World news

Subterms

    More stories

    • 188 Shares109 Views

      in US Politics

      ‘Excessive loyalty’: how Republican giant George Shultz fell for Nixon, Reagan … and Elizabeth Holmes

      by

      “Without Reagan the cold war would not have ended, but without Shultz, Reagan would not have ended the cold war.” This quotation of Mikhail Gorbachev – from the preface of In the Nation’s Service, a biography of George Shultz – now has a bittersweet taste. Reagan died in 2004, Shultz in 2021 (at 100) and Gorbachev in 2022. The cold war is having a renaissance that threatens the legacies of all three.Vladimir Putin has returned Russia to authoritarianism, suspended its participation in the last US-Russia arms control pact and, with the invasion of Ukraine, put the risk of catastrophic confrontation between major powers back on the table.This would have been heartbreaking for Shultz, a second world war veteran who as secretary of state was at Reagan’s side during the summits that ended the cold war. He was a statesman and Republican of the old school who endorsed the wars in Vietnam and Iraq. He was also complicated.In the Nation’s Service, which Shultz authorised but did not control, portrays a man who loved not wisely. He was loyal to Richard Nixon during Watergate, loyal to Reagan during Iran-Contra, loyal to his party when it was cannibalised by Donald Trump and loyal to Elizabeth Holmes when Theranos, her blood-testing company, was exposed as a fraud.“It’s a thread through his life, excessive loyalty, and it grew out of his service in the marines in world war two, where obviously if you’re in combat your life depends on the loyalty and support of your comrades in the Marine Corps,” says the book’s author, Philip Taubman, a New York Times reporter and bureau chief in Moscow from 1985 to the end of 1988.“But as he carried that on through his life, it was a very strong impulse and so he stuck with Nixon too long.”Shultz, who studied at Princeton and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and became dean of the University of Chicago, was Nixon’s labour secretary and led an effort to desegregate southern schools systems. He was the first director of the Office of Management and Budget before becoming treasury secretary.He resisted many of Nixon’s requests to use the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to investigate his “enemies” but did give in to the demand to pursue Lawrence O’Brien, a top Democrat. The Watergate scandal engulfed the White House but Shultz did not resign until May 1974, three months before Nixon himself.Speaking at a Stanford University office in Washington, Taubman, 74, says: “I pressed him on this involvement in the Larry O’Brien investigation. I said, ‘I don’t understand how you allowed that to happen and why you didn’t resign at that point.’“His basic defence was he understood Nixon was involved in misconduct and he thought that had he resigned and Nixon had put someone else in the treasury secretary’s job, there would have been less of an obstacle for Nixon to use the IRS in punitive ways. It was a kind of self-congratulatory explanation. He clearly should have resigned before he did.”Reagan brought Shultz into his cabinet in 1982. Shultz hoped to ease cold war tensions but met with opposition from anti-Soviet ideologues.Taubman, who spent a decade writing the book, with exclusive access to papers including a secret diary maintained by an executive assistant, explains: “It was incredibly brutal. It was probably, if not the most ferocious infighting of any postwar American presidency, certainly one of the top two. He just ran into a buzzsaw.“The people around Reagan who set the tone for foreign policy in the first year … were hardliners on the Soviet Union. What they wanted to do was not contain the Soviet Union, which had been the American strategy since the end of the second world war. They wanted to roll back Soviet gains around the world and Soviet influence.”Shultz rarely got to meet Reagan one-on-one. “He was mystified by Reagan and he was puzzled and unsettled by the turmoil in the administration. For a guy who’d lived through the Nixon administration, you’d think he would have been a hardened internal combatant.“He would come back to his office and tell the aide who recorded all this in his diary, ‘I can’t get through to the president. How is it that the secretary of state can’t meet with the president of the United States to talk about US-Soviet relations?’ … It took several years before he and Reagan began to kind of connect.“One of the things that was clear, as I did the research, was just how disengaged Reagan was. There would be decisions taken that he would sign off on and then they would be reversed by people under him. It was incredibly chaotic and he wouldn’t grasp it by the lapels and say, ‘OK, I agree with George, this is what we’re going to do.’ He just let this turmoil fester until the second term.”In February 1983, history was given a helping hand when a blizzard forced Reagan to cancel a Camp David weekend. He and his wife, Nancy, invited Shultz and his wife to dinner. Shultz could see that for all his hot rhetoric about the “evil empire”, Reagan hoped to ease tensions with Russia.“If you’re looking for the key moments in the ending of the cold war,” Taubman says, “you have … the realisation among the two of them that they have in common a fundamental desire to wind down the cold war, the ascension of Gorbachev, his appointment of Eduard Shevardnadze as Soviet foreign minister, and the beginning of real negotiations over a huge range of issues: arms control; issues involving countries like Cuba, Nicaragua, Angola where there was proxy fighting going on; human rights issues, which Reagan felt very strongly about, as did Shultz, which Gorbachev and his predecessors had resisted but Gorbachev eventually began to agree to discuss.”The capitalist Reagan and communist Gorbachev held their first meeting in Switzerland in 1985. Shultz went to Moscow to negotiate the terms of the summit and made sure the leaders kept talking in private. He was pivotal in making another summit happen in Iceland the following year.But again he was deferential to a fault, this time over Reagan’s “Star Wars” program.Taubman says: “Shultz completely understood that the Strategic Defence Initiative (SDI), the space-based missile defence exotic technology, was unworkable but he wasn’t brought into the discussions until the last minute, just a few days before Reagan was going to give his speech about it on national television. He opposed it. He tried to get Reagan to back away.