Tag: news

There Are No Cheap Stocks Anymore… Literally

The S&P is substantially overvalued on 18 of 20 valuation metrics, with the only exceptions being free cash flow (helped again by depressed capex), and relative to small caps/bonds – the Fed's favorite indicator –  where yields remain depressed thanks to the Fed's failure to stimulate wage inflation for nearly 9 years.

 

But as the relative collapse of the equal-weight S&P relative to the market-cap-weighted S&P, all the gains have gone to the biggest names…

 

And longer-term, share prices have drifted – some might say 'inflated' – to the point that there are no cheap stocks anymore… literally.

 

Perhaps this chart will highlight the 'inflation' better…

It now takes the average American worker almost 95 hours to earn enoough to buy one S&P 500 index 'unit'…30% higher than at the peak in 2007 and almost triple its cost at the lows in 2009…

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2 Dead After Truck Plows Into Crowd In Lower Manhattan; Suspect In Custody

In an attack that bears some of the hallmarks of terror attacks that have unfolded in the UK, Spain and France, a box truck veered into the West Side Highway bike lane Tuesday afternoon and mowed down cyclists and pedestrians, leaving two dead and at least eight injured. The scene is near Hudson Street and Chambers Street. The as-yet-unidentified suspect has reportedly been taken into custody, according to the New York Post.

It was unclear if this was an act of terrorism. NBC is reporting that shots were fired at the scene, but it's unclear if those shots were fired by police responding to the incident, the attack, or, as one twitter user reported, a cab driver.

Grisly video taken at the scene shows the aftermath of the attack:


 

Police shut down the FDR to rush victims to Bellevue Hospital. The West Side Highway has been closed from 20th street down.

"I saw a truck – a white pick-up truck – going down the bicycle lane and running people over," one witness told CBS.

NYPD has confirmed that the suspect is in custody.

Video from NBC shows the blocked-off West Side Highway. Mayor Bill DeBlasio is on his way to the scene.

 

 

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The Endless, Soul-Sucking Emptiness of Partisan Warfare

What is it that compels the leadership of a party that holds all the levers of power in Washington to repeatedly attack political opponents who are out of office, to call for investigations into the actions of administration officials who are totally out of the picture, and plan political campaigns around opposition to politicians who are never going to run again? I’m speaking, of course, of Democrats during the start of the Obama administration.

In 2009, Democrats held both the White House and a commanding majority in Congress, including the 60 Senate seats necessary to overcome a filibuster. Yet on multiple occasions throughout the year, party leaders singled out former President George W. Bush and his administration for attacks.

President Obama, who would let the federal budget deficit soar to record heights during his first term, complained publicly that he had inherited trillions in debt from Bush. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi supported an investigation into potential Bush administration lawbreaking on national security issues. And at the end of the year, Rep. Chris Van Hollen, then the chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, declared that for the 2010 midterm election, the party’s strategy would be to remind voters of how much they disliked President Bush. At the height of the Democratic party’s occupation of elected office in Washington, in other words, a president who had been out of office for nearly a year and would never again hold political power was enemy number one.

You can see a similar instinct at work right now, as Republicans and their partisan allies attempt to jujitsu Trump administration scandals into indictments of Hillary Clinton, who is, you may have noticed, not currently our country’s president, or for that matter, our official anything else.

After the announcement yesterday that Trump’s former campaign manager, Paul Manafort, had been charged with conspiracy and money laundering as part of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russia’s efforts to influence the 2016 election, White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders responded that “today’s announcement has nothing to do with the President, has nothing to do with the President’s campaign or campaign activity.” Instead, she said, “The real collusion scandal, as we have said several times before, has everything to do with the Clinton campaign, Fusion GPS, and Russia. There is clear evidence of the Clinton campaign colluding with Russian intelligence to spread disinformation.”

This morning, Trump responded to news that campaign foreign policy adviser George pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI as part of the same investigation. While working on the campaign, Papadopoulos attempted to set up meetings between the Trump campaign and Russian contacts, and he noted that individuals he believed to be connected to the Russian government said they had dirt on Clinton, including thousands of emails. This occurred months before thousands of Clinton emails were made public as the result of a hack. The president used this as an opportunity to says that his political opponents deserve more scrutiny. Papadopoulos, Trump said, was a “young, low level volunteer, who has already proven to be a liar. Check the DEMS!”

