Missing having a president who is actually a decent human being . . .

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9iYBifsOPI

No Climate Change/ Global Warming ???

Two significant snowfalls. Accumulations 1/2" twice before Thanksgiving.

This past Sunday/Monday another 6" of heavy wet snow followed by temperatures in the low 20's. Additional snowfall 6" in the evening under blizzard conditions, wind gusts up to 40 mph, brown outs and power outages lasting two days. Jewel had to throw away all of their frozen and refrigerated foods. And it's only December 1.

At this hour, temps in the lower 40's and a heavy thunderstorm, precipitation .5" expected. Lost power for 5 minutes.

Sunday temps in the lower 40's with another .25" of rain expected.

This week, temps in the 30's during the day and low 20's/teens at night.

Blame it all on the liberals.

Missing having a president who is actually a decent human being . . .

Me2

Maybe Mueller can ease the pain.

Strange weather..... had a tornado in central Illinois yesterday and snow flurries in the northwest suburbs of Chicago this morning.

Rare December Tornadoes Reported in Central US, Killing 1

Central Illinois residents assessing damage from rare December tornadoes that ripped roofs off homes, downed power lines and injured at least 20 people; same severe weather killed one person in Missouri.

First Cavanaugh and Now Alex Acosta ???????:

Alleged victims of billionaire 'serial sex abuser' Jeffrey Epstein - some as young as 13 when they claim he molested them - hope two new civil cases will finally bring them justice

Billionaire hedge fund manager Jeffrey Epstein, 65, faced an enormous case against him in Florida in 2008 that alleged he sexually assaulted minors

Allegations stemmed from an arrangement where he would have someone call underage girls to give him a massage in exchange for a couple hundred dollars

The girls would arrive and eventually he would try or allegedly succeed in sexually assaulting them

Some of the alleged victims were as young as 13-years-old with over 100 accusations against him.

The law caught up with him, but the intervention of a not yet President Trump's Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta helped secure him an unheard of deal

Epstein could have faced life in prison- instead he quietly did just 13-months behind bars at Palm Beach County jail

Now the victims have launched civil suits against him in an effort to have their voices be heard an possibly get justice

Over a hundred women who were minors as young as 13-years-old are hoping to see justice in their case against billionaire 'serial sex abuser' Jeffrey Epstein in two upcoming civil cases.

Epstein, who is accused by over 100 women who say they were minors when they were lured to his Florida mansion and other properties with the promise of two-hundred dollars for a massage- but instead were then molested- was given a sweetheart deal in 2008 that saw him do just 13-months in county jail...............................
President Trump's Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta, played a critical role in securing the unheard of deal for Epstein to serve just 13 months behind bars for the suspected sex-trafficking of minors.

Despite Epstein, now 65-years-old, facing a 53 page federal indictment that could have saw him in prison for the rest of his life, the billionaire instead quietly did 13-months behind bars in the Palm Beach County Jail.

The Epstein deal, which developed over a breakfast between a then Miami's top federal prosecutor, Alexander Acosta, and a former colleague, Washington, D.C., attorney Jay Lefkowitz, according to the explosive three-part report in the Miami Herald.

Acosta agreed that the deal, which was called a non-prosecution agreement, would also be kept secret from potentially over 100 victims who were mostly minors when the incidents occurred.

The agreement also stopped the FBI from searching for further potential sexual assault victims.

Once that deal was approved by a judge, it was sealed and stopped any chance that the girls or anyone else who could show up in court and try to derail it.

Epstein agreed to plead guilty to two prostitution charges in state court. His four potential accomplices were also immune from prosecution under the deal. So that granted immunity to 'any potential co-conspirators'and those potentially involved were not named in court documents.

That stipulation led to the inference that possibly other influential people could have been having sex with underage girls at Epstein's various homes or on his plane.

The eccentric hedge fund manager had friends in high places far and wide including the likes of former President Bill Clinton, Donald Trump and Prince Andrew.

Acosta is in Trump's cabinet as U.S. secretary of labor. Under his purvey he oversees international child labor laws and human trafficking.

He is also up as a possible successor to U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who resigned under pressure in early November.

AND THE REST OF THE STORY

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/articl ... stice.html

WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON IN WISCONSIN AND ELSEWHERE ??????

MADISON, Wis. — When Democrats won the governor’s office in Wisconsin, it was one of the party’s most celebrated midterm successes in regaining power in the states. Now Republicans are striking back, moving to slash the power of the new governor even before he takes the oath of office.

It was only the latest such Republican effort across the country to try to use legislative action to counter blows the party suffered at the polls.

The long list of proposals Republicans want to consider also includes wide efforts to shore up their strength before Tony Evers, the Democrat who beat Gov. Scott Walker last month, takes office: new limits on early voting, a shift in the timing of the 2020 presidential primary in Wisconsin, and new authority for lawmakers on state litigation. The Republican plan would also slash the power of the incoming attorney general, who is also a Democrat.

AND NOW THE REST OF THE STORY

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/03/us/w ... power.html

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Trump on Coming Debt Crisis: ‘I Won’t Be Here’ When It Blows Up

The president thinks the balancing of the nation’s books is going to, ultimately, be a future president’s problem.

Republicans won't admit it — but their tax cuts blew a big hole in the deficit

The CBO has already estimated these cuts will cost $1.46 trillion over 10 years

President Donald Trump said the deficit grew because of military spending and disaster relief

Mitch McConnell Blames the Poor for Trump's Trillion-Dollar Deficit

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More On What's Going On In North Carolina 4:

There's a major election fraud case unfolding in North Carolina

The first major election fraud case in a long time is unfolding in North Carolina, but it's far different than the threat hyped up by Republicans, and it threatens to force a new election.

The latest: Republican Mark Harris holds an unofficial 905-vote lead over his Democratic opponent Dan McCready in North Carolina's 9th congressional district. North Carolina's state elections board won't certify the results, citing "claims of numerous irregularities and concerted fraudulent activities related to absentee by-mail ballots."

Between the lines: This is different than Republican warnings about voter fraud, which baselessly claim voters are being illegally brought to the polls to vote multiple times or in places they don't reside.

Driving the news:

Democrats in the House are threatening not to seat Harris: Nancy Pelosi said they "could take the 'extraordinary step' of calling for a new election if the winner isn’t clear," the AP reported today.

North Carolina Republicans are open to a new election if fraud is proven to have affected the results, its executive director said today.

Details:

Leslie McCrae Dowless, who worked for Harris' campaign as a contractor, is reportedly at the center of the probe.

He has been accused of collecting and filling out hundreds of voters’ absentee ballots — which is illegal in the state. North Carolina mandates all absentee ballot envelopes must be signed by two witnesses and dropped off by voters or their close relatives.

Dowless has denied any wrongdoing, though the AP reports that Bladen County's elections board has recorded that he submitted over 500 ballots.

The bottom line: President Trump — who spent years baselessly claiming Democrats were behind massive voter fraud and created a voter fraud task force at the White House — has yet to comment on North Carolina.

Go deeper: North Carolina House race in doubt over claims of electoral fraud

https://www.axios.com/election-fraud-ca ... 0212a.html

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More On What's Going On In North Carolina 5

There’s Finally a Persuasive Case of Election Fraud, and Republicans Don’t Care

A congressional race in North Carolina suggests that the likeliest threats to the integrity of elections aren’t the ones that GOP lawmakers are addressing.

One early sign that something about McCrae Dowless wasn’t on the up-and-up came in November 2016.

With the race between North Carolina Republican Governor Pat McCrory and Democrat Roy Cooper down to a razor-thin margin, Republicans filed claims of voter fraud with county boards of election around the state. The GOP was aiming to delegitimize Cooper’s lead and to legitimize years of effort to overhaul voting laws to make them more restrictive, claiming serious fraud.

