| | | | It's Not Just About Alabama | | Any Republicans inclined to dismiss Roy Moore's defeat in Tuesday's Senate contest as stemming from a uniquely flawed candidacy will be making a mistake, suggests Nate Silver for FiveThirtyEight. There's a pattern forming that should worry the party.
"Obviously, the national environment is highly problematic for Republicans—and in all likelihood, it will continue to be problematic for them through next November. Republicans ignore signs of this at their peril, because they've now gotten poor results in Alabama, a host of other states, the generic ballot and Trump's approval rating," Silver says.
"Of course, Republicans won't have Roy Moore running in other races. But they will have other candidates with characteristics similar to Moore (ignoring, for now, the sexual misconduct allegations). That is, they'll have candidates who are nominated by the GOP base against the wishes of party elites and who prove to be disasters with swing voters." "Republicans had been eyeing another bid at repealing Obamacare early in the new year after their repeated failures over the summer and fall. But the loss of a Senate seat likely leaves them at least two votes short of the 50 they'd need to pass the most recent proposal from Senators Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, which would have converted the law into a block grant and cut Medicaid," Berman says.
"And both Trump and conservatives in the House have said in recent weeks that once the tax cuts become law, they would turn to welfare reform and try to enact work requirements and cuts to the food stamp program. House Speaker Paul Ryan has also said he's been working to persuade the president to go along with his longstanding desire to partially privatize Medicare, which Trump vowed to oppose on the campaign trail last year. Republicans were already facing a heavy lift to win support for trimming the social safety net during an election year. Jones's victory could extinguish those plans entirely.
"What might Republicans do instead? Well, infrastructure could rise quickly up the agenda. The issue has a base of bipartisan support in Congress, and the White House is reportedly preparing a detailed proposal that has languished for nearly all of 2017."
| | Putin Takes the Stage Under Attack. That Could Help Him | | From claims Moscow interfered in the US presidential election, to a new round of US sanctions, to the decision to bar its athletes from next year's Winter Olympics, the headlines paint Russia as a nation under attack from outsiders. Expect Vladimir Putin to play that up in his annual news conference Thursday, suggests Nathan Hodge in the Wall Street Journal.
"Mr. Putin has acquired an aura of competence and power in part thanks to Russia's swaggering return to the world stage in recent years. On Monday, during a trip to the Middle East, he declared Russia's military intervention on the side of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad a success; the next day Russian state television broadcast images of Russian troops returning home. The Russian president, who previously got the cold shoulder from other world leaders over the annexation of Crimea, is once again a fixture at international summits. At last month's Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation conference in Vietnam, he had several conversations with U.S. President Donald Trump, who said he found Mr. Putin 'very insulted' by the allegations of electoral meddling.
"But Russian observers say those allegations have helped create an impression among Russian citizens that their president is a political mastermind, a factor they say has raised Mr. Putin's presidential stature much as his assertive foreign policy has."
"Being accused, and even feared, in the West hardly hurts him. 'External pressure strengthens Putin's position within the Russian elite; the same thing with the population,' said Evgeny Minchenko, a Russian political analyst. 'That sense of injury that people have about the Russian team in the Olympics consolidates everyone around Putin.'"
| | The Other Kim Threat We Need to Talk About | | Add one more reason for the US to find a way of resolving the North Korea crisis soon, the Washington Post editorializes: Evidence that the Kim regime is "acquiring the essential machinery and seeking the know-how to produce large amounts of germ-warfare agents rather quickly."
"Biological weapons are tricky from a military point of view. They can be more easily hidden than nuclear missiles or conventional forces. Attacking them preemptively could risk unwanted dispersal of the germs. They are difficult to handle and store for long periods. If dispersed in the air for an attack, germs can shift with winds and weather, endangering troops and civilians, friend and foe alike," the Post says.
"But tests in the 1950s and 1960s carried out by the United States and Britain showed that in some conditions, biological weapons can also be deadly over wide swaths of territory. The United States gave up biological weapons in 1969, and an international treaty banning them took effect in 1975. North Korea joined the treaty in 1987, but the treaty's verification requirements are weak. Despite serious obstacles at home, North Korea has demonstrated an ability to evade sanctions and scale up military industrial plants when it wants to."
| | Syrian Life Expectancy May Have Tumbled 20 Years: Study | | The Syrian civil war has lowered life expectancy in the country by as much as 20 years, according to a new study in the Lancet Global Health journal, with almost one-in-five of those killed between 2011 and 2016 being children.
"Aerial bombing and shelling rapidly became primary causes of direct deaths of women and children and had disproportionate lethal effects on civilians," the authors write, noting that almost three-quarters of those killed were civilians. "Increased reliance on aerial bombing by the Syrian Government and international partners is likely to have contributed to findings that children were killed in increasing proportions over time, ultimately comprising a quarter of civilian deaths in 2016.
"The inordinate proportion of civilians among the executed is consistent with deliberate tactics to terrorize civilians. Deaths from barrel bombs were overwhelmingly civilian rather than opposition combatants, suggesting indiscriminate or targeted warfare contrary to international humanitarian law and possibly constituting a war crime." "Similar pledges have been made before and remain unfulfilled. On Tuesday a Kremlin spokesperson said Russia would retain a sizable force in Syria to fight 'terrorists.' Russia's definition of 'terrorism' in Syria is like that of the Assad regime, which equates it to political opposition."
Meanwhile, "[i]t is no small irony that Mr Putin has claimed victory over Islamic State: the bluster does little to hide the fact that his forces focused much more on targeting the anti-Assad opposition than they did the jihadi insurgency." | | | | | | |
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