This message was echoed by Trump’s GOP allies in Congress: “Don’t forget we still have all the Hillary activity,” said Sen. James Inhofe when asked about the Manafort charges. Just last week, congressional Republicans launched several new investigations into Clinton’s actions as secretary state. And Trump’s most ardent defenders in the media have similarly spent the last week or so downplaying the importance of the Mueller probe while insisting that the Russia investigation that the entire operation is just a meaningless and shoddy Democratic hit job, and also that it reveals important and damning truths about Hillary Clinton and her allies. As always, the real enemy is someone who is out of power, and who will almost certainly never again wield it.

The need for a political enemy, for someone of the opposing party persuasion to despise and blame regardless of their current proximity to actual power, is a consistent feature of the partisan mind. It is a mindset that conceives of politics almost exclusively as a sport, played between two teams, with points to be scored and games to be won.

It’s a zero sum approach to governance, and what it means, in the end, is that anyone who is concerned with improving the performance of government ends up losing, as empty partisan victories inevitably end up prioritized over policy advances. It is politics as a combination of entertainment and petty cultural warfare, and it is a habit that is, at predictable intervals, indulged on both sides of the aisle. It is exhausting, endless, inevitable, and utterly soul-sucking.

The bipartisan nature of this mindset does not mean that what Republicans are doing now is perfectly equivalent to what Democrats did eight years ago. When Democrats blamed Bush for exploding the national debt or for engaging in legally and morally dubious acts in pursuit of the war on terror, they were certainly engaged in a self-serving partisan blame game. But in an important sense, they also had a point: Bush had been president for eight years, and had made a multitude of errors and blunders that profoundly shaped the course of the nation.

Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, not only isn’t president today—she never was. Yes, she served as President Obama’s secretary of state for four years, and she exerted real influence in that role, but not at remotely the same level as President Bush. And it is all but certain that she will never run for office again. And yes, the Clinton machine, the faction of advisers and advocates and money managers inside the Democratic party, was amongst the most powerful and influential players involved in American politics for decades. It is not entirely unreasonable or out of bounds to note or consider Clinton’s many roles in our recent national dramas. But given who controls the actual levers of power in our current government, it is also far from the most pressing concern at the moment. Yet Trump and his defenders would have us believe that shady Clinton dealings are the most important issue being raised by the current investigation. Perhaps even more bizarrely, the GOP faithful have attempted to turn Mueller, a lifelong Republican with a solid reputation, into a front for Clinton sleaze.

It is not an accident that the GOP’s attacks on Clinton have grown louder and more agitated as the investigation into Trump has made progress. It is a strategy designed to muddle the issue by playing on knee-jerk partisan resentments. Those resentments, meanwhile, have yet to produce much in the way of legislative achievements. Shallow partisan deflection is being forced to serve as a substitute for a popular and successful policy agenda. This is partisan politics at its worst, power-seeking and power-weilding for no reason except empty self-perpetuation, which is to say that it is partisan politics as it usually is.

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3 Potential OPEC Deal Killers

Authored by Zainab Calcuttawala via OilPrice.com,

The Middle East isn’t yet ready to agree on the future of OPEC’s output reduction deal as the bloc’s November 30 summit approaches, during which the cartel is set to decide on the depth and length of the cuts one year from their initial approval.

Here are the three key geopolitical issues wreaking havoc on the region’s ability to collectively raise the price of oil.

1. The Trump Administration’s Ongoing Iran Nuclear Deal Drama

From the day that Donald Trump declared he would run for president, he made it clear that he is firmly against the current deal with Tehran to reintegrate Iran’s economy into the international community in exchange for a smaller and monitored nuclear energy program. He believes the plan gives up too much leverage on the American side for the furthering of U.S. foreign policy objectives in the Middle East.

Earlier this month, Trump officially decertified the nuclear deal, which doesn’t do much in the way of dismantling the agreement, but does give Congress leeway to authorize further sanctions against Iran.

Tehran’s oil and gas industry needs global economic integration in order to fund social services and ensure a prosperous future for the Iranian people. Though Secretary of State John Kerry made his rounds reassuring European nations that their firms would not be hit by American sanctions by investing in Iran’s fossil fuel industry, Kerry’s replacement in the Trump administration has made no such promises.

