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Monthly Archives: December 2019

Our Stupid Decade


 

Kevin D. Williamson 18 hrs ago

Editor’s note: The opinions in this article are the author’s, as published by our content partner, and do not necessarily represent the views of MSN or Microsoft.

In 2010, the U.S. electorate responded to the overreach of the Obama administration — on health care, but not only on health care — by giving Republicans control of both houses of Congress. The Obama administration had big ideas. So did congressional Republicans. Both sides failed, and not only because of the other.
Republicans vowed to repeal the Affordable Care Act, and Democrats vowed to implement it in full.
Neither of those things happened.
Republicans, hamstrung by the fact that their voters have a healthy appetite for free stuff, just like the Democrats’ voters, struggled to come up with a viable alternative satisfying more or less impossibly contradictory criteria: Keeping the popular, expensive benefits of the ACA, especially the mandate that insurers perform the logically impossible task of “insuring against” things that already have happened, while getting rid of the unpopular bits that support the popular ones, especially the individual mandate, without which the preexisting-conditions mandate is more or less guaranteed to cause the insurance market to fail. Republicans have repealed bits and pieces of the ACA but have done little to advance a health-care agenda of their own.
Democrats, hamstrung by the fact that their voters have a healthy appetite for free stuff, just like the Republicans’ voters, did as much as Republicans to hobble the ACA, mainly by refusing to implement the measures meant to help pay for it. Led by Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, Democrats put off implementing the tax on medical-device manufacturers, a disproportionate number of which are based in Boston. The so-called Cadillac tax on generous health-care plans, hated by Democratic union bosses, never has been implemented, either; it is formally only delayed, but its repeal is all but certain. Democrats who argued the ACA was the best model for reforming health care immediately moved on to push for a British-style monopoly system.
The Democrats spent a few years complaining about being called “socialists” by conservatives and then rallied behind declared socialists such as Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Barack Obama, who came to power criticizing the excesses of the Bush administration’s war on terrorism, made his peace with extraordinary war powers and then added to them, expanding the drone war and deciding, with no obvious constitutional or statutory authority, to begin assassinating American citizens. Democrats who had produced a whole Chinese opera of discord and wailing over the risibly named PATRIOT Act and the nightmare scenario that Dick Cheney might peek at somebody’s library records, immediately made their peace with extrajudicial killings of U.S. citizens, as long as it was a Democrat pulling the trigger. By 2019, that was understood to be entirely unremarkable.
The Iraq War supposedly ended in 2010. In reality, the U.S. government has been unable to achieve its ends in Iraq or Afghanistan in spite of the extraordinary powers with which it has been invested since 9/11, and Americans have died in Iraq every single year since the supposed end of combat operations there in 2010, almost 50 during the Trump administration alone. President Obama came into office repudiating the Bush doctrine and Bush administration practices but was never able to articulate a plausible alternative. President Trump, who probably could not lay his finger on Iraq on an unlabeled map, has continued the Obama administration’s tradition of incoherence and adhocracy. Political cowardice and the declining political piquancy of Middle Eastern affairs, and of foreign affairs generally, have ensured that two presidents of two parties have left both our enemies and our allies doubting American resolve.
Total federal debt was $12.8 trillion in the first quarter of 2010; today it is almost twice that, at $22.7 trillion. In GDP terms, it has grown from 87 percent to 105 percent. Entitlements remain unreformed, with both the Obama administration and the Trump administration refusing to take one meaningful step on the issue, with reform being held hostage by a combination of cowardice and ideology. France’s socialist president has been a pillar of fiscal rectitude in comparison.
Earlier in the decade in Atlanta, public-school teachers and administrators were sentenced to prison time for cheating on standardized tests in order to paper over the comprehensive failure of the city’s public schools. (Atlanta’s schools are by no means unique in this.) At the end of the decade, celebrities and their enablers were convicted of crimes (and others still were on trial) for bribery and fraud committed in the process of getting their children into elite (and sometimes only decent) colleges. College tuitions were said to be “skyrocketing” in 2010; in the final days of 2019, they were still soaring. Which is to say, education remained unreformed at both ends, from kindergarten through college.
From health care to education to national security to entitlements to fiscal stability, the past decade has been one of missed opportunities. We have had a great number of tedious, self-aggrandizing speeches and, for the past few years, a flaming presidential Twitter account. We have had memes and cancelations, rage mobs, neo-nationalism, resurgent socialism, and generally ineffective government. On the cultural front, we have had stagnation: The top-grossing film of 2010 was Toy Story 3, while in 2019 it will be Avengers 22. The three best-selling books of 2018 were the Michelle Obama memoir Becoming, Girl Wash Your Face, and The Wonky Donkey, which is not an account of the sorry state of the Democratic party.
It was a wonky decade, indeed. And kind of a dumb one.
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He Would Change If He could


Jeff Danziger Comic Strip for December 24, 2019 Non Sequitur Comic Strip for December 24, 2019

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The Common Divider is TOTUS


Stuart Carlson Comic Strip for December 21, 2019

The advent of Donald J. Trump has allowed the rise of the worst of us, all choreographed by 1 small-minded man: Stephen Miller.TOTUS is the instrument, Miller is the wielder of it.

