The Worst Areas in America For Weed Arrests: Reason Roundup

With so many states, cities, candidates, and cultural authorities gung-ho about legalizing weed, it’s sometimes easy to forget just how little has changed in terms of prohibition and enforcement for many parts of the country. Arrest numbers from the National Archive of Criminal Justice Data provide a good reality check.

Its data shows that in many jurisdictions, one-fifth of all arrests are still for marijuana possession. In a few areas, policing pot possession accounts for upwards of 40 and 50 percent of all arrests.

The worst offenders in the country:

  • Dooley County, Georgia (54.5 percent of all arrests)
  • Hamilton County, New York (43.5 percent)
  • Texas’ Sterling County (42.1 percent) and Hartley County (42 percent)
  • Edmunds County, South Dakota (33.3 percent)

According to federal data, “marijuana possession led to nearly 6 percent of all arrests in the United States in 2017,” writes The Washington Post’s Christopher Ingraham, “underscoring the level of policing dedicated to containing behavior that’s legal in 10 states and the nation’s capital.”

But this presents a positively rosy picture compared to local-level arrest data. Just check out this map:

 

What gives? The still-raging federal drug war, of course.

“The federal government incentivizes aggressive drug enforcement via funding for drug task forces and generous forfeiture rules that allow agencies to keep cash and other valuables they find in the course of a drug bust,” notes Ingraham. “And because marijuana is bulky and pungent relative to other drugs, it’s often easy for police to root out.”

Arrest data doesn’t neatly map to liberal/conservative, urban/rural, or any other particular trends. Places like North Dakota, Georgia, and Texas showed high marijuana arrest rates, but so did some East Coast and New England states (New Hampshire, New York, New Jersey) and areas outside Washington, D.C. Meanwhile, “Alabama and Kentucky—which are not known for liberal marijuana policies—also appeared to place a low priority on marijuana possession enforcement,” the Post points out.

FREE MINDS

Pulitzer Prize winners for 2019 were announced yesterday. Poynter has a complete list of winners here. A few highlights:

 

 

St. Louis Post-Dispatch columnist Tony Messenger also won an award (best commentary) for a series on his city’s bail problems.

 

 

Hannah Dreier of ProPublica won the best feature writing prize for this piece:

 

FREE MARKETS

“Bethany and Justin Rondeau are in two very different but oddly parallel businesses: falconry and cannabis.” The Stranger’s Katie Herzog investigates:

ELECTION 2020

Enter Bill Weld. After running for vice president on the Libertarian Party ticket in 2016, Bill Weld will return to his Republican Party roots to mount a 2020 primary challenge to President Donald Trump

Read more from Matt Welch.

QUICK HITS

  • Fires ripped through both the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris and Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa Mosque on Monday, sending watchers around the world into a sort of cosmic panic that very quickly gave way to the same old culture war bullshit and speculation. The fire at Al-Aqsa only affected a small bit of the mosque. As for Notre Dame, French rich folks and companies have already been offering up billions to help repair the damage.
  • The ACLU is leading a class action lawsuit to change Detroit’s bail system. “Bail was originally intended to ensure a person returns to court to face charges against them,” said ACLU of Michigan Deputy Legal Director Dan Korobkin. “But instead, the money bail system has morphed into mass incarceration of the poor. It punishes people not for what they’ve done but because of what they don’t have.”
  • In case you’re interested in Beto O’Rourke’s tax returns.
  • “The Trump campaign is spending nearly half (44%) of its Facebook ad budget to target users who are over 65 years old, as opposed to Democratic candidates who are only spending 27% of their budget on that demographic,” reports Axios.
  • Tiger Woods is getting the Presidential Medal of Freedom, because why not?
  • Land of the free:

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US Industrial Output Contracts In March As Auto Production Slumps

Having slipped for two consecutive months, US Manufacturing production was expected to modestly rebound in March (by 0.1% MoM) but it failed, ending unchanged.

However, headline industrial production data was not just woirse than expected but contracted by 0.1% MoM in March…

The biggest drivers were Mining which fell 0.8% in March after no change in February, and Motor vehicles and parts production, which tumbled 2.5% in March to the lowest level since July. Q1 saw auto production slide 6.9% – the biggest drop since Oct 2014.

Capacity utilization fell to 78.8% from 79% in February (revised down from 79.1%).

