We begin today with Aaron Blake of The Washington Post writing that more and more Americans view Number 45 as a criminal FPOTUS as opposed to merely an unethical one.

In new polling, Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election and his storage of sensitive government documents in his residence at Mar-a-Lago have reached new highs in the percentages of Americans who say Trump broke the law — rather than saying his actions were unethical but not illegal.

On both issues, more Americans say Trump broke the law — 45 percent and 44 percent, respectively — than ever said so during the investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election, the scandal involving Trump’s interaction with the Ukrainian president and other instances in which the question was asked, according to a Washington Post review of polling during Trump’s tenure.

After a presidency marked by Trump repeatedly escaping consequences after controversy and now retaining a fighting chance to win the next election, the data suggests that Trump may find it more difficult to move past these new issues.

At the same time, the political middle remains somewhat mixed in its views on whether Trump’s actions in these instances were illegal or merely unethical. And the polls suggest Trump’s devoted base, which regards him as blameless, continues to constitute as many as 3 in 10 Americans.

Looking at the data laid out in this way, I am reminded of something that MSNBC’s Joy Ann Reid said about Trump’s first impeachment.

That is, while there wasn’t a conviction based on the the impeachment charges, the impeachment, itself, does serve as a sanction and renders any successful attempts to run for reelection almost impossible. That was true in Andrew Johnson’s case in the 19th century and Trump’s case in the 21st century. Gerald Ford’s and Al Gore’s attempts to become POTUS also failed.

I always assumed that Trump lost the 2020 election because of his sheer malicious stupidity and mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic as the primary factor. I still believe that to be the case, for the most part. But maybe that first impeachment over the attempt to extort Ukraine’s President Zelensky had more of an effect than I originally thought.

To indict or not to indict, that is the question. But James D. Zirin writes for Washington Monthly that a third option is available to AG Merrick Garland.

As a former federal prosecutor, I would indict Trump. The facts and the law in Trump’s case are compelling. The rule of law binds us together and is at the core of our democracy. Or, as the Times added, “America is not sustained by a set of principles; it is sustained by resolute action to defend those principles.”

But Garland has a third choice that has received little attention. It could conceivably get him where he wants to go—a “presentment” or report filed by the grand jury with the federal court. Here, prosecutors could lay out the evidence the grand jury has gathered of Trump’s criminality but hold off on an indictment.

The grand jury report is an institution we inherited from the English. It likely dates to 1166 and antedates the grand jury itself. It is mentioned in the Fifth Amendment. The report is presented to the court by the grand jury without any bill of indictment. A presentment may charge individuals with crimes. Meanwhile, the investigation could continue and be followed later by criminal charges in an indictment.

Here’s section 159 of DOJ’s Criminal Resource Manual as well as the text of 18 U.S. Code § 3333.

Matthew Connelly of The Los Angeles Times notes that the nation security classification systems are due for an overhaul.

The security classification system is designed to control information according to its level of sensitivity, ranging from confidential to top secret. Anyone seeking a security clearance to handle these materials must undergo rigorous background checks and training. But being approved for a level of clearance does not automatically give one access to classified information. Only those who already have access to a specific program’s information can grant others with clearance permission to see it, and only if the requestor has an explicit reason for their “need to know.” The system creates the impression that only a select few are permitted to handle carefully defined categories of truly dangerous information.

But these rules do not describe what is actually happening. In 2017 alone, officials told the ISOO that they had stamped something with “confidential,” “secret” or “top secret” more than 49 million times. At the time, this seemed like an improvement. In 2012, similar self-reported data added up to more than 95 million classifications, or three new state secrets per second. Bradley now says that a lot of the data in these earlier reports “was neither accurate nor reliable,” but cannot offer better estimates. And so many Special Access Programs — which may require additional security measures and bear the designation “Sensitive Compartmented Information” — have proliferated across the government that Bradley could not create a complete list. [...]

Trump has claimed that he had a standing order to declassify the records that ended up in Mar-a-Lago — but there is no evidence of such an order and numerous officials have called this claim ludicrous. The fact is, the declassification of even one document involves a page-by-page inspection, and often requires sign-off by multiple departments and agencies. Yet the government employs fewer than 2,000 people to review, redact and determine which of these records can eventually be released.

Stuart Rothenberg of Roll Call recalls the midterm elections of 1998 and 2002 in an attempt to note campaign anomalies that may be present for the 2022 midterms.

Today’s GOP is being defined by its most extreme voices, who spend much of their time complaining about how the 2020 election was “stolen.”

Their attacks on democracy and the rule of law — and the increasing visibility of former President Donald Trump on the campaign trail and in legal fights — have transformed a referendum on Biden in November into a choice between Democrats and Republicans.

The Supreme Court overturning of Roe v. Wade, which guaranteed the right to an abortion; the FBI search at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort; and the findings of the House select committee investigating the attack on the Capitol — combined with falling gas prices, the passage of a gun control bill, and the use of budget reconciliation legislation to pass major initiatives on health care and climate change — have boosted Democratic enthusiasm about the midterms.

Democrats also seem to be overperforming in special elections and primaries, which reflects unusual enthusiasm for the president’s party. That, along with the nomination of extreme Republican nominees for Congress and state offices, suggests that many voters are more worried about Trump and his allies than they are about Biden.

Paul Krugman of The New York Times looks at some indicators that President Joe Biden may be succeeding where Number 45 failed when it comes to bringing manufacturing jobs back to the United States.

Under the radar, however, some of what Trump wanted but failed to achieve — a return of manufacturing to the United States, for instance — may actually be happening under his successor. A recent Bloomberg review of C.E.O. business presentations finds a huge surge in buzzwords like onshoring, reshoring and nearshoring, all indicators of plans to produce in the United States (or possibly nearby countries) rather than in Asia.

There has also been a flurry of news reports, backed by some flaky data, suggesting that companies really are building new manufacturing facilities in the United States and other high-income countries.

So we may be seeing early indications of a partial retreat from globalization. This isn’t necessarily a good thing, but that’s a topic for another day. For now, let’s talk about why this may be happening.

The first thing you need to know is that if we see some decline in world trade in the years ahead, it won’t be the first time that’s happened. It’s common to assume that the world is always getting smaller, that rising international interdependence is an ineluctable trend. But history says otherwise.

Makani Themba of The Nation looks at the history behind the Jackson, Mississippi “water crisis”.

...Jackson’s current mayor—Lumumba’s son, Chokwe Antar Lumumba—is still battling to reach that “infrastructure frontier.” Months of lobbying to get the state to grant Jackson access to its own special tax funds, decades of divestment and neglect, and the state’s consistent denial of city requests for adequate funding have taken their toll. Now, record flooding has accelerated the sadly inevitable—and preventable—rupture of the city’s crumbling water infrastructure. More than 150,000 residents are without potable water.

Most residents under the age of 50 have no memory of a Jackson without “boil water” notices—the frequent public warnings that the water that comes out of your faucet is not safe to consume in any form without a good, rolling boil. The truth is that the “Jackson Water Crisis”—as the press has dubbed it—has been decades in the making. It’s part and parcel of an infrastructure crisis that is gripping much of the country—but with grossly unequal impact. Its roots are in Jim Crow, the separate that was never equal, where everything from water to parks to food and even air in our communities receives less investment, less protection, and less access. Broken levees in New Orleans. Toxic water in Flint. Crumbling buildings in eastern Kentucky. This is beyond a crisis in infrastructure. It is a crisis in justice.

 Jerusalem Demsas of The Atlantic reports on the significance of the decades-long migration of Black Americans from urban to suburban.

In the U.S., the terms inner city and urban have long been code words for Black areas. They are used to evoke the stereotype of a Black underclass, confined to public-housing units or low-income housing, entrenching the belief that this population is somehow inherently meant for city life while also denigrating city life as dirty, crowded, and utterly undesirable. During the 2016 presidential debates, for instance, then-candidate Donald Trump repeatedly referred to African Americans living in “the inner cities.” When asked about the nation’s racial divide or being a president to “all the people in the United States,” he repeatedly evoked the stereotype that Black people largely live in inner cities wracked by crime.