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The Reason The Major Parties Are Failing


Over the years there have been several independent and secondary political parties aspiring to political offices from Municipal to Federal. Some have succeeded, most have failed. The reason for these non-mainstream parties is dissatisfaction or disappointment in the major parties’ activities and the results of those activities. While it is common for the voters to become jaded with the politics of governing, it is more common that many vote by rote or according to the biased information available. There was a time when there was implicit trust in our elected officials no matter the party, this trust was due to the unknown backroom negotiations by the more diligent and service oriented elected officials. Flash forward to now. We have 535 plus elected officials that do less for us than their party and we  (VOTERS) just complain and vote poorly. It is our (the VOTERS) job to elect the best representatives we can but until we understand that politicians hardly ever tell the entire truth no matter how photogenic, well spoken or racially acceptable, we will continue to have semi good government. There has been talk of term limits yet not one of the current sitting representatives will broach the subject of term limits and give up a lucrative gig making 170g annually with other perks with a great health plan. Term limits are the purview of the voters and voters alone and we need to exercise that right. We need to decide to change government by changing Congress one member at a time until we get good representation or at least better than we have now.

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The Tax Break for Children, Except the Ones Who Need It Most


 

Jason DeParle 10 hrs ago

Andrea Morales for The New York Times
Christina McKeigan, a divorced mother of three, earned $23,000 last year and was eligible for about half the maximum credit.
MONROE, La. — With two children and a third on the way, Ciera Dismuke worked five jobs last year while earning just under $15,000. Although the Trump administration often boasts that it doubled the federal child tax credit to $2,000 per child, Ms. Dismuke, like millions of Americans, earned too little to fully qualify. Instead, she got $934 a child, an increase of just $75.

Letha Bradford, a teacher’s aide, qualified for an equally small increase, despite a household budget so tight that she listens to her son’s high school football games outside the stadium to save the admissions fee. Michael Spielberg, a Sam’s Club attendant, also received only a partial credit, while his son, Josh, who has Asperger’s syndrome, doubled up on classes, hoping to graduate early and turn his job bagging groceries into full-time work.
“Food has been a bit of a struggle,” said Josh, 16.
The 2017 tax bill, President Trump’s main domestic achievement, doubled the maximum credit in the two-decade-old program and extended it to families earning as much as $400,000 a year (up from $110,000). The credit now costs the federal government $127 billion a year — far more than better-known programs like the earned-income tax credit ($65 billion) and food stamps ($60 billion).
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But children with the greatest economic needs are least likely to benefit.

While Republicans say the increase shows concern for ordinary families, 35 percent of children fail to receive the full $2,000 because their parents earn too little, researchers at Columbia University found. A quarter get a partial sum and 10 percent get nothing. Among those excluded from the full credit are half of Latinos, 53 percent of blacks and 70 percent of children with single mothers.
“The child tax credit is the largest federal expenditure for children, but it excludes from the full benefit the kids who need it the most,” said Sophie Collyer, a member of the research team at Columbia, who analyzed the program with her colleagues Christopher Wimer and David Harris. “This is a significant flaw in its design that’s at odds with the administration’s claims about the achievements of the tax bill.”
Because the credit rises with earnings, a single parent with two children has to earn more than $30,000 a year to collect the full amount.
Republicans say that the credit is mostly a tax cut, not an anti-poverty program — so rightly favors taxpayers — and that the needy have other sources of aid. But a majority of congressional Democrats have backed a bill to increase the credit and include both the working and nonworking poor, essentially creating a guaranteed income for families with children.
Many rich countries have similar child allowances and less child poverty. But opponents call the idea welfare and warn it will discourage work and responsibility.
Rarely has a program grown so rapidly with such little public notice. While it began in 1997 almost entirely as a tax cut, it is already an anti-poverty program: About 30 percent of its value now goes to “refundable” credits — partial cash awards — for families with no income-tax liability.
Championed by Newt Gingrich and expanded by Barack Obama, the credit has a history of bipartisan support. But the attempt by Democrats to remove the earnings test is a shift for a party that since the Clinton administration has been wary of the welfare label and reflects concerns over stagnant wages, as well as new research showing that even modest amounts of extra cash can have lifelong benefits for children.
By enriching the credit and including the affluent, the Trump expansion itself has brought attention to the poor children it excludes. While the 2017 law made millions of upper-income families eligible for the $2,000 credit (in part to offset the loss of other tax benefits), it gave a boost of just $75 to most full-time workers at the minimum wage.
“It left out 26 million kids” from the full sum, said Senator Michael Bennet, a Colorado Democrat who has helped write a bill to raise the credit to $3,000 per child ($3,600 for those under 6) and pay a portion monthly. “It’s critical that we don’t leave it as a half measure. Our entire conception of ourselves as a land of opportunity is diminished by the fact that our child poverty rates are as high as they are.”
Fighting Child Poverty
The limits of the credit’s reach can be seen in Monroe, a sleepy commercial crossroads 100 miles or more from surrounding cities, where pay is low and workers looking to advance often travel for oil-field jobs or check the want ads in Texas.
Monroe is in Louisiana’s Fifth Congressional District, one of 37 districts in 22 states where half the children or more have parents too poor to get the full credit, according to Ms. Collyer of Columbia. In the New York 15th (the Bronx), the share is 68 percent. In the Texas 34th (Brownsville to the outskirts of San Antonio), it is 61 percent.
In the Louisiana Fifth, 54 percent of children are too poor to receive the full $2,000. Among those with a partial benefit, the average is $1,008.
Many low-income families do not realize they receive the complicated benefit, which is often confused with the earned-income tax credit. Until she showed a reporter her tax return, Ms. Dismuke did not know she had gotten $934 per child. Told that affluent families get much more, she said, “That is not right — I’m quite sure they don’t need it.”
But Christina McKeigan, a divorced mother of three eligible for about half the maximum credit, said it made sense for richer families to get more. “They probably pay more in taxes,” she said. She earned $23,000 last year and stretched her budget with apps for discount grocery stores and recipes for cheesy chicken spaghetti. “I can do a lot with the amount I get.”
Scholars have long debated whether giving needy families cash raises their children’s prospects, especially if there are other problems like depression or domestic violence. But many cite growing evidence that money alone does in fact help.
The National Academy of Sciences, a group created to convey the scholarly consensus, recently concluded that raising incomes of poor families has “been shown to improve child well-being.” Reviewing dozens of studies, it found child benefits as varied as better test scores and graduation rates, less drug use, and higher earnings and employment as adults.
While findings vary, “the weight of the evidence shows additional resources help the kids,” said Greg Duncan, an economist at the University of California-Irvine who led the study.
Giving the full $2,000 credit to poor families would cut child poverty rates by 26 percent, the academy found.
At least 17 wealthy countries provide a child allowance, including Australia, Ireland and Britain. After a 2016 Canadian expansion offered up to $6,400 per child, the country’s child poverty rate fell by a third.
Money helps children in part because of what it can buy — more goods (cheesy chicken spaghetti) and services (gymnastics classes or tutors). Ms. Bradford, the teacher’s aide, is so eager to invest in her sons that she has used tax refunds to send them on Boy Scout trips to 42 states — even when a flood left them living in her car. “I’m trying to instill in them that it’s education that gives you knowledge and power, not cars or clothes,” she said.
Before traveling to Washington and visiting the Vietnam Memorial, the boys — Tony, 17, and Micah, 13 — wrote a report on a Monroe man killed in the war, which the public library added to its collection. Finding the soldier’s name on the wall, Micah said, “felt like touching history.”
Money also helps children by relieving stress, which can reach toxic levels in poor families. Earning just $16,000 despite 15 years in the public schools, Ms. Bradford is an accomplished penny-pincher. Still, food often runs short, and the power company recently shut off the lights, leaving Ms. Bradford so upset that the boys could not focus in school.
“Sometimes the look in her eye, it’s like she’s sick — but she’s not sick, she’s just stressed,” Tony said. “It makes me feel the exact same way.”
Micah said his teacher scolded him for acting distracted, but “all I could think about is how is my Mama going to pay this bill?”

