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Julie Ann Hanson: Almost 50 years later, police make an arrest in the 1972 murder of a ... - 0 views

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  • Almost five decades later, police have arrested and charged a man in the death of an Illinois teen whose body was found in a field stabbed multiple times.
  • Barry Lee Whelpley, 76, of Mounds View, Minnesota, was arrested on June 2 for the 1972 killing of Julie Ann Hanson, a 15-year-old resident of Naperville, Illinois,
  • "The investigation and resulting charges were truly a team effort that spanned decades, and I could not be more proud of the determination and resourcefulness of our investigators, both past and present, who never gave up on Julie."
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  • On July 8, 1972, Hanson borrowed her brother's bicycle to go to a baseball game and never returned home, said Marshall during a news conference. She was reported missing to the Naperville police and her body was discovered later that day in a field with multiple stab wounds.
  • A suspect in the case was not immediately identified. But after 49 years of continued investigation, authorities were led to an arrest through technological advancements in DNA and genetic genealogy analysis,
  • At the time of the Hanson's killing, Whelpley was 27 years old and lived within one mile of Hanson's home, police said.
  • The Will County State's Attorney Office has charged Whelpley with three counts of first-degree murder with a bond set at $10 million.
  • The Hanson family said in a statement that they are grateful to all who have worked on the case throughout the years, according to police.
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Conservatives more likely to believe false news, another study finds - CNN - 0 views

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  • olitical conservatives are more likely to believe untrue news reports than liberals are, researchers reported Wednesday.
  • It's the latest in a series of studies that show people on the political right tend to not only be targeted by fake news, but to believe it's correct.
  • "The idea that U.S. conservatives are uniquely likely to hold misperceptions is widespread but has not been systematically assessed," Bond and Garrett wrote in the journal Science Advances.
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  • They came up with a system for analyzing news and social media reports, and used social media monitoring service YouGov to bounce the headlines off 1,200 volunteers who agreed to report their feelings about the reports between January and June of 2019.
  • "Every two weeks, we retrieved social media engagement data for 5,000 news stories that had the most engagement in the past seven days," they wrote. Each article was carefully fact-checked.
  • "Consistent with other studies, we find that American conservatives are more likely than liberals to hold misperceptions," they wrote.
  • "Analyses suggest that conservatism is associated with a lesser ability to distinguish between true and false claims across a wide range of political issues and with a tendency to believe that all claims are true. The study also shows that conservatives' propensity to hold misperceptions is partly explained by the political implications of this widely shared news. Socially engaging truthful claims tended to favor the left, while engaging falsehoods disproportionately favored the right."
  • "It's tempting to try and read this as evidence that conservatives are more biased or somehow psychologically predisposed to misperceptions. We can't say that," Garrett said.
  • Conservatives were a little less likely to believe stories that were actually true, the researchers found.
  • It might be that conservatives are being targeted more. "We have evidence the media environment is shaping peoples' misperceptions," he added. "Our data suggests that the composition of the media environment is playing a great role now."
  • "Getting the vaccine is not a partisan act. The science was done under Democratic and Republican administrations. Matter of fact, the first vaccines were authorized under a Republican President and widely developed by a Democratic President -- deployed by a Democratic President," Biden said in a televised speech.
  • It's not clear what can be done to reduce the load of false information. Although sometimes it's obvious that a report is a lie, often it appears people honestly believe the false information they are spreading is true, Garrett said.
  • Social media companies have said they are trying to do more to put the brakes on the spread of false information, and Garrett said studies indicate that fact-checking works, too -- although not necessarily immediately.
  • Individuals can also make a difference with polite engagement. "When you see someone online, it can feel like shouting into the wind wind to try and introduce a fact check," Garrett said."But the scientific research suggests that challenging inaccuracies, speaking up when someone says something that isn't true, can make a difference."
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A COVID-19 Vaccine Could Get West Virginians Cash, Guns Or Trips : NPR - 0 views

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shared by anonymous on 06 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • West Virginia is giving its vaccine incentive program a boost to get more residents immunized from the coronavirus, Gov. Jim Justice announced on Tuesday.
  • All residents who get a COVID-19 vaccine will be enrolled in the chance to win a college scholarship, a tricked-out truck, or hunting rifles, in addition to a $1.588 million grand prize. The program, which will run from June 20 through Aug. 4, will be paid for through federal pandemic relief funds.
  • Justice announced in April that West Virginians ages 16 to 35 who got vaccinated could get a $100 savings bond. The immunization drive in the state has since drastically slowed after showing a strong early start.
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  • The state reports that 51.1% of West Virginia's population has received at least one dose of a coronavirus vaccine. Justice hopes the state's new offers of a $588,000 second prize, weekend vacations to state parks, lifetime hunting and fishing licenses, and custom hunting shotguns will boost that number.
  • West Virginians who have been fully vaccinated will need to register to be entered to win the newly announced prizes at a later date.
  • The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported as of Tuesday night that 40.9% of the population has been fully vaccinated. President Biden is aiming for at least 70% of the U.S. adult population to have one vaccine shot and 160 million adults to be fully vaccinated by July 4..
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'Insanely cheap energy': how solar power continues to shock the world | Energy | The Gu... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...r-continues-to-shock-the-world solar power history economics
shared by Javier E on 30 Apr 21 - No Cached
  • Over the last two decades, however, the IEA has consistently failed to see the massive growth in renewable energy coming. Not only has the organisation underestimated the take-up of solar and wind, but it has massively overstated the demand for coal and oil.
  • Jenny Chase, head of solar analysis at BloombergNEF, says that, in fairness to the IEA, it wasn’t alone.
  • “When I got this job in 2005, I thought maybe one day solar will supply 1% of the world’s electricity. Now it’s 3%. Our official forecast is that it will be 23% by 2050, but that’s completely underestimated,”
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  • This rapid radical reduction in the price of PV solar is a story about Chinese industrial might backed by American capital, fanned by European political sensibilities and made possible largely thanks to the pioneering work of an Australian research team.
  • “We’ve got to the point where solar is the cheapest source of energy in the world in most places. This means we’ve been trying to model a situation where the grid looks totally different today.”
  • Every time you double producing capacity, you reduce the cost of PV solar by 28%
  • “The first reaction was: that’s the future. Everybody said that’s the future. But they also said it was one step too early. What they meant was that there was no market for it yet. In China at the time, if you mentioned solar, people thought of solar hot water.”
  • It was a moment that opened up what was possible from the industry, and the new upper limit was “set” at 25% – another barrier Green and his team would smash in 2008. In 2015, they built the world’s most efficient solar cell, achieving a 40.6% conversion rate using focused light reflected off a mirror.
  • In the very early years of the industry, the received wisdom had been that a 20% conversion rate marked the hard limit of what was possible from PV solar cells. Green, however, disagreed in a paper published in 1984.A year later, his team built the first cell that pushed past that limit, and in 1989 built the first full solar panel capable of running at 20% efficiency.
