease with which an authoritarian engineered a hostile takeover of the Republican Party revived liberal interest last year in the work of the political scientist Juan Linz, whose seminal 1990 essay “The Perils of Presidentialism” theorized that the structure of constitutional democracies like ours doom them to devolve into legitimation crises over time.

Since Donald Trump took office, many liberals have looked to cities and states as central fronts in the Democratic resistance. With a president hostile to progressive policies of all kinds, the thinking goes, state legislatures and city councils offer more hope for action on a wide range of issues, from regulating carbon emissions to defending immigrant rights.

“It’s going to be Trumpgate, it’s going to be Comeygate, it’s going to be FBI-gate, it’s going to be something-gate,” The Washington Post’s Bob Woodward crowed last week, the day after President Donald Trump fired FBI Director James Comey. He just might be right. Senator Ed Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat, warned CNN viewers that the scandal could soon “turn into Russiagate”—a term employed by CNBC, Newsweek, Foreign Policy, HuffPost, and Politico. Meanwhile, Vanity Fair, Investor’s Business Daily... Читать дальше...

Close to two years ago I reported on numerous errors, and a questionable commitment to accuracy, by the New York Times columnist David Brooks. In just one paragraph—which he reiterated in various forms in his column, his 2015 book The Road to Character, and in public statements—Brooks reported incorrect dates, cited the wrong polling organization, named incorrect participants in the study the polls were actually taken from, gave wrong statistics, and, according to the authors of the study, offered... Читать дальше...