© Andrea Morales for The New York Times “I was tired of seeing my family not being able to get the things they needed and deserved,” Josh said.
Cash That Makes a Difference, or Welfare?
Most needy families get other benefits, often at considerable taxpayer expense. Between food stamps, the earned-income tax credit and the child tax credit, Ms. Bradford receives about $10,000, plus Medicaid for herself and her sons. Mr. Spielberg gets Medicaid, subsidized housing and food stamps.
As recently as last week, Ivanka Trump, the president’s daughter, tweeted that the expanded credit shows that “we are fighting each and every day for hard-working American families.”
But the 2017 law mostly cut corporate taxes, and the Senate rejected an attempt by two Republicans, Marco Rubio of Florida and Mike Lee of Utah, to slightly reduce the corporate cuts to finance a larger credit for the poor. It would have given Ms. Bradford a gain of $450, rather than $75.
Of the $73 billion of increased spending on the credit, 39 percent went to families in the top quintile and 2 percent to those at the bottom, according to Elaine Maag of the bipartisan Tax Policy Center.
Robert Rector of the conservative Heritage Foundation warns that a universal child allowance would promote dependency and discourage work. “It’s classic, traditional welfare,” he said. “If there was anything we learned from the welfare debate in the 1990s, it was that having a single mom at home with a child and no job is not a good idea.”
But some on the right argue that an allowance promotes work and family. “The problem with the old welfare system wasn’t that it gave money to single mothers, but that it clawed it back, dollar for dollar, when they went to work,” said Samuel Hammond of the libertarian Niskanen Center. “There’s no reason to think that a flat allowance would have the same effect.”
From liberals like Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California to conservatives like Senator Joe Manchin III of West Virginia, a majority of Democrats in both houses favor a broad allowance, as do at least seven of the party’s presidential candidates, suggesting the push is likely to continue. Democrats have been pushing for an expansion of the credit as part of a year-end tax deal.
To understand how poverty limits children, consider Josh Spielberg, whose Asperger’s syndrome would present challenges even if his family had money. “Social interaction is a little different for me — like I don’t understand jokes,” he said, sitting through an interview while solving Rubik’s Cubes. After he made his first friend last year — a “very good kid, sweet kid” — the friend killed himself.
While affluent students who share his goal of attending a good college often spend junior year prepping for tests, Josh took an after-school job at $7.50 an hour and is accelerating classes to graduate early and work full time. The extra load has been “a bit of a struggle,” he said, and may hurt his grades, but “I was tired of seeing my family not being able to get the things they needed and deserved.”
Asked what money could buy, his father said he wished Josh had an ACT tutor — though even without studying he beat the statewide average. For Josh, who is 6-foot-3 with a teenager’s appetite, the appeal of his paycheck is more basic.
“To be honest, it’s eating,” he said. “I treat myself to more expensive food. Like at Taco Bell, I’ll upgrade to the chicken instead of the beef.”

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Turtle Attack


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Under secret Stephen Miller plan, ICE to use data on migrant children to expand deportation efforts


It is apparent that Stephen Miller is a small minded small man seeking absolution from  possibly his own life errors and just getting even for events in his life when he was denigrated. He is now attempting to get even with less fortunate because he can so far. MA

Nick Miroff 30 mins ago

Opinion: The latest Russia bombshell bolsters Democrats’ demand for…
The White House sought this month to embed immigration enforcement agents within the U.S. refugee agency that cares for unaccompanied migrant children, part of a long-standing effort to use information from their parents and relatives to target them for deportation, according to six current and former administration officials.Though senior officials at the Department of Health and Human Services rejected the attempt, they agreed to allow Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to collect fingerprints and other biometric information from adults seeking to claim migrant children at government shelters. If those adults are deemed ineligible to take custody of a child, ICE could then use their information to target them for arrest and deportation.