  • All that would change when Germany passed new laws encouraging the uptake of solar power. Quickly it became clear there was a massive global demand and the world’s manufacturers were struggling to keep up with supply.
  • Spying an opportunity for investment, a consortium that included Actis Capital and Goldman Sachs came knocking to pitch Shi on taking the company public. When the company listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2005, it raised $420m and made Shi an instant billionaire. A year later he would be worth an estimated $3bn and crowned the richest man in China, earning him the moniker “the Sun King”.
  • Around 2012 the world market was flooded with solar panels, sending the price plummeting through the floor, leaving SunTech vulnerable. Already under intense financial pressure, disaster struck when an internal investigation found a takeover bid it had launched had been guaranteed by €560m in fake German government bonds.
  • In a quirk of history, what had begun as an American drive to wean itself off oil was eventually taken up by China, which made solar power dirt cheap in the process.“The Chinese approach to renewables is all about energy security,” Mathews says. “At the scale from which they’re building new industries, they would need colossal imports of conventional fossil fuels, which would cripple them economically.
  • “They can get around that problem, which is a geopolitical obstacle, by manufacturing their own energy equipment.”
  • “We think a 40% module, rather than the 22% you can do nowadays with PERC, is what the industry will be doing once we perfect this stacking approach,” Green says. “We’re just trying to find a new cell that will have all the qualities of silicon that we can stack on top of silicon.
  • “The International Energy Agency now says solar is providing the cheapest energy the world has ever seen. But we’re headed towards a future of insanely cheap energy.“It’s a fundamentally different world we’re moving into.”
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Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene team up to battle political opposition - CNNPolitics - 0 views

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  • Republican Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Matt Gaetz of Florida have a lot in common
  • They've now formed a joint fundraising committee and are making plans to travel the country together on what they are calling an "America First" tour.
  • "There are millions of Americans who need to know they still have advocates in Washington D.C., and the America First movement is consistently growing and fighting," Gaetz said in a statement announcing the tour.
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  • Earlier this month, when Greene flirted with the idea of forming an "America First" caucus, a leaked flier promoting the caucus received sharp criticism for using inflammatory rhetoric. While many Republicans -- even some from the far-right Freedom Caucus -- were quick to distance themselves from the document and the caucus itself, Gaetz proudly proclaimed he was ready to sign up.
  • Greene has returned the favor. When news broke of a federal investigation into Gaetz, which includes allegations of sex trafficking and prostitution, many Democrats and even fellow GOP Rep. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois called for him to resign. But Greene defended her Florida colleague.
  • "I have proudly defended Matt Gaetz from the beginning because I know he has done nothing wrong and I recognized this playbook right from the start,"
  • Now the two are solidifying that alliance through the joint fundraising committee -- which generally allows politicians to secure a single, larger check from a donor and then split the money among several committees -- and their "America First" tour, which is set to kick off next Friday with an event at the Villages, a retirement community that is in neither of their congressional districts.
  • As the pressure on each grows, they have formed an unsurprising bond, often seen talking to each other on the floor of the House of Representatives, and they back each other up when others in the GOP aren't rushing to their defense.
  • "I think these people get too much attention. I don't really want to elevate or amplify their voices. They're not the Republican Party that I am excited to be a leader within," one Republican lawmaker, speaking on the condition of anonymity to speak more freely, told CNN. "For me, it'd be better if these guys just go away."
  • "This is part of the Republican Party's internal struggle about, you know, is this the party of Trump or is this the party of conservative values? And you know, Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene are many things, but you know, conservative Republicans they are not," the lawmaker said.
  • Greene has also become a fundraising force, despite being kicked off her congressional committees. The Democratic-controlled House voted to remove her in February in the wake of recently unearthed incendiary and violent past statements from the congresswoman that triggered widespread backlash. But the freshman raised an unprecedented $3.2 million in the first quarter of 2021, which largely came from an online spigot of small-dollar donations from people across the country.
  • Some Democrats have called on Gaetz to be removed from his committees as well because of his legal troubles.
  • Some Republicans fear that the more the pair are under attack, the stronger their base of support becomes. A separate GOP member of Congress argued that removing Greene from her committees left her only one option: waging a public relations war."I tell the Democrats, who ask me what we are going to do about MTG, that this situation is one of their own creation," the Republican lawmaker told CNN.
  • "It's obviously a bad look for the party. This is not who we are. This is not how we get the majority back. It's a distraction that's only going to hurt our efforts to talk about our agenda and talk about policy," said a GOP congressional aide.
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Colorado Has More Mass Shootings Than Other Places. Survivors Say We All Have Trauma To... - 0 views

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shared by anonymous on 24 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Like their predecessors did at Columbine in 1999 and Aurora in 2012, some of Colorado’s top elected officials gathered Tuesday to mourn victims of a mass shooting.
  • Ten people, including one Boulder police officer, were killed at King Soopers in the city Monday. It’s not clear exactly how many witnesses, now survivors, were in the store, though video footage showed at least a dozen being escorted out.They now join the thousands of people that have survived shootings at schools and other public places in the Denver metro since Columbine. More than 1,800 students attended Columbine in 1999, plus staff. Thousands more, collectively, were at other such shootings, like Platte Canyon High School in 2006, Deer Creek Middle School in 2010, a movie theater in Aurora in 2012, a Walmart in Thornton in 2017, and STEM School in Highlands Ranch in 2019. 
  • A 2019 Denver Post analysis found that the Denver metro has the third-most mass shootings, per capita, of the country’s largest metro areas since 1999. Survivors and experts say there’s a cumulative effect to so many shootings: the circle of survivors, who may face a lifetime of recovery, grows larger with each incident. 
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  • Some community members try to cope by avoiding places where shootings have happened, like movie theaters, Nicoletti said. That may prove more difficult with a grocery store, he added. Others enter a state of denial, believing that a shooting couldn’t happen to them. 
  • A better alternative, Nicoletti said, is to be as prepared as possible while not accepting that shootings are inevitable. Countless active shooter drills that have been carried out in schools and workplaces since Columbine are one example of that. Another is simply observing where all the exits are when you enter a building. 
  • Columbine survivor Missy Mendo said the only way she’s been able to keep herself from normalizing shootings through the years is to work to help people affected by them. That includes her role as a member of the Rebels Project, a local non-profit that helps survivors of mass shootings from around the world connect with one another. Mendo said Monday’s shooting in Boulder was especially difficult for her to try to comprehend.
  • Two graduates of Columbine High School co-founded the Rebels Project and named it after the school’s mascot. One of those co-founders is Heather Martin, a teacher at Aurora Central High School. 
  • She, like other survivors, has spent years finding her own coping strategies. Mental health care, including therapy, has been a big help, she said. But her fears can creep up again after she hears about another school shooting. 
  • Survivors of mass casualty events each have their own unique stories, Martin said. But they all share a common bond, or, as Martin and Mendo say, they belong to a club that no one wants to be in. That club continues to grow with each shooting, a fact that Martins says makes her feel “helpless.”
