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Donald Trump is wrong: Putin isn’t a strong leader.

The fetish for Putin on the right is well-known. Trump has heaped praise on him throughout the campaign, most recently putting on his cultural relativist cap to tell Matt Lauer, “The man has very strong control over a country. It’s a very different system and I don’t happen to like the system, but certainly, in that system, he’s been a leader, far more than our president has been a leader.”

Over the years, Putin has been praised by Rudy Giuliani, Pat Buchanan, Sarah Palin, and Rush Limbaugh. On Friday morning, right-wing radio host Hugh “The Smart One” Hewitt bought into Trump’s argument:

Later, Hewitt clarified his position a bit.

My sense is that Trump thinks that Putin is a strong leader simply because he has good poll numbers, though obviously the authoritarian flourishes are attractive as well. Hewitt, however, is a smart guy trying to make a dispassionate, almost academic argument about effective leadership: Mao was a monster, but he got shit done!

The problem with the argument that Putin is operating from a position of strength, however, is that it’s wrong. Seen properly, the invasion of Crimea wasn’t evidence of Putin’s swashbuckling vigor—it was a desperate land grab to prevent yet another country formerly in Russia’s sphere of influence from gravitating toward the West. Putin’s popular support, while real, is precariously built on an oil-and-gas economy that is in shambles. The government remains one of the most corrupt in the world, presides over several simmering insurgencies, and in recent years has been rocked by huge democratic protests. That Putin’s regime has also taken to assassinating political opponents and journalists is only further evidence of the profound insecurity and weakness of Putin’s standing.

Maybe I’m grading on a curve, but if we’re talking about “strength” and “leadership” and “effectiveness” and “national interest,” I’ll probably stick with Obama.

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What if Obama had lied about his opposition to the Iraq war?

NBC News got an earful from critics after Matt Lauer on Wednesday night allowed Donald Trump to lie about opposing the Iraq war. The network got another, smaller earful from critics Thursday, when it posted this tweet.

Of course, there’s nothing “disputed” about it. His claim to have opposed the Iraq war before it began is false. As of Friday morning, the linked article portrayed the situation accurately, which suggests an upside to all of this weeks failures: Trump won’t be able to lie so brazenly about this to reporters and moderators in the future.

But what about the past? The fact that he’s gotten so far in this campaign on the basis of fabricated opposition to the Iraq war is genuinely shocking. It isn’t one of his more incidental lies, like that he’s a generous altruist or that Trump Tower sells the world’s best taco bowl. It rests at the foundation of the story he tells about his candidacy: that though he lacks governing experience, he has better judgment than both the 16 Republicans he defeated in the primary and “trigger happy” Hillary Clinton. Along with racism, it’s one of the big reasons he’s the GOP nominee, and it’s a story he continues to tell to this day about why he deserves to be president.

We don’t have to go back all that far to remember someone who, despite very little political experience, became president because he opposed the Iraq war when everyone else was falling into line. Now imagine it had been revealed in 2008 that Barack Obama’s opposition to the Iraq war was fabricated—that he’d just made it up. It wouldn’t have been “disputed.” He just would’ve lost. In other words, it isn’t good enough to simply correct Trump every time he repeats this lie going forward. It should dog him every day from now until the election, even if he stops telling it.

September 08, 2016

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Wells Fargo is your perennial reminder that banks can be very bad and regulation good.

Employees at Wells Fargo created up to 1.5 million unauthorized bank accounts and secretly opened more than 565,000 credit cards since 2011, say federal and local regulators. These employees illegally moved funds from existing customer accounts to new accounts to plump up their sales numbers and receive bonuses, unbeknownst to customers who were penalized for insufficient funds, hit with overdraft charges, or subjected to annual credit card fees and interest. As punishment, Wells Fargo is being fined nearly $200 million in total.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which was established in 2011 through the Dodd-Frank Act, slapped the bank with a $100 million penalty, the largest in the agency’s history. In turn, Wells Fargo fired 5,300 employees and promised to compensate customers who had been affected by the scheme, although it didn’t directly admit wrongdoing.

This isn’t the first time that the CFPB has penalized the bank. It also charged Wells Fargo with illegally levying late fees on student loans paid on time between 2010 and 2013, and was involved in an effort by several senators to shut down a Wells Fargo-Amazon partnership that would have disbursed private student loans at a staggering interest rate of up to 14 percent.

Customers had previously sued the bank for opening fake accounts, but account agreements pushed the disputes into private arbitration. This latest development makes apparent the scope of the practice, which the bank had denied was widespread. While Wells Fargo said in a statement that it takes “responsibility for any instances where customers may have received a product that they did not request” (a perfect non-apology), it remains unclear whether any amount of money will restore public trust in the institution.

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Colin Kaepernick is now denying that he’s a secret Muslim.

