Srinagar, May 05: Three soldiers, who were injured during the ongoing encounter in Kandi forest area of Rajouri district, have succumbed to their injuries, taking the death count to five.
An official told the news agency—Kashmir News Observer (KNO) that three soldiers, who injured in the ongoing operation today morning, succumbed to their injuries at Command hospital Udhampur.
Earlier in the day, Army in a statement had stated that two soldiers were killed while three others including an officer have been injured after militants triggered an explosive during the anti-militancy operation in Kandi forest area.
With the death of three more soldiers, the toll has climbed to five in the ongoing operation in Rajouri.
Notably, encounter broke out between militants and security forces in Kandi forest area in Rajouri district today morning.
Following the fierce gunfight internet services were also suspended in the area as a precautionary measure—(KNO)
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SRINAGAR: The authorities on Friday suspended mobile internet services in Rajouri following a fierce encounter between militants and the security forces in the Kandi Forest area of the district.
Quoting officials, KNO reported that mobile internet services have been suspended as a precautionary measure in the area.
Earlier, in the early morning hours, an encounter broke out in Kandi Forest area of Rajouri between militants and counter-insurgent forces.
Meanwhile, Army in a statement said that two soldiers were killed, while an officer among four were injured after militants triggered an explosive during the ongoing encounter.
Lane also appeared to have attended a meeting where 11 Arizona Republicans falsely declared themselves presidential electors. In a video of that meeting, which was posted by the Arizona Republican Party, a man wearing a Trump campaign jacket with the name “Lane” on it is seen passing out papers for people to sign “certifying themselves Arizona’s ‘duly elected and qualified electors.’”
POLITICO also obtained a video from September of 2021 — during which time Lane was working as an RNC “election integrity” official in Virginia — in which he fanned conspiracy theories about the election. Lane was speaking to a gathering of conservative grassroots organizers about the RNC’s statewide plan to deploy poll workers and watchers in the upcoming gubernatorial election.
It’s important that “we learn from mistakes, we learn from any fraud, stealing,” said Lane.
“I don’t think there’s any doubt that last year was stolen. ‘Stolen’ means different things to different people. On one end, it can mean the Chinese, the Russians, uh, hacked machines, or there was an influx of ballots, or fake ballots, whatever,” Lane said in the video given to POLITICO from the group Documented, a non-partisan investigative watchdog that says it believes “democracy itself is under attack.”
“On the other end is, ‘Hey, Covid was a thing, Democrats took complete advantage of it, within the laws, and outside the laws.’ And there’s everything in between,” said Lane.
Lane was among a number of people from the 2020 Trump campaign who both received subpoenas from law enforcement and complied with those requests. The committee declined to comment about the incident or his work in the House. Lane, who does not appear to have faced any charges, did not respond to an email seeking comment.
Lane was a young aide on the Trump campaign at the time, fresh out of graduating from law school. But his career path from there through the House Administration Committee underscores how individuals connected to Donald Trump’s unsuccessful scheme remain well within the corridors of power, including on matters of election conduct.
The House Administration Committee is often considered a sleepy backwater that runs the logistics of the House, including doling out parking and office spaces. But it also has broad jurisdiction over elections — from campaign finance law to voting rights and election administration. Its chair, Rep. Bryan Steil (R-WI), did not vote to block certification of the 2020 election but it’s been holding numerous hearings recently about the 2022 election, some that include individuals who deny the legitimacy of the 2020 election.
Last week, it held a hearing featuring a number of individuals who participated in a recent Washington conference hosted by conservative groups pushing for voting restrictions. Among those who testified were Hans Von Spakovsky, the Heritage Foundation’s elections lawyer who has a long history of advocating for voting restrictions and insists the U.S. system is rife with voter fraud.
Lane’s role would typically include helping to plan hearings, recommend witnesses and draft questions and helping to draft legislation, according to a person familiar with the committee’s operations.
