Новости за 12.08.2021

The snapshot was taken hastily on a cheap Instamatic camera out the back window of an SUV nearly 20 years ago. But my photo of dozens of joyful Afghan boys racing after an American reporter’s car in the slums of Kabul haunts me more with each passing day.

Joe Biden is keeping another campaign promise. This time, that’s not a good thing.

“At the far end of the Trail of Tears was a promise,” Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote two years ago in McGirt v. Oklahoma. His majority ruling recognized that the Muscogee (Creek) Nation’s reservation still existed because Congress, implicitly keeping that promise, had not explicitly disestablished it when Oklahoma became a state in 1907. The 5–4 decision effectively turned half of the state back into Indian country.

One way of interpreting the controversy currently roiling the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) over the relative importance of civil liberties and free speech on the one hand, and the pursuit of social justice goals on the other, is to view it as a conflict between advocates of classical liberal principles of individual freedom and proponents of classical republicanism, which emphasizes pursuit of the common good. In this framing, the civil libertarians want to exalt individual freedom of expression above all other considerations... Читать дальше...

West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin isn’t sold on the $3.5 trillion budget reconciliation bill that could be this country’s last chance to pass anything resembling climate policy for a decade. “Given the current state of the economic recovery,” Manchin tweeted Wednesday, “it is simply irresponsible to continue spending at levels more suited to respond to a Great Depression or Great Recession—not an economy that is on the verge of overheating.”

I felt as though I had stumbled across a crime scene so violent that I couldn’t process it, let alone synthesize the images in front of me. The parts remained stubbornly separate, and there was no way to grasp the meaning of the whole.