What Secretary of State Rex Tillerson did do is issue a statement supporting Iran’s technical compliance to the deal, despite the president’s explicit decertification of it.

The uncertainty surrounding the U.S. sanctions on Iran leads to uncertainty regarding OPEC’s third largest oil producer’s ability to contribute to or maintain oil output. Tehran’s participation in the oil game has been contingent upon the success of the nuclear deal since January 2016. New sanctions from a Republican congress could undo much of the progress made by engaging the economic pariah.

2. Iraq’s Intense Struggle with Kurdistan

The Kurdistan independence referendum last month caused Baghdad to take over key oil fields formerly controlled by the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG). A fraction of former output (half, or less than half, by most measures) is currently flowing through a pipeline in the area due to a deal between the Iraqi government and the Kurdish KAR group.

Last weekend, Iraqi authorities said they increased oil exports from the southern Basra region by 200,000 barrels per day to make up for a shortfall from the northern Kirkuk fields. But this doesn’t promise future output rebuttals if the KRG or its Peshmerga decide to strike back to regain its oil might. A significant loss in output from OPEC’s No. 2 producer could cause an unexpected spike in oil prices, which is what Saudi Arabia, the bloc’s leader, craves.

3. A Gulf Blockade Entering its Sixth Month

Despite its standing as top exporter of liquefied natural gas, Qatar is not a significant oil producer. The geopolitical impact of the Gulf’s economic blockade against Doha, however, could have significant geopolitical consequences as it enters into its sixth month with no end in sight. Instead of limiting its ties to Iran, Qatar has spent its political capital strengthening ties with the Shi’ite nation, which rivals Saudi Arabia politically and economically. Escalating tensions between the Gulf and Qatar will further increase the angst between Iran and Saudi Arabia, impacting the future of Iran as a political player and as a major oil producer.

*  *  *

This trio of major regional disputes plaguing the Middle East heavily involve the top three oil producers in the bloc. Iran has been in economic recovery mode since sanctions were lifted back in January, while Iraq’s stability over the course of 2016 and most of 2017 had allowed production to rise steadily.

With the trajectory of future output for the neighboring nations unclear, it remains to be seen whether the bloc will find it necessary to tighten quotas. After all, if the production cannot be summoned due to tangential political issues, there may be no need to limit it directly.

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Trump Administration Will Defend Cuba Embargo In Symbolic UN Vote

A series of mysterious sonic attacks on US diplomatic personnel (and more than a few spies) working at Washington’s Havana embassy have provided ample justification for the White House to reverse the US-Cuba detente negotiated by the Obama administration. And in a gesture that – though it has no implications for policy – is considered symbolically important, the State Department said Thursday the US will defend America’s decades-old economic embargo on Cuba by voting against a UN resolution condemning it, the Associated Press reported.

The news comes after at least 24 embassy personnel were targeted by mysterious sonic attacks in Cuba, inspiring the administration last month to withdraw most of its employees from the island nation. While the US hasn’t determined the source of the attacks, the administration kicked out most of the diplomats at Cuba’s embassy in Washington and has accused the Cuban government of not doing enough to keep US citizens safe – though Cuban leader Raul Castro has vehemently condemned the attacks.

Every year, the UN votes on a resolution condemning the embargo, and for years the US has predictably voted "no." But last year, the US abstained for the first time, as Obama and Cuban President Raul Castro moved forward with the historic warming of relations between the former Cold War foes.

A "no" vote from U.S. Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley on Wednesday will mark a return to formal support for the embargo, which Obama had unsuccessfully urged Congress to end. Although the Obama administration eased travel and commerce restrictions on Cuba and reauthorized direct commercial flights between the countries, the formal embargo remains in place.

Back in June, Trump said he was going to “cancel” Obama’s detente with Cuba, but – aside from kicking out the diplomats and suspending visa processing – his anti-Cuba rhetoric has mostly been posturing.

"The Trump administration policy gives greater emphasis to advancing human rights and democracy in Cuba, while maintaining engagement that advances U.S. interests," said State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert.

