Lucknow: Days after the Allahabad High Court observed that several illegalities were committed in fixing quota for appointment of 69,000 assistant teachers, Samajwadi Party chief Akhliesh Yadav on Wednesday attacked the BJP government over the issue of reservation and asserted that a caste census is the right solution to this problem.
“The decision on recruitment of 69,000 assistant teachers has come. It is the result of weak arguments in the case by the BJP government, which is against the basic spirit of reservation.
“To take away the rights of Dalits-backwards, BJP complicates the reservation issue through ‘vidhai mayajaal’ (legislative illusion). Caste census is the right solution to this problem so that reservation can be provided in proportion to the population,” Yadav said in a series of tweets in Hindi.
The Lucknow bench of Allahabad High Court on Monday held that the authorities committed several illegalities in fixing quota for appointment of 69,000 teachers in Uttar Pradesh through the Assistant Teachers Recruitment Examination (ATRE)-2019.
The court had directed the state government to review the final list issued in the matter on June 1, 2020, within the next three months after fixing the reservation in a proper manner.
The bench had also quashed the select list of 6,800 teachers issued on January 5, 2022.
“This is the sad story of ill-treatment meted out to the Dalits and OBCs in the BJP government. Is this the ‘Amritkal of freedom’ where assistant teachers are wailing on the streets to protect their livelihood? Will India become Vishwaguru just like this?
This time, 69,000 will bring change!,” Yadav said in another tweet with a video of protesting teachers.
In a separate tweet with another video of protesters, Yadav said, “Where there is no right to protest for one’s rights, everyone has to come forward to revive democracy. Now the Dalit-backward youth have understood the conspiracy of the BJP regarding reservation. BJP should remember that the youth have the power to change the ‘yug’ (era).”
The HC in its order had said that the reservation limit must not exceed 50 per cent of the total seats in any circumstances.
“Apparently, there was no clarity of the score and details of the reserved category candidates, who appeared in the ATRE 2019. There had been no endeavour from the state authorities, who are custodian of the records of the ATRE 2019 and would have assisted this court in providing the said records,” a bench of Justice Om Prakash Shukla said in his verdict disposing of as many as 117 writ petitions.
The court also showed sympathy to the teachers, already posted, facing ouster as result of the review, but went on to rule that the order will work to restore the balance of equity.
“It is the state authorities, who were under a constitutional duty to implement the provisions of the Reservation Act in its letter and spirit. However, the same has not been done, this court in order to balance the equity and keeping in mind these young men and women, who as teachers are going to shape the future of this country,” the court said.
It had granted liberty to the state government to frame a policy for adjustment of teachers who may be ousted by a revision in the select list of June 1, 2020.
Hearing a bunch of petitions, the bench had to look into the correctness of the quota provided by the state authorities in appointing 69,000 assistant teachers.
The cloud has “become essential to our daily lives,” Kemba Walden, the acting national cyber director, said in an interview. “If it’s disrupted, it could create large potentially catastrophic disruptions to our economy and to our government.”
In essence, she said, the cloud is now “too big to fail.”
The fear: For all their security expertise, the cloud giants offer concentrated targets that hackers could use to compromise or disable a wide range of victims all at once. The collapse of a major cloud provider could cut hospitals off from accessing medical records; paralyze ports and railroads; corrupt the software that help financial markets hum; and wipe out databases across small businesses, public utilities and government agencies.
“A single cloud provider going down could take down the internet like a stack of dominos,” said Marc Rogers, chief security officer at hardware security firm Q-Net Security and former head of information security at the content delivery provider Cloudflare.
And cloud servers haven’t proved to be as secure as government officials had hoped. Hackers from nations such as Russia have used cloud servers from companies like Amazon and Microsoft as a springboard to launch attacks on other targets. Cybercriminal groups also regularly rent infrastructure from U.S. cloud providers to steal data or extort companies.
Among other steps, the Biden administration recently said it will require cloud providers to verify the identity of their users to prevent foreign hackers from renting space on U.S. cloud servers (implementing an idea first introduced in a Trump administration executive order). And last week the administration warned in its national cybersecurity strategy that more cloud regulations are coming — saying it plans to identify and close regulatory gaps over the industry.
In a series of interviews about this new, tougher approach, administration officials stressed that they aren’t giving up on the cloud. Instead, they’re trying to ensure that rapid growth doesn’t translate to new security risks.
Cloud services can “take a lot of the security burden off of end users” by relieving them of difficult and time-consuming security practices, like applying patches and software updates, said Walden. Many small businesses and other customers simply lack the expertise and resources to protect their own data from increasingly adept hackers.
