Lindsey Graham Compared Mar-a-Lago to North Korea: Bob Woodward

LONG LIVE THE GREAT LEADER

David Gardner
Tue, October 8, 2024 


Susan Walsh/Getty Images

One of Donald Trump’s closest confidantes has compared the former president’s Mar-a-Lago Florida estate to North Korea, according to an upcoming book by Watergate journalist Bob Woodward.

Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) reportedly said: “Going to Mar-a-Lago is a little bit like going to North Korea. Everybody stands up and claps every time Trump comes in.”

Sen. Lindsey Graham (L) says people get to their feet and clap at Mar-a-Lago whenever Donald Trump walks in.
Win McNamee

Graham is quoted as saying that Biden won the 2020 election “fair and square,” but “Trump doesn’t like to hear that.”

A Trump supporter and “golfing buddy”, Graham has tried to give the GOP nominee advice for his 2024 campaign, writes Woodward in his book, War.

“You’ve got a problem with moderate women. The people that think that the earth is flat and we didn’t go to the moon, you’ve got them. Let that go,” he is said to have told Trump after the midterm elections.

CNN has obtained a copy of the book and it quotes Woodward as writing that Graham urged Trump not to dwell on his loss to Joe Biden in the 2020 election, telling him that if he returns to the White House “then January 6 won’t be your obituary.”

Trump allegedly called Graham a few days later to proudly exclaim: “I gave a speech today and I only mentioned the 2020 election twice!”

Woodward also writes about a March meeting between Graham and Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman when the South Carolina senator suggested calling Trump.

Woodward claims in his book that bin Salman ordered an aide to bring over a bag containing about 50 burner phones and pulled one out with the label, “TRUMP 45.” Another one was supposedly tagged with the name of Biden’s National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan.

The Trump campaign did not comment specifically on the excerpts about Lindsey Graham, but communications director Steven Cheung said: “None of these made up stories by Bob Woodward are true and are the work of a truly demented and deranged man who suffers from a debilitating case of Trump Derangement Syndrome.”

Cheung added: “President Trump gave him absolutely no access for this trash book that either belongs in the bargain bin of the fiction section of a discount bookstore or used as toilet tissue. “

 Daily Beast.

France’s minority government survives a no-confidence vote, 2 weeks after taking office

SYLVIE CORBET
Updated Tue, October 8, 2024 


PARIS (AP) — France’s minority government survived a no-confidence vote on Tuesday, two weeks after taking office, getting over the first hurdle placed by left-wing lawmakers to bring down new conservative Prime Minister Michel Barnier.

The vote was a key test for Barnier, whose Cabinet is forced to rely on the far right’s good will to be able to stay in power, as the nation grapples with economic challenges exacerbated by global inflation.

The no-confidence motion was brought by a left-wing coalition, the New Popular Front, composed of the hard-left France Unbowed, Socialists, Greens and Communists. It received 197 votes, far from the 289 votes needed to pass.


Following the June-July parliamentary elections, the National Assembly, France’s powerful lower house of parliament, is divided into three major blocs: the New Popular Front, Macron’s centrist allies and the far-right National Rally party. None of them won an outright majority.

The far-right National Rally group, which counts 125 lawmakers, abstained from voting the no-confidence motion. Far-right leader Marine Le Pen, herself a lawmaker, said she decided to “give a chance” to the government for now.

Barnier’s Cabinet is mostly composed of members of his Republicans party and centrists from French President Emmanuel Macron’s alliance who altogether count just over 210 lawmakers.

Left-wing lawmakers denounced the choice of Barnier as prime minister as they were not given a chance to form a minority government, despite securing the most seats at the National Assembly. This government “is a denial of the result of the most recent legislative elections,” the motion read.

Olivier Faure, head of the Socialist Party, denounced a “democratic hijacking,” adding that “on July 7, it was the New Popular Front that came out on top.”

Barnier strongly rejected Faure's accusations his government is “illegitimate.”

“I don’t need the government to be reminded it’s a minority one,” Barnier said. “Nobody has an absolute majority.”

The new government is soon to face its biggest challenge as Barnier made a priority of remedying France’s indebted public finances.

“The reality we have to tell the French is that we are spending too much… This cannot go on,” Barnier said.

“We must fix the (state) budget, reduce our public spending, and we will indeed be asking for an exceptional tax from companies and the wealthiest French people... It’s always better to seek to be responsible rather than popular.”

France is under pressure from the European Union’s executive body to reduce its colossal debt.

The country was placed earlier this year by the EU's executive arm under a formal procedure for running up excessive debt, the first step in a long process before any member state can be hemmed in and moved to take corrective action.

In his inaugural speech to parliament last week, Barnier said he will seek to reduce France’s deficit from an estimated 6% of Gross Domestic Product now to 5% next year through a 60 billion ($66 billion) budget squeeze, with the aim to reach 3% by 2029.

To do so, he promised to cut state expenses, spend money more “efficiently” and fight tax evasion and other frauds.

The government is to formally present its 2025 budget bill on Thursday, ahead of an expected heated debated at parliament, as labor unions and left-wing opposition parties prepare to push back against some austerity measures.

A picture of her grief gripped the world. A year on, Gaza woman haunted by memories

Reuters
Sun, October 6, 2024 







FILE PHOTO: A Palestinian woman embraces the body of her niece

KHAN YOUNIS, Gaza (Reuters) - The Reuters photograph of Inas Abu Maamar, face buried in the shrouded body of her dead five-year-old niece Saly, was taken days after Israel began its military offensive on Gaza.

It has become one of the most vivid images of Palestinian suffering during the year-long bombing of Gaza, Israel's response to Hamas' Oct. 7 attack.

Saly was killed with her mother, baby sister, grandparents, uncle, aunt and three cousins. Since then, Abu Maamar, 37, has also lost her sister, killed along with her four children in an airstrike in northern Gaza.