General Assembly resolutions are nonbinding and unenforceable. But the annual exercise has given Cuba a global stage to push back against the hated embargo.

To be sure, the half-century-old US commercial, economic and financial embargo on Cuba is extremely unpopular with other governments, the AP said. Typically, the annual vote to condemn it has received overwhelming support. Voting "no" means the US  will once again be pitted against almost every other nation.

In 2015, the last year that the US voted "no," close ally Israel was the only country to join in opposition, leading to a 191-2 vote to condemn the embargo – the highest number of votes ever for the measure.

The United States lost its only other ally in the vote, Palau, in 2013, when the Pacific island nation abstained rather than joining the US in voting "no."

In late 2014, Obama and Castro announced plans to restore relations, and the following year embassies were re-opened in Washington and Havana. Ties had been cut in 1961 after the communists, led by Fidel Castro, seized power.
 

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This Is The Huge Anti-Trump Protest That Was Organized By… The Russians

From November 2016…

Protesters demonstrating against the election of Donald Trump made their voices heard again Saturday – taking to the streets of New York for the fourth straight day. A crowd of over 5,000 people gathered in Union Square around noon, their ranks rapidly growing and spilling out of the park.

 

Hand-drawn signs floated above the crowd, carrying messages like “Love Trumps Hate,” “Unacceptable,” and “Dump Trump.”

 

 

Chants of “black lives matter,” “popular vote,” and “America was never great” rang from the sea of dissenters.

So which 'leftist', anti-Trump group organized these 1000s of people to protest against their democratically-elected President?

Simple.

As The Hill reports, sixteen thousand Facebook users said that they planned to attend a Trump protest on Nov. 12, 2016 organized by the Facebook page for BlackMattersUS.

The event was shared with 61,000 users.

“Join us in the streets! Stop Trump and his bigoted agenda!” reads the Facebook event page for the rally.

 

“Divided is the reason we just fell. We must unite despite our differences to stop HATE from ruling the land.”

There's just one thing… BlackMattersUS is a Russian-linked group.

How do we know the organizers are "Russians"?

Simple, "The Russians" said so…

The BlackMatters organizing group was connected to the Internet Research Agency (IRA), a Russian “troll farm” with ties to the Kremlin, according to a recent investigation by the Russian Magazine RBC.

 

Facebook has identified the IRA as the group responsible for purchasing 3,000 political ads on Facebook’s platform and operating 470 accounts that appear to have attempted to influence the perspectives of Americans during the 2016 elections.

So to clarify…

The Russians spent $100,000 and created 0.004% of social media content to influence the election… and then the same Russians continued to help President Trump by unifying black and white Americans to protest against him.

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U.K. Anti-Terror Censorship Law Stupidly Used Against Guy Who Fights Terrorism

Joshua WalkerProsecutors in the United Kingdom didn’t think Josh Walker was an actual terrorist. But they treated him as if he were one anyway, because of a book they found in his bedroom.

Fortunately, they failed. But the case, highlighted at The Intercept, details some of the terrible consequences of trying to criminalize dangerous thoughts or ideas rather than actions.

Walker was prosecuted for downloading and having in his possession a copy of The Anarchist Cookbook, an infamous guide to homemade explosives (and other tools for lawbreaking) that was first published in 1971.

Walker wasn’t plotting a terrorist attack. He was, in fact, doing the opposite. According to The Intercept and the court case, he was using the book as a reference material for a terror crisis management simulation at a college.

The United Kingdom does not have the same broad First Amendment freedom of speech protections that Americans have. The Terrorism Act of 2000 in Section 58 criminalizes the ownership of “information of a kind likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism.” There is a defense that a person has a “reasonable excuse” for having the material, and that’s what Walker had to lean on during the trial.

The whole thing seemed particularly absurd because Walker had returned to the United Kingdom from Syria, where he was helping a Kurdish militia fight the Islamic State. I wasn’t kidding when I said he was the opposite of a terrorist. And prosecutors knew that.

From The Intercept:

As the case moved forward, the prosecution acknowledged that Walker was not suspected of plotting any kind of terrorist atrocity. The government was instead arguing that his mere possession of the book was a violation of the Terrorism Act’s Section 58 because it contained information that could have been useful to a terrorist if discovered. The book is freely available to anyone on the internet, and versions of it can even be purchased on Amazon. Regardless, prosecution lawyer Robin Sellers said it was possible a “radicalized” person could find Walker’s copy of the book and use it to prepare an attack.

