Kate Upton accuses Guess co-founder Paul Marciano of sexual misconduct https://t.co/9FUHwXaGrf
— Fox News (@FoxNews) February 1, 2018
Kate Upton Accuses Guess Founder Paul Marciano of Sexual Harassment. https://t.co/wEVM0PlQDQ pic.twitter.com/6NUW1xS6r3
— THE FASHION LAW (@TheFashionLaw) February 1, 2018
Kate Upton Wants to Tell Full Story of Accusing Guess Jeans' Paul Marciano of Sexual Abuse https://t.co/w7CZ2QF1Vt
— TMZ (@TMZ) February 1, 2018
Analysis: That upcoming Democratic rout? Suddenly, it’s looking far less certain. https://t.co/p2yPW8QeKD
— Washington Post (@washingtonpost) February 1, 2018
There have been a lot of positive signs for Democrats’ chances in 2018 over the past few months: A series of special elections in which the party vastly improved on its performance in past contests, though without always seeing a victory as a result. A widening gap in the “generic ballot” poll question, asking people if they prefer to vote for the Democrats or the Republicans in the upcoming House contests. And, of course, President Trump’s ongoing unpopularity.The Democrats are totally freakin' out. The State of the Union speech was phenomenal and leftists have seen the future. It's not bright for them. (They're already unglued, so I can't say they've become any more unglued than they already are; perhaps they're just showing it more?)
Mix those ingredients together, and the result is a midterm election that looks like it could be awfully good for the still-battered party. This has led to a surge of enthusiasm on the left about a seemingly inevitable blue wave sweeping over Washington, bringing the Democrats back to power.
But those trends aren’t as stable as they seem.
Consider the generic ballot question. In RealClearPolitics’ average of polling, the Democrats had a stunning 13-point advantage over the Republicans in late December. Since then, though, that advantage has plunged.
The Democratic advantage now is 7.3 points — still big, but the lowest it has been since last July.
At the same time, Trump’s getting more popular. He hit a low in approval last December, too. He’s still unpopular — but since that low he’s seen a four-point increase in approval according to the RealClearPolitics average. His net approval rating — those who approve minus those who don’t — has risen from minus-21 to minus-13.
Those still aren’t great numbers, but there’s a correlation between a president’s approval and how his party fares in House races. As Trump’s approval rises, so do his party’s chances in November.
Then there’s money. On Thursday morning, The Post reported that the Republican National Committee had substantially outraised the Democrats in 2017. The RNC and its House and Senate committees raised a total of nearly $289 million last year. The Democrats raised a combined $258 million — but the Democratic National Committee raised only $64.5 million to the RNC’s $123 million.
As we will write in nearly every article about the 2018 elections until, say, August, it’s still early. Lots of time to raise money, lots of time for movement in the polls. But the question is how those polls will move. Recent polls have shown an improvement in perceptions of the Republican tax bill, for example, which could both be driving the recent increase in the party’s overall polling and could suggest a longer-term improvement is in the offing...
Michelle Malkin: 'Dreamers' and Demons https://t.co/V1vNre1jhY— John Oliver (@sokeijarhead) February 1, 2018
Xinran Ji, 24, had big dreams. But demons demolished them.More.
The bright hopes of young Xinran Ji, a University of Southern California engineering student from Inner Mongolia, died in 2014 at the hands of a then-19-year-old "Dreamer" and his thug pals. Mexican illegal alien Jonathan DelCarmen, who first jumped the southern border at age 12, pleaded guilty to second-degree murder last summer in the savage robbery and fatal beating of Ji -- who was walking home from a study group after midnight.
No, it wasn't President Trump, ICE agents, Republicans or conservative talk show hosts who racially profiled Xinran Ji. It was "Dreamer" DelCarmen and his partners in crime: Alberto Ochoa, 17, Andrew Garcia, 18, and Alejandra Guerrero, 16. The gangsters targeted Ji because he was Asian and assumed he "must have money." Guerrero had sent Facebook messages about wanting to "flock" (rob) white and Chinese people. Off-campus neighborhoods around USC are dominated by Mexican Mafia affiliates that target foreign students and shake down local businesses owned by law-abiding immigrants.
"Dreamer" DelCarmen and his friends stalked Ji on a street corner in south central L.A. before bashing him in the head with a baseball bat and a wrench. The attack was caught on multiple security cameras. Ji managed to stagger home to his apartment, leaving a quarter-mile trail of blood behind him.
Sometime during the night, Xinran Ji died in his bed. And the aspirations of his family, who sacrificed everything to send him to America to pursue his studies, perished with him.
"Dreamer" DelCarmen and his friends drove off to a nearby beach to rob two more innocent people in a city and state that have defiantly declared themselves "sanctuaries" for people in the United States illegally -- not for the best and brightest like Xinran Ji, but for lawless barbarians like Jonathan DelCarmen.
"It's like heaven fell down," Ji's father told Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge George Lomeli at Garcia's sentencing hearing.
"His life was taken by these demons," Ji's aunt added. "They robbed and killed an innocent youth with very vicious means, and this was inhuman."
Garcia received life in prison without the possibility of parole. Ji's parents' sentence was far worse: a brutal, violent and permanent separation from their only child. In Washington, D.C., however, some families matter more than others. And victims of indiscriminate open borders, like Xinran Ji, don't exist.
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, proud promoter of sanctuary policies for illegal immigrants, led more than two dozen Democrats in turning the State of the Union address into "Take an Illegal Alien to Work Day."
Platitudes whitewash bloody reality.
"I want to be clear: DREAMers are Americans," declared Rep. Nita Lowey, D-N.Y., who invited an illegal alien from El Salvador who now works at Apple. "They contribute to our economy, our communities and our strength and stability as a nation."
Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., brought a Mexican illegal alien, Cesar Montelongo, now enrolled in the M.D.-Ph.D. program at Loyola University Chicago Stritch School of Medicine.