In Bladen County, in the southeastern part of the state, Dowless, who had won a race for soil and water commissioner, alleged that “literally hundreds of fraudulent ballots” were cast in his race. When he was called before the North Carolina State Board of Elections to discuss his complaint, he was unable to answer specific questions about his allegations. More astonishingly, Dowless at one point deflected a question by invoking his Fifth Amendment right to avoid self-incrimination—even though the board was hearing a complaint he himself had filed.

It was a portent. Today, Dowless stands accused of orchestrating a sweeping voter-fraud operation in Bladen County—allegedly to benefit a Republican candidate for U.S. House. The state board has refused to certify the results of the race pending an investigation, leaving the final makeup of the 116th Congress in doubt. Meanwhile, in an ironic twist, Republican lawmakers 100 miles north in Raleigh are close to passing a new voter-ID law. After years of searching for proof that voting fraud is rampant in the Old North State, there’s finally a persuasive case—and it’s a kind of fraud the new law is unlikely to stop.

The first public indication that all was not right in Bladen County came two weeks ago, when the North Carolina State Board of Elections decided not to certify the results of the closely watched Ninth Congressional District race, in which Republican Mark Harris defeated Democrat Dan McCready by just 905 votes. (Harris beat the incumbent, Robert Pittenger, a fellow Republican, in the primary.)

Documents released by the NCSBE on Tuesday indicate that Dowless—who was a contractor for Harris’s campaign, hired through a political-consulting firm—requested almost 600 absentee ballots in Bladen County. According to accounts given to reporters and in sworn affidavits, Dowless had a team of workers going around collecting absentee ballots from voters, which is a violation of state law. In some cases, the affidavits allege, these workers completed ballots for voters—also a violation of the law. Both Bladen and Robeson Counties also had an unusually high number of unreturned absentee ballots, which could indicate they were collected by someone but never turned in. It’s unclear the extent to which these workers were aware they were breaking the law. Harris’s campaign says he was unaware of any illegal activity. Both his campaign and the consulting firm, Red Dome, have received NCSBE subpoenas.

Dowless was hired to get the vote out, and by whatever means, he got results. More absentee votes came in by mail from Bladen County than any other county in the ninth district. It was also the only county in the district where Harris beat McCready in mail-in votes (Democratic campaigns tend to focus more on early and absentee votes), even though the district’s party registration leans Democratic.

The problem for Dowless is that North Carolina has an unusual degree of public transparency about absentee voting (created in part because of widespread absentee-ballot fraud in the 1940s), which made it possible to spot unusual patterns in ballot requests. Gerry Cohen, a longtime election lawyer in the state, flagged curious requests in March. Michael Bitzer, a political scientist at Catawba College who runs an indispensable blog about North Carolina politics, crunched some of the numbers to show the unusual results.

It’s not clear at this point whether the alleged fraud could have swung the result of the congressional election, but given the close margin of the race, the large number of absentee ballots Dowless requested, and the high percentage of unreturned ballots, it is plausible. The NCSBE appears to be uncomfortable with the result, voting by a bipartisan 7–2 margin this week not to certify the election. The board is now investigating and will have an evidentiary hearing no later than December 21. The district attorney in Wake County, home to Raleigh, is also investigating.

At the extreme end of remedies, the NCSBE could even order a do-over election. That’s never happened in a congressional race in North Carolina before, though the board has occasionally ordered new elections in municipal races, to remedy either fraud or errors by election officials. The Charlotte Observer on Wednesday called for a new election. The U.S. House, which will be controlled by Democrats in the new Congress, could also refuse to seat Harris. Representative Steny Hoyer of Maryland, the incoming majority leader, said Tuesday that Harris shouldn’t be seated until concerns about fraud are resolved.

Dowless is no stranger to legal scrutiny. He has been convicted of fraud, perjury, and passing bad checks; in one case, he was accused of forging insurance documents to collect a life-insurance policy on a former employee. Since entering politics, he’s frequently worked at getting the vote out for various candidates; in the 2016 primary, he worked for a candidate running against Harris and Pittenger. Although that candidate lost, he far outpaced both men in Bladen County. According to an affidavit obtained by WSOC, Dowless stood to make $40,000 if Harris won the general election. Dowless did not return a request for comment.

Bladen County has a reputation for lawlessness among North Carolina politicos, and there have been at least five election investigations in the county since 2010. In an interview with Spectrum News last week, Pittenger was asked about the fraud allegations. “There’s some pretty unsavory people out, particularly in Bladen County. And I didn't have anything to do with them,” he said, grinning.

Asked about the NC Election Board’s decision to delay certifying the #NC09 results, Rep. Pittenger says: “There’s some pretty unsavory people out, particularly in Bladen County. And I didn’t have anything to do with them.”#ncpol @SpecNewsRDU pic.twitter.com/WmZQMqQKWN.

Gary Bartlett, who was executive director of the NCSBE from 1993 to 2013, told me the board had looked into possible fraud in Bladen County during his tenure, including scrutinizing Dowless.

“There have been two groups, and the most prominent one is the one that has been in the newspaper lately—he has always been at the forefront,” Barlett said. He said teams would target elderly, poor, and otherwise vulnerable voters who weren’t aware of the law. “They will request a mail ballot. Then they go and ask to help them vote the ballot. Then they will suggest to vote for someone, or they say, ‘We will turn it in for you, and you don’t have to worry about a stamp.’ Then they take the remainder of the ballot and mark it as they wish.”

Bartlett said he’d turned information about potential violations of the law over to the local district attorney, and that he didn’t believe the fraud had swayed the outcome of any elections during his tenure. The News & Observer in Raleigh reports that state investigators are now investigating ballots in neighboring Robeson County, too. The board has previously found fraud in Pembroke, a town in Robeson County.

Election experts say in-person voter fraud—in which an individual arrives at the polls and votes as someone else, or as a duplicate—is extremely rare. It’s more common that poll workers commit fraud, or that there’s some sort of organized action like what’s alleged in Bladen County.

Nonetheless, Republicans have pushed hard for laws that require citizens to show a photo ID to vote, both nationally and in North Carolina. Critics say that such laws disproportionately affect groups that vote Democratic, including the poor, minorities, and young people, who are less likely to hold photo IDs.

In 2013, just after the U.S. Supreme Court invalidated portions of the Voting Rights Act, the North Carolina General Assembly passed one of the strictest voting laws in the nation, which not only required photo ID but also curtailed early voting, among several other measures. The law was loosened slightly in 2015. In 2016, a federal appeals court deemed the law unconstitutional.

“In what comes as close to a smoking gun as we are likely to see in modern times, the State’s very justification for a challenged statute hinges explicitly on race—specifically its concern that African Americans, who had overwhelmingly voted for Democrats, had too much access to the franchise,” Judge Diana Gribbon Motz wrote.

But Republicans in the General Assembly placed a measure on the ballot this November asking voters to approve an amendment to the state constitution that would require photo ID to vote. Voters approved the measure, and now lawmakers are writing the law—doing so during the lame-duck session, when Republicans still hold a veto-proof supermajority in the legislature.

The bill is modeled heavily on a voter-ID law in South Carolina. In 2012, while serving on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, newly seated Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote a decision upholding that law.

Voting-rights advocates say the bill is an improvement over the 2013 and 2015 laws. To assuage concerns about access to photo IDs, it widens the range of valid IDs, allowing student IDs from some colleges and expired IDs in some cases. It also asks county boards of elections to issue photo IDs.

“It’s still a burden, but it probably won’t have a lot of impact,” Cohen said. “Any legitimate voter that’s prevented from voting is a bad thing, but on the scale, it’s not too bad.”

