Congressional investigations, including an impeachment inquiry, into President Donald Trump have expanded in a new--and unprecedented--direction.As part of deciding whether to recommend articles of impeachment, Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee announced on September 6 that they were probing Trump's announcement that next year's G7 would be held at a Trump-owned resort in Doral, Fla., along with Vice President Mike Pence's taxpayer-funded stay at a Trump-owned golf club in Doonbeg, Ireland. The charges represent a new front in the impeachment investigation stemming from obstruction-of-justice allegations from the Mueller Report on Russian interference in the 2016 election.Separately, following a Politico report, the House Oversight Committee revealed on September 6 it was investigating military stays at a Trump-owned property in Turnberry, Scotland, and substantial increases in military refueling at a nearby airport since Trump won the election.
Nikki Haley blasts government's budget deficit: 'We don't have an endless bank account' https://t.co/04Mo69ckRo
— MarketWatch (@MarketWatch) September 13, 2019
1. Joe Biden. This is the third debate he's won, and only the first one was close.Biden has to show that he's sharp and vigorous. He's passed that test.He has to hammer the most important difference between himself and his closest rivals: That they want to eliminate private insurance and they'll raise taxes to pay for their health care plans. Poll after poll shows that health care is one of the top three issues for Democratic voters. And Biden is the guy sitting on the spot that says "let people keep their private insurance." That's good ground.Finally, he has to continue to show voters why people like him. And more than anyone else on stage, he nailed this. Three examples:First, during the opening segment on Medicare for All, Biden focused most of his criticisms on Bernie Sanders (not the most likable guy on stage) rather than Elizabeth Warren (who is much more likable) even though they could have applied to either.Second, when Julian Castro went after him for being a forgetful old man, he pushed back but didn't get ugly. He realized Castro was way out on a limb and he let him stay there.Third, when gun control came up Biden turned to Beto O'Rourke. This is the exchange:BIDEN: [B]y the way, the way Beto handled--excuse me for saying Beto. What the congressman . . .O'ROURKE: That's all right. Beto's good.BIDEN: The way he handled what happened in his hometown is meaningful, to look in the eyes of those people, to see those kids . . . to understand those parents, you understand the heartache.What makes the praise of O'Rourke come off as genuine is the opening, where Biden calls him by his first name--obviously affectionately--and then catches himself and apologizes for not calling him "congressman."The frontrunner is always the guy taking the most fire. Yet time and again, Biden was the most respectful person on the stage. Being respectful doesn't win you the nomination. But it's a mark of why Biden has such deep reservoirs of goodwill with Democratic voters.There's a reason they like him.Exit take: Toward the end, Biden was asked about his biggest professional setback. He started talking about losing his wife and daughter when protestors started screaming at him.This struck me as synecdoche for pretty much the entire primary campaign so far: Young progressives so convinced of their own righteousness that they go after a guy like Biden at a moment like this, thinking that it helps their cause.
Kim Jong Un must be jealous.That's because it seems at last month's G7 conference, President Trump replaced him with a new "favorite dictator." While waiting for a meeting with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah Al Sisi, Trump walked into a room of American and Egyptian officials and asked "Where's my favorite dictator?," several people who were in the room tell The Wall Street Journal.
McCabe's indictment had been expected on charges related to alleged lies to internal Justice Department investigators about his contacts with the media in 2016. On Thursday, Sept. 12, the New York Times and the Washington Post reported that the deputy attorney general had rejected McCabe's final appeal within the department to avoid prosecution. According to the Post, McCabe received a communication from the Justice Department informing him that "[t]he Department rejected your appeal of the United States Attorney's Office's decision in this matter .... Any further inquiries should be directed to the United States Attorney's Office." The Times writes that the decision was made by Deputy Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen, and that Rosen's top aide, Ed O'Callaghan, reached out to McCabe's team on the matter.There is a great deal of uncertainty around what happened next, almost certainly because Rule 6(e) of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure forbids the government, court officials or grand jurors from disclosing matters before the grand jury. This may make the McCabe story a particularly hard nut for reporters to crack. But here's what we know.Normally, when the Justice Department informs a criminal target that it is moving ahead with charges, particularly when the target is a high-profile one, the indictment follows immediately. Yet in this case, no indictment materialized. And that wasn't because the grand jury didn't meet.According to the Post, rather, the grand jury was reconvened on Thursday--but no public charges against McCabe were filed. Now, McCabe's lawyer, Michael Bromwich, has written to U.S. Attorney Jessie Liu, whose office is handling McCabe's case, stating that the defense team has heard "rumors from reporters ... that the grand jury considering charges against Mr. McCabe had declined to vote an indictment"--though the defense has "no independent knowledge of whether the reporting is accurate." Bromwich added that "based on our discussion with" government lawyers, "it is clear that no indictment has been returned." [...]This would be a very big deal--a huge rebuke to the Justice Department's conduct of this case. Grand juries do not need to be unanimous. They need to have a quorum of their 23 members, and they require only a majority to return an indictment. They also don't proceed by proof beyond a reasonable doubt, the standard at trial. Instead, an indictment issues on the lower standard of probable cause. In other words, if this is really what happened, it would mean that the Justice Department couldn't even persuade a majority of people who have heard from all of the witnesses that there is even probable cause to proceed against McCabe.
