They Tried to Start a Church Without God. For a While, It Worked.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/07/secular-churches-rethink-their-sales-pitch/594109/

For religious communes, the more sacrifices demanded, the longer they lasted; however, this connection didn’t hold for secular communes. The implication, Norenzayan said, was that challenging rituals and taxing rules work only when they’re part of something sacred; once the veil of sacrality is removed, people no longer care to commit to things that demand their time and dedication. “If it’s ‘Come and go as you wish,’ that’s not going to work,” he said. Even if secular congregations could create a sense of the sacred, they tend to attract people who are explicitly looking for a community without costly rituals—one that lets you do what you want.

Trump says he's "draining the swamp," but is he?

Trump attacks another African American lawmaker, and calls Baltimore a 'disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess'

https://edition.cnn.com/2019/07/27/politics/elijah-cummings-trump-baltimore/index.html

Trump's morning tirade against Democratic Rep. Elijah Cummings, chairman of the House Oversight Committee, is the latest verbal assault against a minority member of Congress who is a frequent critic of the President. Two weekends ago, Trump -- in racist language that was later condemned by a House resolution -- told four progressive Democratic congresswomen of color to "go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came." Three of the four were born in the US, and the fourth is a naturalized US citizen.

Trump attacked Cummings, 68, who is originally from Baltimore and represents Maryland's 7th Congressional District, for erupting at acting Homeland Security Secretary Kevin McAleenan over border conditions during a congressional hearing on July 18. Cummings' committee has also launched a number of investigations into the Trump administration related to Trump's finances and White House practices, including security clearancesand Hatch Act violations.

Beyond Mueller’s ‘Purview’

https://www.wsj.com/articles/beyond-muellers-purview-11564097665

Trump: ‘This Was Treason’ — ‘This Should Never Be Allowed to Happen to Our Country Again’

.breitbart

In an interview with Fox News Channel’s Sean Hannity, his first since former special counsel Robert Mueller testified before the House Intelligence and Judiciary Committees, President Donald Trump decried the Mueller “fake witch hunt.”

Hannity asked Trump about the importance of determining the origins of the special counsel probe, to which Trump argued this should not be allowed to happen to another president and likened it to “treason.”

“This should never happen to another president of the United States again,” Trump said on Thursday’s broadcast of Fox News Channel’s “Hannity.” “This is an absolute catastrophe for our country. This was a fake witch hunt, and it should never be allowed to happen to another president again. This was treason. This was high crimes. This was everything as bad a definition as you want to come up with. This should never be allowed to happen to our country again.”

AFTER MUELLER'S DEVASTATING TESTIMONY, THE TRUTH IS BEYOND DENYING: CONGRESS IS FAILING US

https://www.newsweek.com/after-muellers-devastating-testimony-truth-beyond-denying-congress-failing-us-opinion-1451135

Led through the narrative of Trump's unpatriotic corruption of American democracy by an adept Chairman Adam Schiff of the House Intelligence Committee, special counsel Robert Muller finally rose to the occasion, as one could see a glimmer of the United States Marine who had earned the Bronze Star for valor in Vietnam in December 1968.

Yes, Mueller agreed, all distracting legalisms finally left behind, it was a disgrace to the office he now holds that Trump and those around him had sought, welcomed, benefited from and remained potentially compromised by the Kremlin's criminal hacking into American computers and the campaign strategy formulated around the leaking of the hacked material. Yes, the danger such an invasion of our electoral sovereignty posed and continues to pose to our ability to govern ourselves is real and pressing. No, that danger has not been acknowledged, much less addressed, by Trump and his allies in Congress—lest they confess the unthinkable: that they are pretenders to the power they wield.

That Trump and his minions systematically lied and dangled the prospect of pardons and discouraged witnesses from coming forward and otherwise committed abuses of power to cover up that dangerous truth—something that the morning hearing tried without much success to dramatize—becomes almost an afterthought once the enormity of the underlying and ongoing crime is acknowledged. That anyone but a sitting president would have long since been indicted for what the special counsel uncovered Trump had done should be obvious to anyone with half a brain and a modicum of honesty but clearly isn't moving the system into high gear.