Manufacturing output fell at a 1.1 percent annual rate in the first quarter, the worst performance since late 2017.

As Bloomberg notes, the data signal further manufacturing softness as producers cope with an inventory buildup, continuing uncertainty around trade and a dimming global growth outlook.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2ZelUn4 Tyler Durden

What Is Bank of America Seeing: Credit Loss Provision Spikes To 6 Year High

There was some good and some not so good news in Bank of America’s just reported Q1 earnings report. On one hand, the bank unveiled that its quarterly profit rose 6% to $7.3 billion, a new all time high, even as revenues dipped with the company trimming some more fat (and/or muscle) as operating expenses dropped by 4% to offset the continued shrinkage in the bank’s trading revenues (all of which was discussed previously).

And while the rest of BofA’s results were generally in line if on the soft side, there was one aspect of the quarterly report that was especially notable, and it had to do with the bank’s asset quality.

Here, what was remarkable is that even as the economy is reportedly getting stronger with better consumer trends, Bank of America bumped up its provision for credit losses to just above $1 billion, or $1.013BN to be specific, up over $100MM from both a year earlier and Q4. This was the highest credit loss provision number since in 6 years, or Q2 2013.

What was also notable, is that this increase took place even as net charge-offs remained relatively stable and as the bank’s total nonperforming loans declines by $0.1BN to $4.9BN, “driven by improvements in consumer.”

Which begs the question: if the economy is so strong and the bank’s NPLs are declining, just what is BofA seeing to be raising its loss provision to a 6 year high?

 

via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2DfTxvt Tyler Durden

Republican Senators Introduce Bill to Cut Legal Immigration in Half

A trio of Republican senators reintroduced the Reforming American Immigration for a Strong Economy Act (RAISE) Act last week, which seeks to reduce legal immigration by 50 percent.

Spearheaded by Sen. Tom Cotton (R–Ark.) with support from Sens. David Perdue (R–Ga.) and Josh Hawley (R–Mo.), the bill would establish a merit-based point system that prizes those with lucrative job offers, U.S.-recognized college degrees, domestic financial holdings, and English language skills. It also aims to undercut White House Adviser Jared Kushner, who has pushed a plan in recent months that would give temporary visas to migrant workers.

President Trump lauded the RAISE Act when it was first unveiled in July 2017, characterizing the current immigration setup as “a terrible system where anybody comes in,” particularly “people that have never worked” and “people that are criminals.”

But almost none of that is true: The low-skill immigrants that the president has cast as criminal welfare queens are anything but. Those same people tend to be steadily employed, use fewer government resources, commit crimes at a lower rate than the native-born, and consistently drive innovation.

In recent months, however, the vast majority of Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric has been narrowly directed toward the undocumented, potentially signaling a change of tune. “Legal immigrants enrich our nation and strengthen our society in countless ways,” the president said during his 2019 State of the Union address. “I want people to come into our country in the largest numbers ever, but they have to come in legally.”

Yet how the RAISE Act would further Trump’s new open-arms attitude toward legal migrants remains to be seen, as the bill proposes to slash successful applicants in half. Nor is it apparent how it would curb illegal immigration, if that’s an unstated goal.

In any case, the bill’s bare-bones proposal would cost the country 4.6 million jobs, with the gross domestic product sinking 2 percent over the next few decades, according to an analysis by the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton Business School. “Job losses emerge because domestic workers will not fill all the jobs that immigrant workers would have filled,” researchers conclude, particularly as the country is already experiencing a labor shortage.

What’s more, low-skill workers—whom the bill threatens to exclude almost entirely—constitute a core section of the U.S. workforce, particularly in the agricultural, construction, and transportation sectors, among others.

The rebirth of the RAISE Act is certainly a bad thing, particularly if Trump is serious about welcoming more legal immigrants. But even more troublesome is the current system as a whole, so burdened by a bureaucratic slew of rules that even the most experienced policymakers don’t seem to understand. In 2017, Kansas’s then-Secretary of State Kris Kobach said of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals recipients: “Go home and get in line, come into the United States legally, then get a green card, then become a citizen.” That same year, over 22.4 million people applied for one of the 50,000 green cards allotted. That means that approximately 99.8 percent of people were denied lawful permanent residence through the visa lottery program.

“Go the legal way,” they say.

