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To the Editor:

Re Elise Stefanik Is Playing a Dangerous Game With Her Career, by Elizabeth Benjamin (Opinion guest essay, nytimes.com, May 14):

By elevating Elise Stefanik to a high post, the Republican Party is trying to move forward by having the party not focus on whether it is pro- or anti-Trump, but rather on what it needs to do to defeat enough Democrats to flip the House and get rid of Nancy Pelosi as speaker.

Ms. Stefanik has proved herself to be not only a remarkable fund-raiser for Republican candidates, but also someone who can organize campaigns and get Republicans elected. Although Liz Cheney was a loyal conservative, she kept dwelling on the past and was tearing the party apart a very counterproductive move. That the Democrats fear a reinvigorated Republican Party is only too evident in the spate of nasty and critical articles that have come out against Ms. Stefanik.

I never thought I would hear the liberal media praising the likes of Liz Cheney, the archconservative from Wyoming, but lo and behold, she gets accolades on a regular basis now as they are desperate to denounce the Republican rising star, Elise Stefanik.

Mary SykesRye, N.Y.

To the Editor:

Re G.O.P. Replaces a Trump Critic With a Trump Convert (news article, May 15):

I am a moderate Republican who has traditionally voted for my partys line of candidates. I now fear that our party is in trouble. With the removal of Liz Cheney our party has shown that it cares more for the hard right of Republican voters than it does for the truth. This is going to disenfranchise a substantial number of traditional Republican voters like me.

I cannot support a party that feels that it must curry favor with a past president for fear of losing the support of his radical legions. Our party will lose the midterm elections when moderate conservative voters either cross over and vote for Democrats or, what is more likely, simply dont vote.

In every candidate debate in the coming elections, I expect that Republicans are going to be asked, Do you believe that the election was stolen from Donald Trump? Our former president must announce not only that he legitimately lost, but also that he is no longer considering returning to the political arena.

Donald Trump, this is your chance to do the right thing and save our party. Please get the big lie behind us.

Michael D. GreenbaumParadise Valley, Ariz.

To the Editor:

The coverage of Elise Stefaniks elevation to the House Republican caucuss leadership has focused on her support for President Trump, but we must not ignore a very important point. Ms. Stefanik has a 44 percent lifetime rating from the American Conservative Union, one of the lowest among Republicans in the House. In other words, she is not a dogmatic ideologue.

This is a good thing, because the American people want bipartisanship in Washington, and that will never happen if ideologues rule the day. If the Democrats would follow suit and put a moderate in their leadership, maybe some good things would follow.

Rob GrienWest Stockbridge, Mass.

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Opinion | The Rise of Elise Stefanik in the Republican Ranks - The New York Times

Joe Bidens rhetorical strategy is simple. Everything is about jobs, America, and more jobs.

Some of you at home wonder whether these jobs are for you. You feel left behind and forgotten in an economy thats rapidly changing, said Biden in his first address to a joint session of Congress. The Americans Jobs Plan [his $2 trillion infrastructure initiative] is a blue-collar blueprint to build America.

The pitch is deceptively simple. Unemployment reached apocalyptic heights last year. Infrastructure spending is popularly associated with jobs and, especially, with well-paid work that doesnt require a college education. But historically, public works projects have a complicated history when it comes to quickly getting a lot of people back to work.

Here are some key lessons from that federal response to the Great Recession and how vice president Bidens work with state and local policymakers frames his presidential policymaking.

The only thing that went wrong with the infrastructure part of the stimulus in 2009 is that the president had an unrealistic expectation of how fast the money could be spent, says Ed Rendell, the former Democratic governor of Pennsylvania. He thought the federal government gives us the money on Monday and on Tuesday we break ground. Joe Biden learned from this experience that you cant expect immediate results.

Time was of the essence and priority was given to policies that would stimulate the economy immediately. Tax cuts were included to court Republican votes and because they inject money into the economy quickly. Aid to state and local governments had a similar effect, as did boosts to unemployment insurance, food stamps, and other social safety net programs.