  • Suddenly, Martin said, she wasn’t the only person who felt nervous in crowded places like a grocery store.
  • It’s not just direct survivors of mass shootings that are feeling trauma right now — whether it’s images of the Boulder shooting seen via traditional and social media, or a year of living with a global pandemic. The key, Martin said, is to give yourself the grace to accept that it’s real and valid. 
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Opinion | Tina Brown: Prince Philip Walked Two Paces Behind the Queen - The New York Times - 0 views

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  • In 1953, in the rustling, ermined silence of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II at Westminster Abbey, the 31-year-old Philip Mountbatten, Duke of Edinburgh, removed his own coronet, knelt at the feet of the young woman he wed six years before, and swore an oath of allegiance. “I, Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, do become your liege man of life and limb and of earthly worship … so help me God.”
  • That Philip kept that oath for the next 68 years is a miracle not only of the modern monarchy but also of modern matrimony.
  • Philip was the unsettling definition of a full-on alpha male: devastatingly handsome, vigorously self-assured, impatient with fools — and not just fools.
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  • This was no contrived union, like the disastrous marriage of Charles and Diana. It was a love match from the start. The queen had been crazy about him since 1939, when she was 13 and Prince Philip of Greece and Denmark, an 18-year-old Navy officer cadet, squired her around the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth.
  • Surrounded by excruciating formality, she could always depend on him to make her laugh. His gift to her was the shared secret that the formalities were both utterly absurd and absolutely necessary. “She knew she would always get an honest answer from him,”
  • In time, he fell in love with her, he told her in a 1946 letter quoted in Philip Eade’s biography, “completely and unreservedly.” When he proposed to her seven years later at Balmoral, neither her father, the king, nor the queen mother thought he was a safe bet.
  • The shy, observant Princess Elizabeth was undaunted. She saw in Philip the unflinching character who would be what she would call on their 50th anniversary “my strength and stay all these years.” The two were bonded by a sense of duty and a desire to serve that was framed by the war.
  • Philip may have been related to half the crowned heads of Europe, but his family had been booted into exile, and he was the penniless prince of nowhere.
  • In return, she provided Philip with an emotional safe place his childhood lacked. Though his eye was rumored to rove, his devotion to the queen cannot be questioned. He completed more than 22,000 royal engagements on his own and accompanied the queen on all of her overseas tours (“Don’t jostle the queen!” he would sometimes bark if the press got too close.)
  • The key to that was to avoid making him feel unmanned. There was a difficult passage in the early years, when he learned that his children would take the dynastic Windsor name, not his own. And there were few models then for how to build a marriage in which the balance of power was so entirely weighted toward a wife, unless you count Queen Victoria and Prince Albert.
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Opinion: Nothing will be allowed to stop Joe Biden's inauguration - CNN - 0 views

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  • Law enforcement authorities are bracing for violence and attempts at disrupting the inauguration of our nation's 46th president, Joe Biden, on January 20. Online threats, which have become de rigueur in the current age of division and stoked partisan outrage, abound.
  • To anyone in America just waking up from a four-year slumber, what an odd and incongruous presidential declaration. We fight like hell during the campaign.
  • Our society acknowledges that as bitterly as we fought the election contest, we remain the United States of America.
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  • The direct result of last Wednesday's Capitol riots, where some Trump supporters overwhelmed Capitol Police checkpoints and occupied and defiled our national seat of government, should distress us all.
  • But what was the Capitol attack and the dark forces it embodied but an emergency? Angry protesters carrying American flags and screeching "stop the steal" abounded. The silly coup attempt -- exemplified by the "QAnon Shaman," shirtless and replete in horned headgear, and the cad who attempted to make off with Nancy Pelosi's lectern -- should embarrass us all.
  • Nothing will impede the peaceful transition of American power that has been so central to our democracy since George Washington handed over the reins to John Adams in 1797 -- 223 years ago. Nothing.
  • Make no mistake about it -- this was an insurrection. I fully understand the precision of language required by our criminal justice system. Title 18 U.S. Code § 2383 defines it this way: "Whoever incites, sets on foot, or engages in any rebellion or insurrection against the authority of the United States or the laws thereof..." Storming the meeting place of our nation's legislature meets this definition.
  • The thing about mobs is that they are not precise, controllable instruments. Once you roil up an instigator or agitator or two, they act as the catalyst for mobilization -- what results then transforms into a singular, dangerous vessel -- and otherwise sober or reasonable folks get caught up in frenzy.
  • These weren't patriots. They were part of a seditious action that resulted in a police officer's death. They were part of the rabble that included a cop killer. The murdered officer, Brian Sicknick, was also an Air National Guard veteran.
  • The incitement and execution of mob violence on Congress is a horror unto itself but, sadly, disorderly crowds bent on destructive action have also become all too familiar over these paralyzingly long past eight months.
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Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner face new cold post-insurrection reality - CNNPolitics - 0 views

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  • When Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner shared their decision to pick up and move their family to Washington from New York four years ago, multiple sources who know the couple said the idea was the White House years would allow easy entree to their ambitious next steps: Kushner would become a powerful player in global politics and Trump would become a shoo-in to a higher office of her own.
  • Yet now they find themselves staring down the end of the ignominious Trump presidency: the United States Capitol still showing signs of the deadly mob attack that breached the seat of democracy, thousands of National Guard troops cordoning off the city, President Donald Trump impeached (again) for his role in inciting the mob and the family patriarch robbed of his most powerful outlet after getting permanently banned from Twitter.
  • A White House official sent this statement when asked for comment: "Ivanka came to Washington to give back to a nation that has given her so much and to fight for policies that help hardworking American families. Over four years, she spearheaded policies that created jobs, empowered American workers, fed families in need and supported small businesses throughout the pandemic. She is proud of her service and excited for the future."
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  • Instead of a smile-and-wave final White House chapter, the couple are busy trying to keep the President from saying too little or too much, throwing themselves on a grenade they aren't certain will detonate but not able to take the chance either way.
  • From her office in the West Wing, Ivanka Trump was fielding calls from Capitol Hill politicians who were literally hiding from a vicious and violent mob. Sen. Lindsey Graham, a ubiquitous presence with the President during golf outings and holiday jaunts to Mar-a-Lago, could not get in touch with Trump to beseech him to publicly call for a stop to the insurrection, a source familiar with the conversation told CNN. So Graham called Ivanka Trump, pleading for her to help talk to her dad.
  • Ivanka Trump was among those who pushed her father to make the Twitter video that ultimately got him banned in the wake of the riot,
  • It was again Ivanka Trump key among the aides who pushed the President to issue a subsequent video in the wake of his impeachment, again denouncing any future violence or plots to wreak havoc across the country. There were no words of "love" this time.
  • "They're trying to keep what little is left for them in terms of sellable currency as Trumps," said one source, who added the change from "before insurrection" to "after insurrection" has moved the needle on the state of the Trump empire from perilous to dire.
