A Fox News poll released Wednesday reported that a majority of Americans believe that special counsel Robert Mueller will find that President Trump committed criminal or impeachable offenses.Fifty-six of respondents in the poll said they believed Mueller's probe will find that Trump committed the offenses.
Being a realist, Hamilton was pessimistic about human nature and skeptical of democracy. He believed "a nation without a national government" was "an awful spectacle." He knew that national power was necessary, and warned against modelling political systems on the basis of "lasting tranquility" in Federalist No. 34.Hamilton's true political ideas might be too startling for audiences today, given America's current political climate. A New York Times journalist pointed to the irony of Hamilton's newfound popularity, noting, "It's an odd moment for the public to embrace an unabashed elitist who liked big banks, mistrusted the masses and at one point called for a monarchal presidency and a Senate that served for life."An aggressive executive branch was central to his vision. In Federalist No. 70, Hamilton wrote, "Energy in the executive is a leading character in the definition of good government." A vigorous executive was precisely what would make America's system work well. The legitimacy and strength of the executive was so important that Hamilton insisted George Washington continue for a second term to provide stability in the early years of the nation.
58 MPH.
— MLB (@MLB) April 25, 2018
You think you could hit this pitch? pic.twitter.com/hP5hb3vylP
Former Trump campaign manager and administration official Steve Bannon ordered Cambridge Analytica staff to test messaging around Russian president Vladimir Putin and Russian expansion in 2014, Cambridge Analytica whisteblower Christopher Wylie told House Democrats this week."It was the only foreign issue, or foreign leader, I should say, being tested at the time I was there," Wylie told Democrats from the House Judiciary and Oversight committees, according to excerpts the lawmakers released today drawn from a Tuesday briefing with Wylie. Under Bannon's instruction, the firm discussed Putin with focus groups and was "also testing images of Vladimir Putin and asking questions about Russian expansion in Eastern Europe," Wylie said.
On This Date: In 1976, protesters tried to burn an American flag at Dodger Stadium.
— ESPN (@espn) April 25, 2018
Outfielder Rick Monday wasn't having any of that. pic.twitter.com/YyQ5tw9yIv
U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley is the most popular member of President Trump's foreign policy team, surpassing Defense Secretary Mattis, and she even has widespread approval among Democrats, young people and minorities, according to a new Quinnipiac poll. [...]Haley's approval/disapproval: Republicans (75/9), Democrats (55/23), Independents (63/19).
After discussing a proposal to finance nonprofit groups to address player concerns, they wanted to talk about why Colin Kaepernick, the quarterback who started the anthem protests to highlight social injustice and police brutality against African-Americans, was, they believed, being blackballed by the owners. The owners sounded panicked about their business under attack, and wanted to focus on damage control."If he was on a roster right now, all this negativeness and divisiveness could be turned into a positive," Philadelphia Eagles defensive lineman Chris Long said at the meeting.Long said he did not wish to "lecture any team" on what quarterbacks to sign, but "we all agree in this room as players that he should be on a roster." The owners' responses were noncommittal. The Eagles owner Jeffrey Lurie said that fighting for social justice is not "about one person."The New England Patriots owner Robert K. Kraft pointed to another "elephant in the room.""This kneeling," he said."The problem we have is, we have a president who will use that as fodder to do his mission that I don't feel is in the best interests of America," said Kraft, who is a longtime supporter of Mr. Trump's.
Powerful political actors -- most notably the majority party leadership and president, but also committee chairmen -- not only can sway how rank-and-file members vote, but they can also influence what subjects are brought up for consideration and, perhaps more importantly, ensure undesired legislation never makes it to the floor. This latter practice -- negative agenda control -- is particularly powerful because when something doesn't happen, no evidence of it is left behind for observers, electoral challengers, or voters to attract scrutiny.Agenda-setting also provides positive power, allowing leaders to set the party's legislative priorities. When party leaders clash over these priorities, the resulting agenda is a window into where power actually lies. By this measure, GOP legislative power mostly lies in Congress right now. Republican leaders have almost completely ignored the policy priorities of President Trump.To date, not one major piece of legislation has been taken up that ideologically reflects Trumpism rather than Republican orthodoxy.
