Lawfare:
Misreading the “Liberal Order”: Why We Need New Thinking in American Foreign Policy
In their view, the United States created and led a post-World War II order—made up of international rules and institutions, free trade, and democracy—that generated enormous benefits now threatened by the Trump administration’s actions. A post-Trump foreign policy, they argue, needs to re-embrace the fundamentals of this order.
Pushing back against Trump’s foreign policy is an important goal. But moving forward requires a more serious analysis than claiming that the “liberal international order” was the centerpiece of past U.S. foreign-policy successes, and thus should be again. Both claims are flawed. We need to understand the limits of the liberal international order, where it previously failed to deliver benefits, and why it offers little guidance for many contemporary questions.
First, advocates of the order tend to skim past the policies pursued under the liberal order that have not worked. These mistakes need to be directly confronted to do better in the future.
Danbury News-Times:
Conn. sees youth surge in voter registration
“There are so many activist groups and marches led by young people that, now more than ever, we know what to do,” said Casanova, a 19-year-old volunteer for Democratic Congressional candidate Mary Glassman, who plans to vote for the first time this year. “It’s easy to know what you have to do, because all you have to do is Google it.”
The tripling of newly registered young adults in Connecticut is not expected to have as large an impact on the Aug. 14 primaries as it could have on the November election for governor, Congress, and other races, because 56 percent of the new voters are not affiliated with a major party.
Even so, the number of young voters who have registered as Republicans represents a 241 percent increase over four years ago at 5,274, and the number of newly registered Democrats aged 18-to-25 represents a 159 percent increase compared to the 20 months after the 2012 election, at 12,7444.
Lawrence Journal-world:
Sen. Moran faces fervent anti-Trump backlash during his stop in Baldwin City
U.S. Sen. Jerry Moran of Kansas on Friday faced a backlash of criticism against President Donald Trump and his own reluctance to criticize the president, as a number of Douglas County residents asked why he, as a Republican, wasn’t doing more to hold Trump accountable for his actions or even help remove the president from office.
“The last year and a half, we’ve been going through this circus of crises and self-made messes all over this world,” one man in the audience said. “I’ll ask you, as a Republican representative, have you confronted Trump on any of these crazy things he’s come up with?”
That was greeted by a loud outburst of applause from the estimated 75-100 people who turned out for the event at the Baldwin City Library on Friday.
Another man in the audience seemed equally frustrated, combining his frustration with the president, reports of Russian meddling in the 2016 election and his dismay over Moran’s own trip to Russia over the July 4th holiday.
“As a member of the party that represents graft, corruption, nepotism, possible treasonous action (and) sexual assault, why do you not have a larger voice and any response to the election question?” he asked. “Why do you even believe you had any moral compass speaking to (Russian Foreign Affairs Minister) Sergey Lavrov, because you do not speak against this authoritarian president?”
“We have a constitutional crisis that has been moving through our system,” another man said. “The only way out that will be least disruptive is for Congress itself to ask the president to resign, for the good of the country.”
Nobody in the audience expressed support for Trump or urged Moran to support his policies.
Nate Cohn/NY Times:
Precinct Data Shows Rich, White Neighborhoods Flipping Democratic in 2016. Will It Last?
The precinct-level data, which is far more granular than the county-level data available immediately after the election, complements a growing body of evidence that is forcing a re-evaluation of some of the initial views of the 2016 presidential election. It appears that Mrs. Clinton succeeded at winning over many rich and well-educated Republicans, perhaps by an even wider margin than pre-election polls implied, just as Mr. Trump made big gains in the poorest white communities compared with Mr. Romney. But there were more not-so-affluent white voters without a college degree in the battleground states, and Mr. Trump’s success with them was enough to give him the edge in the Electoral College.
Lots to think about: Clinton’s game plan wasn’t that flawed, and/but the Russian intervention mattered; so did Comey’s intervention.Bottom line: when you lose, everything you did sucked, or so it will be interpreted.
Wisconsin Gazette:
Complaint alleges NRA used shell company to unlawfully coordinate with Johnson’s campaign
A complaint filed with the Federal Election Commission alleges the National Rifle Association violated U.S. law by using a common vendor to illegally coordinate with Ron Johnson’s 2016 campaign and three other Senate campaigns.
The complaint was filed by the Campaign Legal Center, which has been at the forefront of the campaign in Wisconsin for fair maps and fair elections.
