FROM THE ARCHIVES: THIS PROFILE IS SO FASCINATING... (via The Other Brother):

Who is this guy? (Wright Thompson, ESPN)

You don't notice Ernie Adams at first, but he's always there in his own peculiar way. Walking the halls in the Patriots' complex, lost in his own thoughts, he will often ignore co-workers. In meetings, he has been known to fall asleep. After practice, he is almost always the first person Bill Belichick consults. On game day, he's in the press box with a headset on, running numbers, computing percentages and, some around the league insinuate, overseeing more insidious operations.

When Belichick is taking those lonely walks up and down the sideline, his head bowed as if in prayer, you can bet it's Ernie Adams yapping away in Belichick's ear. Some call him the smartest man they've ever met. A longtime NFL watcher compares him to "Q," James Bond's master of espionage and gadgetry. Author David Halberstam called him "Belichick's Belichick." No other team has anyone like him on its payroll. And yet, save for football insiders, he is virtually unknown. In an era of media oversaturation, there is exactly one more picture of Bigfoot on The Associated Press photo wire (two) than there is of Adams (one). And it's of the back of his head.

So here, in the ballroom of the Phoenix Convention Center, just six days before New England will attempt to complete a perfect season that Adams played a significant role in creating, I want to know what the almost-perfect Patriots think about their secret weapon: a guy with thick glasses and the sartorial sensibility of Mister Rogers; a guy who lived with his mother until she died three years ago. Who, exactly, is Ernie Adams?

"I don't know what his job title is," linebacker Adalius Thomas says. "I didn't even know his last name was Adams."

"Ernie is a bit of a mystery to all of us," offensive tackle Matt Light says. "I'm not sure what Ernie does, but I'm sure whatever it is, he's good at it."

Finally, I approach receiver Wes Welker. "I'm writing a story about Ernie Adams," I tell him.

"Who?" he says.

"The guy who's always with Belichick who doesn't ever really talk."

"Oh," he says, recognition washing over his face. "Ernie."

He thinks for a second. "He's got to be a genius," he says, "because he looks like one."

THE FRIENDSHIP

This is why God created best friends. Inside a cavernous church, Ernie Adams sat through his mother's funeral, the saddest day of a man's life, and by his side, where he'd been for years, was Bill Belichick. Sept. 25, 2004 was a beautiful New England day, a Saturday morning during the Patriots' bye week. In the tree-lined suburb of Brookline, Mass., a small crowd had gathered in the Gothic Revival Episcopal Church on the corner of St. Paul Street and Aspinwall Avenue. The stone bell tower rose cold and medieval against the fall blue sky.

The mourners had come to say goodbye to Helen Adams, a woman who loved education and adored her son even more. Ernie and Helen lived together, like something out of a Victorian novel, one friend said, with much doting and an occasional trip to the old continent. At the end, Ernie took care of his mother. In the crowd were friends from childhood, high school and college. One of them was the headmaster of Dexter School, where Ernie went to elementary and junior high. "I was struck by the loyalty of Belichick to Ernie," Bill Phinney says.

That bond is the cornerstone of the Patriots' dynasty. In many ways, the traits we associate with Belichick and the Patriots are traits commonly ascribed to Adams. The humble pie? Classic Ernie, frequently described as having no ego. The rumpled hoodie? Again, classmates remember, classic Ernie. Together, Adams and Belichick have created the transcendently successful franchise they dreamed of creating back in high school.

"It's really the story of a friendship," says Michael Carlisle, a successful literary agent who was Adams' high school roommate at Andover.

Adams and Belichick met in 1970. Adams had been at Phillips Academy in Andover, an elite New England boarding school, for three years. In that time, he'd become a campus legend, famous for his quirky attire and habits. He wore high-top cleats and old-fashioned clothes, looked and talked like something from the 1940s. His three obsessions were Latin, naval history and, strangely, football.

[originally posted: 1/31/08]

NOW TO GET THE DOG TO MOVE:

46 PERCENT OF AMERICANS IN A RELATIONSHIP WOULD RATHER SLEEP ALONE AT LEAST SOME OF THE TIME, ACCORDING TO A 2018 SURVEY.

The survey of 2,000 people, conducted by OnePoll, found that 24 percent think sleeping separately can actually improve a relationship -- even though those who slept in the same bed were twice as likely as their non-bed-sharing counterparts to rank their relationship happiness a 10 out of 10.

This isn't just an American phenomenon: In the U.K., 15 percent of Brits surveyed said they prefer to sleep in a different bed than their romantic partner, according to a 2018 YouGov survey of nearly 2,100 British adults. Britain's Sleep Council report found that the percentage of couples who sleep separately at least some of the time increased by 9 percent between 2013 and 2017, while the proportion of couples who always sleep alone rose from 8-12 percent.

"If you've slept in your own bed your entire life, sleeping with somebody else in the same bed is a huge deviation from what you are accustomed to," says Bill Fish, a sleep science coach who co-founded the Tuck Sleep Foundation. Habit formation becomes especially relevant as people marry later. Hughes is one example: She and Heath were 38 and 32 when they married, and she says they'd developed independent routines over decades.

Sleep disturbances, personal preferences and simple logistics play a role. For one, snoring: It's estimated that partners lose up to an hour of sleep every night because of a significant other's snoring. Other seemingly minor disturbances add up, particularly when partners operate on opposite timetables. Colleen Noon and her husband began sleeping solo initially because he was getting up several times a night to care for their infant son, and waking her in the process.

IF THEY WERE SERIOUS THEY'D HIRE FUSION:

YOU THINK THE PROGRESSIVES ARE GOING NUTS...:

I was a little taken aback this week by the level of outrage and vitriol spewed at Howard Schultz, the 65-year-old billionaire who built Starbucks into a global brand, after he said he was considering a self-funded, independent campaign for president. The way the left reacted, you'd have thought he was getting rid of almond-milk lattes.

"There is zero appetite for this, and there is an urgent need for the Democratic candidate to win in 2020," said Brian Schatz, the professional tweeter who is also a senator from Hawaii, echoing the common sentiment that Schultz would only serve to split the Democratic vote and reelect Trump.

"Vanity projects that help destroy democracy are disgusting," tweeted Neera Tanden, a key adviser to the last Democratic nominee, who believed that no one else should be able to run for the Democratic nomination but her and then delivered the country into the hands of a covert Russian agent.

Dan Pfeiffer, a senior adviser in the Obama administration, accused Schultz of creating headlines so he could sell his new book, because I guess what Schultz needs is more money. (At Schultz's first book event in Manhattan, a heckler screamed: "Don't help elect Trump, you egotistical billionaire a**hole!")

Liberal media got into the act, too, arguing that Schultz was looking to a bygone time when Americans were tired of partisan politics and still thought government could solve problems in a peaceable way, whereas we know they're now totally radicalized and happy as hell to scream at each other on Twitter all day long. (Or maybe we journalists are confusing American voters with ourselves.)

I guess the lesson here is that liberals are all about breaking up big monopolies and rigged systems, unless it happens to be the two-party chokehold on Washington.

THE BEST AND BRIGHTEST TRUMPBOTS:

Jerome Corsi and one of his lawyers are waging threats to sue against The Gateway Pundit, an outlet that has been overwhelmingly supportive of Corsi before he began singing to Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigators in the Justice Department probe of Russian interference in the 2016 election. Corsi admits that he corroborated evidence that the Mueller team had involving the interactions he had with Trump campaign adviser Roger Stone, who was arraigned on Tuesday, with regard to the WikiLeaks dumps of emails hacked from the Clinton campaign by Russian intelligence operatives.

Larry Klayman, the estranged founder of Judicial Watch who is representing Corsi as he processes through Mueller's probe, appeared on NewsmaxTV yesterday with host John Cardillo to spar with Gateway Pundit contributor Cassandra Fairbanks, who had taken to Twitter the day before to call Corsi "a deranged old man," and to criticize Mueller for taking information from him. Corsi is also represented by New Jersey attorney David Gray.

Happy 100th Jackie!

#LOSER:

Consider these developments in recent days:

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), the Republican chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, on Wednesday called on Trump to lift tariffs on Canada and Mexico before Congress begins debating the NAFTA-replacement treaty the administration recently negotiated, citing the toll the trade war with those countries is taking on American farmers.

"We'll be working all hands on deck to get the job done," Grassley said. "But we need the administration to help us pave the way."

On a related front, Republican Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.) on Wednesday announced bipartisan legislation that would let Congress reclaim its tariff authorities from the president. Other senators who have signed on to cosponsor the bill include farm state Republicans such as Ben Sasse (Neb.), Jerry Moran (Kan.), James Lankford (Okla.), and Lamar Alexander (Tenn.).

"The imposition of these taxes, under the false pretense of national security, is weakening our economy, threatening American jobs, and eroding our credibility with other nations," Toomey said in a press release announcing the bill.

Meanwhile, Politico reported Wednesday that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) is signaling that he won't allow another government shutdown, despite the president's wish to have the option if Congress doesn't approve money for his proposed border wall during negotiations over the next few weeks. McConnell is even entertaining bills that would end shutdowns forever, according to the report.

The dissent even extends to foreign policy, where McConnell on Tuesday "effectively rebuked the president" by introducing a measure criticizing the "precipitous" withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan and Syria. "We are not the world's policeman," the senator said. "But we are the leader of the free world. And it is incumbent upon the United States to lead."

What's going on here?

The president is starting to look like a loser.

TOOK VLAD LONG ENOUGH TO FIGURE OUT THE SHI'A AND AMERICANS WERE JUST USING HIM:

The controversy between Moscow and Tehran has always been a part of the Syrian conflict. However, the debates between the two have started to become more political in nature, influencing the future of Syria's armed forces and other military entities. [...]

Sources in the Russian military industry who spoke with Al-Monitor conceded that since Russian specialists had started helping Damascus build up the efficiency of its air defense and are preparing to transfer the management of S-300 systems to Syrians, further Syrian or Russian reactions to Israeli activities could become a serious issue. For Moscow, this problem may become highly complex, if not intractable, even considering Russia's obvious interest in constraining Iran's ambitions through Israel's actions.

Officially, Russia emphasizes that it distances itself from the regional conflict and exclusively protects its own facilities. Furthermore, it views its support of Syrian air defense forces as a measure to re-establish the country's sovereignty. In this regard, setting up the S-300 and integrating Syrian air defense into a semblance of a unified structure will allow it to keep its distance. At the same time, Moscow bears responsibility for the actions of its "client."

THE HIGH COST OF RACISM:

We have just marked the second anniversary of President Trump's original travel ban, which resulted in significant negative consequences for immigrants and raised difficult legal questions ultimately heard by the Supreme Court. One impact unknown to many is that the ban magnified America's rural health care crisis, because it has blocked medical professionals from affected countries from coming to the United States.

The U.S. Census Bureau projects that in the years spanning 2016-2030, the number of Americans age 65 and older will have increased from 49.2 million to 73 million. By that time, there will be a shortage of 42,600-121,300 doctors across the country, according to the Association of American Medical Colleges. The United States simply has too few doctors available to treat its rapidly aging population. Instead of restricting access to physicians, our leaders should seek to recruit and retain foreign doctors. But the travel ban did the opposite.

For instance, Iran, Syria, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen -- six of the seven countries originally banned -- account for more than 7,000 physicians practicing in the United States. In fact, Iran and Syria are two of the top ten nations that supply the United States with physicians.

WINNING THE WAR ON WAGES:

So Foxconn Technology Group may not make display panels in Wisconsin after all.

Those who've been following Foxconn for a long time won't be surprised. Chairman and founder Terry Gou is as much a salesman as he is a manufacturer, having spent decades honing his pitch not just to clients but also governments. 

Then-Governor Scott Walker, backed by President Donald Trump, loved exactly what he sold: the promise of thousands of jobs to make stuff in the U.S. Walker loved it so much that he pledged as much as $3 billion in sweeteners, a deal that likely cost him his governorship.

Now, according to a Reuters interview with one of Gou's right-hand men, such plans to manufacture display panels may be scaled back or even shelved.

"In Wisconsin we're not building a factory. You can't use a factory to view our Wisconsin investment," Louis Woo was cited as saying. Woo was one of the key architects and negotiators behind Foxconn's deal with the state. 

Foxconn's Wisconsin-made screens likely would have been put into televisions. Woo this week admitted that "in terms of TV, we have no place in the U.S. ... We can't compete."

If Foxconn can't be competitive making electronics in the U.S., nobody can.

DONALD WHO?:

It's been a surprisingly short time in coming. It was only last September that Federica Mogherini, the European Union's high representative for foreign affairs, announced that the European parties to the Iranian nuclear deal--formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action--would establish an a special purpose vehicle to "assist and reassure economic operators pursuing legitimate business with Iran," giving them a route around secondary sanctions imposed by the Trump administration.

Just four months later, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom are ready to launch the much-anticipated SPV, a first-of-its-kind state-owned trade intermediary. It will initially facilitate what French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian has described as trade in "essential goods"--mostly European exports of food and medicine to Iran. These, although not technically sanctioned by the U.S., have been restricted by the reluctance of European banks to facilitate payments for fear of American retribution. [...]

The surprising speed with which the SPV was established reflects a sense of urgency in Europe for an assertion of greater economic independence from the U.S. The French treasury played a leading role in devising the SPV, working closely with the French, German, and British foreign ministries and in consultation with the European Commission. Shortly after Trump's withdrawal from the nuclear deal last May, French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire spoke of a "realization among all European states that we cannot keep going in the direction we are headed today whereby we submit to American decisions."

WAIT, ATTACKING THE REPUBLIC HAS CONSEQUENCES?:

Scott, R-S.C., is doubling down in his opposition to Farr over concerns about the Raleigh, N.C., lawyer's history on race relations. [...]

"For some reason the authors of this letter choose to ignore ... facts, and instead implicate that I have been co-opted by the left and am incapable of my own decision making," Scott said in a statement to McClatchy, adding he votes for Republican judicial nominees "99 percent of the time."

"Why they have chosen to expend so much energy on this particular nomination I do not know, but what I do know is they have not spent anywhere near as much time on true racial reconciliation efforts, decrying comments by those like (Republican U.S. Rep.) Steve King, or working to move our party together towards a stronger, more unified future," Scott continued, referring to the Iowa congressman who recently suggested he was sympathetic to white supremacists in a New York Times interview.

Last last year, Scott was the deciding vote in sinking Farr's chances of being confirmed. The Charleston Republican said he was unable to ignore concerns that Farr may have been involved in a racially motivated voter-suppression strategy during the 1990 reelection campaign of the late-U.S. Sen. Jesse Helms, R-N.C. Farr held a senior staff position with the campaign.

In his statement Wednesday, Scott said, contrary to the suggestion in Tuesday's letter that he never had met with Farr or done the necessary research into his background, "I have met with him multiple times over the past 18 months, both in person and via phone."

Ultimately, Scott said, a Justice Department memo from the George H. W. Bush administration "raise(d) serious questions about the level of involvement Mr. Farr had in the Helms campaign."

LAUGHINGSTOCK:

LIBERTARIANISM ENDS AT THE TIP OF YOUR NOSE:

U.S. Sen. Rand Paul was awarded more than $580,000 in damages and medical expenses on Wednesday in his lawsuit against the neighbor who tackled him and broke several of his ribs in a dispute over lawn maintenance.

WHICH IS WHY THE rIGHT IS SO DESPERATE FOR DISCOVERY:

Russians are using materials obtained from special counsel Robert Mueller's office in a disinformation campaign apparently aimed at discrediting the investigation into Moscow's election interference, federal prosecutors said on Wednesday.

One or more people associated with the special counsel's case against Russian hackers made statements last October claiming to have stolen discovery materials that were originally provided by Mueller to Concord Management, Mueller's team said in court documents filed on Wednesday in the Russian troll farm case.

That discovery -- evidence and documents traded between both sides of a lawsuit -- appears to have been altered and disseminated as part of a disinformation campaign apparently aimed at discrediting the ongoing investigations in Russian interference in the U.S. political system, according to the documents.

In February and July of 2018, Mueller indicted numerous Russian entities and individuals--together with "others known and unknown to the grand jury"--on various charges of conspiring to commit crimes against the United States of America.

In theory, those indictments could be buttressed at any time, evidence willing, by adding American co-conspirators. Yes, American co-conspirators--possibly including those who have already been pinged for serious wrongdoing (pejoratively deemed by some as "process" crimes), such as lying to Congress or the grand jury.

Of course, if President Trump were involved in these conspiracies, it's not a far jump to "high crimes and misdemeanors" warranting impeachment.

Hopefully by now, most people understand that "collusion" is not a crime--it's an umbrella term for a host of potential crimes associated with Russia's attack on our electoral process. But conspiracy is a crime. Conspiracy is an offense that occurs if, first, two or more persons agree to commit a crime and, second, they take a step toward that goal. So, if two guys hatch a plan to rob a convenience store over beers, and then buy a ski mask and water pistol at the mall, they can be charged with a criminal conspiracy. Even if they never actually cross the convenience store's threshold.

Under federal law, if two or more people agree to commit a crime against the United States, and take an action in that direction, they can be sent to jail. An agreement to get around the FEC's reporting requirements, for example, and a subsequent attempt to make a campaign contribution look like something else, would violate 18 U.S.C. § 371. A defendant can be guilty of conspiring to defraud the United States by engaging in other dishonest conduct in connection with a federal agency or program, too.  

As the Department of Justice explains on its website, the goal of federal conspiracy laws is "to protect the integrity of the United States."

In the two conspiracy indictments pending in the Russia probe, the grand jury charged the defendants with attempting to sow discord within the American electorate--and to help Trump win the presidency--by interfering with the lawful functions of the U.S. government. The conspirators allegedly took a number of steps to achieve these goals, such as creating social media accounts of fictitious U.S. persons; holding fake rallies to shape public opinion; planting derogatory public information about Trump opponents Hillary Clinton, Ted Cruz, and Marco Rubio; hacking the email accounts of Clinton's staff; and staging the release of stolen data in order to heighten its impact on the 2016 presidential election.

The Trump campaign was involved. That much is clear from the grand jury's charging papers.

NATURAL ALLIES:

The NRA's Russian hosts were a powerful group. Alexander Torshin, who Erickson said had tentatively offered Keene a Putin interview, was a deputy governor at Russia's powerful central bank at the time. Justice Department prosecutors later alluded to him when they charged Erickson's girlfriend, Russian gun rights activist Maria Butina, with conspiring to act as an unregistered foreign agent in the U.S. Butina pleaded guilty to the charge last month. Her organization, called The Right to Bear Arms, had helped organize the trip Keene went on.

The NRA officials on the trip also met with Dmitry Rogozin, a Putin deputy and prominent figure in the Russian defense industry who is under U.S. sanctions. And they met with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, according to The Washington Post.

The Erickson email, which has not been previously quoted, indicates that the NRA officials on the Moscow trip believed they were meeting with Kremlin power players who could influence the country's president. The existence of this email was first reported by The New York Times.

Erickson's email also said the trip could help ease relations between Russia and the U.S. by creating a way for the Kremlin to connect with a future Republican president.  

"As we discussed over lunch in Iowa, Russia believes that high level contacts with the NRA might be the BEST means of neutral introduction to either the next American President OR to a meaningful re-set in relations with the Congress under a (God forbid) President Clinton," he wrote. "This simple good will trip would have enormous diplomatic consequences for a future U.S. / Russia bilateral relationship to the world."

THE 60% ARE TIRED OF THE PARTISANSHIP:

Schultz has characterized his potential presidential run as appealing to a moderate "silent majority" of voters disaffected with both political parties, whom he sees as veering to the left and the right, leaving open the center. Others say that "silent majority" does not exist.

Schultz has embraced social liberalism on a number of issues, including promoting diversity in corporate culture and LGBT rights, while also rejecting Democratic plans such as "Medicare for all" and the Republican tax law of 2017 as prohibitively expensive. On immigration, Schultz has said he opposes Trump's proposed wall along the U.S.-Mexico border and believes in protecting the 800,000 immigrants brought to this country as children, known as Dreamers.

"We're living at a most fragile time," Schultz said Sunday on CBS's "60 Minutes." "Not only the fact that this president is not qualified to be the president, but the fact that both parties are consistently not doing what's necessary on behalf of the American people and are engaged, every single day, in revenge politics."

STARRING MELANIA AS THE BEARD:

Russian President Vladimir Putin fired a warning shot at Trump this week, strategically dropping compromising information to remind Trump that he has saved all the receipts from their interactions -- and he's not afraid to use them.

Citing a Russian government official, the Financial Times reported Tuesday that Trump met with Putin at last year's G-20 summit in Buenos Aires, without a translator or anyone from his administration present during the exchange. [...]

Speaking to the Financial Times, a Kremlin official said the meeting lasted upwards of 15 minutes and included discussions about substantive issues including the conflict in Syria, as well as Russia's recent aggression toward Ukraine and seizure of two Ukrainian Navy vessels.

Trump and Putin also discussed potential arrangements for a formal meeting, the Kremlin official said.

Putin clearly had the upper hand during the exchange, as he was accompanied by a translator. Trump, meanwhile, was accompanied by Melania, and no one else.

"The four of them sat at a table and were among the last to leave," the Financial Times reported.

None of this was disclosed by the White House, and the timing of the leak from the Kremlin comes just as the Russian government is publicly expressing its anger with the Trump administration for its position on recent events in Venezuela.

The revelation that Trump and Putin discussed Syria policy is particularly damning. Less than three weeks after the November meeting, Trump abruptly and unexpectedly announced that he was ordering U.S. troops to withdraw from Syria -- a move that stands to greatly benefit Putin, who praised Trump's decision, which Trump's own military and intelligence advisers had warned against.

#LOSER:

Donald Trump begins his re-election campaign with only 30.6 percent of Michigan voters saying they would vote to Re-elect Donald Trump. 53.4 percent of Michigan voters said they would vote for someone new to be president. 

23.3 percent of Michigan voters would DEFINITELY vote to Re-elect Donald Trump.  48.5 percent of Michigan voters would DEFINITELY vote for someone new against Donald Trump.   

23.3 percent        Definitely Re-elect President Trump

7.3 percent        Probably Re-election President Trump

4.7 percent        Probably vote for Someone New

48.5 percent        Definitely vote for Someone New

15.0 percent         Depends who the Democratic Nominee is

Among Independent voters that have a disproportional share of deciding Michigan winners, President Trump is faced with unprecedented opposition. 24.1 percent of Independent voters would vote to re-elect President Trump. 54.8 percent of Independent voters would vote to elect someone new.  

THE FOLKS UNFAMILIAR WITH FAUST:

Six Trump campaign associates so far have been indicted for or pleaded guilty to a wide array of federal crimes. And this is before some of the best-known episodes in the Russia scandal, like the Trump Tower meeting and the president's efforts to dictate false statements about it, have faced any legal sanction. Yet even as the legal net has widened, a devoted band of defenders has promoted an energetic defense of the president that has never wavered in its conviction of his essential innocence in the Russia matter.

The Wall Street Journal's Kimberly Strassel, the Washington Examiner's Byron York, the Federalist's Mollie Hemingway, and the National Review's Andrew McCarthy have confidently explained that every new indictment or revelation of malfeasance does not seriously indict the president or is not a revelation at all. These analysts represent the best and the brightest of the Trumpian vanguard, sitting atop an extensive food chain of talk-show hosts and rage-tweeters.

Their method for dismissing every incremental advance in the investigation is the same. First, they examine every new charge in isolation, ignoring the broader pattern of behavior in which it is contained. Then they assume the most innocent possible interpretation for each isolated fact, further assuming that no other incriminating evidence will emerge. It is not clear whether they have decided to act like lawyers for Trump, presenting the most plausible defense they can muster, or if they simply trust he would never do something like collude with Russia, and are working backward from their heartfelt presumption of innocence. Either way, they have developed a method that allows them to acknowledge every new piece of incriminating evidence without in any way altering their confidence that the investigation is going nowhere.

HE ACTUALLY RESEMBLES WOODROW WILSON MOST:

The 10th president, if only in this one respect, was a trendsetter: John Tyler in 1844 began a six-president cascade of men who failed to appear on their party's ballot in the general election following their first term. One, Zachary Taylor, literally had no choice; like Harrison, he died in office. For the others,  national agonizing over slavery and other tensions within each of the major parties made it difficult for any president to sustain a governing coalition. Only James Polk left with a solid reputation and a ledger of successes.

The three presidents who followed Polk--the forgettable series of Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, and James Buchanan--share three characteristics. First, historians routinely rank them among the nation's absolute worst. Second, and related to that, they took no responsibility for resolving the national moral failure of slavery. And third, no matter how they had attained office, they found themselves spurned by their own parties.

The case of Pierce in the 1850s is particularly instructive for potential Republican challengers to Trump today. On one side of the Democratic party, Senator Stephen Douglas stayed out of the administration and undercut the president's bid for renomination by quietly building support among pro-slavery Democrats in the South and West. Pierce's other rival, former secretary of state James Buchanan, served as ambassador in London and used his absence from the United States to duck any blame for the administration's disastrous legislation (notably, the Kansas-Nebraska Act) and lift his own candidacy. Ultimately, that distance from the unpopular president helped Buchanan win the floor fight at the convention--and the presidency in the general election.

The former president whom Trump most resembles, Andrew Johnson, hoped that old Democratic colleagues would reward him with their ticket's top spot in 1868 for the pain he had caused to Republicans after Abraham Lincoln's death. His optimism was misplaced. The party convention instead chose Horatio Seymour, a man who didn't even want the nomination.

THERE'S A REASON THEY DON'T APPEAR TO DEFEND THEMSELVES:

In the two conspiracy indictments pending in the Russia probe, the grand jury charged the defendants with attempting to sow discord within the American electorate--and to help Trump win the presidency--by interfering with the lawful functions of the U.S. government. The conspirators allegedly took a number of steps to achieve these goals, such as creating social media accounts of fictitious U.S. persons; holding fake rallies to shape public opinion; planting derogatory public information about Trump opponents Hillary Clinton, Ted Cruz, and Marco Rubio; hacking the email accounts of Clinton's staff; and staging the release of stolen data in order to heighten its impact on the 2016 presidential election.

The Trump campaign was involved. That much is clear from the grand jury's charging papers.

In paragraph 44, the July indictment states that:  "On or about August 15, 2016, the Conspirators, posing as Guccifer 2.0, wrote to a person who was in regular contact with senior members of the presidential campaign of Donald J. Trump, 'thank u for writing back . . . do u find anyt[h]ing interesting in the docs I posted?'"

"On or about August 17, 2016, the Conspirators added, please tell me if I can help u anyhow . . . it would be a great pleasure to me."

"On or about September 9, 2016, the Conspirators, again posing as Guccifer 2.0, referred to a stolen DCCC [Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee] document posted online and asked the person, 'what do you think of the info on the turnout model for the democrats entire presidential campaign.' The person responded, '[p]retty standard.'"

And in paragraph 43: "On or about August 15, 2016, the Conspirators, posing as Guccifer 2.0, received a request for stolen documents from a candidate for the U.S. Congress. The Conspirators responded using the Guccifer 2.0 persona and sent the candidate stolen documents related to the candidate's opponent."

That's correct. A candidate for U.S. Congress requested and received stolen documents regarding a political opponent from Guccifer 2.0--the same entity behind the illegal hacking of the Democratic National Committee computer network and subsequent email dump. Guccifer 2.0 is operated by Russia's GRU.

NOW MAKE THEM OWNERS, NOT RENTERS:

So far, rumored and announced candidates have outlined at least five formal proposals designed to direct additional cash to low-income households. These proposals, all co-authored by senators -- Cory Booker, Kamala Harris, Sherrod Brown, and Michael Bennet (Rep. Ro Khanna is a co-sponsor on one) -- attempt to do different things: Two would expand the earned income tax credit (EITC), another two offers assistance for rent, and one is a child allowance. But they all have the same overriding objective: improving the lives of low-income Americans.

The press tends to analyze proposals like these in terms of how much they cost, how realistic their passage is, and so on. And while that's important, I had a different question: Which of these plans would do the most to cut poverty in America?

It turns out that a team of researchers at Columbia University's Center on Poverty and Social Policy was asking that question too, and they have the skills to actually answer it. They estimated how much each of these five bills would reduce poverty, deep poverty (measured as the share of people living at or below 50 percent of the poverty line), and child poverty.

The five bills are Harris's LIFT the Middle Class Act and Rent Relief Act; Brown and Khanna's GAIN Act; Booker's HOME Act; and Brown and Bennet's American Family Act. And according to Columbia analysis, all five would significantly cut poverty.

All of them cost a lot -- but they all cost about the same or less than the recent round of Republican tax cuts. All five are more ambitious than any cash proposals during the 2016 primary, or any other Democratic primary I can remember. And in a head-to-head matchup of all five, two plans (surprisingly) stood out as doing the most to reduce poverty at the least cost: bills from Cory Booker and Kamala Harris subsidizing rent for low-income households. [...]

The Rent Relief Act ($93 billion a year), also by Harris, would offer a refundable tax credit to people making $100,000 or less and spending at least 30 percent of their income on rent. The credit would be worth a certain percentage of the difference between their rent (capped at 150 percent of area fair market rent) and 30 percent of their income. For the poorest renters, the credit would cover the full difference; for slightly less poor renters, 75 percent, and so on.

YOU MEAN THEY DON'T VALUE RACIAL HYGIENE?:

In 2016, Trump lost suburban Houston's 7th Congressional District and suburban Dallas' 32nd Congressional District -- both traditionally held by Republicans up and down the ballot -- to Democrat Hillary Clinton.

In 2018 the Republican incumbents who for several years had easily defended these House seats fell to Democratic challengers in the midterm elections. The president's particularly low job approval ratings among women fueled the Democratic Party's victories there, and Republicans worry that this situation could foreshadow what's to come next year.

"It's the suburbs," Robin Armstrong, who represents Texas on the Republican National Committee, acknowledged in an interview with the Washington Examiner. "That's basically the woman's vote. We need to make sure that we're engaging females and letting them know that we're addressing their values and concerns."

HINDU NATIONALISM SEEMS A LIMITED PLATFORM...:

Two-and-a-half weeks after the Hawaii Democrat told CNN she had decided to run for the White House--an announcement that even her own staff didn't know was coming, after weeks of debating the timing of the rollout--the 37-year-old congresswoman has struggled to contain the chaos.

Campaign manager Rania Batrice and Gabbard's consulting firm Revolution Messaging are set to depart after this weekend's official kickoff in Hawaii, two sources familiar with the situation told POLITICO. Gabbard is leaning on her sister, Vrindavan, to fill the void.

Meanwhile, the congresswoman is under fire back home after picking a fight with Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii), and a prominent Democratic state lawmaker is already challenging Gabbard in next year's congressional primary. That means she faces the possibility of losing the presidential race and her House seat as well.

KEEP CRANKING THE TORQUE:

The famous anti-corruption blogger, activist, and thorn in the side of the authorities Alexei Navalny was quick to capitalize on this mass airing of grievances. His staff in Tambov region, for instance, used Twitter to retweet a post declaring that, "We are looking for the resignation of the political leadership in the region [due to the trash issue]. And that is only the start" (Twitter.com/teamnavalny_tmb, December 23, 2018).

Navalny has long been aware that one person's trash is another man's treasure; he has reported on the corrupt awarding of the lucrative contract for disposal of Moscow's trash back in 2015. At that time, he noted the strange award of a 42.9 billion ruble ($702 million) contract to a company called Charter. This firm had almost no public presence or record, but is known to be controlled by Igor Chaika, the then-26-year-old son of the general prosecutor, Yuriy Chaika (Navalny.com, August 28 2015). Small wonder, then, that Navalny featured Chaika as Exhibit A in a recent video (put out via Twitter) that explains "why trash reform is not possible" in Russia and compares the story to an episode of the popular US television show The Sopranos. As debate opened, on January 1, 2019, for solutions to Russia's trash crisis, the video asserts that the web of corruption around the awarding of contracts to deal with garbage makes the prospect of real reform difficult to contemplate (Twitter.com/navalny, January 16, 2019).

The authorities are under extreme pressure to take these ongoing environmental protests more seriously. The current demonstrations are responding to quintessentially local issues. And yet, in an authoritarian country like Russia, environmental protests can sometimes kickstart a more powerful engine of separatism as well as fuel increasingly politically tinged anger at the government. Indeed, in 1988, environmental protests against a biochemical plant in Gudermes presaged the separatist movement that arose in Chechnya. Thanks to the continued penetration of social media access in today's Russia, the rise in horizontal awareness of local issues in other regions thus represents a growing challenge to both local governments and the Kremlin.

IT'S PRECISELY BECAUSE IT'S WORTHLESS...:

Asked whether Trump's demand for $5.7 billion to build a border wall between the U.S. and Mexico was a worthy endeavor, Chertoff said: "No." 

"I think the idea of a wall in and of itself is a symbol. It's not a real tool," said Chertoff, who led the country's Homeland Security department from February 2005 to January 2009. "It is not an efficient or effective tool." 

DONALD WHO?:

Visiting the massive steel mill in Crawfordsville, Ind., operated by Nucor Corp., the largest American steelmaker, helps explain why the much-ballyhooed steel tariffs promoted by Donald Trump have so far been a bust for the steelworkers he successfully courted in his 2016 presidential bid. The Crawfordsville facility, set amid sprawling acres of farmland, looks like many other plants. But the 30-year-old factory has the ability to shrink or expand production at will, depending on demand by customers, while employing pretty much the same number of workers.

That flexibility is why, as the first year of Trump's steel tariffs comes to a close, the U.S. industry's biggest players are enjoying increasing demand and revenue but adding few of the jobs promised during the campaign.

THEY EXIST TO KILL HUMANS:

"We have got to have smart gun safety laws in this country, and we've got to stop buying this false choice. You can be in favor of the Second Amendment and also understand that there is no reason in a civil society that we have assault weapons around communities that can kill babies and police officers," Harris said.

Harris, one of the many Democrats running in the 2020 presidential primary, held a town hall in Iowa where a pastor asked what she would do to tackle gun violence.

"As you know, the rates of gun violence in America are astronomically higher than in other western democracies. What do you think can be done, and what would you be prepared to do to address the problem of gun violence?" the pastor asked.

"Something like universal background checks. It makes perfect sense that you might want to someone can buy a weapon that can kill another human being, you might want to know have they been convicted of a felony where they committed violence," Harris responded.

SOVEREIGNTY IS A FUNCTION OF DEMOCRACY:

THE TIGHTENING NOOSE:

Special Counsel Robert Mueller has never flatly announced that this broad public contention is a lie. He has, rather, meticulously chipped away at it--one indictment at a time, one plea agreement at a time--with the substance of successive prosecutorial actions. First, the court documents related to the plea of Trump campaign foreign policy aide George Papadopoulos were unsealed--telling the story of how Papadopoulos was told by an apparent Russian cutout that the Kremlin had "dirt" on Hillary Clinton in the form of "thousands of emails," months before the DNC and Podesta emails were leaked to the public. Then came the plea of former Trump national security advisor Michael Flynn in December 2017 on charges of lying to investigators over, among other things, contacts during the presidential transition with Russian officials. Two months later, Mueller unspooled a detailed account of a systematic social media influence operation conducted by an entity owned by a friend of Vladimir Putin's. In July 2018, Mueller's office moved the story closer to the Kremlin itself, indicting 12 officials of the GRU, Russia's military intelligence agency, for hacking and leaking emails from the Democratic National Committee and Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta. Most recently, in the case of one-time Trump attorney Michael Cohen, Mueller has asserted in court documents that the Trump Organization's efforts to construct a Trump Tower Moscow went on well into the 2016 presidential campaign and detailed the contacts between Trump associates and Russian officials and cutouts on the matter.

Today, the special counsel brought the story inside the Trump campaign, alleging that Roger Stone, longtime gadfly political operative, had acted as a kind of back channel between the campaign and WikiLeaks--funneling information between Julian Assange and senior officials of the Trump campaign about forthcoming releases of purloined emails. No, this is not the smoking gun many have been waiting for. A lot of the information contained in the indictment has been in the press for a while--and in any event, the relationship it alleges between the campaign and the Russian government is a complicated, and somewhat attenuated, one. But if the Roger Stone indictment doesn't quite allege "collusion" between the Trump campaign and the Russians, it unambiguously alleges--in the language of Robert Mueller's appointment letter--"links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump." Specifically, the indictment alleges that Stone and WikiLeaks were together coordinating between the Russian government and the Trump campaign over the release of information that, by then, had been publicly reported by Crowdstrike and many press outlets to have been stolen by the Russian government.

YOU THINK HE'S A CROOK BECAUSE HE IS:

The study from Clark D. Cunningham at Georgia State University and Jesse Egbert of Northern Arizona University uses a scientific method called "corpus linguistics" that combines traditional linguistics with large sets of data, in the form of contemporary written texts.

Studying 138 million words written between 1760 and 1799, the researchers found more than 2,500 uses of "emolument" or "emoluments." From there, they found:

The word was usually modified either before or after its usage -- much more than an average noun -- suggesting it had a broad meaning that required such specification and clarifying.

Many of the uses concerned personal or private transactions not involving a public official.

The word was often modified using the adjective "official," which would be redundant if that were understood as part of its definition.

It often appeared (35 percent of the time) with other nouns as part of a "coordinated noun phrase," and in many cases involving public officials it was used alongside the word "profit." This suggests it could be something besides a profit.

Perhaps most importantly the study, which was not submitted on behalf of either party in the case, found these coordinated noun phrases often used the word "other" before emoluments. (In fact, the phrase "other emoluments" accounted for one out of every 40 uses of the word, which is far more common than for other nouns.) This suggests many of the words that would proceed "other emoluments" were understood themselves to be forms of emoluments. This would include words like "bounties," "fees," "contracts," "lands," "pay," "clothing," "privileges" and "places."

Taken together, this research suggests that many things constitute an emolument and that Trump's continued acceptance of basically anything from foreign states could be interpreted as accepting emoluments.

The benefit of this kind of study, the authors contend, is that dictionaries are not reliable sources of common usage. "There is no scientific basis for using a handful of definitions written by individual, idiosyncratic dictionary authors and evaluating sixteen sentences, as the District Court did, in order to prove common usage by the population of late 18th century America," Cunningham and Egbert write.

Lawrence Solan of the Brooklyn Law School, who studies both the law and linguistics and has reviewed the new study, said it should strengthen the case for a broader definition of emolument.

DONALD WHO?:

In TV interviews last weekend, Republican lawmakers bent over backward to avoid the word wall. "I happen to agree with the president on barriers," said Sen. Roy Blunt of Missouri. Sen. Susan Collins of Maine pledged "to continue to build physical barriers." On Fox News Sunday, Mick Mulvaney, the acting White House chief of staff, used the word barrier 13 times. Trump is "winning the battle on the importance of a barrier," said Mulvaney. On Face the Nation, Mulvaney boasted that Democrats were privately telling the White House, "We think you might be right on this barrier thing."

Barrier thing? If Trump is winning, why is everyone around him afraid to say the word wall?

The answer is: Trump isn't winning. He's been losing on this issue for a long time. The wall, as he originally proposed it, was a dumb idea. Border security experts told him so. Democrats rejected it, and polls backed them up. Trump tried to get his way by shutting down the government, but nobody budged, and his approval ratings tanked. So now Republicans have retreated to a fallback position. They're claiming that renovations and extensions of current border infrastructure--in short, the status quo--count as Trump's wall.

#LOSER:

ALL COMEDY IS CONSERVATIVE:

Went downstairs to get a snack pic.twitter.com/9b6JDh93dH

— Rep. Ted Lieu (@RepTedLieu) January 29, 2019

THAT'D CAUSE SOME LOVERS' TIFF:

Retired four-star General Barry McCaffrey warned that President Donald Trump will "never be safe" from Russian intelligence due to his one-on-one private meeting with President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki last year.

