#norman ornstein

[marxduck]

Watch "Norm Ornstein on The Radical Right Takeover of the House" on YouTube

[panicinthestudio]

Admit it. Republicans have broken politics., October 29, 2018

Neither party is perfect, but Republicans in Congress have been drifting towards political extremism since long before Trump, and they’re making it impossible for Congress to work the way it’s supposed to. 

Over the past few decades, both Democrats and Republicans in Congress have moved away from the center. But the Republican Party has moved towards the extreme much more quickly -- a trend that political scientists’ call “asymmetrical polarization.” 

That asymmetry poses a major obstacle in American politics. As Republicans have become more ideological, they’ve also become less willing to work with Democrats: filibustering Democratic legislation, refusing to consider Democratic appointees, and even shutting down the government in order to force Democrats to give in to their demands. 

Democrats have responded in turn, becoming more obstructionist as Republican demands become more extreme. 

And that’s made it really easy for media outlets to blame “both sides” for political gridlock. As political scientists Thomas Mann and Norm Ornstein explain in their book “It’s Even Worse Than It Looks,” journalists feel a pressure to remain neutral when covering big political fights. So politics coverage has been dominated by the myth that both parties are equally to blame for the gridlock in DC.

But they’re not. And the only way to stop Republicans in Congress from continuing their drift towards the extreme is to be brutally honest about who’s responsible for breaking our politics. 

Read more of Ornstein and Mann’s work here: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/02/opinion/sunday/republicans-broke-congress-politics.html

Vox

Still, if not even more, relevant alongside ongoing false equivalence between the American political poles, with the Republican Party openly not caring that their candidates are unqualified and/or declaring their own victory as the only legitimate result. The intentional erosion of trust in and the electoral institutions themselves is not just self-centred but corrosive to political legitimacy as a whole when denialism of factual results is permitted.

[maaarine]

Bibliography: books posted on this blog in 2024

Sara AHMED (2010): The Promise of Happiness

Cat BOHANNON (2023): Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution

Holly BRIDGES (2014): Reframe Your Thinking Around Autism: How the Polyvagal Theory and Brain Plasticity Help Us Make Sense of Autism

Johann CHAPOUTOT (2024): The Law of Blood: Thinking and Acting as a Nazi

Caroline CRIADO-PEREZ (2019): Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

Gavin DE BECKER (2000): Survival Signals That Protect Us from Violence

Virginie DESPENTES (2006): King Kong Theory

Annie ERNAUX (2000): Happening

Lisa FELDMAN BARRETT (2017): How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain

Shaun GALLAGHER (2012): Phenomenology

David GRAEBER (2015): The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy

Sarah HENDRICKX (2015): Women and Girls with Autism Spectrum Disorder: Understanding Life Experiences from Early Childhood to Old Age

Sarah HILL (2019): This Is Your Brain on Birth Control: The Surprising Science of Women, Hormones, and the Law of Unintended Consequences

Luke JENNINGS (2017): Killing Eve: Codename Villanelle

Bernardo KASTRUP (2021): Decoding Jung’s Metaphysics: The Archetypal Semantics of an Experiential Universe

Roman KOTOV, Thomas JOINER, Norman SCHMIDT (2004): Taxometrics: Toward a new diagnostic scheme for psychopathology

Benjamin LIPSCOMB (2021): The Women are Up to Something: How Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley, and Iris Murdoch Revolutionized Ethics

Dorian LYNSKEY (2024): Everything Must Go: The Stories We Tell About The End of the World

Kate MANNE (2024): Unshrinking: How to Fight Fatphobia

Mario MIKULINCER (1994): Human Learned Helplessness: A Coping Perspective

Jenara NERENBERG (2020): Divergent Mind: Thriving in a World That Wasn’t Designed for

Lucy NEVILLE (2018): Girls Who Like Boys Who Like Boys: Women and Gay Male Pornography and Erotica

Peggy ORNSTEIN (2020): Boys & Sex: Young Men on Hookups, Love, Porn, Consent, and Navigating the New Masculinity

Lucile PEYTAVIN (2021): Le coût de la virilité

Lynn PHILLIPS (2000): Flirting with Danger: Young Women’s Reflections on Sexuality and Domination

Stephen PORGES (2017): The Pocket Guide to the Polyvagal Theory: The Transformative Power of Feeling Safe

Joëlle PROUST (2013): The Philosophy of Metacognition: Mental Agency and Self-Awareness

John SARLO: The Mindbody Prescription: Healing the Body, Healing the Pain

Jessica TAYLOR (2022): Sexy But Psycho: How the Patriarchy Uses Women’s Trauma Against Them

Manos TSAKIRIS and Helena DE PREESTER (2018): The Interoceptive Mind: From Homeostasis to Awareness

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) went on a bizarre tangent after she was called out for lying about her past comments suggesting the Parkland, Florida, school shooting was staged.

