This Week in America

This Week in America (Post-Election, Week 2; Now that @realDonaldTrump has admitted swindling Trump U students, he's going for a bigger target)

TWiA explores the intersection of policy and politics, and most importantly, how that intersection affects real people. It's dedicated to the proposition that good government is possible, it matters, and taxpayers deserve nothing less. Its starting point is that facts are facts, science is real, data are real, and we can and must learn from history. Below you'll find facts and opinions that derive from fact, informed by a close and careful study of these issues that began in 1968 and has never stopped. Note, when we discuss generic "Democrats" and "Republicans" or "conservatives" and "liberals," etc., we're generally talking about elected officials, unless otherwise noted. Also, bonus bear news and other awesomeness. We appreciate comments and arguments, so please chime in, and if you like it, spread the word. 

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This Week in Infrastructure

Long-time readers know we here at TWiA World Headquarters are big fans of infrastructure projects. They create jobs--jobs that can't be shipped overseas, because a sweatshop worker in the Northern Mariana Islands can't fix a road in Wyoming or paint a school in Ohio. They improve productivity, because goods can be shipped faster and more safely on good roads and rails, businesses can work more efficiently with secure high-speed internet, and so on.

During the presidential campaign, both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump announced major infrastructure improvement plans. Hers took advantage of the historically low rates at which the government can borrow money right now to put funding behind projects that woud have created lots of jobs and resulted in new infrastructure projects across the country.

His plan--not surprisingly, considering he just admitted to being a con man (yes, if you pay a $1 million fine to the state of New York for violating state laws in your Trump University scheme, you are a swindler; self-dealing by buying yourself presents with money donated to your "charity" is also against the law, and the Trump Foundation just admitted to that, too)--is a scam.

Here's how his plan works--he's not spending public money on infrastructure projects. He's spending it on tax rebates to private businesses working on infrastructure projects.

What's the difference? There are many. In the Washington Post, Ronald A. Klain describes some of them. Klain ran the White House's American Recovery and Renewal Act team from 2009-2011, and worked with Clinton on her infrastructure plan.

He writes: "First, Trump’s plan is not really an infrastructure plan. It’s a tax-cut plan for utility-industry and construction-sector investors, and a massive corporate welfare plan for contractors. The Trump plan doesn’t directly fund new roads, bridges, water systems or airports, as did Hillary Clinton’s 2016 infrastructure proposal. Instead, Trump’s plan provides tax breaks to private-sector investors who back profitable construction projects. These projects (such as electrical grid modernization or energy pipeline expansion) might already be planned or even underway. There’s no requirement that the tax breaks be used for incremental or otherwise expanded construction efforts; they could all go just to fatten the pockets of investors in previously planned projects."

Note: those projects aren't likely to be underway in the areas most in need of infrastructure projects--impoverished rural and urban areas (which are also, coincidentally enough, where new jobs are most needed). Government-funded infrastructure projects could be directed to those areas, but for-profit projects aren't going into those areas.

Klain continues:

Moreover, as others have noted, desperately needed infrastructure projects that are not attractive to private investors — municipal water-system overhauls, repairs of existing roads, replacement of bridges that do not charge tolls — get no help from Trump’s plan. And contractors? Well, they get a “10 percent pretax profit margin,” according to the plan. Combined with Trump’s sweeping business tax break, this would represent a stunning $85 billion after-tax profit for contractors — underwritten by the taxpayers.

Second, as a result of the above, Trump’s plan isn’t really a jobs plan, either. Because the plan subsidizes investors, not projects; because it funds tax breaks, not bridges; because there’s no requirement that the projects be otherwise unfunded, there is simply no guarantee that the plan will produce any net new hiring. Investors may simply shift capital from unsubsidized projects to subsidized ones and pocket the tax breaks on projects they would have funded anyway. Contractors have no obligation to hire new workers, or expand workers’ hours, to collect their $85 billion.

To be sure, some of this spending might, incidentally, result in job creation. But that's not its primary purpose--nor is its purpose to improve infrastructure where it's most needed. Instead, it's an infrastructure plan as created by a developer who's used to abusing the tax system to make himself richer. In this case, he'll make some rich investors and contractors richer--at the cost of the taxpayers. It also, as Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman explains, results in the privatization of public assets, so the public can't benefit from them in the long run.

