https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/wp/2017/12/15/female-congressional-candidate-leaves-race-after-sexual-harassment-allegations-resurface/



Andrea Ramsey had been running as a Democrat for a congressional seat in Kansas. (YouTube/Nick Decaro)

A Democratic candidate hoping to flip a hotly contested congressional seat in Kansas has dropped out of the race after allegations that she sexually harassed a male subordinate resurfaced during her campaign.

Andrea Ramsey, 57, who was running to unseat Republican Kevin Yoder in a district that includes Kansas City in 2018, is one of the few, if only, women in public life to step down thus far amid a national conversation about sex and power dynamics in the workplace. The vast majority of those accused of sexual misconduct have been men in public-facing industrieDCCC spokeswoman Meredith Kelly said that the organization had not been involved in the primary, financially or otherwise.

“Members and candidates must all be held to the highest standard,” Kelly said in an emailed statement. “If anyone is guilty of sexual harassment or sexual assault, that person should not hold public office.”s like media, Hollywood and politics.

In a defiant letter posted on Facebook Friday, Ramsey defended herself from the charges made by a former subordinate years ago and blamed her decision on the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the campaign arm of Democrats in the House. Ramsey said that the DCCC had decided “not to support our promising campaign.”
ry, financially or otherwise.

“Members and candidates must all be held to the highest standard,” Kelly said in an emailed statement. “If anyone is guilty of sexual harassment or sexual assault, that person should not hold public office.”

The lesson for Democrats from Alabama is simple: Stop trying to lure Republicans and focus on turning out the base

The question hovering over the Alabama U.S. Senate election, at least for the pundits, was simple: Would Alabama Republicans rather vote for a child molester or a Democrat? The answer was sadly predictable: Even though the allegations against Republican Roy Moore -- that he had pursued or molested teen girls when he was in his 30s -- were entirely credible, white conservative voters still picked Moore over the KKK-fighting Democrat Doug Jones.

In the end, however, in a true miracle that concludes a bizarre year in American politics, Jones won the Alabama race in a squeaker. (At this writing, his margin over Moore is barely over 10,000 votes.) In the end, Jones' unexpected victory came because Democrats -- depressed after many years of never winning statewide elections in Alabama -- were fired up to vote, and turned out in big numbers sufficient to drown out the hard right.

As Nate Cohn of the New York Times tweeted, the Alabama result was the direct result of the turnout gap closing:
https://twitter.com/Nate_Cohn/status/940779765224624128

The lesson here for Democrats is simple: Stop trying to win over Republican voters. Instead, turn out the Democratic base. Indeed, the lesson of Alabama, which Democrats should carry with them into the 2018 elections, is to focus on motivating the base. This was true in 2016, when Hillary Clinton lost largely because black turnout was down in several key states. It proved true in Alabama, where Jones was able to win the reddest of red states because black voter turnout was incredibly high, despite extensive Republican attempts at voter suppression in the state. Some of this was due to the high profile of the race, but a lot of it was due to aggressive efforts to get out the black vote in the state.

Clinton's biggest mistake in 2016 was believing she could use Donald Trump's obvious piggishness to chip off white female voters who usually vote Republican. It didn't work. The white conservative woman who has had enough of men's nonsense is a nice fantasy, but the reality is that such women are both too motivated by racial politics and too loyal to the men in their lives to break free. Jones' victory shows a different path forward. The focus on turning out the liberal base, and black voters in particular, paid off with a Democratic victory almost no one believed would happen.

https://federalnewsradio.com/defense-main/2017/12/navy-says-its-wasted-4-billion-on-continuing-resolutions-since-2011/

Congress’ seemingly unbreakable habit of running the government via a series of continuing resolutions, rather than full-year appropriations bills, has caused the U.S. Navy to waste $4 billion since 2011, officials said Monday.

Service leaders disclosed the estimate just four days before the expiration of the current continuing resolution, expressing a degree of exasperation that it remains unclear exactly how — or if — the government will be funded for the remainder of 2018. They argued that as much as the sea service believes it needs additional funding in order to carry out the full scope of its missions, receiving what funds it does get in a stable, predictable way is even more crucial.

“We have put $4 billion in a trash can, poured lighter fluid on it, and burned it,” Navy Secretary Richard Spencer said in remarks at a U.S. Naval Institute forum in Washington. “Four billion is enough to buy a squadron of F-35s, two Arleigh Burke-class destroyers, 3,000 Harpoon missiles. It’s enough money to buy us additional capacity that we need. Instead, it’s lost, because of inefficacy in the ways of the continuing resolution.”

Although the Defense Department has faced fewer continuing resolutions than domestic agencies have in recent decades, it has still spent at least part of each of the past 10 years under a CR. Because of that, Navy managers have become somewhat adept at navigating their way through the stopgap funding measures.

http://money.cnn.com/2017/12/05/news/companies/corporate-consolidation/index.html?iid=hp-toplead-dom

You've got fewer choices than you used to.
The dominant companies in all kinds of industries now control their markets like never before, thanks in large part to a string of corporate mergers.

"Almost every industry in the United States has become more concentrated over time. That's for sure," said Thomas Philippon, professor of finance at New York University. "All this consolidation has led to less competition, and higher costs for consumers."

More than 75% of U.S. industries have experienced an increase in concentration levels over the last two decades, according to a study by three professors -- Gustavo Grullon of Rice University, Yelena Larkin of York University and Roni Michaely of Cornell.

The trend is a good one for companies. Corporate profits and stock prices are up, and the consolidation and reduced competition is clearly part of the reason, said Larkin. But a lack of competition can lead to higher prices and lost jobs, among other problems.

"Even in cases where prices have fallen, such as airlines, service has deteriorated with the decreased competition," said Dean Baker, co-chairman of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a liberal think tank.

And Baker says if tax reform does bring about a sharp drop in corporate taxes, that could free up money for companies to make even more acquisitions.

http://www.cnn.com/2017/12/05/politics/white-women-class-divide-gender-divide/index.html

If Republican Roy Moore wins next week's Senate special election in Alabama, it will be largely because of his support among women.

More specifically, Moore's ability to survive the allegations of sexually pursuing young girls, which have rocked his campaign, will likely turn on whether he can maintain his pre-scandal advantage among white women without a college education -- even as their college-educated counterparts have moved toward Democrat Doug Jones in much bigger numbers than usual for deeply conservative Alabama, according to public and private polling in the race.

With that contrast, the Alabama race is illuminating one of the least understood political trends of the Donald Trump era. Many commentators have warned that Republicans face a systemic problem with female voters under Trump -- and could see that difficulty deepen if Moore wins and is seated in the Senate. But that conclusion is far too sweeping. Rather than a monolithic response, the Trump era instead is widening the divide between the political preferences of white-collar and blue-collar white women.

The much-touted gender gap hasn't disappeared. Whether looking at whites, blacks or Hispanics, Democrats consistently run better among women than men (or from the other angle, Republicans run better among men than women).

But in the Trump era, the class divide looks more powerful than the gender divide, especially among whites. In the 2016 presidential race, Trump ran much better among white women without a college education than those with an advanced degree. In fact, the gap between the two groups was by far the widest recorded in exit polls since at least the presidential race of 1980.