“When that failed, he tried to get Reagan to be less grandiose about the objectives – failed in all of that. Then … he got in line, saluted and supported it right through the summit in Reykjavik in 1986 where, had Reagan been more flexible about Star Wars, they might have achieved far-reaching arms control agreements. But Reagan wouldn’t give ground.”Gorbachev visited Washington in 1987 and signed a landmark deal to scrap intermediate-range nuclear missiles. Reagan went to Moscow in 1988. The tension drained out of the cold war and Shultz was “indispensable”, Taubman argues. “He was literally the diplomat-in-chief of the United States and he and Shevardnadze were the workers in the trenches who took the impulses of Gorbachev and Reagan and turned them into negotiations and then agreements.”But Shultz’s triumph was short-lived. “He was saddened when George HW Bush came into office because Jim Baker, the incoming secretary of state, and Brent Scowcroft, the national security adviser, decided Reagan and Shultz had gone too far too fast with Gorbachev. They put a pause in relations and that really annoyed Shultz and disappointed him.“He probably was somewhat hopeful under [Russian president Boris] Yeltsin, where things began to look more promising again. Then with Putin he was involved in so-called ‘track two’ diplomacy, where he and Henry Kissinger and some other former American officials would go to Moscow or Beijing and have consultations with Russian and Chinese leaders, talking about things that couldn’t be talked about in official diplomatic channels. He began to realise that Putin was taking Russia back into an authoritarian model.”Shultz’s loyalty was tested again when his beloved Republican party surrendered to Trump, who in 2017 became the first US president with no political or military experience. Trump’s “America first” mantra threatened alliances Shultz and others spent decades nurturing. Yet Shultz was reluctant to speak out.Taubman recalls: “I had a very tough interview with him about this because I knew he was no fan of Donald Trump and that he could see the Republican party was taking a dark turn. So I sat down with him and I said, ‘What are you going to say about Donald Trump? The election’s coming up. Do you feel any obligation to speak out publicly?’“He bobbed and weaved and didn’t really want to say anything and then eventually he said, ‘Henry Kissinger and I are talking about what, if anything, to say.’ A number of weeks later, they did say something. But being somewhat cynical, I’m afraid, I think it was calculated to have minimal impact. They issued a statement on the Friday of Labor Day weekend, which is notoriously a time when everyone’s gone home for the long weekend, saying, ‘We two Republican stalwarts do not plan to vote for either candidate.’“So that’s not bad … but they didn’t denounce Trump and they said, ‘We’re ready to serve if asked, not in an official position, but as an informal adviser to whomever gets elected.’ They sort of punted at that point before the election.“Trump comes into office and increasingly Shultz is concerned about the direction he’s going and the party’s going but he didn’t want to speak up publicly.”Taubman remembers a private meeting in San Francisco, where Trump came up.“Shultz pulls out of his pocket the text of a speech about immigration that Reagan had given, which was a fabulous, wholehearted endorsement of the role of immigrants in American history and how they had continually revitalised the country. He read that text to that group, I think, for as blunt a rebuff of Trump as he could muster at that time.“Then he spoke out later, critically of Trump’s foreign policy. But when all this crazy stuff went down in Ukraine and Rudy Giuliani, of all people, was over there trying to undermine the US ambassador, an outrageous intervention in American foreign policy, he said nothing about it at the time.“He was not unwilling to part company with the party and certainly with Trump but he never chose to take a public stand. I don’t know to this day whether he just didn’t want to anger the president. Probably to his dying day Shultz maintained a respect for the office. Maybe he was just too old to want to engage in a battle with the party and Trump. But there’s no question he and I had private conversations and thought the party had taken a dark turn.”Shultz took a position at Stanford but there was a sour postscript to his career. In his 90s, he threw his weight behind Holmes and her company, Theranos, which promised to revolutionise blood testing. He helped form a board, raised money and encouraged his grandson, Tyler Shultz, to work at the company.When Tyler took concerns about Holmes to the media, she set her lawyers on him and put him under surveillance. Shultz refused to cut ties with Holmes, causing a deep rift in the family. In 2018, Holmes was indicted on charges involving defrauding investors and deceiving patients and doctors. Last year, she was sentenced to more than 11 years in prison.Taubman says: “I think, frankly, he fell in love with Elizabeth Holmes. It was not a physical relationship but I believe he was infatuated with her and she understood that and played on it in a calculating way.“She got him to do all kinds of things to help her put together her board of directors: Henry Kissinger, Bill Perry, all kinds of senior national security officials, none of whom knew the first thing about biomedical issues. Then he played a major role in selling her to the media, and suddenly she’s on the cover of Fortune and Forbes. She’s the darling of Silicon Valley.“I learned … that he wanted to talk to her every day on the telephone and she would show up at his parties. He invited her to the family Christmas dinners. It was a shocking situation, especially in retrospect.”Taubman confronted Shultz. “He continued to defend her to my amazement and, frankly, my disappointment. I came at him pretty hard and he would not let go. He wouldn’t disown her. By this point, it was clear what was going on at Theranos. This was the ultimate expression of excessive loyalty.”Shultz’s family is still bitter.“Tyler continues to be hurt by his grandfather’s conduct. Puzzled by it. He attributed it in his own podcast to either colossal misjudgment or, ‘My grandfather was in love with her or he had a huge financial benefit invested in her.’ All of which was true.“It turns out she gave George Shultz a lot of Theranos stock and, at its peak valuation, that was worth $50m, so there may have been a financial motive too. At the sentencing, George’s son Alex [Tyler’s father] testified and talked about how she had desecrated – which is a wonderful word, a very apt word – the Shultz family.”Taubman reflects: “As I was working on the biography in those last years, when I would talk to people about Shultz, there were no longer questions like, ‘Tell me about his service as secretary of state, tell me what he did to end the cold war.’ It was all, ‘What’s he doing with Elizabeth Holmes?’ It stunted his last decade.“It shouldn’t overshadow what else he did. It was a sad coda at the end of his life. When you look back, he was a major figure in the latter half of the 20th century and pivotal figure in ending the cold war. And for that he deserves enormous credit.”
      In the Nation’s Service: the Life and Times of George P Shultz is published in the US by Stanford University Press More