In a potential sign of Lane’s influence over the committee’s work, last month Lynn Taylor of the Virginia Institute for Public Policy testified before the election subcommittee on the issue of “election observer access.” Taylor worked closely in 2021 with Lane, whom she introduced at the September event, and Cleta Mitchell, an attorney who advised Trump in the 2020 election. Mitchell spread false election claims and participated in the former president’s infamous call with Georgia election officials where Trump urged them to “find” votes. Mitchell resigned from her law firm following criticism of her involvement in the call.
After the 2020 election, Mitchell created a network of activist groups to recruit and coach poll watchers and workers in multiple battleground states. Mitchell’s broader “Election Integrity Network” is now collaborating directly with Taylor, according to Lindsey Zea, a research analyst for the VIPP who spoke during a Feb. 21 Zoom meeting of activists obtained by POLITICO.
Mitchell has also spoken openly about having a working relationship with the House Administration Committee. At a meeting last week for the Election Assistance Commission, a federal agency that serves as a clearinghouse for election information and upon whose advisory board she serves, Mitchell praised the committee’s staff.
“They’ve been wonderful about working with and helping to educate volunteers and citizen activists on weekly calls,” Mitchell said of the staffers. Mitchell did not respond to a request for comment.
During those weekly meetings, which often occur over Zoom and include conservative activists, Mitchell has encouraged attendees to become familiar with local elections clerks as she pushes a menu of reforms that would reduce ballot access among certain groups, including university students.
In an April 13 call run by an allied group, Michigan Fair Elections, Mitchell said “we are at a turning point in our republic.” According to the call, which was obtained by POLITICO, Mitchell went on to say that U.S. “electoral systems” need to change or Republicans will “lose the presidential election” again in 2024. A lawyer on a separate April 6 call run by the same group spoke about plans to sue public universities in Michigan that help register students to vote.
Mitchell has served as a member of the EAC’s advisory board since late 2021, when she was appointed as one of the two representatives of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, an independent federal commission created in the 1950s. Her position there has been the subject of controversy given the key role she played in Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election. Though the board does not have a policy-making role and meets irregularly, it can make recommendations on voluntary guidelines to the EAC. The EAC certifies voting systems and advises local election offices on compliance with federal election regulations.
Earlier this month, the progressive think tank Center for American Progress issued a report highlighting the “failure” to hold Trump and his allies “fully accountable” for their “scheme to destabilize the democratic system for political purposes.”
As a RNC official, Lane collaborated with Mitchell in Virginia’s off-year gubernatorial election in 2021, which Mitchell considered a test pilot for nationwide “election integrity” coalitions. And in a January 2023 letter to RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel, Mitchell and other members of her coalition complained that Lane and some other “election integrity” officials had not retained their positions after the 2022 midterms. The letter referred to Lane as an “outstanding leader.”
“We were distressed, to say the least, to learn that all the state (election integrity directors) and the entire field staff were to be terminated,” the letter read. “Preventing cheating in our nation’s elections is a priority to voters,” it continued.
Shortly thereafter, Lane took up the job with the House Administration Committee, according to his LinkedIn page.
“I have already had the opportunity to meet with Secretaries of State and county election officials from across the country,” Lane said on his LinkedIn in announcing his new role. He said he is “ecstatic” to be in the position.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
My family’s history in North America begins in North Carolina, where an ancestor, Lucy Hardiman, was enslaved. She must have been a resistor because her daughter, Mary Coleman, would weep when recounting the lashes Lucy received during her involuntary entrapment.
Mary moved to Chattanooga, Tennessee, where my family lived from the late 1800s to 1941 during the first phase of their inhabiting the state; a younger generation returned to Tennessee in the early 1990s.
The first phase of my family’s Tennessee history was marked by abandonment, murder, mental illness and alcoholism. Like many Black southern families, there exist cold cases. My grandfather Mack Hopkins was murdered by a white man who said my grandfather had threatened him with a knife. One version of the murder was that my grandfather knocked on the wrong door. There was an inquest, and the white man went free.
