Scaramucci: Divorce Will Show “Who In Media Has Class And Who Doesn’t”

Just days after Anthony Scaramucci replaced Sean Spicer as the White House’s Comms director, the former SkyBridge Capital president, who is still finalizing the sale of his stake in the FoF business to China’s scandal-ridden, money laundering HNA (at what reports allege was a greatly overinflated acquisition price), the Mooch immediately teleported himself to the front page of every political, financial and gossip magazine courtesy of his now infamous New York Magazine telephonic meltdown, in which he slammed Reince Priebus as a “fucking paranoid schizophrenic” and Steve Bannon as a “cocksucker,” and who effectively catalyzed Trump’s decision to fire Priebus on Friday afternoon. And then, the “peak news” cherry on top hit when the Post reported that Scaramucci’s 38-year-old wife Deidre, who had grown tired of his “naked ambition”, and had filed for divorce “after three years of marriage after getting fed up with his ruthless quest to get close to President Trump, whom she despises.”

News of his divorce has so far prompted at least two reactions from the new White House’s communications chief.

On Friday afternoon, Scaramucci asked media outlets to leave his family out of coverage of him and the Trump administration. “Leave civilians out of this. I can take the hits, but I would ask that you would put my family in your thoughts and prayers & nothing more,” he tweeted.

Then, in an ironic twist, the man who made a 30-second delay obligatory when listening to White House briefings, said media coverage of the news will reveal “who in the media has class and who doesn’t.”

“No further comments on this,” he added, although somehow we doubt it.

Meanwhile, the Daily News reported that while Scaramucci looked like a “pottymouthed madman” during his first week as White House communications director, he keeps a level head when it comes to divorce. At least, that’s what his matrimonial lawyer Leonard Sperber said when asked about reports on Friday that the Mooch’s second marriage was ending. Sperber represented Scaramucci in his 2011 divorce from his first wife.

“He was always calm and rational in the handling of his first divorce, which is perhaps the most sensitive, personal matter an individual can endure,” Sperber said in a statement to the Daily News. The Long Island attorney provided the statement after getting pre-authorization to give a comment.

 

Sperber described Scaramucci as having “incredible knowledge of policy, history and economics, amongst other topics.” “His memory is remarkable and, in my opinion, he has a photographic or near photographic memory,” said Sperber, who declined to say if Scaramucci had retained his services again.

It was unclear if Sperber was being paid for the infomercial. The NY Daily News also added that Deidre Ball, his second wife who filed for divorce, once worked as an executive at Scaramucci’s SkyBridge Capital. She could not be reached for comment.

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Republicans Move to Establish Second Special Counsel to Investigate Hillary Clinton, Susan Rice, President Obama

Content originally published at iBankCoin.com

The grounds for war have been laid. You know it and I know it. The democrats have forced republicans into a small corner and have been scratching away at their fat faces since election night. For every action, there is is reaction — basic physics.

Rep. Gaetz and a few dozen other republicans are now calling for a special prosecutor to investigate the great and many crimes of the previous administration and Hillary Clinton.

Rep. Gaetz:

“The American public has a right to know the facts – all of them – surrounding the election and its aftermath,” they wrote. “We urge you to appoint a second special counsel to ensure these troubling, unanswered questions are not relegated to the dustbin of history.”
 

‘I don’t think that the crimes of the prior administration, of Hillary Clinton, the collusion with James Comey and Loretta Lynch should be forgotten just because Hillary Clinton lost the election’

 

Here is their 14 point request.