"I hope Cesar's presence reminds President Trump what's at stake in the debate over DACA: the lives of hundreds of thousands of innocent young people who want to contribute to our country's future."
Democrats and pro-amnesty radicals protest any glint of sunlight shed on the destructive consequences of not enforcing our nation's immigration laws. They claim it's unfair to focus on single cases or "anecdotes," even as they promote DACA recipients as a holy, unassailable class of "honor roll students, star athletes, talented artists and valedictorians."
This propaganda, to which open-borders Republicans have fecklessly capitulated, is an offense to decency and truth...
NEW COLUMN IS POSTED! DEMOCRATS BOO AMERICA https://t.co/gFCVYctd19— Ann Coulter (@AnnCoulter) January 31, 2018
Democrats Boo America https://t.co/qqlc2S5PVH— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) February 1, 2018
Unlike the president, I don't call everything "incredible," but Trump's State of the Union address was incredible, beautifully delivered. (This guy could have a future in television!)More.
As proof, I cite every single media outlet bitterly complaining after the speech that, as MSNBC's chyron put it: "TRUMP FAILS TO MENTION RUSSIA'S ELECTION MEDDLING IN STATE OF THE UNION."
He did not address the elephant in the room!
A lot of people don't like Trump, but no one was thinking that. It's only an elephant in your room, media. This is the very definition of solipsistic.
What did they want him to say? "I confess!"? Then they would have complained that the speech was all about him. There would be five Mueller deputies going over the speech, line by line.
If that's all they got, it was a great speech.
The media claimed that Trump tricked them into reporting that his address was going to be bipartisan -- and then double-crossed them by delivering a "divisive" speech.
To be sure, there were a few partisan flourishes, galling to both sides.
Points Liberals Hate:
-- "Beautiful clean coal";
-- The end of Obamacare's individual mandate;
-- Keeping Guantanamo open; and
-- Firing useless government employees working for the Veterans Administration.
Points Conservatives Hate:
-- Amnesty;
-- Pointless wars; and
-- Any policy Trump mentioned when the camera flashed to Ivanka.
Altogether, these partisan remarks consumed about seven minutes of an 80-minute speech.
The bulk of Trump's address celebrated:
-- A booming economy;
-- Companies bringing jobs home;
-- Low black unemployment;
-- The flag;
-- The national motto;
-- God;
-- Rebuilding roads and bridges;
-- Law enforcement;
-- The life of a child born to an opioid addict;
-- The military;
-- Veterans; and
-- Getting the best immigrants we can.
I'm trying to imagine FDR opposing any of that. But according to today's Democrats, those issues are "divisive." (Calling the president a "racist" 2 million times a day -- that's not particularly divisive.)
Democrats have apparently decided that the magic of immigration-created demographic transformation means the future is theirs! They no longer have to worry about middle-of-the-road voters, independents, undecideds -- or really any Americans at all.
The entire party has embraced Harvard law professor Mark Tushnet's advice (offered back when he thought Trump was going to lose): "The culture wars are over; they lost, we won. ... F*ck Anthony Kennedy." (No asterisk in the original.)
Drawing on his family's mystique, Rep. Joseph Kennedy III delivered the Democratic rebuttal while standing in an auto body shop in front of a broken-down car. The only thing missing was a wet girl in the back seat, seaweed in her hair, desperately scratching at the windshield.
To drive home the point that the Democratic Party is not a moribund carcass with nothing but memories, next year Chelsea Clinton should give the response. Then Hillary, followed by Amy Carter.
Kennedy began by unironically denouncing privilege and celebrity. (As everyone knows, Democrats cannot STAND celebrity!) He then devoted the lion's share of his speech to the Democrats' pet issues: transgenders and foreigners. This is a party so completely insulated from the concerns of normal people that it is now dedicating itself to exotic micro-issues...
.@Edsall: The greatest unknown is how immigration reform will influence the voting behavior of the white working class https://t.co/wVhbIsWwdF
— NYT Opinion (@nytopinion) February 1, 2018
President Trump’s immigration proposal has put Democrats in a bind; they know it and he knows it.Brilliant. Freakin' brilliant. I love this president. I really do.
Trump’s immigration “framework” — first outlined on Jan. 25 — represents an unusually sophisticated strategy. He proposes to more than double the number of Dreamers granted a path to citizenship, a significant concession to Democrats.
In return, he seeks approval of a set of policies strongly opposed by the left, each of which is designed to stem what Trump sees as a threatening increase in the nonwhite population of the United States.
What kind of numbers are we talking about? According to the Pew Research Center:
In 2014, immigrant women accounted for about 901,000 U.S. births, which marked a threefold increase from 1970 when immigrant women accounted for about 274,000 births. Meanwhile, the annual number of births to U.S.-born women dropped by 11 percent during that same time period, from 3.46 million in 1970 to 3.10 million in 2014.There are now an estimated 690,000 registered Dreamers in the United States, all of whom were brought to this country as children before 2007. Trump’s offer would increase the number offered a path to citizenship to 1.8 million by adding those who are eligible for DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals), but who never registered.
For a Democratic Party whose electoral strength depends on Hispanic support (64 percent of Latinos identified with or leaned toward the Democratic Party in 2016) preventing the deportation of the Dreamers and providing them with legal status has become a matter of political necessity.
Trump, acutely aware of the importance of DACA to Democrats, deliberately turned the status of Dreamers into a crisis on Sept. 5 when he ended the Dreamers program.
Since then, DACA has been the subject of constant debate and negotiation. Democrats have continued to threaten to shut down the government, when the Treasury runs out of money on Feb. 8, if no favorable agreement can be reached.
Trump’s proposal more than meets Democratic demands on DACA. But in return Trump wants Democrats to swallow three proposals of varying unpalatability.
First, the creation of a $25 billion fund for construction of a southern border wall to prevent illegal entry to the United States, primarily by undocumented Hispanics.