  • In December, Trump and Kushner closed on the purchase of a $30 million plot of land on exclusive Indian Creek Island just north of Miami, with plans, friends say, to build a private estate. Murmurs that Trump wants to challenge Florida's GOP Sen. Marco Rubio for his seat in 2022 are growing -- or at least they were before the insurrection.
  • "The idea that anyone will forget that her father incited these attacks is about zero," said one political operative who has worked in Republican politics. "If she wanted future voters to overlook just how devastating the end of this administration is, that's a big lift."
  • "The proof here about how worried (the family) is is how quiet they are," said another source, who notes the muzzled Twitter screeds and the dialed-back bravado, most notably of Ivanka Trump's brothers Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump.
  • "Until there's real evidence that the Trump brand is diminished with the activist base and dominant MAGA wing of the party, and not merely among elected Republicans and establishment types, I think Ivanka would remain the clear front-runner against Marco Rubio," he said.
  • The Kushner-Trumps also have a cottage at Trump Bedminster Golf Club in New Jersey, which was recently renovated to add more bedrooms. It's possible they could land there for some amount of time, but politically New Jersey is not Trump country, either.
  • The most fractured of the bonds is likely the tenuous friendship Trump previously had with her stepmother, Melania Trump. The two women are undoubtedly the most powerful and influential in the President's life, and prior to the White House years both were aware and respectful of one another's turf, according to sources familiar with the dynamic. However, Ivanka Trump's perceived incursions into first lady Melania Trump's lane have led to tension between the women that's so bad, one source told CNN, there is little desire by either to be in the same room.
  • In recent months, Ivanka Trump and Melania Trump have not, in fact, been publicly photographed together, with the exception of the presidential debate in September and the Republican National Convention in August
  • At Thanksgiving, Ivanka Trump and the adult siblings went to Camp David, while Trump ate dinner at the White House with Melania Trump, Barron Trump and her parents. Over the Christmas holiday, Ivanka Trump and Kushner did not visit Mar-a-Lago as they had in years past. Though Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner have separate living space at Mar-a-Lago, where the outgoing first couple intends to live post-White House, one source said Melania Trump "hasn't exactly rolled out the welcome mat."
  • But if there were ever a time for the Trump family to get on with its bunker mentality and try for an image upgrade, it would be now -- or the hotels, real estate, branded retail and any future Trump-touched business entities could be irretrievably damaged. "I think this is one time the family has to acknowledge that their actions have had consequences," the source said.
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The Most Important Thing Biden Can Learn From the Trump Economy - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ump-economy-lessons-biden.html biden trump economy US
shared by zoegainer on 15 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • During Mr. Trump’s time in office, it has become clear that the United States economy can surpass what technocrats once thought were its limits: Specifically, the jobless rate can fall lower and government budget deficits can run higher than was once widely believed without setting off an inflationary spiral.
  • Before the pandemic took hold, the jobless rate was below 4 percent, inflation was low, and wages were rising at a steady clip, especially for low and middle earners. The inflation-adjusted income of the median American household rose 9 percent from 2016 to 2019.
  • The higher interest rates from unfunded tax cuts that had been forecast did not materialize; the C.B.O. in spring 2018 had expected the 10-year Treasury bond yield to average 3.5 percent in 2019. In fact, it averaged a mere 2.1 percent, making federal borrowing more manageable.
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  • A widespread view among economic policy elites, after the runaway inflation in the 1970s and early 1980s, was that elevated unemployment was a necessary cost of keeping prices stable. Also, that the government can’t spend much more money than it takes in without crowding out private investment — leaving the economy weaker over time — and that policymakers should act pre-emptively to ward off these risks.
  • It may not have been the best economy ever, as he has repeatedly claimed, but it was easily the strongest since the late 1990s, and before that you have to go back to the late 1960s to find similar conditions.
  • And the Fed cut interest rates starting in 2019 despite a very low jobless rate, implicitly accepting the premise that it had moved too aggressively with rate increases to prevent inflation that never arrived.
  • Yet from spring of 2018 to the onset of the pandemic, the United States experienced a jobless rate of 4 percent or lower, with no obvious sign of inflation and many signs that less advantaged workers were able to find work.
  • A central question for Mr. Biden will be: To what degree is the Trump-era economic success a result of policies that liberals disagree with, to what degree is it a result of policies that Mr. Biden might embrace, and to what degree is it just luck?
  • Mr. Mulligan and other allies of the president emphasize the role of deregulating major industries and lowering taxes on business investment — microeconomic strategies — as crucial to the economy’s success.
  • The Biden administration and Democratic Congress will view more aggressive regulation as a core goal, aimed at preventing corporate misbehavior, protecting the environment, and more. Indeed, left-leaning economists would argue that the very policies Mr. Mulligan credits with the boom are the least durable parts of the Trump-era expansion.
  • If you believe Mr. Mulligan and other Trump allies, the macroeconomic lessons of the Trump years — those having to do with things like deficits, inflation and interest rates — won’t be enough for the Biden administration to recreate the 2019 economy. In this view, the microeconomic details of how the president has governed will be crucial, and the policies that Mr. Biden has advocated — in areas as varied as tighter restrictions on carbon emissions and more aggressive regulation of banks — will prove counterproductive to the cause.
  • If inflation were to remain persistently low, she said, “a more radical rethinking of the economy’s productive potential would surely be in order.”
  • She said that a high-pressure economy — one where unemployment is low and employers have to compete for workers — improves upward mobility
  • Mr. Powell, who will lead the Fed for roughly the first year of Mr. Biden’s term and then will be either reappointed or replaced in February 2022, has also become a vocal enthusiast for avoiding these mistakes of the past.In the strong pre-pandemic labor market, he said in an August speech on the Fed’s new policy framework, “many who had been left behind for too long were finding jobs, benefiting their families and communities, and increasing the productive capacity of our economy.”
  • President-elect Biden has embraced these lessons in shaping his agenda, as he made clear in a news conference Friday where he confirmed that his plans will add up to trillions of dollars when one includes both pandemic response money and longer-term plans.“With interest rates as low as they are,” Mr. Biden said, “every major economist thinks we should be investing in deficit spending to generate economic growth.”
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Trump's Pardons: The List - The New York Times - 0 views

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shared by lmunch on 20 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • With hours to go before President Trump left office, the White House released a list early Wednesday of 73 people he had pardoned and 70 others whose sentences he had commuted.
  • On the list were at least two people who had worked for Mr. Trump: Stephen K. Bannon, his former chief strategist, and Elliott Broidy, a former top fund-raiser. Both received full pardons.
  • The rapper Lil Wayne, born Dwayne Michael Carter Jr., received a full pardon after pleading guilty to possession of a firearm and ammunition by a felon in December. Mr. Trump also granted a commutation to another rapper, Kodak Black, whose legal name is Bill Kapri (though he was born Dieuson Octave). In 2019, he was sentenced to nearly four years in prison for lying on background paperwork while attempting to buy guns.
