The Guardian: Who's afraid of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez?

Their fear is not irrational. Ocasio-Cortez has been using Twitter masterfully, as a way of directing the national political conversation. The Politico article compares her technique to that of Donald Trump, and this isn’t completely wrong: the president has long used his Twitter account to keep the media talking about whatever he wants them to be talking about. Democrats have long failed to keep pace – they end up reacting to whatever Trump says, rather than setting the agenda themselves. In Ocasio-Cortez we see (at last!) what it might look like for lefties to retake control – to begin talking about what we want to talk about rather than whatever nonsense Trump is spewing this week. [...]

If Ocasio-Cortez hadn’t made the remark, there would be no discussion. But she did, and so now there’s a discussion! Now Nobel prize winners are publicly pointing out that high taxes are good, and moderate Democrats are being pressured to endorse “radical” ideas. As the New York Times reported, she is pushing the Democrats to the left whether they like it or not. She has realized what Republicans have known for a long time: if people are talking about your agenda, even if they’re talking about how bad and silly it is, you are making that agenda more plausible. (It’s often called “shifting the Overton window”.) Yes, the National Review will squeal that X tax hike won’t be enough to pay for Y program. But you have got them on the defensive. [...]

This is concerning, of course. In order to get Democrats in Congress to move left, there have to be primary threats. This, historically, is one way socialists have won victories in the United States: they have forced the major political parties to move leftward in order to neutralize the socialist threat. It’s not surprising that Ocasio-Cortez is being asked not to “undermine” fellow Democrats, but it’s encouraging that so far she seems to be going her own way. Politico says that while she is cordial to her fellow party members, she does not give in: [...]

Conservatives cannot stop talking about Ocasio-Cortez. Sean Hannity literally repeats her agenda on live television and then thinks he’s the one winning! She drives them up the wall, and it’s fantastic. But there’s one person who never mentions her: Donald Trump. Strange, isn’t it? Trump mocks everyone on Twitter. But he has never once sent a tweet about her, even though they both have major presences on the platform. I suspect I know exactly why: he realizes that she’s better at this than him. He may be able to make jokes at the expense of Elizabeth Warren, but Ocasio-Cortez is better at online repartee than almost anyone else. He is wise to keep away from tangling with her. Just recently, when Joe Lieberman made a patronizing comment about Ocasio-Cortez not representing the future of the party, she gave a brief but devastating retort that made him look like an out-of-touch fogey. (I doubt he even understood it.)

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Politico: Poland’s ruling party will exploit Gdańsk murder

The government’s plea is self-serving. While there is no evidence that Law and Justice was in any way involved in the murder of Adamowicz, the murder of one of the party's most vocal critics has created an atmosphere of fear and emergency that it is likely to exploit to accelerate its near-total takeover of independent institutions and do away with what’s left of Poland’s democracy. [...]

Indeed, it is laughably naïve to assume that the purged public prosecution service will conduct a thoroughly honest investigation. Just a few months ago, it leveled absurd criminal tax fraud charges against Adamowicz in a thinly veiled attempt to derail his bid for a sixth term as mayor of Gdańsk, where he was a highly popular — and vocally anti-government — figure. [...]

The somber reality is that two centers of the liberal opposition, independent city mayors and secular civil society, were targeted Sunday. Both Adamowicz and the Great Orchestra of Christmas Charity — Poland’s largest annual charity drive organized outside of the Catholic Church — have been subjected to a relentless hate campaign by state-owned media and increasing harassment by Polish authorities. Gdańsk’s city hall was also under near constant monitoring by the government-controlled anti-corruption bureau. [...]

From the Reichstag fire to Turkey’s attempted military coup in 2016, history offers an abundance of cases when a sense of emergency is ruthlessly leveraged by an aspiring authoritarian regime to consolidate power. The mechanism is always the same: fear-induced unity silences the opposition and legitimizes a heavy-handed response by the government.

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Vox: Theresa May lost the Brexit vote because Brexit was a lie

May’s defeat should dispel any illusion that there is a happy ending to the Brexit story. The truth of the matter is that the project that defined May’s premiership — negotiating a Brexit deal acceptable to both the EU and pro-Brexit legislators in her Conservative Party — was structurally impossible. The terms on which Conservative Brexiteers wanted to leave the EU were not acceptable to EU negotiators, and the compromises necessary to bring EU negotiators on board were not acceptable to Conservative Brexiteers. No amount of negotiating could address this dilemma. [...]

That’s obviously not what happened. The Leave campaign won principally by manipulating British xenophobia, but also by making a series of grandiose promises: Britain wouldn’t be hurt economically by quitting the EU’s common market; in fact, it would stand to regain hundreds of millions of dollars a week to spend on its health care system. Britain would have no problem getting out of shared EU regulations; Brexit would “take back control” of the legal system. [...]

The fundamental and insurmountable problem is that Brexit was premised on a fantasy — a painless withdrawal from the European Union — that no prime minister could have delivered. Theresa May is no one’s idea of a great negotiator, but her fundamental project — a negotiated settlement to the Brexit situation — was doomed for structural reasons beyond her control.[...]

Realistically, either no deal or a second referendum is the most likely alternative. Sure, Britain and the EU could agree to postpone the March 29 Brexit deadline, but it’s not clear what future negotiations could accomplish. It’s been two and a half years since the Brexit vote, and no one has come close to figuring out how to resolve the fundamental tension between what British Brexiteers demand and what the EU can live with. Their best attempt just went down in flames.

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Politico: How the Brexit vote was lost

Theresa May's Brexit deal was defeated by 432 votes to 202 — a majority of 230. Scores of her own backbenchers rejected the deal, but she did pick up a handful of opposition votes.

Using POLITICO Pro Intelligence, we've analyzed how the vote was lost.

see the map and the graphs

Reuters: Explainer: Where do the Kurds fit into Syria's war?

The main Syrian Kurdish faction, the Democratic Union Party (PYD), began to establish a foothold in the north early in the war as government forces withdrew to put down the anti-Assad uprising elsewhere. An affiliated militia, the People’s Protection Units (YPG), secured the region. [...]

SDF influence widened to Manbij and Raqqa as IS was defeated in both. It has also reached deep into Deir al-Zor, where the SDF is still fighting IS. The SDF, which also includes Arab and other groups, says it has more than 70,000 fighters. [...]

The PYD is heavily influenced by the ideas of Kurdish leader Abdullah Ocalan, a founding member of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which has waged a 34-year insurgency in Turkey for Kurdish political and cultural rights. Ocalan has been in jail since 1999 in Turkey. He is convicted of treason.[...]

Syria’s Baathist state systematically oppressed the Kurds before the war. Yet the YPG and Damascus have broadly stayed out of each other’s way during the conflict, despite occasional clashes. They also have been seen to cooperate against shared foes, notably in and around Aleppo.  

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