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They showed that Mr. Trump and his aides and allies linked a sought-after Oval Office meeting for Ukraines new president to the investigations. And they established that the administration had frozen $391 million in military aid to Ukraine an ally under threat from Russia during the period when Mr. Trump was pushing hardest for the investigations.

The risks now, Democrats asserted, rest with Senate Republicans if they fail to give serious consideration to convicting Mr. Trump.

Im stunned by some of the reactions, from their own mouths, from the leaders of the Senate abandoning their oath, in defiance of their oath, in plain view, said Representative Madeleine Dean, Democrat of Pennsylvania, who sits on the Judiciary Committee. I think of it as malpractice, but its much more serious than that.

Still, the political ramifications for House Democrats were evident, especially with the start of what will certainly be a combative election year just days away.

Led by the president and his allies, Republicans promised to make vulnerable Democrats pay for their impeachment votes and said the partisan split combined with the near certainty that the Senate would ultimately, and perhaps quickly, acquit the president would allow them to make the case that this was strictly a political exercise born out of spite against a duly elected president.

Moments after the House voted to impeach Mr. Trump, American Action Network, a conservative advocacy group, announced it would hit Democratic lawmakers who supported impeachment and represent districts won by the president in 2016 with a combined $2.5 million of television and online advertisements. Conservative groups had already flooded those districts with a torrent of advertisements.

Each and every one of these members will have to explain their vote to impeach President Trump, Dan Conston, the president of American Action Network, said in a statement. Folks at home expect their member of Congress to deliver on real issues. Instead, theyve spent every waking moment trying to remove Trump from office for their own partisan political ends.

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House Democrats Bet Their Impeachment Votes Are Worth It - The New York Times

WASHINGTON The House voted on Thursday to temporarily eliminate a tax increase on some high-earning residents of states like California and New York that was included in President Trumps 2017 tax overhaul, with some Republicans joining Democrats in support.

The bill would repeal a cap on a popular tax break that prevented taxpayers from deducting more than $10,000 in state and local taxes from their federal income taxes. It paired that repeal which would in effect be a tax cut for upper earners in high-tax states with an increase on the highest earners across the country by raising the top income tax rate to 39.6 percent from 37 percent.

In a procedural twist, Democrats agreed to a Republican amendment that would limit the bills benefits for blue-state billionaires. It would maintain the so-called SALT cap on deductions for taxpayers earning more than $100 million per year, and direct the saved money to a $500 tax break for teachers and first responders. Representative Mike Thompson, Democrat of California, said the motion was accepted in the spirit of the holiday season.

The bill, which was approved by a vote of 218 to 206, has no chance of passing the Republican-controlled Senate, and Mr. Trump has threatened to veto it.

But it was hailed as a victory by its Democratic champions, many of whom were elected last year in wealthy, suburban areas where the SALT cap had raised some voters taxes.

Its about fairness, Representative Thomas Suozzi, Democrat of New York and the lead sponsor of the legislation, said in an interview. Do we want people moving away from New York to go to Florida because they lost their state and local tax deduction?

When those residents move out of state, Mr. Suozzi said, the remaining lower- and middle-income families are left holding the bag.

The 2017 Trump tax law limited deductions for state and local taxes paid, like income and property taxes, to $10,000 per household per year. That resulted in net tax increases for a slice of high-earning residents of areas with high income or property taxes, which tend to be concentrated in large metropolitan areas like New York City and high-tax states like New Jersey and California.

The SALT cap was tucked into the 2017 tax overhaul in part to help finance it and reduce its impact on the deficit. The bill passed on Thursday includes some budgetary gymnastics in order to avoid adding to the federal debt. It would repeal the SALT cap for three years while raising the top income tax rate for six years. Because of how Republicans structured the 2017 law, the SALT cap is set to expire and the top rate is set to rise on their own at the end of 2025.

Voter anger toward the SALT cap in certain areas appears to have helped lift Democrats in the 2018 midterms. In the months leading up to the election, the online research platform SurveyMonkey interviewed nearly 30,000 registered voters about their opinions on the tax law, their voting intentions and other topics. A New York Times analysis of that data suggests that the SALT cap may have had a significant effect on voters views of the tax law and perhaps even on how they voted to a degree that could have influenced the narrowest races in those districts.

Efforts to repeal the cap have emerged as a division among Democrats who have long criticized Republicans for cutting taxes to favor the rich.

Many liberal policy analysts oppose raising the SALT cap, because it would mostly benefit high earners and they would rather use the money for spending programs to help the poor and middle class.