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  • Mr. Trump issued full pardons to Nicholas Slatton and three other former U.S. service members who were convicted on charges related to the killing of Iraqi civilians while they were working as security contractors for Blackwater, a private company, in 2007.
  • Mr. Manafort, 71, had been sentenced in 2019 to seven and a half years in prison for his role in a decade-long, multimillion-dollar financial fraud scheme for his work in the former Soviet Union. He was released early from prison in May as a result of the coronavirus pandemic and given home confinement. Mr. Trump had repeatedly expressed sympathy for Mr. Manafort, describing him as a brave man who had been mistreated by the special counsel’s office.
  • Mr. Stone, a longtime friend and adviser of Mr. Trump, was sentenced in February 2020 to more than three years in prison in a politically fraught case that put the president at odds with his attorney general. Mr. Stone was convicted of seven felony charges, including lying under oath to a congressional committee and threatening a witness whose testimony would have exposed those lies.
  • Mr. Kushner, 66, the father-in-law of the president’s older daughter, Ivanka Trump, pleaded guilty in 2004 to 16 counts of tax evasion, a single count of retaliating against a federal witness and one of lying to the Federal Election Commission. He served two years in prison before being released in 2006.
  • Michael T. Flynn, a former national security adviser who twice pleaded guilty to lying to the F.B.I. about his conversations with a Russian diplomat, and whose prosecution Attorney General William P. Barr tried to shut down, was the only White House official to be convicted as part of the Trump-Russia investigation.
  • The Supreme Court has ruled that the Constitution gives presidents unlimited authority to grant pardons, which excuse or forgive a federal crime. A commutation, by contrast, makes a punishment milder without wiping out the underlying conviction.
  • Joe Arpaio, an anti-immigration crusader who enjoyed calling himself “America’s toughest sheriff,” was the first pardon of Mr. Trump’s presidency.
  • Conrad M. Black, a former press baron and friend of Mr. Trump’s, was granted a full pardon 12 years after his sentencing for fraud and obstruction of justice.
  • Former Gov. Rod R. Blagojevich of Illinois was sentenced in 2011 to 14 years in prison for trying to sell or trade to the highest bidder the Senate seat that Mr. Obama vacated after he was elected president.
  • Susan B. Anthony, the women’s suffragist, was arrested in Rochester, N.Y., in 1872 for voting illegally and was fined $100. Mr. Trump pardoned her on Aug. 18, the 100th anniversary of the ratification of 19th Amendment, which extended voting rights to women.
  • Edward J. DeBartolo Jr., a former owner of the San Francisco 49ers, pleaded guilty in 1998 to concealing an extortion plot. Mr. DeBartolo was prosecuted after he gave Edwin W. Edwards, the influential former governor of Louisiana, $400,000 to secure a riverboat gambling license for his gambling consortium.
  • Alice Marie Johnson was serving life in a federal prison for a nonviolent drug conviction before her case was brought to Mr. Trump’s attention by the reality television star Kim Kardashian West.
  • Jack Johnson, the first Black heavyweight boxing champion, was tarnished by a racially tainted criminal conviction in 1913 — for transporting a white woman across state lines — that haunted him well after his death in 1946. Mr. Trump pardoned him on May 24, 2018.
  • Dinesh D’Souza received a presidential pardon after pleading guilty to making illegal campaign contributions in 2014. Mr. D’Souza, a filmmaker and author whose subjects often dabble in conspiracy theories, had long blamed his conviction on his political opposition to Mr. Obama.
  • Zay Jeffries, a metal scientist whose contributions to the Manhattan Project and whose development of armor-piercing artillery shells helped the Allies win World War II, was granted a posthumous pardon on Oct. 10, 2019. Jeffries was found guilty in 1948 of an antitrust violation related to his work and was fined $2,500.
  • Ten years ago, Bernard B. Kerik, a former New York City police commissioner, was sentenced to four years in prison after pleading guilty to eight felony charges, including tax fraud and lying to White House officials.
  • I. Lewis Libby Jr., known as Scooter, was Vice President Dick Cheney’s top adviser before Mr. Libby was convicted in 2007 of four felony counts, including perjury and obstruction of justice, in connection with the disclosure of the identity of a C.I.A. officer, Valerie Plame.
  • Mr. Trump’s decision to clear three members of the armed services who had been accused or convicted of war crimes signaled that the president intended to use his power as the ultimate arbiter of military justice.
  • Michael R. Milken was the billionaire “junk bond king” and a well-known financier on Wall Street in the 1980s. In 1990, he pleaded guilty to securities fraud and conspiracy charges and was sentenced to 10 years in prison, though his sentence was later reduced to two. He also agreed to pay $600 million in fines and penalties.
  • Dwight Hammond and his son, Steven Hammond, were Oregon cattle ranchers who had been serving five-year sentences for arson on federal land. Their cases inspired an antigovernment group’s weekslong standoff at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon in 2016 and brought widespread attention to anger over federal land management in the Western United States.
  • David H. Safavian, the top federal procurement official under President George W. Bush, was sentenced in 2009 to a year in prison for covering up his ties to Jack Abramoff, the disgraced lobbyist whose corruption became a symbol of the excesses of Washington influence peddling. Mr. Safavian was convicted of obstruction of justice and making false statements.
  • Angela Stanton — an author, television personality and motivational speaker — served six months of home confinement in 2007 for her role in a stolen-vehicle ring. Her book “Life of a Real Housewife” explores her difficult upbringing and her encounters with reality TV stars.
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McCarthy Seeks Thaw With Trump as G.O.P. Rallies Behind Former President - The New York... - 0 views

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shared by saberal on 29 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Two weeks after Representative Kevin McCarthy, the top House Republican, enraged Donald J. Trump by saying that he considered the former president responsible for the violent mob attack at the Capitol, the two men met on Thursday for what aides described as a “good and cordial” meeting, and sought to present a united front.
  • McCarthy, in a speech on the House floor, said that the former president “bears responsibility” for the events of Jan. 6, when a throng of his supporters stormed the Capitol after a rally in which Mr. Trump urged them to “fight like hell” against his election defeat.
  • Aides to both men have been trying to broker a thaw between the two ever since, even as Mr. Trump has targeted other Republicans who criticized him more harshly for his role in the Capitol breach and voted in favor of impeaching him.
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  • Mr. Trump’s advisers have been seeking to highlight his remaining popularity with Republican voters as the Senate trial is set to begin in less than two weeks. All but five Republicans voted on Tuesday to toss out the impeachment case against him as unconstitutional, reflecting how reluctant members of his party are to abandon Mr. Trump even after he has left office.
  • Mr. McCarthy said, adding, “A united conservative movement will strengthen the bonds of our citizens and uphold the freedoms our country was founded on.”
  • Mr. McCarthy tempered his criticism, saying he did not believe that the former president “provoked” the Capitol attack, and that while Mr. Trump bore “some responsibility,” so did “everybody across this country.”