Some congressional Democrats are looking for areas where they can compromised with a President Trump, because a) they need the votes of Trump voters in 2018, and b) Democrats, in general, are in office because they want to help the American people, and therefore aren't drawn to obstruction as a guiding principle, as congressional Republicans were during the eight years of the Obama administration. Democrats tend to react favorably to infrastructure projects, for the reasons mentioned above.

But they shouldn't look at Trump's plan as a jobs plan or an infrastructure plan. It's purely a redistribution-of-wealth plan, from the taxpaying public to the already wealthy. Its costs will drive up the deficit, which will give congressional Republicans yet another excuse to slash funding on the social safety net--because after all, making the rich richer is more important than securing Social Security and Medicare (which they want to destroy anyway).

What can you do? If you're lucky enough to live in a state or district represented by Democrats, call their offices and tell them to resist Trump's infrastructure plan. There are ways to do this right, to fix things that need fixing and create good jobs in the process. But this isn't one of those. This is the wrong plan, for the wrong reasons, and it needs to be stopped.

This Week in Memory

If Trump really does put together an actual infrastructure plan--one that involves the government directly spending money on needed projects--and can get it through a Congress that resisted all such efforts during the Obama administration, it will be good for jobs and for the economy. Even his plan as described might create some jobs, and some of the money spent will trickle down into the economy. But it's also important to remember--though Trump, and those congressional Republicans, have been lying about it for years--that the economy is already on an upswing. Republicans lie about "job-killing regulations" and "job-killing Obamacare" in the middle of the longest stretch of job creation in American history. They say the deficit is growing, when in fact it's been shrinking at a rate not seen since WWII (and all the Republican deficit hawks in Congress will suddenly change their tune as soon as Trump takes office, if not before--suddenly, deficit and a growing national debt will no longer be a problem). They say the economy's in a shambles, when in fact most Americans are making more money than they have at any point in the 21st Century and the stock market us booming.

It's not just the economy, of course. It's crime--violent crime is down nationwide, but Trump spent the last 18 months telling us that it's everywhere. It's terrorism--since 9/11, there hasn't been a major terror attack in the US, despite a few lesser ones like Boston and Orlando committed by people with little or no demonstrable connection to outside terror groups. ISIS is locked in a losing battle in Mosul and is under attack in Raqqa, and has lost most of the territory it's gained. But Trump and the Republicans claim Obama hasn't kept us safe and Islamic terrorists pose an existential threat. It's the border--illegal immigration is at 21st Century lows, but Trump and the Republicans claim people are flooding across the border, committing crimes and taking away jobs. It's energy--we've become a nation with so much that we can export it instead of importing all our fossil fuels, and we've made remarkable strides in green energy.

The point is, in these and many other areas, the Obama administration has been remarkably successful. All along, Republicans have denied that success. Now that they'll have control over all three branches of the federal government, how quickly will they announce that they've made "great strides" in undoing Obama's damaging legacy? They'll claim credit for breaking ISIS's back, they'll claim credit for lowering crime, they'll claim credit for restricting illegal immigration, and they'll claim credit for a strong economy. They'll be right that those things have all improved, but they've improved because they've been on an upward trajectory for years. The lesson is that if you refuse to acknowledge favorable reality during one administration, you can claim lots of progress early in the next one.

We'll need to remember that those claims are lies, just like their refusal to acknowledge the truth during Obama's years were lies.

This Week in Emoluments

What are emoluments? According to Merriam-Webster, "the returns arising from office or employment usually in the form of compensation or perquisites." In this particular case, though, we're discussing them as they relate to the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution (also called the Nobility Clause), which states, "No title of nobility shall be granted by the United States: and no person holding any office of profit or trust under them, shall, without the consent of the Congress, accept of any present, emolument, office, or title, of any kind whatever, from any king, prince, or foreign state."

According to a piece in Think Progress and the analysis of Richard Painter, the chief ethics counsel for President George W. Bush, Trump has already set himself to violate that clause on his first day in office:

Friday evening, the Washington Post reported that about 100 foreign diplomats gathered at President-elect Donald Trump’s hotel in Washington, DC to “to sip Trump-branded champagne, dine on sliders and hear a sales pitch about the U.S. president-elect’s newest hotel.” The tour included a look at the hotel’s $20,000 a night “town house” suite. The Post also quoted some of the diplomats saying they intended to stay at the hotel in order to ingratiate themselves to the incoming president.

