Trump Warns: Dems Are Sending “Their Best Election-Stealing Lawyer” To Florida

Is Florida gearing up for Bush vs. Gore redux?

It’s starting to look that way.

As Fox News reports, lawyers are arriving in Democratic strongholds in Florida as the state prepares for a recount in Broward County, the epicenter of the vote-counting controversy that led to Bush vs. Gore, and Palm Beach County. Both are Democratic strongholds that have been extremely slow to deliver final ballot totals for Tuesday’s election.

Elias

To try and push for a hand recount, defeated incumbent Democrat Bill Nelson has hired Democratic attorney Marc Elias of law firm Perkins Coie to help plead his case and point out suspicious “inconsistencies” with the vote count in Broward, where more than 20,000 voters voted in down-ballot races but left out their votes for governor’s race, in which Nelson’s Democratic ally, Tallahassee Mayor Andrew Gillum, has already conceded to Republican Ron DeSantis. 

The controversy has already attracted the attention of President Trump, who in a series of tweets Friday afternoon warned that Democrats were dispatching attorneys, including their best “election stealing lawyer,” to try and rig the vote after earlier hinting that he might authorize a federal investigation

Trump even praised his former political rival, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, for helping expose the possible corruption happening in Broward County, where boxes of what appear to be uncounted provisional ballots have been discovered at polling stations.

Rubio has highlighted a range of suspicious developments in Broward, including what appeared to be a mystery delivery of ballots. The senator has also criticized local officials for their molasses-like process of counting ballots in Florida’s senate race.

Meanwhile, in a press conference held Thursday evening, Scott, who is also the outgoing governor, warned of “rampant fraud,” and filed lawsuits against the top election officials in two heavily Democratic counties as they continue to report new votes.

Rubio pointed out in a tweet on Friday that Broward is violating state laws about the tallying and submission of vote totals from mail-in ballots.

Rubio also pointed out that early voting in Broward County had ended “108 hours ago”, and that the county wouldn’t disclose “how many ballots are left.”

Last night, Scott specifically called out elections supervisors in both counties, Brenda Snipes in Broward and Susan Bucher in Palm Beach.

“Late Tuesday night, our win was projected to be around 57,000 votes,” Scott told reporters. “By Wednesday morning, that lead dropped to 38,000. By Wednesday evening, it was around 30,000. This morning, it was around 21,000. Now, it is 15,000.”

He continued: “On election night, Broward County said there were 634,000 votes cast. At 1 a.m. today, there were 695,700 ballots cast on election day. At 2:30 p.m. today, the number was up to 707,223 ballots cast on Election Day. And we just learned, that the number has increased to 712,840 ballots cast on Election Day. In Palm Beach County, there are 15,000 new votes found since election night.”

Snipes’ behavior looks particularly suspect, considering that she has expressed a “personal animus” toward Gov. Scott? And also has a record of illegal and unethical behavior, including the illegal destruction of ballots.

Of course, Florida isn’t the only state where Democratic candidates are gaining ground in the vote tallies days after the election ended. In Arizona, Democrat Kirsten Sinema is now leading Republican Martha McSally in that state’s senate race, which has yet to be officially called.

In a tweet sent late Friday afternoon, Trump cryptically warned of new evidence of election tampering in Arizona when he tweeted that “signatures don’t match” on some of the ballots.

In Georgia, Democrat Stacey Abrams is gaining on Republican Brian Kemp in the governor’s race. Whatever the outcome, it’s increasingly looking like the final outcomes of some of these races won’t be known for some time.

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Texas State Rep Wins Uncontested Election From His Jail Cell

Texas Rep. Ron Reynolds (D–Missouri City) has won reelection to the Texas House of Representatives , with a commanding 100 percent of the vote in an uncontested race for a seat representing District 27 in the Houston suburbs.

Despite that wide margin of victory, Reynolds can’t exactly crack open the champagne, as he is currently serving time in Montgomery County jail.

Back in 2015, Reynolds, a former personal injury attorney, was convicted of five misdemeanor charges for his role in a scheme where he and seven other attorneys paid a local chiropractor to sign up patients injured in traffic accidents as clients.

