September 14, 2016
The gap...
The gap between Trump’s America and Clinton’s is getting worse
By Danny Vinik
If Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton sometimes seem like they’re talking about two different Americas, there’s a reason: Their voting bases pretty much live in two different Americas. Clinton voters are concentrated in cities, in the nation’s denser and more diverse areas; Trump voters dominate rural areas and America’s wide-open landscapes.
As a lot of political observers have noted, Trump’s grim-sounding language about a downcast America makes more sense if you realize just what’s happening for his rural base. And buried in the Census Bureau’s new report on income, poverty and health insurance, released Tuesday, are two piece of further bad news for rural America—trends that could keep shaping politics well after November’s election.
For Americans living in metropolitan areas, inflation-adjusted household income rose by 6 percent from 2014 to 2015—a robust bounce back from the recession. But for those living outside those areas—totaling more than 40 million Americans—household income actually fell by 2 percent. The numbers on poverty reveal a similar trend. The number of people in poverty in rural areas did fall by 800,000, but that doesn’t appear to be because people are escaping poverty: Instead, people are simply leaving. The rural population, in that span of time, declined by five million people. Taken in total, the rural poverty rate actually rose slightly, by 0.2 percentage points. In the rest of country, the poverty rate declined by 1.4 percentage points.
The Census numbers come atop other findings about the worsening plight of rural Americans: they also face increasing addiction rates and increasing suicide rates. But Tuesday’s Census reports reveals just how unevenly distributed the economic recovery has been. Cities have bounced back, but the gains haven’t spread to those Americans.
For most of the country, 2015 was a great economic year, according to the new Census figures. Inflation-adjusted median household income rose by 5.2 percent, the official poverty rate fell by 1.2 percentage points and the percentage of people without health insurance fell to 9.1 percent. Income gains were strong across the entire income distribution, with the household income of the bottom 10 percent growing 7.9 percent. Economists across the political spectrum celebrated the new report.
Political economists have spent much of the last year debating the cause of Trump’s success, and specifically about whether his supporters are really driven by economic anxiety, or is it more his appeals to strength and even racially-tinged nationalism. It’s a difficult question to answer because those two explanations are intricately related, but some skeptics of the “economy” argument have pointed out that his supporters’ incomes are relatively high.
A growing body of evidence, however, indicates that looking just at income levels masks a larger story about the economic state of Trump supporters. In August, Jonathan Rothwell, of Gallup, released a major new survey of 85,000 Trump supporters that found that they have relatively high household incomes but live in areas with lower mobility, lower health, and lower educational levels. They are no more likely to live in areas negatively affected by trade but at all income levels, Trump supporters report higher feelings of economic anxiety.
The new Census report may offer further proof that Trump supporters are, at least partially, driven by concerns about the economy. Rothwell did not examine whether low or negative real household income growth predicts support for Trump but he did find that Trump supporters live in areas with low population density—regions that may have seen low or negative income growth in the past year, according to the new Census data.
“It is possible that Trump supporters are more likely than others to have lost income or experienced low growth, even if their incomes are relatively high,” Rothwell said in an email.
Beyond Trump, the new Census report indicates that even as the recovery strengthens, it won’t necessarily lift every area of the country. That the vast majority of Americans are finally seeing strong income growth is great news. But rural America still needs significant help. The justified anxieties of people who live there are going to be an issue for whoever becomes president.
By Danny Vinik
If Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton sometimes seem like they’re talking about two different Americas, there’s a reason: Their voting bases pretty much live in two different Americas. Clinton voters are concentrated in cities, in the nation’s denser and more diverse areas; Trump voters dominate rural areas and America’s wide-open landscapes.
As a lot of political observers have noted, Trump’s grim-sounding language about a downcast America makes more sense if you realize just what’s happening for his rural base. And buried in the Census Bureau’s new report on income, poverty and health insurance, released Tuesday, are two piece of further bad news for rural America—trends that could keep shaping politics well after November’s election.
For Americans living in metropolitan areas, inflation-adjusted household income rose by 6 percent from 2014 to 2015—a robust bounce back from the recession. But for those living outside those areas—totaling more than 40 million Americans—household income actually fell by 2 percent. The numbers on poverty reveal a similar trend. The number of people in poverty in rural areas did fall by 800,000, but that doesn’t appear to be because people are escaping poverty: Instead, people are simply leaving. The rural population, in that span of time, declined by five million people. Taken in total, the rural poverty rate actually rose slightly, by 0.2 percentage points. In the rest of country, the poverty rate declined by 1.4 percentage points.
The Census numbers come atop other findings about the worsening plight of rural Americans: they also face increasing addiction rates and increasing suicide rates. But Tuesday’s Census reports reveals just how unevenly distributed the economic recovery has been. Cities have bounced back, but the gains haven’t spread to those Americans.
For most of the country, 2015 was a great economic year, according to the new Census figures. Inflation-adjusted median household income rose by 5.2 percent, the official poverty rate fell by 1.2 percentage points and the percentage of people without health insurance fell to 9.1 percent. Income gains were strong across the entire income distribution, with the household income of the bottom 10 percent growing 7.9 percent. Economists across the political spectrum celebrated the new report.
Political economists have spent much of the last year debating the cause of Trump’s success, and specifically about whether his supporters are really driven by economic anxiety, or is it more his appeals to strength and even racially-tinged nationalism. It’s a difficult question to answer because those two explanations are intricately related, but some skeptics of the “economy” argument have pointed out that his supporters’ incomes are relatively high.
A growing body of evidence, however, indicates that looking just at income levels masks a larger story about the economic state of Trump supporters. In August, Jonathan Rothwell, of Gallup, released a major new survey of 85,000 Trump supporters that found that they have relatively high household incomes but live in areas with lower mobility, lower health, and lower educational levels. They are no more likely to live in areas negatively affected by trade but at all income levels, Trump supporters report higher feelings of economic anxiety.
The new Census report may offer further proof that Trump supporters are, at least partially, driven by concerns about the economy. Rothwell did not examine whether low or negative real household income growth predicts support for Trump but he did find that Trump supporters live in areas with low population density—regions that may have seen low or negative income growth in the past year, according to the new Census data.
“It is possible that Trump supporters are more likely than others to have lost income or experienced low growth, even if their incomes are relatively high,” Rothwell said in an email.
Beyond Trump, the new Census report indicates that even as the recovery strengthens, it won’t necessarily lift every area of the country. That the vast majority of Americans are finally seeing strong income growth is great news. But rural America still needs significant help. The justified anxieties of people who live there are going to be an issue for whoever becomes president.
Colin Powell unloads...
Emails show Colin Powell unloading on Clinton, Rumsfeld and Trump
And former Vice President Dick Cheney should 'go away already,' Condoleezza Rice writes back in one leaked document.
By Eric Geller
The newly leaked trove of Colin Powell’s emails offers a rare window into the former secretary of state’s unvarnished, at-times scathing thoughts on Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump and old political adversaries who served with him in the George W. Bush administration.
In more than two years of conversations with former White House and State Department colleagues, Powell blasted Trump as "a national disgrace and an international pariah," lit into Clinton aides for their relentless efforts to link the two former secretaries' email practices and excoriated former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his top deputy for trying to blame him for the Iraq debacle.
Powell and Condoleezza Rice, who succeeded him at the State Department, also joked that Trump seemed in over his head in running for president.
“If Donald were to somehow win,” Powell wrote in a June 23 email to Rice, “by the end of the first week in office he'd be saying 'What the hell did I get myself into?’”
“I think his attention span may be waning because national campaigning is a lot harder than just showing up at rallies,” Rice said of Trump earlier in that conversation.
Powell also offered an acerbic — even crass — description of what he saw as Clinton's liabilities as a presidential candidate, along with tabloid rumors about former President Bill Clinton's personal life, in one July 2014 email exchange with New York financier Jeffrey Leeds.
"I would rather not have to vote for her, although she is a friend I respect," Powell wrote. "A 70-year person with a long track record, unbridled ambition, greedy, not transformational, with a husband still d---ing bimbos at home (according to the NYP)."
Clinton's campaign didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.
White House press secretary Josh Earnest declined to weigh in Wednesday when asked about another leaked email, in which Leeds opined to Powell that Clinton would "pummel" President Barack Obama's "legacy if she gets a chance."
"I'll let newsrooms across the country make their own coverage decisions about what they feel is appropriate for the American public to consider," Earnest told reporters. "But I'm not going to have any comments on the contents of a private email of a private citizen."
The emails show Powell corresponding with his inner circle, his team at a speakers’ bureau and interview-hungry journalists over a period of 26 months, from June 2014 to this past August. POLITICO reviewed the correspondence this week after being given access by DC Leaks, a purported anti-secrecy site that researchers have linked to the Russian hackers responsible for breaches at top Democratic organizations. A spokesperson for Powell told ABC News early Wednesday that the emails "are accurate."
DC Leaks did not explain how it had obtained the emails.
The leaked documents continued to cause buzz Wednesday, especially the ones showing Powell’s irritation with Clinton aides’ efforts to invoke his track record while defending her use of a private email server when she was secretary of state.
The Clinton campaign’s “email ploy this week didn't work and she once again looks shifty if not a liar,” Powell wrote on Aug. 20 to someone who worked with him in the White House. “Trump folks having fun with her.”
Not that he was a huge fan of The Donald, however. “Trump just looks stupid trying to appeal to blacks and Latinos,” Powell wrote to the former White House aide on Aug. 21.
Powell’s frustration with Clinton loyalists trying to draw him into her email controversy grew so great that when James Carville, a longtime friend of the Clintons, wrote a Sept. 10, 2015, column linking the two former secretaries' email habits, Powell unloaded on him.
“Dear James,” he wrote in a note intended for Carville, “you are the latest HRC acolyte trying to use me to cover her on the email caper. All these attempts and her dissembling has just made it Worse.”
“She now is apologizing,” Powell continued, adding that “suddenly you surface to throw another log on the fire.”
Powell and Rice also repeatedly and vividly criticized Rumsfeld, the chief steward of the Iraq war.
“One day when we both have had too many drinks we can discuss why [President George W. Bush] tolerated him and why Dick [Cheney], a successful SecDef, was so committed to Don,” Powell wrote on Dec. 16. “I must say I gagged as [President George H.W. Bush] praised him as the ‘best’ at the statuary hall unveiling.”
Powell and Rice’s other targets included former Vice President Dick Cheney and Iraq war architect Paul Wolfowitz.
“Hee, hee, he won't,” Powell wrote to Rice on Nov. 26, after she said Cheney should “concentrate on quality time with his grandkids and let it go.” Powell had flagged a Fox News reporter’s interview with Cheney that delved into Iraq and other Bush-era controversies.
Rice told Powell that Cheney should “go away already!”
Powell called Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defense who spearheaded the Iraq invasion, “a f--king liar” after reading an interview in which Wolfowitz blamed Powell’s State Department for what what many experts allege were the United States’ two largest post-invasion blunders: the disbanding of the Iraqi army, and the decision to expel members of Saddam Hussein’s Baathist Party from the civilian government.
“Bremer worked for him,” Powell wrote to Lawrence Wilkerson, his former chief of staff, on Aug. 28, after Wilkerson flagged the interview for him. He was referring to Paul Bremer, who oversaw the post-invasion transitional government in Iraq. “It wasn't State, it was the President and the guy who reported to Paul.”
“This is the narrative in the Feith and Rummy books,” Powell said, referring to memoirs by Rumsfeld and Bush-era Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith. “No one has really fallen for it.”
The next day, in an email to Rice, Powell wrote that he would “never forget the lunch in your office when Don abdicated the position.” It’s not clear to what he was referring, but Powell added that Rumsfeld “should have been fired that afternoone [sic].”
Rumsfeld “got mad when I tried to pull his you know what out of the fire by sending [National Security Council Iraq specialist Robert] Blackwill out there,” Rice wrote, recalling the meeting. “And when you and I started to talk to [Bremer] directly.”
“Yep,” Powell responded, “remember his tantrum vividly.”
In their Dec. 16 exchange, Powell and Rice reflected on how their experience with intelligence agencies left them wary of blaming the Obama White House for its controversial early explanation of the Sept. 11, 2012, attack on the diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya.
“It is one reason I am not too tough on who said what to whom about Benghazi,” Rice wrote, referring to National Security Advisor Susan Rice blaming an Islamophobic YouTube video, rather than a terrorist plot, for the compound assault. The White House defended Susan Rice, saying she was relying on talking points based on early intelligence.
In her email to Powell, Condoleezza Rice wrote that “intel agencies know how to cover themselves and hang policy types (even POTUS) out to dry.”
Powell replied that the Benghazi investigation was “a stupid witch hunt” and said the “basic fault” for the attack “falls on a courageous ambassador who thought Libyans now love me and I am ok in this very vulnerable place.” He was apparently referring to ambassador J. Christopher Stevens, who was killed in the assault.
He added that he also blamed Stevens’ “leaders and supporters” in Washington, including the intelligence community, diplomatic security officials, Undersecretary of State for Management Patrick Kennedy “and yes, HRC.”
And former Vice President Dick Cheney should 'go away already,' Condoleezza Rice writes back in one leaked document.
By Eric Geller
The newly leaked trove of Colin Powell’s emails offers a rare window into the former secretary of state’s unvarnished, at-times scathing thoughts on Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump and old political adversaries who served with him in the George W. Bush administration.
In more than two years of conversations with former White House and State Department colleagues, Powell blasted Trump as "a national disgrace and an international pariah," lit into Clinton aides for their relentless efforts to link the two former secretaries' email practices and excoriated former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his top deputy for trying to blame him for the Iraq debacle.
Powell and Condoleezza Rice, who succeeded him at the State Department, also joked that Trump seemed in over his head in running for president.
“If Donald were to somehow win,” Powell wrote in a June 23 email to Rice, “by the end of the first week in office he'd be saying 'What the hell did I get myself into?’”
“I think his attention span may be waning because national campaigning is a lot harder than just showing up at rallies,” Rice said of Trump earlier in that conversation.
Powell also offered an acerbic — even crass — description of what he saw as Clinton's liabilities as a presidential candidate, along with tabloid rumors about former President Bill Clinton's personal life, in one July 2014 email exchange with New York financier Jeffrey Leeds.
"I would rather not have to vote for her, although she is a friend I respect," Powell wrote. "A 70-year person with a long track record, unbridled ambition, greedy, not transformational, with a husband still d---ing bimbos at home (according to the NYP)."
Clinton's campaign didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.
White House press secretary Josh Earnest declined to weigh in Wednesday when asked about another leaked email, in which Leeds opined to Powell that Clinton would "pummel" President Barack Obama's "legacy if she gets a chance."
"I'll let newsrooms across the country make their own coverage decisions about what they feel is appropriate for the American public to consider," Earnest told reporters. "But I'm not going to have any comments on the contents of a private email of a private citizen."
The emails show Powell corresponding with his inner circle, his team at a speakers’ bureau and interview-hungry journalists over a period of 26 months, from June 2014 to this past August. POLITICO reviewed the correspondence this week after being given access by DC Leaks, a purported anti-secrecy site that researchers have linked to the Russian hackers responsible for breaches at top Democratic organizations. A spokesperson for Powell told ABC News early Wednesday that the emails "are accurate."
DC Leaks did not explain how it had obtained the emails.
The leaked documents continued to cause buzz Wednesday, especially the ones showing Powell’s irritation with Clinton aides’ efforts to invoke his track record while defending her use of a private email server when she was secretary of state.
The Clinton campaign’s “email ploy this week didn't work and she once again looks shifty if not a liar,” Powell wrote on Aug. 20 to someone who worked with him in the White House. “Trump folks having fun with her.”
Not that he was a huge fan of The Donald, however. “Trump just looks stupid trying to appeal to blacks and Latinos,” Powell wrote to the former White House aide on Aug. 21.
Powell’s frustration with Clinton loyalists trying to draw him into her email controversy grew so great that when James Carville, a longtime friend of the Clintons, wrote a Sept. 10, 2015, column linking the two former secretaries' email habits, Powell unloaded on him.
“Dear James,” he wrote in a note intended for Carville, “you are the latest HRC acolyte trying to use me to cover her on the email caper. All these attempts and her dissembling has just made it Worse.”
“She now is apologizing,” Powell continued, adding that “suddenly you surface to throw another log on the fire.”
Powell and Rice also repeatedly and vividly criticized Rumsfeld, the chief steward of the Iraq war.
“One day when we both have had too many drinks we can discuss why [President George W. Bush] tolerated him and why Dick [Cheney], a successful SecDef, was so committed to Don,” Powell wrote on Dec. 16. “I must say I gagged as [President George H.W. Bush] praised him as the ‘best’ at the statuary hall unveiling.”
Powell and Rice’s other targets included former Vice President Dick Cheney and Iraq war architect Paul Wolfowitz.
