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Ron Johnson: ‘No Enemies to the Right’?

During an interview yesterday, Sen. Ron Johnson declared of the Capitol riot that ‘this didn’t seem like an armed insurrection to me.’ Tim Elfrink reports that As a pro-Trump mob stormed the U.S. Capitol last month, rioters battered police with a multitude of weapons: metal flagpoles, baseball bats, wrenches and clubs. Many soaked police in caustic…

Unemployment Imagined and Real

National unemployment figures have been undercounting the true number of those unemployed. Rachel Siegel reports Fed chair: Unemployment rate was closer to 10 percent, not 6.3 percent, in January: Federal Reserve Chair Jerome H. Powell said Wednesday that the unemployment rate in January was “close to 10 percent,” significantly higher than the 6.3 percent rate…

The Power of Refutation

Laura Hazard Owen writes When’s the best time to correct fake news? After someone’s already read it, apparently: Debunking > prebunking. If you want someone to not believe that false or misleading headline they just read, when’s the best time to correct it? We hear a lot about inoculating people against fake news or “prebunking”…

Ron Johnson Searches for the Real Killer

United States Senator Ron Johnson wonders if, possibly, maybe, perhaps it is Nancy Pelosi who is responsible for the Capitol riot. He doesn’t have any proof for this contention, and after all, he’s only askin’ questions, so don’t ask Johnson for substantiation: “Is this another diversionary operation? Is this meant to deflect away from potentially…

Consequences, Accountability, Repentance, Redemption

David Frum, writing of Trump & Trumpism in The Conservative Cult of Victimhood, observes that There is no redemption without repentance. There is no repentance without accountability. There is no accountability without consequences. He rightly concludes that for the Trumpists, the absence of a moral order of accountability and repentance has meant that Even as Trump commits…

Meanwhile, on Facebook…

Jeremy B. Merrill and Jamiles Lartey report Trump’s Crime and Carnage Ad Blitz Is Going Unanswered on Facebook (‘The president has spent millions on misleading Facebook ads targeting undecided voters, while Joe Biden has been virtually silent’): With unprecedented protests around race and policing dominating the news all summer, it was all but certain criminal justice would emerge as a key…