The arrangement appears to circumvent laws that restrict the use of the refu­gee program for deportation enforcement; Congress has made it clear that it does not want those who come forward as potential sponsors of minors in U.S. custody to be frightened away by possible deportation. But, in the reasoning of senior Trump administration officials, adults denied custody of children lose their status as “potential sponsors” and are fair game for arrest.
The new initiative has not been announced publicly. It was developed by Stephen Miller, President Trump’s top immigration adviser, who has long argued that HHS’s Office of Refugee Resettlement is being exploited by parents who hire smugglers to bring their children into the United States illegally. The agency manages a network of shelters that care for underage migrants who cross the border without a parent and tries to identify sponsors eligible to take custody of the minors — typically a family member.
Previous Trump administration attempts to give ICE more access to the refu­gee program have generated significant opposition, because it potentially forces migrant parents to choose between reclaiming their children and risking arrest. Administration officials acknowledge the arrangement will instill fear among migrant parents, but they say it will deter families from having their children cross into the United States illegally.
Officials at ICE and HHS said the information shared with enforcement agents primarily would be used to screen adults for criminal violations and other “red flags,” and that it would not be focused on capturing parents and relatives who come forward to claim what the government calls “unaccompanied alien children,” or UACs.

Bryan Cox, an ICE spokesman, said his agency will help HHS make sure children are not placed with sponsors until they are thoroughly vetted, a review process that includes using biometric data. Cox said his agency has more powerful screening tools at its disposal than HHS, “including better capabilities to identify fraudulent documents or documents obtained by fraud.”
After the Trump administration began a similar information-sharing initiative last year, which predictably led to fewer sponsors coming forward and created a massive backlog of children in U.S. custody, Democrats fought to put a firewall between ICE and ORR. Language in the 2019 funding bill specifically prohibited the Department of Homeland Security from using child sponsor data — addresses, names, phone numbers — to generate ICE target lists.
According to those provisions, no federal funds “may be used by the Secretary of Homeland Security to place in detention, remove, refer for a decision whether to initiate removal proceedings, or initiate removal proceedings against a sponsor, potential sponsor, or member of a household of a sponsor or potential sponsor of an unaccompanied alien child.”
HHS officials have generally tried to keep ICE at a distance, insisting their agency’s mission is to safeguard children and not to facilitate the arrest of their relatives.
Cox defended the legality of the program, citing the technical wording of the law: When a potential sponsor’s application is rejected, “that individual is no longer considered to be a sponsor or potential sponsor,” and is therefore open to ICE arrest, he said.
While acknowledging the program could leave children in government custody for longer periods, Cox said better screening “should take precedence over speed of placement to what may ultimately be an unsafe environment for the child.”
ICE officials said their enforcement priority would be adult sponsors with criminal records.
Mark Weber, a spokesman for HHS, which oversees ORR, said in a written response that no ICE personnel are currently stationed at the agency, and there were “no plans for ICE personnel to be placed at HHS.”
Weber did not address questions about the legality of the new information-sharing agreement with ICE.
Three officials familiar with Miller’s plan said it was part of his broader effort to chip away at congressionally mandated barriers between ICE and the refugee program.
The White House did not respond to requests for comment Friday. One senior administration official who spoke on the condition of anonymity said the Trump administration — which was widely denounced for separating thousands of children from their parents last year under its “Zero Tolerance” border crackdown — is “in the business of protecting child welfare.”
“Smuggling children into our country is an abomination and horrible for child welfare, and under the system set up under the Obama administration, the level of child smuggling has been atrocious,” the senior administration official said.
By expanding ICE’s role at ORR “we’ll be able to significantly reduce the incentives for child smuggling, and protect thousands — thousands — of children.”
Some officials at U.S. Customs and Border Protection have objected to past information-sharing efforts between ORR and ICE saying that they discourage adult sponsors from reclaiming children in U.S. government custody. When fewer adults come forward, more children must stay in shelters and border stations, and CBP has been faced with caring for infants and young children in austere facilities designed for short-term detention of adults.
As the migration crisis at the border has abated in recent months, Miller has once again worked to tear down the information wall between the refu­gee agency and ICE, according to those familiar with his efforts.
Miller arranged the new information-sharing plan through discussions with ORR Director Jonathan Hayes, according to two of those officials who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity because they fear termination.
As part of the plan, a senior official from ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations, Caleb Vitello, was supposed to be temporarily assigned to work inside ORR. But senior HHS officials rejected that part of the plan during a meeting Thursday, two administration officials said. White House officials have privately denounced HHS staff for having “sabotaged” attempts at implementing information-sharing agreements.
Vitello had previously worked with Miller at the White House on assignment to the National Security Council, according to three officials who have worked with both men.
HHS Secretary Alex Azar was not informed of Miller’s effort to place an ICE official at his agency, two officials said.
Azar has worked to keep his agency out of the maelstrom of immigration politics after the “Zero Tolerance” episode, which separated at least 2,700 children from their parents until Trump was forced to reverse course.
According to the latest ORR data, the government has approximately 4,300 minors in its care, down from 15,000 a year ago. Children spend an average of 69 days in ORR custody, down from 93 days a year ago but still far longer than in recent years.
Before Zero Tolerance, minors spent an average of about 50 days in government shelters, even though ORR had twice as many children in its custody at the time.
HHS also is seeing a growing number of cases they call “category four,” which mean the agency cannot find a parent, relative or other eligible adult to take custody. After several months, those minors are typically placed in long-term foster care. An HHS official said the agency does not have an available tally of the number of category four children.
Arrests along the Mexico border have fallen more than 70 percent since May, when 144,116 migrants were taken into custody amid a record influx of families and children from Central America.
The Trump administration has implemented a package of deterrent measures making it significantly more difficult for migrants who cross the border to qualify for U.S. asylum protections. Since the beginning of the year, border officials have sent more than 53,000 migrants back to Mexico to wait outside U.S. territory while their asylum claims are processed.
The government also has started sending asylum seekers to Guatemala, one of several new agreements that will allow Homeland Security officials to send those seeking safe refuge in the United States to the same crime-plagued region they are fleeing.
Those measures cannot be used to reject underage migrants who arrive and seek protection in the United States, so administration officials continue to view the ORR program as a “loophole” that allows migrants living illegally in the United States to send for their children.
The number of unaccompanied minors taken into custody increased 17 percent from October to November, to 3,321, while the two other demographic categories — family groups and single adults — continued to show declines, the latest enforcement figures show.
nick.miroff@washpost.com

