NY Times (from January):
How to Prevent Gun Deaths? Where Experts and the Public Agree
We conducted a survey on 29 gun control ideas, looking for the intersection of effectiveness and popularity
And found it.
WaPo:
Florida students plead with Congress: It’s about the guns
Students of the Florida school where 17 people died last week said Sunday they will organize nationwide marches for gun control next month and try to create a “badge of shame” for politicians who take money from the National Rifle Association and other gun rights groups.
Thread:
WaPo:
‘They are laughing their asses off in Moscow’: Trump takes on the FBI, Russia probe and 2016 election
You can’t parody what this lunatic tweets.
Blake Hounshell/Politico:
Confessions of a Russiagate Skeptic
Why I have my doubts about whether Trump colluded with Moscow
So what am I still skeptical about?
I keep coming back the slapdash nature of Trump’s 2016 operation, and the chaos and dysfunction that everyone who covered that campaign saw play out each day. Like the Trump White House, the Trump campaign was a viper’s nest of incompetence and intrigue, with aides leaking viciously against one another almost daily. So much damaging information poured out of Trump Tower that it’s hard to believe a conspiracy to collude with Moscow to win the election never went public. If there was such a conspiracy, it must have been a very closely guarded secret.
Referring to the above:
Oh yeah? The Beltway's tendency to give Trump the benefit of the doubt will turn out to be an enormous error in judgment. Arguably, it already has. So use your imagination. For example, how about...
Jonathan Chait/New Yorker:
There’s a Pretty Good Chance President Trump Is Being Blackmailed
Far from being bizarre, imagining Trump paying prostitutes to pee on a bed Obama used as a primitive revenge ritual, and Russians taping the episode, is perfectly consistent with what we know about both parties. That exact scenario may not have happened. Indeed, sex is not the only kind of secret Trump harbors. He endured months of criticism first from Republican candidates, then Democrats, and all along from the media, for refusing to disclose his tax returns. Trump clearly feels protective of his financial information. Some of that information is in the hands of his business partners, many of whom are associated with Russia or are unsavory in some other way. All in all, the odds are disconcertingly high that Russia, or somebody, has blackmail leverage over the president of the United States.
The NY Times has a nice summary of D attitude, and it isn’t “Clinton really won”:
Few Democrats believe that Mr. Trump won solely as a result of Russia’s intervention. But many think the meddling exacerbated Mrs. Clinton’s challenges, making her more vulnerable to what some believe was the decisive blow: the announcement by James B. Comey, the F.B.I. director at the time, just over a week before the election that he was reopening the investigation into her use of a private email server.
“Russia succeeded in weakening her enough so that the Comey letter could knock her off,” said Jennifer Palmieri, who was Mrs. Clinton’s campaign communications director.
Will Bunch/philly.com:
Can a new generation end our gun culture and Trump's presidency? Don't bet against them
“The people in the government who were voted into power are lying to us. And us kids seem to be the only ones who notice …” Emma told a gun-control rally in Fort Lauderdale. “Companies trying to make caricatures of the teenagers nowadays, saying that all we are is self-involved and trend-obsessed and they hush us into submission when our message doesn’t reach the ears of the nation, we are prepared to call BS. Politicians who sit in their gilded House and Senate seats funded by the NRA telling us nothing could have ever been done to prevent this, we call BS. They say that tougher guns laws do not decrease gun violence. We call BS.”
NY Times:
In Wake of Florida Massacre, Gun Control Advocates Look to Connecticut
The Giffords Center, which keeps a state-by-state report card, gave Connecticut an A-minus for its gun laws — the same grade given to New York, which moved even more swiftly after Sandy Hook to pass stricter laws. The center ranked Connecticut 46th and New York 48th for their gun death rates, among the five lowest in the United States.
Max Boot/WaPo:
A vicious vortex of irrationality is sucking in the Republican Party
Have you ever tried arguing with a conspiracy theorist? I did that recently and in the process gained fresh appreciation for the vicious vortex of irrationality that is sucking in the Republican Party.