Second, a shift in immigration priorities from family reunification to a merit system granting entry to workers with relatively high skills. This would require limiting reunification preferences to minor children and spouses, while eliminating them for parents, siblings and adult children, what critics call “chain migration.” These steps would reduce immigration from developing countries: The two top countries of origin benefiting from family reunification policies are Mexico and the Dominican Republic.
Third, an end to the Diversity Immigrant Visa Program. The countries providing the largest numbers of immigrants under the lottery visa program, according to the State Department, are Cameroon, Congo, Liberia, Egypt, Iran, Nepal, Ukraine and Uzbekistan.
The greatest unknown is how immigration reform will influence the voting behavior of the white working class.
In a Jan. 29 Vox essay, “The math is clear: Democrats need to win more working-class white votes,” Ruy Teixeira, a senior fellow at the liberal Center for American Progress, writes that Democrats seeking to regain control of Congress may be forced to mute their opposition to Trump immigration provisions they find offensive.
Teixeira argues that:
The view that Democrats can get along without working-class white voters is simply wrong. It reflects wishful thinking and a rigid set of political priors — namely, that Democrats’ political problems always stem from insufficient motivation of base voters — more than a cold, hard look at what the electoral and demographic data say.The problem for Democrats is that not only do they need to improve margins among white working-class voters but they cannot allow a repetition of the minority voting patterns in 2016. That year, black turnout fell to 59.6 percent from 66.6 percent in 2012; and Clinton won 66 percent of the Latino vote, five percentage points less than President Barack Obama in 2012.
Doug Jones’s December victory in the Alabama Senate race demonstrated how crucial black voters are to Democrats: In that close contest, African-Americans, 92 percent of whom voted for Jones, made up 29 percent of the electorate. They are 26 percent of the voting age population.
The conflicts the Trump proposals present for Democrats are most painful to Hispanic and black elected officials.
President Trump will give his first State of the Union address at 9 p.m. Eastern time, talking up the U.S. economy and calling for bipartisanship — after a year in office during which his aggressive, mercurial politics often overshadowed the former and undermined the latter.More at that top link.
“For the last year we have sought to restore the bonds of trust between our citizens and their government,” Trump plans to say, in a speech excerpt released by the White House on Tuesday evening.
In another excerpt, Trump will say “This is our New American Moment. There has never been a better time to start living the American dream.
Trump also intends to use the speech to call for a bipartisan deal on immigration. On Thursday he proposed a deal that would allow “dreamers” — young immigrants brought to the United States illegally as children — to be given a path to citizenship, in exchange for an increase in border-security funding and large cuts to legal immigration.
“So tonight I am extending an open hand to work with members of both parties, Democrats and Republicans, to protect our citizens, of every background, color, and creed,” Trump will say, according to the excerpts.
That tone will be markedly different from the one that Trump used in a Twitter messages earlier last week, in which he taunted the Senate’s top Democrat, Charles E. Schumer (N.Y.) for not agreeing to a bipartisan immigration deal. That tweet came after a short-lived government shutdown, which ended when Democrats backed down.
“Cryin’ Chuck Schumer fully understands, especially after his humiliating defeat, that if there is no Wall, there is no DACA,” Trump wrote. “DACA” is an acronym for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, an Obama-era program that allowed some “Dreamers” to avoid deportation.
And Trump’s call for bipartisanship and an end to division seemed unlikely to change the tone in Washington — where, in the hours leading up to Trump’s address, lawmakers seemed more divided than ever. One major cause was the fight over a House Intelligence Committee “memo” that purportedly raises questions about federal investigations into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.
Many Republicans have used that memo, which was written by staff members of the committee chairman, Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), as a reason to question the validity of scrutiny of Trump and his staff by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III.
The divisions over immigration will be visible in the gallery that overlooks the House chamber. More than 50 Democratic lawmakers have invited “dreamers” to attend as guests to dramatize their demand for legal status. In response, Republican Rep. Paul A. Gosar (Ariz.) tweeted that he had asked the Capitol Police to check all guests’ IDs, and arrest “any illegal aliens in attendance.”
In Trump’s box, he has guests who will highlight the threat posed by MS-13, a criminal gang active in both the United States and Central America. Trump’s guests will include a federal immigration agent who has investigated the gang, and two sets of parents whose children were killed by MS-13 members...
There is a moment in Rose McGowan's new documentary series when she learns that Harvey Weinstein has allegedly stolen the first half of her memoir, "Brave," months in advance of its publication.More.
"I can't tell you how violating it felt," she explains via voice-over. "It was like being back in that room with him all over again, only this time, it was the inside of my mind and not my body."
Readers of "Brave" will understand why the revelation so enraged McGowan. She does not hold back when writing about Weinstein, whom she refers to only as "The Monster."
Long before the Weinstein scandal broke, McGowan publicly alleged that she had been raped by a Hollywood producer. After other women came forward with allegations of abuse, McGowan named Weinstein. But "Brave" is the first time she has described the alleged attack. Weinstein has denied the allegations.
Midway through the memoir, the incident occupies an entire chapter called "Death of Self." At the 1997 Sundance Film Festival, Weinstein invited McGowan to his hotel room for a meeting. Just a few hours before, he had sat behind her at the premiere of her film "Going All the Way," in which she appeared topless.
Her manager insisted the meeting was important, she writes. "I was so new to the industry's upper echelon, I didn't know … what so many already knew, that he was a predator and I was walking into a trap."
Once she was inside his hotel room, Weinstein offered to show her the hot tub, and before long, she writes, he had pushed her into a steamy room and begun stripping her clothes off. After picking her up and putting her on the edge of the Jacuzzi, she writes, he forced her legs open and performed oral sex on her while masturbating. She pretended to have an orgasm in an attempt to end the experience.
"I did what so many who experience trauma do, I disassociated and left my body. Detached from my body, I hover up under the ceiling, watching myself sitting on the edge of the tub, against a wall, held in place by the Monster whose face is between my legs, trapped by a beast. In this tiny room with this huge man, my mind is blank. Wake up Rose; get out of here."
