Michael Byrd, the until-recently unidentified Capitol Police officer who fatally shot Capitol insurrectionist Ashli Babbitt, says he’s received threats as ex-President Donald Trump and his allies have sought to paint Babbitt as a martyr.
Continue reading “Officer Vilified by Trumpland For Shooting Babbitt Describes Graphic Threats”
Internal Trump campaign polling data from the 2016 election was sent to a person close to Russia’s leader, according to recently unsealed statements by a prosecutor from Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s office.
Continue reading “EXCLUSIVE: Newly Unsealed Transcript Reveals Crux Of Mueller’s Collusion Case”
I wanted to flag to your attention this opinion piece for Robert Kagan in The Washington Post. It is an overarching look at the US mission in Afghanistan. Fundamentally it is an apologia, a defense. But Kagan is significantly more sophisticated and thoughtful than most of the more editorially kinetic defenders of the mission. So even while I think he’s mostly wrong and often disingenuous about recounting these events in which he played an important role you can nonetheless learn a lot about the last twenty years from reading his account. Be cautious, though, because the real essence is the many things left out.
One thing that Kagan is right about is this: Many retrospectives say the US went into Afghanistan with hubris and optimism and a mission to build a Western style democracy in Afghanistan. That’s not true. The US invaded Afghanistan because we were scared and angry. Kagan focuses on the “scared.” “Angry” was just as much it. But it was in the nature of that moment that the two were so fused that it was difficult to distinguish them.
Continue reading “Remembering the Origins of the United States’ 20 Year War in Afghanistan”
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things.
Overheated Republican members of Congress are already calling for Biden’s resignation and/or removal from office after the bombing at Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul left at least 13 U.S. troops and dozens of Afghan civilians dead.
Joe Biden needs to resign. Kamala and Nancy can follow him out the door!
I will be using the powers available to me as United States Congresswoman to bring real leadership back to America.
Support me in this effort today: https://t.co/H1HSfDVu5Q pic.twitter.com/t56fa1uzNz
— Lauren Boebert (@laurenboebert) August 26, 2021
White House press secretary Jen Psaki fired back at the GOP lawmakers in the evening, saying “[t]his is a day where U.S. Service members lost their lives at the hands of terrorists. It’s not a day for politics.”
"This is a day where U.S. service members, 12 of them, lost their lives at the hands of terrorists. It's not a day for politics." — White House press secretary Jen Psaki on two Republican senators calling for President Biden's resignation pic.twitter.com/XZI822r3hZ
— Mediaite (@Mediaite) August 26, 2021
Identifying himself publicly for the first time, Capitol Police officer Michael Byrd told NBC News that he did what he had to do when he fatally shot the Jan. 6 insurrectionist who tried to break into the hallway as members of Congress were fleeing from the violent pro-Trump mob.
Lt. Michael Byrd, who shot Trump supporter Ashli Babbitt during the Capitol riot, says he has been in hiding for months after he received a flood of death threats and racist attacks.
“I believe I showed the utmost courage on Jan. 6 and it's time for me to do that now" pic.twitter.com/2kaAxy8yGc
— MSNBC (@MSNBC) August 26, 2021
South Dakota Attorney General Jason Ravnsborg pleaded no contest to two traffic misdemeanors over a car crash last year in which he fatally struck a pedestrian and claimed not to know he had hit a person until discovering the body the next morning (investigators said they found the victim’s glasses in Ravnsborg’s car).
The Biden administration’s new extension of the eviction moratorium did not survive its first contact with the Supreme Court.
The 83-year-old justice talked to the New York Times about the hard decision to retire:
“There are a lot of blurred things there, and there are many considerations. They form a whole. I’ll make a decision.”
State Republicans are trying to get Democratic gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe kicked off the ballot on a legal technicality, a tactic that will almost certainly go nowhere.
Republicans touted the lawsuit on social media, but a similar suit against McAuliffe argued last week by a pair of Virginia voters failed to persuade a Richmond judge to halt the printing of ballots for the November election.
“Vaccine conspiracy theorists become even more desperate after full FDA authorization” – The Washington Post
A doctor in Tallahassee, Florida got fired from a hospital for selling mask opt-out notes to anti-mask parents for $50 a pop.
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A Florida emergency room doctor got the boot from the hospital he contracts with after he offered opt-out letters for $50 to parents who wanted their kids exempt from school mask mandates. Continue reading “Florida ER Doctor Booted From Hospital After Offering $50 Mask Opt-Out Letters To Parents”
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While Sen. Bernie Sanders’ (I-VT) centrist colleagues in the House try to flex their muscles ahead of the party’s $3.5 trillion reconciliation package reaching their chamber, Sanders is planning to spend the next few weeks selling the bold legislation to Americans — specifically, Republican voters in the Midwest.
I’ve been working on a piece about critiques of the American people’s lack of “strategic patience” as evidenced by our withdrawal from Afghanistan. Then I got this note from TPM Reader PT and thought, yes, that’s exactly what I was thinking.
I suspect that you, like me, have seen at least some commentators who argue that the Taliban “won” in Afghanistan by simply waiting us out, or that this demonstrates to other nations that consider an adversarial stance towards the US that we’re a paper tiger now that they know that even if we do take military action against them, all they have to do is wait for us to withdraw, which we inevitably will. I have a different perspective that I’d like to offer, starting with an analogy:
Continue reading “On the Discontents of ‘Strategic Patience’”
Attacks outside the Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul left at least 12 U.S. service members and an unknown number of Afghan citizens dead.
Continue reading “Kabul Airport Attack Leaves U.S. Service Members, Afghan Civilians Dead”
This article was originally published in ProPublica, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.
When the coronavirus first swept across Florida last year, Angela Gambrel did everything she could to lock down her home in Sumter County, northeast of Tampa.
