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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

Mardi Gras

Mardi Gras: The most fun you'll have with a history lesson

Patricia Clarkson on leading the Mardi Gras group breaking with tradition

In New Orleans, The Fight Over Blackface Renews Scrutiny Of A Mardi Gras Tradition

Mobile mom says shoes thrown from Mardi Gras float sent her kid to the ER

Popeyes might be onto something with chicken-tender-cradlin’ Mardi Gras beads

Sounds like a great way to get grease all over your shirt on Fat Tuesday.

New CPAC stars: Black gun rights activists

For a few minutes at the Conservative Political Action Conference on Thursday afternoon, the message was more Malcolm X than William F. Buckley.

Sporting a red hoodie, his hair in cornrows, Maj Toure touted his group, Black Guns Matter. "We go where there's high violence, high crime, high gun control — high slave mentalities, to be perfectly honest,” he said, “and inform urban America about their human right, as stated in the Second Amendment, to defend their life."

A besuited interviewer seated on stage next to Toure told him, "You don’t look or sound like your stereotypical Second Amendment advocate."

[...] Philip Smith, president of the National African American Gun Association, said Trump was one driver of black interest in gun rights, along with general anxiety about the state of the world. "They are seeing the uncertainty within society across the board," he said. Smith, who did not participate in CPAC, founded his group in 2015, hoping he might attract a few hundred members. Membership quickly climbed into the thousands, and it tripled in the months following Trump’s inauguration. He said the group now has about 30,000 members.

Smith said that 60 percent of his members are black women, who often feel the most vulnerable to violent crime.

First ~6 minutes is the action, the rest is the extended version.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fax-kXMCbtA (NSFW language)

It was lit.

Culture Shock for French in Quebec: ‘We Smoke Cigarettes, They Smoke Pot’

Some Montrealers call them “FFF’s” — French from France.

FFFFFFFFFFFFFF

Kraft Charges Reveal a Sordid World Thriving in Florida

The 77-year-old Kraft proclaims his innocence in a broader investigation that ensnared two other prominent financiers, including John Havens, Citigroup Inc.’s former president. John Childs, a buyout pioneer, was also charged in a related prostitution investigation. The police say in total 26 encounters are captured on video in the Orchids.

The case has peeled back one of the most unsavory aspects of this stretch of Florida -- where a playground of the wealthy filled with golf courses and beaches meets with what authorities say may be a human trafficking ring spanning from China to the U.S. There are multi-million dollar mansions as well as the massage tables that police say women slept on when not engaged by customers.

[...] Jupiter is home to countless celebrities and sports stars, as well as the Trump National Golf Club, where the president golfed with Tiger Woods and Jack Nicklaus earlier this month. Thirty minutes to the south, in the area around near Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club, there are $10 million homes tucked behind carefully groomed hedges and the valet lines teem with Lamborghinis and Rolls-Royces.

Reimer: Prostitution charges against Robert Kraft are degrading and beneath him

Robert Kraft, one of the most powerful and recognizable men in the country’s preeminent entertainment industry, visited a seedy day spa in a Florida strip mall twice last month and illegally solicited prostitutes, law enforcement officials say. Even worse, police say Kraft’s alleged acts are captured on videotape.

TMZ staffer Evan Rosenblum told “Dale & Keefe” Friday he thinks it is “almost a certainty” the videos get released. Florida does have one of the most transparent open records laws in the U.S., which mandates any records received by a public agency, such as state law enforcement, be made available for examination, unless the state legislature rules otherwise.

For anti-human trafficking crusader Ivanka Trump, Robert Kraft could make things awkward

If you're a billionaire, don't be stingy. Just buy a live-in sex slave.

How Twitter Amplified The Ugliest Awards Season Ever

Astronomy Picture of the Day

And for the paranoid crowd:

Watch: Aurora borealis over HAARP

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.