The alleged sexual assault was the culmination of years of torment for McGowan, and "Brave" begins at the beginning. Using a brash tone that will be familiar to the millions who follow her on Twitter, McGowan describes her life, starting with the girlhood years she spent in a religious cult ("I was told I was worth nothing in the eyes of God"), the eating disorder she suffered as a teen ("I was never able to get below 92 pounds"), and her decision to legally emancipate herself from her parents at 15.
Still, as she describes her formative years it is clear that McGowan, 44, has always viewed herself as a defiant spirit and still takes pride in the fact that she grew angry over being made to wear a pink smock at school while the boys got blue ones.
That was after her family split from the Children of God. McGowan's father led the Italian branch and McGowan remembers being forced to declare her acceptance of God, lest she be beaten. When she was 4 a cult elder spotted a wart on her thumb and sliced it off with a razor blade, beginning "a narrative that [messed] with my head for years, that of perfection as self-protection. I told myself if I were just perfect enough, I'd be okay."
When the cult began promoting sex between children and adults, McGowan's father decided to leave. After the family returned to America, where they split time between Oregon and Colorado, she felt out of place. Her schoolmates couldn't understand her odd upbringing and she lashed out, still describing their "proverbial white picket fence" backgrounds as equally dangerous, "a different kind of cult."
"I'm sure I was unnerving as a child because of my intensity. I know I was because I basically was the same as I am now, and I tend to unnerve people to this day."
A runaway at 13, McGowan lived for a year on the street. When she returned home, her father demanded $300 a month in rent so she began gigging as an extra for $35 a day. Before long, she'd moved to Hollywood, finding leading roles in movies like "Scream" and "Jawbreaker." She began dating high-profile men such as Marilyn Manson and director Robert Rodriguez, whom McGowan calls only "RR."
Her relationship with Manson, though oft-scrutinized in the press, was largely without conflict, blissful even, from her descriptions of Manson "painting watercolors of my Boston terriers while I was ordering glassware from Martha Stewart's online store."
This was not the case with "RR," whom McGowan met at the Cannes Film Festival while the filmmaker was still married. RR was at turns weirdly flattering — "I got you at your ripest," he told her — and intensely possessive. On the set of "Grindhouse," McGowan writes, RR would often fly into jealous rages, accusing her of secretly being in love with his collaborator, Quentin Tarantino. Then, after the movie was completed, RR sold it to Dimension Films, a division of the Weinstein Co.
"I can't tell you what it was like to be sold into the hands of the man who had assaulted me and scarred me for life," McGowan writes. "I had to do press events with the Monster and see photos of us together, his big fat paw pulling me in to his body."
Keep reading.The investigation did not go well for Dunn. Because she reported the assault nearly a year-and-a-half after the event, one of the men had already graduated. The other insisted the encounter had been consensual, and since there were no witnesses or evidence, both the police and the university dropped the case. . . .If you haven’t yet read Christina Hoff Sommers’ account of this case, read the whole thing now, because it is central to understanding why and how the Obama administration effectively abolished due-process protections for university students accused of sexual misconduct. Dunn’s story was featured in a 2010 National Public Radio report that portrayed her as a trustworthy and sympathetic victim. The NPR story inspired the infamous 2011 “Dear Colleague” letter to U.S. universities that was interpreted as a mandate to impose extreme policies that in effect denied due-process to accused students, so that any accusation of sexual misconduct was treated as tantamount to proof of guilt.
[Dunn] filed a Title IX sexual discrimination complaint with the [federal Education Department’s] Office for Civil Rights. Dunn accused the University of Wisconsin of multiple violations, including subjecting her to a hostile environment and failing to provide a “prompt and equitable resolution” of her case.
But in 2008, four years after the original incident, she received an 18-page letter from the Department of Education with the verdict: “Based on its investigation, OCR determined that there is insufficient evidence to substantiate the allegations made in the complaint.”
All because Laura Dunn was a drunk teenage slut. Excuse me if I seem a bit judgmental, but didn’t I just tell you to read the whole story?
Latinos with roots in New Mexico are discovering ancestors who were Native American slaves, prompting new debates over identity https://t.co/B6VpNjXmq1
— The New York Times (@nytimes) January 28, 2018
Andrew Sullivan: Since achieving marriage rights, there’s been a radicalization of the gay rights movement’s ideology and rhetoric https://t.co/naGSy5UjH4— New York Magazine (@NYMag) January 28, 2018
"The sewer of most of Twitter is now so rank that even addicts have begun to realize that they are sinking in oceans of shitholery."— Andrew Sullivan (@sullydish) January 26, 2018
https://t.co/emm9BvPYSw via @intelligencer
"Social media has turned journalism into junk, has promoted addictive addlement in our brains, is wrecking our democracy, and slowly replacing life with pseudo-life."— Andrew Sullivan (@sullydish) January 26, 2018
https://t.co/emm9BvPYSw via @intelligencer
Operation Sabotage the Memo https://t.co/061ZCV19jM— Kimberley Strassel (@KimStrassel) January 26, 2018
Rep. Adam Schiff has many talents, though few compare to his ability to function as a human barometer of Democratic panic. The greater the level of Schiff hot, pressured air, the more trouble the party knows it’s in.
Mr. Schiff’s millibars have been popping ever since the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, on which he is ranking Democrat, last week voted to make a classified GOP memo about FBI election year abuses available to every House member. Mr. Schiff has spit and spun and apoplectically accused his Republican colleagues of everything short of treason. The memo, he insists, is “profoundly misleading,” not to mention “distorted” and “political,” and an attack on the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He initially tried to block his colleagues from reading it. Having failed, he’s now arguing Americans can know the full story only if they see the underlying classified documents.
This is highly convenient, given the Justice Department retains those documents and is as eager to make them public as a fox is to abandon the henhouse. Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes had to threaten a contempt citation simply to get permission for his committee to gain access, and even then investigators had to leave Capitol Hill to view them, and were allowed only to take notes. Mr. Nunes has no authority to declassify them. The best he can do in his continuing transparency efforts is to summarize their contents. Only in Schiff land is sunshine suddenly a pollutant.