    • 138 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      Florida’s rightwing governor Ron DeSantis backs Kemi Badenoch’s ‘war on woke’

      by

      Florida’s rightwing governor, Ron DeSantis, has backed UK business secretary Kemi Badenoch in taking on what he calls “the woke”.DeSantis, who is expected to challenge Donald Trump for the Republican nomination for the 2024 presidential election, met Badenoch and foreign secretary James Cleverly on a visit to London this week.In an interview with the Sunday Telegraph, DeSantis said Badenoch had offered her support for his “war on woke”, which has included a bitter legal battle with Disney after the company questioned a Florida law aimed at limiting discussion of homosexuality and gender in schools.DeSantis said: “She complimented what we are doing in Florida. She committed that it is what they are trying to do in Britain.“She pointed out, and I think it’s true, that some of the woke has been exported from the United States.“I commend her and her efforts to make sure that this is not corrupting British society.”His staff tweeted a picture of him and Badenoch, describing them as “two great conservative fighters on a mission”.Some of DeSantis’s views would be considered far outside mainstream UK politics – he recently signed a law to ban abortion in Florida after six weeks of pregnancy, for example.So-called parental rights legislation passed under his governorship has also led to the removal of hundreds of books from school libraries in the state.DeSantis insists only books that are “pornographic, violent or inappropriate” have been banned, but some school districts have responded to the new laws by removing books including The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood and Judy Blume’s Forever from circulation.DeSantis won a landslide re-election to the governorship last year and describes his state as “where woke goes to die”.He has not yet formally announced his candidacy for next year’s presidential race but is widely expected to stand.He told the Sunday Telegraph: “At the end of the day you cannot have a successful society if it is being operated by woke ideology. It is fundamentally at odds with reality and facts and truths, and ultimately a society needs to be grounded in truth.”The Florida governor has taken his battle against what he sees as leftwing ideology well beyond the traditional political sphere – accusing companies with environmental, social and corporate governance policies of trying to use economic power to “impose a political agenda”, for example.“We always just assumed that all these other institutions in society were healthy, whether that’s corporate America, academia or all these other things,” he said.“Now there is just more of a realisation that you can win an election, and we won an election big in Florida, and yet the left can still impose its agenda through these other arteries of society, and that’s a problem.”Some of his interventions have echoes in the UK, where the Conservative government has waded into rows over issues including historic statues, free speech at universities and the National Trust.DeSantis said he agreed with Badenoch’s theory that what he sees as woke ideology had been partly imported to the UK from the US.“It’s like you are sitting here in the UK trying to just do right and then all of a sudden you have this dump,” he said, accusing US “elites” of “pushing that outside of our borders”.He underlined the close relationship between the US and the UK, and gave his backing for Brexit, saying: “I personally thought it was a good idea. If I lived here, I would have supported it.”DeSantis’s trip to the UK formed part of an overseas tour, which also included Japan and South Korea and was apparently aimed at burnishing his foreign policy credentials.Badenoch ran in last summer’s Tory leadership contest, and is widely seen as a potential future candidate.Her campaign heavily featured culture war issues, including the claim that civil servants had tried to block a policy of providing single sex toilets in public buildings.She holds the equalities brief alongside her post as secretary of state for business and trade.Rishi Sunak has leaned into culture war issues since becoming prime minister, most recently taunting Labour leader Keir Starmer at prime minister’s questions by saying: “I am certain what a woman is, is he?” More

