“One of the major disagreements between the House and Senate is over how many F-35s taxpayers will buy from Lockheed Martin next year, reports Defense News, a trade publication for the military-industrial complex. The Senate wants to get 96 of them, while the House has authorized purchasing five fewer—though it should be noted that the Pentagon only asked for 79 new planes.”
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“The various branches of the military already have 375 F-35 fighter jets, according to a July article from Air Force Magazine—far more top-of-the-line fighter jets than any other country in the world. But the planes have been criticized by the Government Accountability Office for being overpriced and failing to meet reliability goals.
Negotiations also loom over the number of new Virginia-class submarines—which cost about $5.5 billion apiece—to be built. The Navy asked for one, so naturally the House decided to budget for two. The Senate has included funding for just a single submarine, Defense News reports.
That’s not sitting well with Rep. Joe Courtney (D–Conn.), whose district notably includes the submarine base in New London, Connecticut. In a statement on Tuesday, Courtney condemned the Senate’s change to the submarine budget as “unworkable.”
“Protests against a police security bill and the arrest of an unarmed Black man have rocked France for three consecutive weekends — with the past two Saturdays turning particularly violent.
The rallies, which started on November 21, have been fueled by public outcry against police brutality and a new draft law that would make it a crime to publish photos or videos of on-duty police officers “with the aim of harming their physical or psychological integrity.” If convicted, violators of the law could face fines of more than $50,000 and up to a year in prison.
French President Emmanuel Macron’s government has argued the measure is needed to protect police officers and their families from online abuse that could end in violence. But critics say it will curb both civil liberties and police accountability.
France has experienced a series of high-profile incidents in recent months of police using heavy-handed tactics, mostly against people of color. Security camera footage showing white police officers beating 41-year-old Black music producer Michel Zecler, a French man of Malian descent who is well known in the French rap scene, in the lobby of his music studio went viral on social media.
The graphic video contradicted the story the officers involved had initially provided to justify their actions: that Zecler had resisted arrest and acted violently toward them. The incident further inflamed the protests, with many arguing the proposed security law would potentially have made sharing such a video illegal. But without the video, Zecler told the New York Times, he’d likely be in prison right now.
In response to the video and the backlash, Macron’s government announced in late November that it would completely rewrite Article 24, the specific part of the broader security bill that would have restricted the sharing of videos and photos of police.
But demonstrators weren’t appeased. This past weekend, tens of thousands of people across France took to the streets in protests that in some cases turned violent. At least 60 people were arrested and several police officers were injured, according to France’s interior minister.”
“The United Kingdom and the European Union have been trying for the last 11 months to negotiate an agreement that will define their future partnership after the UK formally left the bloc in January. But both sides remain stuck on major points — fishing rights, guaranteeing a “level playing field” on government subsidies and regulations, and how to enforce any deal — with very, very little time before the year-end deadline.
Getting a deal is in the interests of both sides, but reaching, ratifying, and implementing any deal in three weeks is going to be a challenge — and might not be feasible at this late stage.
But without any framework, the EU and the UK could face major disruptions in January on everything from trade to transport. It will be painful for both sides, but the UK, now all alone, is expected to feel that fallout more acutely, which will pile on to economic hurt brought on by the pandemic.”
“There are now two competing proposals in Congress, neither of which has garnered the support needed to move forward.
The first is a $908 billion bill that a bipartisan group of senators is working on, which has been heralded as a strong “starting point” by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer. The second is a $916 billion offer from the White House via Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, which Republican lawmakers — including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy — have rallied behind.
Both contain funding for small businesses and vaccine distribution, though they differ on a couple key points. The bipartisan proposal, for example, includes far more funding for unemployment insurance (UI), guaranteeing a weekly $300 boost to recipients for 16 weeks, on top of what they are currently receiving on the state level.
The White House offer, on the other hand, only includes $40 billion to extend expiring programs that have increased access to UI. It also contains funding for a second round of $600 stimulus checks, while the bipartisan proposal does not.
Democrats have already rejected the Mnuchin plan given its treatment of UI, while McConnell has balked at the bipartisan proposal as unnecessarily broad and favored a more targeted bill. These disagreements leave lawmakers at yet another impasse, though both Republicans and Democrats have emphasized they’d like to get something done before leaving for the holiday break, something they’re currently scheduled to do by December 21.”
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“The recurring issues that lawmakers have struggled to navigate throughout stimulus negotiations are still liability protections — a top Republican demand — and state and local aid — a top Democratic one. Earlier this week, McConnell had even suggested stripping both out of a stimulus bill in order to advance it, signaling some movement given his previous commitment to preserving liability protections.”
