If you have been tempted to dismiss the growing progressive insurgency within the Democratic caucus as a mirage produced by a handful of outspoken voices – as Nancy Pelosi has suggested – well, think again.
In what appears to be one of the most deliberate examples yet of the Democrats progressive caucus sabotaging the party’s own agenda because it didn’t get exactly what it wanted, the Hill reports that some House Dems are prepared to scuttle a bill to raise the national minimum wage to $15 an hour if a procedural motion from the Republicans is added to the bill.
It’s meant to be a gesture to moderate Democrats who have sometimes voted with Republicans on procedural issues: The progressives are in no mood to compromise.
Reps. Pramila Jayapal and Mark Pocan, the co-chairs of the House Progressive Caucus, issued a statement accusing the Republicans of supporting a “disingenuous” motion that would amount to a “poison pill”.
“We have no doubt that Congressional Republicans will try to divide the Democratic Caucus with a disingenuous Motion to Recommit. It’s up to all of us to stand unified and reject their bad faith effort to undermine this bill,” Pocan and Jayapal said in a statement.
“After consulting with our Members this week, we are confident that any bill that includes a poison pill Republican Motion to Recommit will lack the votes to pass on the House Floor.”
According to the Huffington Post, a vote on the minimum wage is slated for Thursday. However, even if progressives don’t kill it, the bill will face an almost certain death in the Senate. The federal minimum wage is currently $7.25 an hour, and it hasn’t been raised since 2009. It’s the effective minimum wage in 19 states.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2NXUzDR Tyler Durden
A popular animation production studio in Kyoto, Japan has gone up in flames after a reported arson attack, leaving a shocking 33 people confirmed or presumed dead, and another 36 injured – some critically – according to Japanese fire department statements. It’s Japan’s worst case of arson in decades and among the highest mass casualty events in its recent history.
The three-story building was quickly engulfed after a man sprayed a flammable liquid onto it while reportedly shouting, “You die!” according to local media reports. Many among the deceased had been trapped on the top floor and perished attempting to to get to the roof.
Police arrested a 41-year-old man who had shouted “die” as he poured what appeared to be petrol around the three-story Kyoto Animation building shortly after 10 a.m. — Reuters
The country’s worst case of arson in decades as Kyoto Animation went up in flames. Image source: Kyodo News
The suspect has been detained and is being treated for injuries at a hospital. Early reports didn’t give a motive or were able to identify whether he had been an employee of Kyoto Animation Co., possibly disgruntled or engaged in revenge attack.
An emergency responder told the AFP, “Callers reported having heard a loud explosion from the first floor of Kyoto Animation and seeing smoke.” It total some 70 people had been working inside the building at the time of the attack.
It was among the deadliest fires in Japan’s recent history, as the AP reports:
Authorities say 20 people have been now confirmed dead, with nearly 10 others presumed dead. The outcome makes the case the deadliest fire since a 2001 fire that killed 44 in Tokyo’s Kabukicho entertainment district.
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe called the arson attack “too appalling for words” in a statement posted to social media.
Kyoto Animation works, via Kyodo News
Though nation-wide Japan is marked by low crime incidents, occasional major senseless tragedies rock the country and grab world headlines.
Kyoto Animation has produced the “Sound! Euphonium” series and the upcoming “Free! Road to the World — The Dream” movie, according to Reuters.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2XQXbIe Tyler Durden
The Conference Board Leading Economic Index (LEI) for the U.S. tumbled 0.3% in June to 111.5, following no change in May, and a 0.1% rise in April.
This is the biggest MoM drop since January 2016…
The biggest positive contributor to the leading index was leading Credit index at 0.12
The biggest negative contributor was building permits at -0.18
The ten components of The Conference Board Leading Economic Index® for the U.S. include:
Average weekly hours, manufacturing
Average weekly initial claims for unemployment insurance
Manufacturers’ new orders, consumer goods and materials
ISM® Index of New Orders
Manufacturers’ new orders, nondefense capital goods excluding aircraft orders
Building permits, new private housing units
Stock prices, 500 common stocks
Leading Credit Index™
Interest rate spread, 10-year Treasury bonds less federal funds
Average consumer expectations for business conditions
“The US LEI fell in June, the first decline since last December, primarily driven by weaknesses in new orders for manufacturing, housing permits, and unemployment insurance claims,” said Ataman Ozyildirim, Senior Director of Economic Research at The Conference Board.
“For the first time since late 2007, the yield spread made a small negative contribution. As the US economy enters its eleventh year of expansion, the longest in US history, the LEI suggests growth is likely to remain slow in the second half of the year.”
Seems like stocks may have got over their skis again?
Rate-cuts?
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2NZyvsH Tyler Durden
You’re probably old enough to remember a time when conservatives opposed the idea that it was the federal government’s job to solve most problems. A time when they thought that individuals, families, and community groups, not politicians, were responsible for building a good life and a good society. A time when they believed that government power should be devolved whenever possible to the state and local level, away from the bloated behemoth in Washington.