Abu Maamar has moved three times to avoid bombing, at one point spending four months living in a tent. Today, she is back in her home in Khan Younis, in southern Gaza. Cracks run through the corrugated roof; a shower curtain covers a window-sized hole in the wall.

"We lost all hope in everything," said Abu Maamar, sitting amid rubble in the small graveyard by the family house. Beneath the debris, she said, lay Saly's grave.

"Even the grave was not safe."

Hamas' attack on Oct. 7 killed around 1,200 people in Israel, mostly civilians, and about 250 people were taken hostage, according to Israeli tallies.

Israel's campaign in Gaza, with the declared goal of wiping out Hamas, has since killed at least 41,500 people, mostly civilians, according to Palestinian health authorities.

Israel's military has said its bombardment of Gaza is necessary to crush Hamas, which it accuses of hiding among the general Palestinian population. Hamas denies this. Israel says it tries to reduce harm to civilians.

AIRSTRIKE

Before Oct. 7, Gaza had faced an extensive Israeli blockade following Hamas' takeover of the Palestinian territory in 2007. There was little work and imports were severely restricted but her family was settled, Abu Maamar said.

Abu Maamar lived with her husband near her brother Ramez' family, allowing her to spend much of her time with her nieces Saly and Seba and her nephew Ahmed.

As bombing intensified near the house after Oct. 7, Ramez sheltered with his family at his in-laws' about 1 km (0.6 miles) away. It was hit in an airstrike the next day.

When Abu Maamar heard she went straight to the Nasser hospital in Khan Younis. There she saw Ahmed, then 4, and grabbed him by the hand. She found Saly, dead, in the mortuary.

"I tried to wake her up. I couldn't believe she was dead," she said.

It was there that Reuters photographer Mohammed Salem took the picture of Abu Maamar cradling her dead niece, her body wrapped in a white sheet. The image was named World Press Photo of the year and won a Pulitzer Prize along with other Reuters images of the Oct. 7 attack and war in Gaza.

DISPLACEMENT

Israel said it had attacked 5,000 Hamas targets in Gaza from Oct. 7 until Oct. 17, the day of the airstrike that killed Saly. Palestinian health authorities said about 3,000 people had been killed by that point, including 940 children.

Israel's military did not respond to a request for comment on the strike that killed Saly.

In a comment six days after her death about the killing of another family in a different airstrike in Khan Younis, a spokesperson for Israel's military said: "Hamas has entrenched itself among the civilian population throughout the Gaza Strip. So wherever a Hamas target arises, the IDF will strike at it in order to thwart the terrorist capabilities of the group, while taking feasible precautions to mitigate the harm to uninvolved civilians."

By December, with Palestinian authorities saying the death toll in Gaza had topped 15,000 and Israel preparing to expand its ground assault to southern Gaza, Abu Maamar and other family members moved to Mawasi, a beach area where displaced people sought refuge in tents. They moved twice more as Israeli forces battled Hamas across the south, ordering civilians first from Khan Younis and then the city of Rafah.

Now back home, Abu Maamar says there is no point moving any more. She picked up Saly's favourite outfit, a black dress with traditional red Palestinian embroidery, and pressed it to her face.

"We are just waiting for the cascade of blood to stop."

(Reporting by Mohammed Salem; Writing by Angus McDowall; Editing by Janet Lawrence)

Investigation finds widespread discrimination against Section 8 tenants in California

Associated Press
Tue, October 8, 2024 

FILE - A boy walks past an apartment building as people gather around an inflatable waterslide during a birthday party at the Nickerson Gardens housing project in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles, Wednesday, June 10, 2020. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong, File)


LOS ANGELES (AP) — California tenants who held Section 8 housing vouchers were refused rental contracts by more than 200 landlords, including major real estate firms, according to an undercover investigation that found widespread discrimination in the state.

The investigative nonprofit Housing Rights Initiative announced Tuesday that it has filed complaints with the California Civil Rights Department, alleging landlords violated a state law against denying leases to renters who pay with vouchers. It seeks penalties against 203 companies and individuals.

The nonprofit is also pushing for more state funding to adequately enforce the law, which Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom signed in 2019.


“This historic filing serves as an opportunity for the Governor and his housing enforcement agency to enforce the very bill he signed into law and hold violators accountable,” the Housing Rights Initiative said in a statement.

Newsom's office referred comment on the filing to the state Civil Rights Department. Rishi Khalsa, a department spokesperson, said the agency is “deeply committed to using the tools at its disposal to combat discrimination in housing.” The department has reached more than 200 settlements related to similar discrimination in recent years, Khalsa said.

“We always welcome additional support to strengthen enforcement of civil rights and we continue to work with a range of partners in those efforts,” he said in an email Tuesday.

The goal of the Section 8 program, named for a component of the federal Housing Act, is to keep rental properties affordable and prevent homelessness, which has reached crisis levels in California. Under the program, which has a long waiting list, tenants typically pay about 30% of their income on rent, with the voucher covering the rest.

Over the course of a year, undercover investigators posing as prospective tenants reached out via text messages to landlords, property managers and real estate agents to determine compliance with California's fair housing laws. The investigation found voucher holders were explicitly discriminated against 44% of the time in San Francisco. Voucher denials took place in 53% of cases in Oakland, 58% in San Jose, and 70% in Los Angeles.

In one text message exchange, an agent with EXP Realty, a national brokerage firm, tells an investigator posing as a prospective tenant that utilities are included in the monthly rate for a rental unit. When informed that the tenant has a Section 8 voucher, the agent responds, “I don't work with that program," according to the investigation.

In another exchange, a broker with Sotheby’s International Realty replies to an investigator posing as a hopeful renter, “Oh sorry, owner not accepting Section 8.”

Representatives for EXP and Sotheby's didn't immediately respond Tuesday to emails seeking comment on the claims.

Kate Liggett, program director of Housing Rights Initiative, estimates the filing represents just a fraction of discrimination against Section 8 tenants in California.