“Hee, hee, he won't,” Powell wrote to Rice on Nov. 26, after she said Cheney should “concentrate on quality time with his grandkids and let it go.” Powell had flagged a Fox News reporter’s interview with Cheney that delved into Iraq and other Bush-era controversies.
Rice told Powell that Cheney should “go away already!”
Powell called Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defense who spearheaded the Iraq invasion, “a f--king liar” after reading an interview in which Wolfowitz blamed Powell’s State Department for what what many experts allege were the United States’ two largest post-invasion blunders: the disbanding of the Iraqi army, and the decision to expel members of Saddam Hussein’s Baathist Party from the civilian government.
“Bremer worked for him,” Powell wrote to Lawrence Wilkerson, his former chief of staff, on Aug. 28, after Wilkerson flagged the interview for him. He was referring to Paul Bremer, who oversaw the post-invasion transitional government in Iraq. “It wasn't State, it was the President and the guy who reported to Paul.”
“This is the narrative in the Feith and Rummy books,” Powell said, referring to memoirs by Rumsfeld and Bush-era Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith. “No one has really fallen for it.”
The next day, in an email to Rice, Powell wrote that he would “never forget the lunch in your office when Don abdicated the position.” It’s not clear to what he was referring, but Powell added that Rumsfeld “should have been fired that afternoone [sic].”
Rumsfeld “got mad when I tried to pull his you know what out of the fire by sending [National Security Council Iraq specialist Robert] Blackwill out there,” Rice wrote, recalling the meeting. “And when you and I started to talk to [Bremer] directly.”
“Yep,” Powell responded, “remember his tantrum vividly.”
In their Dec. 16 exchange, Powell and Rice reflected on how their experience with intelligence agencies left them wary of blaming the Obama White House for its controversial early explanation of the Sept. 11, 2012, attack on the diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya.
“It is one reason I am not too tough on who said what to whom about Benghazi,” Rice wrote, referring to National Security Advisor Susan Rice blaming an Islamophobic YouTube video, rather than a terrorist plot, for the compound assault. The White House defended Susan Rice, saying she was relying on talking points based on early intelligence.
In her email to Powell, Condoleezza Rice wrote that “intel agencies know how to cover themselves and hang policy types (even POTUS) out to dry.”
Powell replied that the Benghazi investigation was “a stupid witch hunt” and said the “basic fault” for the attack “falls on a courageous ambassador who thought Libyans now love me and I am ok in this very vulnerable place.” He was apparently referring to ambassador J. Christopher Stevens, who was killed in the assault.
He added that he also blamed Stevens’ “leaders and supporters” in Washington, including the intelligence community, diplomatic security officials, Undersecretary of State for Management Patrick Kennedy “and yes, HRC.”
North Korea
How far will North Korea go to get the world's attention?
By Adam Cathcart
North Korea has carried out its fifth nuclear test, and Kim Jong Un is smiling.
After a breathtaking run of missile and nuclear tests this year, the North Korean leader is now promising miniaturized warheads.
With the country's nuclear potential seemingly realer than ever, Pyongyang television sets are relentlessly beaming out the image of their Supreme Leader's grinning visage.
There's no escaping the fact that Kim Jong Un's North Korea presents a complex challenge to a fragmenting world.
Why did the test happen now? What is North Korea hoping to get out of it?
While there is a huge amount of bluster and untruth spun out of Pyongyang, sometimes when North Korean state organs talk, they mean precisely what they say.
We can scoff when they call their nuclear program a "treasured sword," but increasingly they are making the point that their nukes are not for bartering.
Kim Jong Un has not and probably does not want to engage in talks on denuclearization: he wants North Korea to be recognized as a nuclear state.
Because the peninsula is still technically in a state of war, there are a host of goals he might potentially have. These could range from the cessation of US-South Korean joint military exercises in and around the peninsula, to a peace treaty that would move American forces off of the peninsula altogether.
He also might wish to demonstrate to everyone around him -- both in his own country and in the region -- that he is a strong leader who can intimidate the United States, the country which every North Korean is told to hate from birth.
Nuclear weapons are also a powerful tool in demonstrating Pyongyang's asymmetric ability to stand up to the existential challenge it faces from its rival, the wealthy, US-aligned Korean republic to its south.
Since 2006, North Korea had been testing its nuclear weapons at roughly three-year intervals. But this new test follows only nine months on the heels of the last -- why? The accelerated timing of the tests is probably a combination of scientific and political expediency.
Kim Jong Un is eager to present the incoming US administration with a finished and multi-faceted nuclear threat.
Yet, in spite of a flurry of missile tests, including a crucial launch from a nuclear-capable submarine last month, North Korea has not made major inroads into the American presidential campaign as an issue.
This is perhaps not surprising, with ongoing crises in Syria, the UK's slow but ugly divorce from Europe, Hillary's e-mail history and Trump's focus on Mexico and trade.
The new tests flag North Korea as a major challenge for US foreign policy, encouraging foreign policy advisors to both Trump and Clinton campaigns to either rethink or raise the prominence of North Korea as an issue.
Trump earlier embraced the unorthodox possibility of employing a 'Dennis Rodman strategy 'of personal diplomacy, suggesting he could throw down in person with Kim Jong Un.
The Clinton campaign has loads more experience in dealing with North Korea -- as Bill Clinton's 2009 trip there to spring two noteworthy hostages suggests.
But Hillary has problems here due to her overall alignment with the Obama administration's policy on North Korea, which is charitably called "strategic patience"-- the application of sanctions on North Korea and working as closely as possible with China on the issue.
Apart from a flight by James Clapper to spring another hostage and some back-channel discussions in Singapore, Berlin, and Sweden, this strategy has gone nowhere, and the missiles and nuke tests are piling up.
Kim Jong Un also recognizes that there are huge fractures opening up between the US and China both in the South China Sea and also with respect to anti-missile defenses proposed for South Korea. While they helped the US in early 2016, today officials in Beijing are in no mood to go along with Washington in crushing North Korea's nuclear program.
For supposedly being ignorant of the outside world, the North Korean leadership is fairly astute when it comes to timing the tests. This new test should inject fresh momentum behind North Korea as a campaign issue, regardless of what NBC anchor Matt Lauer did or didn't ask the candidates.
It's becoming apparent from its actions that North Korea wants not to negotiate its nukes away, but to have them recognized, and to look forward to victory -- which it might define as relaxation of US conventional and nuclear military pressure on it.
How far Kim will go between now and the US Presidential inauguration will depend as much on resources as it will on his own whims.
Like the US or the Soviet Union in the late 1940s, there is by no means an inexhaustible supply of nuclear bombs at his disposal. Kim Jong Un's regime has shown a remarkable resilience in resisting sanctions, but there are limits, too, to the resources he can marshal from of Maoist-style Chollima campaigns or "loyalty contributions" from North Koreans making money overseas.
In the meantime, the North Korean people themselves must be exhausted after what is often backbreaking manual labor to feed their country's nuclear weapons progress. Political culture and the dictatorship in Pyongyang require that they smile as they work.
As Kim Jong Un looks out at the world today, he may very well feel stronger than ever.
By Adam Cathcart
North Korea has carried out its fifth nuclear test, and Kim Jong Un is smiling.
After a breathtaking run of missile and nuclear tests this year, the North Korean leader is now promising miniaturized warheads.
With the country's nuclear potential seemingly realer than ever, Pyongyang television sets are relentlessly beaming out the image of their Supreme Leader's grinning visage.
There's no escaping the fact that Kim Jong Un's North Korea presents a complex challenge to a fragmenting world.
Why did the test happen now? What is North Korea hoping to get out of it?
While there is a huge amount of bluster and untruth spun out of Pyongyang, sometimes when North Korean state organs talk, they mean precisely what they say.
We can scoff when they call their nuclear program a "treasured sword," but increasingly they are making the point that their nukes are not for bartering.
Kim Jong Un has not and probably does not want to engage in talks on denuclearization: he wants North Korea to be recognized as a nuclear state.
Because the peninsula is still technically in a state of war, there are a host of goals he might potentially have. These could range from the cessation of US-South Korean joint military exercises in and around the peninsula, to a peace treaty that would move American forces off of the peninsula altogether.
He also might wish to demonstrate to everyone around him -- both in his own country and in the region -- that he is a strong leader who can intimidate the United States, the country which every North Korean is told to hate from birth.
Nuclear weapons are also a powerful tool in demonstrating Pyongyang's asymmetric ability to stand up to the existential challenge it faces from its rival, the wealthy, US-aligned Korean republic to its south.
Since 2006, North Korea had been testing its nuclear weapons at roughly three-year intervals. But this new test follows only nine months on the heels of the last -- why? The accelerated timing of the tests is probably a combination of scientific and political expediency.
Kim Jong Un is eager to present the incoming US administration with a finished and multi-faceted nuclear threat.
Yet, in spite of a flurry of missile tests, including a crucial launch from a nuclear-capable submarine last month, North Korea has not made major inroads into the American presidential campaign as an issue.
This is perhaps not surprising, with ongoing crises in Syria, the UK's slow but ugly divorce from Europe, Hillary's e-mail history and Trump's focus on Mexico and trade.
The new tests flag North Korea as a major challenge for US foreign policy, encouraging foreign policy advisors to both Trump and Clinton campaigns to either rethink or raise the prominence of North Korea as an issue.
Trump earlier embraced the unorthodox possibility of employing a 'Dennis Rodman strategy 'of personal diplomacy, suggesting he could throw down in person with Kim Jong Un.
The Clinton campaign has loads more experience in dealing with North Korea -- as Bill Clinton's 2009 trip there to spring two noteworthy hostages suggests.
But Hillary has problems here due to her overall alignment with the Obama administration's policy on North Korea, which is charitably called "strategic patience"-- the application of sanctions on North Korea and working as closely as possible with China on the issue.
Apart from a flight by James Clapper to spring another hostage and some back-channel discussions in Singapore, Berlin, and Sweden, this strategy has gone nowhere, and the missiles and nuke tests are piling up.
Kim Jong Un also recognizes that there are huge fractures opening up between the US and China both in the South China Sea and also with respect to anti-missile defenses proposed for South Korea. While they helped the US in early 2016, today officials in Beijing are in no mood to go along with Washington in crushing North Korea's nuclear program.
For supposedly being ignorant of the outside world, the North Korean leadership is fairly astute when it comes to timing the tests. This new test should inject fresh momentum behind North Korea as a campaign issue, regardless of what NBC anchor Matt Lauer did or didn't ask the candidates.
It's becoming apparent from its actions that North Korea wants not to negotiate its nukes away, but to have them recognized, and to look forward to victory -- which it might define as relaxation of US conventional and nuclear military pressure on it.
How far Kim will go between now and the US Presidential inauguration will depend as much on resources as it will on his own whims.
Like the US or the Soviet Union in the late 1940s, there is by no means an inexhaustible supply of nuclear bombs at his disposal. Kim Jong Un's regime has shown a remarkable resilience in resisting sanctions, but there are limits, too, to the resources he can marshal from of Maoist-style Chollima campaigns or "loyalty contributions" from North Koreans making money overseas.
In the meantime, the North Korean people themselves must be exhausted after what is often backbreaking manual labor to feed their country's nuclear weapons progress. Political culture and the dictatorship in Pyongyang require that they smile as they work.
As Kim Jong Un looks out at the world today, he may very well feel stronger than ever.
Lithuania
Why Donald Trump is scaring Lithuania
By Linas Kojala
Walking around the old town of Vilnius, capital of Lithuania, you cannot miss a plaque on a historic building. It reads, "Anyone who would choose Lithuania as an enemy has also made an enemy of the United States of America."
These are the words of President George W. Bush, who visited Vilnius in 2002. At that time Lithuania had not yet formally joined NATO, nor the EU. In front of a huge crowd, Bush's statement drew chants of "thank you!" For Lithuanians, this was the moment the country fully regained its independence and became a part of the Western family.
With the Welles declaration of 1940, the US refused to recognize the Soviet occupation of the Baltic States -- an act of defiance that is still commemorated in Washington Square in Vilnius each July. It also offered a glimpse of hope for the freedom fighters who ultimately won Lithuania's independence.
The young country, together with Latvia and Estonia, became the success stories of post-communist transformation.
With just over 6 million inhabitants, the three Baltics managed to create democratic institutions, market economies and vibrant civil societies. And the role of the US was indispensable.
Not surprisingly, America is still seen very positively in Lithuania. Opinion polls currently show 85% favorability towards the US, and it has never been significantly lower. To this day, for most Lithuanians, the US is the only thing that stands between current peace in the Baltics and bloody Kremlin-led crusades such as those that happened in Ukraine.
As a result, US politics is of utmost importance to the Baltics. At the moment, the local media's attention to the presidential elections is significantly higher than the upcoming Lithuanian parliament elections.
Historically, Lithuanians, as well as the roughly 600,000 Americans of Lithuanian-descent, tend to favor Republicans. From Ronald Reagan, who is still an iconic figure for labeling Soviet Union as an "evil empire," to George W. Bush, whose administration concluded NATO's historic enlargement to the East in 2004, Republicans were seen as being "more rigorous" in terms of foreign policy towards the Kremlin.
That's changed with Donald Trump.
Even without an elected position, the Republican presidential nominee is causing anxiety in the region and making Vice President Joe Biden work to reassure America's allies.
By calling NATO "obsolete," Trump draws arguments from the playbook of Russian President Vladimir Putin, who constantly refers to the alliance as "a relic of Cold War."
It is Trump, rather than a military escalation in the Donbass region of Ukraine, that brings memories of the "Iron Curtain." That not only puts American friends in danger, but it forms a lasting negative attitude towards the trans-Atlantic alliance in parts of American society.
After all, it was not only military strength but the political and rhetorical unity around the principle of NATO's deterrence that helped shape the post-WWII landscape which saw the US become the leader of global politics.
And we should not forget that the first and the only time that Article Five of NATO -- the principle of collective defense -- was used in practice was not to defend some Eastern European country. It was after 9/11, which brought American friends all over the globe to stand in unity. Lithuania, however small and seemingly irrelevant, contributed and played a role in Afghanistan, with our nation's Aitvaras special forces, nicknamed Hell's Angels, drawing attention for their professionalism and skills in Ghor province.
While Lithuania is regretfully still not contributing 2% of its GDP to its defense, the budget has increased in recent years and is intended to reach the mark as soon as 2018.
But contrary to what Trump says, it is not only the numbers that matter. When recently deployed US troops met with the public in Lithuanian cities, a journalist asked one senior citizen, "Aren't you afraid seeing all that military technique in your town? Isn't that bringing memories of the war?"
He replied, "Why should I? I have been waiting for American troops for seventy years of my life."
The hope for American leadership and principles is still very much alive. And realization of American leadership very much needed.
Democracy promotion may have had its failures, but it certainly succeeded here.
Lithuanians might have lost some of their traditional leaning towards Republicans. Current polls show little support for Trump.
But the Baltic States still believe in the idea of Reagan's "Shining City on a Hill," which also enlightens countries across the Atlantic. The hope is that the recent gathering of clouds will not shield it.
By Linas Kojala
Walking around the old town of Vilnius, capital of Lithuania, you cannot miss a plaque on a historic building. It reads, "Anyone who would choose Lithuania as an enemy has also made an enemy of the United States of America."
These are the words of President George W. Bush, who visited Vilnius in 2002. At that time Lithuania had not yet formally joined NATO, nor the EU. In front of a huge crowd, Bush's statement drew chants of "thank you!" For Lithuanians, this was the moment the country fully regained its independence and became a part of the Western family.
With the Welles declaration of 1940, the US refused to recognize the Soviet occupation of the Baltic States -- an act of defiance that is still commemorated in Washington Square in Vilnius each July. It also offered a glimpse of hope for the freedom fighters who ultimately won Lithuania's independence.
The young country, together with Latvia and Estonia, became the success stories of post-communist transformation.
With just over 6 million inhabitants, the three Baltics managed to create democratic institutions, market economies and vibrant civil societies. And the role of the US was indispensable.
Not surprisingly, America is still seen very positively in Lithuania. Opinion polls currently show 85% favorability towards the US, and it has never been significantly lower. To this day, for most Lithuanians, the US is the only thing that stands between current peace in the Baltics and bloody Kremlin-led crusades such as those that happened in Ukraine.
As a result, US politics is of utmost importance to the Baltics. At the moment, the local media's attention to the presidential elections is significantly higher than the upcoming Lithuanian parliament elections.
Historically, Lithuanians, as well as the roughly 600,000 Americans of Lithuanian-descent, tend to favor Republicans. From Ronald Reagan, who is still an iconic figure for labeling Soviet Union as an "evil empire," to George W. Bush, whose administration concluded NATO's historic enlargement to the East in 2004, Republicans were seen as being "more rigorous" in terms of foreign policy towards the Kremlin.