During an interview with CBS News’ Lesley Stahl broadcast Sunday on “60 Minutes,” Greene was asked for her stance on the 2018 massacre, which left 17 students and staff dead. Two years before she was elected to Congress, Greene responded to a comment on Facebook calling the shooting a “false flag” operation.

But when asked about it by Stahl, Greene tried to rewrite history.

“I never said Parkland was a false flag,” Greene said. “No, I’ve never said that. School shootings are horrible. I don’t think it’s anything to joke about.”

As she was speaking, “60 Minutes” showed a screengrab of Greene’s now-deleted 2018 Facebook comment.

“We fact-checked,” Stahl replied. “Before I got to this interview.”

Greene offered a word-salad comeback, derailing the discussion.

“Have you fact-checked all my statements from kindergarten through 12th grade and in college? And as I’ve paid my taxes and never broken a law, and the only, I got a few speeding tickets, do we need to talk about those too?” she said. “Because I think where you’re going down is the same attacks that people have attacked me with over and over.”

Stahl didn’t challenge Greene further.

Greene, a Trump-supporting firebrand who was the first open supporter of the QAnon conspiracy theory to be elected to Congress, has on multiple occasions endorsed conspiratorial nonsense about school shootings and was filmed in 2019 harassing a Parkland victim who advocates for gun control.

In another 2018 Facebook comment section unearthed by the Media Matters for America watchdog, Greene responded “this is all true” to a user who said that “none of the School shootings were real or done by the ones who were supposedly arrested for them.”

Greene, during her “60 Minutes” interview, tried to shift blame for her past social media activity, suggesting that “other people also ran my social media” when she liked a 2019 comment suggesting Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) should get a bullet to the head. (Greene was not a member of Congress in 2019.)

Even if that were the case, Greene has publicly alluded to her belief that school shootings are staged. Last year, Greene suggested in a video that the July 4 shooting in Highland Park, Illinois, was orchestrated “to persuade Republicans to go along with more gun control.”

CBS News faced significant backlash over the weekend for interviewing Greene and giving a platform to her dangerous rhetoric. Following the release of the sit-down, Stahl was criticized for allowing Greene to hijack the conversation, failing to adequately call out the lawmaker’s false claims, and normalizing the extremist’s unhinged behavior.

“I have known Lesley Stahl for more than 40 years, worked alongside her for many election weeks. She has been a great journalist, but this is a disgraceful, cringeworthy performance. Shameful to the max,” tweeted Norman Ornstein, an emeritus scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.

“This is even worse than I thought it would be,” wrote The Atlantic staff writer Tom Nichols. “Imagine getting outflanked by MTG, whose answer was ‘what, are you going to go back to everything I’ve said and done since kindergarten’ and Stahl just took it.”

[mariacallous]

On Sunday morning, NBC’s Chuck Todd hosted the Ohio Republican congressman Jim Jordan on Meet the Press, where the querulous conservative ranted about President Biden’s sloppy handing of classified documents.

Todd showed more tenacity than usual in challenging this combative guest (he “incinerated” Jordan, applauded the Daily Kos) but Jordan nevertheless managed to drive home his ill-conceived accusations through sheer volume, repetition and speed.

Jordan’s real victory was being given the chance to do so, at such length, on national TV. Meanwhile, over on Fox News, the Texas Republican senator Ted Cruz was trying his sneering best to connect Hunter Biden to the document dustup, and the rightwing network was helping by showing various file photos of the president’s troubled and troubling son, always with a crazed look in his eye. And social media, of course, overflowed with memes about Corvettes stuffed with boxes, a not-too-subtle shot at classified papers discovered in Biden’s Delaware garage.