McCaffrey, who previously served as a member of President Bill Clinton's cabinet, appeared on MSNBC on Tuesday to discuss a briefing by National Intelligence Director Dan Coats and CIA Director Gina Haspel to the select Senate Intelligence Committee. During the hearing, Coats declined to answer a question about Trump's private meeting with Putin during their Finland summit last July, saying he'd rather discuss it behind closed doors. The retired general shared his perspective on the summit, saying Moscow would undoubtedly use that meeting against Trump at some point in the future.

WHAT THEY SEEK TO HIDE:

Israel's decision to eject observers in Hebron may be a breach of the implementation of the Oslo accords, the Norwegian foreign minister said on Tuesday.

Hebron is a microcosm of the West Bank, a place where the key practices of the Israeli occupation can be observed up close, in a single afternoon.Photograph by Cristina de Middel / Magnum

The stories of Hebron are the stories of the absent and the unseen. They are the stories of the occupation and of Palestinian life that has been caged in or displaced. No one who lives in Hebron, and very few of those who visit the city, can see the entirety of the displacement or appreciate the scale of the absence. Hebron is divided in such a way that some will only ever see the empty streets, while others see a crowded and bustling town--one bound by fences, walls, and barbed wire, beyond which the emptiness begins. To see the emptiness is to understand some of the effects of the occupation; to see it from the point of view of Palestinians, who have been rendered almost entirely invisible, is to understand much more.

For several years, two activist groups, one Israeli and one Palestinian, have been leading tours of the occupation of Hebron. I recently went on both, crossing from the living city of Hebron to its hollow shadow and back several times.

Issa Amro became an activist in 2003, when he was twenty-two, during his last semester at the Palestine Polytechnic University. In January of that year, he went to class only to find that the university had been shuttered by order of the Israel Defense Forces. The school's computers had been used to download bomb-making manuals, the I.D.F. claimed. Amro went home and Googled "how to make a revolution." The search engine returned results on Martin Luther King, Jr., Mahatma Gandhi, and nonviolent struggle. Amro got a committee together and started organizing protests against the closure. Seven months later, when the university was allowed to reopen and Amro was able to graduate, he felt that nonviolent struggle had accomplished something. In 2007, he founded Youth Against Settlements, a group that protests and lobbies against the Israeli occupation and leads tours intended to convey the experience of living under the occupation of the West Bank. (Last year, Amro stepped down as the head of the organization to launch a sister foundation called the Hebron Freedom Fund.)

Amro's tour begins, necessarily, with crossing a checkpoint. Amro resides in the Tel Rumeida neighborhood of Hebron, in an area where about thirty thousand Palestinians--a fraction of the number who used to live here--live under direct Israeli military rule, which protects fewer than a thousand Israeli settlers. This part of the city is freely accessible to Israeli citizens and foreigners, but most Palestinians can enter only if they're residents. It's a border-style checkpoint, with two sets of revolving gates and two soldiers, behind glass, checking documents. Like all Palestinians in Tel Rumeida, Amro has to go through a checkpoint in order to buy groceries and again to bring them home, or to fill his kitchen-stove tank with propane. He has to carry the tank on his back, because Palestinians are not allowed to drive within the neighborhood. On one afternoon and evening in Hebron, I observed Amro cross checkpoints a half-dozen times, and not once did the soldiers pass up an opportunity to harass him: now demanding a body search, now screaming insults at him, now informing him that, as of a half hour earlier, passage to a Palestinian-owned souvenir shop was closed to Palestinians. The soldiers know Amro for his activism, and ongoing harassment of him appears to be a regular part of their job.

Amro is tall and hulking, with deep-set brown eyes and a short beard. In winter, he wears fur-lined green coveralls that enhance his bearish mien and serve as an extreme irritant for I.D.F. soldiers, who constantly demand to know where he got his outfit. The same coveralls are issued to Israeli soldiers, but Amro says that they are made in the Palestinian territories. (I later saw them for sale in shops outside Ramallah.) Amro's wardrobe, like much of the rest of his life, is a form of nonviolent protest.

On the tour, we descended the steep hill on which Amro lives, went through a checkpoint, and walked the street that runs along the base of the hill, the main commercial thoroughfare of the part of Hebron where Palestinians are still allowed to drive, walk, and shop. For a second it felt like we were in a covered market, but this was because the street is fenced in from the top, with a sort of wire net intended to protect the Palestinian traders and their customers from rocks, bottles, and trash thrown by Israeli settlers who live on the street just above. Amro pointed at metal sheeting placed over a section of the net; it is meant to guard against acid that settlers pour down, to destroy the goods sold here. "I've seen it twice," Amro told me. "I've seen the earth boiling here."

In 1997, as part of the Oslo peace process, Israel and the Palestinian Authority drew a line splitting Hebron in two. The area designated as H-1 is controlled by the Palestinian Authority; in H-2, the Palestinian Authority has civil administration over Palestinian residents and the Israeli military controls everything else. H-1 is far larger, and in the past two years its population has roughly doubled, while H-2's has dwindled because settler violence and I.D.F. restrictions have made life unbearable for Palestinians. 

WHAT BEAR?:

In the words of Viktoriya Panfilova of Nezavisimaya Gazeta, "The Russian language is losing its positions in Kyrgyzstan" and, along with the language, Russia as well. Participants at a November 2018 roundtable in Bishkek, on "Kyrgyzstan: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow," discussed what role Russian should have in the country (Nezavisimaya Gazeta, January 16, 2019). And recently, Azimbek Beknazarov, a Kyrgyzstani opposition politician, told journalists that he, along with representatives of 47 other opposition political groups, have drafted a law calling for a referendum to strip Russian of its status as an official language. If the measure is approved, he said, it would mean that Kyrgyzstan, like any normal country, would do all its official business in the language of the titular nationality, representatives of whom now form more than 75 percent of the population (Interfax, January 16, 2019).

When Kyrgyzstan became independent in 1991, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, many officials there used Russian for almost all official business. Some did not speak Kyrgyz well enough to do otherwise; and consequently, the government decided to keep Russian as the second official language. That meant that much official business and nearly all post-secondary education has remained Russian-speaking, a pattern that put pressure on parents to have their children learn Russian earlier so that they could take advantage of higher education and obtain jobs within the government. But it has also been a source of irritation for many ethnic Kyrgyz, who are offended that the language of a foreign country and former occupier retains a de facto higher status than their own.

Over the last decade, there have been numerous attacks on the status of Russian (Fondsk.ru, May 16, 2013; Forum-msk.org, March 24, 2015). But to date, all of these have fallen short. Part of the reason stems from fears that an end to the language's official status will lead many of the nearly 500,000 Kyrgyzstanis who speak Russian to leave, thus stripping the country of some of its most highly trained specialists. Additionally, an administrative phasing out of Russian would eventually make it more difficult for residents of Kyrgyzstan not fluent in the language to go to Russia to earn money as guest workers--a revenue stream the impoverished country depends on. Hampered access to the Russian market for Kyrgyzstani labor could also open the way for the growth of greater Chinese influence in the Central Asian republic, something many Kyrgyzstanis are worried about. Moreover, it might trigger a sharp deterioration in Bishkek's ties with Moscow. Or it could destabilize Kyrgyzstan's perpetually unsettled domestic situation, especially in the southern regions of the country. Panfilova points to all of these factors. But she also raises the suspicion that the Kyrgyzstani opposition is simply using language as a wedge issue to bring down the current government (Nezavisimaya Gazeta, January 16, 2019).

Nevertheless, evidence is now available that support for reducing the status of Russian inside Kyrgyzstan is growing--or, at least, that the government has concluded it must take steps in that direction or face an even more radical outcome. 

KNOWING YOUR ALLIES:

As proof that he is sincere about empowering women, Ghannouchi pointed to the high number of Tunisia's female mayors -- 42 out of a total 68, including Tunis' first female mayor -- who were elected on Ennahda's ticket.

"We are in an electoral year and there many accusations against Ennahda," he said. "But these are part of a media war that is designed to influence public opinion. It was the Ennahda government which declared Ansar al-Sharia to be a terrorist group and took action against them."

Nevertheless, the backlash against rising Islamic extremism coupled with continued corruption and economic stagnation took its toll. Ennahda pulled in second behind the pro-secular Nidaa Tounes in the October 2014 parliamentary elections. It then became a decidedly docile partner in a coalition that has ruled since. "Ennahda saw the limits of Tunisia's religiosity," said Lamine Benghazi, who helps run Al Bawsala, a leading Tunisian civil society organization. "The greater geopolitical trend is demonizing political Islam, and Ennahda sees Nidaa Tounes as something of a shield."

In 2016, Ghannouchi compromised further, declaring, "There is no longer any justification for political Islam in Tunisia." He said Ennahda was a party of "Muslim democrats," distinctly Tunisian in character.

"We are Tunisian Muslims who are determined to live in our age as believing Muslims," he told Al-Monitor. "There is only one Islam, but we believe it is a flexible religion that interacts with each environment with each age." The rebranding has seen Ennahda embrace modern Tunisia's founder Habib Bourguiba as a national hero, whitewashing his abuses and blaming all the horrors endured under six decades of dictatorship solely on Zine El Abidine Ben Ali.

The shift is an acknowledgement that political Islam has become radioactive. Just as critically, it speaks to the continued resilience of a coalition of politicians and officials left over from the Ben Ali regime, including the notorious national guard, which is attached to the Ministry of Interior. In tandem with a deeply entrenched oligarchy, the holdouts of the Ben Ali regime are determined to prevent the Islamists from establishing their own patronage networks within the bureaucracy and the business world, and they will wield and inflate the threat of Islamic extremism to that end if need be. [...]

As in Turkey, one of the dangers facing Tunisia is a smugness born from decades of repressed religiosity that continues to be mistaken for a lack of it. Outside the capital, in impoverished areas like Sidi Bouzid and Kasserine, where the protests that led to Ben Ali's downfall first erupted, Islamic conservatism runs deep. Yerkes observed, "Some portion of the population would like to see a stronger role of religion within the government and public life, and Ennahda used to be the clear political party to help achieve that goal." 

Ennahda lawmakers who back Ghannouchi's moderate stance insist that such a stance is necessary if Tunisia's democracy is to survive. "Cohabitation makes us more pragmatic, and pragmatism is not a dirty word," parliamentarian Naoufel Jammali told Al-Monitor. "On the contrary it is what permitted us to become the sole democracy of all the Arab Spring countries. Cohabitation pushes us to be comfortable with the idea that we are not the sole political party in the country and that we need to work together with other parties in order to remain part of the political landscape." Islamists, leftists and secularists all have deep roots in Tunisia. "We are condemned to live together." 

But just how long will Ennahda be willing to take the back seat? The party has regained a plurality in the parliament following a steady defection of lawmakers from Nidaa Tounes, and it beat the secularists in the country's first free municipal polls that were held in May, though both were overtaken by independents, a sign of voter disaffection across the board.

With Prime Minister Youssef Chahed forming a new secularist bloc after his fallout with Essebsi and his son Hafedh, who engineered Chahed's ouster from Nidaa Tounes in June, Ennahda is poised to be kingmaker. It helped Chahed survive a vote of no confidence in November. Will it continue to throw its weight behind Chahed and International Monetary Fund-inspired reforms? And will Ghannouchi throw his hat in the ring for the presidency? The Ennahda leader is holding his cards close to his chest, saying he has no such ambitions but then leaving the door open by saying it's up to his party.

THAT'S NOTHIN'; DONALD'S WAS REGISTERED ON 6/13/46:

Stone testified in front of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence on September 26, 2017. Immediately thereafter, Stone addressed an assemblage of reporters and expressed the view that his testimony exonerated him from any allegedly untoward activity.

According to a WHOIS query, however, the domain name stonedefensefund.com was registered on September 27, 2017.

DONALD WHO?:

China and Russia pose the biggest risks to the United States and are more aligned than they have been in decades, U.S. intelligence leaders told senators on Tuesday, in testimony that repeatedly contradicted President Donald Trump's statements on global threats. [...]

The intelligence officials also said Iran was not developing nuclear weapons in violation of the 2015 nuclear agreement, even though Tehran has threatened to reverse some commitments after Trump pulled out of the deal. [...]

Coats also said some U.S. allies are seeking more independence, responding to their perceptions of Washington's changing policies on security and trade, and "are becoming more open" to new partnerships.

AN IDEAL PLANK FOR COFFEE DUDE'S PLATFORM:

"If you look at the polling, it shows that regardless of the political spectrum, there's broad support for both border security and then the Dreamers," says Mark Holden, general counsel of Koch Industries and the network's point man on the successful push for criminal-justice reform last year. He met with Trump and other conservative leaders at the White House about shutdown negotiations back on January 23. "Now, what that looks like, people may disagree on, but it means doing something positive with the Dreamers, not kicking them out of the country, but some type of either legalization or a path to citizenship. I've been in meetings with hardcore Republicans on that issue, and even they acknowledge that."

Brian Hooks, chairman of the Koch Seminar Network, told assembled attendees of the Koch network's winter meeting on Monday that the network's effort to unite a broad coalition to push Congress and the White House had already begun.

"We just got the longest government shutdown in the history of our country, and this issue was at the core," Hooks said. "When you read the headlines saying this is impossible, it's understandable. But we see an opportunity to bring the same approach that this network brought to criminal-justice reform, to unite a broad-based policy coalition with groups from the ACLU to people in Silicon Valley, to Fortune 500 companies, to members of the religious community, and a whole lot of people in between. This isn't wishful thinking; this is already underway."

#LOSER:

Nationally, Republican operatives and donors have historically taken Texas for granted and directed their financial and organizational muscle to more competitive regions. Separately, Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, up for re-election next year, has spoken with new RNC co-chairman Tommy Hicks, a Lone Star State native, about concerns that Trump could lose the state.

THESE ARE THE CLINTON YEARS AFTER ALL:

The chairman of the U.S. House of Representatives Budget Committee on Tuesday said he and other senior Democrats aim to write a fiscal blueprint this year that would cut annual budget deficits by 50 percent in the next 10 years, possibly including tax hikes on corporations and the wealthy.

THE YELLOW VEST IS THE MAGA HAT:

[O]ver 11 weeks of yellow vest protests, views from the fringes have bubbled through the diffuse and leaderless movement and have been amplified: anti-Semitic rants about banking, a Holocaust survivor harassed on the subway, assaults on journalists, and claims the government concocted terrorist attacks or deadly accidents to divert attention from the demonstrations.

There has been scattered violence at the protests, with clashes between participants and riot police, and authorities worry that the extremists have taken over the center of the movement, risking a return to the darker episodes from France's past.

On Saturday in Paris, a man in a yellow vest turned toward a journalist filming at the sidelines of an otherwise quiet match, hurled a homophobic epithet and added: "You work for the Jews." [...]

Marchers at one of the first yellow vest rallies in Paris in November held the French flag aloft while chanting "This is our home!" -- a double-edged slogan that resonates with the far-right National Rally party, whose leader Marine Le Pen calls it a "cry of love" for France; critics see only anti-immigrant overtones.

In December, a group of marchers in Paris' bohemian Montmartre neighborhood proffered an anti-Semitic salute. They sang lyrics associated with Dieudonne M'bala M'bala, a French comedian convicted several times of racism and anti-Semitism. The hand gesture and song are both called the "quenelle," with the gesture mimicking an inverted Nazi salute and the song hinting at Zionist plots. Dieudonne describes them as anti-establishment symbols.

On that same day, men in yellow vests harassed an elderly Holocaust survivor on a subway train when she asked them to stop making the gesture, and one of them replied that the gas chambers that had killed her father never existed. A journalist who saw the exchange said no one took the woman's side. France's interior minister said the train operator was trying to identify the men, saying "whether hidden by a yellow vest or in the anonymity of Twitter, anti-Semitism must be fought with all strength."

Some of France's most notorious anti-Semitic personalities have been seen at the forefront of some of the Paris protests.

One of them, Herve Ryssen, appeared on the cover of the weekly Paris Match, facing police as he stood before the Arc de Triomphe. Ryssen has been convicted repeatedly of anti-Semitism and provoking acts of discrimination. He was convicted again last week for Holocaust denial, a crime in France for decades that harkens back to the country's history of surrendering French Jews to the occupying Nazis to be killed.

Government spokesman Benjamin Griveaux acknowledged that protests varied from town to town, but said last week that some were marked by "paramilitaries close to the extreme right." Among them were Victor Lenta, a former soldier who fought alongside pro-Russian separatist forces in Ukraine.

Maxime Nicolle, a YouTube personality who goes by the handle Fly Rider, and Eric Drouet, a trucker who was among the early yellow vest organizers, also have emerged as prominent voices.

The Jean Jaures Foundation, a think tank connected with the Socialist Party, studied online activity by Drouet and Nicolle, and said both are tacitly affiliated with France's far-right party.

It said Drouet shared anti-migrant videos and provided a Facebook platform for discuss plots involving Zionists, banks, and the media. The study said Nicolle had repeatedly liked videos linked with the party that lost to President Emmanuel Macron.

60-40 NATION:

In new WaPo/ABC poll, % saying they would definitely NOT vote for Trump in 2020 general elex:

Voters: 56%
Independents: 59%
White men non-college: 32%
White women non-college: 47%
White men college+: 46%
White women college+: 65% (!)
Black: 90%
Hispanic: 76%
Suburban: 56%

— Carrie Dann (@CarrieNBCNews) January 29, 2019

HE SHOULD HAVE EMAILED HIS NOTES FROM HILLARY'S SERVER:

Is the US about to put troops by Venezuela? That is the question some people are asking after seeing a cryptic phrase on John Bolton's yellow notepad: "5,000 troops to Colombia." Mentioned in this NYT story on oil embargo. See the photo. https://t.co/I9XnbM651s pic.twitter.com/A8qUcYbrey

— Edward Wong (@ewong) January 29, 2019

AMERICAN FIRST:

2. Recognize That America Is Flawed but Deny That It Is Rotten

There is no way for any liberal to look at the United States right now without seeing big, ugly stains. But there is a great range of opinions about how these stains should inform our overall view of the country. A growing number of writers and politicians believe that the rise of Trump is the last piece of evidence that was needed to prove the essential rottenness of America. According to this vision, there has been scant progress over the past 50 years. Today's mass incarceration is as bad as Jim Crow. America is as racist now as it was in the 1960s. The might of its army has the sole purpose of subjugating the rest of the world. Our country is irremediably fallen--and will likely remain so.

The competing vision Harris presents is no less indignant about the present injustices, but both more positive about the "true" nature of America and more hopeful about its future. It recognizes that America has come a very long way from its ugly past. It stipulates that it is, though perhaps not inevitable, entirely within our agency to bend history in an even better direction. And though it recognizes how far America's global standing has sunk under Donald Trump, it still aspires to the United States playing a role of moral leadership in the world. Perhaps most importantly, rather than throwing American symbols on the dustbin of history, it claims that liberals and progressives capture the true soul of America.

Speaking at Netroots, a giant gathering of progressive activists, last year, Harris first emphasized this theme:

The American people know that we are better than this. I know we are better than this because 13 years ago, New Orleans was under water and the initial response was appalling. Katrina exposed a shocking level of racism and neglect. But ultimately Americans of every race and religion and background--local leaders, church groups, college students--came together to bring the city back to life. That's who we are. That's our American identity. ... We are a country that is aspirational. We have not achieved all of those ideals. But we have those ideals and it is part of our identity to fight for those ideals. So let's not let anybody take our flag from us, OK? That's our flag.

On Sunday, she doubled down on the same message: "The truth is that as Americans we have so much more in common than what separates us," she exclaimed. "We are already standing on common ground. I say we rise together or we fall together as one nation indivisible."

PERJURY TRAPPING:

WE'RE GONNA NEED MORE POPCORN:

And then the two sides started to go at it.

Mitchell went thermonuclear on Ann Coulter for an inability to compromise her . . . well, whatever it is that made her so eager for both Romney 2012 and Build a Wall 2016: [...]

And then, Mitchell really dropped the hammer: He called Coulter a Democrat. And you'll never guess who jumped up to thumb the like button.Mitchell was so hot and bothered he even took swings at Mike Cernovich and . . . Breitbart?

Charlie Kirk was also extremely triggered by the linear-thinking, fair-weathered, useful idiots who really thought they were signing up to get a wall. He did an Instagram video about how conservatives just can't abandon Trump with a headline "so sick of people stabbing @realdonaldtrump in the back."

Young Charlie also urged people to understand that Trump has been waging the entire fight by himself, because he is beset on all sides by enemies or the Deep State or whatever. And even the Daily Caller couldn't take it. 

The weird undercurrent in all of this is that, like courtiers serving under an egomaniacal monarch, the sycophants seemed almost pleased to have a chance to differentiate themselves from other loyalists in the eyes of the king. Newt Gingrich, for instance, rushed into a Fox studio to assure the president that he should never listen to irrelevant people like Ann Coulter because he should only listen to highly relevant people such as Newt Gingrich.

THE lEFT IS THE rIGHT:

TOLD YOU THERE WAS A CCCP TAPE:

Forget dancing queen AOC or bangin' Beto or even that unsettling video of teenage Ted Cruz plotting world domination -- this grainy footage of a topless, hammered Bernie Sanders singing "This Land Is Your Land" in the Soviet Union blows them all out of the political shark-filled water.

VIPERS UNITED!:

One former senior White House official said Sims has managed to do the impossible: unite an infamously fractious world of Trump advisers and associates.

"Basically every warring faction has come together," to push back against Sims, said a former senior White House official. "You wouldn't believe the text chains. The best part is the president is sort of chomping at the bit to tap this guy and tweet something to the effect of, 'I didn't know who this guy was. He taped videos.'"

...AND CHEAPER...:

A small team of Israeli scientists think they might have found the first complete cure for cancer.

"We believe we will offer in a year's time a complete cure for cancer," said Dan Aridor, of a new treatment being developed by his company, Accelerated Evolution Biotechnologies Ltd. (AEBi), which was founded in 2000 in the ITEK incubator in the Weizmann Science Park. AEBi developed the SoAP platform, which provides functional leads to very difficult targets.

"Our cancer cure will be effective from day one, will last a duration of a few weeks and will have no or minimal side-effects at a much lower cost than most other treatments on the market," Aridor said. "Our solution will be both generic and personal."

A MORAL ISSUE, NOT AN EXISTENTIAL ONE:

The truth is comparatively boring: According to the United Nations climate-science panel's latest major report, if we do absolutely nothing to stop climate change, the impact will be the equivalent to a reduction in our ­incomes of between 0.2 percent and 2 percent five decades from now.

Yet by the 2070s, personal incomes will be some 300 percent to 500 percent higher than they are today. Far from the "end of the world," the impact of warming is what we'd expect from roughly a single economic recession taking place over the next half century.

Many of us question how this could be true, when we are constantly told that extreme weather is wreaking ever-greater devastation. In fact, ­research shows that extreme weather is having a rather minimal economic effect. Since 1990, the cost associated with extreme weather worldwide has actually declined, to 0.25 percent of global gross domestic product, from 0.30 percent.

Extreme weather costs each French citizen about $25 a year; each American, about $56 per year. That's what the average US worker spends on coffee in less than a month.

What about the escalating costs of hurricanes, now inevitably held up as examples of climate change? Actually, a major study in Nature shows hurricane damage today costs about 0.04 percent of global GDP. By 2100, even if hurricanes were to get twice as bad as they are now, increased prosperity and ­resilience mean the cost will have halved to 0.02 percent of GDP.

What's more, the UN panel finds there is no observable increase in hurricane frequency.

Likewise, extreme weather is killing fewer people now than at any point in the last 100 years: In the 1920s, extreme weather killed about half a million people annually. Now, despite there being four times as many people, it kills fewer than 20,000 each year.

NO FURY LIKE A PARTY SCORNED:

Bill Burton, a former adviser to President Barack Obama, defended his decision to join Howard Schultz's team as the former Starbucks CEO considers an independent presidential bid in 2020, pushing back against suggestions that Schultz could be a spoiler.

Burton was one of the original aides to the Obama campaign 12 years ago and went on to be deputy press secretary in the White House. His addition to Schultz's team will lend the former Starbucks CEO credibility but it will also amplify the pushback to Schultz's potential bid from Democrats who believe it would jeopardize their chances at defeating President Donald Trump.

SETTING THE EDGE:

On Monday, after former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz announced over the weekend that he might be interested in launching an Independent candidacy for the presidency in 2020, former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, a former Republican who supported Hillary Clinton's candidacy in 2016, issued a statement that echoed the panic many Democrats expressed that a prospective Schultz run would jeopardize the Democrats' chances of ousting President Trump in 2020. 

60-40 NATION:

In December, right before the government shutdown began, a surprisingly broad bipartisan coalition united behind long-discussed legislation on criminal-justice reform. The First Step Act won more than 350 votes in the House of Representatives and 87 votes in the Senate, and it was the rare time that the ACLU, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, the NAACP, and Kim Kardashian all applauded legislation signed by President Trump -- while scholars at the Heritage Foundation hailed it as "a conservative victory."

One year ago, attendees at the Koch Seminar Network's winter meeting talked up the criminal-justice reform and prison anti-recidivism programs relentlessly, when they were considered second-tier issues by most of Washington. At this year's winter meeting, the network of activist groups and nonprofits headed by Charles Koch have pointed to the push for criminal-justice reform as evidence that their playbook can work in an era of intensely divided government.

Addressing attendees Saturday night, the 83-year-old Charles Koch called on the network's members to "unite with people across the whole spectrum of viewpoints, of different ideas, including those who have been adversaries." He paused for a surprisingly long moment. "This attitude of holding against others who have different beliefs is tearing our country apart. What we're planning to do, and what we're doing, is bringing people together."

"Uniting broad coalitions is much more effective than partisan politics," said Brian Hooks, chairman of the Koch Seminar Network. In the coming year, the network will "really focus on uniting broad-based policy coalitions," Hooks said. "The next step forward is to go with what's working" as demonstrated in the passage of the First Step Act.

"Our efforts in criminal-justice reform are really a blueprint for going forward focusing on uniting the two sides," James Davis, a senior adviser to several of the network's member groups, told me. This means making more alliances with individuals and organizations that might have fought with the Koch networks in the past. Mark Holden, the Koch general counsel who spearheaded the groups' push for criminal-justice reform, noted that one of his closest allies on the issue, CNN commentator and former Obama-administration official Van Jones, once attended a protest against Americans for Prosperity and the Koch Brothers back in 2011. Last year, Holden and Jones were doing joint interviews, crediting each other for their efforts.

YEAH, BUT LOOK AT THIS SWEET MESS OF POTTAGE! (profanity alert):

"This is the worst f--ing job I've ever had."

So snapped John Kelly on a March morning in the West Wing, according to a new book by Cliff Sims. The chief of staff was sitting in his office, a light-filled space where the White House swimming pool was just visible beyond French doors. "People apparently think that I care when they write that I might be fired. If that ever happened, it would be the best day I've had since I walked into this place," Kelly told the small group of aides in front of him. "And the president knows it, too." [...]

He also watched as senior officials privately laughed off many of the president's stranger requests. In his first few days as director of the National Economic Council, Sims writes, Larry Kudlow emerged from a meeting with the president looking flustered. He told Gary Cohn, his predecessor, that Trump ordered him to "stop" a "special deal" that he believed Amazon was getting from the U.S. Postal Service. "Gary laughed loudly," Sims writes. "'Welcome to the White House,' [Cohn] said, shaking Larry's hand ... 'It's total bulls--.'" Cohn explained that Amazon was not, in fact, getting "some special deal." "He's just mad at [Jeff] Bezos for owning The Washington Post."

Read: The brazenness of Trump's White House staff using private email

"'So' Larry replied hesitantly, 'I shouldn't do anything about this?'" Sims writes that Cohn told Kudlow not to bother, adding, "But now you know why I'm so happy to be leaving." [...]

Sims told me his aim in writing the book was not to scorch or, alternatively, deify the president. In large part, Sims said, it was a way for him to gain clarity and closure on how the experience changed him personally--and how he became, at many points, a person he didn't like. Throughout the book, he calls himself "nakedly ambitious," "selfish," and "a coward." He writes about his struggle to reconcile his Christian faith with working for a president who, for example, "totally lacked nuance" in his attitude toward refugees--particularly "persecuted Christians," whom Trump "promise[d]" to help but "[never] did." Sims writes that he took this concern at one point to Stephen Miller, who, he writes, told him, "I would be happy if not a single refugee foot ever again touched America's soil."

Meanwhile, he writes, he "never heard any of the faith leaders who actually had access to Trump" press him on the issue. He describes Trump's evangelical advisory board as a collection largely of televangelist adherents to the prosperity gospel, people he "doubted" were "positive moral and spiritual influence[s] on the president." "When the president occasionally struggled ... to unify the country on divisive cultural issues, the silence of his 'spiritual advisers' was deafening," Sims writes. "What is the point of having moral authority, as all these advisers claimed to, if you don't stand up for morality?"

IT'S ALL IN YOUR HEAD:

Exploring the well-known link between sleep and pain, a new study has found for the first time that sleep impacts on areas of the brain that control pain.

After just one night of sleep deprivation, the brain region that senses pain goes into overdrive, while other regions that help modulate that pain response go on strike, according to a paper published in the Journal of Neuroscience.

TAX WHAT YOU DON'T WANT:

WHAT LIES BENEATH THE maga HAT:

White House senior advisor Stephen Miller said he would be "happy if not a single refugee foot ever again touched America's soil," a new tell-all book by a former Trump administration staffer claims.

BUBBLICIOUS:

First, let's look at the new Post-ABC polling. Some highlights:

57 percent rate Trump's handling of border security negatively, a remarkable indictment of Trump on his signature issue.

61 percent say Trump is not honest or trustworthy.

58 percent say Trump lacks the personality and temperament to serve effectively as president.

56 percent say Trump has not brought needed change to Washington.

65 percent say Trump does not understand the problems of people like them.

58 percent say Trump is not good at making political deals.

64 percent do not have a lot of confidence that Trump will make the right decisions for the country's future. [...]

That Trump is consulting Dobbs for private advice about how to proceed -- even as he craters in polls -- perfectly captures the folly and delusion consuming this presidency at this particular moment. Trump watches Fox obsessively for validation, and he has very likely seen Dobbs tell him that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi "whipped" him in the shutdown battle; that his only route forward is to declare a national emergency; and that recent leaks about the Russia probe were really about distracting the public from Democratic opposition to Trump's wall, as if that's somehow an unpopular position that Democrats fear holding.

In this mythology, the political threat to Trump does not come from the mounting legal travails he faces (all of that is a hoax and a witch hunt) or from Trump's malicious and deeply destructive shutdown for the sake of his deeply unpopular wall. Rather, the real political danger to Trump always comes from his failure to fight hard enough, whether it's failing to close down special counsel Robert S. Mueller III's investigation, or failing to do whatever it takes -- declare a national emergency, shut down the government until the end of time -- to ensure that he gets the wall without giving up anything that might perturb his base in the slightest.

WHERE VOLDEMORT SERVES NAGINI:

As the meeting was coming to an end, an offhand comment piqued the president's interest.

"We're going to have to keep everyone together, because we're going to be doing this without any Democratic votes," McConnell said.

"Really?" Trump replied, suddenly intrigued. "You don't think we'll get any?"

The owlish, placid Senate majority leader spoke quietly but firmly. "No, Mr. President," McConnell said. "Not one." Democrats had passed Obamacare without any Republican votes. If Republicans were going to repeal it, McConnell believed they'd have to do it in the same way.

"What about Joe Manchin?" Trump asked, as if McConnell must have for­gotten him. Manchin, a 69-year-old West Virginia Democrat who liked to position himself as above partisan politics and willing to work with the GOP, was coming up for reelection in 2018 in a state that Trump had won by 42 points. On top of that, Trump viewed him as a personal friend. Surely his buddy Joe would play ball.

"Absolutely not, Mr. President," McConnell said in a tone that seemed designed to end the debate.

"Really?" the president asked. Often the contrarian, he seemed to view this as a personal challenge as well as a test of his persuasiveness. "I have a wonderful relationship with him; I think he might come around."

McConnell didn't flinch. He stayed sitting upright in his brown leather chair, elbows on the armrests and hands clasped underneath his chin.

"Mr. President," he began, "he'll never be with us when it counts. I've seen this time and time again. We're going to do everything in our power to beat him when he comes up for reelection in 2018."

Trump seemed taken aback. He cut his eyes at Priebus, as if to say, Why did no one tell me this was an issue? He didn't seem angry, just befuddled.

"Well, Joe's been a friend of mine, so we'll have to see," Trump said, turning his attention back to McConnell. "Do we have to go after him like that?" "Absolutely, Mr. President," McConnell shot back without a moment's hesitation. "We're going to crush him like a grape." Outside the walls of the Roosevelt Room, the conventional wisdom was that men like McConnell would temper Trump's aggressive impulses. Just the opposite was happening right now. There was a brief silence--maybe a half second--when the atmosphere in the room felt like the scene in Goodfellas when no one can tell how Joe Pesci is going to react to Ray Liotta calling him "funny." Would he freak out? Would he laugh it off? Finally Trump broke the tension.

"This guy's mean as a snake!" he said, pointing at McConnell and looking around the room.

MA POLS ALMOST ALWAYS WIN NH....:

According to the NH Journal poll, which surveyed 593 registered voters earlier this month, 55 percent of New Hampshire Democrats believe that Elizabeth Warren best represents the Democratic party. Ocasio-Cortez came in second with 28 percent. Just 17 percent said that Clinton was the best representation of the current party.

"The fact that so many Democrats in New Hampshire see Sen. Warren as an accurate reflection of their party isn't that surprising," NH Journal publisher Shawn McCoy said in a press release. "But the fact that Hillary Clinton, an icon of the party for 30 years, trails a progressive activist newcomer like Rep. Ocasio-Cortez is astonishing."

Republicans shouldn't spend too much time gloating over these numbers, however. Because even while New Hampshire Democrats are inching away from Clinton, the poll shows that New Hampshire voters overall are running away from Trump. In 2016 Trump came within half a percentage point of winning the state. Now, he trails both Warren and Vermont Socialist Bernie Sanders by 13 points (54 percent to 41 percent) in head-to-head polling. (Trump also trails Beto O'Rourke 48 percent to 41 percent.)

The poll contains one word of comfort for the president: A sizeable majority of state Republicans (59 percent) said they'd support Trump if he were challenged by Utah senator Mitt Romney.

DEFEND OUR VALUES:

Sheikh Ali Salman, the secretary-general of the outlawed Al-Wefaq political party, on Monday lost his appeal against a life sentence before Bahrain's highest court.

The supreme court upheld the verdict against Salman and two other exiled Al-Wefaq leaders accused of spying for estranged neighbor Qatar.

Sheikh Hassan Ali Juma Sultan and Ali Mahdi Ali al-Aswad were jailed for life in absentia last November, overturning their previous acquittals.

Al-Wefaq -- dissolved by court order in 2016 -- had had links to Bahrain's Shiite Muslim minority and had campaigned for reforms in the Sunni-ruled Gulf kingdom until crushed in 2011 by a Saudi-led intervention.

Amnesty International described Monday's verdicts as "yet another nail in the coffin for the right to freedom of expression in Bahrain and exposes the country's justice system as a complete farce."

TRUMPONOMICS:

JUST ANOTHER POLITICAL PARTY:

THERE'S NO SUCH THING AS SPECIES:

For over a decade during the late 18th century, a wolf stalked the estate of the Earl of Pembroke in Wilton, Wiltshire. Wolves were not commonly seen roaming the grounds of England's stately homes, though the nobility and gentry enjoyed keeping menageries of exotic creatures when they could. Having been extinct in Britain for centuries (if not millennia), the wolf was certainly an unusual creature. This particular wolf, however, was not wild, nor part of a menagerie; her name was Lupa and she seems to have been thought of as more of a pet.

Lupa was born in 1770 and, once weaned, was given to the Earl of Pembroke. She had her own keeper, Nathaniel Townsend, who was paid between £1 and £2 every few months for 'the keeping of the wolf-bitch'. Lupa was kept separately from the other hounds, perhaps in case of aggression between them, and it is unlikely that she lived in the house. She reportedly had four litters of puppies, one of which is recorded in the household accounts in 1773. At the time of her death, Lupa was 12 years old and like many of the family's pets was buried in the gardens of Wilton House with a headstone. All evidence we have for Lupa's existence refers to her as either a wolf or wolf-bitch, but the epitaph that was inscribed on her headstone makes it clear what Lupa really was: a wolf-dog hybrid. [...]

General interest in creating a typology of animals was driven by the divide between nature and culture that emerged in the Enlightenment during the late-17th and 18th centuries. Nature was something to be studied, observed, dissected and understood. It was only 12 years before Lupa was born that the Swedish zoologist Carl Linnaeus' most important work had appeared, the 10th edition of Systema Naturae. In it, Linnaeus laid out the classification of the animal kingdom, giving the world a system for naming plants and animals by genus and species. But while this laid the foundation of the taxonomic system of understanding the natural world that we still use today, general attitudes towards animals were very different.

...AND CHEAPER...:

THEM IS US:

THE VERY MODERATION THAT MAKES HER ELECTABLE...:

A close examination of Harris's record shows it's filled with contradictions. She pushed for programs that helped people find jobs instead of putting them in prison, but also fought to keep people in prison even after they were proved innocent. She refused to pursue the death penalty against a man who killed a police officer, but also defended California's death penalty system in court. She implemented training programs to address police officers' racial biases, but also resisted calls to get her office to investigate certain police shootings.

But what seem like contradictions may reflect a balancing act. Harris's parents worked on civil rights causes, and she came from a background well aware of the excesses of the criminal justice system -- but in office, she had to play the role of a prosecutor and California's lawyer. She started in an era when "tough on crime" politics were popular across party lines -- but she rose to national prominence as criminal justice reform started to take off nationally. She had an eye on higher political office as support for criminal justice reform became de rigueur for Democrats -- but she still had to work as California's top law enforcement official.

Her race and gender likely made this balancing act even tougher. In the US, studies have found that more than 90 percent of elected prosecutors are white and more than 80 percent are male. As a black woman, Harris stood out -- inviting scrutiny and skepticism, especially by people who may hold racist stereotypes about how black people view law enforcement or sexist views about whether women are "tough" enough for the job.

Still, the result is the same: As she became more nationally visible, Harris was less known as a progressive prosecutor, as she'd been earlier in her career, and more a reform-lite or even anti-reform attorney general. Now critics have labeled her a "cop" -- a sellout for a broken criminal justice system.

In the 2020 elections, she faces a balancing act again: managing constituencies on the left that will push for more radical reforms, particularly in the Democratic primary, and more centrist voters who may like some of her "tougher" roots as a prosecutor and attorney general, especially in the general election.

It was no coincidence Harris chose this state to make her initial appearance. Nor was the locale an accident: the annual bash thrown by Alpha Kappa Alpha, the nation's first sorority founded by African Americans, which Harris pledged as a student at Howard University.

Few states are being as closely studied, sized up and sifted through by the senator's campaign as South Carolina, which has a crucial early place on the 2020 calendar.

South Carolina played a vital role propelling Barack Obama to the White House in 2008, boosting him past Hillary Clinton. The state and its large African American population hold similar promise for Harris, whose parents were immigrants: her father from Jamaica, her mother from India.

South Carolina may be a conservative stronghold. But the Democratic primary electorate is mostly black, serving as a political bellwether for much of the South, where Harris' stature as the first viable black female presidential candidate could position her uniquely well. The party is looking for fresh faces, and the turnout of black women has historically been among the highest of any voter group.

KNOWING YOUR ALLIES:

The Muslim Brotherhood has called for the establishment of a united Egyptian opposition group abroad to help regain control of the country after a military coup in July 2013 put Abdel Fattah el-Sisi in power.

In a statement marking the eighth anniversary of the January 25, 2011 revolution, the outlawed group said the purpose of a unified opposition would be to liberate Egypt from military rule and to release political prisoners from prison.

