US Politics

‘Leaders lead during crises’, White House says, as Biden polling plummetsPress secretary promises ‘optimism’ in face of war and inflation despite worrying Post-ABC poll two days before State of the Union

Trump hints at 2024 presidential bid in CPAC speech
Two days ahead of his first State of the Union address, with war raging in Ukraine and inflation rising at home, Joe Biden’s approval rating hit a new low in a major US poll.US inflation is at a 40-year high. Russia’s war will only make it worseRead moreThe survey from the Washington Post and ABC News put Biden’s approval rating at 37%. The fivethirtyeight.com poll average pegs his approval rating at 40.8% overall.Biden’s predecessor, Donald Trump, had historically weak approval ratings throughout his presidency but ended it, according to fivethirtyeight, at 38.6%.Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, told ABC’s This Week Biden would acknowledge challenges but also project optimism when he speaks to Congress and the nation at the Capitol on Tuesday night.“If you look back when President [Barack] Obama gave his first State of the Union, it was during the worst financial crisis in a generation,” Psaki said. “When President [George W] Bush gave his first State of the Union, it was shortly after 9/11.“Leaders lead during crises. That’s exactly what President Biden is doing. He’ll speak to that, but he’s also going to speak about his optimism about what’s ahead and what we all have to look forward to.”The Post-ABC poll found that 55% of respondents disapproved of Biden’s performance, with 44% strongly disapproving. Partisan divides were evident, with 86% of Republicans and 61% of independents disapproving while 77% of Democrats approved of Biden’s performance in 13 months in office.The poll followed others which have sounded warnings for Biden, including a Harvard survey which found a majority of Americans saying Russia would not have invaded Ukraine if Trump was still in the White House.Fox News, meanwhile, found that more Democrats had a negative view of Trump and more Republicans disapproved of Biden than either did of Vladimir Putin.Biden faces strong political headwinds as midterm elections loom. The party in the White House usually suffers in its first midterm contest.According to the Post-ABC poll, 50% of Americans want Republicans – the party whose supporters attacked Congress on 6 January 2021 – to take control on Capitol Hill.Most analysts expect that at least the House will fall to the GOP, though intra-party divisions, particularly over Trump and his political ambitions, could yet damage Republicans in November.Biden has implemented wide-ranging sanctions against Russia and Putin himself, helped marshal world opinion against Russia and sent US troops to allies in Europe.Nonetheless, the Post-ABC poll found that 47% of respondents disapproved of the president’s handling of the Ukraine crisis.Russia invaded as the poll was being conducted this week.The knock-on effects of the Ukraine war on the US economy are widely feared. In the Post-ABC poll, Biden’s approval rating on economic matters stood at the same low level as his overall approval rating, 37%. Three-quarters of respondents rated the US economy negatively.The Post and ABC also said Biden’s approval on handling the coronavirus pandemic continues to slide, with 44% approving and 50% disapproving.The poll also asked about two Republican attack lines: that Biden is not tough enough to stand up to Putin and that at 79 he is not mentally sharp enough to meet the demands of the job.“On the question of whether he is a strong leader,” the Post reported, “59% say no and 36% say yes – closely aligned with his overall approval rating. Among independents, 65% say he is not strong.“On an even more personal question, 54% say they do not think Biden has the mental sharpness it takes to serve as president, while 40% say he does.”TopicsJoe BidenUS politicsInflationUkraineEconomicsEuropenewsReuse this content More

Republicans fear Michelle Obama presidential run, ex-Trump aide saysFormer treasury spokeswoman tells CPAC ex-first lady is popular and ‘immune to criticism’ – though Obama has ruled out politics

Trump hints at 2024 presidential bid in CPAC speech
Michelle Obama would put Republicans “in a very difficult position” if she ran for president in 2024, a former Trump aide said, because the former first lady is both popular and “immune to criticism”.The strange Republican world where the big lie lives on and Trump is fighting to save democracyRead moreMonica Crowley, a former treasury spokeswoman, was speaking on Saturday at CPAC, the conservative conference in Orlando, Florida, at which Donald Trump strongly suggested he will run again in two years’ time.“If [Democrats] were to run Michelle Obama,” Crowley said, during a panel session, “that would put us in a very difficult position because they’d reach for a candidate who is completely plausible, very popular, and immune to criticism.“Also, when you think about her positioning, she [was a Democratic convention] keynote speaker in 2020, she wrote her autobiography [Becoming, a bestseller] and did a 50-city tour, she has massive Netflix and Spotify deals, and she’s got a voting rights group alongside [the Georgia politician and campaigner] Stacey Abrams.”Crowley, a sometime Fox News contributor, is well-connected in Trumpworld. In 2016, Trump sought to appoint her as a deputy national security adviser. She withdrew, amid allegations of plagiarism in a book about the Obama administration and in her PhD dissertation.Crowley called the allegations a “straight-up political hit job” but the book was withdrawn and updated. Columbia University concluded that Crowley’s PhD contained “localised instances of plagiarism” which did not constitute research misconduct. She became treasury spokeswoman in 2019 and, according to the New York Times, was “seen as a positive presence”.Obama is beloved among Democrats and polls highly in surveys of notional fields should Joe Biden go against all indications and decide not to run for a second term, and should Kamala Harris, the vice-president, not then secure the nomination. The former first lady has spoken up on key Democratic policies, including the need to protect voting rights.A candidacy is feared by Republicans all the way up to Trump, who according to the Wall Street Journal reporter Michael Bender was convinced Democrats would parachute Obama in to replace Biden at the 2020 convention.But she has repeatedly said she has no wish to enter politics as a candidate.In 2018, she told a conference in Boston: “The reason why I don’t want to run for president … is that, first of all, you have to want the job.