Deprived of Trump-style excitement by a mostly competent, sometimes boring president, the news media has greeted the supposed scandal of Biden’s mishandling of classified documents with breathless glee. CNN has devoted hours of coverage to chewing it over. The broadcast networks have, in some cases, led their evening newscasts with it.

Finally,all this coverage seems to say, a chance to get back to the false equivalence that makes us what we truly are! And make no mistake, any effort to equate Biden’s sloppy mishandling with former president Trump’s removal of hundreds of classified documents to his Florida hangout at Mar-a-Lago is simply wrong.

As Todd pointed out, Biden has cooperated with the justice department’s search for documents, while Trump has obfuscated and resisted. And although much of the news coverage has pointed this out, it has nevertheless elevated the supposed Biden scandal by giving it so much time, attention and prominence.

It might even remind you of the media’s appalling obsession with Hillary Clinton’s email practices during the 2016 presidential campaign – an obsession that may have affected the election’s outcome, helping to give us four years of a president with no respect for the democracy he was elected to lead.

Why does this keep on happening?

No one has described the cause better than two thinktank scholars in a 2012 Washington Post opinion piece (and the italics are mine): “We understand the values of mainstream journalists, including the effort to report both sides of a story. But a balanced treatment of an unbalanced phenomenon distorts reality. If the political dynamics of Washington are unlikely to change any time soon, at least we should change the way that reality is portrayed to the public.”

The scholars – one from the conservative American Enterprise Institute, the other from the progressive Brookings Institution – were Norman Ornstein and Thomas Mann, who had written a book, It’s Even Worse Than It Looks, about the rise of Republican party extremism and the resulting threats to American democracy. That movement has only metastasized over the past decade, helped along by Trump’s chaotic term and aftermath.

Typical of the media’s “both sides” tendency is this equalizing line in a 2021 Washington Post story about the congressional investigation of the January 6 attack on the US Capitol: “Both parties have attacked the other as insincere and uninterested in conducting a fair-minded examination.” Well, sure, but only one party was consistently resisting efforts to get at the facts and do something about the horrendous attack on American democracy.

It’s debatable if Biden’s mishandling of documents – and more recently that of former vice-president Mike Pence – warrants much attention at all, much less the full-bore media blitz it’s getting.

“The bigger scandal here,” said Jameel Jaffer, executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, is the over-classification of information; the US government puts its classified stamp on 50m documents a year. In an interview with the Guardian’s David Smith last week, Jaffer called that system of secrecy “totally broken in ways that are bad not just for national security, but for democracy”.

Even so, Jaffer didn’t intend to let Trump off the hook.

As Todd rightly pointed out to his combative guest, Biden and Pence didn’t make a fuss about handing over what they shouldn’t have had. (“They raided Trump’s home. They haven’t raided Biden’s home,” Jordan charged. “Because Biden didn’t defy a subpoena,” Todd aptly shot back.) But such challenges are no match for the vast over-coverage of what isn’t all that much of a story, and which is only getting so much attention because of the media’s defensive desire to appear fair and because of its ratings-driven lust for conflict.

Happily, Americans are capable of putting this trumped-up scandal in context, at least according to a recent CBS poll that shows the president’s approval rating unmoved by the wall-to-wall coverage, and in which the vast majority of respondents believe it’s the norm for former office-holders to have classified documents in their homes.

The public, it seems, can respond to hyperbole with a yawn. If only the news media could be as wise.

[azspot]

There are so many in the mainstream press that are just fearful to a remarkable degree of being branded as having a liberal bias. And what we see is that the reaction to that is to bend over quadruply backwards to show there is no bias.

Norman Ornstein

[sethshead]

“Sure, you can say, we’ve covered those things,” commented Norman Ornstein, emeritus scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a longtime observer of media and politics. But, Ornstein pushed back: “Where? On the front page above the fold? As one-offs before moving on? In a fashion comparable to the Defcon 1 coverage of Biden’s age and acuity?” There really is no comparison in the amount or intensity of coverage. One journalist, Jennifer Schulze, counted New York Times stories related to Biden’s age in the week following the debate; she counted a staggering 192 news and opinion pieces, compared to 92 stories on Trump – and that was in a week when the US supreme court had ruled he has immunity for official acts.