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How We Are Ruining America - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ow-we-are-ruining-america.html inequality class classism structural
shared by Javier E on 11 Jul 17 - No Cached
  • The most important is residential zoning restrictions.
  • zoning restrictions in the nation’s 220 top metro areas lowered aggregate U.S. growth by more than 50 percent from 1964 to 2009
  • Reeves’s second structural barrier is the college admissions game.
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  • It’s no wonder that 70 percent of the students in the nation’s 200 most competitive schools come from the top quarter of the income distribution.
  • With their admissions criteria, America’s elite colleges sit atop gigantic mountains of privilege, and then with their scholarship policies they salve their consciences by offering teeny step ladders for everybody else.
  • We in the educated class have created barriers to mobility that are more devastating for being invisible. The rest of America can’t name them, can’t understand them. They just know they’re there.
  • American upper-middle-class culture (where the opportunities are) is now laced with cultural signifiers that are completely illegible unless you happen to have grown up in this class. They play on the normal human fear of humiliation and exclusion. Their chief message is, “You are not welcome here.”
  • In her thorough book “The Sum of Small Things,” Elizabeth Currid-Halkett argues that the educated class establishes class barriers not through material consumption and wealth display but by establishing practices that can be accessed only by those who possess rarefied information.
  • To feel at home in opportunity-rich areas, you’ve got to understand the right barre techniques, sport the right baby carrier, have the right podcast, food truck, tea, wine and Pilates tastes, not to mention possess the right attitudes about David Foster Wallace, child-rearing, gender norms and intersectionality. 1019 Comments
  • the structural barriers he emphasizes are less important than the informal social barriers that segregate the lower 80 percent.
  • Over the past generation, members of the college-educated class have become amazingly good at making sure their children retain their privileged status. They have also become devastatingly good at making sure the children of other classes have limited chances to join their ranks.
  • Over the past few decades, upper-middle-class Americans have embraced behavior codes that put cultivating successful children at the center of life. As soon as they get money, they turn it into investments in their kids
  • Upper-middle-class parents have the means to spend two to three times more time with their preschool children than less affluent parents. Since 1996, education expenditures among the affluent have increased by almost 300 percent, while education spending among every other group is basically flat.
  • Richard Reeves of the Brookings Institution recently published a book called “Dream Hoarders” detailing some of the structural ways the well educated rig the system.
  • Status rules are partly about collusion, about attracting educated people to your circle, tightening the bonds between you and erecting shields against everybody else
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Fact-based impeachment can't penetrate the pro-Trump Web - The Washington Post - 0 views

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shared by Javier E on 14 Dec 19 - No Cached
  • the defense mounted by Trump’s allies made perfect sense to those following live on social media, in groups sealed off from general scrutiny, where facts are established by volume, and confirmation comes from likes.
  • The echo chambers that take hold on social media reach beyond the effects of media coverage partial to the president, which he promotes to counter fact-based reporting.
  • The effect of social media is to jack up the tenor of everything,” said Carl Cameron, who spent more than two decades as a reporter for Fox News before leaving in 2017.
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  • “There’s a statement made by a witness, or an interaction with a lawmaker, and users are able to put together a counternarrative in real time.”
  • Cameron described the live comment streams as laboratories of right-wing talking points, most likely to attract viewers who already share a certain bias. These viewers are unlikely to change their minds, and thus shift opinion polling on impeachment, which has remained relatively stable.
  • Social media once held out promise to connect the world. But in a polarized climate, the firmest bonds appear to be forming among those who already share the same views, allowing partisans to choose not simply their own coverage but the community with which they process it. Self-selected information nourishes identity, experts said, reducing politics to entertainment and blood sport.
  • the Democratic approach rests on more traditional means of persuasion. What committee leaders described as a solemn process, compelled by the president’s own admissions and propelled by “ample facts,” Trump and his congressional allies decried as a charade.
  • But the talking points are then exported through other channels, he added, and eventually reach persuadable voters. Social media, he said, does not just echo but serves as an “amplifier, with powerful cross-pollination on the different platforms, until the talk eventually reaches the office water cooler or coffee machine, or the Thanksgiving table.”
  • “The more social media allows for those kinds of communities that make you feel like you’re part of a group that you aren’t physically in, it can give you the illusion that your opinions are more widely held than they really are,”
  • “That’s a powerful feeling, to be part of a community watching and interpreting something in the same way.”
  • Discussions about the hearing also appeared on YouTube, where live streams similarly became flooded with conspiracy theories and racist vitriol
  • The sort of news consumption enabled by the tech giants remains a largely unstudied phenomenon
  • The phenomenon bears some relationship to talk radio, she said, which allows listeners to call in and share their observations — and to feel as though they’re part of the coverage.
  • That sense of participation became pronounced over the last few weeks, as the watch parties turned into cheering sections for Republican lawmakers who delivered especially impassioned rebuttals for the president
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Race war murder: James Harris Jackson killed Timothy Caughman to spark white v. black c... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...race-war-murder-hate-crime race war racism assassination homicide nyc murder nazi
shared by Javier E on 27 Dec 19 - No Cached
  • There were few signs at Friends that Jackson harbored any hatred, according to interviews with a dozen classmates, teachers and administrators. Most agreed to talk about Jackson only if they would not be identified because they did not want to be connected with his crime.
  • Jackson’s arrest made front-page news across the country. But prosecutors were surprised at how quickly the story faded.
  • Jackson belonged to a small group of more conservative students who stood out on campus, she said. “It was a really liberal school, so people shared a lot of assumptions,” she said. “He liked to challenge those.”
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  • “I think he came to Seder or Passover with me one year at my family’s house,” he said, adding that Jackson had black and Hispanic friends at the school and dated an Asian girl.
  • His senior year, he was one of about 30 Latin students to travel to Italy during spring break. As the group toured ancient Roman ruins, Jackson turned to a student he barely knew and said that his grandfather had admitted on his deathbed to being in the SS.
  • After flunking out of Ohio Wesleyan University his first semester, he did the first of two things that would shock his former Quaker school classmates. In 2009, he enlisted. “Kids from Friends don’t do that,” recalled his history classmate. “Going to West Point is one thing. But to go and just sign up?”
  • “The planet is going down fast. And the best have to be saved. The weak have to die. It’s just that simple,” he continued, turning his face to the ceiling and exhaling loudly with his eyes closed. “This has to be God’s will. What other explanation could there be?”
  • One classmate of color said she, too, had no inkling that Jackson was racist. Instead, they bonded over their love of history. “I felt like he was the only one in the class who got me,” she said.
  • “The coverage of the case was not as extensive or as deep as I thought it would be, given all that was going on in America at time, and its outrageousness,” said Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr., who charged Jackson with murder as a hate crime and murder as terrorism. “Had he come from ISIS and hunted Jews and then killed a Jewish man, I think there would have been much more attention.”