The Muslim Brotherhood - Egypt's oldest and most influential Islamist group - called on expatriate Egyptian judges to take over the leadership of a constituent body, pointing out that individuals or groups abroad can help the work of the opposition at home.

In the interest of the Egyptian revolution and to protect the opposition, the statement also stressed the need to stay away from those who advocate the use of violence.

THE YELLOW VESTS ARE MAGA HATS:

[A]study by sociologist Herve Le Bras suggested that yellow vest protesters are overwhelmingly from rural areas, where there are few minority groups.

"It's a white movement," said Rafik Chekkat, a law expert and editor of the website Etat d'Exception. [...]

The yellow vest movement, meanwhile, has witnessed outbursts of racism.

In one instance, white yellow vest protesters forced a black woman out of her car and insulted her in front of her children, telling her to "go back to [her] country."

"It's white France that's suffering," said Jean-Yves Le Gallou, a self-proclaimed yellow vest member and far-right politician. 

"Bourgeois France duped us, telling us migrants are poor," added Eric Zemmour, a right-wing writer. 

Minorities have been reluctant to join a movement that might very well turn against them, said Sopo.

WHICH GENERAL DOES HE PICK FOR VP?:

Asked if he would consider changing his mind and run as a Democrat, he said, "I feel if I ran as a Democrat I would have to be disingenuous and say things that I don't believe because the party has shifted so far to the left."

"When I hear people espousing free government-paid college, free government-paid health care and a free government job for everyone -- on top of a $21 trillion debt -- the question is, how are we paying for all this and not bankrupting the country?" Mr. Schultz said.

"It's as big of a false narrative as the wall," he added. "Doesn't someone have to speak the truth about what we can afford while maintaining a deep level of compassion and empathy for the American people?"

Mr. Schultz, who grew up in the public housing projects in the Canarsie section of Brooklyn, became a billionaire by building Starbucks from seven stores in Seattle into a global coffee chain with over 350,000 employees. He was known as a progressive corporate leader, offering full health benefits for full- and part-time employees and their domestic partners, and Starbucks became the first privately owned American company to include part-time workers in its stock-option program. [...]

Mr. Schultz's consideration of entering the race as an independent evokes the 1992 campaign by the eccentric Texas billionaire Ross Perot, also a political neophyte. Mr. Perot, for a time, was the leader in the polls and gained almost 19 percent of the popular vote, the most for an independent candidate since Theodore Roosevelt in 1912.

Like Mr. Schultz, Mr. Perot expressed concern about the national debt and vowed to reduce it. Mr. Perot failed to win any electoral votes.

Mr. Schultz, who pointed to a recent Gallup poll showing that 42 percent of voters identified as politically independent, scoffed at the comparisons to previous efforts of independent candidates.

"This is a very different time in America today in terms of how divided we are and the need for the country to come together," he said. "I've done the work this year to unequivocally remove, if I decide to run, any concern regarding ballot access."

Mr. Schultz is relying in part on a small team of outside advisers, including Steve Schmidt, the former campaign strategist for John McCain's 2008 presidential effort.

DONALD WHO?:

Europe set to announce Iran funding vehicle, defying Trump https://t.co/mEL4or8Ds4

— Bloomberg (@business) January 27, 2019

#LOSER:

After the longest partial government shutdown in U.S. history, six-in-10 Americans believe the country is headed in the wrong direction, and nearly 70 percent of them have negative opinions on the state of the nation today, according to the latest national NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll. [...]

RANKING TRUMP'S PRESIDENTIAL QUALITIES -- FROM BEST TO WORST

The NBC/WSJ poll also measures eight presidential qualities for Trump. His highest marks (where he scores a "4" or "5" on a 5-point scale):

being direct and straightforward in communicating with the American people: 43 percent;

changing business as usual in Washington: 39 percent;

being effective and getting things done: 38 percent;

being a good negotiator: 36 percent.

His lowest marks:

being steady and reliable: 32 percent;

being knowledgeable and experienced: 32 percent;

being honest and trustworthy: 28 percent;

having high personal and ethical standards: 24 percent.

Notably, Trump gets below 50 percent on all eight of these qualities.

ALWAYS BET ON THE dEEP sTATE:

Two years after President Trump signed orders to hire 15,000 new border agents and immigration officers, the administration has spent tens of millions of dollars in the effort -- but has thousands more vacancies than when it began.

In a sign of the difficulties, Customs and Border Protection allocated $60.7 million to Accenture Federal Services, a management consulting firm, as part of a $297-million contract to recruit, vet and hire 7,500 border officers over five years, but the company has produced only 33 new hires so far.

The president's promised hiring surge steadily lost ground even as he publicly hammered away at the need for stiffer border security, warned of a looming migrant invasion and shut down parts of the government for five weeks over his demands for $5.7 billion from Congress for a border wall.

DONALD ILLUSTRATES THE INEVITABLE FAILURE OF IDEOLOGY:

Who needs moderation today? At first sight, the present moment does not seem to be ripe for moderation. As long as we live in echo chambers and democratic norms are being defied and undermined by politicians who exhibit erratic patterns of behavior and an insatiable appetite for domination, embracing moderation seems to be a self-defeating course of action. As a political theorist who has been researching this elusive virtue for over a decade, I have learned two important things about it.1 First, writing about moderation often amounts to a silent condemnation to solitude and marginality. This virtue never makes the headlines in our cable news world and it is conspicuously absent from the agenda of many politicians and parties. We know who the lions and foxes of the world are, but the moderates, whoever they may be, rarely appear on our radar screens. Second, the conventional image of moderation as a weak and ineffective virtue deserves to be challenged and revised. Edmund Burke was aware that moderation had often been stigmatized as "the virtue of cowards and compromise as the prudence of traitors." And yet, he still regarded it as the virtue of noble and superior minds. "In all changes in the state," Burke claimed, "moderation is a virtue, not only amiable but powerful. It is a disposing, arranging, conciliating, cementing virtue."2

One may wonder why Burke's defense of moderation seems so alien to many of us today. Don't we need this virtue in our current political world to countervail the influence of misguided ambition and curb the insatiable desire for (more) power and domination? This is arguably a rhetorical question. That is why I have been encouraged by the sudden revival of interest in a virtue which, for all its limitations, remains essential to the smooth functioning of our representative institutions. Jerry Taylor's essay "The Alternative to Ideology" (October 29, 2018) and the Niskanen Center policy essay "The Center Can Hold: Public Policy for an Age of Extremes" (December 2018) are bold manifestos for moderation that highlight the pitfalls of ideological thinking and the dangers of the "monomaniacal pursuit of a single idea" at all costs.3 Both texts extend a timely invitation to those who are not fearful of swimming against the current to rediscover the nuances of a complex, contested, and often misunderstood virtue. They are likely to raise some eyebrows, perhaps even trigger some interesting controversies. We can only hope that they will start a larger debate on an important virtue in scarce supply in Washington and beyond. Here I would like to contribute to this conversation by summarizing a few lessons I have learned while studying moderation in historical perspective.

Although moderation is an old concept with deep roots in classical political thought and in various religious traditions (Christianity, Judaism, Confucianism), it is still surrounded by misunderstanding and suspicion. For many, it is an unappealing word that carries the connotation of weakness, timidity, and indecisiveness. On this view, moderation is practiced only by soft-hearted individuals unable to hold firm opinions or make strong decisions. Others equate moderation with opportunism and see it as a synonym of mediocrity and pettiness. According to this view, moderates lack moral principles, endorse dubious compromises, and/or defend an unsavory center devoid of substance. If one is brave enough to truly believe in something, the argument goes, one cannot (and should not) be a moderate.

Another opinion is that moderation can never be truly radical or democratic enough because it lacks a clear moral or political compass. According to this claim, moderation amounts in practice to endorsing the status quo or condoning, willingly or unwillingly, various forms of injustice in the name of a deceptive modus vivendi. Those who embrace such an objectionable form of moderation do not really care about addressing injustice and reducing inequalities. This was "the moderation of the white man" criticized by Martin Luther King Jr. in his famous Letter from the Birmingham Jail (1963). An additional paradox might be mentioned here. When the public acknowledges the value of moderation, its support for the general concept is often greater than support for moderation on any particular issue, be it government size and spending, health care, immigration, taxation, or abortion. If and when people endorse moderation, they do it on the issues about which they care the least. On those topics which are central to their beliefs, their support for moderation is much weaker.

If anything, all these views of moderation prove that it is quite common to be pessimistic or cynical about the chances of moderation today. That is why it is important to challenge the conventional image of moderation by showing that it is a complex virtue which has a surprisingly radical side, often neglected by its critics and friends alike. If moderation can sometimes be a mask for cowardice and reaction, it can also be an effective means for promoting democratic reforms and preserving the institutional framework of free and open societies. Far from being a philosophy for weak souls, moderation is, in fact, a rare and difficult virtue for courageous minds. It implies a good dose of courage, nonconformism, and eclecticism, which explains why it is so difficult to acquire and practice moderation.

THE HIGH COST OF ETHNO-NATIONALISM:

For the moment, let's leave aside the obvious suspects on Fox News and the obsessive turd polishers (to borrow Jonah Goldberg's term) at American Greatness and focus on the people who are supposed to be analysts first and cheerleaders second.

Rush Limbaugh has always fancied himself as a galaxy brain. But he helped goad Trump into the shutdown and then encouraged the president to hang tough, even as the hard data became impossible to ignore. As recently as last week, when Trump's poll numbers were hemorrhaging, Limbaugh began his show with a blast of bravado:

I'm just gonna tell you, folks, if President Trump can hang in there, if he can hang in there and not go wobbly, he can win this. It's gonna be a few more weeks. There are gonna be a lot of risks. There are gonna be a lot of temptations to drop the ball and cave. I don't mean cave, there's gonna be a lot of temptation to make a deal. But he can win this if he just hangs in there.

So either El Rushbo was dead wrong or Trump is a wobbly wuss. Dittoheads can take their pick.

Then there were the obligatory references to Trump's occult skills at 3-D chess. After Speaker Nancy Pelosi shut down Trump's SOTU, David Brody, who reports for CBN, tweeted that "she's in for a rude awakening. Pelosi is playing checkers, trump is playing chess.

But willfully stupid takes of this sort were not confined to the Trumpist right's lumpenproletariat.

Here's a quick rundown on some of the best of the worst (or is it worst of the best?):

Henry Olsen

Last seen denouncing Mitt Romney for saying that Republicans should care about character, Olsen, a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center returned to the pages of the Washington Post on January 3 to assure readers that "Trump won't lose in a long shutdown."

"Common wisdom says the longer this lasts, the worse the politics will get for President Trump," Olsen wrote. "I disagree. Trump isn't likely to suffer politically because he's not doing anything his supporters find objectionable." In fact, Olsen predicted, the Democrats "will increasingly bear some political responsibility for ending the crisis."

As a result, Olsen predicted that "for Trump, a continued shutdown is a political win no matter what the outcome."

JOINT OPERATIONS:

.@chucktodd: "If you work with WikiLeaks, are you working against America?"@marcorubio: "I think should have been clear to people a long time ago that WikiLeaks and others like that could have been tools of foreign intelligence used to divide America." #MTP

— Meet the Press (@MeetThePress) January 27, 2019

@POTUS Trump and His Associates Had More Than 100 Contacts With #Russia & @Wikileaks Before the Inauguration https://t.co/oluydsQ4LI

— Frances Townsend (@FranTownsend) January 26, 2019

PURITAN NATION:

HAVE YOU EVER WALKED DOWN your local trail and stumbled upon a random stone wall that looks as if it grew from the ground itself? No doubt it was built by someone and is extremely old, but why was it built? Was it the boundary for livestock on an old homestead, or perhaps a line of defense? The New Hampshire Department of Environmental Services is trying to answer some of those questions for the state's mossy partitions.

New England is somewhat of a stone wall hotspot. Around 100,000 miles of walls dot the region's woodlands and countrysides. Most of these walls weren't built deliberately, but were instead a convenient way for farmers in previous centuries to discard plow-impeding rocks from their fields. In the years since, many of those stretches of farmland have become reforested.

To learn more about these structures, the DES launched a crowdsourced initiative to map every stone wall in the state, using Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) mapping. LiDAR utilizes lasers to produce geological surveys showing land elevation.

Through an interactive interface known as the New Hampshire Stone Wall Mapper, interested parties can map the plethora of walls from the resulting aerial imagery.

HE WON'T BE ON THE TICKET:

Privately, some of Mr. Trump's 2016 aides have said they are pessimistic about his path to 270 electoral votes after his party's midterm defeats in states like Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. An Associated Press poll on Wednesday showed that Mr. Trump's overall approval rating had fallen to 34 percent, with his support among Republicans dipping below 80 percent -- a startling turn for a president who strives for total control of the G.O.P., and has usually achieved it. [...]

While core Republican voters remain loyal to him and he is not currently facing a contest for the nomination, Mr. Trump's low standing with political moderates and especially women is leading some G.O.P. officeholders to voice unease about having him at the top of the ticket next year.

"I think it's healthy and appropriate for the party to consider in 2020 whether this is really the path it wants to continue taking," said David F. Holt, the Republican mayor of Oklahoma City, where a Democrat won a stunning House upset last year thanks in part to the suburban antipathy toward Mr. Trump. [...]

In addition to Mr. Hogan, William F. Weld, the former Republican governor of Massachusetts, is weighing a challenge to Mr. Trump as a small-government moderate, people who have spoken with him said. Mr. Weld, 73, who was the Libertarian Party's vice-presidential nominee in 2016, has discussed either opposing Mr. Trump in the Republican primaries or seeking the Libertarian presidential nomination.

KILLER TRUMPBOTS:

On Wednesday, a report from the Anti-Defamation League documented every known extremist killing in the United States in 2018. And according to its findings, right-wing extremists were responsible for every single one:

Right-wing extremists killed 50 people last year, mostly with firearms, making them responsible for more deaths than in any year since 1995, according to the ADL's data.

The report focuses on incidents like the February mass school shooting in Parkland, Florida, committed by a teenager who expressed sympathy towards white supremacist ideology; the massacre at Pittsburgh's Tree of Life synagogue by an avowed anti-Semite; and the shooting spree at a Tallahassee yoga studio by a man bent on committing violence against women.

Guns were responsible for 42 of the 50 deaths documented by the ADL.

The ADL's list may not even capture the full scope of right-wing terror in 2018. For example, it would not include Cesar Sayoc, the pro-Trump Florida bodybuilder who sent a series of pipe bombs to Democratic officials, because mercifully none of his bombs killed anyone.

ALWAYS BET ON THE dEEP sTATE:

Federal Bureau of Investigation Director Chris Wray should hang his head in shame. At a time when he should be restoring the FBI's reputation after Jim Comey, Andrew McCabe, Peter Strzok and others tarnished its image as our country's premier law enforcement agency, he allowed 29 gun slinging agents to make a predawn arrest of former Trump advisor Roger Stone.

ATTA BOY:

Jared Kushner, the president's son-in-law, was confident in his ability as a good-faith negotiator who could find a compromise to end the government shutdown.

His pitch to Democratic lawmakers was simple: He told them he was the person who could "land this plane."

THEY'RE SHORTHAND:

Symbols are powerful, conveying profound messages with the simplest images.

Soldiers carry a flag into battle and face death to hoist it aloft. Christian churches are identified by T-shaped pieces of wood or metal affixed to prominent places. In some ancient Eastern religions, the swastika represented peace, but it is today universally recognized as a sign of racism and anti-Semitism, violent repression and genocide. Each of those symbols carries a deep meaning recognized by those who display it.

During his 2016 campaign, President Donald Trump launched his own symbol -- a baseball cap with the words "Make America Great Again" emblazoned on it. Because of the incendiary rhetoric he spewed during his rallies, the MAGA cap quickly became associated with a bundle of prejudices -- xenophobia, racism, sexism, Islamophobia. If you wear the cap, you aren't just a fan of Trump; you're also a bigot who wants to build a wall on the southern border.

NOT A QUESTION OF WHETHER, BUT HOW:

I first learned about the UBI forty years ago, in a class taught by the late Bernie Saffran. He said that there are trade-offs in how the government sets two parameters: the level of the UBI and the tax rate on earned income. These in turn affect the UBI's impact on the budget and on upward mobility.

For example, suppose that the government grants each family of four a basic income of $20,000, and the tax rate on earned income is 20 percent. A tax rate of 20 percent does little to impede upward mobility, but it means that the "breakeven point" is a family earned income of $100,000. Families earning less than $100,000 would be receiving a net transfer from families earning more than that. This would make the UBI very expensive from a budget standpoint, leaving little or no room for other government spending.

On the other hand, suppose that the tax rate is 80 percent. That makes the "breakeven point" an income of $25,000, meaning that the only families receiving a net transfer are those that earn less than $25,000. But the 80 percent tax rate is a major impediment to upward mobility. People who work especially hard will have very little to show for their efforts.

You might think "A tax rate of 80 percent? That's crazy. There is no way that would be adopted in the U.S." But it turns out that is close to what we have.

Instead of a single tax rate and a universal basic income, we have a complicated tax system and a set of "conditional transfers," meaning money that people receive that can only be spent in certain ways (food stamps, for example) and only if they satisfy eligibility rules, including strict income cut-offs.

Examining the overall impact of all of these taxes and transfers, economist John F. Early found that

the middle-income group averages only 20 percent more spendable income than that of the lowest group. Government income redistribution basically flattens out the bottom 60 percent of income to within 20 percent of each other.

Taking into account the way that they lose eligibility for conditional transfers, low-to-middle income families face an average tax rate of close to 80 percent. In fact, there are surely some families in some income ranges who face a tax rate on incremental earnings of more than 100 percent! They would have more to spend if they earned a bit less income. Given the high implicit tax rates that they face, it is a tribute to their work ethic that so many of these families choose to earn income at all. But we offer them hardly any chance for upward mobility.

The economic case for the UBI, as I first learned from Bernie Saffran, is that it enables the government to meaningfully reduce poverty and still allow for upward mobility. Our current hodge-podge of conditional transfers is less effective on both counts, especially the latter.

DEVIN'S PERJURY TRAP:

[A]s Rep. Jackie Speier told MSNBC's Ari Melber, Stone's arrest could just be one of many dominoes still to fall.

"I think many of those who testified before our committee while the Republicans were in power were under the impression that they could say virtually anything and get away with it," she said. "And we're going to see in short order that Roger Stone is not the only one who lied to Congress."

"Your view, based on what we know to be, the trigger that Mueller is willing to use on false statements to Congress, is that you have knowledge of other individuals that you think by this standard would also be charged?" Melber pressed her.

"Yes I do," said Speier. She refused to name specific examples, but added that "there may be two."

HOMO ECONOMICUS, HE DEAD:

Theorists often remark that the reasonable person is not the average person. As the American legal philosopher Peter Westen puts it:

[R]easonableness is not an empirical or statistical measure of how average members of the public think, feel, or behave ... Rather, reasonableness is a normative measure of ways in which it is right for persons to think, feel, or behave ...

The fact that a reasonable person can't be an average person inspires 'ideal' theories of the reasonable person. The UK's Supreme Court elaborates this view, on which facts about average people are entirely irrelevant. Evidence about ordinary people is 'beside the point. The behaviour of the reasonable man is not established by the evidence of witness, but by the application of a legal standard by the court.' On this view, the reasonable person is some 'ideal' person. As the UK Supreme Court observed, it is 'the anthropomorphic conception of justice ... the court itself'.

Of course, often 'the court itself' reflects the judgment of ordinary jurors. Perhaps surprisingly, the question of how ordinary people judge reasonableness is largely neglected. When people evaluate a standard of 'reasonable care', it might be that they're considering the common level of care or a good level of care. Or perhaps they're considering both.

To test this thought, I ran an experiment. I divided participants into three groups. One group provided their estimates of the reasonable number of different things, such as 'the reasonable number of weeks' delay before a criminal trial' and 'the reasonable loan interest rate'. Another group provided their estimates of the average number of each thing (eg, the 'average loan interest rate'), and the last provided their estimates of the ideal number of each thing (eg, the 'ideal loan interest rate'). Then, I compared the three groups' mean estimates for each example. For instance, is the 'reasonable loan interest rate' more like the average or the ideal interest rate?

A striking pattern emerged: across all these different examples, the estimates of 'reasonable' amounts tended to be intermediate between the 'average' and 'ideal' ones. For example, the reasonable number of weeks' delay before a criminal trial (10 weeks) fell between the judged average (17) and ideal (7). So too for the reasonable number of days to accept a contract offer, the reasonable rate of attorney's fees, and the reasonable loan interest rate.

These results suggest that our conception of what is reasonable is informed by thinking about both what people actually do and what people should do. Reasonableness is not a purely statistical notion, nor is it a purely prescriptive one; instead, it is a 'hybrid'. In this way, reasonableness is similar to other hybrid judgments, such as our judgment of what is 'normal'.

WE ARE ALL DESIGNIST:

Xenophon also wrote down his remembrances of a local philosopher named Socrates. Those who know Socrates mainly through the writings of Plato - Xenophon's near-exact contemporary - will find Xenophon's Socrates something of a surprise. Plato's Socrates claims to know nothing, and flamboyantly refutes the knowledge claims of others. In the pages of Xenophon's Memorabilia, however, Socrates actually answers philosophical questions, dispenses practical life advice, provides arguments proving the existence of benevolent gods, converses as if peer-to-peer with a courtesan, and even proposes a domestic economy scheme whereby indigent female relatives can become productive through the establishment of a textile business at home.

Socrates' conversation, according to Xenophon, 'was ever of human things'. This engaged, intensely practical, human Socrates can be refreshing to encounter. Anyone who has felt discomfort at how the opponents of Plato's Socrates suffer relentless public refutations and reductions to absurdity can take some comfort in Xenophon's Socrates who 'tries to cure the perplexities of his friends'.

For instance, what could be more enchanting than a Socrates who solo-dances for joy and exercise, so unlike the Socrates we know from Plato? In Xenophon's Symposium, Socrates asks the Phoenician dance-master to show him some dance moves. Everyone laughs: what will you do with dance moves, Socrates? He replies: 'I'll dance, by God!' A friend of Socrates then tells the group that he had stopped by his house early in the morning, and found him dancing alone. When questioned about it, Socrates happily confesses to solo-dancing often. It's great exercise, it moves the body in symmetry, it can be done indoors or outdoors with no equipment, and it freshens the appetite. 

Another surprising side of Xenophon's Socrates is shown through his encounter with a person who not only doesn't honour the gods, but makes fun of people who do. To this irreligious person, Socrates presents a careful and persuasive line of reasoning about the designed usefulness of all elements of creation. For humans and many other animals, there are 'eyes so that they can see what can be seen, and ears so that they can hear what can be heard', eyelids, eyelashes, molars and incisors, erotic desire to aid procreation; all these are 'the contrivance of some wise craftsman who loves animals'. And what about the cosmos as a whole? 'Are you, then, of the opinion that ... those surpassingly large and infinitely numerous things are in such an orderly condition through some senselessness?' Human beings even have the spiritual capacity to perceive the existence of gods, 'who put in order the greatest and noblest things', and 'they worry about you!'

THEY'RE FRENCH:

The series, now streaming its sixth season in the US, has enjoyed commercial and critical success, and "stunned executives by becoming the biggest-selling French TV show ever." The many comparisons the show has received to The Wire are revealing, however, because while both shows feature multi-layered plots involving characters from different walks of life, The Wire created memorable characters regardless of race (I think of the drug lord Stringer Bell enrolled in a business course). Spiral, although it creates a compelling and complex female lead in Proust's Police Captain Laure Berthaud, fails to open up the same possibilities for its non-white/minority characters. In fact, at key moments, Spiral abandons its otherwise meticulous plotting and undermines its own pursuit of an unvarnished realism by turning minority characters into types.

BUT WHAT'S HE FOR?:

In what amounted to his inaugural speech, Guaidó called on military officers to withdraw their support from Maduro.

"It has to be the Venezuelan people, the armed forces, and the international community that allow us to assume power, which we will not let slip away," Guaidó told cheering supporters in what amounted to his inaugural address.

At least one high-ranking military official, Col. José Luis Silva, who serves as military attaché at the Venezuelan Embassy in Washington, has heeded Guaidó's call. "As the Venezuelan defense attaché in the United States, I do not recognize Mr. Nicolás Maduro as president of Venezuela," Silva said in an interview Saturday with el Nuevo Herald.

Guaidó lacks any control over government ministries but he is more than just a figurehead. Analysts say that swelling international support for him, coupled with Maduro's diplomatic isolation, strengthens Guaidó's claim to the presidency.

Frank Mora, who heads the Latin American and Caribbean Center at Florida International University, said Guaidó's swearing-in ceremony could become a watershed moment, similar to the 2010 episode in Tunisia when an angry fruit vender set himself on fire and helped ignite the Arab Spring.

Alternative leadership in Caracas has also opened the door for the Trump administration to squeeze the vital flow of petrodollars to the Maduro government -- which counts on oil for 95 percent of its export earnings.

One option would be to send the proceeds from purchases of Venezuelan oil to foreign accounts that could be set up and controlled by Guaidó's governing team, said Francisco Rodríguez, a former economic advisor to Venezuela's National Assembly. He said that diverting oil funds to Guaidó would have a "huge impact" on the Venezuelan economy and put more pressure on Maduro to leave office.

"The pieces are starting to fit together for a peaceful transition in Venezuela," said Benjamin Scharifker, a leading Venezuelan intellectual and an opposition activist.

THE SLOUGH KIDS:

Instead of emerging victorious, many of Trump's allies are walking away from a record-breaking government shutdown feeling outplayed, not least by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. The President is now more unpopular than he was before the shutdown began, sacked with blame for the 35-day lapse in funding.

Friday's announcement was an extraordinary comedown that left many in the White House and those who support Trump marveling at the futility of the preceding four weeks of brinkmanship. In the eyes of some aides and outside advisers, an entire fruitless month has passed that cannot be recouped, a waste of the most valuable asset a White House has: the President's attention and time. [...]

Acknowledging a new political reality with Pelosi in charge, one adviser said the only way forward for Trump is "compromise," with little room for the no-holds-barred approach favored by advisers like Stephen Miller, the immigration hardliner.

"Today is not a cave but a grave for Stephen Miller policies," the adviser said, acknowledging it's not clear at all that Trump is ready to make that kind of course correction. [...]

Two people who talk to Trump regularly said that over the past week or so the President had been in a very sour mood amid the shutdown episode -- a state of mind that only worsened as Friday approached and he realized he was losing the fight. Already a mercurial boss, Trump has lashed out at aides he believes bear some responsibility for the morass.

His aides and advisers are frustrated too, and disappointed over the way Trump boxed himself in during a fateful Oval Office meeting in December, where, with cameras rolling, Trump told Pelosi and Schumer that he would proudly shut the government down over the border wall. He later sought to shirk responsibility, but his words were on tape. And he began steadily being outmaneuvered by Democrats, particularly Pelosi, whose ploy to deprive Trump of a State of the Union address dealt a preliminary blow this week.

For Trump, the border wall -- which began as a rhetorical device at his campaign rallies -- has become something much larger, an extension of himself so personal that he can't let it go.

WHAT'S UP, DON?:

Mr. Stone's early-morning arrest at his Florida home unsurprisingly dominated coverage, but reports also noted that federal agents were "seen carting hard drives and other evidence from Mr. Stone's apartment in Harlem, and his recording studio in South Florida was also raided." The F.B.I., in other words, was executing search warrants, not just arrest warrants. Even the timing and manner of Mr. Stone's arrest -- at the absolute earliest moment allowed under federal rules of criminal procedure without persuading a judge to authorize an exceptional nighttime raid -- suggests a concern with preventing destruction of evidence: Otherwise it would make little sense to send a dozen agents to arrest a man in his 60s before sunrise.

The indictment itself -- which charges Mr. Stone with witness tampering, obstruction of justice and false statements to Congress -- takes little imagination to translate into a search warrant application, and also hints at what Robert Mueller might be looking for. In describing the lies it alleges Mr. Stone told a House committee, the document places great emphasis on Mr. Stone's denial that he had any written communications with two associates -- associates with whom he had, in fact, regularly exchanged emails and text messages. That's precisely the sort of behavior one might focus on in seeking to convince a recalcitrant judge that an investigative target could not be trusted to turn over documents in response to a subpoena, requiring the more intrusive step of seizing Mr. Stone's devices directly.

Of course, as the indictment also makes clear, the special counsel has already managed to get its hands on plenty of Mr. Stone's communications by other means -- but one seeming exception jumps out. In a text exchange between Mr. Stone and a "supporter involved with the Trump Campaign," Mr. Mueller pointedly quotes Mr. Stone's request to "talk on a secure line -- got WhatsApp?" There the direct quotes abruptly end, and the indictment instead paraphrases what Mr. Stone "subsequently told the supporter." Though it's not directly relevant to his alleged false statements, the special counsel is taking pains to establish that Mr. Stone made a habit of moving sensitive conversations to encrypted messaging platforms like WhatsApp -- meaning that, unlike ordinary emails, the messages could not be obtained directly from the service provider.

The clear implication is that any truly incriminating communications would have been conducted in encrypted form -- and thus could be obtained only directly from Mr. Stone's own phones and laptops. 

ALWAYS BET ON THE dEEP sTATE:

For the better part of two years, Rubio has been lobbying Trump to take on Maduro, and on Wednesday he appeared to have succeeded in a big way. Around 1 p.m., the President briefly interrupted his public spat with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi over the time and place of the annual State of the Union address to unveil a major intervention in Venezuela: the recognition of Juan Guaidó, the little-known, thirty-five-year-old head of the opposition National Assembly, as the country's legitimate interim leader. Tens of thousands took to the streets in Caracas, and more than a dozen other countries quickly joined the United States in backing Guaidó's claim to the Venezuelan Presidency. Maduro called it a U.S.-backed coup attempt and, in retaliation, ordered the expulsion of American diplomats within seventy-two hours. It's anybody's guess what will happen next. Pretty much all we know for sure is that Trump's surprise decision to throw the United States into the middle of Venezuela's chaos represents a major challenge to a teetering government.

This is not the crisis we expected to be talking about this week. The U.S. government is in its own paralyzed gridlock and Trump's approval rating is cratering because of it. In his announcement, Trump cited Venezuelans' demands for "freedom and the rule of law," which is not exactly the centerpiece of the President's foreign policy toward any other country in the world. Trump and his Administration have not only ignored human-rights abuses in other countries but celebrated some of the world's worst perpetrators of them. He began his Presidency by promising Arab dictators in Riyadh that he would not lecture them and, even in the face of the extrajudicial killing of a U.S. resident, he has stuck to it.

In typical Trump fashion, the decision about Venezuela happened quickly, at the last minute, and apparently without the normal process that would have accompanied such a significant move in any other Administration. On January 10th, Maduro was sworn in for a new term as President, even though the U.S., and much of the rest of the international community, had declared his reëlection, last year, as illegitimate. That seemed to be where the matter stood until January 15th, when Rubio, who chairs the Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee for the Western Hemisphere (and has used that perch to turn himself into what I've often heard referred to as the State Department desk officer for Latin America), took to the Senate floor. Citing the Venezuelan constitutional provision that calls for the head of the National Assembly to assume the Presidency in case of its vacancy, he demanded that the Trump Administration recognize Guaidó as the country's interim leader. Rubio's prodding, along with that of exile groups, sent the Administration "scrambling," McClatchy News reported.

COMMITTING A CRIME IN PUBLIC DOES NOT ACTUALLY MAKE IT LEGAL:

In the summer of 2016, the fact of Russia's "active measures" was the subject of speculation, anonymous quotes and supposition -- but was not officially confirmed in public.

Since then, Mueller's office has detailed some of Russia's practices: Its use of social media agitation to deepen divisions among Americans, and the cyberattacks against political and other targets in search of embarrassing dirt to release.

The question now is what Stone, Trump's then-campaign chairman Paul Manafort, Trump's family or Trump himself knew about what was taking place behind the scenes.

Trump has gone back and forth then and now about what he accepts about the Russian election interference in 2016. But at the time he was consistent about how much he loved WikiLeaks and urged voters to focus on what it was revealing about the Democrats, no matter where the material was coming from.

The events of July 2016 followed many contacts by Russians or their agents with people in the Trump campaign -- including a meeting the previous month hosted by Donald Trump Jr., following an offer of help for the campaign, again via intermediaries, from the Russian government.

Manafort also met at least once with a business associate who has been linked to the GRU and, according to court documents, allegedly discussed polling data from the campaign, although the details about that meeting aren't clear.

And even as Trump's political fortunes improved throughout 2016, he and his deputies were negotiating with powerful Russians behind the scenes over a potential Trump Tower project in Moscow.

#LOSER:

Before President Donald Trump finished speaking from the Rose Garden, putting a temporary end to the five-week government shutdown, a running group text between several of his former aides lit up with complaints.

"[Speaker Nancy] Pelosi ordered everything off the menu and left Trump hanging with the bill," one Trump ally texted to the group.

"President Nancy Pelosi, she runs the country now," said a former White House official. "We went from indefinite shutdown, to down payment, to cave -- all within a span of 24 hours."

That official said that Trump's core supporters and former aides are "furious" and "melting down."

Bewildered by his decision to accept a deal without funding for a wall on the southern border -- not even the "down payment" the White House had requested a day earlier -- some of his most loyal supporters fretted that Trump was in danger of losing his fervent base that has fueled his presidency. It didn't help that special counsel Robert Mueller had just released more details about the Trump campaign's alleged attempts to backchannel with WikiLeaks during the election.

#LOSER:

His poll numbers were plummeting. His FBI director was decrying the dysfunction. The nation's air travel was in chaos. Federal workers were lining up at food banks. Economic growth was at risk of flatlining, and even some Republican senators were in open revolt.

So on Friday, the 35th day of a government shutdown that he said he was proud to instigate, President Trump finally folded. After vowing for weeks that he would keep the government closed unless he secured billions in funding for his promised border wall, Trump agreed to reopen it.

He got $0 instead.

Trump's capitulation to Democrats marked a humiliating low point in a polarizing presidency and sparked an immediate backlash among some conservative allies, who cast him as a wimp.

ORANGE IS THE NEW ORANGE:

[Vanity Fair reporter Gabriel] Sherman reports that, despite Stone's implications to the contrary, there's good reason to believe he may flip on Trump. One Republican close to Trump told Sherman that, "Stone knows Donald isn't loyal. He calls him 'Mr. Ingratitude.'"

There's been much speculation that Trump may be dangling pardons for his allies caught in Mueller's investigation or that those allies might be holding out hope for a pardon and refusing to cooperate on this basis. There are severe political risks, though, to the strategy for the president, lowering the likelihood that Trump will ever take this route. And given that Stone has seen that none of the other people indicted by Mueller have yet been pardoned by Trump, he may realize this as an increasingly unlikely bet.

Sherman also reports that Donald Trump Jr., the president's eldest son, fears that he may too be indicted soon. 

Far-right activists Mike Cernovic and Paul Joseph Watson also chimed in, with the former calling Trump "a broken man" and the latter declaring his base was in "complete meltdown".

DADDY, WHAT WAS CASH:

Daniel Kaplan of SportsBusiness Journal reports that Tropicana Field will be the first major league ballpark to stop accepting cash. Yes, for real. Everything -- beer, hot dogs, nachos, foam fingers and the rest -- must be either (a) purchased with a credit card; or (b) with a Rays gift card which one can obtain for cash.

This is gonna cause a lot more controversy than you might think.

It's still a small handful of places, but a growing number of businesses, often coffee shops or upmarket fast casual restaurants, have adopted cashless policies, refusing to accept paper currency and requiring customers to pay with debit or credit cards. The rationale: thanks to chip and tap and smartphone technology it's become quicker and easier to to simply take cards or electronic payment, reducing customer wait time and the hassle of making change, counting cash drawers down at the end of the day, etc.

The polices have met with backlash, however, because they freeze out people who don't have access to bank accounts and/or credit or debit cards, such as low-income and people of color, who are far more typically unbanked of underbanked than others. You can read up on what that means here, but the upshot is that, according to the FDIC, 6.5 percent of households in the United States do not have any affiliation with a bank whatsoever. 

MAGA OR CHRISTIAN:

THE COMMON MERIT OF MANKIND:

For our ancestors the world was a small, and--compared with our modern sense of it--a comparatively snug affair. Six thousand years at most it had lasted. In its history a few particular human heroes, kings, ecclesiarchs, and saints stood forth very prominent, overshadowing the imagination with their claims and merits, so that not only they, but all who were associated familiarly with them, shone with a glamour which even the Almighty, it was supposed, must recognize and respect. These prominent personages and their associates were the nucleus of the immortal group; the minor heroes and saints of minor sects came next, and people without distinction formed a sort of background and filling in. The whole scene of eternity (so far, at least, as Heaven and not the nether place was concerned in it) never struck to the believers's fancy as an overwhelmingly large or inconveniently crowded stage. One might call this aristocratic view of immortality; the immortals--I speak of Heaven exclusively, for an immortality of torment need not now concern us--were always an elite, a select and manageable number.

But, with our own generation, an entirely new quantitative imagination has swept over our western world. The theory of evolution now requires us to suppose a far vaster scale of times, spaces, and numbers than our forefathers ever dreamed the cosmic process to involve. Human history grows continuously out of animal history, and goes back possibly even to the tertiary epoch. From this there has emerged insensibly a democratic view, instead of the old aristocratic view, of immortality. For our minds, though in one sense they may have grown a little cynical, in another they have been made sypathetic by the evolutionary perspective. Bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh are these half-brutish pre-historic brothers. Girdled about with the immense darkness of this mysterious universe even as we are, they were born and died, suffered and struggled. Given over to fearful crime and passion, plunged in the blackest ignorance, preyed upon by hideous and grotesque delusions, yet steadfastly serving the profoundest of ideals in their fixed faith that existence in any form is better than non-existence, they ever rescued trimphantly from the jaws of ever-imminent destruction the torch of life, which, thanks to them, now lights the world for us. How small indeed seem individual distinctions when we look back on these overwhelming numbers of human beings panting and straining under the pressure of that vital want! And how inessential in the eyes of God must be the small surplus of the individual's merit, swamped as it is in the vast ocean of the common merit of mankind, dumbly and undauntedly doing the fundamental duty and living the heroic life! We grow humble and reverent as we contemplate the prodigious spectacle. Not our differences and distinctions,--we feel--no, but our common animal essence of patience under suffering and enduring effort must be what redeems us in the Deity's sight. An immense compassion and kinship fill the heart. An immortality from which these inconceivable billions of fellow-strivers should be excluded becomes an irrational idea for us. That our superiority in personal refinement or in religious creed should constitute a difference between ourselves and our messmates at life's banquet, fit to entail such a consequential difference of destiny as eternal life for us, and for them torment hereafter, or death with the beasts that perish, is a notion too absurd to be considered serious. Nay, more, the very beasts themselves--the wild ones at any rate--are leading the heroic life at all times. And a modern mind, expanded as some minds are by cosmic emotion, by the great evolutionist vision of universal continuity, hesitates to draw the line even at man. If any creature lives forever, why not all?--why not the patient brutes? So that a faith in immortality, if we are to indulge it, demands of us nowadays a scale of representation so stupendous that our imagination faints before it, and our personal feelings refuse to rise up and face the task. The supposition we are swept along to is too vast, and, rather than face the conclusion, we abandon the premise from which it starts. We give up our own immortality sooner than believe that all the hosts of Hottentots and Australians that have been, and shall ever be, should share it with us in secula seculorum. Life is a good thing on a reasonably copious scale; but the very heavens themselves, and the cosmic times and spaces, would stand aghast, we think, at the notion of preseving eternally such and ever-swelling plethora and glut of it.

Having myself, as a recipient of modern scientific culture, gone through a subjective experience like this, I feel sure that it must also have been the experience of many, perhaps of most, of you who listen to my words. But I have also come to see that it harbors a tremendous fallacy; and, since the noting of the fallacy has set my own mind free again, I have felt that one service I might render to my listeners tonight would be to point out where it lies.