Honesty and balance in reporting requires some sense of proportion and perspective. The media has lost all touch with these things, having taken on a Trump-will-be-Trump air with the Felon-in-Chief while turning the debate into a self-perpetuating firestorm.

I do not ask the media to take sides; nonetheless, by being so much more critical of Democrats than Republicans despite the crimes and alleged crimes of Trump, his intended erosion of our international alliances, and the dangers of his plans for politicizing the bureaucracy and instituting an unrestrained unitary executive branch. This certainly deserves comparable wall-to-wall coverage.

I don't really think the media is biased against Biden personally. But there's the problem of narrative: if someone's talking about it, everyone has to talk about it, even as nothing but a feedback loop of irresponsible speculation. And then there are eyeballs. Anxious liberals are addicted to doomclicking, and news outlets need audiences. So they'll pander to the masochistic neurosis of Democrats even if that escapes the echo chamber and starts to sour undecided voters on Biden. Republicans don't have this sense of doubt or introspection, so there is no point to trying to attract them with alarmism about Trump's deficits.

Thus democracy ends.

[jkanelis]

Wait for trials ... and convictions!

Norman Ornstein is one of those Washington, D.C., gray eminences whom the media turn to for a look at the political landscape and whether it is changing under our feet in real time. Ornstein believes that Donald Trump’s current standing as the “frontrunner” for the 2024 presidential election is going to change “when and if the convictions” start rolling in from the felony criminal trials that…

[xtruss]

How McConnell’s (Addison Mitchell McConnell III) Bid To Reshape The Federal Judiciary Extends Beyond The Supreme Court

— OCTOBER 31, 2023 | By Priyanka Boghani & James O'Donnell | PBS—NOVA

A Still From Frontline's Documentary "McConnell, The GOP and The Court."

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) is widely credited with cementing a conservative majority on the Supreme Court.

But McConnell’s crowning achievement may extend past the Supreme Court. Experts in Frontline’s upcoming documentary McConnell, the GOP & the Court, said that McConnell sees his role in filling the federal judiciary with conservative judges as one of the strongest parts of his legacy.

When President Trump took office and McConnell served as Senate majority leader, Trump had more than 100 vacancies to fill in the lower courts, including 17 in the U.S. courts of appeals — all of them lifetime appointments. The Supreme Court hears around 80 cases a year, while the courts of appeals handle tens of thousands of cases annually — often making them the last word in most cases that impact the lives of Americans.

“[McConnell] has calculated, correctly, that most of the most contentious issues in our society eventually wind up in the courts,” conservative columnist and author Mona Charen told Frontline in a 2023 interview for McConnell, the GOP & the Court. “It is critical, if you want certain outcomes, to be sure that you have the right mix of judges.”

McConnell’s Strategy During Obama’s Presidency

During the first 2020 presidential debate on Sept. 29, President Trump boasted of the “record” number of judges he had appointed, adding that one of the reasons he had the chance to appoint so many was because former President Barack Obama had left so many vacancies.

“When you leave office, you don’t leave any judges,” Trump said. “That’s like, you just don’t do that.”

It wasn’t President Obama’s decision to leave the judicial vacancies, however. Just as McConnell helped cement a conservative majority on the Supreme Court for decades to come, judicial experts and journalists who spoke to Frontline for Supreme Revenge, a 2019 documentary examining the political battle over the highest court, credited McConnell with holding open vacancies that Trump then filled with conservative federal judges at a breakneck pace.

McConnell himself took credit for the strategy in a December 2019 interview with Sean Hannity of Fox News. When Hannity wondered why President Obama left so many vacancies, McConnell said: “I’ll tell you why. I was in charge of what we did the last two years of the Obama administration.”

McConnell “completely changed the nature of congressional warfare against Obama and Democratic judicial nominees,” Norman Ornstein, a political scientist at the conservative think tank American Enterprise Institute, told Frontline in 2019.

McConnell was exposed to the machinations of judicial appointments early in his career, when he worked for Marlow Cook, a U.S. senator from Kentucky who sat on the Senate Judiciary Committee. During his time as a staffer for Cook, McConnell saw two of President Richard Nixon’s Supreme Court nominees rejected.

“It was in those years that McConnell really came to understand the importance, the centrality of judicial nominations in our political system, both the Supreme Court nominations and also … federal lower-court nominations,” Alec MacGillis, a ProPublica reporter and author of “The Cynic: The Political Education of Mitch McConnell,” told Frontline in 2019.

The young McConnell also learned “what it takes to get these nominations through the Senate, to really kind of figure out how to win that game, the game of judicial politics,” MacGillis said.

Those lessons proved useful when McConnell took on leadership positions in the Senate. Senate Republicans were in the minority for much of Obama’s tenure, but under McConnell’s leadership they employed filibusters to slow down or block the confirmation of judicial nominees — a tactic Democrats had used under President George W. Bush. GOP senators also withheld “blue slips,” which were traditionally given to the two senators from the home state of a judicial nominee for their approval or rejection.

In order to overcome those efforts to stall appointments, in November 2013 then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and the Democrats changed the rules, eliminating filibusters for federal judicial and executive branch nominees, with the exception of Supreme Court nominees.

At the time, McConnell told the Democrats, “You’ll regret this, and you may regret this a lot sooner than you think.” When Republicans took control of the Senate in 2015, confirmations of Obama’s judicial nominees slowed to a crawl.

According to the Congressional Research Service, only 28.6 percent of Obama’s judicial nominees were confirmed during the last two years of his presidency, the lowest percentage of confirmations from 1977 to 2022, the years the report covered.

Trump’s Judicial Appointments, With McConnell’s Help

When Trump won the 2016 election, Senate Majority Leader McConnell employed the “nuclear option” when Senate Republicans ended filibusters for Supreme Court nominees — stymieing attempts from Democrats to block Neil Gorsuch’s confirmation.

Thirty of President Trump’s appeals court nominees were confirmed during his first two years of office. According to CRS, that was the greatest number of appeals court nominees confirmed by the Senate in the first two years of any presidency since it started tracking that data.

President Trump maintained his pace through the last two years of his term and appointed 54 appeals court judges during his 4-year tenure — a higher number than any other recent president, with the exception of President Jimmy Carter. (By comparison, President Obama appointed 55 appeals court judges over the course of eight years.)

By the end of his term, Trump confirmed a total of 228 judges across the appeals and district courts. They were mostly young, white and male. They would go on to decide cases about elections, voting rights, immigration, the environment, labor, abortion, gun control and other issues that impact the lives of Americans. They will remain on the courts for their lifetimes.

Biden’s Impact on the Judiciary

When President Joe Biden took office in 2021, Sen. McConnell once again became Senate minority leader, with fewer tools at his disposal to shape the makeup of the nation’s judges.

Amid that new dynamic, President Biden has left his own mark on the judiciary, nominating demographically diverse candidates. In June, Biden confirmed his 100th district court judge, which put him ahead of Trump’s figures at the same point in his tenure, though it’s unclear if that pace can continue through the end of his term.

As Biden’s push for judicial nominees has reached purple and red states, Republican senators have been slow to return “blue slips,” a tactic they used during the Obama administration, to thwart some of those nominations. That means Biden has struggled to confirm judges in southern states, especially those with two Republican senators. The Democrats’ leader in the House and some progressive groups have pushed for the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee chair to do away with the “blue slip” practice.

The new confirmations came at a time when a number of high profile Supreme Court rulings and controversies have affected public perception of the federal judiciary, including scandals that led to calls for the Supreme Court to adopt an ethics code. McConnell has defended the Supreme Court, arguing that it is less polarized than the public believes and describing it as “ideologically unpredictable.”

Still, experts have told Frontline, the effectiveness of the judiciary — whether at a district court level or the high court — does depend in part on the public’s belief in their independence from party politics.

“The courts rule and expect their decisions to be obeyed based upon a sense among the public, fostered by our Constitution, that they are the ultimate arbiters,” Jamie Gorelick, who served as deputy attorney general during the Clinton administration, told Frontline in 2018. “They don’t have a standing army. They have no way to enforce their rules. Their rulings are enforced by the majesty of the courts.”

“If the American public comes to believe that this is just another political body, that you can count a Republican vote or Democratic vote, that this is a process that is easily manipulated by politicians, it hugely diminishes the courts and their ability to perform their function under the Constitution,” she said.