But a low-skill Mexican immigrant seeking residence to the States has to wait an average of 131 years for approval. That’s time no person has to spare—and it’s likely why more than 11 million people opted for the illegal route.

That immigrants keep the economy in motion is not lost on Trump. “I need people coming in because we need people to run the factories and plants and companies that are moving back in,” said Trump after his State of the Union address. “We need people.”

He’s right. We need people. But those people will be hard to come by with a bill like the RAISE Act, and even harder still so long as the legal system remains impenetrable.

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The Internet Erupts With Speculation About Who Started The Notre Dame Cathedral Fire

Update 2: Ever careful to watch for false-flags and conspiracy theory concerns, video is emerging of a Gilets-Jaunes in black clothes at one of the two towers half an hour after the start of the fire at Notre-Dame…

One definite way to disenfranchise the yellow vests – as they crush French autocracy – would be to set them up as the fall-guys for this national disaster. Surely that is not possible!

*  *  *

Update 1: A silver lining – if that’s possible: a Catholic priest was today hailed a hero as it emerged he entered the Notre-Dame last night during the height of the inferno to rescue precious cathedral relics including the Crown of Thorns.

The hallowed artefact, which symbolises the wreath of thorns placed on the head of Jesus Christ at his crucifixion, was stored in the cathedral’s treasury and was brought to Paris by French King Louis IX in 1238. Jean-Marc Fournier, Chaplain of Paris Fire Brigade, was also said to have saved the Blessed Sacrament last night from the 850-year-old Gothic masterpiece.

*  *  *

Paris prosecutor Rémy Heitz stressed early indications suggest the fire was accidental, as he added:

“Nothing indicates a deliberate act.”

But, as Michael Snyder details below, now that the initial shock of the fire has subsided, the Internet is buzzing with speculation about the origin of the fire.  In the end, there are only two options.  Either this was an accident, or someone intentionally started the fire.  And if the fire was intentionally started, obviously someone had a motive for doing so.

Time columnist Christopher J. Hale set off a firestorm of speculation when he tweeted that a friend who works at the cathedral told him “cathedral staff said the fire was intentionally set”…

Hale deleted the tweet just a few minutes later.

Was he lying about what he had been told?

Coming from a professional journalist, that doesn’t seem likely.

Instead, it is much more likely that Hale quickly figured out that he said something that he wasn’t supposed to say.

A YouTube video that purportedly contains audio of Muslims celebrating the fire at the Notre Dame cathedral has also sparked a lot of speculation.  But at this point there doesn’t appear to be any way to verify the authenticity of the video.

But what we do know is that all of this comes at a time when churches all over France are being attacked.

On March 17th, the second largest church in France erupted in flames, and police later ruled that it was not an accident…

While Notre Dame is undoubtedly the most well-known landmark to be affected, Paris’ second largest church, Saint-Sulpice, briefly burst into flames on March 17, the fire damaging doors and stained glass windows on the building’s exterior. Police later reported that the incident had not been an accident.

Overall, a dozen Catholic churches were either set on fire or greatly vandalized during one seven day stretch last month…

A dozen Catholic churches have been desecrated across France over the period of one week in an egregious case of anti-Christian vandalism.

The recent spate of church profanations has puzzled both police and ecclesiastical leaders, who have mostly remained silent as the violations have spread up and down France.

Last Sunday, marauders set fire to the church of Saint-Sulpice — one of Paris’ largest and most important churches — shortly after the twelve-o’clock Mass.

And some of the vandalism that was reported during that seven day period was deeply, deeply disturbing…

In Nimes (department of the Gard), near the border with Spain, the church of Notre-Dame des Enfants was desecrated in a particularly odious way, with vandals painting a cross with human excrement, looting the main altar and the tabernacle, and stealing the consecrated hosts, which were discovered later among piles of garbage.

Likewise, the church of Notre-Dame in Dijon, in the east of the country, suffered the sacking of the high altar and the hosts were also taken from the tabernacle, scattered on the ground, and trampled.

Could it be possible that there is a connection between those attacks and the fire that just erupted at the Notre Dame cathedral?

That is a question that any decent investigator would be asking at this point.

We also know that anti-Christian and anti-Semitic attacks are on the rise in France.  Just check out these numbers…

The number of anti-Semitic attacks (541) rose 74 percent from 2017-2018 while anti-Muslim attacks numbered just 100, the lowest since 2010.

