Opinion

Information on Afghan debacle must be declassified so lessons can be learned

Even as the Biden administration tries to close the book on U.S. misadventures in Afghanistan, it still has yet to open the books on embarrassing information that could expose how badly the 20-year stabilization effort was mismanaged. Classified information was made available to the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction as he prepared his most recent report on waste, fraud and abuse in the war and rebuilding effort. But the American public and some members of Congress still aren’t allowed to see it. President Joe Biden must honor pledges for full transparency and declassify ...

Liberating Iran: Biden learned from failures of Obama-era approach

With dozens of protesters now killed in Iran as unrest sparked by the killing of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini at the hands of the country’s morality police engulfs the country, U.S. leadership finds itself in the familiar yet uncomfortable conundrum of how to respond. So far, the Biden administration is threading the needle ably. Over a decade ago, when President Barack Obama found himself watching mass protests from afar, his tendency towards dispassionate calculation left him taking a tepid stance, likely out of fear that a stronger stance would open the door for the Iranian leadership to paint t...

Ken Paxton makes a run for it: Fleeing a subpoena, the Texas AG epitomizes cowardice of GOP bullies

Bullies are always the biggest cowards underneath their blustery exteriors, we know that. But it is satisfying nevertheless when some of the biggest jerks of the GOP prove the point. So it was Monday, when the Texas Tribune reported that Ken Paxton, the bellicose attorney general of Texas, fled a subpoena like it was a magical mirror that reflects the state of a viewer's soul. All credit to the process server, Ernesto Herrera, for his plain-written but evocative affidavit describing the response he got from Paxton, who talks tough on Twitter but ran when facing a man simply asking if he could hand him a stack of papers.

This article originally appeared at Salon.

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How to prosecute Boss Trump: RICO

Even folks who support Donald Trump might agree that the former president is a con artist, a master gaslighter and a shrewd racketeer. As I argue in my book "Criminology on Trump," the Houdini of white-collar crime and founder and CEO of the Trump Organization has effectively operated a criminal enterprise, beginning in 1980. He did so for the next 36 years before being elected president in November 2016. Throughout his presidency and afterward, Trump continued running, and even expanding, his criminal enterprise.

Trump's lifetime as an outlaw and a racketeer may finally be coming to an end after more than four decades of eluding the criminal law. He is currently encircled by at least six or seven significant civil or criminal investigations.. Most legal scholars or former U.S. prosecutors will likely approach these white-collar, corporate and state crimes evidently committed by Trump and his associates as disparate and unrelated litigating conflicts.

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A seismic change has taken place at the Supreme Court

In the summer of 2022, the U.S. witnessed a dramatic change in how the majority of Supreme Court justices understand the Constitution.

At the end of a single term, the court rejected the long-standing constitutional right to abortion, expanded gun rights and ruled that religion can have a bigger role in public institutions.

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Why did he steal the documents? Maggie Haberman's book may hold the answer

The latest Trump tell-all book is New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman's "Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America," to be published next week. An article adapted from the book appeared in the Atlantic over the weekend, dropping at least one major hint for the answer to one of the great questions hovering over the former president since the FBI executed that search warrant at Mar-a-Lago early in August: Why did Donald Trump take all those classified documents from the White House?

Speculation so far basically boils down to three main possibilities. The first is that Trump is a hoarder who can't throw anything away. He just throws stuff into boxes with the idea that he'll get back to it later and he never does. So they just taped up the boxes and sent them off to Mar-a-Lago without even looking at the contents. This sounds like a reasonable guess. Trump had no idea how to do the job of president. Throwing stuff in boxes "for later" is exactly how someone who's in way over his head might deal with his inability to understand whatever he's looking at in the moment. Adding in random unrelated items — golf balls, newspaper clippings, knickknacks — would be an accurate reflection of his chaotic mind.