Reynolds filed several appeals of his conviction, all of which were denied.

Since being found guilty, he has managed to win a number of primaries in his heavily Democratic district. In 2016 he won a four-way primary with 48 percent of the vote. In 2018 he managed to get 60 percent in a two-way contest with attorney Wilvin Carver.

“The unfortunate thing about Reynolds is that he is has a strong record for supporting environmental protection and gay rights, but with the possible jail sentence hanging over his head it’s hard to support him,” wrote the Houston Chronicle editorial board, which threw its support behind Carver.

Because Reynolds was convicted of misdemeanors rather than a felony, he was not forced to resign. He is now serving a year-long sentence, and should be released by September 2019. Unless he is released from jail early, he will miss the entire 2019 legislative session.

Reynolds’ inability to introduce or vote on legislation just might dampen his effectiveness as a legislator. It surely isn’t an ideal arrangement for any constituents who expect him to represent their interests in the State House.

This does not seem to bother Democratic politicos, who seem to be in no rush to disavow Reynolds.

A July election flier shared by Fort Bend County Democratic Party Chairwoman Cynthia Ginyard features Reynolds alongside other county candidates. Reynold’s Twitter feed shows him at a September Houston-area African American Faith Leaders Breakfast, which was also attended by failed Senate candidate Beto O’Rourke.

This speaks to a chronic lack of competition. In 2018, nearly a third of Texas’ state representatives faced no opponent in the general election. That’s not good for state-level democracy, which is supposed to entail, if not good options, at least an option when voters go to the polls.

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Want A Free $100k? Quit Your Job & Move Here…

Authored by Simon Black via SovereignMan.com,

According to the latest jobs report, averages wages for US workers increased 3.1% – the strongest growth since 2009.

Median individual income in the US is now around $31,000, which means the typical American put an extra $1,000 in their pocket last year.

That’s solid extra cash.

But if you really want to see your wages grow, quit your job and become homeless.

Just be sure you move to San Francisco.

There are about 7,500 homeless people in San Francisco.

The number of homeless in the city has stayed constant for years, but the rest of the population has been booming. And that expansion means tech companies and their workers are now coming face to face with homelessness on a daily basis.

And the collective guilt of the Silicon Valley elite is just too much to handle.

Before Tuesday’s election, San Francisco was already spending over $50,000 on each and every homeless person.

That’s well above the median individual income… and it actually rivals the median household income of about $60,000.

So the average homeless person in San Francisco is using up more resources each year than the average American household earns in wages (and has to pay tax on).

And that money does NOT include the costs of police officers, nurses, doctors, and prison staff who deal with the consequences of homelessness.

But on Tuesday, the good people of San Francisco saw fit to almost double that homeless benefit. 60% of San Franciscans voted for a tax on businesses to support homeless people.

And now the city will spend over $90,000 per year, for each homeless person in the city.

If those costs were split evenly among the residents of San Francisco, each man woman and child would fork over $770 per year to support the city’s homeless.

But Silicon Valley will foot the extra $300 million.

The new tax levies an extra 0.5% on large businesses’ total receipts… No, not profit, but revenue.

So a business could turn no profit, but bring in $100 million in revenue, and it would still owe the homeless people of San Francisco half a million dollars.

That’s half a mil that can’t be used to hire new workers or invest back into the business.

But why bother toiling for 3% wage growth anyway? Homeless people just got an 80% raise.

Now, each homeless person in San Francisco takes three times as much as the median individual income, and 150% of the median household income.

But hey, San Francisco is a rich city. Maybe they can afford to lift homeless people above the middle class.

So what’s the plan then? How will all this extra money be used to alleviate homelessness?

Actually… the money was the plan.

And it has been the plan for the 30 years that spending on homeless programs has increased in San Francisco.

And that plan hasn’t changed as homelessness has increased along with the cash.

So the new plan is throw more money at the same problem, and hope it goes away.