Meanwhile in the same period, there were 1063 anti-Christian attacks, a slight increase on the previous year.

Needless to say, radical Islamists are responsible for most of the attacks against Christians and Jews, and the number of Muslims living in the Paris area has greatly increased in recent years…

According to reports, the number of Jews fleeing France for their safety has dramatically increased since 2000.

In one Paris suburb alone – Seine-Saint-Denis – 40 percent of the population is Muslim while 400,000 illegal immigrants also live there.

But in this politically-correct era, we aren’t supposed to talk about attacks against Christians, and this is especially true if those attacks are conducted by radical Islamists.

On Monday, even anchors at Fox News had apparently been instructed that any speculation about who started the Notre Dame cathedral fire must be immediately shut down.  These days there is very little difference between Fox News and the other major news networks, and that is very unfortunate.

On another note, I also find it very interesting that at one point on Monday a YouTube algorithm linked the fire at the Notre Dame cathedral with the 9/11 attacks…

A YouTube feature designed to combat misinformation offered some of its own during a major news event Monday: It linked the fire at the Notre Dame Cathedral to the September 11 terrorist attacks.

The company blamed the mixup on its algorithms. It removed the links on all Notre Dame fire posts after the issue was flagged.

In this day and age, the “spin” is often more important than the actual events themselves.

In the coming days, a tremendous effort will be made to get us to feel a certain way about the Notre Dame cathedral fire.

But what would be so wrong with allowing us to think for ourselves and allowing us to come to our own conclusions?

The Internet was one of the last bastions for global free speech, but now the heavy hand of censorship is descending, and our ability to freely discuss global events is eroding a little bit more with each passing day.

via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2Gb1UZC Tyler Durden

Concordia University Disinvites Harvard Professor Harvey Mansfield Over His Conservative Gender Views

Concordia University in Canada had invited Harvard University Professor Harvey Mansfield to give the spring commencement address for its Liberal Arts College. The college’s students study great books and Western thought, and Mansfield teaches these subjects, so one might think he was a good fit.

But then the university rescinded its invitation. Principal Mark Russell sent Mansfield a weaselly letter expressing regret that faculty and alumni “were unable to reach consensus as to what we wanted to achieve with this event.” Russell lamented that the selection committee “acted in good faith but rather precipitously” when it invited him in the first place.

This is clearly doublespeak: Thankfully, Mansfield discovered the true explanation, which he relates in his Wall Street Journal op-ed:

What had taken place, I learned but not from him, was a faculty meeting prompted by a letter from 12 alumni that demanded a reversal of the committee’s invitation because my “scholarly and public corpus … heavily traffics in damaging and discredited philosophies of gender and culture.” Promoting “the primacy of masculinity,” apparently a reference to my book “Manliness,” attracted their ire. Though I was to speak on great books, not gender, this “trafficking”—as if in harmful drugs—disqualified me without any need to specify further. Such sloppy, inaccurate accusation was enough to move a covey of professors to flutter in alarm.

Mansfield is a political conservative, and his views on gender reflect his conservative outlook. No doubt many people would disagree with them—especially those on the hyper-woke left, whose gender-related opinions are not shared by the vast majority of the population. If this means that Mansfield should be denied a platform, then no one who has ever expressed a problematic opinion on any matter would be deemed fit to speak on campus.

Mansfield spends the rest of his op-ed theorizing about why his critics wanted him disinvited. He characterizes the new left as believing the following:

Speech is not an alternative to power but a form of power, political power, and political power is nothing but the power to oppress. A professor like me might trick gullible students and lure them to the wrong side. So it is quite acceptable to exclude speakers from the other side. Supremacy of the wrong side must be prevented by supremacy of the right side.

I don’t think this is quite right. I researched the motivations of anti-speech campus actors for my forthcoming book, Panic Attack: Young Radicals in the Age of Trump (pre-order here), and generally found that their desire to shutdown conservative speakers mostly stemmed from the notion that offensive speech had the power to cause tangible emotional harm to vulnerable populations with which far-left activists sympathize. Their view would probably be that Mansfield’s opinions are mentally taxing for female, queer, and transgender students—and that harming the students in this way is akin to physically harming them. Preventing Mansfield from speaking, then, is a matter of self-defense—a response to a threat of violence.

