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- Margins of Error
Look closely at almost anything and you'll find data—lots of it. But what are those numbers really saying about who we are and what we believe? Harry Enten is on a mission to find out. [TheTopNews] Read More.5 days ago - The Next Big Thing in the Ukraine War: Ground DronesÂ
We arrived at the headquarters of Ukraine’s 3rd Assault Brigade’s NC-13 strike unit just after 11 p.m. The soldier escorting me tells me to turn off my phone to avoid giving away our location, and we walk in silence through the night, then enter a darkened building. Deep inside, the operations room is buzzing with activity. Double-decker computer screens line the black walls. Radios crackle, a commander is barking orders, and a knot of plainclothes drone operators huddles quietly in a corner, poring over daytime satellite images of nearby fields and forests. “They’re plotting tonight’s route,” my escort tells me. Three kamikaze ground drones—unmanned vehicles, each about as big as a medium-sized dog—will travel overland for five or six hours to blow up a Russian bunker. The Ukrainian defense industry is so innovative and dynamic—evolving in just five years from a few old-fashioned, Soviet-era manufacturers to global vanguard and pacesetter—that it is difficult to track all the groundbreaking developments. Already this year, Kyiv has upended the war with a new generation of long-range drones and missiles that have knocked out over one-third of Russia’s oil refining capacity. Closer to the battlefield, new mid-range drones are disrupting enemy supply lines and support logistics, dramatically slowing Russia’s advance. Most impactful for the U.S. and its Middle East allies, Ukrainian drone interceptors—whose widespread use began just over a year ago—helped Gulf states survive the Iranian Shahed strikes that threatened their cities this spring. Yet many strategists in Ukraine and the West are focused on a different cutting-edge development, with several predicting that 2026 will be “the year of the unmanned ground vehicle.” The Ukrainian military isn’t the first to experiment with ground drones. Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, and the United States fielded rudimentary prototypes nearly 100 years ago. But as with unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), Ukraine is the first to scale ground robots effectively, shrinking and simplifying old models and adding modern software. Inexpensive to produce and easy to use, a proliferating variety of aerial drones has flooded the war zone, transforming combat worldwide. UGV development is a few steps behind. While Ukraine’s aerial drone production has grown from a few thousand in 2022 to more than 7 million this year, Kyiv set an annual goal of just 50,000 UGVs. Small kamikaze UGVs. Credit: 3rd Assault Brigade strike unit. Credit: 3rd Assault Brigade strike unit. Still,… [TheTopNews] Read More.5 days ago - Alan Dershowitz Won’t Forget What Larry David Did to Him
Here it is, August on Martha’s Vineyard, and Alan Dershowitz has barely been heard from.Well, that’s not exactly true. He has been heard from on many topics—because Dershowitz is who he is, and pretty much anyone can join Substack, and TV bookers can be hard to resist. Still, he has said little publicly about the maddening injustice he’s faced in recent years: his annual summer shunning at the hands of the island’s liberal social gentry. Has this perennial comedy of ill manners—the Vineyard cancellation of Alan Dershowitz—finally run its course?The story has become a familiar seasonal menace; as pernicious as ticks, and as hard to kill. Its particulars are known. Dershowitz, the inexhaustible Harvard Law professor who represented a gallery of notorious clients over several decades, was once a kibitzing dynamo here. But that was before the blacklists and the badgering.In his telling (and retelling), Dershowitz became socially radioactive during Donald Trump’s first term, when he began speaking out on the president’s behalf, and then joined his first impeachment defense team. Although he did not personally support Trump—he’d been a lifelong Democrat who’d voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016 and would support Joe Biden in 2020—his stock explanation was that everyone is entitled to legal representation. It was the same basic principle he had applied when representing the likes of Mike Tyson, O. J. Simpson, Claus von Bülow, and, more recently, Jeffrey Epstein. It was no different, in fact, than the occasion of Dershowitz’s first-ever visit to Martha’s Vineyard, in 1969, when he was enlisted to help in the defense of Ted Kennedy after his late-night accident at Chappaquiddick.Yet defending Trump was apparently too noxious for Dershowitz’s reputation. “I never thought I would see McCarthyism come to Martha’s Vineyard,” he lamented in a column in The Hill in 2018. According to Dershowitz, locals have urged his exclusion from various Vineyard businesses and institutions. Every summer, it seems, has brought a new episode in ostracism, cold shoulders in the hot sun.[Thomas Chatterton Williams: The right is changing the rules of the culture war]There was the Great Pierogi Incident last year at the West Tisbury farmers’ market, in which a vendor refused to sell half a dozen dumplings to Dershowitz, citing his representation of “several sexual predators and abusers, including Jeffrey Epstein.” Dershowitz claimed that he was being discriminated against over his vocal support for Israel and initiated a follow-up spectacle a… [TheTopNews] Read More.6 days ago - Trump Is Putting His Face on Everything
We Americans remember our presidents in all sorts of ways, with monuments and statues, on coins and street signs. Another thing we do is wait—we wait until a president is safely out of office, or dead, before we bestow such honors.Donald Trump has bent many democratic traditions, but this one, he’s discarded altogether. Trump has been putting his name on buildings since before most Americans were born. He built his political career atop his personal brand, and much of his second term has been defined by an obsession with leaving his mark. The result is something entirely new in the nation’s history. The more you look, the more you see Trump’s face, name, or signature all around you—on a government building, infrastructure project, banknote, taxpayer-funded website, or official document.COMPLETEDTrump’s face has appeared swiftly, often with little warning—and nowhere more so than in the nation’s capital. To find a comparable leader so fixated on the proliferation of his image, the historians I spoke with reached across oceans and time: The face of Hafez al-Assad, who ruled Syria for nearly three decades, was printed on children’s schoolbook covers; Mussolini covered Rome’s Palazzo Braschi with a display featuring his head. Obviously Mao Zedong comes to mind. This creation of a cult of personality is partly how strongmen have sought to erase memories of their predecessors and “insert themselves into the social fabric,” Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a historian of authoritarianism at NYU, told me. There may not be a perfect comparison, but past regimes offer clues, the scholars said, about how a leader’s ubiquity can help inure citizens to broader shifts in their relationship to their government.Kevin Carter / GettyTrump’s face—staring back at federal workers, residents, and tourists from banners draped on agencies such as the Labor Department—sends a message that “he is inseparable from these more impersonal institutions of governance,” says Lisa Wedeen, a political scientist at the University of Chicago.Kevin Carter / GettyA banner featuring the president’s face appeared on the Agriculture Department (right) last year, but was taken down soon after. Banners similar to it remain on the Labor, Justice (left), and Interior (center) Departments, despite objections by Democrats over the cost and the message they send—especially at the Justice Department, which, particularly since Watergate, has tried to operate autonomously from the president, for all sorts of obvious reasons.Anna Moneymaker / GettyThe U.S. Institute of Peace, a government-funded think tank, had Donald… [TheTopNews] Read More.6 days ago - Americans Like Moderate Politicians and Progressive Policies, But Not SocialismÂ...