"By exposing this widespread and harmful practice, we call on the State to provide agencies like the California Civil Rights Department with the resources they need to eradicate voucher discrimination once and for all,” Liggett said in a statement.

US considers breakup of Google in landmark search case

Reuters Published October 9, 2024 

The US said on Tuesday it may ask a judge to force Alphabet’s Google to divest parts of its business, such as its Chrome browser and Android operating system, that it says are used to maintain an illegal monopoly in online search.

In a landmark case, a judge found in August that Google, which processes 90 per cent of US internet searches, had built an illegal monopoly.

The Justice Department’s proposed remedies have the potential to reshape how Americans find information on the internet while shrinking Google’s revenues and giving its competitors more room to grow.

“Fully remedying these harms requires not only ending Google’s control of distribution today, but also ensuring Google cannot control the distribution of tomorrow,” the Justice Department said.

The proposed fixes will also aim to keep Google’s past dominance from extending to the burgeoning business of artificial intelligence, prosecutors said.

The Justice Department might also ask the court to end Google’s payments to have its search engine pre-installed or set as the default on new devices.

Google has made annual payments — $26.3 billion in 2021 — to companies including Apple and other device manufacturers to ensure that its search engine remained the default on smartphones and browsers, keeping its market share strong.

Google, which plans to appeal, said in a corporate blog post that the proposals were “radical” and said they “go far beyond the specific legal issues in this case.”

Google maintains that its search engine has won users with its quality, adding that it faces robust competition from Amazon and other sites, and that users can choose other search engines as their default.

The world’s fourth-largest company with a market capitalization of over $2 trillion, Alphabet is under mounting legal pressure from competitors and antitrust authorities.

A US judge ruled on Monday in a separate case that Google must open up its lucrative app store, Play, to greater competition, including making Android apps available from rival sources.

Google is also fighting a Justice Department case that seeks the breakup of its web advertising business.

As part of its efforts to prevent Google’s dominance from extending into AI, the Justice Department said it may seek to make available to rivals the indexes, data and models it uses for Google search and AI-assisted search features.

Other orders prosecutors may seek include restricting Google from entering agreements that limit other AI competitors’ access to web content and letting websites opt out of Google using their content to train AI models.

Google said the AI-related proposals could stifle the sector.

“There are enormous risks to the government putting its thumb on the scale of this vital industry skewing investment, distorting incentives, hobbling emerging business models all at precisely the moment that we need to encourage investment,” Google said.

The Justice Department is expected to file a more detailed proposal with the court by Nov 20. Google will have a chance to propose its own remedies by Dec 20.

US District Judge Amit Mehta’s ruling in Washington was a major win for antitrust enforcers who have brought an ambitious set of cases against Big Tech companies over the past four years.

The US has also sued Meta Platforms, Amazon.com and Apple claiming they illegally maintain monopolies.

Some of the ideas in the Justice Department’s proposals to break up Google had previously garnered support from Google’s smaller competitors such as reviews site Yelp and rival search engine company DuckDuckGo.

Yelp, which sued Google over search in August, says spinning off Google’s Chrome browser and AI services should be on the table.

Yelp also wants Google to be prohibited from giving preference to Google’s local business pages in search results.

 Biden's grade on the economy jumps to an A

Rick Newman · Senior Columnist
Tue, October 8, 2024

President Joe Biden came into office in 2021 with a strong economy that gradually weakened as inflation hammered Americans’ purchasing power. With inflation now fading, the Biden economy is once again looking as solid as it did when Biden’s term first began.

Since July, the Biden economy has improved two notches on the Yahoo Finance Bidenomics Report Card, from a B+ to a solid A. That’s the same mark our report card gave the economy during Biden’s first month in office, in January 2021.

Our Bidenomics Report Card tracks six metrics using data provided by Moody’s Analytics: total employment, manufacturing employment, real earnings adjusted for inflation, exports, the stock market’s performance, and GDP growth per capita. In each of those categories, we compare performance under the current president with seven prior presidents going back to Jimmy Carter in the 1970s at the same point in their first term. (Here’s our full methodology.)

Compared with those prior presidents, the Biden economy is strongest in three out of six categories: employment, manufacturing employment, and GDP growth. The Biden economy is third out of eight in stock performance and second out of five in exports (that data only goes back to 1993).

The weakest mark for Biden has come in average hourly earnings, because high inflation in 2022 and 2023 eroded the value of a typical paycheck. For seven months in 2022, Biden’s score on earnings was the lowest of the eight presidents.

But inflation has dropped from a peak of 10% in 2022 to just 2.5% now, which is close to normal. Real earnings growth under Biden flipped from negative to positive earlier this year, meaning that wages are once again growing by more than inflation. Biden now ranks third out of eight on real earnings growth, which is the main thing pushing his grade up.

An A grade on our report card isn’t exactly the same as a great economy. Since we’re comparing the current president to recent predecessors, our grade only reflects how he’s doing relative to them. There can still be notable weaknesses, such as housing and food costs that remain too high for many families on a budget.

Still, our A grade is consistent with many other analyses of the current economy. Employers have created more than 16 million jobs under Biden, the most during any presidential term. Earlier this year, manufacturing employment hit a 16-year high. There hasn’t been a recession in more than four years, and Goldman Sachs recently lowered its 12-month recession odds from 20% to 15%, in line with the historical average.

There's also been a notable improvement in voter trust for Democrats on the economy since Vice President Kamala Harris replaced Joe Biden as the party's presidential candidate over the summer. In several polls, Harris's rating on the economy is higher than Biden's was just a few months ago. That could be because voters simply find Harris more engaging or accessible, or it could reflect actual improvements in the economy that ordinary people are starting to notice. Whatever the cause, it obviously comes at the right time for Harris, with Election Day less than a month off.

