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Former Vice President Joe Biden will join Mitt Romney and other prominent Republicans at an annual summit in Utah this week.

Romney, the Republican presidential nominee in 2012, will interview Biden, on Friday as part of the three-day summit, the Associated Press reported .

"Biden is attending because he believes in bipartisanship and the importance of keeping good lines of communication open across the aisle," Biden spokeswoman Kate Bedingfield told the AP.

The event comes about a week after Biden launched a political action committee (PAC) called "American Possibilities," dedicated to encouraging and aiding Democratic candidates to run for office.

The invitation-only Experts and Enthusiasts (E2) Summit in Park City, Utah, will feature a number of prominent Republicans, including Sens. Lindsey Graham and John McCain , both vocal GOP critics of President Donald Trump , and House Speaker Paul Ryan , who was Romney's running mate in 2012.

The event will also feature former Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, former CIA Director Mike Morell and Microsoft Chairman John Thompson, Politico reported.

Trump declined the invitation, according to the AP.

Biden is not the first Democrat to attend Romney's annual summit. Democratic strategist David Axelrod, a former senior adviser to former President Barack Obama, participated in the discussion.

At the summit last year, Romney, then a "Never Trump" Republican, told the crowd that Trump's nomination as the Republican candidate "is breaking my heart for the party."

Biden, a longtime politician who is now 74 years old, spurred speculation in recent months that he would run for president in 2020, though he has not officially announced any intention to do so.

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Joe Biden Will Speak At Republican Summit Hosted by Mitt Romney - Fortune

One GOP politician is facing renewed scrutiny after calling for violence in the wake of last weekends deadly terror attack on London Bridge.

In a controversial Facebook post, Louisiana Republican Congressman Clay Higgins wrote on June 4, The free world all of Christendom is at war with Islamic horror.

Continued Higgins, Not one penny of American treasure should be granted to any nation who harbors these heathen animals. Not a single radicalized Islamic suspect should be granted any measure of quarter. Their intended entry to the American homeland should be summarily denied.

Every conceivable measure should be engaged to hunt them down. Hunt them, identify them, and kill them. Kill them all. For the sake of all that is good and righteous. Kill them all.

Though many were critical of Higgins statement, he told the Washington Post that it was being interpreted incorrectly. Higgins maintained that he was only calling for the death of Islamic terrorists, not all Muslims.

Many Muslims are American citizens and Id give my last lifes blood for any one of them, but that doesnt mean Im not going to speak out boldly and from my heart about the threat we face as a nation and as a world, the 55-year-old told the newspaper.

Higgins also maintained to the Post that hes a compassionate, loving human being, but that he has no love for people who blow up children at a concert, referencing last months terror attack on Manchester Arena.

In a different statement to CNN, Higgins further defended his stance, asserting, We are a world at war.

FROM PEN:People at the White House: The Final Interview with The Obamas

The enemy is radicalized Islamic jihadists. The terrorists certainly take advantage of the politically correct madness that consumes the West. They revel, that many in the western world are frightened to speak freely. Ive never been accused of being politically correct. I call things the way I see them, he said.

Higgins has been mired in controversy before prior to being elected to Congress, he was the St. Landry Paris Sheriffs Offices captain and PIO in Louisiana. His intense Crime Stoppers videos related to the sheriffs office eventually lead to his resignation from the position, according to CNN.

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Louisiana Republican Rep. on Radicalized Islamic Suspects: 'Hunt Them, Identify Them, and Kill Them' - PEOPLE.com

This article originally appeared on AlterNet.

As he insults NATO, jails immigrants and pulls out of the Paris Agreement, many American politicians cling to the idea that Donald Trump is an aberration, a new disease in American politics that both the party and the country as a whole are just beginning to grapple with. As anyone who remembers the actual fake news that led the country into the Iraq War, or who has followed the careers of operatives like Roger Stone (or just watched Get me Roger Stone) can tell you, Trumps rise has been decades in the making.

What happened on climate change, Paul Krugman writes in his Monday column, isnt an unusual caseand Trump isnt especially unusual for a modern Republican.

