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Standing in Front of Garbage, Trump Recycles Terrible Ideas About Free Trade

by AdolphClarkson Posted on June 28, 2016

Mother Jones

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Donald Trump launched extensive attacks on free trade, China, and Hillary Clinton during a speech on Tuesday in Pennsylvania, pledging to renegotiate trade deals and repeatedly promising American workers better jobs and more tariff protections.

“Globalization has made the financial elite who donate to politicians very wealthy, but it has left millions of our workers with nothing but poverty and heartache,” Trump said. “I want you to imagine how much better our future can be if we declare independence from the elites who’ve led us to one financial and foreign policy disaster after another.”

Standing in front a wall of crushed aluminum cans at a steel plant near Pittsburgh, the presumptive GOP presidential nominee outlined a seven-point plan that included withdrawing from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which he called “the death blow for American manufacturing”; renegotiating the North American Free Trade Agreement (and withdrawing from the treaty if Canada and Mexico don’t agree); and taking numerous steps to crack down on alleged Chinese trade abuses, including currency manipulation.

Clinton, Trump charged, was the handmaiden for anti-working-class policies, having supported TPP and NAFTA. While she was secretary of state, Trump said, she “stood by idly while China cheated on its currency, added another trillion dollars to our trade deficits, and stole hundreds of billions of dollars in our intellectual property.” With these accusations, Trump once again made an explicit appeal to Bernie Sanders supporters. Sanders is a vocal critic of TPP, NAFTA, and other trade deals, and Trump quoted the Vermont senator in attacking Clinton for supporting free trade. “As Bernie Sanders said, Hillary Clinton ‘voted for virtually every trade agreement that has cost the workers of this country millions of jobs,'” Trump said.

Trump linked his old-school trade policies to the United Kingdom’s vote on Thursday to leave the European Union. “Our friends in Britain recently voted to take back control of their economy, politics and borders,” he said. “I was on the right side of that issue—with the people—while Hillary, as always, stood with the elites.” Trump was in Scotland last week, arriving just hours after the referendum result was announced, and congratulated the Scots for “taking their country back”—even though Scotland voted overwhelmingly to remain in the EU. He also told reporters there that the pound’s quickly declining value would bring in more tourists and help his golf courses.

Yet while Trump claimed that protectionism and support for manufacturing would “create massive numbers of jobs” and usher in “a new era of prosperity,” there’s little evidence for those promises. For instance, Trump rhapsodized about the prosperity that tariffs would bring back to the American steel industry, but the United States already slaps a 266 percent tariff on some Chinese steel imports and employs other anti-dumping measures. And American manufacturing production has actually increased over the last six years, but technology advances mean those gains don’t create many new jobs.

Meanwhile, the credit ratings agency Moody’s issued a report last week finding that Trump’s plan would result in “a more isolated US economy” with “larger federal government deficits and a heavier debt load.” The agency acknowledged that Trump’s plan was vague, but its best guesses at what his economic policy would look like were frightening. “By the end of his presidency, there are close to 3.5 million fewer jobs and the unemployment rate rises to as high as 7%, compared with below 5% today,” the report read. “During Mr. Trump’s presidency, the average American household’s after-inflation income will stagnate, and stock prices and real house values will decline.”

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Standing in Front of Garbage, Trump Recycles Terrible Ideas About Free Trade

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Britain Is a Total Mess Right Now

by WiltonMacKillop Posted on June 27, 2016

Mother Jones

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The day before the Brexit vote, Nick Clegg, the former leader of the Liberal Democrats, wrote a piece titled “What you will wake up to if we vote to Leave…” It’s astonishingly prescient and worth a read. Apparently not very many people believed him, though.

But he was totally right, and no one knows what the hell is going on anymore. The process of leaving the EU officially starts when Britain invokes Article 50 of the EU charter, but oddly enough, no one seems to be especially eager to do that. David Cameron, the caretaker prime minister, has announced that he doesn’t plan to do this anytime soon, and Boris Johnson, the leader of the Brexit forces, seems to be OK with that:

Mr. Johnson offered no details about when or how Britain should invoke Article 50 — the formal process for leaving the European Union — nor did he lay out a plan for how Britain could maintain free trade with the European Union, the world’s largest common market, without accepting the bloc’s demand for the unrestricted movement of workers.