Repealing the cap should not be a top priority, Seth Hanlon, a senior fellow at the liberal Center for American Progress, wrote in an online column this month.

If policymakers are concerned with the effect of the SALT cap on middle-class families, he wrote, there are options to address it without providing enormous windfalls for the wealthy.

At least one leading presidential contender, former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., favors eliminating the cap.

This bill truly is a tax cut for the few, said Representative Kevin Brady of Texas, the top Republican on the House Ways and Means Committee. What Democrats are proposing today is regressive.

Mr. Suozzi said on Thursday that the repeal of the cap would be 100 percent paid for by the wealthiest Americans, by raising the top income tax rate.

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SALT Tax Increase That Burned Blue States is Targeted by Democrats - The New York Times

The top Democratic candidates will soon take the stage at the next debate, and oh boy, are party leaders squirming. Up until late last week, when Andrew Yang made the cutoff by a hair, all six of those making their pitch were white#debatesowhite, as the hashtag called it. Worse yet, half of those Caucasians are old enough to be carrying Medicare cards. As Frank Bruni wrote in last weeks Sunday column, for a party that celebrates diversity, pitches itself to underdogs and prides itself on being future-minded and youth-oriented, thats a freaky, baffling turn of events.

Some blamed the freaky turn on billionaire money crowding out the merely rich little guys, while others pointed a finger at the DNC for a dysfunctional qualifying system and a primary calendar privileging Iowa and New Hampshire, both largely white states. Also popular is the theory of electabilityif voters top priority is nominating someone who can beat Donald Trump, white old-timers seem like the safest bet. But the facts behind #debatesowhite suggest that, despite the best efforts of progressives and the party establishment to hype 2020 candidates in terms of their race, gender, and LGBTQ status, the Democratic rank-and-file have limited use for identity politics.

Remember that the Dems started the year with a historically diverse field: two blacks, an Asian, a Hispanic, and an out gay man. In the following months, a sizable cluster of women joined the fray. Finally, Americans would see a field that looked like America. Yet 12 months later, all the nonwhite candidatesexcept Yang, who has explicitly disavowed identity politicsare either going or gone. Even Kamala Harris, whose Jamaican father and Indian mother made her intersectionally intersectionalblack, Asian, female, and immigrant to bootwill not be standing in front of a podium.

By the logic of identity politics, this shouldnt have happened. Blacks make up 21 percent of the Democratic party. That should be enough, some might think, to guarantee substantial support for at least one of the black candidates, but it hasnt worked that way. Joe Biden is the favorite among black Dems. In fact, they seem to love the Scranton-born grandfather; with 43 percent of black voters support, he registers 30 points higher than anyone else. The irony wasnt lost on New York magazines lefty politics writer, Eric Levitz: If Joe Biden retains his current standing, then the Democrats 2020 nominee will better reflect the preferences of black Democrats than those of white ones.

True, the former vice presidents strength might well stem from his connection to Barack Obama. And theres some evidence that African-Americans are more likely to come to the polls if there is a black candidateat least if he or she is running as a Democrat. About a third of black Democrats say that they would be more enthusiastic if the nominee were also black. But color preference can easily take a back seat to actual policies, especially now, as the party veers left. Black voters are less likely to call themselves liberal than white voters, suggesting that they will be more moderate on many issues than the black media and advocates assigned to speak for them, as well as the partys white elites.

Latino voters, making up 12 percent of the party, have proved even more indifferent than blacks to the rules of identity politics. Julin Castro, the only Latino in the race, was supposed to be their guy. But a recent Noticias Telemundo poll of Latino voters found him in fifth place, attracting a mere 2 percent of his presumed base. Nor were Hispanic voters particularly interested in other minority candidates; theyre also getting behind Biden (26 percent) and Bernie Sanders (18 percent). According to the New York Times, Sanders has collected more money from Latino voters than any other candidate in the Democratic field; hes raised three times as much from the group as Barack Obama did in 2008.

Harris, who dropped out of the race due to lackluster fundraising and falling poll numbers, is the most striking example of the failure of identity politics to catch fire among the electorate. No one drank from the diversity well more deeply than Harris. The former San Francisco district attorney and now California senator launched her campaign at Frank Ogawa Plaza, named after an Oakland civil rights leader, on Martin Luther King Day, and the anniversary of the beginning of Shirley Chisholms presidential run in 1972. She called herself a child of Oakland, another signal to black voters that she was one of them, and turned the fact that she was bused as a child into a largely white school into a star turn in the first debate.