It is the most obvious fallacy in the world, and the only wonder is that all the world should not see through it. It is the result of nothing bit an invincible blindness from which we suffer, an insensibility to the significance of alien lives, and a conceit that would project our own incapacity into the vast cosmos, and measure the wants of the Absolute by our own puny needs. Our christian ancestors dealt with the problem more easily than we do. We, indeed, lack sympathy; but they had a positive antipathy for these alien human creatures, and they naively supposed the Deity to have antipathy, too. Being, as they were, `heathen,' our forefathers felt a certain sort of joy in thinking that their Creator made them as so much mere fuel for the fires of hell. Our cutlure has humanized us beyond that point, but we cannot yet conceive them as our comrades in the fields of heaven. We have, as the phrase goes, no use for them, and it oppresses us to think of their survival. Take, for instance, all the Chinamen. Which of you here, my friends, sees any fitness in their eternal perpetuation unreduced in numbers? Surely not one of you. At most, you might deem it well to keep a few chosen specimens alive to represent an interesting and peculiar variety of humanity; but as for the rest, what comes in such surpassing numbers, and what you can only imagine in this abstract summary collective manner, must be something of which the units, you are sure, can have on individual preciousness. God himself, you think, can have no use for them. An immortality of every seperate specimen must be to him and to the universe as indigestible a load to carry as it is to you. So, engulfing the whole subject in a sort of mental gidiness and nausea, you drift along, first doubting that the mass can be immortal, then losing all assurance in the immortality of your own particular person, precious as you all the while feel and realize the latter to be. This, I am sure, is the attitude of mind of some of you before me.

But is not such an attitude due to the veriest lack and dearth of your imagination? You take these swarms of alien kinsmen as they are for you: an external picture painted on your retina, representing a crowd oppressive by its vastness and confusion. As they are for you, so you think they positively and absolutely are. I feel no call for them, you say; therefore there is no call for them. but all the while, beyond this externality which is your way of realizing them, they realize themselves with the acutest internality, with the most violent thrills of life. 'Tis you who are dead, stone-dead and blind and senseless, in your way of looking on. You open your eyes upon a scene of which you miss the whole significance. Each of these grotesque or even repulsive aliens is animated by an inner joy of living as hot or hotter than that which you feel beating in your private breast. The sun rises and beauty beams to light his path. To miss the inner joy of him, as Stevenson says, is to miss the whole of him.*10* Not a being of the countless throng is there whose continued life is not called for, and called for intensely, by the consciousness that animates the being's form. That you neither realize nor understand nor call for it, is an absolutely irrelevant circumstance. That you have a saturation-point of interest tells us nothing of the interests that absolutely are. The Universe, with every living entity which her resources create, creates at the same time a call for that entity, and an appitite for its continuance,--creates it, if nowhere else, at least within the heart of the entity itself. It is absurd to suppose, simply because our private power of sympathetic vibration with other lives gives out so soon, that in the heart of infinite being itself there can be such a thing as plethora, or glut, or supersaturation. It is not as if there were a bounded room where the minds in possession had to move up or make place and crowd together to accommodate new occupants. Each new mind brings its own edition of the universe of space along with it, its own room to inhabit; and these spaces never crowd each other,--the space of my imagination, for example, in no way inteferes with yours. The amount of possible consciousness seems to be governed by no law analogous to that of the so-called conservation of energy in the material world. When one man wakes up, or one is born, another does not have to go to sleep, or die, in order to keep the consciousness of the universe a constant quantity. Professor Wundt, in fact, in his `System of Philosophy,' has formulated a law of the universe which he calls the law of increase of spiritual energy, and which he expressly opposes to the law of conservation of energy in physical things.*11* There seems to be no formal limit to the positive increase of being in spiritual respects; and since the spiritual being, whenever it comes; affirms itself, expands and craves continuance, we may justly and literally say, regardless of the defects of our own private sympathy, that the supply of individual life in the universe can never possibly, however immeasurable it may become, exceed the demand. The demand for that supply is there the moment the supply itself comes into being, for the beings supplied demand their own continuance.

I speak, you see, from the point of view of all the other individual beings, realizing and enjoying inwardly their own existence. If we are pantheists, we can stop there. We need, then, only say that through them, as through so many diversified channels of expression, the eternal Spirit of the Universe affirms and realizes its own infinite life. But if we are theists, we can go farther without altering the result. God, we can say, has so inexhaustible a capacity for love that his call and need is for a literally endless accumulation of created lives. He can never faint or grow weary, as we should, under the increasing supply. His scale is infinite in all things. His sympathy can never know satiety or glut.

I hope now that you agree with me that the tiresomeness of an over-peopled Heaven is a purely subjective and illusory notion, a sign of human incapacity, a remnant of the old narrow-hearted aristocratic creed. ``Revere the Maker, lift thine eye up to his style and manners of the sky,'' and you will believe that this is indeed a democratic universe, in which your paltry exclusions play no regulative part. Was your taste consulted in the peopling of this globe? How, then, should it be consulted as to the peopling of the vast City of God? Let us put our hand over our mouth, like Job, and be thankful that in our personal littleness we ourselves are here at all. The Deity that suffers us, we may be sure, can suffer many another queer and wondrous and only half-delightful thing.

For my own part, then, so far as logic goes, I am willing that every leaf that ever grew in this world's forests and rustled in the breeze should become immortal. It is purely a question: are the leaves so, or not? Abstract quantity, and the abstract needlessness in our eyes of so much reduplication of things so much alike, have no connection with the subject. For bigness and number and generic similarity are only manners of our finite way of thinking; and, considered in itself and apart from our imagination, one scale of dimensions and of numbers for the Universe is no more miraculous or inconceivable than another, the moment you grant to a universe the liberty to be at all, in place of the Non-entity that might conceivably have reigned.

The heart of being can have no exclusions akin to those which our poor little hearts set up. The inner significance of other lives exceeds all our powers of sympathy and insight. If we feel a significance in our own life which would lead us spontaneously to claim its perpetuity, let us be at least tolerant of like claims made by other lives, however numerous, however unideal they may seem to us to be. Let us at any rate not decide adversely on our own claim, whose grounds we feel directly, because we cannot decide favorably on the alien claims, whose grounds we cannot feel at all. That would be letting blindness lay down the law to sight.

DO KIM AND ASSAD AT THE SAME TIME:

When the U.S. rushed to endorse a military coup against Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez in 2002, it ended up with egg on its face. The self-styled leader of a "Bolivarian" revolution was back in office within three days -- and more anti-American than ever.

The decision by Washington to recognize opposition leader Juan Guaido as the nation's legitimate president could see a repeat, if Chavez-heir Nicolas Maduro should cling onto power. But it takes place in a very different geopolitical climate, one where failure risks global repercussions.

Venezuela's economy is in a tailspin, prompting millions to flee to neighboring states that have backed the U.S. in refusing to recognize Maduro's 2018 re-election, widely seen as fraudulent. The coup against Chavez was condemned by many Latin American governments as anti-democratic. Now it's the military that's keeping an authoritarian Maduro in power, in the face of much stronger domestic and regional opposition.

Yet the current stand-off is also freighted with great-power rivalry -- between China, Russia and the U.S. -- that barely existed in Venezuela 16 years ago. That's providing Maduro with a reservoir of international support in standing up to Washington that Chavez didn't enjoy.

HIDDEN? IT'S STATED IN THEIR LOGO:

They'll never admit it in public, but many of your bosses want machines to replace you as soon as possible.

I know this because, for the past week, I've been mingling with corporate executives at the World Economic Forum's annual meeting in Davos. And I've noticed that their answers to questions about automation depend very much on who is listening.

In public, many executives wring their hands over the negative consequences that artificial intelligence and automation could have for workers. They take part in panel discussions about building "human-centered A.I." for the "Fourth Industrial Revolution" -- Davos-speak for the corporate adoption of machine learning and other advanced technology -- and talk about the need to provide a safety net for people who lose their jobs as a result of automation.

But in private settings, including meetings with the leaders of the many consulting and technology firms whose pop-up storefronts line the Davos Promenade, these executives tell a different story: They are racing to automate their own work forces to stay ahead of the competition, with little regard for the impact on workers.

THE CULTURE WARS ARE A ROUT:

What ever happened to the Campus Free Speech Crisis? A year ago, universities were bracing for a new wave of Charlottesvilles. Administrators were predicting more protests, more deplatformings, and more out-of-control student activism. Indeed, the crisis was thought to be so acute that the White House convened a forum to address it, while state legislatures across the country scrambled to pass new laws and regulations.

What a difference a year makes. Rather than collapsing into chaos, 2018 was a year of relative quiet on college campuses. There were fewer deplatformings, fewer fired professors, and less violence compared to 2017. There was also more dialogue, greater respect for faculty free speech rights, and increased tolerance on both the right and the left. All of which raises the question: what went right? [...]

Finally, there are hopeful signs that a new culture of tolerance is taking hold on campus.

In colleges and universities across the country, students are forming new clubs and networks dedicated to respectful dialogue. Campus leaders are following suit, explicitly affirming the value of free speech and establishing protocols for its protection. Among conservatives in particular, there is a renewed emphasis on inviting speakers of substance, as opposed to those who seek merely to provoke.

For faculty, there are encouraging signs as well. Despite powerful campaigns to pressure universities into firing controversial professors, the vast majority of administrators held firm to principles of academic freedom. Indeed, a survey carried out by the conservative American Enterprise Institute found overwhelming support for academic freedom throughout the professoriate. While threats to faculty persist (including, ironically, to the survey's author), universities appear much less willing to placate their outraged critics than they did in 2017.

Why the new culture of tolerance? Some of it, I suspect, is due to the efforts of groups like PEN America, FIRE, and Heterodox Academy, which have been working tirelessly all year to promote dialogue and protect free speech. Fear of litigation is also likely to have made a difference. But I suspect the broader national political climate may be an even more important factor. Few observers truly appreciate how deeply the culture on campus is shaped by events taking place off it, which is why I suspect there is too little recognition that many of the events of 2016 and 2017, when concern about the "Free Speech Crisis" was at its height, were tied to the presidential election.

Trump's campaign and victory generated enormous consternation among many students and faculty, leading some to embrace confrontational forms of activism. In this, they were no different from activists off campus. But as that initial surge of panic has receded, so has the combative sense of urgency and alarm that drove campus activists when it was vivid and fresh. In other words, it is probably not that students are suddenly being won over by Mill's On Liberty. Nor is it that they now see the value of what Charlie Kirk or Ben Shapiro bring to campus. Rather, it is just that they are beginning to find them boring.

This might not sound like tolerance, but it is

Few people saw the improvements of 2018 coming. Interestingly, one of the few who did was social psychologist and Heterodox Academy co-founder Jonathan Haidt, who predicted in late 2017 that conditions on campus were poised to improve. Haidt got some of the details wrong. For example, he thought that there would be more free speech controversies in spring 2018, but there turned out to be fewer. But he was nevertheless on to something. The culture, tactics, and networks on campus have begun to change, and for the better.

NOT MAGIC, JUST HISTORY:

If you want evidence that being partisan rots the brain, take a look at Leftist commentary criticising 'neoliberals' for loving Harry Potter. A classic of the genre was published recently by one RJ Quinn, which sets out such a brain-bendingly idiotic misreading of JK Rowling's novels I could have wept. The hypothesis is that neoliberals love the Potter franchise because it presents a world in which "the magic of facts and reason and elite education were enough to vanquish the ills of society".

Well, thanks to my seven year old daughter, I've just reread all one million words of the Harry Potter novels, and I can tell you that Lord Voldemort is not defeated by facts, reason or elite education. He's defeated by love. 

AND THIS WAS HIS HONEYMOON PERIOD:

Trump now has the lowest two-year average approval rating of any president in over seven decades.

A new poll from ABC News/Washington Post shows Trump with an average approval rating of 38 percent during his first two years in office. That is 23 points lower than the average approval for the 12 presidents before him, 61 percent, going back to 1945 -- when the first approval polls for U.S. presidents were conducted.

Trump's immediate predecessor, President Barack Obama, averaged a 55 percent approval rating in the same two-year time period, and President Bill Clinton had 51 percent. President John F. Kennedy had the highest marks, averaging 74 percent support over his first two years in office.

The latest poll also marks a record low for Trump himself, not just all U.S. presidents in the history of polling. His January approval rating was 37 percent, down 4 points from October and down one point from his previous low in December.

NANCY SHOULDN'T HAVE UNBUCKLED THE CHOKE BALL:

#LOSER:

After Trump announced Friday a deal to reopen the government for three weeks without the $5.7 billion in border wall funding he has been demanding, the conservative commentator tweeted that he is now the "biggest wimp ever to serve as president."

TIME FOR YOUR PERP WALK:

Roger Stone, a longtime Republican strategist and sometime confidant of President Donald Trump, was arrested in Florida on Friday after being indicted for obstructing Special Counsel Robert Mueller's probe into possible coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia before the 2016 U.S. election.

The indictment goes to the heart of Mueller's investigation and could pose serious risk to Trump. It lays out how Stone, after leaving Trump's campaign in 2015, continued communicating regularly with unnamed senior campaign officials about an organization matching the description of WikiLeaks -- and how a "senior Trump campaign official was directed to contact Stone."

Those exchanges occurred in the summer of 2016, when WikiLeaks began publishing Democratic emails that Mueller has previously alleged were obtained by Russian government hackers in an effort to interfere with the presidential election. [...]

Mueller's indictment describes how a "high-ranking Trump campaign official" was in touch with Stone in October 2016 ahead of the release of additional damaging information about Clinton's campaign by WikiLeaks. That official was Stephen Bannon, according to a person familiar with the matter. Bannon, who later served as Trump's top strategist, texted Stone after the release to say, "Well done."

WE'RE GONNA NEED MORE SHOWER CURTAINS (via The Other Brother):

A new 3D-printing technique could render a three-dimensional object in minutes instead of hours--at up to 100 times current speeds. The experimental approach uses a vat of resin and some clever tricks with UV and blue LED lights (no lasers needed) to accelerate the printing process.

KILLING BABY HITLER:

We should be wary of drawing broad conclusions from the geographical differences, particularly because about seventy per cent of the respondents were male college graduates. Still, the cultural differences were stark. Players in Eastern-cluster countries were more likely than those in the Western and Southern countries to kill a young person and spare an old person (represented, in the game, by a stooped figure holding a cane). Players in Southern countries were more likely to kill a fat person (a figure with a large stomach) and spare an athletic person (a figure that appeared mid-jog, wearing shorts and a sweatband). Players in countries with high economic inequality (for example, in Venezuela and Colombia) were more likely to spare a business executive (a figure walking briskly, holding a briefcase) than a homeless person (a hunched figure with a hat, a beard, and patches on his clothes). In countries where the rule of law is particularly strong--like Japan or Germany--people were more likely to kill jaywalkers than lawful pedestrians. But, even with these differences, universal patterns revealed themselves. Most players sacrificed individuals to save larger groups. Most players spared women over men. Dog-lovers will be happy to learn that dogs were more likely to be spared than cats. Human-lovers will be disturbed to learn that dogs were more likely to be spared than criminals.

In its discussion, the paper skims over the uglier aspects of the study to identify "three strong preferences" that might provide a starting point for developing a standardized machine-ethics framework: sparing human lives, sparing more lives, and sparing young lives. The paper concludes with a soaring look into the future, and recasts machine ethics as a "unique opportunity to decide, as a community, what we believe to be right or wrong; and to make sure that machines, unlike humans, unerringly follow these moral preferences." But, when I asked Shariff what he thought of the human prejudice shown in the data, he laughed and said, "That suggests to us that we shouldn't leave decisions completely in the hands of the demos."

THE MYTH OF A DECENT TRUMPBOT:

The presidential son-in-law is "repeatedly assuring Trump that he can personally strike a deal with Democrats," reports the Post. Kushner, fired up by faith in his deal-making prowess, believes he is on the cusp of breaking apart the Democratic caucus and delivering a ransom to Trump. "A person familiar with Kushner's strategy" -- i.e., Kushner himself -- tells the Post "he has been focused on targeting Democrats who may want to break from leadership and has had positive conversations with many of them."

This sounds insane. Indeed, other advisers in the White House say it's insane. "They can't jam Pelosi. They never will. They think Nancy Pelosi will have to eat something. She's not going to have to eat anything." Another quote describes Kushner as "delusional."

UNDER VLAD'S THUMB:

Nearly three months after deeming Russia in violation of a chemical weapons law, the Trump administration has yet to impose tough new sanctions on Moscow required by the law and triggered by the poisoning last year of former Russian spy Sergei Skripal.

Even as the European Union moves ahead, punishing four Russian officials this week in connection with the poisoning, the U.S. has not moved forward with its own penalties. The delay comes as the Trump administration faces intense congressional scrutiny over a Treasury Department deal to lift sanctions on companies that had been controlled by Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska.

HE WON'T BE ON THE TICKET:

[A] key aspect of polarization has been somewhat overlooked: negative partisanship. Voters with this attitude are mobilized not by love of their own party so much as by hatred of the opposition party. Negative partisanship especially benefits the party that doesn't hold the presidency, because out-party voters find themselves living in a world where their political preferences are under constant assault, or at least appear to be so.

For the midterms, I devised a new forecasting model informed partly by this new paradigm of voter behavior. It was as accurate as the best in the forecasting business, and my predictions were made months ahead of the others. That's important, because it is already telling us what we can expect from the 2020 election. [...]

Motivated by the threat posed by the Trump administration, casual Democratic voters, especially college-educated women, have been activated since Mr. Trump's election and will remain activated so long as the threat he presents to them remains. And the complacent Democratic electorate of the 2010 and 2014 congressional midterms as well as the 2016 presidential election is gone (for now). It has been replaced by a galvanized Democratic electorate that will produce the same structural advantage for Democrats that manifested in the 2018 midterms.

The surge won't be uniform. Democrats will win big in more urban, more diverse, better-educated and more liberal-friendly states and will continue to lose ground in other states like Missouri. Although Mr. Trump may well win Ohio and perhaps even Florida again, it is not likely he will carry Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania in 2020. Look at the midterm performance of statewide Democrats in those states. And his troubles with swing voters, whom he won in 2016, will put Arizona, North Carolina and perhaps even Georgia in play for Democrats and effectively remove Virginia, Colorado, Nevada and New Hampshire from the list of swing states.

#LOSER:

THUS THE CONFUSION OF THE TRUMPBOTS:

In a new study published Thursday in the journal Science, political scientists surveyed the inhabitants of this Internet pocket around the time of the last presidential election, from Aug. 1 to Dec. 6, 2016. They found that people who shared fake news were more likely to be older and more conservative. "Super-sharers" were responsible for the bulk of fake news, soaking their Twitter feeds in falsehoods with the gusto of kids with water pistols. They were enthusiastic communicators, tweeting an average of 70 times a day, and had a very limited reach.

Only 0.1 percent of users shared 80 percent of the fake news. "And almost all exposure is among 1 percent of Twitter users," said David Lazer, a political-science professor at Northeastern University and an author of the new report.

A TIME FOR CHOOSING:

As the leader of the Catholic Church in the 50 counties of Central and Eastern Kentucky, I join the Diocese of Covington and other Catholic leaders in apologizing in the wake of this incident.

I am ashamed that the actions of Kentucky Catholic high school students have become a contradiction of the very reverence for human life that the march is supposed to manifest. As such, I believe that U.S. Catholics must take a look at how our support of the fundamental right to life has become separated from the even more basic truth of the dignity of each human person.

Without engaging the discussion about the context of the viral video or placing the blame entirely on these adolescents, it astonishes me that any students participating in a pro-life activity on behalf of their school and their Catholic faith could be wearing apparel sporting the slogans of a president who denigrates the lives of immigrants, refugees and people from countries that he describes with indecent words and haphazardly endangers with life-threatening policies.

#LOSER:

Republican senators, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.), warned the vice president that prolonging the shutdown is not a smart political strategy, in hopes of sending a clear message to President Trump that he needs to resolve the crisis as soon as possible.

Lawmakers vented their irritation to Pence shortly before six GOP senators defected to vote for a Democratic-backed bill that would open the government without funding Trump's proposed border wall.

THE GENTLEMAN'S C LIVES:

Jared Kushner's application for a top secret clearance was rejected by two career White House security specialists after an FBI background check raised concerns about potential foreign influence on him -- but their supervisor overruled the recommendation and approved the clearance, two sources familiar with the matter told NBC News.

The official, Carl Kline, is a former Pentagon employee who was installed as director of the personnel security office in the Executive Office of the President in May 2017. Kushner's was one of at least 30 cases in which Kline overruled career security experts and approved a top secret clearance for incoming Trump officials despite unfavorable information, the two sources said. They said the number of rejections that were overruled was unprecedented -- it had happened only once in the three years preceding Kline's arrival.

THE PATHOLOGY TO THE WHITE HOUSE:

On Day 34 of the government shutdown, with federal workers set to miss their second straight paycheck on Friday, the Trump administration was prominently represented by two denizens of Wall Street: Wilbur Ross and Larry Kudlow.

Ross, the commerce secretary, on Thursday morning bemoaned air traffic controllers, who he incorrectly said were calling in sick, and added in a CNBC interview, "I don't really quite understand why" federal workers were visiting food banks. Instead, he suggested they apply for loans from banks.

Then came Kudlow, the top White House economic adviser, who called the shutdown "just a glitch." He went on in a midday gaggle with reporters: "Am I out of touch? I don't think I'm out of touch. I'm addressing the problem. I've met with my individual staff members and God bless them. They're working for free. They're volunteering. But they do it because they believe government service is honorable and they believe in President Trump."

The twin appearances underscored a tone-deafness that has appeared more pronounced in the Trump administration as the plight of about 800,000 unpaid federal workers worsens. And it has become a fresh vulnerability for Democrats to exploit at a moment when polls show Trump already losing the public opinion battle over the shutdown.

"Is this the 'Let them eat cake' kind of attitude?" House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) asked Thursday. "Or, 'Call your father for money'? Or, 'This is character-building for you. It's all going to end up very well just so long as you don't get your paychecks'?" [...]

Peter Wehner, a former official in the past three Republican administrations and a Trump critic, said the president is "lacking an empathy gene. This is a man who hasn't shown empathy throughout his entire life, so to expect him to show empathy toward federal workers who are suffering is just not going to happen."

LIKE LARRY HOLMES VS MARVIS FRAZIER:

.@SenatorBennet responds to @Sentedcruz: "These crocodile tears that the Senator from Texas is crying for first responders are too hard for me to take." pic.twitter.com/g4FBxdfiGY

— CSPAN (@cspan) January 24, 2019

NO WONDER THE rIGHT HATES HIM:

George Soros launched a searing attack on China's president Xi Jinping, singling out advancements in artificial intelligence in the hands of repressive regimes as a "mortal threat" to societies around the world.

In a provocative speech, the billionaire philanthropist and proponent of open societies said China was not the only authoritarian regime in the world but it was the wealthiest, strongest and technologically most advanced.

"This makes Xi Jinping the most dangerous opponent of open societies," he said.

LIKE TEAM SPIRIT DAY AT COVINGTON CATHOLIC!:

Michael Ertel was recently appointed Florida's Secretary of State by Republican Governor Ron DeSantis. He lasted less than a month in that position. Ertel resigned Thursday afternoon just hours after photographs surfaced of him wearing blackface at a Halloween party in 2005.

Ertel's costume also featured fake breasts and a bandana. His t-shirt identified him as a "Katrina victim"-just two months after the destructive Category 5 hurricane had all but laid waste to the Big Easy's Ninth Ward and created thousands of refugees.

REPRESSION WAS EXACTLY WHAT OPPONENTS OF THE BROTHERHOOD WANTED:

"No one imagined that the situation would be this bad," Maher, an engineer who is also studying for a degree in political science, told Reuters. "Even the right to gather in a crowd or to express an opinion is not available."

President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, who came to power determined to crush the Muslim Brotherhood after a year in office that saw the economy suffer, has also targeted secular activists, including many prominent figures of the January 25 uprising.

Many have fled the country, others are in prison while a third group have been cowed into silence.

AND SHE DIDN'T GIVE HIM A SAFETY WORD...:

The first month of Pelosi's return to the speakership has thus far served as a pretty resounding affirmation of her leadership and political acumen. And Wednesday epitomized it.

At the start of the day, we got a CBS News poll that tested the popularity of Washington's leaders. Pelosi scored a 39 percent approval rating. That was shy of her disapproval -- 50 percent -- but it was significantly better than Trump's split (36-59) and far better than Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell's (R-Ky.) 25-55. It also appears to be her best mark in a poll since the last time she was speaker a decade ago.

The poll also notably tested her head-to-head with Trump, asking who was doing a better job with shutdown negotiations. Forty-seven percent chose Pelosi, while just 35 percent chose Trump. It also affirmed previous polling that showed the American people blame Trump and the Republicans for the shutdown by more than a 20-point margin -- the kind of margin that has forced Republicans to fold during past shutdowns.

And Pelosi's edge in the shutdown fight was only reinforced as the day went on. Early Wednesday afternoon, Trump made the highly questionable decision of telling Pelosi he would deliver the State of the Union address next week from the House chamber, even though Pelosi has raised shutdown-related objections to it. But Pelosi quickly sent a letter back saying she would not extend the invitation, and Trump, rather remarkably, immediately backed down. Pelosi had called his bluff.

UNITY TO WHAT?:

Tall and lanky, Guaido is known for his love of his hometown baseball team, the Sharks of La Guaira, and salsa dancing. Unlike many opposition allies, who are criticized for their blue-blooded roots, Guaido has humble origins. The son of a commercial pilot and a homemaker, he is one of seven children who grew up in the small port city near Caracas.

In 1999, his family survived mudslides that destroyed much of Vargas and killed thousands. "Seeing your daily life wiped out from one day to the next forced us to detach ourselves from material things, but brought us closer," Guaido told the newspaper El Nacional last month.

Guaido's partner is Fabiana Rosales, a fellow student leader. Their daughter, Miranda, named after a forerunner to South American independence hero Simon Bolivar, was born amid the 2017 wave of protests, during which her father was hit in the neck by plastic buckshot and broke his hand in clashes with police.

It was just four years ago that Guaido entered the National Assembly. He became its chief due to "a series of unfortunate events" after peers were arrested or forced into exile, said Carlos Romero, a political scientist at the Central University of Venezuela in Caracas.

Guaido was sworn in as the head of the assembly on Jan. 5, the week before Maduro's inauguration for a second term as president. Maduro began the six-year term in defiance of domestic foes and the more than 60 nations that refuse to recognize his 2018 election.

In his short career, Guaido has been applauded for building unity among fellow legislators. Now his challenge is to do the same across the country, channeling the desperate desire for change within the limits of a regime intent on suppressing dissent. "The situation has catapulted him into the spotlight," Romero said.

REGULATOR-IN-CHIEF:

Ever since President Trump took office, his appointees have directed federal agencies to draft regulations meant to delay or reverse policies of the Obama administration.

Nearly all the proposals have been tripped up by the same arcane 1946 law governing administrative policies. Just last week, two signature administration actions -- to add a question about citizenship status to the 2020 census, and to allow employers to avoid covering birth control for their workers if they object to it -- have been stymied by rulings under the law.

That law, the Administrative Procedure Act, was written to make sure that the executive branch followed some basic steps when it wanted to change policies. Over time, courts have given it additional teeth by requiring regulators to follow certain processes and conduct certain analyses before making changes. The Trump administration appears to have repeatedly failed to hew to those standards.

"I think there was a lot of corner cutting by the administration," said Josh Blackman, an associate professor at the South Texas College of Law in Houston, who has been critical of shortcuts in the regulatory process by both the Trump and Obama administrations.

An analysis by the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University School of Law shows that more than 90 percent of court challenges to major Trump deregulatory actions have been successful so far. By the institute's count, 30 big rules have been challenged, and the courts have found for the litigants 28 times.

#LOSER:

A strong majority of Americans blame President Donald Trump for the record-long government shutdown and reject his primary rationale for a border wall, according to a new poll that shows the turmoil in Washington is dragging his approval rating to its lowest level in more than a year.

Overall, 34 percent of Americans approve of Trump's job performance in a survey conducted by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. That's down from 42 percent a month earlier and nears the lowest mark of his two-year presidency. 

"As the Shutdown was going on, Nancy Pelosi asked me to give the State of the Union Address," Mr. Trump wrote on Twitter shortly after 11 p.m., hours after he had said he would look for another venue for the speech. "I agreed. She then changed her mind because of the Shutdown, suggesting a later date. This is her prerogative - I will do the Address when the Shutdown is over."

WHAT WALL?:

Colorado's Republican U.S. senator says he would vote yes on a package of bills to reopen the federal government and thinks his Republican colleagues should do the same. [...]

Gardner, who is facing a challenging re-election campaign in 2020, is one of two Republican senators who publicly split with their party Thursday on whether funding for the border wall needs to be part of the deal to reopen the federal government. Susan Collins of Maine, also up for re-election in two years, was the other.

THE ACCOUNTABILITY PARTY:

 Representative Sheila Jackson Lee, facing fallout from a lawsuit claiming she fired an aide who said she was sexually assaulted by a supervisor at the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation, said on Wednesday she had decided to resign as the foundation's chairwoman.

Ms. Jackson Lee, a Texas Democrat in her 13th term, also stepped aside temporarily from an important House Judiciary subcommittee chairmanship, the committee said.

Ms. Jackson Lee made the decision to step aside from both roles as pressure was growing within her own party to account for the claims in a Jan. 11 lawsuit brought by a woman who worked in her congressional office and who said she was sexually assaulted by a Black Caucus Foundation supervisor. 

IT'S LIKE HAVING JIMMY CARTER BACK IN OFFICE, LOSING TO IRAN:

 An international conference in Poland next month that the Donald Trump administration had intended to showcase global unity and resolve to isolate Iran is instead highlighting wariness among US allies.

European allies are scrambling for excuses to send lower-level diplomats instead of their foreign ministers to the Feb. 13-14 Warsaw conference and also are looking for ways to dilute the agenda while not outright snubbing the United States, European sources said.

SO MUCH FOR RUM, SODOMY AND THE LASH:

In September 2017, two Norwegian firms, Yara and Kongsberg, announced plans to build the world's first fully electric and autonomous container ship, the Yara Birkeland, by 2020. In 2018, Kongsberg teamed with another Norwegian firm, Wilhelmsen, to form the world's first shipping company dedicated to autonomous vessels. In November, the ferry Folgefonn, also from Norway, underwent successful auto-docking, undocking and dock-to-dock tests, all controlled remotely, demonstrating how autonomously ships of the future might function, even when in port.

In the Netherlands, a consortium of 20 maritime businesses launched a project in December to study and demonstrate the potential of autonomous maritime transport. In Germany, the Fraunhofer Center for Maritime Logistics and Services is designing a remote-control tugboat that could help large, manned ships dock and undock. And the European Commission is co-sponsoring a collaborative project called MUNIN (Maritime Unmanned Navigation through Intelligence in Networks) that's developing technology for unmanned vessels.

China's Maritime Safety Administration and Wuhan University of Technology are developing uncrewed multifunctional maritime ships, the country's latest step in developing advanced transport solutions. And British automobile giant Rolls-Royce plans to build a remotely operated local vessel by 2020. By 2035, the company aims to launch autonomous, unmanned oceangoing ships.

These plans are altering the face of shipping, shaped for centuries by sailors and explorers whose actions formed the bedrock of trade and transport. But increasingly, say observers and industry insiders, autonomous, unmanned commercial ships represent an unavoidable future -- one where human errors can be avoided, financial margins improved because of fewer wages and lower fuel costs for lighter vessels, and the impact on the environment reduced.

"The magnitude of cost-saving potential [when it comes to autonomous and unmanned vessels] is huge," says Oskar Levander, senior vice president of concepts and innovation at Rolls-Royce Marine.

Lives can also be saved with unmanned ships. According to insurance company Allianz, 2,712 people died because of maritime accidents in 2017. In all, 94 ships were lost that year to accidents; 1,129 have been lost over the past decade. "One of the main advantages of unmanned vehicles is that it allows for operations that do not put human lives at risk," says Richard V. Lawson, CEO of the Washington-based International Ocean Science and Technology Industry Association.

A SIMPLE GOD IS MORE COMFORTING BUT LESS INTERESTING:

What you found is that Allah is more merciful, consistently so, than in the Bible. Is that accurate?

Yes, it is. A friend asked me, what was the biggest surprise you discovered in writing the book? I said, Allah is more merciful than Yahweh. Understand, we're talking about the same being, but the presentation (in the Quran) stresses not just Allah's mercy, but also the themes of repentance and forgiveness. I should say, these episodes that involve biblical material probably are no more than a quarter or a fifth of the overall material in the Quran. So, my comment that Allah is more merciful than Yahweh is confined to that portion of the Quran.

I'll give two examples. Adam and Eve in the Quranic version immediately repent of their sin and throw themselves on the mercy of Allah and Allah forgives them on the spot. They do have to leave paradise, but if they live a good life then at the Last Judgment they will ascend to the heavenly garden. Adam and Eve in the Bible never do repent.

Similarly, the Israelites, just after crossing the Red Sea, create the Golden Calf and God decides to exterminate them as punishment. Moses dissuades him from that, but still there's horrendous violence imposed on them, a mass slaughter of the lead offenders. In the Quran, the Israelites immediately repent and Allah forgives them. The tablets of the law are not broken. In something approaching efficiency, the Israelites get over it, Allah gets over it and everyone moves on to the Promised Land.

You point out in your book that the biblical idea of humankind created in God's image doesn't really exist in the Quran. A lot of interfaith leaders might be surprised to hear that.

Yes, that's right. Jews pray to "Avinu Malkeinu," "our Father, our King," and "Our Father, who art in heaven," is the beginning of the Lord's Prayer in Christianity. But there isn't a similar kind of rhetoric or emphasis in Islam.

Allah is at pains to say that Jesus is not his son, and actually there's a scene in which Allah and Jesus are speaking and Jesus explicitly repudiates any notion that during his life on earth he ever claimed such as a blasphemous thing. No, he is not the son of God. God had no son, or spouse, and no one really closely associated with him.

This has the effect of making Allah a more awe-inspiring, more august being. Christian theology itself sometimes uses the phrase that God is the "wholly other." That phrase, "wholly other," is a pretty apt description of Allah in the Quran.

It appears the theology of the Quran is fairly straightforward in comparison with the Bible. Would you agree?

Yes. I make the point that the Hebrew Bible came into being over a thousand years. The Quran came into being as 20 years of revelation to the Prophet Muhammad from the year 610 to the year 632. So, there is much greater consistency in the portrayal of the character of Allah. He is more moral in a way. He's more exacting, but always in a predictable manner. Of course, the complexity that Christianity has by having the deity be both divine and human at the same time is also completely absent. So, by being "wholly other" Allah can be wholly simple. That provides a kind of appeal, a kind of fascination, but it isn't a fascination of complication and conflict.

AND TANKING LIKE DUKAKIS:

The Morning Consult-Politico poll finds that "57 percent of registered voters disapprove of Trump's job performance -- more than any other survey in Trump's two years in office -- while 40 percent approve. The 17-percentage-point deficit matches two previous lows of the Trump presidency." Sixty percent of independents now disapprove of his performance. As time goes on, more Americans blame Trump for the shutdown ("49 percent of voters [say] he is responsible in the latest survey -- up 6 points since the shutdown began").

The CBS News poll has even worse numbers for Trump. In that survey, "Seven in 10 Americans don't think the issue of a border wall is worth a government shutdown, which they say is now having a negative impact on the country. ... Mr. Trump's overall approval rating has dipped three points from November to 36 percent today. Fifty-nine percent of Americans now disapprove of the job he is doing - a high for his presidency, although just one point above his previous high." To add insult to injury, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) gets higher marks (47 percent) than Trump (35 percent) in handling the shutdown. Only 39 percent think Trump cares a lot or some about people like them; 53 percent say the same of Democrats. On the wall, 61 percent think the border can be secured without it, while 71 percent say it is not worth a shutdown.

The irony here -- or is it karma? -- is that Trump's biggest cheerleaders in the right-wing media (e.g. Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity) and his hardcore anti-immigrant adviser Stephen Miller who egged him on are now responsible for the worst political debacle of his presidency, one that has erased any residue of presidential power. He's now trapped, waiting for a permission slip from the right-wing media chorus to capitulate -- or watch his support and any hope for legislative accomplishments evaporate.

ALWAYS BET ON THE dEEP sTATE:

[A]t the halfway point in this Presidential cycle, it is also worth asking how successful these attacks have been--and the answer is more encouraging than is sometimes acknowledged. Trump has undoubtedly disrupted the American system of government, but he hasn't upended it. And, in many ways, his Administration is already losing steam. With his approval rating languishing at a historic low despite a vibrant economy, and with the Democrats now in charge of the House of Representatives, he no longer controls the legislative agenda. After all the personnel departures, he is finding it hard to fill key vacancies. With polls showing that a majority of the public blames him for the shutdown, he has been forced to sue for peace. (According to the Times, he told Mick Mulvaney, his acting chief of staff, "We are getting crushed.") Although there is a long way to go before November, 2020, Trump's reëlection prospects don't look good. In an NPR poll that came out last week, fifty-seven per cent of registered voters said that they would definitely vote against Trump if he runs again.

From the beginning, it was clear that Trump's narcissism, amorality, disregard for the truth, and authoritarian tendencies presented a grave threat. The question was how much he would be reined in by the fabled checks and balances that the Founders erected to prevent the emergence of an overweening Presidency--the split between the executive and the legislature, the independent judiciary, the free press, regular elections to elicit the will of the people. To express it another way, the question was: Who was the more powerful, Donald Trump or Thomas Jefferson? So far, Jefferson is winning on points. For the most part, the institutions of American democracy have withstood the assaults they have been subjected to, frustrating and infuriating Trump in equal measure.

BRA-CAGO:

'59ERS:

WALL-LESS:

Even by the standards set by pianist, composer, bandleader, and social activist Arturo O'Farrill, Fandango at the Wall, a double-CD with the 18-piece Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra, qualifies as personal. A New York City resident, the 58-year-old O'Farrill was born in Mexico City, and he's been openly critical of President Trump's attempts to build a wall along the United States' southern border. Inspired by retired Mexican librarian Jorge Francisco Castillo's annual Fandango Fronterizo Festiva--a burgeoning event that's brought musicians to play through the meshed wall separating Tijuana from San Diego for a decade--O'Farrill upped the global ante for this recording by performing with his orchestra at several locations along the border, aided by various special guests, many of whom are from countries targeted by Trump's travel ban. [...]

Horns, stringed instruments, and guest French-Chilean vocalist Ana Tijoux singing and rapping in Spanish on "Somos Sur" tear down perceived walls between jazz, classical, hip-hop and traditional Mexican music, while Mexican stars like the singing, violin-playing Villalobos Brothers (on the dramatic "El Pijul") and vocalist/jarana player Patricio Hidalgo (a romping "Conga Patria") also get spotlight time. Disc one's centerpiece is O'Farrill's three-part "Invisible Suite," defying categorization and featuring a banner Carter solo, the New Haven String Quartet, and the Young People's Chorus of New York City.

WE CAN'T GET RID OF DRIVERS FAST ENOUGH:

OPPORTUNITY KNOCKING:

Everything started to change when Keynesian intellectual hegemony broke down because of the economic turbulence caused by stagflation in the 1970s. In 1983, Donald Stuart, Jr. founded the Liberal Institute in the city of Rio de Janeiro with the purpose of publicizing the ideas of the Austrian School. The Liberal Institute was the first in a series of think tanks which emerged at the beginning of the 21st century dedicated to defend the market economy. Guedes, for instance, is one of the founders of the pro free-market Millennium Institute.