The problems come when those cloud providers aren’t providing the level of security they could.
So far, cloud providers have haven’t done enough to prevent criminal and nation-state hackers from abusing their services to stage attacks within the U.S., officials argued, pointing in particular to the 2020 SolarWinds espionage campaign, in which Russian spooks avoided detection in part by renting servers from Amazon and GoDaddy. For months, they used those to slip unnoticed into at least nine federal agencies and 100 companies.
That risk is only growing, said Rob Knake, the deputy national cyber director for strategy and budget. Foreign hackers have become more adept at “spinning up and rapidly spinning down” new servers, he said — in effect, moving so quickly from one rented service to the next that new leads dry up for U.S. law enforcement faster than it can trace them down.
On top of that, U.S. officials express significant frustration that cloud providers often up-charge customers to add security protections — both taking advantage of the need for such measures and leaving a security hole when companies decide not to spend the extra money. That practice complicated the federal investigations into the SolarWinds attack, because the agencies that fell victim to the Russian hacking campaign had not paid extra for Microsoft’s enhanced data-logging features.
“The reality is that today cloud security is often separate from cloud,” Anne Neuberger, the deputy national security adviser for cyber and emerging technology, said last week during a roll-out event for the new cyber strategy. “We need to get to a place where cloud providers have security baked in with that.”
So the White House is planning to use whatever powers it can pull on to make that happen — limited as they are.
“In the United States, we don’t have a national regulator for cloud. We don’t have a Ministry of Communication. We don’t have anybody who would step up and say, ‘It’s our job to regulate cloud providers,’” said Knake, of the strategy and budget office. The cloud, he said, “needs to have a regulatory structure around it.”
Knake’s office is racing to find new ways to police the industry using a ‘hodgepodge’ of existing tools, such as security requirements for specific sectors — like banking — and a program called FedRAMP that establishes baseline controls cloud providers must meet to sell to the federal government.
Part of what makes that difficult is that neither the government nor companies using cloud providers fully know what security protections cloud providers have in place. In a study last month on the U.S. financial sector’s use of cloud services, the Treasury Department found that cloud companies provided “insufficient transparency to support due diligence and monitoring” and U.S. banks could not “fully understand the risks associated with cloud services.”
But government officials say they see signs that the cloud providers’ attitude is changing, especially given that the companies increasingly see the public sector as a source for new revenue.
“Ten years ago, they would have been like, ‘No way,’” said Knake. But the major cloud providers “have now realized that if they want the growth that they want to have, if they want to be within critical sectors, they actually not only need to not stand in the way, but they need to provide tools and mechanisms to make it easy to prove compliance regulations,” he said.
The push for more regulations isn’t getting immediate objections from the cloud industry.
“I think that that’s highly appropriate,” said Phil Venables, Google’s chief information security officer.
But at the same time, Venables argued that cloud providers are subject to plenty of regulation already, pointing to FedRAMP and the requirements cloud providers must satisfy in order to work with regulated entities such as banks, defense industrial base companies and federal agencies — the very tools Knake described as “hodgepodge.”
The White House outlined a more aggressive regulatory regime in its new cyber strategy. It proposed holding software makers liable for insecure code and imposing stronger security mandates on critical infrastructure companies, like the cloud providers.
“The market has not provided for all the measures necessary to ensure that it’s not being inappropriately used, that it’s resilient, and that it’s being good caretakers of the small and medium-sized business under its umbrella,” said John Costello, the recently departed chief of staff in the Office of the National Cyber Director.
Cloud computing companies are “eager” to work with the White House on a “harmonized approach to security requirements across sectors,” said Ross Nodurft, executive director of the Alliance for Digital Innovation, a tech trade group whose members include cloud giants Palo Alto Networks, VMWare, Google Cloud and AWS — the cloud computing arm of Amazon. He also said that companies already comply with existing “extensive security requirements” for specific industries.
A spokesperson for Microsoft, which is not a member of ADI, referred POLITICO to a Thursday blog post from a Microsoft executive making similar assertions that the company looks forward to working with agencies on crafting appropriate regulations. AWS said in a statement that it prioritizes security but did not address the question of whether it supports additional regulation. Oracle did not respond to a request for comment.
If the government fails to find a way to ensure the resilience of the cloud, it fears the fallout could be devastating. Cloud providers have effectively become “three or four single points of failure” for the U.S. economy, Knake said.
According to a 2017 study from the insurance giant Lloyds, an outage at one of the top three cloud providers lasting between three and six days could cause $15 billion in damages.