San Francisco doesn’t even have the metrics to say what “success” is with this new tax. Where is that money going? Who is it helping? Has it improved the situation? By what measures?

The data just isn’t there. No one has bothered to track it.

For $90k per person, you could hire someone to follow every homeless person around and clean up the, well, let’s say “mess” they leave behind on the streets.

Hell for that price, you could rent every homeless person in San Francisco a room at the Marriott every single night of the year, and still have money left over… or just buy them a home outside of town.

But the streets are still littered with waste, next to the tents that house the homeless on every street corner.

It should be obvious by now that the problem isn’t a lack of funding. The problem is handing out an absurd amount of free money to the homeless population and having absolutely no plan for how that money will be put to work to solve the homeless problem.

But now that there’s a free $100k worth of benefits up for grabs, why wouldn’t every hobo west of the Mississippi come running?

It’s a gold rush fit for the times we live in.

And to continue learning how to ensure you thrive no matter what happens next in the world, I encourage you to download our free Perfect Plan B Guide.

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Why Can’t Psychedelics (and Other Drugs) Just Be for Fun?: Podcast

In a career spanning 30 years, Reason Senior Editor Jacob Sullum has been one of the most insistent voices in favor of “pharmacological freedom,” the right of individuals to use whatever substances they want to control, modulate, and change their mind, emotions, and moods. In the latest issue of Reason, Sullum reviews Michael Pollan’s popular new book on psychedelic drugs and boldly asks the question, “Who Controls Your Cortex?” The answer, he says, is the individual.

In a wide-ranging and personal conversation, I talk with Sullum about the immense changes in drug policy over the past quarter-century, why the marijuana legalization movement has succeeded, and what the future holds for less-popular and more-potent substances such as MDMA (ecstasy) and psilocybin as they gain various forms of government approval as “legitimate” medicines. We talk frankly about our own experiences and how, as parents, we talk about legal and illegal drug use with our children. Sullum is the author of 1998’s For Your Own Good, a history of the anti-smoking movement, and 2004’s Saying Yes: In Defense of Drug Use.

Subscribe, rate, and review our podcast at iTunes. Listen at SoundCloud below:

Audio production by Ian Keyser.

Don’t miss a single Reason Podcast! (Archive here.)

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Inside the Crazy History of North Korea’s Kim Dynasty: New at Reason

Kim Jong UnTelevision critic Glenn Garvin sits down with three generations of North Korea’s nutty Kims as they’re examined by National Geographic’s Inside North Korea’s Dynasty:

The Kim storyline, sometimes insanely funny and sometimes just plain insane, makes Inside North Korea’s Dynasty irresistible. Its analysis is sometimes lightweight, its reporting sometimes sketchy. It is certainly not the best documentary ever made about North Korea. But when gazing in dumbfounded awe at its footage of Kim 3’s miniskirted all-girl rock band prancing around on stage like a collection of nuclear-tipped Nancy Sinatras while a film of nuclear holocaust plays in the background … well, who cares?

Assembling an impressive library of archival clips to match its interviews with everybody from Kim 3’s personal chef to one of Kim 2’s assassins (she blew a South Korean airliner out of the sky; death toll, 115), Inside follows the two-thirds-of-a-century-and-counting course of what it calls “the world’s first communist hereditary monarchy.” (Those pikers, the Castro brothers, were nearly a decade later in getting started.)

View this article.

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Big Changes for Birth Control Rules—But Not Big Enough

There’s a lot to unpack in the government’s new rules regarding birth control, health insurance, and personal ethics. Issued this week and slated to take effect in January, the rules revise Obama-era directives on the now-notorious contraception mandate and are very similar to draft rules released in October 2017.

Lawsuits quickly followed that first Trump-administration attempt at a revision. By the end of last year, two federal judges had temporarily blocked enforcement of the changes.

The new “Final Rules on Religious and Moral Exemptions and Accomodation for Coverage of Certain Preventive Services Under the Affordable Care Act”—issued jointly by the departments of Health and Human Services (HHS), Treasury, and Labor—differ from the earlier rules “in technical ways,” say the departments in a November 7 statement.