“Why wouldn’t I stay at his hotel blocks from the White House, so I can tell the new president, ‘I love your new hotel!’” said one diplomat from an Asian nation. “Isn’t it rude to come to his city and say, ‘I am staying at your competitor?’”

The incoming president, in other words, is actively soliciting business from agents of foreign governments. Many of these agents, in turn, said that they will accept the president-elect’s offer to do business because they want to win favor with the new leader of the United States.

According to Painter, Trump's “only good answer is to sell the hotel or give it to his kids (and pay the gift tax) by January 20.” If he still owns it then, he'll be profiting from foreign governments trying to curry his favor.

Trump, however, is making no pretense of trying to separate his business interests from his presidential duties. Most presidents with any real wealth place their financial affairs in a blind trust--assets are sold and replaced with ones of equal value, but the president doesn't know what those are, so can't design policy specifically to benefit himself financially. Trump has said, instead, that his family will run his business. But that same family is also deeply involved in his White House affairs. Daughter Ivanka attended his first meeting with an international head of state, and he's talking about giving her husband, Jared Kushner, an influential West Wing role. Where there's no wall between the Oval Office and the executive suite, the prospects of corruption are ever-present. Here, Paul Waldman runs through some other opportunities for self-enrichment, and the Washington Post took a deep dive into some of his business interests around the world.

And again, this is a president who's just admitted to being a con man. How can he be trusted? Answer: he can't.

This Week in Attorneys General

How racist is Sen. Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III (R/AL), Trump's pick for Attorney General? Remember, that person runs the Department of Justice, which is, among other things, responsible for protecting the civil rights of all Americans. The Atlantic runs down some of the reasons Sessions is entirely wrong for that job. Judging by his record and his stated beliefs, straight white people will have a protector, but everybody else is on their own.

Side Note: Here's a dissenting view by a writer who thinks Sessions probably isn't a racist, and he offers some examples of good works Sessions has done. That said, this writer is also concerned about the idea of Sessions as A.G.

This Week in Nazis

If these pictures aren't disturbing to you, you've lost your capacity to be disturbed. The first, from The Atlantic, shows audience members at a white nationalist conference celebrating Trump's victory with the Nazi salute. The second is a since-deleted tweet from a restaurant at which conference members held a dinner [much to the dismay of the restaurant's owners, who said the reservation was made under a name that didn't indicate who was booking the space. They've since donated all the proceeds from that night to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL)]. For those of us born in the wake of WWII, to see Americans employing the Nazi salute is beyond the pale. )But at least now we know what Tila Tequila's been doing since MySpace imploded--polishing up her Iron Cross forr the new Reich).

(Daniel Lombroso/The Atlantic)

 

Side Note: Trump announced this week that he's not going to prosecute Hillary Clinton, after all. Some elements of his base are outraged at this "cave," but we'd like to point out that presidents are not prosecutors. In the United States of America, prosecuting her would never have been his decision to make. In a dictatorship, sure, that happens all the time. For Trump to even announce (through a spokesperson) that he's decided not to prosecute is itself a sign of creeping fascism, because the clear implication is that it would have been his call, either way.

If America worked like that, President Obama could "prosecute" Trump today for his Trump University scam and Trump Foundation self-dealing, two crimes to which Trump has just admitted, and lock him up before he can even take office. But despite the absurd right-wing claims of Obama's "tyranny," he's not a would-be Fuhrer. Trump, however, keeps talking like the rule of law means nothing, the Rule of Trump everything.

Congress will certainly continue its endless "investigations" of Clinton, wasting tax dollars out of partisan rancor and spite. Whether Trump's DoJ will investigate her remains to be seen, but the call isn't the president's. Any confirmation hearings of Sen. Sessions should include questions about whether his DoJ will be appropriately independent of a president who clearly doesn't understand how our government works.

This Week in Humiliation

After losing to Trump in the primaries, then endorsing him, then being reduced to carrying Trump's luggage and making fast-food runs for him (and being implicated by former aides in the Bridgegate scandal), NJ Gov. Chris Christie has gone to Trump begging for a job. Here 's Trump demonstrating how the doorman at one of Trump's properties should hail a taxi, because doorman is Christie's best employment prospect at this point.