On Wednesday, amid the scrutiny of Bladen County, the state House added a provision to the bill that requires citizens to submit a photocopy of a photo ID or else to sign an affidavit saying they have a “reasonable impediment” to obtaining a photo ID when requesting an absentee vote. That provision might make schemes like the one alleged in Bladen County harder to execute, but it also might make it harder for legitimate absentee voters to cast a ballot. A version of the bill passed the Senate last week.

North Carolina Republicans say they want an investigation, but in the meantime, they are clamoring for the NCSBE to certify Harris’s election and send him to Washington. After years of Republicans insisting there’s rampant election fraud in North Carolina and accusing Democrats of indifference or complicity, there’s finally a case that looks like real, outcome-changing election fraud. It just so happens that it’s alleged to have benefited a Republican. Suddenly, the North Carolina GOP is less concerned about the effects of fraud.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archi ... id/577393/

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U.S. trade deficit hits the highest level in a decade

The U.S. trade deficit reached $55.5 billion in October — the highest level in a decade — as imports rose 0.2% to $266.5 billion and exports fell 0.1% to $211 billion, the AP reports.

Why it matters: President Trump has made the trade deficit a signature grievance of both his campaign and presidency, slapping tariffs on aluminum, steel and $250 billion worth of Chinese goods. But the latest figures from the Commerce Department show the deficit with China has actually risen 7.1% to a record $43.1 billion, with U.S. soybean exports to China dropping 46.8% as a result of retaliatory tariffs.

https://www.axios.com/us-trade-deficit- ... 76d19.html

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The Wisconsin power grab is part of a bigger Republican attack on democracy

The GOP’s turn against democracy may be a greater threat to the American experiment than President Trump.

The Wisconsin Republican Party is nullifying the results of the 2018 election.

On Wednesday morning, the Republican-controlled state legislature passed a bill that would seize key powers from incoming Democratic Gov. Tony Evers, who defeated incumbent Gov. Scott Walker in November. Walker is expected to sign it in the coming days.

The bill blocks Evers’s ability to change state welfare policy and withdraw from a lawsuit against the Affordable Care Act — two things he campaigned on. It limits the state’s early voting period, a move that would make it harder for Democrats to win future elections. And this is all happening during the lame-duck session before Evers takes power, rushed through quickly in an explicit effort to weaken Democrats and prevent the new governor from doing what he was elected to do. In essence, Wisconsin Republicans are telling the state’s voters that their preferences will be ignored.

This would be troubling enough if it were a one-off. But it’s not.

Michigan Republicans are currently weighing similar plans, and both are following in the footsteps of North Carolina Republicans, who passed a power-stripping bill after a Democratic victory in the 2016 governor’s race. State Republicans in three of the country’s most vital swing states are displaying open contempt for the most basic principle of democracy: that when you lose an election, you have to hand over power to your opponents. The national party hasn’t condemned these power grabs, giving the state legislatures tacit permission to rewrite the rules.

These power grabs highlight one of the most disturbing facts about American politics today: The Republican Party has become institutionally indifferent to the health of democracy. It prioritizes power over principle to such an extreme degree that it undermines the most basic functioning of democracy.

In the long run, the GOP’s turn against democracy could well be a greater threat to the American experiment than anything President Donald Trump has done.

Why the state power grabs are so scary

The specifics of the power-stripping efforts vary from state to state — my colleague Tara Golshan has a great explanation of the details in each case — but share a fundamentally similar structure. Each one curtails the governor’s ability to make changes to Republican-backed policies like welfare work requirements, and political rules like campaign finance regulation. Republican-controlled legislatures are given enhanced powers to block governors’ moves through measures such as handing them control over state bureaucracies. And these bills all happen during lame-duck sessions, specifically subverting the results of elections that just happened.

Republican legislators sometimes bill the laws as high-minded protections of the separation of powers, but no one is fooled. The goal is to prevent Democrats from overturning Republican policy initiatives and electoral rules that help Republicans win statewide elections.

Wisconsin Speaker of the House Robin Vos was quite clear on this point during the debate over the bills. At one point, he warned Republicans that if they don’t pass the power grab, they “are going to have a very liberal governor who is going to enact policies that are in direct contrast to what many of us believe in.” That “very liberal governor” had of course just been voted in by the people of Wisconsin, presumably to enact the policies he had campaigned on.

To understand why this is especially troubling, we need to take a step back and think about the purpose of a democratic political system.

Democracy is premised on the idea that political power is only legitimate when exercised with the consent of the governed. But in reality, people disagree about fundamental political and moral issues; no elected government will ever have 100 percent support of the population, or anything close to it. The purpose of a democratic political system is to bridge that gap: to create a system for resolving these disagreements that everyone thinks is fair. That way, everyone will accept the outcome of the election as basically legitimate even when their side loses.

The post-election power grabs amount to Republicans declaring that they no longer accept that fundamental bargain. They do not believe it’s legitimate when they lose, or that they are obligated to hand over power to Democrats because that’s what’s required in a fair system. Political power, to the state legislators in question, matters more than the core bargain of democracy.

Now, a certain level of working the refs is inevitable in a democratic system. American politicians, as Georgetown’s Matt Glassman notes, have always tinkered with the system’s rules to give themselves and their favored policies a leg up. For instance, Democrats in Massachusetts back in 2004 tried to amend the rules for Senate vacancies to make sure that then-Gov. Mitt Romney couldn’t appoint a Republican to the Senate if then-Sen. John Kerry won his bid for the presidency.

But literally stripping powers from officials of the opposing party after they win elections goes well beyond this kind of tinkering. It’s nothing less than a rejection of the idea that the people should get to decide who rules them, a point that many political scientists were quick to highlight after the Wisconsin bill passed.

“By undermining the results of the midterms, the GOP makes a mockery of the notion that elections matter,” Jaime Dominguez, a political scientist at Northwestern University, told me via email. The Wisconsin law is “a breathtaking assault on the most basic democratic norm: the willingness of the loser of an election to let the winner rule,” Yascha Mounk, a fellow at Harvard scholar who studies democratic breakdown, tweeted.

There’s also a broader context. Republicans have, for years now, engaged in a systematic and nationally coordinated effort to rewrite the rules of the political game in their favor. What’s happening in Wisconsin and Michigan is only the latest manifestation of a broader anti-democratic trend, which in the past decade or so has become part of the party’s identity.

The spread of extreme partisan gerrymandering and voter ID laws, tools used by Republicans to marginalize minorities and other Democratic-leaning constituencies, are the most obvious examples.

The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) wrote draft legislation that Republican state legislatures around the country quickly and easily adapted into their own voter ID laws. Another effort, Project REDMAP, an initiative of the Republican State Leadership Committee, was a national coordinating committee helping Republicans at the state level put together extreme partisan gerrymanders in the wake of their sweeping 2010 victories.

In both cases, Republican or GOP-aligned organizations at the national level spearheaded a campaign to systematically undermine the fairness of the electoral system. It’s the flip side of the Wisconsin-Michigan-North Carolina laws: Instead of trying to nullify Democratic victories after they happen, they’re trying to change the system so Democrats can’t win in the first place. At times, they’re even honest about it.

“I think electing Republicans is better than electing Democrats. So I drew this map in a way to help foster what I think is better for the country,” North Carolina state Rep. David Lewis, chair of the legislature’s redistricting effort, once said in defense of his gerrymander.

And there is simply no parallel on the other side. While state Democrats have certainly gerrymandered — Maryland being a particularly egregious case — it’s not nearly as nationally systematic as it has been on the Republican side. And Democrats certainly have not engaged in large-scale efforts to suppress Republican voters or strip powers from Republican officials after they win office. Republican officials don’t seem to feel constrained by the basic, principled norms of democracy the way that Democrats are.