This Might Be the Most Important Exchange in the Mueller Testimony

 https://time.com/5635276/mueller-testimony-obstruction-conspiracy-analysis/

As we continue to review Mueller’s testimony, determine what it means and what should come next, it’s critical that we focus on the seriousness of the evidence in Volume I of the report regarding the multiplicity of contact Trump and his campaign had with the Russians and the open arms with which they accepted Russian activity designed to turn American voters toward him. Mueller wanted focus on his conclusion that it was not possible to exonerate the President on charges of obstruction. As Ohio Republican Mike Turner pressed him near the end of the Intelligence Committee hearing on whether DOJ had the power to exonerate people and whether it was appropriate for him to say that the investigation had not exonerated the President, Mueller suddenly pushed back. He told Turner that he included his conclusion on the lack of exoneration in the report because the Attorney General might not know this was their conclusion and “he should know it.” Mueller was not writing a report for the public. He was writing the confidential report to the Attorney General that the special counsel regulations called for.

The Attorney General ignored Director Mueller’s conclusion. In fact he navigated 180 degrees from it to declare that the investigation had given the President a clean bill of health – no collusion, no obstruction. But that is not the case in either regard, and in fact, it may be that it was the obstruction that led to the absence of conspiracy charges. We would do well to take Mueller’s unheeded warning to the Attorney General to heart as we move forward.

REPUBLICANS BLOCK FOURTH ELECTION SECURITY BILL DESPITE MUELLER'S WARNING RUSSIA IS INTERFERING 'AS WE SIT HERE'

newsweek

Robert Mueller issued a stark warning to Congress on Russian election interference Wednesday: "They're doing it as we sit here."

Still, Senate Republicans have blocked four pieces of legislation that sought to bolster the security of U.S. elections since the former special counsel's daylong congressional testimony, the latest of which came on Thursday when Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Kentucky Republican, blocked two unanimous consent votes.

"The Republican leader has already indicated his intention to bury this bill in the legislative graveyard," said Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, a New York Democrat, on the floor just prior to McConnell's block. Schumer was one of two Democrats who tried to force a vote on one of the bills. "That's a disgrace."

In his testimony before the House Intelligence Committee Wednesday, Mueller elaborated on his report, which concluded that Russia tried to interfere in 2016 in a "sweeping and systematic fashion."

"It wasn't a single attempt. They're doing it as we sit here, and they expect to do it during the next campaign," Mueller said of Russia. "Much more needs to be done in order to protect against these intrusions—not just by the Russians, but others as well."

OFFICIALS FAILED TO SOUND ALARM ON 2016 RUSSIAN MEDDLING TO AVOID PORTRAYING VOTING SYSTEMS AS 'INSECURE

<https://www.newsweek.com/officials-failed-sound-alarm-russian-election-meddling-2016-voting-systems-insecure-1451218

Government officials feared that warning the public about ongoing efforts by Russia to subvert the 2016 U.S. elections would sow discord in the integrity of America's voting systems, according to a report released Thursday by a Senate panel's bipartisan investigation into election interference.

The 67-page report issued by the Senate Intelligence Committee, although largely redacted, reaffirms much of which is already known about Russia's extensive efforts to undermine an American election.

The report revealed that officials at "all levels of government" were concerned with eroding election integrity and thus chose not to offer detailed warnings to staffers at the state level, which in turn led local officials to not react with "any additional urgency," causing "confusion and a lack of information."

"In 2016, officials at all levels of government debated whether publicly acknowledging this foreign activity was the right course," the report stated. "Some were deeply concerned that public warnings might promote the very impression they were trying to dispel—that the voting systems were insecure."

Following a breach in Illinois by Russian actors in June 2016, FBI "flash alerts"—warnings of potential cyber security threats alerted to local authorities—were issued to several unidentified states in August. But the alerts flagging specific IP addresses lacked enough information for state officials to properly address them.