A U.S. federal appeals court on Friday revived a lawsuit alleging President Donald Trump violated the U.S. Constitution by profiting from foreign and domestic officials who patronized his hotels and restaurants, adding to the corruption claims against Trump.
[I]t wasn't until 1954 that scientists at Bell Labs in the US made a serendipitous breakthrough.By pure luck, they noticed that when silicon components were exposed to sunlight, they started generating an electric current. Unlike selenium, silicon is cheap - and Bell Labs' researchers reckoned it was also 15 times more efficient.These new silicon PV cells were great for satellites - the American satellite Vanguard 1 was the first to use them, carrying six solar panels into orbit in 1958.The Sun always shines in space, and what else are you going to use to power a multimillion-dollar satellite, anyway? Yet solar PV had few heavy-duty applications on Earth itself: it was still far too costly.Vanguard 1's solar panels produced half a watt at a cost of countless thousands of dollars.By the mid-1970s solar panels were down to $100 (£81) a watt - but that still meant $10,000 for enough panels to power a light bulb. Yet the cost kept dropping.By 2016 it was 50 cents a watt and still falling fast. After millennia of slow progress, things have accelerated very suddenly.Perhaps we should have seen this acceleration coming.In the 1930s, an American aeronautical engineer named TP Wright carefully observed aeroplane factories at work.He published research demonstrating that the more often a particular type of aeroplane was assembled, the quicker and cheaper the next unit became.Workers would gain experience, specialised tools would be developed, and ways to save time and material would be discovered.Wright reckoned that every time accumulated production doubled, unit costs would fall by 15%. He called this phenomenon "the learning curve".Recently, a group of economists and mathematicians at Oxford University found convincing evidence of learning-curve effects across more than 50 different products from transistors to beer - including photovoltaic cells.Sometimes the learning curve is shallow and sometimes it is steep, but it always seems to be there.In the case of PV cells, it's quite steep: for every doubling of output, cost falls by over 20%.And this matters because output is increasing so fast: between 2010 and 2016 the world produced 100 times more solar cells than it had before 2010. [...][N]ow that solar PV has marched along the learning curve, it is competitive even in rich, well-connected areas.As early as 2012, PV projects in the sunny US states were signing deals to sell power at less than the price of electricity generated by fossil fuels.That was the sign that solar power had become a serious threat to existing fossil fuel infrastructure, not because it's green but because it's cheap.In late 2016 in Nevada, for example, several large casino chains switched from the state utility to purchase their power from largely renewable sources.This wasn't a corporate branding exercise: it was designed to save them money, even after paying $150m (£122m) as a severance fee.
[T]oday it's another of Heidegger's relationships that overshadows his life and legacy: his affiliation with the Nazi Party, which he joined in 1933 and never truly renounced. Heidegger and Hitler also shared a lover's discourse of sorts: terms such as Heimat (homeland), Volk (people) and "historical destiny", a fondness for the German forest, and contempt for cosmopolitanism and "humanism". Since the posthumous publication of Heidegger's private notebooks, their common foe is also beyond doubt, despite his feelings for Arendt: "World Jewry". [...]Perhaps the most worrying sign of Heidegger's relevance today lies in politics - where all manner of dangerous reactionaries delight in declaring their indebtedness to him. Martin Sellner, leader of the Austrian branch of the neo-fascist network Generation Identity - which allegedly has ties to Brenton Tarrant, who murdered 51 people in attacks on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand this year - attributes his "path of thinking to Heidegger". For the ultra-conservative thinker and adviser to Vladimir Putin Aleksandr Dugin, mastering Heidegger "is the main strategic task of the Russian people". When Steve Bannon, Donald Trump's former chief strategist, was interviewed by Der Spiegel last year, he held up a biography of Heidegger. "That's my guy," he said.Heidegger's thought cannot be confined to a single idea or interpretation. He pined for a lost harmony and simplicity, but left one of the most divisive and complex oeuvres in the history of philosophy. He was a nature lover and a Nazi philosopher; an anti-Semite and an almost rabbinical thinker (some Nazis were suspicious of his avid Jewish readers and wanted to ban his work because of a perceived "Talmudic-Kabbalist" quality). He was obsessed with the West and is adored by its self-appointed defenders. But he was also influenced by Eastern philosophy and, convinced that the West had lost its way, he became central to anti-Western thought, inspiring the 1979 Iranian Revolution's idea of "Westoxification". Meanwhile, his more spiritual musings circulate innocently on social media, as life advice for the lost at heart.There is no clear political philosophy in Heidegger. Born in 1889, in the small village of Messkirch, he was a philosopher whose style was often willingly - some say comically - opaque. Many of his key terms are so difficult to define that translators simply opt to keep the original German. At the time of writing, "Martin Heidegger" is one of only 174 English Wikipedia pages -out of a total 29 million - officially flagged as "incomprehensible" by the site.This is also one of the reasons why Heidegger's standing is so fraught, even when his Nazism and anti-Semitism are set aside. The way he wrote has especially irked Anglophile readers, who suspect a man without substance. So whereas for Arendt he was "the secret king of thought" and for Levinas "the greatest philosopher of the century", Bertrand Russell, by contrast, thought Heidegger did not even warrant a place in his History of Western Philosophy (1945). "Heidegger is the only world-famous philosopher of the 20th century about whom it can seriously be argued that he was a charlatan," Bernard Williams wrote in 1981.