The good news is that rules respect religious freedom without veering into ideology on their own accord. (You can ignore the outrage peddlers trying to portray the changes as some sort of religious fundamentalist plot.) They set up more consistent and expansive protections for people with religious or moral objections to birth control. And they should stop the onslaught of lawsuits against HHS from objecting employers.

“The Trump administration inherited dozens of lawsuits filed against HHS by organizations with sincerely held religious or moral objections” to the Affordable Care Act’s contraception mandate, says the HHS/Labor/Treasury statement. It notes that Obamacare “did not require contraception coverage in health insurance,” merely the coverage of certain to-be-determined “preventive services,” and that it exempted grandfathered-in plans from even this broad requirement.

It was in 2011 that federal regulators defined preventive services to include all FDA-approved contraception methods, meaning all employer-sponsored health insurance plans were required to cover them at no point-of-sale cost to the insured. An exemption was offered to churches, religious orders, and religious auxiliaries with doctrinal opposition to some or all forms of contraception.

Religious nonprofits could not get a total exemption but could apply for an “accomodation.” This entailed notifying the government of their objection to offering health plans with contraception coverage, at which point the government would arrange for the health insurer or another third party to provide the coverage. After the Supreme Court’s 2014 ruling in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, this accomodation was extended to closely held for-profit organizations, too.

Democrats feared that a Republican-controlled Congress and the Trump administration would kill the contraception mandate entirely. But the new rules offered last year and their 2018 update both leave the mandate mostly intact while carving out more and broader exceptions.

Under the first new rule, churches, religious orders and auxiliaries, nonprofit and for-profit organizations, non-public institutions of higher education, and “other non-governmental employers with religious objections” are allowed to opt out “on the basis of sincerely held religious beliefs.” Insurance issuers can also opt out if all of the companies they provide plans to are also exempted. And individuals can opt out of being insured by a plan that includes contraception coverage to the extent that their employer and insurance issuer are willing to provide another option.

Under the second new rule, all of the above except publicly traded businesses can get an exception based on “non-religious moral convictions opposing services covered by the contraceptive mandate.”

In either case, the accomodation is available, but it is also “voluntary, at the option of the entity,” the departments explain. “That is, an otherwise exempt entity can elect to take advantage of the accommodation, which would provide contraceptive coverage to its employees and their dependents,” but does not have to.

That brings us to the bad news: A lot of women could lose any insurance coverage for contraception. HHS and company estimate that the changes “may affect the coverage of approximately 6,400 women,” and could impact up to 127,000 women.

Thousands of women losing coverage for contraception is no good, even if you don’t think that the solution is forcing others to subsidize the service. Less access to or use of contraception means more unintended pregnancies, and more unintended pregnancies means more of all sorts of negative outcomes.

Liberal activists have been objecting to the changes by doubling down on the insistence that all employer-sponsored health plans must offer contraception coverage. But there’s a third way, one that doesn’t dictate that employers violate religious principles or ethical convictions but also helps ensure low-cost access to at least some forms of birth control for people whose health insurance doesn’t cover it (as well as for the many women without health insurance or those who need access to it without a spouse or family member knowing): The FDA could allow hormonal birth control pills to be sold over the counter.

Over-the-counter contraceptive pills would both drive down costs and increase ease of access for women regardless of whether they’re insured. And in conjunction with the repeal of other unnecessary regulations about how birth control can be prescribed and obtained, all sorts of new services and venues that make obtaining birth control easier could flourish. (Emergency contraception, one of the most contested forms of birth control among those with religious objections, is already available without a prescription in the U.S.)

Freeing birth control pills from prescription-drug status is an idea that people across political factions (and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists) have backed in the past. Hopefully, the new contraception-mandate rules will finally lay to rest the years of fighting over this issue, which ultimately affects a very small minority of American women, and start us working toward solutions that expand contraception access for all.

