November 2017 News Reports
Editor’s Choice: Scroll below for our monthly blend of mainstream and alternative November 2017 news and views
Nov. 30
GOPers Ramming Through Tax Cut For Trump, Big Donors
New York Times, The Senate Is Rushing to Pass Its Tax Bill Because It Stinks, Editorial Board, Nov. 30, 2017. As more senators show signs of sacrificing their principles and embracing the Republican tax bill for minor and nebulous concessions, it bears looking more closely at the process that produced this terrible legislation and some of its lesser-known provisions.
The Senate tax bill, a 515-page mammoth, was introduced just last week, and the chamber could vote on it as soon as Thursday. This is not how lawmakers are supposed to pass enormous pieces of legislation. It took several years to put together the last serious tax bill, passed in 1986.
Congress and the Reagan administration worked across party lines, produced numerous drafts, held many hearings and struck countless compromises. This time it’s not about true reform but about speed and bowling over the opposition in hopes of claiming a partisan victory.
The country ought to be dismayed by the way senators like Bob Corker (left), Susan Collins and Ron Johnson appear to be backing away from their principled objections based on half-measures promised by President Trump and the majority leader, Mitch McConnell, that will not address its big flaws.
This rush to the Senate floor has been orchestrated by Mr. McConnell, following the same playbook he used in the failed effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act. The longer people have to study the details, the less likely the bill is to pass. People should know by now about the big stuff: the giant permanent corporate tax-rate cut, the small and temporary tax cuts for the middle class, the repeal of the A.C.A.’s…
New York Times, 
2016 Trump campaign foreign policy advisor George Papadopoulos, third from the left, sits during a meeting that includes then-Sen.…
HuffPost,
The immediate backlash marked the first significant attention to the “Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity” since Trump started it last month and followed through on a vow to pursue his own unsubstantiated claims that voter fraud is rampant and cost him the popular vote in the presidential election. The White House has said the commission will embark upon a “thorough review of registration and voting issues in federal elections,” but experts and voting rights advocates have pilloried Trump for his claims of widespread fraud, which studies and state officials alike have not found. They say that they fear the commission will be used to restrict voting.
And Mr. Trump has proved himself willing to shift direction up until the moment of a public announcement. He is set to meet Wednesday afternoon with Secretary of State Rex Tillerson (shown at left in a file photo), who has advocated that the United 
States remain a part of the Paris accords and could continue to lobby the president to change his mind.
The strategy allowed Kushner and his partners to obtain $50 million in financing from foreigners through a U.S. visa program. Jared Kushner and his real estate partners wanted to take advantage of a federal program in 2015 that would save them millions of dollars as they built an opulent, 50-story residential tower in this city’s booming waterfront district, just across the Hudson River from Lower Manhattan.
bipartisan agreement will keep the government funded through September, congressional aides said, effectively ending the threat of a government shutdown. The deal, which still must be voted on, is said to include increased spending for the military and for border security, but does not 
When officials alerted families to the potential lead contamination in January, the dominoes fell quickly. The district superintendent and assistant superintendent resigned. The school board hired an independent investigator. Administrators shuttered Summit and moved students to another building several miles away. And the mother of a kindergartner filed a federal lawsuit, saying the inaction had created “a school full of poisonous drinking water.”
Trump tried to bluff by publicly telling him to go ahead and do it. And then the Senate Intelligence Committee took control of the entire pot by rejecting Flynn’s offer, essentially saying ‘not at this time’ (link). Now they’re making him beg to be allowed back into the game to play his hand.