Brexit, actually. pic.twitter.com/4ryuh19c75
— Boris Johnson (@BorisJohnson) December 9, 2019
A perennial Republican House candidate whose doomed bids against Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) have become a cause celebre on the right was arrested Saturday on three felony charges.Businessman Omar Navarro has leveraged his frequent campaigns against Waters to become a prominent voice on the far-right, earning more than $1 million in campaign contributions and the backing of Trumpworld figures like controversial former sheriff Joe Arpaio, former Trump adviser Roger Stone, and Ret. Gen. Michael Flynn.Despite that support, Navarro lost both his 2016 and 2018 runs against Waters by more than 50 percentage points each. Faced with unanimous voter rejection, Navarro has chosen to run again in 2020. But now, he faces significant legal troubles related to alleged stalking of his ex-girlfriend.
For months, President Trump and his allies have been salivating over a report from the Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz, outlining what they expected would be a tale worthy of a John Le Carre novel. Taking a cue from Trump, Fox News and a constellation of right-wing media have promised us the report would reveal the smoking guns in the Deep State's plot to destroy the president. The report, a product of Trump's insistence that his servile Department of Justice investigate the origins of the Trump-Russia probe, would unleash the hounds of hell on the Democrats, the Obama administration, and the intelligence community.Well, the report's finally been released and the results are underwhelming, to put it mildly. Burn this phrase, lifted directly from the report, into your mind: "No evidence political bias influenced the decision to open the Russia probe." As has happened time and again, Trump's ludicrously overwrought promise -- that this was to be a tentpole of his ongoing (and entirely imaginary) war against the Deep State -- was followed by an utterly underwhelming outcome.The vast enterprise of formerly conservative media outlets now dedicated to trafficking in baroque QAnon-adjacent conspiracy theories in defense of Trump will try their best to polish this turd into a diamond, but the chances are slim they'll be able to convince even their own audience of credulous Trump rubes and conspiracy nuts this report means all that much.
'You guys are based in California, not Ukraine, right?' -- an analyst mocked Trump's CrowdStrike conspiracy on the firm's earnings call https://t.co/vArImtOgUV
— Business Insider (@businessinsider) December 9, 2019
Reindeer and caribou are the same species, Rangifer trandus, separated by the Bering Strait. https://t.co/4NjlDIbEv6
— JSTOR Daily (@JSTOR_Daily) December 9, 2019
Shocking precisely no one who has been paying attention to the facts, the IG report finds in broad strokes that the FBI's investigation of Trump's campaign in 2016 was properly predicated, opened under correct evidentiary procedures, and conducted lawfully. Horowitz did find at least 17 violations of various Justice Department procedures--relating to FISA surveillance applications for Trump campaign adviser Carter Page--but nothing that would give credence to the Trump's long-running grievance that the entirety of the US government was out to get him in 2016.Instead, Horowitz concludes, the FBI was rightly troubled by the signals it picked up in 2016 that Russia had nefarious designs on that year's presidential election. The FBI had an "authorized purpose" to launch the investigation, Horowitz says, which was briefed to bureau leaders and designated a "sensitive investigative matter." The FBI's use of confidential sources was appropriate, and there is no "documentary or testimonial evidence that political bias or improper motivation" played a role in the case. One by one, Horowitz undermines the key conspiracy talking points of Trumpland--including that Trump campaign aide George Papadopoulos was approached by a CIA plant.That said, Horowitz does find the numerous failures in the Page surveillance applications troubling enough to merit a review of the FBI's FISA procedures more broadly. "Although some of the factual misstatements and omissions we found in this review were arguably more significant than others, we believe that all of them taken together resulted in FISA applications that made it appear that the information supporting probable cause was stronger than was actually the case," the report states.Perhaps more than anything, the IG report concludes that the FBI's Crossfire Hurricane investigation was beset by the normal problems of government, large bureaucracies, and team projects, more incompetence and rushed work than conspiracy. At multiple junctures, Horowitz's report stresses that the errors it found were accidental rather than malicious--although, he argues, that should be no excuse.
Take it from a country that knows - it is possible to restore lost trust.On Dec. 9, a day designated as International Anti-Corruption Day, a new Greek prime minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, hailed his country's latest step in battling corruption. For the first time, Greece will have a single, independent body to probe government wrongdoing. The so-called Transparency Authority, Mr. Mitsotakis said, will also help restore the qualities needed in public life to regain Greece's credibility.The new graft-busting agency is one more milestone in Greece's odyssey to redeem its reputation. A decade ago, the government admitted it had been lying about the size of the national debt. Instead of being 3.7% of gross domestic product, it was more than 15%. The falsification of official data shook financial markets and almost broke up the European Union's single-currency zone.Europe's economy spiraled into recession. Its leaders then worked hard to instill a culture of integrity in Greece along with providing it with massive bailouts - the largest ever to a country on the brink of bankruptcy.That work is steadily paying off. Almost every political party now supports open and rational economic policies, such as creation of the new anti-corruption agency. The government is running a budget surplus that is verifiable. This year, the Athens stock exchange could be the world's best performer. Greece is again borrowing from financial markets on very favorable terms. And its economic growth could reach 3% next year.