“And you can’t just say, ‘Well, you’re a woman, run.’ We just can’t find the women we like and ask them to do it, because there are millions of women who are inclined and do have the passion for politics.“I’ve never had the passion for politics. I just happened to be married to somebody who has the passion for politics, and he drug me kicking and screaming into the arena.”Obama has also said she would like to retire – or spend more time “chasing summer”.Her husband has said: “Michelle will not run for president. I can guarantee it.”Still, some Republicans still appear to fear Obama could somehow be dragged into a race against Trump.Crowley said: “For all of these people who say, ‘Michelle Obama isn’t political … they’re making too much money now,’ keep a very close eye on her because her trajectory is exactly what Barack Obama did before he ran for president and what Bill and Hillary Clinton both did.01:07“I think if she were to run, that would be a very difficult situation for us.”Calls to expel Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene after speech at white nationalist event Read moreCrowley also said she thought Democrats would need to appeal to Black women, particularly if Harris could not secure a post-Biden nomination.Contrary to Crowley’s claim, Michelle Obama’s “trajectory” does not seem similar to that of her husband or either Clinton. A successful lawyer and popular first lady, she has never run for national office, let alone been a senator (Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton), governor (Bill Clinton) or secretary of state (Hillary Clinton again).She has however given well-received speeches at Democratic conventions – including a heartfelt expression of support for Biden, her husband’s vice-president, and criticism of Trump, in 2020.“Let me be as honest and clear as I possibly can,” she said then. “Donald Trump is the wrong president for our country.“He has had more than enough time to prove that he can do the job, but he is clearly in over his head. He cannot meet this moment. He simply cannot be who we need him to be for us. It is what it is.”TopicsMichelle ObamaUS elections 2024US politicsDemocratsRepublicansDonald TrumpJoe BidennewsReuse this content More

New York might decriminalize sex work. But will it do so safely and responsibly?Geoffrey MakIn an odd twist, leftwing groups support a libertarian, free-market approach, while some sex trafficking survivors support a more cautious, regulated approach The New York state legislature is debating between two bills that decriminalize sex work. The bills agree on the need to decriminalize sex workers but offer very different approaches for doing so. The Stop Violence in the Sex Trades Act seeks to fully legalize the sex trade. The Sex Trade Survivors Justice and Equality Act, which is adapted from the Nordic model, would decriminalize sex workers while keeping in place laws penalizing pimps and clients.In an odd twist, the first bill, which takes a libertarian and free-market approach to sex work, is supported by leftwing groups including the Democratic Socialists of America. Sex trafficking survivor groups, political moderates and prosecutors have mostly supported the more cautious, regulated approach. I believe advocates for both bills want the best for sex workers. But the first approach – a blanket decriminalization of sex work, including of pimps and johns – may make sex workers less safe, not more.No one disputes that sex workers face serious and constant risk of violence, and that the status quo is unsustainable and unjust. Since sex work is illegal in all states except Nevada, sex workers – who are at high risk of violence by clients, pimps and the police – generally have no way to organize for better labor protections, or to report violence without risking incrimination. In other countries, decriminalizing sex workers has made them safer. Studies of Sweden and Northern Ireland found that even partial decriminalization reduced street prostitution, lowering client violence.Decriminalization also aims to break the vicious cycle of police violence, incarceration and deportation. “I have so many issues with the vice squad,” New York state senator Jessica Ramos, who co-sponsored the Stop Violence bill for full decriminalization, told me. She accuses the police of either doing too much or too little.When a Queens vice squad raided a Flushing massage parlor in 2017, a worker fell off a second-floor balcony and died. In 2018, police officers across New York, including members of a vice squad in southern Brooklyn, were arrested for providing protection for a sex trafficking ring. The ring operated across boroughs – including in the district Ramos represents, where mostly Latina sex workers, some of them undocumented immigrants, walk the streets.