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Hucksters like Jones would not be able to stir up distrust in our institutions if our institutions were rock solid, and they are anything but.

@Finn dAbuzz,
Quote:
Hucksters like Jones would not be able to stir up distrust in our institutions if our institutions were rock solid, and they are anything but.

Former Trump Aide [Nunberg] Says His Interviews ‘Made for Good TV’

Ari Berman
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@AriBerman
Big news for voting rights: Washington state has now passed automatic voter registration, Election Day registration, pre-registration for 16 & 17 year olds & a state Voting Rights Act. Governor will soon sign all 4 bills.

Still, even Mr. Trump has taken to joking about the revolving door lately. At the annual Gridiron Dinner last weekend with politicians and figures in the news media, he said, “I like chaos,” and called the turnover “invigorating.”

Almost as if he were previewing the next episode of a show, he added, “Who’s going to be the next to leave? Steve Miller or Melania?”

Almost as if he were previewing the next episode of a show, he added, “Who’s going to be the next to leave? Steve Miller or Melania?”

The New Yorker just published an article by Jane Mayer that contends that Trump chose Rex Tillerson over Mitt Romney for his Secretary of State at the direction of the Kremlin, because all of the dirt in the salacious Steele Dossier is true and the evidence of this is being held over Trump's head.

Of course, the Ukraine related sanctions have not been lifted and the Trump Administration has increased military aid to the country, well beyond the pouch-o-meals provided by the Obama Administration.

The Trump administration has decided not to punish anybody for now under new sanctions retaliating for Russia's election-meddling, the State Department said Monday, in a surprising move that fueled further questions about whether President Donald Trump is too soft on Moscow.

No matter how stupid anyone believes Trump is, he's certainly not so dumb as to think that the Kremlin would interpret the firing of cruise missiles against a Syrian airbase shortly after he was inaugurated as cooperating on the conflict in Syria.

The article is a blatant piece of propaganda intended to help rehabilitate the image of Richard Steele, and Mayer not only casts him in a sympathetic light, she attempts to lionize him.

The article is a blatant piece of propaganda intended to help rehabilitate the image of Richard [sic] Steele, and Mayer not only casts him in a sympathetic light, she attempts to lionize him.

John Sipher, the former C.I.A. officer, predicts that Mueller’s probe will render the final verdict on Steele’s dossier. “People who say it’s all garbage, or all true, are being politically biased,” Sipher said. “There’s enough there to be worthy of further study. Professionals need to look at travel records, phone records, bank records, foreign police-service cameras, and check it all out. It will take professional investigators to run it to ground.” He believes that Mueller, whose F.B.I. he worked with, “is a hundred per cent doing that.”

That's because the tariffs would further drive up his cost to buy domestic steel, while Chinese kegs, which would not be covered by the tariff because they are already manufactured, would stay cheap.

"When a Chinese keg delivered to America costs only a little more than what we pay for just the steel, there really is no point in trying to compete on that basis," says Bentley.

He's already losing $50,000-$100,000 a month. He says 2018 will be a make-or-break year for the business.

In a CNN report Wednesday, Mark Zandi, chief U.S. economist at Moody's Analytics, estimated that job losses because of the tariffs could range from 100,000 to 150,000.

A report published Monday by D.C.-based consulting firm The Trade Partnership suggests that five jobs would be lost for every job gained.

Bentley expects at least some of his workers would be among those on the losing end. "I worry about the people here," he says, his eyes filling with tears.

Republicans confront Trump over steel tariffs, fearing trade war
Bentley — who runs other businesses in the area — bought the American Keg Company in 2016. He says he didn't expect to make much of a profit, but, given the growing craft beer industry and the expectation brewers would pay at least a little more for a domestic product, breaking even seemed possible.

The only way that can happen now, he says, is if the U.S. government broadens the proposed tariffs to include imports of finished kegs. But that's a tough case to make for a small company without lobbyists or lawyers.

Bentley says his employees might not understand all the implications of Trump's proposal. He fears they'll come to understand it the hard way.

They didn't think that tariff thing through.

Canada is expected to announce Friday the start of formal free-trade negotiations with the four-country South American trade bloc known as Mercosur.

A spokesman for International Trade Minister Francois-Philippe Champagne says the negotiations could begin in earnest in the next 10 days.

That announcement will come after Champagne formally signs the reconstituted and much larger Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement later today in Santiago, Chile.

Champagne's spokesman Joseph Pickerill says the progress on both deals is a positive sign that Canada's efforts have paid off to diversify its international trade portfolio in the face of growing uncertainty with its top trading partner, the United States.

Louisiana’s former governor, Bobby Jindal, deserves much of the blame. A Republican wunderkind when elected at age 36 in 2008, he cut income taxes and roughly doubled the size of corporate tax breaks. By the end of his two terms, businesses were able to use those breaks to avoid paying about 80 percent of the taxes they would have owed under the official corporate rate.

At first, Jindal spun a tale about how the tax cuts would lead to an economic boom — but they didn’t, just as they didn’t in Kansas. Instead, Louisiana’s state revenue plunged. The tax cuts helped the rich become richer and left the state’s middle class and poor residents with struggling schools, hospitals and other services.

In December, the Department of Justice requested that the Census Bureau add a question to the 2020 survey that would ask respondents to reveal whether or not they are U.S. citizens. Since ProPublica first reported the DOJ’s letter, civil rights groups and congressional Democrats have announced their opposition, arguing that in the midst of President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown, the question will lead many people to opt out of the census, resulting in an inaccurate population count.

A lot is at stake. The once-a-decade population count determines how House seats are distributed and helps determine where hundreds of billions of federal dollars are spent.

But one question regarding the December letter remained unclear. The letter was signed by a career staffer in a division of the DOJ whose main function is handling budget and procurement matters. Who, observers wondered, was actually driving the policy change?

Emails obtained by ProPublica in response to a Freedom of Information Act request provide an answer: The letter was drafted by a Trump political appointee who is best known for his work defending Republican redistricting efforts around the country.

John Gore, who since last summer has been the acting head of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, draftedthe original letter to the Census Bureau, the emails show. In one email, Arthur Gary, the career official who signed the letter, noted that it was sent “at the request of leadership, working with John.”

Gore came to the Trump administration from the law firm Jones Day, where he was an appellate specialist best known for defending a range of Republican state redistricting plans that were attacked as racial gerrymandering by opponents. Gore, for example, helped defend a Virginia redistricting that was ultimately thrown out by a court which ruled that the legislators had focused too much on race.

The emails show Gore sending a draft of the census letter to Gary in early November under the subject line, “Close Hold: Draft Letter.” Gary signed and sent the letter the next month and then emailed a note to Gore confirming it was being mailed.

It’s not clear why Gore, who did not respond to a request for comment, didn’t sign the letter himself. The Justice Department press office also did not respond to requests for comment.

ProPublica previously reported that Gore wrote a filing changing the department’s position in litigation challenging Texas’ voter ID law. The Obama-era DOJ had pursued litigation claiming that the Texas statute intentionally discriminated against minority voters; the Trump administration then withdrew the claim. Gore wrote the filing largely by himself but asked career attorneys who’d long been involved in the case to sign it.

A decision on adding a citizenship question to the 2020 census is expected by the end of the month and will be made by Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross. The Census Bureau is part of the Commerce Department.

Separately, the Trump administration has taken a second step that suggests a philosophical commitment to including citizenship questions as part of the census. It selected as its first political appointee at the Census Bureau a longtime legislative aide to former Sen. David Vitter. The Louisiana Republican made headlines for years by repeatedly introducing controversial proposals for the census to ask about citizenship and immigration status.