"In a few months, we may find ourselves looking back with nostalgic regret on 2015, when we only had a mere 16 candidates running for the Republican Party's nomination for president.

"That was nothing compared to what's likely in store for the Democrats in 2020. A sober estimate of the number of candidates who might contend for the Democratic presidential nomination next year and in 2020 approaches 40. Even if many of those decide finally not to take the plunge, we're almost certainly going to see a 20-person field at a minimum.

"This means the Democrats will face all the logistical problems the GOP faced - and more, owing to the Dems' ideological makeup and the nature of the social and cultural debates of the moment."

"Lawmakers are facing an end-of-the-year traffic jam with legislation piling up and a tight schedule that leaves them little wiggle room.

"Leadership is juggling a backlog of must-pass bills and nominations as well as eleventh-hour requests from rank-and-file members as legislators try to cram as much as possible into the final days of the work year. Republicans, in particular, are feeling pressure to make a last-ditch effort as they prepare to cede control of the House to Democrats in January.

"But the schedule got further scrambled following former President George H.W. Bush's death, with Washington expected to dedicate days to mourning the 41st president. House Republicans announced Monday they are canceling votes for the week, while the Senate is delaying the start of its work week.

"Republican leadership unveiled a two-week continuing resolution to prevent a partial government shutdown by Friday night's deadline for the seven appropriations bills they failed to pass by Sept. 30, the end of fiscal 2018.

"That would push the border wall fight until Dec. 21 and, potentially, give lawmakers a few more days to squeeze in additional votes. Even with the funding battle put on the back-burner, leadership is facing a lengthy to-do list and multiple hard deadlines."

"Republicans need to regain the offensive on the fiscal issues. The GOP has somehow allowed big-spending Democrats to get to the right of them on the issue of financial responsibility and balanced budgets.

"Polls show that Democrats are now more trusted on balancing the budget than Republicans. That's like losing an arm wrestling contest to Nancy Pelosi.

"The big first step for Republicans to regain American trust on fiscal responsibility is for President Donald Trump to deliver a nationally televised prime-time speech from the Oval Office to announce an all-hands-on-deck war on Washington waste. ...

"The issue is teed up right now because the spending trends have been so alarming. The Congressional Budget Office just announced that the government is now spending $2 billion more than it takes in every day. Don't even think about blaming the tax cuts. In 2018, the estimated $3.4 trillion raised in federal revenues was the highest level ever in American history -- even with the tax cuts. The problem is a spending avalanche that now exceeds $4 trillion of outlays a year."

Read entire article here.

"Bush believed in the essential goodness of the American people and in the nobility of the American experiment. His understanding of the nation and of the world seems antiquated now; it seemed so in real time, too, at least in the last year or so of his presidency. But there was nothing affected about Bush's vision of politics as a means to public service, of public service as the highest of callings. This vision - of himself engaged in what Oliver Wendell Holmes called the passion and action of the times - was as real and natural to him as the air he breathed. It was his whole world, and had been since his earliest days when he would watch his father come home from a day on Wall Street only to head back out to run the Greenwich Town Meeting. It was as simple - and as complicated - as that. ...

"His life was spent in the service of his nation, and his spirit of conciliation, common sense, and love of country will stand him in strong stead through the ebbs and flows of posterity's judgment. On that score - that George H.W. Bush was a uniquely good man in a political universe where good men were hard to come by - there was bipartisan consensus a quarter century after his White House years."

"CNN dropped commentator Marc Lamont Hill on Thursday after he made remarks in support of Palestinian rights that some interpreted as calling for the elimination of Israel.

"'Marc Lamont Hill is no longer under contract with CNN,' a network spokesperson told POLITICO.

"Speaking at a meeting at the United Nations on Wednesday, Hill called for a 'free Palestine from the river to the sea.' The statement, which many say refers to the boundaries of the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, is a rallying cry by several Palestinian groups, including Hamas, and is viewed by some as calling for the elimination of Israel, which currently occupies those boundaries."

"General Motors just shared some very bad news: It is closing five factories in the United States and Canada, eliminating 15 percent of its work force (and 25 percent of its executives), and getting out of the passenger-car business almost entirely to focus on SUVs and trucks. President Donald Trump threw a fit, but GM shrugged him off. The facts are the facts.

"What did U.S. taxpayers get for their $11.2 billion bailout of GM? About ten years of business-as-usual, and one very expensive lesson.

"Bailouts don't work.