My grandfather, a laborer, supplemented the family’s food supply by hunting. My only photo is of him posing in front of a car. About a dozen rabbits, a source of protein, are strung up. It’s bad enough that the capitalist system has opposed Blacks acquiring assets, but the murder of Black men compounds the loss, depriving their survivors of assets these victims might have accrued.
My mother was 17 when she visited my grandfather in the hospital; his clothes were soaked with blood. As he was lying near death, he told her he’d overheard the doctor say, “Let that n—-r die.” Years later, when I received a copy of the death certificate, his cause of death was listed as “shock,” with the sentence, “stabbed by some man.”
Four years after my grandfather’s death, I was born in the hallway of the same hospital.
I haven’t been able to obtain the inquest report, but in court my mother called the murderer of my grandfather a liar. She was tough like that, an attribute she inherited from her grandmother, Mary Coleman, who opened a food stand in her front yard after her Irish husband abandoned her. Mary catered to white workers who were employees of the pipe manufacturer located near the Tennessee River in Chattanooga. She insisted that they call her Mrs. Coleman.
The 1930s were difficult for my mother. In 1930, Mary Coleman, her grandmother, died. In 1934, her father was murdered. In 1938, she became pregnant by a Knoxville college student. He refused to support her, leaving her and me in poverty while he married into the Black aristocracy.
We ultimately moved to Buffalo, New York, in search of a safer existence, but until then, my mother found a way for us to survive in the Tennessee of the 1930s and 1940s. In her 2003 memoir, “Black Girl From Tannery Flats,” she called it her “Southern Strategy.”
What she had learned was that good white people would protect you from the bad ones. That was her Southern Strategy. My grandfather’s murderer represented white evil. And my mother could call her father’s murderer a liar because present in the court was Mrs. Clifford Grote, a member of one of the most powerful Chattanooga families, a family that represented the other side of white Tennessee. She employed both my mother and grandmother. Even though my mother was unmarried, Mrs. Grote pulled strings to get her an apartment in the projects. When my grandmother became schizophrenic (the family version was she was under a HooDoo curse), the Grotes were there to support her. They lived in a plantation-styled estate, columns and all. I remember there being an elevator that connected the floors. Mrs. Grote called me G.W. because I was born on February 22, sharing a birthday with the first president. Family members still call me by that name.
They weren’t the only good white folks. When my mother’s boyfriend, a pretty boy with “good hair,” was caught in bed with a white woman at the Read Hotel where he worked, another employer, a white man named Herbert Spencer, helped to get him out of town safely. When my mother was stabbed during a race riot on a Knoxville bus, her employer, a white woman, insisted that she receive a settlement from the bus company. “You’d do it for me,” she said. My mother also used this strategy in Buffalo. When it came time for my younger brothers to be ensnared in the criminal justice system, she warned the cops assigned to the ritual that young Black men must maneuver that she worked for Judge Sedita, a member of an important Italian American family. His brother Frank was mayor. The cops backed off.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
During Putin’s first two terms as president, from 2000 to 2008, the hallmarks of what came to be known as “Putinomics” were political stability, steady economic growth and bringing both political and economic power back “under center.” He created so-called “national champion companies,” using the coercive muscle of the state to take over and consolidate entire markets under corporations in which the government owned a controlling stake. Industrial giants like Gazprom and Rosneft would serve as the natural gas and oil arms of the Kremlin, prioritizing the interests of the Russian state.
“Vodka may not be gas or oil,” explained an article in the Russian journal Ekspert, “but it too is a strategically important product. So important that to control its production it was necessary to create an alcohol equivalent of Gazprom.”