(photo by Mike Segar/Reuters)

This Week in Rural/Urban Inequality

Rural populations elected Donald Trump, despite the fact that more than 2 million more American voters chose Hillary Clinton instead. In the last 7 presidential cycles, Democrats have won the popular vote in 6, but twice now (once through the intercession of the Supreme Court), Republicans have won the White House. This imbalance also exists in the Congress, where Republicans continually win a greater percentage of congressional seats than their percentage of the vote. The message is clear--Americans prefer Democratic policies and candidates, but the rural preferences baked into the Constitution (written when 95 percent of the population was rural) give rural populations a far larger say in American politics than they're entitled to by the numbers. Here's the history behind that, and the numbers that show had bad it really is.

This Week in DAPL

This week, police used concussion grenades, rubber bullets, tear gas, and water cannons--despite outdoor temperatures of 26 degrees--on the mostly indigenous protesters at the Dakota Access Pipeline. This is a continuing, slow-motion tragedy to which attention must be paid.

This Week in Bears

Here's an adorable video of a polar bear gently petting a sled dog. Later, some unidentified polar bear ate an unidentified dog, but there's not necessarily any connection between those two events. (Thanks to TWiA special ursine correspondent Marcy Rockwell for the tip.)

Happy Thanksgiving, America!

This Week in America - Where Do We Go From Here?

I realized, about halfway through the day after, when I last felt such despair over the fate of the country that I love.

It was on September 11, 2001, and the dark days that followed. We had been attacked from without (although some of those attackers, we would soon learn, had been living within). Thousands of Americans died.

But the world rallied around us--at least for a while. We weren't to blame for that catastrophe. We were its victims.

That perception changed, slowly, and the change accelerated when President Bush somehow decided it was more important to invade Iraq than to focus on the fight against Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, or the search for Bin Laden. The change became more pronounced when the scandal of Abu Ghraib erupted, and when Gitmo began to fill, and when it was learned that we'd given up our longstanding American abhorrence of torture.

Our moral standing in the world slipped then, and it wasn't reclaimed until after President Obama was elected and, right from the jump, declared that America was not a country that tortured. He made it his mission to end the long wars. But during the wreckage of Iraq, Al Qaeda in Irad had formed, found a foothold, and morphed into ISIS. So in some ways, the wars continue, and they've been brought home again.

This week, America elected the most unqualified person to ever hold the office of president--which, as we're often reminded, is the most powerful position on Earth. Donald Trump holds none of the qualities we would ordinarily look for. He's not intelligent, he's not honest, he's not brave, he's not trustworthy, he's not empathetic. He's cunning, in an animal way, and he has the scruples of a psychopath. He'll tell any lie, then tell the opposite lie thirty seconds later and believe it just as much. He's a bully and a probable sexual predator. He preaches hate. He doesn't believe in science or facts. He's a bigot who's become the hero of the KKK and the neo-Nazis and the--yes, deplorables--who make up the so-called alt-right.

And we elected him.

The only saving grace we can find is that he lost the popular vote, which means more Americans voted for Hillary Clinton than for him. But too many of those Americans live in the same states--the blue states, the sane states--so thanks to the electoral college, their votes weren't weighted as strongly as those in the more sparsely populated states. (In a country as evenly divided as we are, we'll keep seeing a split between the popular vote and the electoral college--and it will keep being that Democrats win the popular vote but not the presidency--unless we can do something about it.)

But he won, and for that, we can, in part, blame the terrorists who attacked us on 9/11.

This tragedy is worse, though, because we did it to ourselves.

The country has suffered from PTSD ever since. Each new attack, whether in Madrid or Mumbai, London or Paris, or here at home, puts us ever more on edge. What terrorists want is to scare us into changing ourselves, and they succeeded in that. We've become fearful. America's right wing has become ever more radicalized, and that radicalization has found an audience because enough people are afraid that they accept the nonsensical claims of the right--that President Obama might be a secret Muslim, that he's not one of us, that he's letting terrorists into the country. Only Republicans can keep us safe, they tell us, ignoring the inconvenient fact that 9/11 happened on the Republican watch. The terrorists want us to distrust each other, to pull back from engagement with the wider world, to blame all Islam for terrorism so they can frame the fight as one between the West and their religion. They've accomplished those things. With Trump's election, the terrorists have won. 9/11 was only a skirmish, this is victory.