That makes comparisons between the Joe Biden and Donald Trump economies more important than any other past president. Biden is out, but Harris is still the incumbent responsible for the Democrats' record. Trump has his own record, dating to his own term as president, giving voters a backward-looking guide to whether Harris or Trump will be better for the economy.


The data gives Harris, via Biden, a clear edge in three categories and Trump an edge in two. You can see how the two compare by clicking on each tab in the charts above. The Biden-Harris economy is the blue line in each of the charts.

Biden outdoes Trump in total employment, manufacturing employment, and GDP growth. At this point in Trump’s term, the COVID pandemic had triggered a deep, if brief, recession, which damaged Trump’s economic numbers. But Biden did better in all three categories even if you only compare the first three years of each term, excluding COVID from Trump’s record.

Trump has done better on inflation and on real income growth, which is related to inflation. For voters who feel like the economy was better under Trump, that’s probably related to incomes that consistently rose by more than inflation, both before and after COVID.

US President Joe Biden arrives to speak about the Biden-Harris administration's progress in replacing lead pipes and creating well paying jobs in Milwaukee, Wisc., Oct. 8, 2024. (MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty Images) · MANDEL NGAN via Getty Images

Drop Rick Newman a note, follow him on X, or sign up for his newsletter.

On stock performance, Biden leads Trump by a bit at the moment, but they’ve gone back and forth on that. We don’t include exports among the charts above because it’s not intuitive to consumers, but Biden has a strong edge there too.

Overall, the highest grade Trump earned when we ran the Trumponomics Report Card — with the same methodology as the Biden project — was an A-. Trump ended his term with a C because of the COVID disruptions. Barring anything disastrous, Biden seems likely to end his term next January with a B+ or better, and he could sustain the A grade he enjoys now.


Partisans can come up with plenty of pet reasons why Biden or Trump is better for the economy. In reality, the US president has less control over the economy than many people think. The US economy is a gargantuan organism affected by thousands of inputs from all over the world, and presidential policies are a tiny fraction of those.

There’s an important caveat, however: the vast amount of fiscal and monetary stimulus Congress and the Federal Reserve enacted in 2020 and 2021 to jolt the economy out of a COVID depression. Most of that happened during Trump’s final year in office, which prevented the immediate downturn from being a lot worse. Much of that also carried into Biden’s term, powering spending, hiring, and growth beyond what it probably would have been otherwise.

Biden signed yet another stimulus bill into law after taking office in 2021, which juiced the economy even more. That also contributed to the inflation that became Biden’s biggest economic vulnerability. And voters seem to have punished Biden more for high inflation than they rewarded him for a booming job market. Biden’s approval rating sank as inflation went up, but it never recovered as inflation came down. That leaves Biden with a huge asterisk next to his accurate claim of the most jobs created under any presidential term.

Whatever voters remember about the Biden or Trump economies, the old investing maxim probably applies: Past results don’t guarantee future performance. The next president almost certainly won’t ride an economy gassed up by unprecedented stimulus measures the way Trump and Biden both did. During the next few years, the economy could be driven more by things Americans don't get to vote on than by the one they do.

Rick Newman is a senior columnist for Yahoo Finance. Follow him on X at @rickjnewman.

Column: A conservative think tank says Trump policies would crater the economy — but it's being kind

Michael Hiltzik
Tue, October 8, 2024 

If you are wired into the flow of campaign news — as I am, for my sins — you will be inundated this week with reports of a new analysis of the fiscal impact of the economic proposals of Donald Trump and Kamala Harris.

Long story short: Trump's would be much worse in terms of increasing the federal debt than Harris'. According to the study issued Monday by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, Harris' policies would expand the debt by $3.5 trillion over 10 years, Trump's by $7.5 trillion.

These are eye-catching figures, to be sure. They're also completely worthless for assessing the true economic effect of the candidates' proposals, for several reasons.

The disappearance of migrant workers...dries up local demand at grocery stories, leasing offices, and other nontraded services. The resulting blow to demand for all workers overwhelms the reduction in supply of foreign workers.

The Peterson Institute for International Economics, on Trump's deportation plan

One is the committee's single-minded, indeed simple-minded, focus on the direct effect of the proposals on the federal deficit and national debt. That's not surprising, because (as I've reported in the past) the CRFB was created to be a deficit scold, funded by the late hedge-fund billionaire Peter G. "Pete" Peterson.

For instance, the CRFB has been a consistent voice, as was Peterson, in campaigns to cut Social Security and Medicare benefits on the preposterous grounds that the U.S., the richest country on Earth, can't afford the expense. (Peterson's foundation still provides a significant portion of the committee's budget.)


This focus on the national debt and the federal deficit as a linchpin of economic policy dates back to the 1940s among Republicans and the 1970s among Democrats. Throughout that period it made policymaking more austere and left the country without the resources to combat real economic needs such as poverty while increasing inequality.

The harvest, as economist Brad DeLong of UC Berkeley has noted, was the rise of a policy that failed everyone but the rich. Trump would continue that policy; Harris would continue the Biden administration's effort to return the U.S. to a government that serves all the people.

Another problem with the analysis is that the candidates' proposals are inchoate — as the committee acknowledges. The committee cobbled together their purported platforms from written policy statements, social media posts, and dubious other sources and then absurdly claimed that its effort helped to "clarify [the] policy details."

The worst shortcoming of the CRFB's analysis is that it's hopelessly narrow. Its focus is on the first-order effects of the individual proposals on federal income and spending, without paying much attention to the dynamic economic effects of those policies. Would the policy spur more growth over time, or less?

The committee estimates the direct cost of Harris' proposal to extend and increase the health insurance subsidies created by the Affordable Care Act and improved by the Biden administration at $350 billion to $600 billion over 10 years; but what would be the gains in gross domestic product from reducing the cost of healthcare for the average household?
The committee barely even acknowledges that this is a salient issue. It says that in some of its estimates it accounts for "dynamic feedback effects on revenue and spending," but also says, "we do not account for possible changes in GDP resulting from the candidates’ policies."

