The mayor of Charlottesville, Va., celebrated the results of the highly-anticipated governor’s race on Tuesday, calling Virginia “a wall against [President] Trump and Trumpism.”
“The eyes of the country are on the Commonwealth of Virginia,” Mayor Mike Signer (D) tweeted. “As they should be. We are a wall against Trump and Trumpism.”
The eyes of the country are on the Commonwealth of Virginia. As they should be. We are a wall against Trump and Trumpism.
— Mike Signer (@MikeSigner) November 7, 2017
Lt. Gov. Ralph Northam (D) was projected to win the Virginia governor’s race Tuesday, defeating Republican Ed Gillespie in a major victory for Democrats.
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Gillespie adopted similar techniques to Trump during the race, focusing on identity politics and issues like immigration. He blasted Northam on “sanctuary cities” and ran ads featuring his support for Confederate monuments throughout the state.
Northam, who led in a series of polls in the state carried by Hillary ClintonHillary Diane Rodham ClintonWhite House accuses Biden of pushing ‘conspiracy theories’ with Trump election claim Biden courts younger voters — who have been a weakness Trayvon Martin’s mother Sybrina Fulton qualifies to run for county commissioner in Florida MORE last year, called Gillespie’s campaign “divisive” and “fear-mongering.” Northam countered with ads seeking to link Gillespie to Trump, particularly in Northern Virginia, which voted overwhelmingly for Clinton.
Signer was a strong critic of Trump following the deadly violence at a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville in August. Signer ripped Trump for his response to the clash, which left one person dead and dozens injured, in which Trump blamed “many sides” for the violence.
“People are dying, and I do think that it’s now on the president and on all of us to say enough is enough. This [white nationalist] movement has run its course,” Signer said at the time.
Former Mexican President Vicente Fox was in Dubai on election night when the results came through.
“It was terrible for me that night. I didn’t go to bed, I couldn’t go to sleep,” he said.
Fox, a brash former businessman-turned-politician, had reason to lose sleep over Trump’s election. As soon as Trump announced his candidacy in June 2015, bashing Mexico and Mexicans, Fox became one of Trump’s most outspoken Mexican critics.
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“That’s my character, that’s the way I am and I don’t like to be offended like that and I decided to do something,” Fox said.
“I really thought he would not win. I really thought the United States could not have a president like Donald TrumpDonald John TrumpSenate advances public lands bill in late-night vote Warren, Democrats urge Trump to back down from veto threat over changing Confederate-named bases Esper orders ‘After Action Review’ of National Guard’s role in protests MORE,” he said.
Trump’s populist message was especially jarring to Fox, who’s spent his political career fighting against populism in Latin America.
“What was my feeling? First of all, sadness. I really felt sad,” he said. “Because the United States, this great nation, this leading nation of the world, had elected a leader that, if [he has] any qualification, it’s that he’s not a leader.
“So sadness. … And then, I got my courage out.”
Since the election, Fox has kept up his taunts to Trump over border wall funding. In September, he announced a fake presidential bid against Trump in 2020.
“It’s like in boxing. He is my punching bag. So that brings me joy,” Fox said.
Republican Sen. Bill CassidyWilliam (Bill) Morgan CassidySenate advances public lands bill in late-night vote GOP senators dodge on treatment of White House protesters The Hill’s Morning Report – Presented by Facebook – US virus deaths exceed 100,000; Pelosi pulls FISA bill MORE (La.) announced Saturday that he is pulling his support of Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore (R) following allegations of sexual misconduct against him.
“Based on the allegations against Roy Moore, his response and what is known, I withdraw support,” Cassidy tweeted.
Based on the allegations against Roy Moore, his response and what is known, I withdraw support.
— Bill Cassidy (@BillCassidy) November 11, 2017
Two other lawmakers have pulled their endorsements following a bombshell report in The Washington Post Thursday, in which Moore was accused of having inappropriate sexual contact with a 14-year-old girl in 1979, when he was 32.
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GOP Sens. Mike Lee (Utah) and Steve Daines (Mont.) both announced Friday night that they would no longer endorse Moore for Senate.
Other lawmakers from both parties have said Moore should step out of the race if the allegations are true.