The relationship between autocracy and vodka in Russia, of course, goes back much further than Putin. Every innovation of feudalism — from legal serfdom to oppressive taxation and forced conscription — bound Russian society to the state, subordinating society for the profit of the autocrat. Once crystallized into traditions, such dynamics of domination and subordination persist through time as culture.
And there’s nothing more synonymous with Russian culture than vodka.
The historical reasons for this are generally dismissed as trivial or politely avoided altogether. I’ve explored this topic in two books, and I’ve found that you can’t understand Russia without understanding the connection between booze and political power. The details aren’t always easy to pin down; when it comes to the opaque and corrupt contemporary world of Russian business, questions of who truly owns what offshore shell company is often the subject of speculation and rumor. But recent revelations by brave Russian investigative journalists — working at tremendous personal peril to expose high-level corruption in an increasingly repressive autocracy — have provided important pieces of the puzzle, allowing us to finally see a fuller picture of Russia’s vodka autocracy.
Together, this new information combined with historical patterns reveal how the Kremlin has wielded alcohol as a weapon — maintaining political dominance over its own dependent Russian civil society, both throughout history and into the present. In particular, it is an account of how Russian President Vladimir Putin has amassed a shadow empire of vodka to enrich himself at the direct expense of his citizens’ drunken misery.
‘Vodka … will lead us back to capitalism’
The Russian people’s well-known affinity for vodka is more a legacy of its rulers’ autocratic statecraft than some innate cultural or genetic trait.
Many global societies have traditions of brewing low-alcohol fermented drinks — beers, wines and hard ciders — which were often safer to drink than bacteria-ridden stream water. Russia was no exception: Peasants there drank many of the same brews as their European counterparts: Beers, ales, mead from fermented honey, and kvass from fermented bread.
But the advent of industrial distillation — and the high-potency vodkas, brandies, whiskies and gins borne of the Industrial Revolution — was a game changer. In the words of historian David Christian, “distilled drinks were to fermented drinks what guns were to bows and arrows: instruments of a potency unimaginable in most traditional societies.”
The liquor traffic has long been a well-known tool of European domination and conquest. With brandy and guns, the British colonized India and South Africa. With gin and guns, the Belgians decimated the Congo. In North America, it was whiskey — “the white man’s wicked water” — and guns, that settlers employed to ethnically cleanse the eastern half of North America of Native Americans.
Rather than a far-flung, transoceanic empire like the British, Russia’s was a contiguous, land-based empire. Russian emperors conquered and colonized neighboring non-Russian populations and subordinated them within an autocratic system alongside their ethnic Russian counterparts. And they used some of the same tools.
In 1552, while laying siege to the Khanate of Kazan, Ivan the Terrible saw how the Tatars monopolized their tavern business. Seizing both the town and the idea, Ivan proclaimed a crown monopoly on the alcohol trade, funneling all profits to the tsar’s coffers. Soldering the link between booze and feudalism, the same Law Code of 1649 that legally bound the Russian serf to the land also forbade the private trade in vodka under penalty of torture.
Even Russian historians admit vodka is the world’s most primitive distilled beverage, and the cheapest to mass produce. Over time, vodka elbowed-out the traditional fermented drinks —not because it tasted better, but because it turned a bigger profit. Rubles from the sale of vodka swelled the Muscovite treasury.
By the mid-19th century, the imperial vodka monopoly was the largest contributor to the Russian budget, with one-third of all revenues — enough to both fund lifestyles of opulence and imperial splendor and field the world’s largest standing army — derived from the drunken poverty of the Russian peasantry. Even beyond the officially sanctioned vodka trade, dealing vodka became a privilege officially reserved for the gentry and Romanov family; the distilleries on their private estates generating ever more royal wealth.
By the 20th century, it didn’t take a rabid Marxist to note the obvious: The liquor traffic was how the rich got richer while the poor got poorer. Indeed, many European socialists and revolutionaries abstained from drinking on just such ideological grounds — including Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky. So when Lenin’s Bolsheviks seized power in Petrograd in 1917, they extended the World War I vodka prohibition inherited from their tsarist predecessors beyond the end of the war. In 1922, Lenin argued against putting “vodka and other intoxicants on the market, because, profitable though they are, they will lead us back to capitalism and not forward to communism.”