"Schoolhouse Rock!," and Bob Dorough as its musical director, presented these animated gems as just another Saturday morning cartoon, and we ate it up. The music was irresistible, bypassing the brain and heading straight for the heart. It expressed a casual mastery, a deep sense of connection, and -- to borrow a modern phrase -- "baked-in diversity.""Verb: That's What's Happenin'" gives us not only an insanely catchy song, but a black superhero. The cartoon aired on September 22, 1973, a scant six years after the Black Panther debuted in the Fantastic Four comic book series. Zachary Sanders sang it, but Bob Dorough wrote it.Blossom Dearie, Dorough's friend and collaborator since the mid-'50s, sang his delicate and melancholy "Figure Eight." Again, Bob looked for the meaning behind the number: "Place it on its side," he wrote, "and it's a symbol meaning infinity."Before all that, though, Bob Dorough was a solid jazz player who managed a rare vocal on a Miles Davis record. His singing was vulnerable and idiosyncratic, expressed with a charming Southern drawl -- definitely not what was considered popular at the time, especially in the mid-1950s, when Dorough released his first solo album, Devil May Care (his own website describes one performance as having "the soft-spoken tones of a hip elf"). [...]As one astute YouTube commenter (it can happen) pointed out, Bob Dorough's singing was demotic: "of or relating to the ordinary, everyday, current form of language [or] everyday people." He spoke to us, about some extraordinary things, as if we not only could understand, but wanted to.
To study the effect of political and institutional changes on the economy, we look at share prices in the Santiago exchange during the tumultuous political events that characterized Chile in the early 1970s. We use a transparent empirical strategy, deploying previously unused daily data and exploiting two largely unexpected shocks which involved substantial variation in policies and institutions, providing a rare natural experiment. Allende's election and subsequent socialist experiment decreased share values, while the military coup and dictatorship that replaced him boosted them, in both cases by magnitudes unprecedented in the literature. The most parsimonious interpretation of these share price changes is that they reflected, respectively, the perceived threat to private ownership of the means of production under a socialist government, and its subsequent reversal.
Colbeck's presentation was loaded with false conspiracy theories that have been pushed by the far right to undermine Muslim Americans. A recent BuzzFeed News analysis found that state and local Republican politicians and officials have publicly attacked Islam in 49 states since 2015, typically with impunity."There's a lot of pressure being applied in our society right now. You're seeing Muslim legislators in the state legislature. And you're seeing also a push at the local level at city councils," Colbeck can be heard saying as a slide titled "Civilization Jihad Techniques" is up on a screen.Well-funded anti-Muslim groups like the Center for Security Policy and ACT for America -- once fringe elements of the conservative movement that have recently risen to prominence in the Trump era -- have alleged for years that Muslim Americans are subverting US laws through the practice of Sharia and that it would replace or supercede the laws of the land.Sharia -- often used as a fear-inducing term associated with anti-Western beliefs -- is simply a religious code of conduct, no different than those contained in other Abrahamic religions.Oftentimes anti-Muslim conspiracy theories also involve the belief that the Muslim Brotherhood -- the oldest political Sunni Islamist group that began in Egypt and has since spread to many Arab nations -- is actually infiltrating every aspect of Muslim American society with nefarious intentions. There were unfounded allegations that Hillary Clinton's top aide, Huma Abedin, was a member, for example.
French President Emmanuel Macron urged the United States to reject narrow nationalism and engage the world, telling U.S. lawmakers on Wednesday that modern economic and security challenges must be a shared responsibility.French President Emmanuel Macron arrives to address a joint meeting of Congress in the House chamber of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, U.S., April 25, 2018. REUTERS/Brian SnyderCapping a three-day visit to the United States, Macron told a joint meeting of Congress that isolationism and nationalism were "a tempting remedy for our fears." But he said international engagement was the only solution."This requires -- more than ever -- the United States' involvement as your role was decisive for creating and guarding today's free world. The United States is the one who invented this multilateralism. You are the one now who has to help preserve and reinvent it," he said.
