Новости за 13.06.2017

The New York Times on Sunday, in a story titled “Democrats in Split-Screen: The Base Wants It All. The Party Wants to Win,” described a “growing tension between the party’s ascendant militant wing and Democrats competing in conservative-leaning terrain.” The reporters, Alexander Burns and Jonathan Martin, cited Senator Bernie Sanders as a leader of the former group and Georgia congressional candidate Jon Ossoff as representative of the latter. At one point, the piece referenced “tension between Mr. Читать дальше...

Donald Trump’s stunning decision to fire FBI Director James Comey brought inevitable comparisons to the “Saturday Night Massacre,” that evening in October 1973 when President Richard Nixon, enmeshed in the throes of Watergate, ordered independent special prosecutor Archibald Cox fired, and then accepted the resignations of both Attorney General Elliot Richardson and Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus when they refused to carry out his instructions. With Nixon (and future Trump) henchman Roger Stone unavailable... Читать дальше...

It’s rare, though not impossible, to connect emotionally with one of Haruki Murakami’s characters. They are transparent nonentities, serving to focus and magnify. Think of Aomame from 1Q84, who floats through a slightly shifted alternate world, observing but largely apart from it. The nameless narrator of Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World cooly scrutinizes a bizarre world inside his own mind. Like Emerson’s transparent eyeball, they serve as a lens for the peculiarities that surround them... Читать дальше...

Looking backwards after more than a month, the firing of James Comey has blended into the larger pattern of scandal engulfing Donald Trump’s presidency. This may have been inevitable; in a sense, Trump’s decision to fire the FBI director was a single plot point in an unfolding saga. But the effect has been to obscure in our memories just how shocking that development was when it happened. Politics is full of surprises, but the Comey firing was truly astonishing.

After a period of cautious optimism that the American Health Care Act was dead on arrival in the Senate, the upper chamber is inching closer to making the nightmare of Trumpcare a reality. As Sarah Kliff reported on Monday in Vox, moderate Republicans are starting to drop their objections to rolling back the Medicaid expansion that took place under Obamacare, meaning that the Senate bill is lining up with the House’s extremely unpopular bid to uninsure some 23 million people. No one outside the... Читать дальше...