The several hundred attendees of this week’s National Conservatism conference have a different vision for American politics. The event brought together a variety of speakers to discuss and defend, in explicit terms, the need for a new nationalism.
As the Hudson Institute’s Chris DeMuth put it, “our claim is that the government has abdicated basic responsibilities and broken trust with large numbers of our fellow citizens.” It has done this by allowing a globalized economy to emerge and U.S. manufacturing supremacy to be lost; by not “securing our borders” or ensuring that immigrants are sufficiently assimilated into the culture; by either turning a blind eye to or actively encouraging the erosion of traditional Christian values.
“The rising economic tide has swallowed entire regions,” said pro-Israel activist David Brog. The result, according to Hillbilly Elegyauthor J.D. Vance, has been “family decline, childhood trauma, opioid abuse, community decline, decline of the manufacturing sector and all the sense of dignity and purpose and meaning that comes along with it.” And the answer to these problems, under the new nationalist view, is for conservatives to shed their aversion to big government. “We should care about a whole host of public goods,” Vance concluded, “and actually be willing to use politics and political power to accomplish those goods.”
Practically speaking, the nationalist agenda is largely focused on the need for a federal “industrial policy.” For Breitbart‘s John Carney, that means tariffs, and lots of them. Americans need to be willing to pay higher prices to protect the jobs of their fellow citizens, according to Brog. For American Affairs founder Julius Krein, “protectionism is not sufficient….It’s not radical enough.” The Manhattan Institute’s Oren Cass laid out a plan involving research and development subsidies, infrastructure investments, preferential tax rates for favored firms, punitive taxes on companies that move jobs overseas, “trade enforcement” to make other countries play according to our rules, and more. “We should have a National Institutes of Manufacturing just as we have a National Institutes of Health,” he said.
What do all of these proposals—and the many others offered at the conference, from censoring porn to cracking down on opioids to preventing trans girls from playing on girls’ sports teams—have in common? There is a tendency among the new nationalists to frame their movement as standingin opposition to supranationalism. Yoram Hazony, author of The Virtue of Nationalism, laments in particular what he sees as a push toward a homogenous “new world order” in which umbrella institutions such as the European Union and the United Nations override the rightful sovereignty of states.
Yet the true object of the nationalists’ ire is much closer to home: They cannot abide individual Americans making social and economic choices they do not like. For consumers, the question might be whether to buy foreign or domestic. For a business owner, it might be where to open a factory. For a parent, it might be whether or not to attend drag queen story hour at the local library. Regardless, the new nationalists have decided not only that there is a right answer from a moral perspective but that government should force you to choose correctly.
“Today we declare independence,” Hazony said, “from neoliberalism, from libertarianism, from what they call classical liberalism. From the set of ideas that sees the atomic individual, the free and equal individual, as the only thing that matters in politics.”
For Cass, Vance, Hazony, and the others, the situation is binary: We can either accept a moral relativism in which no outcome is better than any other as long as it was freely chosen, or we can acknowledge that our society faces problems and embrace federal efforts to fix them.
That choice is a false one. When it comes to solving problems, there are numberless alternatives to government interference. They begin with individual initiative and personal responsibility, but they need not end there. Once upon a time, conservatives understood as a canard the progressive maxim that “government is simply the name for things we do together.” Private actors do things together every day, via churches, charities, neighborhood groups, businesses, professional associations, and other civil society organizations (to say nothing of family and friends).
This point was drawn out during the conference by the ultraconservative Notre Dame political scientist Patrick Deneen, the only person I heard voice any unease with the national conservative project. In American history, he noted, “the emphasis of [nationalism] was the explicit and desired and in many ways successful aim to weaken the more local, regional, neighborhood, and particular forms of identity within the nation—those identifications that had been the hallmark of the American political/cultural experience.” According to Deneen, nationalism was the progressive idea that we should put “the national need before the sectional or personal advantage” and “that local government should cede its activities to the national government.” In this moment, he said, “it seems natural for conservative to rally around the idea of the nation. But we should always be wary of simply occupying the ground recently vacated by progressives.”
Alas, Deneen went on to support virtually all the same policy prescriptions as everyone else at the conference. Anti-individualism seems to be the unifying theory of the ascendant political right. If government infringements on personal liberty are the price of achieving good outcomes, conservatives are more than happy to pay it.
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You’re probably old enough to remember a time when conservatives opposed the idea that it was the federal government’s job to solve most problems. A time when they thought that individuals, families, and community groups, not politicians, were responsible for building a good life and a good society. A time when they believed that government power should be devolved whenever possible to the state and local level, away from the bloated behemoth in Washington.
The several hundred attendees of this week’s National Conservatism conference have a different vision for American politics. The event brought together a variety of speakers to discuss and defend, in explicit terms, the need for a new nationalism.
As the Hudson Institute’s Chris DeMuth put it, “our claim is that the government has abdicated basic responsibilities and broken trust with large numbers of our fellow citizens.” It has done this by allowing a globalized economy to emerge and U.S. manufacturing supremacy to be lost; by not “securing our borders” or ensuring that immigrants are sufficiently assimilated into the culture; by either turning a blind eye to or actively encouraging the erosion of traditional Christian values.
