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November 2018

POLITICS Comments turned off

Kevin McCarthy is Elected House Minority Leader Defeats conservative Jim Jordan, 159-43; McConnell and Schumer keep Senate posts By Kristina Peterson and Natalie Andrews

By on November 14th, 2018

https://www.wsj.com/articles/mitch-mcconnell-re-elected-majority-leader-by-senate-republicans-1542211942?cx_testId=16&cx_testVariant=cx&cx_artPos=0&cx_tag=collabctx&cx_navSource=newsReel#cxrecs_s

WASHINGTON—Congressional lawmakers elected familiar faces Wednesday to leadership next year as they brace for Democrats to take control of the House in January.

In the most closely watched election, House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R., Calif.) defeated Rep. Jim Jordan (R., Ohio) in a 159-43 vote to lead House Republicans when they enter the minority next year.

Mr. McCarthy’s victory ended the uncertainty that House Republicans had faced since House Speaker Paul Ryan (R., Wis.) announced in April he would retire at year’s end.

Three years after he unexpectedly withdrew a bid to become House speaker, Mr. McCarthy completed his rebound at a low point for House Republicans. After last week’s midterm elections, Democrats have so far won a net of 34 House seats and have a chance at picking up as many as 38.

“We took a beating in the suburban areas,” Mr. McCarthy said after the leadership elections. He said Republicans were willing to work with House Democrats, but that the GOP would block moves from Democrats who exceed their oversight authority regarding the Trump administration. “If their agenda is simply investigations and impeachment, and not focusing on the hardworking American public, we’ll be there to defend the American public,” he said.

Democratic leaders have said they plan to focus on transparency in politics and oversight of the Trump administration next year. They have cautioned Democratic lawmakers to tread carefully around impeachment, which could spark political backlash.

Mr. McCarthy’s defeat of Mr. Jordan isn’t likely to end the power struggle between House GOP leadership and its more conservative wing, particularly the House Freedom Caucus, a group of roughly three dozen of the House’s most conservative Republicans. Mr. Jordan helped found the group in January 2015.

“We speak for millions of Americans that feel like this place has forgotten them—that hasn’t changed,” said Rep. Mark Meadows (R., N.C.), chairman of the Freedom Caucus and a close ally of Mr. Jordan.

Mr. Meadows said it was important that Mr. McCarthy’s election hadn’t gone unchallenged. “To have any dissenting votes is certainly saying that at least we didn’t just automatically go out and crown somebody as the new leader,” he said.

It isn’t yet clear whom Mr. McCarthy will be squaring off against next year in the House.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Best Bad Brexit Deal May’s withdrawal pact from the EU is lousy but is the only game in town.

By on November 14th, 2018

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-best-bad-brexit-deal-1542239961

Theresa May has finally struck a deal with Brussels for Britain’s withdrawal from the European Union, and it reminds us of what Winston Churchill said about democracy—the worst form of government except for all the others.

Mrs. May sold the plan to her balky cabinet in a five-hour meeting on Wednesday. And if her plan survives vetting in Parliament, the policy outline will manage Britain’s departure from the EU, with a second round of talks on the post-Brexit trading relationship to come.

Most details aren’t controversial. Those include provisions on the status of EU citizens in Britain and Brits living in the EU, and the money Britain will contribute to the EU budget under commitments made before the 2016 Brexit referendum.

The rub concerns the indefinite trading agreement that Brussels demanded to avoid imposing a hard border between Northern Ireland, which is part of the U.K., and the Republic of Ireland that is remaining in the EU. Mrs. May has agreed that the entire U.K. will remain within the EU customs union if some other U.K.-EU trade deal isn’t struck. Britain will accept some EU regulations, and economic rules still could diverge over time between Northern Ireland and the rest of the U.K.

Pro-Brexit Tories are right to call this a bad deal—“vassal state stuff,” in the words of the always colorful Brexiteer Boris Johnson. It limits Britain’s ability to negotiate its own trade deals unless Britain can first negotiate a new trading arrangement with Brussels.

But it’s the best, and currently the only, serious option on the table. Reimposing a hard border for Northern Ireland, which would be necessary without a withdrawal deal, would renege on Britain’s commitments under the Good Friday peace agreement of 1998 and risk re-igniting sectarian strife. Britain also has refused to accept a Brussels proposal to create a new customs border between Northern Ireland and the rest of the U.K., though this would make the most economic sense.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

‘It’s a Crisis of Civilization in Mexico.’ 250,000 Dead. 37,400 Missing. In an echo of Latin America’s ‘Dirty Wars,’ gang violence has fueled mounting disappearances, leaving mothers to search for their children’s corpses By José de Córdoba and Juan Montes

By on November 14th, 2018

https://www.wsj.com/articles/its-a-crisis-of-civilization-in-mexico-250-000-dead-37-400-missing-1542213374?cx_testId=16&cx_testVariant=cx&cx_artPos=3&cx_tag=collabctx&cx_navSource=newsReel#cxrecs_s

EL FUERTE, Mexico—One recent day, a line of grieving mothers armed with picks and shovels worked their way across a muddy field looking for Mexico’s dead and missing, their own children among them.