US physicists have used ultra-cold atoms to model the universe's expansion in a lab, a process that could be used to test cosmological theories right here on Earth. [...]
"The nice thing is that from these results, we now know how to design experiments in the future to target the different effects that we hope to see," says Gretchen Campbell, co-author of the study and also from NIST.
The latest shoe to drop is Sean Hannity's sketchy purchase of a dozen homes in Atlanta through Henssler Financial, the financial advisor he part-owns and pitches on his show without telling his audience about his financial stake, which itself is another major financial conflict of interest.Now, the Guardian reveals that Sean Hannity's real estate company bought those homes from a major fraud ring convicted of perpetrating a criminal conspiracy to rig the bids in foreclosure auctions after the 2008 housing crash:In 2012, a shell company linked to the Fox News host bought 11 homes in Georgia that had been purchased by the dealer, Jeff Brock, following foreclosures. Brock transferred the properties to corporate vehicles that sold them on to the Hannity-linked company at a profit.Brock pleaded guilty in 2016 to federal charges of bank fraud and conspiracy for his role in an operation to rig foreclosure auctions between 2007 and 2012. He was sentenced to six months in prison and had to pay more than $166,000 in fines and restitution."By the very nature of this criminal act, the bank," said Special Agent in Charge J. Britt Johnson of the FBI's Atlanta Division when the 20-person operation was busted, "and more importantly, the homeowner owner in financial distress, are the victims that these federal laws were created to protect."
According to Comey's memos about that conversation, Trump claimed it was impossible for him to have done any such thing, because "he had spoken to people who had been on... the trip with him and they had reminded him that he didn't stay over night in Russia for that."All available evidence proves otherwise--from flight records obtained by Politico to social media posts from the time to testimony from Trump's own bodyguard. And now there's more proof.Thomas Roberts, host of that year's Miss Universe pageant, confirmed to The Daily Beast on Tuesday that Trump was in Moscow for one full night and at least part of another.
Before allegedly killing 10 people with a van in Toronto, Alek Minassian appeared to have posted a message on Facebook that linked him to a toxic online community of misogynists that has become the source of a growing pattern of violence.The Facebook post, which authorities who spoke with NBC News believe came from Minassian, links Minassian to an online community known as "incels," short for involuntary celibates. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation also reported that Facebook confirmed the authenticity of the post.Self-described incels congregate mostly online, meeting in forums and message boards like Reddit and 4chan, and its offshoot site 8chan, to discuss their hopelessness with women in posts that are peppered with racist and misogynistic rants.
[T]he public and a few of our bolder political leaders are waking up to the reality that we simply cannot keep jamming more cars into our cities.A century of experience has taught us the folly of it. Three pathologies emerge. First, every car becomes the enemy of every other. The car you hate most is the one that's right in front of you not moving. As cars pile in, journey times and pollution rise.Second, after a certain point, more cars make the city a less congenial place for strollers, bicyclists and people who take public transit to their destinations. The cars push out frolicking kids, quiet afternoons reading on a bench and sidewalk cafes. So we give up our public space, our neighbor-to-neighbor conversations and ultimately our personal mobility for the next car, and the next one.And then there is the odd fact, counterintuitive as it is, that building more roads does not really cure congestion and can even make it worse. The problem, as experts realized starting in the 1930s, is that as soon as you build a highway or add lanes to a freeway, cars show up to fill the available capacity. The phenomenon is so well understood that it has a name: induced traffic demand. [...]London now has 15 years of experience with a stiff "congestion charge" that discourages many drivers from entering the city center. In a virtuous cycle, the money goes to better public transit and more bike lanes. Early legislative discussions are underway about trying the same thing in Seattle and in some of California's more congested cities. New York has just turned down such a plan for the second time in a decade, but the idea is not going to die -- the city needs it too badly.In the crowded cities of Asia, people are not allowed to get a car just because they want one. Shanghai residents must buy license plates that have gone for up to $13,000 at auction, and Beijing residents have to enter a lottery for a plate.