Allegations that former Attorney General Loretta Lynch instructed then-FBI Director James Comey to downplay the nature of the Clinton email probe
 

The FBI and DOJ’s decisions in the course of the email probe, including controversial immunity deals with Clinton aide Cheryl Mills and others
 

The State Department’s involvement in deciding which Clinton emails to make public
 

Disclosures in WikiLeaks-released emails regarding the Clinton Foundation and, according to the letter, “its potentially unlawful international dealings”
 

Connections between Clinton officials and “foreign entities” including Russia and Ukraine
 

Revelations in hacked Democratic National Committee emails about “inappropriate” coordination between the DNC and Clinton campaign against Bernie Sanders’ Democratic primary campaign
 

The “unmasking” of Americans in intelligence documents and potentially related leaks of classified information
 

Comey’s admitted leak of details of his conversations with President Trump
 

The FBI’s “reliance” on controversial firm Fusion GPS, which was involved in the questionable anti-Trump “dossier”
 

“Our call for a special counsel is not made lightly,” the lawmakers wrote. “We have no interest in engendering more bad feelings and less confidence in the process or governmental institutions by the American people. Rather, our call is made on their behalf. It is meant to determine whether the criminal prosecution of any individual is warranted based on the solemn obligation to follow the facts wherever they lead and applying the law to those facts.”

 

Rep. Gaetz tears into Clinton, Rice, Obama and the whole cabal — calling for an investigation into these matters.

And here is the Chair of the House Judiciary Committee, Rep. Goodlatte, discussing the hypocrisy of the left, wanting a Russian investigation but not one that pursues the truth in the sundry of apparent crimes committed by the previous administration and Hillary.

With AG Sessions under pressure to deliver, I would not be surprised to see dueling Special Counsels investigating both matters at the same time.

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With LIBOR Dead, $400 Trillion In Assets Are Stuck In Limbo

In an unexpected announcement, earlier this week the U.K.’s top regulator, the Financial Conduct Authority which is tasked with overseeing Libor, announced that the world’s most important, and manipulated, benchmark rate will be phased out by 2021, catching countless FX, credit, derivative, and other traders by surprise because while much attention had been given to possible LIBOR alternatives across the globe (in a time when the credibility of the Libor was non-existent) this was the first time an end date had been suggested for the global benchmark, which as we explained on Thursday, had died from disuse over the past 5 years.

Commenting on the decision, NatWest Markets’ Blake Gwinn told Bloomberg that the decision was largely inevitable: “There had never been an answer as to how you get market participants to adopt a new benchmark. It was clear at some point authorities were going to force them. The FCA can compel people to participate in Libor. What can ICE do if they’ve lost the ability to get banks to submit Libor rates?”

And while the rationale for replacing Libor is well understood (for those unfamiliar, read David Enrich’s comprehensive account of Libor rigging “The Spider Network“), there are still no clear alternatives. Ultimately, as Bank of America calculates, “moving an existing $9.6 trillion retail mortgage market, $3.5 trillion commercial real estate market, $3.4 trillion loan market and a $350 trillion derivatives market is a herculean task.” A partial breakdown of the roughly $400 trillion in global Libor-referencing assets is shown in the table below.

And with nearly half a quadrillion dollar in securities referncing a benchmark that is set to expire in under 5 years, the biggest problem is one of continuity: as Bloomberg calculated last week, in addition to the hundreds of trillion in referencing securities,  there is also currently an open interest of 170,000 eurodollar futures contracts expiring in 2022 and beyond – contracts that settle into a benchmark that will no longer exist. “What are existing contract holders and market makers supposed to do?”

Then there is the question of succession: with over $300 trillion in derivative trades, and countless billions in floating debt contracts, referening Libor, the pressing question is what will replace it, and how will the transition be implemented seamlessly?

According to Bank of America, one possible option to achieve the transition could be to move to a “fixed-spread” Libor benchmark. In this scenario, regulators and market participants could agree for Libor to be hardcoded as a fixed spread over the underlying benchmark of their choice (BTFR-broad Treasury financing rate in the US, SONIA in UK etc). This could help to ensure that contracts that rely on Libor could continue to have a reference rate while the rate itself would move based on the regulator’s preferred benchmark.

The option obviously would raise some concerns around what spread to be chosen, the term structure of the fixed spread (for 1m vs. 3m libor for example) – but these, BofA believes, would be easier challenges to address than renegotiating and re-hedging existing contracts.