Moments after Democrats took the debate stage on Thursday night, President Trump delivered a rambling and disjointed 68-minute speech accusing the news media and the "radical left" of wanting to destroy America."Whether you like me or not, it doesn't matter," Mr. Trump told an audience of Republican House lawmakers at a conference in Baltimore. "You have to elect me; you have no choice." [...]"The bulb that we're being forced to use -- the light doesn't look good," Mr. Trump lamented during an extended aside about his dislike for energy-efficient light bulbs. "I always look orange...
It seemed inevitable that O'Rourke's call to ban ownership of military-style weapons would rile up the guns=distilled liberty true believers online, but it was, perhaps predictably, an elected Republican official--from the state of Texas no less--that led the way over the cliff. Texas state Rep. Briscoe Cain tweeted a not-so-thinly veiled threat at the presidential contender, tweeting "My AR is ready for you Robert Francis," calling O'Rourke, whose nickname is Beto, by his first and middle names.
...his depiction of the Steppes actually describes what he saw in the American Plains.Between 1883 and 1887 he wrote his legendary trilogy, a fictional recounting of the glories and trials of the seventeenth-century Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Among many historical events, the novels cover the Khmelnytsky Uprising of Ukrainian Cossacks, the Swedish invasion of Poland, and wars between Poland and the Ottoman Empire. The books both secured Sienkiewicz fame in Poland and abroad, and reinforced Polish nationalism and international sympathy for the Poles' cause.As his fame grew, Sienkiewicz became more involved in Polish nationalism and philanthropy, founding or supporting projects for starvation relief, schools, and the construction of tuberculosis sanatoriums. In 1896 he published his most celebrated novel, Quo Vadis, set amid the persecution of the early Church in Nero's Rome. The work sold 800,000 copies in the United States in eighteen months. In 1905 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature. [...]Sienkiewicz's depiction of the ideal hero represents both an anthropomorphized vision of Poland and the kinds of Polish men and women that were required to secure and maintain a sovereign, independent Polish nation. Sienkiewicz's Poland is a glorious nation with a profound martial and religious legacy, but one suffering internal intrigues at the hands of vain, selfish Polish nobility who leave the nation vulnerable to external assaults from Germans, Russians, Cossacks, and Turks. This mirrored the Poland of his own day, which ceased to exist after its eighteenth-century partition by the competing powers of Germany, Austro-Hungary, and Russia. These not only oppressed the Polish people but also often actively sought to suppress their culture and language.Poland required the kinds of citizens who drank deeply from their heritage and who refused to be cowed by tyrannical powers. They, says Sienkiewicz, must avoid the extremes of merciless, utilitarian violence so common among their subjugators and the apathy and sensual nihilism that enticed the disaffected youth. They must instead pursue a purity and righteousness that would appeal to foreign sympathizers and prove essential to building a soon-to-be-realized flourishing Polish civic society. In contrast to the old Poland, which disastrously catered to the interests of the landed nobility, the new Poland would exemplify the Christian virtues of charity and self-sacrifice.Sienkiewicz's vision for the good life represents a pedagogical lesson for both Poles and Americans. It repudiates moral decadence in favor of restrained, pious virtue and civic obligation, one that is fiercely patriotic and proud of its heritage. These qualities were clearly evident in the Polish citizens who resisted the Nazis and Soviets. Indeed, these traits enabled two generations of Poles to endure--and overcome--Soviet domination.
Common themes emerged from this research that are aligned with anecdotal evidence and commonly held understandings and assumptions about the health care cost burden of small employers. Primarily, it is clear that health care costs are arguably the major concern for small businesses. Though small employers report taking steps to reduce the burden, often by shifting some of the costs onto their employees, few have considered dropping coverage altogether.Increasing health care costs is not sustainable for small employers. They want change and are willing to take pragmatic steps. This desire for change does not adhere to party lines; across the ideological spectrum, small-business owners are open to a range of possible solutions. Those favored by small employers require legislative action, primarily at the federal level, to help small employers affordably provide health insurance to their employees.Surprisingly, there was an openness to concepts that might be construed as extreme, like Medicare for All or a single-payer system. Other options, such as a Medicare or Medicaid buy-in, also found favor. Though business owners tend to be a conservative group, we did see an unexpected and almost apolitical frame on the issue of health care. Small-business owners did not ascribe blame to one actor or the other. They saw solutions as independent of party of origin, signaling an interest in policy and action from policymakers rather than a strict adherence to political ideology.