Like everything else in Brazil, intellectual revolutions are slow. It was the economic chaos engendered by the erratic policies of Dilma Rousseff's leftist government (2011-16) that provided the countless free-market advocates with an opportunity to move new ideas to the center of the political debate. Surprisingly, it was Bolsonaro, a former champion of big government, who decided to adopt economic liberalism as his platform.

Nevertheless, the influence of libertarian think tanks goes beyond the political discussion. Today, they are providing the government with new names and new thinking to help restructure Brazil. For example, the new Minister of Education, the philosopher Ricardo Velez Rodrigues, is a member of the Liberal Institute. Salim Mattar, who is leading the privatization program of the new government, was in the Institute's executive council. The Bank of Brazil, the country's largest public bank, is now headed by Rubem Novaes, another member of the Institute. Adolfo Sachsida, secretary of Economic Policy, and Roberto Ellery, who was part of the Bolsonaro's transition team, are two other prominent members of the Liberal Institute.

The popularity that libertarian ideas have gained in Brazil and the central role that many adherents of this doctrine hold in the new government do not mean that libertarianism has won. On the contrary, it means that libertarians have been given the opportunity to show that the virtues of the free market go beyond theory and can be proved in practice.

Jair Bolsonaro is not a libertarian, but a conservative populist who has been converted to a free-market apostolate by the immediate needs of a country that has lived, for the last four years, through an economic nightmare animated by bad ideas. The success of libertarians will be directly associated with both their ability in reshaping public policies and in delivering positive financial results to people that are tired of unemployment and loss of purchasing power.

LEAVING THE COVINGTON BOYS WITH A CHOICE TO MAKE:

One of the reporters flying with the Pope to Panama told him he had recently seen a barrier designed to deter migrants that juts out into the Pacific Ocean in San Diego, the western edge of the U.S. border with Mexico, and described it as a "folly".

"Fear makes us crazy," Francis replied.

PUBLIC OBSTRUCTION OF JUSTICE IS OBSTRUCTION OF JUSTICE:

Michael D. Cohen, the former personal lawyer and fixer for President Trump, has indefinitely postponed his congressional testimony, his lawyer said in a statement on Wednesday, citing Mr. Trump's verbal attacks on Mr. Cohen's family in the days since he scheduled his appearance on Capitol Hill. [...]

Mr. Trump has repeatedly suggested on Twitter that Mr. Cohen's family members be investigated. In a recent interview with Jeanine Pirro, the Fox News host and one of Mr. Trump's preferred interviewers, he called for Mr. Cohen's father-in-law to be investigated without citing details.

A PEOPLE SO GENEROUS...:

The majority of the poll's respondents, 57 percent, believes it's likely Russia "has compromising information" on Trump, while 31 percent of those polled disagree.

THE FACE OF TERROR:

TRUMPONOMICS:

"The trade war has been very damaging for the U.S. agricultural economy," said David MacLennan, chief executive of U.S. food and agricultural giant Cargill Inc, which announced worse-than-expected results out of China earlier in January.

"The longer this goes on, the worse it is," he told Reuters.

Foreign investment in the United States, which includes cross-border mergers and acquisitions and intra-company loans, fell about 18 percent in 2018 from the prior year, according to the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD).

That is close to the 19 percent year-on-year drop in foreign investment globally. But it is notable given the deregulation and tax cuts that might have otherwise fed into inward investment.

MAYBE HE WAS COUNTING ROOM & BOARD?:

"Never in the history of this country has it been legal to make people work for free but that's what's happening to federal employees. This can never happen again," Welch tweeted while linking to a VTDigger article about his bill.

Welch, a seven-term congressman, was quickly reminded that, actually, there was this one other time in our nation's history where it was "legal to make people work for free."

OPEN FOR BUSINESS:

Brazil's new right-wing President Jair Bolsonaro threw out the welcome mat for big business and foreign investors on Tuesday, telling a summit of CEOs in Davos that his government would make the country one of the top 50 in which to do business.

Bolsonaro said he would work to open up Brazil's relatively closed economy, reduce and simplify taxes, privatize state companies and give his new justice minister the tools to tackle corruption.

#LOSER:

THE 7% SOLUTION:

Only 7 percent of American voters surveyed support giving Donald Trump funding for his Mexico border wall to end the U.S. government shutdown, according to a new poll.

CHE SHIRTS FOR THE rIGHT:

MAGA hats, however, hold special significance for some middle and high school students. Travel to any tourist destination in DC and you'll see swaths of school groups, many of them wearing hats purchased at nearby souvenir shops. It's not a coincidence that most of the kids wearing them happen to be white: All over the country, there have been reports of students in MAGA hats bullying their Latino, Middle Eastern, Black, Asian, and Jewish classmates (BuzzFeed found 81 instances in one year between 2016 and 2017) on the basis of race and religion.

Students wearing the caps, like the group from Covington, often repeat the slogans that the president built his campaign around. "Fake news" and "build the wall" became their own memes, pithy phrases tailor-made to be shouted by large groups of people. But just like the hat and its slogan, these phrases have far-reaching consequences. The press, and truth itself, is under direct attack from the president, and Trump's demands for $5 billion of funding for his border wall has now contributed to the longest government shutdown in US history, which so far is estimated to have cost the American economy more than the cost of the proposed fence.

These are problems, however, for adults to worry about and for kids to make fun of. In a 2017 report on the draw that MAGA hats hold for teens, Hilary George-Parkin noted that the more that adults wring their hands about the potential dangers of Trumpist symbolism, the easier it is for kids to laugh about how dramatic they're being. "I think kids think of [MAGA hats] as more of a joke," a 14-year-old named Julia from New Jersey told her, "and adults don't."

Plus, the more taboo the hats become, the more power they hold, at least from a fashion standpoint. Teens have always been quick to embrace clothing that adults find distasteful or uncomfortable, from visible underwear to rude novelty T-shirts. For some teens who wear MAGA hats, it's no more than a fashion trend. "I only got it because everyone else was," Julia added. "I doubt I'd wear it after the trip because I'm not really much of a hat person anyway."

But for those for whom the phrase "Make America Great Again" refers to only a small slice of who or what "America" is, it isn't just a hat. One Muslim American mother whose son went on a middle school trip to DC in which "every single white kid besides maybe one or two" returned wearing a MAGA hat said that the red caps became a familiar marker of exclusionary preteen politics.

"I think 12-year-old boys use it as a form of bullying -- identifying themselves as part of this group to the exclusion of others just for the fun of it," she told George-Parkin. "That's what it seemed like to me. Us over here with the red hats, and you over there ... you're not even an individual anymore. Now you're just one of the brown kids and you're not one of us."

#LOSER:

President Donald Trump's disapproval rating is at an all-time high amid a historically long partial government shutdown and concerns about the president's relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin, according to a new POLITICO/Morning Consult poll.

Nearly 6-in-10 voters -- 57 percent -- disapprove of Trump's job performance, compared to the 40 percent that approve. In addition, 54 percent of voters blame Trump and Republicans on Capitol Hill for the government shutdown. 

NO MARKET FOR ANTI-CONSTITUTIONALISM:

Since its conception, the Federalist Society has had one consistent and very graspable ideological backbone: that the Constitution should be interpreted as having the meaning it had when it was enacted. So-called originalism gives the Federalists a catchy intellectual hook. The agents of change in American law, they argue, should be legislators, not judges; that's how the Constitution intended it. Hence the famous proclamation of Justice Antonin Scalia--the first faculty adviser to one of the Federalist Society's founding chapters at the University of Chicago--that the Constitution is "dead, dead, dead."

The Federalists' mantras are succinct and understandable: The law should be neutral. It is the duty of the judiciary to say what the law is, not what it should be. Whatever its theoretical weaknesses, says Columbia Law School's Jamal Greene, "originalism's simplicity is one of its chief selling points." And in the abstract, it's widely popular: In one study by Greene and his colleagues, 92 percent of people expressed support for the idea that a good Supreme Court judge should "uphold the values of those who wrote our Constitution two hundred years ago."

Standing behind the original meaning of the Constitution gives the Federalists a deeply appealing claim to a neutral, timeless American tradition. It is also complete nonsense, according to scholars who've looked at the rulings of "originalist" judges: Those judges tend to issue politically conservative rulings regardless of the larger principles at stake. Judge Richard Posner, no liberal, has ridiculed Scalia's claim that originalism and the related doctrine of textualism offer greater certainty than competing principles, such as interpreting the Constitution as an evolving document. Originalism, for all its pretenses, is no more than a fig leaf for injecting politics into the judiciary.

Judicial neutrality may be a fiction, but it's a useful one--and an idea for which liberals just haven't found a response. The Federalist Society's claim that the law should be agnostic on policy consequences is seductive to law students and lawyers; the invocation of the Constitution gives it rhetorical roots in the foundations of the Republic. What do liberals have to offer on their side?

One of their counterweights is law school itself: There's no question that law school faculties are overwhelmingly liberal, but when it comes to delivering results on the federal bench, the academy is not the same thing as an organization with a focused mission and a budget. The ACS has a mission, true, but it can be a little hard to pin down. Its website says the organization "works for positive change" on "important legal and constitutional issues including access to courts, voting, equality, and many other issues directly affecting people's lives." As judicial philosophies go, it couldn't be more diffuse. And the focus on outcomes rather than first principles immediately colors it with politics.

But the liberal legal academy hasn't come up with an easily digestible rival idea, or a readily comprehensible way to demonstrate to the American people that the idea of "fidelity to the Constitution" means less than the politics of the judge who professes it.

TAX COLLECTOR FOR THE ETHNOSTATE:

[I]RS employees across the country -- some in coordinated protest, others out of financial necessity -- won't be clocking in, according to Tony Reardon, president of the National Treasury Employees Union, and several local union officials. The work action is widespread and includes employees from a processing center in Ogden, Utah, to the Brookhaven campus on New York's Long Island.

The move is the leading edge of pushback from within the IRS, and it signals the potential for civil servants to take actions that could slow or cripple government functions as the shutdown's political stalemate continues in Washington. U.S. Department of Agriculture meat inspectors have begun to call in sick, Transportation Security Administration sickouts at airports have been rising, and federal law enforcement agencies say the shutdown is increasing stress among agents and affecting investigations.

"They are definitely angry that they're not getting paid, and maybe some of them are angry enough to express their anger this way," said Reardon, whose union represents 150,000 employees at 33 federal agencies and departments. "But these employees live paycheck to paycheck, and they can't scrape up the dollars to get to work or pay for child care." [...]

Scott, who has worked at the IRS for four years, says she typically helps as many as 50 people a day with their returns during tax season, including U.S. troops stationed overseas. She said the shutdown could delay refunds for months, and without employees like her on the job, "it's going to be a disaster all around."

Many of the IRS employees who are choosing not to come to work despite getting called back are taking advantage of a provision in the union contract that allows them to miss work if they suffer a "hardship" during a shutdown, according to the labor groups.

SOME THINGS CAN'T BE WHITE-WASHED:

The statute of limitations does not apply only to white public figures in America. The great artist Paul Robeson (1898-1976) was not only a Communist with Soviet ties but an outright Stalin apologist. In a particularly infamous episode, he publicly denied the persecution of Soviet Jews during Stalin's "anti-cosmopolitan" campaign after a 1949 trip to Moscow--even though his friend Itzhak Feffer, a poet who was later executed, discreetly told him the truth during his visit and pleaded for help. Robeson's Communist sympathies cost him dearly in his lifetime, destroying his once-stellar career during the Cold War. Yet today, he has been recognized with many honors, from a U.S. Post Office stamp to a star on Hollywood's Walk of Fame to several high schools and community or campus centers named after him (including the Paul Robeson Cultural Center at my own alma mater, New Jersey's Rutgers University, of which he was also an alumnus).

Should these honors be denied because of Robeson's terribly flawed politics? I don't believe so. For one, Robeson was a true giant of both black American culture and American culture, period. He was also a complicated and tragic figure, held hostage by his conviction that discrediting Communism would hurt the struggle for black empowerment in the United States at a time when racism was openly institutionalized in large parts of the country. Robeson's relationship with the Soviet regime illustrates his moral conflicts: Despite his public stance in the West, he tried to make a statement against anti-Semitism on his 1949 Soviet trip by speaking in tribute to Soviet Jews and singing a wartime resistance song in Yiddish during his nationally broadcast concert in Moscow. Later, he reportedly became persona non grata in the USSR after privately confronting Khrushchev about anti-Jewish discrimination.

The contrast to Davis, who reached adulthood in an America that offered vastly more opportunities for black political participation, is stark. There is no indication that she ever showed any concern about the human rights situation in the Soviet bloc--not only on behalf of "pro-capitalist" dissidents, but even on behalf of, say, the Russian feminists who were jailed or forced to emigrate after launching an underground publication challenging the Soviet propaganda myth of full gender equality in the USSR, or the gays brutally persecuted for their sexuality in the Soviet Union and Cuba. (In 1973, Soviet Georgian film director Sergei Parajanov was tried for "homosexual relations" and sentenced to five years in labor camps; several Western communists, including French writer Louis Aragon, interceded with the Kremlin and probably helped secure the director's early release. Davis, who had very real influence with the Soviet regime at the time, said nothing.) Nor has she shown any regret or remorse since.

It's also unclear just what it is that Davis accomplished for the black community. Despite being dubbed a "civil rights icon," her only involvement in the civil rights movement of the Martin Luther King era happened when she was a teenage high school student; she spent most of the early 1960s studying in Europe with radical mentors like Herbert Marcuse, then threw herself into work for the Communist Party long past the time when it played an actual role in the fight for black equality. She was also involved with the Black Panthers, a violent radical group whose primary victims were fellow African-Americans such as Sam Napier, the distribution manager of the party newspaper, killed with unspeakable brutality by a rival Panther faction, and 19-year-old Alex Rackley, tortured and murdered on mistaken suspicion of being an FBI informant. A 1969 speech Davis gave at a Black Panther rally in Oakland, California included words of solidarity for the "brothers and sisters in Connecticut"--the men and women awaiting trial for Rackley's horrific murder.

While Davis was active on the far-left fringes of black politics in the 1970s and 1980s, her most notable role at the time was being the vice-presidential candidate of the Communist Party, a Soviet-funded outfit supremely irrelevant to the interests of African-Americans. It is notable, too, that while some black American Communists such as Josephine Wyatt left the party in the 1980s after its leader Gus Hall pursued a deliberate course of de-emphasizing the "black national question," Davis remained loyal.

LYING FOR DONALD ISN'T ALL IT'S CRACKED UP TO BE?:

REALLY?:

[T]here's one Trump-Moscow link where the emerging evidence is already as damning as it is disturbing.

During much, if not all, of Trump's campaign he sought to enrich himself by pursuing a luxury hotel-condominium-office deal in Russia known as Trump Tower Moscow.

And as a candidate, Trump repeatedly misled or lied to voters about his business with Russia. "I have nothing to do with Russia," he told reporters in July 2016. "I don't deal there," he said during the Oct. 9 presidential debate.

The truth is, Trump had coveted a lucrative hotel project in Russia -- whether to build one or license his name to be emblazoned on a skyscraper -- for decades. "We will be in Moscow at some point," he said in a 2007 deposition.

Later, as a presidential candidate, he secretly signed an 18-page letter of intent for Trump Tower Moscow on Oct. 28, 2015, the day of the third Republican presidential debate.

Court filings by Mueller in November make clear that negotiations led by Trump lawyer Michael Cohen continued through at least June 2016. Cohen lied about this to Congress to "give the false impression that the Moscow Project ended before 'the Iowa caucus and ... the very first primary,' " according to the filings. 

THE MESSAGE? "WE HATE MEXICANS":

White House press briefings, in steady decline even before the partial government shutdown, have now ground to a halt as a prolonged power struggle among President Donald Trump's aides leads to a muddled messaging strategy, people familiar with the matter say. [...]

No one has emerged as the clear leader among Sanders, Bill Shine, Kellyanne Conway or Mercedes Schlapp, leading to deep divisions among one of the administration's most fractious departments and causing a void for a coverage-obsessed president.

The communications team has also drawn the ire of dozens of senior staffers, including Trump at times, who have blamed them for failing to blunt PR missteps and allowing them to turn into full-blown disasters.

The inner workings of the communications team were described to CNN by 11 current and former White House officials who requested anonymity in order to speak candidly.

In a West Wing where proximity to the President translates into power, the four senior communications aides -- Sanders, Shine, Conway and Schlapp -- can often be found where Trump is.

All four were present for a relatively mundane hurricane briefing in October. Three -- Shine, Sanders and Conway -- were back again during his interview with two Washington Post reporters in later November. And all of them were seated along the wall of the Situation Room during Trump's first, second and third meetings with Democrats during the partial government shutdown.

Mick Mulvaney, who replaced John Kelly as chief of staff earlier this year, has made clear to staff that he has no desire to curb access to Trump, as his predecessor did.

But despite the constant presence of four senior communications officials, their colleagues say it has not helped form a coherent message.

THE FACE OF TERROR:

Police in New York Tuesday announced the arrest of four suspects in an alleged terror plot. They described the plan to attack a group of Muslims in central New York state as serious and real. 

Brian Colaneri, 20; Vincent Vetromile, 19; Andrew Crysel, 18; and a 16-year-old suspect whose name is being withheld, were arrested Friday in the town Greece.

"If they had carried out this plot, which every indication is that they were going to, people would've died," said Chief Patrick Phelan.

SO MUCH WINNING!:

Close to half, 46 percent, of registered voters who consider themselves political independents in a Hill-HarrisX survey released Tuesday said Trump and GOP members in Congress are the primary ones responsible for the shutdown, a 7-point increase from a survey conducted in the last two days of December. 

FILLING THE TEACHING GAP:

Nathan Phillips, a Native American man seen in a viral video of an encounter with a group of Kentucky Catholic school students, says he wants to meet with them and church officials to discuss the incident and turn it into a "teachable moment."

"Let's create space for the teaching of tolerance to happen," Phillips, an Omaha Nation elder, said in a news release from the Lakota People's Law Project. [...]

Phillips says he wants dialogue with the students, and Nelson said the Lakota People's Law Project plans to offer a formal invite to the school soon.

"I have faith that human beings can use a moment like this to find a way to gain understanding from one another," Phillips said.

Phillips offered to visit the school and hold a discussion "about cultural appropriation, racism and the importance of listening to and respecting diverse cultures."

Phillips, in collaboration with the Indigenous Peoples March and the Lakota People's Law Project, is also requesting a meeting with Vatican officials and Pope Francis "to discuss what role the Church might be willing to play in reconciling the Catholic community worldwide with Indigenous people."

"We feel that there is a distinct lack of understanding and appreciation of Native peoples and traditions worldwide," said Phillips. "It's time to address the indecency of culturally appropriating our ritual movements and songs for the enjoyment of non-Native peoples." [...]

Others are also calling for a reunion of the two groups. On Monday, Cincinnati restaurateur Jeff Ruby offered to fly out Phillips first class to his establishment to "break bread and make amends" with Covington Catholic High School students, according to the Courier Journal.

"There might be blame on both sides," Ruby, who has mentored Covington Catholic students, told the Journal. "We have to remember these are kids in this situation. There may have been things done and said in the heat of the moment. I'd like to get both sides together, get them talking and maybe take a moment to stand in the other's shoes."

"RUDY GIULIANI. HE LIED FOR TRUMP":

WHAT DID YOU EXPECT FROM HERITAGE AND A REPUBLICAN PRESIDENT?:

Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D., Mich.) ripped Obamacare as being written by insurance companies and for creating "winners and losers" in health care in a new interview on the New York Times podcast "The Daily."

SO MUCH WINNING!:

THE TRUTH IS THE POINT:

The problem is, neither of these distillations captures the truth, which is hidden somewhere in a mess of different segments of different recordings showing different offenses by different parties. It's true that the Hebrew Israelites shouted invective at the kids, and it is true that the kids chanted school cheers to drown them out. It's also true that the schoolboys, whether someone else was mean to them beforehand or not, were giggling as they let loose with offensive war whoops and tomahawk chops while a Native American man beat his drum before them. It's true that one of them ripped his shirt off in a signal of self-assured dominance. And it's true that a smirk is a smirk.

IF IT DOESN'T SAY "CONVICTED FELON" YOU ESCAPED EASY:

Saying things for Trump, not always being truthful about it--do you ever worry that this will be your legacy? Does that ever worry you in any way?

Absolutely. I am afraid it will be on my gravestone. "Rudy Giuliani: He lied for Trump." 

ALWAYS BET ON THE dEEP sTATE:

President Donald Trump's bid to build a U.S.-Mexico border wall and end a month-long partial government shutdown suffered a blow on Tuesday when the U.S. Supreme Court left in place for now a program protecting young illegal immigrants from deportation.

THERE'S NOTHING LESS MASCULINE THAN THIS VICTIM POLITICS:

The Left fears men. Which is exactly why the corporate-media-activist ideological conglomerate is currently losing its collective mind over a viral video of young, white, Catholic men in MAGA hats smirking at an Indian.  [...]

Every great resistance movement, rebellion, and revolution has been lead by men. And that terrifies our elites. [...]

Cooperation, exploration, and courage--that is what manhood means. And that is exactly why our elites quake at the sight of young conservative men who refuse to back down when attacked. They're used to the bow-tied, soy-male, David French-brand of conservatism that insists the highest virtue is being nice to people who utterly despise you.

#ALLCOMEDYISCONSERVATIVE:

Iliza Schlesinger is a contender for today's most successful comedienne. She has a special on Netflix, Elder Millennial--she's had many before and will have more. Few women get a lot of attention in comedy and it's easy to see why she does, since she's pretty, starving herself to perfection and showing her rib cage to prove it, and also very funny. She's teaching young American women how to interact with men or at least their own insecurities.

Famous comediennes talk about the war of the sexes more than male counterparts. Iliza, though a feminist, offers all-American observations about the dating scene in glamour-cities like Los Angeles. Such cities don't help women marry--which is the purpose of her comedy. Instead, as she complains, cities prey on the unspoken desires of young women. Unfortunately, this leads her to an obvious paradox. Women put heroic effort into mating but they still mostly fail.

Iliza excels at mocking men as dumb and predatory. It's worth listening to her for the entertainment--and then again because behind the laughs there's a lot of sad stuff about what it's like to be a young woman, alone in a city, trying to get married and mostly failing. Iliza herself has succeeded, as she says, at 35. But if this were so many young women's experience of men that this comedy is popular--why would they even want to marry? Evolution is her answer. So it's easy to blame society, but nature is far worse. Unfortunately, Iliza, who calls make-up war paint, can only utter ugly truths that leave women unscathed. She grants women one moral flaw--insecurity--but she blames society for that, too.

Comedy's supposed to tell ugly truths--we're told comedians are transgressive, willing to say things most of us won't. Iliza proves equality with male comics in filthy language and pretends to reveal the dirty truth about women men idolize. Comediennes are forever proving equality in filth. But if the ugliest truth about women is they're systematically victims--there's no hope of happiness.

This burden of perfection means moments of insight are hidden in ideology.

ONE FLEW OVER THE SEAL'S NEST:

What Tony and several other former U.S. Special Operations Forces personnel received Newport Brain Research Laboratory, located at the Center, was a new treatment for brain disorders, one that might just revolutionize brain-based medicine. Though the FDA clinical trials to judge its efficacy and risks are ongoing, the technique could help humanity deal with a constellation of its most common mental disorders -- depression, anxiety, aggressiveness, attention deficit, and others--and do so without drugs. And if its underpinning theory proves correct, it could be among the biggest breakthroughs in the treatment of mental health since the invention of the EEG a century ago.

At the lab, Tony (whose name has been changed to protect his identity) met Dr. Erik Won, president and CEO of the Newport Brain Research Laboratory, the company that's innovating Magnetic EEG/ECG-guided Resonant Therapy, or MeRT. Won's team strapped cardiac sensors on Tony and placed an electroencephalography cap on his skull to measure his brain's baseline electrical activity. Then came the actual therapy. Placing a flashlight-sized device by Tony's skull, they induced an electromagnetic field that senta small burst of current to his brain. Over the course of 20 minutes, they moved the device around his cranium, delivering jolts that, at their most aggressive, felt like a firm finger tapping.

For Tony, MeRT's effects were obvious and immediate. He walked out of the first session to a world made new. "Everything looked different," he told me. "My bike looked super shiny."

He began to receive MeRT five times a week-- each session lasting about an hour, with waiting room time -- and quickly noticed a change in his energy. "I was super boosted," he said. His mood changed as well.

Today, he admits that he still has moments of frustration but says that anger is no longer his "go-to emotion." He's developed the ability to cope. He still wants help with his memory, but his life is very different. He's taken up abstract painting and welding, two hobbies he had no interest in at all before the therapy. He's put in a new kitchen. Most importantly, his sleep is very different: better.

Tony's experience was similar to those of five other special-operations veterans who spoke with Defense One. All took part in a double-blind randomized clinical trial that sought to determine how well MeRT treats Persistent Post-Concussion Symptoms and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD. Five out of the six were former Navy SEALS.

THE DRAGON HAS NO TEETH:

President Xi Jinping stressed the need to maintain political stability in an unusual meeting of China's top leaders -- a fresh sign the ruling party is growing concerned about the social implications of the slowing economy.

Xi told a "seminar" of top provincial leaders and ministers in Beijing on Monday that the Communist Party needed greater efforts "to prevent and resolve major risks," the official Xinhua News Agency said. He said areas of concern facing the leadership ranged from politics and ideology to the economy, environment and external situation.

EDITH KEELER MUST DIE:

Here's the version of "The City on the Edge of Forever" that's been seen by countless viewers since 1967: After administering a small dose of a dangerous drug to Lt. Sulu (George Takei), Dr. McCoy (DeForest Kelley) accidentally administers a massive dose to his own abdomen after getting knocked about when the Enterprise hits some interference from a strange time distortion.

Driven temporarily mad, McCoy beams down to the nearest planet, home to the Guardian of Forever, a talking portal that allows visitors to travel through time and space. When McCoy uses it to travel back to Depression-era New York, the Enterprise's landing party learns their ship has disappeared. Whatever McCoy has done has distorted history in such a way that the universe as they know it has ceased to exist.

Captain Kirk (William Shatner) and Mr. Spock (Leonard Nimoy) give chase, in time learning that McCoy has changed time by saving the life of Edith Keeler (Joan Collins), the near-saintly proprietor of a soup kitchen. If allowed to live, her idealistic message of pacifism and tolerance will delay the United States' entry into World War II, allowing Hitler to develop the atomic bomb, win the war, and dominate the Earth -- shutting the door on the hopeful future imagined throughout the series.

And so, as Spock says twice in the episode -- first as a question then as a statement arrived at through cold, hard logic -- Edith Keeler must die. The only problem: Kirk has fallen in love with her and isn't sure he can bring himself to let her die. But, after reuniting with McCoy, he does just that, stopping the doctor from saving Edith from a truck that strikes her down in the street.

VICE SIGNALLING:

[T]he Republican Party] has become thoroughly braided into Trump's bigotry. In a nation where the chant of "Trump! Trump! Trump!" has become a racist jeer, the GOP has accepted its rebranding as his subsidiary. To many suburban voters, the party has become a symbol of intolerance. To many younger voters, an instrument of white privilege. At the national level at least, the party's fate is inseparable from the fate of the president.

Most members of the conservative movement will be tainted for flipping their inspiration from Ronald Reagan to George Wallace with hardly a moment's thought. This gives credence to charges of racial prejudice that I once thought exaggerated.

We'll stipulate that the Catholic boys from a high school in Kentucky were a little obnoxious when an indigenous man named Nathan Phillips banged a drum at them in front of the Lincoln Memorial on Friday. But Phillips was being a lot more obnoxious. To put it another way, if you were minding your own business in a public place and someone came right up to you and put a drum up to your face and made a huge racket inches from your nose, would you be happy about it?

The kids from Covington Catholic High School in Covington, Ky., were ambassadors for causes much bigger than themselves: Catholicism and the right to life. As such, they should have comported themselves better than to jeer and do a tomahawk chop in front of Phillips.

"The world today is often inhabited by fear. It is an ancient disease", but "the call not to be afraid often recurs in the Bible," he said.

"Our time experiences great fear as it faces the vast dimensions of globalization and fear often turns against people who are foreign, different or poor as if they were enemies," he said. Francis noted that "the atmosphere of fear can infect also those Christians who hide the gift they have received, like the slave in the parable: they do not invest it in the future, they do not share it with others, they preserve it for themselves."

EVERY PAGE:

In 1959, when I went to work for Newsday, on Long Island, the paper had a managing editor named Alan Hathway, who was an old-time newspaperman from the nineteen-twenties. He was a character right out of "The Front Page," a broad-shouldered man with a big stomach that looked soft but wasn't. His head was shiny bald except for a monklike tonsure, and rather red--very red after he had started drinking for the day, which was at lunch. He wore brown shirts with white ties, and black shirts with yellow ties. We were never sure if he had actually graduated from, or even attended, college, but he had a deep prejudice against graduates of prestigious universities, and during his years at Newsday had never hired one, let alone one from Princeton, as I was. I was hired as a joke on him while he was on vacation. He was so angry to find me there that during my first weeks on the job he would refuse to acknowledge my presence in his city room. I kept saying, "Hello, Mr. Hathway," or "Hi, Mr. Hathway," when he passed my desk. He'd never even nod. Ignoring me was easy for Mr. Hathway to do, because as the low man on the paper's reportorial totem pole I never worked on a story significant enough to require his involvement.

At the time, Newsday did not publish on Sundays, so as low man on the totem pole I worked Saturday afternoons and nights, because if a story came in then I could put the information in a memo and leave the actual writing to the real reporters who came in on Sunday.

Late one Saturday afternoon, a telephone on the city desk rang, and when I picked it up it was an official from the Federal Aviation Agency, calling from his office at what was then (because John F. Kennedy hadn't yet been assassinated) Idlewild Airport. Newsday had been doing a series of articles on Mitchel Field, a big Air Force base in the middle of Long Island's Nassau County that the military was giving up. Its twelve hundred acres were the last large open space in the county, so what happened to it was important. The F.A.A. was seeking to make it a civilian airport. Newsday, however, felt that it should be used instead for public purposes--in particular, for education, to allow Hofstra University to expand, and to create a campus for Nassau Community College, the only general-education public college on Long Island, which was then being housed in temporary quarters in the county courthouse in Mineola. The rooms there were already too crowded to accommodate the students, many of them from the large low-income community in nearby Hempstead. Public education for the poor: that was something worth fighting for.

I hadn't been working on any of the Mitchel Field stories. But on this Saturday suddenly this guy from the F.A.A. was on the phone, and he says something along the lines of "I really like what you guys are doing on Mitchel Field, and I'm here alone in the F.A.A. offices, and if you send someone down here I know what files you should be looking at."

I was alone, the only person in the city room. This happened to be the day of the big Newsday annual summer picnic on the beach on Fire Island. Just about everyone else had gone, except me. None of them had a cell phone, of course, since there were no cell phones then. I called the editor who was my immediate superior, and then his superior, but wasn't able to reach them. When, after many calls, I finally did reach an editor, he told me to call the paper's great investigative reporter Bob Greene, but Greene wasn't reachable, either, and neither were the other reporters I was told to call. Eventually, the editor told me that I would have to go myself.

I will never forget that night. It was the first time I had ever gone through files. The official met me at the front door and led me to a room with a conference table in the middle, and, on the table, high stacks of file folders. And somehow, in a strange way, sitting there going through them, I felt at home. As I went through the memos and the letters and the minutes of meetings, I could see a pattern emerging, revealing the real reason that the agency wanted the field to become a civilian airport: executives of corporations with offices on Long Island, who seemed to be quite friendly with the F.A.A. officials, wanted to be able to fly in and out of Long Island on their company planes without the inconvenience of having to drive to Idlewild or LaGuardia. I kept looking for a piece of paper on which someone came right out and said that, but I didn't find one; everything I could find talked around that point. But between all the pieces of paper I found sentences and paragraphs that, taken together, made the point clear.

There are certain moments in your life when you suddenly understand something about yourself. I loved going through those files, making them yield their secrets to me. And here was a particular and fascinating secret: that corporate executives were persuading a government agency to save them some driving time at the expense of a poor kid getting an education and a better chance in life. Each discovery I made that helped to prove that was a thrill. I don't know why raw files affect me that way. In part, perhaps, it's because they are closer to reality, to genuineness--not filtered, cleaned up, through press releases or, years later, in books. I worked all night, but I didn't notice the passing of time. When I finished and left the building on Sunday, the sun was coming up, and that was a surprise. I went back to the office, and before driving home I wrote a memo on what I had found.

I had previously worked at a newspaper in New Jersey, and my wife, Ina, and I hadn't yet moved to Long Island. Early on Monday morning, my day off, the phone rang, and it was Mr. Hathway's secretary, June Blom. Alan wanted to see me right away, she said. I said, "I'm in New Jersey."

"Well, he wants to see you just as soon as you can get here," June replied. I drove to Newsday that morning, sure every mile of the way that I was about to be fired.

I ran into June just as I entered the city room; motioning to Alan's office, she told me to go right in. Walking across the room, I saw, through the glass window, the big red head bent over something he was reading, and as I entered his office I saw that it was my memo.

He didn't look up. After a while, I said tentatively, "Mr. Hathway." I couldn't get the "Alan" out. He motioned for me to sit down, and went on reading. Finally, he raised his head. "I didn't know someone from Princeton could do digging like this," he said. "From now on, you do investigative work."

I responded with my usual savoir faire: "But I don't know anything about investigative reporting."

Alan looked at me for what I remember as a very long time. "Just remember," he said. "Turn every page. Never assume anything. Turn every goddam page."

ECONOMIES EXIST TO CREATE AND PRESERVE WEALTH:

Imagine a button that would instantly double the productivity of the labor market's most productive quintile, but also cause the least productive quintile to drop out of the labor force. Would you push the button?

IF ONLY W AND THE UR COULD RUN AGAIN:

Take 1976, when Jimmy Carter came out of nowhere to win the nomination and presidency. Depending on who you're talking to, this is the most wide-open Democratic primary since 2004, 1992, or 1976. But 1976 is the year most likely to be like our own: a huge, divided field of liberal candidates ran for president after a period of nightmare politics. If you read enough about the 1976 election, you'll pick up on a dead-ended weariness -- the kind of emotional valence that feels familiar to 2019, a year that has begun with a dystopian joke about Marie Kondo throwing away most of the world because it does not spark joy.

"What Jimmy Carter has thought is that many people are turned off by the old politics, Watergate, stress, issues, and now," Sally Quinn wrote at the time, "they simply want to make it through the night."

The Vietnam War and Richard Nixon -- both finished by then -- dominated 1976. Carter's campaign recognized early on, the New York Times wrote, that though there might "be passing moments of interest in other concepts," one subsumed all others: "the issue of integrity" -- and "the most successful candidates would base their pursuits on that foundation." A decade later, Jerry Rafshoon, Carter's TV ad maker, told the New Republic that the basis for the campaign's materials -- an array of gentle PBS-looking clips -- was Carter's existing message. "We looked at the footage we had and these were the lines that were capturing audiences. Who came up with it? Jimmy Carter the candidate," he said. "It worked for those times."

And thus, in ads and on the trail: Jimmy Carter spent a lot of time talking about love.

"I want a government," the central line went, "that is as good and honest, and decent, and truthful, and fair, and competent, and idealistic, and compassionate, and as filled with love as are the American people."

Despite cratering the word "liberal" for a quarter century, during the actual campaign, Carter frustrated a wide array of Democrats and reporters by eluding ideological categorization. He seemed very liberal on civil rights, for instance, but Julian Bond wouldn't endorse him; he was a final and Southern rebuke to segregationist George Wallace, but he'd shown a little friendliness to Wallace years before; he hadn't opposed the Vietnam War, but called it a racist war in 1976, fought by those who couldn't afford to evade the draft. He kept saying he was a nuclear physicist (he was not) and rarely gave specifics about anything he'd actually do on taxes, inflation, etc.

Instead, stuff like: "We've still got the greatest system of government on earth. Richard Nixon hasn't hurt it. Watergate didn't hurt it. Vietnam and Cambodia haven't hurt it. ... We still have within us the same strength, the same courage, the same ability, the same intelligence, the same educational capacity, the same religious faith, the same love of our land, the same concern about our children as have existed in the minds and hearts of the great people of the past."

This was delivered to rapt, quiet crowds in a fairly grim manner -- which was maybe part of the appeal, seeming serious after all the chaos.

LAUGHINGSTOCK:

President Donald Trump's social media accounts are filled with vile racism, idiotic xenophobia, and inaccurate statistics. And now we can add another category to the list: fake photos.

In recent months, Trump's official Facebook and Instagram accounts have published photos of the president that have been manipulated to make him look thinner. [...]

[I]n one of the strangest alterations, Trump's fingers have been made slightly longer. Seriously.

Donald Trump, an unindicted co-conspirator whose own lawyer admits that the president was trying to secure a real estate deal in Russia as late as November of 2016, has been somewhat sensitive about the size of his hands ever since journalist Graydon Carter described Trump as a "short-fingered vulgarian." Carter was writing for the now-defunct Spy magazine in the 1980s when he made the observation and the insult has reportedly bothered Trump for decades. Carter claims that the president has even sent photos of his hands to Carter with the fingers circled in gold Sharpie.

"To this day, I receive the occasional envelope from Trump," Carter wrote in 2015, before Trump won the presidency. "There is always a photo of him--generally a tear sheet from a magazine. On all of them he has circled his hand in gold Sharpie in a valiant effort to highlight the length of his fingers. I almost feel sorry for the poor fellow because, to me, the fingers still look abnormally stubby."

OUR TWO REPUBLICAN PARTIES:

KAMALA HARRIS HAS a prosecutor problem.

She's running for president as a progressive, but as attorney general of California, she criminalized truancy -- making it a crime for kids to be late for school, and dragging into the criminal justice system even more disproportionately low income, predominantly black and latino families. She's overlooked the misconduct of her prosecutors and fought to uphold their wrongfully secured convictions. She defended California's choice to deny sexual reassignment surgery to a trans inmate, and in 2014, appealed a federal judge's holding that the death penalty was unconstitutional.

The list goes on and on. But in some ways the details don't matter. The problem isn't that Harris was an especially bad prosecutor. She made positive contributions as well -- encouraging education and reentry programs for ex-offenders, for instance. The problem, more precisely, is that she was ever a prosecutor at all.

To become a prosecutor is to make a choice to align oneself with a powerful and fundamentally biased system. As Paul Butler, former prosecutor and author of "Chokehold: Policing Black Men," told The Guardian, "as a lawyer who went to law school with a goal of helping black people and using my legal skills to make things better, the realization that the law itself was a mechanism to keep African American people down was frightening." He added, "Lawyers are competitive and ambitious, and the way that manifests itself in a prosecutor's office is you want to get tough sentences. I got caught up in that world. You feel like you're doing the Lord's work -- you tell yourselves that you're helping the community."

LET RUDY SPEAK!:

Top Washington criminal defense lawyers, both Democrats and Republicans, told me they couldn't understand what Giuliani was trying to achieve with his TV appearance.

"Any defense lawyer would advise their client in an investigation not to discuss testimony with other people involved in the investigation in order to avoid the risk of obstruction or suborning perjury charges," said a Republican attorney who spoke on condition of anonymity because he works with the Trump administration and doesn't want to offend them.

"Rudy is the gift that keeps on creating issues that do not otherwise exist. He should have taken the Mueller statement [denying the BuzzFeed story], embraced it and not said another word," said a prominent criminal defense lawyer, who requested not to be identified because he's active in Robert Mueller's investigation.

TRUMPSPEAK FOR SUBORNATION:

Rudy Giuliani didn't do his client any favors Sunday, acknowledging on CNN that it was possible President Donald Trump spoke with Michael Cohen before his testimony to Congress. In discussing a BuzzFeed story that claims Trump told his longtime personal lawyer to lie about negotiations on a deal to build a Trump Tower in Moscow, Giuliani said he had no knowledge of any talks.