Comey told the Sun-Times that Fitzgerald is part of his three-member legal team that also includes David Kelley, a former deputy U.S. attorney under Comey in New York, and Dan Richman of Columbia Law School, another former federal prosecutor. [...]Comey and Fitzgerald have been friends for decades, dating back to when they both worked as prosecutors in the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York.Appointed to be the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois in September 2001, Fitzgerald prosecuted former Illinois governors Rod Blagojevich and George Ryan, former Chicago Police Cmdr. Jon Burge as well as former Sun-Times owner Conrad Black.In 2003, Comey -- then the deputy attorney general -- appointed Fitzgerald as the special counsel to investigate the leaked identity of former CIA operative Valerie Plame. Former Vice President Dick Cheney's Chief of Staff Scooter Libby was convicted, though he was pardoned by Trump last week.Fitzgerald, who has been loath to comment on political matters since shifting to private practice, issued a rare statement after the pardon, saying the "facts have not changed."At the Tuesday reception hosted by his literary agency Javelin, Comey said it was his "first book party ever." Playing on Comey's ongoing feud with the Trump administration, cocktails on the drink menu were named "Deep State," the "Southern District" and "[REDACTED]."
Mick Mulvaney, the budget director and director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, has gutted the latter agency's role in preventing consumer fraud. Tuesday, he met with lobbyists and executives from the banking industry, promising further steps to gut regulations to prevent them from cheating customers. That's not even the scandalous part! The scandalous part is that Mulvaney asked the executives and lobbyists to donate more money, and told them the more they donated, the more influence they would have. Mulvaney didn't offer this as a sad concession to reality but an actual principle of governance he had personally abided:"We had a hierarchy in my office in Congress," Mr. Mulvaney, a former Republican lawmaker from South Carolina, told 1,300 bankers and lobbyists at an American Bankers Association conference in Washington. "If you're a lobbyist who never gave us money, I didn't talk to you. If you're a lobbyist who gave us money, I might talk to you."
In another sharp blow to the Trump administration's immigration policy, US District Judge John Bates reinstated the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program that was scheduled to end under a presidential order.Expanding on previous judicial orders rejecting the Trump policy, he ordered the administration to accept new DACA applications as well as to continue processing renewal applications -- which could mean protection for hundreds of thousands of children and youth brought here by immigrant parents.Denouncing the cancellation of DACA as "arbitrary and capricious" because the Department of Homeland Security had failed to adequately justify a policy that will severely disrupt millions of lives, the judge issued a harsh, 60 page opinion calling the Trump policy "particularly egregious."A George W. Bush appointee who sits on the US District Court for the District of Columbia -- and once helped to write Kenneth Starr's indictment of Bill Clinton -- Bates described the administration's legal argument as "barebones," "implausible," "meager," and "doubly insufficient."
"We know that it's the only way that we are going to be able to achieve our goal of getting billions of fans on the platform and getting the entire music industry to the size that we think it should be," Gustav Söderström, the Swedish company's chief research and development officer, told a news conference in New York.In the first significant redesign of its free tier since 2014, Spotify said that non-paying users will be able to pick and choose which songs to play on up to 15 curated playlists - roughly 40 hours of music per day.Non-subscribers previously had to settle for a shuffle of tracks.
After its first week in stores, the book has posted record numbers, selling 600,000 copies in all formats. That surpassed Hillary Clinton's memoir, "What Happened," which sold 300,000 copies in its first week.Comey's book is now the biggest debut of 2018, and biggest debut for a non-fiction book in at least five years.