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The subject of a third major political party in the United States brings out generally predictable reactions: cynicism in cynics, fantasy in fantasists, partisanship in partisans. But it is worth remembering that there already has been a very successful third party: the Republican Party, which skyrocketed to power very shortly after its founding in 1854, with the first Republican president, Abraham Lincoln, winning the White House in 1860. By contrast, the Libertarian Party, founded in 1971, has topped out at 3.3 percent in presidential electionsand that was in 2016, when the partys ticket comprised two moderate Republican former governors (Gary Johnson and William Weld) running against two corrupt and contemptible New York Democrats, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. The Libertarians have not had much success in state legislatures or town councils or school boards. The Greens and the other exotic minor parties are for hobbyists, the political equivalents of people who build miniature ships in bottles or collect stamps.

The Republican Party emerged from the wreckage of the Whig Party because the Republicans believed in something and the Whigs did not: When it came to the most important issue of the dayslaverythe Republicans had a firm position, if a painfully moderate one, while the Whigs could not quite figure out what they should think about it. The Republicans were not a radical abolitionist party but a conservative anti-slavery party that ended up being the political home of radical abolitionists because the abolitionists had nowhere else to go. Lincolns position on slavery was, in fact, much narrower than many of those of us who admire him might have wanted from him at the time: He did not propose to abolish slavery but only to prevent its spread in the hopes that it would die out on its own; a constitutionalist might concur with Lincolns assertion in his first inaugural address that as president he did not have the power to interfere with slavery in the southern states, but Frederick Douglass was not wrong to fault him for going beyond that to add that he would not be inclined to use such power if he had it. The word politician has a disreputable odor on it, but Lincoln was a gifted and wily politician, a politician of the first order, and it was such a politician that the convulsing republic needed. A saint would have simply denounced slavery as an unbearable moral evilwhich, of course, it wasbut it took a politician to work against that evil while also working to ensure that the United States would remain the United States, enduring even through the treachery of the slave power and the brutality of the Civil War. It was Lincolns saintliness that failed him and us, setting the course toward a Reconstruction that was too conciliatory and insufficiently reformist.

A compromise position is not necessarily a position that lacks moral clarityit may be, and often is, a position that recognizes the limitations of the current political situation and that does not indulge the adolescent tendency to pine for the impossible. At the same time, a position that is uncompromising or even extreme often is one that lacks genuine clarity, moral or political.

The Republican Party in our time is a confused and debased thing. Trump and Trumpism have made that worse, but the decadence of the GOP did not begin in 2016. Faced with the great moral question of their day, the Republicans of Lincolns time offered moral firmness tempered by realism; faced with the great moral questions of our timeabortion, Russia, the attempted coup detat of 2021Republicans offer moral hysteria instead of moral firmness, delusion rather than realism. (It does not help that on two out of three of those big issues, a great many Republicans are on the wrong side.) But even on abortion, Republicans are now unsteady. In the pre-Dobbs era, Republicans could organize themselves around the outrage that was Roe vs. Wade, as naked a piece of judicial usurpation of the lawmaking power as modern American history has to offer. But with Roe vacated, Republicans have been made to give up the thing they are good atoppositionand instead try to do the one thing that they have shown themselves more or less incapable of for 30 years or moregoverning.

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Meet the Whigs - The Dispatch

Where Google says people have the strongest feelings about the indicted Donald Trump

Former U.S. President Donald Trump (R) talks with one of his attorneys inside the courtroom for his arraignment proceeding at the Manhattan criminal court April 4, 2023 in New York City. (Photo by Steven Hirsch-Pool/Getty Images)

Donald Trump may bash the media but he really loves being the subject of discussion, so it seems everyone has an opinion about him.

Despite all that information of various reliability, there's also confusion about Trump at a time Americans are so politically divided.

Many Americans don't understand why others love Donald Trump or hate him, and they've turned to a source used by both sides. They used Google searches to find answers.

The news that a New York grand jury indicted Trump broke on March 30.

In those 11 days, most Trump supporters blamed Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg. They called his investigation into alleged hush money to porn star Stormy Daniels, in order to beat Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election which was then a month away, politically motivated. They also said Trump wont get a fair trial in Manhattan.