The newspaper also found three other women who said that Moore had approached them around a similar time, when they were between the ages of 16 and 18.
Moore has denied the allegations regarding the 14-year-old, saying they are “completely false.”
A majority of voters across the U.S. in a new Morning Consult/Politico poll say Republican Alabama Senate nominee Roy MooreRoy Stewart MooreSessions goes after Tuberville’s coaching record in challenging him to debate The 10 Senate seats most likely to flip Sessions fires back at Trump over recusal: ‘I did my duty & you’re damn fortunate I did” MORE should drop out of the race amid sexual misconduct accusations.
Sixty percent of voters say Moore should end his Senate bid due to the accusations, while 16 percent said he should continue his campaign. Twenty-four percent said they did not know or did not have an opinion.
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Sixty percent of registered voters find the accusations levied against Moore to be “very credible” or “somewhat credible.” Six percent said they do not find the allegations to be at all credible, while 11 percent said they believe the accusations are “not too credible.” Twenty-three percent said they did not know or did not have an opinion.
The poll was conducted after The Washington Post last week reported an accusation from a woman who said she had sexual contact with Moore in 1979, when she was 14 years old. Moore, who would have been 32 at the time, has denied this allegation.
The Post’s report also included accounts from three other women who claim Moore pursued them around the same time, when they were between 16 and 18 years old. Moore in an interview last week admitted he may have dated women in their later teens at that point in this life, but that he did not “remember anything like that.”
Another woman on Monday publicly accused Moore of sexually assaulting her when she was 16 years old. The new Politico/Morning Consult survey was conducted prior to the most recent allegation.
The online survey of 1,993 registered voters across the country was done from Nov. 9-11. It has a margin of error of 2 percentage points.
With his inauguration now less than three weeks away, a new survey shows a majority of the American people are far from confident that Donald Trump, a former reality television star who won the Electoral College but lost the popular vote by nearly 3 million votes, is up to the major tasks entrusted to the President of the United States.
According to results released by Gallup on Monday, “less than half of Americans are confident in [Trump’s] ability to handle an international crisis (46%), to use military force wisely (47%) or to prevent major scandals in his administration (44%).”
Those numbers are far lower than measures taken on Trump’s most recent predecessors—Barack Obama, George W. Bush, and Bill Clinton—all of whom had percentages close to 70% in each of those categories prior to their taking office.
Even in areas where those polled expressed higher confidence in Trump, he still came up with much lower ratings than those who came before him.
As Gallup notes, these figures are consistent with other polling showing Trump with historically low overall approval ratings both before and since his election victory.
Last month, a separate Gallup poll found that people also had a historically low approval of how President-elect Trump was handling his transition, a figure that is normally higher than overall approval numbers.
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Amid the clamor over the pending repeal of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), President-elect Donald Trump may have unintentionally offered his support for a solution typically championed by those on the progressive left: Medicare-for-All.
Weighing in on the partisan battle to uphold and amend or scrap the system known as Obamacare, the incoming president tweeted:
Trump’s call for “a healthcare plan that really works” was met with flurry of responses pointing to the publicly-funded, single-payer model that seemed to fit the bill.
“Trump knows that single payer is the better system,” RoseAnn DeMoro, executive director of National Nurses United, told Common Dreams. “He has business interests in other countries and knows the cost savings.”
“But,” she added, “he is seduced by the profits that can be garnered off of our health, I assume, or he would yank the curtain away from this shallow discussion on healthcare.”
Referring to the current Congressional debate, DeMoro continued: “Single payer, expanded Medicare-for-All, is kept off the American agenda because it doesn’t allow massive billions to be extracted from our people to the huge financial interests that control our health, from pharma to insurance companies to hospitals, down to the doctors offices. It is the biggest sham of a debate we have had in this country.”
Trump’s directive to “get together” and build a “healthcare plan that really works” contradicts his previous advice for Republicans to “be careful” in their eager repeal of the law, saying: “It will fall of its own weight.”
The shift came about the same time it was reported that Trump supporters might actually want a plan that looks more like Medicare-for-All.
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Writing for the New York Times on Thursday, Drew Altman, president and chief executive of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, discussed the findings of six focus groups conducted by the foundation in the Rust Belt region—”three with Trump voters who are enrolled in the Affordable Care Act marketplaces, and three with Trump voters receiving Medicaid.”