The Schiff pressure gauge is outmatched only by the Justice Department and the FBI, which are now mobilizing their big guns to squelch the truth. That included a Wednesday Justice Department letter to Mr. Nunes—written by Assistant Attorney General Stephen Boyd, designed as a memo to the media, copied to its allies in Washington, and immediately leaked to the public. And the department wonders why anyone doubts the integrity of all its hardworking professionals.
Mr. Boyd gets in his cheap shots, for instance slamming Mr. Nunes for moving to release a memo based on documents that Mr. Nunes hasn’t even “seen.” He apparently thinks Rep. Trey Gowdy —the experienced former federal prosecutor Mr. Nunes asked to conduct the review of those docs—isn’t qualified to judge questions of national security. He hyperventilates that it would be “reckless” for the committee to make its memo public without first letting the Justice Department review it and “advise [the committee] of the risk of harm to national security.” Put another way, it is Mr. Boyd’s position that the Justice Department gets to provide oversight of Congress. The Constitution has it the other way around.
The bigger, swampier game here is to rally media pressure, and to mau-mau Mr. Nunes into giving the department a veto over the memo’s release. Ask Sen. Chuck Grassley how that goes. Mr. Grassley, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, recently sent a referral to the department for a criminal probe into dossier author Christopher Steele. He then in good faith asked the department its views on an unclassified portion of that referral that he wants to make public. The department invented a classified reason to block public release, and has refused to budge for weeks.
The Boyd letter is also a first step toward a bigger prize: President Trump. Under House rules, a majority of the Intelligence Committee can vote to declassify the memo. Mr. Trump then has up to five days to object to its release. If he doesn’t object, the memo goes public. If he does, a majority of the House would have to vote to override him.
The shrieks of reckless harm and national security are designed to pressure Mr. Trump to object. And wait for it: In coming days the Justice Department’s protectors will gin up a separate, desperate claim that Mr. Trump will somehow be “interfering” in special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe unless he objects to the release. According to this view, it is Mr. Trump’s obligation not just to sit by while the media and the Mueller team concoct their narrative, but to block any evidence that might undercut it...
In addition to being a big story about harassment, this @maggieNYT @amychozick is another case study – of many – in Clinton refusal to discard associates regarded by many in her wide circle as toxichttps://t.co/GGMdMe8mvU
— Alex Burns (@alexburnsNYT) January 26, 2018
Via @maggieNYT and @amychozick: "Hillary Clinton Chose to Shield a Top Adviser Accused of Harassment in 2008" https://t.co/JJ7HfxYnGi pic.twitter.com/AevncHhWm0
— Sopan Deb (@SopanDeb) January 26, 2018
Clinton protected top staffer accused of sexual harassment during 2008 campaign: report https://t.co/K84smjbpRf pic.twitter.com/C79rHHdvUr
— The Hill (@thehill) January 26, 2018
I find it hard to believe Hillary Clinton would stand by and protect someone accused of sexually harassing a young subordinate.
— Alex Griswold (@HashtagGriswold) January 26, 2018
Hillary Clinton protected a top staffer accused of sexual harassment during her 2008 presidential campaign, The New York Times reported Friday.
Clinton's then-senior faith adviser, Burns Strider, was accused in 2008 of sexually harassing a young female staffer, according to the Times. Instead of firing Strider, as Clinton's campaign manager recommended, the campaign kept him on, docked him several weeks of pay and ordered him to undergo counseling.
The young woman who accused him was moved to a new job.
Strider was accused by a woman who shared an office with him of rubbing her shoulders without permission, kissing her on the forehead and sending her a number of sexually suggestive emails. The woman shared the complaint with Patti Solis Doyle, Clinton's then-campaign manager, who brought it to the candidate's attention.
But Clinton personally requested that Strider remain on staff. The young woman signed a non-disclosure agreement upon leaving the campaign and declined to comment for the Times story...
Wheelies in the 2018 @Dodge Demon.— Jay Leno's Garage (@LenosGarage) January 25, 2018
Don't miss an all new episode of #JayLenosGarage TONIGHT at 10p on CNBC! pic.twitter.com/ZrBtWOL0Vb
This is a horrifying read from Angus Deaton. Alas, I fear he underestimates the ability of Americans to hide from reality. https://t.co/tpODq5u1yc— Daniel W. Drezner (@dandrezner) January 25, 2018
You might think that the kind of extreme poverty that would concern a global organization like the United Nations has long vanished in this country. Yet the special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, Philip Alston, recently made and reported on an investigative tour of the United States.Keep reading.
Surely no one in the United States today is as poor as a poor person in Ethiopia or Nepal? As it happens, making such comparisons has recently become much easier. The World Bank decided in October to include high-income countries in its global estimates of people living in poverty. We can now make direct comparisons between the United States and poor countries.
Properly interpreted, the numbers suggest that the United Nations has a point — and the United States has an urgent problem. They also suggest that we might rethink how we assist the poor through our own giving.
According to the World Bank, 769 million people lived on less than $1.90 a day in 2013; they are the world’s very poorest. Of these, 3.2 million live in the United States, and 3.3 million in other high-income countries (most in Italy, Japan and Spain).
As striking as these numbers are, they miss a very important fact. There are necessities of life in rich, cold, urban and individualistic countries that are less needed in poor countries. The World Bank adjusts its poverty estimates for differences in prices across countries, but it ignores differences in needs.
An Indian villager spends little or nothing on housing, heat or child care, and a poor agricultural laborer in the tropics can get by with little clothing or transportation. Even in the United States, it is no accident that there are more homeless people sleeping on the streets in Los Angeles, with its warmer climate, than in New York.
The Oxford economist Robert Allen recently estimated needs-based absolute poverty lines for rich countries that are designed to match more accurately the $1.90 line for poor countries, and $4 a day is around the middle of his estimates. When we compare absolute poverty in the United States with absolute poverty in India, or other poor countries, we should be using $4 in the United States and $1.90 in India.