That's changed with Donald Trump.
Even without an elected position, the Republican presidential nominee is causing anxiety in the region and making Vice President Joe Biden work to reassure America's allies.
By calling NATO "obsolete," Trump draws arguments from the playbook of Russian President Vladimir Putin, who constantly refers to the alliance as "a relic of Cold War."
It is Trump, rather than a military escalation in the Donbass region of Ukraine, that brings memories of the "Iron Curtain." That not only puts American friends in danger, but it forms a lasting negative attitude towards the trans-Atlantic alliance in parts of American society.
After all, it was not only military strength but the political and rhetorical unity around the principle of NATO's deterrence that helped shape the post-WWII landscape which saw the US become the leader of global politics.
And we should not forget that the first and the only time that Article Five of NATO -- the principle of collective defense -- was used in practice was not to defend some Eastern European country. It was after 9/11, which brought American friends all over the globe to stand in unity. Lithuania, however small and seemingly irrelevant, contributed and played a role in Afghanistan, with our nation's Aitvaras special forces, nicknamed Hell's Angels, drawing attention for their professionalism and skills in Ghor province.
While Lithuania is regretfully still not contributing 2% of its GDP to its defense, the budget has increased in recent years and is intended to reach the mark as soon as 2018.
But contrary to what Trump says, it is not only the numbers that matter. When recently deployed US troops met with the public in Lithuanian cities, a journalist asked one senior citizen, "Aren't you afraid seeing all that military technique in your town? Isn't that bringing memories of the war?"
He replied, "Why should I? I have been waiting for American troops for seventy years of my life."
The hope for American leadership and principles is still very much alive. And realization of American leadership very much needed.
Democracy promotion may have had its failures, but it certainly succeeded here.
Lithuanians might have lost some of their traditional leaning towards Republicans. Current polls show little support for Trump.
But the Baltic States still believe in the idea of Reagan's "Shining City on a Hill," which also enlightens countries across the Atlantic. The hope is that the recent gathering of clouds will not shield it.
Why California is so cool...
These pictures of central California show why it is such a cool place to live..
$1 trillion
Trump presidency could cost U.S. economy $1 trillion: Oxford Economics
by John Geddie
The U.S. economy could be $1 trillion smaller than otherwise expected in 2021 if Republican candidate Donald Trump wins the presidential election in November, economics research firm Oxford Economics said on Tuesday.
While the firm said Trump's policies - including more protectionist trade measures, tax cuts and mass deportation of illegal immigrants - may be watered down in negotiations with Congress, they could have "adverse" consequences.
"Should Mr. Trump prove more successful in achieving adoption of his policies, the consequences could be far-reaching – knocking 5 percent off the level of U.S. GDP relative to baseline and undermining the anticipated recovery in global growth," it said.
Oxford Economics describes itself as an independent global advisory firm. It is headquartered in Oxford, England, but has offices around the world, including in Chicago, Miami, Philadelphia, San Francisco and Washington.
The Trump campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the research. At a campaign event in Clive, Iowa, on Tuesday, however, Trump reasserted that he would grow the U.S. economy.
He vowed to revive the country's manufacturing sector by preventing U.S. companies such as Apple Inc from making products overseas, renegotiating global trade accords and slashing federal taxes and regulations.
"We’re going to provide opportunity, prosperity and security for all Americans," Trump said.
Under its baseline scenario, Oxford Economics expects U.S. gross domestic product, the value of all goods and services produced in the economy, to grow at a fairly constant rate of around 2 percent from 2017, reaching $18.5 trillion in 2021.
But if Trump is elected and succeeds in implementing his policies, it predicts growth would slow significantly, falling near zero in 2019, and reducing overall GDP to $17.5 trillion.
Oxford Economics said its baseline scenario assumes Trump's Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton triumphs in the Nov. 8 vote and a split Congress emerges - between a Republican U.S. House of Representatives and a Democratic U.S. Senate - which results largely in a continuation of current policies.
Trump would face challenges winning the backing of Congress for all his policies, and some economists argue that looser tax policy could actually help boost economic growth.
The latest opinion polls show Clinton, the former secretary of state, ahead, but her lead has slipped in recent weeks.
by John Geddie
The U.S. economy could be $1 trillion smaller than otherwise expected in 2021 if Republican candidate Donald Trump wins the presidential election in November, economics research firm Oxford Economics said on Tuesday.
While the firm said Trump's policies - including more protectionist trade measures, tax cuts and mass deportation of illegal immigrants - may be watered down in negotiations with Congress, they could have "adverse" consequences.
"Should Mr. Trump prove more successful in achieving adoption of his policies, the consequences could be far-reaching – knocking 5 percent off the level of U.S. GDP relative to baseline and undermining the anticipated recovery in global growth," it said.
Oxford Economics describes itself as an independent global advisory firm. It is headquartered in Oxford, England, but has offices around the world, including in Chicago, Miami, Philadelphia, San Francisco and Washington.
The Trump campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the research. At a campaign event in Clive, Iowa, on Tuesday, however, Trump reasserted that he would grow the U.S. economy.
He vowed to revive the country's manufacturing sector by preventing U.S. companies such as Apple Inc from making products overseas, renegotiating global trade accords and slashing federal taxes and regulations.
"We’re going to provide opportunity, prosperity and security for all Americans," Trump said.
Under its baseline scenario, Oxford Economics expects U.S. gross domestic product, the value of all goods and services produced in the economy, to grow at a fairly constant rate of around 2 percent from 2017, reaching $18.5 trillion in 2021.
But if Trump is elected and succeeds in implementing his policies, it predicts growth would slow significantly, falling near zero in 2019, and reducing overall GDP to $17.5 trillion.
Oxford Economics said its baseline scenario assumes Trump's Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton triumphs in the Nov. 8 vote and a split Congress emerges - between a Republican U.S. House of Representatives and a Democratic U.S. Senate - which results largely in a continuation of current policies.
Trump would face challenges winning the backing of Congress for all his policies, and some economists argue that looser tax policy could actually help boost economic growth.
The latest opinion polls show Clinton, the former secretary of state, ahead, but her lead has slipped in recent weeks.
Fact-Checking
Fact-Checking in the Age of Trump
The business of ferreting out candidates' whoppers is booming, and no wonder.
By Alicia Shepard
Glenn Kessler was going to take the night off from The Washington Post’s “Fact Checker” blog and just watch Donald Trump’s long-awaited immigration speech in Phoenix on Aug. 31.
But after 30 minutes, he couldn’t help himself. He emailed his colleague, Michelle Ye Hee Lee, and said, “I really think we should do an instant fact-check.” Then he turned to his wife and said, “I’ll be up late.”
By the next day, a host of news and fact-checking outfits had scrutinized Trump’s speech for inaccuracies or misleading statements, including NPR, PolitiFact, the AP, Factcheck.org, ABC News and more.
Despite frequent laments about this campaign being conducted in a fact-free zone, the nonpartisan fact-checking world is exploding. And the record-breaking number of visitors to fact-checking sites proves there is a voracious desire for the truth. So does the outrage that’s erupted over NBC host Matt Lauer’s failure to fact-check Trump’s statements at a candidate forum on Sept. 7.
“I hear these comments in the media that fact-checking doesn’t matter this year and I couldn’t disagree more,” said Angie Drobnic Holan, editor of PolitiFact, which started in 2007. “Fact-checked information has become a major part of the coverage this year, whereas before it was relegated to the back pages.”
Last November, when NPR surveyed its audience about what it wanted in political stories, 96 percent said they wanted information that verified what candidates said. Another measure: That instant fact-check Kessler and Ye Hee Lee churned out drew 1,900 comments.
Besides demand, what’s driving the increase in fact-check journalism is imitation. “Other news outlets see how we and others have done it and see they can do it too,” said Holan. But that’s not all: “The other reason is you have a candidate like Donald Trump, who has significant problems with accuracy,” she added.
PolitiFact and PunditFact are run by the Poynter-owned Tampa Bay Times, an independent newspaper in Florida. In 2009, PolitiFact won the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting for its fact-checking coverage of the 2008 election.
Today, there are 41 active fact-checking efforts in the US that look into statements made by elected officials, candidates, party leaders and political activists, according to Mark Stencel of the Reporters’ Lab at Duke University, which studies fact-checking and fact-checks campaign ads. (Most fact-checkers are journalists.)
Eleven of the 41 focus on national politics, and in particular this year, on the presidential race. The Big Three — The Post, PolitiFact and FactCheck.org — do it year-round, looking into White House statements, issues such as the Affordable Care Act or other policies that generate a lot of talk. The remaining 30 are state and local.
“Our audience is people interested in factual information about American politics from a source with no stake in the issue other than accuracy and truthfulness,” said Holan. “It’s critical that we are nonpartisan and don’t take sides.”
In 2010, PolitiFact created its first state office in Texas to fact-check local politicians. Today, it has 20 state chapters working with local media organizations.
As an example, PolitiFact partnered with ABC15, a TV station in Phoenix. After Trump’s immigration speech, ABC15 ran a segment using PolitiFact to counter Trump’s claim that there are 30 million undocumented immigrants in the US. The accepted figure, according to experts, is between 11 and 12 million.
“Voters can now get analysis from multiple local fact-checkers in at least nine states — Arizona, California, Colorado, Iowa, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — all of which are holding US Senate races this year,” wrote Stencel in a story on the Reporters’ Lab.
In California, there are three fact-checking organizations vetting local politicians — The Sacramento Bee, Voice of San Diego and Capital Public Radio in Sacramento.
Worldwide, there are 96 fact-checking projects in 37 countries.
Because of increased interest during the presidential conventions, The Post last month launched Fact-Check Friday, using social media sites to distribute a roundup of articles from the week.
And it’s not just mainstream news outlets doing it. Snopes.com fact-checks politicians as well as wild rumors. Comedy Central’s Daily Show with Trevor Noah runs “What the Actual Fact?” a serio-comic attempt at correcting misstatements. Stephen Colbert of CBS’ Late Show does something similar, as does John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight on HBO.
CNN made news when it corrected Trump on its lower third caption after the Republican presidential nominee said he had never advocated that Japan get nuclear weapons, even though he did.
It would be easy to dismiss fact-checking as an exercise in futility, particularly in the age of Trump. But that would be a mistake, said Stencel, former NPR digital managing editor.
“We have two well-known presidential nominees whose trustworthiness and truthfulness have been in question for years, if not decades — in part because fact-checkers and other journalists have scrutinized both of them,” Stencel said. “So saying that these two candidates’ ongoing evasiveness and truth-twisting means fact-checking does not work or is irrelevant is like blaming firefighters for a string of arsons.”
And here is the fact checkers’ dilemma: By fact-checkers’ own measures, Trump and Hillary Clinton are operating in such different leagues on the truthiness scale that any semblance of even-handedness would actually be … not true.
A recent PolitiFact study notes “that 27 percent of Clinton’s statements were mostly or completely, pants-on-fire false, compared with 70 percent of Trump’s.” Or consider FactCheck.org’s recent parsing of the candidates’ performances at that forum Lauer moderated.
The hunger for well-researched facts from a source without a dog in the fight is causing journalists to more closely examine, debate and codify the methods and ethics of fact-checking. Holan wrote a column in 2014 on the seven steps to better fact-checking.
And different fact-checkers employ different methods for reaching and presenting their conclusions.
Some use a rating system. The Post uses “Pinocchios” to evaluate a statement. One Pinocchio is “a selective telling of the truth” and four, the highest, is a “whopper.” “I will readily admit that Pinocchio ratings are a marketing gimmick,” said Kessler. “We are in the business of selling newspapers. Pinocchios are a great way of summarizing your final core judgment.”
PolitiFact’s equally cheeky ratings go from “True” to “Mostly True” to “Half True” to “Mostly False” to “False,” and if it’s really bad, “Pants on Fire.” (See statements that earned a “Pants on Fire.”)
FactCheck.org doesn’t do ratings. “As a longtime newspaper person I can understand wanting to shorthand it and say ‘Pants on Fire,’ or ‘Mostly False,’” said Eugene Kiely, director of FactCheck.org. “But for us, it doesn’t work. It’s really subjective whether it’s two or three or four Pinocchios and I don’t want to get in an argument with the campaign.”
As fact-checking has matured, some fact-checkers altered their methods: When Kessler first started six years ago, he would, as a courtesy, give the public figure about to be rated a heads-up. Grade-grubbing ensued.
“I started getting plea bargaining over Pinocchios,” he said. “One Cabinet secretary told me I was crazy, that what he said was worth only one Pinocchio. I said, three. He kept badgering and then said, ‘OK, it was bad. It was a two, but no way was it a three.”
Kessler kept it at three. And has stopped giving heads-ups.
The whole enterprise has come a long way since 2003 when former CNN reporter Brooks Jackson joined the Annenberg Public Policy Center and began exploring politicians’ tortured relationship with the truth. He launched FactCheck.org, the grandfather of fact-checkers, with political communications professor Kathleen Hall Jamieson. Today, the six-person foundation-funded operation is seeing unprecedented traffic on its site.
“We set a record in 2015 with pageviews that were the highest since we’ve been measuring pageviews starting in 2011,” said Kiely. “We are already way ahead at this point in the year over last year. So we are easily going to set a new record in terms of readers.”
The Post won’t release numbers but Kessler noted that from July 2015 to July 2016, unique visits to the newspaper’s Fact Checker blog have increased 477 percent. “The August numbers are a new monthly record, up 40 percent over July and July had been a record for us in terms of unique visits,” he said.
How fact-checkers decide what to investigate is subjective, but typically follows what’s making news — such as Trump’s immigration speech or Clinton’s email scandal.
“The way all fact-checkers work is to go to the campaign or committee or whoever made the statement,” said Kiely, “and ask where is the support for the claim being made. Sometimes the campaigns will push back to explain their positions. We also go to nonpartisan organizations to get their analysis. Then we write the item based on the materials they provide and independent research.”
The Clinton campaign has a dedicated staffer to deal with fact-checkers’ inquiries. Trump does not and is less responsive, say fact-checkers. “If there’s nothing to back up the statement and it seems fictional, usually the response is silence,” said PolitiFact’s Holan, adding: “I’m not just talking about Trump.”
Does all this effort make a difference? Do candidates change their tunes after their facts (or lack of them) are vetted by nonpartisan groups?
Mostly, they don’t, say fact-checkers interviewed — though Holan noted that former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush has corrected himself after a fact-check, and has publicly admitted he worries about being “Politi-Facted.”
The man who beat Bush for the Republican presidential nomination is less sensitive. “One of the noteworthy things about Trump is, even though he’s constantly fact-checked for his wild misstatements, he almost never corrects or stops saying them,” said Kessler, who joined The Post’s fact-checking operation after a career reporting on foreign affairs and US government.
But that’s beside the point. Fact-checkers aren’t focused on the candidates. They do it for the general public and the historical record. They see their jobs as more about shedding light than “gotcha.”
“We don’t set out to change the behavior of candidates during the campaign,” said Kiely. “Then we’d be incredibly frustrated. We are just trying to get information to the people who want it. There is a great demand for factually correct information.”
Including from journalists, who often rely on fact-checking organizations in their reporting, said Holan. And fact-checks can become campaign issues. Politicians themselves use them, citing opponents’ negative reviews in campaign ads or stump speeches, a phenomenon so widespread it has a name: the weaponization of fact-checking.
“I burst out laughing at how ridiculous it is to say fact-checking doesn’t matter,” said Kessler. “It’s nice if politicians change their language. But we write the fact-check to inform voters, citizens, readers. To allow them to have a better understanding of policies and how the government works. What people do with that information is up to them.”
The business of ferreting out candidates' whoppers is booming, and no wonder.
By Alicia Shepard
Glenn Kessler was going to take the night off from The Washington Post’s “Fact Checker” blog and just watch Donald Trump’s long-awaited immigration speech in Phoenix on Aug. 31.
But after 30 minutes, he couldn’t help himself. He emailed his colleague, Michelle Ye Hee Lee, and said, “I really think we should do an instant fact-check.” Then he turned to his wife and said, “I’ll be up late.”
By the next day, a host of news and fact-checking outfits had scrutinized Trump’s speech for inaccuracies or misleading statements, including NPR, PolitiFact, the AP, Factcheck.org, ABC News and more.
Despite frequent laments about this campaign being conducted in a fact-free zone, the nonpartisan fact-checking world is exploding. And the record-breaking number of visitors to fact-checking sites proves there is a voracious desire for the truth. So does the outrage that’s erupted over NBC host Matt Lauer’s failure to fact-check Trump’s statements at a candidate forum on Sept. 7.