The alt-right’s logic: if you sit during the national anthem you hate America, and since all Muslims hate America, Kaepernick must be one. The rumor was mainstreamed by Fox News, where hosts even alluded to Kaepernick’s supposed conversion to Islam.

On Wednesday, Kaepernick made an announcement denying he was Muslim:

“I have great respect for the religion, know a lot of people that are Muslim and are phenomenal people... I think that [rumor] comes along with people’s fear of this protest, as well as Islamophobia in this country. People are terrified of them to the point where Trump wants to ban all Muslims from coming here, which is ridiculous.”

In the same way conservatives have dismissed President Barack Obama’s birth certificate and continued circulating the “birther” issue, Kaepernick’s statement will likely go ignored. In so doing, the alt-right hopes to achieve a larger objective: to confuse the problem of racial injustice with that of “radical Islam.”

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Will smaller profile pictures eliminate racism on Airbnb?

The company thinks it might. On Thursday morning, Airbnb released a 32-page document that ambitiously aims to “fight discrimination and build inclusion,” in response to widespread criticism that minorities were being shut out of the home rental site.

Working with Laura Murphy, the former head of the American Civil Liberties Union, the company plans to create a team dedicated full-time to fighting bias and promoting diversity, experiment with reducing the profile photo size, discourage renters from falsely claiming a home isn’t vacant, and promote diversity in its own offices. The company warns that hosts “may not” decline a guest based on race, gender, sexual orientation, or disability status. Failure to comply could (but maybe not) result in suspension from the platform.

In addition to growing complaints by Airbnb users about hosts’ discriminatory practices, three Harvard researchers released a working paper in December that revealed discrimination against guests with African-American-sounding names.

While the new policies read more like vague promises and a school teacher enforcing playground rules, it marks a step in the right direction for the company and for the world of the shared economy in general.

Someone should buy Gary Johnson a map.

Johnson, running as both the Libertarian and the Dad Who Lets You Smoke Weed In The Basement If You Promise Not To Drive Anywhere After candidate for president, totally screwed up his non-existent chance of winning the election on Morning Joe this morning. Asked by journalist Mike Barnicle about the situation in Aleppo, which has been the epicenter of the civil war in Syria since 2012, Johnson flaked.

Running on the Libertarian ticket usually means focusing on destroying the government at home rather than destroying (or propping up) murderous regimes abroad so, if one is being very, very kind to Johnson, this screw-up emerges out of ideological rigidity rather than ignorance: Gary Johnson is so against becoming tangled in foreign wars he doesn’t even know foreign wars are happening!

After the Morning Joe himself, Joe Scarborough, stepped in to help him out, Johnson sort of made that argument. “I do understand Aleppo and I ... understand the crisis that is going on. But when we involve ourselves militarily, when we involve ourselves in these humanitarian issues, we end up—we end up with a situation that in most cases is not better, and in many cases ends up being worse.”

Talking about the horse race implications of anything Johnson does is a bit of a stretch, though he is polling at a respectable 9 percent right now, per Real Clear Politics’s model. But to win over skeptical Republicans and Democrats, Johnson has to seem like a sound, intelligent, and reasonable alternative to Clinton and Trump—someone whom it isn’t embarrassing to cast your vote for. Saying things like “And what is Aleppo?” only raises the already sizable barrier to entry for Johnson.

Hillary Clinton has to do better.

The deck was stacked against Clinton at last night’s NBC presidential forum. Matt Lauer, who rolled over like a trained poodle when presented with 99 percent of Trump’s lies, had his real journalist hat on when grilling Clinton. The questions she received from the audience were more pointed as well, compared to the relatively straightforward ones Trump still managed to screw up. If you needed evidence that Clinton is being graded on a curve, this was it.

As my colleague Ryu Spaeth wrote this morning, Clinton’s performance shouldn’t really matter. This election is about Donald Trump, and there was plenty of evidence in last night’s 30-minute interview that he is not fit to lead.

But still: Going into the debates, Hillary Clinton has to do better. Last night, she played political prevent defense. She was trying to project an appearance of being detail-oriented and ready to lead, but she came off, as The Daily Beast wrote shortly after the debate, as “lawyerly—technical where unnecessary, vague where details were necessary, or simply utterly wrong.”

The way she addressed the question of ISIS were representative. Clinton, like Trump, did not explain how she would defeat ISIS; unlike Trump, she presented something that sounded like a plan, but wasn’t. “We have to defeat ISIS,” she said. “That is my highest counterterrorism goal. And we’ve got to do it with air power. We’ve got to do it with much more support for the Arabs and the Kurds who will fight on the ground against ISIS.” But we won’t do it with ground troops, she insisted. It was a mix of defensiveness (trying to atone for her previous position on the Iraq War) and pandering (We’re going to defeat ISIS!), with a hint of her real strength: her passionate and comprehensive policy knowledge.

