03 November 19
Many of you stepped up for Reader Supported News in the last week of October. My area was in fact under mandatory evacuation and the situation was very unsettled. At this point calm has returned. I’ll be writing a longer piece on the my experiences shortly.
It bears noting that many of RSN’s team members were located in areas of the country not directed by California’s wildfires and they carried on very impressively.
That said November will bring with it the same fundraising challenges and high stakes for success. RSN: Of the people, for the people, funded by the people.
Seriously.
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03 November 19
Charles Pierce | Elizabeth Warren's Healthcare Plan Has All the Ambition Democratic Voters Should Demand
Charles Pierce, EsquirePierce writes: "It's good to aspire to things. It's good to throw the cap over the wall. It also helps if your plan is as carefully constructed and precisely reasoned as the one Senator Professor Warren put out there on Friday, the one that so thoroughly answers the question, "How're you gonna pay for it?" that people should be embarrassed to ask it again."READ MORE
From left: Commissioners W. David Waters, James Hurley, Frank 'Pat' Dodd, Chairman Steven Perskie, Commissioner Valerie Armstrong. (photo: NJ Casino Control Commission)
The 5 People Who Could Have Stopped TrumpMichael Kruse, PoliticoKruse writes: "In the spring and summer of 1991, a handful of state watchdogs in Atlantic City, New Jersey, considered whether to put an end to Donald Trump."
EXCERPTS: Trump was in his mid-40s and only four years earlier had published the pure brand boost of The Art of the Deal, but now he was in trouble. He needed the licenses to keep his casinos open to have any shot at staving off personal bankruptcy and a potentially permanent reputational stain. No licenses would have meant no casinos would have meant less collateral for the banks as Trump tried to dig out from under billions of dollars of debt. And the regulators had overwhelming reason to question his financial stature and overall fitness to continue. In addition to Trump’s dismal individual straits, the cash flow at his debt-riddled casinos wasn’t enough to make them profitable as the industry sagged in the throes of a recession. Trump’s “financial viability,” Steven P. Perskie, the chairman of the commission, stated at a meeting in May, “is in serious peril.” He and his fellow commissioners had a choice to make: renew Trump’s licenses and hope his bottom line improved—or strip him of them and risk delivering a debilitating blow to Atlantic City’s wheezing economy.
“He learned in Atlantic City that people would always roll over for him,” said Bryant Simon, a local historian and the author of Boardwalk of Dreams.
Some 120 miles south of Trump Tower and Manhattan, on the wind-whipped New Jersey shore, Atlantic City from the start was a hub of chintzy glitz, of lowbrow, vaudevillian stunts and gags, the cotton candy hawked on the sand-sprayed boardwalk a meager cover for the endemic corruption, the bossism and the racketeering, the grift and the graft. The state’s voters in 1976 had opted to make gambling legal within the confines of the moribund municipality, extending its lengthy history as a lodestone, in the words of O’Brien, in his book Bad Bet, for a “platoon of con artists and snake-oil salesman ready to fleece the unwary.”
In 1986, a regulator pushed back. It was Armstrong, and she all but labeled Trump a liar. Trump had promised to pay for a road-widening initiative when he acquired the Castle from Hilton, and now he wasn’t making good on the pledge, testifying that Hilton’s attorneys hadn’t made the obligation clear, and that the project, anyway, was “a disgrace” and “a disaster.”
And in the late ‘80s, Trump did nothing but get bigger and bigger, with the soaring sales of The Art of the Deal, his shopping-spree acquisitions of a yacht, an entire airline and New York’s Plaza Hotel, and increasing chatter about running for president. Riding high, he was licensed for a third casino, even after Armstrong called his bid “laced with hyperbole, contradictions and generalities.” The opulent Taj Mahal opened in 1990 and made Trump by far the largest operator in Atlantic City—not just the only owner of two properties but the only owner of three.
They listened to testimony from Wilbur Ross—an investment banker who was representing the Taj bondholders in what would become the facility’s Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing and is now Trump’s Secretary of Commerce. And they listened to Joseph Fusco, Trump’s attorney in the matter, who reminded them in May how they had gotten here—how they had licensed Trump for the Plaza seven years before, how they had licensed Trump for the Castle six years before, how they had licensed Trump himself almost 10 years before.