“I hear these comments in the media that fact-checking doesn’t matter this year and I couldn’t disagree more,” said Angie Drobnic Holan, editor of PolitiFact, which started in 2007. “Fact-checked information has become a major part of the coverage this year, whereas before it was relegated to the back pages.”
Last November, when NPR surveyed its audience about what it wanted in political stories, 96 percent said they wanted information that verified what candidates said. Another measure: That instant fact-check Kessler and Ye Hee Lee churned out drew 1,900 comments.
Besides demand, what’s driving the increase in fact-check journalism is imitation. “Other news outlets see how we and others have done it and see they can do it too,” said Holan. But that’s not all: “The other reason is you have a candidate like Donald Trump, who has significant problems with accuracy,” she added.
PolitiFact and PunditFact are run by the Poynter-owned Tampa Bay Times, an independent newspaper in Florida. In 2009, PolitiFact won the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting for its fact-checking coverage of the 2008 election.
Today, there are 41 active fact-checking efforts in the US that look into statements made by elected officials, candidates, party leaders and political activists, according to Mark Stencel of the Reporters’ Lab at Duke University, which studies fact-checking and fact-checks campaign ads. (Most fact-checkers are journalists.)
Eleven of the 41 focus on national politics, and in particular this year, on the presidential race. The Big Three — The Post, PolitiFact and FactCheck.org — do it year-round, looking into White House statements, issues such as the Affordable Care Act or other policies that generate a lot of talk. The remaining 30 are state and local.
“Our audience is people interested in factual information about American politics from a source with no stake in the issue other than accuracy and truthfulness,” said Holan. “It’s critical that we are nonpartisan and don’t take sides.”
In 2010, PolitiFact created its first state office in Texas to fact-check local politicians. Today, it has 20 state chapters working with local media organizations.
As an example, PolitiFact partnered with ABC15, a TV station in Phoenix. After Trump’s immigration speech, ABC15 ran a segment using PolitiFact to counter Trump’s claim that there are 30 million undocumented immigrants in the US. The accepted figure, according to experts, is between 11 and 12 million.
“Voters can now get analysis from multiple local fact-checkers in at least nine states — Arizona, California, Colorado, Iowa, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — all of which are holding US Senate races this year,” wrote Stencel in a story on the Reporters’ Lab.
In California, there are three fact-checking organizations vetting local politicians — The Sacramento Bee, Voice of San Diego and Capital Public Radio in Sacramento.
Worldwide, there are 96 fact-checking projects in 37 countries.
Because of increased interest during the presidential conventions, The Post last month launched Fact-Check Friday, using social media sites to distribute a roundup of articles from the week.
And it’s not just mainstream news outlets doing it. Snopes.com fact-checks politicians as well as wild rumors. Comedy Central’s Daily Show with Trevor Noah runs “What the Actual Fact?” a serio-comic attempt at correcting misstatements. Stephen Colbert of CBS’ Late Show does something similar, as does John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight on HBO.
CNN made news when it corrected Trump on its lower third caption after the Republican presidential nominee said he had never advocated that Japan get nuclear weapons, even though he did.
It would be easy to dismiss fact-checking as an exercise in futility, particularly in the age of Trump. But that would be a mistake, said Stencel, former NPR digital managing editor.
“We have two well-known presidential nominees whose trustworthiness and truthfulness have been in question for years, if not decades — in part because fact-checkers and other journalists have scrutinized both of them,” Stencel said. “So saying that these two candidates’ ongoing evasiveness and truth-twisting means fact-checking does not work or is irrelevant is like blaming firefighters for a string of arsons.”
And here is the fact checkers’ dilemma: By fact-checkers’ own measures, Trump and Hillary Clinton are operating in such different leagues on the truthiness scale that any semblance of even-handedness would actually be … not true.
A recent PolitiFact study notes “that 27 percent of Clinton’s statements were mostly or completely, pants-on-fire false, compared with 70 percent of Trump’s.” Or consider FactCheck.org’s recent parsing of the candidates’ performances at that forum Lauer moderated.
The hunger for well-researched facts from a source without a dog in the fight is causing journalists to more closely examine, debate and codify the methods and ethics of fact-checking. Holan wrote a column in 2014 on the seven steps to better fact-checking.
And different fact-checkers employ different methods for reaching and presenting their conclusions.
Some use a rating system. The Post uses “Pinocchios” to evaluate a statement. One Pinocchio is “a selective telling of the truth” and four, the highest, is a “whopper.” “I will readily admit that Pinocchio ratings are a marketing gimmick,” said Kessler. “We are in the business of selling newspapers. Pinocchios are a great way of summarizing your final core judgment.”
PolitiFact’s equally cheeky ratings go from “True” to “Mostly True” to “Half True” to “Mostly False” to “False,” and if it’s really bad, “Pants on Fire.” (See statements that earned a “Pants on Fire.”)
FactCheck.org doesn’t do ratings. “As a longtime newspaper person I can understand wanting to shorthand it and say ‘Pants on Fire,’ or ‘Mostly False,’” said Eugene Kiely, director of FactCheck.org. “But for us, it doesn’t work. It’s really subjective whether it’s two or three or four Pinocchios and I don’t want to get in an argument with the campaign.”
As fact-checking has matured, some fact-checkers altered their methods: When Kessler first started six years ago, he would, as a courtesy, give the public figure about to be rated a heads-up. Grade-grubbing ensued.
“I started getting plea bargaining over Pinocchios,” he said. “One Cabinet secretary told me I was crazy, that what he said was worth only one Pinocchio. I said, three. He kept badgering and then said, ‘OK, it was bad. It was a two, but no way was it a three.”
Kessler kept it at three. And has stopped giving heads-ups.
The whole enterprise has come a long way since 2003 when former CNN reporter Brooks Jackson joined the Annenberg Public Policy Center and began exploring politicians’ tortured relationship with the truth. He launched FactCheck.org, the grandfather of fact-checkers, with political communications professor Kathleen Hall Jamieson. Today, the six-person foundation-funded operation is seeing unprecedented traffic on its site.
“We set a record in 2015 with pageviews that were the highest since we’ve been measuring pageviews starting in 2011,” said Kiely. “We are already way ahead at this point in the year over last year. So we are easily going to set a new record in terms of readers.”
The Post won’t release numbers but Kessler noted that from July 2015 to July 2016, unique visits to the newspaper’s Fact Checker blog have increased 477 percent. “The August numbers are a new monthly record, up 40 percent over July and July had been a record for us in terms of unique visits,” he said.
How fact-checkers decide what to investigate is subjective, but typically follows what’s making news — such as Trump’s immigration speech or Clinton’s email scandal.
“The way all fact-checkers work is to go to the campaign or committee or whoever made the statement,” said Kiely, “and ask where is the support for the claim being made. Sometimes the campaigns will push back to explain their positions. We also go to nonpartisan organizations to get their analysis. Then we write the item based on the materials they provide and independent research.”
The Clinton campaign has a dedicated staffer to deal with fact-checkers’ inquiries. Trump does not and is less responsive, say fact-checkers. “If there’s nothing to back up the statement and it seems fictional, usually the response is silence,” said PolitiFact’s Holan, adding: “I’m not just talking about Trump.”
Does all this effort make a difference? Do candidates change their tunes after their facts (or lack of them) are vetted by nonpartisan groups?
Mostly, they don’t, say fact-checkers interviewed — though Holan noted that former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush has corrected himself after a fact-check, and has publicly admitted he worries about being “Politi-Facted.”
The man who beat Bush for the Republican presidential nomination is less sensitive. “One of the noteworthy things about Trump is, even though he’s constantly fact-checked for his wild misstatements, he almost never corrects or stops saying them,” said Kessler, who joined The Post’s fact-checking operation after a career reporting on foreign affairs and US government.
But that’s beside the point. Fact-checkers aren’t focused on the candidates. They do it for the general public and the historical record. They see their jobs as more about shedding light than “gotcha.”
“We don’t set out to change the behavior of candidates during the campaign,” said Kiely. “Then we’d be incredibly frustrated. We are just trying to get information to the people who want it. There is a great demand for factually correct information.”
Including from journalists, who often rely on fact-checking organizations in their reporting, said Holan. And fact-checks can become campaign issues. Politicians themselves use them, citing opponents’ negative reviews in campaign ads or stump speeches, a phenomenon so widespread it has a name: the weaponization of fact-checking.
“I burst out laughing at how ridiculous it is to say fact-checking doesn’t matter,” said Kessler. “It’s nice if politicians change their language. But we write the fact-check to inform voters, citizens, readers. To allow them to have a better understanding of policies and how the government works. What people do with that information is up to them.”
The good.. No more Monsanto. The Bad???
Monsanto Now Belongs to Bayer
In the year's biggest deal so far, German pharma giant Bayer has bought Monsanto.
By Tom Philpott
Updated: Monsanto has agreed to be sold to Bayer for $56.5 billion—a deal worth a total of $66 billion when Monsanto's debt is taken into account. Bayer agreed to pay Monsanto a break-up fee of $2 billion if antitrust regulators reject the deal. The combined company would be be the globe's largest seller of both seeds and agrichemicals.It plans to place its seeds and GM traits division in Monsanto's home city of St. Louis; while its pesticide division will be in Bayer's home city, Monheim, Germany. No word yet on whether the Monsanto brand will continue to exist.
And then there were three.
On Tuesday, marriage negotiations between seed/pesticide giant Monsanto and its suitor, German behemoth Bayer, got hotter than a corn field at high noon in late summer. Bayer sweetened its offer to $56.5 billion Tuesday afternoon, just as Monsanto's Board of Directors was scheduled to meet to consider the offer, according to Bloomberg News. Monsanto's board consented Wednesday—resulting in "the biggest deal this year and the largest ever by a German company."
In its current incarnation, Bayer is mainly a pharmaceutical company, with interests in prescription drugs, over-the-counter staples like aspirin, and animal medicines. But it also has a large division devoted to selling seeds and, particularly, pesticides—and it has been itching for months to expand those business lines by taking over Monsanto.
This deal would represent a massive step in a remarkable recent run of mergers among the handful of companies that dominate those markets. Late last year, Dow and DuPont—two US chemical behemoths with large agribusiness divisions—agreed to merge. A few months later, after fending off an aggressive and persistent bid from Monsanto, Swiss seed/pesticide titan Syngenta jumped into the the clutches of ChemChina, a conglomerate owned by the Chinese government.
Here's what the agribusiness landscape will look like if these mergers clear regulatory hurdles—a big if. These charts are updated from my December post on the Dow-DuPont merger.
However, such hyper-consolidation of markets that are so crucial to the global food supply may be too much for US and EU antitrust authorities to digest. The European Commission recently threw doubt on the Dow-DuPont deal by halting its process for approving the merger, pending more information from the two companies.
Back in August, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R.-Iowa) announced the US Senate Judiciary Committee would soon hold hearings on the deal, based on concerns among farmers that the "sudden consolidation in the industry" would give remaining players the leverage to raise seed and pesticide prices. Earlier this week, 250 members of the National Farmers Union descended on Washington, DC, to protest the recent consolidation wave, complaining that it reduced competition and raises the price of seeds and chemicals "while farmers are already being squeezed by weak commodity markets," Reuters reports.
But it's the executive branch, mainly the Department of Justice, that has ultimate authority on whether Dow-DuPont and possible Bayer-Monsano tie-up passes US regulatory muster—and it has shown recent willingness to halt mergers in the agribiz space. Just two weeks ago, the DOJ sued to halt a relatively small deal between Monsanto and farm-equipment giant John Deere. Monsanto had agreed to sell its precision-planting arm—involving machines that allow farmers to plant seeds at variable rates across fields—to Deere for $190 million. Not so fast, said the DOJ in its complaint, noting that the deal would give Deere 86 percent of the US market for these tools.
As I noted back in the July, Democratic Party leaders, after years of acquiescence to a long wave of mergers in the agribusiness space and in corporate America at large, is recently showing showing signs that they think enough is enough. After months of wrangling, Bayer won over Monsanto's board. But this massive deal still faces a tough row to hoe before its vast profit potential can be harvested.
In the year's biggest deal so far, German pharma giant Bayer has bought Monsanto.
By Tom Philpott
Updated: Monsanto has agreed to be sold to Bayer for $56.5 billion—a deal worth a total of $66 billion when Monsanto's debt is taken into account. Bayer agreed to pay Monsanto a break-up fee of $2 billion if antitrust regulators reject the deal. The combined company would be be the globe's largest seller of both seeds and agrichemicals.It plans to place its seeds and GM traits division in Monsanto's home city of St. Louis; while its pesticide division will be in Bayer's home city, Monheim, Germany. No word yet on whether the Monsanto brand will continue to exist.
And then there were three.
On Tuesday, marriage negotiations between seed/pesticide giant Monsanto and its suitor, German behemoth Bayer, got hotter than a corn field at high noon in late summer. Bayer sweetened its offer to $56.5 billion Tuesday afternoon, just as Monsanto's Board of Directors was scheduled to meet to consider the offer, according to Bloomberg News. Monsanto's board consented Wednesday—resulting in "the biggest deal this year and the largest ever by a German company."
In its current incarnation, Bayer is mainly a pharmaceutical company, with interests in prescription drugs, over-the-counter staples like aspirin, and animal medicines. But it also has a large division devoted to selling seeds and, particularly, pesticides—and it has been itching for months to expand those business lines by taking over Monsanto.
This deal would represent a massive step in a remarkable recent run of mergers among the handful of companies that dominate those markets. Late last year, Dow and DuPont—two US chemical behemoths with large agribusiness divisions—agreed to merge. A few months later, after fending off an aggressive and persistent bid from Monsanto, Swiss seed/pesticide titan Syngenta jumped into the the clutches of ChemChina, a conglomerate owned by the Chinese government.
Here's what the agribusiness landscape will look like if these mergers clear regulatory hurdles—a big if. These charts are updated from my December post on the Dow-DuPont merger.
However, such hyper-consolidation of markets that are so crucial to the global food supply may be too much for US and EU antitrust authorities to digest. The European Commission recently threw doubt on the Dow-DuPont deal by halting its process for approving the merger, pending more information from the two companies.
Back in August, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R.-Iowa) announced the US Senate Judiciary Committee would soon hold hearings on the deal, based on concerns among farmers that the "sudden consolidation in the industry" would give remaining players the leverage to raise seed and pesticide prices. Earlier this week, 250 members of the National Farmers Union descended on Washington, DC, to protest the recent consolidation wave, complaining that it reduced competition and raises the price of seeds and chemicals "while farmers are already being squeezed by weak commodity markets," Reuters reports.
But it's the executive branch, mainly the Department of Justice, that has ultimate authority on whether Dow-DuPont and possible Bayer-Monsano tie-up passes US regulatory muster—and it has shown recent willingness to halt mergers in the agribiz space. Just two weeks ago, the DOJ sued to halt a relatively small deal between Monsanto and farm-equipment giant John Deere. Monsanto had agreed to sell its precision-planting arm—involving machines that allow farmers to plant seeds at variable rates across fields—to Deere for $190 million. Not so fast, said the DOJ in its complaint, noting that the deal would give Deere 86 percent of the US market for these tools.
As I noted back in the July, Democratic Party leaders, after years of acquiescence to a long wave of mergers in the agribusiness space and in corporate America at large, is recently showing showing signs that they think enough is enough. After months of wrangling, Bayer won over Monsanto's board. But this massive deal still faces a tough row to hoe before its vast profit potential can be harvested.
Trump and the Deadly Powerboat Race...
The Trump Files: The Deadly Powerboat Race Donald Hosted in Atlantic City
"The worse the weather, the better for business."
By Max J. Rosenthal
Throughout most of the 1980s, the American Power Boat Association held its world championship races in the calm waters off Key West, Florida. But in 1988, Donald Trump outbid Key West and moved the 1989 edition of the high-speed spectacle up to Atlantic City to help lure more people to his casinos.
Powerboat racers were not happy. Errol Lanier told South Florida's Sun-Sentinel newspaper that there was "no chance" that the water in Atlantic City would be calm. "People who have to race there next October will find it atrocious," he said. "Many racers said the APBA should have realized that scheduling a race in New Jersey in mid-October was risky at best," the Miami Herald later noted.
They were right. The Washington Post reported that the first day of the competition "was a minor disaster as more than half of the superboat fleet, including [Miami Vice star Don] Johnson's new catamaran, failed to finish." Then bad weather canceled the races for four straight days, leaving the spectators and racers fuming. "The organization of this championship has been very bad," Italian racer Eduardo Polli told the Post.
None of this seemed to bother Trump, though. His casinos were doing bumper business thanks to the bored and stranded race fans. "I walked through the [Trump] Castle today and it's Boomtown, U.S.A.," he crowed to the Post. "The worse the weather, the better for business."