“The rising economic tide has swallowed entire regions,” said pro-Israel activist David Brog. The result, according to Hillbilly Elegyauthor J.D. Vance, has been “family decline, childhood trauma, opioid abuse, community decline, decline of the manufacturing sector and all the sense of dignity and purpose and meaning that comes along with it.” And the answer to these problems, under the new nationalist view, is for conservatives to shed their aversion to big government. “We should care about a whole host of public goods,” Vance concluded, “and actually be willing to use politics and political power to accomplish those goods.”
Practically speaking, the nationalist agenda is largely focused on the need for a federal “industrial policy.” For Breitbart‘s John Carney, that means tariffs, and lots of them. Americans need to be willing to pay higher prices to protect the jobs of their fellow citizens, according to Brog. For American Affairs founder Julius Krein, “protectionism is not sufficient….It’s not radical enough.” The Manhattan Institute’s Oren Cass laid out a plan involving research and development subsidies, infrastructure investments, preferential tax rates for favored firms, punitive taxes on companies that move jobs overseas, “trade enforcement” to make other countries play according to our rules, and more. “We should have a National Institutes of Manufacturing just as we have a National Institutes of Health,” he said.
What do all of these proposals—and the many others offered at the conference, from censoring porn to cracking down on opioids to preventing trans girls from playing on girls’ sports teams—have in common? There is a tendency among the new nationalists to frame their movement as standingin opposition to supranationalism. Yoram Hazony, author of The Virtue of Nationalism, laments in particular what he sees as a push toward a homogenous “new world order” in which umbrella institutions such as the European Union and the United Nations override the rightful sovereignty of states.
Yet the true object of the nationalists’ ire is much closer to home: They cannot abide individual Americans making social and economic choices they do not like. For consumers, the question might be whether to buy foreign or domestic. For a business owner, it might be where to open a factory. For a parent, it might be whether or not to attend drag queen story hour at the local library. Regardless, the new nationalists have decided not only that there is a right answer from a moral perspective but that government should force you to choose correctly.
“Today we declare independence,” Hazony said, “from neoliberalism, from libertarianism, from what they call classical liberalism. From the set of ideas that sees the atomic individual, the free and equal individual, as the only thing that matters in politics.”
For Cass, Vance, Hazony, and the others, the situation is binary: We can either accept a moral relativism in which no outcome is better than any other as long as it was freely chosen, or we can acknowledge that our society faces problems and embrace federal efforts to fix them.
That choice is a false one. When it comes to solving problems, there are numberless alternatives to government interference. They begin with individual initiative and personal responsibility, but they need not end there. Once upon a time, conservatives understood as a canard the progressive maxim that “government is simply the name for things we do together.” Private actors do things together every day, via churches, charities, neighborhood groups, businesses, professional associations, and other civil society organizations (to say nothing of family and friends).
This point was drawn out during the conference by the ultraconservative Notre Dame political scientist Patrick Deneen, the only person I heard voice any unease with the national conservative project. In American history, he noted, “the emphasis of [nationalism] was the explicit and desired and in many ways successful aim to weaken the more local, regional, neighborhood, and particular forms of identity within the nation—those identifications that had been the hallmark of the American political/cultural experience.” According to Deneen, nationalism was the progressive idea that we should put “the national need before the sectional or personal advantage” and “that local government should cede its activities to the national government.” In this moment, he said, “it seems natural for conservative to rally around the idea of the nation. But we should always be wary of simply occupying the ground recently vacated by progressives.”
Alas, Deneen went on to support virtually all the same policy prescriptions as everyone else at the conference. Anti-individualism seems to be the unifying theory of the ascendant political right. If government infringements on personal liberty are the price of achieving good outcomes, conservatives are more than happy to pay it.
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via IFTTT
As the Jeffrey Epstein case continues to unfold, a laundry list of celebrities, business magnates and socialites who have flown anywhere near the registered sex offender’s orbit are now tainted with pedo-polonium. Many of them, such as Bill Clinton, Ehud Barak, and Victoria’s Secret boss Les Wexner have sought to distance themselves from Epstein and his activities – however their attempts have fallen on deaf ears considering their extensive ties to the pedophile.
As Vanity Fair‘s Gabriel Sherman notes, “The questions about Epstein are metastasizing much faster than they can be answered: Who knew what about Epstein’s alleged abuse? How, and from whom, did Epstein get his supposed $500 million fortune? Why did Acosta grant Epstein an outrageously lenient non-prosecution agreement? (And what does it mean that Acosta was reportedly told Epstein “belonged to intelligence”?)”
