Originally a comment by Bruce Gorton on Easier than persuading the laws of physics to change their minds.

You can in fact have both a growing economy and good environmental standards.

The thing about the economy that a lot of people miss is that a strong economy is basically everyone, not just the richest chunk of it. If you have to pay people to properly maintain your factory – that money isn’t vanishing into a void, it is going into their pockets where it will then be spent on the stuff that they need.

Not only that but regulation creates those jobs, and creates sub-industries which otherwise wouldn’t exist. For example, with mining, what happens when the mine runs … Read the rest

Susan Hennessey and Benjamin Wittes do a quick summing up:

The first big takeaway from Monday morning’s flurry of charging and plea documents with respect to Paul Manafort Jr., Richard Gates III and George Papadopoulos is this: The president of the United States had as his campaign chairman a man who had allegedly served for years as an unregistered foreign agent for a puppet government of Vladimir Putin, a man who was allegedly laundering remarkable sums of money even while running the now-president’s campaign, a man who allegedly lied about all of this to the FBI and the Justice Department.

The second big takeaway is even starker: A member of President Trump’s campaign team admits that he was working

But now that we’re talking about Emmett Till…I missed the news last January that Carolyn Bryant Donham admitted that most of what she testified about Till was false. It was a week after Trump’s inauguration and I was a little preoccupied.

The woman, Carolyn Bryant Donham, spoke to Timothy B. Tyson, a Duke University professor — possibly the only interview she has given to a historian or journalist since shortly after the episode — who has written a book, “The Blood of Emmett Till,” to be published next week.

In it, he wrote that she said of her long-ago allegations that Emmett grabbed her and was menacing and sexually crude toward her, “that part is not true.”

…

Emmett,

Times headline:

Trump, Responding to Manafort Indictment, Says Democrats Should Be Focus of Inquiry

A few tweets:

MSNBC: Manafort indicted
CNN: Manafort indicted
Fox: Are feet shoes

— Jazz. (@LeaderoftheNew) October 30, 2017

https://twitter.com/PalmerReport/status/925030233811668993

Oh, it’s Princess Ivanka’s birthday? Sad.

Paul Manafort just agreed to turn himself in to the FBI. What should we report on?
CNN: Manafort
MSNBC: Manafort
Fox News: Hamburger emoji pic.twitter.com/Wjsvkb2coW

— Roberto Aram Ferdman (@robferdman) October 30, 2017

How the Manafort news is playing on Fox right now pic.twitter.com/vSYsVQ3oED

— Jonathan Cohn (@CitizenCohn) October 30, 2017

… Read the rest

Now. Manafort has been indicted.

President Trump’s campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, was indicted Monday on charges that he funneled millions of dollars through overseas shell companies and used the money to buy luxury cars, real estate, antiques and expensive suits.

The charges against Mr. Manafort and his longtime associate Rick Gates represent a significant escalation in a special counsel investigation that has cast a shadow over Mr. Trump’s first year in office.

Separately, one of the early foreign policy advisers to Mr. Trump’s presidential campaign, George Papadopoulos, pleaded guilty to lying to the F.B.I. about a contact with a Russian professor with ties to Kremlin officials, prosecutors said on Monday.

Separately. Separate investigation? We’re going to have our work … Read the rest

Speaking of Corinthian Colleges…the Post reported last year:

Nearly 80,000 students of defunct for-profit giant Corinthian Colleges are facing some form of debt collection, even though the U.S. Department of Education unearthed enough evidence of fraud to forgive their student loans, according to an investigation by the staff of Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.).

Before it shut down last year, Corinthian, which ran Everest Institute, Wyotech and Heald College, became an example of the worst practices in the for-profit education sector, including high loan defaults and dubious programs. Amid allegations of deceptive marketing and lying to the government about its graduation rates, Corinthian lost its access to federal funds in 2014, forcing the company to sell or close its

The right-wingers are stepping up efforts to suppress the Mueller investigation.

Shortly before a federal grand jury reportedly filed the first charges in special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election, conservatives were renewing their calls for the attorney to resign.

Mueller, who is leading the Justice Department’s investigation as special prosecutor, is a former FBI director, which critics say creates a conflict of interest in the case.

Plus he has worked with Comey in the past, which the right-wingers claim makes them BFFs and thus Conflict of Interest.

The GOP has long complained about Mueller’s supposed lack of objectivity. But this week, demands urging him to quit escalated in the wake of reports that the

Puerto Rico is telling Whitefish it’s all over between them.

The Puerto Rico electric power company said Sunday that it is canceling a controversial $300 million contract it had signed with a small Montana-based company and tasked with a central role in repairing the territory’s hurricane-ravaged electric grid.

The move came after Gov. Ricardo Rosselló said the contract was a distraction and should be canceled after critics in the electric power industry, Congress and the Federal Emergency Management Agency raised questions about whether the company, Whitefish Energy, was well equipped to respond to the hurricane damage.

And whether it got the contract because of cronyism, or worse.

Whitefish Energy, which had just two employees the day Hurricane Maria hit

It’s a good thing Trump is such a populist, isn’t it. Good thing he’s the savior of the forgotten working class and a drainer of the swamp.

The Education Department is considering only partially forgiving federal loans for students defrauded by for-profit colleges, according to department officials, abandoning the Obama administration’s policy of erasing that debt.

Under President Barack Obama, tens of thousands of students deceived by now-defunct for-profit schools had over $550 million in such loans canceled.

But President Donald Trump’s education secretary, Betsy DeVos, is working on a plan that could grant such students just partial relief, according to department officials. The department may look at the average earnings of students in similar programs and schools to

Originally a comment by Bjarte Foshaug on There might be some coal under there.

For everyone out there who doesn’t understand the problem, I have a message for you: The economy is man-made. The environment is not. Which one do you think we could manage to remake if they conflict? And which one can we absolutely not live without?

Exactly. Beautifully formulated. Or to paraphrase Bill McKibben, as difficult as it may be to change the economic system, it’s almost certainly going to be easier than persuading the laws of physics to change their minds. My first question to anyone who argues that protecting the environment is going to harm the economy is “Compared to what?” After all, there … Read the rest