You already know our current Administration is, shall we say, ethics-challenged, but the Campaign Legal Center's complaint describing several Department of Interior appointees giving inside info to their former employers may still shock you -- particularly when you recall that this Administration's own ethics pledge requires appointees to refrain from communicating about specific policies with former employers for two years. And then there's the part where an Interior official actually meets with a Koch-affiliated group about two lawsuits the group had filed against Interior -- one of which got settled in a manner said group found very satisfying. Our President would probably call that "deal-making," but the rest of us would call it corrupt.
This article alleging that liberals may have committed a "gaffe" by "scaring" Amazon out of New York City should strike you as a skimpy article given that five of the article's seven-only-seven paragraphs have nothing to do with the Amazon deal. And if the poll finding that a majority of New Yorkers (including a supermajority of black and Latinx respondents) approved of the deal gives you pause, click through to the poll's crosstabs and find that the Amazon question only discussed tax breaks and job creation, when objections to the Amazon deal also included Amazon's general propensity to destroy small businesses wherever it goes and its pointed refusal to let its New York workers unionize.
FiveThirtyEight provides a useful public service by telling us exactly where every Republican Senator stands on our President's "national emergency" declaration. At this writing, eight Republican Senators oppose it, 15 more have "doubts," and we've got some, ah, surprises in the undecided column, including Arkansas's Tom Cotton, who's never seen a wave of anti-immigrant hysteria he didn't like, and Arizona's Martha McSally, whom you'd think would have a more settled opinion about the matter just due to her home state. Naturally, these folks saying they oppose it or have "doubts" about it is a long way from doing something about it. I bet Kentucky's Rand Paul, for example, votes to block it at approximately the moment he figures out it'll make no difference either way.
Our Administration's nominee for U.N. Ambassador, former Fox News talking head/State Department spokeshack Heather Nauert, withdraws from consideration for the job "in the best interest of my family" after Bloomberg reports that Ms. Nauert once hired a nanny who didn't have proper authorization to work (though she was in the country legally). And then Secretary of State Pompeo pushed her right out the door; gosh, he sure learns quick! Sadly, other Administration possibilities for the post seem to have even bigger problems than Ms. Nauert had, and the one person who would likely sail through Senate confirmation (who is, that's right, currently the "acting" U.N. Ambassador) seems not to be a favorite of the Administration. Maybe Lindsey Graham can recommend someone.
Oh, but our Administration isn't the only organization hiring TEH BESTEZT PEEPULZ!!!!!: CNN has hired a Republican spokeshack with approximately zero journalistic experience to "coordinate" their 2020 campaign coverage. Which provides us with yet another useful reminder that just because Our Glorious Elites look like they're fighting doesn't mean they're actually fighting! And don't make any hay out of the fact that our President supposedly "hates" her, for the same reason.
Finally, buried deep in this Philadelphia Metro piece describing a study finding that getting rid of cash bail for more than three-fifths of criminal charges has not actually resulted in mass rapes by zombies is the notion (voiced by a reporter, apparently) that getting rid of cash bail might cause the murder rate to spike. Yes, the murder rate in Philadelphia has gone up lately, but seriously, does anyone think to themselves well, I wasn't going to murder anyone today, but now I might, because folks who get arrested for pissing in public don't have to post bail anymore? But that's the right-wing mind, where literally anything they don't like can be said to cause literally anything else they don't like, and to hell with reason, or even persuasion.
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