Meanwhile, the pound continues to fall and the financial community continues to panic. Tomorrow the Labor Party will hold a vote of confidence on its leader, Jeremy Corbyn, which he’s expected to lose by a landslide. Scotland is threatening to secede yet again. And the EU is saying that if Britain wants to retain access to the common market, then they have to accept free immigration too:

If it wants access to the bloc’s single market, post-Brexit Britain must accept EU freedom of movement rules and the supremacy of the European Court of Justice, EU diplomats have warned ahead of a vital summit. The idea that Britain could have access under a European Economic Area style deal and impose border controls was a non-starter, diplomats said.

Well, who knows? Maybe that’s just their opening negotiating position. But the Brexiteers are in for some serious trouble if it turns out that the price of access to the European market is the very thing that prompted their victory in the first place.

What a mess. And all for nothing.

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Britain Is a Total Mess Right Now

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Sadiq Khan Makes an Impassioned Call to Reject Brexit

by AlexandriaOrme Posted on June 22, 2016

Mother Jones

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In the final stretch leading up to Thursday’s landmark referendum that will decide Britain’s fate as a member of the European Union, London mayor Sadiq Khan on Tuesday made a rousing speech urging voters to reject Brexit—a campaign he condemned as “project hate” against immigrants.

Khan’s sharp rhetoric was a part of BBC’s Great Debate on Tuesday, in which leading members of both sides in the campaign to determine Britain’s future in the EU made last-minute appeals to voters about whether or not Britain should retain its membership. Pro-Brexit leader and former London mayor Boris Johnson also participated in the televised debate, where he continued his calls for Britain to leave and “take back control” of its economy and its destiny. Johnson also said that if Britain were to vote in favor Britain’s departure on Thursday, it could mark the beginning of a new “independence day” for the country.

Khan and Scottish Tory Leader Ruth Davidson slammed Johnson for spreading “lies” about the cost of EU membership and using Turkey’s potential membership to fuel fears concerning terrorism and Britain’s security. They argued that contrary to those who want to leave the EU, the cost of membership does not outweigh its benefits.

Johnson, along with the the far-right political party United Kingdom Independence Party, have been criticized for employing scare-mongering tactics to convince Britons to withdraw its EU membership. UKIP leader Nigel Farage insists that his party is not racist.

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Sadiq Khan Makes an Impassioned Call to Reject Brexit

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Could a Typo Help Save the Planet?

by HubertElzy2 Posted on April 18, 2016

Mother Jones

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This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The United States and China are leading a push to bring the Paris climate accord into force much faster than even the most optimistic projections—aided by a typographical glitch in the text of the agreement.

More than 150 governments, including 40 heads of state, are expected at a symbolic signing ceremony for the agreement at the United Nations on April 22, which is Earth Day.

It’s the largest one-day signing of any international agreement, according to the UN.

But leaders will really be looking to see which countries go beyond mere ceremony and legally join the agreement, which would bind them to the promises made in Paris last December to keep warming below the agreed target of 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit).

So far, the US, China, Canada and a host of other countries have promised to join this year—boosting the hopes of bringing the Paris deal into force before the initial target date of 2020—possibly as early as 2016 or 2017, according to officials and analysts.

That is well before the timeline originally envisaged at Paris. Environment ministers attending the World Bank spring meetings this week said the faster pace indicated serious commitment to dealing with the global challenge.

The accelerated timeline would have one obvious advantage for Barack Obama. The standard withdrawal clause on any such agreement would force a future Republican president to wait four years before quitting Paris, according to legal experts.

An earlier start date could also turbo-charge the agreement, providing momentum for deeper emissions cuts.

It could also help efforts to attain the more ambitious goal of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees C (2 degrees F)—which would give a better chance of survival to small islands and other countries on the front lines of climate change.

Christiana Figueres, who heads the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, has said global emissions need to peak by 2020 to have any chance of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees C. There has already been about 1 degree C (1.8 degrees F) of warming above pre-industrial levels.

“Early entry into force—we are very committed to making that happen,” Catherine McKenna, Canada’s environment and climate change minister, told a panel at the World Bank last week. “We can’t just now rest on our laurels and have a nice signing on Earth Day, and then we all go home.”

She told the Guardian Canada was committed to signing the agreement this year.

The push to bring the climate agreement into force quickly is in sharp contrast to the earlier international efforts to fight climate change through the Kyoto Protocol, which did not take effect for four years.

Eliza Northrop, an analyst at the World Resources Institute, said there was growing momentum behind an early approval of the agreement.

“It’s likely it could come into effect in 2017. It could even happen this year,” she said.

Governments at the Paris climate meeting had initially set the start date of the agreement in 2020—with intense discussion over whether that start date should be at the start or end of the year, according to diplomats.

The 2020 date remained in the negotiating drafts almost until the very end, the diplomats said. But unaccountably the final draft prepared by France left out the entire clause. By that point, after a few late-night negotiating sessions, a number of countries did not notice the omission.