Such a collapse could be triggered by a cyberattack on a major cloud provider, a natural or human-caused disaster that disrupts or cuts power to a major data center, or simply a failure in the design and maintenance of a core cloud service.
If the White House can’t get the results it wants through using existing regulations and cajoling companies into improving practices voluntarily, it will have to hit up Congress. And that could be its biggest hurdle.
Some Republicans have already criticized the White House’s national cybersecurity strategy for its heavy emphasis on regulation.
“We must clarify federal cybersecurity roles and responsibilities, not create additional burdens, to minimize confusion and redundancies across the government,” Rep. Mark Green (R.-Tenn.), the chair of the House Homeland Security Committee, and Rep. Andrew Garbarino (R-N.Y.), head of its cyber and infrastructure protection subcommittee, said in a statement last week.
As gatekeepers of the House Homeland Security Committee, Garbarino and Green wield de facto veto power over any major cybersecurity legislation that the White House might send Congress.
In the short term, that eliminates the possibility of the more ambitious cloud policy proposals outlined or hinted at in White House’s new strategy
That could mean that the administration will have to increase pressure on the companies to do more on their own.
Trey Herr, a former senior security strategist who worked in cloud computing at Microsoft, said cybersecurity agencies could, for example, require the heads of the major cloud providers to appear before top government cyber brass on a semi-regular basis and prove that they’re taking adequate steps to manage the risk within their systems.
The major cloud providers “have plenty of ways to talk about the security of one product, but few to manage the risk of all those products tied together,” said Herr, who is now the director of the Atlantic Council’s cyber statecraft initiative.
“It’s one thing to do a good job building a helipad on the top of your house,” he said. But “no one is asking if the house is built to handle that helipad in the first place.”
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
Union Road Transport and Highways Minister Nitin Gadkari
Nagpur: Union Road Transport Minister Nitin Gadkari said on Friday that the bad quality of Detailed Project Reports (DPRs) leads to a host of problems including cost escalation in road projects, and he was in the “mood to take a decision to allow international firms to make them.”
He was speaking at the International Conference on Asian Scenario on Infrastructural Development here.
There is a need to reduce the cost of production in road projects, he said.
Expressing disappointment over the quality of DPRs in road construction, the minister said he has “never seen a perfect DPR” in his life.
The construction industry should work on improving the DPR quality, he said.
“I am in the mood to take a decision to allow international companies to make DPRs and giving them priority, though I am not of that opinion, but because of not so good DPRs, lot of problems are being faced. Everywhere there is cost escalation,” Gadkari said.
He also said that agriculture by-products and biomass should be utilised in construction work.
Initially, the objects were showing up on our newly upgraded radars and we assumed they were “ghosts in the machine,” or software glitches. But then we began to correlate the radar tracks with multiple surveillance systems, including infrared sensors that detected heat signatures. Then came the hair-raising near misses that required us to take evasive action.
These were no mere balloons. The unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) accelerated at speeds up to Mach 1, the speed of sound. They could hold their position, appearing motionless, despite Category 4 hurricane-force winds of 120 knots. They did not have any visible means of lift, control surfaces or propulsion — in other words nothing that resembled normal aircraft with wings, flaps or engines. And they outlasted our fighter jets, operating continuously throughout the day. I am a formally trained engineer, but the technology they demonstrated defied my understanding.
After that near-miss, we had no choice but to submit a safety report, hoping that something could be done before it was too late. But there was no official acknowledgement of what we experienced and no further mechanism to report the sightings — even as other aircrew flying along the East coast quietly began sharing similar experiences. Our only option was to cancel or move our training, as the UAP continued to maneuver in our vicinity unchecked.
Nearly a decade later we still don’t know what they were.
When I retired from the Navy in 2019, I was the first active-duty pilot to come forward publicly and testify to Congress. In the years since, there has been some notable coverage of the encounters and Congress has taken some action to force the military and intelligence agencies to do much more to get to the bottom of these mysteries.
But there has not been anything near the level of public and official attention that has been paid to the recent shoot downs of a Chinese spy balloon and the three other unknown objects that were likely research balloons.
And that’s a problem.
Advanced objects demonstrating cutting-edge technology that we cannot explain are routinely flying over our military bases or entering restricted airspace.
“UAP events continue to occur in restricted or sensitive airspace, highlighting possible concerns for safety of flight or adversary collection activity,” the Director of National Intelligence reported last month, citing 247 new reports over the last 17 months. “Some UAP appeared to remain stationary in winds aloft, move against the wind, maneuver abruptly, or move at considerable speed, without discernible means of propulsion.”
