Новости за 19.06.2017

At his annual live call-in show late last week, Vladimir Putin wryly offered political asylum to James Comey “if he faces prosecution of any kind” in the United States, asking, “What’s the difference between the FBI director and [Edward] Snowden?” There is, of course, a clear distinction between slipping your own unclassified memo to the press and leaking a massive trove of data about classified National Security Agency programs. There’s another important difference: the latter redounded to Russian president’s benefit... Читать дальше...

Megyn Kelly’s highly anticipated interview with Alex Jones, the notorious peddler of conspiracy theories, aired as planned on NBC on Sunday night, despite widespread protests and Jones’s own attempts to sabotage the segment. People praised Kelly’s performance, with Politico’s Jack Shafer writing that “she took the mendacious Jones apart in such a textbook manner you had to wonder what all the shouting had been about.” But it was telling that there was no “Megyn Kelly moment,” the term Jim Rutenberg... Читать дальше...

In 2015, when Amazon opened its first brick-and-mortar bookstore, there was a lot of speculation about what the company was really up to. Were the stores designed to sign up new Prime subscribers? Were they hubs for the company’s expanding same-day delivery operation? Could they be stations for the company’s budding drone fleet? Or perhaps these stores were just what they appeared to be: Amazon’s first step to replace the bookstores it had driven out of business.

Like a lot of feminists who hoped against hope for Hillary Clinton’s election, there was one thing I looked forward to with special, unqualified joy: The traditional model of the first family was going to be turned on its head at last. Goodbye to the impossibly perfect exemplar of patriarchy we’ve come to expect, if not demand. No more benevolent and hardworking dad who still somehow makes time. No more selfless mom with the over-scrutinized clothes and hair and civic-minded projects. No more... Читать дальше...

“That man is like superhuman,” Joy Manbeck told The New York Times at the annual People’s Summit in Chicago earlier this month. “He still plays basketball. He walks to work. I don’t care. I want him. Period. I want Bernie.” So does RoseAnn DeMoro, the indefatigable leader of the National Nurses United union. In an interview with McClatchy, she said the Vermont senator is “so clearly ahead” of other potential contenders in the nascent 2020 Democratic presidential field. She added, “He has the most comprehensive program. Читать дальше...

You have to go back to the Woodrow Wilson administration to find an example of a legislative exercise as opaque and regressive as the Republican health care bill. Back then, according to Don Ritchie, historian emeritus of the Senate, it was the Democrats who shut Republicans out of the process. But, as Ritchie told the Los Angeles Times last week, the strategy did not wear well and hasn’t been reprised in almost a century.

Donald Trump seems hellbent on becoming the first president to be impeached for tweeting. On Thursday and Friday, he fired off tweets that both confirmed he was under investigation and seemed to be trying to sabotage the process: