In four weeks, Alabama will go to the polls to elect a new US senator, but recent and mounting allegations of sexual misconduct by Republican nominee Roy Moore have thrown the contest into disarray, with top GOP officials in Washington calling on their party's candidate to step aside. To bring down a politician, it's not enough to show that he has violated your principles. You have to show that he's violated his own. Rumors have swirled for years that, in the early eighties, Roy Moore was banned from a mall for bothering teen-age girls. Unearthed footage of a 2015 speech by Rep. Frederica Wilson shows President Trump's chief of staff misrepresented her remarks when he assailed her from the White House press room on Thursday for what he said was "selfish behavior." President Trump has botched nearly everything. Even Sen. Bob Corker, a former ally, laments that “the White House has become an adult day care center.” Now Trump’s chief of staff, Gen. John Kelly, is acknowledging the president’s incompetence. At a White House briefing on Thursday, Kelly tried to reassure the press and the public about his boss. Instead, Kelly inadvertently confirmed that he and other aides are struggling to protect Trump from himself. In a move likely to roil America’s insurance markets, President Donald Trump will “immediately” halt payments to insurers under the Obama-era health care law he has been trying to persuade Congress to unravel for months. Eighteen U.S. states vowed to sue President Donald Trump's administration on Friday to stop him from scrapping a key component of Obamacare, subsidies to insurers that help millions of low-income people pay medical expenses, even as Trump invited Democratic leaders to negotiate a deal. President Donald Trump announced on Friday that he is formally “decertifying” the nuclear deal with Iran under US law. Weirdly, this is not the same thing as quitting the deal — in fact, Trump said in his speech that he plans to stay in it (at least for now). Throughout Tuesday’s oral arguments in Gill v. Whitford, Justice Anthony Kennedy and the Supreme Court’s left-leaning justices grilled Wisconsin’s attorneys with tough questions that suggest a majority of the court is prepared to impose constitutional limits on political redistricting. The highlight of the hour came when Justice Sonia Sotomayor posed a very simple inquiry that cut to the core of the case: “Could you tell me what the value is to democracy from political gerrymandering? How does that help our system of government?” Democratic voters in Wisconsin say gerrymandering the voting districts has given Republicans too much power and violate the Constitution. Donald trump was right. He inherited a mess. In January 2017, American foreign policy was, if not in crisis, in big trouble. Strong forces were putting stress on the old global political order: the rise of China to a power with more than half the productive capacity of the United States (and defense spending to match); the partial recovery of a resentful Russia under a skilled and thuggish autocrat; the discrediting of Western elites by the financial crash of 2008, followed by roiling populist waves, of which Trump himself was part; a turbulent Middle East; economic dislocations worldwide. Last week, much of official Washington rejoiced after President Trump made a deal with senior congressional Democrats to forestall a government shutdown, provide aid to hurricane victims, and raise the debt ceiling until December. The deal, some observers claimed, marked Trump’s long-awaited pivot to conventional Presidential leadership and a bipartisan style of governing. Some praised this maneuver as statesmanlike, while others denounced it as a betrayal of the President’s fellow-Republicans, but there was something close to consensus that Trump had jettisoned the hard-right politics expressed at the beginning of his term in office and begun a new and different chapter. The United States has no diplomatic relations with North Korea, so there is no embassy in Washington, but for years the two countries have relied on the “New York channel,” an office inside North Korea’s mission to the United Nations, to handle the unavoidable parts of our nonexistent relationship. The office has, among other things, negotiated the release of prisoners and held informal talks about nuclear tensions. In April, I contacted the New York channel and requested permission to visit Pyongyang, the capital of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. The special counsel overseeing the investigation into Russia’s role in the 2016 election is interviewing senior intelligence officials as part of a widening probe that now includes an examination of whether President Trump attempted to obstruct justice, officials said. It was political theater of the best kind. The nature of the events that led ex-FBI Director James Comey to testify before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Thursday are extraordinary. Comey’s testimony of his version of events was even more so.
|