“People who are most often targeted for police harassment or arrests or for violence – due to or related to sex work – are women, poor people, people of color, immigrants and trans people,” Mark Mishler, the legislative director for New York state senator Julia Salazar, who sponsored the Stop Violence bill, told me.There’s some evidence that arrests of sex workers in New York might already be decreasing on their own. The NYPD cites an overall decline in prostitution-related arrests (including of buyers and pimps as well as workers) in recent years. Arrests went from 1,069 in 2019 down to 193 in 2021. In an emailed statement, an NYPD spokesperson told me, “The NYPD’s enforcement priorities shifted in early 2017, and have continued, leading to fewer arrests over recent years of sex workers for prostitution and a greater share of arrests of those who buy sex and promote sex for sale.”Nevertheless, advocacy for full decriminalization has conjoined itself with vast, increasing leftwing support for police abolition. Leftwing and sex workers’ groups have embraced the abortion rights slogan “My body, my choice,” readapting it to sex workers’ freedom to do whatever they choose with their bodies. Under the slogan “Sex work is work,” the DSA considers full decriminalization as “a central fight for the labor movement and for socialist feminism”.Perhaps. But a misguided legislative intervention can hurt more than help. In 2018, for example, Congress passed Fosta/Sesta, a law that banned online sex ads – inadvertently flushing more sex workers out into the streets, where rushed negotiations put them at even greater risk of client-perpetrated violence.The movement for full decriminalization is anti-discrimination, anti-carceral and anti-police. But what do its arguments have to say about the concrete reality of sex trafficking? The Stop Violence bill might be more ideologically photogenic, but its opponents worry that full decriminalization might provide loopholes – or a carte blanche – for sex trafficking, a prospect that supporters of the Stop Violence bill don’t seem to acknowledge.Alexi Meyers, a former prosecutor and a consultant for the partial decriminalization bill, told me that if the Stop Violence bill repeals a statute criminalizing “promoting prostitution” (which refers to pimps) at the felony level, it would take away “the bread and butter of trafficking cases”.In New York, sex trafficking laws look for material force – like drug use, physical violence, kidnapping by withholding someone’s passport, or the destruction of property – as evidence of sex trafficking. But force is often psychological, with consent manufactured.Cristian Eduardo, a Mexican immigrant and sex trafficking survivor, told me that his traffickers often made him believe that he was choosing the life. This was in 2015, when he lived in an apartment in Queens operated by traffickers who gave him food, housing and vital HIV medication – which they convinced him he couldn’t get elsewhere – in exchange for sex with whichever john they assigned him.“The sex buyers are often very violent and abusive,” Eduardo said about his years in trafficking. “I never knew what was going to happen. The only thing I knew was I was going to be used as an empty vessel.”He says that if had been asked in court if he had consented to his treatment, he probably would have said yes, at the time. “I didn’t know it was exploitation, I thought it was my own fault and my own choice,” he said.Meyers, who worked on trafficking cases at the Brooklyn district attorney’s office, added, “We don’t always have victims who are cooperative with prosecutors – whether they are so highly traumatized by what they’ve been through, or whether they are terrified of their trafficker.” For this reason anti-pimping statutes are all the more important; they are a way to get traffickers off the streets without having to prove in court that their victims were definitively coerced.Yet advocates for full decriminalization often seem blithely uninterested in this dilemma. When I asked Mishler, Julia Salazar’s legislative director, about trafficked workers who might be hesitant to testify against their traffickers for fear of violence or homelessness, he said, “That’s not our problem. The law is the law.”I put the same question to Mariah Grant, the research and advocacy director of the Sex Workers Project, which supports full decriminalization. “You aren’t going to arrest your way out of this problem,” she said. “What we need is money that is being wrongfully diverted towards trafficking cases – that, in fact, are not actually trafficking, but people who are adults consenting to work in the sex trades – to be instead moved towards social services.”But this stance – “not actually trafficking” – feels like willed ignorance, ethically lazy or naive in the extreme. Yes, trafficked sex workers need social services, but they also need laws, not ideals, to protect them. You can’t girlboss your way out of trafficking.According to the New York State Interagency Task Force on Human Trafficking, there were about 1,000 confirmed victims of sex trafficking in New York between 2007 and 2019, a number that Meyers told me is probably an undercount of the actual victims. If the Stop Violence bill passed, that number could go up. One 2013 study of 150 countries showed that, on average, countries where prostitution is legal reported larger human trafficking inflows. For instance, sex trafficking in Germany declined gradually through 2001, then – after sex work was decriminalized in 2002 – began to increase again.There are persuasive advantages to full decriminalization. Sex workers would be able to unionize. Third-party workers, like those operating phone lines or client screeners, could work without fear of being prosecuted as pimps, creating a safer workplace. An increased demand of buyers, once decriminalized, would give sex workers more bargaining power. A 2007 study in New Zealand has shown that after full decriminalization, almost 65% of sex workers found it easier to refuse clients, and 57% reported improved police attitudes towards sex workers.But even as “sex work is work,” the sex trade can’t be treated like any other service industry, because most service industries aren’t inextricably entangled with violence and organized crime. Any law decriminalizing sex workers needs to address the sex trade as a whole, and prioritize the needs of the most disadvantaged. It’s possible to reduce violence against sex workers while also protecting those in trafficking; partial decriminalization would accomplish that.“It’s just so sad that people are like, yes, sex work is empowering, sex work is work,” Eduardo said. “And I’m like, You are not fighting for the vulnerable when you’re not fighting for the ones who are in need. You’re fighting to give more power to those who already have it.”