Facts and expertise went out of style years ago, andtodays G.O.P. doesnt do substance; it doesnt assemble evidence, or do analysis to formulate or even to justify its policy positions. Facts and hard thinking arent wanted, and anyone who tries to bring such things into the discussion is the enemy. When Trumpcare was assembled, Krugman asks, Did the administration and its allies consult with experts, study previous experience with health reform, and try to devise a plan that made sense? Of course not. In fact, House leaders made a point of ramming a bill through before the Congressional Budget Office, or for that matter anyone else, could assess its likely impact.

When the CBO analyzed the latest version of the bill, it estimated a whopping 23 million Americans would lose healthcare. Instead of making any attempt to defend the bill, Mick Mulvaney, the White House budget director, decided to discredit the CBO, claiming the office did a miserablejob of predicting the effects of the Affordable Care Act in 2009 and accused an office headed by a former Bush administration official of being biased toward Democrats. Never mind that Secretary of Health and Human Services Tom Price helped select the offices current director. Never mind that, as Krugman notes, the White House did do an internal analysis of an earlier version of Trumpcare, which was leaked to Politico. Its predictions were even more dire than those from the C.B.O.

These facts are politically inconvenient, and now, Truth as something that exists apart from and in possible opposition to political convenience, is no longer part of their philosophical universe, Krugman writes. He continues:

Influential conservatives have for years clung to what is basically a crazy conspiracy theory that the overwhelming scientific consensus that the earth is warming due to greenhouse-gas emissions is a hoax, somehow coordinated by thousands of researchers around the world. And at this point this is effectively the mainstream Republican position.

They continue to say its a hoax partly to protect the companies that profit from pollution, claiming that without regulation, the magic of the marketplace can solve all problems, while at the same time swearing that these magical markets would roll over and die if we put a modest price on carbon emissions, which is basically what climate policy would do. This is nonsense, Krugman contends, but its not supposed to be true, its supposed to be convenient: Republicans want to keep burning coal, and theyll say whatever helps produce that outcome.

Read the entire column.

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Paul Krugman: The Republican Party is destroying America's credibility by the day - Salon

Freedom House is out with its exhaustive report on democracy and democratic trends around the world. There is very little good news:

The 21st century has been marked by a resurgence of authoritarian rule that has proved resilient despite economic fragility and occasional popular resistance. Modern authoritarianism has succeeded, where previous totalitarian systems failed, due to refined and nuanced strategies of repression, the exploitation of open societies, and the spread of illiberal policies in democratic countries themselves. The leaders of todays authoritarian systems devote full-time attention to the challenge of crippling the opposition without annihilating it, and flouting the rule of law while maintaining a plausible veneer of order, legitimacy, and prosperity.

The trend is disheartening, to say the least. Every indicator of freedom it tracks free expression, pluralism, rule of law, individual rights, etc. has declined worldwide. Freedom House suggests authoritarians have gotten more daring and liberal democracies less liberal (in the sense of 19th century liberalism), which in turn gives encouragement to the authoritarians.

One cannot understand the decline of democracy without examining the out-sized role Russian President Vladimir Putin plays:

This is particularly true in the areas of media control, propaganda, the smothering of civil society, and the weakening of political pluralism. Russia has also moved aggressively against neighboring states where democratic institutions have emerged or where democratic movements have succeeded in ousting corrupt authoritarian leaders. . . .

The success of the Russian and Chinese regimes in bringing to heel and even harnessing the forces produced by globalizationdigital media, civil society, free marketsmay be their most impressive and troubling achievement.

Modern authoritarianism is particularly insidious in its exploitation of open societies. Russia and China have both taken advantage of democracies commitment to freedom of expression and delivered infusions of propaganda and disinformation. Moscow has effectively prevented foreign broadcasting stations from reaching Russian audiences even as it steadily expands the reach of its own mouthpieces, the television channel RT and the news service Sputnik.

