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The U.S. trade deficit surged to a 10-year high in 2018, with the politically sensitive shortfall with China hitting a record peak, despite the Trump administration slapping tariffs on a range of imported goods in an effort to shrink the gap.

The Commerce Department said on Wednesday that an 18.8 percent jump in the trade deficit in December had contributed to the $621.0 billion shortfall last year. The 2018 deficit was the largest since 2008 and followed a $552.3 billion gap in 2017.

It's a rather idiotic metric to set in the first place. But, if you can't even excel at the metrics you set for yourself then you are failing.

Despite Trump's Promises, The Trade Deficit Is Only Getting Wider
U.S. trade deficit jumps to 10-year high in 2018
In a Blow to Trump, America’s Trade Deficit Hit Record $891 Billion

President Donald Trump revoked a requirement that U.S. intelligence officials publicly report the number of civilians killed in drone strikes and other attacks on terrorist targets outside of war zones.

Trump formally ended the requirement with an executive order on Wednesday, months after signaling such a move. The administration last year ignored a May deadline for an annual accounting of civilian and enemy casualties required under an order signed in 2016 by then-President Barack Obama. The order was part of an accountability effort to minimize civilian deaths from drone strikes.

Trump Cancels U.S. Report on Civilian Deaths in Drone Strikes

An election may have been stolen in North Carolina. While evidence continues to be gathered, officials are investigating whether a paid Republican campaign contractor collected mail-in ballots from likely Democratic voters and never turned them in, possibly changing the result of the election. It’s a crisis of democracy: State election officials told a hearing Monday that North Carolina’s 9th Congressional District was subject to a “coordinated, unlawful, and substantially resourced absentee ballot scheme” orchestrated by a GOP operative.

Here’s my question: Where is the voter fraud crowd? You know, the folks who cry “crime” when two people named John Smith vote in the same state? Their silence in the face of seemingly serious election fraud reveals their fundamental bad faith and hucksterism.

I served with many of the celebrities of the voter fraud pack when I joined President Trump’s Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity in 2017. ... The documents that were released reveal the truth: Contrary to statements by the White House and Republican commission members such as vice chairman Kris Kobach, the Kansas secretary of state, the commission uncovered no evidence of widespread voter fraud. ... Kobach claimed the few instances of fraud were “the tip of the iceberg,” the judge, a George W. Bush appointee, concluded that “there is no iceberg; only an icicle largely created by confusion and administrative error.” Despite this resounding defeat, Kobach continues to rely on the same discredited statistics, and voter fraud remains a top-line GOP concern.

Now that North Carolina is investigating what could be systematic election theft, you’d think people so committed to seeing fraud where it doesn’t exist would be sounding the alarm. What’s alleged in North Carolina’s 9th Congressional District is not an occasional individual registering to vote when she is ineligible, but a sustained program to steal the votes of others.

Why doesn’t the ‘voter fraud’ crowd care about what happened in North Carolina?

UPDATE: North Carolina Elections Board throws out the tainted results and orders a new election!
North Carolina elections board orders new House election after ballot tampering scandal

Voters will go back to the drawing board with new primary elections in the Ninth District after the board’s vote.

Paul Manafort "intentionally" lied to special counsel Robert Mueller's office, breaking the plea agreement that made him the star cooperator in the Russia probe, a federal judge found on Wednesday.

Manafort "made multiple false statements to the FBI, the OSC and the grand jury concerning matters that were material to the investigation," including his contacts with his Russian associate during the campaign and later, Judge Amy Berman Jackson wrote on Wednesday.

Manafort was convicted of various financial crimes in August, and then cut the deal to plead guilty to two charges of conspiracy and witness tampering in September.
In all, Jackson determined Manafort intentionally lied about $125,000 he received for the legal bills, about another unnamed Justice Department criminal investigation and about his interactions with his longtime Russian associate Konstantin Kilimnik while he was campaign chairman and later.

Jackson noted twice in her order that two of the topics Paul Manafort lied about, Kilimnik and payments he received for his legal bills were "material to the investigation."

Judge voids Paul Manafort plea deal, says he 'intentionally' lied to the FBI, special counsel and grand jury

Boy, they sure do lie about Russia a lot!

Reducing drug costs feature prominently in Trump's State of the Union Address.

However, his much-touted NAFTA re-write would grant an additional ten years of patent protection to pharmaceutical patents. That means generic medications will take ten more years to come to market and allows pharmaceutical companies to charge monopoly prices for ten years longer.

That will not result in cheaper medications.

Stronger Drug Patents in New NAFTA To Cost U.S. Manufacturing Workers Jobs

Why some people are worried about drug patent protections in the new NAFTA

Brexit is the gift that keeps on taking, and we haven't even left (the EU) yet. That happens at midnight on 29th March.

The thorny issue of the Irish border has yet to be solved as this Channel 4 News report explains despite Nigel Farage's blatant stupid signalling on Irish TV.

This was in a week where Gerard Batten, UKIP leader, formally wrote to the Queen asking her to suspend Parliament (i.e. British sovereign democracy) to prevent Remainer MPs sabotaging Brexit. It is worth noting that the last time a monarch interfered with Parliament England became a Republic.