“There’s really an assault on electoral fairness, I would say, in Republican-governed states,” Daniel Ziblatt, a Harvard professor and author of How Democracies Die, tells me. “It’s really only in Republican-governed states where this has taken place.”

Republican indifference to democracy is a threat to the system

For most of American history, elections have not been free or fair. Vast swaths of the country were not permitted to vote based solely on their race or gender. Even after voting rights were inscribed in the Constitution, Jim Crow laws and campaigns of racist terrorism prevented African Americans from exercising the right to vote. It’s only recently, really since the 1965 Voting Rights Act, that the United States even approximated a fully egalitarian democracy.

And that’s what makes these Republican moves so alarming. It’s not that Republicans are anti-democratic, in the sense of wanting to tear down American democracy and replace it with an authoritarian alternative. It’s that they’re democracy-indifferent, unconcerned with the fact that their pursuit of power echoes some of the undemocratic practices we’ve seen in both American history and failing democracies abroad.

In Hungary, a once-vibrant democracy I visited recently, the ruling Fidesz party has spent the past eight years building an electoral system that quietly eliminated democratic competition without having to nakedly rig the vote counts.

Parliamentary districts were redrawn and gerrymandered to give Fidesz a leg up. The new constitution packed the country’s courts, creating new seats that Fidesz Prime Minister Viktor Orbán filled with loyalists. Civil servants were fired en masse, and Fidesz allies were installed in vital roles, like election supervision. Hungary’s state broadcaster was brought under the control of a new media board, and its editorial outlook began to mirror Fidesz’s positions.

No single one of these moves destroyed democracy in Hungary. Cumulatively, though, they created a system in which it was very difficult for the opposition to compete on a fair playing field. Minor changes to the political and electoral system, each one potentially defensible on its own terms, amounted to an attempt to undermine the functioning of the democratic system.

The parallels with what Republicans are doing in the states are obvious. And while the 2018 election has proven that America is not even close to this far gone — Democrats won about 40 seats in the House — there’s a risk that this Republican anti-democratic behavior will escalate if it proves successful. (In fact, one could argue, it already has: The Wisconsin and Michigan bills are building on North Carolina’s example.)

There has not been a hint of hand-wringing from President Trump or Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell or outgoing House Speaker Paul Ryan (who happens to be from Wisconsin). They do not object because they do not object: The past few years have shown that the national Republican leadership is perfectly fine with power grabs, and at times willing to back them.

“Once partisan goals trump democratic commitments, everything is on the table,” writes Brendan Nyhan, a political scientist at the University of Michigan. “Scholars of democratic erosion know how dangerous this situation can be,”

It’s not clear what the bottom is — when more responsible Republicans will start to see that they’re walking down the same road as authoritarian political parties like Fidesz. Is the Republican Party too far gone, too willing to countenance anti-democratic behavior, to be able to reform itself?

If that’s the case, then American democracy is in serious trouble.

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics ... -democracy

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Senate rebukes Saudi Arabia over Khashoggi, Yemen war

WASHINGTON (AP) — Senators voted Thursday to recommend that the U.S. end its assistance to Saudi Arabia for the war in Yemen and put the blame for the death of journalist Jamal Khashoggi squarely on Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, in a direct challenge to both the longtime Middle East ally and President Donald Trump’s handling of the relationship.

The succession of bipartisan votes came two months after the Saudi journalist’s slaying at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul and after Trump persistently equivocated over who was responsible. U.S. intelligence officials concluded that bin Salman must have at least known of the plot, but Trump has repeatedly praised the kingdom.

Senators made clear where they put the blame. The resolution, passed by unanimous agreement, says the Senate believes the crown prince is “responsible for the murder” and calls for the Saudi Arabian government to “ensure appropriate accountability.”

Senators voted 56-41 to recommend that the U.S. stop supporting the war in Yemen, a direct affront to the administration’s war powers abilities.

The floor action brought an unusual show of bipartisan resolve in the Senate over U.S foreign policy, even amid an uncertain outcome as the measures move to the House.

Frustration with the crown prince and the White House prompted several Republicans to support the Yemen resolution as a way to rebuke the longtime ally. Seven Republicans and all Democrats voted for it. Some already had concerns about the war, which human rights groups say is wreaking havoc on the country and subjecting civilians, many of them children, to deadly disease and indiscriminate bombing.

Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who co-sponsored the Yemen resolution with Republican Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, called the vote a “historic moment.”

Lee said Khashoggi’s death focused attention “on the fact that we have been led into this civil war in Yemen half a world away” and “we’ve done so following the lead” of Saudi Arabia.

“What the Khashoggi event did was to demonstrate, hey, maybe this isn’t a regime that we should just be following that eagerly into battle,” Lee said.

The resolution condemning Saudi Arabia for Khashoggi’s slaying was introduced by Senate Foreign Relations Chairman Bob Corker and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. Both Republicans opposed the Yemen resolution and voted against it.

McConnell said senators have grave concerns about Khashoggi’s killing, but “we also want to preserve a 70-year partnership between the United States and Saudi Arabia, and we want to ensure it continues to serve American interests and stabilizes a dangerous and critical region.”

But McConnell urged colleagues to back the resolution on Khashoggi’s death. Its passage, he said, provided “a clear and unambiguous message about how we feel about what happened to this journalist.”

The resolution also calls the war in Yemen a “humanitarian crisis” and demands that all parties seek an immediate cease-fire.
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It appears unlikely that the House would be willing to consider the Yemen resolution. House leaders added a provision to an unrelated House rule that would make it more difficult for lawmakers there to call it up.

CIA Director Gina Haspel briefed House leaders on the Khashoggi slaying on Wednesday, and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Defense Secretary Jim Mattis briefed the full House on Thursday.

Pompeo and Mattis briefed the Senate last month and told senators there was “no direct reporting” or “smoking gun” to connect the crown prince to Khashoggi’s death at the Saudi consulate. But a smaller group of senators leaving a separate briefing with Haspel days later said there was “zero chance” the crown prince wasn’t involved.

House Republicans were less eager than their Senate counterparts to criticize Saudi Arabia and the Trump administration. House Majority Whip Steve Scalise, R-La., said after Thursday’s briefing that he was waiting to see the outcome of the administration’s ongoing investigation.

Scalise said there had been “discussions” about action before the end of the year but wouldn’t say if GOP leaders would consider Corker’s resolution.

Khashoggi, who had lived in the U.S. and wrote for The Washington Post, had been critical of the Saudi regime. He was killed in what U.S. officials have described as an elaborate plot as he visited the consulate for marriage paperwork.

Saudi prosecutors have said a 15-man team sent to Istanbul killed Khashoggi with tranquilizers and then dismembered his body, which has not been found. Those findings came after Saudi authorities spent weeks denying Khashoggi had been killed in the consulate.

Pressed on a response to the slaying, Trump has been reluctant to condemn the crown prince. He said the United States “intends to remain a steadfast partner” of the country, touted Saudi arms deals worth billions of dollars to the U.S. and thanked the Saudis for plunging oil prices.

The Senate debate came as the United Nations secretary general on Thursday announced that Yemen’s warring sides have agreed to a province-wide cease-fire and withdrawal of troops in Hodeida, a contested Red Sea port city. The agreement came during peace talks in Sweden.

The brutal four-year-old civil war pits the internationally recognized Yemeni government, supported by a Saudi-led coalition, against the Iran-backed rebels known as Houthis.

Sen. Todd Young, R-Ind., who voted for the Yemen resolution, said he’s “absolutely convinced” the Senate’s action is applying pressure on the Saudis. He said that without it “there’s a real possibility that there wouldn’t be negotiations going on right now in Sweden.”