But in the end, her diverse identity and policy ideas appealed more to political and media elites than the Democratic hoi polloi. She attracted big name Hollywood supporters. The Washington Post Pundit Ranking gave Kamala Harris the best shot at defeating Trump five times in a row before realizing voters were just not that into her. Even at her campaigns peak, polls showed she held more support from white liberals than from black voters, National Journals Josh Kraushaar noted.

And what about the much-hyped womens vote? The Tao of identity politics teaches us that women should feel a sense of solidarity with their sisters, but thats not the way theyve been acting. Kirsten Gillibrand, the campaign seasons star avatar of womens issues, was best known for her fight for paid leave and against sexual abuse in the military and on college campuses. Those efforts didnt help her in a national campaign. Though almost 60 percent of self-identified Democrats are women, Gillibrand could never break 2 percent support, and she failed to meet the donor threshold for Septembers debate. She ran as a white woman of privilege, telling voters, I can talk to those white women in the suburbs and explain to them what white privilege actually is. Evidently, women of color were unimpressed, while white ladies were not amused; her candidacy deflated like an old balloon.

Elizabeth Warren, the highest polling of the Democratic women still standing, is finding a bit more support from women than menabout 2.9 points more. Certainly Warren is saying all the right Democratic things about familiar issues, announcing ambitious plans to undercut restrictive abortion laws, narrow the pay gap for women of color, establish universal child care, and reduce maternal mortality.

This could bring more women on board the Warren train, but she shouldnt count on it. Theres little evidence that women as a group gravitate toward female candidates, though they look like they will in hypothetical matchups. Women are likely to vote Democratic by a considerable margin, but thats true no matter who the nominee. What looks like women voting for women is usually just women voting for Democrats, Kathleen Dolan, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee explained to Nate Silvers 538 blog. The aspiring glass-ceiling breaker Hillary Clinton had a 12-point margin of victory among women, virtually identical to Barack Obamas 13- and 11-point wins with female voters in his two presidential runs. Even women avowing a strong sense of shared gender identity were no more likely to come through for her.

And what about Andrew Yang, the candidate who, in a last-minute save, helped the Dems escape a dreaded optics of white supremacy at the Democratic debate? Ironically, the political establishment has been hellbent on ignoring Yangs impressive candidacy even though he is nonwhite. MSNBC and CNN have forgotten to include the Taiwanese-American in graphics and polls on several occasions, even as he was polling better than other minority candidates who producers were able to remember. Other outlets got his name wrong, an error that would have given competitor networks chyron material for days if he were a black or Latino or female candidate. Does anyone doubt that Yangs invisibility is because he is Asian, an uncomfortably ambiguous status within the metaphysics of identity politics? Because Asians, particularly the Taiwanese, have been immensely successful in America, they cloud any simple narrative of crushing white power and racism.

Finally, we come to Pete Buttigieg, the first openly gay person to make a serious showing in a presidential primary season. That has not been enough to protect him from attacks from progressive Democrats, some gay, who are ordinarily the most vociferous supporters of LGBT causes. Progressives have been enraged with the mayor of South Bend for his stint at McKinsey, the global consultancy firm. They have been equally incensed about a photo of Buttigieg raising money with members of the Salvation Army, in their view a homophobic organization. He has been canceled from some homosexual circles for not being gay enough. Nation contributor David Klion retweeted a thread accusing the mayor of showing off a token black woman at campaign events. Mayor Pete is an exploitative twerp is the sort of description popular in Twitters more progressive precincts.

Its not the first time, and probably wont be the last, that the Democratic political class has failed to heed the message that those who live by identity politics often die by identity politics.

Kay S. Hymowitz is a City Journal contributing editor, the William E. Simon Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, and the author of Manning Up: How the Rise of Women Has Turned Men into Boys.

Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

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The Failure of Democrat's Identity Politics to Catch Fire Among the Electorate - City Journal

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The Liberal Democrats will soon begin the process of electing their third leader in less than a year after Jo Swinson lost her seat in a shock result at this month's general election.

The pro-European Union party secured 11 House of Commons seats last week, one fewer than it won at the 2017 general election. Swinson lost her East Dunbartonshire constituency to Scottish National Party candidate Amy Callaghan.

The next leader of the Liberal Democrats will be tasked with establishing a new raison d'tre for the party after it failed to stop Brexit. Boris Johnson, boosted by an 80-seat majority, is set to take the UK out of the EU in January.