Geoffrey Mak is a New York-based writer
TopicsUS politicsOpinionNew YorkSex workSex traffickingcommentReuse this content More

Stealth Hunter: Biden’s tangled business dealings are becoming hard to ignoreInfluence-peddling is Washington’s ‘spectator sport’ – but now there’s an interest in taking a closer look at the president’s son To the political right in America, Joe Biden’s son Hunter has been the gift that keeps on giving, with his public struggles with addiction, scandalous private life and tangled business life. To the left, Hunter’s travails are dismissed as a Republican political obsession and a talking point for tabloid journalism and internet gossip.But last week, two witnesses called before a federal grand jury seated in Wilmington, Delaware, which is looking into the tax affairs of the president’s son, made the subject harder to avoid.First there was Lunden Roberts, with whom Biden has a three-year-old unacknowledged child. Then Zoe Kestan, an ex-girlfriend and lingerie and textile designer, spent five hours giving testimony on Biden’s spending, including – reportedly – stays at the Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles, where, in 2018, allegedly, Biden was preoccupied with cooking crack cocaine.Wretched and salacious as that sounds, much of Hunter Biden’s story, detailed at length in his autobiography Beautiful Things, published last year, tends that way. “I’m not a curio or a sideshow to a moment in history,” Biden claimed in his book. “I’ve worked for someone other than my father, [I] rose and fell on my own.”But that’s not how Joe Biden’s political enemies see it.Donald Trump tried to make issue out of Hunter’s business dealings in Ukraine, Russia and China, which included high paid consultancies and gifts, and allegations that, as vice-president, Joe Biden had shaped American foreign policy in Ukraine to benefit his son.For Trump, it backfired, when efforts to uncover information about the Bidens and Ukraine helped to trigger his first impeachment. Then came the surfacing of Hunter Biden’s missing laptop, with its library of decadent pictures and business email chains, mysteriously left at a Wilmington repair shop, which found its way to Republican political operatives including Rudy Giuliani and Steve Bannon, plus the rightwing press and the FBI.On the political flip-side, House intelligence committee chair Adam Schiff said the laptop was a “smear” from Russian intelligence, and 50 former intelligence officials said it was probably Russian disinformation. Now, however, almost no one disputes its authenticity.Hunter Biden confirmed that he was under federal investigation over a tax matter in December 2020, days after his father was elected president. Attorney general Bill Barr said he had “not seen a reason” to appoint a special counsel to oversee investigations, which include an investigation by a federal securities fraud unit in New York and another in Pennsylvania.Biden has not been charged with any crime, and David Weiss, US Attorney for Delaware who oversees the inquiry, is regarded as a straight-shooter unlikely to be swayed by political pressure. He was appointed by Trump on the recommendation of the state’s two Democratic senators and has not been replaced by Joe Biden.Weiss, according to Politico, avoided taking any decisions that would alert the public to the existence of the inquiry before the 2020 presidential election – and a repeat of the FBI’s Hillary Clinton missing emails investigation, which may have influenced the outcome of the 2016 contest.But the larger question – beyond whether Hunter Biden correctly met tax obligations during a period in which, by his own telling, he was being paid $50,000 a month by Ukrainian firm Burisma – are Biden’s financial ties to foreign figures and businesses while his father served as Barack Obama’s No 2.Illegal lobbying is an issue that shadowed Trump throughout his presidency, leading to the conviction of Paul Manafort, Trump’s 2016 campaign manager, on tax fraud charges. Manafort later pleaded guilty to violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act (Fara) by providing false statements, laundering money, witness tampering and failing to register as an agent of the Ukrainian government.Last year, Thomas Barrack, a friend and former adviser to Trump, was arrested on charges that he and others failed to inform the US government that they were working to influence US foreign policy on behalf of the United Arab Emirates.Under US statutes, all persons acting politically or quasi-politically on behalf of foreign entities in the US must properly disclose their activities.In addition to Hunter Biden’s ties to Ukraine through the gas company Burisma, he has sat on the boards of BHR Partners, a private investment fund backed by a number of Chinese state entities; a hedge fund, Paradigm; a consultancy, Seneca Global Advisors; and the fundraising firm Rosemont Seneca.Republicans, including the senior Iowa senator Chuck Grassley, have called on the justice department to evaluate whether Hunter or Joe Biden’s brother James Biden should have registered as foreign agents over their business arrangements with the Chinese government-backed energy company CEFC.In 2018, Business Insider reported that Hunter Biden sought an annual $2m retainer to aid in the recovery of Libyan assets frozen by the Obama administration during Muammar Gaddafi’s rule. The list of accusations goes on.According to Jonathan Turley, a legal scholar at the George Washington University Law School, “influence-peddling is a virtual spectator sport in the nation’s capital – a protected corruption”.Turley said: “It’s how powerful ruling elites make much of their money, and Congress has never seriously tried to crack down on it. The children and spouses of powerful leaders continue to receive windfall payments from companies