Associated Press writer Laurie Kellman in Washington contributed to this report.

https://www.apnews.com/eef2ba95a9ac4376afb37d3db39eddb7

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The war in Yemen is disastrous. America is only making things worse

Mohamad Bazzi
Jun 11, 2018

The Saudi campaign to seduce Trump has worked – by escalating US military involvement without any political settlement he’s prolonging Yemen’s war

Donald Trump is quietly escalating America’s role in the Saudi-led war on Yemen, disregarding the huge humanitarian toll and voices in Congress that are trying to rein in the Pentagon’s involvement. Trump administration officials are considering a request from Saudi Arabia and its ally, the United Arab Emirates, for direct US military help to retake Yemen’s main port from Houthi rebels. The Hodeidah port is a major conduit for humanitarian aid in Yemen, and a prolonged battle could be catastrophic for millions of civilians who depend on already limited aid.

With little public attention or debate, the president has already expanded US military assistance to his Saudi and UAE allies – in ways that are prolonging the Yemen war and increasing civilian suffering. Soon after Trump took office in early 2017, his administration reversed a decision by former president Barack Obama to suspend the sale of over $500m in laser-guided bombs and other munitions to the Saudi military, over concerns about civilian deaths in Yemen. The US Senate narrowly approved that sale, in a vote of 53 to 47, almost handing Trump an embarrassing defeat.

In late 2017, after the Houthis fired ballistic missiles at several Saudi cities, the Pentagon secretly sent US special forces to the Saudi-Yemen border, to help the Saudi military locate and destroy Houthi missile sites. While US troops did not cross into Yemen to directly fight Yemen’s rebels, the clandestine mission escalated US participation in a war that has dragged on since Saudi Arabia and its allies began bombing the Houthis in March 2015.

The war has killed at least 10,000 Yemenis and left more than 22 million people –three-quarters of Yemen’s population – in need of humanitarian aid. At least 8 million Yemenis are on the brink of famine, and 1 million are infected with cholera.

The increased US military support for Saudi actions in Yemen is part of a larger policy shift by Trump and his top advisers since he took office, in which Trump voices constant support for Saudi Arabia and perpetual criticism of its regional rival, Iran. The transformation was solidified during Trump’s visit to the kingdom in May 2017, which he chose as the first stop on his maiden foreign trip as president. Saudi leaders gave Trump a grandiose welcome: they filled the streets of Riyadh with billboards of Trump and the Saudi King Salman; organized extravagant receptions and sword dances; and awarded Trump the kingdom’s highest honor, a gold medallion named after the founding monarch.

The Saudi campaign to seduce Trump worked. Since then, Trump has offered virtually unqualified support for Saudi leaders, especially the young and ambitious crown prince Mohammed bin Salman, who is the architect of the disastrous war in Yemen. By blatantly taking sides, Trump exacerbated the proxy war between Iran and Saudi Arabia, and inflamed sectarian conflict in the region.

During his visit to Riyadh, Trump announced a series of weapons sales to the kingdom that will total nearly $110bn over 10 years. Trump, along with Jared Kushner, his son-in-law and senior adviser, who played a major role in negotiating parts of the agreement, were quick to claim credit for a massive arms deal that would boost the US economy. But many of the weapons that the Saudis plan to buy – including dozens of F-15 fighter jets, Patriot missile-defense systems, Apache attack helicopters, hundreds of armored vehicles and thousands of bombs and missiles – were already approved by Obama.

From 2009 to 2016, the Obama administration authorized a record $115bn in military sales to Saudi Arabia, far more than any previous administration. Of that total, US and Saudi officials signed formal deals worth about $58bn, and Washington delivered $14bn worth of weaponry.

Much of that weaponry is being used in Yemen, with US technical support. In October 2016, warplanes from the Saudi-led coalition bombed a community hall in Yemen’s capital, Sana’a, where mourners had gathered for a funeral, killing at least 140 people and wounding hundreds. After that attack – the deadliest since Saudi Arabia launched its war – the Obama administration pledged to conduct “an immediate review” of its logistical support for the Saudi coalition. But that review led to minor changes: the US withdrew a handful of personnel from Saudi Arabia and suspended the sale of some munitions.

Toward the end of the Obama administration, some American officials worried that US support to the Saudis – especially intelligence assistance in identifying targets and mid-air refueling for Saudi aircraft – would make the United States a co-belligerent in the war under international law. That means Washington could be implicated in war crimes and US personnel could, in theory, be exposed to international prosecution. In 2015, as the civilian death toll rose in Yemen, US officials debated internally for months about whether to go ahead with arms sales to Saudi Arabia.

But these concerns evaporated after Trump took office. Like much of his chaotic foreign policy, Trump is escalating US military involvement in Yemen without pushing for a political settlement to the Saudi-led war. His total support for Saudi Arabia and its allies is making the world’s worst humanitarian crisis even more severe.

Mohamad Bazzi is a journalism professor at New York University. He is writing a book on the proxy wars between Saudi Arabia and Iran

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... ing-crisis

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Trump was in the room during hush money discussions, NBC News confirms


Donald Trump was the third person in the room in August 2015 when his lawyer Michael Cohen and National Enquirer publisher David Pecker discussed ways Pecker could help counter negative stories about Trump's relationships with women, NBC News has confirmed.

As part of a nonprosecution agreement disclosed Wednesday by federal prosecutors, American Media Inc., the Enquirer's parent company, admitted that "Pecker offered to help deal with negative stories about that presidential candidate's relationships with women by, among other things, assisting the campaign in identifying such stories so they could be purchased and their publication avoided."

The "statement of admitted facts" says that AMI admitted making a $150,000 payment "in concert with the campaign," and says that Pecker, Cohen and "at least one other member of the campaign" were in the meeting. According to a person familiar with the matter, the "other member" was Trump.

Trump was first identified as attending the meeting by The Wall Street Journal.

Daniel Goldman, an NBC News analyst and former assistant U.S. attorney said the agreement doesn't detail what Trump said and did in the meeting. "But if Trump is now in the room, as early as August of 2015 and in combination with the recording where Trump clearly knows what Cohen is talking about with regarding to David Pecker, you now squarely place Trump in the middle of a conspiracy to commit campaign finance fraud."

A spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York, which investigated Cohen's hush-money payments to Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal, declined to comment.

McDougal, a former Playboy Playmate, and her lawyers have said that the National Enquirer paid her $150,000 in August 2016 as part of a "catch-and-kill" strategy to keep the story from circulating publicly.

When Cohen pleaded guilty to arranging the payments in August, he said he had done so "at the direction" of an unnamed candidate, and that a $150,000 payment prior to the 2016 election was "for the principal purpose of influencing" the election. The meeting between Cohen, Pecker and unnamed other parties to discuss suppressing stories was referenced in the criminal information document to which Cohen pleaded guilty. The document also refers to "at least one other member of the campaign" being present.

The statement of admitted facts says that AMI's "principal purpose in making the payment was to suppress the woman's story so as to prevent it from influencing the election." Rudy Giuliani, a lawyer for the president, has said the payments were made to spare Trump's family from embarrassment.

On Wednesday, Judge William Pauley sentenced Cohen to a total of 36 months behind bars, and three years of post-release supervision, for tax evasion, violating campaign finance law and other charges. The judge ordered him to pay almost $1.4 million in restitution and forfeit $500,000, while fining him $50,000 for lying to Congress. Cohen must turn himself in to start serving his sentence by March 6.

At his sentencing, Cohen said that "time and time again, I felt it was my duty to cover up [Trump's] dirty deeds."