The agreement, the first time all countries agreed to emissions cuts and other actions to fight climate change, aims to limit warming to below 2 degrees C and move towards a zero-carbon economy by the end of the century.

But it’s a tall order. The agreement needs to be approved by 55 countries accounting for at least 55 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions to come into force.

The US and China committed to join the agreement this year—but that still leaves a gap of more than 15 percent of global emissions.

A number of countries, including India and Japan, require their parliaments to approve the Paris agreement—a process which could take time.

The European Union will need agreement from its 28 member states before it can join the agreement—which makes it highly unlikely to be in a position to join early on.

“The assumption is that you have to do this without the EU to get to that 55 percent hurdle, if you want to see that in the next year or so,” said Alden Meyer, strategy director for the Union of Concerned Scientists.

That will force governments to cobble together a coalition of smaller countries if they hope to reach the 55 percent emissions threshold.

Possible contenders include India, Mexico, the Philippines, and Australia.

So far, about 10 countries have said they would join the agreement this year.

On Wednesday, Román Macaya, Costa Rica’s ambassador to Washington, said his country would join the agreement in 2016. Palau, Switzerland, Fiji, and the Marshall Islands have also said they will approve the agreement this year.

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Could a Typo Help Save the Planet?

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Trump manages to surprise us with strange “climate” obsession

by MayDeeter575 Posted on March 28, 2016

Trump manages to surprise us with strange “climate” obsession

By on 28 Mar 2016commentsShare

Leave it to Donald Trump to stumble onto a talking point that can still surprise us. Trump has told two newspapers in the last week that nuclear weapons are the only type of climate change that concerns him.

“I think our biggest form of climate change we should worry about is nuclear weapons,” he told The Washington Post Editorial Board when asked about his concern for human-made warming. Trump then told The New York Times in an interview about his foreign policy, completely unprompted, “When people talk global warming, I say the global warming that we have to be careful of is the nuclear global warming.”

Trump’s nuclear-as-climate-change concern hasn’t yet reached the same level of infamy of lines like, “I’m not a scientist,” but he’s been tweeting on it since at least 2014:

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Apparently, it’s a reference to the Cold War-era debate over the threat of a nuclear winter if the United States and Soviet Union were to go to war, but now he means it in the context of North Korea and Iran. Conservatives might not normally compare nuclear weapons directly to climate change, though they do like to complain that President Obama overstates the risks of climate change compared to terrorism and foreign threats (see Mike Huckabee’s favorite quip, “I assure you that a beheading is much worse than a sunburn”).

In the same Post interview, Trump insisted he isn’t a “big believer in man-made climate change.” But he hasn’t mentioned his other two favorite theories in a while about how climate change is a hoax: Cold weather in New York debunks global warming, and the whole thing is a con “created by and for the Chinese.”

Trump could be following national Republican trends where politicians change the subject instead of jumping into science denial. Maybe that counts as something like progress? Or Trump is just giving us another flavor of climate denial.

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Anti-Immigrant Right Makes Big Gains in Germany

by AsaBrumbaugh Posted on March 14, 2016

Mother Jones

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The backlash against refugees reached new heights in Germany on Sunday as voters swept Alternative for Germany, a right-wing anti-immigration party, into three of the country’s state parliaments with a significant share of the vote.

The three-year-old party, usually known by the German acronym AfD, finished in second place in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt, where it received 24.2 percent of the vote, behind Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats. Anti-refugee sentiment is highest in former East German states, but AfD also earned big totals in two western states. It won just over 15 percent in Baden-Württemberg and 12.6 percent in Rhineland-Palatinate, both of which border France. The party poached votes from across the political spectrum, taking big chunks from the left-wing Greens and Left Party as well as the center-right Christian Democrats and the center-left Social Democrats.

“We have fundamental problems in Germany that led to this outcome,” said AfD chief Frauke Petry after the elections. She blamed immigration, “ethnic violence,” and deference to Muslim social norms for much of the anger that fueled her party’s gains. “We want to be the party of social peace,” she said. (Earlier this year, she called for German border guards to be allowed to shoot people trying to enter the country.)

Germany accepted around 1 million refugees in 2015, by far the most of any European nation. Merkel defended her country’s liberal policy on refugees as both a humanitarian necessity and a historical duty, and even declared an open-door policy for Syrians. But her country’s “summer fairytale” of open arms and moral leadership always competed with anti-foreigner protests, arson attacks on refugee housing, and harsh criticism from high-ranking members of her own governing coalition. Those voices have grown louder as refugee numbers continue to mount, and Merkel has revoked the open door and reduced benefits for asylum seekers. Now AfD’s victory has given the anti-refugee right its first serious political power.