Also illuminating is a statement by attorney Brad Edwards, who said during a Wednesday press conference seated next to Epstein accuser Courtneey Wild that “There were other business associates of Mr. Epstein’s who engaged in improper sexual misconduct at one or more of his homes. We do know that,” adding “In due time the names are going to start coming out.“
What’s more, the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit will release of approximately 2,000 pages of documents, likely over the next several days, which may reveal sex crimes committed by “numerous prominent American politicians, powerful business executives, foreign presidents, a well-known prime minister, and other world leaders,” according to the court’s three-judge panel.
The documents were filed during a civil defamation lawsuit brought by Epstein accuser Virginia Roberts Giuffre, a former Mar-a-Lago locker-room attendant, against Epstein’s former girlfriend and alleged madam, Ghislaine Maxwell. “Nobody who was around Epstein a lot is going to have an easy time now. It’s all going to come out,” said Giuffre’s lawyer David Boies. Another person involved with litigation against Epstein told me: “It’s going to be staggering, the amount of names. It’s going to be contagion numbers.” –Vanity Fair
Other famous names associated with Epstein include LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman, Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerberg, who Musk introduced to the registered sex-offender. Zuckerberg spokesman told Vanity Fair “Mark met Epstein in passing one time at a dinner honoring scientists that was not organized by Epstein,” adding “Mark did not communicate with Epstein again following the dinner.”
Musk told the magazine “I don’t recall introducing Epstein to anyone, as I don’t know the guy well enough to do so, Epstein is obviously a creep and Zuckerberg is not a friend of mine. Several years ago, I was at his house in Manhattan for about 30 minutes in the middle of the afternoon with Talulah [Riley], as she was curious about meeting this strange person for a novel she was writing. We did not see anything inappropriate at all, apart from weird art. He tried repeatedly to get me to visit his island. I declined.”
Uh, this is Jeffrey Epstein’s “friend” and alleged madam Ghislaine Maxwell with @elonmusk at the Oscars in 2014. These people were everywhere I suppose… pic.twitter.com/kCeIimdbCm
According to one source, Epstein had a steady stream of who’s who’s flowing into his Manhattan mansion, including Bill Gates, Larry Summers, and Steve Bannon.
“Jeffrey collected people. That’s what he did,” the source told Vanity Fair.
Thus far, the name most publicly associated with Epstein’s alleged crimes is famed lawyer Alan Dershowitz, who’s been waging a public battle with David Boies for years. In April, Boies’s client Giuffre sued Dershowitz for defamation after Dershowitz called her a liar (a strategy similar to that of seven of Bill Cosby’s accusers). In the days since the FBI arrested Epstein at Teterboro Airport a week and a half ago, Dershowitz has been going on television and dialing up friends and reporters to profess his innocence and label Giuffre and Boies liars. “I want everything to come out! I’m not afraid of anything because I did nothing wrong,” Dershowitz told me on the afternoon of July 15.
He called me a minute after I had emailed him for comment. He said he’d been friends with Epstein since 1996, when they were introduced at a party on Martha’s Vineyard by Lynn Forester de Rothschild. “She begged me to meet him. She told me, ‘here’s this smart academic.’” A few days later, Epstein invited Dershowitz to Les Wexner’s 59th birthday party at Wexner’s mansion in New Albany, Ohio. “It’s a tradition that Jeff invited the smartest person he met that year. He told them I was the smartest.” They remained close for years. Dershowitz strenuously denied ever participating in Epstein’s underage sex ring and said he’d only been in Epstein’s presence with his wife. “I got one massage!” he told me. “It was from a 50-year-old Russian woman named Olga. And I kept my shorts on. I didn’t even like it. I’m not a massage guy.” –Vanity Fair
DC on edge
“Epstein bragged about his contacts in Washington,” said attorney David Boies.
According to the report, “One theory circulating among prominent Republicans is that Epstein was a Mossad agent. Another is that the George W. Bush White House directed Acosta not to prosecute Epstein to protect Prince Andrew on behalf of the British government.”
“The royal family did everything they could to try and discredit the Prince Andrew stuff,” said Boies. “When we tried to follow up with anything, we were stonewalled. We wanted to interview him, they were unwilling to do anything.”
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2GjsdxT Tyler Durden
Sen. Rand Paul (R–Ky.) is catching a lot of flak for demanding that the Senate actually debate an open-ended extension of the September 11 Victims Compensation Fund.
On Wednesday afternoon, Paul objected to when Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D–N.Y.) attempted to pass the bill by unanimous consent—an expedited process that does not require each senator to record his or her vote.
“Any new spending that we are approaching, any new program that’s going to have the longevity of 70, 80 years, should be offset by cutting spending that’s less valuable,” said Paul on the Senate floor. “We need to at the very least have this debate. I will be offering up an amendment if this bill should come to the floor, but until then I will object.”
Sen. Mike Lee (R–Utah) also opposed passing the bill by unanimous consent.
The bill, H.R. 1327, would extend the life of the Victims Compensation Fund to 2090. (The fund is currently set to stop accepting claims by the end of next year.) It would also do away with any limited appropriations for the fund, instead paying out however much is necessary to cover eligible claims through 2092.
The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the bill would cost $10.2 billion over the next decade.