"Never mind the moral hazard, the rent-seeking, the cronyism and the favoritism, and all of the inevitable corruption that inevitably accompanies multibillion-dollar sweetheart deals between Big Business and Big Government. Set aside the ethical questions entirely and focus on the mechanics: Businesses such as GM get into trouble not because of one-time events in the wider economic environment, but because they are so weak as businesses that they cannot weather one-time events in the wider economic environment. GM's sedan business is weak because GM's sedans are weak: Virtually all of the best-selling sedans in the United States are made by Toyota, Honda, and Nissan. The lower and middle sections of the market are dominated by Asia, and the high end of the market by Europe: Mercedes, Audi, BMW. GM can't compete with the Honda Civic at its price point or with the Audi A7 at its price point. Consumers like what they like, and they aren't buying what GM is selling. It isn't winning in the dino-juice-powered market, in the electric-car market, or in the hybrid market, either: GM is not exactly what you would call a nimble corporation."

Read entire article here

"President Donald Trump and China's Xi Jinping will meet over dinner Saturday evening in Buenos Aires marking a pivotal moment in the escalating trade war between the world's two largest economies.

"Trump is hopeful for a breakthrough with Xi but is ready to impose more tariffs if the upcoming talks don't yield progress, Larry Kudlow, Trump's top economic adviser, told reporters Tuesday during a briefing ahead of the Group of 20 meeting in Argentina.

"The president believes 'there is a good possibility that we can make a deal' and he 'is open to it,' Kudlow said later Tuesday.

"Washington and Beijing remain at odds on key issues such as U.S. accusations of intellectual property theft and forced technology transfer, he said."

"A climate change report published Friday contains cherry-picked data that appear designed to warn of the consequences if steps are not taken to mitigate global warming, according to one climate expert.

"The scientists who wrote the National Climate Assessment (NCA) used unreliable information that exaggerates the risks global warming poses, University of Colorado Prof. Roger Pielke Jr. noted in a series of tweets. He fears the report will make it easier for critics to dismiss future climate studies.

"'By presenting cherrypicked science, at odds w/ NCA Vol,1 & IPCC AR5, the authors of NCA Vol.2 have given a big fat gift to anyone who wants to dismiss climate science and policy,' Pielke Jr. wrote in a tweet Friday shortly after the White House released the report. 'Embarrassing.'

"'People are not dumb. Clim chg is real & deserves policy response, but not like this,' he said, referring to volume two of the NCA, a federal report the administration is required by law to submit. Volume one was published in 2017 and 'played things straight on the science of extremes,' added Pielke Jr., who has criticized media reporting on similar reports in the past."

"The documentary The Creepy Line takes its name from a shockingly unguarded remark by the former Google CEO Eric Schmidt. He is smiling and relaxed in a conference as he explains that Google has (had?) a nickname for excessive invasiveness. 'Google policy on a lot of these things,' Schmidt says, 'is to get right up to the creepy line and not cross it.'

"How is that going so far? The Creepy Line, a terrifying and important 80-minute documentary now streaming on Amazon Prime, is an attempt to answer that question.

"The film delves into some of the troubling habits of our two Internet masters, Facebook and especially Google. An early segment of the film, produced and partly narrated by the journalist Peter Schweizer, illustrates how your search history gives Google an enormous, permanent cache of information about you, everything from what things you like to buy to what you like in bed. Naturally Google uses the data mainly to fine-tune ad sales. But what else might they do with it? Who knows?

"Google, noticing that people would leave the search engine to roam the Internet, came up with a browser, Chrome. Now everything you do online through Chrome is logged by Google. But Google wants to know what you're doing even when you're not online. Hence: Android. As soon as you log on, Android uploads a complete picture of everywhere your phone has been that day. 'These are all free services but obviously they're not,' notes professor Jordan Peterson, another talking head in the doc. It's a surveillance business model. Google Maps, Google Docs, Gmail . . . Google knows more about you than your spouse does. It even has drafts of emails you didn't send. Oh, and they have the power to block information from reaching you too. Just by bumping undesirable stuff to the second page of search, Google can more or less make it disappear. Hey, good thing Google doesn't have any overt political or cultural preferences you might not agree with, right? Peterson says Google shut off access to his Gmail and his YouTube channel when the corporation decided it didn't like what he was saying. Ten minutes into the movie, you'll pause it and switch all of your devices to non-Google search engines. (Try DuckDuckGo, which vows not to track you and also promises unbiased search results.)"

Read entire article here.

From our table to yours, we wish everyone a Happy Thanksgiving!