Western democracies have been barely skirting disaster. Russia, with varying degrees of success, now routinely interferes with elections in Western democracies, trying to tip elections to local pro-Russian parties. It bankrolls right-wing parties, infiltrates free media and, when needed, deploys force as it did in Ukraine. Russias modus operandi might sound awfully familiar:

For Russia, the payoff from this strategy is a network of parties that identify with the Kremlins hatred of liberal values, support Russia on critical foreign policy issues, and praise Putin as a strong leader. While some of these parties are still marginal forces in domestic politics, a growing number are regarded as legitimate contenders, especially since an uncontrolled influx of refugees and an increase in terrorist attacks dented public trust in mainstream parties. Even if Russia remains unpopular in most European countries, the fact that increasingly influential political figures laud Putin for his energy, decisiveness, and eagerness to challenge liberal orthodoxies is regarded as a gain for Moscow. As these parties acquire a share of governing power in EU states, the prospects for a recognition of the Crimea annexation and the abandonment of economic sanctions improve significantly.

You can see why Russia is so delighted with President Trump.

And finally Western operatives including none other than Paul Manafort have no qualms about helping authoritarians, for a price. Authoritarian states also rent the services of former government officials and members of Congress, powerful lawyers, and experienced political image-makers to persuade skeptical audiences that they share the interests of democracies, the report explains. These lobbyists work to advance the economic goals of their clients energy companies and other businesses, but they also burnish the reputations of regimes that have been sullied by the jailing of dissidents or opposition leaders, the shuttering of media outlets, or violent attacks on peaceful demonstrators. Examples, according to Freedom House, include Manafort, Michael Flynn and Richard Burt: According toPolitico, Burt received $365,000 in the first half of 2016 for lobbying on behalf of Nord Stream II, a Russian-backed pipeline plan that would deliver more natural gas directly to Western and Central Europe via the Baltic Sea, bypassing Ukraine and Belarus. At the same time, Burt was helping to write a major Trump foreign policy address. That speech, among other things, called for greater cooperation with Russia. Remarkable, isnt it, that so many of the operatives-for-sale wound up associated with Trump in some fashion?

The report raises not only the gloomy prospect of a worldwide decline in democracy, human rights and electoral politics but also an increased threat of international conflicts from rogue states seeking to satisfy nationalist sentiment at home and compensate for economic failure. Freedom House has interesting advice for Western politicians:

We urge responsible political figures to call out colleagues or rivals when they show contempt for basic democratic ideas. Until now, politicians in the democracies have been unimpressive in their responses to opponents who embrace authoritarian figures like Putin. This is despite the overwhelming evidence of egregious crimes under Putins rule: murdered journalists and political opposition leaders, the invasion of neighboring states, brutish counterinsurgency campaigns in the North Caucasus, the emasculation of a once-vibrant media sector, rigged elections, and much more. If they choose to shower him with praise, political leaders like Marine Le Pen, Geert Wilders, and Donald Trump should be forced to account for the realities of Putins appalling record. The same is true for any politician who praises dictators in the Middle East, Asia, or Africa.

Maybe seen in this light, Secretary of State Rex Tillersons attempt to split off values from our strategic interests is nonsensical. Democratic governments are in our strategic interest and to the extent we lend a hand even rhetorically to non-democratic leaders, we are slitting our own throats and undercutting the international liberal order that has prevented world war and spread prosperity for 70 years.

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Freedom House: Democracy is losing - Washington Post (blog)

The government registration gateway was tedious Matt Morley (far left) and Jeremy Evans (far right), with collaborators Jay Baykara and Josh Balfour in Newspeak House. Photograph: Sarah Lee for the Guardian

Theres an infuriating gap in the coverage of this election. It lies between the idea that the internet has changed everything and any detail of what might have happened on the internet. This gap has been filled with a bit of noise about Facebook ads and echo-chamber Twitter feeds.

But, in fact, civic tech is a real thing, featuring real people, with real technical expertise, trying to hack around every democratic deficiency. They are trying to tackle everything from a sheer lack of easily accessible information to the shortcomings of the first-past-the-post system. They dont just exist. A lot of them exist in the same building: Newspeak House in east London. Its a community space for political technologists according to its founder, 32-year-old Ed Saperia. In practice, that means that it looks like a Silicon Valley startup exposed concrete, free-flowing nachos, a pool table.