There is a third problem: while the above scenario could be one option for a short term solution, the longer term concern continues to be the lack of a clear alternative for new contracts. Acccoring to BofA’s Mark Cabana, the FCA announcement likely increases activity in the OIS market (both receive and pay flows) – but ultimately, the OIS market (overnight indexed swaps) is based on a fed funds rate whose own future is unclear in a system of non-zero excess reserves dwindling underlying volumes (chart below).

Another option is the BTFR rate (broad Treasury financing rate) which was selected by the Alternative Reference Rates Committee or ARCC (which is having its inaugural meeting on August 1) – but the market has gone down this route before with little success in the GC futures market given declining GCF volumes.

In the end, BofA warns that the most likely emerging scenario is one “involving a fractured derivatives market with multiple underlying benchmarks across different countries developing.”Worse, note that the FCA suggests that the IBA and panel banks could continue to produce Libor but the FCA would no longer persuade panel banks to stay.

Finally, what makes the above especially problematic, is that 2021 is when the Fed’s balance sheet shrinkage is expected to conclude (according to NY Fed estimates), and when short term rates are to be at their tightening peaks according to sellside estimates. That this will come at a time when there is no effective way to trade, or hedge, unsecured short-term rates – which will by then be roughly 2% higher than where they are now according to the Fed’s dot plot…

… will make the Fed’s normalization, from a market standpoint, especially “interesting”, if not impossible.

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It’s Your Money But You Can’t Have It: EU Proposes Account Freezes To Halt Bank Runs

Authored by Mike Shedlock via MishTalk.com,

If there is a run on the bank, any bank in the EU, you better be among the first to get your money out.

Although it’s your money, the EU wants to Freeze Accounts to Prevent Runs at Failing Banks.

European Union states are considering measures which would allow them to temporarily stop people withdrawing money from their accounts to prevent bank runs, an EU document reviewed by Reuters revealed.

 

The move is aimed at helping rescue lenders that are deemed failing or likely to fail, but critics say it could hit confidence and might even hasten withdrawals at the first rumors of a bank being in trouble.

 

The proposal, which has been in the works since the beginning of this year, comes less than two months after a run on deposits at Banco Popular contributed to the collapse of the Spanish lender.

 

Giving supervisors the power to temporarily block bank accounts at ailing lenders is “a feasible option,” a paper prepared by the Estonian presidency of the EU said, acknowledging that member states were divided on the issue.

 

EU countries which already allow a moratorium on bank payouts in insolvency procedures at national level, like Germany, support the measure, officials said.

 

“The desire is to prevent a bank run, so that when a bank is in a critical situation it is not pushed over the edge,” a person familiar with German government’s thinking said.

 

The Estonian proposal was discussed by EU envoys on July 13 but no decision was made, an EU official said. Discussions were due to continue in September. Approval of EU lawmakers would be required for any final decision.

 

Under the plan discussed by EU states, pay-outs could be suspended for five working days and the block could be extended to a maximum of 20 days in exceptional circumstances, the Estonian document said.

Spooking Customers

I side with Charlie Bannister of the Association for Financial Markets in Europe (AFME), who says “We strongly believe that this would incentivize depositors to run from a bank at an early stage.”

Why Might Customers Want to Run?

Here are a trillion reasons: Over €1 Trillion Nonperforming EU Loans: EU vs US Percentages.

Non-Performing Loans

Notes

  • I am unsure why the graphs sometimes use different country codes than appears in the first column. Where different, I show both symbols. The list of country codes is shown below.
  • Forb ratio stands for forbearance ratio.
  • Cov ratio stands for coverage ratio: (Loans – Reserve balance)/Total amount of non-performing loans. It’s a measure of how prepared a bank is for losses.

Italy, Greece, Spain, Portugal, and Ireland have a combined €606 billion in non-performing loans.

The entire European banking system is over-leveraged, under-capitalized, and propped up by QE from the ECB. Simply put, the EU banking system is insolvent.

That the EU has to consider such drastic measures proves the point.