Within months, Lenin was dead, and his successor Joseph Stalin gradually restarted the traditional Russian vodka monopoly, but in the service of the gleaming, new Soviet state. Stalin was even more ruthless than the tsars in uprooting any grassroots temperance movements that dared promote public health and wellbeing, diminishing the flow of rubles for the state. Indeed, the economic might of the Soviet colossus was built upon the drunkenness of its subjects.
When, in the 1980s, Mikhail Gorbachev tried to reform the moribund Soviet economy, he began by trying to wean Russians from their vodka. His resulting anti-alcohol campaign ended in disaster, partly because he couldn’t wean the Soviet government from its own addiction to alcohol revenues. By papering-over the budgetary hole by printing ever more rubles, the resulting hyperinflationary spiral helped doom the Soviet Union itself.
By the 1990s, the communist administrative-command economy was dead, and with it went the state vodka monopoly. The new “Wild East” of Russian capitalism extended to the largely unregulated liquor market. Amidst the decade-long economic depression, Russian alcohol consumption skyrocketed, along with Russian mortality. Russians drank on average 18 liters of pure alcohol per year — 10 liters more than what the World Health Organization considers dangerous. The average Russian drinker was quaffing 180 bottles of vodka per year, or a half-bottle every single day. Consequently, average male life expectancy in Russia dipped to only 58 years. The inebriate national tenor was led by oft-inebriated President Boris Yeltsin, who seemed to stumble from one drunken public embarrassment to another.
This was the context for the rise of a new Russian vodka oligarchy. Rather than being an aberration, historically selling vodka to the downtrodden Russian people was a time-tested source of fantastic wealth throughout Russian history — whether that wealth was state revenue, private profit or both simultaneously.
Indeed, this is also where corruption has blossomed throughout Russian history — in the grey zone between public power and private profit.
‘The brainchild of Vladimir Putin’
In the beginning, Putin seemed an unlikely candidate to build a vast vodka empire. He has never been particularly associated with drinking or alcohol. Both his biography and public image are largely distant from booze. Growing up, this undersized Leningrad hoodlum took to judo, which instilled discipline and kept him off the streets. As a young KGB officer stationed in East Germany, he would occasionally knock back a beer, but nothing more. “He is indifferent to alcohol, really,” his then-wife, Lyudmila Putina once explained.
The dismal 1990s found Putin back in St. Petersburg, as an able — and most importantly, loyal — aide to liberal mayor Anatoly Sobchak. Putin headed the city’s External Relations Committee, overseeing lucrative foreign-investment deals and reportedly skimming from them handsomely. His can-do reputation earned Putin a promotion to Moscow, serving first as the deputy chief of Yeltsin’s presidential staff, then head of the FSB security service before being appointed prime minister in August 1999. Once in Yeltsin’s Kremlin, rather than succumb to the usual drunkenness of official banquets, Putin would reportedly dump his drinks, discretely, into decorative flowerpots.
After he became president, whether practicing judo, playing hockey or riding shirtless on horseback, Putin carefully crafted a public image of virility, physical fitness and stable leadership; purposefully drawing a stark contrast with the sickly, drunken and unsteady Yeltsin presidency. Publicly, Putin championed active and healthy lifestyles — much to the delight of a few, nascent public health and anti-liquor organizations, which invoked Putin’s machismo in their “live sober” campaigns. Decrying the “alcoholization” of Russian society was a consistent theme of his annual state of the union addresses.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
But this dust-up is actually more interesting than that, because it involves a notable change in the wider political landscape: The rise of the populist right means there are more Republicans saying positive things about traditionally left positions on issues like trade and corporate power.