GIVE HER THE CHILD SHE'LL GIVE YOU THE MAN:

The incident appeared to begin when a small group of Black Hebrews were making anti-Trump remarks on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. The Covington students, many wearing "Make America Great Again" memorabilia, crowded around the group and started yelling at them. Although it's tough to make out what the students were saying in the video, it's clear they are taunting the Hebrews.

[H]is mother claimed "black Muslims" had been harassing the group of Donald Trump supporters from the private, all-male Covington Catholic High School in Kentucky.

EXCEPT FOR THE ONES MUELLER HAS:

Rudolph W. Giuliani, President Trump's personal lawyer, said on Sunday that discussions about building a Trump Tower in Moscow lasted through the November 2016 election, months longer than previously confirmed.

Mr. Giuliani said in an interview with The New York Times that Mr. Trump "recalls a series of conversations" with his former lawyer and fixer, Michael D. Cohen, about the project during the campaign.

"He can't tell you the date" that it ended, Mr. Giuliani said. "There are no entries or phone logs" that indicated specifics, he added.

THERE IS NO DIGNITY IN A BOONDOGGLE:

A recent paper by the Tinbergen Institute in the Netherlands revealed that a quarter of workers are dissatisfied with their jobs. The study of 100,000 workers from 47 countries found that 8% perceive their job as "socially useless", while a further 17% are doubtful about the usefulness of their job.

So what does work really mean anyway? For many it's a hierarchical relationship between employer and employee, in which the latter is paid and contributes a portion to the government in the form of taxes.

But there's another way to think about work, argues Bregman. Work should be defined simply as doing something that adds value to society.

Of course, this type of work already exists. No-one would argue that doctors, teachers, care workers, cleaners, and those working in garbage disposal aren't doing useful work. But Bregman says there are a great many jobs that contribute nothing to society - so-called "bu[***]t jobs".

Bregman argues that the social usefulness of many jobs has been in decline since the middle of the last century. And the advent of the Fourth Industrial Revolution is only going to exacerbate the problem.

"In the 50s, 60s and 70s, if you were really talented in your field you would probably go into research or government," he says.

"But then what started to happen in the 80s in advanced economies is that it became much more financially attractive to move into financial services and the tech industry. While there is useful work being done there, we also know, especially with the financial sector, that it involves a huge amount of people getting rich at expense of others.

LACK OF PRAGMATISM IS IDEOLOGY:

Mr. Glazer's turn to neoconservatism followed an almost paradigmatic path. Throughout the 1950s, and even after he went to work for the Kennedy administration's Housing and Home Finance Agency in 1962-63, he continued to consider himself a radical. But if, as his longtime friend Irving Kristol put it, a neoconservative is a liberal who has been mugged by reality, then Mr. Glazer got hit over the head.

He had taken a teaching post at Berkeley in 1963, just as the student rebellions of the 1960s were erupting. Opposed to the growing American military involvement in Vietnam and supportive of social policies designed to help the poor, he initially sympathized with the student protesters. But as they grew more extreme -- "nihilistic" was Mr. Glazer's word -- he turned away from them and his own leftist past as well. He moved toward what he saw as a hard-won pragmatism but what others saw as a reactive conservatism. [...]

During the battles of the 1970s over busing and affirmative action, Mr. Glazer published "Affirmative Discrimination" (1975), a landmark statement for neoconservatives and others opposed to government-enforced racial balancing. Mr. Glazer was prominently featured in one of the earliest studies of the group, Peter Steinfels's "The Neoconservatives: The Men Who Are Changing America's Politics" in 1979.

Mr. Glazer was never an entirely reliable neoconservative. He wasn't comfortable with the label, and on foreign policy he continued to describe himself as "somewhat left." If he opposed policies like affirmative action, it was not, as with more traditional conservatives, out of antipathy to government itself, but out of a skepticism about what public programs could accomplish.

One of his books was entitled "The Limits of Social Policy," published in 1988.

"On most areas of public policy," he said, "I consider myself pragmatic, rather than a man of the left or a man of the right."

As a social scientist, Mr. Glazer valued hard facts over good intentions. At the same time, he was modest about what the facts could show. A reader of his work was always coming upon phrases like "I am not sure" and "We do not have the knowledge" and "I do not know."

This meant that the nonideological Mr. Glazer could change his mind. In his writings on architecture and city planning, for example, he went from early enthusiasm for modernism to a "growing disenchantment."

"In the end," he said, "the defense of a radical modernism became the work of an elite that the ordinary person could not understand."

During the 1990s Mr. Glazer decided that he had been wrong about the course of integration as set out in "Affirmative Discrimination" -- that he had been complacent about racial progress in America.

And once he had concluded that some kind of multiculturalism was necessary for public education, he bowed to what he saw as the inevitable: "Even the most balanced and professional effort to define a curriculum for students in American schools today will place a heavy emphasis on multiplicity and diversity, race and ethnicity."

In Mr. Glazer's case, it seemed, a multiculturalist was a neoconservative who had been mugged by reality.

THE GREAT EXFILTRATION:

Tony was one of the best officers to ever serve at CIA. His work was unique, and it help to protect our nation in significant ways. He will be missed. May he Rest In Peace. https://t.co/1GVxVWEKwa

— Michael Morell (@MichaelJMorell) January 19, 2019

THE lEFT IS THE rIGHT:

FETUS INTO FETISH:

As of Saturday, at least two advertisers have pulled the plug on conservative commentator Ben Shapiro's eponymous podcast over the host's controversial speech at the annual anti-abortion March for Life rally in Washington, D.C. on Friday.

"[T]he truth is that no pro-life person on earth would kill baby Hitler," Shapiro said before adding, "Baby Hitler was a baby."

WELL READ RETURNS:

At one point in that post-election period, Gaetz, chief of staff Shane Strum and transition team leader Susie Wiles holed up at the Ponte Vedra Inn & Club to map out a proposed first 100 days.

"The governor comes in and says he loves it -- but would like to do all of it in January," Gaetz said.

As striking as the contrast is between DeSantis' campaign and early, pedal-to-the-metal governing style, consider how the Fox News partisan has managed to please so many Democrats on key policies.

No way the bipartisan goodwill lasts, but the early moves sent a reassuring message to the 50.4 percent of Florida voters who cast ballots for someone else.

Chris Hand, a Jacksonville lawyer and Democratic strategist who worked on the bipartisan Groveland Four Clemency Coalition, hailed DeSantis and the Florida Cabinet for so quickly pardoning the young men wrongfully accused of rape in 1949.

"To the extent that this is Gov. DeSantis signaling that he wants to be a leader for all Floridians, that would be a welcome change from the previous administration," he said.

Democratic St. Petersburg Mayor Rick Kriseman applauded DeSantis' emphasis on environmental protection and plan to create an Office of Resilience and Coastal Protection to respond to rising sea levels.

"Every city in this state is going to need help addressing issues of mitigation and adaptability, and we could be real partners," Kriseman said.

TEACH YOUR TRUMPKINS WELL:

Nathan Phillips, Omaha, is a Vietnam Veteran who hosts a sacred pipe ceremony at Arlington, was taunted in D.C.

Native Twitter has gone ablaze as a Native American elder singing the AIM Song in Washington DC during the Indigenous Peoples March was ridiculed, taunted and mocked by a group of non-Native youth.

The video, which was posted by YouTube account holder KC NOLAND, was also screen captured and shared on other social media accounts with views shortly gaining tens of thousands of views.

The elder is Nathan Phillips, an Omaha elder who is also a Vietnam Veteran and former director of the Native Youth Alliance. He is also a keeper of a sacred pipe and holds an annual ceremony honoring Native American veterans in the Arlington National Cemetery.

THE DISCIPLINE OF DEMOCRACY:

His decision to contest the presidential polls in July is seen by analysts as the ex-warlord's attempt legitimize his Hizb-i-Islami party. The faction has been blamed for atrocities committed during Afghanistan's brutal civil war, which led many Afghans to welcome the emergence of the Taliban in 1996 in the hope the hardline Islamist group would restore law and order.

In 2003, the U.S. State Department listed him as a terrorist, accusing him of taking part in and supporting attacks by al Qaeda and the Taliban. But Washington later welcomed Ghani's decision to sign a peace deal with Hekmatyar.

In 2016, President Ghani's government granted immunity to Hekmatyar but the former warlord has been critical of his administration and the parliamentary election process in 2018.

Announcing his candidacy, Hekmatyar pledged to restore peace and security and said the current government had failed to end the war with the Taliban.

"Our country's situation requires a powerful central government lead by an elected president supported by the majority of people," he told a news conference in Kabul.

IT'S A PURITAN NATION:

It is no exaggeration to say that drunk driving was largely ignored in the United States until the late 1970s. Even when drunk drivers caused serious injury or death, they often pleaded guilty to misdemeanors or traffic violations. For young men aged 21 to 44, who constituted the bulk of the offenders, drunk driving was almost a rite of passage. More jarringly, from our modern vantage point, police and prosecutors characterized victims such as Lightner's daughter Cary, who had been walking down the side of a highway when she was killed, as being "in the wrong place at the wrong time." Deaths caused by drunk drivers were "accidents."

In a country that celebrated both drinking and driving, it has long been hard to convince people that it was unacceptable to do both.

After its brief flirtation with Prohibition in the 1920s, the United States readily welcomed back alcohol into its social fabric. Manufacturers used advertising in newspapers and magazines, and later on radio and television, to connect drinking with the good life. It was a healthy habit, too. A 1937 pamphlet entitled Beer in the American Home actually characterized the beverage as "liquid food." And the more you drank, the better. Schaefer reminded its customers that it was the "one beer to have when you're having more than one."

Prior to World War II, most public drinking occurred in bars and taverns located within cities. Patrons could avail themselves of public transportation to get home. But rapid suburban growth in the 1950s meant that drinking became associated with driving, either after work or after dinner at a local restaurant.

In the late 1950s, a Harvard-trained physician and epidemiologist named William Haddon, Jr. began to formally study the incidence and characteristics of drunk driving in the United States. His work culminated in a document, the 1968 Alcohol and Highway Safety Report, that estimated that alcohol was involved in 800,000 crashes annually, leading to 25,000 deaths. Drunk driving, he and his coauthor A. Benjamin Kelley concluded, was a major public health problem that was being ignored.

But it was not until victims of drunk driving went public with their stories that the people paid attention.

This happened because two modes of advocacy converged in the early 1980s. On the one hand, anti-drunk driving efforts built upon recent progressive activism such as the Civil Rights movement, anti-Vietnam War protests, and second-wave feminism (hence Mothers Against Drunk Driving). On the other hand, fighting drunk driving meshed with more conservative, Reagan-era efforts to create "wars" against drugs and crime and to recognize the rights of crime victims.

IT'S WHAT ELECTORATES DEMAND OF GOVERNMENT:

Based on publicly available national polling data, voters do, in fact, want to help struggling families: According to the non-partisan Kaiser Family Foundation health tracking poll released in November, about three quarters of the American public--including 77 percent of the population living in non-expansion states--holds a favorable view of the Affordable Care Act provision that grants states the option to expand Medicaid. In those same states, KFF found that 59 percent of the population would be in favor of expanding Medicaid to cover more low-income Americans, while 34 percent said they would like to see their state leave its existing Medicaid coverage unchanged.

In a 2012 ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court handed a victory to the Affordable Care Act when it upheld the constitutionality of the law's individual mandate, which stipulates that most people must maintain a minimum level of health insurance coverage. A majority of the court also decided that the ACA's mandatory Medicaid expansion was unconstitutional, effectively leaving it up to the states to decide whether or not to opt to expand coverage.

But while 36 states and Washington, D.C., have adopted Obamacare's Medicaid expansion, some red states have continued to eschew the increased coverage proposals.

With 4.7 million uninsured, Texas boasts the most people under the age of 65 without medical insurance out of any state, according to a report released by the Urban Institute in December. And in Georgia, newly minted Republican Governor Brian Kemp continues to decry Medicaid as "a failed government program," despite the fact that 73 percent of the state's population supports an expansion. Both states are legally ineligible to put Medicaid expansion to voters by way of a ballot initiative, meaning that Republican wins during the 2018 mid-terms all but ensure that the possibility has stalled for the foreseeable future.

Conversely, in states like Maine and Wisconsin, Democratic victories in November have bolstered the prospects of health-care expansion in a big way. In Wisconsin, Republican Governor Scott Walker was recently ousted by Democrat Tony Evers, who ran a campaign centered around passing Medicaid expansion. And in Maine, an approved initiative to expand health-care access that had been held hostage by Republican Governor Paul LePage will now likely see the light of day under the tenure of newly elected Democrat Janet Mills.

In the remaining six states eligible to put Medicaid expansion on the ballot in 2020--Florida, Mississippi, Missouri, Oklahoma, South Dakota, and Wyoming--there's still hope for reform.

Bridget McCandless, president and chief executive officer of Health Forward in Kansas City, Missouri, says her organization has tangled with the state's Republican-led general assembly for years without luck. She called the passage of ballot initiatives in three red states last fall "an opportunity for advocates in the state of Missouri to understand that there was an opportunity to expand Medicaid in this state."

Although Schleifer could not disclose which states the Fairness Project plans to target in 2020, he says the group is currently "evaluating the viability" of campaigns in all six states eligible for ballot initiatives. McCandless confirmed in an interview with Pacific Standard that her organization has been working with the Fairness Project in order to collect preliminary data on the popularity of a potential ballot initiative to expand Medicaid in the Missouri.

"I think when you put Medicaid expansion to the people in an initiative petition, you see voters make decisions less on political reasons and more on human issues," McCandless says. "Being healthy or well isn't a red or blue issue, it's about taking care of our neighbors and making sure as many people as possible can access the care that they need."

ALL IN YOUR HEAD:

ALL IN HER HEAD (profanity alert):

Far below the Antarctic circle, I watch a woman cry real tears because she can't get gluten-free toast.

Mary is a plummy old English lady traveling alone, an Agatha Christie figure who I expected would spend her time solving mysteries on the ship. When people started disappearing in the Ross Sea, Mary would work the case and gather everyone in the ship's saloon for the spectacular reveal.

Unfortunately, Mary turned out to be a bit of a shipboard bully, bad-talking the other passengers instead of helping to solve their murders. But I am still not ready to see her go to pieces over toast.

Conor, our juvenile delinquent chef, emerges from the galley and drapes himself across the table to soothe her.

"What can I get you, love?" he coos, "Can I get you an egg?"

"I don't want an egg."

"Can I get you some bacon?"

"I don't want bacon. What I want is a second piece of toast."

"I'm so sorry, but we don't have enough for all the gluten-free passengers."

Her face darkens. "I know for a fact that there are some people who were not gluten-free before they got on this ship."

The accusation hangs in the air, unanswerable, and Mary starts to cry. These are angry tears, tears that demand gluten-free justice. The single piece of corn toast she has been allotted for breakfast lies mute on her plate, an affront to God and man.

Rodney convenes a summit in the ship's auditorium to address the gluten crisis. Only passengers with dietary restrictions are invited. The rest of us must huddle around the open hatch one deck above, straining to hear. We are deep in the Ross Sea, five hundred miles from the nearest human being, and this is the most exciting thing that has happened on the ship in weeks.

There are tears of laughter on the bridge when I tell the Russian crew about the Great Antarctic Glutiny.

"You mean if this woman eats bread, she will die?"

"Not really. She just gets sick."

"Yuri, come here! You have to hear this. If she eats bread, the woman will die."

"She won't die. Gluten causes digestive problems for some people. But it's also become a sort of health fad."

"What is 'gluten'? Is that even a Russian word?"

Here they've got me. Tolstoy never wrote about gluten (kleikovina), and the ship's dictionary is strictly nautical. Trying to paraphrase the concept only exposes the holes in my own understanding of this mysterious, flavorful substance.

"It's some kind of a protein in grain. I think it makes things taste good."

Yuri makes a skeptical face.

"It doesn't kill anyone," I insist. "But people can get digestive... unpleasantness."

"So bread will make her sick?"

"Yes."

"Can she eat potatoes?"

"Yes. And corn."

Any hope of sympathy from the Russians evaporates.

"Then let her eat potatoes. Let her eat corn. Or let them all stay home and eat whatever the f[***] they want."

The Russians are seasick, homesick, and lacking in sympathy for the unique challenges that confront the Antarctic tourist. Repeated trips to the Ross Sea have brought them no closer to understanding why people would pay money--tens of thousands of American dollars!--to stare at ice when they could instead be visiting the big duty-free shops at Busan, or spending a pleasant two weeks fishing off the coast of Sakhalin Island, where the fish practically jump into your net and you can sometimes see bears right on the shore.

No one has asked the crew if they have nut allergies, gluten sensitivity, hypertension, lactose intolerance, or any other kind of dietary restriction. Their culinary options are to stay home in Vladivostok earning nothing, or get on the ship and eat what they are given. The closest the Russians come to a dietary preference is the battery of hot sauce and condiment bottles that crowds the center of their table at each meal, along with trays of raw onion, garlic, and weapons-grade mustard.

The conversation on the bridge soon turns to fish and the best ways of preparing them, and I leave the crew to go lie in my bunk for a while, sliding back and forth in time with the motion of the sea, thinking about gluten.

We have been at sea for a very long time.

MADDEN WILL SUFFICE:

From the NFL to rec leagues, football is facing a stark, new threat: an evaporating insurance market that is fundamentally altering the economics of the sport, squeezing and even killing off programs faced with higher costs and a scarcity of available coverage, an Outside the Lines investigation has found.

The NFL no longer has general liability insurance covering head trauma, according to multiple sources; just one carrier is willing to provide workers' compensation coverage for NFL teams. Before concussion litigation roiled the NFL beginning in 2011, at least a dozen carriers occupied the insurance market for pro football, according to industry experts.

The insurance choices for football helmet manufacturers are equally slim; one helmet company executive said he was aware of only one. Pop Warner Little Scholars, which oversees 225,000 youth players, was forced to switch insurers after its longtime carrier, a subsidiary of the insurance giant AIG, refused to provide coverage without an exclusion for any neurological injury.

"People say football will never go away, but if we can't get insurance, it will," Jon Butler, Pop Warner's executive director, lamented to colleagues after discovering that just one carrier was willing to cover the organization for head trauma, according to a person who was present.

IT'S THE GREAT AMERICAN PASTIME:

American military leaders are "constantly apologizing" for President Donald Trump's Syria withdrawal plan, according to the commander who oversees a force of 65,000 U.S.-backed fighters that's battling the Islamic State.

"It was a joint war, but they left us in the middle of the road," said Gen. Mazlum Kobane, who is in charge of the coalition of militias known as the Syrian Democratic Forces. [...]

Kobane highlighted that Trump's decision, which was widely seen as the abandonment of a loyal ally, was made against the advice of some U.S. commanders.

"They are embarrassed," Kobane said, referring to his American counterparts. "They didn't expect this decision. It's out of their hands, and they are constantly apologizing for it."

WHO KNEW THEY COULD MAKE THE ARCHIPELAGO MORE INHUMAN:

CHI-ZIL:

IS THERE ANY ENEMY DONALD ISN'T AN ASSET FOR?:

Pelosi spokesman @Drew_Hammill: "In light of the grave threats caused by the President's action, the delegation has decided to postpone the trip so as not to further endanger our troops and security personnel, or the other travelers on the flights." pic.twitter.com/wwd8J5AuCi

— Sahil Kapur (@sahilkapur) January 18, 2019

DUDE, IT'S ALL BOTTOM-FEEDERS:

"Give me their names," he said, his eyes narrowing. "I want these people out of here. I'm going to take care of this. We're going to get rid of all the snakes, even the bottom-­feeders."

Only in retrospect did I see how remarkable this was. I was sitting there with the President of the United States basically compiling an enemies list -- but these enemies were within his own administration. If it had been a horror movie, this would have been the moment when everyone suddenly realizes the call is coming from inside the house.

The President proceeded to name White House staffer after White House staffer. Almost no one was deemed beyond reproach--not his chief of staff, not senior aides, almost no one other than those with whom he shared a last name. He wanted me to help him judge their loyalty. How, I wondered, had it come to this?

#LOSER:

The Donald Trump administration conducted a preliminary internal assessment of its Iran "maximum pressure" policy this month and determined that it is not working, according to a new report. Such an assessment could drive administration efforts to try to provoke Iran to leave the nuclear deal, possibly by urging a potential inspections crisis at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), some experts said.

"So far, there is little evidence that the administration is meeting any of its possible goals," the International Crisis Group writes in the new report, "On Thin Ice," on the third anniversary of the Iran nuclear deal.

"A preliminary internal assessment by the administration described to Crisis Group purportedly concludes that the U.S. approach has yet to curb Iran's behaviour or entice Tehran back to the negotiating table," the ICG report says, citing in a footnote an interview conducted by the group with a senior US administration official this month.

DON'S STRUGGLE:

"I was a nationalist, and not a patriot," Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf.

Trump used the word during a campaign rally Monday night, declaring to a crowd in Houston, "You know what I am? I'm a nationalist."

ANDY'S NERVOUS AND THE LIGHTS ARE BRIGHT:

If the big report in BuzzFeed is true, then President Trump suborned -- persuaded someone to commit -- perjury . . .  and there was widespread belief in the Republican party that suborning perjury was an impeachable offense back in 1998.

When Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) asked President Trump's nominee for attorney general, William P. Barr, earlier this week whether it would be a crime if "the president tried to coach somebody not to testify, or testify falsely," Barr was unequivocal: "Yes," the nominee told the Senate Judiciary Committee. "Under an obstruction statute, yes."

Now that an explosive story published Thursday by BuzzFeed News alleges that Trump did just that, by ordering Michael Cohen, his former attorney, to lie to Congress, Barr's answer presents the White House with a new quandary -- the president's own choice for the nation's top law enforcement official has described such conduct as "classic" obstruction of justice. Barr said the same when pressed by Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), as well as in his own written statements. He has affirmed his view at least three times, both in a once-private memo and in sworn testimony.

HOW TO GET BOTH SOVEREIGNTY AND ECONOMY:

ALL COMEDY IS CONSERVATIVE:

Ranchers and farmers near the U.S.-Mexico border have been finding prayer rugs on their properties in recent months, according to one rancher who asked to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation by cartels who move the individuals.

The mats are pieces of carpet that those of the Muslim faith kneel on as they worship.

"There's a lot of people coming in not just from Mexico," the rancher said. "People, the general public, just don't get the terrorist threats of that. That's what's really scary. You don't know what's coming across. We've found prayer rugs out here. It's unreal. It's not just Mexican nationals that are coming across."

DON'T CRY FOR ME...:

This kind of partisan attack is simply not done by at the Pentagon. Former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Joseph Dunford, who was traveling overseas, have taken extraordinary steps to keep political discourse away from the military. In part, they did so by sharply reducing their press appearances, public engagements, and the number of reporters permitted to travel with them abroad. The select officers and civilians picked to hear this speech apparently got the message. The room did not applaud.

Still, the president continued to wade into politics by tweaking the noses of his predecessors and taking personal credit for new policies and arguably untrue advances in foreign relations.

DONALD WHO?:

Kevin Kester is used to taking the long view--his family has raised cattle on the land his Bear Valley Ranch occupies in California since 1867. But he also can see what looms in the not-too-distant future across the Pacific Ocean.

The 11-country trade deal once known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership has started to come into force, giving his Australian competitors what stands in coming years to be an increasingly valuable leg up in Japan, the U.S.'s most lucrative export market for beef. Thanks to President Trump's withdrawal from the TPP--one of his first acts in office--American ranchers won't get any of the benefits of the reduced tariffs for beef and other farm products U.S. negotiators spent years haggling over with Japan, the pact's biggest remaining economy.

Kester isn't just another bemused bystander to American politics. As the current volunteer president of the powerful National Cattlemen's Beef Association, he serves on committees that advise Trump and his cabinet on agricultural policy and trade. He doesn't see Trump reversing course and joining what's now known as the CPTPP (the "C" stands for comprehensive and the "P" for progressive, a rebranding requested by Canada's Justin Trudeau) anytime soon. His advice to the government: Please hurry up and negotiate with Japan so U.S. beef doesn't become another economic casualty of the president's trade wars. "We're encouraging them to get on the horse and get working on the bilateral with Japan as soon as possible," he says.

Kester's plea echoes an emerging theme among U.S. industries going into 2019. While plenty of corporate angst is focused on tariffs and the president's China battles, many businesses are more concerned about protecting their share of other offshore markets and their international competitiveness. The reason is simple. Trump's election in 2016, amid the advent of an era of protectionist power politics, threatened to bring about the death of globalization--a subject that will consume this month's World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Yet the rest of the world appears to have decided globalization isn't the enemy after all, and that leaves the U.S. playing trade catch-up.

The CPTPP is just one sign of that. 

hISTORY eNDS EVERYWHERE:

THEY EXIST TO KILL PEOPLE:

Suicide rates among U.S. children and teens have hit startling rates and a study now finds one clear predictor of youth suicide: gun ownership.

THE REASON GUYS ON THE RIGHT ARE DARWINIST:

An alt-right activist who met with two Republican congressmen to discuss "DNA" and "genetics" posted on Facebook that he believes Muslims are "genetically different in their propensity for violence or rape" and linked to stories about how African-Americans "possessed a 'violence' gene."

THE TIGHTENING NOOSE:

President Donald Trump directed his longtime attorney Michael Cohen to lie to Congress about negotiations to build a Trump Tower in Moscow, according to two federal law enforcement officials involved in an investigation of the matter.

Trump also supported a plan, set up by Cohen, to visit Russia during the presidential campaign, in order to personally meet President Vladimir Putin and jump-start the tower negotiations. "Make it happen," the sources said Trump told Cohen.

And even as Trump told the public he had no business deals with Russia, the sources said Trump and his children Ivanka and Donald Trump Jr. received regular, detailed updates about the real estate development from Cohen, whom they put in charge of the project.

Some legal observers have argued that finding a "corrupt intent" in Trump's use of his constitutional powers of executive oversight would fall short of establishing a charge of criminal obstruction. Two former top prosecutors on the Whitewater investigation, Sol Wisenberg and Robert Ray, made this case to me last year: "I think almost everything that Trump did, starting with the firing of Comey, criticizing Sessions for recusing himself, all of that stuff, allowing the attacks on Mueller to happen, it's all terrible," Wisenberg said. "But I don't think it's obstruction."

Crucially, this skepticism of the "corrupt intent" model is shared by the man who is likely to be overseeing Mueller by the time he issues his final report: William Barr, the president's nominee for attorney general. Last summer, Barr wrote a lengthy memo to top Justice Department officials arguing that case exactly: that Trump had been exercising lawful Article II constitutional powers when he fired Comey, and that finding a crime in an otherwise lawful action by probing for corrupt intent would rely on "a novel and legally insupportable reading of the law," one that would "have grave confines far beyond the immediate confines of this case and would do lasting damage to the Presidency and to the administration of law within the Executive branch."

"It is well settled that statutes that do not expressly apply to the president must be construed as not applying to the president if such application would involve a possible conflict with the president's constitutional prerogatives," Barr argued. As a result, the standard of "corrupt intent," taken alone, would be insufficient to establish a charge of corruption for President Trump.

And here is where the new Buzzfeed story comes in.

Because if true, the allegations in the new report render the legal debate between the Mariotti view and the Barr-Wisenberg view moot. If this Buzzfeed report is accurate, and there is hard evidence to show that Trump ordered Cohen to commit perjury by lying to Congress, that would be obstruction, open and shut.

Buzzfeed's anonymous sources suggest there is indeed hard evidence. "The special counsel's office," the report states, "learned about Trump's directive for Cohen to lie to Congress through interviews with multiple witnesses from the Trump Organization and internal company emails, text messages, and a cache of other documents."

The importance of these allegations simply cannot be overstated: If this is true, and Mueller can prove it, that's the whole ball game.

ALWAYS BET ON THE dEEP sTATE:

"I told him how well I knew Bob Mueller and that the Barrs and Muellers were good friends and would be good friends when this was all over," Barr said. "Bob is a straight-shooter and should be dealt with as such."

While Barr said during his hearing that Trump "was interested" in hearing about the friendship, the details that emerged this week caught the President off guard, the three sources said. He bristled at Barr's description of the close relationship, complaining to aides he didn't realize how much their work overlapped or that they were so close.

HAIL THE RATKING:

"Ya think!!!" one former Trump campaign official wrote to POLITICO when asked if Giuliani was trying to protect the president at the expense of everyone who worked for him.

The Team Trump infighting has been a prosecutor's dream for Mueller, opening up an ever-widening window into the behind-the-scenes workings of a rookie politician whose campaign has been under investigation for years. The special counsel and federal prosecutors have already benefited from the internal sniping, flipping Trump's former lawyer, national security adviser and campaign chairman.

Bickering and backstabbing were Trump world trade marks long before the former businessman launched his White House bid, from the real estate mogul's decades of private business dealings to his years as a reality television star.

FAITH IMPOSES OBLIGATIONS:

I've been involved in Christian education for much of my life. I attended a Christian college, my oldest kids attended a dozen consecutive years of Christian schooling, I served a term as chairman of their school's board, and I've represented Christian institutions for more than two decades, and I've never once seen a Christian institution declare that no gays are allowed.

Instead, many thousands of Christian schools have statements of faith and codes of conduct that require teachers and sometimes students and parents to agree with the school's theological doctrine and comply with a code of conduct. They don't say, "No gays allowed." They say, "Here is what we believe, and here is how you must behave."

And sure enough, that's exactly what Immanuel Christian School does. It's a ministry of the Immanuel Bible Church, it has adopted the church's essentials of the faith, and it has created a "parent agreement" that contains the following relevant language:

I understand the biblical role of Immanuel Christian School is to partner with families to encourage students to be imitators of Christ. This necessarily involves the school's understanding and belief regarding biblical morality and standards of conduct. I understand that the school reserves the right, within its sole discretion, to refuse admission to an applicant or to discontinue enrollment of a student if the atmosphere or conduct within a particular home, the activities of a parent or guardian, or the activities of the student are counter to, or are in opposition to, the biblical lifestyle the school teaches. This includes, but is not limited to contumacious behavior, divisive conduct, and participating in, supporting, or condoning sexual immorality, homosexual activity or bi-sexual activity, promoting such practices, or being unable to support the moral principles of the school. (Lev. 20:13 and Romans 1:27.) I acknowledge the importance of a family culture based on biblical principles and embrace biblical family values such as a healthy marriage between one man and one woman. My role as spiritual mentor to my children will be taken seriously.

Let me translate this from Christianese: You must conduct yourself in accordance with historic, orthodox Christian teaching about human sexuality. And, let's be clear, any person -- regardless of their sexual orientation and whether they suffer from gender dysphoria -- can both agree with and comply with the moral statements above. There are countless same-sex-attracted Christians who do. There are many thousands of Christians with gender dysphoria who do.

Why? Because these Christians share with other orthodox Christians the notion that their fundamental identity is not defined by their sexuality or perceived gender identity but rather by their faith in Christ.

TO THE CONTRARY, 66% OF THE 25% IS HIS BASE:

The Pew poll asked respondents how willing they'd be to compromise on a solution to the shutdown deal. About two-thirds of Republicans who support a border wall said that a compromise to reopen the government that doesn't include wall funding would be unacceptable. But, among Democrats who oppose the wall, 84 percent say that a compromise that includes wall funding would be unacceptable.

By this point, it's pretty clear that the president and the GOP are in a very deep hole. The wall hasn't become more popular. The majority of the public blames the shutdown on Trump. A CNN poll found that just 66 percent of Republicans agree that building the wall will help solve the crisis on the border -- not exactly a ringing endorsement. But, what should worry Trump the most - and could be more problematic in the long run - was this finding in the Quinnipiac poll: When asked who they trusted more on border security, Democrats in Congress were ahead of Trump by 5 points (49 to 44 percent). In other words, not only is Trump losing the argument on the wall and the shutdown, but he's also losing on the issue of safety and security. That's losing the battle AND losing the war.

TAX WHAT YOU DON'T WANT, NOT WHAT YOU DO:

All four of the still-living former Federal Reserve chairs, nearly 30 Nobel economists and all but one former chair of the White House's Council of Economic Advisers have signed onto a statement laying out their support for a carbon-tax policy -- one that has been gaining support from big oil companies, environmental groups and others across the political spectrum.

The plan includes a tax on carbon emissions that rises over time, with the proceeds sent back to Americans via quarterly dividend checks.

Other carbon-tax policies have put the money toward other priorities, including clean-energy investments and eliminating other taxes.

The op-ed published Wednesday says a sufficiently rising carbon tax would "replace the need for various carbon regulations that are less efficient." That point is particularly controversial among some environmentalists who want regulations as a backstop.

[I]n Trump's hierarchy of bliss, dominance does seem to rank at the top. "I love to crush the other side and take the benefits," he wrote in a book called Think Big. "Why? Because there is nothing greater. For me it is even better than sex, and I love sex." He went on to observe: "You hear lots of people say that a great deal is when both sides win. That is a bunch of crap. In a great deal you win--not the other side. You crush the opponent and come away with something better for yourself."

So it makes sense that, two years after Trump entered office, Sullivan's game-theoretical framing has caught on. The zero-sum game--in which the players' fortunes are inversely correlated, so that for one player to win the other must lose--has become a standard paradigm for the Trump presidency. If you Google "Donald Trump" and "zero-sum" you'll get such headlines as "Trump's Zero Sum Delusion," "Donald Trump and the Rise of Zero-Sum Politics," and simply "Zero-Sum Trump."

Some of the articles attached to these headlines are about economics. They may lament Trump's gleeful anticipation of "winning" the trade wars he starts--as if trade were a zero-sum game--and his seeming obliviousness to the fact that trade wars can have lose-lose outcomes. Other articles focus on world affairs more broadly. Nations come together to pursue win-win outcomes in the face of all kinds of problems, from financial meltdowns, climate change, and weapons proliferation to overfishing of the seas. And Trump's attitude toward the institutions that embody such nonzero-sum engagement is notably lacking in warmth.

As journalist Jonathan Swan wrote on Axios this summer, "Trump has expressed skepticism, and in some cases outright hostility towards NATO, the European Union, the United Nations, the World Trade Organization, and the Group of Seven." Swan added that Trump has "already withdrawn the U.S. from the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Iran deal" and "announced his intent to withdraw from the Paris climate accord."

The zero-sum label applies not just to Trump's policy preferences but to his political style. He's expert at evoking reactions that seem to have been engineered by evolution for zero-sum situations, notably fear of, hatred of, and contempt for a perceived enemy. Bill Clinton presumably had Trump in mind when he said, five months into Trump's presidency, "We've seen a resurgence in the oldest of all social reactions--the tendency to look at people first as the other, to think of life in zero-sum terms, it's us versus them."

ALL IN YOUR HEAD:

#LOSER:

U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin discussed lifting some or all tariffs imposed on Chinese imports and suggested offering a tariff rollback during trade discussions scheduled for Jan. 30, the Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday, citing people familiar with the internal deliberations.

#LOSER:

"We are getting crushed!" Mr. Trump told his acting chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, after watching some recent coverage of the shutdown, according to one person familiar with the conversation. "Why can't we get a deal?" [...]

Behind the scenes, meanwhile, the White House is in a moment of transition as West Wing staff members become acclimated to the leadership style of a new chief of staff. Mr. Mulvaney, a former congressman from South Carolina, has told aides he has no plans to duplicate the type of chain-of-command structure preferred by John F. Kelly, the retired Marine general he replaced. Nor did he want to limit anyone's access to Mr. Trump.

"You're all adults," Mr. Mulvaney told the White House staff members in attendance, according to an administration official in the room.

TAX WHAT YOU DON'T WANT:

ALL THE BENEFITS, NONE OF THE DRAWBACKS:

THE ONE CURIOUS PART OF TRUMPISM...:

Chuck Johnson, as the Daily Beast notes, is an infamous alt-right figure who has helped raise money for the publisher of the neo-Nazi Daily Stormer site and written that he doesn't believe the Auschwitz concentration camp, or gas chambers in general, ever existed. Harris and Roe, who represent districts in Maryland and Tennessee, respectively, said in statements that they'd met with Johnson to discuss DNA sequencing research, an astounding subject to have covered with a supporter of neo-Nazism given that, you know, the Nazis used genetic pseudo-science to justify the worst genocide in human history.

OLD MAN YELLS AT MARKET FORCES:

More U.S. coal-fired power plants were shut in President Donald Trump's first two years than were retired in the whole of Barack Obama's first term, despite the Republican's efforts to prop up the industry to keep a campaign promise to coal-mining states.

SHUT UP; YOU'RE PROPS:

It's not just Trump's unpredictable decision making that has officials on edge, it's also his penchant for politicizing the military-- something that's come into focus in recent months as he's struggled to fulfill his campaign promise to crack down on immigration and build a border wall. His decision to draw down troops in Syria and his claims that ISIS is defeated have also rankled military commanders who felt it wasn't well thought out.

Some of the highest-ranking officers say there is a new atmosphere of unease inside the Pentagon, particularly among some of the most senior ranks, over the President's inclination to use the military to achieve certain partisan policy objectives. Behind the scenes officials are trying to keep it all at bay. "The amount of time we have to spend making sure our statements and what we say is apolitical is astronomically higher than ever before," one senior military officer told CNN.

If commanders order the troops to perform a mission for reasons that are political -- rather than based on national security grounds -- the fundamental nature of the US military is changed, several officials worry. That line has already been crossed in the minds of some over the issue of sending troops to the border. It could become even more of a problem should the President decide to declare a national emergency to gain access to Defense Department funds to build the wall.

IT'S NOT A pROGRESSIVE PARTY:

Time after time, when progressives urged her to embrace criminal justice reforms as a district attorney and then the state's attorney general, Ms. Harris opposed them or stayed silent. 

THAT LAW-ABIDING WHITE IMMIGRANT YOU LIKE AT WORK...:

As the Trump administration demands funding for a border wall to stop illegal immigration, a new study finds that for the seventh consecutive year, visa overstays far exceeded unauthorized border crossings.

The report released Wednesday by the Center for Migration Studies of New York finds that from 2016-2017, visa overstayers accounted for 62 percent of the newly undocumented, while 38 percent had crossed a border illegally.

"It is clear from our research that persons who overstay their visas add to the US undocumented population at a higher rate than border crossers. This is not a blip, but a trend which has become the norm," said Donald Kerwin, CMS's executive director in a statement.

HE WON'T BE ON THE TICKET:

The president also faces some significant headwinds for re-election in 2020. Just 30 percent of registered voters said they will definitely vote for Trump in 2020, while 57 percent said they will definitely vote against him. [...\]

For context, in 2010, when asked about then-President Barack Obama, just 36 percent said they would definitely vote for him, while 48 percent said they would not. Obama went on to win with 51 percent of the vote.

FIGHTING THE LAST WAR:

Globalization is in the midst of a transformation. Yet the public debate about trade is often about recapturing the past rather than looking toward the future. The mix of countries, companies, and workers that stand to gain in the next era is changing. Understanding how the landscape is shifting will help policy makers and business leaders prepare for globalization's next chapter and the opportunities and challenges it will present.

Global value chains are undergoing five structural shifts

One of the forces reshaping global value chains is a change in the geography of global demand

The rise of domestic supply chains in China and other emerging economies has also decreased global trade intensity

New technologies are changing costs across global value chains

Given the shifts in value chains, companies need to reevaluate their strategies for operating globally [...]

 

Section 4: New technologies are changing costs across global value chains

The explosive growth of cross-border data flows, highlighted in MGI's previous research on digital globalization, is ongoing. From 2005 to 2017, the amount of cross-border bandwidth in use grew 148 times larger. A torrent of communications and content travels along these digital pathways--and some of this traffic reflects companies interacting with foreign operations, suppliers, and customers.