“It smells bad here,” said Lizbeth Ortega, a member of Las Rastreadoras de El Fuerte, or the Trackers of El Fuerte, a group of mothers who look for missing people.

The mothers literally wear their pain. Some don white T-shirts, like Ms. Ortega’s, which has a blown-up photograph of her daughter Zumiko, kidnapped almost three years ago and still missing. On the back, her shirt says “I’ll search for you until I find you.”

Other mothers wear green shirts with the words “Promise Fulfilled.” They are the ones who have found the bodies of their missing children.

That day, the mothers scoured the site outside El Fuerte, a town in Sinaloa state, on Mexico’s northern Pacific Coast, looking for one of two men presumably kidnapped by cartel gunmen in recent weeks. One body had already been found in a field. The women believed the other may be nearby. In the end, they came up empty.

“This is my life,” said Mirna Medina, a forceful woman who holds the group together. “Digging up holes.”

Her son, who sold CDs by a gas station, was kidnapped in 2014. Three years later to the day, she and the other mothers of the search group dug up his remains. “I felt his presence,” she said, remembering the day and breaking out in tears. “I wanted to find him alive, but at least I found him.”

Some 37,000 people in Mexico are categorized as “missing” by the government. The vast majority are believed to be dead, victims of the country’s spiraling violence that has claimed more than 250,000 lives since 2006. The country’s murder rate has more than doubled to 26 per 100,000 residents, five times the U.S. figure.

Because the missing aren’t counted as part of the country’s official murder tally, it is likely Mexico’s rate itself is higher.

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Climate Scientists Discover Error in Major Ocean-Warming Study By Jack Crowe

By on November 14th, 2018

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/climate-scientists-discover-error-in-m

Two researchers have been forced to issue a major correction to a recent study indicating oceans have been warming at a significantly higher rate than previously thought due to climate change.

The paper, published October 31 in the scientific journal Nature, suggested ocean temperatures have risen roughly 60 percent higher than estimated by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). But, after errors in the authors’ methodology were identified, they realized their findings were roughly in line with those of the IPCC, after all.

The researchers’ alarming findings were uncritically reported by numerous mainstream-media outlets but Nic Lewis, a mathematician and popular critic of the consensus on man-made climate change, quickly identified errors.

“The findings of the . . . paper were peer reviewed and published in the world’s premier scientific journal and were given wide coverage in the English-speaking media,” Lewis wrote in a critique of the paper. “Despite this, a quick review of the first page of the paper was sufficient to raise doubts as to the accuracy of its results.”

Ralph Keeling, a climate scientist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography who co-authored the paper, said he and his partner, Laure Resplandy of Princeton, quickly realized the implications of their mistake once Lewis pointed it out.

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POLITICS Comments turned off

Report: Florida Dem Organizer Called Voters to Fix Rejected Mail-In Ballots after Election Day By Jack Crowe

By on November 14th, 2018

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/florida-democrat-organizer-called-voters-to-fix-rejected-mail-in-ballots-after-election-day/

A Democratic volunteer in Palm Beach, Fla. was reportedly recorded while calling a voter to correct their rejected mail-in absentee ballot as recounts were being conducted, in violation of the law.

The report comes after the Department of State revealed that it discovered election officials in four counties, included the embattled Democratic stronghold of Broward, illegally changed the date on mail-in-ballot-correction forms, granting voters more time to fix their rejected absentee ballots than is allowed by law.

The so-called “cure affidavits” were supposed to be due no later than 5 p.m. on November 5, the day before the election, but the forms were changed to indicate they were due back by 5 p.m. on Thursday, two days after the election. Department of State officials have referred the incident to the Department of Justice for investigation.

“Altering a form in a manner that provides the incorrect date for a voter to cure a defect . . . imposes a burden on the voter significant enough to frustrate the voter’s ability to vote,” Florida Department of State interim general counsel Bradley McVay wrote in a letter sent to federal prosecutors on November 9 and released publicly on Tuesday.

In an email chain released with the November 9 letter, Citrus County Supervisor of Elections Susan Gill said that a voter who received an illegally modified “cure affidavit” also received a call from the office of the Florida Democratic party, indicating party volunteers were calling voters to correct rejected mail-in ballots.