and foreign interests, but we’ve never quite seen the likes of Hunter Biden’s enterprises. His contracts go beyond anything we’ve seen before.”Joe Biden has long insisted that his son did nothing wrong. “There’s nobody that’s indicated there’s a single solitary thing that he did that was inappropriate, wrong … or anything other than the appearance,” Biden said two years ago.But should the Delaware panel recommend criminal charges, it could ricochet around the second half of his father’s administration.Like Barr, the current US attorney general, Merrick Garland, has declined to appoint a special counsel. But if Republicans gain control of the legislature in November, pressure to appoint a prosecutor will certainly build, as it did from Trump with Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian election meddling or with Ken Starr, appointed to investigate the Clinton’s Whitewater investment dealings.“I don’t have any doubts that if they [Republicans] can, they will,” said James Carville, architect of Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential victory and Democratic party strategist throughout the 90s, with a long memory of politically inspired investigations.“At first you’re outraged, then it becomes the standard routine of everyday life. You become battle-hardened and immune to it. I think they spent 687 hours investigating the Clinton Christmas card list – a major, major investigation. I can’t tell you the amount of coverage and investigations that went into Whitewater, which was nothing. [And] Travelgate. Then you end up with an act of consensual sex and they go, ‘A-ha! We were right the whole time!’”But for presidential children, the stakes are different, and may have only have risen as Washington has become more partisan. “They find themselves in the spotlight whether they want to or not,” said Nancy Reagan biographer Bob Colacello.“Lynda Bird Johnson dating playboy movie star George Hamilton, Ron Reagan dropping out of Yale to become a ballet dancer, his sister Patti Davis marching with Nuclear Freeze protesters, Chelsea Clinton flopping as a TV news reporter, the Bush girls partying at downtown Manhattan clubs … all were tempests in teapots compared to the mess Hunter Biden has got himself into with his questionable business ventures in China and Ukraine.”One issue, says Kathleen Clark, a professor of Law at Washington University in St Louis, is that the financial conflict of interest law does not reach the adult children of elected officials. “There were similar, if not exactly parallel, problems with the adult children of Donald Trump trying to sell condos in India, [trying to] pursue business in other countries,” Clark points out.But efforts to investigate the Trump family are faltering.Last week, the New York district attorney’s investigation into whether the Trump Organization – which includes Trump sons Eric and Donald Jr as senior executives – inflated the value of assets to obtain favorable bank loans, appeared near to collapse when two prosecutors hired for the purpose resigned.But the Delaware grand jury in Hunter Biden’s affairs has greater scope.According to Tessa Capeloto, an attorney specializing in the Foreign Agents Registration Act at Wiley Rein, the impetus to look at influence-peddling violations has increased since a 2016 inspector-general’s report found that Fara was not being enforced as aggressively as needed.“There’s been a concerted effort by DOJ to see that the statute has some teeth and is being effectively administered and enforced. The statute is out there for a reason, which is to ensure that certain political and quasi-political activities undertaken on behalf of foreign interests are reported and made transparent.”TopicsHunter BidenUS politicsfeaturesReuse this content More

Toni Morrison novel The Bluest Eye off banned list in St Louis schoolsNobel laureate’s classic debut was removed from libraries but backlash and lawsuits prompted vote to restore

Books bans and ‘gag orders’: the crackdown no one asked for
A banned book by the Nobel laureate Toni Morrison will be available again to high school students in a district in St Louis, Missouri, after the Wentzville school board reversed its decision to ban The Bluest Eye, in the face of criticism and a class-action lawsuit.‘Adults are banning books, but they’re not asking our opinions’: meet the teens of the Banned Book ClubRead moreThe board made national news last month when it voted 4-3 to removed the book from school libraries, citing themes of racism, incest and child molestation.Morrison’s 1970 debut novel is one of several titles, including Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe and L8R, G8R by Lauren Myracle, to have gained the attention of school boards in conservative US areas.The Wentzville ban was imposed after a challenge by a parent exercising the right to request titles not be available to their children. Backlash was swift, critics saying the board had violated first amendment rights.In a letter of protest, the Intellectual Freedom Committee of the Missouri Library Association said: “We encourage you to reexamine the depth of your commitment to education in the truest sense, and to find your courage in the face of baseless political grandstanding at the expense of educators and students in your district.”The American Civil Liberties Union of Missouri sued the district on behalf of two students. According to the St Louis Post-Dispatch, the board accepted a review committee’s recommendation to retain Morrison’s book, voting 5-2 on Friday to rescind the ban. An ACLU official, Anthony Rothert, welcomed the news but warned that books remain suppressed including All Boys Aren’t Blue by George M Johnson, Fun Home by Alison Bechdel, Heavy by Kiese Laymon and Lawn Boy by Jonathan Evison. Challenges against two other books had been withdrawn, the Post-Dispatch reported.The board also approved the retention of Gabi, a Girl in Pieces by Isabel Quintero, which faced challenges regarding language and depiction of rape.