Given that many of those populists have racial and social views that progressives find appalling, the question across Washington’s progressive organizations is: What’s the right way to think about working with them — or even just praising their break from GOP orthodoxy? So far, there’s little consensus on the question, and a high danger of vitriol in cases where it comes up, even when the cases don’t involve a lightning-rod like Carlson.
To rewind a bit: The 1,200-word essay that kicked off the fireworks, by writers Lee Harris and Luke Goldstein, spent little time on the ousted Fox host’s incendiary racial and cultural statements, but instead lingered on his professed disdain for mainstream American elites. “Carlson’s insistent distrust of his powerful guests acts as a solvent to authority,” they wrote, noting his evolution from libertarian to “rejecting many of the free-market doctrines he’d previously espoused.
Among other things, the piece cited his skepticism about free trade, his monologues against monopolistic Big Tech firms, and a viral segment about potential job losses from self-driving cars. It also noted that he attacked establishmentarian GOP leaders over their support for the Ukraine war.
It’s safe to say that the immediate social media reaction did not give the pair points for originality.
“Disgraceful and stupid,” tweeted Prospect alum Joshua Micah Marshall of Talking Points Memo. “Genuinely revolting,” added Zachary Carter, the journalist and John Maynard Keynes biographer. “The whitewashing of Tucker Carlson has begun,” said The Bulwark’s Will Saletan.
Much of the blowback focused, appropriately, on the actual column, with a chorus of critics arguing quite convincingly that Harris and Goldstein had been snookered — that Carlson was a phony populist, part of a long American tradition of demagogues like George Wallace pretending to fight economic elites when they really want to just pick on some out-group of fellow citizens.
Fair enough. But at least some of the criticism moved beyond engaging on the argument’s merits (or lack thereof) and instead cast doubt on the motivations of the authors themselves, suggesting something more sinister might be afoot.
“How did these writers, who are either too dumb to notice Carlson’s virulently racist, sexist & anti-labor politics, or whose own politics are so vile that they don’t care, ever get hired by the Prospect in the first place?,” tweeted writer Kathleen Geier.
A day later, amid the incoming flak, Prospect editor David Dayen issued a statement of his own, saying the piece had missed the mark. “It is my job as editor to make sure that whatever journalism or opinion we publish upholds our mission,” he wrote. “I don’t think we quite got there with this story.”
The magazine left the original essay in place on its site, but soon published a scathing rebuttal by two other Prospect writers. The act of distancing, naturally, invited a whole new barrage of incoming criticism from people who accused Dayen of cowering before the online rage.
“They should have gotten a raise,” Ruy Teixeira, the longtime progressive Washington think-tank figure, told me this week, referring to Harris and Goldstein. “Instead they brought the hammer down. They got denounced by their own editor, denounced by their own comrades on their staff … for what I actually thought was a pretty good article, the kind of article that wasn’t completely predictable and made you think.”
Harris declined comment; Goldstein did not respond to a message. Dayen, too, declined to be quoted, except to say that the writers weren’t reprimanded for the story, that their status at the magazine is unchanged and they’ll keep writing about whatever interests them — including on places where the right and left overlap. The magazine has in fact done a fair amount of that with no particular blowback, including putting Donald Trump’s trade chief, Robert Lighthizer, on its cover for a largely laudatory feature in 2019.
Teixeira, of course, is no stranger to making this sort of allegation about intellectual narrowness in the progressive ecosystem. Last year, he left the Center for American Progress and took a perch at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, saying that his politics hadn’t changed (he still refers to himself as a social democrat) but that he couldn’t stand the narrow focus on identity that he said permeated his former world.
If you missed that saga, you can be forgiven. There’s a whole library’s worth of stories about the alienation of mostly older left-wing figures from post-collegiates in think tanks or advocacy groups, a divide that often involves disagreements over campus-style identity debates. (In one example, the Democratic Socialists of America canceled a speech by the celebrated left-wing academic Adolph Reed because some in the organization were upset that he’d argued that the left must emphasize class over race.)