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Civil Rights Groups Sue To Block Trump’s Asylum Crackdown

As was widely expected, a coterie of civil rights groups are suing to block President Trump’s order making it illegal for migrants to declare asylum anywhere but designated border crossing points. The lawsuit, brought by the ACLU, Southern Poverty Law Center and Center for Constitutional Rights, was filed in the same US district court in Northern California that helped block the first two iterations of President Trump’s temporary ban on immigrants from a handful of Muslim majority nations.

Trump

Here’s more from the Hill.

In a complaint filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California on Friday, the American Civil Liberties Union, Southern Poverty Law Center and Center for Constitutional Rights allege that the Trump administration is violating immigration law as well as the federal statute that governs the way administrative agencies can issue rules.

“President Trump’s new asylum ban is illegal,” Omar Jadwat, director of the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project, said in a statement.

“Neither the president nor his cabinet secretaries can override the clear commands of U.S. law, but that’s exactly what they’re trying to do. This action undermines the rule of law and is a great moral failure because it tries to take away protections from individuals facing persecution — it’s the opposite of what America should stand for.”

President Donald Trump issued an order on Friday to halt asylum claims made by people who illegally cross the US border with Mexico, a move that he had telegraphed well in advance. The decision, which was made in response to the caravans advancing toward the US’s southern border from central America, was previewed on Thursday night.

The new policy is set to take effect at 12:01 am on Saturday and will affect anybody who crossed the border outside of an official point of entry. The policy change is intended to discourage illegal immigration, as many migrants cross the southern border from war-torn Central American countries with the intention of declaring asylum, only to illegally remain in the country while they await their hearings.

 

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Goldman Calls It: “Stocks May Be About To Enter A Sustained Bear Market”

Two months ago we reported that according to Goldman’s bear market indicator, the risk of a market crash dead ahead was higher than before the dot com bubble burst in 2000 and ahead of the 2008 global financial crisis, or as Goldman puts it, “our Bull/Bear market indicator is flashing red.”

Fast forward two months, and one market correction later, and Goldman’s mood has only gotten worse, not helped by the brutal market action of October, which saw many assets hitting a bear market, and the S&P falling on 16 of the 23 trading days while, collectively, equity markets across the world shed around $5tn of market cap.

To Goldman strategist Peter Oppenheimer, “the obvious question now is whether this has marked the start of a bear market more broadly, or if it is a less entrenched, albeit sharp, correction from which markets will quickly recover.” And, as he concedes, “things do not look encouraging” as three factors suggest that “equities could be about to enter a sustained bear market”:

  • First, the growth/inflation mix is turning against equity returns.
  • Second, a sharp decline is often followed by a bounce.
  • Third, the GS Bear Market Risk Indicator is at elevated levels

Goldman tackles these key “bear market” risks one at a time, starting at the top:

1. The growth/inflation mix is turning against equity returns:

The problem here, stated simply, is that the global economy which had seen a significant boost from record loose financial conditions in 2017 and was further buoyed (particularly in the US) by the fiscal boost, is starting to lose momentum. Goldman economists’ 4Q estimate for growth has already slowed to 2.6%, well below the prior two quarters. Worse, looking ahead, as a result of the tightening of financial conditions and the prospects of diminishing support from fiscal policy is likely to result in the US economy slowing to a year-on-year rate of 1.75% by 4Q 2019.

As Exhibit 1 shows, the interest rate rises in the US economy over the past couple of years have been offset by very strong growth. As we move forward in time, the balance between growth and inflation deteriorates.

Coupled with tighter financial conditions, the impact of US trade tariffs and rising oil prices have slowed global growth momentum, Openheimer writes and shows in Exhibit 2 that there is a reasonable relationship between global growth momentum indicators such as PMIs and equity returns year over year. Exhibit 3 shows that there is also a close relationship between growth momentum and the performance of Cyclicals relative to Defensives. Interestingly, in both cases the market moves would seem to have overshot the existing macro data, suggesting that further growth deterioration has been priced in to some extent

* * *

2. A sharp decline is often followed by a bounce: 

Around the top of a bull market, we often see slightly higher volatility and a peak followed by a correction, and then another peak. We have seen corrections twice this year: in January and then again in October. Bear markets do not tend to occur in straight lines. There is nearly always a bounce after the initial decline, providing investors with another opportunity to reduce risks if there are sufficient signals at the time to suggest a further decline is likely. The profile of the average bear market (starting in the post-war period and using US data) is shown in Exhibit 4.

