Новости за 08.05.2024

At a press conference Wednesday, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson pushed a right-wing conspiracy theory that undocumented immigrants are voting in elections—and then in the same breath admitted that there was no proof.

The Ku Klux Klan is the “the military wing of the Democratic Party” and migrants coming to the U.S. “have no interest in being Americans,” Republican Representative Scott Perry said in a closed-door meeting with other lawmakers Tuesday.

Donald Trump simply can’t help himself from taking a solid jab at the partial gag order he’s under in his New York hush-money trial. The court-imposed gag order prevents him from speaking publicly about courtroom staff, prosecutors, jurors, witnesses, or their family members—but according to Trump, not having the opportunity to openly insult them is thoroughly “unfair.”

A Republican lawmaker has decided that the violent detention of college students participating in Gaza solidarity protests isn’t enough of a punishment. Instead, he believes the only way to encourage them to stop using their First Amendment right to protest is to ship them off to Gaza.

There is nothing new or unexpected about Benjamin Netanyahu’s arrogance. When President Bill Clinton first met him at the White House in 1996—mere weeks after Netanyahu first took office as Israel’s prime minister—he reportedly seethed to aides, “Who the fuck does he think he is? Who’s the fucking superpower here?” That arrogance subsequently caused rifts with Republican and Democratic presidents alike. Netanyahu, now in his third stint as prime minister, has not changed at all over the last 30 years. Читать дальше...

America’s disgraced mayor seems to have lost practically everything in his bid to aid Donald Trump.

After complaining about being forced to attend his hush-money trial, Donald Trump is spending his day off with people who spent thousands of dollars on his NFTs.

Donald Trump just got some good news on another legal front.

A Georgia appeals court has agreed to review the decision to keep Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis on the RICO prosecution against Trump in his Georgia election interference case. That criminal trial charges Trump and more than a dozen of his associates with trying to steal Georgia’s 2020 election from the candidate that actually won the majority of votes, Joe Biden. Now, with Tuesday’s decision from the appeals court... Читать дальше...

As if Robert F. Kennedy Jr. couldn’t get any weirder, the presidential candidate has admitted that a doctor once suspected a worm ate part of his brain and then died inside his head.

Nikki Haley is still haunting Donald Trump’s bid for the White House.

Three months after abandoning her long-shot campaign, Haley still managed to nab 128,000 votes in Indiana’s GOP presidential primary on Tuesday, according to polling results compiled by Decision Desk HQ. That constituted 21 percent of the Republican vote in the Hoosier State, meaning one in five registered conservatives still preferred Haley over their party’s presumptive nominee.

It’s the continuation of an anti-Trump... Читать дальше...

Quite simply, one of the finest essays on Kafka ever written.

—Franklin Foer, former TNR editor, Insurrections of the Mind: 100 Years of Politics and Culture in America

The magazine made the case for military intervention in the Balkans, persistently and passionately. It was a model of activist journalism, demonstrating how to step on the soapbox without turning into a bore. It didn’t hurt that the case was made by the likes of Samantha Power, who got her journalistic start with pieces on Bosnia, as well as the scholar Fouad Ajami. These articles helped shape the template for liberal hawkishness, a doctrine of humanitarian interventionism that aspired to enshrine... Читать дальше...

Humor is not the primary métier of The New Republic nor, for that matter, of liberalism. But there’s a small tradition that includes this cute, fairly mild satire by a very young Philip Roth, mocking both Eisenhower and the Power of Positive Thinking. During the seventies, Woody Allen wrote regular send-ups for the magazine. The magazine most regularly deployed humor, and to great effect, during the eighties and nineties, a period when it gleefully attempted to overthrow the oppressive orthodoxies of liberalism. Читать дальше...

The New Republic trumpeted its connections to the New Deal. One of its advertisements cited testimony from a visitor to the Oval Office who claimed to have witnessed copies of the magazine stacked on Roosevelt’s desk. This was a bit of disingenuous marketing. Until the late thirties, The New Republic raked FDR on a regular basis, even when it should have been nodding its head in agreement with his policies.

All this hostility to Roosevelt was fairly predictable. Intellectuals are paid to... Читать дальше...

The editors of The New Republic both craved and attracted spiritual godfathers. Louis Brandeis, John Dewey, Learned Hand, and Felix Frankfurter would play this role in the early life of the magazine, passing along avuncular suggestions. Mencken never intervened in the life of The New Republic in this sort of way. In fact, the crusty newspaperman made an unlikely idol for the young liberals. His disappointment with his fellow humans poured forth in bilious essays that espoused deeply conservative politics. Читать дальше...

This essay sounds unlike the Walter Lippmann—that granite fixture on the opinion раgе—who became so well known. There’s not a hint of any conversations with foreign ministers or senior senators. His tone has none of his famous detachment. His prose explodes with the passion of a young man. Before Herbert Croly discovered Walter Lippmann, he had just spent a brief tour working for George Lunn, the Socialist mayor of Schenectady, New York.

Months into contentious contract negotiations, the Progressive Workers Union, representing around 400 Sierra Club employees, now alleges that the renowned environmental group “has retaliated against union members for protected concerted activity” by planning to lay off half of the union’s six-person bargaining committee in those negotiations and elected members of PWU’s executive committee. That’s according to the latest Unfair Labor Practice charge the union has filed against the Sierra Club with the National Labor Relations Board... Читать дальше...

If you’re a big fan of money in politics, then the Federal Election Commission made your day last week with two important moves: one that could open the floodgates in the funding of state ballot initiatives, and another that could further obscure the sources of funding in American elections.

Technological history may not repeat, but it occasionally rhymes. Last September, ChatGPT, the popular generative A.I. program made by OpenAI, released a voice mode that allowed users to talk to the software. ChatGPT then “talks” back. A few days later, OpenAI’s head of safety posted on X about a surprisingly moving interaction she had with the program:

This week, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene is deciding whether to call a snap vote to oust Mike Johnson as House speaker. She has a list of demands, and if they aren’t met, she will pull the trigger. If so, Democrats seem prepared to save Johnson. Which raises some questions: Can Democrats leverage anything in exchange for protecting the speaker? Are Greene and MAGA losing power inside the House GOP? We talked to Representative Ted Lieu, the Number 4 in the House Democratic leadership, about... Читать дальше...

A Biden administration report that could cut off military aid to Israel has been indefinitely delayed.

Judge Aileen Cannon, who coincidentally was appointed by Donald Trump, announced Tuesday afternoon that she is indefinitely postponing his classified documents case in Florida.

In court Tuesday during Donald Trump’s hush-money trial, some new and unusual nicknames were entered into the legal record during adult film actress Stormy Daniels’s testimony.