The Navy has also officially acknowledged 11 near misses with UAP that required evasive action and triggered mandatory safety reports between 2004 and 2021.Advanced UAP also pose a growing safety hazard to commercial airliners. Last May, the Federal Aviation Administration issued an alert after a passenger aircraft flying over West Virginia experienced a rare failure of two major systems while passing underneath what appeared to be a UAP.
One thing we do know is these craft aren’t part of some classified U.S. project. “We were quite confident that was not the explanation,” Scott Bray, the deputy director of the Office of Naval Intelligence, testified before Congress last year.
Florida Sen. Marco Rubio confirmed in a recent interview that whatever the origin of these objects it is not the U.S. military. “We have things flying over our military bases and places where we’re conducting military exercises and we don’t know what it is and it isn’t ours,” said Rubio, who is vice chair of the Intelligence Committee.
President Joe Biden rightly points out the real national security and aviation safety risks, from “foreign intelligence collection” to “hazard to civilian air traffic,” that arise from low-tech “balloon-like” entities. I applaud his new order to create an interagency UAP taskforce and a government-wide effort to address unidentified objects, and his proposal to make sure all aerial craft are registered and identifiable according to a global standard is good common-sense.
However, what the president did not address during his press conference Feb. 16 were the UAP that exhibit advanced performance capabilities. Where is the transparency and urgency from the administration and Congress to investigate highly advanced objects in restricted airspace that our military cannot explain? How will this new taskforce be more effective than existing efforts if we are not being clear and direct about the scope and nature of advanced UAP?
The American public must demand accountability. We need to understand what is in our skies — period.
In the coming days, I will launch Americans for Safe Aerospace (ASA), a new advocacy organization for aerospace safety and national security. ASA will support pilots and other aerospace professionals who are reporting UAP. Our goal is to demand more disclosure from our public officials about this significant safety and national security problem. We will provide credible voices, public education, grassroots activism and lobbying on Capitol Hill to get answers about UAP.
President Biden needs to address this issue as transparently as possible. The White House should not conflate the low-tech objects that were recently shot down with unexplained high-tech, advanced objects witnessed by pilots. Our government needs to admit that it is possible another country has developed game-changing technology. We need to urgently address this threat by bringing together the best minds in our military, intelligence, science and tech sectors. If advanced UAP are not foreign drones, then we absolutely need a robust scientific inquiry into this mystery. Obfuscation and denial are a recipe for more conspiracy theories and greater distrust that stymie our search for the truth.
We need a coordinated, data-driven response that unites the public and private sectors. The North American Aerospace Defense Command, the U.S. Space Force and a host of other military and civilian agencies need to be marshaled in support of a much more aggressive and vigilant effort, along with our scientific community and private industry.
Right now, the pieces of the UAP puzzle are scattered across silos in the military, government and the private sector. We need to integrate and analyze these massive data sets with new methods like AI. We also need to make this data available to the best scientists outside of government.
We have strong supporters of more data sharing. Sen. Rubio has suggested the Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), which was set up by Congress last year, share its data on unidentified objects with academic institutions and civilian scientific organizations. The American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics and the Galileo Project at Harvard, tech startups like Enigma Labs, and traditional defense contractors could all play a role.
Unfortunately, all UAP reports and videos are classified, meaning active-duty pilots cannot come forward publicly and FOIA requests are denied. These are two major steps backwards for transparency, but they can be mitigated with data-sharing.
I am impressed by the recent whistleblower protections enacted last year to encourage more pilots and others to come forward, and I support the fresh push by Rubio and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) for full funding of AARO. Given the stakes, Congress also needs to fund grants for more scientific inquiry of UAP.
Above all, we need to listen to pilots. Military and civilian pilots provide critical, first-hand insights into advanced UAP. Right now, the stigma attached to reporting UAP is still too strong. Since I came forward about UAP in 2019, only one other pilot from my squadron has gone public. Commercial pilots also face significant risks to their careers for doing so.
New rules are needed to require civilian pilots to report UAP, protect the pilots from retribution, and a process must be established for investigating their reports. Derision or denial over the unknown is unacceptable. This is a time for curiosity.
If the phenomena I witnessed with my own eyes turns out to be foreign drones, they pose an urgent threat to national security and airspace safety. If they are something else, it must be a scientific priority to find out.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
McLaurin says sales balance out and remain healthy, but this seesawing of interest reflects a very different worldview from the one that helped his organization become a Washington cultural institution. “People in this mind think of the White House as now,” he says. “We don’t think of the White House as now. We think of the White House as a stage that American history has been played out on for 223 years.”