The first 9/11 Victims Compensation Fund operated from 2001 to 2003, and awarded $7 billion to the families of the 2,880 people killed in the attacks on that day, plus another 2,680 who were injured.
In 2011 the fund was renewed and expanded to cover anyone injured during the rescue and recovery efforts at the targeted World Trade Center, as well as those in proximity to the attacks who were injured or came down with other health problems, including cancer.
Despite Paul’s objections, the permanent extension of the victim’s fund will almost certainly pass. The Senate’s reauthorization measure currently has 73 co-sponsors, and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (D–Ky.) has said he will put it to a vote before the August recess.
On Fox News, former Daily Show host and 9/11 first responder champion Jon Stewart accused Paul of “fiscal responsibility virtue signaling,” saying the Kentucky senator’s current concerns about the deficit were hypocritical in light of his support for 2017’s tax cuts.
Stewart was not alone in this line of criticism.
If, God forbid, Rand Paul is ever trapped in a burning building, maybe a $1 trillion tax cut will run in to save him. https://t.co/H3QGH1cc1F
So let me get this straight: @RandPaul has no problem voting for billions in tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, but votes against providing health care for 9/11 first responders because he's worried about the debt.
These condemnations skate over Paul’s rather reasonable position that the Senate should actually debate the bill and consider fiscal offsets before approving nearly a century’s worth of effectively unlimited spending.
Rep. Justin Amash (I–Mich.) made this same point last week when explaining why he voted against the victim fund’s extension in the House:
Our Constitution empowers Congress to appropriate money. Typically, this means we must vote annually to spend on a particular object. This process holds government accountable to the people. The 9/11 VCF works differently by authorizing 70+ years of unlimited, automatic spending.
And while it’s true that Paul voted for a deficit-increasing tax cut, he has also consistently introduced legislation to cut spending across the board. Just last month, the Senate rejected a budget plan authored by Paul that would have cut federal spending by $183 billion in the coming fiscal year.
Libertarian-leaning folks like Paul want less spending, lower taxes, and smaller deficits. The senator has a record of supporting all three policies, even though the rest of Congress seems only able to muster support for one.
FREE MINDS
President Donald Trump’s attacks on “Squad” member Rep. Ilhan Omar (D–Minn.) escalated markedly Wednesday night at a North Carolina rally. Trump went on an extended rant against the congresswoman, declaring that she “looks down with contempt on the hardworking Americans, saying ‘ignorance is pervasive in many parts of this country.'” He also said that “Omar has a history of launching vicious anti-Semitic screeds.”
The president’s riff sparked a chant of “send her back” from the crowd, which Trump did not discourage.
Both right and left condemned the crowd’s behavior on Twitter:
I know I’m a broken record. But there is nothing in American patriotism that could create an argument for “send her back.” There is plenty in nationalism that would demand it. Oh, FWIW I think Omar’s views run the gamut from silly to reprehensible. But she’s an American. Period.
On some level “send her back” sounds similar to “lock her up.” But here is how it is worse to my ears. Now they don’t even have the false pretext of alleged corrupt behavior. They are just telling an American with whom they disagree to go back to Africa.
The House voted to repeal the Affordable Care Act’s “Cadillac tax” on high-end health plans by a commanding 419–6 vote. That measure, passed as part of the initial Obamacare legislation, imposed a 40 percent tax on employer-sponsored insurance plans worth $11,200 for individuals and $30,100 for families. It was scheduled to go into effect in 2022.
Both unions and businesses opposed the tax, as it raised the cost of providing fringe health benefits to employees.
Free marketeers are split on the tax. Many view it as just another way the government makes health care coverage more expensive. But some libertarians have offered tentative support for it. By taxing wages but not health benefits, they argue, the current tax code encourages an expensive, inefficient system of employer-sponsored insurance coverage. The “Cadillac tax” amounts to a partial rollback of this distortionary tax policy, the thinking goes.
Libertarian-leaning Rep. Justin Amash (I–Mich.) voted against the tax’s repeal.
QUICK HITS
20 candidates have qualified for CNN’s upcoming Democratic primary debate, including for the first time Montana Gov. Steve Bullock.
FaceApp—a smartphone application that adds years and beards to users’ selfies—was innocent fun for about a week. Now it’s facing a deluge of privacy concerns.
Prosecutors have dropped sexual assault charges against actor Kevin Spacey.
The House has killed a renegade attempt to impeach Trump, sponsored by Rep. Al Green (D–Texas).
More kids in the U.S. and Britain would rather be YouTubers than astronauts.
Demands for the resignation of Puerto Rico Gov. Ricardo Rosselló have grown louder. The governor was recently revealed to have made sexist comments in a group chat with other politicians.
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Sen. Rand Paul (R–Ky.) is catching a lot of flak for demanding that the Senate actually debate an open-ended extension of the September 11 Victims Compensation Fund.
On Wednesday afternoon, Paul objected to when Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D–N.Y.) attempted to pass the bill by unanimous consent—an expedited process that does not require each senator to record his or her vote.