Germany is the latest country where anti-immigrant sentiment has boosted right-wing parties. France’s nativist National Front party nearly won control of several regional governments during French elections in December. It failed to win any of the regions in the second round of voting but still garnered a record number of votes. Right-wing populist parties have also seen major gains in Sweden and Denmark since the number of refugees arriving in Europe exploded last year.

Despite AfD’s success at the polls—and renewed criticism from the powerful Bavarian wing of her party—Merkel pledged to keep Germany largely open to refugees. Germany has tried since last year to get the European Union to create a binding, continent-wide system to distribute refugees, and Merkel said on Monday that she will keep at it rather than close Germany’s borders. “I am firmly convinced, and that wasn’t questioned today, that we need a European solution and that this solution needs time,” she said.

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Anti-Immigrant Right Makes Big Gains in Germany

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Here are the countries that are the best — and worst — at protecting the environment

by WadeHardwick864 Posted on March 4, 2016

Here are the countries that are the best — and worst — at protecting the environment

By on 4 Mar 2016commentsShare

It’s usually best to avoid listicles. No one needs to know the top 10 popsicle flavors from 1997 or the 25 worst celebrity tweets about peanuts. But a ranking of how well countries are doing to protect the environment? Now that’s a listicle we can get behind here at Grist.

Yale’s 15th annual Environmental Performance Index comparing 180 countries’ performance on “high priority environmental issues in two areas: protection of human health and protection of ecosystems” just came out, and it’s mostly what you’d expect: Countries up top tend to be heavily Nordic; countries at the bottom tend to be heavily unstable.

The top five are Finland, Iceland, Sweden, Denmark, and Slovenia. Finland already gets two-thirds of its electricity from renewables or nuclear power and plans to get 38 percent of its total energy from renewables by 2020. Iceland gets 85 percent of its energy from renewables and has great air quality. Sweden has great water quality and plans to cut greenhouse gas emissions to 40 percent of 1990 levels by 2020. And Denmark has great water quality, as well as high marks for biodiversity.

But Slovenia? The central European nation might seem out of place in the top five, but it’s apparently kind of a boss when it comes to biodiversity. And with the third largest forest-to-land ration in the European Union, it’s doing a bang-up job of forest preservation.

The next five on the list are Spain, Portugal, Estonia, Malta, and France. The U.S. is way down at 26 — right below Canada, which is precisely where we like to be.

The bottom five countries are Afghanistan, Niger, Madagascar, Eritrea, and Somalia for a lot of the reasons you might expect: illegal hunting and poaching, poor air and water quality, deforestation, failure to protect biodiversity, over-fishing.

Check out this write-up by some of the researchers over at Scientific American for more details on the best and worst performing countries. Or go watch this nice little video. Then, I promise, you can go read that listicle about whether or not your relationship is doomed.

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Here are the countries that are the best — and worst — at protecting the environment

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The NSA spied on top-secret climate negotiations between world leaders

by LinEagarwvz Posted on February 24, 2016

The NSA spied on top-secret climate negotiations between world leaders

By on 24 Feb 2016commentsShare

Climate negotiations between the world’s powerhouses usually take place behind closed doors — unless, that is, the U.S. government is secretly listening in.

A batch of documents released by WikiLeaks on Tuesday reveal that the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) spied on communications regarding international climate change agreements, including negotiations in 2008 between United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, whom the NSA had reportedly been spying on for decades. The NSA listened in on a private meeting between the two leaders ahead of a 2009 conference in Copenhagen, and gleaned information about their hopes that the European Union play a major role in climate change mitigation, adding Merkel thought the “tough issue” would involve carbon trading.

An excerpt from one of the NSA memos reads:

Ban Ki-moon, in an exchange on 10 December with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, pointed out that the world would be watching the EU with “keen interest” for reassurances that it will maintain its leadership role in combating climate change … Ban also maintained that since the new U.S. administration will have a very engaging and proactive attitude on the issue, the time is right for the EU and the whole world to create conditions necessary for reaching a meaningful deal at the 2009 UN Climate Talks … Merkel believed that the climate-change issue should be discussed at the heads-of-state level, otherwise it would not work.

In a statement, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange accused “a country intent on protecting its largest oil companies” of bugging Ki-moon’s efforts to save the planet.