Part of the response to Obama's election was the Tea Party movement, which also pushed Republicans further to the right. With that shift, a big chunk of America's center shifted right as well. Not all of it, obviously, but enough to widen the gap between left and right, to turn it into a nearly unbridgeable chasm. People who used to have differences of opinion can barely see each other anymore--our neighbors are distant, shadowy figures, and slightly suspicious.

Politicians who wanted government to fail, who don't believe it can work, took office and set about making sure it did fail. Many of those failed the most by it are among those who voted for Trump. When, or whether, they'll recognize that he has no interest in helping their lives improve is anybody's guess.

The Tea Party was a largely working-class white movement, with distinctly nationalist undertones. As I've written before, the Republican Party tried to co-opt it but was instead taken over by it. And now, its ideal candidate--fact-free, openly racist and religiously bigoted, actively hostile to Democrats and liberals and elites and science and "political correctness"--which really just means being nice enough and empathetic enough to choose words that don't hurt those they land on--has come along. Inspired, somehow, by his campaign, they came out to vote in the states that mattered. Fewer of them than of those that oppose them but enough.

Enough.

We didn't think Americans were that full of hate, that afraid, that bitter. But enough were. So Donald Trump became the president-elect.

What can we expect? Nothing that regular readers of this blog are likely to find reassuring.

With Republican majorities in Congress, we'll get a conservative Supreme Court justice, extending the right wing's 5-4 lock for a generation. If any of the minority justices should die or retire over the next four years, that split will be even more pronounced.

Millions of Americans will lose their health care. Americans will die because of this. The Republicans have had six years to propose an alternative, and they've failed to. But they'll repeal it anyway.

We'll pull out of the Paris climate accord, and we'll loosen restrictions on fossil fuel extraction. Hello, Keystone. Hello, DAPL. If Trump can remember its name, he'll kill the EPA. Our little-and-late efforts to not cook the planet will be derailed, and we'll once again be the world's biggest climate offender. Americans will die.

Trump's economic agenda, combined with that of congressional Republicans, will force us into another recession, and likely a depression. Banks will be deregulated, free to cause chaos like they did in 2008. More of the nation's treasure will shift from the poor and middle classes into the pockets of the wealthy. Millions will be unemployed. We'll become Kansas writ large, which will force us to limit investments in our future. Americans will die.

Social Security? Medicare? House Speaker Paul Ryan has been trying to kill those for years. Now he'll have a president who might well go along with him. Except Ryan's not conservative for Breitbart's Steve Bannon, who's the puppetmaster pulling Trump's policy strings. Trump doesn't know policy, and doesn't care about it. Bannon does. He has an agenda, and that includes replacing Ryan with someone even more extreme. Who knows that that does to Social Security and Medicare? It won't be good, whatever it is. Americans will die.

A free press? Freedom of religion? Say goodbye. Trump has already promised to make it easier for public figures to shut down media outlets that report unflattering things about them. He wants to outlaw people on the basis of their religion. He has no interest in any constitutional amendment but the Second, and the First has been right in his crosshairs for more than a year.

Black and brown Americans will suffer. Muslims and Jews will suffer. Women will suffer. LGBTQ people will suffer. We'll all suffer, but for some the suffering will be worse, because Trump has mainsteamed hate against our fellow Americans based on who they are or what they look like or who they worship or who they love. Americans will die.

We'll lose our status as both a global superpower and a moral authority. Trump has threatened to pull out of existing international agreements, to let NATO flounder, to kill the Iran nuclear deal (thereby allowing Iran to develop nuclear weapons). He's not bothered by nuclear proliferation. He's willing to let Russia call the shots in Syria, and probably elsewhere. He's easily baited--what are the chances we won't be at war somewhere within a year or two? Americans will die.

Trump has no interest in the institutions that have kept America what it is for so long. He was elected, in fact, precisely because he promised to destroy them. Whatever anyone thinks might constrain him--Congress, the courts, the press, public opinion--he's already shown he's happy to ignore them, subvert them, or crush them beneath his fascistic bootheel.