“Any new spending that we are approaching, any new program that’s going to have the longevity of 70, 80 years, should be offset by cutting spending that’s less valuable,” said Paul on the Senate floor. “We need to at the very least have this debate. I will be offering up an amendment if this bill should come to the floor, but until then I will object.”
Sen. Mike Lee (R–Utah) also opposed passing the bill by unanimous consent.
The bill, H.R. 1327, would extend the life of the Victims Compensation Fund to 2090. (The fund is currently set to stop accepting claims by the end of next year.) It would also do away with any limited appropriations for the fund, instead paying out however much is necessary to cover eligible claims through 2092.
The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the bill would cost $10.2 billion over the next decade.
The first 9/11 Victims Compensation Fund operated from 2001 to 2003, and awarded $7 billion to the families of the 2,880 people killed in the attacks on that day, plus another 2,680 who were injured.
In 2011 the fund was renewed and expanded to cover anyone injured during the rescue and recovery efforts at the targeted World Trade Center, as well as those in proximity to the attacks who were injured or came down with other health problems, including cancer.
Despite Paul’s objections, the permanent extension of the victim’s fund will almost certainly pass. The Senate’s reauthorization measure currently has 73 co-sponsors, and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (D–Ky.) has said he will put it to a vote before the August recess.
On Fox News, former Daily Show host and 9/11 first responder champion Jon Stewart accused Paul of “fiscal responsibility virtue signaling,” saying the Kentucky senator’s current concerns about the deficit were hypocritical in light of his support for 2017’s tax cuts.
Stewart was not alone in this line of criticism.
If, God forbid, Rand Paul is ever trapped in a burning building, maybe a $1 trillion tax cut will run in to save him. https://t.co/H3QGH1cc1F
So let me get this straight: @RandPaul has no problem voting for billions in tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, but votes against providing health care for 9/11 first responders because he's worried about the debt.
These condemnations skate over Paul’s rather reasonable position that the Senate should actually debate the bill and consider fiscal offsets before approving nearly a century’s worth of effectively unlimited spending.
Rep. Justin Amash (I–Mich.) made this same point last week when explaining why he voted against the victim fund’s extension in the House:
Our Constitution empowers Congress to appropriate money. Typically, this means we must vote annually to spend on a particular object. This process holds government accountable to the people. The 9/11 VCF works differently by authorizing 70+ years of unlimited, automatic spending.
And while it’s true that Paul voted for a deficit-increasing tax cut, he has also consistently introduced legislation to cut spending across the board. Just last month, the Senate rejected a budget plan authored by Paul that would have cut federal spending by $183 billion in the coming fiscal year.
Libertarian-leaning folks like Paul want less spending, lower taxes, and smaller deficits. The senator has a record of supporting all three policies, even though the rest of Congress seems only able to muster support for one.
FREE MINDS
President Donald Trump’s attacks on “Squad” member Rep. Ilhan Omar (D–Minn.) escalated markedly Wednesday night at a North Carolina rally. Trump went on an extended rant against the congresswoman, declaring that she “looks down with contempt on the hardworking Americans, saying ‘ignorance is pervasive in many parts of this country.'” He also said that “Omar has a history of launching vicious anti-Semitic screeds.”
The president’s riff sparked a chant of “send her back” from the crowd, which Trump did not discourage.
Both right and left condemned the crowd’s behavior on Twitter:
I know I’m a broken record. But there is nothing in American patriotism that could create an argument for “send her back.” There is plenty in nationalism that would demand it. Oh, FWIW I think Omar’s views run the gamut from silly to reprehensible. But she’s an American. Period.
On some level “send her back” sounds similar to “lock her up.” But here is how it is worse to my ears. Now they don’t even have the false pretext of alleged corrupt behavior. They are just telling an American with whom they disagree to go back to Africa.
The House voted to repeal the Affordable Care Act’s “Cadillac tax” on high-end health plans by a commanding 419–6 vote. That measure, passed as part of the initial Obamacare legislation, imposed a 40 percent tax on employer-sponsored insurance plans worth $11,200 for individuals and $30,100 for families. It was scheduled to go into effect in 2022.
Both unions and businesses opposed the tax, as it raised the cost of providing fringe health benefits to employees.
Free marketeers are split on the tax. Many view it as just another way the government makes health care coverage more expensive. But some libertarians have offered tentative support for it. By taxing wages but not health benefits, they argue, the current tax code encourages an expensive, inefficient system of employer-sponsored insurance coverage. The “Cadillac tax” amounts to a partial rollback of this distortionary tax policy, the thinking goes.
Libertarian-leaning Rep. Justin Amash (I–Mich.) voted against the tax’s repeal.
QUICK HITS
20 candidates have qualified for CNN’s upcoming Democratic primary debate, including for the first time Montana Gov. Steve Bullock.
FaceApp—a smartphone application that adds years and beards to users’ selfies—was innocent fun for about a week. Now it’s facing a deluge of privacy concerns.