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Local Opposition Halts Planned Minor League Stadium Subsidy

County officials in Virginia have cancelled plans to build a minor league baseball stadium that could have ended up costing taxpayers as much as $35 billion, but the team might soon be looking for a hand-out somewhere else.

Art Silber, owner of the single-A Potomac Nationals, a minor league affiliate of the nearby Washington Nationals, asked Prince William County officials to withdraw the stadium proposal last week. A planned vote on the stadium deal never materialized in the face of opposition from local taxpayers and two members of the county board of supervisors, according to Inside NoVa, a regional online news platform.

“He clearly saw that he did not have the votes for this to pass,” Supervisor Pete Candland, who had opposed the project throughout the process, told WTOP, a local TV affiliate.

The battle might be over, but the war could go on. Silber is considering other locations in northern Virginia for a new stadium, Inside NoVa reports, meaning that Prince William County’s win could be another area’s loss if local officials offer a similar deal to the minor league team.

Reason reported on the stadium proposal earlier this month, highlighting the role that Prince William County Supervisor Corey Stewart played in the process. Stewart ran for governor—and recently launched a bid to win the Republican nomination for Virginia’s 2018 senate election—promising to be a conservative who would oppose special interests, but he championed a stadium deal that would have included one of the largest public subsidies ever for a minor league ballpark.

Although Silber initially promised to pay for most of the new ballpark, the final plan that ended up before Prince William County officials in late June would have put taxpayers on the hook for at least $17 million to leasing land where the stadium was to be built, along with $7 million in infrastructure upgrades. Worse, the county would have been left holding the bag if the team was unable to make promised lease payments over the next three decades.

“Corporate welfare for professional sports teams is a bad call for taxpayers in Virginia,” says JC Hernandez, state director for Americans for Prosperity, a conservative grassroots group that helped to organize local opposition to the Potomac Nationals’ stadium deal. “Stadium subsidies regularly prove to be bad investments, yet sports owners consistently turn to taxpayers for handouts.”

The group is already preparing for the next fight by throwing its support behind a proposal from state Del. Michael Webert, R-18th District, to prohibit taxpayer financing for stadiums. Webert has submitted his bill to the American Legislative Exchange Council, a group of conservative state lawmakers, where he hopes it will become a model for other states to follow.

That’s yet another sign of the growing political opposition to building stadiums with tax dollars. Earlier this year, Sens. Cory Booker (D–N.J.) and James Lankford (R–Okla.), proposed legislation in Congress to ban the use of tax exempt municipal bonds in financing stadium projects. Their bill would not mark the end of government-subsidized stadiums, but would close a major loophole that’s been exploited by cities from New York to San Diego in recent years. According to a recent analysis by the Brookings Institution, a centrist think tank, since 2000, 45 major professional sports stadium projects have been financed in part by more than $13 billion in municipal bonds.

Congressional action could be helpful, but the fight against stadium subsidies ultimately has to be won at the local level, one place at a time. Chalk up a win in Virginia.

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Kim Jong Un: “The Entire US Territory Is Now Within Our ICBM Range”

Confirming a Friday report by David Wright, physicist and co-director of the UCS Global Security Program, that the newest North Korean ICBM – which on Friday night flew for 45 minutes, reaching an altitude of up to 3,725 kilometers and traveled just under 1,000 kilometers before landing in Japan waters – can strike half the major metro areas on the continental US, overnight North Korea’s leader Kim Jong-Un said that “we have demonstrated our ability to fire our intercontinental ballistic rocket at any time and place and that the entire U.S. territory is within our shooting range.

Quoted by the Korean Central News Agency, he also expressed his “great satisfaction” with the ICBM test – the country’s second after an earlier test on July 4 – which reaffirmed that the missile was able to deliver a “large-sized, heavy nuclear warhead” to the United States. The test  was part of the “final verification” of the Hwasong-14 missile’s technical capabilities, including its maximum range.