It’s not the first time we’ve discovered that the NSA has attempted to spy on other countries’ efforts to combat climate change. In 2014, world governments were furious to learn from a batch of documents released by the whistleblower Edward Snowden that the NSA had monitored communications between leaders of Brazil, South Africa, India, China, and several other countries. The NSA funneled information about other countries’ positions on climate change issues to U.S. negotiators for the 2009 climate conference in Copenhagen — a gathering widely considered to be a failure.

The newest climate memos, part of a larger group of WikiLeaks documents spanning 2007 to 2011, give rare insight into leaders’ hopes for the Copenhagen summit.

It’s not clear exactly what kind of advantage the U.S. managed to gain by intercepting communications between Ki-moon and Merkel, but it likely didn’t make the outcome of the Copenhagen conference any better. Just as we finally learn the full extent of the political maneuvering behind Copenhagen, the world has mostly moved on: In December, the world reached a new climate accord in Paris — one that, hopefully, will lead to real and lasting change.

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The NSA spied on top-secret climate negotiations between world leaders

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Black Lives Matter Students Just Walked Out of a San Francisco School

by MarylouRickett Posted on February 24, 2016

Mother Jones

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San Francisco’s Lowell High School is the city’s most coveted public, elite school that posts some of the highest test scores in the country. But when it comes to the treatment of its black students, young activists argue that the school is flunking—and needs to change. That’s the main message about 25 members of Lowell High’s Black Student Union delivered to the City Hall and San Francisco Unified School District today. The students walked out of classes in the morning and then marched toward the Civic Center area of the city, where they were greeted—unexpectedly—by several San Francisco school board members and San Francisco school chief Richard Carranza.

The protests were sparked by a number of incidents, but the most recent was a sign that was posted on a public billboard on campus earlier this month that read, “Black History Month” and included a Twitter hashtag below that read “#gang.” Chy’na Davis, a sophomore at Lowell High, told Mother Jones that while it was clear the message was meant to offend black people, it took several days for the school administration to remove it. Davis said she appreciated that the school held an assembly to discuss the issue, but said that most of her friends who are not black left the meeting without an understanding of why the incident was offensive to black students.

“The poster was a straw on the camel’s back,” Davis explained, while five of her peers nodded in agreement. “There are so many small, daily incidents and comments that stereotype us.” Just last month, she says, a student asked her, “Did you eat fried chicken this weekend?” Another student joked to her friend while walking by Davis, “See, I have black friends. I’m ghetto.”

Kristina Rizga/Mother Jones

According to several students at the walkout today, some teachers intervene when they hear offensive remarks toward black students, but most don’t. There isn’t enough black history being taught at Lowell or discussions of police brutality or the Black Lives Matter movement, Davis and other members of the Black Student Union told Mother Jones. “We just feel like our individual complaints are not taken seriously by the school. So, we decided to take action together,” said Davis. She added that today’s walkouts were inspired by the national Black Lives Matter movement.

Lowell High school has 2,650 students, and only 2 percent of them are African American. In a letter sent to students shortly after Lowell High school administration removed the offensive sign, school principal Andrew W. Ishibashi said the school would institute more cultural-sensitivity training for students and staff.

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Black Lives Matter Students Just Walked Out of a San Francisco School

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Here’s How You Know Marco Rubio’s Robot Gaffe Is Serious

by MarlenePearson5 Posted on February 7, 2016

Mother Jones

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Not long after the conclusion of the GOP debate in New Hampshire, Michael Steele, a former chair of the Republican Party, was sitting in a booth at JD’s Tavern in Manchester, a favorite watering hole for journalists, pundits, and political tourists, and he was shaking his head. A reporter had told him that she had just heard from Marco Rubio’s camp. The once-surging presidential candidate had two hours earlier become the goat of the night, after he robotically repeated talking points in response to Chris Christie’s fierce attack that junior senator from Florida was nothing but an inexperienced empty-suit legislator whose best asset was his ability to deliver memorized rhetorical flourishes—that is, to robotically repeat talking points.

Responding to Christie—and proving his assailant’s point—Rubio had multiple times recited a prepared line in which he slammed President Barack Obama for purposefully ruining the United States. This was Rubio’s emperor-has-no-clothes moment. And after the debate, he dared not enter the spin room to explain his broken-record impersonation. But his advisers, up until now one of the most savvy teams on the GOP side, quickly developed their post-debate spin. They were telling reporters that the debate demonstrated that Rubio was so committed to criticizing Obama that he would seize every opportunity to do so. At the bar, when Steele heard this, he laughed sadly. “No, no, no,” he said. “It was a major blunder.”

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Here’s How You Know Marco Rubio’s Robot Gaffe Is Serious

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