Saturday, December 22, 2018

In the news, Wednesday, December 12, 2018


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DEC 11      INDEX      DEC 13
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Information from some sites may not be reliable, or may not be vetted.
Some sources may require subscription.

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from Capital Press
The West's Ag Website

House passes farm bill, sending it to Trump's desk
The House has easily passed the farm bill, a massive legislative package that reauthorizes agriculture programs and food aid.

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from The Heritage Foundation
RIGHT BIAS, MIXED, think tank in Washington, D.C

Trump’s Ex-Lawyer Didn’t Violate Campaign Finance Laws, and Neither Did the President
President Donald Trump’s former attorney, Michael Cohen, may have been convinced by the Office of the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York to plead guilty to a supposed violation of campaign finance law, but that doesn’t mean that what happened is actually a federal crime.

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from The Hill
LEFT-CENTER BIAS, MIXED, newspaper in Washington, D.C.

Congress must not be fooled by the effort to block citizenship question
Liberal activists understand the importance of manipulating the census to advance their progressive causes and have long made clear they will use Congress and the courts to impose their will on the administration. They could get their way on this issue. They are smart and have been at this game a long time. They figure that if they get something in “must pass” legislation, they can convince enough Republican lawmakers who do not get why the census matters so much. There are reports that Republican lawmakers may include what liberal groups want on the census in the omnibus spending bill currently being negotiated behind closed doors.
Liberal groups focused on ethnicity, such as the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials, Asian Americans Advancing Justice, Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, National Urban League, and others want several things, the most important of which is to remove a question about citizenship that the administration wants to reintroduce in the 2020 census. These organizations have strong liberal allies in Congress who also understand the salience of the census.

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from National Review
RIGHT BIAS

Michael Cohen Pled Guilty to Something That Is Not a Crime
The prosecutor is twisting campaign-finance law. Donald Trump’s wayward counsel, Michael Cohen, was sentenced today as part of a plea bargain with the government. As part of that settlement, Cohen has admitted to criminal violations of federal campaign-finance law and has implicated President Trump in those violations. The press is ablaze with headlines trumpeting the president’s possible involvement in two felony campaign-finance violations. The source of these violations are Mr. Cohen’s arranging — allegedly at Trump’s direction — hush-money payments to women alleging long-ago affairs with the 2016 presidential candidate. The Federal Election Campaign Act holds that an “expenditure” is any “purchase, payment, loan, advance, deposit or gift of money, or anything of value, for the purpose of influencing any election for Federal office.” According to Cohen and the U.S. Attorney, the hush-money payments were, it appears, made in the hopes of preventing information from becoming public before the election, and hence were “for the purpose of influencing” the election. This means that, at a minimum, they had to be reported to the Federal Election Commission; further, if they were authorized by Mr. Trump, they would become, in the law’s parlance, “coordinated expenditures,” subject to limits on the amounts that could be spent. Since the lawful contribution limit is much lower than the payments made, and the payments were not reported, this looks like an open and shut case, right? Well, no. Or at least not in the way some might presume. To the contrary, the law — following our common sense — tells us that the hush-money payments outlined by the U.S. Attorney are clearly not campaign expenditures. There is no violation of the Federal Election Campaign Act.

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from The Spokesman-Review
Newspaper in Spokane, Washington

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