    • 88 Shares129 Views

      in World Politics

      Americans are the US Government’s Greatest Enemy

      by

      The Fair Observer website uses digital cookies so it can collect statistics on how many visitors come to the site, what content is viewed and for how long, and the general location of the computer network of the visitor. These statistics are collected and processed using the Google Analytics service. Fair Observer uses these aggregate statistics from website visits to help improve the content of the website and to provide regular reports to our current and future donors and funding organizations. The type of digital cookie information collected during your visit and any derived data cannot be used or combined with other information to personally identify you. Fair Observer does not use personal data collected from its website for advertising purposes or to market to you.As a convenience to you, Fair Observer provides buttons that link to popular social media sites, called social sharing buttons, to help you share Fair Observer content and your comments and opinions about it on these social media sites. These social sharing buttons are provided by and are part of these social media sites. They may collect and use personal data as described in their respective policies. Fair Observer does not receive personal data from your use of these social sharing buttons. It is not necessary that you use these buttons to read Fair Observer content or to share on social media. More

    • 163 Shares129 Views

      in US Politics

      Traffic review: Ben Smith on Bannon, BuzzFeed and where it all went wrong

      by

      Ben Smith is a willing passenger on the rollercoaster also known as the internet. He reported for Politico, was founding editor-in-chief at BuzzFeed News and did a stint as a columnist for the New York Times. Then he co-founded Semafor. Graced with a keen eye and sharp wit, he has seen and heard plenty.People and businesses crash, burn and sometimes rise again. BuzzFeed News is no more. The New York Times trades 75% higher than five years ago. Tucker Carlson is off the air. Roger Ailes is dead. Twitter ain’t what it used to be.Smith’s first book, Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral, captures the drama with light prose and a breezy tone. He observes that internet news morphed from being a vehicle for the left into the tool of the right. It’s a lesson worth remembering.Technology is agnostic. The market yearns to build the better mousetrap. Secret sauce seldom stays secret for long. Barack Obama demonstrated a then-unparalleled mastery of electoral micro-targeting; in turn, the first Trump campaign harnessed Facebook and social media in a manner few envisioned.Traffic is the narrative of an industry and its personas. Smith spills ink on the overlapping relationships between the late Andrew Breitbart, founder of the eponymous rightwing website, Arianna Huffington and Matt Drudge. He stresses that ideology tethered to accessible if potentially inflammatory content gains eyeballs and clicks. Kittens are cute. Listicles are good for laughs. On the other hand, dick pics get stale quickly unless there’s a story behind them. Brett Favre is the exception that proves the rule.Smith recounts discussions with Steve Bannon, the dark lord of Trumpworld. He describes a Trump Tower meeting, amid the 2016 campaign. Bannon, then Trump’s campaign chairman, “exuded confidence, but it didn’t feel like a winning campaign”, Smith observes. “He didn’t seem to have much to do.”But there was more to the confab than atmospherics. There was insight.“Breitbart hadn’t just chosen Trump, Bannon told me, based on the candidate’s political views.” Rather, “Bannon and his crew had seen the energy Trump carried, the engagement he’d driven, and attached themselves to it.”Charisma counts. Said differently, Hillary Clinton was only a candidate. Unlike Trump, she did not spearhead a movement, evoke broad loyalty or elicit passion. Bernie Sanders, the Brooklyn-born socialist, stood in marked contrast. And he didn’t give speeches at Goldman Sachs or summer on Martha’s Vineyard.Sanders connected with the white working class and Latinos. A creature of the beer track, he came within two-tenths of a point of beating Clinton in Iowa then clobbered her in New Hampshire. The Democratic primary extended into July. The performance of the senator from Vermont presaged Clinton’s election day woes.“BuzzFeed, in Bannon’s view, had failed to recognize that Bernie Sanders could generate the same energy, the same engagement,” Smith writes. “Why hadn’t we gone all in for Bernie, he asked me.”Smith’s answer satisfied no one, not even himself: “I told Bannon that we came from different traditions.”Greed, sex and ambition also marble Smith’s tale. Sam Bankman-Fried, founder of the FTX crypto exchange and a $10m investor in Semafor, faces a dozen federal criminal counts. The company plans to repurchase his shares. Tainted money is a flashpoint for aggrieved creditors.The pursuit of coolness, cash and desirability seldom respects boundaries. Like moths, journalists gravitate to flames only to be burned. In one chapter, Smith recalls the plight of BuzzFeed’s Benny Johnson.Johnson came from the Blaze, the hard-right brainchild of Glenn Beck, purveyor, Smith says, of “deranged conspiracies about Barack Obama before [Fox] pushed him out in 2011”. As for Johnson, he generated clickable copy. “He had a gift for traffic,” Smith writes. Johnson also had a plagiarism problem. In hindsight, he flashed warning signs. Apparently, Smith elected to ignore them.“I wasn’t really worried about whether Benny would fit in,” he admits. “I should have been.”Johnson was not another David Brooks or George Will. He was not “a bridge between BuzzFeed’s reflexive progressivism and the other half of the country”. Rather, Johnson crystallized something new, “a conservative movement more concerned about aesthetics than policy, motivated by nostalgia and culture more than by the overt subject matter of politics”.These days, owning the libs takes precedence over policy debate. Exhibit A: Marjorie Taylor Greene. Mien matters more than ever.Smith writes: “I sometimes wonder now if Benny was headed toward the kind of rightwing populism that Donald Trump came to embody.”Perhaps. Then again, “bullshit” and looks have always populated politics and the ranks of politicians. Smith’s words, again. After BuzzFeed, Johnson bounced to the National Review then on to the Daily Caller. He is now at Newsmax and Turning Point USA, the $39m non-profit led by Charlie Kirk.Elsewhere, Smith recalls an offer made by Disney in 2013, to purchase BuzzFeed for $450m with the “potential of earning $200m more”. Smith’s colleagues rejected the deal. The Disney chief, Bob Iger, exploded: “Fuck him, he loses, the company will never be worth what it would have been worth with us.”He was prescient.“By 2022, the internet had splintered,” Smith notes.America now faces a rerun of the last presidential election, Biden v Trump again.In his conclusion, Smith writes: “Those of us who work in media, politics and technology are largely concerned now with figuring out how to hold these failing institutions together or to build new ones that are resistant to the forces we helped unleash.”Rome wasn’t built in a day. Nor was the web. Sometimes, creative destruction is just destruction, slapped with a gauzy label.
      Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral is published in the US by Penguin Random House More