Thats roughly half the country. Statistics from the other half dont seem to understand that.

Those people took to Google and asked,

Yes, that question has been trending since Trumps indictment.

According to Google Trends, that exact question skyrocketed by 1259.2% in the U.S. Massive, to say the least.

The state where people seem to be most confused, where the question was asked the most, was Missouri. Following the Show-Me state in asking were Ohio, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Virginia.

A different phrase is popular with people who hate the former president, the only one impeached twice and now indicted on 34 felony counts:

That phrase similarly skyrocketed since Trumps indictment put him back at the top of the news cycle.

According to Google Trends, that search spiked by 1131.6%.

Google Trends used that phrase to determine where people seem to hate Trump the most.

Those states are Massachusetts, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey.

The most observant readers probably noticed Massachusetts and Ohio near the top of both lists. That means people in those states are most likely to doubt Trumps innocence.

This analysis of Google Trends was first reported by averagebeing.com.

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Where Google says people have the strongest feelings about the indicted Donald Trump - KEYE TV CBS Austin

One can trace former President Donald Trumps indictment by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg back to the media/Democrat belief that Trumps 2016 election was illegitimate.

Sure, some, like Hillary Clinton, questioned former President Barack Obamas birthplace. And, after the 2000 Bush v. Gore Supreme Court decision some, for a time, groused and called George W. Bush president select. But never in modern times has a president been so widely and consistently described as illegitimate as has candidate, president and now former President Donald Trump. It never stopped.

I write as the son of a lifelong Democrat mother, as the younger brother of a lifelong Democrat, a Navy vet who was my best friend. My Marine vet father was a registered Republican with whom my mother and brother disagreed in spirited but never hateful debate across the kitchen table.

When John F. Kennedy defeated Richard Nixon in 1960, my father never cried foul! despite credible allegations of vote-stealing, especially in Illinois. Nixon knew about this, but chose not to protest and filed no lawsuit, perhaps fearing counter-allegations against his campaign.

Last year, The New York Times published a review of a Nixon-friendly biography. According to the book, Nixon, at his Christmas party after Kennedys narrow victory, told his guests, We won, but they stole it from us. The Times review dismissed Nixons complaint: The weakness of the case did not stop Nixons men from pushing their allegations. But six decades hence in the absence of new evidence, at a time when false claims of a stolen election pose a mounting threat to our system of self-government historians ought to think twice before endorsing them.

Historians ought to think twice about endorsing allegations of stolen elections. Sound advice. And the advice applies to non-historians, particularly media pundits and politicians.

This brings us to the 2016 election in which the upstart Trump, not taken seriously by Democrats and most of the media, defeated the heavy favorite Hillary Clinton, whose chance of winning The New York Times on Election Day pegged at 85%.

Obamas Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson testified before Congress that the Russians, despite their efforts, failed to change a single vote tally. As to the Russian election interference, largely through ads and posts on Facebook, Johnson called it unknowable whether this altered public opinion or the outcome of the election.

Yet two years later, a 2018 YouGov poll found 66% of Democrats believe that Russia in 2016 changed vote tallies. And a 2018 Gallup poll found 78% of Democrats believe that the Russian 2016 interference changed the outcome of the election. This means a greater percentage of Democrats believe the 2016 election was stolen than Republicans who felt that way about 2020.

Nearly 25% of the Democrat congressional delegation refused to attend Trumps inauguration. Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., one of the most respected members of the House, called Trumps election illegitimate, a charge Lewis reiterated months before he died. Former President Jimmy Carter said: I think a full investigation would show that Trump didnt actually win the election in 2016. He lost the election, and he was put into office because the Russians interfered on his behalf. Hillary Clinton routinely called the election stolen and President Trump illegitimate.

Yet Republicans and the mainstream media did not call Clinton, Carter, Lewis and the Democrats who boycotted Trumps inauguration election deniers. The First Amendment gives losers, with or without evidence, the right to complain without fear of prosecution, let alone persecution.

Notably, Hillary Clinton has been silent about Trumps indictment. Why? She likely does not want to remind the country that she clearly violated the Espionage Act with her basement server but skated because the FBIs James Comey said she lacked the intent to violate the statute though her violation does not require intent.