It occurred while I was traveling the country to talk about my new book on Edward Lansdale, the legendary covert operative who in the 1950s helped to defeat a communist insurgency in the Philippines and then to create the state of South Vietnam. While Lansdale was once known as a pioneer of counterinsurgency, in recent years he has acquired notoriety among conspiracymongers who think that he was responsible for John F. Kennedy’s assassination.
This astonishing claim was first made by the now-deceased L. Fletcher Prouty, an Air Force officer who worked for Lansdale at the Pentagon in the early 1960s. In retirement, Prouty became a prolific conspiracy theorist who was associated with the neo-Nazi Liberty Lobby and Lyndon LaRouche. He said that “the Churchill Gang” murdered FDR and that David Rockefeller stage-managed the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Quinta Juricec/WaPo
Institutions can’t save America from Trump
Trump’s critics look to institutions — the courts, the FBI, the media, the military — to set the country back on stable ground and reestablish that shared world he so thoroughly disrupted.
But these institutions will never be able to deliver on this symbolic promise. Familiar and stable though they might be, they weren’t constructed to set the world right. Like all institutions, they have limited tool kits and missions that stop short of rescuing the nation. …
The unsatisfactory truth is that institutions will not save us. We have to do the work of saving ourselves — while protecting these institutions from Trump and pushing to improve them. The only way out of the Trump presidency’s constant upheaval of morality and knowledge and meaning, its destruction of the world we share as citizens, is nothing more or less than politics.
They can make continued support of Trump untenable, though. And that, in turn, helps us with the vote in November.
Seth Masket/Vox:
Why Mitt Romney isn’t being told to move on
Clinton and Romney are very similar, to a certain point.
Can you guess why?
A note about tweets with pictures:
Judge rules that embedding a photo tweet is still copyright infringement
The case involves a photographer, Justin Goldman, who sued several major publications including Time, Vox, Breitbart, and others, when they embedded someone else's tweet of his copyright-protected photo of NFL star Tom Brady. Judge Katherine B. Forrest is ruling in favor of Goldman, writing:
...when defendants caused the embedded Tweets to appear on their websites, their actions violated plaintiff’s exclusive display right; the fact that the image was hosted on a server owned and operated by an unrelated third party (Twitter) does not shield them from this result.
As far as photojournalists and cartoonists go, I will refrain from embedding pic tweets in my main posts without permission. They produced and own the work. Let’s respect their provenance. Retweet the authors, don’t steal their work.
Karen Tumulty/WaPo:
We’ve just hit a new presidential low
In a remarkable set of tweets over the weekend, the commander in chief sounded off on new revelations about the extent of Russia’s campaign to undermine our electoral system. His response: to lash out at his political adversaries and the institutions that are charged with keeping the country safe.
What was missing — tellingly so — was any indication that he plans to do anything against the perpetrators themselves.
Dereliction of duty.
Very smart student column (University of Michigan) by Hank Minor on asymmetric politics:
When people on the left try to analyze the right wing, they should avoid using a Democratic mindset to interpret Republican behavior. Students who work for (or will eventually work for) campaigns and student activists have to remember that the way they think about politics is often shaped by what the party with which they identify.
I think it’s legitimate to make one’s case using reasons that are less than practical. I support DACA because Dreamers shouldn’t have their lives destabilized. I support a higher minimum wage because people deserve to support themselves if they work full time. I also think that there are times to avoid this, though; the goal is to actually translate your ideas into to legislation and have them signed into law.
When we evaluate our current environment and find it flawed, there has to be a step before action when practical reality is considered. How will this look to the opposition? Is this viable, given the way it will be evaluated? Can we, given the composition of our party, really pursue this strategy? In a political environment where partisan conflict has become one of the most important influencing factors, cross-party conversation has to be tailored to the way each side sees itself and its opposition.