To make this stereotype work in the 21st century requires overlooking one key fact: Black families have been absconding from cities for decades. In a recent paper, the economists Alex Bartik and Evan Mast note that over the past 50 years, the share of the Black population living in the 40 most populous central cities in the U.S. fell from 40 percent to 24 percent. They are not the first to highlight this phenomenon. Demographers and sociologists in particular have been noting this trend for decades. As the Brookings Institution demographer William Frey has documented, from 2000 to 2010, the Black population of the central cities in America’s 100 largest metro areas decreased by 300,000. Detroit, Chicago, and New York (prime destinations during the Great Migration) as well as Atlanta, Dallas, and Los Angeles all saw declines in their Black populations.

What this geographic shift has meant for Black Americans is complicated, and there are many stories to tell—of families moving to opportunity, of inequality replicating itself when they get there, and of the people left behind. In 1968, Congress passed the Fair Housing Act and outlawed discrimination in the housing market. This did not eradicate housing inequality, but it did give Black households much more freedom to actualize their preferences of where to live and whom to live among. More than 50 years later, we are still seeing how those preferences shape the nation’s geography of opportunity.

Nektaria Stamouli of POLITICO Europe reports on rising tensions between Turkey and Greece.

Earlier this week, the Greek foreign ministry sent letters to NATO, the United Nations and the EU complaining about comments by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan that it said were “unprovoked, unacceptable and an insult against Greece and the Greek people” and asking the organizations to condemn Ankara’s behavior.

“By not doing so in time or by underestimating the seriousness of the matter, we risk witnessing again a situation similar to that currently unfolding in some other part of our Continent,” Greek Foreign Minister Nikos Dendias wrote in the letters, dated Monday and Tuesday, alluding to the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Erdoğan has stepped up his rhetoric against Greece in recent days, amid what Ankara sees as a growing military buildup on the Greek Aegean islands, close to Turkey’s coastline. In a repeated, thinly veiled threat, he said: “We can come down suddenly one night when the time comes.”

Finally today, Hyung-Jin Kim and Kim Tong-Hyung of The Diplomat answers the question: why is Russia looking to buy weapons from North Korea.

The ammunitions North Korea reportedly intends to sell to Moscow are likely copies of Soviet-era weapons that can fit Russian launchers. But there are still questions over the quality of the supplies and how much they could actually help the Russian military.

Slapped by international sanctions and export controls, Russia in August bought Iranian-made drones that U.S. officials said had technical problems. For Russia, North Korea is likely another good option for its ammunitions supply, because the North keeps a significant stockpile of shells, many of them copies of Soviet-era ones.

North Korea “may represent the single biggest source of compatible legacy artillery ammunition outside of Russia, including domestic production facilities to further supplies,” said Joseph Dempsey, research associate for defense and military analysis at the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS).

Have a good day, everyone!

We begin today with Dion Lefler of The Wichita Eagle and his review of the winning campaign in support of abortion rights in Kansas and what it may portend for the future of Kansas politics.

I didn’t cover the Value Them Both election watch. Like almost all serious journalists in the state, I was banned by the campaign from attending.

So all I can tell you about their thinking is that they blamed — you guessed it — the mainstream media.

According to their written statement, the media “propelled the left’s false narrative, contributing to the confusion that misled Kansans about the amendment.”

That’s not what happened at all.

I can only speak for myself, but I never believed their infinitely repeated protestations that they didn’t want to ban abortion, just make reasonable regulations about it.

I didn’t believe it because they didn’t even believe it themselves.

Apparently, about six out of 10 voters didn’t believe them either. 

It was the Value Them Both campaign that attempted to mislead voters and propelled false narratives. One example from Jill Filipovic’s essay for CNN.

The vote was much watched by abortion rights proponents and opponents alike. It also wasn’t exactly a fair fight: One conservative group sent out text messages on Monday, the day of the vote, warning, “Women in KS are losing their choice on reproductive rights. Voting YES on the Amendment will give women a choice. Vote YES to protect women’s health.”

Voting “yes” on the Amendment was actually a vote against abortion rights. Abortion opponents, though, were clearly worried enough that Kansas voters cared about women’s rights, and so they resorted to playing dirty.

They still lost, which makes this victory even sweeter.

Mitch Smith, Lauren Fox, and Elizabeth Diaz of The New York Times report that the overwhelming victory for abortion rights at the ballot box in Kansas had a very broad coalition which included more rural and, perhaps, even more Republican voters than one would think.

DeAnn Hupe Seib is a fiscally conservative, churchgoing Republican from rural Kansas. When faced with a ballot question about whether abortion rights ought to be removed from her state’s constitution, she voted no. So did her home, Jefferson County, which favored Donald J. Trump by a 32-point margin in 2020.

“I was old enough that I remember stories of women who could not get abortions or had to defy their church in order to get in and get an abortion in order to save their lives,” said Ms. Hupe Seib, 63, a lawyer. “So it’s a very real issue to me, and I know it can be again.”

The sweeping victory for abortion rights in Kansas on Tuesday — the country’s first post-Roe vote on the issue — relied on a broad coalition of voters who turned out in huge numbers and crashed through party and geographic lines to maintain abortion access in the state. The result was an election with a stunning 18-point margin that is shaking up national politics ahead of the midterm elections.

Amy Davidson Sorkin of The New Yorker wishes that Democratic campaign organizations and consultants would stop interfering in Republican primaries on behalf of election-denying candidates.

But the tactic of manipulating Republicans into nominating proto-authoritarian election deniers is damaging even if it works, in the short term, exactly as intended—that is, even if it helps the Democrats win some seats. For one thing, it habituates Republicans—voters, activists, local officials—in the practice of uniting behind extremists after the primary. It cajoles them into discarding whatever taboos might be left at this point. And making the most conspiratorial voices the loudest changes the tone of the political conversation. Candidates of the sort who might vote to impeach Trump the next time—and it’s all too plausible that there could be a next time—will be driven from politics. (All but four of the ten impeachment-voting Republicans have now either retired or been defeated in primaries, and one of the four, Liz Cheney, is almost certain to lose her primary; notably, the three who survived are in states with nonpartisan “top-two” primaries.) The saddest aspect of Meijer’s comments is how bitter he sounds. “I’m sick and tired of hearing the sanctimonious bullshit about the Democrats being the pro-democracy party,” he told Politico.

Voters may tire of it, too—another risk for Democrats. If, when surveying the strange shape of the G.O.P. field, with its collection of the extreme, the improbable, and the outlandish, Democrats sound gleeful rather than dismayed or alarmed, voters’ faith in their seriousness could be diminished. They could come across as hypocrites and fakes, at a time when voters say they are looking for authenticity. And they could sound like part of a party that doesn’t have faith in its ability to win an election on the strength of its own policies and ideals.[...]

Why have some of the Democratic Party’s most prominent campaign organizations—the D.C.C.C., the D.G.A.—pursued such a terrible approach in these races? The fear for democracy’s future is real. But they or their political consultants may have become too enraptured by the idea of their own cleverness or toughness. Another explanation is that there is just too much money in politics these days chasing too few good ideas. Bad schemes get funded, too. OpenSecrets has documented more than five hundred million dollars in outside spending in the primaries alone, a number that is no doubt incomplete owing to the opacity of many of the organizations that are involved in elections in one way or another (and the primaries aren’t over yet); it doesn’t include spending by the campaigns themselves.

Keep playing with fire like that and you’re liable to get burned.

Heather Cox Richardson writes for her Letters for an American Substack about the significance of Alex Jones emails and texts, especially in light of the Rolling Stone exclusive reporting that those texts and emails will be subpoenaed by the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol.

