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MURDER, POLITICS, AND THE END OF THE JAZZ AGE by Michael Wolraich Order today at Barnes & Noble / Amazon / Books-A-Million / Bookshop |
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Kudlow said invading Iraq in 2002 as a “small war” would boost the economy
During the run-up to the Iraq War, Kudlow was an unabashed hawk...
December 2007:“ There’s no recession coming. The pessimistas were wrong. It’s not going to happen....We are in a slow patch. That’s all. It’s nothing to get up in arms about.”
In July 2008, Kudlow said it was a “mental recession, not an actual recession”
So while Starr was required by statute to forward any findings of impeachable offenses to Congress, Mueller is forbidden to speak publicly and may only forward a “confidential report” to the attorney general (or, in this case, Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein). While Rosenstein may feel obliged to make a limited disclosure to Congress of any disagreement with Mueller, there is no formal mechanism to transmit Mueller’s conclusions regarding impeachable offenses, much less the underlying evidence, to the Congress.
If true, fuggeabout that whole protectionist thing! He's about as "free-trade" as one can get.
By Eamon Javers & Jacob Pramuk @ CNBC.com, 14 minutes ago
President Donald Trump plans to name Larry Kudlow as his top economic advisor, sources told CNBC.
Trump could announce his decision to choose Kudlow as his National Economic Council director as soon as Thursday. The president offered the CNBC senior contributor and on-air personality the job on Tuesday night, and Kudlow accepted, a person familiar told CNBC.
Kudlow would replace Gary Cohn, who left the White House earlier this month amid disagreements about tariffs on steel and aluminum imports. The longtime CNBC personality advocates for free trade and generally opposes tariffs [....]
By Richard Perez-Pena @ NYTimes.com, 33 minutes ago
2:56 minute Video @ TheGuardian.com, March 13
Families of the 16 children and teacher killed in the Dunblane massacre 22 years ago today send a message to survivors of last month’s Parkland school shooting in Florida, who are planning a protest to push for US gun law reform. The Dunblane shooting led the UK to bring in some of the strictest firearms legislation in the world, outlawing private ownership of most handguns. Almost overnight, 200,000 gun owners had their weapons banned, a law which was enforced with heavy fines and up to 10 years in prison
Hint: it’s not about the economy. By Sean Illing @ Vox.com, March 13
Robert Wuthnow, a sociologist at Princeton University, spent eight years interviewing Americans in small towns across the country. He had one goal: to understand why rural America is so angry with Washington.
Wuthnow’s work resulted in a new book, The Left Behind: Decline and Rage in Rural America. He argues that rural Americans are less concerned about economic issues and more concerned about Washington threatening the social fabric of small towns and causing a “moral decline” in the country as a whole. The problem, though, is that it’s never quite clear what that means or how Washington is responsible for it.
So I decided to speak with Wuthnow about what he learned and whether fears about America’s “moral decline” are really just a cover for much deeper fears about race and demographic changes [.....]
By Maxwell Tani @ TheDailyBeast.com, March 13
The eccentric billionaire considered buying ‘The Onion’ several years ago, The Daily Beast confirmed, and now Musk is hiring the satire outlet’s staffers for a secret new project.
By Pete Schroeder @ Reuters.com, March 13
WASHINGTON - Two of Wall Street’s largest Washington-based trade groups said on Tuesday that they were merging, as big banks rethink their lobbying strategies under the business-friendly administration of U.S. President Donald Trump.
The Clearing House Association (TCH) and the Financial Services Roundtable (FSR), which both count the likes of Citigroup, Bank of America and JP Morgan Chase among their members, will combine to form a single group to push policy changes in the nation’s capital, they said in a joint statement [...]
Second headline: Under Pompeo, a Foreign Policy That Fits the President’s Worldview
By David E. Sanger @ NYTimes.com, 12 minutes ago
The man who is to become secretary of state opposes the nuclear deal with Iran and doubts North Korea will give up its nuclear arsenal through negotiations.
Just got a reminder from CNN right now: 4th in the line of succession to the presidency.
Amazingly, Rubio gets an awful lot right here. Now, we really don't need more than tariffs because a tariff that raises the price of the imported good or service above the equilibrium price of domestic alternatives is sufficient to protect the latter. But the Florida Republican's reasoning and the values expressed in the op-ed are pretty spot on:
The right trade policy for the United States is not a choice of unrestrained free trade or protectionism. “More Trade” or “Less Trade” isn’t the goal. The goal is better jobs and higher wages for American workers. Trade is a means to those ends.
@ NYDailyNews.com, March 12
One photo caption: Cuomo said he’s ready to declare an emergency that could result in an independent monitor to circumvent NYCHA’s slow-moving bureaucracy.
Ending excerpt:
De Blasio has been widely criticized for announcing a $200 million fixup of NYCHA boilers that he said couldn’t start until July and wouldn’t be finished for at least three years.
“You can’t tell the tenants of the New York City Housing Authority I’m going to replace your boiler in three years,” Cuomo said.
City Councilman Ritchie Torres (D-Bronx) was less diplomatic, stating flatly, “As you know our mayor is out of town. But the mayor has been out of town when it comes to the management of public housing.”
By Dan Simon @ CNN.com, March 12
James Schwab, a spokesman for the San Francisco Division of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, has resigned, citing what he says are falsehoods being spread by members of the Trump administration including Attorney General Jeff Sessions.