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Fact Checker: Fact-checking President Trump’s impeachment letter to Pelosi


 

Glenn Kessler 2 hrs ago,Fact Checker, The Washington Post

 
“This impeachment represents an unprecedented and unconstitutional abuse of power by Democrat Lawmakers, unequaled in nearly two and a half centuries of American legislative history.”

— President Trump, in a letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), Dec. 17, 2019
Reading President Trump’s impeachment-eve letter to the House speaker seemed very familiar to The Fact Checker. It’s like a written version of his campaign rallies, replete with false claims we have fact-checked many times before either in individual fact checks or in our database of false or misleading Trump claims.
This letter will add a couple dozen new entries to our database, but here are some of the lowlights.
“The Articles of Impeachment introduced by the House Judiciary Committee are not recognizable under any standard of Constitutional theory, interpretation, or jurisprudence. They include no crimes, no misdemeanors, and no offenses whatsoever. You have cheapened the importance of the very ugly word, impeachment!”
There’s nothing in the Constitution that says an impeachment needs to be a specific crime.
“Fortunately, there was a transcript of the conversation taken, and you know from the transcript (which was immediately made available) that the paragraph in question was perfect.”
Trump only released the rough transcript after Democrats announced they would launch a possible impeachment inquiry. Many outside experts say that Trump’s July 25 call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was highly unusual. Trump appeared to have no agenda except to ask for the Ukrainian government to work with his private attorney to investigate a potential 2020 presidential rival and also investigate debunked conspiracy theories about possible interference by Ukraine in the 2016 election. Trump made about eight requests for help with some sort of investigation involving either former vice president Joe Biden or the Democrats.
Before the call took place, Trump with no explanation halted the expected delivery of military aid. Some U.S. diplomats believed the halt was connected to the president’s demands for a probe of Biden, text messages released by Congress show. Moreover, The Washington Post reported that at least four national security officials were so alarmed by Trump’s ongoing pressure campaign on Ukraine that they lodged objections with a White House lawyer before and right after the call.
“I said to President Zelensky: ‘I would like you to do us a favor, though, because our country has been through a lot and Ukraine knows a lot about it.’”
There is no evidence that Ukraine had any role in the 2016 election interference that intelligence agencies concluded was directed from the highest levels of the Russian government. After making this comment in the call, Trump referenced a debunked theory that CrowdStrike, the Californian company that revealed the hack of the Democratic National Committee, was Ukrainian, to the apparent confusion of Zelensky.
“I said do us a favor, not me, and our country, not a campaign.”
Weeks after the rough transcript of the July 25 call with the Ukrainian president was released, Trump began claiming that when he said “do us a favor” in the call, the word “us” referred to the United States, not himself, the administration or his campaign. This is an ex post facto explanation that strains credulity. He repeatedly requested that Ukrainian officials meet with his personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani.
“You know full well that Vice President Biden used his office and $1 billion dollars of U.S. aid money to coerce Ukraine into firing the prosecutor who was digging into the company paying his son millions of dollars.”
This sentence is a fountain of falsehoods.
Trump falsely accuses former vice president Joe Biden of something he did not do. The Ukrainian prosecutor general’s office had opened an investigation into the Ukrainian oligarch Mykola Zlochevsky, who owned Burisma Holdings, a natural gas company; Hunter Biden, a lawyer and businessman, joined Burisma’s board in April 2014 and left in 2019.
The prosecutor general, Viktor Shokin, let that investigation and others go dormant, and the United States and its allies decided he was not effective in his job and in fact let corruption flourish. Biden traveled to Ukraine in December 2015 and said the United States would withhold $1 billion in loan guarantees unless Shokin was removed; it was not a demand to stop the Burisma prosecution, and there’s no evidence of Shokin’s “digging” into Burisma — nor is there any evidence Hunter Biden was ever under investigation.
(Trump incorrectly claims $1 billion in U.S. aid money was at stake, but note that it was just a loan guarantee.)
The vice president’s trip was part of a longer push by the United States, Western allies and nongovernmental organizations such as the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. The goal was to promote reform in Ukraine and remove a prosecutor who allegedly was turning a blind eye to corruption. The U.S. plan to push for Shokin’s dismissal didn’t initially come from Biden but rather filtered up from officials at the State Department. Shokin was eventually removed by parliament. The prosecutor general of Ukraine in early 2019, Yuriy Lutsenko, was quoted as saying “he had no evidence of wrongdoing by U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden or his son.”
Hunter Biden did earn substantial sums from Burisma over six years that could have totaled “millions.”
“Even Joe Biden admitted just days ago in an interview with NPR that it ‘looked bad.’”
Trump suggests that Biden said his successful efforts to oust the prosecutor looked bad. Trump is mischaracterizing an interview with NPR, in which Biden is quoting his son talking about being on Burisma’s board.
“The matter is, my son testified and did an interview saying if he, looking back on it, made a mistake, he made a mistake although he did nothing wrong,” Biden said. “The appearance looked bad and it gave folks like Rudy Giuliani an excuse to come up with a Trumpian kind of defense, why they were violating the Constitution. His, his words speak for themselves.”
“President Zelensky has repeatedly declared that I did nothing wrong.”
This isn’t true. Zelensky has tried hard not to get in the middle of U.S. political fight and faces a dilemma in discussing what he thought about the call. He does not want to get on Trump’s bad side — and he does not want to appear weak back home.
Trump’s “nothing wrong” language echoes misleading tweets he made about an interview that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky had with Time magazine. Nowhere in the interview did Zelensky say that his American counterpart did “nothing wrong.” In fact, he criticized Trump’s comments about corruption in Ukraine and his decision to suspend military aid to Kyiv.