The next exhibit shows an average profile, with the range of experiences in the blue shaded area. However, this is an oversimplification because the period over which the bounce occurs does vary, and sometimes the market has a correction and then a rally even before the actual peak (1987 and 2007 are examples) according to Goldman. On most other occasions the market correction comes after the peak; this tends to be followed by a bounce as the market recovers towards the peak before reversing again. But the common factor in all cases is that, with the exception of 1998, a correction and bounce can be clearly observed. Exhibit 5 shows this experience for each of the US bear markets since 1960.

As Oppenheimer explains, the average decline in the first correction is 9% over 2 months but the average bounce after that is almost as large over a further 2 months, before an eventual further decline of 34%. In reality, the final sharp down-leg of the bear market rarely comes in one straight line; it could also have a number of rallies along the way, although these are typically not as strong as the initial bounce and do not take the market close to previous highs. What can explain the initial bounce? There are generally two explanations:

  1. Late in the bull market investors are unclear about small corrections; they often perceive them as buying opportunities and are worried about missing such opportunities to increase returns.
  2. The bounce usually comes before there is any real ‘confirmation’ in the hard macro data that the initial correction is justified. When data start to confirm the justification for an initial market decline, prices tend to fall back further. Interestingly, EPS on average tends to start to fall 5 months after the peak of the market (although, as we discuss later, there is a wide variation around this).

The risk, to Goldman, is that from these levels the market enjoys a short-term rally but this becomes a signal to sell rather than buy the market.

The risk is further compounded, because as Morgan Stanley recently warned, after 11 years, BTFD no longer works.

The GS Bear Market Risk Indicator is at elevated levels

As we reported in September, Goldman recently constructed a bull/bear indicator based on the common pattern of a number of variables around the peak of previous bull markets. Goldman found that many bull market peaks were associated with a combination of conditions based on five factors: the labour market, growth momentum, valuation, term structure of the yield curve and inflation.

In summary, the very low levels of unemployment (particularly in the US) scored as a high risk in the index. This is because low unemployment is normally associated with rising wages, margin pressure and tighter monetary policy. Also, every post-war US recession has been preceded by only modest rises in unemployment from very low levels (a third of 1%). Very strong growth momentum (measured by the ISM as an example) also flags as a risk. Of course, strong economic activity is generally a good thing for equity markets. However, very strong activity is typically followed by slower growth which, when combined with other factors (in particular much higher interest rates), can weaken equity prices. The third stretched factor on many metrics was valuation. High valuations in isolation do not provide much of a timing signal for investors but, again, when combined with other factors can indicate risks of a correction or possible bear market.

Goldman aggregated these variables in a signal indicator, and took each variable and calculated its percentile relative to its history since 1948. What it found is that, heuristically, the odds of a bear market at this moment, are in the 73% percentile.

The aggregate Bear Market Risk Indicator shows the average of these factors. Historically, when the Indicator rises above 60% it is a good signal to investors to turn cautious, or at the very least recognise that a correction followed by a rally is more likely to be followed by a bear market than when these indicators are low. By the same token, when the Indicator is very low, below 40% (as was the case in 1975, 1982 and 2009), investors should see any market weakness as an opportunity to buy.

As shown below, the risk of a bear market has almost never been greater.

So where are we now? As Oppenheimer puts it simple, “The signal is red.

What does a high indicator mean?

According to Goldman, the average return on US equities in any 12-month period since the 1950s has been 9%. Exhibit 9 shows what average forward returns have been conditional on the level of our Bear Market Risk Indicator. If the indicator is very low, at <20%, then on average equities enjoy returns of 20-25% over the next 12 months. But once the indicator rises to 40-60% then the average return becomes close to the longer-term average of c.9% over 12 months.