"I just couldn't bear the burden -- continuing on as a representative of the agency and charged with upholding integrity, knowing that information was false," he told CNN on Monday.
Schwab cited Acting Director Tom Homan and Attorney General Jeff Sessions as being the purveyors of misleading and inaccurate information, following Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf's controversial decision to warn the community of an upcoming ICE raid. [.....]
Op-ed by Joshua Geltzer @ Wired.com, March 11
Geltzer is executive director and visiting professor of law at Georgetown Law’s Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection as well as an ASU Future of War fellow at New America writing a book on the issues discussed here. From 2015 to 2017 he served as senior director for counterterrorism at the National Security Council.
[....] When Russia manipulates elections via Facebook, or ISIS recruits followers on Twitter, or racist landlords deny rentals to blacks and then offer them to whites through Airbnb, commentators and companies describe these activities as “manipulation” or “abuse” of today’s ubiquitous websites and apps. The impulse is to portray this odious behavior as a strange, unpredictable, and peripheral contortion of the platforms.
But it’s not. It’s simply using those platforms as designed [....]
Recognizing that these challenges—and others—emerging on modern communications platforms stem from their inherent features isn’t an indictment of the companies whose services we’ve all come to rely on; to the contrary, it shows just how hard these problems are. And it calls for a reorientation as to how the companies and the rest of us think about addressing these challenges.
First, [....]
By Michael Tackett @ NYTimes.com, March 11
GRAPEVINE, Tex. — Carol Rains, a white evangelical Christian, has no regrets over her vote for President Trump. She likes most of his policies and would still support him over any Democrat. But she is open to another Republican. “I would like for someone to challenge him,” [.....]“But it needs to be somebody that’s strong enough to go against the Democrats.” Her preferred alternative: Nikki R. Haley, the United Nations ambassador and former South Carolina governor. One of her friends, Linda Leonhart, agreed [....]
According to data from the Pew Research Center, support among white evangelical women in recent surveys has dropped about 13 percentage points, to 60 percent, compared with about a year ago. That is even greater than the eight-point drop among all women.
“That change is statistically significant,” said Gregory A. Smith, Pew’s associate director of research, who also noted a nine-point drop among evangelical men. “Both groups have become less approving over time.” [....]
By Jim Tankersley & Alan Rappeport @ NYTimes.com, March 11
WASHINGTON — The legislative blitz that rocketed the $1.5 trillion tax cut through Congress in less than two months created a host of errors and ambiguities in the law that businesses big and small are just now discovering and scrambling to address.
Companies and trade groups are pushing the Treasury Department and Congress to fix the law’s consequences, some intended and some not, including provisions that disadvantage certain farmers, hurt restaurateurs and retailers and could balloon the tax bills of large multinational corporations.
While Treasury can clear up uncertainty about some of the murky provisions, actual errors and unintended language can be solved only legislatively — at a time when Democrats seem disinclined to lend votes to shoring up a law they had no hand in passing and are actively trying to dismantle.
On Thursday, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce released a 15-page request it had sent the Treasury Department for clarification on how the law affects multinational corporations, mutual fund investors and mom-and-pop pass-through entities.
It was a public display of the lobbying that businesses are waging primarily behind the scenes to change or shape enforcement of the law, most notably its byzantine new provisions intended to crack down on multinationals sheltering profits abroad for tax purposes [......]
CONTINUES WITH PLENTY OF SPECIFIC EXAMPLES in various businesses....
Why Trump won.
The [Stolper-Samuelson] theorem was set out 20 years earlier in a seminal paper, co-authored by Paul Samuelson, one of the most celebrated thinkers in the discipline. It shed new light on an old subject: the relationship between tariffs and wages. Its fame and influence were pervasive and persistent, preceding Stolper to Nigeria and outlasting his death, in 2002, at the age of 89. Even today, the theorem is shaping debates on trade agreements like the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) between America and 11 other Pacific-rim countries.
The paper was “remarkable”, according to Alan Deardorff of the University of Michigan, partly because it proved something seemingly obvious to non-economists: free trade with low-wage nations could hurt workers in a high-wage country. This commonsensical complaint had traditionally cut little ice with economists. They pointed out that poorly paid labour is not necessarily cheap, because low wages often reflect poor productivity—as Kaduna Textile Mills showed. The Stolper-Samuelson theorem, however, found “an iota of possible truth” (as Samuelson put it later) in the hoary argument that workers in rich countries needed protection from “pauper labour” paid a pittance elsewhere.
The Russian president’s remarks came during an occasionally surreal interview with NBC News in which he speculated that nearly anyone other than the Kremlin could have been to blame.
By Avi Selk @ WashingtonPost.com, March 11
[.....] Putin’s remarks came during a long and occasionally surreal interview with NBC News on Saturday, in which he speculated that nearly anyone other than the Russian government could have been behind a program to disrupt the election. U.S. intelligence agencies believe Putin ordered the effort to undermine faith in the U.S. election and help elect Donald Trump as president.
“Maybe they’re not even Russians,” Putin told Megyn Kelly, referring to who might have been behind the election interference. “Maybe they’re Ukrainian, Tatars, Jews — just with Russian citizenship.”
He also speculated that France, Germany or “Asia” might have interfered in the election — or even Russians paid by the U.S. government [.....]
original SF Chronicle piece here, thought the PDF was more detailed & interesting.