    • 138 Shares109 Views

      in US Politics

      Leaked abortion draft made us ‘targets of assassination’, Samuel Alito says

      by

      Samuel Alito said the decision he wrote removing the federal right to abortion made him and other US supreme court justices “targets of assassination” but denied claims he was responsible for its leak in draft form.“Those of us who were thought to be in the majority, thought to have approved my draft opinion, were really targets of assassination,” Alito told the Wall Street Journal in an interview published on Friday.“It was rational for people to believe they might be able to stop the decision in Dobbs by killing one of us.”Alito wrote the ruling in Dobbs v Jackson, the Mississippi case that overturned Roe v Wade, which established the right to abortion in 1973.Alito’s draft ruling was leaked to Politico on 2 May last year, to uproar and protest nationwide. The final ruling was issued on 24 June.On 8 June, an armed man was arrested outside the home of Brett Kavanaugh, with Alito one of six conservatives on the nine-justice court. Charged with attempted murder of a United States judge, the man pleaded not guilty.The conservative chief justice, John Roberts, voted against overturning Roe, but the three rightwingers installed by Republicans under Donald Trump ensured it fell regardless.Progressives charged that a conservative, perhaps the hardline Alito, might have orchestrated the leak in an attempt to lock in a majority for such a momentous decision.Alito said: “That’s infuriating to me. Look, this made us targets of assassination. Would I do that to myself? Would the five of us have done that to ourselves? It’s quite implausible.”The leak was investigated by the supreme court marshal, without establishing a perpetrator.Saying the marshal “did a good job with the resources that were available”, Alito said he had “a pretty good idea who is responsible, but that’s different from the level of proof that is needed to name somebody”.Alito said the leak “was a part of an effort to prevent the Dobbs draft … from becoming the decision of the court. And that’s how it was used for those six weeks by people on the outside, as part of the campaign to try to intimidate the court.”He also said the leak “created an atmosphere of suspicion and distrust”. The justices “worked through it”, he said, “and last year we got our work done … but it was damaging”.Last November, after a bombshell New York Times report, Alito denied leaking information about a decision in a 2014 case about contraception and religious rights.His Wall Street Journal interview seemed bound to further anger Democrats and progressives. Justices regularly claim not to be politically motivated, but even with a Democrat in the White House the court has made other momentous conservative rulings, notably including a loosening of gun-control laws.Joe Biden’s administration has shied from calls for reform, including the idea justices should be added to establish balance or give liberals a majority, reflecting Democratic control of the White House and Senate.Alito told the Journal he did not “feel physically unsafe, because we now have a lot of protection”. He also said he was “driven around in basically a tank, and I’m not really supposed to go anyplace by myself without the tank and my members of the police force”.Complaining that criticism also stoked by corruption allegations against two more conservatives, Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch, were “new during my lifetime”, Alito said: “We are being hammered daily, and I think quite unfairly in a lot of instances.“And nobody, practically nobody, is defending us. The idea has always been that judges are not supposed to respond to criticisms, but if the courts are being unfairly attacked, the organised bar will come to their defense.”Alito said legal authorities had, “if anything … participated to some degree in these attacks”.He declined to comment on reporting by ProPublica about Thomas’s friendship with Harlan Crow, a Republican mega-donor who has bestowed gifts and purchases which Thomas largely did not disclose.But Alito did complain about how Kavanaugh was treated when allegations of sexual assault surfaced during his confirmation process.“After Justice Kavanaugh was accused of being a rapist … he made an impassioned speech, made an impassioned scene, and he was criticised because it was supposedly not judicious, not the proper behavior for a judge to speak in those terms.“I don’t know – if somebody calls you a rapist?”Accusations against Kavanaugh included attempted rape while a high school student. On Friday, the Guardian reported that new information showed serious omissions in a Senate investigation of the allegations, mounted when Republicans controlled the chamber.Polling shows that public trust in the supreme court has reached historic lows.“We’re being bombarded,” Alito complained, “and then those who are attacking us say: ‘Look how unpopular they are. Look how low their approval rating has sunk.’“Well, yeah, what do you expect when … day in and day out, ‘They’re illegitimate. They’re engaging in all sorts of unethical conduct. They’re doing this, they’re doing that’?”Such attacks, he said, “undermine confidence in the government [as] it’s one thing to say the court is wrong; it’s another thing to say it’s an illegitimate institution”.With some court-watchers, the interview landed heavily.Robert Maguire, research director for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, an independent watchdog, said: “There is no depth to the pity [justices] – and Alito in particular – feel for themselves when they face public criticism.” More