Tom de Grunwald is working on a vote-swapping website, SwapMyVote, which is trying to hack the problem of first-past-the-post. Look, he explains, this isnt working at all. In 2015, 74.4% of votes were wasted [they werent cast for the eventual winners]. It causes so many problems, from voter apathy to the difficulty of setting up new parties. Even the fact that we never argued with Ukip properly because people took it for granted that they were just extremists who would never cut through. If they had been getting the seats that reflected their popularity, we would have been arguing with them for 10 or 15 years by now.

These civic tech entrepreneurs are not happy with the old-school duality that we know something is broken but accept it as completely normal. Everyone here is used to iterating very quickly. If the product isnt working, you change the product to make it work.

I first came here two weeks ago to interview a Bernie Sanders campaigner, thinking it was just a hot-desking space, and noticed a few things: phrases such as electoral data uttered with a rare enthusiasm, open-ended questions along the lines of what if we took the progressive alliance concept and applied it not just to voting, but to campaigning? Could we build an app for that?

Some people, in groups of twos and threes, were working on a political matchmaking website (you say what ideas or policies you agree with, and it matches you to a candidate). Others were campaigning for online voting; some just building a centralised list of candidates, something that, remarkably, the government doesnt do. Some were fighting education cuts, some were pushing voter registration, some were fighting fake news. There was a lot of cross-pollination, and a palpable sense of possibility.

On that first visit, I sidled over to Sym Roe from Democracy Club, who I had come across during the EU referendum, when he was building a polling-station-finder tool. Can you give me five minutes? he asks, with anxious courtesy. I think were just about to solve something. This, in the scheme of the 2017 election fly-on-the-walling, is not something I have heard anywhere else.

James Moulding, 24, is a political analyst at Crowdpac, the Steve Hilton/Paul Hilder cross-Atlantic project that crowdfunds for candidates and campaigns. Independently from that, he has cocreated an air-quality-monitoring startup and is working on how you would crowdsource a manifesto. The latter technique has been employed by Spanish anti-austerity party Podemos, but the example the techies all use is Taiwan, where the government does real-time consultation with its citizens using the pol.is platform. This, incidentally, was Ed Saperias driving motivation in setting up Newspeak; the realisation that all the parties right now are faking it. They are putting together platforms that they hope some people will support, rather than finding ways for their policies to be cocreated.

Mouldings core business today is a computer game modelled on the French socialist candidate Jean-Luc Mlenchons Fiscal Kombat, in which a French president shakes bankers until money comes out of them. Mouldings version, Corbyn Run, is better. A man runs past. Why is he sweating? I ask. Because hes a bureaucrat. Also, hes running. Corbyn catches him, shakes the money out of his pockets and then does the same to a few bankers. Its made by Labour party members, he says sternly, not the Labour party. This mix of activity some shallow, some profound, some fun, some not fun at all (there is nothing playful about creating mobile sensor networks to produce air quality data) is typical, though everything is marked by a sense of urgency.

Elections are not really mostly what we think about, here, Saperia says. The thing thats fascinated me, for as long as I can remember, is how humans can successfully interact at scale; in a way that we think is good and meaningful. If you wanted to have a conversation with 10,000 people, how could you do that? Wikipedia is a really good example of thousands of people creating something great, through communicating. Whereas Facebook is quite atomising; everyone sticks to their small groups.

In 2014, he was asked by the Green party for digital help with their membership surge. He had never previously been interested in party politics. Thats when I realised that this whole political ecosystem is not functioning very well. He made a diagram of civil society: one-third education, media, journalism and academia; one-third civil service, local authorities, government, parliament; and one-third unions, activists, party members, campaigners.

A lot of these people dont know each other. I thought: what this space needs is some community building. These networks in Newspeak are very noticeable lots of the people have links in the electoral commission, or in the Government Digital Service (GDS), or have only just resigned from the civil service.

The election has sharpened everybodys focus. Jeremy Evans, 25, and Matt Morley, 22, usually run the fact-card startup explaain.com, but have given themselves full-time to GE2017.com. The site pushed voter registration with a tool for students, where they could check which constituency home or college their vote would make the most difference in. It came up with Vauxhall as a potential swing between Labour and the Liberal Democrats, something that didnt show up in any polling I had seen. Weve got an algorithm that takes in many factors, including betting odds. Where do you get those? We scrape data from actually, I cant tell you that.