But that kind of incident feels different than what was going on last week.
In fact, for progressives, the debates like the fracas over the Carlson column could, perversely, be seen as a side-effect of good news. Instead of a furious argument over internal dissent against political tactics, it was a furious argument over (alleged) new external support for policy positions.
Even for folks who don’t buy the idea that the market-skeptical bits of Carlson’s schtick were at all genuine, it’s a situation that’s presenting itself more frequently as elements of the GOP move beyond Reaganite positions and instead talk up things like opposition to monopolies, support for living family wages or protectionist treatment of embattled stateside manufacturing.
The challenge is that the rising GOP populists whose views on economic issues might appeal to progressives also often have social views that are way more extreme than the average Chamber of Commerce lifer. Sometimes, in fact, those social views may even be their motivator for their hostility to businesses. Witness the fulminations about “woke capitalism.”
One example of those complications popped up in POLITICO Magazine’s recent profile of antitrust advocate Matt Stoller. Stoller drew sharp criticism for his seeming warmth toward Republican Sen. Josh Hawley, who fist-pumped insurrectionists and led Senate efforts to overturn the 2020 election — but has also lobbed grenades at monopolies. The stance has made Stoller a controversial figure on the left, even as his push for a crusade against monopoly has been embraced by the Biden administration.
When we spoke this week, Stoller said it boils down to what politics is for.
“They think politics is fundamentally a moral endeavor,” he said when I asked him about people who disdain the idea of treating someone like Hawley as an acceptable partner. “They’re not shy about letting me know what they think. … But I think that we have a lot more in common than a lot of people who are interested in politics assume. I have a different view of what politics is. For me, when I look at politics, I think about political economy as, like, the driving factor, and corporate power as the driving factor.”
In a way, it’s an argument on the left that goes back to the popular front period of the 1930s, or further (in the Russian civil war, the Bolsheviks argued about making common cause with Islamic fighters from Central Asia, whose embrace of religion was distinctly non-Marxist).
Michael Kazin, the historian of American populism, says there’s a long history of fuzziness about what constitutes left and right, which complicates the question of just who you’ll deem acceptable. Prominent opposition to big business in the Great Depression, he says, also included the likes of the antisemitic radio priest Charles Coughlin and the segregationist Louisiana Gov. Huey Long.
Kazin, whose newest book is a history of the Democratic Party, says he’s sure Carlson is no fellow traveler — and also thinks coming up with a standard for how people like Hawley should be embraced or rejected might also be a little premature given the political realities: “Do you really think that Hawley’s going to support anything Biden wants? There’s a wish to have a broad anti-corporate alliance, but in the end the constituencies are very different.”
David Duhalde, chair for the Democratic Socialists of America Fund, told me that one way to slice it is a function of where you sit. A Senator like Bernie Sanders working with the libertarian Utah Republican Mike Lee to curb presidential war powers? With 100 voters in the Senate, he doesn’t have much choice. A think tanker or essayist trying to be clever? Not so much. “I’m more sympathetic to what the pols are trying to do than to media figures trying to find nuance where there isn’t any,” he says.
And for at least some people closer to the grassroots, the tendency to police against associating with ideological undesirables is a sign of a bigger sickness in elite circles. Amber A’Lee Frost, a writer and longtime fixture of the far-left Chapo Trap House podcast, once wrote about giving a talk about the importance of union organizing before an audience of tech workers. During the question and answer session afterwards, a woman approached the mic to ask what they should do if someone from the alt-right wanted to join their union.
If that happens, Frost replied, it means you’ve won.
“It was kind of a dead silence,” she told me this week, a sign that she’d said something deeply troubling.
Frost, unsurprisingly, was dismissive of both sides of the Carlson contretemps — “right wing populism is largely a cynical brand of lip service from a bunch of professional hucksters” — but says she finds the one tic in the debates about potential left-right overlap disappointingly familiar.
