Reddit Politics Summary Friday Dec 22nd 17

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This is a digest of the top posts on reddit/r/politics over the last 24 hours.
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White House finally admits Trump will benefit from tax bill

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Why Are Politicians Allowed To Vote On A Bill They Profit From?

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• Specific provisions in the bill ranging from tax reductions on pass-through real estate LLCs to flat tax deductions for oil and gas master limited partnerships are likely to have a significant impact on some legislators’ tax bills.
• It gets into a slightly murkier territory with the niche tax breaks that IBT uncovered, because they do not apply to a specific company such as one real estate firm or pipeline, but they are not as broad as a change to the overall tax bracket structure. When talking about the ethics rules not applying to tax bills, the House and Senate ethics committees had in mind the fact that shifts in tax brackets and tax rates affect a broad class of people and so do not constitute a conflict of interest.
• But there is also a less cynical rationale, which is that Congress is an elected body most directly tied to its constituents and with fairly robust financial disclosure requirements, which — for instance — allowed IBT to report on the financial stakes of senators in the tax bill. But ethics committees in the House and Senate are likely to be more permissive in allowing members to vote on legislation and read the restrictions on voting very narrowly.

Putin’s First Year in the White House

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• What better propaganda could the Kremlin get than the Charlottesville horrors, the racial divide crippling the NFL, or the candidacy of Roy Moore? In the Cold War, the Kremlin constantly cited America’s racial strife as proof that, whatever its democratic pretensions, the country was still a bastion of white supremacy. Then there is Russia’s permanent interest in deepening the racial and partisan divides in America — the better to force the United States to be more concerned with internal strife than with foreign affairs.
• In the Middle East, Russia has never been stronger — it is now the key player in the future of Syria, while Putin’s naked annexation of Crimea and sections of eastern Ukraine remains in place, unmentioned by the White House. Trump backed Brexit, breaking the U.K. away from its European partners; he supported Marine Le Pen in France for the same reason; and he has routinely lambasted Merkel, whose power is now hanging by a thread. America has also broken with its European allies by withdrawing from the Paris Accords on climate, threatening the Iran nuclear deal, and backing the ethno-nationalist extremists who now run Israel on the status of Jerusalem. He has permanently undermined the core Article 5 commitment that an attack on one NATO country is an attack on all of them, by being the first U.S. president to equivocate on it.
• There’s been no attempt by the White House to protect the integrity of our elections — just a constant disdain for those who worry about them, and a general, somewhat egregious, complacency.

The Democrats’ Wave Could Turn Into A Flood

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• Their current advantage is larger than the lead Republicans had at this point in the 1994 cycle, the lead Democrats held at this point in the 2006 cycle or the lead Republicans had at this point in the 2010 cycle.
• What I am saying, though, is that when the generic ballot is showing this large of a lead for one party, the playing field of competitive races also tends to be correspondingly huge.

Trump’s Dutch ambassador confronted with clip of him talking ‘no-go zones’ after he called quote ‘fake news’

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Poll: Most People Believe the Sexual Misconduct Allegations Against Trump Are True

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AT&T is laying off an estimated 600 employees after announcing $1,000 bonuses for more than 200,000 U.S. employees in response to the GOP Tax Plan passing

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• It creates a lot of tension and, quite frankly, a lot of our members are on edge because they don’t understand the direction of this company and its mentality of how they’re being treated," he said.
• At the same time, technology improvements are driving higher efficiencies and there are some areas where demand for our legacy services continues to decline, and we’re adjusting our workforce in some of those areas as we continue to align our workforce with the changing needs of the business.
• As a result of decreasing work volume and to increase efficiency, we are consolidating some call center work currently done at one of our locations in Kansas City into another company location in San Antonio.

Democrats Need to Make Clear that Firing Mueller Triggers Impeachment

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• "Any attempt by this President to remove special counsel Mueller from his position or to pardon key witnesses in any effort to shield them from accountability or shut down the investigation would be a gross abuse of power and a flagrant violation of executive branch responsibilities and authorities.
• Though Trump aides deny that the president is angling to shut down Mueller’s investigation into Russian meddling with the 2016 presidential election—and a host of other issues that cut close to the president and his inner circle—there can be no question that the Trump team and its media allies have launched a campaign to discredit the special counsel.

Discussion Megathread: Congress votes on GOP Tax Bill

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• The violation of the so-called Byrd Rule forced the Senate to strip those provisions from the bill and vote on a different version than what passed the House, that vote passing after midnight on Wednesday.
• To make it land for those in the business world, it would be like advocating for the loss of a client because it frees up the company to do more effective marketing to land an even bigger client.
• No one, including the authors, understand the scope of the loopholes and unintentional distortions that are baked in, we are simply going to have to discover them all together.

Fun Friday Off-Topic Megathread: Press F5 to Pay Respects

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• Thankfully, just two days ago at his elementary school, a man who had a real white beard, standing 6 feet tall, with rosy cheeks, wearing a green long-sleeved T-shirt and jeans, stopped by. My son is smart enough to know there are fake Santas and how to spot them, but still believes in the real Santa.
• Well, I had to drop off some money at the front office for a gift for a teacher, and while we were there, Santa came walking out of the office, striding confidently, like he's a busy man. He was there to drop off some "snow from the North Pole," which was really one of those concoctions that doesn't melt very easily.
• Anyone could see that these four people, the African American waitress and the three presumably conservative white, male patrons, came from very different walks of life, and that they had very different political views, specifically when it came to Trump.