Obviously, this approach to speech is incredibly flawed, and would make it impossible to have all sorts of interesting conversations on campuses. Again, Mansfield is an incredibly intelligent and respectable scholar whose views are well within the mainstream. If Concordia’s students are too timid to hear what he has to say, it’s hard to imagine they are prepared to face the outside world.

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Gold Dumps As ‘Someone’ Decides 0830ET Is Perfect Time To Puke $1.5 Billion Notional

Precious metals traders are using the ‘f’ word a lot this morning – ‘Fiduciary’ – as they question the rationale for ‘someone’ deciding to puked over 11,000 gold futures contracts (around $1.5 billion notional) into the market, sending the price tumbling to its lowest since January…

Some have argued this is technically driven as Gold breaks below its 100DMA…

But others noted the recent trend of weakness ahead of the London Fix…

Silver was also hammered lower…

 

via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2GrQRwQ Tyler Durden

We’ve Seen This Happen Before The Last 3 Recessions…And Now It Is The Worst It Has Ever Been

Authored by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog,

Since the last financial crisis, we have witnessed the greatest corporate debt binge in U.S. history. 

Corporate debt has more than doubled since then, and it is now sitting at a grand total of more than 9 trillion dollars.  Of course there have been other colossal corporate debt binges throughout our history, and they all ended badly.  In fact, the ratio of corporate debt to U.S. GDP rose above 40 percent prior to each of the last three recessions, but this time around we have found a way to top that.  According to Forbes, the ratio of nonfinancial corporate debt to U.S. GDP is now nearly 50 percent…

Since the last recession, nonfinancial corporate debt has ballooned to more than $9 trillion as of November 2018, which is nearly half of U.S. GDP. As you can see below, each recession going back to the mid-1980s coincided with elevated debt-to-GDP levels—most notably the 2007-2008 financial crisis, the 2000 dot-com bubble and the early ’90s slowdown.

You can see the chart they are talking about right here, and it clearly shows that each of the last three recessions coincided with the bursting of an enormous corporate debt bubble.

This time around the corporate debt bubble is larger than it has ever been before, and risky corporate debt has been growing faster than any other category…

Through 2023, as much as $4.88 trillion of this debt is scheduled to mature. And because of higher rates, many companies are increasingly having difficulty making interest payments on their debt, which is growing faster than the U.S. economy, according to the Institute of International Finance (IIF).

On top of that, the very fastest-growing type of debt is riskier BBB-rated bonds—just one step up from “junk.” This is literally the junkiest corporate bond environment we’ve ever seen.

Needless to say, the stage is set for a corporate debt meltdown of epic proportions.

What makes this debt bubble even worse is the way that our big corporations have been spending the money that they are borrowing.

Instead of spending the money to build factories, hire workers and expand their businesses, our big corporations have been spending more money on stock buybacks than anything else.

Every year, publicly traded corporations spend hundreds of billions of dollarsbuying back their own stocks from shareholders, and much of that is being done with borrowed money.

For example, in recent years General Motors has spent nearly 14 billion dollars on stock buybacks.  And that number certainly sounds quite impressive until you learn that General Electric has spent a whopping 40 billion dollars on stock buybacks.

Sadly, both corporate behemoths are now absolutely drowning in debt as a result of their foolishness.

In the final analysis, borrowing money to fund stock buybacks is little more than an elaborate Ponzi scheme.  In their endless greed, corporate executives are cannibalizing their own companies because it makes some people wealthier in the short-term.

And now this giant corporate debt bubble has reached a bursting point, and there is no way that this story is going to end well.

Meanwhile, another financial bubble of epic proportions is also getting a lot of attention these days.  If you are not familiar with “shadow banking”, here is a pretty good explanation from CNBC…

Nonbank lending, an industry that played a central role in the financial crisis, has been expanding rapidly and is still posing risks should credit conditions deteriorate.

Often called “shadow banking” — a term the industry does not embrace — these institutions helped fuel the crisis by providing lending to underqualified borrowers and by financing some of the exotic investment instruments that collapsed when subprime mortgages fell apart.

This kind of lending has absolutely exploded all over the globe since the last recession, and it has now become a 52 trillion dollar bubble…

In the years since the crisis, global shadow banks have seen their assets grow to $52 trillion, a 75% jump from the level in 2010, the year after the crisis ended. The asset level is through 2017, according to bond ratings agency DBRS, citing data from the Financial Stability Board.