President Trump tweeted after the sentencing that he "never directed Michael Cohen to break the law."

https://www.aol.com/article/news/2018/1 ... /23617653/

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Trump’s claim that he didn’t violate campaign finance law is weak — and dangerous


The case against the president would be far stronger than the case against John Edwards was.

By George T. Conway III (Kellyanne's husband)
Trevor Potter and
Neal Katyal

December 14 at 6:00 AM

Last week, in their case against Michael Cohen, federal prosecutors in New York filed a sentencing brief concluding that, in committing the felony campaign-finance violations to which he pleaded guilty, Cohen had “acted in coordination with and at the direction of Individual-1,” President Trump. And this week, prosecutors revealed that they had obtained an agreement from AMI, the parent company of the National Enquirer, in which AMI admitted that it, too, had made an illegal payment to influence the election. The AMI payment was the product of a meeting in which Trump was in the room with Cohen and AMI President David Pecker.

This all suggests Trump could become a target of a very serious criminal campaign finance investigation. In response, Trump has offered up three defenses. His first was to repeatedly lie. For quite some time, he flatly denied knowledge about the $130,000 payment to Stormy Daniels. But now he seems to be acknowledging that he knew (since his personal company reimbursed Cohen for the payment, he ought to). Now Trump and his acolytes have turned to two other excuses: They point to an earlier case involving former senator John Edwards to argue that what Trump did wasn’t a crime; and they say, even if it was a crime, it wasn’t a biggie — there are lots of crimes, so what, who cares.

The former is a very weak legal argument, and the latter a dangerous one. Indeed, the campaign finance violations here are among the most important ever in the history of this nation — given the razor-thin win by Trump and the timing of the crimes, they very well may have swung a presidential election.

Begin with the Edwards case. The former senator from North Carolina and two-time Democratic presidential candidate was charged in 2011 with multiple campaign finance felonies in connection with payments that one of Edwards’s supporters made to a woman with whom Edwards had an extramarital sexual relationship. Prosecutors alleged that this money was paid, with Edwards’s knowledge, to influence the election, and therefore that the payments were illegal campaign contributions. When the case went to trial, the jury hung on most counts and acquitted on one, which Trump’s defenders point to for support.

But the case is actually harmful for Trump — especially what the judge ruled. Edwards repeatedly argued that the payments were not campaign contributions because they were not made exclusively to further his campaign. The judge rejected this argument as a matter of law, ruling that a payment to a candidate’s extramarital sexual partner is a campaign contribution if “one of” the reasons the payment is made is to influence the election.

As a legal matter, that aspect of the Edwards case is what matters now — and it’s damning for Trump. It provides a precedent that other courts could follow in any prosecution arising out of the hush-money schemes Trump paid: The president could face criminal charges for conspiring with Cohen to make the payments because the evidence shows the payments were made, at least in part, for campaign purposes. As for what the jury concluded in the Edwards case, there’s good reason to believe that the evidence in a criminal case against Trump would be much stronger.

The timing of the payments in Edwards’s case appeared to relate to paying for expenses from the birth and support of the child he fathered with his partner rather than to any campaign activity, and payment began before the campaign did. In contrast, Trump’s payments to his former sexual partners were made many years after the actual affairs. The payments to Daniels, whose given name is Stephanie Clifford, were made in the final weeks of the 2016 campaign, immediately after the “Access Hollywood” scandal broke, when Daniels was in negotiation with national media outlets to go public with her story. This timing strongly suggests that the payments were campaign-related.

Edwards argued that he didn’t know anything about the payments and that, regardless, the payments in his case were intended to keep news of the affair and pregnancy from his wife — not to keep the information from voters. Trump tried the first tactic, but Cohen’s tapes eviscerated that argument. There is no reason to think that Trump’s attempt to paint these as personal payments is any less of a lie than his attempt to say he didn’t know about them. Unlike with Edwards, prosecutors have noted evidence that Cohen “coordinated with one or more members of the campaign, including through meetings and phone calls, about the fact, nature, and timing of the payments.” If Cohen had made the payments as a purely personal matter for Trump, separate and apart from Trump’s candidacy, Cohen would not have consulted with the campaign about doing so. Further, Trump was first aware of threats to publish information about this affair in 2011, when his youngest child had just been born to his new wife and at the time made no offers of money to keep the news quiet. What was different in 2016 was the election.

In the Edwards case, there was a paucity of evidence. A key witness, Bunny Melon, was 101 years old and too frail to show up at trial. There were no written legal agreements providing money in exchange for silence, as there are in Trump’s case, and no threats by the mother of the child to go public immediately if the funds were not received. That’s why one juror told the media that the evidence wasn’t there to show even that Edwards intended the money to go to Rielle Hunter. In contrast, in a bombshell disclosure this week, the public learned that AMI, the parent corporation of the National Enquirer, is cooperating with the prosecution and has stated that the payments were made to influence the 2016 election. And even more worrisome for Trump, reports emerged Thursday that Trump was the third person in the very room where Cohen and David Pecker (the head of AMI) discussed the hush money payments — making it very hard for Trump to assert a non-campaign-related purpose.

Finally, all the money that changed hands in the Edwards case came from an individual. In the scheme to prevent Karen McDougal from talking about an affair she says she had with Trump, some payments originated from a corporation — AMI. The use of corporate funds to make a contribution to a presidential campaign has been illegal for decades. That makes the offense in Trump’s case significantly more serious than the charges against Edwards, or even the already serious charges Trump could face for conspiring with Cohen to make illegal and unreported individual contributions. And because the source of the payments can ultimately be traced back to the Trump Organization, prosecutors have many robust sources of evidence to comb. Those sources already suggest there were false payments (which would likely violate federal and state tax laws) and “grossing up” of Cohen’s money to account for his personal taxes. All of this may amount to consciousness of guilt and may also be a path for prosecutors to discover who authorized the payments in the first place (likely “Individual-1” or one of his children). The evidentiary record is going to reveal how involved Trump and his family was in these payments — a corporate record that was completely nonexistent with Edwards.

Trump’s legal adviser Rudy Giuliani has argued that the jury in the Edwards case vindicated Edwards, but, in fact, the jurors acquitted him on only one criminal charge and deadlocked on the others. And at any rate, as Giuliani (a former federal prosecutor before he was mayor of New York) should know, criminal jury verdicts are not legal precedents. The Edwards jury, applying the law to the particular facts of that case, did not find Edwards guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. This is 100 percent irrelevant to whether Cohen’s guilty plea proves that Trump broke the law based on very different facts.

The final Trump defense being floated, that everyone breaks the law, fares no better. As its chief expositor, Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah), put it, “I don’t care” if the law has been broken, “all I can say is he’s doing a good job as president.” He added, “The Democrats will do anything to hurt this president. Anything.”

As individuals who have devoted their lives to nonpartisan enforcement of the law, we cannot think of a more dispiriting statement. Hatch is wrong about every aspect of this statement. The accusations against Trump come from career prosecutors in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York (otherwise known as Trump’s own Justice Department). But the more important point is this: We will rue the day a senator trotted out such callousness about federal felonies.

The whole idea of our criminal justice system is to enumerate those offenses that are so egregious that they demand serious jail time. Those felonies are the bread and butter of our criminal justice system. Of course, every criminal defendant seeks to minimize his crimes. But such defendants don’t have a cheering squad composed of United States senators. If Trump wants to argue he didn’t commit the crimes, as he used to assert in April, fine. He’s entitled to that defense. But the grievous minimization of serious campaign finance violations by members of Trump’s political party further corrode our commitment to our age-old ideal of being a “government of laws, and not of men.” If Hatch thinks too much activity has been criminalized, he is in a welcome position to change the laws as a member of the Senate. He shouldn’t denigrate the law in the process. After all, the campaign disclosure requirements at issue here were enacted by Congress (as key post-Watergate reforms after President Richard Nixon’s personal lawyer Herbert Kalmbach went to prison for paying hush money to potential witnesses out of secret cash campaign contributions).