The Democratic Party’s big tent has widened this summer as five U.S. House candidates backed by the Democratic Socialists of America won primaries in safely Democratic districts and almost surely will join DSA-endorsed incumbents Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib. Predictably, this development has raised questions regarding how welcoming the Democratic Party establishment should be of the DSA, how reflective the DSA is of the Democratic base, and whether an increasing association with socialism would help or hurt the party in the general election. A new poll from CBS News and YouGov sheds some light on these and related matters. On many bread-and-butter issues, we see a lot of common ground between Democrats, independents, liberals, and moderates in support of progressive goals. But when it comes to broader concepts of socialism and capitalism, Democrats and liberals sharply diverge from the rest of the electorate, including the crucial middle. In turn, there’s little reason for the Democratic Party to embrace the socialist label as they pursue progressive policies. For example, 67 percent of respondents said, “wealthy people in the U.S. pay … less than their fair share,” with big majorities in agreement on the left and center. Only among Republicans and conservatives is support for that belief below 50 percent. At the same time, majorities say they are “willing” to raise their own taxes when the extra money goes to various progressive priorities. For health care, it’s 65 percent. For education, 62 percent. For food assistance, 60 percent. For housing, 51 percent. In all these areas, Democrats, independents, liberals, and moderates make up the majority, while Republicans and conservatives fall short of 50 percent support. The numbers reverse when respondents were asked if they are willing to raise their taxes to fund “police and law enforcement,” “border and immigration enforcement,” and “military and defense.” Republicans and conservatives say yes on all three issues (and 51 percent of moderates agree on police), but because Democrats and independents oppose them, that’s not enough to achieve majority support across the electorate. But that left-center coalition breaks down when asked about socialism and ideological branding. Only 35 percent overall have a “positive” view of socialism (including 9 percent with a “very positive” view), powered by 71 percent of liberals and 58 percent of Democrats. Support tanks among moderates (32 percent) and independents (36 percent). Asked if socialist policies would… [TheTopNews] Read More.6 days ago - A Democrat in Name Only
Photographs by KC McGinnisSomewhere along the county road between Independence and Manchester, I lost Rob Sand.This had been a distinct possibility when I agreed to join the 44-year-old Democratic candidate for governor on a segment of a weeklong bike ride across Iowa. Unlike Sand, I am not a biker—merely a leisurely walker and, like any good Millennial woman, an occasional Pilates-doer. Which is why, on a long, low-grade hill dotted with Queen Anne’s lace, my quads began to burn, my pace slowed, and the subject of my story disappeared into a rainbow river of helmets. A minute later, the sag wagon overtook me. Soon so did a 9-year-old boy.Thankfully, my humiliation was short-lived. These days in Iowa, one can never truly be without Rob Sand. Even as I panted alone at the back of the peloton, I could hear people chattering about the man who would be governor. “Was that who I think it was?” they said. And, “Oh, I just love him!” At one point, a fit-looking cyclist who turned out to be the former NFL wide receiver Tim Dwight pulled up beside me to lament Iowa’s unfulfilled economic potential. “This is why,” he said, “we need Rob.”Sand, the state auditor, is ubiquitous in Iowa. On any given day, one might encounter him in a TV ad, promising jail time for corrupt politicians; on Instagram, talking through a mouthful of Casey’s breakfast pizza; and at a town hall singing “America the Beautiful” with a bipartisan crowd of gray hairs. Sand is something rarely found in nature: a successful Iowa Democrat. Which is perhaps why his presence generates such mania. Biking with him across the state felt a little like showing up to a middle-school slumber party with Taylor Swift—or riding shotgun in the popemobile. Despite Sand’s bike helmet and lack of signage, hundreds of people recognized him and begged for selfies. “I nearly killed Iowa’s next governor!” yelled a man in Winthrop who bumped into Sand’s bike. People often used both his first and last name, running them together into a single word. “I lent my bike pump to Robsand!” another man declared in Independence. Sand’s party has struggled to gain purchase in Iowa since the dawn of the Trump era, and a Democrat hasn’t been elected governor since 2006. The funny thing is, Sand is not a particularly proud Democrat. He tends to refer to the party as “the… [TheTopNews] Read More.1 week ago
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