Новости за 18.10.2022

Democrats and liberal political junkies were rattled by a New York Times/Siena College poll that was written up in the newspaper as “Republicans Gain Edge as Voters Worry About Economy, Times/Siena Poll Finds.” The poll’s top line found that 49 percent of likely voters planned to vote for a generic Republican candidate in the 2022 midterms. A slightly smaller portion of those surveyed, 45 percent, said they planned to vote for a generic Democrat instead.

Over the summer, Democratic legislative successes coupled with dropping gas prices worked to drive attention away from the precarity of the economy. Meanwhile, rage continued to seethe at the Supreme Court’s abrogation of reproductive rights. Signs were pointing in the right direction for Democrats heading into the fall midterms.

The Western canon dodged a bullet last week when Geoffrey Chaucer (1342–1400), author of The Canterbury Tales, was cleared of raping a woman named Cecily Chaumpaigne. Suspicion had been cast by a 1380 legal document, discovered in the late nineteenth century, in which Chaumpaigne said (translated here from the original Latin):

Earlier this month, former President Donald Trump asked the Supreme Court to intervene on his behalf in the litigation surrounding the federal probe into classified documents that were stored at Mar-a-Lago after he left office. His lawyers claimed that “any limit on the comprehensive and transparent review of materials seized in the extraordinary raid of a President’s home erodes public confidence in our system of justice.”

There are few episodes in national history as blithely misunderstood as America’s participation in World War I. In the history-textbook summary, the country remained above the fray until German submarine attacks forced President Wilson to renege on his 1916 election promise to keep the country out of the war. Despite their belated RSVP, the well-fed, well-bred American soldiers arrived in Europe as liberators, marched cheerfully into the protracted slaughter, and quickly put paid to the Hun. Back they came to more cheering crowds... Читать дальше...