“They were not, by and large, angry about their health care,” Altman noted, “they were simply afraid they will be unable to afford coverage for themselves and their families.”
He continued:
When “asked about policies found in several Republican plans to replace the Affordable Care Act—including a tax credit to help defray the cost of premiums, a tax-preferred savings account and a large deductible typical of catastrophic coverage—several of these Trump voters recoiled, calling such proposals ‘not insurance at all,'” he wrote. They also “expressed disbelief” when they were told Trump “might embrace a plan that included these elements.”
What’s more, Altman noted, “they were unmoved by the principle of risk-sharing, and trusted that Mr. Trump would find a way to protect people with pre-existing medical conditions without a mandate, which most viewed as ‘un-American.'”
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who had made Medicare-for-All a pillar of his presidential campaign, took to the Senate floor on Wednesday to denounce the Republican budget, which laid the groundwork for repealing the ACA, as well as “end[ing] Medicare as it presently exists.”
“Let us be clear,” he said, “the United States of America is the only major country on Earth…that does not guarantee healthcare to all people as a right.”
“I believe that healthcare for all is a human right,” Sanders continued, adding (and sounding very much like the president-elect): “I would have hoped that we would be working together to figure out what is a complicated issue, as to how we could move forward to guarantee healthcare to all people in a cost effective way, but that is not what we are debating today.”
Similarly, Don McCanne, health policy fellow with Physicians for a National Health Program, said Wednesday that with the current health financing system “in shambles,” it is “ironic” that Republicans and Democrats “are debating mere tweaks that will affect how many will not have affordable access to health care when the debate should be over whether we continue to tolerate our overpriced system that leaves so many out, when we can adopt a proven health care financing system that makes health care truly accessible and affordable for everyone.”
“That, of course,” he added, “would be a single payer national health program—an improved Medicare that covers everyone.”
Echoing Sanders’ speech, his staff account tweeted early Thursday:
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Released Thursday by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP), the publication shows that the repeal would give to each of the top 400 highest-income taxpayers—who averaged incomes of roughly $318 million in 2014—a tax cut of about $7 million a year.
That’s because getting rid of the healthcare law would mean getting rid of its two Medicare taxes, which are paid for by individuals with incomes above $200,000 and couples with incomes above $250,000. One is a 3.8 percent Medicare tax that hits their unearned income (like capital gains) above those thresholds, while the other is additional 0.9 percent tax on earned income above those thresholds.
As such, a repeal “delivers tax cuts that are extremely tilted to the top,” the report states.
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At the same time, low-and middle-income households would see a rise in taxes since they would lose premium tax credits to buy health coverage through the marketplaces, CBPP notes. For the rich, the benefits of a repeal wouldn’t end with the elimination of the Medicare taxes, the report continues:
Apart from taking healthcare coverage away from some 30 million people, another study released last week showed that the repeal could cost states trillions in lost revenue and output.
Meanwhile, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Democratic leaders in Congress have called for Jan. 15 to be a day of action nationwide to “[m]ake sure [President-elect] Donald Trump and his Republican colleagues know that we won’t let them take our healthcare away, end Medicare as we know it, cut Medicaid, and defund Planned Parenthood.”
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Billionaire heiress and school privatization advocate Betsy DeVos faced withering scrutiny Tuesday at a rushed confirmation hearing for her nomination as secretary of education, often betraying her inexperience with education policy as she dodged Democrats’ questions.
As she attempted to avoid the line of questioning, at one point DeVos refused to say whether or not she’d defund public schools.
Watch NBC News‘ footage of DeVos refusing to answer a series of questions about her donations to the Republican Party, her privatization agenda, and her total lack of government and policy experience:
DeVos was also the first of President-elect Donald Trump’s cabinet picks to sit for a hearing without completing a full ethics review, a fact not lost on Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), who noted that without that review, the senators are unable to question the billionaire about how she stands to personally profit from education policy.
Democrats were also dismayed when Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), chairman of the Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, announced that he was limiting the questioning to “one round of five minutes for each senator,” the New York Times writes, noting that the questioning in previous hearings had included two rounds.
