FREE WHITEWATER

Trump

‘Inside Wisconsin’s Disastrous $4.5 Billion Deal With Foxconn’

The published case against Foxconn – with reporting & analysis from some of America’s finest journalists and economists – is overwhelming. Their careful, published work has set out the plain facts for well over a year. And yet, as a multi-billion dollar public failure, there are even more startling accounts still emerging. Austin Carr reports…

Slothful: Donald Trump Works Less Than Most Americans

Even before the latest reporting from Alexi McCammond and Jonathan Swan, there has been ample evidence that Trump was slothful — a shiftless, unproductive man: In a Special Report, MSNBC Chief Legal Correspondent, Ari Melber, examines Trump’s first two years in office and a scandal hiding in plain sight: mounting evidence that there are stretches…

The Fight Against Gravity

The Trump Administration wants to bolster industries that are market failures, with coal as an example.  Catherine Rampell writes of that effort in The Trump administration learns that fighting gravity is hard: The Trump administration is learning that, as new data show that the industries it has worked hardest to prop up — through bailouts, tariffs…

Does Trump Think Sicario: Day of the Soldado is a Documentary?

Mary Papenfuss reports Rachel Maddow: Trump May Have Cooked Up ‘Taped Women’ From ‘Sicario’: President Donald Trump has been obsessively repeating a horror tale of trafficked women in cars at the southern border, their mouths taped shut, so they “can’t even breathe.” The problem is that trafficked women and border officials apparently have no idea what he’s…

Undermining His Own Case for a National Emergency

Elizabeth Goitein observes Trump Is Destroying His Own Case for a National Emergency (“By waiting for Congress to act, the president is undermining the legal basis for any declaration”): Here’s how the legal process for emergency powers works: Under the National Emergencies Act, passed by Congress in 1976, the president has broad discretion to declare a…

Commerce Slows

Update, Friday afternoon: Trump folds under pressure agrees to a three-week re-opening of the federal gov’t.  Of his Rose Garden address this afternoon (one that I watched in full), Jennifer Rubin observes “[m]aybe this is part of an insanity defense for the Russia probe.” One reads that under the shutdown, interstate commerce now slows: Significant…

Ignorant Policymakers Will Produce Ignorant Policies

Rep. Justin Amash, who is as close to a libertarian as any Republican in Congress, offered this observation about Wilbur Ross, Trump’s Secretary of Commerce: It’s amazing that Wilbur Ross was nominated and confirmed to be secretary of anything. He’s shown over many years that he doesn’t understand basic economics, and to describe him as…

The Shutdown Brings…a shutdown

Troy Newmyer reports Economists worry ‘zero growth’ may be reality as shutdown drags on: Kevin Hassett, the Trump administration’s top economist, acknowledged yesterday the economy may not grow at all in the first quarter if the shutdown lasts that long. And White House acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney is eyeing an even longer impasse. He…

Yet Go He Will…

Ted Koppel cautions Don’t expect Trump to go quietly: There is a disarming innocence to the assumption that whether by impeachment, indictment or a cleansing electoral redo in 2020, President Trump will be exorcised from the White House and that thereby he and his base will largely revert to irrelevance. Truthfully, there are few among the…