Instant and low-cost digital communication has had one clear effect: lowering transaction costs and enabling more trade flows. But the impact of next-generation technologies on global flows of goods and services will not be as simple. The net impact is uncertain, but in some plausible scenarios, the next wave of technology could dampen global goods trade while continuing to fuel service flows.

Digital platforms, logistics technologies, and data-processing advances will continue to reduce cross-border transaction costs and enable all types of flows

In goods-producing value chains, logistics costs can be substantial. Companies often lose time and money to customs processing or delays in international payments. Three sets of technologies will continue to reduce these frictions in the years ahead.

Digital platforms can bring together far-flung participants, making cross-border search and coordination more efficient. E-commerce marketplaces have already enabled significant cross-border flows by aggregating huge selections and making pricing and comparisons more transparent. Alibaba's AliResearch projects that cross-border B2C e-commerce sales will reach approximately $1 trillion by 2020. B2B e-commerce could be five or six times as large. While many of those transactions may substitute for traditional offline trade flows, e-commerce could still spur some $1.3 trillion to $2.1 trillion in incremental trade by 2030, boosting trade in manufactured goods by 6 to 10 percent. Continued rapid growth in small-parcel trade would present a challenge for customs processing, however.

Logistics technologies also continue to improve. The IoT can make delivery services more efficient by tracking shipments in real time, and AI can route trucks based on current road conditions. Automated document processing can speed goods through customs. At ports, autonomous vehicles can unload, stack, and reload containers faster and with fewer errors. Blockchain shipping solutions can reduce transit times and speed payments. We calculate that new logistics technologies could reduce shipping and customs processing times by 16 to 28 percent. By removing some of the frictions that slow the movement of goods today, these technologies together could potentially boost overall trade by 6 to 11 percent by 2030.6

Automation and additive manufacturing change production processes and the relative importance of inputs

Previous MGI research has found that roughly half of the tasks that workers are paid to do could technically be automated, suggesting a profound shift in the importance of capital versus labor across industries. The growing adoption of automation and advanced robotics in manufacturing makes proximity to consumer markets, access to resources, workforce skills, and infrastructure quality assume more importance as companies decide where to produce goods.

Service processes can also be automated by artificial intelligence (AI) and virtual agents. The addition of machine learning to these virtual assistants means they can perform a growing range of tasks. Companies in advanced economies are already automating some customer support services rather than offshoring them. This could reduce the $160 billion global market for business process outsourcing (BPO), now one of the most heavily traded service sectors.

Additive manufacturing (3-D printing) could also influence future trade flows. Most experts believe it will not replace mass production over the next decade; its cost, speed, and quality are still limitations. But it is gaining traction for prototypes, replacement parts, toys, shoes, and medical devices. While 3-D printing could reduce trade in some specific products substantially, the drop is unlikely to amount to more than a few percentage points across overall trade in manufactured goods by 2030. In some cases, additive manufacturing could even spur trade by enabling customization.

Overall, we estimate that automation, AI, and additive manufacturing could reduce global goods trade by up to 10 percent by 2030, as compared to the baseline. However, this reflects only the direct impact of these technologies on enabling production closer to end consumers in advanced economies. It is also possible that these technologies could lead to nearshoring and regionalization of trade instead of reshoring in advanced economies. Moreover, developing countries could adopt these technologies to improve productivity and retain production, thereby sustaining trade.

New goods and services enabled by technology will impact trade flows

Technology can transform some products and services, altering the content and volume of trade flows in the process. For example, McKinsey's automotive practice estimates that electric vehicles will make up some 17 percent of total car sales globally by 2030, up from 1 percent in 2017. This could reduce trade in vehicle parts by up to 10 percent (since EVs have many fewer moving parts than traditional models) while also dampening oil imports.

The shift from physical to digital flows that started years ago with individual movies, albums, and games is now evolving once again with streaming and subscription models. Streaming now accounts for nearly 40 percent of global recorded music revenues. Cloud computing uses a similar pay-as-you-go or subscription model for storage and software, freeing users from making heavy capital investments in their own IT infrastructure.

The advent of ultra-fast 5G wireless networks opens new possibilities for delivering services. Remote surgery, for example, may become more viable as networks transmit sharp images without any delays and robots respond more precisely to remote manipulation. In industrial plants, 5G can support augmented and virtual reality-based maintenance from remote locations, creating new service and data flows.

WORKING FOR HIM IS DISASTER AID:

[Pam] Patenaude, HUD's second in command, reportedly grew frustrated by the White House's attempt to block federal relief money to the island following the devastation left by Hurricane Maria in 2017.

According to the Post, Patenaude expressed concern in fall 2018 over the Trump administration's attempt to block disaster-recovery money Congress appropriated for the island and states hit by hurricanes. Patenaude visited Puerto Rico a half-dozen times during her time in the role.

"I didn't push back," Patenaude told the Post, referring to Trump's attempt to block relief funding. "I advocated for Puerto Rico and assured the White House that Puerto Rico had sufficient financial controls in place and had put together a thoughtful housing and economic development recovery plan."

Carlos Mercader, the executive director of the Puerto Rico Federal Affairs Administration in Washington, told the Post that Patenaude showed the "most commitment to Puerto Rico of any of the public officials inside the Trump administration." Mercader joined Patenaude on several trips to the island.

Patenaude's departure comes as HUD faces criticism for not renewing hundreds of expired affordable-housing contracts prior to the beginning of the partial government shutdown, which entered its 26th day on Wednesday. The Post noted that the move not to renew such contracts jeopardizes property owners' budgets and low-income tenants' housing stability.

RUDY, THE GIFT WHO KEEPS ON GIVING:

ALL COMEDY IS CONSERVATIVE:

Surprised Democratic lawmakers cheered their leader's rationale: If the government stays shut down, Pelosi would deprive Trump of the spotlight he craves. To a president especially sensitive to acts of disrespect -- and one with a hearty appetite for pomp and circumstance -- the so-called unvitation was not merely a ­power play. It was a calculated personal slight.

In the two weeks since she reclaimed the speaker's gavel, Pelosi has moved aggressively to leverage her decades of congressional experience to needle, belittle and undercut Trump with swipes at his competence and even his masculinity.

WHEN WE ELECTED A CRIMINAL?:

THE IDEAL SOLUTION:

Donors to a GoFundMe "Trump Wall" campaign have reportedly given the organizer, Brian Kolfage, permission to transfer at least $7 million in donated funds to his new nonprofit and plan to construct a barrier along the southern border on private land.

"BUT DO NOT HARM THE JEWS":

[i]n late 1978 a delegation of the Jewish community went to Paris to meet the leader of the revolution, Ayatollah Khomeini. The tacit purpose of this trip was to ensure that Jews would not be regarded as enemies of the revolution but rather as its supporters. This meeting was the first of many between the Jewish leadership and Khomeini. Shortly after, the hospital received its first recognition from Khomeini: "For this reason [the humanitarian help] Imam Khomeini, before his return to Iran, had sent a letter of gratitude to the director of the hospital, recognizing his help and support for the wounded revolutionaries," said Dr. Siamak Moreh-Sedeq, one of the hospital's leaders and the current Jewish deputy in the Majlis in an interview. He described the assistance given to the revolutionaries and confirmed, once again, the story of the Shah's army siege in 1978. Receiving Khomeini's recognition is not a small feat. In many ways it secured the future of the Jews under the leadership of the revolution.

Throughout the revolutionary events, there was a continuing attempt by both revolutionary factions and the Jews to draw a clear distinction between Jews and Zionists. This would be a theme well into the early revolutionary period, but even from the time of the protest there were multiple occasions on which revolutionaries and nonrevolutionaries provided ways to tell the difference.

On Sept. 1, 1978, a few days before the escalation of Black Friday, Yousef Kohan, then the Jewish representative in the Majlis, and another member of the parliament, Ahmad Bani-Ahmad, met the Grand Ayatollah Muhammad Kazim Shari'atmadari. The purpose of this meeting was to have the respected ayatollah stopped the incitement against Jews, which was becoming a problem in some of the provinces in Iran. In his memoir, Kohan described the efforts:

At 1:30 in the afternoon of that September 1st, Bani-Ahmad called me and said, "Kohan! Put on your clothes and come to me immediately. Bring your documents with you." Those days, Bani- Ahmad was in danger, because he was seriously opposing the Shah's regime. I took the address of his secret location, which was the home of one of his fellow Azeris, and took off immediately. Outside the house, a group of tough Azerbaijanis were standing and I could tell they were armed. I asked Bani-Ahmad what was going on. "We want to go visit His Eminence Ayatollah Shari'atmadari," he answered.

In any case, all the issues were humbly reported to him on that day in Qum. The Ayatollah was inclined to proclaim that the lives of Jews were protected unless if they were agents of Israel. Bani-Ahmad recommended that "even though this is correct, but mentioning it will cause the malefactors to take the life of any Jew they want and then claim that he had been an Israeli agent. It would be better if His Eminence issued a general, unconditional and unambiguous command." Many reporters and correspondents from major international news agencies were constantly on the alert at Shari'atmadari's house with their cameras, because that location was the epicenter of Iranian politics, which was of interest to the whole world. That evening, the Iranian radio and television broadcasted this proclamation of the great Source of Emuluation of Iranian Muslims:

"Reports are reaching us that a series of written threats against religious minorities who are recognized by the Constitution and respected by the Iranian Nation, have begun under the name of the Clergy and the banner of Islam. Iranian minorities, have all the liberties and the rights imaginable for the people of Iran. On the other hand, according to the ruling of Islamic commandments, personal rights of all the people of the world and even the human rights of our enemies have been recognized. Religious Minorities, which have been identified in the Constitution, have been shoulder to shoulder with the struggle of the Iranian nation as far as I remember. They accompanied the people in every step of the momentous events of the Constitutional Revolution. I shall never accept the smallest threat or intimidation against them under the name of Islam. In fact I consider such actions as an anti-Iranian and anti Islamic conspiracy. We must know that irresponsible people with missions of sabotage are on the prowl and are hoping to spread the seeds of hate and disunity."

Such a proclamation from a prominent religious leader like Ayatollah Shari'atmadari was a major achievement for the Jewish leadership and in fact was crucial at a moment when Israel was brought up more often as part of the anti-Shah slogans and some Iranians could not tell the difference between Jews, Zionists, and Israelis.

Later that month, during the events of Black Friday it was rumored that the Shah deployed Israeli soldiers to confront the protesters. This rumor, of course, had no basis, but it promptly became an issue demanding attention on behalf of the Jewish leadership.

In the 2013 documentary Before the Revolution: The Untold Story of the Israeli Paradise in Iran, Nissim Levy, one of the Israeli embassy's security officers, recalls that as he drove through the streets of Tehran right before the ultimate victory of the revolution, he saw graffiti that read, "Kill Every Israeli--But Do Not Harm the Jews."

Shortly after the 'Ashura events, the revolution took a dramatic turn when on Jan. 15, 1979, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi left Iran for good. "Shah Raft" (The Shah left), announced the newspapers the next day to the overjoyed crowds, and about two weeks later they announced that the Imam had arrived (Imam amad). All major minority groups came to the airport to welcome Ayatollah Khomeini back to Iran. The Jewish delegation coordinated their participation with another prominent leader of the revolutionary movement, Ayatollah Mohammad Bihishti.

After the installation of the new regime, the hospital encountered controversy. Jalali states, "One night after the revolution they called me to tell that a group of people from the regime came and changed the name of the hospital to 'Khusraw Golisurkhi Hospital.' A member of the left, Gol-isurkhi had been executed by the Shah.It took us a long time, together with Parviz Yesha'ya to change it to Dr. Sapir Hospital." Simin, Sapir's relative, explained how they petitioned the government to have the name changed to Dr. Sapir: "I collected evidence from people that got treatment in the hospital, collected newspaper stories, letters from clerics about the hospital during the revolution, and gave it to them in a big box. After a short discussion they pronounced him a shahid, a martyr of the revolution, and ordered to have the name changed to Dr. Sapir Hospital."

This episode of the name change became significant as the Jewish community retained management of the hospital and the government acknowledged the role the hospital had played during the revolution. Still today, at the entrance to the hospital, there is a sign welcoming patients, staff, and visitors. The sign reads, in Hebrew and Persian, "Love thy neighbor as yourself " (Hebrew: Ve'ahavta le're'acha kamocha; Persian: Hamnow'at ra mesl-i khodet dust bedar), and this essentially captures the philosophy of this hospital from the days it was established by Sapir and onward.

HAVING THE LEFT HATE HER IS A BOON:

Last week, we introduced a method for evaluating Democratic presidential contenders, which focused on their ability to build a coalition among key constituencies within the party. In particular, our method claims there are five essential groups of Democratic voters, which we describe as:

Party Loyalists, who are mostly older, lifelong Democrats who care about experience and electability.

The Left.

Millennials and Friends, who are young, cosmopolitan and social-media-savvy.

Black voters.

And Hispanic voters, who for some purposes can be grouped together with Asian voters.

The goal is for candidates to form a coalition consisting of at least three of the five groups.

I certainly wouldn't claim that this is the only way to evaluate the field; rather, it's part of what we hope will be a fairly broad toolkit of approaches that we'll be applying as we cover the Democratic candidates at FiveThirtyEight over the course of the next 18(!!) months.1 Furthermore, in reality, the various ideological and demographic constituencies within the Democratic Party are more fluid than this analysis implies. Nonetheless, it has influenced my thinking -- the coalition-building model has made me more skeptical about the chances for Bernie Sanders, Joe Biden and Amy Klobuchar, for instance, but more bullish about Kamala Harris, Beto O'Rourke and Cory Booker. In this article, I'll go through a set of 10 leading contenders and map out their potential winning coalitions; we'll tackle some of the long-shot candidates later on this week. [...]

The candidate who looks best according to the coalition-building model is probably not O'Rourke, however. Instead, it's California Sen. Kamala Harris, who potentially has strength with all five groups.

Harris, who is of mixed Jamaican (black) and Indian descent, was easily the top choice in the survey of influential women of color that I mentioned earlier. So while I don't automatically want to assume that nonwhite candidates will necessarily win over voters who share their racial background -- it took Obama some time to persuade African-Americans to vote for him in 2008 -- Harris seems to be off to a pretty good head start. And her coalition not only includes black voters, but also potentially Asian and Hispanic voters. Harris did narrowly lose Hispanic voters to Sanchez, a Hispanic Democrat, in 2016 (while winning handily among Asian voters). But her approval ratings among Hispanic voters are high in California, a state where the group makes up around a third of the electorate.

If black voters and the Hispanic/Asian group constitute Harris's first two building blocks, she'd then be able to decide which of the three remaining (predominately white) Democratic groups to target to complete her trifecta. And you could make the case for any of the three. Harris polls better among well-informed voters, which could suggest strength among Party Loyalists. She's young-ish (54 years old) and has over 1 million Instagram followers, which implies potential strength among millennials. (And remember, Democratic millennials highly value racial diversity.) Harris's worst group -- despite a highly liberal, anti-Trump voting record -- might actually be The Left, the whitest and most male group, from which she's drawn occasional criticism for her decisions as a prosecutor and a district attorney.

THE lEFT IS THE rIGHT:

Six years after his death, we get Revolution in Ruins: The Hugo Chávez Story (BBC Two), a dense and deeply depressing precis of his 14-year rule of Venezuela: a country with the largest proven oil preserves on the planet where 90% of the population live in poverty. Why this, now? Probably because of the rise in populism and the cult of personality in politics, which collide with such magnetic force in the polarising figure of Chávez.

Of course there's a world of difference between the populism of the left and the right, which is what we're seeing in Brazil, Hungary, the US and the endless chaos of Brexit. What's so appalling is the outcome is often the same: the slippery slope to authoritarianism, corruption and abject poverty. Venezuela is now a country in freefall. Inflation is said to be more than 1,000,000%. People are starving to death. Childhood friend Rafael Simon Jimenez says of the president's death from cancer at the age of 58, "[it] spared him from dealing with the disaster that began under his rule".

DO THE RIGHT THING!:

If the shutdown results in the end of this tradition begun by Woodrow Wilson, something good will have come of it.

AMERICAN GENIUS:

NOT EVEN A SCOOBY-DO MYSTERY:

Mr. Trump's meeting with Mr. Putin that day lasted more than two hours. Afterward, Mr. Trump took his interpreter's notes and instructed the interpreter not to brief anyone. Mr. Tillerson told reporters that the leaders discussed everything from Syria to Ukraine, but he also described "a very robust and lengthy exchange" on the election hacking.

A few hours later, Mr. Trump sought out Mr. Putin again during a dinner for all the leaders. Videotape later made public showed Mr. Trump pointing at Mr. Putin, who was seated across and down a long table, then pointing at himself and then making a pumping motion with his fist.

Mr. Trump later told The Times that he went over to see his wife, Melania Trump, who was sitting next to Mr. Putin, and the two leaders then talked, with Mr. Putin's interpreter translating. No American officials were present, and the White House did not confirm the encounter until more than 10 days later, after it was independently reported.

The day after the two meetings, as Mr. Trump was on Air Force One taking off from Germany heading back to Washington, he telephoned a Times reporter and argued that the Russians were falsely accused of election interference. 

WHEN YOU'VE EXHAUSTED EVEN RASMUSSEN:

The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Wednesday shows that 43% of Likely U.S. Voters approve of President Trump's job performance. Fifty-five percent (55%) disapprove.

The latest figures include 32% who Strongly Approve of the job Trump is doing and 46% who Strongly Disapprove. This gives him a Presidential Approval Index rating of -14.

WE'RE WITH CHEETO JESUS ON THIS ONE:

"IT'S NOT GAY BASHING WHEN WE DO IT":

Rep. Ilhan Omar (D., Minn.) accused a Republican lawmaker without evidence of being "compromised" Tuesday.

BACK TO W:

Pelosi suggests she and Trump work together to come up with a new date for the State of the Union that would be after the government re-opens. Alternatively, she suggests Trump simply deliver his address in writing instead of in person, as presidents did before former President Woodrow Wilson's administration.

WE SHOULD BE LAUNCHING FOR THEM:

Telecommunications Minister Mohammed Javad Jahromi told Iranian state television that the rocket carrying the satellite had passed the first and second launch stage, but that it had developed problems in the third phase.

"Payam satellite was successfully launched this morning with the Basir satellite carrier. But the satellite unfortunately failed to be placed in the orbit in the last phase," said Jahromi.

The country had plans to send two satellites, Payam, meaning "message," and Doosti, meaning "peace" into orbit.

State television said the two satellites would be used to gather information on the country's environment. 

ALWAYS BET ON THE dEEP sTATE:

Judge Jesse M. Furman of the Southern District of New York found that Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross violated federal law by misleading the public -- and his own department -- about the reasons for adding the question, which would have forced everyone taking the census to answer whether or not they and others in their household are US citizens. [...]

The Trump administration claimed it needed better citizenship data to enforce the Voting Rights Act and that the Department of Justice had asked Ross to add a citizenship question to the census for this reason. But emails and records uncovered as part of the lawsuit showed that Ross had been asking his staffers and other agencies to find reasons to add a citizenship question months before he received a letter from DOJ.

Furman also declared that Ross's decision violated the federal Administrative Procedure Act, which governs how federal agencies make regulations and other decisions. Ross had ignored and in some cases lied about evidence from his own officials that found asking people about citizenship would decrease participation and increase cost. The ruling also finds that Ross and the Department of Commerce violated two specific provisions in the federal Census Act -- one that seeks to limit the number of questions people are asked directly in the census and one regarding reports to Congress as the census is being planned.

AIN'T SEEN NOTHIN' YET:

Prosecutors working for special counsel Robert S. Mueller III have intensively scrutinized Paul Manafort's activities after President Trump's election -- including after Manafort was criminally charged -- and indicated they have extensive details not yet made public about Manafort's interactions with former Russian aide Konstantin Kilimnik and others, a Tuesday court filing showed.

Although heavily redacted, the documents state that Manafort, Trump's former campaign chairman, claimed he was trying to get people appointed in the new presidential administration. The filing also states that in another Justice Department investigation, Manafort provided information that appears related to an event while he was with the campaign in August 2016.

HIS MASTER'S VOICE:

During the campaign, Trump repeatedly praised Putin, and downplayed objections to Russia's seizure of Crimea. In one extraordinary campaign rally, he called on Russia to hack emails from the former U.S. secretary of state, who happened to be his rival for the presidency. (Russian hackers made their first attempt to do so that very day.) He hired Paul Manafort as his campaign manager despite copious warning signs, including his work as a lobbyist for foreign dictators and his offer to work for free. Manafort was one of several aides who in June 2016 met with Russians who, the aides believed, were bringing damaging info about Clinton. (Trump would later dictate a misleading statement about the meeting.)

Several Trump advisers, especially George Papadopoulos and Carter Page, had extensive contacts with Russians, which they have attempted to downplay. The Trump Organization also claimed it had cut off discussions about building a tower in Russia, when in fact it remained in close contact with Russian government officials about the project.

Before and after the election, Trump dismissed the judgment of the U.S. intelligence community that Russia was interfering in U.S. politics. During the presidential transition, Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner (who attended the June 2016 meeting) sought to set up a secret backchannel with Russia that would bypass the federal government. Meanwhile, National-Security Adviser-designate Michael Flynn had conversations with the Russian ambassador, about which he lied to FBI agents and Vice President Mike Pence. Trump only fired Flynn when his lying was revealed in the press.

During a February 2017 interview with Bill O'Reilly, Trump dismissed concerns about Putin killing dissidents and journalists. In May 2017, he abruptly fired FBI Director James Comey, citing the Russia investigation as his motivation. The day after he fired Comey, he welcomed Russia's U.S. and ambassador and foreign minister to the White House--an arrangement that rattled some intelligence experts on its own--where he told them that firing that "nutjob" Comey had relieved "great pressure because of Russia" on him. Trump also disclosed sensitive classified information to the Russians.

During the summer of 2017, Trump continued to deny that Russia had interfered in the presidential election, despite a growing body of evidence. In July 2017, he met with Putin in Hamburg, with a tiny team of advisers; Trump greeted Putin warmly, and according to the Russians, Trump "accepted" Putin's denials of interference in the election.

That meeting turned out to be only a warm-up for a disastrous meeting with Putin in Helsinki the following summer, in which Trump kowtowed to the Russian leader; openly took Putin's side over U.S. intelligence on the interference issue; suggested allowing Russia to take part in the inquiry; and entertaining allowing the Russians to question a former U.S. ambassador to Moscow.

More recently, Trump regurgitated a strange and bogus Russian assertion that the Soviet Union entered Afghanistan in 1979 to fight terrorists. According to TheTimes, the president has also discussed the idea of withdrawing the U.S. from NATO, which would effectively destroy the organization and fulfill one of Putin's greatest desires in geopolitics.

Any of these specific incidents, and many others that I have omitted, might be individually explained away fairly easily. As a pattern, they're too weird to dismiss with a shrug or cobbled together explanations.

JOB TRAINING WRAPPED IN SHEEPSKIN:

From the beginning, free college in Tennessee was framed not as a form of personal betterment, or social welfare, but in terms of economic development. State leaders found that companies considering locating in Tennessee wanted a broad base of skilled workers more than just about any financial incentive they could offer.

"I can't emphasize enough to anybody who's not in the middle of these economic development conversations how much it has changed - literally it is all about workforce development," Haslam said. "You could look out and say, 'We're really close to having a big mismatch and jobs are going to go somewhere else and we're going to have a lot of people here who won't have jobs.' So that's the primary emphasis, that was the primary motivating factor."

Increasingly, that means workers with some form of postsecondary education. For Tennessee, this was a problem: The percentage of Tennessee residents with a degree beyond high school was in the low 30s - nearly 10 points below the national average at the time. Haslam created a statewide initiative to bring that up to 55 percent by 2025.

The centerpiece of that initiative was free college. Haslam saw it as the quickest, most surefire way to get people - especially those who had never considered college - talking about it. It had to make a splash - even if it meant running up against political resistance from his own party.

"We wanted it to be an easy thing to sell and describe," Haslam said. "If I say, 'Well, it's free unless your income's above this level,' or, 'it's free unless you make a 2.5 GPA' ... Free was an easy discussion so we could say, 'If you walk across that high school stage, then you could go to college free.' And that was a conversation we wanted people to have around their dinner tables."

But "free" wasn't an automatic sell to the Republican lawmakers who would have to sign off. "There were people, particularly on my side of the aisle, who had an issue around, like, 'free - free? - so you don't have to do anything to qualify for it?'" Haslam said. "There was a sense in which this is going to be another entitlement program. That was one of the issues. Mainly from Republicans."

Haslam enlisted Mark Norris, the Senate majority leader and one of the state Legislature's most conservative members, to draft free college legislation and get their Republican colleagues on board. The plan would be funded from a lottery reserve - meaning no new taxes - and it would require students do community service to qualify, so it wouldn't be seen as a handout.

Norris, now a district judge after he was tapped by Trump to a federal bench in western Tennessee, was quickly faced with "concern this was, quote unquote, just another entitlement program that was costing taxpayers money," Norris said. But "when people came to learn it wasn't costing taxpayers money unless they play the lottery, it gave them pause."

In retrospect, Tennessee Republicans came up with a remarkably effective strategy for how free-market politicians could talk about free college to their donors, voters and national colleagues. First Tennessee Promise is billed as an economic-growth program, a way to boost the workforce and lure companies - and jobs - to the state. It focuses on community colleges and technical colleges where students train for those jobs, rather than more elite universities that serve better-off students and come with what critics see as a liberal political culture.

Second, the program is open to everyone, not just low-income students. That sends a signal that it's not a "poverty" program or an "entitlement," and gets buy-in from wealthier families who have their own concerns about the growing cost of college. And importantly, Tennessee's programs are state-based, not a federal mandate or "just another entitlement check from Washington," as Sen. Lamar Alexander, a Tennessee Republican and former state governor, put it.

"It's different than the Bernie Sanders, 'We'll just send you a check from Washington," said Alexander, who also served as president of the University of Tennessee and U.S. secretary of Education. "That's why Republicans are very comfortable with it, conservatives are very comfortable with it ... We don't think of it as an entitlement, we think of it as a ladder to the middle class."

To make it affordable for a non-wealthy state, Tennessee's program is "last dollar" - meaning the state pays only what isn't covered by Pell Grants, the federal aid program for low-income students. It costs the state about $45 million a year, an amount covered entirely by the lottery reserve fund.

"We did it without raising taxes. We didn't add any debt or add to the deficit," said Michael Sullivan, executive director of the state's Republican Party and a supporter of the program. "We took the fiscally responsible steps."

THANKS, JIMMY:

To understand Soviet concerns about Afghanistan, it is helpful to go back to 1973, six years before the Soviet invasion. On July 16, 1973, Muhammad Daoud Khan overthrew King Zahir Shah, who had ruled the country since 1933, in a coup d'état. Moscow, which had been providing military aid to Afghanistan since at least 1955, grew increasingly alarmed about instability in Afghanistan. In April 1978, Daoud was assassinated during a coup led by Nur Mohammad Taraki, further increasing Soviet fears about their southern flank.

The next year, it was Washington's turn to become alarmed after its ambassador to Afghanistan, Adolf Dubs, was kidnapped by armed extremists posing as police. When Afghan security forces attempted to rescue him, Dubs was shot and killed. President Jimmy Carter's national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, blamed the incident on "either Soviet ineptitude or collusion."

Afghanistan headed toward the abyss. Demonstrations erupted in cities like Herat, and, as one top-secret Soviet assessment concluded, key parts of the Afghan Army "essentially collapsed." In June 1979, there was yet another coup, as Taraki was replaced by Hafizullah Amin. This was the last straw for Moscow. As the Soviet archives indicate, Moscow's leaders believed that Amin was growing too close to Washington. A top-secret report to Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev warned: "It is known, in particular, that representatives of the USA, on the basis of their contacts with the Afghans, are coming to a conclusion about the possibility of a change in the political line of Afghanistan in a direction which is pleasing to Washington." The KGB came to similar conclusions and assessed that Amin would likely turn to Washington for aid.

On December 8, 1979, Brezhnev hosted a meeting with several trusted Politburo members, including ideologist Mikhail Suslov, KGB head Yuri Andropov, Defense Minister Dmitriy Ustinov, and Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko. Andropov and Ustinov argued that Washington was trying to expand its influence in Afghanistan. The group tentatively agreed to direct the KGB to remove Amin and replace him with the Babrak Karmal. They also deliberated about sending Soviet troops to Afghanistan. On December 12, Brezhnev, Suslov, Andropov, Ustinov, and Gromyko met again. The group assessed that the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan threatened the security of the Soviet Union's southern borders, which the United States and other countries could take advantage of by aiding the Afghan regime. In addition, Afghanistan could become a future U.S. forward operating base situated in the Soviet Union's "soft underbelly" in Central Asia.

On Christmas Eve 1979, elite Soviet forces began flying into Kabul airport and the military airbase at Bagram. The 357th and 66th Motorized Rifle Divisions of the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan from Turkmenistan and began advancing south along the main highway. The 360th and 201st Motorized Rifle Divisions crossed the Amu Darya River from Uzbekistan.

The Soviet invasion created an immediate global uproar. In response, over five dozen countries--including the United States--boycotted the 1980 Summer Olympics, which were held in Moscow. The Soviet invasion increased already-high tensions between Washington and Moscow.

Terrorism had nothing to do with all this. While Soviet leaders were concerned about "religious fanatics" that were involved in Afghan protests, the Soviets were overwhelmingly worried about U.S. power and influence. To argue that the Soviets were "right to be there," as President Trump remarked, is either to misunderstand Cold War history or, even worse, to legitimize Brezhnev's cold-blooded, anti-U.S. strategic rationale for invading Afghanistan.

In response to the Soviet invasion, the United States conducted one of its most successful covert action programs during the Cold War. 

THE HORROR, THE HORROR:

"Congo opposition leader Felix Tshisekedi clinches surprise win in presidential election," reported Reuters. The BBC announced "Felix Tshisekedi steps out of his father's shadow to lead DR Congo," and the United Nations extolled the country's "first peaceful transfer of power." [...]

On Sunday 30 December 2018, millions of Congolese went to the polls to elect a new president and national lawmakers. Despite a two-year delay, a chaotic process, and the exclusion of four percent of the electorate because of the on-going Ebola health emergency, the vote came off with relative calm.

The presidential contest was fought between Emmanuel Ramazani Shadary, the choice of the country's president Joseph Kabila (who is under EU sanctions for human rights crimes), Felix Tshiekedi, the son of the country's veteran opposition leader who founded the Union for Democracy and Social Progress in 1982 and died in 2017, and Martin Fayulu, a former executive of Mobil Oil who was backed two political leaders the government barred from standing.

Just getting to this point of electoral uncertainty was a struggle of epic proportion for Congo's 85 million people -- and why the final certified result must be just, and evidence-based.

LIBERATION FROM IDEOLOGY:

SMOKING THEM OUT:

[C]onservatives themselves need to be better at policing that distinction. Too often conservatives react to unjustified charges of racism by discounting all such charges. Conservatives ought to be realistic, too, about the unsavory supporters that even defensible causes can draw.

The third is that the frequency and offensiveness of King's provocations have grown as Donald Trump has become the dominant force in the Republican Party. That is probably not a coincidence.

During his presidential campaign, Trump barely and belatedly disavowed the white nationalist David Duke, attacked a judge for having Mexican ancestry, and urged the banning of all adherents of a global faith. And he won.

Maybe King felt liberated by his example to be less politic about his views. 

DONALD WHO?:

ALWAYS BET ON THE dEEP sTATE:

The U.S. Senate voted on Tuesday to move ahead with a resolution disapproving of a Trump administration plan to ease sanctions on Russian companies tied to Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, clearing the way for debate and a vote on the plan.

THE lEFT IS THE rIGHT:

In a Monday evening segment, featuring anti-war leftist journalist Glenn Greenwald, the Fox News host argued that Gabbard had been unfairly maligned because of her deep skepticism about intervention in Syria and willingness to talk to Assad.

"There's something so stealthy and feline and dishonest about the way they're attacking her," Tucker said. "If you don't like her foreign policy views, let's just say so. But no one ever really wants to debate what our foreign policy should be. They just attack anyone who deviates from their own dumb ideas."

Gabbard first became an in-demand Fox News guest in 2015 after she criticized Barack Obama's unwillingness to use the label "radical Islamic terrorism." Her media tour explaining that position earned her positively-tilted coverage in right-wing outlets like Breitbart and The Daily Caller--a trend that continued when she later expressed skepticism of Obama's Iran nuclear deal. [...]

Steve Bannon, Trump's former White House chief strategist, reportedly admired Gabbard's foreign policy, and arranged a meeting with her and Trump shortly after his election. Bannon was reportedly considering Gabbard for an administration role, although no such job ever materialized.

"He loves Tulsi Gabbard. Loves her," a person close to Bannon told The Hill at the time. "Wants to work with her on everything." The person added that Gabbard "would fit perfectly too [inside the administration] ... She gets the foreign policy stuff, the Islamic terrorism stuff."

Richard Spencer, a white nationalist and alleged domestic abuser who has called for "peaceful ethnic cleansing," has tweeted multiple times in support of Gabbard. David Duke, a former Ku Klux Klan leader and current racist, has also heaped praise upon her.

"Tulsi Gabbard is brave and the kind of person we need in the diplomatic corps," Spencer tweeted in January 2017. "Tulsi Gabbard 2020," he tweeted later that year.

In a November 2016 tweet, Duke said Gabbard was representative of a "political realignment" he hoped to see in the U.S., and called for Donald Trump to appoint her secretary of state. Duke ran a favorable blog post about Gabbard on his website.

Gabbard hit back at Duke. "U didn't know I'm Polynesian/Cauc?" she tweeted at the former KKK leader. "Dad couldn't use 'whites only' water fountain. No thanks. Ur white nationalism is pure evil." But he continued to laud her, writing "God bless Tulsi Gabbard" later that year.

Spencer and Duke credited their Gabbard support to her stance on Syria, where civil war has resulted in an estimated half-million deaths. (Some on the far right view Assad as a hero. The Intercept reported that fascists in the U.S. and abroad see Assad as creating an ideal "homogeneous" authoritarian state, free of political dissent. And James Fields Jr., the neo-Nazi who murdered a woman with a car at a 2017 white nationalist rally in Virginia in 2017, posted a meme of Assad on Facebook, alongside pictures of swastikas and Hitler.)

Gabbard has billed herself as an anti-interventionist in Syria, but she's gone further than many pacifists--most famously by meeting with Assad on the trip organized by members of a far-right group in early 2017.

DANG THAT LIBERAL 9TH CIRCUIT:

Tuesday's case, New Prime v. Oliveira, involves a dispute between a trucking company (New Prime) and one of its drivers, Dominic Oliveira. When he began work, Oliveira was required to complete 10,000 miles hauling freight for New Prime--for free, as an "apprentice." He was then compelled to complete another 30,000 miles as a "trainee," for which he was paid about $4 an hour. Once he became a full-fledged driver, Oliveira was designated as a contractor rather than an employee. He was forced to lease his own truck (from a company owned by the owners of New Prime), buy his own equipment (from the New Prime store), and pay for his own gas, often from New Prime gas pumps.

Typically, New Prime would have to pay all these expenses. But because it classified Oliveira as a contractor, it deducted the costs from his paycheck. Sometimes, that paycheck wound up negative due to these deductions, meaning New Prime essentially charged Oliveira to work for the company.

In 2015, Oliveira filed a class-action lawsuit on behalf of himself and tens of thousands of other "contractors." He alleged that New Prime had misclassified him as a contractor to underpay him, a violation of federal labor law. But Oliveira's contract with the company declared that all disputes must be resolved through individual arbitration, a process that is costly, time-consuming, and often unjust, favoring employers over workers. New Prime asserted that, under the Federal Arbitration Act, courts must enforce this "agreement" and dismiss Oliveira's claims. That's no surprise: In recent years, SCOTUS has repeatedly used the FAA to crush labor lawsuits, deploying the 1925 law to throw class actions and labor disputes out of court.

But New Prime had a problem. The FAA generally obligates courts to enforce arbitration clauses. But it expressly excludes "contracts of employment of ... workers engaged in ... interstate commerce," such as "seamen" and "railroad employees." Everyone agrees that truckers qualify for this exception. New Prime, however, asserted that truckers who work as contractors do not have "contracts of employment" and thus do not qualify. And by classifying so many workers as contractors, the company believed it had worked around the FAA's exemption.

Not so, Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote for the court on Tuesday. We may see a formal distinction between "employment" and contractor work today. But when Congress passed the FAA in 1925, Gorsuch explained, "Dictionaries tended to treat 'employment' more or less as a synonym for 'work.' " Indeed, "all work was treated as employment," whether or not "a formal employer-employee or master-servant relationship" existed. Citing six dictionaries from the era, as well as contemporaneous statutes and rulings, Gorsuch concluded that "contract of employment" was understood to encompass "work agreements involving independent contractors." As a result, Oliveira, along with other truckers and transportation contractors, qualify for the FAA's exemption. His class-action lawsuit may proceed in court.

HE IS THE AVATAR OF THE REFORM PARTY:

In 1999, President Trump briefly ran against paleo-conservative Patrick Buchanan for the Reform Party presidential nomination, and before dropping out of the race, Trump told NBC's Tim Russert that Buchanan is "a Hitler lover" and apparent "anti-Semite," and "it's just incredible that anybody could embrace this guy. And maybe he'll get 4 or 5 percent of the vote and it'll be a really staunch, right-wacko vote. I'm not even sure if it's right. It's just a wacko vote." Upon dropping out, Trump wrote in The New York Times: "I leave the Reform Party to David Duke, Pat Buchanan, and Lenora Fulani. That is not company I wish to keep."

On Sunday night, Trump tweet-quoted approvingly from a recent Buchanan column about militarizing the border to preserve white male America.

SO MUCH WINNING...:

An Alabama judge has voided a 2017 state law preventing the removal or alteration of historic memorials, saying it infringed citizens' free-speech rights and effectively enshrined a pro-Confederacy message in the southern U.S. state.

The ruling was the latest blow in an ongoing national fight over memorials to the pro-slavery Confederacy, which lost in the 1861-1865 U.S. Civil War. Backers of the monuments call them a tribute to history and heritage, while opponents decry them as powerful tributes to institutionalized racism.

DAYENU:

🚨 Barr refuses to commit to following the advice of ethics officials if they recommend he should recuse from the Mueller investigation 🚨 pic.twitter.com/Mcs2B8OV9B

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) January 15, 2019

FEINSTEIN: "Has anyone given you nonpublic information about Mueller's investigation?"

BARR: "*I don't recall* getting any confidential information." pic.twitter.com/5fVeP5OVN4

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) January 15, 2019

NO WONDER DONALD SIDED WITH JARED:

As Bannon was carrying out the firing, at Trump Tower in New York, Christie forced him to tell him who was really behind the dismissal by threatening to go to the media and point the finger at Bannon instead.

"Steve Bannon ... made clear to me that one person and one person only was responsible for the faceless execution that Steve was now attempting to carry out. Jared Kushner, still apparently seething over events that had occurred a decade ago."

The political assassination was carried out by Kushner as a personal vendetta, Christie writes, that had its roots in his prosecution, as a then federal attorney, of Charles Kushner in 2005. The real estate tycoon was charged with witness tampering and tax evasion and served more than a year in federal prison. [...]

The elder Kushner hired a sex worker to seduce his brother-in-law Bill Schulder, then filmed them having sex in a motel and sent the tape to his own sister, Esther. The bizarre plot was an attempt to blackmail the Schulders into keeping their silence about Bill's knowledge of Charles's fraudulent activities.

Charles Kushner pleaded guilty to 18 charges and served 14 months in a federal prison in Alabama.

In one of the most visceral passages of the book, Christie recounts for the first time how Jared Kushner badmouthed him to Trump in April 2016, pleading with his father-in-law not to make Christie transition chairman. Remarkably, he did so while Christie was in the room.

