Daily Clips: February 2, 2017
Tweet of the day:
Do you believe it? The Obama Administration agreed to take thousands of illegal immigrants from Australia. Why? I will study this dumb deal!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 2, 2017
House Republicans Vote to End Rule Stopping Coal Mining Debris From Being Dumped in Streams: Deregulation!
Productivity slows to 1.2 percent rate in Q4: Meanwhile, “labor costs rose at a 1.7 percent rate, up from a tiny 0.2 percent gain in the third quarter.”
Here’s what I learned about Fear, American Style: The worst, most terrible things that the United States has done have almost never happened through an assault on American institutions; they’ve always happened through American institutions and practices. These are the elements of the American polity that have offered especially potent tools and instruments of intimidation and coercion: federalism, the separation of powers, social pluralism, and the rule of law. All the elements of the American experience that liberals and conservatives have so cherished as bulwarks of American freedom have also been sources and instruments of political fear. In all the cases I looked at, coercion, intimidation, repression, and violence were leveraged through these mechanisms, not in spite of them. (You can read an article-length version of the argument here.)
