Quote:Trump has a history of calling out fraud, without providing evidence to back up his claims. No widespread claim of voter fraud by the president has ever been proved true. He even created a commission to investigate alleged fraud after the 2016 election, but it dissolved without releasing any findings.

(NPR)

(November 11, 2018 at 7:04 pm)Jörmungandr Wrote:

Quote:Trump has a history of calling out fraud, without providing evidence to back up his claims. No widespread claim of voter fraud by the president has ever been proved true. He even created a commission to investigate alleged fraud after the 2016 election, but it dissolved without releasing any findings.

(NPR)

Quote:Rep. Steve King, the newly reelected Iowa Republican with a history of incendiary comments about race and immigration, dared a conservative magazine to show evidence that he had called immigrants “dirt.”

“Just release the full tape,” King, who eked out a victory last week despite affiliations with white nationalists, told the Weekly Standard’s online managing editor Saturday on Twitter. Days earlier, the magazine reported that King had made an inflammatory joke about immigrants.

The Weekly Standard released the recording — a two-minute audio in which King can be heard bantering with a handful of supporters at the back of an Iowa restaurant during a campaign stop on Nov. 5, the magazine reported. He talked about pheasant hunting and his “patented pheasant noodle soup” sprinkled with whole jalapeño peppers he had grown himself. Around the 1:20 mark, King joked that he’d have to get some “dirt from Mexico” to grow his next batch of peppers because they didn’t have enough bite.

“Trust me, it’s already on its way,” a woman quipped, appearing to refer to the caravan of Central American migrants traveling from Mexico to the U.S. border.

King engaged, saying: “Well, yeah, there’s plenty of dirt. It’s coming from the West Coast, too. And a lot of other places, besides. This is the most dirt we’ve ever seen.”

The following day, on Election Day, Weekly Standard assistant opinion editor Adam Rubenstein, who was covering the campaign event and has been critical of King, published an article about the conversation. It included a transcript but not the audio.

In a statement to The Washington Post on Monday evening, Sarah Stevens, King’s chief of staff, accused the Weekly Standard of misrepresenting the congressman’s comments and conjuring a false story. Stevens said the congressman believed the supporter was referring to dirt coming from the “leftist media,” not immigrants. In response to the supporter, King repeated similar comments he had been making during the campaign — that the “leftist media” and liberal multibillionaires from coastal states were trying to smear him, Stevens said.

(November 13, 2018 at 10:52 am)Jörmungandr Wrote:

Quote:“Just release the full tape,” King, who eked out a victory last week despite because of affiliations with white nationalists, told the Weekly Standard’s online managing editor Saturday on Twitter. Days earlier, the magazine reported that King had made an inflammatory joke about immigrants.

Quote:President Trump’s fixation with America’s widening trade deficit is fueling his decision to impose stiff tariffs on steel and aluminum imports. Only a small group of experts share Mr. Trump’s fixation, and few see tariffs as an effective tool to narrow the so-called trade gap.

America’s trade deficit is the gap between how much in goods and services it imports from foreign countries, and how much it exports. Mr. Trump complains about the metric frequently, saying the trade imbalance is a measure of America’s weakness on trade policy.

“We lost, over the last number of years, $800 billion a year,” he said in the White House on Monday, while defending his tariffs against criticism from Republican leaders in Congress. “Not a half a million dollars, not 12 cents. We lost $800 billion a year on trade.” He went on to say that the country “lost $500 billion” a year to China, though it was not clear what figure he was citing, given that America’s annual trade deficit with China has never climbed beyond $375 billion.

Most economists do not see the trade gap as money “lost” to other countries, nor do they worry about trade deficits to a large degree. That’s because trade imbalances are affected by a host of macroeconomic factors, including the relative growth rates of countries, the value of their currencies, and their saving and investment rates. For instance, America’s trade deficit narrowed dramatically during the Great Recession, when national consumption faltered.

Mr. Trump has long argued that the trade deficit hinders economic growth, and that reducing it will accelerate American job creation. Even those who agree with that view say there are better ways to reduce the imbalance than through tariffs, which can backfire and further widen the trade deficit if other countries impose reciprocal tariffs.

“If you look across countries, there’s no evidence that high tariffs reduce your trade deficit,” said Joseph E. Gagnon, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, and a co-author of a 2017 book of policy recommendations on how to reduce trade imbalances.

“The trade deficit is a terrible metric for judging economic policy,” said Lawrence H. Summers, a Harvard economist and former chairman of President Barack Obama’s National Economic Council. Mr. Summers said tariffs would actually worsen deficits by making American companies that ship steel and aluminum overseas less competitive, and by inviting foreign retaliatory tariffs against other exports.

(NY Times, March 2018)

Quote:Early Monday morning, after returning from a European commemoration of the end of World War I and as Americans awoke to observe the Veterans Day holiday, President Trump announced a bold new strategy: refusing to recognize the votes of U.S. service members stationed overseas.

“The Florida Election should be called in favor of Rick Scott and Ron DeSantis in that large numbers of new ballots showed up out of nowhere, and many ballots are missing or forged,” the commander in chief tweeted. “An honest vote count is no longer possible-ballots massively infected. Must go with Election Night!”

Trump, who has long argued without evidence that there was widespread voting fraud in the election that he won in 2016, was riffing off the tune played by Scott, Florida’s sitting governor, who leads his race to unseat incumbent Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson by less than 13,000 votes out of nearly 8.2 million votes counted. The slow pace of counting mail-in votes, particularly in urban (and blue-leaning) counties such as Broward, Palm Beach and Miami-Dade, has led Scott to claim on Fox News — against the opinion of Florida’s top law enforcement agency — that “Sen. Nelson is trying to commit fraud to win this election.” What evidence does Scott have? None, other than that the offending South Florida counties “came up with 93,000 votes after election night. We still don’t know how they came up with that.”

As it happens, we do know where those votes came from: Among other sources, many of the ballots that arrive after Election Day are cast by military service members, contractors and dependents deployed overseas. Scott — a Navy veteran whose own administration snubbed several Florida-born Medal of Honor recipients to nominate him for the state’s new Military Hall of Fame in 2011 — should have known that from his time aboard a Pacific-based frigate. Indeed, the state he represents is one of the friendliest states of the union when it comes to accommodating overseas and military voters: It requires ballots to be sent to deployed service members at least 45 days before Election Day, and it counts those votes as long as they’re postmarked by Election Day and received in the voter’s home county within 10 days of the election — in this case, Nov. 16. Florida, in fact, has historically had a higher percentage of military personnel request and return mail-in ballots than any other state in the union.

Quote:Fox News fans melt down after their favorite network supports CNN’s Acosta: ‘You are dead to me’

(November 14, 2018 at 1:07 pm)Minimalist Wrote: This morning the Trumptards are mad at FOX for backing CNN.  I imagine pretty soon they will be looking for their own Joseph Goebbels to tell them what they want to hear.

https://www.rawstory.com/2018/11/fox-new...osta-dead/

Quote:Fox News fans melt down after their favorite network supports CNN’s Acosta: ‘You are dead to me’

How long until they start spelling "America" with a "K?"

Quote:First Tell me where the first amd guarantees you access to anyone and anywhere?

If I was @realDonaldTrump  I would solve the problem by NOT holding any press briefings! Kinda of takes the poor media (FYI that isn't needed anymore) out of the POOR LITTLE OLD ME coverage

Quote: should never defend such a rude and disruptive man. He is free to speak & write anything he wants. We deserve orderly & respectful White House Briefings

Quote:…Wow and CNN was so supportive of FOX when bh0 attacked Rosen