Новости за 24.05.2017

The Washington Post published a moving column on Tuesday that, for good reason, became one of the most widely read articles on the site. It was written by Mary and Joel Rich, who are public figures only insofar as they’re the parents of Seth Rich, the 27-year-old staffer at the Democratic National Committee who was shot dead late one night last year in Washington, D.C. Police, who haven’t solved the case, believe it was a botched robbery. But because of Rich’s place of employment, and some reckless... Читать дальше...

Fox News’ firing of Bob Beckel last week was hardly a crushing loss for liberalism in the public discourse. As co-host of The Five from 2011 to 2015, and again this year, the Democratic commentator routinely disgraced the progressive cause. He once proudly declared, “I’m an Islamophobe.” He repeatedly made misogynistic comments and dropped racial slurs on air. Just earlier this month, he complained that Democrats talk too much about being “the party of labor, women, minorities, you know, LBGT... Читать дальше...

Robert De Niro has been in some bad comedies in recent decades, but there’s no altering the fact that he is one of Hollywood’s great treasures. Now he’s back, in HBO’s The Wizard of Lies, doing what he does best: playing a gangster who is difficult to get a moral read on. White-collar the crime may be, but Bernie Madoff is a character cut straight from the mob-flick tradition.

The Environmental Protection Agency is thrilled with Donald Trump’s proposed budget for fiscal year 2018. According to an agency press release on Tuesday, the budget “provides $5.655 billion to help the agency protect human health and the environment.” It “aims to reduce redundancies and inefficiencies and prioritize EPA’s core statutory mission of providing Americans with clean air, land, and water,” and it allocates millions of dollars for clean air programs, Superfund and Brownfield site cleanups, and safe drinking water. Читать дальше...

There’s plenty to criticize about Donald Trump’s plans to massively expand the U.S. military. His requested $54 billion increase in defense spending, combined with his bellicose rhetoric, seems tailor-made to lead America into more violent conflicts. And aside from Trump’s obsession with owning “the best” of everything, it’s not clear that the United States needs to boost military spending by 10 percent—particularly when Trump campaigned on a pledge to avoid foreign entanglements.

After the 2016 election, Donald Trump and Republicans gloated that the Democratic Party was in its worse shape since the 1920s. Democrats had not only lost the White House and both houses of Congress, but were decimated at the state level. They were in the midst of an existential crisis, stemming from Hillary Clinton blowing her race against the least popular presidential candidate in modern American history. Where had the Democrats gone so wrong?

The political durability of conservative economic doctrine owes a great deal to euphemisms. As the main exponents of that doctrine, Republicans seek to distribute income from the poor to the wealthy by gutting social programs and returning the savings to high-income earners through tax cuts. Euphemisms obscure the brutality of that underlying moral vision. The affluent, in the language of the right, are “job creators,” the poor are “dependents,” the central goal (reducing top marginal tax rates)... Читать дальше...