Prosecutors have dropped sexual assault charges against actor Kevin Spacey.
The House has killed a renegade attempt to impeach Trump, sponsored by Rep. Al Green (D–Texas).
More kids in the U.S. and Britain would rather be YouTubers than astronauts.
Demands for the resignation of Puerto Rico Gov. Ricardo Rosselló have grown louder. The governor was recently revealed to have made sexist comments in a group chat with other politicians.
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The circus will be coming to town a week later, but not to worry, the show will go on longer and there will be many added attractions, including a full troop of 800-pound gorillas and an entire herd of 8000-pound elephants in the room. And once the balancing acts, the clowns and the ferocious beasts pack up and move on, America might find itself without a Democratic Party, or at least one it would recognize.
The circus is the testimony of Robert Mueller before the House Judiciary (extended to 3 hours) and Intelligence Committees (2 hours). The Democrats will aim to use Mueller’s words to finally achieve their long desired impeachment of Donald Trump. But is there anyone who’s not a US Democrat who thinks that is realistic? House Speaker Nancy Pelosi doesn’t seem to think so.
In order for the Dems to get their wish, Mueller would have to say a lot of things that are not in his report. It all appears to hang on the interpretation of his assessment that a sitting president cannot be prosecuted, which the Dems take to mean that there actually was a crime that could -or should- be prosecuted.
It’s not clear why the hearing was delayed from July 17 to 24, but don’t be surprised if it has to do with US District Judge Dabney Friedrich’s decision that Mueller must stop talking in public about a case that is in front of her, because his words might prejudice a jury. That is the case that Mueller brought in February 2018 against Internet Research Agency, Concord Management, their owner Yevgeniy Prigozhin (aka Putin’s cook), and 12 of his employees.
Mueller thought he could get away with presenting a case against them because they would not show up, but Prigozhin did hire a major law firm. Ironically, Friedrich has reportedly also decided that the lawyers cannot talk about the case to their own client(s). She hasn’t thrown out the case or anything, she’s simply told everyone including Mueller to stop discussing it in public.
So it’s quite possible that once the House Democrats figured this out (the decision stems from May 28 but was unsealed only on July 1), they had to change strategy. Mueller has been barred from saying a single word about it, including in the House.
In his report, Mueller tried to establish a link between the Russian firms and the Kremlin, but never proved any such link. They are accused of meddling in the 2016 election through emails and social media posts, an accusation that looks shakier by the day.
With that part of his report out of the way, what is left for him to talk about? He himself already gave up on the whole collusion narrative, which would appear to leave only obstruction. Well, there’s the Steele dossier, but with John Solomon blowing another gaping hole in ityesterday, that may not be the wisest topic to discuss on the House floor. By now, only the very faithful still believe in the dossier.
The Republicans surely don’t, and they also happen to be House members, and get to ask questions of Mueller on the 24th. The spectacle last night where Nancy Pelosi insisted on calling Trump a racist was nutty (you don’t do that in the House), but the Mueller hearings promise to be much much more nuts still.
In the background a second investigation is playing out: DOJ IG Michael Horowitz has been probing if DOJ or FBI officials abused their powers to spy on the Trump campaign. His report has been delayed, if reports are correct, because Christopher Steele at the very last minute agreed to testify. Those talks apparently were long and detailed. Wonder what he had to say.
And there’s a third probe too: AG Barr has tasked John Durham, the US attorney for Connecticut, to follow up on the Horowitz report and look at whether officials at the CIA, the NSA, and/or foreign intelligence agencies (think MI6), violated protocols or statutes.
That case is about whether the FISA court was misled to secure a warrant to put Trump campaign aide Carter Page under surveillance. It can also take a new look at the text messages between Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, messages that Trump tweeted about on Saturday: “This is one of the most horrible abuses of all. Those texts between gaga lovers would have told the whole story. Illegal deletion by Mueller. They gave us “the insurance policy.”
The deletion reportedly may have been accidental. But it does set the tone. The door is wide open for the Republicans to go after Mueller. And he knows it, always has. He never wanted the hearings, he said it was all in his report. But the Dems wanted more, they want Mueller to say Trump is guilty of obstruction (of a probe that perhaps should never have taken place).
Personally, I wonder whether a Republican congressman/woman will have the guts to ask Mueller why he refused to talk to Julian Assange, the most obvious person for him to talk to in the whole wide world. But since the GOP hates Assange as much as the Dems, I don’t have high hopes of that happening.
What they certainly will ask is when he knew his probe wasn’t going anywhere. And if that was perhaps as much as a whole year before he presented his report. The Dems will tear into Mueller looking for obstruction. Like: if Trump were not the president, would you sue him? Problem with that is none of this would have happened if Trump were just a citizen.
But I lean towards Ray McGovern’s take, who says thatthe circus may not come to town on July 24 either. Because there’s no there there (something Peter Strzok himself said about the Steele dossier), and because the Dems know this is their last shot at glory. And the GOP doesn’t mind another week or so of preparation.