“They’re more invested in who’s on their side than what’s going on,” she said of the people who take umbrage at the idea that left politics might someday lure people with dubious records. “There’s this fear of contamination from the right, which betrays that these people are scared of the general population.”
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
SRINAGAR: Two army personnel have been killed and four others injured after a group of militants triggered an explosive during an ongoing encounter in Kesari area of Kandi hamlet in Rajouri district.
The statement reads, “On specific information about the presence of militants in the Kandi Forest in Rajauri Sector, a joint operation was launched on May 3 2023. At about 7: 30 am on May 5 2023, a search team established contact with a group of terrorists well entrenched in a cave. The area is thickly vegetated with rocky and steep cliffs.”
“They triggered an explosive device in retaliation. The Army team has suffered two fatal casualties with injuries to four more soldiers including an officer”, reads the statement.
Additional teams from the vicinity have been directed to the site of the encounter. The injured personnel have been evacuated to Command Hospital, Udhampur.
“As per initial reports, a group of militants are trapped in the area. There is a likelihood of casualties in the militant group”, it reads.
“Indian Army columns have been conducting relentless intelligence-based operations to flush out a group of terrorists involved in ambush on an army truck in Tota Gali area of Bhata Dhurian in Jammu region”, reads a statement.
“The operation is in progress”, reads the statement adding further details are being ascertained. (GNS)
2 army soldiers killed, officer among 4 injured in ongoing Rajouri encounter
Srinagar, May 05 : Two army soldiers were killed while four personnel including an officer were injured after militants triggered an explosive during the ongoing encounter in Kandi area of Rajouri district on Friday, Army said.
In a statement, issued to the news agency—Kashmir News Observer (KNO), a defence spokesperson said that Army columns have been conducting relentless intelligence based operations to flush out a group of militants involved in ambush on an army truck in Tota Gali area of Bhata Dhurian in Jammu region.
The statement reads that on specific information about presence of militants in the Kandi Forest in Rajauri Sector, a joint operation was launched on 03 May 2023.
“At about 0730 hours today, a search team established contact with a group of militants well entrenched in a cave. The area is thickly vegetated with rocky and steep cliffs,” it reads.
Army said that the militants triggered an explosive device in retaliation. “The Army team has suffered two fatal casualties with injuries to four more soldiers including an officer.”
As per the statement that additional teams from the vicinity have been directed to the site of encounter. “The injured personnel have been evacuated to Command Hospital, Udhampur.”
It added as per initial reports a group of militants are trapped in the area. “There is a likelihood of casualties in the militant group.”
Army said that the operation is in progress and further details are being ascertained—(KNO)
Srinagar, May 5: Two army personnel have been killed and four others injured after a group of militants triggered an explosive during an ongoing encounter in Kesari area of Kandi hamlet in Rajouri district.
“Indian Army columns have been conducting relentless intelligence based operations to flush out a group of terrorists involved in ambush on an army truck in Tota Gali area of Bhata Dhurian in Jammu region”, reads a statement issued to GNS.
Detailing out further, the statement reads, “On specific information about presence of terrorists in the Kandi Forest in Rajauri Sector, a joint operation was launched on 03 May 2023. At about 0730 hours on 05 May 2023, a search team established contact with a group of terrorists well entrenched in a cave. The area is thickly vegetated with rocky and steep cliffs.”
“The terrorists triggered an explosive device in retaliation. The Army team has suffered two fatal casualties with injuries to four more soldiers including an officer”, reads the statement.
“Additional teams from the vicinity have been directed to the site of encounter. The injured personnel have been evacuated to Command Hospital, Udhampur.”
“As per initial reports a group of terrorists are trapped in the area. There is a likelihood of casualties in terrorists group”, it reads.
“The operation is in progress”, reads the statement adding further details are being ascertained. (GNS)