The prosecution’s argument seemed bizarre and without precedent. People in the U.K. have been prosecuted before under the Terrorism Act for possessing the “Anarchist Cookbook,” but usually the defendants have been involved in some other kind of nefarious activity as well. In 2010, for example, a member of a violent neo-Nazi group called the “Wolf Pack” was convicted of a terrorism offense for possessing the book. He was linked, through his father, to a plot to overthrow the government and poison people. In another case, in 2011, a man was sentenced to three years in prison for selling the “Cookbook” and Al Qaeda training manuals, pocketing $113,000 in the process. Walker’s case was different: He was being prosecuted solely because he downloaded and stored a copy of the book.

Fortunately for Walker, the jury also found the prosecution’s argument bizarre. Last week they found him not guilty.

Despite the absurdity of this prosecution, the U.K.’s home secretary (essentially the equivalent of the head of America’s Department of Homeland Security) actually wants to expand this anti-terror censorship law.

Section 58 doesn’t currently cover viewing or reading content online. So this month Secretary Amber Rudd said she wants to expand the law’s reach to cover people who view “terrorist content online, including jihadi websites, far-right propaganda and bomb-making instructions.” (If you’d like to know how the U.K. government would be able to know what you’ve been viewing online, they’ve covered that with the Investigatory Powers Act that went into effect at the start of the year.)

Rudd says that the “reasonable excuse” exemption will remain for people such as journalists and academics who write about ideas the government has classified as “extremist.” But even when prosecutors acknowledged that Walker was not a terrorist, they still put him on trial.

This law is obviously open to prosecutorial abuse already. That’s a good reason not to give the government the power to punish yet more speech, as if the speech itself is some sort of magic spell that causes terrorism just by being read.

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Will America’s Prosperity Be Completely Wiped Out By Our Growing Debt?

Authored by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog,

The federal government is now 20.4 trillion dollars in debt, and most Americans don’t seem to care that the economic prosperity that we are enjoying today could be completely destroyed by our exploding national debt. 

Over the past decade, the national debt has been growing at a rate of more than 100 million dollars an hour, and this is a debt that all of us owe.  When you break it down, each American citizen’s share of the debt is more than $60,000, and so if you have a family of five your share is more than $300,000.  And when you throw in more than 6 trillion dollars of corporate debt and nearly 13 trillion dollars of consumer debt, it is not inaccurate to say that we are facing a crisis of unprecedented magnitude.

Debt cannot grow much faster than GDP indefinitely.  At some point the bubble bursts, and when it does the pain that the middle class is going to experience is going to be off the charts.  Back in 2015, the middle class in the U.S. became a minority of the population for the first time ever.  Never before in our history has the middle class accounted for less than 50 percent of the population, and all over the country formerly middle class families are under a great deal of stress as they attempt to make ends meet.  The following comes from an absolutely outstanding piece that was just put out by Charles Hugh Smith…

If you talk to young people struggling to make ends meet and raise children, or read articles about retirees who can’t afford to retire, you can’t help but detect the fading scent of prosperity.

 

It has steadily been lost to stagnation, under-reported inflation and soaring inequality, a substitution of illusion for reality bolstered by the systemic corruption of authentic measures of prosperity and well-being.

 

In other words, the American-Dream idea that life should get easier and more prosperous as the natural course of progress is still embedded in our collective memory, even though the collective reality has changed.

The reality that most of us are facing today is a reality where many are working two or three jobs just to make it from month to month.

The reality that most of us are facing today is a reality where debts never seem to get repaid and credit card balances just continue to grow.

The reality that most of us are facing today is a reality where we work day after day just to pay the bills, and yet we never seem to get anywhere financially.

The truth is that most people out there are deeply struggling.  The Washington Post says that the “middle class” encompasses anyone that makes between $35,000 and $122,500 a year, but very few of us are near the top end of that scale…

It’s also situation specific. “The more people in a family, the more money they typically need to live a comfortable middle-class lifestyle,” writes the Post. Likewise, the more expensive your area, the more you need to make to qualify. Overall, “America’s middle-class ranges from $35,000 to $122,500 in annual income, according to The Post’s calculation” approved by the Pew Research Center.