About Trumps indictment over hush money payments, two can play the rouge prosecutor game. There are republican DAs and attorneys general, too. In the movie Tora! Tora! Tora! about the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto said, I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve.

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ELDER: Dear Trump haters: Can you contain this fire? - Odessa American

It is the freshness of the secret and top secret documents, and the hints they hold for operations to come, that make these disclosures particularly damaging, administration officials say. On Sunday, Sabrina Singh, a Pentagon spokeswoman, said U.S. officials had notified congressional committees of the leak and referred the matter to the Justice Department, which had opened an investigation.

Amajor intelligence breach. After U.S. intelligence documents, some marked top secret, were found circulating on social media, questions remain about how dozens of pages from Pentagon briefingsbecame public and how much to believe them. Here is what we know:

Are the documents real? Yes, officials say at least, for the most part. Some of the documents appear to have been altered, officials say. U.S. officials are alarmed at this exposure of secret information, and the F.B.I. is working to determine the source of the leak.

Where did the materials come from? The evidence that this is a leak, and not a hack, appears strong. The material may be popping up on platformslike Discord, Twitter, 4chan and the Telegram messaging app, but what is being circulated are photographs of printed briefing reports.

What other countries are named? The leak appears to go well beyondclassified material on Ukraine. Analysts say the trove of documents also includes sensitive material on Canada, China, Israeland South Korea, in addition to the Indo-Pacific military theater and the Middle East.

The 100-plus pages of slides and briefing documents leave no doubt about how deeply enmeshed the United States is in the day-to-day conduct of the war, providing the precise intelligence and logistics that help explain Ukraines success thus far. While President Biden has barred American troops from firing directly on Russian targets, and blocked sending weapons that could reach deep into Russian territory, the documents make clear that a year into the invasion, the United States is heavily entangled in almost everything else.

It is providing detailed targeting data. It is coordinating the long, complex logistical train that delivers weapons to the Ukrainians. And as a Feb. 22 document makes clear, American officials are planning ahead for a year in which the battle for the Donbas is likely heading toward a stalemate that will frustrate Vladimir V. Putins goal of capturing the region and Ukraines goal of expelling the invaders.

One senior Western intelligence official summed up the disclosures as a nightmare. Dmitri Alperovitch, the Russia-born chairman of Silverado Policy Accelerator, who is best known for pioneering work in cybersecurity, said on Sunday that he feared there were a number of ways this can be damaging. He said that included the possibility that Russian intelligence is able to use the pages, spread out over Twitter and Telegram, to figure out how we are collecting the plans of the G.R.U., Russias military intelligence service, and the movement of military units.

In fact, the documents released so far are a brief snapshot of how the United States viewed the war in Ukraine. Many pages seem to come right out of the briefing books circulating among the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and in a few cases updates from the C.I.A.s operations center. They are a combination of the current order of battle and perhaps most valuable to Russian military planners American projections of where the air defenses being rushed into Ukraine could be located next month.

Mixed in are a series of early warnings about how Russia might retaliate, beyond Ukraine, if the war drags on. One particularly ominous C.I.A. document refers to a pro-Russian hacking group that had successfully broken into Canadas gas distribution network and was receiving instructions from a presumed Federal Security Service (F.S.B.) officer to maintain network access to Canadian gas infrastructure and wait for further instruction. So far there is no evidence that Russian actors have begun a destructive attack, but that was the explicit fear expressed in the document.

Because such warnings are so sensitive, many of the top secret documents are limited to American officials or to the Five Eyes the intelligence alliance of the United States, Britain, Australia, New Zealand and Canada. That group has an informal agreement not to spy on the other members. But it clearly does not apply to other American allies and partners. There is evidence that the United States has plugged itself into President Volodymyr Zelenskys internal conversations and those of even the closest U.S. allies, like South Korea.

In a dispatch that is very reminiscent of the 2010 WikiLeaks disclosures, one document based on what is delicately referred to as signals intelligence describes the internal debate in Seoul over how to handle American pressure to send more lethal aid to Ukraine, which would violate the countrys practice of not directly sending weapons into a war zone. It reports that South Koreas president, Yoon Suk Yeol, was concerned that Mr. Biden might call him to press for greater contributions to Ukraines military.