It has been a source of frustration to those eager to return our public debates to ones rooted in reality that lies that have built a certain right-wing personality cannot be punctured because of the constant sowing of confusion around them. Part of why the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol has been so effective is that it has carefully built a story out of verifiable facts. Because House minority leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) withdrew the pro-Trump Republicans from the committee, we have not had to deal with the muddying of the water by people like Representative Jim Jordan (R-OH), who specializes in bullying and hectoring to get sound bites that later turn up in on right-wing channels in a narrative that mischaracterizes what actually happened.

But today something happened that makes puncturing the bubble of disinformation personal. In the damages trial, the lawyer for the Sandy Hook parents, Mark Bankston, revealed that Jones’s attorney accidentally shared a digital copy of two years’ worth of the texts and emails on Jones’s phone and, when alerted to the error, didn’t declare it privileged. Thus Bankston is reviewing the material and has said that Jones lied under oath. This material includes both texts and financial reports that Jones apparently said didn’t exist.

This is a big deal for the trial, of course—perjury is a crime—and it is a bigger deal for those who have believed InfoWars, since it reveals how profitable the lies have been. Bankston revealed that for all of Jones’s claims of low income, in 2018 InfoWars made between $100,000 and $200,000 a day, and some days they made $800,000. But there is more. People calculating the math will note that if indeed there are two years of records on that phone, the messages will include the weeks around the events of January 6, 2021.

Robin Givhan of The Washington Post  writes that even though activists for military families won a victory in getting the PACT Act passed in the Senate, the utter contempt and disrespect for those activists by some of the nation’s lawmakers was on full display.

On Tuesday, the veterans, military family members and their supporters were on their sixth day outside the Capitol. They were clustered under a few trees in the blessed shade just beyond the Capitol’s east plaza on a morning that was already sweltering. They were there to shame the Senate into passing the PACT Act, which extends health-care benefits to veterans who were exposed to toxins from the enormous pits in which the military regularly disposed of waste. Those burning garbage dumps have been linked to cancers, sleep apnea, and other respiratory and neurological ailments. Indeed, President Biden has noted that his son Beau served overseas near such a site and later died of a brain tumor. And so it was not surprising to see an activist holding a cardboard sign shaped like a tombstone that bore the words, “the troops.” Another sign warned: “vets are dying.”

A lot of Americans come to Capitol Hill to make a case for their interests or to raise awareness about looming emergencies. But these activists faced particularly galling circumstances. The Senate had passed the PACT Act back in June with an 84-14 vote, but it had been changed somewhat in the House; so last week the Senate had to vote again, and the second time around the dizzying carousel that is the legislature, the vote was 55-42. This might still seem like a win for veterans, but basic math isn’t so basic in the Senate because of the filibuster, which requires 60 votes before a bill can turn into a law. The legislation stalled and these determined citizens from Virginia and North Carolina and New York were sweating it out on the grass trying to get senators to give veterans something more tangible than a mere “thanks” for their service.[...]

In our democracy, there’s every reason to be proud of the people’s ability to protest and have their demands met. But in the process of making their voices heard on this subject, there have been constant reminders of just how loathe those in power are to listening to voices other than their own. As the bill — and amendments — were considered on the Senate floor, Rand Paul (R-Ky.), explained how he wanted to pay for the veterans’ health care by calling a 10-year moratorium on foreign aid distributed by USAID. Then he rattled off a list of the aid group’s expenditures that, based on the snarling disgust in his tone, he deemed offensively wasteful: encouraging tourism in Tunisia, teaching Korean students about climate change and encouraging millions of Filipinos to go to school. His colleagues did not approve of Paul’s amendment.

Jonathan Capehart, also of The Washington Post, says that for all of Sen. Josh Hawley’s “concern” about masculinity, what he is really selling is more racial resentment.

But as clownish as Hawley comes across, we dismiss him at our own risk. He is selling a vision of masculinity to White America that has much more to do with prejudice than manliness. It’s an old story — but a successful one, and one that’s poised to catch on. Stopping that from happening will require offering an alternative, with better examples of what being a man really means.

During a recent interview, Jason Kander, an Afghanistan War veteran who in 2018 stepped away from rising success in the Democratic Party to tend to his mental health, broke down his fellow Missourian’s plan. Hawley, he said, “is positioning himself, and therefore his movement — his far-right, White-guy movement — as, ‘If you’re a man, then you believe in these things.’” These things, you could probably guess, are archconservative values such as the patriarchy, opposition to women’s bodily autonomy, support exclusively for heterosexual marriage, an aversion to labor organizing. In other words, as Kander told me via email later, Hawley is “making manhood synonymous with conservatism.”

The pitch holds natural appeal for older White men who already hew to traditional morals. But what about the younger White men who, as Kander says, watch Ultimate Fighting but still like their LGBTQ co-workers and have friends who have had abortions? Hawley figures he can woo them too, so long as they share one potent trait with the older group: racial resentment. This vision of masculinity is as much about being White as it is about being a man.

Dave Zirin of The Nation says that Donald Trump is up to his old tired racist tricks again, this time with WNBA star Brittney Griner.

Trump’s one constant has been his racism and bigotry. Even when it seemingly makes no political sense, his unerring instinct moves him toward his happy place: hating others. Never underestimating the racism that lives in this country’s marrow has been his greatest political survival skill, and his survival has never felt more precarious. This is the best way to understand why Trump would look at the political landscape, see Brittney Griner rotting in a Russian prison, and say she should be buried under the cell. Instead of defending a US citizen, an Olympian, and a symbol of wrongful political detentions, Trump piled on. On some godforsaken fascistic podcast that I wouldn’t link to on a dare, Trump called Griner “potentially spoiled” (not sure what that means) and said she deserved to be behind bars.

He described her Kafkaesque situation as follows: “She went in there loaded up with drugs into a hostile territory where they’re very vigilant about drugs. They don’t like drugs. And she got caught. And now we’re supposed to get her out—and she makes, you know, a lot of money, I guess. We’re supposed to get her out for an absolute killer and one of the biggest arms dealers in the world.”[...]

It has largely been a given that everyone wants Griner to come home and be reunited with her family. But Trump doesn’t see the world in terms of easing human suffering. He sees Griner, and you can imagine the neon-blood-red words flashing in his brain—“Black,” “lesbian,” “WNBA”—and Trump immediately deducing that he can use her as a political piñata to bond himself to a frenzied base. It comes from his Colin Kaepernick playbook: demonize a Black athlete, lie about who they are and what they stand for, and reap the benefits.

Charu Sudan Kasturi of the Guardian writes that the spread of polio remains a global threat.

In June, the WHO reported cases of vaccine-derived polio – where a weakened virus in the vaccine itself spreads in the environment and infects people – in Eritrea, Ghana, Togo, Ivory Coast, Israel, Yemen, Nigeria and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. And in July, a patient in a New York City suburb was diagnosed with vaccine-derived polio. Over the past six weeks, traces of this form of the virus have also been found in sewage samples in Kolkata and London.

These seemingly unconnected cases highlight a common threat: globally, polio vaccination levels in 2021 dropped to their lowest in 15 years, according to WHO data, with immunisation initiatives disrupted during Covid. India and Indonesia, two of the world’s most populous nations, have witnessed particularly sharp falls in vaccine coverage.

That makes the recent spate of cases a canary in a coalmine, say experts – warning that the paralysing disease eliminated in most of the world could come back, especially in densely populated regions, unless countries redouble their efforts on vaccinations and surveillance.

With such an overwhelming amount of media attention given to the optics of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s trip to Taiwan, Brian Hioe of The Diplomat takes a look at some of the substantive issues.

Pelosi’s motivations for the visit have been speculated to be anything from securing her political legacy to an attempt to tout the Democrats’ record as tough on China before midterm elections. When Pelosi’s plane touched down in Taiwan around 10:43 p.m., the Washington Post released an op-ed by Pelosi arguing for her visit. In that article, she provided her rationale for the trip: “In the face of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) accelerating aggression, our congressional delegation’s visit should be seen as an unequivocal statement that America stands with Taiwan, our democratic partner, as it defends itself and its freedom.”