Morley and Evans can tell me how many people landed on the registration page 100,000 and how many clicked on the link 72% but beyond sending the link, we have no idea. Only the GDS has that information, Evans says. The government gateway was tedious; [it] put people off [and] made them think they needed their national insurance number when they didnt.

Now the registration deadline has passed, GE2017 has moved on, with a quiz that matches you to a party, not unlike Crowdpacs matchmaker quiz. Fragmentation is one of the problems we wanted to solve. There were about six or seven who-should-I-vote-for? apps at the last election, all of them got between 100,000 and a million hits. We spoke to the Electoral Commission about having a state-sponsored app they have one in Germany. We wanted to make it semi-official, get everyone under one roof, build a really, really good one. Events overtook them, and there wasnt time. Once you have done your quiz, there are a couple of telling links: a link to a longer quiz; a link to SwapMyVote; a link to how to spoil your ballot. Most people think you can just draw a cock, but it wont be included in the official results unless you do a straight line through all the candidates. Even now, Matt and I arent completely clear on it. He thought you did a line through the page on the left, and I thought you did it through the candidates. Its amazing how difficult it is to find this information. Im still not clear on whether you can draw a line and then draw a cock.

Across the desk, Areeq Chowdhury, 24, is working single-handedly on WebRoots Democracy, which started as a campaign for online voting but has evolved into a thinktank covering the use of personal data, fake news, e-petitions, voter advice applications. His own evolution (not counting the one that brought him here, having studied economics and political science, through KMPG, into the civil service, which he quit a month ago) is interesting. It started as the glaring answer to how to get young people to vote, but it soon became clear that the main beneficiaries would be disabled people, those who were bedridden, or with very limited vision. The Royal National Institute of Blind People estimated that 1.4 million people struggled to vote in 2015. They do it with braille, but a lot of people dont read braille any more.

Newspeak runs fellowships, one of whom is Sophie Chesney, 26. She is studying for a PhD in computer science at Queen Mary and her field is natural language processing specifically, Im looking at the automatic detection of misleading headlines. It sounds like, if it came off, an algorithm for the discovery of fake news, but she chooses her words carefully and makes no outlandish claims. If the text is making an exaggerating claim, that may be linked to a negative sentiment. But Im not at the moment experimentally ready to show that.

Democracy Club has been running since 2009, set up by Sym Roe and Joe Mitchell. It is run on no money: Roe does six months contracting as a software engineer, then six months unpaid for Democracy Club. A lot of people here are doing really cool stuff, but were doing the boring bits: aggregation work, creating data that is open for everyone to use. He is doing a centralised list of candidates, and for the 2016 and 2017 local elections, we created a database of all 16,000 candidates, and all of that was open data. They have partnered with the Electoral Commission, and had support from Google and Twitter. The work does sound quite boring but incredibly good for amassing contacts. I was working in digital government, for the DWP and the Ministry of Justice. A lot of it is knowing the way the civil service works. Also, being a white, middle-class man who works as a software developer. That helps.

As we are speaking, something interrupts my vision from the left, and a man who looks like a Stone Roses fan is crouched on the floor, with his arms reaching up to Roes keyboard. This, it transpires later, is Michael Smethurst from the Parliamentary Digital Service. Along with Anya Somerville, a parliamentary librarian, and Ben Woodhams, who originally worked for Hansard and slid into change management, Smethurst is engaged in trying to make the parliamentary website more functional; they come into Newspeak House periodically. We cant really editorialise parliament, its not our job. There might be 500 statutory instruments of which two are of any interest. Its not our job to pick out those two. Yet any meaningful access to democracy requires that the citizen can navigate the terrain. These mini institutions whether Democracy Club or mySociety (which created the seamlessly influential TheyWorkForYou.com) collate, editorialise, create digital order for the public good. The more transparent and accessible democracy is, the more obvious it is which bits could be better. Its like sitting in on the meeting where they invented dentistry, or clean water: kind of obvious, kind of earth-shattering, kind of tedious, kind of magical.

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Democracy? There's an app for that the tech upstarts trying to 'hack' British politics - The Guardian