Since the Democrats, the media, and Mueller himself all have strong incentive to “make the worst case appear the better” (one of the twin charges against Socrates), they need time to regroup and circle the wagons. The more so, since Mueller’s other twin charge — Russian hacking of the DNC — also has been shown, in a separate Court case, to be bereft of credible evidence. No, the incomplete, redacted, second-hand “forensics” draft that former FBI Director James Comey decided to settle for from the Democratic National Committee-hired CrowdStrike firm does not qualify as credible evidence.
Both new developments are likely to pose a strong challenge to Mueller. On the forensics, Mueller decided to settle for what his former colleague Comey decided to settle for from CrowdStrike, which was hired by the DNC despite it’s deeply flawed reputation and well known bias against Russia. In fact, the new facts — emerging, oddly, from the U.S. District Court, pose such a fundamental challenge to Mueller’s findings that no one should be surprised if Mueller’s testimony is postponed again.
And I was serious when I said before that once the Mueller hearings are done, “America might find itself without a Democratic Party, or at least one it would recognize”. Because if and when the Mueller circus fails to provide the impeachment dream (try elections!), where are they going to go, what else is there to do?
They’ve been clamoring for impeachment for collusion (big fail), for obstruction (Mueller wouldn’t have it) and now racism, but that is merely based on interpretation of tweets. Nancy Pelosi wrote about ‘women of color’, not Donald Trump.
America needs a strong Democratic party, and it certainly doesn’t have one right now. The Dems should be calling for an end to regime change wars, that is a popular theme among their voters. But they don’t, because guess where their money comes from. They are in a very deep identity crisis, and Trump just has to pick them off one by one. They should look at themselves, not at him. Do these people ever do strategy?
First, Mississippi gubernatorial candidate and state Rep. Robert Foster refused to have a female reporter accompany him on a campaign trip, an otherwise standard practice. Not to be outdone, his competitor Bill Waller Jr., the former chief justice of the Mississippi Supreme Court, stated that he would not spend any time alone with a woman (who is not his wife) in a personal or professional setting. According to CNN, here’s Waller’s murky statement:
“I just think it’s common sense. I just think in this day and time that appearances are important … transparency’s important. And I think that people need to have the comfort of what’s going on in government between employees and people. And there’s a lot of social issues out there about that,” Waller told the news outlet on Monday. He said his goal “is to not make it an issue so that everyone’s comfortable with the surroundings and we can go about our business.”
[…]
Waller told Mississippi Today that in his 22 years serving on the state Supreme Court, he never found himself alone with a female colleague.
This reasoning was similar to the one that Robert Foster had provided:
“I trust myself completely, but I don’t trust the perception that the world puts on people when they see things and they don’t ask the questions, they don’t look to find out the truth. Perception is reality in this world, and I don’t want to give anybody the opinion that I’m doing something that I should not be doing,” he said.
Given Waller’s statement that this has been his practice for many years, even the most creative minds won’t be able to blame this one on #MeToo (they might still try with Foster, though). So how are we to understand these men’s attitudes? Here are some possibilities:
While they would deny this as the reason, these men don’t trust themselves not to misbehave around women. This should make them look bad to voters.
Their wives don’t trust these guys around women. Voters may want to inquire why that is, and the reasons may well end up looking bad to voters.
These men don’t trust women not to behave inappropriately toward them. Any women. This should make said men look bad to voters.
These men don’t trust how journalists would present such interactions and/or they don’t trust the public in how it would view Important Men spending any time alone with women. In other words, these candidates don’t trust voters with something fairly basic. Why should voters trust them with much more important things?
If I was a voter in Mississippi, I would feel either 1) suspicious or 2) fairly insulted and stereotyped by now. I expect that individuals in that state are no less able to form judgments about human relationships than individuals anywhere else, even if their politicians apparently hold them in lower regard than I do. The exclusion of women from the same professional opportunities as men is a long-standing problem. Occasionally men express concerns about “what will people say” as a reason not to provide mentorship in a number of settings. This only becomes the reality if we let it become self-fulfilling–meaning, if interactions between one man and one woman are treated as inherently suspect.
Whenever I hear of stories like in Mississippi, or in fact ones where men did misbehave, I am reminded of how somehow none of this was a problem during my clerkship year. As it happened, I clerked for a Southern male judge (Judge Morris S. Arnold of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit) who had an all-female crew of three year-long clerks, one permanent clerk, and one administrative assistant. The fact that it was all women that year was coincidental, and most years it was a mix of genders, including with male majorities.
Never once did I think my judge acted inappropriately toward me. None of my co-clerks ever reported anything to me, either. Sometimes several of us spoke to him in chambers, and other times it was just one of us. Neither did that ever feel uncomfortable nor did anyone else think it was strange.
I have yet to meet anyone who speaks ill of Judge Arnold for any reason. He had (and I believe still has) a happy marriage with a lovely wife. If he could pull off healthy professional relationships with all his female employees in Arkansas over a decade ago, these Mississippi gentlemen could surely give it a shot in 2019.
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