As news reports increasingly suggested that Pelosi would, in fact, be visiting Taiwan, speculation revolved around which day she would arrive. Another open question was the length of her visit – whether she would only stay a few hours in Taiwan, as some sources indicated, or whether she would stay overnight – and then whether her visit would only involve meeting with President Tsai Ing-wen or if it would also involve speaking to the Taiwanese legislature.

In the end, Pelosi’s visit involved stops to the legislature and to meet with Tsai. The House speaker’s comments were similar on both occasions, stressing Taiwan-U.S. cooperation in terms of mutual security interests, economic cooperation, and “shared values of self-governance and self-determination,” a phrase she used during verbal comments in her op-ed. With regards to her points on economic cooperation, Pelosi touted the CHIPS Act as an arena for cooperation between the U.S. and Taiwan, a somewhat odd framing considering the CHIPS Act is sometimes understood as aimed at reducing U.S. reliance on Taiwanese semiconductors.

Hannah Roberts of POLITICO Europe writes that with the hard-right Brothers of Italy party poised to win next month’s Italian snap elections, there is a fear that fascism is creeping into Italy. Again.

The public discourse over the murder of Alika Ogorchukwu, beaten to death in front of bystanders in the coastal town of Civitanova Marche, has laid bare the divisions in society as Italians prepare to vote in a snap election next month.

For some, the killing is the fault of years of hate-stoking anti-immigrant rhetoric from politicians on the right, with disturbing echoes of fascism. Others accuse the left of trying to make political capital out of a tragedy.

The bitter dispute matters because, according to current polling, it is the anti-immigration parties on the right of Italian politics that stand to win most support at the election and form the next government.

At the head of them all is Giorgia Meloni, leader of the hard-right Brothers of Italy, who is on track to become the country’s next prime minister after the September 25 vote. It would mark a radical shift in Italian politics, posing potential risks to the country’s economy after a period of stability under outgoing Prime Minister Mario Draghi’s steadying influence. There are also fears a right-wing coalition could weaken European unity at a sensitive time.

The Grammarian writes for The Philadelphia Inquirer on the importance of clear and precise grammar even if it is a bit “clunky.”

But what’s a grammarian to do when precise and concise are at odds with each other?

The ways we talk about abortion and gender — particularly in the wake of Roe v. Wade’s downfall — illustrate the problem.

Take, for example, a recent viral exchange between Sen. Josh Hawley, lately known for running away from the same rioting Jan. 6 mob that he’d raised a fist in solidarity with, and Berkeley law professor Khiara Bridges. In a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, Hawley objected to Bridges’ use of the phrase “people with a capacity for pregnancy,” which Hawley — ever the studious grammarian — thought should be shortened to just “women.” Bridges replied that Hawley’s questioning was transphobic, as it excluded trans men and nonbinary people who can become pregnant, as well as cisgender women who are unable to become pregnant. [...]

Put aside (for only the briefest moment) the fact that Hawley’s motivation was likely not syntactic concision but the desire to pick a fight and spark a viral moment and a provocative Twitter post (mission accomplished, Senator). A pressing language question still lingers here.[...]

Where does that leave someone just trying to improve the ways they speak and write?

Finally today, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar writes a wonderful essay on his Substack about his 60-year relationship with Boston Celtics legend Bill Russell. (Pushing fair use a bit here to tell the story of a young Lew Alcindor meeting Bill Russell.)

As I wandered into the gym, I saw, sitting casually on the bleacher bench reading The New York Times, Bill Russell. The Secretary of Defense himself. My personal hero.

I also saw my coach, Jack Donahue, chatting with the Celtics coach, Red Auerbach. Being naturally shy and unnaturally polite, I decided to head downstairs to the locker room and wait patiently until they were done. Maybe I could find a copy of the Times to read too.

“Lew, c’mere,” Coach Donahue called to me.

I gulped. Me?

I shuffled over to Coach Donahue, who introduced me to Coach Auerbach. Coach Auerbach gestured at Bill Russell. “Hey, Bill, c’mere. I want you to meet this kid.”

Bill Russell dipped down his newspaper and looked me over with a frown. Then he snorted. “I’m not getting up just to meet some kid.”

I shrank to about six inches tall. I just wanted to run straight home.

Auerbach chuckled. “Don’t let him get to you, kid. Sometimes he can be a real sourpuss.” He grabbed my wrist and walked me over to Russell.

“Bill, be nice. This is the kid who just might be the next you.”

Bill looked at me again, this time taking a little longer. I was already 7’, two inches taller than him.

I stuck out my hand. “How do you do, Mr. Russell. Pleasure to meet you.”

He didn’t smile, but his demeanor had softened, just a little. He shook my hand. “Yeah, yeah, kid.”

That’s how I met my childhood hero.

Have a good day, everyone!

We begin today with Rachel Siegel of The Washington Post writing about the Federal Reserve raising interest rates by three-quarters of a percentage point to stave off inflation.

The Fed hiked interest rates by three-quarters of a percentage point, following a similarly aggressive rate hike in June, even as Chair Jerome H. Powell acknowledged that the Federal Reserve sees previous hikes as already weighing on housing, business investment and consumer demand.[...]

Inflation has plagued policymakers for months, becoming the economy’s biggest problem and weighing on families nationwide, but especially the most vulnerable lower-income families. Higher prices for milk, gas and clothing have soured people’s sense of how the economy is working for them, dampening consumer sentiment and influencing families to change their own spending behavior, which can worsen inflation.

The glum economic mood has also become a major political problem for the Biden administration going into the midterm elections. Republicans continue to blame Democrats’ stimulus efforts from earlier in the pandemic for supercharging the economy and have resisted more federal spending.

Paul Krugman of The New York Times says that even if the Bureau of Economic Analysis shows a shrinking in real G.D.P. for the second quarter, that does not necessarily mean that the economy is in recession.

There’s a pretty good chance the Bureau of Economic Analysis, which produces the numbers on gross domestic product and other macroeconomic data, will declare on Thursday, preliminarily, that real G.D.P. shrank in the second quarter of 2022. Since it has already announced that real G.D.P. shrank in the first quarter, there will be a lot of breathless commentary to the effect that we’re officially in a recession.

But we won’t be. That’s not how recessions are defined; more important, it’s not how they should be defined. It’s possible that the people who actually decide whether we’re in a recession — more about them in a minute — will eventually declare that a recession began in the United States in the first half of this year, although that’s unlikely given other economic data. But they won’t base their decision solely on whether we’ve had two successive quarters of falling real G.D.P.

To understand why, it helps to know a bit about the history of what is known as business cycle dating.

William Danvers writes for The Hill that the American economy is still going through economic shocks caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Supply and demand, which is fundamental to the cost of goods and services, were affected dramatically by the pandemic. People largely stayed at home. Jobs were lost and businesses were closed. Supply chains were disrupted. The nature of work and education changed. How people viewed their jobs and their future in the workforce was altered.

Lockdowns meant that the home became central to day-to-day lives, which altered patterns of consumption and how the economy functioned. For example, going to movies and restaurants was drastically curtailed, even halted. The restrictions of everyday life during the height of the pandemic had an impact on how people viewed their day-to-day activities. Working from home, another pandemic-related change, affects issues such as office space, public transportation and the functioning of businesses that no longer connect to the pre-pandemic economic reality of going into the office regularly.

Understanding the role that the pandemic has played in determining the present economic state in the U.S. and globally, as well as the economic future, is key to determining responses to present crises. Biden has been criticized for putting too much money into the economy and thereby increasing the likelihood of inflationary pressure with his American Rescue Plan, but the plan was literally a lifeline for millions of Americans — who, in turn, helped stabilize the economy.  

Burgess Everett and Marianne Levine of POLITICO report on the deal that Senator Joe Manchin struck with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer on a financial package that includes energy and climate spending as well as ACA premiums.

Moreover, Manchin’s announcement came hours after final passage of semiconductor legislation, a bill Republicans threatened to block mere weeks ago in an effort to stop Democrats from pursuing a party-line tax, climate and health care package.

