Michael Gerson/WaPo:
The cowardice among Republicans is staggering
With the blessing of Republican leaders, the lickspittle wing of the GOP is now firmly in charge. The existence of reckless partisans such as Nunes is hardly surprising. The nearly uniform cowardice among elected Republicans is staggering. One is left wishing that Obamacare covered spine transplants. The Republican-led Congress is now an adjunct of the White House. The White House is now an adjunct of Trump’s chaotic will...
The way Ryan is headed, history offers two possible verdicts: Either he enabled an autocrat, or he was intimidated by a fool.
Jennifer Rubin/WaPo:
Trump’s lapdogs now accept the labeling of opponents as ‘treasonous’
Some Republicans will ignore the remarks; others will scream at the media for covering them. Others will rationalize it. As of this writing, there has been little pushback from the GOP. Republicans’ refusal to call out the most base language, the language of dictators, confirms their capitulation — political and moral — to Trump. (These are the same people who insist Republicans cannot be tarred with a broad brush in 2018 because they don’t share Trump’s racist, xenophobic and anti-democratic views.)
Lickspittle. Lapdogs. And these are the conservatives (see also below, most of today’s pundits are conservatives). Liberals don’t have good things to say either.
Gabriel Sherman/Vanity Fair:
“HE WANTS A KILLER”: POST-BANNON, POST-NUNES, POST-KELLY FRICTION, A FRUSTRATED TRUMP SEARCHES FOR A WEST WING RESET
He pines for old campaign hands Jason Miller, Corey Lewandowski, and David Bossie—but will Ivanka have the final say?
Trump has recently told advisers he wants a “killer” to steer the White House’s response to Robert Mueller’s investigation and craft a midterm election message for him to stump on this fall. For Trump, there’s a growing urgency to fill the role. His efforts to stymie Mueller’s probe have so far failed, and the specter of impeachment looms if Democrats win back the House in November. Ivanka, who’s been frustrated with Chief of Staff John Kelly, has told her father that he needs people around him that will put his interests above their own. “She wants to clean house,” a Trump friend told me. “Her view is J.F.K. had Bobby there to have his back.”
He’s losing.
Jonathan Rauch and Ben Wittes/Atlantic:
Boycott the Republican Party
If conservatives want to save the GOP from itself, they need to vote mindlessly and mechanically against its nominees.
A few days after the Democratic electoral sweep this past November in Virginia, New Jersey, and elsewhere, The Washington Post asked a random Virginia man to explain his vote. The man, a marketing executive named Toren Beasley, replied that his calculus was simply to refuse to calculate. “It could have been Dr. Seuss or the Berenstain Bears on the ballot and I would have voted for them if they were a Democrat,” he said. “I might do more analyses in other years. But in this case, no. No one else gets any consideration because what’s going on with the Republicans—I’m talking about Trump and his cast of characters—is stupid, stupid, stupid. I can’t say stupid enough times.”
Count us in, Mr. Beasley. We’re with you, though we tend to go with dangerous rather than stupid. And no one could be more surprised that we’re saying this than we are.
Wired:
BOB MUELLER’S INVESTIGATION IS LARGER—AND FURTHER ALONG—THAN YOU THINK
Last summer, I wrote an analysis exploring the “known unknowns” of the Russia investigation—unanswered but knowable questions regarding Mueller’s probe. Today, given a week that saw immense sturm und drang over Devin Nunes’ memo—a document that seems purposefully designed to obfuscate and muddy the waters around Mueller’s investigation—it seems worth asking the opposite question: What are the known knowns of the Mueller investigation, and where might it be heading?
The first thing we know is that we know it is large.
It was the launch, sure, but it was sticking the landing(s).
Jennifer Rubin/WaPo:
Certainly Trump and his true believers may find themselves on defense once again if Democrats successfully push for release of their own memo. Republicans who aren’t among the cultists (like Sean Hannity) and aren’t willing to embarrass themselves and misrepresent the facts should hit the pause button, reflect upon what the memo does and does not do, consider the impression the GOP is leaving (namely, that it is an unserious and irresponsible defender of national security), and decide whether they want to be at the mercy of the likes of Devin Nunes. If intellectually respectable Republicans, former intelligence professionals and former Republican House members are publicly knocking the memo, maybe it is time to give Nunes the boot — before the voters do.