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“Democratic leaders have noted, however, that any package without state and local aid would be completely inadequate given huge budget cuts that regional governments are being forced to make. They’ve said, too, that state aid has support from lawmakers on both sides of the aisle. “State and local funding is bipartisan unlike the extreme corporate liability proposal Leader McConnell made which has no Democratic support,” Schumer has said.
Republicans thus far have insisted that liability protections are necessary to ensure that small businesses don’t get hit with a deluge of lawsuits for how they handled the pandemic, while Democrats counter that such shields are intended to protect corporations from accountability. Some Republicans, including McConnell, have opposed state and local aid because they claim that states could use this funding to cover other unrelated costs. Researchers, however, have emphasized that these funds are needed to address what could be up to $500 billion in shortfalls that states have accrued due to lower revenues and higher costs during the pandemic.”
“it won’t be easy for the new administration to undo the reforms, which went through a multiyear review as required by the Administrative Procedures Act. Going back to the previous Title IX standards would require an equally involved and time-consuming process.”
“Yes, the polls correctly predicted that Joe Biden would win the presidency. But they got all kinds of details, and a number of Senate races, badly wrong. FiveThirtyEight’s polling models projected that Biden would win Wisconsin by 8.3 points; with basically all the votes in, he won by a mere 0.63 percent, a miss of more than 7 points. In the Maine Senate race, FiveThirtyEight estimated that Democrat Sara Gideon would beat Republican incumbent Susan Collins by 2 points; Gideon lost by 9 points, an 11-point miss.”
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“The theory is that the kind of people who answer polls are systematically different from the kind of people who refuse to answer polls — and that this has recently begun biasing the polls in a systematic way.
This challenges a core premise of polling, which is that you can use the responses of poll takers to infer the views of the population at large — and that if there are differences between poll takers and non-poll takers, they can be statistically “controlled” for by weighting according to race, education, gender, and so forth. (Weighting increases and decreases the importance of responses from particular groups in a poll to better match their share of the actual population.) If these two groups do differ systematically, that means the results are biased.
The assumption that poll respondents and non-respondents are basically similar, once properly weighted, used to be roughly right — and then, starting in 2016, it became very, very wrong. People who don’t answer polls, Shor argues, tend to have low levels of trust in other people more generally. These low-trust folks used to vote similarly to everyone else. But as of 2016, they don’t: they tend to vote for Republicans.”
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“n 2020, Shor argues that the differences between poll respondents and non-respondents have gotten larger still. In part due to Covid-19 stir-craziness, Democrats, and particularly highly civically engaged Democrats who donate to and volunteer for campaigns, have become likelier to answer polls. It’s something to do when we’re all bored, and it feels civically useful. This biased the polls, Shor argues, in deep ways that even the best polls (including his own) struggled to account for.
Liberal Democrats answered more polls, so the polls overrepresented liberal Democrats and their views (even after weighting), and thus the polls gave Biden and Senate Democrats inflated odds of winning.”
“That leaves ethnic Armenians in control of the capital Stepanakert and areas mostly to the north, but experts say none of what the Armenians will keep is strategically significant. In effect, Armenia will maintain nominal political control over the capital and its rump of the region (the yellow part in the maps above), but that’s about it. The power Armenia has had in the territory for decades is basically gone.
Meanwhile, Azerbaijan won the war, so it gained the most.
As of December 1, it will control the three withdrawn-from areas of Nagorno-Karabakh and the surrounding seven territories, while also remaining in Shusha (or Shushi). That means Azerbaijan will control the most important areas in Nagorno-Karabakh (the green area in maps above) with its military forces.”
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“the deal means Azerbaijan is the clear victor in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict; Armenia is left reeling and in political turmoil; and Russia and Turkey both enhanced their presence and influence in the region. It’s a dramatic shift from what the situation looked like six weeks ago.
The question now is if the deal will hold. Three previous ceasefire attempts failed in this latest conflict, and political opposition to the deal in Armenia may force the current prime minister — or someone else who usurps his power — to withdraw from the pact.”
“President Donald Trump’s tweets attacking the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election might not sway the outcome — but they might sway Americans’ faith in democracy.
A study by political science researchers from Stanford and five other universities found that exposure to those tweets “erodes trust and confidence in elections and increases the belief that elections are rigged among his supporters.” However, among those who oppose the president, the study found that their trust in elections actually increased after seeing his tweets, albeit by a slightly smaller magnitude.”
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“people’s self-reported views may have less to do with their actual opinions and more to do with staying in line with their party. Previous research has shown that survey respondents often follow partisan cues: Politico, for instance, found that Republicans’ and Democrats’ views on whether the economy was improving flipped after Trump’s 2016 win, but that those shifts in reported attitudes only sometimes affected people’s actual behavior.”