Once we do this, there are 5.3 million Americans who are absolutely poor by global standards. This is a small number compared with the one for India, for example, but it is more than in Sierra Leone (3.2 million) or Nepal (2.5 million), about the same as in Senegal (5.3 million) and only one-third less than in Angola (7.4 million). Pakistan (12.7 million) has twice as many poor people as the United States, and Ethiopia about four times as many.
This evidence supports on-the-ground observation in the United States. Kathryn Edin and Luke Shaefer have documented the daily horrors of life for the several million people in the United States who actually do live on $2 a day, in both urban and rural America. Matthew Desmond’s ethnography of Milwaukee explores the nightmare of finding urban shelter among the American poor.
It is hard to imagine poverty that is worse than this, anywhere in the world. Indeed, it is precisely the cost and difficulty of housing that makes for so much misery for so many Americans, and it is precisely these costs that are missed in the World Bank’s global counts.
Of course, people live longer and have healthier lives in rich countries. With only a few (and usually scandalous) exceptions, water is safe to drink, food is safe to eat, sanitation is universal, and some sort of medical care is available to everyone. Yet all these essentials of health are more likely to be lacking for poorer Americans. Even for the whole population, life expectancy in the United States is lower than we would expect given its national income, and there are places — the Mississippi Delta and much of Appalachia — where life expectancy is lower than in Bangladesh and Vietnam.
Beyond that, many Americans, especially whites with no more than a high school education, have seen worsening health: As my research with my wife, the Princeton economist Anne Case, has demonstrated, for this group life expectancy is falling; mortality rates from drugs, alcohol and suicide are rising; and the long historical decline in mortality from heart disease has come to a halt...
None of this means that we should close out “others” and look after only our own. International cooperation is vital to keeping our globe safe, commerce flowing and our planet habitable.What to do?
But it is time to stop thinking that only non-Americans are truly poor. Trade, migration and modern communications have given us networks of friends and associates in other countries. We owe them much, but the social contract with our fellow citizens at home brings unique rights and responsibilities that must sometimes take precedence, especially when they are as destitute as the world’s poorest people.
Money really is at the heart of everything that is fucked up with our healthcare. Case in point: I’m scheduled for surgery tomorrow morning. It’s been on the books for weeks. I’ve gone through extensive pre-testing and have followed up with the hospital every step of the way
— Aminatou Sow (@aminatou) January 22, 2018
"The big blue metros believe their eco success is threatened by the Trump agenda of hostility to immigration & free trade, prioritization of tax cuts over investments in education & scientific research,the stoking of racial tensions" & SALT deduction limit https://t.co/BmTuqHfZNL— Ronald Brownstein (@RonBrownstein) January 23, 2018
While President Donald Trump relentlessly claims credit for the strengthening economy, the nation's economic growth is being driven overwhelmingly by the places that are most resistant to him.These are the fault lines of the next American civil war. When and how it all goes to hell, who knows? But something this fundamentally radical will bring an eruption at some point, and those who anticipate the collapse will be better prepared for the fighting and the fallout.
Counties that voted for Hillary Clinton against Trump in 2016 accounted for nearly three-fourths of the nation's increased economic output and almost two-thirds of its new jobs in the years leading up to his election, according to previously unpublished findings provided to CNN by the Metropolitan Policy Program at the Brookings Institution.
That imbalance looks even starker when considering that Clinton won less than one-sixth of the nation's counties. Trump carried more counties than any candidate in either party since Ronald Reagan in 1984.
Yet it is the diverse major metropolitan areas that voted in preponderant numbers against Trump that have clearly emerged as the nation's engines of growth. In the process, the big blue metros have pulled further away from the small town and rural communities that provide the foundation of Trump's support.
The key to this divergence has been the large metro areas' dominance of the job opportunities created by the diffusion of digital technologies, largely in white-collar industries from business consulting to software development. Meanwhile, smaller places remain much more reliant on resource extraction (like oil and gas production), manufacturing and agriculture, which have not grown nearly as reliably, or explosively, as the digital economy.
"We have two quite different economies, and what is happening in recent years is growth is largely emanating from these big county metros," says Mark Muro, director of policy at the Metropolitan Policy Program. "These are not political trends. They are deep economic and technological long waves. And while we are in the midst of this long wave, we are not near the end of it."
These trends long predate Trump's presidency. But the President's policy agenda, which prioritizes reviving manufacturing and promoting energy development, generally favors the smaller places over the large metros -- many of which feel threatened by his initiatives, from restricting immigration and trade to limiting the deductibility of state and local taxes.
Muro, like many economic analysts, is dubious that anything Trump does can meaningfully unwind the consolidation of economic opportunity into the largest metropolitan areas. If anything, Muro says, the tilt toward the big blue metros has intensified in recent years. "We think this is a fundamental sea change," he says.
This pattern creates what could be called the prosperity paradox. Even as economic growth is concentrating in Democratic-leaning metropolitan areas thriving in the information economy, Republicans rooted in non-urban communities largely excluded from those opportunities now control all the levers of power in Washington and in most states. That disjuncture raises a pointed long-term question: How long can the places that are mostly lagging in the economy dictate the terms of politics and policy to the places that are mostly succeeding?
Generally through American history, political power has followed economic power. From the Civil War through the Great Depression, Republicans controlled the White House for 56 of 72 years as the party of the rapidly industrializing and urbanizing Northeast and Midwest. During that era, Democrats were marginalized politically as the champions of the agricultural and resource-producing South and West that felt sublimated by the Northern-based industrial and financial economic order.
In the decades just before and after World War II, Franklin Roosevelt built an impregnable New Deal Democratic coalition that married support from traditionally internationalist Eastern business and finance interests with new efforts to integrate the South and West into the national economy (through mechanisms ranging from the Tennessee Valley Authority to the World War II defense buildup). Similarly, the shift of economic clout to the Sun Belt after World War II prefigured the conservative movement's resurgence from the 1960s through the 1990s around Republicans Barry Goldwater of Arizona and Ronald Reagan of California.