When racing finally resumed, the event turned deadly when the Team Skater boat got into a horrific accident. "The 32-foot racing boat was headed southwest about 2 1/2 miles from the starting line when its bow launched into the air, hooked the water and rolled, landing upright," the Associated Press reported. Driver Kevin Brown was killed instantly, while his crewmate, James Dyke, survived with minor injuries. Trump does not appear to have ever commented on Brown's death.
"The worse the weather, the better for business."
By Max J. Rosenthal
Throughout most of the 1980s, the American Power Boat Association held its world championship races in the calm waters off Key West, Florida. But in 1988, Donald Trump outbid Key West and moved the 1989 edition of the high-speed spectacle up to Atlantic City to help lure more people to his casinos.
Powerboat racers were not happy. Errol Lanier told South Florida's Sun-Sentinel newspaper that there was "no chance" that the water in Atlantic City would be calm. "People who have to race there next October will find it atrocious," he said. "Many racers said the APBA should have realized that scheduling a race in New Jersey in mid-October was risky at best," the Miami Herald later noted.
They were right. The Washington Post reported that the first day of the competition "was a minor disaster as more than half of the superboat fleet, including [Miami Vice star Don] Johnson's new catamaran, failed to finish." Then bad weather canceled the races for four straight days, leaving the spectators and racers fuming. "The organization of this championship has been very bad," Italian racer Eduardo Polli told the Post.
None of this seemed to bother Trump, though. His casinos were doing bumper business thanks to the bored and stranded race fans. "I walked through the [Trump] Castle today and it's Boomtown, U.S.A.," he crowed to the Post. "The worse the weather, the better for business."
When racing finally resumed, the event turned deadly when the Team Skater boat got into a horrific accident. "The 32-foot racing boat was headed southwest about 2 1/2 miles from the starting line when its bow launched into the air, hooked the water and rolled, landing upright," the Associated Press reported. Driver Kevin Brown was killed instantly, while his crewmate, James Dyke, survived with minor injuries. Trump does not appear to have ever commented on Brown's death.
Poll Watchers, Worse Than It Sounds
Trump is Recruiting an Army of Poll Watchers. It's Even Worse Than It Sounds.
Voter challenges "can play out in very ugly ways."
By Patrick G. Lee, ProPublica
Donald Trump's campaign website implores voters to "Help Me Stop Crooked Hillary From Rigging This Election!" by signing up as observers. He warned people at an August 12 campaign event in Altoona, Pennsylvania, that Clinton could win the state only by cheating, and he asked supporters to "go down to certain areas and watch and study, and make sure other people don't come in and vote five times." Less than a week later, Trump's running mate, Mike Pence, encouraged a crowd in Manchester, New Hampshire, to help ensure a fair election by serving as poll watchers because "you are the greatest vanguard for integrity in voting."
No one knows how many of the Republican nominee's supporters will heed his call to stand in polling places on November 8 and challenge some voters' credentials—but past experience suggests that a wave of partisan poll watchers could create confusion and discourage people who have a right to cast ballots.
The potential impact of poll observers varies by state, depending on each state's rules about who can monitor voting, what credentials a voter needs to get a ballot, and what a citizen must do if challenged. Adam Gitlin, counsel for the Democracy Program of New York University School of Law's Brennan Center for Justice, said an influx of inexperienced watchers could create bottlenecks, particularly if they raise systematic challenges based on voters' race, religion, or ethnicity.
"There's actually a risk that, in a more disorganized way, people are going to be showing up to the polls, they won't know the law, and they'll be engaging in discriminatory challenges," Gitlin said. "That can create the potential for a lot of disruption, longer lines because each voter takes longer to vote, and potentially discouraging and intimidating voters from coming to the polls."
In 46 states, the laws permit private citizens to challenge a voter's registration on or before Election Day, according to a 2012 survey by the Brennan Center. At least 32 states and the District of Columbia also allow political party designees to mount Election Day poll challenges, according to a ProPublica review of state statutes.
In many of those states, the person bringing a challenge needs little if any evidence, with the burden of proof falling on voters accused of being ineligible. According to the Brennan Center, only 15 states require supporting documentation to be included as part of a polling-place challenge. In Wisconsin, any voter can challenge someone's ballot based on the suspicion that the person is not qualified. The same goes in Virginia, Oregon, and South Carolina.
Consider the experience of Leah Wright Rigueur, a professor and historian based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. One of the first times she voted was in Hanover, New Hampshire, when she was a senior in college, majoring in history and keen to perform her civic duty in the 2002 midterm elections. Under New Hampshire's rules, voters can register at the polls on Election Day. When Rigueur, who is black, walked into the polling place to register and vote, she was singled out and challenged by an older white man, who didn't have to provide any backing for his accusation, she says. Several of her black classmates got similar treatment, she learned later that day.
"If only students and only students of color are being singled out, what are you going to think about this? You're going to think that people are targeting me because I look a certain way, for whatever reason," she said in an interview. "It was absolutely mortifying."
"If only students and only students of color are being singled out, what are you going to think about this? You're going to think that people are targeting me because I look a certain way, for whatever reason…It was absolutely mortifying."
Rigueur, who registered as an independent, remembers having to answer several questions and sign an affidavit before she was allowed to vote. "It took me a long time, but I voted because I was so angry about the way I was being treated," she said. "You really don't understand what it's like until you're actually accused of it. I had never in my wildest dreams thought that I'd walk into a polling station and somebody would say, 'Fraud!' It almost felt cartoonish." (In 2010, New Hampshire passed a law requiring challenges to be submitted in writing, along with a description of the "specific source" of knowledge backing up the claim.)
Variations of Rigueur's experience are present in many of the challenges at the polls. Voters can be required to produce multiple forms of identification to prove their current address, find another voter willing to vouch for them, or swear to a statement that affirms their qualifications. In many states, challenged voters can fill out a provisional ballot that will be verified later. For Rigueur, the entire process took about three hours, she says, in part because of the delays and confusion caused by the numerous challenges being brought against others at the polling place.
Voter challenges "can play out in very ugly ways, particularly where you have challengers who position themselves inside polling places for the sole purpose of targeting voters on unlawful and discriminatory grounds," said Kristen Clarke, executive director of the DC-based Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, a nonprofit group that works to combat racial inequities. "The rules vary state by state, but what is almost universal is the fact that there aren't many safeguards for voters who are subject to challenges." In California, Ohio, Texas, and Alabama, poll observers cannot directly question a voter's eligibility at the polls. That's also the case in Oklahoma and West Virginia, both of which go a step further by banning watchers from polling places during voting hours.
There is also the charge that challengers tend to target minority voters. In Southbridge, Massachusetts, a town official said observers linked to tea party groups attempted to intimidate Hispanics during a 2011 primary, in part by raising frivolous challenges against them when they came to vote. Another alleged case of voter intimidation took place just before the 2004 presidential election in southern Georgia, when 95 Hispanic registered voters were summoned to a courthouse to prove they were eligible. A group of Atkinson County residents had obtained a list of all the Hispanics on the voting rolls after rumors that a candidate for county commissioner had tried to help noncitizens register.
There have been incidents in local elections as well. In 2004, Phuong Tan Huynh, a Vietnamese American, ran against a white incumbent for a city council position in Bayou La Batre, Alabama. During the primary election, supporters of the incumbent singled out Asian Americans and challenged about 50 of them who showed up to vote, in some cases based on claims that they weren't citizens. The Department of Justice then announced that it would monitor the treatment of Vietnamese American voters during the ensuing municipal runoff. Huynh won that vote, becoming the first Asian American elected to the city council.
Logan Churchwell, a spokesman for True the Vote, a Houston-based nonprofit that trains citizens for poll watching as part of its campaign against voter fraud, said such observers play a necessary and central role in improving voter confidence, irrespective of political agendas. The group, which bills itself as nonpartisan, officially started in 2010 as an offshoot of a Houston tea party group. Since then it has provoked widespread criticism that its volunteers are overzealous and disruptive. For instance, during Wisconsin's 2012 gubernatorial recall election, the League of Women Voters received more than 50 voter complaints that True the Vote-trained watchers mounted aggressive challenges and otherwise intimidated voters. Churchwell said the group hasn't seen any evidence to back up the complaints.
For him, the deployment of citizen poll watchers has been unfairly characterized as an effort by conservatives to disenfranchise minority voters. President Barack Obama's campaign organized poll watching, he pointed out, as does Hillary Clinton's. "If we have enough people paying attention to the process from A to Z, then we are going to have more faith in our elections," he said. The Trump and Clinton campaigns did not respond to requests for comment about their plans for recruiting poll watchers.
"If we have enough people paying attention to the process from A to Z, then we are going to have more faith in our elections."
True the Vote conducts in-person and online poll-watcher training sessions, has created a smartphone app that allows users to send in reports of election irregularities, and has enabled volunteers to vet voter rolls and challenge registrations en masse. After they are trained, observers typically must go through a local or county political party organization to get assigned to a particular polling place. Churchill said that because of that process, True the Vote couldn't target specific precincts in most states even if it wanted to.
Contrary to claims by Trump and groups like True the Vote, studies of recent elections have found scant evidence of voter impersonation fraud at the polls. One 2014 analysis, by Justin Levitt—then a professor at Loyola Law School, and now the Obama administration's top voting rights lawyer in the Department of Justice—could find allegations of about 250 such fraudulent votes from 2000 to 2014, a period when there were more than 1 billion total votes cast.
Still, the initiatives by the Trump campaign and True the Vote are provoking a kind of arms race for poll observers. In August, True the Vote's president and founder, Catherine Engelbrecht, said in a video message that the group is aiming to "deploy thousands of people trained to keep watch for fraud, illegal voters and hackers bent on stealing the election."
The Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law is in turn planning to recruit as many as 5,000 nonpartisan poll watchers and call center volunteers, according to Clarke, the executive director. The group runs the largest nonpartisan election-monitoring program in the country, with an Election Day presence in 24 states and multiple hotlines to support voters who encounter problems, she said.
Avery Davis-Roberts, an associate director at the nonprofit Carter Center in Atlanta, said voters who are challenged in November should immediately ask for details on the official procedures. "Find out what you can do as a voter," she said, "to either complain about the decision that's being made by the election official, or what you can do as a voter to ensure you have access to a ballot on Election Day, even if it's a provisional ballot."
Voter challenges "can play out in very ugly ways."
By Patrick G. Lee, ProPublica
Donald Trump's campaign website implores voters to "Help Me Stop Crooked Hillary From Rigging This Election!" by signing up as observers. He warned people at an August 12 campaign event in Altoona, Pennsylvania, that Clinton could win the state only by cheating, and he asked supporters to "go down to certain areas and watch and study, and make sure other people don't come in and vote five times." Less than a week later, Trump's running mate, Mike Pence, encouraged a crowd in Manchester, New Hampshire, to help ensure a fair election by serving as poll watchers because "you are the greatest vanguard for integrity in voting."
No one knows how many of the Republican nominee's supporters will heed his call to stand in polling places on November 8 and challenge some voters' credentials—but past experience suggests that a wave of partisan poll watchers could create confusion and discourage people who have a right to cast ballots.
The potential impact of poll observers varies by state, depending on each state's rules about who can monitor voting, what credentials a voter needs to get a ballot, and what a citizen must do if challenged. Adam Gitlin, counsel for the Democracy Program of New York University School of Law's Brennan Center for Justice, said an influx of inexperienced watchers could create bottlenecks, particularly if they raise systematic challenges based on voters' race, religion, or ethnicity.
"There's actually a risk that, in a more disorganized way, people are going to be showing up to the polls, they won't know the law, and they'll be engaging in discriminatory challenges," Gitlin said. "That can create the potential for a lot of disruption, longer lines because each voter takes longer to vote, and potentially discouraging and intimidating voters from coming to the polls."
In 46 states, the laws permit private citizens to challenge a voter's registration on or before Election Day, according to a 2012 survey by the Brennan Center. At least 32 states and the District of Columbia also allow political party designees to mount Election Day poll challenges, according to a ProPublica review of state statutes.
In many of those states, the person bringing a challenge needs little if any evidence, with the burden of proof falling on voters accused of being ineligible. According to the Brennan Center, only 15 states require supporting documentation to be included as part of a polling-place challenge. In Wisconsin, any voter can challenge someone's ballot based on the suspicion that the person is not qualified. The same goes in Virginia, Oregon, and South Carolina.
Consider the experience of Leah Wright Rigueur, a professor and historian based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. One of the first times she voted was in Hanover, New Hampshire, when she was a senior in college, majoring in history and keen to perform her civic duty in the 2002 midterm elections. Under New Hampshire's rules, voters can register at the polls on Election Day. When Rigueur, who is black, walked into the polling place to register and vote, she was singled out and challenged by an older white man, who didn't have to provide any backing for his accusation, she says. Several of her black classmates got similar treatment, she learned later that day.
"If only students and only students of color are being singled out, what are you going to think about this? You're going to think that people are targeting me because I look a certain way, for whatever reason," she said in an interview. "It was absolutely mortifying."
"If only students and only students of color are being singled out, what are you going to think about this? You're going to think that people are targeting me because I look a certain way, for whatever reason…It was absolutely mortifying."
Rigueur, who registered as an independent, remembers having to answer several questions and sign an affidavit before she was allowed to vote. "It took me a long time, but I voted because I was so angry about the way I was being treated," she said. "You really don't understand what it's like until you're actually accused of it. I had never in my wildest dreams thought that I'd walk into a polling station and somebody would say, 'Fraud!' It almost felt cartoonish." (In 2010, New Hampshire passed a law requiring challenges to be submitted in writing, along with a description of the "specific source" of knowledge backing up the claim.)
Variations of Rigueur's experience are present in many of the challenges at the polls. Voters can be required to produce multiple forms of identification to prove their current address, find another voter willing to vouch for them, or swear to a statement that affirms their qualifications. In many states, challenged voters can fill out a provisional ballot that will be verified later. For Rigueur, the entire process took about three hours, she says, in part because of the delays and confusion caused by the numerous challenges being brought against others at the polling place.
Voter challenges "can play out in very ugly ways, particularly where you have challengers who position themselves inside polling places for the sole purpose of targeting voters on unlawful and discriminatory grounds," said Kristen Clarke, executive director of the DC-based Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, a nonprofit group that works to combat racial inequities. "The rules vary state by state, but what is almost universal is the fact that there aren't many safeguards for voters who are subject to challenges." In California, Ohio, Texas, and Alabama, poll observers cannot directly question a voter's eligibility at the polls. That's also the case in Oklahoma and West Virginia, both of which go a step further by banning watchers from polling places during voting hours.
There is also the charge that challengers tend to target minority voters. In Southbridge, Massachusetts, a town official said observers linked to tea party groups attempted to intimidate Hispanics during a 2011 primary, in part by raising frivolous challenges against them when they came to vote. Another alleged case of voter intimidation took place just before the 2004 presidential election in southern Georgia, when 95 Hispanic registered voters were summoned to a courthouse to prove they were eligible. A group of Atkinson County residents had obtained a list of all the Hispanics on the voting rolls after rumors that a candidate for county commissioner had tried to help noncitizens register.
There have been incidents in local elections as well. In 2004, Phuong Tan Huynh, a Vietnamese American, ran against a white incumbent for a city council position in Bayou La Batre, Alabama. During the primary election, supporters of the incumbent singled out Asian Americans and challenged about 50 of them who showed up to vote, in some cases based on claims that they weren't citizens. The Department of Justice then announced that it would monitor the treatment of Vietnamese American voters during the ensuing municipal runoff. Huynh won that vote, becoming the first Asian American elected to the city council.
Logan Churchwell, a spokesman for True the Vote, a Houston-based nonprofit that trains citizens for poll watching as part of its campaign against voter fraud, said such observers play a necessary and central role in improving voter confidence, irrespective of political agendas. The group, which bills itself as nonpartisan, officially started in 2010 as an offshoot of a Houston tea party group. Since then it has provoked widespread criticism that its volunteers are overzealous and disruptive. For instance, during Wisconsin's 2012 gubernatorial recall election, the League of Women Voters received more than 50 voter complaints that True the Vote-trained watchers mounted aggressive challenges and otherwise intimidated voters. Churchwell said the group hasn't seen any evidence to back up the complaints.
For him, the deployment of citizen poll watchers has been unfairly characterized as an effort by conservatives to disenfranchise minority voters. President Barack Obama's campaign organized poll watching, he pointed out, as does Hillary Clinton's. "If we have enough people paying attention to the process from A to Z, then we are going to have more faith in our elections," he said. The Trump and Clinton campaigns did not respond to requests for comment about their plans for recruiting poll watchers.
"If we have enough people paying attention to the process from A to Z, then we are going to have more faith in our elections."