“Wentzville’s policies still make it easy for any community member to force any book from the shelves even when they shamelessly target books by and about communities of color, LGBTQ people and other marginalized groups,” said Rothert. “Access to The Bluest Eye was taken from students for three months just because a community member did not think they should have access to Toni Morrison’s story.”Many library associations argue that parents of minors should be able to control their children’s reading but should not make books unavailable to others.Opponents of Morrison’s book, including conservative lawmakers, urged the school board to maintain its ban. After the decision, board member Sandy Garber maintained that The Bluest Eye “doesn’t offer anything to our children”.According to the American Library Association, which monitors challenges to books, calls for bans are increasing.“It’s a volume of challenges I’ve never seen in my time at the ALA – the last 20 years,” the director of the ALA office of intellectual freedom, Deborah Caldwell-Stone, told the Guardian in November. “We’ve never had a time when we’ve gotten four or five reports a day for days on end, sometimes as many as eight in a day.Reuse this content More

Donald Trump defends calling Putin ‘smart’, hints at 2024 presidential bidEx-president tells CPAC he could have stopped ‘appalling’ Russian invasion of Ukraine before giving strongest indication he will run again Donald Trump, the former US president, has defended his description of Russia’s Vladimir Putin as “smart” while seeking to blunt accusations that he admires the invasion of Ukraine.Trump reiterated his false claim that the 2020 election was stolen by voter fraud as he argued that the invasion of Ukraine would never have happened if he was still in the White House.“The Russian attack on Ukraine is appalling,” he told the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Orlando, Florida, on Saturday night. “It’s an outrage and an atrocity that should never have been allowed to occur.“We are praying for the proud people of Ukraine. God bless them all. As everyone understands, this horrific disaster would never have happened if our election was not rigged and if I was the president.”The strange Republican world where the big lie lives on and Trump is fighting to save democracyRead moreElection officials, numerous judges and Trump’s own attorney general found no evidence that the election was rigged. Having retold “the big lie”, he went on to compare himself favourably with other presidents’ handling of Putin.“Under Bush, Russia invaded Georgia. Under Obama, Russia took Crimea. Under Biden, Russia invaded Ukraine. I stand as the only president of the 21st century on whose watch Russia did not invade another country.”Democrats dismissed the speech and condemned Trump for still cosying up to Putin. Adonna Biel, a spokesperson for the Democratic National Committee, said: “After spending four years selling out Ukraine, the defeated former president took the stage at CPAC to double down on his shameless praise for Putin as innocent Ukrainians shelter from bombs and missiles at the hands of Russia.“This has been the theme of the Republican party all week, making clear that their party is beholden to a defeated former president who lost them the White House, House, and Senate.”An audience of about 5,000 people at CPAC, the biggest annual gathering of grassroots conservatives, roared and whistled their approval. Some chanted: “USA! USA!”Trump, whose “America first” approach rattled Nato allies, claimed that Russia and other countries respected the US when he was president and blamed Joe Biden for displaying weakness on the global stage.“I have no doubt that President Putin made his decision to ruthlessly attack Ukraine only after watching the pathetic withdrawal from Afghanistan, where the military was taken out first, our soldiers were killed and American hostages, plus $85bn worth of the finest equipment anywhere in the world were left behind,” he said.Trump, who notoriously deferred to autocrats, also responded to criticism over his description this week of Putin’s invasion of separatist areas of Ukraine as “genius”, “savvy” and “smart”.He asserted that Putin has suffered no repercussions beyond sanctions, which he has shrugged off for 25 years. “The problem is not that Putin is smart – which of course, he’s smart – but the real problem is that our leaders are dumb. They’ve so far allowed him to get away with this travesty and an assault on humanity.”He added: “So sad. Putin is playing Biden like a drum and it’s not a pretty thing as somebody that loves our country to watch.”Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign had more than 100 contacts with Russia, prompting a special counsel investigation that stopped short of alleging direct collusion. As president, Trump was notoriously reluctant to condemn Putin and, at a summit in Helsinki, took the Russian leader’s word over that of his own intelligence agencies. His administration did impose some sanctions on Moscow, however.Trump recalled on Saturday: “I was with Putin a lot. I spent a lot of time with him. I got along with him … I did a lot of things that were very tough on Russia. No president was ever as tough on Russia as I was.