Today the nation's core economic divide is less between regions than within them. After mostly declining through the late 20th century, the large metropolitan areas have restored their position as the locus of growth across the country by emerging as the epicenter of the information economy.
That advantage has allowed many metropolitan areas to achieve booming levels of growth and investment unmatched for decades: Tim Burgess, who served as acting Seattle mayor last fall, for instance, recently told me that the city is now enjoying its best economy since the Klondike gold rush in the 1890s. The intense nationwide competition for the second Amazon headquarters -- which produced finalists located solely in large metropolitan areas -- underscores how digital technologies are concentrating economic opportunity into the nation's biggest places.
Data from Muro and Brookings research assistant Jacob Whiton quantify the dramatic extent of that shift.
In 2016, Clinton won fewer than 500 counties and Trump won more than 2,600. But the counties that Clinton carried accounted for 72% of the nation's increased economic output from 2014 through 2016, the most recent years for which figures are available, according to Brookings. The Clinton counties accounted for 66% of the new job growth over that period as well.
In both output and employment the Clinton counties over that recent period accounted for an even higher percentage of the new growth than they did from 2010 through 2016, the full period of recovery from the financial crash of 2008.
The tilt away from Trump is even more pronounced at the very top of the economic pyramid. Of the 30 counties that generated the largest share of new jobs from 2014 through 2016, Trump carried only two: Collin County (north of Dallas) and Maricopa (Arizona), where Republican-leaning suburbs slightly outvoted a strongly Democratic metro core in Phoenix.
Clinton carried all the other places leading the employment growth list. That included not only such blue state behemoths as Los Angeles, Chicago, New York and Seattle, but also the economic hubs in purple and even Republican-leaning states, from Miami, Oakland County (outside Detroit), to Mecklenburg (Charlotte) and Wake (Raleigh) counties in North Carolina, and Dallas, Bexar (San Antonio) and Travis counties (Austin) in Texas.
In all, Brookings calculated, Clinton won 79 of the 100 counties that contributed the most to economic growth from 2014 to 2016, and 76 of the 100 that generated the most job growth...
The horror on display for the past week in Courtroom 5 of the Ingham County Courthouse in Lansing, Mich., marks the largest sexual assault scandal in this country's history and maybe the most tragic youth sports story ever.More.
It's the story of nearly 200 females, mostly athletes, including Olympic gold-medal gymnasts, who were molested during examinations by Nassar over the past two decades while he was a USA Gymnastics and Michigan State University physician.
It's the story of parents continually trusting a sports system that failed them at every level, from the lowliest Michigan State coach to the vaunted USOC.
Nassar, 54, has been sentenced for 60 years in prison on child pornography charges. He also pleaded guilty to 10 sexual assault charges for which he will be sentenced on Wednesday.
As part of the plea deal, Nassar's victims have been allowed to confront him in court — 177 of them have so far, powerful women and girls facing their demon and firing back with strength and inspiration.
They've cried, they've cursed, and some have nearly collapsed, as they've all powerfully given witness to the pain of assault and the will to endure.
Videos of their testimony are all over the internet and parents should watch. That could have been your child. It could have been my child.
Athlete after athlete told stories of being ordered to visit Nassar by a coach, often without a parent present. During what he called treatment, he would vaginally or anally penetrate them for as long as 20 to 40 minutes. When they complained, they were told they didn't understand medicine or were otherwise shushed. Until now.
"Little girls don't stay little forever,'' said Kyle Stephens, the first victim to testify last week, looking directly in Nassar's face as the doctor hid behind his hands. "They grow into strong women who return to destroy your world.''
Mattie Larson, one of the last women to testify, spoke of being molested at the Karolyi Ranch, the former cathedral of USA Gymnastics. The ranch is located in the woods outside Houston, where cell phone service is sketchy and parents weren't allowed. She also described being molested in Minnesota at her first national championships, penetrated by the doctor even with a USA Gymnastics trainer in the same room.
"Larry, you were the only one I trusted,'' she said. "In the end, you turned out to be the scariest monster of all."
The issue of trust has been a recurring theme. The athletes and their parents had to trust a system that churned out Olympians. Or they had to trust the university if they wanted to compete in college. And that gave Nassar his opportunity.
Anne Swinehart, whose daughter Jillian was abused when she was 8, spoke for many of the tortured parents when she said, "To think I let this happen to my child when I was sitting right there…''
This could happen to any of us with children in sports, right? We hand them over to strangers with no questions asked. We send them to distant backyards for pitching lessons, to desolate ice rinks for early-morning skating practice, and we walk away for hours or even entire weekends.
And when some sports authority tells us our child has potential but needs a private therapy session with a team doctor, we're not skeptical, we're thankful for the attention.
In this case, only too late did the parents realize that even the biggest and brightest of sports institutions care mostly about themselves.
Nassar worked for Michigan State, and at least 14 staffers and school representatives reportedly knew about his abuse for more than 20 years. Yet, even when Nassar was finally the subject of Title IX and campus police investigations in 2014, school president Lou Anna Simon didn't even look at the reports, and at least 12 more assaults occurred before the doctor was fired.
Michigan State did worse than ignore Nassar; it enabled him. The school even continued to charge women for sessions in which he was accused of molesting them.
"My mom is still getting billed for appointments where I was sexually assaulted,'' Emma Ann Miller, 15, said in court this week, before the university finally stopped halted its billing.
This scandal is, by numbers, larger than the Jerry Sandusky child molestation case that cleaned out Penn State's president, athletic director and legendary football coach. So how does MSU president Simon keep her job? In one of the most sickening statements in a case full of them, trustee Joel Ferguson said during a radio interview, "There's so many more things going on at this university than just this Nassar thing. … I mean, when you go to the basketball game, you walk into the new Breslin [Center] and the person who hustled and got all those major donors to give money was Lou Anna Simon.'