Recounts in the Florida gubernatorial and Senate races began Saturday and must conclude by 3 p.m. on Thursday or else initial vote counts will be used to determine the contests.

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POLITICS Comments turned off

Sherrod Brown: If Stacey Abrams Doesn’t Win, GOP ‘Stole It’ By Mairead McArdle

By on November 14th, 2018

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/sherrod-brown-if-stacey-abrams-doesnt-win-gop-stole-it/

Senator Sherrod Brown said Wednesday that if Democrat Stacey Abrams loses her bid for governor of Georgia, Republicans “stole” the election.

“If Stacey Abrams doesn’t win in Georgia, they stole it,” the Ohio Democrat said. “It’s clear. It’s clear. I say that publicly and it’s clear.”

Brown went on to say that there are “way more” Democrats than Republicans, so the GOP has to cheat to win elections.

“They win elections by redistricting and reapportionment and voter suppression and all the ways they try to scare people, particularly people of color,” he said at the National Action Network conference in Washington.

Throughout the campaign, Republican nominee Brian Kemp was accused of using his position as Georgia’s secretary of state to suppress votes, in particular by putting tens of thousands of African-American voter registrations on hold. Kemp in turn accused the Democratic party just before Election Day of attempting to hack Georgia’s voter registration system, saying he had opened an investigation into it but refusing to provide any evidence for his claims.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Social Media Have Been Captured by Elitists, Demagogues, and Mobs By Fred Bauer

By on November 14th, 2018

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/11/social-media-elitists-mobs-killed-dream-of-digitial-egalitarianism/

How the dream of digital equality became a nightmare

As has become increasingly evident in recent years, the utopian hope of early Internet proponents has, like that of starry-eyed enthusiasts of similar projects, sometimes led to surprising reversals in reality. One of the claims of early Internet culture is that the World Wide Web would help connect diverse communities and lead to a more democratic culture. Social media have in some ways fulfilled that promise. Everyone can have a platform now, accessible to people across the world. The user-friendly format of modern social networks is a lot more accessible than HTML coding. Varieties of online simulacra of communities have proliferated.

However, the growth of social-media platforms has also led to the creation of a few centralized nodes. A relatively small number of players (Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc.) have gained immense power in determining which voices can be heard through community standards and ever-shifting (and opaque) algorithms. Social-media companies have built attractive “walled gardens” and pretend that such manicured zones can be the public square as a whole.

In recent months, that pretension to universality has become less and less plausible. In part in response to the ongoing populist disruption, social-media companies have taken a much more aggressive approach in de-platforming users. That such community standards are not equally enforced across the ideological spectrum only increases the quasi-editorial power of these platforms. The power of these community standards can be seen in the fact that a fair amount of political energy is expended on battles over who can even have a voice on the platforms in the first place. The flamewars that used to happen on discussion boards and blogs across the Internet have now been funneled to a few places, which gives the moderators of such locations increasing power. Now the purported digital public square increasingly resembles a first-grade classroom, echoing with shrill volleys of “I’m telling!” (That some media corporations have led various efforts to de-platform rogue media outlets is another sign of how the currently entrenched power elite can use the digital landscape to protect its own power.)

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

UK Reaches Draft Brexit Deal with EU By Rick Moran

By on November 14th, 2018

https://pjmedia.com/trending/uk-reaches-draft-brexit-deal-with-eu/

The United Kingdom has agreed to a draft agreement with the EU to withdraw from the European Union. But analysts warn that there is much uncertainty over whether the deal will be accepted by a majority of Prime Minister Theresa May’s cabinet and Tories in parliament.

The New York Times explains May’s dilemma:

Details of the agreement were not immediately available. Presumably, it contains language pertaining to the “backstop” plan to settle the contentious issue of the Irish border, the part of the agreement that is likely to set off the most sparks in the cabinet discussions.

The breakthrough followed months of discussions over an issue that has divided Britons and split the governing Conservative Party. But the prime minister’s problems are far from over.

Even assuming she gains the cabinet’s approval on Wednesday without a politically damaging raft of resignations — not a given — Mrs. May faces daunting odds in pushing the compromise plan through Parliament, where it has many opponents.

Britain is scheduled to quit the European Union on March 29. The draft agreement, if approved, would at least avert the prospect of a disorderly and chaotic departure without any deal — something that could clog ports and lead to shortages of food and some medicines.

If Mrs. May’s cabinet signs off on the draft agreement, the next step is for European Union leaders to give it their blessing at a meeting at the end of the month.

It would then need the approval of the European Parliament and of British lawmakers in London. If that is forthcoming, the agreement would lead to a standstill transition period during which very little would change before the end of 2020.

