Новости за 06.01.2020

When the United States bombed its own former air base in Baghdad to kill Qassem Soleimani, Iran’s revered Middle East paramilitary commander, just before Friday prayers last week, the pretext was that he was about to kill a bunch of Americans. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was quick to praise the “decision to eliminate Soleimani in response to imminent threats to American lives.” What threat? It wasn’t clear, and officials in government, as well as politicians on Capitol Hill briefed after the attack... Читать дальше...

According to a certain type of Republican, the party has lost its way under President Trump. This is the foundational premise of the self-styled Never Trump Republican but also reliable fodder for high-profile op-eds in national publications. Last week, longtime Republican political strategist Stuart Stevens wrote exactly this kind of piece for The Washington Post, arguing that the Republican Party has lost its moral compass under this administration and “stands for all the wrong things now.” 

In 2011, when I lived in Milwaukee, the only job I held for more than a couple days was working the lunch rush at a gyro cart downtown. I was paid $60 a day plus tips, all in cash. One day, in an attempt to feel a little less adrift in life, I opened a checking account at a chain bank across the street from my workplace and received a debit card. Yet, I rarely used the checking account or debit card, and balance often hovered around $10.

Joe Biden has been through impeachment before.

Not the oversexed and overhyped Bill Clinton variety, but the real 1974 Richard Nixon smoking-gun version. And for Biden, these were moments that transcended partisanship and called for national unity.


Biden was in the Capitol cheering when Jerry Ford, in his first speech to Congress, broke with the divisiveness of the Nixon years and pledged to be president of all the people—including “women’s liberationists and male chauvinists.”


As the youngest senator... Читать дальше...

Nearly two decades ago, Nursultan Nazarbayev, the then-doughy dictator of Kazakhstan, came hat-in-hand to the George W. Bush White House, desperate to make a deal. The post-Soviet strongman had a problem: The Department of Justice (DOJ) had accused Nazarbayev of gob-smacking bribery. Per the DOJ, the Kazakh leader had put the squeeze on a range of hydrocarbon companies, hoping to tap the country’s vast oil wealth. Those companies reciprocated by funnelling tens of million of dollars to Kazakhstan’s kleptocrat-in-chief. Читать дальше...