The Manchin-Schumer deal includes roughly $370 billion in energy and climate spending, $300 billion in deficit reduction, three years of subsidies for Affordable Care Act premiums, prescription drug reform and significant tax changes. Manchin said the bill was at one point “bigger than that” but that’s where the two Democrats settled.

As part of the agreement announced Wednesday, Schumer and Speaker Nancy Pelosi agreed to pass legislation governing energy permits. Manchin said he spoke to Schumer, Pelosi and President Joe Biden on Wednesday.

Paul M. Krawzak of Roll Call  lays out the possibilities for the “vote-a-rama” to come.

A full CBO score wasn’t yet available for the not-yet-released Senate substitute text. But under the publicly unveiled parameters of a deal struck between Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer, D-N.Y., and Joe Manchin III, D-W.Va., it will contain drug pricing provisions that will reduce “on-budget” deficits — the part that counts toward meeting reconciliation directives — by $277 billion over a decade.

Adding two years of expanded health insurance premium subsidies would be expected to cost somewhere in the ballpark of $40 billion, reducing the net deficit reduction.

Still, that leaves plenty of room for senators to offer amendments, including on things like extending expiring Trump-era tax cuts, provided they don’t go below $1 billion in Finance Committee deficit reduction. GOP senators could offer other amendments, including on energy policy, to try and put Democrats in a tough spot ahead of midterm elections this November.

Alternatively, there’d be room for Democrats to try to expand spending within Finance’s jurisdiction. They could seek to add a paid leave program, expanded child tax credits, funding for home- and community-based care under Medicaid, or Medicare hearing benefits that were in earlier versions — as well as tax increases to pay for it all.

Gabriel R. Sanchez, Keesha Middlemass, and Alla Rodriguez of The Brookings institution look at the effects of misinformation on the American electorate.

One of the drivers of decreased confidence in the political system has been the explosion of misinformation deliberately aimed at disrupting the democratic process. This confuses and overwhelms voters. Throughout the 2020 election cycle, Russia’s cyber efforts and online actors were able to influence public perceptions and sought to amplify mistrust in the electoral process by denigrating mail-in voting, highlighting alleged irregularities, and accusing the Democratic Party of engaging in voter fraud. The “big lie” reinforced by President Trump about the 2020 election results amplified the Russian efforts and has lasting implications on voters’ trust in election outcomes.

The Collaborative Multi-Racial Political Study reveals that a robust 57% of white Americans believes there was voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election, including 26% of whom believe there was definitely fraud in 2020. This survey also reveals that racial and ethnic minorities are highly susceptible to misinformation regarding voter fraud, as 38% of Latinos and 30% of African Americans think there might have been at least some fraud in 2020. Furthermore, in a 2021 survey by Howard University Digital Informers, a slim majority (51.5%) of respondents believe that “Black Americans are targets of fake news”.

In conjunction with the circulation of claims of election fraud and misinformation throughout the country, the public’s trust in our democratic system subsequently declined as well. An ABC NEWS/Washington Post survey found that only 20% feel “very confident” in the integrity of the U.S. election system. Furthermore, 56% of respondents of a recent CNN poll said that they have “little or no confidence” that the elections represent the will of the people. This pessimism is shared by the America youth as well, as 42% of the Harvard Youth Poll participants believe that their vote does not make a difference.

Jennifer Rubin of The Washington Post writes that the deluge from DOJ investigations of Trump and his acolytes for the Jan. 6 attempt to overthrow the duly elected American government are just beginning.

It might have been hard for jaded Beltway reporters to imagine, but powerful evidence presented dramatically in a easily accessible way — along with steady amplification by the media — may well be draining Trump of his support and encouraging Republicans to look elsewhere for a leader. No wonder the right-wing editorial pages of the New York Post and Wall Street Journal, both Rupert Murdoch publications, have broken sharply with Trump. Trump of all people should understand how the aura of being a “loser” turns people off.

If you feel as though the pace of revelations has picked up, you’re not alone. On Tuesday, the New York Times published another blockbuster report regarding Trump’s phony elector scheme. The Times reviewed emails that show one lawyer involved in the scheme “repeatedly used the word ‘fake’ to refer to the so-called electors, who were intended to provide Vice President Mike Pence and Mr. Trump’s allies in Congress a rationale for derailing the congressional process of certifying the outcome.” That’s classic “admissions against interest” — the sort of self-incriminating statements that light up prosecutors’ eyes. Plus, with more names popping up in emails, the pool of witnesses grows. The Post’s report also revealed that the Justice Department has the phone logs of senior Trump aides.[...]

The question now is not whether Trump will be exposed to criminal investigations but how far along and how fast they are moving. Meanwhile, the public’s view of his conduct grows ever more negative, with possible consequences for his party. If Trump feels a tad claustrophobic, it’s because the walls are closing in.

Renée Graham of The Boston Globe writes that Trump’s base will not abandon him because of white supremacy, not in spite of it.

With a historic 81 million votes Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election. But Trump got 74 million votes, 11 million more than he garnered in 2016. That means millions more people heard Trump’s lies, witnessed his racism, and saw him impeached for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress and thought, “Yup, I want some of that for four more years.”

Now, even after a second impeachment and an ongoing House investigation revealing Trump’s culpability in the deadly insurrection that defiled the Capitol and wounded our democracy, Republicans have remade themselves in his graven image, their would-be autocrat a half-century in the making. Election deniers who’ve swallowed whole Trump’s Big Lie are vying for seats in the Senate and House, and as governors and secretaries of state who will certify future elections.

Despite not even a scintilla of evidence to the contrary, nearly 70 percent of Republicans do not believe that Biden is the legitimately elected president. More than 60 percent of Republicans say Jan. 6 was not an insurrection, but a “legitimate protest.” Reacting to Trump’s crimes alone is like treating the wound, but not an infection that continues to spread.

Trump’s minions carry their support and what he emboldened not as a millstone, but as a badge of honor. Time won’t change that.

Charles Blow of The New York Times writes that Trump doesn’t care one bit about law and order and neither do the MAGA folks.

This week, Trump returned to Washington for the first time since he left office. And the speech he gave was another law and order speech, returning to the theme of empowering the police, calling for the execution of drug dealers, and describing the country as a “cesspool of crime.”

In all this, he encouraged cities to reinstate racialized stop-and-frisk policies, because “it works,” and called on them to flood the streets with more officers and pull back on accountability for those officers’ actions.

Trump said, “There is no longer respect for the law, and there certainly is no order.”

Clearly, irony escapes the man.

But his remarks underscore another reality, beyond the fact that his support for the police is opportunistic at best, and it is this: In societies that prize grotesque imbalance, you will reap grotesque resistance and violent expressions. And when you add stressors like a pandemic and surging inflation, the problem will only get worse.

Elizabeth Wellington of The Philadelphia Inquirer says that The Sesame Place staff needs are even simpler than DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) training; that staff needs basic couth and “home training.”

Real talk: DEI alone won’t solve this problem, because DEI doesn’t teach common decency and manners. A mean person, dressed up as a friendly Sesame Street monster, decided it was OK to behave nastily toward two Black children. Instead of greeting the little girls with outstretched arms — or at the very least offering them high fives — this cretin, disguised as a muppet, shooed them away after giving other children — white children — mad love. And more videos have surfaced of Black children being ignored by Sesame Place characters, demonstrating a pattern of mistreatment. [...]

Let’s be clear: This column isn’t knocking the need for DEI training, so the people whining about being forced to acknowledge Black history as American history can cool their racist heels. Diversity, equity, and inclusion training in workplaces is meant to teach people how to recognize unconscious biases that result in them treating their Black colleagues like servants. DEI also helps institutions raise employees’ awareness of systemic racism that results in unequal housing, pay, education, transportation, and food access.

DEI training doesn’t, however, teach basic manners. It doesn’t instill kindness. It doesn’t cure a bitter heart. Call me crazy, but a person should not need DEI training to know they should treat Black children with the same compassion they treat white children. That’s the job of home training. Sesame Place needs to do a better job making sure they hire employees who have home training. DEI training helps employers spot racists and reject them because racists are not good people.