The committee's treatment of Trump's tariff proposals demonstrate the vacuum at the heart of its analysis. It treats the income from Trump's proposal — a 10% to 20% tariff on most imported goods and 60% on Chinese imports — as a revenue gain for the federal budget. Economists are all but unanimous in regarding tariffs as a tax on American consumers, however — in other words, a tax transferring household income to the Treasury.
Donald Trump's economic policies would destroy economic growth, according to an expert analysis. (Peterson Institute for International Economics)

The committee writes: "Such a significant change to trade policy could have economic and geopolitical repercussions that go beyond what a standard tax model would estimate." As a result, "the true economic impact is hard to predict." Thanks for nothing.

Uncertainties about the details of the candidates' proposals resulted in laughably wide ranges in the committee's fiscal estimates. The effect on the deficit and debt of Harris' proposals is estimated at zero to $8.1 trillion over 10 years. For Trump's plans, the range is $1.45 trillion to $15.15 trillion. What are voters or policy makers supposed to do with those figures?

The CRFB also reports a "central" estimate for both — $3.5 trillion expansion of debt for Harris, $7.5 trillion for Trump — but doesn't say much about how it arrived at those figures, other than to say that sometimes it just split the difference between the high and low estimates, and sometimes relied on estimates of the individual proposals by the Congressional Budget Office and the congressional Joint Committee on Taxation.

I asked the CRFB to comment on the shortcomings listed above, but haven't received a response.

Despite all that, the CRFB analysis showed up on the morning web pages of major newspapers and other media coast-to-coast on Monday, as though its conclusions were credible, solid and bankable. (Here at The Times, we passed.)

Consider the CRFB's treatment of Trump's deportation policy, which he has called "largest deportation program in American history," affecting at least 11 million undocumented immigrants and millions more who are in the U.S. legally.


The committee says that might increase the deficit by anywhere from zero to $1 trillion over a decade, with a middle-of-the-road estimate of $350 billion — "chiefly," it said, "by reducing the number of people paying federal taxes." It also cites unspecified "additional economic effects of immigration."

The CRFB might have profited from reading an analysis of the deportation proposal produced in March by the Peterson Institute for International Economics, which was also funded by Pete Peterson but, staffed by economic eggheads with a wider intellectual horizon, tends to take a more intelligent approach to economic policy.

"The immigrants being targeted for removal are the lifeblood of several parts of the US economy," the institute observed. "Their deportation will ... prompt US business owners to cut back or start fewer new businesses, ... while scaling back production to reflect the loss of consumers for their goods."

Read more: Column: The Biden economy is booming. Why aren't Americans happier with it?


The institute cited estimates that a deportation program in effect from 2008 to 2014 cost the jobs of 88,000 U.S. native workers for ever one million unauthorized immigrant workers deported. Arithmetic tells us that, in those terms, deporting 11 million immigrants would cost the jobs of about 968,000 U.S. natives.

"The disappearance of migrant workers ... dries up local demand at grocery stores, leasing offices, and other nontraded services," the institute reported. "The resulting blow to demand for all workers overwhelms the reduction in supply of foreign workers."

The institute was a lot more free-spoken than the CRFB about the effect of Trump's proposed policies on economic growth. Considering only the deportations, tariffs, and Trump's desire to exercise more control over the Federal Reserve System, it concluded that by the end of Trump's term, U.S. GDP would be as much as 9.7% lower than otherwise, employment would fall by as much as 9%, and inflation would climb by as much as 7.4 percentage points.

An overly sedulous focus on deficit reduction as economic policy has caused "real harm [for] the nation's most vulnerable groups, including millions of debt-saddled and downwardly mobile Americans," economic historian David Stein of the Roosevelt Institute and UC Santa Barbara wrote last month. When it became Democratic orthodoxy under Presidents Carter and Clinton, the party pivoted to "'Reagan Democrats' and suburban white voters at the expense of the labor and civil rights movements."

As the federal government pulled back, "state budgets were ravaged," Stein wrote. State and local services were slashed. The efforts to control federal debt forced households to take on more debt.

The deficit scolds are still at it and still have vastly more credibility than they deserve. That's clear from the CRFB's analysis and the alacrity with which it was republished as "news" Monday. Efforts to turn policy back to the point that it benefits everyone, not just the rich, still have a long way to go in this country.

This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.

How Joe Biden helped fuel a Middle Eastern war and ‘collapse American credibility’

Richard Hall

THE INDEPENDENT
Mon, October 7, 2024 

In the weeks following the brutal Hamas attacks in Israel on October 7 last year, Joe Biden made clear his two priorities. He said he wanted to ensure Israel had the means to go on the offensive against Hamas in Gaza, and to prevent a wider regional war that could drag in US forces.

He achieved the first by ensuring a steady flow of weapons and aid to Israel to the tune of $17.9 billion, without any conditions on their use. On the second, he failed dramatically.

In recent days, Israel has invaded Lebanon to its north and killed hundreds of civilians in a bombing campaign. The Houthis in Yemen are firing sporadic salvos towards Israel. Iranian ballistic missiles rained down on Israel in the first week of October, and a fierce Israeli response is expected that could enflame the region further. Tens of thousands of civilians have been killed by Israel in Gaza, many of them with US weapons, and the war still rages.

Biden’s failure has been so great that some former State Department officials have wondered if it was not a failure at all, but part of a shifting strategy to reshape the Middle East.

“I think it becomes increasingly difficult to say that all of this is simply a tragedy of errors,” former State Department official Josh Paul, who resigned over US support for the war in October last year, told The Independent.

“There is, in Washington right now, a sense that maybe this is an opportunity, a time to settle scores and to sort of press reset on Iranian ambitions in the region, on Hamas and Hezbollah, without regard to the cost in innocent human lives.”

At the center of this question is a simple truth: Biden has repeatedly expressed his belief that a ceasefire is the only way to prevent a regional conflict, but as Israel pursued its maximalist war aims in Gaza and now in Lebanon, he has refused to take the necessary action required to bring one about.