But Obama avidly promoted public works spending as well. Comparisons with the New Deal and Franklin Roosevelt abounded, with many Democrats and progressives vaguely recalling the Works Progress Administration and the Tennessee Valley Authority. In a Dec. 6, 2008, radio address to the nation, Obama promised to enact the single largest new investment in our infrastructure since the creation of the interstate highway system.

But despite the popular imagination of public works providing rapid relief, historically it hasnt quite worked that way.

But building bridges and roads is more popular than tax cuts (which the left often disapproves of) or social spending (which the right often attacks), and it appeals to a gauzy vision of the unemployed being handed hard hats and being transformed into construction workers. As Rahm Emanuel told Grunwald, the one thing that brings Democrats and Republicans together [is] concrete. That vision was particularly appealing during the Great Recession, when actual construction workers were suffering mass unemployment after the housing market collapsed.

Infrastructure spending was included in Obamas stimulus package, but the realities of how such projects work clashed with the administrations imperative to quickly shoot money through the economy. Federal agencies, state governments, and municipal politicians dont have big drawers of pre-planned projects ready to break ground at any moment. Building anything takes time. Design, permitting, and environmental reviews dont come already prepared, no matter how pressing the emergency.

Infrastructure projects are full of lags at many different levels, says Amanda Page-Hoongrajok, assistant professor of economics at Saint Peters University. One of the biggest takeaways from trying to incorporate state and local government capital spending into stimulus policy during the Great Recession was that capital projects are just different from direct stimulus.

Then-President Barack Obama included a call for long-term investments in the nations roads, railways and airports as part of the $50 billion stimulus plan in Septemeber 2010. (Source: AP)

I think we can get a lot of work done fast, Obama said in a December 2008 interview on Meet The Press. When I met with the governors, all of them have projects that are shovel ready, that are going to require us to get the money out the door, but theyve already lined up the projects and they can make them work.

A Google Trends search for the term shovel ready finds almost no use until a massive spike started forming in December 2008 and ended in February 2009 when the stimulus passed. Smaller spikes occurred in 2010 and 2011 as the media narrative soured and it became clear how long many of the projects were taking to get going.

Page-Hoongrajok interviewed dozens of state and local politicians about how they approached capital spending in the wake of the Great Recession. The overwhelming majority saw their public works efforts, even if funded by federal dollars, as distinct from the Keynesian countercyclical stimulus Obamas administration was attempting.

In 2008, Obama literally said I have all these shovel ready projects ready to go, says Page-Hoongrajok. But actually, if those projects were truly shovel ready, they would have already had funding. If you have a big design ready for a huge bridge, or a public library, you most likely had the funding online.

Page-Hoongrajoks research found that the only agencies that had projects ready to launch immediately were transit agencies. A policymaker in Philadelphia told her that in other areas of local governance it took at least one year to set up a project and another two to three years to actually spend the money. Representatives from almost all 50 states said that it took them four or more years to spend stimulus funds for capital projects. Within the first year of receipt, half of states reported spending less than 25 percent of their federal capital dollars.

Even during the New Deal, which placed infrastructure spending at the heart of its recovery efforts, public works projects faced similar challenges. By the end of 1933, the Public Works Administration was being attacked for not employing people fast enough. Whos Holding Back Public Works asked an article in a September edition of The New Republic. Secretary of the Interior Harold L. Ickes responded by blaming states and localities for being sluggish in suggesting projects.

But the Rescue Act also focused on direct aid to American citizens and businesses, boosting unemployment insurance, covering COBRA payments, and sending $1,400 checks directly to individuals. Public works were not in the picture. Instead, they have their own bill so that Bidens recovery plans decouple infrastructure spending from stimulus.

Theres no talk about shovel ready projects [this time]; theyre talking about an eight-year plan, says Bill Dupor, assistant vice president of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, in reference to Bidens American Jobs Act. For [Bidens] first two [bills], one is about recovery and one is about reinvestment. Theyve split things up.