    • 138 Shares199 Views

      in Elections

      Mike Pence interviewed by grand jury investigating Capitol attack – live

      by

      From 2h agoHere’s more from the Guardian’s Hugo Lowell about Mike Pence’s interview with federal investigators, and why his testimony may be so important to any case against Donald Trump:Mike Pence testified before a federal grand jury on Thursday in Washington about Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results, according to a source familiar with the matter, a day after an appeals court rejected a last-ditch motion to block his appearance.The former vice-president’s testimony lasted for around seven hours and took place behind closed doors, meaning the details of what he told the prosecutors hearing evidence in the case remains uncertain.His appearance is a moment of constitutional consequence and potential legal peril for the former president. Pence is considered a major witness in the criminal investigation led by special counsel Jack Smith, since Trump pressured him to unlawfully reject electoral college votes for Joe Biden at the joint session of Congress, and was at the White House meeting with Republican lawmakers who discussed objections to Biden’s win.The Biden administration announced on Thursday a set of new initiatives to discourage immigrants from illegally crossing into the US via the US-Mexico border.The measures include harsher crackdowns on those who do come and new pathways that offer an alternative to the dangerous journey, the Associated Press reports.Such alternatives include setting up migration centers in other countries, increasing the amount of immigrants allowed in, and faster processing of migrants seeking asylum. Those not eligible for asylum who cross over will be penalized, AP further reports.The policies come as May 11 approaches, which will end the public health rule instituted amid the Covid-19 pandemic that allowed for many migrants to be quickly expelled.The Montana governor was lobbied by his non-binary child to reject several bills that would harm transgender people in the state, according to the Guardian’s Sam Levine.
      The son of the Republican governor of Montana, Greg Gianforte, met their father in his office to lobby him to reject several bills that would harm transgender people in the state, the Montana Free Press reported.
      David Gianforte told the paper they identify as non-binary and use he/they pronouns – the first time they disclosed their gender identity publicly. They told the outlet they felt an obligation to use their relationship with their father to stand up for LGBTQ+ people in the state.
      “There are a lot of important issues passing through the legislature right now,” they said in a statement. “For my own sake I’ve chosen to focus primarily on transgender rights, as that would significantly directly affect a number of my friends … I would like to make the argument that these bills are immoral, unjust, and frankly a violation of human rights.”
      Read the full article here.A Tennesee lawmaker who was previously outsted for calling for gun control after a Nashville mass shooting has spoken about Zephyr being silenced.In an interview with Democracy Now, Tennessee representative Justin Jones spoke with Zephyr about the need for continued solidarity.“An attack on one of us is an attack on all of us,” said Zephyr, after Jones said that several communities stood with Zephyr amid attempts to silence her.Earlier this week, Republicans in Montana barred the state’s sole transgender lawmaker, Democrat Zooey Zephyr, from the floor of the state House of Representatives.Their justification? That Zephyr’s interaction with protesters who were demonstrating against her earlier silencing by the House’s Republican majority amounted to “encouraging an insurrection.” The Associated Press reports that such claims have become increasingly common in recent months in state legislatures where Republicans rule. Case in point, the rhetoric used by GOP lawmakers to briefly expel two Democrats from the Tennessee state House of Representatives earlier this month.Here’s more from the AP:
      Silenced by her Republican colleagues, Montana state Rep. Zooey Zephyr looked up from the House floor to supporters in the gallery shouting “Let her speak!” and thrust her microphone into the air — amplifying the sentiment the Democratic transgender lawmaker was forbidden from expressing.
      While seven people were arrested for trespassing, the boisterous demonstration was free of violence or damage. Yet later that day, a group of Republican lawmakers described it in darker tones, saying Zephyr’s actions were responsible for “encouraging an insurrection.”
      It’s the third time in the last five weeks — and one of at least four times this year — that Republicans have attempted to compare disruptive but nonviolent protests at state capitols to insurrections.
      The tactic follows a pattern set over the past two years when the term has been misused to describe public demonstrations and even the 2020 election that put Democrat Joe Biden in the White House. It’s a move experts say dismisses legitimate speech and downplays the deadly Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the U.S. Capitol by supporters of former President Donald Trump. Shortly after, the U.S. House voted to impeach him for “incitement of insurrection.”
      Ever since, many Republicans have attempted to turn the phrase on Democrats.
