"Donald Trump tried to overthrow an election by violence."

That's old news, we already reported that.

"As president, Donald Trump directed tens of millions of tax dollars to his own pockets."

Old news.

(cont'd) "Russian intelligence helped elect Trump by illegal means. Trump welcomed the help."

Russia, Russia.

"He was proven in court to have raped a woman."

Civil proceeding, not criminal - and sexual assault, not rape. Besides ... old news.

(cont'd)

A word to everybody writing, "The Democrats have nobody to blame but themselves" takes ... The fundamental reason we're in this crisis this morning is that the party of Lincoln, Eisenhower, and Reagan is about to nominate for president a dictator-loving criminal against the Constitution. That disgrace and shame is theirs.

Half a point to Trump on Smoot Hawley. The tariffs that put the world on the path to the Great Depression were the US tariffs of 1922, which doomed hopes for an export-led recovery from WW1. War-ravaged Europe was obliged to borrow dollars it needed rather than earn them ... Because the 1922 tariffs were followed by a short-lived financial/consumer boom in the United States, Americans were -and remain - blind to their catastrophic effect on the world economy (and also on the US farm sector, which had a terrible 1920s). ...

Lincoln Alexander Law School is Canada's newest. It opened its doors to its first students in September 2020. To distinguish itself from more established competitors, it early identified progressive activism as its reason for being. . (Thread)lsac.org/choosing-law-s… An institutional commitment to progressive activism may have seemed a good idea in 2020. Three years later, it resulted in almost half the full-time student body signing an open letter endorsing and defending the October 7 Hamas terror attack on Israel. thestar.com/news/investiga…

If Americans had chosen free trade and collective security in 1924, their sons would not have had to storm the beaches of Normandy in 1944. "America First" is the path to isolation, depression, and war. Germany was a democracy in 1924. To survive, that democracy needed to export to pay for food and fuel and service its war debts. When the United States imposed heavy tariffs under Presidents Harding and Coolidge, it doomed German democracy - and Japan's too.

This brilliantly revisionist book published in 2017 will transform your thinking about the Canadian role in D-Day. kansaspress.ku.edu/9780700625246/
The story as most of us know it: Canadians landed on the most easterly of the D-Day beaches, made the deepest inland penetration on Day 1, cut a crucial road ... but then stalled. That anticlimatic story, argues "Stopping the Panzers," completely misconceives the Canadian role.

If you believe in the lab-leak theory of COVID - and are angry that the US government did not act on it - a reminder that every relevant decision here was Donald Trump's to make, not Dr Fauci's. If you believe that the US government covered up a Chinese biological threat for political reasons, your beef is with the person who headed the government when the alleged cover-up decision was supposedly made. That would be President Donald Trump.

Here's why and how the Trump conviction helps the Biden re-election (and why and how it doesn't). A thread. 1) Biden heads a big, messy coalition. To win re-election, he has to herd a lot of cats. Two sets of cats are especially prone to stray. We hear a lot about the first set: younger, poorer, less connected to the political process.

Biden making the same error w/r/t Israel that he previously made with Ukraine: trying to micro-manage from a distance somebody else's defensive war by limiting categories of weapons. This error doesn't limit war. This error prolongs war, by denying the ally the means of success. I often think the Biden foreign policy would produce more success if its architects were less clever. "Give the Ukrainians/Israelis enough that they don't lose, but not enough to win" is an idea to baffle all lesser minds.

Every dictator who ever seized power justified his coup as an official act for the good of the state. Between November 2020 and January 2021, Donald Trump attempted a coup d'etat. Fortunately, power is harder to seize in the United States than in other countries. Fortunately too the outcome of the 2020 election was too clear to be subverted. Fortunately also ...

They'd each deny it, but this is psychologically indistinguishable from this

The defendant's presence at his criminal trial is not an inconvenience or imposition, as Trump's partisans complain. The defendant's presence is a *right,* guaranteed by the Sixth Amendment. 1/x The right to be present at one's trial is precious. But it is not absolute. The Supreme Court has ruled that presence at a trial can be forfeited by persistently bad behavior. 2/x

The US did not sell weapons to Israel until the mid-1960s.
1/xciaotest.cc.columbia.edu/olj/meria/meri… The US did not provide military aid to Israel until the mid-1970s. 2/xjewishvirtuallibrary.org/history-and-ov…

No big deal, just the second-largest newspaper in French Canada caricaturing Jews as vampires. lapresse.ca/actualites/car… The Jew as vampire is one of the deepest myths of western culture. The 1922 film Nosferatu that inspired the La Presse cartoon also inspired Nazi cartoonists of the Third Reich anumuseum.org.il/blog/myth-vamp…

Why was the Alger Hiss case such a big deal? The secrets Hiss betrayed to the Soviets were not so important. (He gave them, eg, blueprints for a new design for a Navy lifeboat.) It was Hiss's career trajectory that alarmed: the potential for a Soviet asset as secretary of state. The Hiss case convulsed the country. But we've now had eight years of people with deep connections to the ex-KGB dictator in Moscow arriving at the very highest levels of US politics, media, and government - and that's become business as usual.

News reports don't get more disturbing than this, from @propublica about the president of Mexico. propublica.org/article/mexico…
The @propublica story deals with Lopez Obrador's first run for president, in 2006. Lopez Obrador lost, a result he never accepted and tried to overturn. When he ran again in 2018, Lopez Obrador promised "hugs, not bullets" for the cartels.

"Israel has only existed since 1948."

Which is true, if by "existed" you mean "has been continuously sovereign under its present government."

It's also true that as a country founded in 1948, Israel is older than 134 of the 193 member nations of the United Nations. The weird fact of the modern world is how *new* most countries are, even seemingly ancient ones. EG Egypt re-emerged as an independent sovereignty only in 1922 after half a millennium under Ottoman then British overlordship.

Meet Sir Mark Sykes, a baronet, wealthy landowner, and a faithful servant of the British Crown and Empire as both soldier and diplomat. In his short life - he died a month before his 40th birthday - Sir Mark Sykes saw action in the Boer War, was elected to Parliament, traveled in the Near East. At the outbreak of the First World War, Sykes was assigned to the intelligence unit that studied the Ottoman Empire.

Some thoughts on the future of Gaza after the end of major combat operations, whenever that may be. A thread ... 1. Hamas's October war will leave behind great destruction in Gaza - and (if imaginable) even more intense bitterness than ever before between Palestinians and Israelis.

ISIS recreated slavery within the territory it held. Captive girls, women, and boys were bought and sold by ISIS fighters. iir.cz/institutionali…
The opportunity to take and exploit enslaved women, girls, and boys became an important part of ISIS recruitment message. theguardian.com/world/2017/oct…

In "The Decline of the English Murder," Orwell observed that certain crime stories actually bolster faith in the social order: stories about crimes that are not system-threatening, that are detected and justly punished. George Santos was such a story. orwell.ru/library/articl… I think the above explanation is why the Santos story has amused so many people so much: no challenge to the Constitution, no threat to democracy, just a shameless lawyer and crook ultimately brought low by his own comically outrageous excesses.