If that view is gaining a foothold among not-especially-radical folks who’d otherwise be glad to pay $24.95 for an ornament featuring Lyndon Johnson’s 1967 Blue Room Christmas Tree, it’s probably even more pronounced among the general public.
There’s no shortage of data on the public’s view of the sitting president. But polling on the presidency, that historic symbol of American nationhood, is harder to come by. And yet, anecdotally, it appears that having a country where any chief executive is lucky to crack 50 percent approval ratings is having an impact on the institution itself. The long weekend formerly known as George Washington’s Birthday may now be known as Presidents Day, but the country is in no mood to celebrate.
Consider the book market, where the decades-long run of doorstop-sized biographies of presidents seems to have slowed, with no author having yet assumed the mantle of the late David McCullough. Hardcover nonfiction is down across the board, as is history. “We talk about it all the time as agents and publishers, what do people want?” says Rafe Sagalyn, the prominent Washington literary agent. “Well, people want escapism. A book that takes them somewhere different is good.”
Sagalyn says one replacement for president books among readers of serious nonfiction involves tomes about what he calls “president-adjacent” characters, like Stacey Schiff’s 2022 book about Revolutionary War agitator Samuel Adams or Susan Glasser and Peter Baker’s bestseller about longtime Washington fixer James A. Baker III. By their very subjects, these books tend to have more room for nuance — leaving readers with more sense of discovery, and relying less on a shared pantheon of heroes.
Even the comparatively few president books that are due out this year suggest readers’ curiosity isn’t consumed by larger-than-life statesmen. Instead, they’re focused on what Bruce Nichols, the publisher of Little, Brown and Company, described to me as “non-canonical” chief executives. For instance, a rare biography of James Garfield is due this summer. Garfield spent a scant six months in office in 1881 before dying of a gunshot wound by an assassin, but the rest of his life was fascinating — or at least readers had better hope it was. Likewise, Richard Norton Smith’s long-planned biography of Gerald Ford, a 2½-year White House resident, is expected in April.
In the broad sweep of American history, it’s no surprise that interest in the presidency would change over time. The framers themselves were wary of too much falderal around the office. Over the years, we’ve gone up and down, from pious lessons featuring George Washington and the cherry tree to dishy gossip featuring JFK and Marilyn Monroe. But these days, with significant portions of the country telling pollsters that the identity of the president affects their day-to-day happiness, we have a situation that might confound hero-worshippers and dirt-diggers alike: On any given day, around half the country is liable to find the institution itself a painful subject to think about.
That new reality may complicate life for the Washington cottage industry built around the assumption that America is always hungry for trivia and wisdom about presidents.
The industry’s output, so far, seems unaffected by the national mood. Books in the venerable genre of “presidents — they’re just like us” continue to be published: A 2021 book about presidential dogs (it sold poorly), a 2022 volume about presidential best friends (it beat expectations), a brand-new book about presidents and food. The former CNN political analyst Chris Cillizza’s book about presidents and sports will be published later this spring.
The anecdotes that populate books like these represent essential tradecraft for Tevi Troy. A former official in the George W. Bush administration and the author of books on presidential pop culture (2013’s What Jefferson Read, Ike Watched, and Obama Tweeted), presidential disaster-management (2016’s Shall We Wake the President?), and presidential staff rivalries (2020’s Fight House), he’s someone who has turned the marshaling of presidential arcana into a career, or at least a robust side hustle. (He’s also a fellow at the Bipartisan Policy Center.)
Last year, Troy combined his love for all things presidential with a business that’s potentially more lucrative than selling nonfiction books: management consulting. He launched 1600 Lessons, an executive-coaching series that builds its lessons around presidential leadership. “The idea is that the presidential concepts are really applicable in the business world, or in running any organization,” he says. “It’s actionable, specific recommendations. Educational because of teaching about these presidents, but also informative and entertaining, because it’s based on all these great stories of presidents.”
Priced in the five figures, the five-part workshop’s early clients have included Lockheed Martin and Eli Lilly.
Why would anyone — especially a publicly traded company — hire a D.C. think tank maven to craft management lessons based on an office that so many Americans associate with reviled figures? The answer is easy, Troy says: “Presidents are one of the few things that still connect us as a nation. The Super Bowl was the most watched event of the year, and only one-third of Americans watched it. Everyone knows who the president is.” So if you’re putting together management-coaching presentations about preparation or succession-planning, to cite two of Troy’s sessions, the presidency represents a relatable set piece. (He also makes clear he teaches about leadership errors, like Eisenhower’s failure to prepare the way for a successor.)