"He implied I had acted unethically and inappropriately but didn't state one fact to back that up," Christie writes. "Just a lot of feelings - very raw feelings that had been simmering for a dozen years."

Kushner went on to tell Trump that it wasn't fair his father spent so long in prison. He insisted the sex tape and blackmailing was a family matter that should have been kept away from federal authorities: "This was a family matter, a matter to be handled by the family or by the rabbis."

CAN I CALL IT A SHOVEL?:

NBC News' standards department sent an email to staffers Tuesday telling them not to directly refer to Rep. Steve King's recent comments about white supremacy as "racist."

"Be careful to avoid characterizing [King's] remarks as racist," reads the email, which two NBC News staffers shared with HuffPost. "It is ok to attribute to others as in 'what many are calling racist' or something like that."

THE DRUBBING THE HOUSE GOP EARNED (profanity alert):

The commission appointed by Congress in 2009 to investigate the causes of the meltdown concluded that it "was the result of human action and inaction, not of Mother Nature or computer models gone haywire." A "combination of excessive borrowing, risky investments, and lack of transparency put the financial system on a collision course with crisis." And perhaps most tellingly, the commissioners determined, the crisis had been "avoidable."

In the leadership meeting Pelosi convened after her phone calls with Bernanke and Paulson, the Federal Reserve chairman described a "very severe financial crisis--hundreds of billions in losses." The administration was forced to turn to Congress, Bernanke declared, because the Fed was "no longer able to use the tools we have to maintain stability. It is a matter of days," the chairman warned, before "a major meltdown [would occur] in the United States and globally." Paulson agreed. "I've never seen anything like it," he said. "Once in 100 years."

Congress would have to authorize the Treasury to purchase the toxic assets. "If we don't deal with it by next week, the country could collapse," Paulson warned. The alternative, Bernanke predicted, was a "deep, long recession." Congressional leaders, many of whom considered the two financial managers politically naive and partly responsible for the unfolding catastrophe, were stunned. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid asked how much the purchase would cost. "Hundreds of billions," Paulson admitted, and even then, it was inevitable that widespread foreclosures would cost millions of Americans their homes.

Democratic leaders immediately seized on the strategy of using Wall Street's crisis to benefit millions of Americans on "Main Street" who were seeing their homes, savings, and jobs evaporate without generating any comparable urgent response. Congress had negotiated with Paulson and the Bush administration a meager $168 billion stimulus bill in February, but the law had minimal impact on the worsening recession. Pelosi and Senator Chuck Schumer of New York insisted that something like Paulson and Bernanke's audacious proposal could only secure Democratic votes if it included billions of dollars in anti-recessionary spending to promote job creation, extend unemployment assistance, and fund other initiatives to reduce the "perception the bill is a [corporate] bailout." Barney Frank, the chair of the House Financial Services Committee, also demanded restrictions on the exorbitant executive-compensation packages of financial-services companies to help secure the needed votes.

The administration and congressional Republicans reacted negatively to these efforts to expand the scope of the legislation. "We won't get there if you take that approach," Paulson admonished. The House Republican leader, John Boehner, agreed, advising the Democrats, "Don't play politics." Other Republicans raised their own concerns. Dick Shelby, the senior Republican on the Senate Banking Committee, skeptically described the administration's proposal as "a blank check." Reid explained that Democrats would also face challenges rounding up votes without incentives. "It's political reality," Reid declared in defense of the additional spending. Without the anti-recessionary provisions, Frank advised, "I can't tell you the bill will pass." After a tense moment, Paulson glumly responded, "Then God help us." [...]

Administration negotiators were also exasperated by a plethora of conservative-generated TARP alternatives, including one from Chief Deputy Whip Eric Cantor that would have substituted a federal insurance plan for the bailout. Paulson dismissed these alternatives as "pretty ridiculous" and focused on crafting the legislation with Democrats. Meanwhile, on the Senate side of the Capitol, Paulson was "laying an egg" with the Senate Finance Committee, a top Boehner aide confided in me. White House Chief of Staff Josh Bolten told Democratic leaders their Republican counterparts were "horrid," according to Reid, and Obama quoted Bush as having declared, "My problem is House Republicans." According to a senior White House staffer, neither Senator Shelby nor the ranking member Spencer Bachus of Alabama was being helpful. The obstinacy of Bachus, said Paulson, was "disgraceful."

Reid was flabbergasted to hear that even McCain was leaning against the bill. "We can't pass a bill unless 80 percent of Republicans vote for it," he told Pelosi, who called McCain's opposition "just pathetic." When McCain called Pelosi on September 24 to complain about the pace of the discussions, Pelosi sharply rebuked him. "We are making progress," she said. "It is not accurate to say otherwise." McCain then proposed a suspension of the presidential campaign and the convening of a bipartisan White House summit to hash out a legislative agreement. Pelosi was concerned that a White House meeting would cause delays. When Bolten called to invite her to attend the meeting, the speaker reproached him for capitulating to McCain's "political stunt." She instructed Paulson, "Tell the president to lead! ... I will not allow Congress to look like it's in disarray!" Later in the meeting, she reminded him, "The president never listened to us on Iraq ... He never broaches disagreement." Unless Bush embraced the TARP design they had fashioned together, she told the Treasury secretary, "we have wasted our time, and it is an insult to you." Sardonically, Paulson noted, "I'm beyond that point."

Schumer thought McCain's suggestion was "just weird," especially coming from someone who had offered little "except for an occasional, unhelpful statement, sort of thrown [in] from far away." The Democratic presidential nominee, Barack Obama, was similarly skeptical of the meeting, which might force the postponement of his first debate with McCain, but he was also wary of rejecting the kind of invitation he might soon as president extend to congressional leaders. "We've got him boxed in ... We have him on the ropes," Obama said. "If we didn't go, it would be a bad precedent," he told Reid and Pelosi. They unenthusiastically decided to participate, and decided Obama would serve as their leader. However, they agreed, there would be no deal-making at the meeting, and the exit statement to the press would emphasize that it was the Republicans who needed to "get their ducks in a row."

"We've got a serious economic crisis," Bush declared to the participants around the enormous oval table in the Cabinet Room. "This meeting is an attempt to reach agreement quickly. I can't tell you how important it is to get something done." He cautioned against loading up the bailout with controversial provisions that could jeopardize passage, but he also signaled flexibility, adding that if Paulson and Bernanke signed off, "we're for it. You damn sure don't want to be the people who see it crater." He made, I recall, a point of singling out Pelosi for her collaboration with administration officials.

Obama's opening statement focused on the proposal under negotiation, while Boehner and Bachus again floated alternative approaches. Their ideas, like the insurance scheme, drew sharp rebukes from Frank and Reid, who accused the Republicans of leading negotiators "down a primrose path" only to throw up obstacles at the last minute. As the parties parried, Bush became increasingly restless. "It's easy for smart guys to sit around," he said, but "if money isn't loosened up, this sucker could go down." Although he had proposed the meeting, McCain remained silent for nearly an hour. A CNN reporter confidentially disclosed to me later that McCain's campaign staff had feared that his presence in the meeting could be "political dynamite," and a Boehner staff person privately expressed to me deep concern at the nominee's lack of preparation, admitting he had requested staff assistance from Boehner only the day before the meeting.

After nearly every other principal had spoken, Obama turned to his rival. "We need to hear from John," he declared, and all heads turned to the silent senator. McCain awkwardly stumbled through a rambling statement, thanking Bush for convening the meeting and declaring his support for the concerns expressed by other Republicans. Puzzled looks flew around the Cabinet Room.  [...]

Afterward, Nowakowski told me the Republican leader was displeased with the outcome of the White House meeting and furious with Paulson for seemingly siding with Democrats against the GOP proposals. Perhaps, she mused, Pelosi should "start thinking" about a bill that could pass with only Democratic votes. Confidentially, a top White House aide admitted that Boehner's conference was filled with "hardheads" and that the meeting had been awful, "chaos ... typical of McCain world," allowing others to "outmaneuver him." I recall one Republican aide telling me, "The only person in the room who looked presidential was your guy," Obama. [...]

Unease hung over the House chamber as the debate began on September 29. Blunt advised Pelosi, "Don't count on the Republicans," while Nowakowski advised that some Republicans would undoubtedly "beat their chests" in opposition. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Paulson, and Bernanke continued to call House members, the White House liaison Dan Meyer reported, but there might be only 75 Republican votes for the bill. He asked for additional time to convince recalcitrant Republicans, but Pelosi, worried that her own members might begin to drift away, insisted that the vote go forward.

In a leadership meeting, Democratic Whip Jim Clyburn confidentially predicted that only half of the Democrats' 235 members would support the bill, but far fewer if the Republicans produced only 75 of their own. Pelosi dispatched Barney Frank to meet with skeptical Democratic factions, including the liberal Hispanic and Black Caucuses, and the conservative Blue Dogs. Steeling himself for the onslaught of complaints, Frank asked, "When is the Asshole Caucus, and do I have to address them?"

Shortly after the New York stock market had opened that morning, Citigroup announced it was taking over the failing Wachovia Bank, and several central banks announced plans to shore up the credit markets. Neither action prevented the Dow from beginning a precipitous decline, a worrisome backdrop to the debate. In her statement in support of the bill on the House floor, Pelosi acknowledged, "We have a situation where on Wall Street, people are flying high. They are making unconscionable amounts of money. They make a lot of money. They privatize the gain. The minute things go tough, they nationalize the risk ... they drive their firm into the ground, and the American people have to pick up the tab. Something is very, very wrong with this picture."

She castigated Bush for squandering the $5.6 trillion surplus bequeathed him by President Bill Clinton on unpaid wars, tax cuts, and a Medicare expansion. "No regulation" and "fiscal irresponsibility, combined with an 'anything goes' economic policy, has taken us to where we are today," she asserted. Now, she assured the skeptics in her caucus, "the party is over." She promised that "before long, we will have a new Congress, a new president of the United States, and we will be able to take our country in a new direction."

In his floor speech, Jerry Lewis, a well-respected Southern California Republican, offered a rationale for his recalcitrant fellow conservatives to support the bill. "Frankly, I'm furious," he admitted. "The idea of spending taxpayer dollars to prop up risky investments keeps me awake at night. It goes against all the principles I have lived by." But there was little choice. "Doing nothing will cause a potential catastrophe."

The toughest selling job fell to Boehner, who had privately described the bill to Republicans as a "crap sandwich, but I'm going to eat it anyway." His voice cracking as he spoke in the well of the House chamber, his cheeks streaked with the tears, he acknowledged, "Nobody wants to vote for this, nobody wants to be anywhere around it ... I didn't come here to vote for bills like this. But let me tell you this, I believe Congress has to act." He pleaded with members on both sides of the aisle: "What's in the best interest of our country? Not what's in the best interest of our party [or] our own reelection." His earnest plea received tepid applause, and then it was time to vote.

As the seconds ticked down on the 15-minute clocks flanking the chamber, it became evident that the bipartisan entreaties and White House pressure had failed. The bill was defeated by a vote of 205-228, a rare loss on the floor for Pelosi. Nearly 60 percent of Democrats (140 out of 235) voted "yea," compared with just 33 percent of Republicans (65 of 198). Bush, who had called all 19 Republican members of his Texas delegation, had persuaded just four to support the bill. One of the Texas dissenters, Jeb Hensarling, denounced TARP as the first step "on the slippery slope to socialism."

Anxiety over the fast-approaching election played a significant role in the defeat. Of 18 members in "toss-up" races, 15 voted against the bill, including all six freshman Democrats facing tight campaigns. Some voiced skepticism about the accuracy of the administration's description of the crisis, recalling the misleading information provided Congress about weapons of mass destruction that was used to justify the war in Iraq. Many in the Hispanic and Black Caucuses proved unwilling to explain to their economically suffering constituents the massive spending for Wall Street, particularly since the bill contained little of what Democrats had sought for the jobless and those at risk of losing their homes.

In the cloakroom, stunned members watched the Dow Jones average plunge sharply lower. When the final vote was announced, the bottom fell out. Within minutes, the market had lost nearly 700 points off its opening, ending 778 points lower for the day, a record one-day point loss. By day's end, $1.2 trillion in IRAs, pension funds, and savings was gone--nearly twice the size of the bailout package itself. The VIX index that chronicled market volatility, the so-called fear index, closed at the highest level in its 28-year history.

IT'S CALLED LEGISLATING:

[I]n the fall of 2008, Pelosi still wrangled the votes for a massive bank bailout proposed by Bush's administration, in part because of a willingness to give Democrats some key demands in exchange.

Admitting his party had taken a "thumping" in the 2006 midterms, Bush pledged to work with Pelosi. And he did; in 2007 and 2008, Pelosi and Bush partnered on a fiscal stimulus bill and a large energy bill that raised fuel efficiency standards, among other things.

"We had good lines of communication, we had regular meetings down at the White House," remembered John Lawrence, Pelosi's chief of staff from 2005 to 2011.

Pelosi is an old-school politician who sees the role of speaker of the House as standing up for the institution, ensuring it fulfills its constitutional responsibilities, and making deals on bills. Even with a powerful position in the majority, she has had to compromise with the Senate and the White House; for example, agreeing to cut a public option from the final version of the 2010 Affordable Care Act. But she still has a strong record working with both Democratic and Republican presidents.

"She makes it very clear going into negotiations with the executive branch that she is not there to simply follow the dictates of any other branch," Lawrence told me recently.

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As Pelosi begins her second tenure as speaker of the House -- this time, amid a government shutdown -- Trump would be wise to look back at her working relationship with Bush. The 43rd president learned that when he came to the table willing to truly engage, he could get a deal with Democrats. When he wasn't, Pelosi wouldn't cave.

She's earned respect from her Republican opponents. "I don't think there's any question that she's a very accomplished legislator," said Michael Steel, who served as a spokesperson for former Republican House Speaker John Boehner.

YES, VIRGINIA, YOU CAN COLLUDE PUBLICLY:

July 7, 2017 -- First meeting

Trump received some disturbing news on the morning of July 7, when the New York Times reached out to the White House seeking comment on a bombastic story. The Times had learned that Trump's son, Don Jr., together with Jared Kushner, the president's son-in-law, and then campaign chairman Paul Manafort, had met with Natalia Veselnitskaya, a Russian lawyer. The meeting took place at Trump Tower, in the midst of the presidential campaign in June 2016.

(Last week, prosecutors charged Veselnitskaya with obstruction of justice in the context of a money laundering probe. The case is unrelated to the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, but helped confirm Veselnitskaya's ties to the Russian government.)

Later that day, Trump and Putin met in person for the first time. Their encounter, which was scheduled as part of the G20 summit in Hamburg, lasted more than two hours, and was surrounded by secrecy. The only people present were Trump and Putin's translators, and the American and Russian foreign ministers. Afterwards, both presidents gave reporters vague descriptions of what was discussed.

Trump reportedly ensured the content of the meeting was kept secret by keeping his translator's notes, and demanding that she not brief anyone on what was discussed, according to the Post.

Secret chat

Then, on the evening of July 7, during a formal dinner in Hamburg, Trump walked up to Putin, and the two talked "privately and animatedly" for almost an hour, Ian Bremmer, the head of political risk consultancy Eurasia, said at the time, citing world leaders who had been present at the dinner. [...]

July 8 -- Statement to the Times

While flying back to Washington from the Hamburg summit, the president dictated a statement to aides regarding the Trump Tower meeting. 

DISQUALIFYING ON ITS FACE:

Attorney General nominee William Barr shared a controversial memo last year with nearly all of President Donald Trump's lawyers concluding that an aspect of special counsel Robert Mueller's case could be "fatally misconceived," Barr acknowledged Monday.

Barr's 19-page memo -- which concluded that Trump's publicly reported interactions with ex-FBI Director James Comey could not constitute obstruction of justice -- was addressed to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and Assistant Attorney General Steve Engel and released as a part of Barr's Senate questionnaire last month. But it was previously unclear who else had seen it.

In a letter to Senate Judiciary Chairman Lindsey Graham Monday night, Barr said that he had sent it to White House special counsel Emmet Flood, Solicitor General Noel Francisco, and his former Justice Department colleague Pat Cipollone who is now White House counsel. He also discussed the issues raised in the memo with Trump lawyers Marty and Jane Raskin and Jay Sekulow. In addition he sent a copy, or had a conversation about the contents of the memo with Abbe Lowell, an attorney for Jared Kushner.

BUYING AN OFF-BRAND GUNGA DIN:

The Special Counsel's Office and federal prosecutors in Manhattan are scrutinizing a meeting involving former House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes, one-time National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, and dozens of foreign officials, according to three sources familiar with the investigations.

The breakfast event, which was first reported by The Daily Sabah, a pro-government Turkish paper, took place at the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C. at 8.30 a.m. on Jan. 18, 2017--two days before President Donald Trump's inauguration.

HIS MASTER'S VOICE:

There are few things that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia desires more than the weakening of NATO, the military alliance among the United States, Europe and Canada that has deterred Soviet and Russian aggression for 70 years.

Last year, President Trump suggested a move tantamount to destroying NATO: the withdrawal of the United States. [...]

[M]r. Trump's national security team, including Jim Mattis, then the defense secretary, and John R. Bolton, the national security adviser, scrambled to keep American strategy on track without mention of a withdrawal that would drastically reduce Washington's influence in Europe and could embolden Russia for decades.

Now, the president's repeatedly stated desire to withdraw from NATO is raising new worries among national security officials amid growing concern about Mr. Trump's efforts to keep his meetings with Mr. Putin secret from even his own aides, and an F.B.I. investigation into the administration's Russia ties.

GONNA NEED MORE GOOSE DOWN:

Previous research suggested the idea of sucking carbon out of the air -- "direct air capture" -- would prove too costly, with CO2 removal breaking the bank at $600 per ton. However, new research published in Joule on June 7 by Canadian company Carbon Engineering demonstrates that they can suck CO2 out of the air for between $94 and $232 per ton.

"It's unlike CO2 capture that's designed to work from a power plant. We're capturing CO2 from the atmosphere -- that's what our technology does," David Keith, founder of Carbon Engineering, tells CNET.

"The purpose of capturing from the air is that you can make low carbon fuels from renewable power."

The research is a major breakthrough demonstrating direct air capture technology can be economically viable and provide an alternative means of generating low-carbon fuels that can "drop-in" to existing infrastructure -- meaning they might be powering cars and planes in the future.

That's important because solar and wind power continue to get cheaper, even powering entire cities, but Keith says that "doesn't allow us to make airplanes fly and trucks drive." By combining existing renewable energy sources with the direct air capture system, Carbon Engineering can generate fuel that is essentially carbon-neutral and affordable.

"You can make gasoline or diesel fuel [via direct air capture] but, of course, they didn't come from the ground, so the amount of carbon they emit when they burn is just the amount you used making them, so they're carbon neutral," says Keith.

FROM MORAL MAJORITY TO MORAL COWARDICE (profanity alert):

In their criticism of King, you get the sense that Republicans are actually relieved to be in the position of attacking racism for a change, instead of being forced to defend it from the president. They seem to be signaling that they are not really the bigots they appear to be. Republicans seem desperate to explain that they are normal and moral -- despite all the evidence. Attacking King reveals some sense of shame at what they have become.

Yet, in the end, Republican critics of King manage to look worse rather than better. If racism is the problem, then President Trump is a worse offender. And the GOP's relative silence on Trump is a sign of hypocrisy and weakness. [...]

By any standard, Trump says things that are reckless, wrong, abhorrent, offensive and racist. Until Republicans can state this reality with the same clarity and intensity that they now criticize King, they will be cowards in a time crying for bravery.

THE FAILED PRESIDENCY:

Missing throughout the trip was any concrete plan or vision for how to move beyond the problems that already bedevil the region -- from the 18-month diplomatic spat between the gas-rich state of Qatar and its Gulf neighbors to the investigation into the death of columnist Jamal Khashoggi, whose killing has become a hurdle for U.S.-Saudi ties.

In the background was the drumbeat of the continuing federal government shutdown, new reports about the investigations into Trump and Russia, and the president's own Twitter feed. It all made for weakened leverage for America's top diplomat.

"The U.S. rolls in hot without a plan or the architecture of policy planning and bureaucracy to support its aims," said Karen Young, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute who focuses on the Middle East. "The underlying anxiety of dealing with the Trump administration, with its domestic upheaval, and its foreign policy towards the Middle East that changes daily, is exhausting and counterproductive to diplomacy."

TRUMPONOMICS (profanity alert):

The world's busiest airport has descended into chaos as President Trump's government shutdown drags into its fourth week.

Travelers at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport are reporting hours-long waits at domestic terminals, missed flights due to lack of security personnel, and the closure of checkpoints across the airport due to a lack of TSA agents.

For one Atlanta air traffic controller, the airport, which processes more than 100 million passengers per year, has become "a total s[***]show."

YOU'RE WELCOME:

 

Residents in Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Jersey and New York have some of the highest tax bills in the nation. They also pay thousands more in federal taxes than their state receives back in federal funding.

In total, 10 states are so-called donor states, meaning they pay more in taxes to the federal government than they receive back in funding for, say, Medicaid or public education. North Dakota, Illinois, New Hampshire, Washington state, Nebraska and Colorado round out the list.

HIS MASTER'S VOICE:

In the early weeks of the Trump administration, former Obama administration officials and State Department staffers fought an intense, behind-the-scenes battle to head off efforts by incoming officials to normalize relations with Russia, according to multiple sources familiar with the events.

Unknown to the public at the time, top Trump administration officials, almost as soon as they took office, tasked State Department staffers with developing proposals for the lifting of economic sanctions, the return of diplomatic compounds and other steps to relieve tensions with Moscow.

These efforts to relax or remove punitive measures imposed by President Obama in retaliation for Russia's intervention in Ukraine and meddling in the 2016 election alarmed some State Department officials, who immediately began lobbying congressional leaders to quickly pass legislation to block the move, the sources said.

"There was serious consideration by the White House to unilaterally rescind the sanctions," said Dan Fried, a veteran State Department official who served as chief U.S. coordinator for sanctions policy until he retired in late February. He said in the first few weeks of the administration, he received several "panicky" calls from U.S. government officials who told him they had been directed to develop a sanctions-lifting package and imploring him, "Please, my God, can't you stop this?"

DADDY, WHAT WAS CASH:

The US has long been a laggard when it comes to payment technology. But several factors, from changes in how fraud liability is handled to the biggest credit card issuer's embrace of contactless technology, are now coming together (paywall) for a reboot. Even the Federal Reserve is contemplating how best to upgrade the country's payment plumbing to make it real-time and available 24 hours a day.

Britain's experience with contactless payments shows how it gives physical cash a run for its money. Spending using contactless cards rose to £3 billion ($3.8 billion) in 2017, up from £117 million in 2014, according to the UK Cards Association. A CMSPI consultancy case study of a large fast-food chain found that contactless payments catch on quickly, "cannibalizing both cash and card payments." The study showed that contactless transactions increased by 64% in one year to account for 27% of all purchases, while cash declined by 11%.

"In the UK, contactless payments have been key in digitizing low-value high-frequency payments," Bernstein research analysts wrote in a report this month. [....]

The US, encumbered by entrenched interests and aging transactions systems, has been slow to change. But the massive data breach in 2013 at retail company Target helped spur the shift away from the magnetic stripe, an older and more vulnerable way of processing payments. Since then, a change in fraud liability (pdf) has given merchants, like stores and restaurants, an incentive to switch to EMV chip technology that's more secure. Merchants, instead of card issuing banks, have been on the hook for fraudulent magnetic stripe payments since 2015. While the US has lagged behind in NFC and contactless payments, "that is rapidly changing"  given the recent overhaul in payment terminals, Bernstein wrote.

EMERGENCY?:

It is critical to bear in mind what is at stake here: Congress has exclusive control of the power to appropriate. The expenditure of federal funds without lawful congressional authorization is a criminal offense. Congress could have written into the law the president's unfettered discretion to determine the existence of an emergency. It did not. Courts will not lightly read into the law what Congress does not expressly provide on an issue central to the constitutional separation of powers.

Moreover, the more questionable the case for an emergency, the more unlikely that a court would read the statutory authorizations as broadly as the administration would like. You can only push the courts so far. A president who's trying to advance the most aggressive case for deference to his judgment about an emergency may succeed on that front, and then fail to convince the courts that even with the emergency in place, he has clear statutory authorization for the particular project--in Trump's case, of course, the construction of the "beautiful" steel wall with slats that enable stateside observers to peer through to the other side.

So the first problem the president faces is seeking to exercise discretion under this statute that he does not have. The second is that some of what he has said about the "emergency" undercuts the very claim that there is one. In fact, the president has periodically declared that things are going quite swimmingly at the border, as he did in remarks in meetings with congressional leaders:

A lot of the wall is built. It's been very effective. I asked for a couple of notes on that. If you look at San Diego, illegal traffic dropped 92 percent once the wall was up. El Paso, illegal traffic dropped 72 percent, then ultimately 95 percent once the wall was up. In Tucson, Arizona, illegal traffic dropped 92 percent. Yuma, it dropped illegal traffic 95 to 96 percent.

Now, of course, the administration will argue that these comments merely showcase the virtues of the wall. If walls work in San Diego or Tucson or El Paso, they can be expected to work with similarly spectacular results elsewhere.

The downside of this argument, however, is that to take the president at his word, the administration is making do quite nicely without the declaration of an emergency--and he has pushed his point hard. At Christmastime, he advised the American public that "our country is doing very well ... We are securing our borders," after tweeting two weeks before that, "Border Patrol and our Military have done a FANTASTIC job of securing our Southern Border ..." What, then, supports the need for the use of extraordinary authorities in the name of an "emergency"?

Trump is not helped in answering this question by his other, repeated public utterances on the subject. He and his spokespersons have repeatedly made false statements about the terrorists, drugs, human trafficking, and ordinary criminals crossing over into the United States on foot at the southern border. These claims have been debunked by fact-checking just about everywhere, including at his own State Department. So he starts off in a bad place when claiming legal authority to proclaim an emergency, having both bragged that he is doing quite well without one and then misrepresented the grounds that might exist for such a proclamation if he nonetheless decided to issue it.

Finally, courts will not fail to note the considerable evidence in the president's public statements that he is looking to the national emergency as a tool to resolve a conflict with the Congress. He has said that one way or another, he is going to build the wall, and the shutdown was the first bare-knuckled maneuver to break the stalemate in congressional negotiations. Now he's speaking of an emergency. It is, on its face, a negotiating gambit, apparently also a political rallying cry. But because he is treating the declaration of an emergency as a tactic, he has added considerably to his difficulties in having his "emergency" taken seriously by the courts.

The president's predilection for trampling on his own case brings to mind his unhappy experience with the travel-ban litigation caused by his statements on Twitter and on the campaign trail. Eventually, after considerable trimming and adjustment, the administration was able to do better with a revised executive order and a superseding proclamation. These cases tested difficult questions about the extent to which the president's public utterances--including statements on the campaign trail--invite the examination of the true motives behind executive action.

That Trump eventually survived this scrutiny in the travel cases will have little relevance to his efforts to concoct a national emergency now to support his wall-building project. In the travel-ban cases, the Supreme Court found that he was operating under an immigration law that "exudes deference to the President in every clause."  The National Emergencies Act only "exudes" deference to his decision to proclaim an actual emergency. Moreover, none of the tricky issues presented by campaign-trail statements made prior to the election are present in this instance. Trump has issued a steady stream of statements as president. No one has to engage in any raw speculation or psychological testing to ferret out his motives. He has said what he has said, in clear terms and consistently. These are not slips of the tongue, but one statement after another, most of them separately--and all of them in the aggregate--damning to his legal position on the existence of an emergency.

Commentators looking for illuminating constitutional precedents typically begin with the Youngstown Steel and Tube Co. case, in which the Supreme Court rejected President Harry Truman's claimed authority to direct the secretary of commerce to seize steel-producing facilities. The majority in that case produced two opinions, and other justices wrote as well, so it is fair to say that teasing out lucid doctrine from that case is no simple matter. However, it has become clear over time, from the more developed historical record, that the Court was decisively influenced by the evidence that no steel-shortage crisis existed. There was no emergency, and the Court was aware of this.

And so, for that matter, was the Truman White House. One staff memorandum that later came to light openly acknowledged public skepticism about the claim of emergency and conceded that it was well founded. "The fact is that the public has never believed this contention, and in the face of recent releases of steel for racetracks and bowling alleys, they are even less likely to believe this now."

For this reason, Maeva Marcus, a leading historian of the case, has written: "The Court simply was not convinced of the crisis confronting the nation was sufficiently grave to justify the president's assertion of power." The factual circumstances surrounding the president's claim of authority drove the court's decision. Marcus notes approvingly one commentator's view that "the legal arguments between the two divisions of the Court [in Youngstown] were consequently of little significance; the vital disagreement was over premises." The Truman administration's key premise was an emergency shortage in steel production--and there was none.

Trump has manufactured for himself the same problem from which Truman suffered: an absence of presidential credibility. It is possible, of course, that the courts will let Trump off the hook, giving him more of the benefit of the doubt than Truman enjoyed. Trump would purportedly be acting pursuant to a statute, not on an expansive claim of inherent, constitutional authority. But is also true that when Truman misrepresented the emergency steel shortage, he was at least leading a nation at war.  

It is also worth noting that Trump is repeating another mistake that Truman made. Like his distinguished predecessor, he is flaunting his view of the unqualified "absolute right" to declare this emergency. It never serves presidents well to enter into these constitutional tests with a show of arrogance, especially when their legal footing is far from secure. If Trump doubts this, he might ask legal veterans of the George W. Bush administration how they fared before the courts in advancing confrontational positions on rule-of-law issues in the War on Terror.

TAXING CONSUMPTION:

Conservative Australian shoppers started to wind down their use of cash and credit in the run-up to the key Christmas shopping period, new figures show amid suggestions this year could see record numbers give up their credit cards for good.

Figures from the Reserve Bank released on Monday showed the number of withdrawals out of the nation's network of ATMs at their lowest level for a November since 2001.

ATM transactions dropped by 3.9 per cent over the past year.

The number of credit cards on issue has fallen below 16 million, dropping steadily over the past six months ahead of a string of new rules that started from January 1. They have now fallen to their lowest level since March 2015.

Those laws included a requirement that credit card issuers assess an application based on the ability of the customer to repay the entire credit limit within a three-year period.

Card issuers must also give customers the ability to reduce the limit or cancel their cards online, while they must not charge interest retrospectively on outstanding balances.

As credit card accounts are shut down they are being replaced with debit cards.

JUST A MISTAKE:

Despite being unable to get much going in the second half, Foles and the Eagles offense found themselves deep in Saints territory, poised to retake the lead on a final drive. Foles dropped back and threw a bullet to one of his favorite targets, wide receiver Alshon Jeffery.

Except the ball sailed right through Jeffery's hands and was intercepted by Saints cornerback Marshon Lattimore, in effect sealing the game.

Jeffery dropped to the ground, devastated.

 But then, just a few minutes later, this happened:

Philadelphia Eagles QB Nick Foles consoles WR Alshon Jeffery after 4th quarter interception. According to Jeffery, Foles "told me he loved playing with me and we wouldn't have won a Super Bowl without me."

Now that's #leadership.

#Eagles #NickFoles #AlshonJeffery #Eagles pic.twitter.com/iKYwFYMgEn

-- Justin Bariso (@JustinJBariso) January 14, 2019

Now that's what true leadership looks like.

Jeffery hadn't dropped a pass all game. In fact, Jeffery has never dropped a pass in the postseason.

No matter how skilled you are at your profession, you will make mistakes. That's life, and it doesn't matter if you work for a professional sports team or a fast food restaurant.

But here's the thing: It's how you deal with those mistakes that will define the type of influence you have on the people you work with.

OUR TWO REPUBLICAN PARTIES:

ALTHOUGH FDR SHOULD HAVE BEEN:

[I]n Trump's concealing and perhaps destroying of records of conversations with Vladimir Putin, the question is raised: Was he destroying evidence of collusion and in fact continuing to collude with Putin? "I'm at a loss to figure out a legitimate much less reassuring explanation for the impounding of his interpreter's notes," former federal prosecutor Harry Litman tells me. "How could intelligence agencies, not to mention the American people, not react to that with extreme alarm?"

There is no logical reason that Trump would be going to such efforts to keep everyone else from knowing what he told Putin if there was not something untoward, embarrassing and/or incriminating in those discussions. Otherwise, those records would be essential for his own senior staff in formulating Trump's desired Russia policy. Not knowing what was said would mean his own aides might work at cross purposes with the president and/or not take advantage of Putin's own words. You tie your administration up in knots in this way only if the discussions didn't concern U.S. policy (but instead Trump's private affairs) and/or there was something compromising in the discussions. The very fact that Putin knows what was said and we don't raises the potential for blackmail.

Let's remember where we started: "No collusion." Since then we've learned of: more than 100 contacts between the Trump campaign and the Russians, Moscow Trump Tower dealmaking that continued through the 2016 campaign, a June Trump Tower meeting where Russians offered "dirt" on Hillary Clinton, and Trump's campaign chairman Paul Manafort sharing polling data with a Russian linked to Kremlin intelligence operations.

As if that were not all bone-chilling enough, we saw Trump refuse to flat-out deny he was a Russian agent when asked by Fox News gadfly Jeanine Pirro. Republican senators, when asked on Sunday, didn't offer a complete rebuttal. Far from it. (Asked about subpoenaing the translator to report on the Trump-Putin Helsinki meeting, Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz weakly replied, "You know, I think it's premature for that. I've seen the allegations. I want to find out a little bit more about what happened there. I want to learn more than just the allegations in the press.") Vice Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee Mark R. Warner (D-Va.), invariably sober and circumspect, declined to rule out the possibility that the president was knowingly or unknowingly a Russian asset. He said: "Well, Jake, that's the defining question of our investigation and the Mueller investigation."

To many this seems like a bad movie plot. "The Manchurian Candidate scenario, by its very nature, has always been highly implausible," Litman acknowledges. "But the question seems to be becoming 'Is it the least implausible explanation for a long chain of bizarre and worrisome actions by the President?'"

WHO COULD HAVE DREAMT...:

President Trump dispatched national security adviser John Bolton on a cleanup mission a week ago, with a three-day itinerary in Israel that was intended to reassure a close ally that Trump's impulsive decision to immediately withdraw troops from Syria would be carried out more slowly and with important caveats.

The plan seemed to work at first. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was all smiles, thanking Bolton profusely for the show of U.S. support.

But by the end of the week, attempts to dissuade Trump or place conditions on the withdrawal faded as the U.S. military announced it had "begun the process of our deliberate withdrawal from Syria." A multipronged effort to significantly alter or reverse Trump's decision by alarmed U.S. national security officials, foreign allies and Republican hawks in Congress was effectively a bust.

Since Trump's abrupt Syria announcement last month, a tug-of-war with allies and his own advisers has roiled the national security apparatus over how, and whether, to execute a pullout. Netanyahu spoke to Trump two days before the president's announcement and again a day afterward. French Prime Minister Emmanuel Macron tried to get the president to change his mind. Even Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who liked the policy, was concerned it could not be safely executed so quickly.

The episode illustrates the far-reaching consequences of Trump's proclivity to make rash decisions with uneven follow-through, according to accounts of the discussions from more than a dozen current and former U.S. officials and international diplomats. The president's erratic behavior on Syria cost him the most respected member of his cabinet, former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis; rattled allies and partners unsure about U.S. commitment to the region; and increased the possibility of a military confrontation between Turkey and Kurdish forces.

#LOSER:

In the final hours of 2018 Donald Trump signed into law an act that reopens the door to a TPP-style deal in Asia.  CARLOS BARRIA

However, the enacting of a new law is a significant step for the Congress and White House, which have delivered a bold statement of intent that the US is determined to stay engaged across the Indo-Pacific on security and trade.

It represents a major effort to assuage allies' concerns that a US withdrawal would create a power vacuum in favour of a more assertive China.

The so-called Asia Reassurance Initiative Act (ARIA), which Mr Trump ratified without fanfare as one of his final acts on New Year's Eve, includes a call for the US to return to multilateral trade deals, countering the President's own tendency to pursue agreements with individual countries such as Mexico, Canada and Japan.

Responding to questions from The Australian Financial Review, Republican senator for Colorado, Cory Gardner, who spearheaded the law's passage through Congress, described it as an opportunity to "re-engage in trade conversations" including the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

OLD McDONALD HAD A BOT:

A new generation of family farmers is welcoming robotic milkers and smartphone apps. It's part of a drive to make technology a tool for sustainable and small-scale farming. https://t.co/tkn2eeO5t9

— The New York Times (@nytimes) January 13, 2019

REMIND THEM CONSTANTLY:

IT'S A REFRESHING CHANGE FROM LYING ABOUT IT:

President Donald Trump avoided directly answering when asked whether he currently is or has ever worked for Russia after a published report said law enforcement officials, concerned about his behavior after he fired FBI Director James Comey in 2017, had begun investigating that possibility.

SOLVE FOR THE THRESHOLD PROBLEM AND THE REST FOLLOWS:

In Stubborn Attachments: A Vision for a Society of Free, Prosperous, and Responsible Individuals I argue that we should have two and only two "stubborn attachments" in our social philosophy:

Sustainable economic growth

Absolute human rights

Of those two concepts, economic growth is the focus of the book, and the key point is that economic growth has ethical value. More broadly, I argue for a perspective which is more forward-looking, more oriented toward investment, more respectful of common sense morality (which I see as growth-enhancing), calling for more epistemic humility on the small questions and questions of implementation, and also more utopian in the sense of asking people to focus their attention on how we might make the future a much, much better place, most of all through the medium of economic growth.

If you find it useful to ask whom a book alienates, I would say the emphasis on growth runs contrary to much of the discourse amongst left-wing progressives and egalitarians, and the focus on sustainability might turn off many of those on the current political right.

Behind all that are particular pieces of argumentation, a few of which I will try to summarize.

First, the fundamental problem of moral judgment addressed in the book is one of aggregation. If a choice or policy makes some people better off and others worse off, how are we to weight those competing interests? I respond by finding one case where aggregative judgments are relatively unproblematic. In particular, I believe that life in a much wealthier society is better for virtually everyone. It is much better to live in the United States than Albania, or better to live in Denmark than Burkina Faso. Alternately, you might say that Denmark today is a much better place to live than say Denmark in 1930.

Second, I work backwards from those judgments. If significantly greater wealth is indeed a positive social good, which choices can we in fact endorse? We can endorse choices that bring us to the much wealthier state of affairs, namely higher rates of sustainable economic growth.

As an aside, but an important one, my concept of wealth is broader than most current measures of GDP. We need to adjust GDP for instance to take into account environmental sustainability, the value of leisure time, and the value of possibly unmeasured social indicators, noting that many of the latter are in fact indirectly reflected in GDP. For instance, health matters above and beyond wealth, but still a healthier population is likely to be more productive.

Third, the power of compound returns remains underrated. In the early 1960s, South Korea was as poor as much of sub-Saharan Africa, but since then compound returns have made for a huge difference. Or considering the years 1870 to 1990, if the United States had grown one percentage point less per year, the country would in 1990 have had the same standard of living as Mexico. More abstractly, if you can boost the growth rate by two percentage points a year (by no means a utopian scenario for many emerging economies), after a time horizon of 55.5 years income will be three times higher than it otherwise would have been. Compound growth truly matters.

Fourth, we should not discount the future well-being of humans and also future humans. Significant gains or costs in the future should not dwindle in moral importance simply because they are distant in time. You don't have to believe the discount rate on future well-being should be exactly zero in all circumstances; it suffices to regard the ability to bring about a much, much better and sustainable future as having decisive weight in our current choices. Furthermore, you can believe in this treatment of well-being without denying the appropriateness of the positive discounting of financial flows in a variety of settings, including corporate decision-making.