That argument was given added impetus with the muted reaction from the White House to Israel’s widespread bombing and subsequent invasion of Lebanon last week, in response to Hezbollah rocket fire directed at northern Israel — precisely the outcome Biden claimed to want to prevent.

Biden called the Israeli killing of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, with several US-made 2,000lb booms, a “measure of justice,” while restating US aims to “de-escalate the ongoing conflicts in both Gaza and Lebanon through diplomatic means.”

Behind the scenes, meanwhile, US officials were speaking of Israel’s Lebanon invasion as a “history-defining moment,” according to reporting in Politico, “one that will reshape the Middle East for the better for years to come.”

The same officials said that Brett McGurk, the top Middle East White House advisor, “told top Israeli officials in recent weeks that the U.S. agreed with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s broad strategy to shift Israel’s military focus to the north against Hezbollah.”

Those competing messages have defined the administration’s response over the last year as the war spread to new borders.

A Palestinian child walks with a bicycle by the rubble of a building after it was hit by an Israeli airstrike, in Gaza City, Oct. 8, 2023 (Copyright 2023 The Associated Press. All rights reserved)

There was no question in the immediate aftermath of October 7 — when Hamas killed 1,200 people in Israel and took hundreds of hostages — that the US would give its full support to Israel.

However, it soon became clear that Israel did not have a coherent plan for what to do with Gaza beyond destroying Hamas.

By December, the situation in Gaza was “far beyond” a humanitarian crisis, in the words of medical charity Medicins Sans Frontieres. The death toll had passed beyond 20,000 and some 85 per cent of Gaza’s 2.3 million population had been displaced.

As the casualties rose, Biden played a dual role of calling for a ceasefire while sending more and more weapons to Israel for it to carry out the war.

His calls for a ceasefire were repeatedly rebuffed, sometimes humored, but never realized. Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the head of a coalition government propped up by an extreme right-wing party, appeared to have calculated that his political survival depended on continuing the war.

Biden was embarrassed by Netanyahu again and again.

In February, the president told the world that he believed a ceasefire agreement was just days away. It never came.

In July, Israeli media reported that Netanyahu spiked a hostage and ceasefire deal by making new demands in the 11th hour.

There’s never any accountability, and they just continue to flood Israel with more and more weapons. And Israel could not continue this without that influx of weapons

Annelle Sheline, former foreign affairs officer at the US State Department

Just last month, the US believed it had reached an understanding with Israel over a ceasefire in Lebanon — again, Netanyahu walked back his comments.

“I don’t know why Netanyahu said what he said and I don’t know what his considerations were — whether they were political or operational. Ask him why he said that,” White House spokesman John Kirby said.

Opposition to US support for the war grew internally. The State Department saw an unprecedented number of internal dissent memos — a formal process by which staff can express concerns internally about a policy.

At least twelve US government officials have resigned in protest over the war, from across several departments.

Throughout, Biden’s team would brief the media about his private rage, or his being blindsided by Netanyahu’s actions. And yet he still refused, repeatedly, to use the tools he had at his disposal to pressure Israel to end the conflict, even as it became clear that Israel was expanding its ambitions beyond Gaza.

The Biden administration would claim shock after each episode, but Paul believed the repeated cycle was a sign that it wasn’t serious about stopping the growing war.

“These are not idiots. These are people who have been around the block,” said Paul, the former State Department official, of Biden’s national security advisors. “You might pull the wool over their eyes when it comes to ceasefire talks once or twice or three times, but when you’ve done it a dozen times, I think it suggests that there is more going on here.”

Annelle Sheline, who worked in the State Department for one year as a foreign affairs officer before resigning in February, now too believes that some in his administration are seeing opportunity in this regional war, rather than trying to end it.

“Having been on the inside and reading the communiques, they’re saying the same things that they say publicly about supporting a ceasefire, but then the actions say the opposite,” she told The Independent.

“There’s never any accountability, and they just continue to flood Israel with more and more weapons. And Israel could not continue this without that influx of weapons,” she added.

Dr Sheline and other former State Department officials have singled out Brett McGurk, the White House coordinator for the Middle East and North Africa, as a key driving force behind the administration’s abandonment of a comprehensive ceasefire.

“It’s arguable at this point to what extent Biden is really with it, but I think people like Brett McGurk, Jake Sullivan, and Antony Blinken, they see this as a way to contain Iran,” Sheline said.

“Especially Brett McGurk, who has been anti-Iran through several administrations,” she added.

A man walks amid the rubble of a building levelled in an overnight Israeli airstrike that targeted the neighbourhood of Moawwad in Beirut's southern suburbs on October 3, 2024. (AFP via Getty Images)

The last war between Israel and Hezbollah was equally destructive. In 2006, a Hezbollah ambush on a group of Israeli soldiers on the border led to a devastating 34-day conflict that led to the deaths of 1,200 people in Lebanon, mostly civilians, and 157 Israelis, mostly soldiers.

Israel attacked Lebanon’s infrastructure and displaced more than 1 million people.

Then-Secretary of State in the Bush administration, Condoleezza Rice, described Israel’s bombing campaign as “the birth pangs of a new Middle East.”

She was right, but not in the way she thought. Hezbollah emerged from that conflict stronger than before — it was emboldened and claimed victory for surviving, and for continuing to fire rockets throughout.

In the years following it has grown stronger still. It gained valuable fighting experience on the battlefields of Syria’s civil war, its stockpile of Iranian-made and self-produced rockets has never been higher and its capability has improved.

Today, the Biden administration appears to be making a similar calculation — that military force can reshape the Middle East and create a more favorable outcome for both US and Israeli interests.

Brian Finucane, who worked for a decade in the Office of the Legal Adviser at the State Department advising on issues related to the laws of war, arms transfers and war crimes, told The Independent that without a shift in policy from the White House, the regional crisis will only get worse.