Aaron Bolton and Ellis Juhlin of Kaiser Health News report that increasing numbers of women may be opting for permanent sterilization in response to the Dobbs decision.

The uncertainty around abortion access in Montana and other states where abortion is now or could become illegal, plus the fear of future legal fights over long-term contraception, has seemingly spurred a rise in the number of people seeking surgical sterilization, according to reports from doctors. That includes Marietti, who is having a salpingectomy, a procedure in which the fallopian tubes are removed instead of tied, as in tubal ligation, which can be reversible.

How many people sought permanent sterilization after the fall of Roe won’t become clear until next year, said Megan Kavanaugh, a researcher for the Guttmacher Institute, which gathers data related to reproductive health care across the U.S. and supports abortion rights.

But anecdotal reports indicate that more people have been undergoing permanent birth control procedures since the Supreme Court’s June 24 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which struck down Roe. Dr. Kavita Arora, who chairs the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists’ ethics committee, said providers across the country are beginning to see an influx of patients into their operating rooms.

Eric Kutscher and Lala Tomnoy Das write for the Los Angeles Times that discrimination in the medical and public health systems against LGBTQ individuals is key to ending the monkeypox outbreak.

It’s no accident that this virus receiving a weak public health response is one that mostly affects men who have sex with men, many of whom self-identify as gay, bisexual and transgender. In fact, WHO advisers declined to declare a monkeypox emergency in June in part because the disease has not moved out of this primary risk group. With cases rising, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus overruled advisers to make the declaration.

To be clear, nothing about LGBTQ individuals makes them more biologically susceptible to monkeypox. The current outbreak is primarily transmitting via close physical and sexual contact, though it can also spread through respiratory secretions and touching infected materials (such as clothing and linens). The reason this virus continues unchecked among men who have sex with men is that public health authorities have been slow to treat the risk to these individuals as an emergency.

To end monkeypox, we must confront the discrimination in the medical and public health systems that has enabled this preventable crisis. Clearly, having a vaccine for monkeypox is not enough in the face of homophobia that hampers public health response. And the steps it will take to end monkeypox will also enhance access to the comprehensive and patient-centered primary care that largely does not reach LGBTQ individuals.

I’ve heard that song before.

Aydali Campa of InsideClimateNews writes that a number of west side residents in Atlanta fear that an EPA investigation of high levels of lead in the area may lead eventually to gentrification.

In 2018, a graduate student found high levels of lead, a powerful neurotoxin, in a few urban gardens across the west side of Atlanta and alerted the Environmental Protection Agency. Since 2019, the EPA has been testing soil in the study area, but mistrust from residents has slowed that process. Many who live in the two historically Black neighborhoods in the study area view the federal government’s efforts with a jaundiced eye. They suspect the remediation is part of an effort to help gentrification flourish by pushing them off the now-valuable land where Black Atlantans have lived with toxins for a long time.

So far, the agency has been cleaning the site under its emergency response program for short-term cleanups, but the projects under this program have time and funding limits. In March of this year, the EPA added the site that spans 627 acres to the Superfund National Priorities List, making it eligible to receive federal funding for the investigation and long-term cleanup. As a Superfund site, the EPA will oversee remediation and evaluate public health and environmental risk associated with the contamination. Under the current scope, EPA officials say the cleanup will take about four more years, and the site will likely grow by as many as hundreds more properties. They estimate the entire cost of the remediation to be upwards of $49 million.

It will take testing of residents’ soil and blood to understand the extent of the contamination and its harm to residents’ health. Despite not doubting that their homes could be polluted with lead, some residents say that the community’s history of racism and displacement makes them wary of allowing the government into their homes to confirm it.

An eight-reporter team for Der Spiegel writes about the end of globalization (!) and what that means for Germany.

These days, even stoic government leaders seem overwhelmed by the barrage of world crises, tremendous upheavals and changing times. The global financial crisis, the refugee crisis, Brexit, the climate collapse, the coronavirus pandemic and the war in Ukraine have all happened in succession. It's more than enough to make a person dizzy. And yet, all this now simply feels like a preview for the massive change that is only now starting to role in: The age of globalization is coming to an end.[...]

Globalization has never been a purely economic phenomenon. For three decades, it was the defining world order, the guiding principle informing all political decisions. It determined how and where we work and how well we live and even who is a friend and who is a foe.

Linked to this was a clear vision of the further development of humanity: that the world would become ever more prosperous, and thus necessarily ever more modern, ever more liberal, ever more democratic. And that it would constantly become more Western. That economic ties would also create common values. And, more importantly: peace – at least more than ever before.

But all of these supposed certainties have just been steamrolled by Putin's tanks. These days, everybody who is anybody is proclaiming the death of globalization.

Finally today, Andrew Downie of the Guardian writes about the outrage among a group of Brazilian senators because a prosecutor dropped five criminal charges against Brazilian President Jair Bolosonaro related to his mismanagement of COVID.

A congressional inquiry into Bolsonaro’s handling of the pandemic ended last October with recommendations that the president face a range of charges, but a senior prosecutor, Lindôra Araujo, shelved five of the nine charges, leading senior lawmakers to request her conduct be examined.

Seven senators also asked the supreme court to ignore her decision as they promised not to let Bolsonaro and his supporters off the hook. “Those who want to halt the investigations into those crimes under investigation by the Covid CPI will not be allowed to rest,” said Humberto Costa, one of the seven senators.

The chief prosecutor’s office said evidence initially presented to the Covid inquiry “did not contain the proper individual proofs” required to meet the legal criteria for criminal charges. It also said relevant documents were missing and that evidence to connect the alleged crimes was lacking.

It called Araujo’s ruling strictly “legal”, while classing last year’s Covid inquiry as “political”.

Have a good day, everyone!

We begin today with the Editorial Board of the Boston Globe saying that the nation’s lawmakers don’t have to wait for history (or the Justice Department) to do something about the jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol.

The intended audiences for the Jan. 6 hearings have been clear from the start. The first is American voters, who can finally put an end to Trump’s political career by leaving him behind if he ever runs again. The second audience is much smaller. The House committee can’t hold anyone legally accountable for any crimes they committed, and so the case they made in public added pressure on those who can — officials at the Department of Justice. On multiple occasions, this editorial board has argued that Trump and his cronies who partook in his scheme to usurp American democracy must be put on trial because allowing them to go unpunished would send a dangerous message to future administrations that they can get away with anything.

But there’s a third audience that should be paying close attention to what has come out of the Jan. 6 committee, and that is the people who work in the very chambers where the hearings have been held. So far, Congress has not reinforced a single guardrail, let alone install any new ones, to protect Americans from a repeat of the Trump years. They are trying, as Lincoln might have put it, to escape history. 

Brian Klaas of The Atlantic gives a diagnosis that American democracy is dying.

I’ve spent the past 12 years studying the breakdown of democracy and the rise of authoritarianism around the world, in places such as Thailand, Tunisia, Belarus, and Zambia. I’ve shaken hands with many of the world’s democracy killers.

My studies and experiences have taught me that democracies can die in many ways. In the past, most ended in a quick death. Assassinations can snuff out democracy in a split second, coups in an hour or two, and revolutions in a day. But in the 21st century, most democracies die like a chronic but terminal patient. The system weakens as the disease spreads. The agony persists over years. Early intervention increases the rate of survival, but the longer the disease festers, the more that miracles become the only hope.

American democracy is dying. There are plenty of medicines that would cure it. Unfortunately, our political dysfunction means we’re choosing not to use them, and as time passes, fewer treatments become available to us, even though the disease is becoming terminal. No major prodemocracy reforms have passed Congress. No key political figures who tried to overturn an American election have faced real accountability. The president who orchestrated the greatest threat to our democracy in modern times is free to run for reelection, and may well return to office.

Jonathan Swan of Axios presents another installment for Axios’ “Inside Trump 25” series, the horrific look at what’s being planned in the event of a second Trump Administration,

Kash Patel, who is set to play an influential role in a second Trump administration, has described a new approach to ensure Trump does not repeat these mistakes.

