Новости за 01.03.2022

As President Joe Biden prepares to deliver his second State of the Union address, his approval ratings have never been lower, and his presidency has never looked better.

After my two pathetic failed attempts to sneak into the VIP area of the 3NINE nightclub for the Kick Off CPAC Weekend party in Orlando, Florida, the bouncer took pity on me and waved me through anyway. I left the dark pulsing fluorescence of the interior and emerged into the soft night air of the swank poolside bar. Beneath the palm trees, enraptured fans jockeyed for drinks and snapped selfies with various right-wing celebrities.

Last Saturday, in Central Texas, Marin Brice was out with her 10-year-old daughter, driving to get a treat after acting class, talking about an upcoming political protest. She told me she explained it as simply as she could: “Our governor wants to make it so that trans kids can’t have puberty blockers—because that’s something she understands—and if anyone helps trans kids receive or get puberty blockers, they could get in trouble and can go to jail.” The protest, she said, was “because everyone thinks this is awful. Читать дальше...

Przemyśl, Poland (pronounced SHEH-mihsh-ul), is ordinarily a sleepy place in southeastern Poland. It is a town of about 60,000, sitting about eight miles from the Ukrainian border, with a statue of Pope John Paul II in its center. Przemyśl was once a part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, and its buildings look Viennese rather than Soviet.

The response to Russia’s unprompted invasion of Ukraine over the past week has been one of incredible, unprecedented isolation. Sanctions and freezes, targeting assets and draining currency reserves, pummeling the ruble and cleaving Russian trade from much of the rest of the world—all of it has come hard and fast, aimed at transforming Russia into a continental North Korea. And with good reason: Since NATO troops won’t engage their Russian counterparts in Ukraine, economic warfare remains at the top of the West’s playbook. Читать дальше...

In normal times, the State of the Union in an even-numbered year offers an obvious time to assess the political prospects of the president and his party. And by conventional standards, the outlook for Joe Biden and the Democrats is bleak. If you read the latest pundit roundup, the Democrats have about as much chance of holding Congress in 2022 as a homemade iPhone video filmed with a thumb over the lens has of winning the Academy Award for best picture.

Last week, The New Republic’s literary editor, Laura Marsh, spoke with author Dana Stevens, Slate’s movie critic and the author of the new book Camera Man: Buster Keaton, the Dawn of Cinema, and the Invention of the Twentieth Century.

Marjorie Taylor Greene, the lunatic Georgia MAGA congresswoman who only recently stopped loving QAnon and thinks that Jewish space lasers might be starting wildfires out West, is one of the right’s biggest stars. Stripped of her committee assignments and banned from Twitter for spreading Covid-19 misinformation, Greene is a completely ineffectual, downright useless—even by congressional standards—representative. But that only adds to her wide appeal on the American right: Here is someone who only... Читать дальше...