There are tiny points of light scattered across the landscape--the defeat of America's Most Corrupt Sheriff^TM, the election to the Senate of Tammy Duckworth and Kamala Harris and Maggie Hassan, and of course, the fact that most American voters chose another candidate--but there aren't enough of them to constitute a silver lining, much less a bright side.

We're in for a dark, dark time, America.

Hold your loved ones close. Walk in nature. Read good books. Listen to good music.

And be ready to work harder than ever, in 2018 and 2020. There's much to be done.

We have a country to save.

Shame On Us, America

Shame, shame on us.

Shame on us for not working harder to elect Hillary Clinton. Shame on us for not doing more, giving more, knocking on more doors, making more phone calls, imagining that the most significant election of our lifetimes would turn out okay so we could sit back and take it easy. Shame on us for letting our emotions sway our votes instead of our intellect. It wasn't hard to see which candidate was capable, which had worked hard in service to the country for decades, and which offered stability and security in a dangerous world.

Shame on our media for settling, as usual, on the easy narratives--Clinton was untrustworthy and dishonest, and Donald Trump was a buffoon not to be taken seriously. Shame on them for giving him so much free air time, because it drove up ratings and profits in the short term are more important than a sound economy in the long term. Shame on them for focusing on Clinton's email issues instead of the very real policy differences between the candidates (or the fact that while Clinton spelled out her policy proposals in detail, Trump was allowed to get away with making vague promises that he (and he alone) could "fix" things.

Shame on Gary Johnson and Jill Stein and their supporters for letting their egos and their pet issues persuade them that it didn't matter whether Clinton or Trump won, because "there's no difference between the parties." There is, and it's huge. And even if there weren't, there's also a difference between the candidates.

Shame on the elected Republicans who knew the dangers of a Trump presidency, but put party ahead of country and refused to fight against him. Giving up presidential power for another cycle would have been a sacrifice, but when we're called upon to sacrifice for our country, that's what we're supposed to do. That's called courage. Very few elected Republicans displayed any.

Shame on voters who willingly ignored--or embraced--Trump's misogny, his racism, his fascist tendencies, his religious bigotry, his anti-Semitism, his denial of science, his incitements to violence, his bullying, his pathetic revenge fantasies.

We've just elected a conscienceless authoritarian white supremacist rapist con man to the most powerful job in the world.

We're the United States of America. We should be better than that. We set a moral example for the world, and now, we've failed the world. Bigly.

Shame on us.

Election Day! Whatever Else You Do, Get Out and VOTE!

But not, you know, for the racist would-be authoritarian with the tiny fingers.

Side Note: We've seen many people saying that a Trump presidency shouldn't be so worrisome, because he wouldn't be able to do many of the things he promises to. Since most of the people saying that support Trump, one has to wonder--why support him if you don't believe he'll at least try to keep his promises? Most presidents can't keep them all, but most of them do try to follow through.

Even at that, their assurances ring hollow. Recent history tells us that the Republicans in Congress wouldn't stand up to a President Trump. They won't even stand up to candidate Trump, and as President he would have tens of millions more votes behind him, and the support of a plurality of Americans. As dysfunctional as Congress is, the federal court system is even more so, thanks to obstruction of a ninth SCOTUS justice and the blocking of many nominees for other courts.

To assume that he wouldn't even try to put his authoritarian plans into action is dangerously foolish. He has shown that he has no respect for the institutions that would otherwise constrain him, and no respect for the Constitution he would be violating. And history shows us that presidents are willing to use their power over the Justice Department and the military. Those people must not remember Archibald Cox, the esteemed attorney and Watergate special prosecutor. When Attorney General Elliott Richardson and Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus both resigned rather than obey President Nixon's order to fire Cox, Nixon kept digging around in the barrel until he found Solicitor General Robert Bork, who had no such scruples. And under George W. Bush, our intelligence agencies and military accepted orders to torture prisoners, which is against both US and international law. A president has a great deal of latitude, and he can fire people who don't obey his order and replace them with toadies who will.

America can't afford a Trump presidency. Please, vote wisely.

This Week in America (General Election Week 14.1 – Prediction Time)

Deadlines and travel have necessitated a very short post this time, but that's okay--there's plenty of political news out there. Maybe too much.

