NEWS ROUNDUP
Washington women step up, drain the swamp, scary movie
Tuesday, October 31, 2017
WASHINGTON WOMEN
► In today’s Spokesman-Review — Sen. Murray crafts humane, bipartisan fix for Obamacare. As such, it faces an uphill batlle. (by Shawn Vestal) — Sens. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) and Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) detailed their proposal Oct. 18. The CBO scored it Wednesday, saying it would bring down the deficit and stabilize insurance markets, which could reduce premiums, but not have a big effect on the number of insured Americans. It’s an honest, focused, limited, practical, consumer-oriented attempt to fix a problem. Let’s hope that doesn’t doom it.
LOCAL
► In today’s Seattle Times — Assault on Obamacare creates ‘unique challenges’ in Washington state as enrollment starts — Enrollment for the Washington Health Benefit Exchange begins Wednesday, Nov. 1. State and King County employees and agencies are working against national trends to try to increase the number of people becoming insured.
► From KING 5 — Homeless camp cleanup prompts letter from Seattle firefighters to Sawant — Seattle firefighters are speaking out against a budget proposal that would end clean-ups of unauthorized homeless camps in the city. In a letter to councilmember Kshama Sawant, Seattle Firefighters Union President Kenny Stuart said, “Needle sticks, exposure to biohazard and contaminants, and assault are serious issues that our firefighters face at unauthorized encampments every day.”
DRAIN THE SWAMP
► In today’s NY Times — Mueller’s first indictments send a message to the president — Mueller’s charges did not implicate President Trump but collectively amounted to a political body blow to him. The gravity of the threat may yet tempt Trump to short-circuit the investigation by firing the special counsel or pardoning his former campaign chairman or others.
► From Lawfare — Mueller’s show of strength: A quick and dirty analysis — The first big takeaway: 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 Trump’s campaign team admits that he was working with people he knew to be tied to the Russian government to “arrange a meeting between the Campaign and the Russian government officials” and to obtain “dirt” on Hillary Clinton in the form of thousands of hacked emails — and that he lied about these activities to the FBI. He briefed President Trump on at least some of them.
► From KUOW — ‘None of this is real’: Conservative media reacts to Mueller indictments — For weeks, conservative media outlets have echoed these themes, working to discredit Mueller and recycling own Trump’s tweets describing the probe as a political witch hunt.
TRICKLE-DOWN TAX CUTS
► From Bloomberg — Key GOP moderate Susan Collins lays out demands for tax bill — Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) said she’s opposed to two tax breaks for the wealthy that her party leaders are pushing for, indicating that her vote won’t be easy to win on President Donald Trump’s top legislative priority. “I do not believe that the top rate should be lowered for individuals who are making more than $1 million a year,” Collins said. “I don’t think there’s any need to eliminate the estate tax.”
► From Rep. Lloyd Doggett — A candy message about Republican tax bill
NATIONAL
► In today’s NY Times — Thanks to Wall Street, there may be too many restaurants — Since the early 2000s, banks, private equity firms and other financial institutions have poured billions into the restaurant industry as they sought out more tangible enterprises than the dot-com start-ups that were going belly-up. There are now more than 620,000 eating and drinking places in the United States, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and the number of restaurants is growing at about twice the rate of the population.
TODAY’S SCARE
► From The Intercept — This is the most terrifying movie you can watch this Halloween — In 1939, 20,000 Americans rallied in New York’s Madison Square Garden to celebrate the rise of Nazism — an event largely forgotten from American history. A NIGHT AT THE GARDEN is a 7-minute film that uses striking archival fragments recorded that night to transport modern audiences into this gathering and shine a light on the disturbing fallibility of seemingly decent people.
The Stand posts links to Washington state and national news of interest every weekday morning by 10 a.m.