Jonathan Chait/New York:
The central, and most damaging, accusation in the memo published Friday by House Republicans is that the FBI failed to disclose the bias of one of its sources when it applied to wiretap Carter Page. “Neither the initial application in October 2016, nor any of the renewals, disclose or reference the role of the DNC, Clinton campaign, or any party/campaign in funding [British agent Christopher] Steele’s efforts, even though the political origins of the Steele dossier were then known to senior and FBI officials,” charged the memo. That was hardly explosive, or the kind of damning failure that would send people to prison or be worse than Watergate, as Trump defenders charged. But it was something. If true.
It’s not true. As the Ellen Nakashima reported, the application to wiretap Page did disclose that one of the sources of intelligence to generate suspicion that Page might be acting illegally came from a political source. It was mentioned in a footnote on the FISA application. Nunes was asked about this on Fox & Friends. He did not deny the point. Instead he insisted that it wasn’t good enough because the disclosure was merely a footnote. “A footnote saying something may be political is a far cry from letting the American people know that the Democrats and the Hillary campaign paid for dirt that the FBI then used to get a warrant on an American citizen to spy on another campaign,” the distinguished Republican explained.
Notice how “The FBI LIED about the Steele dossier” has been scaled back to, “The FBI did not highlight the truth about the Steele Dossier in the part of the application we bothered to read.” So now the main attack on the FBI is about font size. No doubt all the subsequent memos Nunes is promising to release will have additional bombshells.
Max Boot/WaPo:
Congress should censure Nunes. Just like McCarthy.
The last time a member of Congress made a reckless and baseless attack on a revered pillar of America’s security, it did not end well for him. Sen. Joseph McCarthy got away with smearing the State Department, which has never received the popular esteem it deserves, but when he took on the U.S. Army, accusing it of harboring a subversive dentist (really!), he went too far.
During the 1954 Army-McCarthy hearings, Army counsel Joseph Welch delivered his famous rebuke — “Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency? ” — and that was it. McCarthy was censured by the Senate and stripped of his committee chairmanship.
Emily Badger and Margot Sanger-Katz/NY Times:
Who’s Able-Bodied Anyway?
The 400-year history of how we talk about the deserving versus the undeserving poor.
These so-called able-bodied are defined in many ways by what they are not: not disabled, not elderly, not children, not pregnant, not blind. They are effectively everyone left, and they have become the focus of resurgent conservative proposals to overhaul government aid, such as one announced last month by the Trump administration that would allow states to test work requirements for Medicaid.
Able-bodied is not truly a demographic label, though: There is no standard for physical or mental ability that makes a person able. Rather, the term has long been a political one. Across centuries of use, it has consistently implied another negative: The able-bodied could work, but are not working (or working hard enough). And, as such, they don’t deserve our aid.
“Within that term is this entire history of debates about the poor who can work but refuse to, because they’re lazy,” said Susannah Ottaway, a historian of social welfare at Carleton College in Minnesota. “To a historian, to see this term is to understand its very close association with debates that center around the need to morally reform the poor.”
Guardian:
Fake news sharing in US is a rightwing thing, says study
University of Oxford project finds Trump supporters consume largest volume of ‘junk news’ on Facebook and Twitter
Low-quality, extremist, sensationalist and conspiratorial news published in the US was overwhelmingly consumed and shared by rightwing social network users, according to a new study from the University of Oxford.
The study, from the university’s “computational propaganda project”, looked at the most significant sources of “junk news” shared in the three months leading up to Donald Trump’s first State of the Union address this January, and tried to find out who was sharing them and why.
“On Twitter, a network of Trump supporters consumes the largest volume of junk news, and junk news is the largest proportion of news links they share,” the researchers concluded. On Facebook, the skew was even greater. There, “extreme hard right pages – distinct from Republican pages – share more junk news than all the other audiences put together.”
The research involved monitoring a core group of around 13,500 politically-active US Twitter users, and a separate group of 48,000 public Facebook pages, to find the external websites that they were sharing.
Dara Lind/Vox:
The state of play is driven by a fundamental divide on immigration in Congress — not between supporters and opponents of a particular bill, but between people who feel an urgent need to act on immigration to protect DACA recipients and those who feel no such urgency. And with Democrats losing their appetite for another shutdown over immigration, right now it looks like the inaction caucus has the upper hand.