“Unless there is a dramatic course correction we’re going to see more suffering and death and more hostilities involving US forces with the Houthis and potentially in Iraq and Syria,” he said.

A woman looks at pictures and memorials for Israeli festival goers who killed by Hamas at the site of the Supernova Music Festival rave near Kibbutz Reim, Southern Israel, 19 September 2024. (EPA)

The actions that the Biden administration should take today, he argued, are no different from those first months of the Gaza war.

“It would be picking up the phone and telling Netanyahu he’s got to do the hostage deal with Hamas, bring about a ceasefire in Gaza, withdraw troops from Lebanon, or the US government is pulling the plug on further arms transfers,” he said.

The implications of not changing course could be hugely consequential, at home and abroad. The involvement of the US in a Middle East war going into an extremely close election will no doubt help Donald Trump against Vice President Kamala Harris.

The refusal of the Biden administration to follow the law on arms transfers to countries suspected of committing human rights abuses also sets a dangerous precedent that Trump can utilize, as will Biden’s campaign against the Houthis in Yemen without seeking Congressional approval.

“It has further weakened the already fairly weak US domestic law and guardrails on the use of force, which will make it easier for President Trump, or whoever succeeds Biden, to once again go to war without congressional authorization,” Finucane said.

Dr Sheline also believes that the US has squandered its international standing and long-term objectives with regard to containing Russia and China for a less important strategic gamble in the Middle East.

“I think they’re actually undermining those policies. The US has squandered international credibility and support, like the coalition that Biden built to counter Russia in Ukraine. He seems to be willing to sacrifice them in order to continue to give these illegal weapons to Israel,” she said.

Paul believes that Biden’s personal history with Israel has clouded his view. His commitment to Israel seemed to be shaped by an idea of a country that no longer existed — one where the US supported an ostensibly liberal state in wars against its autocratic Arab neighbors, not a far-right government against a largely defenseless population.

“I think Biden is unique about this; he is an ideologue when it comes to Israel in a way that I don’t think any of his predecessors have been,” he said.

The State Department’s reputation, he added, after a year of defending Israel’s gross human rights abuses in Gaza, has been irreparably damaged.

“I worked with the State Department spokespeople, and to see them not only debasing themselves, but beclowning themselves, when the facts are so evident, is deeply disappointing.

“It has been very sad for me to see this collapse of American credibility,” he added.

Democratic senator accuses Trump of steering FBI investigation of Justice Brett Kavanaugh

I LIKE BEER SENATOR, DO YOU LIKE BEER?

Bart Jansen, USA TODAY
Updated Tue, October 8, 2024 

WASHINGTON – Former President Donald Trump said in 2018 the FBI would have “free rein” to investigate allegations against his Supreme Court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh, but a report Tuesday from a Senate Democrat found the investigation “flawed and incomplete” without following up on multiple leads.

The report from a member of the Judiciary Committee, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., criticized the FBI for not investigating more fully the claims of Kavanaugh’s alleged sexual misconduct described by two women. Kavanaugh has denied the allegations.

Whitehouse’s report said the FBI didn’t investigate thousands of tips it received, but passed them along to the White House.

“The supplemental background investigation was flawed and incomplete, as the FBI did not follow up on numerous leads that could have produced potentially corroborating or otherwise relevant information,” the report said.

While “President Trump publicly claimed the FBI had ‘free rein’ to take any investigative steps it deemed necessary, the Trump White House exercised total control over the scope of the investigation, preventing the FBI from interviewing relevant witnesses and following up on tips,"the report concluded.

President Donald Trump speaks next to Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh as they participate in a ceremonial public swearing-in in the East Room of the White House in Washington, on Oct. 8, 2018.

Whitehouse alleges the Trump administration "kneecap(ped)" FBI investigators and "misled the Senate."

Kavanaugh didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Trump campaign spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said in a statement the "ridiculous story" about the report was a way to "delegitimize the Supreme Court and pave the way for Kamala Harris to pack the Court with Radical-Left Judges."

"Everyone knows Brett Kavanaugh was unfairly slandered and smeared with lies in a Democrat-led hoax to derail his appointment to the Court that ultimately failed," Leavitt said.

The FBI said in a statement it responds to requests from the White House counsel’s office to conduct background investigations of candidates for government posts. In contrast to its criminal investigations, the FBI doesn’t have the authority to expand the scope of its background investigations beyond what the White House requests.

"In these investigations, the FBI follows a long-standing, established process through which the scope of the investigation is limited to what is requested,” the agency said. “We have consistently followed that process for decades and did so for the Kavanaugh inquiry.”

Christine Blasey Ford closes her eyes as she is sworn in before testifying to the Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearing for President Donald Trump's Supreme Court nominee Judge Brett Kavanaugh on Capitol Hill in Washington, on Sept. 27, 2018.

The report revisits one of the most contentious Supreme Court confirmations in a generation that nearly scuttled Kavanaugh’s nomination. Kavanaugh was confirmed on a nearly party-line vote of 50-48, with Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia the only Democrat joining Republicans supporting him. Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, voted present.

Trump nominated Kavanaugh, who had served on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals for 12 years, to the Supreme Court on July 9, 2018. Allegations of sexual misconduct began to surface two months later despite not being uncovered in the FBI’s background investigation.

Trump denied at the time that he limited the FBI investigation and that "I want them to interview whoever they deem appropriate, at their discretion."

Christine Blasey Ford, a professor at Palo Alto University, told the Senate in a letter that Kavanaugh “physically and sexually assaulted her” during high school by locking her in a bedroom, climbing on top of her and attempting to remove her clothes. She later testified to the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Ford’s lawyers, Debra Katz and Lisa Banks, said the report confirmed the FBI investigation was a “sham” that gave cover to Republicans to confirm Kavanaugh.