  • It would be another five months before hundreds of white supremacists and neo-Nazis descended on Charlottesville for the “Unite the Right” rally — a gathering that would end in violence and expose the alt-right for what it really was.
  • Detective Schick considered the crime a window into the growing problem of white supremacy in America. “We need to know where this train of thought is coming from, how it’s being perpetuated in these hate groups,” he said. “It’s the same thought pattern used back by the Ku Klux Klan.”
  • At their 10-year reunion, Jackson’s classmates decided to hold a Quaker meeting for worship.There, in the meeting house Harris used to attend with them, the young professionals wondered if there were warning signs they didn’t see, or if the school’s progressivism had somehow helped push Jackson toward violence.
  • “There is clearly something that was missing from our high school or our experience that didn’t allow him to speak about these feelings sooner,” one Friends graduate said.
  • Raines, Jackson’s former history teacher who now works at another private school, said he brought up the case this fall during an assembly. The virulence of white supremacy should not be ignored.
  • “You see these trends, these forces, resurging,” he said. “You need to take action if you can.”
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TreasuryDirect KIDS - The History of U.S. Public Debt - The New Deal (1933-1936) to Wor... - 0 views

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shared by Javier E on 04 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • All the New Deal programs were paid for, and run by, the Government. This meant that the Government’s debt grew a great deal.  The U.S. debt was $22 billion in 1933 and grew by 50 percent in the three years that followed, reaching $33 billion.
  • Taking part in this war was very expensive for the U.S. Not only did the U.S. pay for its own military, it also lent money to Britain and other countries fighting the German military. The estimated cost for the U.S. was $323 billion. To help pay for the war, the U.S. took on more debt, borrowing about $211 billion. Much of the debt was in the form of U.S. Savings Bonds, which were al
  • At the end of World War II, the Government’s debt had grown to more than $258 billion.
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A Hunger Strike in ICE Detention | The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...hunger-strike-in-ice-detention politics US history Crisis
shared by anniina03 on 17 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • n June of 2018, Ajay Kumar, a thirty-two-year-old farmer with a thick beard and a soft voice, left Haryana, a state in northern India. He told me that political opponents had been intimidating him for being a loud and persistent activist and that they had eventually forced him to leave. His family pooled money, and he used it to fly to Ecuador, a country that he didn’t need a visa to enter. From there, he stole across the Colombian border, made his way through the rain forests of Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Guatemala, and Honduras, and crossed into Mexico. He lost clothes, money, and, at one point, his shoes. He worried that he would be killed by gangs, or that he would die of drowning or dehydration. “We never know how, what, when, where we will die,” he told me recently. Two months after he left India, Kumar reached the U.S.-Mexico border, near Otay Mesa, California, and turned himself in to Border Patrol.
  • Kumar was one of nearly nine thousand Indians apprehended along the southern border of the U.S. in 2018—a remarkable rise from the year before, when roughly three thousand were apprehended. A decade ago, there were only ninety-nine.
  • Since Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party came to power, in 2014, there has been a rise in violence, threats, and intimidation against minorities and members of the political opposition in India. In the past few decades, the country’s economy has also undergone a rapid liberalization, and inequality has intensified.
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  • Over the past several months, the U.S. has been trying to stop Indian migrants before they even reach the border. Last week, Mexico deported more than three hundred Indian migrants who were waiting to cross into the U.S., under a deal with the Trump Administration to avoid tariffs on Mexican exports. In 2016, two anonymous ICE officials described to Buzzfeed the agency’s unofficial policy toward Indian asylum seekers: “Keep them out. If you catch them, detain them.”
  • When Kumar reached California, he spent a few days in a packed cell, and then he and other asylum seekers were put on buses and planes—with chains around their hands, feet, and stomach, “as if we were some criminals,” Kumar recalled
  • Kumar ended up in the Otero County Processing Center, an ICE facility managed by a private contractor, where he says his treatment worsened. The officers spoke to Kumar and other Indian asylum seekers in English and Spanish, and refused to provide translators (except when they filled out medical questionnaires), despite the fact that the migrants spoke only Punjabi and Hindi.
  • Force-feeding is painful and potentially harmful to patients, and organizations including the Red Cross, the American Medical Association, and the World Medical Association consider it medically unethical
  • But what made Kumar most upset was that he and the other migrants were subjected to “animal-like treatment”—foul language, aggression, and punitive responses to minor violations of the rules. “When they cursed at the Indians and treated them badly, I couldn’t stand seeing it, so I would speak out against them,” Kumar told me. “If I said something, they would put me in the SHU”—the Special Housing Unit, a euphemism for solitary confinement—“for fifteen days, ten days, by myself in a small room.” (ICE did not respond to my request for comment.)
  • Kumar and other Indian asylum seekers were vegetarian because of their religious beliefs, and the staff sometimes taunted them and made them wait until everyone else got food before they could eat.
  • In July, Kumar went on a hunger strike to protest his indefinite detention and looming deportation. “I decided if I am going to die, I’ll die here,” he told me. When the officers at Otero saw that Kumar had stopped eating and drinking, they sent him to solitary. A few days later, he could hear the officers putting others in SHU rooms near his. He couldn’t see or talk to them and only later learned that five other Indian men had also gone on hunger strike. He did not know what had sparked their protest, though the Otero staff considered him their ringleader, nonetheless. “I had one demand from the beginning,” he told me. “I just want my freedom. I didn’t ask for anything else.”
  • n mid-July, Kumar and three other hunger strikers were transferred to the El Paso Service Processing Center’s medical unit, in Texas, where Kumar was at times isolated from the others. ICE obtained a court authorization to force-feed them, a procedure that involves pushing a tube through a patient’s nose and down the esophagus. One of the migrants had just been treated for a nose infection, and, as ICE doctors placed the tube in his nostril, he began spitting blood and lost consciousness. According to Corchado, who also represented this detainee, the doctor administering the tubes told him, “End your hunger strike and we’ll stop this.” He ended the strike that night.
  • In March of this year, Kumar learned that an immigration judge had rejected his application for asylum, finding the evidence of persecution he had presented not credible, and had ordered his deportation. Kumar filed an appeal. While he waited, he requested to be released on bond, something he had been asking for since he was apprehended, but ICE refused. Though ICE uses punitive measures against detainees, people in immigration detention are officially being held for an administrative violation rather than for a criminal offense, which means that, except in special circumstances, there is no legal limit on how long they can be held.
  • In January, a group of Indian asylum seekers dubbed the “El Paso Nine” banded together in a collective hunger strike. A court gave authorization for them to be force-fed, but the feeding was stopped after two or three weeks in the face of mounting pressure from politicians, activists, and lawyers. Seven of the strikers were eventually deported, and two were released to await rulings on their cases. But forty-nine members of Congress signed a letter to the Department of Homeland Security demanding an investigation into the use of force-feeding by ICE.