Thus, while most Americans may think of the upcoming long weekend as a time for linen sales, Troy is glad to be an outlier. Presidents Day, he says, is “like my Christmas and Thanksgiving Day rolled into one.”
One possibly surprising person who doesn’t share that sentiment: Michael Beschloss, the NBC presidential historian and perhaps Washington’s best-known source of stories about the presidency. Once upon a time, Washington’s Birthday on February 22 was a federal holiday, and many states also took off Lincoln’s birthday, 10 days earlier. But as the holiday calendar changed to be built around three-day weekends, the two were combined into a single day without a namesake.
“Many people think that Presidents Day is a moment intended for worship of all presidents equally — even Donald Trump, Warren Harding and James Buchanan. To my mind, this point of view is basically royalist and pre-1776,” says Beschloss, who has become increasingly vocal in his concern for the state of American democracy. “Underlying this would be a ridiculous premise that all presidents in history must be wonderful, just in differing ways.” By contrast, the founders’ view “was to assume that someone elected president could turn out to be a scoundrel or incompetent, and to build a system that protects the American people from such dangers.”
In the context of current events, Beschloss says he wouldn’t be surprised if readers’ interest turned away from themes that venerate presidents for their own sake.
“People are understandably more resistant to treacly stories of past presidents that assume that these 44 people were all basically good guys, trying, more or less, to do the right things,” he says. “In these anxious, often ugly times, sadly, that is an approach that many Americans will not find very convincing.”
For his part, the White House Historical Association’s McLaurin is planning to spend the weekend in a place where a more respectful attitude may still prevail: overseas. Working with American expats and the State Department, the association is organizing wreath-layings at statues of American presidents located in 13 foreign countries ranging from Australia to Bulgaria to Cameroon.
McLaurin says he will be on hand for six wreath-layings in London and one in Scotland.
“I think it’s a wonderful education tool,” he told me this week, shortly before flying across the Atlantic. “It gets attention in these local places, media attention and Americans’ attention that are living abroad and doing something on Presidents Day to honor an American president. And that’s the type of thing we do. There is political noise in the air, but our mission is to persevere and keep doing what we were founded to do 60 years ago.”
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
Haley could very likely have it worse than the candidates did in 2016, encountering a veritable buzz saw of sexist and racist attacks from the moment she declares her presidential run. That’s because the base of the Republican Party, the most rabid and committed primary voters, has become more male and more far-right since Trump became the party standard bearer. Misogynist ideology and hate has proliferated so much among in recent years that the Southern Poverty Law Center has begun tracking “Male Supremacy” groups. Groups like the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys that supported Trump and have seen members convicted of seditious conspiracy for involvement in the January 6th insurrection on the Capitol are also rabidly anti-woman. Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes told listeners on his podcast that, “Maybe the reason I’m sexist is because women are dumb.” Avowed White Supremacist Nick Fuentes, who dined recently with Trump at Mar-A-Lago, has told followers that his ideal world is one where the “women don’t have the right to vote,” one in which “women are wearing veils at church,” and “women [aren’t] in the workforce.”
In another era these extremists could be safely relegated to the political margins, but today they are playing a more central role than ever. While Kevin McCarthy and some other Republican leaders have condemned Fuentes, Trump himself refused to disavow him and dozens of lawmakers refused to comment about it either way. Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who continues to enjoy some of the highest ratings in cable TV, has used his considerable platform to launch racist and sexist attacks that have become more overt and more vitriolic in the last few years.
Of course, Trump, as the only declared Republican presidential candidate, looms large. He built his base on attacking women, particularly women of color. From endlessly debasing women journalists, political leaders and public figures who have criticized him to his braggadocio on the “Access Hollywood” tapes and racist rants against Secretary Elaine Chao Trump has never tried to hide his distain in even minimal veneer. He even brought Roger Ailes, who before his death in 2017 had been accused of sexual harassment by at least 20 women, on as an adviser to his campaign and appointed Bill Shine, who was accused of covering up sexual harassment during his time at Fox News, as White House communications director. Researchers found that in the 2016 election “hostile sexism” was a primary predictor of support for Trump, second only to party affiliation.
Astonishingly, it’s not just Trump or right-wing extremist men that push sexist ideology in the Republican Party. Congresswomen Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert have both embraced anti-feminism, despite their own career ambitions. It’s a trend that’s not especially new. Phyllis Schlafly, who was among the first prominent conservative women to back Trump when he ran for president, successfully fought passage of the Equal Rights Amendment, and railed against equal rights for women even as she was benefiting from the system she fought. But these attitudes pose a particularly significant threat today because so many of the figures most at ease with hostile sexism now hold positions of real power in the Republican Party. Lauren Boebert may be a back bencher, but she was part of the crew that held McCarthy’s speaker vote hostage. She told the Denver Post that she believes “women are the lesser vessel, and we need masculinity in our lives to balance that.” Taylor Greene, who now holds leadership positions on Congressional committees and is vying to be Trump’s running mate in ’24, told an interviewer that Satan was manipulating women into having abortions.