This is a long, slow, treacherous path to a Brexit. If May can convince her cabinet to back the deal — a big if — the parliamentary brawl to approve it could very easily lead to May’s ouster. If that happens, Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, a hardline Brexiteer , is waiting in the wings to replace her.

A change in Conservative leadership at this point would almost certainly lead to a “no deal” Brexit and widespread chaos, the effects of which could plunge the UK into an economic and political crisis that would drive the Tories from power and hand the government to the odious ant-Semites of the Labor Party. CONTINUE AT SITE

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POLITICS Comments turned off

Cory Booker ‘Absolutely’ Considering a Presidential Run in 2020, Deciding in ‘Coming Months’ By Nicholas Ballasy

By on November 14th, 2018

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/cory-booker-absolutely-considering-a-presidential-run-in-2020-deciding-in-coming-months/

Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) said he’s “absolutely” considering a run for president in 2020 and will take some time “over the coming months” to decide.

“I’ll consider that. I’m focused right now on my re-election but is that something I’ll consider? Absolutely,” Booker said at Yahoo! Finance’s All Markets Summit today.

“Now is not the time to do that. We’ve got re-elections in the field. I’ve got a lot of work to do. I’ve just come off an election. I will do my best over the coming months,” he added.

When asked when he would make his decision, Booker replied, “My decision’s made right now. I’m running for re-election [in 2020], but will I take some time over the coming months to consider it? I absolutely will but let’s, like, this is bothersome to me that we’re two years out… it is too early to say.”

Booker continued, “Honestly, right now, this is those wonderful moments in Washington where we should be able to come together and get good work done before we start vulcanizing ourselves for presidential ambitions. I am so excited.”

Booker, a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, called for a federal investigation of the Georgia gubernatorial race between Stacey Abrams and Brian Kemp.

“I mean, I don’t understand how you can have a guy who’s running for an office, who’s currently holding office, supposed to be policing and protecting elections, using that office to disenfranchise people, to remove people from the polls. I mean, there should be a federal investigation,” he said, referring to Kemp, who resigned as Georgia’s secretary of state after Election Day.

“The Justice Department should be investigating that election to make sure it was fair and the decisions that were made were not to politically advantage someone, but to protect voters and the voting process,” he added.

Booker argued that the governorship is being “stolen” from Abrams and said the situation goes beyond impropriety. A federal judge ordered a review of thousands of provisional ballots this week as Abrams has not conceded.

“I’m saying this from a perspective where I have not been in the weeds, but I think that Stacey Abrams’ election is being stolen from her, using what I think are insidious measures to disenfranchise certain groups of people,” the senator said.

“And that’s something I think that all of us should be calling for is the Trump Justice Department should conduct an investigation into what happened, because on the on the appearance of it that’s not just appearance of impropriety. To me, it’s the appearance of voter fraud, voter disenfranchisement, voter suppression,” he added.

Booker recently proposed a bill that would create federally funded savings accounts for children born in the U.S. as a way to address the “racial wealth gap” in the country. He estimated that the legislation, called the “American Opportunity Accounts Act,” would cost $50-$70 billion depending on how the program is managed. CONTINUE AT SITE

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Macron Is Picking A Fight With Trump Out Of Empty Arrogance By Paul Bonicelli

By on November 14th, 2018

http://thefederalist.com/2018/11/14/macron-picking-fight-trump-empty-arrogance/
Trump and Macron alternate between clashing with and fawning over one another, because although they are quite different people, they seek similar goals.

President Donald Trump and French President Emmanuel Macron have a unique and often strained relationship. They alternate between clashing with and fawning over one another, because even though they are quite different people, they seek similar goals: the greatness of their countries.

The age difference and generational dynamic explain some of the ups and downs of this relationship, as do the different political cultures of the two countries. But there is more to it than that. There is the history of each country and our relationship across history; there is the current state of world affairs with the United States’s continuing dominance while France is in its second century of declining importance and influence; and there is the failure of the European Union to create the kind of home and institutions that would satisfy the great powers of Europe vis a vis a power like the United States.
Latest Battle in This War of Words: The United Nations

The latest clash between Trump and Macron was Macron’s strong rebuttal Saturday to Trump’s United Nations speech in September. That Trump speech was the clearest and starkest explanation of Trump’s views on international affairs and his plans for the U.S. role in the world. Trump rejected globalism and embraced patriotism, which many of his critics say is really nationalism. Trump seems to be fine with that term nationalism, too, because he has embraced it as meaning patriotism.

The globalism he rejects maintains that each nation-state should defer to international organizations or other nation-states when confronting challenges both at home and abroad. In the patriotism, or nationalism, he embraces, each nation-state naturally prefers itself and seeks its own interests above all others.

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