  • Kumar was taken off the feeding tube after nearly a month and then persisted in his strike. His weight dropped, as did his blood pressure and heart rate. He started getting severe abdominal pains. “I was literally seeing him die in front of me,” Corchado told me.
  • On September 12th, the court allowed ICE to resume force-feeding Kumar. The judge wrote in his opinion that he couldn’t order ICE to release Kumar, but he scolded the government for not having given Kumar an independent doctor’s evaluation and for what the judge called its “penological” treatment of him.
  • At the end of his hunger strike, Kumar weighed a hundred and seven pounds. He left the El Paso facility on September 26th and is now staying with an immigration activist in Las Cruces, New Mexico. He is eating solid foods again, and gardening, and he recently enrolled in E.S.L. classes. But he can’t run like he used to, and he’s still regaining his vision after going partially blind from starvation. “I’m not fully recovered,” he told me, two weeks after his release. “There are some mental issues—I can’t remember everything. But I’m better than before.”
  • In September, the Board of Immigration Appeals agreed to remand Kumar’s asylum case back to the immigration judge, concluding that the initial ruling, which judged Kumar’s testimony to be not credible, was “clearly erroneous.” Kumar’s case will be heard again, in December, by the same judge. His odds are not great—more than forty-one per cent of Indian asylum seekers were ordered to be deported from the United States last year, and the percentage is likely to be even higher this year.
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'The red wall is cracking': Buttigieg gets ovation after expecting protests | US news |... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...owa-conservative-election-2020 trump economics Policy US Crisis politics
shared by brookegoodman on 19 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • “What you need to realize with Sioux county is there’s a very strong religious flavor there, from their courts to their public squares,” said Ned Bjornstad, a former elected prosecutor in north-west Iowa turned veteran defense attorney who practices regularly in Orange City. “For a candidate like Buttigieg, I’d expect protesters.”
  • “Iowans long for someone who understands them,” Harms said. “The second you meet him, you get that impression that he almost knows you. Of course he can come into Orange City, and people will like him. There’s that common bond among midwesterners.”
  • “In the last 50 years, every Democratic president has a perspective outside Washington, is new on the national scene, and is of a new generation,” he said. “I check all those boxes.”
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  • “I can’t think of anyone more anathema to the seat of Sioux county, but a packed house there suggests there’s broad appeal, for whatever reason,” Best said.
  • Corrie Hayes, a 21-year-old senior at Northwestern College, said she was impressed particularly with his response to a question about abortion rights, when he said that in the Book of Genesis, life begins with breath. She wouldn’t get into her positions on policy – she said she was deeply religious and her faith guided her every day – but she said she could tell Buttigieg was sincere about his faith.
  • More people than ever before are reading and supporting our journalism, in more than 180 countries around the world. And this is only possible because we made a different choice: to keep our reporting open for all, regardless of where they live or what they can afford to pay.
  • None of this would have been attainable without our readers’ generosity – your financial support has meant we can keep investigating, disentangling and interrogating. It has protected our independence, which has never been so critical. We are so grateful.
  • Pete Buttigieg knew he was foraying into unfriendly confines when he was en route to Orange City, the seat of Iowa’s most conservative county.
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Opinion: The humiliation of Mike Pence - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html Trump Pence US Politics Election Biden Voting Fraud 2020 2024
shared by yehbru on 02 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • One-term President Donald Trump, who lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden by over seven million votes, is reportedly pressuring Pence to take steps to overturn the will of the people.
  • Fortunately, the US Constitution offers Pence no way to stop the process as he presides over the joint session of the House and Senate next week, a process that Biden presided over four years ago when Trump's victory was certified).
  • Nevertheless, Pence could aid Republicans as they deliver speeches that will delay the outcome and add to the sense, among Trump loyalists, that he was cheated out of re-election. In doing so, Pence could stake his claim to the Trump legacy -- a populist base composed of millions -- and get a boost for his own political futur
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  • It's worth remembering that Pence was offered the vice president's job, in part, because of his appeal to vast numbers of evangelical voters who would be reassured by his presence alongside the profane, thrice-married Trump
  • Trump's defeat should have signaled that Pence's reward, his own rise as the GOP's leading 2024 presidential candidate, was at hand. Instead he's had to suffer a bit longer as the press reports that the President is angry with him for failing to work harder at overturning the election.
  • Pence has still taken steps to show his commitment to Trump. Last week, Pence jetted to West Palm Beach, where he promised a crowd of conservative youth that, "We're going to keep fighting until every legal vote is counted. We're going to keep fighting until every illegal is thrown out." He also urged the young voters to "stay in the fight" against election fraud.
  • Despite claims, many from Republicans, of election fraud, it is exceedingly rare and efforts to prove it exists in any pervasive sense have failed.
  • Republicans, especially Trump, kept selling the fraud claim, and some people have bought into it. Before the election, the Pew Research Center found that 43% of Republicans and 25% of all those surveyed believed voter fraud to be a real problem when people voted by mail. Post-election, according to a NPR/PBS New Hours/Marist poll, only one quarter of Republicans say they trust the election results.
  • Although Trump has said he is considering a run in 2024, he has also said he might back away from this idea, according to Politico. This would make Pence a frontrunner for the next Republican ticket. Under these circumstances, now is not the time for him to break the bond.
8More

Their First Try Backfired, but Giuliani and Allies Keep Aiming at Biden - The New York ... - 0 views

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shared by cartergramiak on 01 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • The former New York mayor’s dirt-digging effort on Hunter Biden in 2019 ended with President Trump’s impeachment. Now he is back with new associates. So far it is not going exactly as planned.282
  • On the weekend of Oct. 10, President Trump’s personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani, his former adviser Stephen K. Bannon and a prominent new ally, a Chinese billionaire and Mar-a-Lago member named Guo Wengui, gathered at Mr. Guo’s luxury apartment overlooking Central Park for dinner and cigars.
  • Now Mr. Giuliani, undaunted and surrounded by a new cast of characters after some of his wingmen in the Ukraine caper were indicted, is trying again.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Mr. Giuliani expressed frustration with the way the news media was keeping its distance, and said he would have preferred to have pushed out the materials earlier.“I would have loved to have had this six months ago,” he said in a recent interview. “It would have solved a lot of my problems.”
  • Mr. Guo and Mr. Bannon began working together after Mr. Bannon left the White House in 2017, quickly bonding over their mutual antipathy toward the Chinese Communist Party.
  • Mr. Guo, who is also known as Miles Kwok, left China in 2014, as the government there began leveling corruption allegations against his business associates and eventually Mr. Guo. He moved to New York, buying a $67.5 million apartment along Central Park and spending time aboard the Lady May.
  • Mr. Bannon asserted that the effort to limit the spread of the New York Post’s articles on social media had backfired, drawing more attention to them. “Social media overplayed this and did us a favor,” Mr. Bannon said.
  • At the same time Mr. Bannon and Mr. Giuliani were shopping the purported hard drive, two other efforts were afoot to disseminate related information on Hunter Biden.
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