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A 'democratic contempt' for the spoils of inherited white power

The House passed Wednesday an upgrade of the old Electoral Count Act in an effort to prevent another criminal president from staging another attempt at a procedural coup. The Senate has its own version with sufficient sponsors among the Republicans. All signs point to reconciliation before the measure goes to the president.

Nine House Republicans were for the bill. All the others were against it. Their rationale appears to be that if Wyoming Congresswoman Liz Cheney is for something, as she was for this legislation, then the Republican conference is against it – out of spite for her high-impact role on the committee investigating Donald Trump’s attempted coup.

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Mitch McConnell's darkest hour: Is the 'Grim Reaper' nearing the final curtain?

By Ira Shapiro

Discovery comes most often not from finding something unknown or long hidden but from seeing afresh what has been on the table all along. — David McCullough

After all this time, is it still possible to underestimate Mitch McConnell's political skill and his destructive impact on our country?

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DeSantis draws from white segregationist playbook for his latest political ploy

Whether out of ignorance or deliberate intent, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis drew from a white supremacist playbook when he tricked 50 immigrants into boarding a plane in Texas so he could stage the stunt of delivering them to wealthy vacationers at Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts. The similarities are too striking to be mere coincidences between DeSantis’ action and one pulled by the Little Rock White Citizens’ Council in 1962. Back then, it was dubbed the Reverse Freedom Rides — an attempt to send Blacks to the North in response to Freedom Riders protesting public-transit segregation in the Sou...

Olympic abuse scandal: A strange twist

This is a tale full of Kafkaesque twists about the efforts of the U.S. Olympic Committee (USOC) and its affiliated national sport governing bodies (NGBs) to make it look as if they're doing something about their sexual abuse problem. It's also a story that gets pretty deep in the weeds and one that bumps up against a basic reality: Although many millions of viewers watch the Summer and Winter Olympics and debate the internal or international drama hyped up by multibillion-dollar broadcast rights holder NBC, very few of them know or care anything about USOC's lords of the rings or their apparatchiks' day-to-day operations, far from the flag-waving captured on TV.

This article first appeared on Salon.

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The Justice Department's big dilemma

As the 2022 midterm campaigns approach Election Day on Nov. 8, 2022, a federal probe into former President Donald Trump’s handling of classified documents is testing an unwritten policy of the U.S. Justice Department.

Some legal analysts have suggested that the so-called 60-day rule requires federal prosecutors to delay public actions during the final stages of an election to avoid influencing the perceptions of a candidate – or tipping the scale for or against a political party.

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MAGA and the 'incels': Latest Jan. 6 arrests show how fascists target insecure young men

Last week, with the help of online detectives who have spent the past year and a half painstakingly tracking the identities of participants in the Jan. 6 insurrection, the FBI arrested five members of the group America First for their role in the Capitol riot. Using video footage the insurrectionists had taken themselves, along with news photos and social media clues contributed by internet sleuths, the FBI submitted an affidavit charging that these five young men helped trash House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's office and assault Capitol police officers.

The affidavit blandly describes America First, an ardently pro-Trump group, as motivated by "a belief that they are defending against the demographic and cultural changes in America." The deeper truth is this group — whose members call themselves "groypers" — is among the most shamelessly fascist of the many far-right gangs that invaded the Capitol that day. Their leader, Nick Fuentes, has declared that "Trump was awesome because he was racist," engaged in Holocaust denialism and heaped praise on various historical dictators, including like Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler. Indeed, he did the latter at a conference attended by Republican Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Paul Gosar of Arizona, signaling how far Fuentes' fascist worldview has crept into the Republican Party.

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As DeSantis tries to rob immigrants of their humanity, he manages to lose his own

It’s fitting that the Statue of Liberty has her back turned to Martha’s Vineyard.

Or maybe it’s just as fitting that the metal where her eyes should be can’t see what Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis did with several planes of refugees – the huddled masses teeming to be free, version 2022.

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