Presidents Carter and Reagan and Prime Minister Thatcher provided the cover, but it was the bankers who had to steer the policies that broke inflation and gave us the boom we continue to live in. Godspeed, Chairman.When Volcker, a Democrat, was appointed in the summer of 1979 by President Carter to become the Federal Reserve's 12th chairman, the nation had lived for years with high inflation, caused in part by oil crises stemming from geopolitical and economic shocks.Consumer prices were soaring at an annual rate of more than 13% that year. And Americans had become almost numb to the problem: families reacted by making purchases before their money lost value, and businesses routinely bumped up prices and wages.Volcker wasn't alone in viewing this as inherently unstable for the economy or in thinking that the Fed needed to lift short-term interest rates to rein in runaway inflation. But few had advocated -- or anticipated -- the kind of quick and tough medicine that the new chairman would administer.Within days of taking office, Volcker began the first of what would be repeated efforts to reduce the money supply and ratchet up interest rates, which would climb to more than 20% in 1981.The aggressive policy made borrowing costs very expensive, and many feared that Volcker's bold strategy would prove to be too costly. In fact, the economy fell into recession, first in mid-1980 and then again in 1982.Volcker came under withering criticism. Consumers decried the double-digit unemployment. Lawmakers from both parties vilified the Fed as an enemy of America.Businesses went even further. Some plastered "Wanted" posters of Volcker and his colleagues. Farmers drove their rumbling tractors along Constitution Avenue in downtown Washington, D.C., near the Fed's marbled building, and home builders dumped piles of two-by-fours at the central bank to show their unsold lumber and the housing market's woes."This guy was berated by an awful lot of people, and day after day he just shrugged," Lyle E. Gramley, who watched Volcker's steely performance while serving as a Fed board governor in 1980-85, said in 2014. "He was one very tough guy." (Gramley died in 2015.)Volcker's approach carried a heavy political price for Carter, contributing to his landslide defeat at the hands of Ronald Reagan in 1980.Carter acknowledged as much in a statement issued Monday through the Carter Center: "Paul was as stubborn as he was tall, and although some of his policies as Fed chairman were politically costly, they were the right thing to do," he said. "His strong and intelligent guidance helped to curb petroleum-driven inflation, easing a strain on all Americans' budgets. We are grateful for his service to our country."In the early 1980s, as the recession deepened, the Reagan White House grew anxious as well, with some top aides deriding Volcker and seeking to pressure him to back off.But as George P. Shultz, Reagan's economic advisor and secretary of State from 1982 to early 1989, recollected, none of that mattered because Volcker had Reagan's backing."He put a political umbrella in effect on Paul," Shultz said in an interview with The Times in 2014, adding that Reagan and others in the administration knew that a solid economy depended on getting control of inflation.Although Reagan and his Republican Party lost a number of congressional seats in the midterm elections in 1982, the next year, the nation's inflation rate -- which had peaked at nearly 15% in 1980 -- was brought down to about 3%. And the economy began a growth spurt that would last to the end of the decade."Paul could think long and act on that basis," Shultz said.
The anticipated report on the Russia investigation conducted by the Department of Justice's inspector general revealed that Christopher Steele, the author of the infamous Trump dossier, had a "friendly" relationship with one of President Donald Trump's family members.That family member was subsequently revealed as Ivanka Trump by ABC News, and the inspector general's report said that Steele denied having a bias against then-candidate Donald Trump when he wrote the dossier."He stated that if anything he was 'favorably disposed' toward the Trump family before he began his research, because he had visited a Trump family member at Trump Tower and 'been friendly' with [the family member] for some years," the report reads."He described their relationship as 'personal' and said that he once gifted a family tartan from Scotland to the family member," the report continues.
All of which could become a bit awkward for right-wing media types who have been consumed with political fantasies and thirsting for vindication over the promise that Horowitz's report contains damaging revelations about the Justice Department and the Obama administration. It could prove even more embarrassing for QAnon fans who have become convinced that Horowitz's report will set off mass arrests against top Democrats.Many of Trump's most loyal boosters and sycophants at Fox News have long promised that Horowitz's report was not only going to expose FISA abuses and reveal that the Russia investigation was a politically motivated hoax by the Obama administration, but would also lead to actual jail time for those in the Deep State.