"Everybody that gave us the [Attorney General] Bill Barrs of the world, that gave us [FBI director] Chris Wray, that gave us [former Deputy Attorney General] Rod Rosenstein, that gave us [former CIA director] Gina Haspel ... everybody that said 'these are Trump people' should be put on the list and we're never going to listen to them ever again," Patel said on a conservative podcast, "The Lee Smith Show," in April.

"That's Step 1," Patel said. "Step 2, you listen to guys that have proven themselves to be, I don't want to say loyal to the president but loyal to the democratic process. ... You need guys like [Trump loyalist and former director of national intelligence] Johnny Ratcliffe, Ric Grenell, Devin Nunes, Jim Jordan, Mark Meadows, [Rep. Matt] Gaetz … you need folks like that."

Jim Jordan told Axios he thinks it likely Trump will bring back some of the final team who ran the Department of Homeland Security — such as Tom Homan, Mark Morgan and Chad Wolf — "because that was an agency that cleaned it up, did it right, secured the border."

Heather Cox Richardson writes for her Letters to an American blog about the efforts of President Joe Biden to defend democracies worldwide.

When he took office, Democratic president Joe Biden recognized that his role in this moment was to prove that democracy is still a viable form of government.  

Rising autocrats have declared democracy obsolete. They argue that popular government is too slow to respond to the rapid pace of the modern world, or that liberal democracy’s focus on individual rights undermines the traditional values that hold societies together, values like religion and ethnic or racial similarities. Hungarian president Viktor Orbán, whom the radical right supports so enthusiastically that he is speaking on August 4 in Texas at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), has called for replacing liberal democracy with “illiberal democracy” or “Christian democracy,” which will explicitly not treat everyone equally and will rest power in a single political party.  

Biden has defended democracy across the globe, accomplishing more in foreign diplomacy than any president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Less than a year after the former president threatened to withdraw the U.S. from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken pulled together the NATO countries, as well as allies around the world, to stand against the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The new strength of NATO prompted Sweden and Finland to join the organization, and earlier this month, NATO ambassadors signed protocols for their admission. This is the most significant expansion of NATO in 30 years.  

That strength helped to hammer out a deal between Russia and Ukraine with Turkey and the United Nations yesterday to enable Ukraine to export 22 million tons of grain and Russia to export grain and fertilizer to developing countries that were facing famine because of Russia’s blockade of Ukrainian ports. An advisor to the Ukrainian government called the agreement “a major win for Ukraine.” When a Russian attack on the Ukrainian port of Odesa today put that agreement under threat, U.S. ambassador to Ukraine Bridget A. Brink called the attack “outrageous.”

Jon Allsop of Columbia Journalism Review evaluates the first “season” of the Jan. 6 Committee hearings.

Still, with the committee’s scheduled run now over, it’s worth reflecting on how it succeeded, not only substantively but also at what amounted, effectively, to an exercise in media production. In terms of format, any future hearings will be unlikely to deviate too much from what we’ve seen so far—indeed, the format has remained disciplined and consistent since the committee aired its first televised hearing, also in prime time, last month. As I wrote then, it’s a format that has innovated without being totally revolutionary, which I mean in a positive sense; each individual hearing has dispensed with the worst aspects of the genre—partisan mudslinging, preposterous grandstanding, a bloated running time—while retaining others, remaining recognizable as a Congressional hearing and thus retaining a basic aesthetic of institutional gravitas. (Not everyone will welcome this, but it makes sense for the committee given that its work is aimed at preserving institutions.) And the hearings arguably have been revolutionary when taken as a whole—radically reshaping the idea of what a long-running Congressional probe can look like.

I likened the first prime-time hearing to a long-form magazine article, in the sense that it synthesized things that were, for the most part, already public knowledge in a way that added fresh perspective and emotional depth. Since then, it’s been more common for media critics to compare the hearings to a prestige TV miniseries. Last night, that metaphor kicked into overdrive, with talk of a “finale” hearing and a possible “second-season pickup” (a reference to the prospect of future hearings). The structure of the final hearing, in fairness, invited such comparisons. It even featured a final-episode blooper reel of Trump struggling through a video message to supporters after January 6—though of course, what he said was scary, not funny.[...]

As I (and others) have written before, none of this is a bad thing, even though talking about deadly serious events through the prism of television techniques instinctively sounds trivial; as James Poniewozik, the Times’s great TV critic, put it after the committee’s first hearing, “storytelling is a tool for engagement, not just distraction.” Ultimately, that’s what the committee has done these past few weeks: tell a story. What matters above all, in real-life storytelling, is that the story is true—and this one demonstrably has been. As I see it, the committee has laid down a blueprint for how Congress might rethink future hearings and investigations to better engage the public on all manner of questions of public concern. It has also shown that TV can still be a useful vehicle for that type of engagement. “Many analysts have downplayed its importance with the rise of the Internet and social media,” CNN’s David Zurawik noted last night. “But these hearings have shown the enduring political and cultural power of the medium.” (Not that this is an either/or question: the committee has proven adept at viral clip-making, too.)

Natalia Contreras of the Texas Tribune reports that a group of conservative volunteers have begun examining the votes of the 2020 election in Tarrant County, TX.

Volunteers with the group, the Tarrant County Citizens for Election Integrity, told Votebeat Friday that their goal is to ensure the results of the election were accurate. Members are specifically counting votes in the Republican primary for U.S. Senate, in which Sen. John Cornyn won with 73% of the vote in Tarrant County over his closest challenger, who won 13% of the county’s votes. The group also alleges a range of fraudulent activities related to the 2020 November general election in Tarrant and other counties across the state but has offered no evidence to support the allegations.

“We’re not here as Republicans or Democrats,” said John Raymond, a volunteer with the group. “A lot of people don’t have faith in our elections, so we’re just here counting, making sure that what the secretary of state’s numbers say are right.”

“There's nothing wrong with the election,” Tarrant County Election Administrator Heider Garcia said. “But the ballots are now public and it's their right [to inspect them], and we will do everything that we have to do to make sure they can exercise their right to inspect public records.”

The group’s tallying of ballots — spurred by unsupported claims of voter fraud and of flawed election audits in Texas — began more than a week ago. In contrast with high-profile reviews of ballots elsewhere in the country, such as the 2021 review ordered in Maricopa County by the Arizona state Senate, the Tarrant ballot inspection has until now attracted almost no notice. In fact, even the secretary of state’s office said it had previously been unaware of Citizens for Election Integrity’s ballot review. But it’s unlikely to be the last such effort.

The examination of ballots in Tarrant County might have something to do with the fact that Joe Biden was the first Democrat to win Tarrant County in a presidential election since Lyndon Baines Johnson.

Katy Swordfisk writes for Phys.org about a study that shows that overconfidence bolsters anti-scientific views.

"Our research suggests that there may be a problem of overconfidence getting in the way of learning, because if people think they know a lot, they have minimal motivation to learn more," Light said. "People with more extreme anti-scientific attitudes might first need to learn about their relative ignorance on the issues before being taught specifics of established scientific knowledge."

The paper examined attitudes about eight issues with scientific consensus on which anti-consensus views persist: climate change, nuclear power, genetically modified foods, the big bang, evolution, vaccination, homeopathic medicine and COVID-19. Light said they found that in general, as people's attitudes on an issue get further from scientific consensus, their assessments of their own knowledge of that issue increases, but their actual knowledge decreases. Take COVID-19 vaccines, for example. The less an individual agrees with the COVID-19 vaccine, the more they believe they know about it, but their factual knowledge is more likely to be lower.

"Essentially, the people who are most extreme in their opposition to the consensus are the most overconfident in their knowledge," Light said. "Our findings suggest that this pattern is fairly general. However, we did not find them for climate change, evolution, or the big bang theory."

The degree to which attitudes on an issue are tied up with political or religious identities could affect whether this pattern exists for that issue, Light added.