The most important news is this:

The Chicago Cubs are the Undisputed Baseball Champions of the Universe!

 

We predicted this result, and were ecstatic to see it come through on Wednesday night.

At this time in 2012--the last weekend before the election--we confidently released our Electoral College prediction. We were close--we'd given Florida to Romney, based on a hunch that he would over-perform his (very close) polling there. We were wrong--that one went to Obama--but we were right on all the rest.

This time out, we're not as certain. We still think Hillary Clinton will win, but we're not sure if it'll be a nail-biter, a blowout, or something in between.

We think Democrats will take the Senate, but probably by a razor-thin margin--and we won't be surprised if the opposite occurs.

We predict the House will, unfortunately, remain solidly Republican.

This is largely guesswork, performed days out, and we reserve the right to alter our predictions closer to Election Day, based on new events and new polling. In the meantime, if you want to follow polls on your own, you could do worse than to watch Sam Wang's Princeton Election Consortium and Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight.com. We hope Silver is being unnecessarily pessimistic this time out about Donald Trump's chances, because he greatly underestimated Trump during the primaries. A few days ago, he wrote that Trump's chances of winning the presidency were about equal to the chances that the Cubs would win the World Series, and we know how that turned out. Wang is more optimistic, and we think with reason. That said, Silver's methodology is sound and he's usually close.

For a frightening look at what could happen in a Republican-held Congress during a Clinton presidency, read Brian Beutler's piece in the New Republic. If he's correct, the next Congress could make the last few look like models of cooperation and civility.

Hillary Clinton is not the most popular politician in history, but she has her very, very dedicated fans. Many millions of Americans are thrilled that there may finally be a woman president, and millions of them are extra-thrilled that it's her. Here's why they love her.

There's still time for you to help. Donate, phone bank, walk precincts, and of course, vote!

 

This Week in America (General Election, Week 14)

This is a special midweek edition of TWiA, because it's less than a week before the election, and there's too much going on to wait until Friday.

Follow us on Twitter: @ThisWeekAmerica

Be sure to vote!

This Week in Emails (Part 1)

 Everybody who's panicked over Friday's letter from FBI Director James Comey to Congress about "new" "Hillary Clinton" emails (which might be neither new, nor Hillary Clinton's) discovered on a computer belonging to Huma Abedin and Anthony ("Weiner") Weiner needs to step away from the ledge and take a deep breath.

First, the polls were already tightening, before Friday's news. That was expected--they do that as we get closer to the election, as the undecided voters gradually make their decisions. A certain number of those will have decided to vote for Donald Trump simply because they're Republicans or Republican-leaning. Others will make the same decision, because Clinton is the de-facto "incumbent," and undecideds, by definition, have mixed feelings about the incumbent (or their choice would have been easy, and settled a long time ago). And some of the movement may have been because of the Comey letter; it's hard to tell for sure yet. Clinton's numbers haven't gone down significantly, but Trump's have been picking up a bit. Her lead was pretty large, her position in the swing states pretty strong, but Trump was edging a little closer, mostly because he had gone for a week or so without saying something incredibly stupid or offensive, and therefore, stayed out of the headlines.

Of course, we wouldn't be where we are if Republican voters had realized early on what the world would look like if it was so rare for the President of the United States to go for a week at a time without saying something incredibly stupid or offensive.

We here at TWiA World Headquarters don't think the revival of the email controversy will ultimately have a huge impact on the presidential race. There are several reasons for this belief:

• Trump has been harping on the emails for months and months, blowing their significance way out of proportion. Nothing about the Comey letter elevates the issue to the level of importance Trump has already been claiming, falsely, that they have. So his supporters are already as agitated about the issue as they can be, and Clinton's voters have already realized they're not really that important in the greater scheme of things. If the news pushes a few more undecideds toward Trump, they probably would have gone there anyway.

• The biggest risk Clinton faced at the polls was that her supporters thought she had it in the bag. If the most important race to you is the presidency, and you think it's already won, then come election day, you might just stay home instead of fighting the lines at the polls. A little touch of panic isn't a bad thing, because it's true that this will be a close election, and it's true that it's critically important to the country that Trump not be allowed anywhere near the Oval Office. So if the Comey letter scares some Clinton voters to the polls, that's good. (On the flip side, Trump supporters demoralized by his seemingly inevitable loss might also be encouraged to vote, which will still keep the election close.)