As a reminder, Wright’s calculations showed that the ICBM could have a range 10,400 km (6,500 miles), not taking into account the Earth’s rotation, which if added would increase the range of missiles fired eastward. And, calculating the range of the missile in the direction of some major US cities gives the approximate results in Table 1, which showed that Los Angeles, Denver, and Chicago appear to be well within range of this missile, and that Boston and New York may be just within range while Washington, D.C. is just out of range.

Melissa Hanham, a researcher at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies in California, confirmed the findings saying that the test showed North Korea is now capable of hitting U.S. cities such as Denver or Chicago.

Also on Saturday, Kim said the test was a “serious warning” to the US, which has been “meaninglessly blowing its trumpet” in threatening Pyongyang.

In response, U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said in a statement that “as the principal economic enablers of North Korea’s nuclear weapon and ballistic missile development program, China and Russia bear unique and special responsibility for this growing threat to regional and global stability.” He added that even as the US seeks a peaceful denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, Tillerson said, “we will never accept a nuclear-armed North Korea nor abandon our commitment to our allies and partners in the region.”

In a late Friday statement from the White House, Trump rejected North Korea’s claims that its nuclear program is designed to prevent an attack by the U.S. or other, saying it had the “opposite effect.”

“By threatening the world, these weapons and tests further isolate North Korea, weaken its economy, and deprive its people,” Trump said.

China also responded to the launch, with Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang saying in a Saturday statement in the People’s Daily newspaper that Beijing also opposes North Korea’s launch and its violations of Security Council resolutions, while calling on all parties to show restraint.

As Reuters subsequently reproted, Marine General Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, discussed “military response options” in a phone call with his South Korean counterpart, his spokesman said in an emailed statement that didn’t elaborate. While Trump hasn’t ruled out a military response, Dunford warned in June that an armed conflict with North Korea would leave the millions of residents in Seoul, South Korea’s capital, to face casualties “unlike anything we’ve seen in 60 or 70 years.” This month he told a security conference in Colorado that “what’s unimaginable to me” is allowing the capability for “a nuclear weapon to land in Denver, Colorado.”

Shortly after the North Korean launch, the US and South Korean militaries responded with their own display of military strength, firing live surface-to-surface missiles from rocket launchers, amid renewed tension on the peninsula. Videos posted by the South Korean Ministry of Defense showed the US-made Tactical Missile System, known as ATACMS, as well as its own Hyunmoo Missile II.

The missiles hit the East Sea on Saturday morning, where North Korea’s ballistic missile is believed to have landed, as part of a live-fire exercise to demonstrate its “precision firing ability,” the US 8th Army said. US Forces in Korea said two missiles were fired from the ATACMS along with two Hyunmoo system missiles. The ATACMS is a Lockheed Martin surface-to-surface missile, with a range of 160km that can be fired from a range of rocket launchers.

The South Korean ministry said it was responding “to provocations of North Korean ballistic missiles.” “The systems can be rapidly employed to provide deep-strike precision capability, enabling the ROK-U.S. Alliance to engage a full array of time-critical targets under all weather conditions,” the 8th Army said on Facebook.

South Korea also said it would deploy four additional THAAD [Terminal High Altitude Area Defense] anti-missile launchers after North Korea’s test. The THAAD deployment had been delayed after South Korean President Moon Jae-in ordered an environmental assessment. Meanwhile, China on Saturday said it had grave concerns about the possibility of more Thaad launchers in South Korea. It called on the U.S. and South Korea to stop the deployment, saying the launchers hurt the strategic balance in the region.

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P&G Slashed Digital Ad Spending, This Is What Happened Next

Submitted by Wolf Richter of WolfStreet

Tired of feeding an opaque, slimy industry of bots and fake clicks

Procter & Gamble, one of the largest and most sophisticated advertisers in the world, reported on Thursday that sales were slightly down in the fourth quarter and for the fiscal year, despite consumer price inflation. It’s the epitome of corporate revenue stagnation: only price increases keep revenues from declining. An activist investor – formerly called “corporate raider” – is breathing down its neck. So cost cutting to raise profits is the trick.