It is an enormously sensitive subject among South Korean officials. During a recent visit to Seoul, before the leaked documents appeared, government officials dodged a reporters questions about whether they were planning to send 155-millimeter artillery rounds, which they produce in large quantities, to aid in the war effort. One official said South Korea did not want to violate its own policies, or risk its delicate relationship with Moscow.

Now the world has seen the Pentagons delivery timeline for sea shipments of those shells, along with estimates of the cost of the shipments, $26 million.

With every disclosure of secret documents, of course, there are fears of lasting damage, sometimes overblown. That happened in 2010, when The New York Times started publishing a series called States Secrets, detailing and analyzing selected documents from the trove of cables taken by Chelsea Manning, then an Army private in Iraq, and published by Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder. Soon after the first articles were published, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton expressed fear that no one would ever talk to American diplomats again.

In addition to endangering particular individuals, disclosures like these tear at the fabric of the proper function of responsible government, she told reporters in the Treaty Room of the State Department. Of course, they did keep talking though many foreign officials say that when they speak today, they edit themselves with the knowledge that they may be quoted in department cables that leak in the future.

When Mr. Snowden released vast amounts of data from the National Security Agency, collected with a $100 piece of software that just gathered up archives he had access to at a facility in Hawaii, there was similar fear of setbacks in intelligence collection. The agency spent years altering programs, at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars, and officials say they are still monitoring the damage now, a decade later. In September, Mr. Putin granted Mr. Snowden, a low-level intelligence contractor, full Russian citizenship; the United States is still seeking to bring him back to face charges.

But both Ms. Manning and Mr. Snowden said they were motivated by a desire to reveal what they viewed as transgressions by the United States. This time it doesnt look ideological, Mr. Alperovitch said. The first appearance of some of the documents seems to have taken place on gaming platforms, perhaps to settle an online argument over the status of the fight in Ukraine.

Think about that, Mr. Alperovitch said. An internet fight that ends up in a massive intelligence disaster.

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How the Latest Leaked Documents Are Different From Past Breaches - The New York Times

As part of the CGI U, students developed initiatives focused on health, education, poverty, environment, human rights, poverty alleviation and public health, impacting local and global communities.

As part of the CGI U, students developed initiatives focused on health, education, poverty, environment, human rights, poverty alleviation and public health, impacting local and global communities.The University of Alabama at Birmingham had a historic number of students selected for the Clinton Global Initiative University annual meeting, with 15 students attending.

The students developed new, specific and measurable initiatives that addressed one of the five focus areas: education, environment and climate change, peace and human rights, poverty alleviation, and public health.

We were so excited to return to in-person participation at the Clinton Global University Initiative for the first time since 2019, said Gareth Jones, director of UABService LearningandUndergraduate Research. While continuing to send students to the online version, we were eager to experience the in-person meeting. We had 15 amazing students who proposed Commitments to Action that will continue the tradition of UAB students being change-makers in the global community. Our office was thrilled to support these students as they shared their plans and visions with innovators and community builders from around the world.

CGI U gathers hundreds of undergraduate and graduate students worldwide to collaborate with influential leaders, experts and innovators on solving humanitys most pressing problems. This year, the first in-person assembly was held after the pandemic and the theme was Homecoming: Strengthening Community, Leadership & Action.

Vanderbilt University hosted the 2023 assembly, which was led by former President Bill Clinton, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Clinton Foundation Vice Chair Chelsea Clinton. Featured speakers included Pete Buttigieg, United States secretary of Transportation, among others.

UAB students were among nearly 700 students representing 92 nations and 42 states who gained expertise and inspiration from influential leaders.

UABs CGI U students represent the School of Public Health, Collat School of Business, and College of Arts and Sciences with their Commitment to Action projects focused on specific areas:

Since President Clinton founded CGI U, more than 11,800 students from over 1,800 schools have made an impact in over 160 countries and all 50 states. Their efforts have culminated in more than 8,400 Commitments to Action, adding nearly 700 made by this years participants.

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UAB among top five schools in the nation with 15 students ... - University of Alabama at Birmingham