Helen Branswell of STATnews reports on the World Health Organization declaring monkeypox a worldwide public health emergency.

In an unusual move, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus made the declaration even though a committee of experts he had convened to study the issue did not advise him to do so, having failed to reach a consensus. The same committee met just one month ago and declined to declare a public health emergency of international concern, or PHEIC.

Though the committee does not formally vote, a survey of the members revealed that nine thought a PHEIC should not be declared and six supported a declaration. When the group met in June, the breakdown was 11 against and three for. [...]

Monkeypox is endemic only in about a dozen countries in Central and Western Africa. But in May, public health officials in London reported six cases in people who had not traveled to endemic countries. Four of the six were in men who have sex with men.

The number of cases internationally has ballooned in the ensuing weeks, now reaching more than 16,000 in over 75 countries throughout Europe, North and South America, the Middle East, new parts of Africa, South Asia, and Australia. The United States has recorded nearly 2,900 cases.

Frederik Obermaier and Bastian Obermayer, writing for Der Spiegel, were the two journalists that were first contacted by a whistleblower about the Panama Papers story. Here, the journalists conduct the first-ever interview with the still anonymous whistleblower.

DER SPIEGEL: Tax havens seem to be of crucial importance for strongmen in autocratic regimes.

Doe: Putin is more of a threat to the United States than Hitler ever was, and shell companies are his best friend. Shell companies funding the Russian military are what kill innocent civilians in Ukraine as Putin's missiles target shopping centers. Shell companies masking Chinese conglomerates are what kill underage cobalt miners in the Congo. Shell companies make these horrors and more possible by removing accountability from society. But without accountability, society cannot function. [...]

DER SPIEGEL: Do you fear Russia might seek revenge?

Doe: It's a risk that I live with, given that the Russian government has expressed the fact that it wants me dead. Before Russia Today's media presence was curtailed due to Russia's attack against Ukraine, it aired a two-part Panama Papers docudrama featuring a "John Doe" character who suffered a torture-induced head injury during the opening credits, after which a cartoon boat sailed through the pool of his blood, as though it were the Panama Canal. However bizarre and tacky, it was not subtle. We have seen others with connections to offshore accounts and tax justice resort to murder, as with the tragedies involving Daphne Caruana Galizia and Ján Kuciak. Their deaths affected me deeply, and I call upon the European Union to deliver justice for Daphne and Ján and their families. And to deliver rule of law in Malta, one of Mossack Fonseca's former jurisdictions.

Vince Chadwick of Devex has an exclusive that an internal EU document shows that the European Union is recalibrating their diplomatic approach to the African continent over the war in Ukraine.

On the one hand, the report calls for “understanding and empathy for African challenges, and willingness to help find concrete solutions.”

But it also underlines that Europe is “the main indirect victim of [Russian President Vladimir] Putin’s war of aggression,” citing “dramatic consequences in all aspects (security, economic, financial, social, migration - 7 million refugees, unemployment).” And it opens the possibility of calibrating foreign aid from Europe according to Africa’s stance.

“Becoming more transactional in our approach, we should be clear about the fact that the willingness of Europeans (governments and taxpayers) to maintain higher levels of financial engagement in African countries will depend on working based on common values and a joint vision,” the report reads.

Despite billions of euros pledged to Ukraine, EU officials have so far said publicly that African countries will get the same amount of development assistance from the EU institutions as that initially agreed in their 2021-2027 country plans. However, the latest report points out that “it is clear that the longer the war will last, the less resources there will be.”

Joseph Steib of War on the Rocks details the failure of interventionist narratives and practices in the Global War on Terror and its effects on U.S. policy in Ukraine.

In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, neoconservative and liberal narratives built bipartisan support for a highly interventionist response. Despite their differences, these narratives converged in concluding that the solution to terrorism was transforming the countries from which it emerged, specifically through the application of U.S. military power in the Middle East. But when the war in Iraq turned into a violent quagmire, anti-interventionist critics from the nationalist right and progressive left got a new hearing for their ideas. Both sets of critics rejected the idea of transforming foreign societies, and were more skeptical of military intervention in general.

Indeed, the larger crisis of the U.S. political establishment is linked to the failure of the interventionist visions of the Global War on Terror. Support for the Iraq War became a political liability, as figures like Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush discovered in the 2016 primaries. Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders both gained political momentum from their once-marginal critiques of an elite that had misconceived and misled the response to terrorism while neglecting domestic problems. Former interventionist intellectuals now focus on defending liberal democracy against assaults from within and without rather than on efforts to democratize the world.

In short, the constituency for post-9/11 dreams of global transformation has collapsed. In response, the Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations have all sought to limit U.S. interventions. Now, as President Biden seeks to rally political support for his policy in Ukraine, it remains to be seen just how much the Global War on Terror and its backlash have transformed debates over U.S. foreign policy.

The independent Russian media agency Meduza received the permission of St. Petersburg media outlet Bemuga to publish the inspirational story of an opposition politician in St. Petersburg who came out as gay last month.

On June 24, in an interview with the LGBT+ health website Parni Plus (“Guys Plus”), Troshin came out as gay. While some may see his timing as imprudent— after all, the Russian government is currently both waging a war of aggression against Ukraine and preparing legislation that would further demonize LGBT+ people — Troshin saw coming out as both an important move towards a more progressive Russia and an important step in his personal journey.

“No matter what time you choose, there will always be someone who says it’s the wrong time,” Troshin said. “[But] all coming-out announcements, especially those of public figures, help to reduce homophobia and move society closer to living up to European values. The government is trying to lead the country in a completely different direction right now, of course, but I’m confident that progress can’t be stopped.” [...]

There’s no question that LGBT+ people have become a scapegoat for the Russian government as it seeks to justify increasingly illiberal policies as necessary measures against an attack on “traditional values” from the West. Troshin recognizes that while still maintaining his belief that equality will prevail in Russia. “I don’t think you can stop progress,” he said. “And that means that the LGBT rights situation will inevitably improve. I’m confident that it won’t be long before there are gay parades on Nevsky Prospekt and rainbow flags on government buildings, including Smolny, on pride week.”

Finally today, Michelle Young of The Wilson Quarterly writes about the efforts to preserve Ukraine’s artwork and cultural heritage.

In Lyiv, local volunteers worked rapidly to protect historical monuments in the old town, one of seven UNESCO World Heritage sites in Ukraine. The effort, according to Lilia Onyshchenko, who serves as the head of historical preservation for the city and spoke to the Los Angeles Times, involved using “whatever materials they could find—ideally fireproof.” She told them, “They built scaffolding around iconic structures, hoisted cranes to affix plywood to protect delicate stained-glass windows, stowed away gold-lacquered panels from the churches in basements and hallways and cached foam-wrapped artwork in bunkers.”

Marc Young, an experienced disaster relief operator, who assisted in bringing in vehicles for rescue efforts in Ukraine says, "Almost all cultural heritage sites, churches, and government buildings had some level of protection initially. Obviously it took some time after the bombing started to fortify them [with] sandbagging around foundations and boarding or corrugated metal covering of windows. This lasted for a short term at some sites in the West and Kyiv, as some had been removed during my three months. The 'protection' for the most part would have been from incidental contact. In my opinion a missile strike in close proximity would have rendered most of the efforts worthless. In Bucha and Irpin I did see indiscriminate damage that included churches and sites of historical importance."

Cities in eastern Ukraine did not have as much time as the ones further west. Kyiv and Kharkiv were hard hit, and artworks there could not be moved in time. The Washington Post reported that “the windows of Kharkiv’s main art museum have been blown out, subjecting the 25,000 artworks inside to freezing temperatures and snow for weeks. . . . Twenty-five works by one of Ukraine’s most celebrated painters, Maria Prymachenko, famed for her colorful representation of Ukrainian folklore and rural life, were burned when Russians bombed the museum housing them in a town outside Kyiv. Other museums in the capital are boarded up, their works still inside because those who would have evacuated them have fled.”

Have a good day, everyone!