NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft has communicated with flight controllers in Laurel, Maryland after a flyby of a distant orb named ‘Ultima Thule’ far beyond Pluto.
With surprisingly little interest in or urgency about the shutdown now approaching its third week, Washington is now abuzz with the whipped up spat between President Trump and Mitt Romney after Romney wrote an unflattering oped in The Washington Post. Robert Costa says Trump’s critics see an opening and that one of his top advisors is getting calls from GOP donors asking Romney to challenge President Trump in 2020. Let’s please get real about this. Mitt Romney isn’t going to challenge anyone. President Trump won’t face any real challenge to his nomination and Romney’s oped was at best a mild rebuke. Read More
When President Trump has his angry, teary monologue with the painting of Hillary in the White House, it’ll be a pool spray. We’re halfway there.
GOPer at center of NC election fraud scandal asks court to declare him the winner.
There are issues that divide Republicans and Democrats that sometimes benefit the GOP and at another time the Democrats. Universal healthcare and abortion are issues like this. And so might be the issue of the border wall. If so, the Democrats should be very careful. What follows is a comment on politics, not policy.
Shortly after his top communications staffer said Nancy Pelosi was just obsessed with a wall as opposed to a “physical barrier”, President Trump released a letter insisting on a wall.
Absolutely critical to border security and national security is a wall or a physical barrier that prevents entry in the first place. Members of both parties—including then Senators Obama and Clinton, current Senator Schumer, and many other members of the House and Senate—all voted for a hard, physical barrier. Walls work. That’s why rich, powerful, and successful people build them around their homes. All Americans deserve the same protection. In Israel, it is 99 percent effective.
A very unpretty picture here in the Post of the President’s efforts to negotiate an end to the three-week government shutdown. The White House is making a big play of Vice President Pence working through the weekend in what they claim are negotiations. But the President hasn’t actually given Pence the authority to discuss specific numbers of even specific proposals. And this is compounded by the fact that no one would put much stock in such offers even if Pence were nominally empowered to make them because the President routinely overrules them in tweets. Read More
As you’ve likely seen, the now-ubiquitous Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is now floating a 60% to 70% marginal income tax rate on income over $10 million a year. I think this is a great proposal whether or not it ever goes anywhere or whether this particular price point makes sense simply because it opens up the tax policy conversation in ways it’s been closed for a few decades. It is simply crazy that the progressivity of the tax code currently tops out at $500,000 a year incomes. Read More