No one is sure where President Trump got the idea that the Democratic National Committee's hacked server was hidden in Ukraine. As the impeachment saga unfolds, even the president's most ardent defenders, from Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, would rather talk about quid pro quos or revive the discredited claim that Ukraine, not Russia, interfered in the 2016 United States presidential election--anything to avoid discussing an evidence-free case that borders on lunacy. In her powerful testimony before the House Intelligence Committee, Fiona Hill, a former White House foreign policy adviser, characterized the story of the "missing" server as one of the fictions propagated by Russia's security services, and Trump's own staff had made a point of debunking it for the president. Nevertheless, in his fateful phone call of July 25, when the president asked Ukraine's newly elected president to "do us a favor" and track down the DNC server, U.S. foreign policy was officially replaced by a conspiracy theory.As tends generally to be the case with most of the overheated conspiracy theories lighting up the internet and our political culture at large, the story of the Ukraine-based server is something of an urban legend for the digital age--caroming across our badly warped systems of news delivery from some great Oz-like font of right-wing misinformation, and just as abruptly alighting on our president's diplomatic to-do list. Internet anonymity hides the identities of those behind the curtain who push this and scores of other coordinated assaults on consensual reality, from the insane anti-Semitic libels that inspire armed young men to march into synagogues and open fire, to the unhinged speculations of the mysterious "Q" who posts cryptic messages revealing Trump's secret war against a cabal of pedophiles in the American government and Hollywood.There are exceptions, however. In a handful of cases, it's possible to trace some of the most destructive theories back to their source. Take, for example, the conspiracy theory that DNC staffer Seth Rich was killed in 2016 by a "hit team"; or the campaign seeking to tar Christine Blasey Ford, the woman who accused Justice Kavanaugh of sexually assaulting her in high school, as deeply tied to the CIA; or the report that the bones of children were found on Jeffrey Epstein's island--all these myths lead back to one person. In each of these cases, we can confidently trace the confabulation in question to a man named David Lawrence Booth.A 64-year-old retired chemical plant control-room operator, Booth is one of the world's foremost purveyors of conspiracies and fake news. Writing under the nom de plume of Sorcha Faal on his website What Does It Mean, Booth and his wife have spent the past 15 years cooking up fabricated tales of impending war, government cover-ups, looming financial collapse, alien arrivals, Satanic acts, earthquake weapons, man-made hurricanes, global apocalypse, and "deep state" machinations of all descriptions. On his website, Booth has falsely suggested that he is an officer in the Mossad or the CIA. The truth about his life is equally fascinating--Booth happens to have been the youngest person ever to attempt to hijack a plane in the U.S.--and an examination of his past, with its links to both Russia and Russian disinformation campaigns, opens a rare window into how and why someone can be drawn into the world of conspiracies.
American schoolchildren's educational attainment has stagnated in the 21st century, according to data from two recently updated assessments of reading, math, and science skills.Results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), released in November, and from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), released Tuesday, indicate that American kids have seen minimal improvement in their academic abilities since the early to mid-2000s.
In February 2017 -- in case past and future comments proved otherwise -- newly inaugurated President Trump told reporters: "I am the least anti-Semitic person you've ever seen in your entire life." The sweeping pronouncement from the president, who once suggested that Jews might be committing fake hate crimes in order to make him look bad, has not stood the test of his presidency.On Saturday, speaking before the Israeli American Council in Hollywood, Florida, President Trump engaged in the anti-Semitic trope of a Jewish obsession with wealth. Discussing Senator Elizabeth Warren's plan for a wealth tax, he said that Jews in the audience should "be my biggest supporters because you'll be out of business in about 15 minutes." Trump incorrectly said that the plan -- which requires households to pay an annual 2 percent tax on every dollar of net worth over $50 million -- would take "100 percent of your wealth away" and that "you're not going to vote for the wealth tax."He doubled down on the bigoted tropes, broadcasting a harmful claim about Jewish business dealings. "A lot of you are in the real estate business because I know you very well, you're brutal killers," Trump said. "You're not nice people at all, but you have to vote for me. You have no choice." He then switched gears, engaging in the ancient, yet enduring anti-Semitic claim surrounding Jewish loyalty, which he also evoked in August.
At events around the country, groypers have heckled mainstream conservatives and asked provocative questions -- often about Israel, immigration and LGBTQ rights -- in an effort to unmask them as "fake" conservatives and "frauds." Named for a more grotesque version of the cartoon Pepe the Frog, which has been coopted by white nationalists, the goal appears to be to move conservatism closer to white nationalism, according to Marilyn Mayo, a senior research fellow at the Anti-Defamation League's Center on Extremism.In an interview last year, Fuentes said he avoids the term "white nationalist" for purely tactical reasons."The reason I wouldn't call myself a white nationalist -- it's not because I don't see the necessity for white people to have a homeland and for white people to have a country," Fuentes said. "It's because I think that kind of terminology is used almost exclusively by the left to defame and I think the terminology and the labels that we use -- I don't think that we can look at them outside of the context of their connotations in America."The strategy appears to be bearing some fruit. In April, Ann Coulter retweeted a Fuentes tweet on immigration. Michelle Malkin, a Fox News regular, criticized efforts to silence groypers, who she described as "truth-tellers."