“The Congressional report published today confirms what we long suspected: the FBI supplemental investigation of then-nominee Brett Kavanaugh was, in fact, a sham effort directed by the Trump White House to silence brave victims and other witnesses who came forward and to hide the truth,” the lawyers said in a statement. “As a result of this effort, anyone who came forward with concerns to the FBI was re-directed, without investigation, to the Trump White House which intentionally buried the information.”

A classmate of Kavanaugh’s at Yale University, Deborah Ramirez, told the New Yorker that Kavanaugh “exposed himself at a drunken dormitory party.”

Kavanaugh publicly denied both allegations.

Whitehouse, a former U.S. attorney and state attorney general, said he continued to review the FBI’s performance because of serious questions during the confirmation process for a lifetime appointment to the court.

“The Trump White House thwarted proper FBI investigation of the allegations against Kavanaugh, denying Senators information needed to fulfill our constitutional duties,” Whitehouse said in a post on X. “Senators, and the American people, deserve real answers – not manufactured misdirection – when such serious questions about a lifetime nominee emerge late in the confirmation process.”

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Trump accused of steering FBI investigation into Brett Kavanaugh

In New Report Into FBI’s Half-Baked Kavanaugh Probe, Thomas-Hill Parallels Abound

Kate Riga

TPM
Tue, October 8, 2024 



The two cases already drew obvious parallels, 30 years apart: Men are nominated for the Supreme Court, their elevation prompts revelations of alleged past harms done to multiple women, Republicans go into total-war mode to smear the women and defend their nominees, Democrats and the FBI fail to protect the women or disqualify the nominees.

But perhaps the most striking parallel between the accusations against Brett Kavanaugh and Clarence Thomas, revealed in a new Senate report on the FBI’s 2018 “investigation” into Kavanaugh’s behavior, are the witnesses — with the potential to sink the nominations — who were silenced.

“Democratic members of the Senate Judiciary Committee also individually contacted the FBI to provide names of people with potentially corroborating or otherwise relevant information who had reached out after trying — but failing — to get in touch with FBI investigators,” the report read.

The FBI received over 4,500 tips on Kavanaugh during its investigation, but only interviewed 10 people (omitting both Kavanaugh and his first public accuser, Christine Blasey Ford), per the report. These may have included more critical information like that provided by Max Stier, who could not reach the FBI investigators and would later tell the New York Times about a dorm party where Kavanaugh drunkenly pulled down his pants and his friends thrust his genitals into the hand of a female student — strikingly similar to the testimony of Deborah Ramirez, which the FBI dismissed as “uncorroborated.”

Few people remember today (if they were ever told) that Anita Hill, too, was far from alone in her historic testimony about Thomas’ workplace stalking and harassment.

Angela Wright, a former Equal Employment Opportunity Commission employee under Thomas, flew to Washington D.C. during the hearings under subpoena, prepared to tell the committee about her experience with Thomas hounding her for dates, calling her leg hair “sexy,” asking for her bra size at a farewell banquet for a coworker, coming to her apartment at night, uninvited.

“The thrust of my concerns at this point was to not watch a woman — who I believed in my gut to be telling the truth about a man who I believe to be totally capable of doing what she said he did — the thrust of my concern was not to watch her become victimized, when I knew of similar situations that I had had with Mr. Thomas,” Wright told the Senate Judiciary committee staffers, as part of testimony which would be included later in a committee report that basically no one read.

She sat in a Virginia hotel room for three days, and was never called to speak before committee members.

And she wasn’t alone. Rose Jourdain, a former elderly speechwriter at the EEOC, had been Wright’s confidant and was sitting in a hospital room, ready to confirm her allegations.

Sukari Hardnett, Thomas’s former special assistant at the EEOC, wrote a letter to the committee after trying to reach out with relevant information and being ignored, telling them that all the Black women who worked for Thomas knew they were “being auditioned,” that they could embrace the harassment and be “summoned constantly” or rebuff it and be treated as a “leper.” Her own attempt to transfer away from his attentions left her an “outcast” for the rest of her time at the agency, she wrote.

All three women expected to testify; none did. Their accusations were buried in an enormous committee report that even some of its members didn’t read until Thomas was already confirmed. In both cases, corroborating witnesses were silenced and excluded, leaving Ford and Hill alone to be smeared, threatened and discredited.

There are many galling things about the new report, published six years after Kavanaugh’s confirmation: Donald Trump’s White House’s brazen and successful efforts to curtail the investigation, the many Republican senators citing the FBI report to justify their vote for Kavanaugh, the Biden White House’s reluctance to cooperate with Senate Democrats, which prolonged the probe even further.

Biden has said that he believes Wright’s televised testimony, in addition to Hill’s, would have sunk Thomas’ nomination. It’s infuriating to imagine what the corroborating information contained in those 4,500 tips would have done to Kavanaugh — as he and Thomas sit side-by-side on the nation’s highest court, enjoying a lifetime tenure.

PAKISTAN

Four policemen involved in killing of Umerkot blasphemy suspect remanded

Our Correspondent 

Published October 9, 2024 

MIRPURKHAS: The Mirpurkhas police on Tuesday produced a local CIA official, Hidyatullah Narejo, and constables Nadir Arain, Qadir and Farman in an Anti-Terrorism Court (ATC) and obtained their four-day remand.

The CIA official and constables were nominated in the FIR pertaining to the Sept 19 encounter in Mirpurkhas in which blasphemy suspect Dr Shah Nawaz Kunbhar was killed.

The suspects had gone underground amid an uproar over Dr Kunbhar’s killing in their custody and were eventually suspended. They were tracked down by the Punjab police and arrested a couple of days back reportedly from a place near Kasur town.

The investigating officer of the encounter case, Aslam Jagirani, produced them in the Mirpurkhas ATC, which remanded them in police custody for four days.

The ATC also remanded another nine suspects, arrested for their alleged involvement in rioting, creating a law and order situation and other such offences were also remanded in police custody for seven days.

Published in Dawn, October 9th, 2024