• If people are genuinely uncertain whether the email issue means Clinton is some kind of security risk, they need only look at the fact that the vast, vast majority of the national security establishment is supporting Clinton, and others haven't endorsed her but have publicly rejected Trump. The list includes all of the former presidents (except George W. Bush, who's staying mum), and a huge number of Republican luminaries, like former secretaries of state (including Gen. Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice, her predecessors under George W. Bush, and George Shultz, who served under Ronald Reagan), deputy secretaries of state (like Paul Wolfowitz and Robert Zoellick), former secretaries of defense (including Robert Gates, who served under both George W. Bush and Obama) former intelligence community heads (including former acting CIA Director Michael Morrell, former heads of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff and Tom Ridge, former CIA and NSA head Gen. Michael Hayden, former Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte), and so many more. Here's a letter from 50 Republican veterans of the national security establishment--people who have worked in Republican administrations going back to Nixon--denouncing a Trump presidency. The defense contracting community is overwhelmingly backing Clinton, too. If the email issue meant Clinton was a bigger security risk than Trump, these officials would not be refusing to support Trump, but they are.

• Trump has a bad habit of projecting his own faults on others. He calls Clinton a liar, but his campaign has left media fact-checkers scrambling and working overtime, trying to find some way to catalog the rampant dishonesty that tumbles from his lips with every paragraph. He calls her "crooked," but his business career is littered with the remnants of businesses he's cheated and customers he's ripped off. He attacks her for deleting emails, but this week, Newsweek reported: "Over the course of decades, Donald Trump’s companies have systematically destroyed or hidden thousands of emails, digital records and paper documents demanded in official proceedings, often in defiance of court orders. These tactics—exposed by a Newsweek review of thousands of pages of court filings, judicial orders and affidavits from an array of court cases—have enraged judges, prosecutors, opposing lawyers and the many ordinary citizens entangled in litigation with Trump. In each instance, Trump and entities he controlled also erected numerous hurdles that made lawsuits drag on for years, forcing courtroom opponents to spend huge sums of money in legal fees as they struggled—sometimes in vain—to obtain records."

As literally the most famous woman in the world over the course of some 25+ years in the public eye, much has been learned about Hillary Clinton. Her and her husband's financial lives and tax records are available for anyone who cares to look. They've been investigated time and again, with no wrongdoing more significant to the national interest than Bill's sexual indiscretions ever found. Dozens of books have been written about them, by themselves, supporters, and foes. Now, campaign emails have been stolen and released to the world, thanks to the corrupt partnership of Russia* and Wikileaks. We know more about Clinton than we have about any presidential candidate in American history.

About Trump, by comparison, we know next to nothing except what he and his public relations machine want us to know. As the Newsweek piece concludes, "This review of Trump’s many decades of abusing the judicial system, ignoring judges, disregarding rules, destroying documents and lying about it is not simply a sordid history lesson. Rather, it helps explain his behavior since he declared his candidacy. He promised to turn over his tax returns and his health records—just as he promised to comply with document discovery requirements in so many lawsuits—then reneged. As a result, he has left a sparse evidentiary trail that can be used to assess his wealth, his qualifications for the presidency or even his fitness. Should voters choose him to be the next U.S. president, he will enter the Oval Office as a mystery, a man who has repeatedly flouted the rules. He has solemnly told the country to trust him while refusing to produce any records to prove whether he speaks the truth or has utter contempt for it."

His running mate, Mike Pence, confirmed on Sunday that nobody's going to be seeing Trump's tax returns before the election. What is Trump afraid the voters will learn?

The real impact of the new story (or the revival of an old one) might be further down the ballot. A couple of percentage points lower can mean Clinton doesn't get the landslide election she--and we--were hoping for. That slippage could also cost her the Senate, which was briefly within grasp, and Republicans will almost certainly retain the House. Which means say hello to endless "investigations," obstruction, and dysfunction.

*Speaking of Russia, these days Trump denies any relationship with Russian dictator Vladimir Putin. Not so long ago, he was singing a different tune, claiming that he definitely does have an ongoing relationship with Putin. Which Trump is telling the truth?

Below the fold: More on emails, charity, the aftermath, lunch, and more.