RABBIS MAKING IT HARDER FOR ISRAELI IMMIGRANTS TO PROVE THEY’RE JEWISH

https://www.jpost.com/Israel-News/Rabbis-making-it-harder-for-Israeli-immigrants-to-prove-theyre-Jewish-596760

A study recently released by the Israel Democracy Institute and Itim warns that over the next two decades, hundreds of thousands of Israeli citizens from the former Soviet Union or of Ethiopian descent may need to undergo a process to validate their Judaism.

The study showed an increase in the proportion of cases that ended with a ruling that the applicant was not Jewish, from 2.9 percent in 2011 to 6.1 percent in 2016 to 6.7 percent in 2017.

FactChecking the Mueller Hearings

https://www.factcheck.org/2019/07/factchecking-the-mueller-hearings/

While former special counsel Robert S. Mueller reiterated in congressional testimony what he said in his voluminous report on the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential campaign, politicians reiterated some claims about the inquiry and its findings.

Mueller testified before the House judiciary and intelligence committeeson July 24. A redacted version of the special counsel’s 448-page report had been released three months earlier, on April 18. It concluded that “[t]he Russian government interfered in the 2016 presidential election in sweeping and systematic fashion,” detailing the hacking and social media operations involved, as we’ve explained before. 

The report said the “investigation established multiple links between Trump Campaign officials and individuals tied to the Russian government.” It “did not establish that the Campaign coordinated or conspired with the Russian government in its election-interference activities.” See our April 18 story “What the Mueller Report Says About Russian Contacts” for more on that. 

On the issue of potential obstruction of justice by President Donald Trump, the report “found multiple acts by the President that were capable of exerting undue influence over law enforcement investigations, including the Russian-interference and obstruction investigations,” but it “did not draw ultimate conclusions about the President’s conduct,” Mueller wrote, because investigators refrained from making a prosecutorial judgment. As he repeated in his congressional testimony, Mueller wrote in the report that an opinion issued by the Office of Legal Counsel finding that a sitting president couldn’t be indicted factored into the decision to not weigh in on prosecution. For more on the “key events” the report examined regarding  obstruction, see “What the Mueller Report Says About Obstruction.”

Attorney General William P. Barr told Congress in a March 24 letter that the Department of Justice wouldn’t bring charges against Trump, concluding that “the evidence developed during the Special Counsel’s investigation is not sufficient to establish that the President committed an obstruction-of-justice offense.”

For an overview of key moments during the Russia investigation, see our timeline of the probe.

Let’s take a look at some repeated claims made during and about Mueller’s testimony.

Trump's lies are getting bolder and the press is stuck in the middle

https://edition.cnn.com/2019/07/25/media/mueller-hearing-trump-lies/index.html
Big Lies

Either you reject the lies, or you accept the lies.

Of all the divides in American life today, this is the divide I keep thinking about. President Trump and his allies lie with reckless abandon. They make dishonest politicians from the past look like amateurs. When they get called out, they lie about the lying. Trump did this on Wednesday after Robert Mueller contradicted several of the president's fictions about the Mueller Report. When PBS "NewsHour" correspondent Yamiche Alcindor pointed this out to him, citing Mueller's own words, Trump denied it and insulted Alcindor.

I'm often told that people are "numb" to Trump's noise and nonsense. But let's examine this for a minute:

President Trump blasts Robert Mueller after hearings

A look at whether Robert Mueller broke the rules for special counsels

https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2019/jul/24/john-ratcliffe/look-whether-robert-mueller-broke-rules-special-co/\\\

Our ruling

Ratcliffe said Mueller overstepped the rules for prosecutors by writing about potential crimes that were not charged. This is wrong.

Federal regulations specifically require special prosecutors to explain their decisions not to prosecute. That explanation goes to the attorney general, who then decides what to make public.

We found no legal scholar who agreed with Ratcliffe.

We rate this claim False.