Who is going to pick up the pieces when a big chunk of those debts start going bad during the next financial crisis?

Never before in human history have we seen so much debt.  Government debt is at all-time record levels all over the world, corporate debt is wildly out of control and consumer debt continues to surge.

A system that requires debt levels to grow at a much faster pace than the overall global economy is growing to maintain itself is a fundamentally flawed system.

But that is what we are facing.  If global debt growth fell to zero, the global economy would instantly plunge into a horrific depression.  The only way to keep the game going is to keep expanding the debt bubble, and the larger it becomes the worse the future crash will be.

Most of us have been in this system for our entire lives, and so most of us don’t even realize that it is possible to have a financial system that is not based on debt.  This is one of the reasons why I get so frustrated with the financially-illiterate politicians who insist that everything will be just fine if we just tweak our current system a little bit.

No, everything is not going to be just fine.  In fact, we have perfectly set the stage for the worst financial meltdown in human history.

At this point nobody has put forth a plan to fundamentally change the system, and there is no way out.

All that is left to do is to keep this current bubble going for as long as humanly possible, and then to duck and cover when disaster finally strikes.

via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2v4tFy0 Tyler Durden

It’s Official: Bill Weld Announces Primary Challenge to Donald Trump

Bill Weld, the 73-year-old former federal prosecutor, two-term governor of Massachusetts, and 2016 vice presidential nominee for the Libertarian Party, announced Monday afternoon on CNN that he is officially running for president in the Republican primary against incumbent Donald Trump.

“I really think if we have six more years of the same stuff we’ve had out of the White House the last two years, that would be a political tragedy, and I would fear for the republic,” Weld told CNN’s Jake Tapper. “So I would be ashamed of myself if I didn’t raise my hand and run.”

In an announcement press release, Weld called himself a “Reagan Republican” who “knows that America can still be that ‘shining city on a hill.’”He declared that “it is time to return to the principles of Lincoln—equality, dignity, and opportunity for all,” and stressed such non-Trumpian themes as “the rule of law, a free and open press, and America’s global leadership.” The accompanying campaign video touted among other things Weld’s record as a “crime fighter,” while leaving his Libertarian adventure of 2016-2018 unmentioned.

As he has since announcing an exploratory committee two months ago, Weld Monday stressed four Trump demerits: The president’s deliberate divisiveness, casual disregard for the rule of law, incuriosity about climate change, and fiscal profligacy.

“Donald Trump is not an economic conservative; he doesn’t even pretend to be,” Weld told Tapper. “And, you know, the country deserves to have some fiscal restraint and conservatism and cutting spending in Washington, D.C. Right now all that really is coming out of Washington is divisiveness, and both parties are responsible for that, but the grandmaster of that is the president himself. I’ve never seen such bitterness in this country.”

One of the main reasons Weld is alone so far in challenging Trump within the GOP is that the market fundamentals he faces are just brutal. The president’s approval rating among Republicans has remained between 88 percent and 90 percent for the past five months, according to Gallup. Trump raised more than $30 million in the first quarter, and has consolidated power within the Republican National Committee to a degree frequently characterized as “unprecedented.” And the early head-to-head polling, if anything, is worse.

An Emerson nationwide survey released this week has Trump beating Weld by a staggering 70 percentage points. More ominously, the same company this month found a 64-point margin in Weld’s home state of Massachusetts. The Weld campaign has a theory that if New Hampshire polls start creeping toward the high 20s, then you’re near the “Buchanan benchmark” of 37 percent back during Pitchfork Pat’s 1992 primary challenge to then-president George H.W. Bush. You have to squint awfully hard to see such optimism in the numbers, but then, there are still 300 days between now and the New Hampshire primary.

“It is a long shot. But it’s certainly less of a long shot than Donald Trump was when he announced and no one thought he was serious,” Weld’s longtime political adviser Stuart Stevens told the Washington Post. “Tonally, he’s going to run a very different campaign. He’s not mad at the world. He’s not a victim.”

One challenge Weld faces among Republican and libertarian-leaning voters alike is his track record of slippery political allegiances and policy positions. In May 2016, during a contentious two-round ballot fight to become the Libertarian Party’s vice presidential nominee, Weld was repeatedly asked by the then-dropping out V.P. challenger Alicia Dearn to promise never to “betray” the L.P., as many believe he had done during a botched New York gubernatorial bid in 2006.