Federal campaign finance law prohibits coordination between candidates and outside groups such as the NRA.
Oldie but relevant:
Andrew Sullivan/New York:
Portrait of the President As a Con Man
Con men usually know that a con has a life span, and not a long one. At some point, it will collapse because it is, in fact, bullshit. By then, the best con men have made the sale — think of “Trump University” — and moved on. They also know that keeping the suckers sealed off from other sources of contrary information is essential until the deal is done. You have to maintain a fiction relentlessly, dismiss or delegitimize external information that might get your marks to think differently, and constantly make the sale. You have to humor and flatter and bullshit all the time, until you’ve sealed the deal.
And Trump is really, really good at this. In fact, it’s his chief skill, along with his instinct for the easy mark and another human being’s vulnerable spot. It has worked many times before. It’s at the root of his entire shady business career. His problem now, however, is that this is the biggest of all cons, if you’re playing at a presidential level, and is also the longest. It has to be sustainable for at least four years. And that’s an extremely long time to keep it alive.
This is why, it seems to me, Trump tweets so often and so aggressively. It’s his chief mechanism for keeping his dupes under his spell, for sustaining the narrative of the con while reality tugs at it. He’s making the sale every news cycle of every day because the alternative is the whole thing crashing to the ground. It’s also why he keeps holding rallies. You need that kind of mass crowd hysteria to sustain a con — “America Is Great Again!” — that might otherwise be fraying at the edges. It’s why he lambastes the media. Their role in undercutting the con — in presenting the arguments against it, in raising suspicions about the con man himself — is deeply destabilizing to the project. And it’s why he has to lie, and lie with greater and greater intensity and frequency.
STAT:
Physicians aren’t ‘burning out.’ They’re suffering from moral injury
Most physicians enter medicine following a calling rather than a career path. They go into the field with a desire to help people. Many approach it with almost religious zeal, enduring lost sleep, lost years of young adulthood, huge opportunity costs, family strain, financial instability, disregard for personal health, and a multitude of other challenges. Each hurdle offers a lesson in endurance in the service of one’s goal which, starting in the third year of medical school, is sharply focused on ensuring the best care for one’s patients. Failing to consistently meet patients’ needs has a profound impact on physician wellbeing — this is the crux of consequent moral injury.
Kelly Weill/Daily Beast:
American Racists Look for Allies in Russia
Pro-Trump hate groups are praising Russia and its ‘macho’ leader after the president’s summit with Vladimir Putin in Helsinki.
In the run-up to Trump’s election, other white nationalists took the Putin praise to Russia. White nationalist writer Jared Taylor and former Ku Klux Klan lawyer Sam Dickson attended the white nationalist International Russian Conservative Forum in St. Petersburg in March 2015. Speaking alongside members of Greek neo-Nazi parties and French extremists, Dickson hailed Putin as having “[done] a lot” for Americans, as opposed to Obama whose “policies are directed against whites and Christians.” Dickson ended his speech on a broken Russian salute of “God save the Tsar!”
Former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke and former leader of the white nationalist Traditionalist Worker Party Matthew Heimbach have also promoted Putin, with Heimbach telling Business Insider in 2016 that "I really believe that Russia is the leader of the free world right now.”
And as Trump sides increasingly with Putin over his own intelligence agencies, the racist right has begun openly advertising for Russian allies.
In case you missed it:
Daily Progress:
Bigfoot has become a hot topic in Virginia’s 5th Congressional District race.
Leslie Cockburn, the Democratic nominee, tweeted screenshots from an Instagram account of Denver Riggleman, the Republican nominee, depicting images of Bigfoot naked but censored.
The Instagram post from Riggleman, which depicts Bigfoot with a large black bar over its genitals, reads “Cover art for #matinghabitsofbigfoot almost complete. I hide nothing in this magnificent tome. Don’t erase the censor box…”
In a tweet, Cockburn points to Riggleman as a running mate of Corey Stewart, the Republican nominee for U.S. Senate whom she accuses of being a white supremacist.
“Now he been exposed as a devotee of Bigfoot erotica,” Cockburn wrote about Riggleman. “This is not what we need on Capitol Hill.”
Cockburn also tweeted another image from Riggleman’s Instagram that depicted a similarly censored nude Bigfoot with Riggleman’s face pasted on the body.
Aren’t you glad you’re up to speed?