“But with respect to what’s going on now, it would have been so easy for me to stop this travesty from happening. He understood me and he understood that I didn’t play games. This would not have happened. Someday, I’ll tell you exactly what we talked about. And he did have an affinity, there’s no question about it, for Ukraine. I said, never let it happen, better not let it happen.”He added: “I also warned Nato about the danger of Russia and look at the consequences. On foreign policy, the world rightly had a healthy fear that as president I would stand strong for Americans’ priorities.”During an 85-minute speech to a packed ballroom at CPAC, Trump, who contested the 2016 and 2020 elections, also gave his strongest hint yet that he will run for president in 2024. “We did it twice, and we’ll do it again,” he said. “We’re going to be doing it again a third time.”Kremlin papers appear to show Putin’s plot to put Trump in White HouseRead moreThere were loud cheers from the crowd, many of whom wore “Make America great again” caps and “Trump 2024” regalia. There were shouts of “Four more years!” and “We want Trump!”The former president went on to rail against “leftwing tyranny” and “crackdowns, censorship and cancel culture”, praise protesting Canadian truckers and brand Biden’s supreme court nominee, Ketanji Brown Jackson, “a radical left zealot”. He claimed that the court’s existing justices, including conservative Brett Kavanaugh, are “terrified of the radical left” and “afraid to do the right thing”.Trump pushed the baseless conspiracy theory that his 2016 election rival, “Crooked” Hillary Clinton, spied on him, prompting chants of “Lock her up!” And he accused Democrats of caring more about Ukraine’s borders than America’s own.He declared: “You could take the five worst presidents in American history and put them together and they would not do the damage that Joe Biden’s administration has done in just a very short period.”TopicsDonald TrumpCPACUS politicsUkraineVladimir PutinReuse this content More

Poll: US majority believes no Russian invasion with Trump as presidentCaps-Harris poll shows 62% of respondents believe Putin would not have ordered troops into Ukraine with Trump in White House A clear majority of Americans think Vladimir Putin would not have ordered the Russian invasion of Ukraine had Donald Trump still been in the White House, according to a new poll.Tucker Carlson leads rightwing charge to blame everyone but PutinRead moreThe poll, by the Harvard Center for American Political Studies (Caps)-Harris, found that 62% of those surveyed believed Putin would not have sent troops into Ukraine with Trump in the White House.In partisan terms, the survey found that 85% of Republicans and 38% of Democrats held the view.The poll, conducted on Wednesday and Thursday this week among 2,026 registered voters, found that 59% said Putin only ordered the invasion because he saw weakness in Joe Biden. Forty-one percent said the US president was not a factor in Putin’s decision.Republicans in Congress have attacked Biden for perceived weakness in the face of autocratic leaders abroad. Party figures have been less keen to discuss Trump’s expressions of admiration for Putin during the Ukraine crisis.The Harvard study’s findings broadly buttressed a Fox News poll, carried out before Russia invaded, that found more Republicans had a negative view of Biden than of Putin and more Democrats had a negative view of Trump than of the Russian leader.That study said 92% of Republicans had a negative view of Biden while 81% had a negative view of Putin. Among Democrats, 87% had a negative view of Trump and 85% a negative view of Putin.Tucker Carlson condemned for Ketanji Brown Jackson ‘Rwanda’ commentsRead moreA third poll, released by NPR/PBS/Marist College, will add concern for a Biden administration battling low approval ratings generated by public dissatisfaction on fronts including handling of the pandemic, the Afghanistan withdrawal, a stalled legislative agenda and inflation.The NPR-Marist poll found that 56% of Americans said Biden’s first year in office was a “failure”. Just 39% called it a success.Two-thirds of independents said Biden’s first year was a failure, while 91% of Republicans said so. Among Democrats, 80% called Biden’s first year a success – but 15% said it had been a failure.TopicsUS newsUS politicsVladimir PutinRussianewsReuse this content More

Ketanji Brown Jackson will be a superb addition to the US supreme courtMoira DoneganUnlike most people nominated to the court, Jackson’s career has included advocating for the rights of criminal defendants and the poor She has always wanted this. Ketanji Brown Jackson, President Biden’s nominee to fill the supreme court seat left vacant by the retirement of Stephen Breyer at the end of this term, said that she wanted to become a judge one day in the yearbook from her Miami high school. By then she was already a champion in national oratory competitions, sharpening the skills of rhetoric and cadence that are the stock and trade of ambitious lawyers. Her parents – an attorney and a school principal – saw their daughter’s potential, and helped her to hoist herself from her middle-class origins onto the path followed by ambitious lawyers from more patrician backgrounds. She went to Harvard for undergrad and then to Harvard Law, eventually clerking on the court for Breyer himself – a justice known to be particularly picky with his clerkships.She seems to have pursued the law with single-minded devotion since she was very young, committing herself to the profession with all the passion and devotion of a vocation.Tucker Carlson condemned for Ketanji Brown Jackson ‘Rwanda’ commentsRead moreBut her legal career took her to places most supreme court justices’ careers have not: In addition to her standard bona fides in private practice and later on the federal bench, she served on the United States Sentencing Commission, working to assess federal criminal sentencing practices and advocating for reduced sentences for drug offenders. Later, she served as a federal public defender in Washington. This makes her the first former public defender nominated to the court, and the first since Thurgood Marshall with extensive