The bad arguments being floated in Trump’s defense are emblematic of a deterioration in respect for the rule of law in this country. The three of us have deep political differences, but we are united in the view that our country comes first and our political parties second. And chief among the values of our country is its commitment to the rule of law. No one, whether a senator or a president, should pretend America is something less.

I stated over a year and a half ago that Trump and the GOP were dangerous. Total disrespect for the rule of law and the constitution.

The party of Trump has a corruption problem and the scandals seem endless.

The legacy of Trump and the GOP, when all is said and done, will be defined by its lies.

I can't believe that his base is so gullible. Trump said it himself. " It’s okay to lie since 'people agree with me.' " He finally told the truth for once.

Shame on Trump. Shame on his minions. Shame on his base.

Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) said all you need to know: “I don’t care” if the law has been broken, “all I can say is he’s doing a good job as president.”

Joe....people are stupid....they are sheep that will follow false prophets. Con artists, flim-flam men, cult leaders , the shameless and liars milk suckers for all they are worth.

Joe is living proof that your first statement is correct !

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[The Republican Party continues its assault on the rule of law and the constitution. Don’t believe it?? Look no further than Wisconsin and Michigan where the party of Trump just rebuked the citizens in those states by letting them know that their votes don’t count. The voting citizens in this country voted for change and they got it…….. but didn’t. The party of Trump in Wisconsin just stripped their newly elected Governor and Attorney General of their power to perform their duties in a blatant power grab. In Michigan, the party of Trump in just stripped their newly elected Governor, Attorney General, AND Secretary of State their power to perform their duties This power grab just sent a message to the voters in this country to basically go screw yourselves. The changes they voted for ain’t gonna happen……….at least for now!]

Why the state power grabs are so scary

The specifics of the power-stripping efforts vary from state to state — my colleague Tara Golshan has a great explanation of the details in each case — but share a fundamentally similar structure. Each one curtails the governor’s ability to make changes to Republican-backed policies like welfare work requirements, and political rules like campaign finance regulation. Republican-controlled legislatures are given enhanced powers to block governors’ moves through measures such as handing them control over state bureaucracies. And these bills all happen during lame-duck sessions, specifically subverting the results of elections that just happened.


By Zack Beauchamp@zackbeauchampzack@vox.com

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics ... -democracy]





Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker Signs Bills Curbing Democratic Successor’s Power

Scott Walker, Wisconsin’s outgoing Republican governor, signed measures into law Friday that “diminish the power” of his recently elected Democratic successor, The New York Times reports. The measures give more power to Republican lawmakers and prevent Governor-elect Tony Evers from delivering on some of his campaign promises. According to the Times, the bills will curb Evers’ power in the “rule-making process” and give lawmakers most appointments on an “economic development board until next summer.” The lame-duck legislation will also reportedly limit early voting, limit the power of incoming Attorney General Josh Kaul, and allow lawmakers to “intervene in some lawsuits.” Evers has said he might file a lawsuit over the last-minute changes, and said that Walker has decided to “override the will of the people of Wisconsin.” Walker lost to Evers by about one percentage point in the November election.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/wisconsin ... sors-power






The lame duck power grab in Michigan | Thompson

Some white male Republican politicians love democracy — provided they're in the majority. And when they're not, they believe their white male privilege trumps majority rule and entitles them to still call the shots.

Don't believe me? How else do you explain the last-minute power grabs engineered by outgoing white male Republican lawmakers in Michigan and Wisconsin?

In Michigan, voters elected Democrats to the offices of governor, attorney general and secretary of state for the first time in 28 years. Too bad! Republicans who still control the state Legislature believe they are entitled to restrict the powers of the three victorious women who will take over in January.

Hundreds of thousands of voters endorsed a ballot initiative that would have raised Michigan's minimum wage and required employers to offer workers paid sick leave. Too bad! White male Republican politicians get to put the kibosh on that, too.

The roaring sense of entitlement driving these actions disproves the notion that white male privilege isn't a thing.

Loving democracy means supporting the concept of majority rule — even when you're in the minority.

Follow Mike Thompson on Facebook and Twitter

https://www.freep.com/story/opinion/col ... 220654002/



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[Anyone heard from trump on the current stock market collapse? Been pretty quiet lately but I guess he’s got a lot on his plate right now with five different investigations against him all going on simultaneously. The three major markets are now in trump correction territory. 11 month gains have basically evaporated in the past three – four weeks?!.]



Stocks fall into correction territory

The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed 497 points lower on Friday, or 2.02%, while the S&P 500 fell 1.9% and Nasdaq Composite dropped nearly 2.3%. All three are now in correction territory.

Downward drivers: Johnson & Johnson, the biggest decliner in both the Dow and S&P 500, had its worst day in over 15 years after a Reuters report said the company knew its baby powder "was sometimes tainted with carcinogenic asbestos." Disappointing economic data in China also fueled the sell-off.

https://www.axios.com/stocks-end-week-l ... 6b176.html



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[This is getting ridiculous! The last time, about a year ago, I posted these numbers at about 3,000. They've basically doubled this year. When will his base and minions in Washington get it? You can expect that whenever he opens his mouth, a lie or misstatement will truly follow.]



President Trump has made 6,420 false or misleading claims over 649 days

If President Trump’s torrent of words has seemed overwhelming of late, there’s a good reason for that.

In the first nine months of his presidency, Trump made 1,318 false or misleading claims, an average of five a day. But in the seven weeks leading up the midterm elections, the president made 1,419 false or misleading claims — an average of 30 a day.

Combined with the rest of his presidency, that adds up to a total of 6,420 claims through Oct. 30, the 649th day of his term in office, according to The Fact Checker’s database that analyzes, categorizes and tracks every suspect statement uttered by the president.

The flood of presidential misinformation has picked up dramatically as the president has barnstormed across the country, holding rallies with his supporters. Each of those rallies usually yields 35 to 45 suspect claims. But the president often has tacked on interviews with local media (in which he repeats the same false statements) and gaggles with the White House press corps before and after his trips.

So that adds up to 84 claims on Oct. 1, when he held a rally in Johnson City, Tenn.; 83 claims on Oct. 22, when he held a rally in Houston; and 78 claims on Oct. 19, when he held a rally in Mesa, Ariz.

Put another way: September was the second-biggest month of the Trump presidency, with 599 false and misleading claims. But that paled next to October, with almost double: 1,104 claims, not counting Oct. 31.

The burden of keeping track of this verbiage has consumed the weekends and nights of The Fact Checker staff. We originally had planned to include Oct. 31 in this update, but the prospect of wading through 20 tweets and the nearly 10,000 words Trump spoke that day was too daunting for our deadline.

The president’s proclivity to twist data and fabricate stories is on full display at his rallies. He has his greatest hits: 120 times he had falsely said he passed the biggest tax cut in history, 80 times he has asserted that the U.S. economy today is the best in history and 74 times he has falsely said his border wall is already being built. (Congress has allocated only $1.6 billion for fencing, but Trump also frequently mentioned additional funding that has not yet been appropriated.)

But there are many curious moments, too, suggesting the president is walled off from contradictory information.

In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Trump emphatically denied he had imposed many tariffs. “I mean, other than some tariffs on steel — which is actually small, what do we have? . . . Where do we have tariffs? We don’t have tariffs anywhere,” he insisted. The newspaper responded by printing a list of $305 billion tariffs on many types of U.S. imports.