Haley faces a high hurdle in even convincing Republican voters that a woman can be president. A December 2022 USA Today poll revealed just how challenging gender is in Republican politics. Overall, a majority of voters (55 percent) say that gender doesn’t matter in presidential elections. Those who did have a preference chose a male president by more than 2-1, 28 percent-12 percent.
Among Republicans, 50 percent said the ideal president would be male while a paltry 2 percent said she would be female. In contrast, Democrats with a preference chose a woman over a man by 2-1, 24 percent-11 percent. Among those voters with a preference, men by 8-1 preferred a male president over a female one, 32 percent-4 percent. Even women were somewhat more likely to prefer a male president (25 percent-19 percent).
Politics is as much about time and place as it is about talent. And in this time and place, the hurdles for a woman in the Republican Party are exceptionally high. Whether we agree with Haley’s positions or not, we should all root for a level political playing field that stays in the bounds of decency and civility. Unfortunately, in today’s Republican political reality, the chances that happens are slim to none.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
Thiruvananthapuram: Hailing Rahul Gandhi’s determination, AICC general secretary K C Venugopal on Saturday said during the initial days of the Bharat Jodo Yatra, there was a delicate situation in which the former Congress chief faced severe knee problems that forced him to think about whether he should be replaced by someone else.
Venugopal, a close confidante of Rahul, said the predicament had even forced Priyanka Gandhi to tell him that her brother might be giving up the nationwide foot march due to the severe pain and hand over the baton of the yatra to senior Congress leaders.
“His knee pain had aggravated when the yatra entered Kerala on the third day of its commencement from Kanyakumari. One night, he called me to tell (me) about the severity of his knee pain and suggested to carry out the campaign by replacing him with any another leader,” the senior Congress leader said during a function organised at KPCC headquarters here in the evening to honour the Bharat Jodo yatris from Kerala.
Narrating the sequence of events that he had faced when the yatra that began from Kanyakumari in Tamil Nadu on September 7, 2022 entered Kerala, Venugopal said a yatra without Rahul Gandhi was unimaginable for the Congress workers and leaders.
“Then came Priyanka Gandhi’s call to inform about the severity of knee pain Rahul suffers. She even thought of suggesting to hand over the campaign to other senior leaders,” the AICC general secretary said, adding those were anxious moments wherein he stood with folded hands, praying for divine intervention.
Finally, a physiotherapist suggested by Rahul Gandhi joined his medical team and treated him. “With God’s grace, his pain was cured,” Venugopal told the gathering at the function also attended by senior party leaders including A K Antony.
The yatra led by Rahul Gandhi had entered Kerala on September 10 and it traversed through the state for 19 days.
The Bharat Jodo Yatra had ended on January 30 in an opposition show of strength with leaders of several parties joining Congress leader Rahul Gandhi as he capped his ambitious 145-day journey that covered some 4,000 kilometres from Kanyakumari to Kashmir.
In fact, Oversight Committee Chair James Comer (R-Ky.) suggested in a brief interview with POLITICO that the Justice Department should hold off on issuing any indictment against Hunter Biden so Republicans can complete their probe. He openly acknowledged that criminal charges could hinder his investigation, giving any witnesses in the DOJ case clearance to assert their Fifth Amendment rights.
If the DOJ does go that route, one option would be for the panel to pivot to focus more heavily on other Biden family members, including brothers of the president, the GOP chair said.
“If they indict Hunter Biden, there’s still a lot of stuff out there. And say we can’t touch anything [Hunter-related], it freezes up all the evidence — there’s still a lot of stuff out there,” Comer said.
In calling for the DOJ to delay, Comer said prosecutors had already “waited this long” and Republicans would only “need a matter of months.” But his recommendation is all but guaranteed to fall flat. If the DOJ did listen, it would mirror the sort of unfounded coordination accusations that Republicans have previously lobbed at Democrats.
The DOJ tends to purposely avoid linking its work to Congress’ timeline — a frequent source of frustration for both parties. For example, members of the Jan. 6 select committee routinely groused that the department didn’t appear to be pursuing matters they had uncovered in their inquiry that they believed potentially rose to criminal levels.