“They should have taken his license, given it to a trustee, and today we wouldn’t be dealing with Donald Trump in the White House,” David Cay Johnston, the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter who covered Atlantic City and the hearings of ‘91 for the Philadelphia Inquirer, told me. But “they could not bring themselves to go back and acknowledge that they got it completely wrong. They had to protect their position.”
READ MORE
Representative Scott Perry. (photo: FoxNews)
Sam Brodey, The Daily Beast
Brodey writes: "As House Democrats ramp up their impeachment push, their adversaries on the Republican side are preparing to unleash a counter-push to disrupt impeachment proceedings, discredit the whistleblower, and interrogate every person the whistleblower spoke with."
EXCERPT:
Rep. Scott Perry (R-PA) said Republicans should push for the whistleblower’s identity to be made public—something that The Daily Beast has reported that Republicans have aimed to goad witnesses into revealing during the closed-door depositions, much to the horror of Democrats and intelligence community veterans. Schiff has blocked Republicans from asking questions about the whistleblower and their identity, and several witnesses have declared in their opening statements that they would refuse to talk about the whistleblower.
“I mean, we have to know, were laws broken, what was the motivation, who did they talk to? What was the method of transmission?” said Perry, who has been at nearly every impeachment deposition, as he exited a closed-door proceeding the day the House officialized the inquiry. “These are important factors. And we have to count on, at this point, Chairman Schiff to reveal that person. He's the one of all of us who knows.”
“Somehow it has to happen,” said Perry, who decried Schiff’s decision to head off questions about the whistleblower. “At some point, essentially, the whistleblower is the accuser of the President, and the President's going to be on trial.”
Several GOP lawmakers said they wanted to hear directly from the whistleblower, though some, such as Meadows, said they’d be happy to do so in a closed-door setting with a smaller group of officials. Schiff had initially said the committees may hear from the whistleblower, but that’s now considered unlikely due to the other first-hand testimony that has come in.
Katie Hill answers questions from reporters at the US Capitol following her final speech on the floor of the House of Representatives. (photo: Win McNamee/Getty Images)
Jill Filipovic, Guardian UK
Filipovic writes: "Why don't more women run for political office? Look no further than Katie Hill and the reprehensible publication of her intimate photos."
EXCERPT:Let’s get this out of the way: Hill’s affair with the campaign staffer was wrong, and by most accounts, including Hill’s, a major error in judgment requiring serious consequences. Yes, affairs with staffers are nearly as old as campaigns themselves, and men have gotten away with this kind of bad behavior for generations. Several of those men remain in Congress, despite actions far more exploitative than Hill’s. But standards are finally changing to recognize that power imbalances in the workplace distort the ability of subordinates to fully consent to a sexual relationship, and make it even more difficult for them to refuse.
LGBTQ Rally. (photo: Valdrin Xhemaj/EPA)
Palestinian lawmaker Khalida Jarrar of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine upon her release from an Israeli prison, June 3, 2016. (photo: Haytham Shtayeh/Flash90)
Sunset Park relax against the backdrop of the Manhattan skyline. Over 75% of the population is non-white, has higher levels of air pollution and less access to healthy food options than other New York City neighborhoods. (photo: Busà Photography/Getty Images)
Any Good Climate Plan Must Address Poverty and RacismDayton Martindale, In These TimesMartindale writes: "When the Green New Deal resolution was introduced by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), many were confused by its scope: Why would a climate plan also promise housing and healthcare?"
EXCERPT:
Climate change will exacerbate regional health disparities tied to industrial air pollution. In many areas, people of color suffer greater impacts from dirty air, because they are more likely than whites to live in communities heavily exposed to pollution sources like coal-fired power plants [and] oil refineries. …
Many urban neighborhoods … are prone to the “heat island” effect: Surfaces absorb heat and raise area temperatures. Further, the prevalence of heat-trapping surfaces in a neighborhood correlates strongly with poverty and the proportion of people of color.
As seen in the uneven destruction wrought by [Hurricane] Katrina, a community’s resilience is often determined by social privilege. Marginal populations tend to lack insurance and be neglected by emergency response and healthcare systems. …
The poor and people of color are disproportionately threatened by potential floods. Their vulnerability is heightened not only because of where they live, but also factors like limited English ability and lack of access to emergency transportation. …
Extreme weather … could drastically increase energy prices, making it harder for working-class families to cover the cost of electricity. Climate volatility could also lead to job losses in the farming and tourism sectors.