The Biden administrations rhetoric around the American Jobs Act is, obviously, about job creation. But the $2 trillion plan is not about juicing the economy in 2021, or even in the crucial midterm election year of 2022. Instead, it is meant to unfold over the course of a decade. It is about long-term economic development.

Contemporary scholarship about the New Deal has emphasized that if the great public works projects of the time did not defeat the specter of unemployment, that doesnt mean they failed as conservative critics have suggested. (Its also worth noting that recent research found that an additional dollar of New Deal public works and relief spending in a county during the 1930s raised 1939 income by nearly a dollar.)

New Deal public works programs are better understood not as unsuccessful state-employment measures, but rather as a strikingly effective method of state-sponsored economic development, writes Jason Scott Smith, assistant professor of history at the University of New Mexico.

In this way, at least, the Roosevelt comparisons are much more apt for Joe Biden than they were for Barack Obama. Promising more jobs is probably a better way to make sure he justifies that comparison, even if todays unemployment crisis is a distant memory by the time the money actually gets spent.

[The Obama administration] did a poor job of setting out expectations [for the stimulus acts infrastructure spending] and a poor job of promoting their good work afterwards, says Rendell. Biden learned from those mistakes.

Read the rest here:
The Economic Lessons Biden Learned from Obama and Roosevelt - Governing

Damon Weaver, who at age 11 became one of the youngest people to interview a sitting president, and who later gained attention for scoring other high-profile interviews with celebrities like Dwyane Wade and Oprah Winfrey, died on May 1. He was 23.

The death was confirmed by Candace Hardy, Mr. Weavers sister. The cause was not made known.

Ms. Hardy told WPTV-TV in West Palm Beach, Fla., that her brother had texted her while she was at work that he was in the hospital. By the time she went to see him, she said, he had already died.

In 2009, Mr. Weaver, then 11, conducted a sit-down interview with President Barack Obama in the Diplomatic Room of the White House, questioning him on topics including the Obama administrations efforts to improve education in lower-income areas like Mr. Weavers hometown, Pahokee, Fla., and Mr. Obamas basketball skills.

You did a great job at this interview, so someone must be doing something right at that school, Mr. Obama told Mr. Weaver after the 11-year-old extended an invitation to come visit him at Kathryn E. Cunningham/Canal Point Elementary School in South Florida.

Before his meeting with Mr. Obama, Mr. Weaver gained sizable attention from an interview in 2008 with Joseph R. Biden Jr., then Mr. Obamas running mate.

Damon Lazar Weaver Jr. was born on April 1, 1998, according to his funeral announcement. His sister told WPTV that Mr. Weaver was a light and the life of the party. According to the station, Mr. Weaver graduated from high school with a full scholarship to Albany State University in Georgia. He graduated from the university in 2020, according to a post on his Instagram page.

Everybody just couldnt wait to be around him, Ms. Hardy told WPTV. Family gatherings, they were always fun just because of his presence.

Mr. Weaver also covered Mr. Obamas inauguration as the 44th president for his schools television news program, interviewing inauguration attendees and celebrities including Ms. Winfrey and Samuel L. Jackson. In an interview with The Associated Press before heading to Washington, Mr. Weaver highlighted what he enjoyed most about being a reporter.

I liked seeing people on TV, so I thought that I could do that job one day, Mr. Weaver said. I like being a reporter because you get to learn a lot of things, you get to meet nice people and you get to travel a lot.

Mr. Weaver said that his favorite subjects in school at the time were reading and math, and that he had goals of becoming a journalist one day and maybe even a football player, an astronaut or president.

Im very proud of him, Regina Weaver, Mr. Weavers mother, told The Associated Press. I never imagined that this project would go as far as it has gone.

Complete information about his survivors was not immediately available.