True the Vote conducts in-person and online poll-watcher training sessions, has created a smartphone app that allows users to send in reports of election irregularities, and has enabled volunteers to vet voter rolls and challenge registrations en masse. After they are trained, observers typically must go through a local or county political party organization to get assigned to a particular polling place. Churchill said that because of that process, True the Vote couldn't target specific precincts in most states even if it wanted to.
Contrary to claims by Trump and groups like True the Vote, studies of recent elections have found scant evidence of voter impersonation fraud at the polls. One 2014 analysis, by Justin Levitt—then a professor at Loyola Law School, and now the Obama administration's top voting rights lawyer in the Department of Justice—could find allegations of about 250 such fraudulent votes from 2000 to 2014, a period when there were more than 1 billion total votes cast.
Still, the initiatives by the Trump campaign and True the Vote are provoking a kind of arms race for poll observers. In August, True the Vote's president and founder, Catherine Engelbrecht, said in a video message that the group is aiming to "deploy thousands of people trained to keep watch for fraud, illegal voters and hackers bent on stealing the election."
The Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law is in turn planning to recruit as many as 5,000 nonpartisan poll watchers and call center volunteers, according to Clarke, the executive director. The group runs the largest nonpartisan election-monitoring program in the country, with an Election Day presence in 24 states and multiple hotlines to support voters who encounter problems, she said.
Avery Davis-Roberts, an associate director at the nonprofit Carter Center in Atlanta, said voters who are challenged in November should immediately ask for details on the official procedures. "Find out what you can do as a voter," she said, "to either complain about the decision that's being made by the election official, or what you can do as a voter to ensure you have access to a ballot on Election Day, even if it's a provisional ballot."
Trump's Red Carpet?
How Did an Alleged Russian Mobster End Up on Trump's Red Carpet?
And here's a coincidence: The guy was indicted for being part of a global gambling ring run out of Trump Tower.
By David Corn and Hannah Levintova
How did an alleged and notorious Russian mobster connected to an illegal international gambling ring run out of Trump Tower end up as a special guest at a Donald Trump event in Moscow in 2013? This may be one of the odder questions of the already-odd 2016 presidential campaign.
On April 16, 2013, federal agents burst into a swanky apartment at Trump Tower in New York City as part of a larger raid that rounded up 29 suspected members of two global gambling rings with operations allegedly overseen by a supposed Russian mob boss named Alimzhan Tokhtakhounov. The Russian was not nabbed by US law enforcement. Since being indicted in the United States a decade earlier for allegedly rigging an ice skating competition at the 2002 Olympics, he had been living in Russia, beyond the reach of Western authorities. And this new gambling indictment did not appear to inconvenience Tokhtakhounov. Seven months after the bust, he was a VIP attendee at Donald Trump's Miss Universe 2013 contest held in Moscow. In fact, Tokhtakhounov hit the red carpet within minutes of Trump. An alleged crime lord who was a fugitive from American justice was apparently a celebrity guest at Trump's event.
During the 2016 race, Trump's associations with Russia have sparked assorted controversies. He has praised Russian leader Vladimir Putin and made a series of contradictory remarks regarding his relationship with the autocrat. (In July, Trump said he had never spoken to Putin, but in a 2014 video, he claimed he had.) Trump has insisted on the campaign trail, "I have nothing to do with Russia." Yet he has a long history of attempting—and generally failing—to forge deals in that country. And Trump has been surrounded by campaign aides—including onetime campaign chairman Paul Manafort—with close and lucrative business ties to Russia and Putin allies.
Contrary to his claim of having nothing to do with Russia, Trump did pull off one major deal there: staging the 2013 Miss Universe pageant in the nation's capital. At the time, Trump co-owned the contest with NBC. The event landed him in the company of Tokhtakhounov and other high-profile Russians. And Trump hoped it would also bring him close to Putin. Months before the contest, he tweeted, "Do you think Putin will be going to The Miss Universe Pageant in November in Moscow - if so, will he become my new best friend?"
Putin didn't show up, but, according to Russian media accounts and photos of the event, Tokhtakhounov did. He was part of a crew of wealthy and powerful Russians who, according to a press report, were treated as VIPs. Also present were Vladimir Kozhin, a top government official and member of Putin's inner circle (who the following year would be hit with US sanctions in response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine) and Aras Agalarov, a Russian billionaire oligarch close to Putin with whom Trump wanted to develop a high-rise in Moscow. (Agalarov played a role in drawing the beauty contest to Moscow; it was held in a concert hall owned by his family business empire, and his son, a middling pop star, performed at the pageant.) After the event, Trump boasted to the New York Post, "Almost all of the oligarchs were in the room."
Asked how Tokhtakhounov came to be part of the red-carpet crowd at the event, a spokeswoman for Miss Universe, which Trump sold in 2015, said she was not familiar with his name.
In a phone interview with Mother Jones, Tokhtakhounov initially said he had not attended the beauty pageant. After being told that there were photos and media reports showing that he had been there, he acknowledged that he had been present at the glitzy gathering. But he denied that he had been a VIP and said he had purchased his own ticket. Tokhtakhounov also said he had no interaction with Trump at the event.
The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
Alimzhan Tokhtakhounov's tale is an intriguing story of sports, Hollywood stars, poker, and alleged crime. The indictment filed by Preet Bharara, the US attorney in Manhattan, which triggered the 2013 raid, identified Tokhtakhounov as a vory v zakone—or a vor—a Russian term for a select group of the highest-level Russian crime bosses. A vor receives tributes from other criminals, offers protection, and adjudicates conflicts among other crooks. The indictment charged that Tokhtakhounov used his "substantial influence in the criminal underworld" to protect a high-stakes illegal gambling ring operating out of Trump Tower. He sometimes deployed "explicit threats of violence and economic harm" to handle disputes arising from this gambling operation. The indictment noted that in one two-month period he was paid $10 million by this outfit for his services.
The operations of the gambling scheme were handled by two other men: Vadim Trincher and Anatoly Golubchik. The indictment alleged that they and others ran "an international gambling business that catered to oligarchs residing in the former Soviet Union and throughout the world," used "threats of violence to obtain unpaid gambling debts," and "employed a sophisticated money laundering scheme to move tens of millions of dollars…from the former Soviet Union through shell companies in Cyprus into various investments and other shell companies in the United States." According to the US attorney, their enterprise "booked sports bets that reached into the millions of dollars" and laundered approximately $100 million.
Trincher, a dual citizen of the United States and Israel, was a championship professional poker player who had purchased a Trump Tower apartment located directly below an apartment owned by Donald Trump. In 2009, Trincher had paid $5 million for the posh pad. Two years later, he and his wife had reportedly hoped to hold a fundraiser in the apartment for Newt Gingrich's presidential campaign, but they had to cancel the event because of the presence of mold caused by a water leak. During one court hearing, the US attorney's office said that Trincher, then 52 years old, directed much of the racketeering enterprise from this Trump Tower apartment. "From his apartment, he oversaw what must have been the world's largest sports book," Assistant US Attorney Harris Fischman remarked. "He catered to millionaires and billionaires."
The indictment also targeted an associated gambling ring operated by Trincher's son Illya, Hillel Nahmad, the son of a billionaire art dealer, and others. (Nahmad also reportedly owned the entire 51st floor of Trump Tower.) This crew managed a high-stakes betting operation and money-laundering shop. The indictment charged another Trincher son named Eugene and several others with running illegal high-stakes poker rooms in and around New York City. This group included Molly Bloom, who had previously earned a reputation as an organizer of private poker games for celebrities, including Leonardo DiCaprio and Tobey Maguire. Following the raid, the New York Daily News reported that a witness told the paper that "games held by the crew in a Trump Tower apartment…[were] poker 'on steroids,' with cameos by movie and sports stars, including A-Rod."
Shortly after the indictment was issued, Tokhtakhounov told a Russian television channel that the case against him was "yet another fairy tale from the Americans." He claimed the prosecutors had included him in the indictment "to give the situation significance." He acknowledged that he knew two of the defendants and had placed bets with them. "Of course, in conversation," he added, "I might have given them advice on how to do things better."
Tokhtakhounov was trying to depict himself as a victim unfairly targeted by the United States. In 2002, he was indicted for allegedly fixing skating matches at the Salt Lake City Olympics. (The feds believed he had rigged events so that Russians would take home a gold and a French pair would win another gold—and he would pocket a French visa.) He was arrested in Italy, but soon Tokhtakhounov, who denied the charges, was let go and made his way back to Russia.
Something of a celebrity in Russia, Tokhtakhounov has engaged in various enterprises. He once owned casinos in Moscow. He claimed to be an organizer of pop concerts and fashion shows. He represented a modeling association, and he wrote novels. He lived in a high-end apartment building in Moscow and kept a palatial country house outside the city. He is currently wanted by Interpol for conspiracy to commit wire fraud, bribery conspiracy, wire fraud, and "bribery in sport contests."
A year following the Trump Tower raid, Trincher and Golubchik, after pleading guilty, were each sentenced to five years in prison. Each man was ordered to forfeit more than $20 million in cash, investments, and property. (Trincher's sons, Nahmad, and Bloom also pled guilty.) Tokhtakhounov, the US attorney's office noted, remained a fugitive.
Trump has cited the 2013 Miss Universe contest as proof he possesses serious foreign policy experience. In May, he told Fox News, "I know Russia well. I had a major event in Russia two or three years ago, which was a big, big incredible event." And it provided the reality television mogul the opportunity to hobnob with a Putin crony who is now under US sanctions, various oligarchs who are chums with the Russian leader, and an alleged Russian mafioso accused by the US government of protecting a global criminal enterprise that operated directly below one of Trump's own apartments in Trump Tower. What a small world.
And here's a coincidence: The guy was indicted for being part of a global gambling ring run out of Trump Tower.
By David Corn and Hannah Levintova
How did an alleged and notorious Russian mobster connected to an illegal international gambling ring run out of Trump Tower end up as a special guest at a Donald Trump event in Moscow in 2013? This may be one of the odder questions of the already-odd 2016 presidential campaign.
On April 16, 2013, federal agents burst into a swanky apartment at Trump Tower in New York City as part of a larger raid that rounded up 29 suspected members of two global gambling rings with operations allegedly overseen by a supposed Russian mob boss named Alimzhan Tokhtakhounov. The Russian was not nabbed by US law enforcement. Since being indicted in the United States a decade earlier for allegedly rigging an ice skating competition at the 2002 Olympics, he had been living in Russia, beyond the reach of Western authorities. And this new gambling indictment did not appear to inconvenience Tokhtakhounov. Seven months after the bust, he was a VIP attendee at Donald Trump's Miss Universe 2013 contest held in Moscow. In fact, Tokhtakhounov hit the red carpet within minutes of Trump. An alleged crime lord who was a fugitive from American justice was apparently a celebrity guest at Trump's event.
During the 2016 race, Trump's associations with Russia have sparked assorted controversies. He has praised Russian leader Vladimir Putin and made a series of contradictory remarks regarding his relationship with the autocrat. (In July, Trump said he had never spoken to Putin, but in a 2014 video, he claimed he had.) Trump has insisted on the campaign trail, "I have nothing to do with Russia." Yet he has a long history of attempting—and generally failing—to forge deals in that country. And Trump has been surrounded by campaign aides—including onetime campaign chairman Paul Manafort—with close and lucrative business ties to Russia and Putin allies.
Contrary to his claim of having nothing to do with Russia, Trump did pull off one major deal there: staging the 2013 Miss Universe pageant in the nation's capital. At the time, Trump co-owned the contest with NBC. The event landed him in the company of Tokhtakhounov and other high-profile Russians. And Trump hoped it would also bring him close to Putin. Months before the contest, he tweeted, "Do you think Putin will be going to The Miss Universe Pageant in November in Moscow - if so, will he become my new best friend?"
Putin didn't show up, but, according to Russian media accounts and photos of the event, Tokhtakhounov did. He was part of a crew of wealthy and powerful Russians who, according to a press report, were treated as VIPs. Also present were Vladimir Kozhin, a top government official and member of Putin's inner circle (who the following year would be hit with US sanctions in response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine) and Aras Agalarov, a Russian billionaire oligarch close to Putin with whom Trump wanted to develop a high-rise in Moscow. (Agalarov played a role in drawing the beauty contest to Moscow; it was held in a concert hall owned by his family business empire, and his son, a middling pop star, performed at the pageant.) After the event, Trump boasted to the New York Post, "Almost all of the oligarchs were in the room."
Asked how Tokhtakhounov came to be part of the red-carpet crowd at the event, a spokeswoman for Miss Universe, which Trump sold in 2015, said she was not familiar with his name.
In a phone interview with Mother Jones, Tokhtakhounov initially said he had not attended the beauty pageant. After being told that there were photos and media reports showing that he had been there, he acknowledged that he had been present at the glitzy gathering. But he denied that he had been a VIP and said he had purchased his own ticket. Tokhtakhounov also said he had no interaction with Trump at the event.
The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
Alimzhan Tokhtakhounov's tale is an intriguing story of sports, Hollywood stars, poker, and alleged crime. The indictment filed by Preet Bharara, the US attorney in Manhattan, which triggered the 2013 raid, identified Tokhtakhounov as a vory v zakone—or a vor—a Russian term for a select group of the highest-level Russian crime bosses. A vor receives tributes from other criminals, offers protection, and adjudicates conflicts among other crooks. The indictment charged that Tokhtakhounov used his "substantial influence in the criminal underworld" to protect a high-stakes illegal gambling ring operating out of Trump Tower. He sometimes deployed "explicit threats of violence and economic harm" to handle disputes arising from this gambling operation. The indictment noted that in one two-month period he was paid $10 million by this outfit for his services.
The operations of the gambling scheme were handled by two other men: Vadim Trincher and Anatoly Golubchik. The indictment alleged that they and others ran "an international gambling business that catered to oligarchs residing in the former Soviet Union and throughout the world," used "threats of violence to obtain unpaid gambling debts," and "employed a sophisticated money laundering scheme to move tens of millions of dollars…from the former Soviet Union through shell companies in Cyprus into various investments and other shell companies in the United States." According to the US attorney, their enterprise "booked sports bets that reached into the millions of dollars" and laundered approximately $100 million.
Trincher, a dual citizen of the United States and Israel, was a championship professional poker player who had purchased a Trump Tower apartment located directly below an apartment owned by Donald Trump. In 2009, Trincher had paid $5 million for the posh pad. Two years later, he and his wife had reportedly hoped to hold a fundraiser in the apartment for Newt Gingrich's presidential campaign, but they had to cancel the event because of the presence of mold caused by a water leak. During one court hearing, the US attorney's office said that Trincher, then 52 years old, directed much of the racketeering enterprise from this Trump Tower apartment. "From his apartment, he oversaw what must have been the world's largest sports book," Assistant US Attorney Harris Fischman remarked. "He catered to millionaires and billionaires."
The indictment also targeted an associated gambling ring operated by Trincher's son Illya, Hillel Nahmad, the son of a billionaire art dealer, and others. (Nahmad also reportedly owned the entire 51st floor of Trump Tower.) This crew managed a high-stakes betting operation and money-laundering shop. The indictment charged another Trincher son named Eugene and several others with running illegal high-stakes poker rooms in and around New York City. This group included Molly Bloom, who had previously earned a reputation as an organizer of private poker games for celebrities, including Leonardo DiCaprio and Tobey Maguire. Following the raid, the New York Daily News reported that a witness told the paper that "games held by the crew in a Trump Tower apartment…[were] poker 'on steroids,' with cameos by movie and sports stars, including A-Rod."
Shortly after the indictment was issued, Tokhtakhounov told a Russian television channel that the case against him was "yet another fairy tale from the Americans." He claimed the prosecutors had included him in the indictment "to give the situation significance." He acknowledged that he knew two of the defendants and had placed bets with them. "Of course, in conversation," he added, "I might have given them advice on how to do things better."
Tokhtakhounov was trying to depict himself as a victim unfairly targeted by the United States. In 2002, he was indicted for allegedly fixing skating matches at the Salt Lake City Olympics. (The feds believed he had rigged events so that Russians would take home a gold and a French pair would win another gold—and he would pocket a French visa.) He was arrested in Italy, but soon Tokhtakhounov, who denied the charges, was let go and made his way back to Russia.
Something of a celebrity in Russia, Tokhtakhounov has engaged in various enterprises. He once owned casinos in Moscow. He claimed to be an organizer of pop concerts and fashion shows. He represented a modeling association, and he wrote novels. He lived in a high-end apartment building in Moscow and kept a palatial country house outside the city. He is currently wanted by Interpol for conspiracy to commit wire fraud, bribery conspiracy, wire fraud, and "bribery in sport contests."
A year following the Trump Tower raid, Trincher and Golubchik, after pleading guilty, were each sentenced to five years in prison. Each man was ordered to forfeit more than $20 million in cash, investments, and property. (Trincher's sons, Nahmad, and Bloom also pled guilty.) Tokhtakhounov, the US attorney's office noted, remained a fugitive.