“I’m a Libertarian for life,” Weld said, trying to make the awkward moment go away without precisely answering the question. Dearn pressed him, saying that “betray,” to her, just meant leaving the party, to which Weld declared: “Libertarian for life means not going back to any other party.”

To the surprise of many in the L.P., Weld after the 2016 seemed to stay true to that vow, making the state-party convention circuit, endorsing Libertarian candidates, and talking about the need for America’s third party to take the 2020 presidential election “seriously.” As recently as last the second half of 2018 he was describing his separation from the GOP as being “Free at last,” arguing in a Reason debate with Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) that “If we want a new broom to sweep things clean in Washington, the answer is not the R party or the D party. It is the Libertarian Party,” and declaring that it is “our bounded duty to destroy by every means at our disposal” the “two-party monopoly.” He switched to the GOP just three months later.

On Monday, Tapper asked the newly re-minted Republican whether he would “run as an independent” in case the primary challenge fell short. Weld’s answer contained loopholes you could drive a truck through. “No, no, I don’t think so,” he said. “But I could not support Donald Trump for president. I’m not saying I would ever endorse a Democrat in this race, but I could not support the president.”

As per usual with the orange-haired Brahmin, Weld’s announcement Monday produced mixed reactions among libertarians. L.P. National Membership Manager Jess Mears, who worked on the Gary Johnson/Bill Weld campaign in 2016, was magnanimous.

Fox Business Network’s Kennedy, who eviscerated Weld after his infamous last-minute “vouching” for Hillary Clinton on MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show, was somewhat less enthused.

Fifth place 2016 finisher Evan McMullin, though, is stoked.

Weld, at a year older than Trump, would be the oldest president in U.S. history. He hasn’t won an election in a quarter century, back when Pete Buttigieg was 12. He’s a deficit hawk in an era of debt denialism, a proudly elite globalist in a time of ascendant populist nationalism, and a pro-choice, pro-amnesty Republican who backed Barack Obama in 2008 and urged major-party voters in 2016 to choose Hillary Clinton over Trump. There have been more improbable campaigns, but not many.

Reason has interviewed Weld many times, producing the kinds of comments over the past three-plus years you would not normally expect from a competitive Republican politician. “The Libertarian Party is more congenial to me, dogmatically, ideologically, than either of the other two parties,” he told me in November 2017, while vowing that he was going to stay in the L.P. “Because the Democratic Party is not fiscally responsible and the Republican Party is not socially tolerant.”

We shall soon see whether the GOP is tolerant of internal political competition, or whether Trump will be no more bothered by Weld than Richard Nixon was by Pete McCloskey.

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“Nine Centuries Of History Lost” – What Front Pages Said About Notre Dame Inferno

As millions of Europeans grappled with the notion that, in the span of just five hours, a devastating fire nearly destroyed more than 850 years of history after erupting in the attic of Paris’s cathedral of Notre Dame, newspapers in the UK and France went to the presses with the tragedy as the unchallenged lead story.

Most went to print before French President Emmanuel Macron revealed that the 400 firefighters working to combat the blaze had managed to save the interior of the structure. So they led with the impression that the cathedral was a total lost, as many had suspected.

Starting with the French papers, the catholic newspaper La Croix featured the headline “Le coeur en cendres” – heart in ashes.

In a city that has suffered several tragedies over the past few years, including terror attacks and civil unrest, Les Echos termed the fire “La tragédie de Paris” – the tragedy of Paris”.

Le Parisien’s headline is “Notre-Dame des Larmes” – Our lady of tears.

Le Figaro calls it “Le désastre” – the disaster.

Libération led with “Notre Drame” – Our tragedy.

Moving on to the UK, the Times of London wrote: “The Battle to save Notre Dame”.

The Daily Mail: “Nine centuries of history lost to an unholy inferno”.

The Daily Telegraph: “Paris weeps for its beloved lady.”

The Guardian: “Inferno devastates Notre Dame”.

The Sun: “Notre Doom”

The i led with: “Tragedy of Notre Dame”.

The Financial Times was one of a few papers to share space on it front page, devoting the lower half to a story about Goldman’s earnings.

The Express: “a nation weeps as inferno engulfs Notre Dame.”

Meanwhile, after the fire, Parisians wake up to a smoldering wreck.

via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2v8Z7LA Tyler Durden