Nearly 25 times, he has claimed that Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh was No. 1 in his class at Yale University or at Yale Law School. The law school does not rank, and Kavanaugh graduated cum laude from the college — the third level, below summa cum laude and magna cum laude. At the time, Yale granted honors rather liberally, so nearly 50 percent of the class graduated with honors, with half of those cum laude.

This is one of those facts that can be easily checked with a Google search, yet the president persists with his falsehood.

Similarly, Trump attacked Richard Cordray, a Democrat running for governor in Ohio, for having spent $250 million on renovating the building for the agency he once ran, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. That was almost double the actual cost. Oddly, Trump added that after Cordray spent “$50 million on some elevators, it turned out they didn’t work.”

Trump lives in expensive housing, but that’s a fantasy. The most expensive elevator ever is the 1,070-foot-high Bailong Elevator, set in a Chinese mountain range. It cost $20 million.

Thirteen times, Trump invented whole-cloth stories about Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), the lead plaintiff in a steadily advancing lawsuit that could open up the Trump Organization’s books to lawmakers. Trump falsely claimed Blumenthal said he was a war hero and fought in Vietnam’s Da Nang province. “We call him ‘Da Nang Richard.’ ‘Da Nang’ — that’s his nickname,” Trump said. Blumenthal described his military record in misleading or false terms on a few occasions before he was elected to the Senate in 2010, but he never said he fought in the theater. Trump also said Blumenthal dropped out of the Senate race (no), barely won anyway (no) and was crying when he apologized (no).

“It’s like liberating, like a war, like there’s a foreign invasion. And they occupy your country. And then you get them out through whatever. And they call it liberation,” Trump declared in Mosinee, Wis., on Oct. 24. Some audience members began yelling, “Get the hell out.”

This dystopian vision of a violent gang overrunning cities and towns across the United States is divorced from reality. MS-13 operates in a few areas such as Los Angeles, Long Island and the Washington region. It’s a gross exaggeration to say that towns are being liberated from MS-13, as if they had been captured.

Most striking, the tone of Trump’s attacks on Democrats escalated the closer the election approached. The president always had slammed Democrats, but his rhetoric became sharper and increasingly inaccurate in recent weeks.

“They want to erase our gains and plunge our country into a nightmare of gridlock, poverty, chaos and, frankly, crime, because that’s what comes with it,” he said on Oct. 4. “The Democrat Party is radical socialism, Venezuela and open borders. It’s now called, to me — you’ve never heard this before, the Party of Crime. It’s a Party of Crime, it’s what it is. And to pay for their socialism, which is going to destroy our country.”

On Oct. 18, in Missoula, Mont., Trump falsely said no one even challenges his description of the Democrats as the party of crime. “Democrats have become the party of crime. It’s true. Who would believe you could say that and nobody even challenges it. Nobody’s ever challenged it,” he said.

But then he had an unusual moment of doubt. “Maybe they have. Who knows? I have to always say that, because then they’ll say they did actually challenge it, and they’ll put like — then they’ll say he gets a Pinocchio. So maybe they did challenge it, but not very much."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics ... d3bf54ca33

<

There is a ceasefire in the US-China trade war. So who waved the white flag first?

China may scale back the rhetoric of its global ambitions, recognising that discretion may be the better part of valour in a long-term game

Likewise, Trump may be less confrontational, now that the soft underbelly of the US economy has been exposed

Business›Banking & Finance Macroscope
by Anthony Rowley
PUBLISHED : Sunday, 16 December, 2018, 11:02am
UPDATED : Sunday, 16 December, 2018, 7:50pm

US President Donald Trump would never admit the funk he is in, but has more reason than Chinese President Xi Jinping to be scared of the ending of the war he started.

Bluster and bravado aside, the truce suggests a growing awareness within the Trump camp of the need to reach a deal with China – and soon!

There is real cause for alarm, and that is the ticking bomb at the heart of the world’s largest economy – the stock market.

A common and mistaken assumption is that the US entered the trade war in a stronger shape, whereas China’s economic health was deteriorating and unable to withstand a broad and protracted economic war.

America’s economy is powered to a much greater extent by a single giant dynamo – akin to a nuclear reactor – at its heart: the stock market.

It is a monster relative to the size of the US economy and in global terms. US equities were valued at a combined US$32 trillion in early 2018, almost double the size of the world’s largest economy. By contrast, China’s market-to-GDP ratio was just 71 per cent.

Why should this matter, beyond giving Trump the reason to brag about size? It matters a great deal because a stock market the size of America’s is a gigantic money or wealth machine that supports consumption and investment – and therefore economic growth – proportionately.

The word “proportionately” is important because the greater the capitalisation-to-GDP ratio, the greater the potential leverage on economic vitality. In the US where massive central bank liquidity has fuelled equity investment, this positive leverage has been huge.

Conversely, when stock prices start going south, they exert a tremendous negative impact on the economy. This is surely why Trump seemed so anxious to keep his trade deal with Xi Jinping on track, even to the point of offering to intervene with the US Justice Department in the case of a detained Chinese executive.

Stock markets are political in a way that other organs of the financial system are not. It is odd how often this is overlooked. Economic data – trade or employment figures – in general are greeted with a yawn by most people, unless they show a sharp rise in joblessness. Inflation data can occasionally excite, but again only if they show a sharp rise.

Bond yields can rise or fall without raising too much delight or dismay to any but the professional investors. Even currencies need to jump or plunge to grab attention. But stock market movements rivet many people, especially when Wall Street dives as it has recently.

Trump was happy to brag when the stock indices soared to records on interest rates that by some estimates have been at their lowest level since the 16th century in real terms. But he forgot how vulnerable he was to a market reversal.

As he went into his trade war declaring that it’s “easy to win,” Trump expected the booming US economy to carry him to victory, while an anaemic China would quickly beg for mercy and concede. Instead, both sides have come out with white flags fluttering.

Japan’s economy, the world’s third largest, is vulnerable in this regard. The ratio of stock market capitalisation to GDP is 127 per cent, again much higher than in China’s case. Hong Kong’s ratio is much higher still, but that is mainly due to its being an offshore financial centre.

What is a stable market valuation-to-GDP ratio? Some estimates suggest a ratio of between 75 to 90 per cent of GDP is sustainable over the longer term. Yet globally, the ratio was closer to 120 per cent as of late 2017, according to the World Bank.

The global figure is very much influenced by the price of American stocks, because of the sheer size of the US market. Despite recent corrections, the US market capitalisation still exceeds the 2000 level when irrational exuberance died and the dotcom bubble burst.

None of this is to say that China is not vulnerable economically, not least the size of corporate and government debt, especially borrowings by local government. But China has more fiscal leeway to deal with such problems than many market economies.

The Chinese stock market tends to be more volatile than Western markets but it is important to remember that the leveraging impact of this volatility on the Chinese economy is not as serious as in the US, because of the lower proportionate value of stocks to GDP.

Trump has been foolish to gamble on his economy’s inherent strength to carry him through a trade war that was reckless from the start. Apart from slumping stock valuations, the legacy of this war has been falling business confidence, which also weakens his hand.

For now, Wall Street may experience a modest relief rally at Trump’s white flag. But this does not detract from the fact that US stocks remain overvalued by historical fair value standards and will no doubt continue to correct toward equilibrium.

It would be absurdly naive to think that US animus toward China can be dissipated through an expedient truce, or that China will do anything for a quiet life and abandon its challenge of America’s technological supremacy.

China may scale back the rhetoric of its global ambitions, recognising that discretion can be the better part of valour in a long-term game.

Likewise, Trump and company are likely to be less confrontational, now that the soft underbelly of the US economy has been exposed.

Anthony Rowley is a veteran journalist specialising in Asian economic and financial affairs

https://www.scmp.com/business/banking-f ... white-flag

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