monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

They're blaming "the left" for creating a violent atmosphere.

I'm not willing to call it terrorism quite yet

In London we've just had a real tragedy, twelve dead, many hospitalised and 120 families left homeless. You've just got a couple of injuries, if they weren't representatives it wouldn't even have made the news. Stop being so melodramatic.

Michigan's health chief is one of five officials charged with involuntary manslaughter in connection with the Flint water crisis.
Nick Lyon and the others are accused of failing to alert the public to an outbreak of Legionnaires' disease.

However, the state governor backed Mr Lyon, calling him a "strong leader".
The outbreak involved about 100 cases and led to 12 deaths, and was thought to have been linked to poor water quality in Flint city in 2014-15.
Thousands of residents were also found to have drunk water poisoned with lead.

Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette brought the charge of involuntary manslaughter against Mr Lyon, as well as Michigan water chiefs Liane Shekter-Smith and Stephen Busch, and Flint water managers Darnell Earley and Howard Croft.

“We have always had to work to move this country forward to achieve the great ideals of our Founding Fathers. They’ve marched, they’ve bled and yes, some of them died,” she continued. “This is hard. Every good thing is. We have done this before. We can do this again.”

More than 1,000 people were shouting “Shut it down” outside the University of California, Berkeley venue where Milo Yiannopoulos planned to speak on Wednesday when a group of black-clad, masked protesters carrying flags and shields arrived to put those words into action.

The band of about 150 anti-fascist activists – or antifas – quickly and efficiently stormed the multilayered police barricades that kept the crowd away from the entrances of the Martin Luther King Jr student union.

But what the moment really calls for is something more specific and meaningful: a mutual denunciation of political violence and the potential incitement of political violence by Democrats and Republicans, the right and the left. What happened in Alexandria this morning was not an exercise in “Trump-hatred” or progressive political protest, but an act that violates the most basic norms of a constitutional democracy governed by the rule of law. Left-of-center people — a group that includes myself — need to examine their consciences and their words to ensure that we in no way give even the slightest sense that violence against political opponents might ever be justified. We cannot leave the impression that we think the Alexandria shooter took legitimate grievances just a bit too far.

Instead of pointing fingers at the political factions or parties or ideologies to which the alleged shooter belonged, right-of-center people need to examine their own consciences and words, particularly given the temperature of their own discourse today on social media. A good starting point for conservatives would be renunciation, once and for all, of rationales for the Second Amendment that suggest the population needs to arm itself in order to shoot police officers and members of the military in case a government they consider “tyrannical” appears.

Redrawing the essential line between violent and nonviolent political activity will not always be easy. But if the civil-rights movement, led by women and men suffering from much greater injustices than today’s keyboard warriors of political conflict will ever experience, was able to find and hew to the right side of that line, so can we.

During his public testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Tuesday, Attorney General Jeff Sessions refused to answer any questions about conversations he might have had with President Donald Trump.

“It would be inappropriate for me to answer and reveal private conversations with the president when he has not had a full opportunity to review the questions and to make a decision on whether or not to approve such an answer,” Sessions told Democratic Sen. Martin Heinrich during a contentious exchange.

Heinrich’s response was forceful: “My understanding is that you took an oath, you raised your right hand here today, and you said that you would solemnly tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, and now you're not answering questions.”

But Sessions was adamant that he was obeying long-established DOJ guidelines, and that he was obligated to remain silent.

Later, Sen. Kamala Harris pushed back against Sessions’s argument, asking if this DOJ rule was in writing somewhere. “I think so,” Sessions said.

To find out whether Sessions has a legal justification for his silence, I reached out to 10 legal experts. I asked them if Sessions’s claim that he’s protecting the president's constitutional right to executive privilege makes any sense.

All but one of the experts rejected Sessions’s argument on its face, insisting that Sessions is legally permitted to discuss conversations with the president, provided the president hasn’t yet invoked executive privilege (which he hasn’t). One expert believes there is a precedent for Sessions’s actions, but that Congress can — and should — compel him to answer their questions.

You can read their full responses below.

I agree, the hatred has gotten out of hand (on all sides) and we on the left need to be loud and clear (for our part) in denouncing it.