What if the indicator is high? Above 60% and 12-month subsequent returns do tend to fall. We are currently at 73% and this is consistent historically with zero average returns over the next 12 months. Of course, there is a large range around this. Moreover, this tends to give the impression of a flat market, whereas it could be anything but flat – a good deal of volatility with various drawdowns could still be consistent with zero returns over the year.

Exhibit 10 shows the maximum drawdown over the following 2 years conditional on the starting point of our Bear Market Risk Indicator (the vertical orange lines show what the indicator would be using the US Shiller P/E as the valuation variable or the simple P/E ratio).

At the current level of Goldman’s Indicator, the maximum drawdown has been about 15% historically. This, by the way, is as close as Goldman will ever come to telling its banking clients to get out of stocks.

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Trump Blasts Barack After Michelle Unloads On President

President Trump fired back at the Obamas, ahead of their book tour, following Michelle’s comments that she will “never forgive” Trump for the “xenophobic” ‘birther’ claims that her husband was not actually born in America.

In excerpts from her memoir “Becoming” obtained by The Washington Post,

“The whole thing was crazy and mean-spirited, of course, its underlying bigotry and xenophobia hardly concealed,” the former first lady writes.

“But it was also dangerous, deliberately meant to stir up the wingnuts and kooks.”

“What if someone with an unstable mind loaded a gun and drove to Washington? What if that person went looking for our girls? Donald Trump, with his loud and reckless innuendos, was putting my family’s safety at risk. And for this I’d never forgive him,” she continues.

As The Hill reports, the book, which is set to release Tuesday, details the first lady’s early life in Chicago all the way through to her time as first lady, and includes her feelings of shock and disbelief following Trump’s election in 2016.

But, as Mediaite.com reports, President Trump – as is his way – was not taking this lying down. During a Friday morning pool spray at the White House, Trump was asked about Michelle Obama’s comments. His reply?

I guess she wrote a book. She got paid a lot of money to write a book. And they always insist you come up with controversial. Well, I’ll give you a little controversy back. I’ll never forgive [Barack Obama] for what he did to our United States military. By not funding properly, it was depleted. Everything was old and tired. And I came in and I had to fix it.”

Trump added, “So I’ll never forgive him for what he did to our military. I’ll never forgive him for what he did in many other ways — which I’ll talk to you about in the future.”

We suspect – given the timing of Michelle’s 10-city book tour that is scheduled to kick off Tuesday in her hometown of Chicago – this little feud is far from over…

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College Offers Safe-Space For Students To “Process, Stressful” Midterm Election Results

Authored by Celine Ryan via Campus Reform,

Students at an Illinois college received an email on Tuesday offering “extra support and resources” for those struggling to “process” the 2018 midterm election results.

Three Elmhurst College offices informed students that there would be increased support on campus during the “stressful time” of midterm elections, according to an email obtained by Campus Reform

“Our staff will have open office hours to provide a space to process the outcomes of the elections,” Elmhurst’s Office of Diversity & Inclusion, Office of Student Involvement, and Office of the Chaplain said in the email.

“We will also have coffee, cider, hot chocolate, and some treats to offer you,” they continued.

“We hope that you will join us if you need some extra support and resources throughout the day.”

The school invited those unable to make the 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. office hour window to a separate “space to process election results” held by the Elmhurst’s Spiritual Life Council at 5 p.m. Wednesday.

“I think it’s pretty cool that the school gives people a place to go and get information on the election,” Elmhurst student Tramaine Franklin told Campus Reform.

Following the election of President Donald Trump in 2016, students at the University of California-Irvine gathered for a “group cry” where they proclaimed their “solidarity” with “marginalized communities” in response to Trump’s win.

More recently, professors at Mississippi State University went as far as to cancel classes for a “moment of silence” to honor the women who accused then-Supreme Court Justice nominee Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault. At least one of Kavanaugh’s accusers has since admitted that it was “just a ploy,” USA Today reported.

Campus Reform reached out to Elmhurst and the offices involved for comment but did not receive one in time for publication.

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