Zelensky also questioned Trump’s decision to freeze military aid, casting it as a matter of “fairness.” Here are Zelensky’s full comments on a potential quid pro quo: “I never talked to the President from the position of a quid pro quo. That’s not my thing. … I don’t want us to look like beggars. But you have to understand. We’re at war. If you’re our strategic partner, then you can’t go blocking anything for us. I think that’s just about fairness. It’s not about a quid pro quo. It just goes without saying.”
“Ambassador Sondland testified that I told him: ‘No quid pro quo. I want nothing. I want nothing. I want President Zelensky to do the right thing, do what he ran on.’”
Trump has misleadingly seized on a small part of the damaging impeachment inquiry testimony of Gordon Sondland, a Trump donor and the U.S. ambassador to the European Union. Sondland testified that the White House declined to invite Zelensky to meet with Trump in Washington as a means of pressuring Zelensky to announce the investigations Trump wanted into Joe Biden. “I know that members of this committee frequently frame these complicated issues in the form of a simple question: Was there a ‘quid pro quo’?” Sondland said. “With regard to the requested White House call and the White House meeting, the answer is yes.”
Sondland said he later came to believe that $400 million of military aid to Ukraine was also contingent on an announcement of the investigations. But Trump is quoting from a phone conversation that Sondland said he had with Trump on Sept. 9, after Congress announced an investigation into the holdup of aid to Ukraine. Sondland testified that he did not know whether Trump was telling the truth, at least about the funding portion of the quid pro quo.
“Your chosen candidate lost the election in 2016, in an Electoral College landslide (306-227).”
This is an old favorite line from Trump’s rallies, but as always he gets two things wrong — that he won a landslide and the electoral college math.
Trump earned 306 pledged electors, Hillary Clinton 232. But after defections by some electors, the final tally was 304 votes for Trump and to 227 votes for Clinton.
But Clinton won the popular vote by nearly 3 million. If 40,000 votes had switched in three states, Trump would have also lost the electoral college. So it was no landslide.
According to a tally by John Pitney of Claremont McKenna College, every Republican president since Rutherford B. Hayes in 1876 won a larger share of the electoral college votes than Trump, with the exception of George W. Bush (twice) and Nixon in 1968.
“Congressman Adam Schiff cheated and lied all the way up to the present day, even going so far as to fraudulently make up, out of thin air, my conversation with President Zelensky of Ukraine and read this fantasy language to Congress as though it were said by me.”
As of Dec. 10, Trump 62 times has railed about a relatively minor event as if it were a serious crime. Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) summarized the content of Trump’s July 25 call with Zelensky at a congressional hearing, occasionally for dramatic effect (or what Schiff called a parody). There is no exact transcript of the conversation, as the summary was cobbled together from notes, so Schiff told the audience that “this is the essence of what the president communicates.”
Much of what Schiff said tracks the basic contents of the call but he went too far to claim Trump had asked Zelensky to “make up” or “manufacture” dirt; Trump simply asked for an investigation of a potential 2020 rival.
“The so-called whistleblower who started this entire hoax with a false report of the phone call that bears no relationship to the actual phone call that was made.”
The whistleblower report is correct on key details about the call between Trump and the Ukrainian president, according to the rough transcript released by the White House. Other details in the whistleblower complaint have been largely confirmed, according to a line-by-line examination by The Fact Checker. Yet Trump more than 60 times has falsely insisted the report was inaccurate.
Trump’s letter also contains exaggerated or false claims that Trump constantly makes about his achievements or the Russia probe. Here’s a brief summary.
“Seven million new jobs created”: Trump always counts from the election, giving himself credit for three months of jobs under Obama. It’s nearly 6.6 million since he took office.
“A completely reformed VA with Choice and Accountability for our great veterans”: the laws passed under Trump built on laws passed earlier, especially a VA Choice law signed by Obama.
“Historic tax and regulation cuts”: Trump’s tax cuts rank sixth in the last 100 years when measured as a percentage of gross domestic product. His regulation cuts are large, but aren’t historic compared with the deregulation in the Carter years.
“The first decline in prescription drug prices in half a century”: Trump overstates what happened to the consumer price index for prescription drugs. It fell by 0.6 percent for the 12 months ending December 2018, and then kept dropping for a period of months but more recently has increased. The Bureau of Labor Statistics says there are other 12-month periods with index declines, including one as recently as 2013.
“The replacement of the disastrous NAFTA trade deal with the wonderful USMCA”: Trump keeps claiming that he significantly overhauled the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), but all he did was make some modest tweaks. The new agreement is about 90 percent the same, with some elements borrowed from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the trade deal Trump scrapped at the start of his term.
“Massive new trade deals with Japan and South Korea”: Again, modest at best.
“Becoming the world’s top energy producer”: This happened under Obama.
“A colossal reduction in illegal border crossings”: They have soared under Trump, almost doubling from 2016 to 2019. Trump is counting from May to November, when there has been a decline, but overall the numbers are higher.
“45 million dollars spent, 18 angry Democrat prosecutors”: The special counsel’s investigation cost $32 million, according to financial reports released by the Justice Department. Mueller reported direct costs and also indirect costs, which no other special counsel had reported for previous investigations. He seized assets from Paul Manafort worth more than $40 million as part of the probe. Those assets now belong to taxpayers, and there’s a case to be made that the special counsel’s investigation therefore made more money than it spent.
“The use of spies against my campaign”: After the FBI opened a counterintelligence investigation, an FBI informant in Europe, a professor named Stefan Halper, met with at least three people working on the Trump campaign in Europe. But the Justice Department inspector general, in a report issued in 2019, found no evidence that such confidential sources interacted with the campaign before the investigation was started or that any were placed on the campaign.
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‘We squandered a major economic recovery’: Harvard professor


 

Sibile MarcellusReporter
December 18, 2019, 8:22 AM CST
0:59 4:30
The nation wasted the major economic recovery, according to a new report by Harvard Business School on U.S. competitiveness.
“We had this wonderful recovery. It could have given us the chance to take some significant resources and devote them to some of our well-known challenges, like infrastructure or health care…none of that happened. Instead, we squandered a major economic recovery and didn’t use it to make things better,” said Harvard Business School professor Michael Porter, a co-author of the study.
The business community’s role in politics has made a significant contribution to Washington’s dysfunction, according to HBS’s report. The majority of the business leaders surveyed said businesses’ overall engagement worsened the political system by advancing policies that benefited special interests.
The report lays out the different ways in which businesses engage in politics today. The $6 billion spent annually on lobbying is just one facet; others include spending on elections and ballot initiatives, efforts to influence employees’ votes and donations, and adding former government officials to companies’ payrolls.
(The report surveyed thousands of business leaders, including 5,713 Harvard Business School alumni and 1,006 members of the general public).
‘Perverting everything’
The overwhelming majority of business leaders surveyed in the report said lobbying primarily advanced company interests, sometimes at the expense of the public interest. More than half (56%) of the general public agreed. Only 26% of the general public view corporate lobbying as a means of advancing public policy, according to HBS.

US Capitol dome illuminated, Washington, DC, graphic element on gray
“Lobbying has been hugely expanding and growing over time and it’s just perverting everything about legislation,” Porter said. “If you want your M&A deal approved, you do lobbying. You get to the people in the legislature that are involved in [the Federal Trade Commission] or connected with the various groups and you can get regulations modified. You can get deals passed.”
Businesses that lobby make sure to play both sides. “It’s one great lobbying fest going on and the [political] parties are just playing it for everything they can. They have a lot of clout, a lot of money pouring into their ranks,” Porter said.
The report highlights the opioid crisis as an example. “You know why the opioid crisis happened in America? Because the political system and lobbying by the opioid production industry – they spent so much money that they defeated various ballot initiatives and they were able to overturn a lot of the regulatory ideas to control the prescriptions of opioids,” Porter said.
‘Distorting the Democratic process’
Corporations spent an estimated $2.8 billion on federal elections in 2018, according to OpenSecrets; 71% of business leaders surveyed in the report believe the overall business community’s election spending distorted the democratic process, while 60% of the public agreed, according to HBS.
Tellingly, when asked about their own companies’ behaviors, HBS alums painted a rosier picture. “Alumni felt that what their own companies were doing was just fine, but they felt that what business as a whole was doing was bad for America,” said Harvard Business School professor Jan Rivkin, a co-author of the report.
Of the HBS alumni who were asked about business overall (not their company) 60% said companies shouldn’t have corporate political action committees (organizations that raise money privately to influence elections). A majority of alums also stated that business as a whole should not use corporate PACs as a way to solicit employee contributions to candidates the company supports.
But this is not an uncommon practice. Porter said the survey suggests many companies “actually go to their employees and try to persuade them to vote for the candidate the company wants and to give money.”

U.S. President Donald Trump delivers remarks to mark six months since the passage of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, in the White House East Room in Washington, U.S., June 29, 2018. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst
“Employees are getting dragged into this game,” he said, adding: “We don’t see that as democratic principles. We think that’s not democracy where your employer is telling you how to vote and telling you where to give money.”
Narrative on how well U.S. economy is performing ‘not exactly right’
Businesses were among the largest beneficiaries of President Trump’s signature tax cut passed in 2017, but there’s little evidence that those savings trickled down to a broader swath of workers. While unemployment is at a record low and stocks are at record highs, wealth inequality persists. In fact, 65% of HBS alumni ages 18-44 said the U.S. should use the tax system to undertake more redistribution toward lower-income individuals.
“There’s lots of areas where the narrative isn’t exactly right,” Porter said. “For example, we have a lot of people employed, but there’s a lot of data that shows that the people employed are often not getting a living wage, or they’re not being paid for their qualifications. A lot of college graduates in jobs that don’t really compensate them for what they know.”
Porter said the real unemployment rate is closer to 10%.
“On the state of the economy, I think there’s a certain tendency now to tell a good story,” he said. “But if you look underneath the hood at some of the things that really matter to our society, we’re not doing as well as is sometimes alleged.”

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We Are Republicans, and We Want Trump Defeated


 

 
Editor’s note: The opinions in this article are the author’s, as published by our content partner, and do not necessarily represent the views of MSN or Microsoft.

George T. Conway III, Steve Schmidt, John Weaver and Rick Wilson The New York Times, 23hrs ago
Patriotism and the survival of our nation in the face of the crimes, corruption and corrosive nature of Donald Trump are a higher calling than mere politics. As Americans, we must stem the damage he and his followers are doing to the rule of law, the Constitution and the American character.

That’s why we are announcing the Lincoln Project, an effort to highlight our country’s story and values, and its people’s sacrifices and obligations. This effort transcends partisanship and is dedicated to nothing less than preservation of the principles that so many have fought for, on battlefields far from home and within their own communities.
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This effort asks all Americans of all places, creeds and ways of life to join in the seminal task of our generation: restoring to this nation leadership and governance that respects the rule of law, recognizes the dignity of all people and defends the Constitution and American values at home and abroad.
Over these next 11 months, our efforts will be dedicated to defeating President Trump and Trumpism at the ballot box and to elect those patriots who will hold the line. We do not undertake this task lightly, nor from ideological preference. We have been, and remain, broadly conservative (or classically liberal) in our politics and outlooks. Our many policy differences with national Democrats remain, but our shared fidelity to the Constitution dictates a common effort.
The 2020 general election, by every indication, will be about persuasion, with turnout expected to be at record highs. Our efforts are aimed at persuading enough disaffected conservatives, Republicans and Republican-leaning independents in swing states and districts to help ensure a victory in the Electoral College, and congressional majorities that don’t enable or abet Mr. Trump’s violations of the Constitution, even if that means Democratic control of the Senate and an expanded Democratic majority in the House.

© Samuel Corum for The New York Times
The American presidency transcends the individuals who occupy the Oval Office. Their personality becomes part of our national character. Their actions become our actions, for which we all share responsibility. Their willingness to act in accordance with the law and our tradition dictate how current and future leaders will act. Their commitment to order, civility and decency are reflected in American society.
Mr. Trump fails to meet the bar for this commitment. He has neither the moral compass nor the temperament to serve. His vision is limited to what immediately faces him — the problems and risks he chronically brings upon himself and for which others, from countless contractors and companies to the American people, ultimately bear the heaviest burden.
But this president’s actions are possible only with the craven acquiescence of congressional Republicans. They have done no less than abdicate their Article I responsibilities.
Indeed, national Republicans have done far worse than simply march along to Mr. Trump’s beat. Their defense of him is imbued with an ugliness, a meanness and a willingness to attack and slander those who have shed blood for our country, who have dedicated their lives and careers to its defense and its security, and whose job is to preserve the nation’s status as a beacon of hope.
Congressional Republicans have embraced and copied Mr. Trump’s cruelty and defended and even adopted his corruption. Mr. Trump and his enablers have abandoned conservatism and longstanding Republican principles and replaced it with Trumpism, an empty faith led by a bogus prophet. In a recent survey, a majority of Republican voters reported that they consider Mr. Trump a better president than Lincoln.
Mr. Trump and his fellow travelers daily undermine the proposition we as a people have a responsibility and an obligation to continually bend the arc of history toward justice. They mock our belief in America as something more meaningful than lines on a map.
Our peril far outstrips any past differences: It has arrived at our collective doorstep, and we believe there is no other choice. We sincerely hope, but are not optimistic, that some of those Republicans charged with sitting as jurors in a likely Senate impeachment trial will do likewise.
American men and women stand ready around the globe to defend us and our way of life. We must do right by them and ensure that the country for which they daily don their uniform deserves their protection and their sacrifice.
We are reminded of Dan Sickles, an incompetent 19th-century New York politician. On July 2, 1863, his blundering nearly ended the United States.
(Sickles’s greatest previous achievement had been fatally shooting his wife’s lover across the street from the White House and getting himself elected to Congress. Even his most fervent admirers could not have imagined that one day, far in the future, another incompetent New York politician, a president, would lay claim to that legacy by saying he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and get away with it.)
On that day in Pennsylvania, Sickles was a major general commanding the Union Army’s III Corps at the Battle of Gettysburg, and his incompetence wrought chaos and danger. The Confederate Army took advantage, and turned the Union line. Had the rebel soldiers broken through, the continent might have been divided: free and slave, democratic and authoritarian.
Another Union general, Winfield Scott Hancock, had only minutes to reinforce the line. America, the nation, the ideal, hung in the balance. Amid the fury of battle, he found the First Minnesota Volunteers.
They charged, and many of them fell, suffering a staggeringly high casualty rate. They held the line. They saved the Union. Four months later, Lincoln stood on that field of slaughter and said, “It is for us, the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.”
We look to Lincoln as our guide and inspiration. He understood the necessity of not just saving the Union, but also of knitting the nation back together spiritually as well as politically. But those wounds can be bound up only once the threat has been defeated. So, too, will our country have to knit itself back together after the scourge of Trumpism has been overcome.
George T. Conway III is an attorney in New York. Steve Schmidt is a Republican political strategist who worked for President George W. Bush, Senator John McCain and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. John Weaver is a Republican strategist who worked for President George H.W. Bush, Senator John McCain and Gov. John Kasich. Rick Wilson is a Republican media consultant and author of “Everything Trump Touches Dies” and the forthcoming “Running Against the Devil: A Plot to Save America From Trump and Democrats From Themselves.”
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.

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