Trump seeks to pardon SEAL and others accused of war crimes

https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/new...war-crimes

Ohio lawmakers vote to give themselves a pay raise

https://www.daytondailynews.com/news/sta...P0IC9dlbL/

Trump 'seriously' considering banning suppressors after Virginia Beach shooting

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/...h-shooting

It’s practically an American pastime to blame cellphones for all sorts of societal problems, from distracted parents to faltering democracies. But the devices might have also delivered a social silver lining: a de-escalation of the gang turf wars that tore up cities in the 1980s.

The intriguing new theory suggests that the arrival of mobile phones made holding territory less important, which reduced intergang conflict and lowered profits from drug sales.

Lena Edlund, a Columbia University economist,  and Cecilia Machado, of the Getulio Vargas Foundation, lay out the data in a new National Bureau of Economic Research working paper. They estimate that the diffusion of phones could explain 19 to 29 percent of the decline in homicides seen from 1990 to 2000.

“The cellphones changed how drugs were dealt,” Edlund told me. In the ’80s, turf-based drug sales generated violence as gangs attacked and defended territory, and also allowed those who controlled the block to keep profits high.

The cellphone broke the link, the paper claims, between turf and selling drugs. “It’s not that people don’t sell or do drugs anymore,” Edlund explained to me, “but the relationship between that and violence is different.”

....................

Edlund and Machado are not the first to suggest that phones could have played a role in the decline. Among others, the criminologists Erin Orrick and Alex Piquero were able to show that property crime fell as cellphone-ownership rates climbed. The first paper on the cellphone-crime link suggested that phones were an “underappreciated” crime deterrent, as mobile communications allow illegal behavior to be reported more easily and quickly.

But cellphones are far from the only possible explanation. Any measurement that was going up in the ’90s correlates with the decline of violence. Thus, there are probably too many theories out there, each with limited explanatory power. One commonsense argument that’s been made is that certain police tactics (say, stop-and-frisk or the “broken windows” approach) or the explosion of incarceration rates must have been responsible for the decline, but most careful reviews have found little evidence to suggest that they had more than a marginal impact.

from The Atlantic


(I am tempted to believe that the cell phone is one of the best deterrents to crime because it makes reporting a crime easy. I once used one against a drunk driver).

It seems like they get all of the bad. Is there any good side that extends to our lives, not the life of some hypothetical children in the future?

Trump’s Golf Costs: $102 Million And Counting, With Taxpayers Picking Up The Tab

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/...pEu#page=2

Ex-GOP Lawmaker: Trump Is “Illegitimate President,” Should Be Impeached

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019...ached.html

Updated because I now have a source:


I cannot verify this, as it seems too extreme to be credible. But 'too bad to be true' describes much of what has been said of this President.

By Vice-President Pence, who supposedly said in ONE cabinet meeting alone:

Quote:“Thank you for seeing, through the course of this year, an agenda that truly is restoring this country.”
“You described it very well, Mr. President.”
“You've restored American credibility on the world stage.”
“You've signed more bills rolling back federal red tape than any president in American history.”
“You've unleashed American energy.”
“You've spurred an optimism in this country that's setting records.”
“You promised the American people in that campaign a year ago that you would deliver historic tax cuts, and it would be a 'middle-class miracle.' And in just a short period of time, that promise will be fulfilled.”
“I’m deeply humbled, as your vice president, to be able to be here."
“Because of your leadership, Mr. President, and because of the strong support of the leadership in the Congress of the United States, you're delivering on that middle-class miracle.”
“You've actually got the Congress to do, as you said, what they couldn’t do with [the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska] for 40 years.”
“You got the Congress to do, with tax cuts for working families and American businesses, what they haven’t been able to do for 31 years.”
“And you got Congress to do what they couldn’t do for seven years, in repealing the individual mandate in Obamacare.”
“Mostly, Mr. President, I’ll end where I began and just tell you, I want to thank you, Mr. President. I want to thank you for speaking on behalf of and fighting every day for the forgotten men and women of America.”
“Because of your determination, because of your leadership, the forgotten men and women of America are forgotten no more. And we are making America great again.”

When a lot of the owners are dying off and they can't be sold for the ridiculous prices? Any idea what will happen based on the last fourth turning? Housing trends seem like a hyper version of a 3T even though we're in the 4T.

This piece by Thomas Edsall in today's NY Times fits in well with our discussions, but not with any posted thread I could find.  It also references an alternative 4 phase system -- different from TFT, but not incompatible.

The Fight Over How Trump Fits in With the Other 44 Presidents

It didn’t take long after President Trump took office for conflicting views about the strength and duration of his legacy to surface.
A “regime” theory of the presidency — developed in “The Politics Presidents Make” by Stephen Skowronek, a political scientist at Yale — provides the theoretical basis for the view that despite his victory in 2016, Trump represents the final collapse of Reagan-era conservatism. Skowronek described his overall project as a “study of presidents as agents of political change” that produced a framework of “four types of political leadership,” each of which I will explore in more detail below, with and without reference to the seeming anomaly of Trump.

Jack Balkin, a law professor at Yale, adapting Skowronek’s model, argues that Trump epitomizes the fourth type of political leadership Skowronek identifies because Trump is “in the same structural position as Herbert Hoover and Jimmy Carter,” caught in an uphill, presumptively doomed, struggle “to hold together the fraying coalition of an exhausted regime.”

… more at the link above.