criminal defense experience. Her nomination signals a respect for a field of legal practice with great moral authority but little respect from the legal establishment: advocating for the rights of criminal defendants and the poor.When Biden nominated Jackson to a seat on the DC circuit court just last summer, the post was widely seen as a stepping-stone to the supreme court itself: Jackson had already been all but anointed as Breyer’s successor. She sailed through that confirmation, even bagging three Republican votes. The ease of her last appointment, even amid the backdrop of her future one, suggested that Senate Republicans had not been able to manufacture controversy from her record, a failure on their part that suggests remarkable discipline on Jackson’s. She seems to have behaved in a manner becoming a federal judge her whole life. It’s as if she was born wearing a black robe.And yet for much of the nation’s history, Judge Jackson’s story would have been impossible. Jackson is the first Black woman to be nominated to the supreme court, fulfilling a Biden campaign promise, and she has made her way in a legal profession – and indeed, in a country – that is accustomed to discarding Black women’s talent. In many ways she represents America’s great, if usually thwarted, promise: that hard work by individuals, combined with a moral arc of national history that bends toward justice, can deliver talented and worthy people to success despite the injustices imposed on them for their race, their sex, or their origins. That there has never been a Black woman on the court before is testament to how rarely this promise is kept: Jackson is not the first Black female legal mind worthy of the court, and if she is confirmed, she will serve alongside more than one white man of lesser intellect and character. But though she is the first, she will not be the last.When Jackson joins the court, all of the Democratic appointees will be women. Two will be women of color. That gender disparity is likely to be especially stark in abortion and LGBT rights cases the coming years, as the conservative legal movement builds off its expected success in Dobbs v Jackson, the case that will overturn Roe v Wade this summer, and sets its sights undoing the privacy right that the court has used to protect sexual freedoms. Over its coming terms, the court – whose extreme right bent will not be changed by Jackson’s addition – is likely to approve further abortion bans and restrictions, cut off contraception access, and roll back marriage equality, trans rights, and the legality of gay sex.Dissenting will be three women who stand for the rights of Americans to live lives free of the notion that biology must be destiny, and unencumbered by sex role stereotypes. These women will stand for these freedoms, and others, while a majority of six conservative justices enshrine male supremacy and forced birth into federal law. Jackson’s opinions will likely be oriented more towards young lawyers and the general public than towards her conservative colleagues, who have shown themselves petulant and unwilling to engage in good faith with the arguments of the liberals. It is not an enviable task that Jackson will face on the court, but we can be grateful that she is willing to take it.Nor will her confirmation be easy. Though Jackson has long been the favorite to replace Breyer, in recent weeks a group of conservative Democrats, led by the influential congressman Jim Clyburn, made a concerted push to encourage Biden to nominate Judge Michelle Childs, a federal district court judge from South Carolina. Childs’ nomination would have been a favor to Clyburn, whose endorsement of Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential primary is widely credited with reviving Biden’s faltering campaign. But Childs had sparked weariness from the left for her past decisions regarding criminal sentencing and her private practice work on labor disputes. Perhaps it was this criticism that endeared her to Senate Republicans, who issues warm words about Childs and dangled a bipartisan confirmation vote in front of Biden. Now that their preferred candidate has been rejected in favor of one more amenable to progressives, conservatives have endeavored to paint Jackson has an extreme leftist.“If media reports are accurate, and Judge Jackson has been chosen as the supreme court nominee to replace Justice Breyer, it means the radical left has won President Biden over yet again,” tweeted Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican on the Senate judiciary committee who voted to confirm Judge Jackson to the DC circuit last summer.Jackson’s actual jurisprudence reflects scrupulousness more than radicality. While on the DC circuit this past year, Judge Jackson presided over a case called Committee on the Judiciary v McGahn, a lawsuit concerning the Trump administration’s attempt to sabotage a congressional investigation. It’s the kind of case that ambitious judges pray to avoid: high-profile and politically charged, with one party that would declare any unfavorable outcome a process violation.Knowing she was under a microscope, Jackson delivered a measured, thorough, and lengthy ruling declaring that former White House counsel Don McGahn could be compelled to testify before Congress. It was the kind of point-by-point argument meant to be ironclad even to the least sympathetic of readers. But the opinion also contained memorable flashes of rhetoric. “Presidents are not kings,” Jackson wrote. “They do not have subjects, bound by loyalty or blood, whose destiny they are entitled to control.” It was the kind of writing that would represent the pinnacle of many judges’ careers. For Jackson, it may be only the beginning.
Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist
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