When a corporate giant cuts costs, it cuts the revenues of other companies.

And it did. Its “selling, general, and administrative expenses,” which include advertising and marketing, fell 7% in the quarter. Net income jumped 12%. And digital advertising took it on the chin in P&G’s earnings report:

Digital ad spending was lower versus a high base period and due to current period choices to temporarily restrict spending in digital forums where our ads were not being placed according to our standards and specifications.

Back in the day before digital ads, advertisers lived by a rule of thumb: Half of our advertising doesn’t work and is wasted; we just don’t know which half.

Digital advertising with all its consumer tracking technologies and direct micro-targeting promoted by now withering “adtech” companies or booming Facebook was supposed to have changed that equation. But it hasn’t. The hard part still is figuring out which half is wasted. But P&G is working on it.

When P&G speaks about cutting digital advertising, people listen, other companies follow, and the advertising industry quakes in its boots.

In April, P&G announced some details of its $12 billion or so cost-cutting binge over five years. This includes slashing $2 billion in advertising expenditures – among them $1 billion in media and $500 million in agency fees.

A year ago P&G announced that it would move away from ads on Facebook that micro-target specific consumers. Facebook is trying to leverage its enormous trove of consumer data to enhance its income. This has been its big promise. But P&G found that this micro-targeting of specific consumers based on the data Facebook has collected on them reduced reach and wasn’t working.

During the earnings call with analysts on Thursday (transcript via Seeking Alpha), CFO Jon Moeller explained the gist of it:

“In the fourth quarter, the reduction in marketing that occurred was almost all in the digital space. And what it reflected was a choice to cut spending from a digital standpoint where it was ineffective: where either we were serving bots as opposed to human beings, or where the placement of ads was not facilitating the equity of our brands.”

He touched on the two most common complaints about digital advertising scams:

  • Advertisers are paying for ads that are viewed and clicked on by bots, not humans.
  • Ads are placed by thousands of automated “ad exchanges” that are out of control of the advertiser on sites and pages that don’t match the advertiser’s products.

The entire vast space between legitimate advertisers and legitimate publishers is populated by a murky slimy world of often invisible entities, usually automated, that try to extract their cut and in the process further dilute the effectiveness of advertising expenses.

So P&G cut over $100 million out of its digital advertising spend in the fourth quarter, and this is what happened, according to Moeller: “We didn’t see a reduction in the growth rate.” And he added, “What that tells me is that that spending that we cut was largely ineffective.”

These spending cuts on digital ads are part of a larger strategy to more quickly halt spending on things – from ad campaigns to product development programs – that aren’t working, CEO David Taylor told the Wall Street Journal:

“We got some data that said either it was in a bad place or it was not effective,” Mr. Taylor said of the digital cuts. “And we shut it down and said, ‘We’re not going to follow a formula of how much you spend or share of voice. We want every dollar to add value for the consumer or add value for our stakeholders.”

P&G didn’t say if it would shift its ad spend from digital to other media, such as television. TV networks have long been clamoring that much of digital ad dollars disappear without trace in the opaque world of the Internet. But back in the day when we lived by the rule that half of ad spending was wasted and that we just didn’t know which half, there was no digital advertising – and TV networks got a big part of the pie, and still, half of the ad money just disappeared without producing results. So TV isn’t going to be the solution.

Marketing executives of other companies too have long riled against the murkiness of digital advertising, the false promises, the intractability of the Internet, the clicks and views by bots on which advertisers are wasting their money, and the billions of dollars that get blown without results. But getting a grip on what works and what doesn’t is hard.

There’s a larger issue: Retail spending (not adjusted for inflation) has grown on average 2.4% per year in the US over the past five years. Over the same period, digital advertising nearly doubled to $72.5 billion in 2016. Clearly, even digital advertising – despite the lure of Facebook and the like – cannot induce consumers overall to spend more and increase the size of the overall pie for advertisers. It can only, at best, divide up the pie differently.