Trump has cited the 2013 Miss Universe contest as proof he possesses serious foreign policy experience. In May, he told Fox News, "I know Russia well. I had a major event in Russia two or three years ago, which was a big, big incredible event." And it provided the reality television mogul the opportunity to hobnob with a Putin crony who is now under US sanctions, various oligarchs who are chums with the Russian leader, and an alleged Russian mafioso accused by the US government of protecting a global criminal enterprise that operated directly below one of Trump's own apartments in Trump Tower. What a small world.
North and South
The North and South Jupiter
A wide, looping orbit brought Juno close to Jupiter on August 27. As the spacecraft swung around the giant planet's poles JunoCam acquired these premier direct polar views, a change from the usual nearly equatorial perspective of outbound spacecraft and the telescopes of planet Earth. The sunlit side of Jupiter's north polar region (left) was imaged about 125,000 kilometers from the cloud tops, two hours before Juno's closest approach. An hour after close approach the south polar region was captured from 94,500 kilometers away. Strikingly different from the alternating light-colored zones and darker belts girdling more familiar equatorial regions, the polar region clouds appear more convoluted and mottled by many clockwise and counterclockwise rotating storm systems. Another 35 close orbital flybys are planned during the Juno mission.
Polar Bears
Polar Bears Across the Arctic Face Shorter Sea Ice Season
Polar bears are among the animals most affected by the seasonal and year-to-year decline in Arctic sea ice extent, because they rely on sea ice for essential activities such as hunting, traveling and breeding.
A new study by University of Washington researchers, funded by NASA and using satellite data from NASA and other agencies, found a trend toward earlier sea ice melt in the spring and later ice growth in the fall across all 19 polar bear subpopulations, which can negatively impact the feeding and breeding capabilities of the bears. The paper, published on Sept. 14 in the journal The Cryosphere, is the first to quantify the sea ice changes in each polar bear subpopulation across the entire Arctic region using metrics that are specifically relevant to polar bear biology.
"This study shows declining sea ice for all subpopulations of polar bears," said co-author Harry Stern, a researcher with the University of Washington's Polar Science Center in Seattle.
The analysis shows that the critical timing of the sea ice break-up and sea ice freeze-up is changing in all areas in a direction that is harmful for polar bears.
“Other researchers have used the satellite-derived sea ice data to look at how the sea ice extent in a particular place is changing in a particular month. But for us the important thing was the timing of the retreat of sea ice in the spring and its advance in the fall, for all 19 polar bear subpopulations,” Stern said.
Nineteen separate polar bear subpopulations live throughout the Arctic, spending their winters and springs roaming on sea ice and hunting. The bears have evolved mainly to eat seals, which provide necessary fats and nutrients in the harsh Arctic environment. Polar bears can't outswim their prey, so instead they perch on the ice as a platform and ambush seals at breathing holes or break through the ice to access their dens.
"Sea ice really is their platform for life," said co-author Kristin Laidre, a researcher at the UW's Polar Science Center. "They are capable of existing on land for part of the year, but the sea ice is where they obtain their main prey."
The new study draws upon 35 years of satellite data showing sea ice concentration each day in the Arctic. NASA scientists process the data, stored at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado.
The center also reports each fall the yearly minimum low for Arctic sea ice. This August saw the fourth lowest in the satellite record and the September minimum extent is likely headed to its second lowest level in the record.
In 17 of the 19 polar bear subpopulations, the researchers found that the total number of ice-covered days declined at the rate of seven to 19 days per decade between 1979 and 2014. The decline was even greater in the Barents Sea and the Arctic basin. Sea ice concentration during the summer months — an important measure because summertime is when some subpopulations are forced to fast on land — also declined in all regions, by 1 percent to 9 percent per decade.
The most striking result, researchers said, is the consistent trend across all polar bear regions for an earlier spring ice melt and a later fall freeze-up. Arctic sea ice retreats in the springtime as daylight reappears and temperatures warm. In the fall months the ice sheets build again as temperatures drop.
"These spring and fall transitions bound the period when there is good ice habitat available for bears to feed," Laidre said. "Those periods are also tied to the breeding season when bears find mates, and when females come out of their maternity dens with very small cubs and haven't eaten for months."
The researchers found that on average, spring melting was three to nine days earlier per decade, and fall freeze-up was three to nine days later per decade. Over the 35 years of Arctic sea ice satellite data. that corresponds to a roughly 3-and-a-half-week shift at either end — and seven weeks of total loss of good sea ice habitat for polar bears.
"We expect that if the trends continue, compared with today, polar bears will experience another six to seven weeks of ice-free periods by mid-century," Stern said.
The trend appears to be linear and isn't accelerating or leveling off, Stern added.
The study's results currently are used by the Polar Bear Specialist Group, part of the International Union for Conservation of Nature's Species Survival Commission. . The Polar Bear Specialist Group used the sea ice metric as a measure of polar bear habitat in the IUCN Red List assessment of polar bears, which assesses the conservation status of polar bears. The researchers plan to update their findings each year as new ice coverage data are available.
"It's nice to see this work being used in high-level conservation goals," Laidre said.
“This NASA-funded work is an excellent example of the use satellite imagery to understand the distribution and abundance of an Arctic keystone species, with the added benefit of providing vital information to those charged with managing polar bear populations globally,” said Woody Turner, the Program Scientist for Biological Diversity and Program Manager for Ecological Forecasting in the NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C.
The study was funded by NASA and the Greenland Institute of Natural Resources.
Polar bears are among the animals most affected by the seasonal and year-to-year decline in Arctic sea ice extent, because they rely on sea ice for essential activities such as hunting, traveling and breeding.
A new study by University of Washington researchers, funded by NASA and using satellite data from NASA and other agencies, found a trend toward earlier sea ice melt in the spring and later ice growth in the fall across all 19 polar bear subpopulations, which can negatively impact the feeding and breeding capabilities of the bears. The paper, published on Sept. 14 in the journal The Cryosphere, is the first to quantify the sea ice changes in each polar bear subpopulation across the entire Arctic region using metrics that are specifically relevant to polar bear biology.
"This study shows declining sea ice for all subpopulations of polar bears," said co-author Harry Stern, a researcher with the University of Washington's Polar Science Center in Seattle.
The analysis shows that the critical timing of the sea ice break-up and sea ice freeze-up is changing in all areas in a direction that is harmful for polar bears.
“Other researchers have used the satellite-derived sea ice data to look at how the sea ice extent in a particular place is changing in a particular month. But for us the important thing was the timing of the retreat of sea ice in the spring and its advance in the fall, for all 19 polar bear subpopulations,” Stern said.
Nineteen separate polar bear subpopulations live throughout the Arctic, spending their winters and springs roaming on sea ice and hunting. The bears have evolved mainly to eat seals, which provide necessary fats and nutrients in the harsh Arctic environment. Polar bears can't outswim their prey, so instead they perch on the ice as a platform and ambush seals at breathing holes or break through the ice to access their dens.
"Sea ice really is their platform for life," said co-author Kristin Laidre, a researcher at the UW's Polar Science Center. "They are capable of existing on land for part of the year, but the sea ice is where they obtain their main prey."
The new study draws upon 35 years of satellite data showing sea ice concentration each day in the Arctic. NASA scientists process the data, stored at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado.
The center also reports each fall the yearly minimum low for Arctic sea ice. This August saw the fourth lowest in the satellite record and the September minimum extent is likely headed to its second lowest level in the record.
In 17 of the 19 polar bear subpopulations, the researchers found that the total number of ice-covered days declined at the rate of seven to 19 days per decade between 1979 and 2014. The decline was even greater in the Barents Sea and the Arctic basin. Sea ice concentration during the summer months — an important measure because summertime is when some subpopulations are forced to fast on land — also declined in all regions, by 1 percent to 9 percent per decade.
The most striking result, researchers said, is the consistent trend across all polar bear regions for an earlier spring ice melt and a later fall freeze-up. Arctic sea ice retreats in the springtime as daylight reappears and temperatures warm. In the fall months the ice sheets build again as temperatures drop.
"These spring and fall transitions bound the period when there is good ice habitat available for bears to feed," Laidre said. "Those periods are also tied to the breeding season when bears find mates, and when females come out of their maternity dens with very small cubs and haven't eaten for months."
The researchers found that on average, spring melting was three to nine days earlier per decade, and fall freeze-up was three to nine days later per decade. Over the 35 years of Arctic sea ice satellite data. that corresponds to a roughly 3-and-a-half-week shift at either end — and seven weeks of total loss of good sea ice habitat for polar bears.
"We expect that if the trends continue, compared with today, polar bears will experience another six to seven weeks of ice-free periods by mid-century," Stern said.
The trend appears to be linear and isn't accelerating or leveling off, Stern added.
The study's results currently are used by the Polar Bear Specialist Group, part of the International Union for Conservation of Nature's Species Survival Commission. . The Polar Bear Specialist Group used the sea ice metric as a measure of polar bear habitat in the IUCN Red List assessment of polar bears, which assesses the conservation status of polar bears. The researchers plan to update their findings each year as new ice coverage data are available.
"It's nice to see this work being used in high-level conservation goals," Laidre said.
“This NASA-funded work is an excellent example of the use satellite imagery to understand the distribution and abundance of an Arctic keystone species, with the added benefit of providing vital information to those charged with managing polar bear populations globally,” said Woody Turner, the Program Scientist for Biological Diversity and Program Manager for Ecological Forecasting in the NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C.
The study was funded by NASA and the Greenland Institute of Natural Resources.
Gringo feo
Vicente Fox: Trump turning U.S. back to days of 'gringo feo'
By Nick Gass
Donald Trump's rhetoric and campaign is nothing new in the Americas, former Mexican President Vicente Fox suggested Wednesday, ripping into the Republican nominee anew while drawing explicit comparisons between him and past Latin American demagogues.
Fox has repeatedly criticized Trump throughout the election cycle, particularly over his insistence that Mexico would pay for the cost of a wall along the country's border with the United States. Asked on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" whether Trump's candidacy reminded him of "any past demagogic candidates in Latin America," Fox did not miss a beat.
"Absolutely, yes. And we suffered from that all along the 20th century," Fox said, mentioning the likes of former Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, as well as the Perons and the Kirchners of Argentina. "And I'm surprised this nation is going back to the old days of the gringo feo, of the ugly American but also going back to populism."
Declaring the U.S. "great already" because of "the work of these millions and millions of workers," Fox acknowledged the loss of manufacturing jobs in the country over the last decade but added that Trump was not telling the whole truth about the growth "from the new economy, in the new jobs, the quality jobs which is what U.S. Americans have here, so it's wrong on every position."
"It is wrong on going to a trade war with China, with Mexico. He doesn't understand that U.S. economy has a deficit with every single economy in the world and he's not going to go to war with everybody. We are frightened outside. I work with 95 former heads of states" with the Club de Madrid, Fox continued. "We are now in one solid front against this man. This is not the voice of United States. This is not the voice of a compassionate leadership. This is not the voice of a brilliant leader which would be world leader, not only president of the United States."
By Nick Gass
Donald Trump's rhetoric and campaign is nothing new in the Americas, former Mexican President Vicente Fox suggested Wednesday, ripping into the Republican nominee anew while drawing explicit comparisons between him and past Latin American demagogues.
Fox has repeatedly criticized Trump throughout the election cycle, particularly over his insistence that Mexico would pay for the cost of a wall along the country's border with the United States. Asked on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" whether Trump's candidacy reminded him of "any past demagogic candidates in Latin America," Fox did not miss a beat.
"Absolutely, yes. And we suffered from that all along the 20th century," Fox said, mentioning the likes of former Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, as well as the Perons and the Kirchners of Argentina. "And I'm surprised this nation is going back to the old days of the gringo feo, of the ugly American but also going back to populism."
Declaring the U.S. "great already" because of "the work of these millions and millions of workers," Fox acknowledged the loss of manufacturing jobs in the country over the last decade but added that Trump was not telling the whole truth about the growth "from the new economy, in the new jobs, the quality jobs which is what U.S. Americans have here, so it's wrong on every position."
"It is wrong on going to a trade war with China, with Mexico. He doesn't understand that U.S. economy has a deficit with every single economy in the world and he's not going to go to war with everybody. We are frightened outside. I work with 95 former heads of states" with the Club de Madrid, Fox continued. "We are now in one solid front against this man. This is not the voice of United States. This is not the voice of a compassionate leadership. This is not the voice of a brilliant leader which would be world leader, not only president of the United States."
70 years
Obama: Trump spent 70 years avoiding working people
By Louis Nelson
Speaking in the shadow of the Philadelphia Museum of Art steps made famous by the movie “Rocky,” President Barack Obama scoffed at the notion of Donald Trump as the champion of the common man.
“Look, I keep on reading this analysis that, well, you know, Trump’s got support from, like, working folks. Really? Like, this is the guy you want to be championing working people?” the president said at a rally for Hillary Clinton. “This guy who spent 70 years on this Earth showing no concern for working people. This guy is suddenly going to be your champion? I mean he’s spent most of his life trying to stay as far away from working people as he could. And now this guy's going to be the champion of working people? Huh?”
By contrast, Obama likened his former secretary of state to the silver-screen Philadelphia boxer, a statue of whom stood nearby. He recalled her 2008 primary victory in Pennsylvania and said that despite their hard-fought 2008 battle, he “really, really, really” wants to see her elected to the White House.
“Now, look, can I just say I am really into electing Hillary Clinton?” Obama said, interrupting the crowd’s chants of Clinton’s name. “This is not me going through the motions here. I really, really, really want to elect Hillary Clinton.”
Obama spent the bulk of the beginning of his rally ticking off his administration’s accomplishments, highlighting economic gains over the past eight years as well as renewed diplomatic ties to Cuba, a nuclear agreement with Russia and the death of Osama Bin Laden. As he listed successes from the past eight years, an audience member yelled that gas was $2 a gallon, to which the president jokingly responded “thank you for reminding me. Thanks, Obama.”
But the president also said “we knew that we wouldn't meet all of our challenges in one term or even in one presidency,” and went on to praise Clinton as the candidate best positioned to continue the progress he touted. He compared his former secretary of state to Donald Trump, a candidate who Obama said presents a “fundamental choice about who we are as a people. This is a choice about the very meaning of America.”
“What we’ve seen from the other side in this election, this isn't Abraham Lincoln's Republican Party. This isn't even the vision of freedom that Ronald Reagan talked about,” he said. “This is a dark, pessimistic vision of a country where we turn against each other, we turn away from the rest of the world. They're not offering serious solutions. They're just fanning resentment and blame and anger and hate. And that is not the America we know. That's not the America I know.”
Also unrecognizable to Republican leaders of the past, Obama said, would be Trump’s friendly tone towards Russia and specifically its president, Vladimir Putin. Of the Manhattan billionaire’s relationship with Putin, Obama said “he loves this guy,” and said the Russian president was “Donald Trump’s role model.”
“Can you imagine Ronald Reagan idolizing somebody like that?” Obama asked the crowd. “He saw America as a shining city on the hill. Donald Trump calls it a divided crime scene.”
The president also pilloried Trump’s recent interview with Larry King that aired on the Russian government-owned TV network RT America, where Obama said the GOP nominee sought to “talk down our military and to curry favor with Vladimir Putin.” Obama derided the praise Trump has lavished on Putin as “a strong leader” who has more adeptly led his own country than Obama has the U.S.
“The interviewer asks him well why do you support this guy? ‘He's a strong guy. Look, he's gotten a 82 percent poll rating.’ Well, yes, Saddam Hussein had a 90 percent poll rating,” Obama said, recalling in general terms praise that Trump has offered Putin in the past. “I mean, if you control the media and you've taken away everybody's civil liberties and you jail dissidents, that's what happens. The pollster calls you up and says ‘do you support the guy who if you don't support him he might throw you in jail?’ You say ‘yes, I love that guy.’”
Even with a historically unpopular candidate in Trump, Obama returned again to his regular campaign rally refrain: “Don’t boo, vote.” He called on Pennsylvanians not just to support Clinton but also Democrats up and down the ballot, highlighting Senate candidate Katie McGinty’s bid to unseat Republican Sen. Pat Toomey.
The Pennsylvania senate seat is one Democrats hope to capture as part of their larger bid to regain control of the Senate. Seeking to tie Toomey to his party’s presidential candidate, Obama told the crowd that “if you oppose raising the minimum wage you should vote for Trump. You should also vote for Pat Toomey. A Trump-Toomey economy will be right up your alley.”