Republicans are formally kicking off their investigation into the Biden family this week with their first public hearing tied to the probe, focused on Twitter’s decision to restrict a New York Post story on Hunter Biden just before the 2020 election. (Twitter officials have publicly acknowledged that they view the decision as a mistake.)
As part of the hearing, three former company executives — James Baker, former Twitter deputy general counsel; Yoel Roth, Twitter’s former global head of trust and safety; and Vijaya Gadde, Twitter’s former chief legal officer — are expected to testify. Comer formally subpoenaed them, but aides said it was meant to give the witnesses legal cover to appear before the panel.
Democrats, meanwhile, are expected to use the hearing to ask their own questions about Twitter’s handling of former President Donald Trump’s controversial tweets. Their witness for the hearing will be Anika Collier Navaroli, a whistleblower who previously spoke with the House’s Jan. 6 committee over the social media platform’s handling of Trump’s tweets.
The former president was banned from the platform in the wake of the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol by his supporters, only to be allowed back on recently by its current owner, Elon Musk.
The hearing serves as Comer’s opener into his larger Biden family investigation, which is expected to take a broad dive that specifically touches on Hunter Biden’s business dealings, bank records and art sales but also spans beyond the First Son. Republicans are hunting for a smoking gun that ties Joe Biden’s decisions to his son’s business agreements, though no evidence has yet emerged linking the two.
POLITICO has not undergone the process to authenticate the Hunter Biden laptop that underpinned the New York Post story, but reporter Ben Schreckinger has confirmed the authenticity of some emails on it. A committee aide described themselves as highly confident that the information gleaned from the laptop was connected to Hunter Biden, but argued that the onus was on skeptics of its veracity to prove that any specific email or document on it isn’t valid.
Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.), a member of the Oversight Committee, questioned the need for either the DOJ or House GOP investigation, arguing that they were both “based on false premises.” But he also identified the undeniable political pickle that the DOJ’s active investigation would present for Republicans by limiting their requests for information and cooperation from potential witnesses.
“Why not, in some cases, say … ‘we know DOJ is investigating, and we’re gonna wait to hear the results before we do.’ We did that with the Mueller report,” Connolly added.
The DOJ declined to comment for this story. But the department previously outlined how it responds to congressional investigations in a letter last month to Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), chair of the Judiciary Committee and a member of the Oversight panel.
That letter detailed how the DOJ handles information requests spawning from congressional investigations, effectively warning that it was reserving the right not to cooperate with GOP demands if they’re tied to an ongoing internal matter.
Carlos Uriarte, DOJ’s legislative affairs chief, noted in the letter that “consistent with longstanding policy and practice, any oversight requests must be weighed against the Department’s interests in protecting the integrity of its work.” The DOJ, in accordance with long-standing policy, hasn’t formally confirmed the existence of a Hunter Biden investigation.
Regardless of whether the DOJ ultimately issues any Hunter Biden-related indictments, though, the ongoing federal probe has cast a shadow over Congress’ fight on that front.
Republicans say they are basically in the dark about the tightly held inquiry, which has reportedly gone on for years. And some Democrats view the DOJ probe as a legitimate counterpart to House Republicans, saying it is the proper lane for investigating any of Hunter Biden’s potential missteps.
Hunter Biden and his team are also going on offense, urging the DOJ, Delaware attorney general and IRS to investigate many of the figures who came to possess the files culled from his alleged laptop — and some of the “inconsistencies” in stories about how those various offices came to access the records.
That request from Hunter Biden would require the administration to take up the politically explosive matter at the same time House Republicans are preparing to seek similar information from the same offices. Administration officials have given no indication they plan to do so.
Katherine Tully-McManus contributed to this story.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
Ballia: Uttar Pradesh Minister of State for Minority Welfare Danish Azad Ansari on Friday targeted the Samajwadi Party (SP) and said its leaders have a problem with the progress of the Muslim youth.
Ansari, the only Muslim minister in the Yogi Adityanath-led BJP government in Uttar Pradesh, told reporters in Sikandarpur on Friday afternoon said that the progress of Muslim youths makes SP leaders “uncomfortable” and they are “troubled” by it.
Calling upon the youth of the Muslim community to contribute in the development of the society, Ansari said today it is necessary that they should contribute in the development of the society with promptness.
The minister alleged that the SP has a problem with the development of the minority society of Uttar Pradesh. Expressing his gratitude towards Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath, Ansari said the CM has given him a place in his Council of Ministers for uplift of society and he will serve the public with all sincerity.
Ansari went on to say that if leaders of the SP were concerned about the society, they would have talked about its progress and the uplift of the youth. “The SP does not want the minorities to progress,” he alleged.