And when one of the most sophisticated high-tech advertisers in the world decides it is overspending on digital advertising and is able to very carefully remove the rot, thus bringing down its costs without hurting its revenues, other companies will follow, with some consequences for the relentless but often ineffective surge of digital advertising dollars.

Investors who bought the hype of “adtech” in the world of digital advertising are left holding the bag.

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Suspended Student Says He Was Told to ‘Stay Quiet’ About His Own Lack of Consent: New at Reason

When a fellow Rollins College student accused Nicholas Mancini of sexual assault in January 2016, Mancini told campus investigators that his accuser had “initiated all physical contact with him ‘without asking for his consent.'” Mancini also maintained that the incident had been limited to some kissing, which his accuser had stopped, “stating that she should not ‘do this’ because she has a boyfriend.” According to Mancini, the college’s Title IX coordinator advised him “to not make a report concerning his Consent Complaint and threatened him to ‘stay quiet’ about his Consent Complaint.”

Mancini’s account may or may not be accurate, write Samantha Harris. It’s just one side of the story. Sexual misconduct hearings exist precisely for the purpose of resolving parties’ conflicting narratives and determining, as accurately as possible, who is telling the truth.

But Nicholas Mancini didn’t get a hearing.

View this article.

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“Senate Republicans Look Like Fools” Trump Urges End To Filibuster, Claims Russia Was Against Him In 2016

After a turmoil-filled evening, President Trump is wasting no time this morning telling the American people (via Twitter) just how he feels about Russia, Republican Senators, and the Filibuster.

With the mainstream media generally ignoring the ongoing DWS-Awan Brothers debacle and shrugging off Fusion GPS involvement, Trump's first tweet of the day should open a few eyes (although probably not)…

As a reminder, The Hill notes that the Senate Judiciary Committee heard testimony this week claiming that Fusion GPS founder Glenn Simpson and others evaded registering as foreign agents even though the firm worked on part of an influence campaign to overturn the Magnitsky Act, which was passed to punish Russian officials in 2012.

As we detailed here

Graham: So, I just want to absorb that for a moment. The group that did the dossier on President Trump hired this British spy, wound up getting it to the FBI. You believe they were working for the Russians?

 

Browder: That's correct.  And in the Spring and Summer of 2016 they were receiving money indirectly from a senior Russian government official.

The White House subsequently brought up the testimony, linking it to the dossier, in a press briefing.

"Today there was public testimony that further discredited the phony dossier that's been the source of so much of the fake news and conspiracy theories, and we learned that the firm that produced it was also being paid by the Russians,” White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said

The firm this week accused the White House of trying to "smear" it for investigating the president's alleged ties to Russia. The company called it “a nonsensical argument that Russia had an agent investigate and expose Russia’s influence on the election.” The Senate Judiciary Committee has subpoenaed Fusion GPS founder Simpson for testimony.

But then he refocused his aim on Healthcare, filibuster, and Republican Senators…

 

Of course – President Trump may need to adjust the 'rules' a little more since '49' seems to the magic number that Republican Senators can't count above. Still, not a bad start for a Saturday morning rant.

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New York City Sued over Menu-Labeling Mandate: New at Reason

Fast FoodEarlier this month, several food-industry groups sued New York City in an effort to halt Mayor Bill de Blasio’s plans to begin enforcing the city’s mandatory menu-labeling law next month.

The National Restaurant Association’s Restaurant Law Center—along with the Food Marketing Institute, National Association of Convenience Stores, and New York Association of Convenience Stores—filed suit on July 14 in U.S. District Court in Manhattan.

The suit argues the city’s menu-labeling law conflicts with a federal menu-labeling law, passed as part of the Affordable Care Act, even though enforcement of the pertinent portion of that federal law has yet to begin. The plaintiffs contend that under the U.S. Constitution’s Supremacy Clause, New York City’s “premature enforcement is preempted by federal law.” Food policy expert Baylen Linnekin explains further.

View this article.

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