Politics

Back in July, the state of Illinois narrowly avoided a junk bond rating with a last minute budget deal that included a 32% in hike in income taxes.  Republican Governor Bruce Rauner vetoed the budget and called it a "disaster," but both houses of the state legislature voted to override his veto.  Meanwhile, S&P and Moody's were apparently both convinced that the budget deal was sufficient for the state to remain an investment grade credit and all lived happily ever after, if just for a few months.  Per CNN:

Less than 24 hours after CNN triggered the latest outbreak of 'Trump Derangement Syndrome' by relaying information from anonymous sources that Trump's former campaign manager Paul Manfort has been under surveillance by the FBI since 2014, Manafort has fired back by calling on the Department of Justice to release all transcripts of his tapped phone calls so that the American public "can come to the same conclusion as the DOJ — there is nothing there."  Per the Daily Caller:

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More Thoughts on Trump’s UN Declaration of War Against Iran and North Korea

Paul Craig Roberts

Authored by Ryan McMaken via The Mises Institute,

After fifty years of imposing embargoes and other sanctions, the United States never managed to topple Cuba's communist regime.

 

After forty years of the same in Iran, the US met with similar amounts of success.

 

Ongoing sanctions against North Korea have not toppled to regime there. 

But, some people in Washington won't let decades of failure dissuade them. 

In what may be the most bizarre news of the day, Bloomberg reports that Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates were "close to taking military action in the early stages of their ongoing dispute with Qatar", until Donald Trump called the leaders of both countries and warned them to back off; in other words, Trump's intervention prevented yet another gulf war, which if true will make the U.S. Millitary-Industrial complex very unhappy as Trump's peace effort likely cost US offense defense companies tens of billions in lost profits.