Anti-abortion Republican congressman Tim Murphy of Pennsylvania has announced his plans to retire following reports that he had an extramarital affair and urged his mistress to get an abortion during a pregnancy scare [....]
NEW YORK — On Tuesday night, President Donald Trump casually told Geraldo Rivera on Fox News that the United States would have to wipe out $75 billion in debt owed by Puerto Rico to bondholders around the world.
Wall Street promptly freaked out, sending Puerto Rican bonds into a tailspin and leading the White House to move swiftly to clean up Trump's seemingly offhand remarks.
The Justice Department has released a series of recently overruled legal memos concluding that presidents cannot appoint their relatives to the White House staff or presidential commissions, even to unpaid posts.
[....] For years, Mr. Rees-Mogg, 48, has been one of British politics’ favorite eccentrics, affecting a languid, antiquarian poshness that verges on performance art. He was an obscure backbencher, though, never once included in an annual ranking of the country’s top 100 right-wing thinkers.
Sens. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and Dick Durbin are (D-IL) re-introducing a bipartisan criminal justice reform bill that never made it to the floor last year. It calls for lower minimum sentences for drug offenders, targets violent criminals and calls for a National Criminal Justice Commission to conduct a review of the criminal justice system.
Trade was a defining issue for candidate Donald Trump in 2016, when he lambasted American NAFTA negotiators for "the worst trade deal maybe ever signed anywhere" and an unconscionable strike against U.S. manufacturing jobs. As president he upended the Trans-Pacific Partnership for similar reasons. His biggest data point, wielded like a cudgel: America's $500 billion annual trade deficit.
The 2018 midterm elections will be determined in large part by who goes to the polls and who stays home. Historically, far fewer Americans turn out to vote in midterm than presidential elections and in 2014, turnout hit a 70-year low.
There’s a growing faction inside the Senate Republican Conference, and it looks like bad news for Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump: The devil-may-care caucus.
[....] Tillerson’s desire to remain on the job is a stabilizing move [....] His departure now would be widely seen as damaging to America’s already fragile position in a world disrupted by Trump’s erratic policies.
1:35 PM PT -- Sources tell us at 10:30 Monday morning a chaplain was called to Tom's hospital room. We're told the family has a do not resuscitate order on Tom. The singer is not expected to live throughout the day, but he's still clinging to life. A report that the LAPD confirmed the singer's death is inaccurate -- the L.A. County Sheriff's Dept. handled the emergency.
Excerpt has my underlining, of what I think it a very interesting analytic point as to the current climate, seems to go for both parties in many cases:
