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U.S. Politics: Who's Cohen Down?


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The Trump administration is seeking to completely revamp the country’s social safety net, targeting recipients of Medicaid, food stamps and housing assistance.

Trump is doing so through a sweeping executive order that was quietly issued earlier this week — and that largely flew under the radar.

It calls on the Departments of Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development, Agriculture and other agencies across the federal government to craft new rules requiring that beneficiaries of a host of programs work or lose their benefits.

Trump argued with the order, which has been in the works since last year, that the programs have grown too large while failing to move needy people out of government help.

http://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/383106-trump-order-targets-wide-swathe-of-public-assistance-programs

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55 minutes ago, Fragile Bird said:

It was just pointed out on CNN that the special prosecutor who investigated Scooter Libby was appointed by James Comey.

So there's about an 80/20 chance it's simply Trump being petty and vindictive, ala his "Reverse everything Obama ever did" policy.

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Just now, Paladin of Ice said:

So there's about an 80/20 chance it's simply Trump being petty and vindictive, ala his "Reverse everything Obama ever did" policy.

Corretct me if I am wrong, but wasn't Libby charged during the last days of the Dubya Presidency. I remember (at least I think I do) remember an American acquitance being quite unhappy about Dubya commuting Libby's sentence (before the verdict), because of his great service to the Republican Party country or something like that.

So that looks more like he is either throwing a bone to the hardcore homers or indirectly sending a message for people in the cross hairs of the feds.

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2 hours ago, OldGimletEye said:

The Orange One shows he’s a bigger dumb ass than Dubya. That is one heck of a feat.
 

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/4/14/17237788/trump-tweet-syria-mission-accomplished-bush

And conservative sorts people, I’d imagine, will eat that shit up, like its the best thing ever. Mmm. Hmmm. Taste good, can I have another serving?

Well not surprisingly, the C suite shows what its real priorities are.

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/4/14/17237960/trump-tax-cuts-bank-earnings-tweets

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Not that I ever drink Starbuck’s over priced coffee, when regular old black gas station coffee is good enough for little old  me. In fact, I’d probably drink coffee strained through a dirty sock, if I were desperate enough. But, if I ever though about going into a Starbuck’s, this kills it.

https://www.vox.com/identities/2018/4/14/17238494/what-happened-at-starbucks-black-men-arrested-philadelphia

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Robert Skidelsky covers the sorry ass intellectual history of austerity.

What were the papers or articles that bolstered right wing austerity talking points? I'd say it was (a short list)

1. Cole and Ohanian's paper that the New Deal delayed the recovery. It was a horseshit paper for at least a few reasons.

2. Alberto Alesina's expansionary austerity paper.

3. Amity Schlaes book Forgotten Man (Conservative horseshit you should forget about). One of her main claims? The stock market didn't return to its pre 1929 level until the 1950s. Forget about showing actual GDP data.

4. Interns at the Cato Institute being allowed to hit the LINEST function on Excel without knowing what in the hell they were doing.

5. Random nonsensical horseshit from Cochrane, Fama, Dan Mitchell, Lucas, etc. etc.

https://www.project-syndicate.org/onpoint/the-advanced-economies-lost-decade-by-robert-skidelsky-2018-04?

 

 

 

Alesina's empirical methodology was latter shown to be very dubious.

Whether he became more circumspect or not, the damage had already been done.

Well for one, it seems to assume output growth is a fairly deterministic process and that recessions are just temporary hick ups from the trend, which we are finding out is not the case.

Also, that paper was shown to be empirically flawed by a graduate student who tried to replicate the results.

In simple Robinson Caruso models where Robinson Caruso the firm owner knows what Robinson Caruso the consumer’s intended future spending plans are, and act of savings automatically translates into an act of investment. In the real world where firms don’t know what a consumer’s future plans are, not so much.

 

Given Lucas' mindless neo-Walrasianism, one wonders why he thinks monetary policy does anything.

Just wanted to give a shout-out: thanks for these updates and analysis.

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5 hours ago, Notone said:

Corretct me if I am wrong, but wasn't Libby charged during the last days of the Dubya Presidency. I remember (at least I think I do) remember an American acquitance being quite unhappy about Dubya commuting Libby's sentence (before the verdict), because of his great service to the Republican Party country or something like that.

So that looks more like he is either throwing a bone to the hardcore homers or indirectly sending a message for people in the cross hairs of the feds.

Given many were convinced Rosenstein would be fired Friday, and it appears not to have happened, I would bet that someone in the Administration presented the pardon as an alternative to Trump to firing Rosenstein. It provides an emotional salve, sends a message to the FBI and possible snitches, and is much safer than the firing.

It might end up in Mueller's obstruction case against Trump though.

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Ryan: Trillion-dollar deficits were inevitable

http://thehill.com/homenews/house/383256-ryan-trillion-dollar-deficits-were-inevitable

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Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) says that trillion-dollar deficits could not have been avoided by the GOP-controlled Congress, responding to critics within his party who say that leaders have behaved irresponsibly.

“That was going to happen. The baby boomers retiring was going to do that,” Ryan said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” of projections that the country will start running trillion-dollar deficits as soon as 2020.


 

 
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Blergh, the more Comey says stuff, the more of a worm he is. He flat out refuses to take responsibility for the fact that Drumpf is in the Whitehouse because he tipped the scales in the final week. Fewer than 100,000 swing voters - or voters who didn't bother turning up - would have averted this absolute disaster.

He was not the only factor, absolutely not. But he was a huge contributing factor and he won't admit it.