'For Ferguson's Michigan State, it seems that money trumps morality. Listening to the gymnasts, the same philosophy was followed by USA Gymnastics in the pursuit of Olympic gold...
Olivia Burns beat out 10,000 other models to be the winner of the first-ever “Maxim Cover Model” contest. https://t.co/lyoEB2d0C3 pic.twitter.com/Hpwx4fRPqQ
— Maxim (@MaximMag) January 8, 2018
Border Patrol arrested a volunteer with No More Deaths last week, hours after the humanitarian groupheld a news conference to accuse border agents of tampering with their water-aid stations in the Arizona desert.Also, at the Intercept, via Memeorandum, "Eight Humanitarian Activists Face Federal Charges After Leaving Water for Migrants in the Arizona Desert."
Agents on Wednesday detained Scott Warren, a faculty associate at Arizona State University, on charges of harboring undocumented immigrants.
Warren was arrested near Ajo with two men who had crossed the border illegally.
According to court records, Border Patrol had set up surveillance on a building known as "the Barn," and tracked the two migrants to the location. They also saw Warren approach the building and talk to the migrants.
The migrants turned themselves in to the agents.
The two men allegedly told agents they had researched online how to best cross the border illegally, and had obtained the address of "the Barn" as a place to stop for food and water...
Denise Lindstrom, a 49-year-old homeless woman, sits in a wheelchair at a homeless encampment on the Santa Ana River trail today in Anaheim, Calif. Authorities on Monday told the homeless living in the encampment that it is being closed down. | Photo @jaethephotog pic.twitter.com/If55OwYPif
— AP Images (@AP_Images) January 23, 2018
Hundreds of homeless face eviction or arrest as O.C. clears encampment amid shelter bed shortage https://t.co/FwK8tVVki8 pic.twitter.com/U5QSKdUgaw
— Los Angeles Times (@latimes) January 23, 2018
Amid anxiety among homeless, law enforcement begins plan to gradually clear out Santa Ana riverbed encampments https://t.co/Ayz0LfJBEU pic.twitter.com/QmR1RBCHu3
— O.C. Register (@ocregister) January 23, 2018
I am surprised, relieved in a profound sense and impressed that channel 4 put this up uncut, enabled comments and, finally, left it online. Maybe there's hope yet. @cathynewman https://t.co/OqQtLqElc8— Jordan B Peterson (@jordanbpeterson) January 19, 2018
— Jordan B Peterson (@jordanbpeterson) January 22, 2018
The Jordan Peterson interview fallout will be that he's branded a 'controversial professor', while Cathy Newman will avoid being labelled a ‘controversial interviewer’, predicts Douglas Murray https://t.co/mUz94ujQR0— The Spectator (@spectator) January 22, 2018
My exclusive: LA Times publisher and CEO Ross Levinsohn was a defendant in two sexual harassment cases settled by employers and female colleagues repeatedly accused him of misconduct throughout his career. https://t.co/bKfExuUTAM
— David Folkenflik (@davidfolkenflik) January 18, 2018
The Los Angeles Times has given prominent coverage to recent revelations of sexual harassment of women by prominent men, particularly in entertainment and media. Yet a review by NPR finds that the newspaper's own CEO and publisher, Ross Levinsohn, has been a defendant in two sexual harassment lawsuits and that his conduct in work settings over the past two decades has been called into question repeatedly by female colleagues.Threatening legal action didn't seem to help some of the earlier targets of the #MeToo recrimination ("reckoning") campaign, so I doubt it's going to help this guy.
This story is based on a review of court documents, financial filings and fresh interviews with 26 former colleagues and associates. Taken in concert, they suggest a pattern of questionable behavior and questionable decisions on the job. The portrait that repeatedly emerges is one of a frat-boy executive, catapulting ever higher, even as he creates corporate climates that alienated some of the people who worked for and with him.
Among the accusations:
— Levinsohn was sued in separate sexual harassment lawsuits as an executive at two different corporations. By his own sworn testimony, Levinsohn admitted to rating the relative "hotness" of his female colleagues in office banter as a vice president at a digital media company. He also testified that he speculated about whether a woman who worked for him there was a stripper on the side.
— Two witnesses say they were shocked to see Levinsohn aggressively kissing and pressing himself against a woman at a glitzy music industry dinner in plain view of his subordinates and his clients. Levinsohn was married at the time.
— Levinsohn once told an executive for the Hollywood Reporter he would not stay at the publication's lunch honoring the entertainment business' most influential fashion stylists because he would have to be surrounded by gays — using a vulgar epithet for them, according to the executive.
Almost all people interviewed declined to be quoted by name, citing concerns for their careers given Levinsohn's current perch atop the Los Angeles Times. It is one of the most important newspapers in the country and it is the most influential media organization in California, the capital to the world's entertainment industry. His behavior, as described by those who worked with him, raises questions about how effectively he can lead the paper as it covers the #MeToo movement and such widespread harassment revelations.
Levinsohn did not respond on the record to detailed questions emailed to him and a Times spokeswoman setting out the chief allegations raised in this story. In a telephone call he initiated Wednesday with NPR's CEO, Jarl Mohn, Levinsohn called those allegations "lies" and said he would retain legal counsel if he felt NPR had disparaged him. NPR sent detailed questions to Tronc's chief executive and public affairs staffers early Wednesday morning. The crisis management strategist Charles Sipkins issued a statement on Tronc's behalf Thursday afternoon saying Levinsohn had been placed under investigation by the corporation after the story was posted.
"This week, we became aware of allegations that Ross Levinsohn acted inappropriately. We are immediately launching an investigation so that we have a better understanding of what's occurred," the statement read. "At Tronc, we expect all employees to act in a way that supports a culture of diversity and inclusion. We will take appropriate action to address any behavior that falls short of these expectations."
Sipkins said Tronc had not suspended Levinsohn...