See original here:
Damon Weaver, Child Reporter Who Interviewed Obama, Dies at 23 - The New York Times

Somehow, after everything, there remain creatures in Washington, D.C. obsessed with bipartisan compromise. One of our two major political parties has lined up in opposition to renewing what's left of the Voting Rights Act, which swept through Congress on a strong bipartisan basis in the Bush years, when it actually still had some teeth. The same party's Arizona affiliate is engaged in a circus "audit" of that state's election results because they didn't like who won. They've also responded to the 2020 election, which many Republicans continue to Just Ask Questions about, by passing hundreds of restrictive voter laws in state legislatures across the country. Through this and gerrymandering and court-packing and the undemocratic features of the Senate and the Electoral College, the party has devoted itself, root and branch, to clinging to power without crafting an agenda that actually appeals to a majority of citizens.

But even beyond any of that, they just submarined their own shared Bipartisan Bill to establish a commission to look into an attack on their own place of work earlier this year. If a mob broke into your company's offices and ransacked the place, chanting that they wanted to hang the vice president of the firm, would the VP's putative friendsand brother!shut down an inquiry into what happened? This is not normal behavior, and it's not the behavior of an organization whose members can be reasoned with. (As David Freedlander pointed out, House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy used to back a Commission as a desperate escape from impeaching Donald Trump for his crimes against the republic. Now he's against this, too. It's almost like he's not actually interested in any kind of accountability.) There will be no Bipartisan Compromise so long as the Republican Party clings to the increasingly kaleidoscopic fever dreams blasting out of the right-wing infotainment vortex. As my colleague, Charles P. Pierce, wrote, the Democrats will need to go it alone on a January 6 commission. In truth, they'll have to go it alone on everything.

Drew AngererGetty Images

This ought to have been obvious before. In the Senate, Mitch McConnell has proven to be the most cynical operator that Washington, D.C. has seen in some time, and that's saying something. McCarthy, in the House, is as craven as he is dense. And the party has a track record, going back to the Obama years, of demanding bipartisan consultation, extracting concessions and watering down bills, then voting against them anyway. This is what happened with the January 6 commission: Republicans got pretty much everything they wanted, and they still shut it down. They will do the same with the American Jobs Plan. As Catherine Rampell brilliantly laid out in the Washington Post, the initial lowball counterproposal they offered was actually vastly inflated. Their aim is to hack away at the bill, then vote against it. And you can probably forget about even that level of commitment to the American Families Plan. Josh Hawley might have some family-benefits proposals, and so might Mitt Romney on the party's other wing, but when it gets to crunch time, you can expect at least the former (and very possibly the latter) to vote against the plan and fist-pump at the faithful.

This is an American political ecosystem where shame has ceased to function as a social force and, in fact, shamelessness has become a political superpower. To survive and thrive in the entirely degraded post-Trump Republican Partythe culmination of 40-plus years of self-replicating insanityyou cannot have any compunction about lying your ass off and acting in continual, ceaseless bad faith. There are people in this party who voted against the American Rescue Plan and then went bragging to their constituents about all the relief they'd brought home. Flip-flopping is pass. You now have to be able to juggle multiple contradictory positions at once. John Katko made the mistake Wednesday of thinking any principleeven that an attack on their own workplace should be investigated by Congresswas durable enough to survive the gauntlet of self-serving nonsense. Democrats should do their own commission, and then they should do their own bills. This will require Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema coming back to reality, and seeing all of the above for it is before signing off on filibuster reform. You cannot negotiate with the void.

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Once More For the People in the Back: You Cannot Negotiate or Compromise With the Republican Party - Esquire

For almost as long as humans have been capable of defying gravity, flinging ourselves into the heavens with metal wings, we've seen things in the sky that we can't explain. It's an area of study that's been, for the most part, confined to the fringes of polite society. But now these unexplained flying objects have captured the attention of mainstream America and Congress.

I knew that I regarded myself as more of a Dana Scully than a Fox Mulder, as dedicated to rational inquiry, logic and science as you can be at the age of 8.

