Bill Browder: Putin’s Big Mistake in Trying To Get Me Vladmir Putin offered to let US investigators question the 12 Russian intelligence agents just indicted…
Bill Browder: Putin’s Big Mistake in Trying To Get Me
Vladmir Putin offered to let US investigators question the 12 Russian intelligence agents just indicted by Special Counsel Robert Mueller in exchange for letting Moscow do the same to hedge funder and longtime Putin nemesis Bill Browder. And, as Browder himself writes at Time, “this is no idle threat. For the last ten years, I’ve been trying to avoid getting killed by Putin’s regime, and there already exists a trail of dead bodies connected to its desire to see me dead.” President Trump initially said he considered this “an incredible offer.” But Browder has been a British citizen since 1989. And that country “might have a few choice words for him [Putin] after Russian agents spread the military-grade nerve agent Novichok across the cathedral town of Salisbury.”
Religion writer: Mark Zuckerberg’s Holocaust Blunder
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has touched off a firestorm by defending the intentions of Holocaust deniers. He opposed removing their posts, because they’re not “intentionally getting it wrong.” But as Yair Rosenberg suggests at The Atlantic, “this position is so bizarre, it’s hard to know where to begin.” Even if Zuckerberg were right, that doesn’t “absolve Facebook of responsibility for uncritically hosting and spreading that content.” But censorship alone “is not an effective response.” Rosenberg suggests “counter-programming hateful or misleading speech with better speech.” Such as posting a “prominent disclaimer” on such pages warning against being “misled by propaganda” and linking to the United States Holocaust Museum. Because their real targets are not other confirmed Holocaust deniers but people who don’t realize they’re being trolled.
Conservative: Trump Not the First To Cozy Up to Putin
President Trump “is trying to do something that both of his immediate predecessors tried to do: turn over a new leaf with Russia,” says Marc Thiessen at The Washington Post. Moreover, he adds, “they both failed, and so will he.” George W. Bush, recall, said he was able to “get a sense” of Vladimir Putin’s “soul” and found him “straightforward and trustworthy.” Then Barack Obama “tried to appease Putin by giving in to the Russian leader’s demands that we cancel our missile-defense plan with Poland and the Czech Republic.” And let’s not forget Hillary Clinton’s giant red “reset” button. So now it’s “Trump’s turn to learn the hard way that Russia is an adversary, not a competitor.” But however dismaying his words at Helsinki, it isn’t time to really worry until “Trump’s actions match his rhetoric.” Until then, this was “an embarrassment, not a disaster.”
Political scribe: Parties Surrendering to the Fringe
Responsible Republican voices “have lost control within the Trump White House and are unable to shape the agenda on the outside,” asserts National Journal’s Josh Kaushaar. But at least the GOP “has an establishment that has attempted (unsuccessfully) to steer a conventional course” and “prevent extreme candidates from emerging in primaries.” Yet “some formerly reasonable members of the Democratic establishment are now eagerly surrendering to the whims of their own increasingly dogmatic base.” And they’re adopting tactics normally associated with far-left activists that will “only undermine their chances of winning back power.” Against their base, says Kraushaar, “it’s not yet clear whether Democratic leaders are willing to put up a fight.”
Criminal-justice writer: A Tale of Two Killings
Last Sunday, reports Heather Mac Donald at City Journal, a 59-year-old woman was killed by a would-be carjacker on Chicago’s West Side. The night before, a Chicago police officer killed a 37-year-old man who’d been “observed behaving in a manner suggesting he was carrying a gun” (and, indeed, he was). True to script, she notes, the latter incident “sparked violent street anarchy.” But there were no protests “against the taking of the innocent carjacking victim’s life” — although carjackings have tripled in Chicago since 2015. Fact is, “Black Lives Matter activists have nothing to say about this violence because it does not involve police officers.” Sad to say, “the demoralization of law enforcement continues, and it is the law-abiding residents of high-crime areas who will continue paying the price.”
— Compiled by Eric Fettmann