      “They want to ring alarm bells and they want to compare this to Jan. 6,” said Andy Nelson, the Democratic Party chair in Missoula County, which includes Zephyr’s district. “There’s absolutely no way you can compare what happened on Monday with the Jan. 6 insurrection. Violence occurred that day. No violence occurred in the gallery of the Montana House.”
      This week’s events in the Montana Legislature drew comparisons to a similar demonstration in Tennessee. Republican legislative leaders there used “insurrection” to describe a protest on the House floor by three Democratic lawmakers who were calling for gun control legislation in the aftermath of a Nashville school shooting that killed three students and three staff. Two of them chanted “Power to the people” through a megaphone and were expelled before local commissions reinstated them.
      The Guardian’s Sam Levine reports on the latest steps in Florida authorities’ march to tighten down on voting access, as the state’s Republican governor Ron DeSantis edges closer to announcing a presidential campaign:Florida Republicans are on the verge of passing new restrictions on groups that register voters, a move voting rights groups and experts say will make it harder for non-white Floridians to get on the rolls.The restrictions are part of a sweeping 96-page election bill the legislature is likely to send to Governor Ron DeSantis’s desk soon. The measure increases fines for third-party voter registration groups. It also shortens the amount of time the groups have to turn in any voter registration applications they collect from 14 days to 10. The bill makes it illegal for non-citizens and people convicted of certain felonies to “collect or handle” voter registration applications on behalf of third-party groups. Groups would also have to give each voter they register a receipt and be required to register themselves with the state ahead of each general election cycle. Under current law, they only have to register once and their registration remains effective indefinitely.Stephanie Kirchgaessner reports that a 2018 investigation that played a role in Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the supreme court was less thorough than it appeared. If you read one Guardian story today, make it this one:A 2018 Senate investigation that found there was “no evidence” to substantiate any of the claims of sexual assault against the US supreme court justice Brett Kavanaugh contained serious omissions, according to new information obtained by the Guardian.The 28-page report was released by the Republican senator Chuck Grassley, the then chairman of the Senate judiciary committee. It prominently included an unfounded and unverified claim that one of Kavanaugh’s accusers – a fellow Yale graduate named Deborah Ramirez – was “likely” mistaken when she alleged that Kavanaugh exposed himself to her at a dormitory party because another Yale student was allegedly known for such acts.Here’s more from the Guardian’s Hugo Lowell about Mike Pence’s interview with federal investigators, and why his testimony may be so important to any case against Donald Trump:Mike Pence testified before a federal grand jury on Thursday in Washington about Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results, according to a source familiar with the matter, a day after an appeals court rejected a last-ditch motion to block his appearance.The former vice-president’s testimony lasted for around seven hours and took place behind closed doors, meaning the details of what he told the prosecutors hearing evidence in the case remains uncertain.His appearance is a moment of constitutional consequence and potential legal peril for the former president. Pence is considered a major witness in the criminal investigation led by special counsel Jack Smith, since Trump pressured him to unlawfully reject electoral college votes for Joe Biden at the joint session of Congress, and was at the White House meeting with Republican lawmakers who discussed objections to Biden’s win.Good morning, US politics blog readers. On Thursday, former vice-president Mike Pence appeared before the grand jury empaneled by special counsel Jack Smith to consider charges against Donald Trump over the January 6 insurrection. The possibility that Trump could face a federal indictment over the attack, as well as his involvement in plots to stop Joe Biden from taking office and the classified materials found at Mar-a-Lago, is a major unknown in the presidential race, particularly since polls show Trump as the most popular Republican candidate. There’s no saying when Smith could make his charging recommendation, but Pence’s testimony is a reminder that the investigation remains a real threat to the former president.Here’s what’s going on today:
      House Democratic leadership will hold their weekly press conference at 10.30am eastern time. Expect plenty of railing against the debt limit proposal Republicans passed earlier this week.
      Joe Biden is keeping it low key, presenting the Commander-in-Chief’s trophy to the Air Force Falcons, champions of last year’s Armed Forces Bowl, at 2.30pm, then heading to a Democratic fundraiser in the evening.
      Joe Manchin, the conservative Democrat representing deep-red West Virginia, yesterday afternoon again called on Biden to negotiate with Republican House speaker Kevin McCarthy on an agreement to raise the debt limit. The president has thus far refused to do so. More

