monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

Without it, we would have no schools, highways and roads, air traffic control, police and fire officers, and many other necessary social services.

schools, highways and roads, air traffic control, police and fire officers, and many other necessary social services.

In his new memoir McConnell writes poignantly about that first campaign: “Approaching strangers, speaking in front of crowds—it was all extremely hard for me at the time…. At my core, I’m quite shy.” He and an old friend who helped manage the campaign

slogged through the summer, spending our weekends eating fish sandwiches and shaking hands at the Catholic picnics popular throughout the county. During the week…I’d travel up and down Dixie and Preston Highways as the sun went down, going in and out of stores by myself, introducing myself to the employees and customers at local diners and small businesses, and explaining why I was running for county judge. County government was a mess. People were escaping from the jail. Taxes were going up.

He was able to raise enough money, McConnell writes, to put ads for his campaign on radio and television. In November, he defeated the incumbent Democrat by six percentage points, to his great satisfaction.

McConnell’s charming account of that first experience in electoral politics has but one flaw: it isn’t what happened. Alec MacGillis, a fine reporter who has worked at The Washington Post, The New Republic, and ProPublica, fills in some large holes in McConnell’s account in his short but revelatory book, The Cynic: The Political Education of Mitch McConnell. First and most important, the substance of McConnell’s campaign was shaped not by the candidate and his sidekick with whom he ate fish sandwiches, but by two highly experienced (and expensive) campaign consultants. McConnell’s campaign in 1977 cost $355,000, a level of spending without precedent in Jefferson County. His success raising money allowed McConnell to hire Robert Goodman, an artful producer of campaign commercials for television, and Tully Plesser, a prominent pollster and strategist.

...Was he serious? Well, no. McConnell said in an interview years later that these recommendations were political posturing, “playing for headlines” to distract voters from Watergate.

[In 1984]He traded up for a fancier, and more expensive, political consultant and pollster, this time hiring Roger Ailes,

American intelligence agencies have told the White House they now have “high confidence” that the Russian government was behind the theft of emails and documents from the Democratic National Committee, according to federal officials who have been briefed on the evidence.

But intelligence officials have cautioned that they are uncertain whether the electronic break-in at the committee’s computer systems was intended as fairly routine cyberespionage — of the kind the United States also conducts around the world — or as part of an effort to manipulate the 2016 presidential election.

Struggling to keep Iraq from splintering, American diplomats pushed for a law in 2011 to share the country’s oil wealth among its fractious regions.

Then Exxon Mobil showed up.

Under its chief executive, Rex W. Tillerson, the giant oil company sidestepped Baghdad and Washington, signing a deal directly with the Kurdish administration in the country’s north. The move undermined Iraq’s central government, strengthened Kurdish independence ambitions and contravened the stated goals of the United States.

Mr. Tillerson’s willingness to cut a deal regardless of the political consequences speaks volumes about Exxon Mobil’s influence. In the Iraq case, Mr. Tillerson and his company outmaneuvered the State Department, which he has now been nominated by President-elect Donald J. Trump to lead.

“They are very powerful in the region, and they couldn’t care less about what the State Department wants to do,” Jean-François Seznec, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, a research group in Washington, said of Exxon Mobil’s pursuits in the Middle East.

Big banks are fighting tens of billions of dollars of potential legal costs linked to at least a dozen pending lawsuits arising from the financial crisis. Now they want the Supreme Court to weigh in, arguing that regulators took too long to file their claims.

A handful of banks, including Wells Fargo, Credit Suisse and Deutsche Bank, have asked the Supreme Court to review a lower court decision that said the regulators filed their claims on time despite a Depression-era securities law that gave them only a three-year window.

The Justice Department is pushing back. In a brief submitted last week, it says the banks’ argument lacks merit and asked the court not to take up the case.