During the hearing, Warren pointed out that DeVos has no experience at all with managing loans or grants—particularly on the scale of the federal loan and grant system, a system upon which poor, working- and middle-class students depend to pursue higher education:
And DeVos faced many pointed questions about her myriad conflicts of interest, such as when Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) asked DeVos if her family’s contributions of hundreds of millions of dollars to the Republican Party perhaps played a role in her nomination for education secretary.
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When Sanders went on to ask if DeVos would work with him to push for free college tuition, DeVos, who personally inherited billions, said, “I think that’s a really interesting idea, and it’s really great to consider and think about, but I think we also have to consider the fact that nothing in life is really free.”
DeVos also refused to answer Sanders’ questions about to how she plans to help people paid less than $15/hour—and the Republican Party is against raising the minimum wage, he points out—as they struggle to pay for the skyrocketing costs higher education and childcare:
At times DeVos even appeared entirely unfamiliar with major education laws, such as when Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-N.H.) asked DeVos whether her plan to decrease federal funds for schools meant she wouldn’t enforce the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. DeVos had apparently never heard of it:
That was far from the most absurd moment of the hearing, observers noted: at one point, DeVos argued in favor of allowing guns in schools—citing the necessity of defending schools from grizzly bears. She mentioned a school in Wyoming that had a fence to protect it from wildlife, and said, “I think probably there, I would imagine that there’s probably a gun in the school to protect from potential grizzlies.”
“It’s hard to imagine someone less qualified to oversee the nation’s schools than Betsy DeVos,” argued public education advocate Diane Ravitch earlier this month. “DeVos did not attend public schools, nor did her children. She has never been a teacher, administrator, practitioner or scholar of education. In fact, one wonders whether she has ever actually set foot in a public school.”
“Betsy DeVos is a dedicated enemy of public education,” Ravitch said on MSNBC Tuesday, “and 85 percent of this country’s children are in public schools.”
“Reason, knowledge, ethics—none of that matters here,” wrote teacher and advocate Steven Singer after the hearing. “We are truly in the age of the plutocrats where money has arrogantly attempted to buy governmental power outright. Right in front of our noses.”
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President Donald Trump doubled down on his embrace of torture on Wednesday, saying that it “absolutely works.”
He made the fallacious claim in interview with ABC News, an excerpt of which was released before its airing on Wednesday evening.
Trump said that he asked top intelligence officials whether waterboarding and other forms of torture work, and “the answer was yes, absolutely.”
Ultimately, he said he is “going to go with” the opinions of Defense Secretary James Mattis and CIA Director Mike Pompeo as to whether to reinstate torture.
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Asked by interviewer David Muir, “Do you want waterboarding?” he replied: “I don’t want people to chop off the citizens’ or anybody’s heads in the Middle East, OK, because they’re Christian or Muslim or anything else.”
“I want to do everything within the bounds of what you’re allowed to do legally. But do I feel it works? Absolutely I feel it works,” he added.
In February 2016, Trump also lied and said that “torture works” and that he “would bring back a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding.” He also said on the campaign trail that waterboarding may not be a “tough enough” to confront the threat of Islamic State.
Trump’s first post-inaugural interview airs at 10pm ET on ABC.
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In at least one respect, U.S. President Donald Trump has eclipsed all his predecessors: How quickly he has reached majority disapproval.
Gallup’s Presidential Job Approval Center found on Saturday that after just eight days in office, Trump’s disapproval rating reached 51 percent—a record that, as pollster Will Jordan noted, fellow U.S. presidents did not even come close to reaching.
Gallup’s latest three-day rolling average survey was taken after Trump’s first week in office, on the same day that he enacted his controversial travel ban on citizens from seven predominantly Muslim countries, which was met with fierce protests at airports across the nation.
As Nation columnist Dave Zirin observed:
While the survey does not capture the response to Trump’s latest executive order, it indicates that wide swathes of the American public are not in support of the other drastic steps taken in those first few days.
“Perhaps using his first week to begin construction of a border wall, halt refugee immigration from seven majority-Muslim countries, announce plans to roll back the Affordable Care Act, and reinstate a ‘global gag rule’ around abortion may have had something to do with it,” quipped Vox‘s Jacob Gardenswartz.
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