“The bottom line is: $100,000 is on the middle-class spectrum, but barely: 75 percent of U.S. households make less than that,” writes the Post.

In a previous article, I noted that the bottom 90 percent of income earners in the U.S. brought home more than 60 percent of the nation’s income back in the early 1970s, but last year that number fell to just 49.7 percent.

The middle class is shrinking year after year, and the really bad news is that it appears that this decline may soon accelerate.  In fact, one major European investment bank is warning that the U.S. economy will “slow down substantially” in 2018.

But we can’t afford any slow down at all.  As it is, there is no possible way that we are going to be able to deal with our exploding debts at the rate the economy is growing right now.  According to Boston University professor Larry Kotlikoff, we are facing a “fiscal gap” of 210 trillion dollars over the next 75 years…

We have all these unofficial debts that are massive compared to the official debt. We’re focused just on the official debt, so we’re trying to balance the wrong books…

 

If you add up all the promises that have been made for spending obligations, including defense expenditures, and you subtract all the taxes that we expect to collect, the difference is $210 trillion. That’s the fiscal gap. That’s our true indebtedness.

Where in the world is all of that money going to come from?

Are you willing to pay much higher taxes?

Are you willing to see government programs slashed to a degree that we have never seen before in U.S. history?

If your answer to both of those questions is no, then what would you do to solve the fiscal nightmare that we are facing?

According to Brian Maher, author Robert Benchley once sat down to write an article about this fiscal mess, and what he came up with sums up the situation perfectly…

Benchley sat at his typewriter one day to tackle a vexing subject.

 

He opened his piece with “The”… when the full weight of his burden collapsed upon his shoulders.

 

He abandoned his typewriter in frustration.

 

He returned shortly thereafter and resumed the task anew…

 

With only “The” to work with… Benchley immediately knocked out the article, presented here in its entirety:

 

“The hell with it.”

Unfortunately, we can’t afford to say that.

Our exploding debt is a crisis that we must tackle, and the first step is to understand that our current financial system was literally designed to create as much debt as possible.  Once we abolish the Federal Reserve, our endless debt spiral will end, but until we do our debt problems are only going to continue to grow until the system completely implodes in upon itself.

*  *  *

Michael Snyder is a Republican candidate for Congress in Idaho’s First Congressional District, and you can learn how you can get involved in the campaign on his official website. His new book entitled “Living A Life That Really Matters” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com.

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Watch Live: Social Media Lawyers Explain To Politicians How 0.004% Of Traffic Swung The Election

Nearly two months after Facebook first confirmed that it had identified some 3,000 paid posts that had been clandestinely financed by purported Russia-linked troll farms, the companys' general counsel, Colin Stretch, and his counterparts at Twitter and Google, are heading down to the Hart Senate Office Building for a long-awaited hearing hosted by the Senate Judiciary Committee’s subcommittee on crime and terrorism. According to the description on the committee's website, the hearing is meant to help lawmakers and the companies “find solutions” that will allow them to filter out attempts by foreign powers like Russia to influence US elections.

South Carolina Senator and former presidential candidate Lindsey Graham will preside over the hearings, which are expected to begin at 2:30 ET.

Watch the hearing live below;

By late Monday night, the contents of the prepared testimony for all three companies had already leaked to the press. And for anybody who’s been following the Russian interference narrative, the testimony contains few surprises.

As we reported yesterday, Facebook plans to testify that Russia’s $100,000 in ad spending may have helped their posts be seen by as many as 126 million people over more than two years (of course, some of this ads ran after the election).

Of course, while the 126 million headline number may appear astonishingly large – without context it appears to suggest that the Russian disinformation campaign achieved one of the highest marketing IRRs in human history – in context, it’s actually negligible.

That’s because Americans were fed a total of 33 trillion stories by Facebook via their news feeds, meaning the tainted Russia content represents just 0.004% of total stories circulated on Facebook’s platform.

Meanwhile, Google’s director of law enforcement and information security is preparing to testify that he has found 18 English-language channels with 1,108 videos uploaded, totaling about 43 hours of content, that originated with Russian operatives.