The contest is expected to officially get underway in late January with party figures keen to choose Swinson's successor before the Labour Party chooses its new leader to replace Jeremy Corbyn.

A Liberal Democrat source told Business Insider: "Now more than ever, the country needs a strong opposition. Given the frothing civil war on Labour benches, you can bet it won't be Labour stepping up to the plate."

They added: "The questions the candidates must answer is just how they see the UK's relationship with our European partners, how the party converts support into seats and on what issues the party will carve out as our key fights over the next few years."

Here are the likely candidates in the race to become the new leader of the Liberal Democrats.

WIktor Szymanowicz/NurPhoto via Getty Images

Moran is widely regarded as the favorite to win. One senior party figure told Business Insider: "It's Layla's to lose."

Senior Liberal Democrats including current members of Parliament urged Moran to go for the leadership when the party last held a leadership contest earlier in the year. Swinson and Ed Davey ended up being the only candidates.

At the time, the MP for Oxford West and Abingdon believed it was too soon to go for the top job, having only been elected in 2017. She also wanted to focus on shoring up her majority, after winning her seat with a majority of just 816.

However, last week she was returned to Parliament with a much bigger majority of 8,943, meaning she is in a more secure position to go for the leadership this time around.

Moran, who is the first UK MP of Palestinian descent, is popular with Liberal Democrat members. Her supporters say her pitch is strong because unlike the party's two most recent leaders, she did not serve in coalition with David Cameron's Conservatives, and will not be grilled on her party's record in government like her predecessors were.

Moran has on a number of occasions called on her party to be more lucid in explaining what it represents.

In her last interview with Business Insider, she said the party ought to whittle down its pitch to handful of clear policies, saying: "We are very good at talking about a whole host of things but then people ask 'but what do you actually stand for?'"

Aaron Chown/PA Images via Getty Images

Moran's closest leadership rival is set to be Ed Davey.

The MP for Kingston and Surbiton is the party's co-interim leader along with outgoing party president, Sal Brinton.

Davey ran to be Liberal Democrat leader earlier this year, but lost out to Swinson. He has so far evaded questions on whether he intends to run this time around, but party figures expect him to stand.

Supporters say he'd be best choice for the Liberal Democrats as he has the most developed idea of what the party should be and what it ought to stand for now that the mission to stop Brexit has failed.

A party figure who supported Davey in the last leadership contest said that compared to Swinson, he was more focused on issues other than trying to stay in the EU, and wanted to talk about "the intellectual beating heart of the party."

They said that Davey was best-placed to help the party figure out a new purpose.

"We are a bit bruised, Brexit is almost certainly going to happen, and some of those single-issue supporters are going to peel away," they told Business Insider.

Davey put fighting climate change front and centre of his last leadership campaign.

Speaking in the House of Commons this week as the party's interim leader, he told Speaker Lindsay Hoyle that the Liberal Democrats would prioritise tackling the climate emergency in this new parliament.

Aaron Chown/PA Images via Getty Images

Christine Jardine, the Liberal Democrat MP for Edinburgh West, is said to be considering a leadership bid.

Formerly a prominent journalist in Scotland, Jardine was first elected in 2017 and is a popular figure within the party.

One party figure who intends to support Jardine if she decides to enter the upcoming leadership contest described her as a "live underdog" who "might surprise a few people."

"She'll start as third favorite but she's very good on TV and has not had same exposure as Ed and Layla," they said.

However, while an impressive leadership campaign would likely help Jardine raise her profile, the odds of winning would still be heavily stacked against her.

Lib Dem figures point to the fact that she recently failed to win the contest to become the party's next president, losing out to grassroots party blogger, Mark Pack.

Aaron Chown/PA Images via Getty Images

Daisy Cooper has been only an MP for a matter of days, but has indicated that she could stand to be party leader.

Cooper, who was elected the MP for St Albans last week, told LBC that her lack of parliamentary experience was not a big issue. She unsuccessfully ran for Parliament twice before winning her seat in southeast England this month.

"I've worked in campaigns for a long time," she told the radio station. "I've got big ambitions for what we can achieve in parliament as a small team in the Lib Dems."

Lib Dem figures say that while Cooper has very little chance of winning the upcoming contest, throwing her hat in the ring would help her secure some valuable exposure early in her House of Commons career.

She is highly-rated within the Liberal Democrats and seen as a leading light among its next generation of politicians at a time when the party has lost some of its most seasoned and well-known MPs in Swinson and Sir Vince Cable.

Cooper is close to Swinson and worked on her leadership campaign earlier this year.