He boasts that he didn't leak or authorise any leaks while in the FBI (which is almost certainly wrong anyway) to which I demand: Why the hell didn't he?! If he is the patriot he claims to be, then your own reputation is the price worth paying to expose the fact that you claim a crime lord is running the USA, on the payroll of another crime lord running Russia.

It's a pity that all of this selflessness only emerged once he got a book deal, too. Apparently it wasn't worth saying unless he was paid to say it.

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3 hours ago, Yukle said:

Blergh, the more Comey says stuff, the more of a worm he is. He flat out refuses to take responsibility for the fact that Drumpf is in the Whitehouse because he tipped the scales in the final week. Fewer than 100,000 swing voters - or voters who didn't bother turning up - would have averted this absolute disaster.

He was not the only factor, absolutely not. But he was a huge contributing factor and he won't admit it.

He boasts that he didn't leak or authorise any leaks while in the FBI (which is almost certainly wrong anyway) to which I demand: Why the hell didn't he?! If he is the patriot he claims to be, then your own reputation is the price worth paying to expose the fact that you claim a crime lord is running the USA, on the payroll of another crime lord running Russia.

It's a pity that all of this selflessness only emerged once he got a book deal, too. Apparently it wasn't worth saying unless he was paid to say it.

Comey only looks good when you put him beside Trump and his defenders. 

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36 minutes ago, Darth Richard II said:

Not the one we deserve.

What does one really deserve, though? Trump Presidency was going to be and is an ugly thing.

That Comey done things that very much upset all sides is the best for his credibility. The events surrounding Clinton at the end was a political jam and being angry is doing what those who did it want.

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The GOP’s Never-Trumpers Are Really Just Never-Democrats

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/04/the-gops-never-trumpers-are-really-just-never-democrats.html

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David Brooks, the New York Times op-ed page’s long-standing ambassador from the center-right, recently wrote a self-flagellatory column about the failure of anti-Trump Republicans to influence their own tribe. It was remarkable not for what it said but for what it didn’t. After lingering over the grim evidence — President Trump’s approval rating still hovers in the low 40s, and, more important, he commands the near unanimous support of the Republican base — Brooks concluded, “A lot of us never-Trumpers assumed momentum would be on our side as his scandals and incompetences mounted. It hasn’t turned out that way.”

What implications might be drawn from the implacable support of the party base for the manifestly incompetent, scandal-ridden party leader? One might entertain the conclusion that no combination of facts and logic can dislodge the Republican base from its tribal loyalties. This interpretation could be supported by such evidence as the fondness of Republicans for birtherism, their distrust of climate science, and so on. Perhaps the Republican base as currently constituted is hopelessly immune to reason and a reasonable person such as Brooks should instead refocus his political energies on curtailing its political power.

But Brooks’s column did not come to that conclusion. Indeed, amazingly enough, he did not even consider the option. Instead, he suggested that critics of Trump must try harder and somehow do a better job of persuading Republicans to stop loving Trump so much. The idea of abandoning the Republican Party because it is authoritarian and toxically anti-intellectual was apparently as unfathomable to him as a fish in a polluted river deciding to live on land.

If you want to understand why an event as large and potentially cataclysmic as the election of Donald Trump has not (yet) scrambled the long trench-warfare stalemate between red and blue America, this dynamic is a good place to start.

 

 

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‘We Can Solve Huge Technical Issues, But Can’t Pay Our Employees a Fair Wage?’
A conversation with Ellen Pao about the homogeneity of internet pioneers, Reddit’s quest for growth, and the inability of tech executives to change.

http://nymag.com/selectall/2018/04/ellen-pao-reddit-ceo-interview.html

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I guess my concern is that the solution so far is more of the same. You’ve got these people who are incredibly innovative. They can solve huge technical issues. They can bring the internet to Africa at a low cost, but we can’t pay our employees a fair wage that allows them to live above the poverty line and feed their families and buy a home? We can’t get harassment off of our sites? You have these people who haven’t used their skill, innovation, their giant teams, or their huge coffers to solve them. What makes you think they’re going to change and care about these problems today? And that’s the piece that I’m not really sure about. And when you look at a company like Uber, and you bring somebody who looks very similar in to solve the problem, I don’t really know that the problem is going to get solved.

I’ve suggested that Facebook bring in a bunch of people who are not part of a homogeneous majority to their executive team, to every product team, to every strategy discussion, because you need the people who are living the problem to help solve it and to help people who clearly don’t understand the impact of their network and the nature and extent of the problems on their platforms. To actually be able to solve the problem, you need to understand it, and there are not enough people in powerful positions who can have an impact at those platforms.

 


 

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How Low Will Trump Go?
The president’s legal situation appears to be getting worse. What might he do to get out of it?

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/04/what-trump-could-still-do-to-obstruct-the-mueller-and-cohen-investigations.html

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Let’s say Rosenstein is replaced. You’re saying it would be difficult for a new deputy to meddle in the SDNY investigation of Michael Cohen—but if someone wanted to do that, what forms could that take?

Well any number of forms ranging from the simple forms of refusing approvals when requested to the more-intrusive forms like moving around resources, telling the FBI that it should reassign—of the 30 investigating agents, [sending] 20 of them to go do bank fraud in South Dakota tomorrow. Things of that nature. He could certainly play some games in that regard. At his strongest, he could direct the U.S. attorney’s office to close the investigation, but that would be one of these really strong acts that would certainly generate a lot of notice and would be highly unlikely, even for a Trump loyalist.

 

 

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