“Pat Toomey strongly opposes Obamacare, the disastrous Iran nuclear deal, and many other Obama initiatives, so of course the president will support his opponent. But that hasn’t stopped Toomey from joining with the president on gun safety and some job creation measures," Toomey's Senate campaign responded in a statement emailed out by his campaign. "That’s the difference between a senator who thinks for himself, and the partisan extremist rubber stamp that Katie McGinty would be.”
Obama also acknowledged that Clinton’s decades in the public eye have left her exposed to “what I believe is more unfair criticism than anybody out here,” but cautioned Americans, and especially young Americans, not to dismiss her as a relic of the past. He praised her for continuing to seek public office “even if we haven't always appreciated her.”
“We are a young country, we are a restless country. We always like the new, shiny thing. I benefited from that when I was a candidate. And we take for granted sometimes what is steady and true. And Hillary Clinton's steady and she is true,” the president said before urging voters to support Clinton by echoing a famous Teddy Roosevelt speech. “If you're serious about our democracy then you've got to be with her. She's in the arena and you can't leave her in there by herself. You have to get in there with her.”
By Louis Nelson
Speaking in the shadow of the Philadelphia Museum of Art steps made famous by the movie “Rocky,” President Barack Obama scoffed at the notion of Donald Trump as the champion of the common man.
“Look, I keep on reading this analysis that, well, you know, Trump’s got support from, like, working folks. Really? Like, this is the guy you want to be championing working people?” the president said at a rally for Hillary Clinton. “This guy who spent 70 years on this Earth showing no concern for working people. This guy is suddenly going to be your champion? I mean he’s spent most of his life trying to stay as far away from working people as he could. And now this guy's going to be the champion of working people? Huh?”
By contrast, Obama likened his former secretary of state to the silver-screen Philadelphia boxer, a statue of whom stood nearby. He recalled her 2008 primary victory in Pennsylvania and said that despite their hard-fought 2008 battle, he “really, really, really” wants to see her elected to the White House.
“Now, look, can I just say I am really into electing Hillary Clinton?” Obama said, interrupting the crowd’s chants of Clinton’s name. “This is not me going through the motions here. I really, really, really want to elect Hillary Clinton.”
Obama spent the bulk of the beginning of his rally ticking off his administration’s accomplishments, highlighting economic gains over the past eight years as well as renewed diplomatic ties to Cuba, a nuclear agreement with Russia and the death of Osama Bin Laden. As he listed successes from the past eight years, an audience member yelled that gas was $2 a gallon, to which the president jokingly responded “thank you for reminding me. Thanks, Obama.”
But the president also said “we knew that we wouldn't meet all of our challenges in one term or even in one presidency,” and went on to praise Clinton as the candidate best positioned to continue the progress he touted. He compared his former secretary of state to Donald Trump, a candidate who Obama said presents a “fundamental choice about who we are as a people. This is a choice about the very meaning of America.”
“What we’ve seen from the other side in this election, this isn't Abraham Lincoln's Republican Party. This isn't even the vision of freedom that Ronald Reagan talked about,” he said. “This is a dark, pessimistic vision of a country where we turn against each other, we turn away from the rest of the world. They're not offering serious solutions. They're just fanning resentment and blame and anger and hate. And that is not the America we know. That's not the America I know.”
Also unrecognizable to Republican leaders of the past, Obama said, would be Trump’s friendly tone towards Russia and specifically its president, Vladimir Putin. Of the Manhattan billionaire’s relationship with Putin, Obama said “he loves this guy,” and said the Russian president was “Donald Trump’s role model.”
“Can you imagine Ronald Reagan idolizing somebody like that?” Obama asked the crowd. “He saw America as a shining city on the hill. Donald Trump calls it a divided crime scene.”
The president also pilloried Trump’s recent interview with Larry King that aired on the Russian government-owned TV network RT America, where Obama said the GOP nominee sought to “talk down our military and to curry favor with Vladimir Putin.” Obama derided the praise Trump has lavished on Putin as “a strong leader” who has more adeptly led his own country than Obama has the U.S.
“The interviewer asks him well why do you support this guy? ‘He's a strong guy. Look, he's gotten a 82 percent poll rating.’ Well, yes, Saddam Hussein had a 90 percent poll rating,” Obama said, recalling in general terms praise that Trump has offered Putin in the past. “I mean, if you control the media and you've taken away everybody's civil liberties and you jail dissidents, that's what happens. The pollster calls you up and says ‘do you support the guy who if you don't support him he might throw you in jail?’ You say ‘yes, I love that guy.’”
Even with a historically unpopular candidate in Trump, Obama returned again to his regular campaign rally refrain: “Don’t boo, vote.” He called on Pennsylvanians not just to support Clinton but also Democrats up and down the ballot, highlighting Senate candidate Katie McGinty’s bid to unseat Republican Sen. Pat Toomey.
The Pennsylvania senate seat is one Democrats hope to capture as part of their larger bid to regain control of the Senate. Seeking to tie Toomey to his party’s presidential candidate, Obama told the crowd that “if you oppose raising the minimum wage you should vote for Trump. You should also vote for Pat Toomey. A Trump-Toomey economy will be right up your alley.”
“Pat Toomey strongly opposes Obamacare, the disastrous Iran nuclear deal, and many other Obama initiatives, so of course the president will support his opponent. But that hasn’t stopped Toomey from joining with the president on gun safety and some job creation measures," Toomey's Senate campaign responded in a statement emailed out by his campaign. "That’s the difference between a senator who thinks for himself, and the partisan extremist rubber stamp that Katie McGinty would be.”
Obama also acknowledged that Clinton’s decades in the public eye have left her exposed to “what I believe is more unfair criticism than anybody out here,” but cautioned Americans, and especially young Americans, not to dismiss her as a relic of the past. He praised her for continuing to seek public office “even if we haven't always appreciated her.”
“We are a young country, we are a restless country. We always like the new, shiny thing. I benefited from that when I was a candidate. And we take for granted sometimes what is steady and true. And Hillary Clinton's steady and she is true,” the president said before urging voters to support Clinton by echoing a famous Teddy Roosevelt speech. “If you're serious about our democracy then you've got to be with her. She's in the arena and you can't leave her in there by herself. You have to get in there with her.”
Record rise in income
Record rise in incomes could boost Clinton
The income hike isn’t likely to impress Trump, who insists that the federal government’s economic statistics are rigged.
By Marianne LeVine and Timothy Noah
Since the 1990s, weak income growth for the typical American family has been a talking point for both parties, the caveat at the end of any otherwise favorable employment report under George W. Bush or Barack Obama.
But a Census Bureau report released Tuesday morning showed the largest single-year boost in median household income in nearly half a century, prompting the White House to declare that Democratic policies are working. That's welcome news for Hillary Clinton's campaign — though it may prove a blip in an otherwise dismal trend dating back two decades.
According to the census report, median household income increased 5.2 percent in 2015, to $56,516. That was the first annual increase of any kind, after inflation, since the Great Recession of 2007-09, and the largest recorded annual increase since the data series started in 1967.
The Clinton campaign immediately retweeted a favorable comment on the findings by University of Michigan economist Justin Wolfers — adding, mischievously, a 2004 quote from Trump: “It just seems that the economy does better under the Democrats than under the Republicans.”
In a blog post, Jason Furman, chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, said the report “shows the remarkable progress that American families have made as the recovery continues to strengthen.”
According to the report, last year's median household income was up $2,798 from an inflation-adjusted $53,718 in 2014.
The income hike isn’t likely to impress Trump, who insists that the federal government’s economic statistics are rigged. In an economic speech last month, Trump said the 5 percent unemployment rate was “one of the biggest hoaxes in American politics,” and on Monday he told CNBC that Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen is keeping interest rates low “because she’s obviously political and doing what Obama wants her to do.”
But Tuesday's good news was difficult to refute. In a written statement, Rep. Kevin Brady (R-Texas) ignored the finding on household income and focused on the report's finding that 13.5 percent of Americans live in poverty. "Today’s report is another disappointing confirmation that too many Americans are still struggling to provide for their families and reach their full potential," he said.
Even so, Brady conceded that the poverty rate fell 1.2 percentage points over 2014 — the largest annual decline since 1968.
The 2015 income jump wasn't sufficient to boost the median above its pre-recession level.
"Yeah, it’s great that in the last year we saw an increase in household income, but we’re still below 2007 numbers,” said Aparna Mathur, resident scholar in economic policy studies at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute.
According to the census report, in 2015 household median income remained, after inflation, 1.6 percent lower than in 2007 and 2.4 percent lower than in 1999.
But Mathur didn't dispute that the latest news was favorable. "This reflects the labor market is recovering," said Mathur. "That’s the reason we’re seeing household income going up."
Jared Bernstein, former chief economic adviser to Vice President Joe Biden, went further, saying “This is the kind of report you’d expect as the economy moves closer to full employment.”
James Sherk, a research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, warned that changes in the Census Bureau's questionnaire elevated income numbers after 2013. Its survey "systematically reports higher income for years 2014 and onwards than it would have using the old survey methodology," he said. But that wouldn't account for the large jump between 2014 and 2015.
Sherk also noted that in a less-sluggish economic recovery the income jump recorded for 2015 would have occurred years earlier. "The growth in 2015 ... is long overdue," he said. "This has been the slowest recovery in the postwar era.”
Some doubt lingers whether incomes are rising as fast in 2016 as they did in 2015. Gross domestic product grew more robustly in 2015 than it has thus far this year. The Commerce Department reported last month that real GDP grew an anemic 1.1 percent in the second quarter of 2016. That was higher than the first quarter of 2016’s 0.8 percent but below the fourth quarter of 2015’s 1.4 percent.
On the other hand, wages — as distinct from income, which includes investment gains — have been rising more briskly in 2016 than they did last year. The left-leaning Economic Policy Institute calculates that nominal wage growth was up 2.51 percent in August over the previous year. In August 2015 nominal wage growth was up 2.08 percent.
The census report even delivered mildly favorable news on the intractable problem of income inequality, reporting a 4.7 percent decline in the ratio of household income at the 90th and 10th percentiles. The ratio also declined in 2014. Other inequality measures showed no statistically significant change.
The most lopsided increases in income inequality over the past two decades have occurred in income share for the top 1 percent versus the bottom 99 percent. In June, Berkeley economist Emmanuel Saez reported that although "income inequality remains extremely high," the recovery "now looks much less lopsided than in previous years," with incomes for the bottom 99 percent up 3.9 percent in 2015. That, Saez said, was "the best annual growth rate since 1999."
Even so, an online database maintained by Saez, Thomas Piketty and other leading economists shows income share for the top 1 percent in 2015 approaching, at 22 percent, an earlier peak of 23.50 in 2007 and the all-time high of 23.94 in 1928, the year before the stock market crash and the onset of the Great Depression.
According to Tuesday’s report, Hispanic households saw a 6.1 percent increase in real median household income in 2015, non-Hispanic white households saw a 4.4 percent increase, and black households saw a 4.1 percent increase. Asian households did not see a statistically significant change in real median household income.
Men and women working full-time, year-round, saw their first significant annual increase in real median earnings since 2009. Men in that group experienced a 1.5 percent increase between 2014 and 2015, while women working full-time experienced a 2.7 percent increase. The female-to-male earnings ratio was 80 percent, close to the 2014 ratio.
The supplemental poverty rate, another poverty measure that considers government assistance programs for low-income families, declined to 14.3 percent, down 1 percentage point from 2014.
Elise Gould, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute, attributed part of the decline in the poverty rate to recent minimum wage hikes at the state and local level and federal assistance programs like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or food stamps.
The income hike isn’t likely to impress Trump, who insists that the federal government’s economic statistics are rigged.
By Marianne LeVine and Timothy Noah
Since the 1990s, weak income growth for the typical American family has been a talking point for both parties, the caveat at the end of any otherwise favorable employment report under George W. Bush or Barack Obama.
But a Census Bureau report released Tuesday morning showed the largest single-year boost in median household income in nearly half a century, prompting the White House to declare that Democratic policies are working. That's welcome news for Hillary Clinton's campaign — though it may prove a blip in an otherwise dismal trend dating back two decades.
According to the census report, median household income increased 5.2 percent in 2015, to $56,516. That was the first annual increase of any kind, after inflation, since the Great Recession of 2007-09, and the largest recorded annual increase since the data series started in 1967.
The Clinton campaign immediately retweeted a favorable comment on the findings by University of Michigan economist Justin Wolfers — adding, mischievously, a 2004 quote from Trump: “It just seems that the economy does better under the Democrats than under the Republicans.”
In a blog post, Jason Furman, chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, said the report “shows the remarkable progress that American families have made as the recovery continues to strengthen.”
According to the report, last year's median household income was up $2,798 from an inflation-adjusted $53,718 in 2014.
The income hike isn’t likely to impress Trump, who insists that the federal government’s economic statistics are rigged. In an economic speech last month, Trump said the 5 percent unemployment rate was “one of the biggest hoaxes in American politics,” and on Monday he told CNBC that Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen is keeping interest rates low “because she’s obviously political and doing what Obama wants her to do.”
But Tuesday's good news was difficult to refute. In a written statement, Rep. Kevin Brady (R-Texas) ignored the finding on household income and focused on the report's finding that 13.5 percent of Americans live in poverty. "Today’s report is another disappointing confirmation that too many Americans are still struggling to provide for their families and reach their full potential," he said.
Even so, Brady conceded that the poverty rate fell 1.2 percentage points over 2014 — the largest annual decline since 1968.
The 2015 income jump wasn't sufficient to boost the median above its pre-recession level.
"Yeah, it’s great that in the last year we saw an increase in household income, but we’re still below 2007 numbers,” said Aparna Mathur, resident scholar in economic policy studies at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute.
According to the census report, in 2015 household median income remained, after inflation, 1.6 percent lower than in 2007 and 2.4 percent lower than in 1999.
But Mathur didn't dispute that the latest news was favorable. "This reflects the labor market is recovering," said Mathur. "That’s the reason we’re seeing household income going up."
Jared Bernstein, former chief economic adviser to Vice President Joe Biden, went further, saying “This is the kind of report you’d expect as the economy moves closer to full employment.”
James Sherk, a research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, warned that changes in the Census Bureau's questionnaire elevated income numbers after 2013. Its survey "systematically reports higher income for years 2014 and onwards than it would have using the old survey methodology," he said. But that wouldn't account for the large jump between 2014 and 2015.
Sherk also noted that in a less-sluggish economic recovery the income jump recorded for 2015 would have occurred years earlier. "The growth in 2015 ... is long overdue," he said. "This has been the slowest recovery in the postwar era.”
Some doubt lingers whether incomes are rising as fast in 2016 as they did in 2015. Gross domestic product grew more robustly in 2015 than it has thus far this year. The Commerce Department reported last month that real GDP grew an anemic 1.1 percent in the second quarter of 2016. That was higher than the first quarter of 2016’s 0.8 percent but below the fourth quarter of 2015’s 1.4 percent.
On the other hand, wages — as distinct from income, which includes investment gains — have been rising more briskly in 2016 than they did last year. The left-leaning Economic Policy Institute calculates that nominal wage growth was up 2.51 percent in August over the previous year. In August 2015 nominal wage growth was up 2.08 percent.
The census report even delivered mildly favorable news on the intractable problem of income inequality, reporting a 4.7 percent decline in the ratio of household income at the 90th and 10th percentiles. The ratio also declined in 2014. Other inequality measures showed no statistically significant change.
The most lopsided increases in income inequality over the past two decades have occurred in income share for the top 1 percent versus the bottom 99 percent. In June, Berkeley economist Emmanuel Saez reported that although "income inequality remains extremely high," the recovery "now looks much less lopsided than in previous years," with incomes for the bottom 99 percent up 3.9 percent in 2015. That, Saez said, was "the best annual growth rate since 1999."
Even so, an online database maintained by Saez, Thomas Piketty and other leading economists shows income share for the top 1 percent in 2015 approaching, at 22 percent, an earlier peak of 23.50 in 2007 and the all-time high of 23.94 in 1928, the year before the stock market crash and the onset of the Great Depression.
According to Tuesday’s report, Hispanic households saw a 6.1 percent increase in real median household income in 2015, non-Hispanic white households saw a 4.4 percent increase, and black households saw a 4.1 percent increase. Asian households did not see a statistically significant change in real median household income.
Men and women working full-time, year-round, saw their first significant annual increase in real median earnings since 2009. Men in that group experienced a 1.5 percent increase between 2014 and 2015, while women working full-time experienced a 2.7 percent increase. The female-to-male earnings ratio was 80 percent, close to the 2014 ratio.
The supplemental poverty rate, another poverty measure that considers government assistance programs for low-income families, declined to 14.3 percent, down 1 percentage point from 2014.
Elise Gould, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute, attributed part of the decline in the poverty rate to recent minimum wage hikes at the state and local level and federal assistance programs like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or food stamps.
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