The company also found that two accounts linked to the Russian troll farm spent a total of $4,700 on search and display ads during the 2016 election cycle.

Meanwhile, Twitter is preparing to tell Congress this week that Russia-linked accounts "generated approximately 1.4 million automated, election-related tweets, which collectively received approximately 288 million impressions" between Sept. 1 and Nov. 15, 2016.

At one point in the testimony, Twitter's acting general counsel, Sean Edgett, wrote that the company "identified 36,746 accounts that generated automated, election-related content and had at least one of the characteristics we used to associate an account with Russia,” Business Insider reported.

That is far higher than the number of Russia-linked accounts Twitter initially disclosed to the Senate Intelligence Committee in a closed-door interview last month. Still, like Facebook, Twitter is preparing to emphasize in its prepared remarks that the nearly 37,000 accounts represented "1/100th of a percent (0.012%) of the total accounts on Twitter at the time." Meanwhile, roughly 9% of the tweets from the 2,752 IRA-linked accounts were election-related, Twitter said, and more than 47% of those tweets were automated.

Of course, Democratic lawmakers who have pushed this latest narrative have been unfazed by these numbers. Instead, they've maintained that any evidence of "interference" is too much. And while Facebook said yesterday that is was devising sophisticated tools to completely filter out disingenuous posts, it might be more effective if they just blocked people with their browser language set to Russian from paying for ads – or posting anything, really – on their platforms.

Perhaps the most frustrating aspect of today's hearing is that trio of Silicon Valley lawyers will get to do it all again tomorrow during a hearing before the Senate Intelligence Committee. Ranking member Sen. Mark Warner – who recently introduced a law that would require social media companies to expand ad-related disclosures – has tweeted a series of questions he intends to ask:

 

 

 

 

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Republican Chair Of House Financial Services Committee To Retire

One of the most powerful and longest serving Congressmen, Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-Dallas), won’t run for re-election next year according to the Dallas News. Hensarling – who chairs the powerful Financial Services Committee and has been a strong voice in regulating the financial industry – has represented Congressional District 5 in the Dallas area since 2003.

“Today I am announcing that I will not seek reelection to the US Congress in 2018. Although service in Congress remains the greatest privilege of my life, I never intended to make it a lifetime commitment, and I have already stayed far longer than I had originally planned,” Hensarling wrote to supporters today. A staunch Constitutional conservative, Hensarling has long believed that Congress was not a place for career politicians. Yet. his announcement comes as a surprise to those who felt that he would be in line for more influential leadership posts. But Hensarling said Tuesday he wanted to spend more time with his family.

“Since my term as Chairman of the House Financial Services Committee comes to an end next year, the time seems right for my departure,” he wrote in a statement. “Although I will not be running for reelection, there are 14 months left in my congressional term to continue the fight for individual liberty, free  enterprise, and limited constitutional government – the causes for which I remain passionate.”

He said he will continue the work of his committee until his term ends.

“Much work remains at the House Financial Services Committee in the areas of housing finance reform, regulatory relief, cyber security and capital formation to name just a few,” he said. “Furthermore, important work remains in the Congress as a whole – especially pro-growth tax reform. I look forward to continuing this work on behalf of the people of the 5th District of Texas and all Americans.”

Hensarling is the second North Texas congressman to opt against another term in Congress. In January Rep. Sam Johnson, R-Plano, announced that he would retire when his term ends next year.

According to The Hill, several GOP lawmakers and aides on the Hill, before Hensarling’s statement to the Dallas Morning News, had said there was an “expectation” that this will be Hensarling’s last term in Congress.

Hensarling has chaired the Financial Services panel since 2013, leading the House GOP fight against the strict Dodd-Frank Act finance rules passed after the financial crisis. The committee produced dozens of bills to restrict or eliminate major portions of Dodd-Frank. Many of those laid the foundation for Hensarling’s Financial CHOICE Act, the most ambitious attempt to reshape the Obama-era law. Hensarling has advanced a slew of other fixes to Dodd-Frank through the committee, several with major bipartisan support, earning high marks from the financial services industry. “He has had – and continues to have – a tremendous impact on the financial sector,” said a financial services industry lobbyist of Hensarling, calling him “the leader in Republicans efforts to reduce financial regulation under President Trump.”

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