At other times, she simply seemed defensive.

Again, Clinton was held to a different standard than Trump on Wednesday night. But answers like this don’t work in a presidential forum and they especially won’t work when juxtaposed with Trump’s straight talk.

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The 2016 election is a referendum on Donald Trump. That’s pretty much it.

Brian Beutler rightly identifies the problem with the media’s coverage of the presidential race as one of skewed proportions. Hillary Clinton’s controversies—her use of a private email server, the conflicts of interest stemming from her husband’s work at the Clinton Foundation, and the generally exasperating way the Clintons have addressed these issues—have been unfairly put on par with Trump’s far more egregious sins. All of this was on display at NBC’s presidential forum last night, wherein Clinton was grilled by Matt Lauer and members of an audience largely composed of military veterans, while Trump skated by despite lying about his position on the Iraq War, using confidential national security briefings to darkly suggest a grave dereliction of duty on the part of President Obama, praising Vladimir Putin, and affirming past statements that allowing women to serve in the military only encourages sexual assault. This is easily enough evidence that Trump isn’t fit to be president, and that, whatever Clinton’s flaws, his fitness is the only meaningful question that must be addressed in this election.

Trump’s performance last night, of course, only comes on top of even more disturbing aspects of his personal history and campaign, including a patent disregard for the Constitution, a willingness to give voice to the racist right, and a penchant for taking advantage of society’s most vulnerable members. This is not even to mention the world-historical embarrassment that a President Trump would confer on the United States. Clinton, at best, would extend the progress made under the Obama administration and serve as a pathbreaking role model for women in this country; at worst, the institution of American democracy would survive in some recognizable form. The same can’t be said of Trump. It’s important for the press to investigate Clinton vigorously and responsibly, especially if she is to be president. But Trump’s candidacy is so awful that, when it comes to a choice between the two, Clinton herself really doesn’t matter. The stakes of this election were determined when the Republican Party nominated Trump. He is what this election is about.

September 07, 2016

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A Native American tribe is winning its battle against a North Dakota pipeline project.

Since April, the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe has been fighting the construction of the Dakota Access oil pipeline on their reservation and across the Missouri River, which abuts their land. What is at stake, they say, is the destruction of sacred sites on nearby land taken from the tribe in the 1980s. Most worryingly, there is also the potential for contamination of the Missouri River, which is the main source of water for the reservation’s 8,000 residents. On Tuesday, a judge responded to the tribe’s request for a restraining order by handing down a temporary halt to parts of the project, and said he would rule on Friday on the tribe’s injunction to stop the project in its entirety until the disputes between the tribe and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers are resolved.

The protest encampment outside the town of Cannon Ball has grown to include hundreds of people, many from other tribal nations, environmental coalitions, and Black Lives Matter. The largely peaceful protests came to a head over the weekend, when Dakota Access, the company in charge of the construction, began to dig up some of the sacred sites, and private security guards unleashed attack dogs and sprayed tear gas on protesters.

Tribal representatives stressed that their efforts weren’t just aimed at protecting the water for the reservation, but also the 17 million people who live downstream. As a member of the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation told The Washington Post, “It’s not going to be if it breaks, it’s going to be when it breaks.” Considering that more than half of the pipelines in the U.S. are more than 50 years old, and that pipeline ruptures occur regularly (most recently in a catastrophic spill in Louisiana), there is clearly a lot at stake for the Standing Rock Sioux.

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With the nomination of a Muslim federal judge, Obama cements his reputation as a president of firsts.

Against a rising tide in anti-Muslim incidents, the president’s appointment of Abid Riaz Qureshi to the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia is a timely statement on America’s commitment to ensuring all its people are represented. If confirmed by the Republican-controlled Senate, Qureshi would be the country’s first Muslim-American federal judge.

In addition to himself being the first black president in American history, Obama’s presidency has been filled with a number of other important firsts too: the first woman and first black librarian of Congress, the first Latina Supreme Court justice, the first transgender White House staffer, and the first black attorney general, among others.

As CAIR National Executive Director Nihad Awad noted in a statement, “If confirmed, Qureshi will join the hundreds of thousands of American Muslims serving their fellow citizens and the nation.” Still, very few minorities have been represented at the highest levels of government, a situation that Obama, for one, is aiming to change.

Donald Trump will turn to ignorant generals whom he’s smarter than to destroy ISIS, bigly.

A brief timeline of Trump quotes:

November 13, 2015: “I know more about ISIS than the generals do, believe me.”

June 5, 2016: “[The generals] don’t know much because they’re not winning.”

September 6, 2016: “I am also going to convene my top generals and give them a simple instruction: They will have 30 days to submit to the Oval Office a plan for defeating ISIS.”