    • 125 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      Michigan students sue after school bans ‘Let’s Go Brandon’ sweatshirts

      by

      Two students in Michigan have filed a lawsuit against their school district after they were banned from wearing “Let’s Go Brandon” sweatshirts.The slogan is widely understood as a coded euphemism for a profane curse towards Joe Biden and is popular with conservatives.The lawsuit, filed by the two middle-school students through their mother, accuses Michigan’s Tri County Area school district of “censoring the students’ peaceful, non-disruptive political expression in school”.According to the lawsuit, one of the brothers wore a “Let’s Go Brandon sweatshirt” to Tri County middle school last February. The sixth-grader was stopped in the hallway by the school’s assistant principal who asked that he remove the sweatshirt, saying that it was equivalent to “the F-word”.The boy, fearing further punishment, took off the sweatshirt, the lawsuit said.The boy then wore the sweatshirt again a few weeks later “to express his opposition to President Biden”. to which a teacher responded, “Take the sweatshirt off. I’ve told you before and won’t tell you again.”The lawsuit states that the slogan “conveys the same opposition to President Biden, sanitized to express the sentiment without using profanity or vulgarity”, adding that the sweatshirt “did not disrupt class, cause disturbance among students, or invade the rights of others”.A few months later, the boy’s older brother also wore the sweatshirt to the same school. The eighth-grader was removed from class and was asked to remove his sweatshirt, which he did.“Despite prohibiting ‘Let’s Go Brandon’ apparel, the school district permits students to wear apparel expressing other political and social messages, including but not limited to apparel expressing support for LGBTQ+ rights,” the lawsuit said.The school district has defended its decision to prohibit the slogan. Its attorney Kara T Rozin said: “The commonly known meaning of the slogan ‘Let’s Go Brandon’ is intended to ridicule the president with profanity. At least one of the students … has acknowledged knowing what this slogan means, and a simple Google search confirms the slogan means ‘Fuck Joe Biden’.”She added that although the school district “does not prohibit students from the right to express their political views or from wearing clothing with political slogans”, its student code prohibits “language or clothing containing language that is offensive, vulgar or profane”. More