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Who will be the next leader of the Liberal Democrats? - Business Insider

In 1997, Deep Blue defeated Garry Kasparov, the reigning world chess champion. In 2011, Watson defeated Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, the worlds best Jeopardy players. In 2016, AlphaGo defeated Ke Jie, the worlds best Go player. In 2017, DeepMind unleashed AlphaZero, which trounced the world-champion computer programs at chess, Go, and shogi.

If humans are no longer worthy opponents, then perhaps computers have moved so far beyond our intelligence that we should rely on their superior intelligence to make our important decisions. Nope.

Despite their freakish skill at board games, computer algorithms do not possess anything resembling human wisdom, common sense, or critical thinking. Deciding whether to accept a job offer, sell a stock, or buy a house is very different from recognizing that moving a bishop three spaces will checkmate an opponent. That is why it is perilous to trust computer programs we dont understand to make decisions for us.

Consider the challenges identified by Stanford computer science professorTerry Winograd,which have come to be known asWinograd schemas.For example, what does the word it refer to in this sentence?

I cant cut that tree down with that axe; it is too [thick/small].

If the bracketed word is thick, then it refers to the tree; if the bracketed word is small, then it refers to the axe. Sentences like these are understood immediately by humans but are very difficult for computers because they do not have the real-world experience to place words in context.

ParaphrasingOren Etzioni,CEO of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, how can machines take over the world when they cant even figure out what it refers to in a simple sentence?

When we see a tree, we know it is a tree. We might compare it to other trees and think about the similarities and differences between fruit trees and maple trees. We might recollect the smells wafting from some trees. We would not be surprised to see a squirrel run up a pine or a bird fly out of a dogwood. We might remember planting a tree and watching it grow year by year. We might remember cutting down a tree or watching a tree being cut down.

A computer does none of this. It can spellcheck the word tree, count the number of times the word is used in a story, and retrieve sentences that contain the word. But computers do not understand what trees are in any relevant sense. They are likeNigel Richards,who memorized the French Scrabble dictionary and has won the French-language Scrabble World Championship twice, even though he doesnt know the meaning of the French words he spells.

To demonstrate the dangers of relying on computer algorithms to make real-world decisions, consider an investigation of risk factors for fatal heart attacks.

I made up some household spending data for 1,000 imaginary people, of whom half had suffered heart attacks and half had not. For each such person, I used a random number generator to create fictitious data in 100 spending categories. These data were entirely random. There were no real people, no real spending, and no real heart attacks. It was just a bunch of random numbers. But the thing about random numbers is that coincidental patterns inevitably appear.

In 10 flips of a fair coin, there is a 46% chance of a streak of four or more heads in a row or four or more tails in a row. If that does not happen, heads and tails might alternate several times in a row. Or there might be two heads and a tail, followed by two more heads and a tail. In any event, some pattern will appear and it will be absolutely meaningless.

In the same way, some coincidental patterns were bound to turn up in my random spending numbers. As it turned out, by luck alone, the imaginary people who had not suffered heart attacks spent more money on small appliances and also on household paper products.

When we see these results, we should scoff and recognize that the patterns are meaningless coincidences. How could small appliances and household paper products prevent heart attacks?

A computer, by contrast, would take the results seriously because a computer has no idea what heart attacks, small appliances, and household paper products are. If the computer algorithm is hidden inside a black box, where we do not know how the result was attained, we would not have an opportunity to scoff.

Nonetheless, businesses and governments all over the world nowadays trust computers to make decisions based on coincidental statistical patterns just like these. One company, for example, decided that it would make more online sales if it changed the background color of the web page shown to British customers from blue to teal. Why? Because they tried several different colors in nearly 100 countries. Any given color was certain to fare better in some country than in others even if random numbers were analyzed instead of sales numbers. The change was made and sales went down.

Many marketing decisions, medical diagnoses, and stock trades are now done via computers. Loan applications and job applications are evaluated by computers. Election campaigns are run by computers, including Hillary Clintons disastrous 2016presidential campaign.If the algorithms are hidden inside black boxes, with no human supervision, then it is up to the computers to decide whether the discovered patterns make sense and they are utterly incapable of doing so because they do not understand anything about the real world.

Computers are not intelligent in any meaningful sense of the word, and it is hazardous to rely on them to make important decisions for us. The real danger today is not that computers are smarter than us, but that wethinkcomputers are smarter than us.

Featured image credit: Lumberjack Adventures by Abby Savage. CC0 via Unsplash.

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AI is dangerous, but not for the reasons you think. - OUPblog