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

John McWhorter at the Aspen Ideas Festival last June, answering questions about students and free speech.

The whole white privilege paradigm is very interesting because I think it should be part of an education for students to learn that there is something, and I’ll title it white privilege, that’s fine. These are things that must be considered, such that a student wouldn’t look at a disadvantaged part of the city and just say, “Well what’s wrong with them?” The idea is to understand that a lot of what the person sees is that people start out at different places––and that whiteness is a privilege. However, our problem once again these days is that it is being taken in a direction

Ugly.

On Thursday’s edition of Hannity, former White House deputy assistant to the president Sebastian Gorka suggested that Hillary Clinton deserves to be tried for treason and executed.

“If this had happened in the 1950s, there would be people up on treason charges right now,” Gorka said. “The Rosenbergs, okay, this is equivalent to what the Rosenbergs did, and those people got the chair. Think about it — giving away nuclear capability to our enemies, that’s what we’re talking about.”

But it wasn’t hers to “give away.”

As secretary of state, Clinton was one of nine cabinet members sitting on the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), which is tasked with reviewing deals like Uranium One.

The difficulties of writing dialogue for characters who share an idiom foreign to the writer – specifically, UKnians writing Yank and Yanks writing UKnian.

[I]t’s fairly common for British writers to create ostensibly American characters who give themselves away in dialogue. The writer need not even be British, necessarily: Lionel Shriver is an American writer who has lived in the U.K. for many years. Her most recent novel, “The Mandibles: A Family, 2029-2047,” imagines a financial apocalypse set entirely in the United States, albeit in the future. All of the major characters are American. And yet a father assures his son that a set of silverware “could come in useful.” A woman signs off a telephone conversation

Let’s have a feel-good story, because why not.

Two women with their two dogs were lost in the Pacific in a small sailboat for five months, and then the Navy found them and rescued them.

The moment the two women and their dogs were finally rescued is captured on video, taken from the deck of a Navy boat.

The camera wobbles as the motorboat cuts across the ocean, some 900 miles southeast of Japan, toward the lone sailboat that had been sending distress signals for months after its engine died.

One of the women is on the deck, her arms outstretched.

She feverishly blows kisses toward the rescue boat. This is the reaction of someone who had been lost

From the ACLU:

For almost a year, Kris Kobach, the secretary of state of Kansas, has struggled to hide the truth about his efforts to lobby the Trump administration to make it much harder for Americans to vote. Part of that struggle ended today when a federal court ordered excerpts of Kris Kobach’s testimony disclosed along with other documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union in our challenge to his restrictive voter registration regime.

The unsealed materials confirm what many have suspected: Kobach has a ready-made plan to gut core voting rights protections enshrined in federal law. And he has been covertly lobbying Trump’s team and other officials from day one to sell them the falsehood that noncitizens