I never watched "The X-Files" when it was on the air as a somewhat cowardly lad who self-censored his media consumption, I knew that it was probably too scary for my developing tastes. But I still knew that I regarded myself as more of a Dana Scully than a Fox Mulder, as dedicated to rational inquiry, logic and science as you can be at the age of 8. I still do, to be honest. That's why I'm deeply skeptical that the objects we see in the grainy videos that have been circulating online for years are from another planet.

But now that I'm older, I find myself understanding Mulder a little better, with his belief in things unknown. And like the poster in his FBI office read, "I want to believe." I just need the evidence.

I will say, though, the evidence that UFOs actually are zipping around out there has grown considerably since I was a kid. It's not hard to see why the public has been so fascinated since last year, when the Defense Department confirmed the provenance of some of the videos out there. Just in the last few days, a recently leaked video from the Navy showed ... something disappearing into the water off California.

That clip was released just ahead of CBS' "60 Minutes" interview with two former Navy pilots who recounted their experiences with unidentified aerial phenomena, or UAPs the official term the U.S. government uses for these kinds of things. And they knew how wild their claims sound, which is a good first step to establishing a witness's credibility.

"Over beers we've said, 'Hey man, if I saw this solo, I don't know that I would have come back and said anything,'" Lt. Cmdr. Alex Dietrich said. "Because it sounds so crazy when I say it."

Even former President Barack Obama weighed in on these objects Monday. "What is true, and I'm actually being serious here, is that there is footage and records of objects in the skies that we don't know exactly what they are," Obama said on CBS' "The Late Late Show with James Corden." (Sidebar: What a bit of synergy there for the "60 Minutes" segment; well done, everyone on the CBS crew who made that happen.)

"We can't explain how they move, their trajectory," Obama continued. "They did not have an easily explainable pattern. And so I think that people still take seriously trying to investigate and figure out what that is."

We apologize, this video has expired.

Let me pause to say that yes, I do believe that alien life exists somewhere out there. But as I said in an essay last year, I think we're not exactly the first stop on the galactic traveler's itinerary nor should we be. Humanity has a long way to go before we're ready for visitors from beyond.

It's the folks who do think we're Grand Central Station for various alien species who have kept the discussion about what pilots have seen confined to the realm of kooks and cranks for decades. But that could change soon in the next few weeks, Congress will receive a "detailed analysis of unidentified aerial phenomena data and intelligence" from the Office of Naval Intelligence, the Pentagon's Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force and the FBI.

"Oh, but Congress has so many other things it could be doing!" I hear you say out there. First of all, shut up. This is amazing; let me have this. But also, there is an actual legitimate non-extraterrestrial reason that I'm glad that Congress is looking into these zippy little aircraft. Whatever they are, they're in U.S. airspace, and, if these videos are any indication, they move in a way that isn't like anything else the public has seen.

If and this is a big if! these things are aircraft that another country has developed, that seems like a pretty big deal. (And if you were to pitch me a theory that the U.S. actually knows what these things are but can't say because it doesn't want any other country to get the tech, well, that's more believable than aliens to me.) On this front, I find that I, wildly enough, agree with Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., which in normal circumstances would be evidence that I had been replaced with an alien replica.

"Some of my colleagues are very interested in this topic, and some kind of, you know, giggle when you bring it up," Rubio, the vice chair of the Intelligence Committee, said on "60 Minutes." "But I don't think we can allow the stigma to keep us from having an answer to a very fundamental question."

He's right. It's a national security issue to have things flying around that we can't ID. That's probably part of why the fascination with UFOs was so high during the post-World War II era, as the fear of the Soviets' developing a secret airplane probably freaked a lot of people out. So, I, for one, am super excited to see what the unclassified report to Congress has to say about this.

And if some of the evidence happens to point to an origin higher than the troposphere for these weird little aircraft well, I'll try to keep an open mind.

Hayes Brown is a writer and editor for MSNBC Daily, where he helps frame the news of the day for readers. He was previously at BuzzFeed News and holds a degree in international relations from Michigan State University.

Read more here:
Obama says UFOs are out there. But are they aliens or humans? - MSNBC