Новости за 21.08.2020

It’s been a big week for yacht news. Yesterday, white supremacist shirt-layering aficionado Steve Bannon was arrested on a $28 million, 150-foot yacht in Connecticut for defrauding donors to his Build the Wall crowdfunding page.* Also yesterday, Politico reported that the boat from which Evangelical Liberty University President Jerry Falwell Jr. posted a scarring picture with his pants unbuttoned several weeks ago was, in fact, a 164-foot yacht owned by Nascar mogul Rick Hendrick that Falwell... Читать дальше...

If one issue dominated the Democratic presidential primaries this cycle, it was health care. Bernie Sanders’s Medicare for All proposal set a standard that other candidates vied to match while simultaneously striving to not commit to as generous a plan. Debate moderators asked endless variations of the same question: How will you pay for it? The more moderate candidates, including Joe Biden, attacked single-payer with criticisms that often veered into the territory of inane lies. But now that... Читать дальше...

Throughout his entire political career, stretching from Richard Nixon to Donald Trump, Joe Biden has been searching for his voice and for words that were authentically his own.

All eyes this week have been focused on the Democratic National Convention, which should probably be considered the formal kickoff of this year’s general election campaign. Although the coronavirus pandemic forced Democrats to move to virtual proceedings, it should be said that the convention wasn’t all too different in substance from conventions past. There were lofty speeches, moments of canned drama, and, of course, a set of ideologically driven controversies over the future of the party and the convention itself. Читать дальше...

Last week, concluding a two-year investigation into the university’s admissions process, the Justice Department accused Yale of discriminating against white and Asian American applicants in order to manipulate the demographics of its student body. “There is no such thing as a nice form of race discrimination,” Eric Dreiband, assistant attorney general for the civil rights division, said in a statement announcing the move. “Unlawfully dividing Americans into racial and ethnic blocs fosters stereotypes... Читать дальше...

“So, I just heard that,” the President of the United States said at a White House press conference last Thursday. The conference, like the rest of Trump’s regular press briefings, was ostensibly about the federal government’s slow and lazy response to a pandemic that is still spreading uncontrolled throughout the United States. But because that response can no longer really be said to exist as such, and because he’s never much cared, and mostly because there is a presidential election coming up... Читать дальше...

The Democratic Party sure knows how to piss off climate advocates. Tuesday, party leaders cut a promise to end fossil fuel subsidies from their 2020 platform, telling The Huffington Post that the pledge shouldn’t have been in the final draft to begin with.

Not that long ago, Democrats spoke of ideas. The 2020 presidential primary was rooted in policy: universal health care, the Green New Deal, immigration reform. It also bravely faced what it meant to be “political.” Over the course of more than a year, dozens of presidential candidates acted out what was, in essence, an existential crisis, not just over how best to beat Donald Trump but over what, exactly, the Democratic Party is meant to represent.

The Republican National Convention’s speaker lineup is the sign of a party that knows itself well: First there’s Abby Johnson, the former Planned Parenthood clinic director who had a very lucrative anti-abortion epiphany and has since created an entire persona and career as a repentant abortion convert. Then there’s Patricia and Mark McCloskey, the gun-toting couple from Missouri who were charged for threatening peaceful police brutality protestors with their firearms. There’s also Nick Sandmann... Читать дальше...