As the documentary McConnell, the GOP & the Court recounts, federal courts hold a unique power to McConnell to shape American policies in a lasting way that Congress, legislation and policy cannot. To McConnell, his role in shaping the judiciary has been a signature accomplishment, according to Dan Balz, who covers national politics, the presidency and Congress at The Washington Post.

“His overriding priority was to remake the federal judiciary,” Balz said. McConnell’s efforts not only shaped the makeup of lower courts, Balz noted, but also built a pipeline of conservative judges who would go on to serve in more powerful positions.

“When there were openings on the appellate courts and ultimately the Supreme Court, you had people who were fully experienced and ready to go and ready to step in and be nominated for the Supreme Court, that being obviously the ultimate goal,” he said.

— This story was originally published May 21, 2019. It has been updated.

[adhoccc]

What about Congress and the courts? To start with, Congress can impeach and remove Supreme Court justices, with no comparable power going the other way. The Senate can reject nominees for the court that have been proposed by the president. And Congress can, and has, added and subtracted members of the Supreme Court, going from its original six down to five and up to as many as 10 before settling at nine in 1869. But we also know that Article 3 gives little direct power to the Supreme Court. It has original, constitutionally mandated jurisdiction, but here is the critical element of Article 3, Section 2: “In all cases affecting Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, and those in which a State shall be Party, the Supreme Court shall have original jurisdiction. In all the other cases before mentioned, the Supreme Court shall have appellate jurisdiction, both as to Law and Fact, with such Exceptions, and under such Regulations as the Congress shall make.”

Norman J. Ornstein na The New Republic.

[pscottm]

Trump's 2025 vision: A lot more power for him

What Trump is proposing for 2025 ... is the trappings of a democracy. ... But it's a Potemkin village," said Norman Ornstein, an emeritus scholar at the American Enterprise Institute

[ilovetheater-nl]

Music Stages presenteert opera Papoea van Maarten Ornstein op 13 mei 2023 in Muziekgebouw in Amsterdam

Music Stages, het Amsterdamse productiehuis, presenteert op zaterdag 13 mei in Muziekgebouw aan ‘t IJ: Opera Papoea, gecomponeerd door Maarten Ornstein.  De roman Norman was het schrijversdebuut van Merel Hubatka. Het verhaal is gebaseerd op de biografie van haar vader. Ze beschrijft daarin hoe de Papoea’s speelbal werden van grote internationale ontwikkelingen. Samen met componist Maarten…

[truck-fump]

"A harbinger of things to come": <b>Trump's</b> RNC shakeup signals plans for 2025 - Axios

New Post has been published on https://www.google.com/url?rct=j&sa=t&url=https://www.axios.com/2024/03/13/trump-rnc-makeover-2025-plan-government&ct=ga&cd=CAIyGjUzM2UwMTY5ZmFhZTIwMGQ6Y29tOmVuOlVT&usg=AOvVaw12NFAgWwhDn2_jXMZf3V2B

"A harbinger of things to come": Trump's RNC shakeup signals plans for 2025 - Axios

Trump “clearly wants a Republican National Committee that dances to his tune, jumps when he says jump,” said Norman Ornstein, an emeritus scholar at …

[stoweboyd]

The GOP has become an insurgent outlier: ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; un-persuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence, and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.

| Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein, Let’s just say it: The Republicans are the problem.

[porterdavis]

Three acts of treachery

Norman Ornstein‏Verified account @NormOrnstein

Mitch McConnell says blocking Merrick Garland was the most consequential thing he has ever done. I would say a close second is blackmailing Obama and the intelligence community to keep a lid on Russian involvement in the 2016 election. Both are utterly nefarious acts.

Um, I would add stonewalling democracy in not stopping Trump’s shut-down and allowing a vote in the Senate.

Photo - Scott Applewhite/AP

[plitnick]

AIPAC’s insurrectionists for Israel

AIPAC’s insurrectionists for Israel

AIPAC has received intense criticism for the decision of its new political action committee to endorse 37 Republicans who tried to prevent the certification of the presidential election of 2020. In my latest piece for +972 Magazine, I argue that the criticism, while coming in many cases from unprecedented quarters, demonstrates conclusively that AIPAC’s self-declared “single-issue” focus means…