Meanwhile in Sunderland, which overwhelmingly voted Leave, the local Nissan car factory will not be making the new X-Trail model due to Brexit uncertainty.

And, of course, there are plans to evacuate the Queen "if Brexit turns ugly."

Why would Brexit possibly turn ugly when there will be no downsides. only upsides?

Murders at the hand of extremists were up 35% in 2018, with right-wing extremists responsible for more deaths than any other year in more than two decades, the Anti-Defamation League reported Wednesday.

The ADL’s Center on Extremism tracked 50 extremism-related murders last year, according to the new edition of its Murder and Extremism Report. All of them were conducted by right-wing extremists (one perpetrator also had alleged ties to Islamist extremism). That number made 2018 the deadliest year for right-wing extremists since the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, which killed 171.

Among the murders tracked in the ADL’s analysis were the mass shootings at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, which killed 17; Tree of Life*Or L’Simcha Synagogue in Pittsburgh, which killed 11; and a Waffle House in Nashville. All of the suspects in those cases had expressed support online for far-right ideologies.

Right-Wing Extremist Murders Surged In 2018: ADL

President Trump Directed His Attorney Michael Cohen To Lie To Congress About The Moscow Tower Project

President Donald Trump directed his longtime attorney Michael Cohen to lie to Congress about negotiations to build a Trump Tower in Moscow, according to two federal law enforcement officials involved in an investigation of the matter.

Trump also supported a plan, set up by Cohen, to visit Russia during the presidential campaign, in order to personally meet President Vladimir Putin and jump-start the tower negotiations. “Make it happen,” the sources said Trump told Cohen.

The special counsel’s office learned about Trump’s directive for Cohen to lie to Congress through interviews with multiple witnesses from the Trump Organization and internal company emails, text messages, and a cache of other documents. Cohen then acknowledged those instructions during his interviews with that office.

If that's all true, then:

Presidential historian: First impeachment article against Nixon was ‘obstruction by directing others to lie’

Presidential historian Jon Meacham on Friday resurfaced the first article of impeachment brought against former President Nixon in a discussion following a bombshell report that President Trump directed his former longtime lawyer Michael Cohen to lie to Congress.

“The first article of impeachment against Nixon was just this: obstruction by directing others to lie,” Meacham tweeted early Friday morning. “This is not hysteria or hyperventilating. It’s history.”

As Coast Guard paychecks went undelivered Tuesday as the result of an ongoing partial government shutdown, the service's top officer urged its members to stay the course.

In a public letter published Tuesday afternoon on his social media pages, Adm. Karl Schultz said the day's missed paycheck, to his knowledge, marked the first time in the history of the nation "that service members in a U.S. Armed Force have not been paid during a lapse in government appropriations."

The Coast Guard, the only military service to fall under the Department of Homeland Security, is also the only service with payroll affected by the shutdown, which began Dec. 22. The Coast Guard was able to issue final paychecks for the year, but will be unable to distribute further pay until a budget deal is reached or another appropriation agreement is made.

In all, some 55,000 Coast Guard active-duty, reserve and civilian members are going without pay; the number includes 42,000 active-duty service members.

Coast Guard civilians have been on furlough or working without pay since the shutdown began.

For the First Time in History, a US Military Service Is Working Without Pay

Lawyers for Trump’s disgraced former campaign chairman, who was convicted of tax and bank fraud last year, submitted a filing in Washington, D.C., federal court responding to Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s assertion that Manafort had lied to Mueller’s office and so violated his plea agreement. Manafort’s lawyers pushed back on that claim by saying that he had extensively cooperated with Mueller, meeting with the government lawyers and investigators a dozen times and twice testifying before a grand jury.

But Manafort’s team screwed up.

They tried to redact four different passages in their filing, but failed to do so properly, leaving the redacted text in plain sight. For instance, Manafort’s lawyers responded to Mueller’s allegation that Manafort lied to the government about his interactions with a man named Konstantin Kilimnik, who was Manafort’s right-hand man during his time as a powerful political consultant in Ukraine. What’s more noteworthy is that Kilimnik has alleged connections to Russian intelligence.

What the redacted text says is that Manafort allegedly misled Mueller about meeting with Kilimnik during the 2016 presidential campaign and discussing a “Ukraine peace plan” with Kilimnik “on more than one occasion.” Another improperly redacted section revealed that Mueller has alleged that Manafort “lied about sharing polling data with Mr. Kilimnik related to the 2016 presidential campaign.”

Paul Manafort’s Lawyers Appear to Accidentally Blow the Door Open on Collusion

Oops! Not a mistake I would expect out of "the best people!"

Fox News' Shep Smith and Andrew Napolitano now see proof of 'collusion' between Trump's team and Russia

"This shows that Bob Mueller can demonstrate to a court, without the testimony of Paul Manafort, that the campaign had a connection to Russian intelligence and the connection involved information going from the campaign to the Russians," Napolitano said. "The question is, was this in return for a promise of something from the Russians, and did the candidate, now the president, know about it?” That would be "a conspiracy," he added, regardless of whether the Trump campaign actually got anything of value from the Russians.