Reddit Politics Summary Sunday Dec 17th 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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Fox host calls FBI 'criminal cabal'

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This Evangelical Leader Denounced Trump. Then the Death Threats Started.

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• Up until that point, she had been a wildly influential and welcome presence in the evangelical world, a Christian author whose writings made the New York Times best-seller list and whose home renovation got its own HGTV series.
• During the campaign, as other white evangelicals coalesced around the Republican nominee, Hatmaker effectively joined the coterie of "Never Trump" evangelicals, telling her more than half a million Facebook followers that Donald Trump made her "sad and horrified and despondent." After the "Access Hollywood" tape leaked and prominent evangelical men came to Trump’s defense, she tweeted: "We will not forget. Nor will we forget the Christian leaders that betrayed their sisters in Christ for power." Then, in an interview with Religion News Service columnist Jonathan Merritt, she made what was a stunning admission for her evangelical community: She said she supported same-sex relationships.
• Hatmaker wrote that she understood now the machine’s "systems and alliances and coded language and brand protection," not as the insider she had long been, but "from the outside where I was no longer welcome." During the election season, she added, the "Christian Machine malfunctioned." It laid bare the civil war within her Christian community.

Trump’s Censorship Of Science Will Kill People

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• Science is the best method that we as human beings have of figuring out the truth of reality, and wishing away the facts by trying to substitute them with " alternative facts " will greatly impede scientific progress.
• The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention lannounced that in the United States they are seeing the most measles cases in 20 years as they warned clinicians, parents and others to watch for and be vaccinated against the potentially deadly virus. Daniela Chavarriaga holds her daughter, Emma Chavarriaga, as pediatrician Jose Rosa-Olivares, M.D. administers a measles vaccination during a visit to the Miami Children's Hospital on June 02, 2014 in Miami, Florida.
• Homeopathy is not harmless, yet despite the fact that it kills people every day, only recently has the federal government taken steps to address this problem.

New: Trump officials demand Mueller return thousands of emails

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• The backdrop: The final bill will permit deductions of up to $10,000 in state and local taxes — including income, property and sales taxes. On average, Manhattan residents get $57,400 in state and local income tax deductions and $14,400 in property tax deductions, per IRS data.
• This week features Cecile Richards, president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America and Planned Parenthood Action Fund, tells us a worthy part of her morning routine. I chat with industry leaders about their quirks and life hacks for Axios' My 6 Big Things series.
• The twist: The sources say that transition officials assumed that Mueller would come calling, and had sifted through the emails and separated the ones they considered privileged. But the sources said that was for naught, since Mueller has the complete cache from the dozen accounts.

Law firm demands $102G from Jared Kushner’s real estate company, claiming unpaid bills

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• While he no longer runs the firm, he still owns it — and many of the beefs over the conditions of his apartments came while he was in charge.
• and its property manager, Westminster, in lawsuits and in other complaints of using harassment tactics — like loud construction and poor maintenance of properties — to get them to move out of rent-regulated apartments.
• When Kushner purchased his building and an adjacent building in 2013 for $17 million, Kaplan and several tenants organized to fight back against evictions and shoddy conditions.

Fox News faces backlash saying the US may be facing a 'coup' with Mueller investigation

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America still hasn't reckoned with the election of a reckless con man as president

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• Now, every desperate American must gaze in the mirror and interrogate the puzzled face and puzzling fate that stares back: What did I do or not do that made the cataclysm possible? Did I ignore past transgressions that corrode today’s society: the discrimination, the sexism, the violence, the authoritarianism, the intolerance, the imperial ambitions, the slavery and greed and persecutions that have darkened America’s story? Did I overestimate the strength of our democracy and underestimate the decency of my neighbors? Was I too fearful, too complacent, too impatient, too angry? Whom did I not talk to, whom did I not persuade? What privilege and comforts, what overwork and debts, kept me from giving my all? What injustice or humiliation or bigoted remark did I witness and let pass? How can I help to recover our country, make it once more recognizable, make it luminous and forgiving?We must vigorously protest the president’s craven actions, but above all we need to acknowledge that what ultimately matters is not what a foreign power did to America, but what America did to itself. But I fear that the Russia investigations — and the hope that they will save the republic — are turning too many opponents of this administration into passive, victimized spectators of a drama performed by remote actors over which they have no control.The psychic, intellectual and emotional energy expended on this issue would be better employed, I believe, by addressing a more fundamental concern: What was it, what is it, in our American soul that allowed the Russians to be successful? Russians voting in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin the election to the Republican candidate by a bit more than 80,000 votes. Thomas Paine, that foreigner, that immigrant, that subversive who loved America, said it best in December of 1776, as his adopted homeland’s inaugural revolution was in danger of being defeated: "Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph."I cannot guess whether we will be spirited enough to find the consolatory answers to our crisis. What I do not doubt, as America cries out for a second and much needed revolution, is that a long night of searching lies ahead of us.Ariel Dorfman is the author of "Homeland Security Ate My Speech" and the forthcoming novel "Darwin’s Ghosts." He lives with his wife Angélica in Chile and in Durham, N.C., where he is professor emeritus of literature at Duke University. I’m tired of hearing about how Russia intervened in the recent U.S. election and tired of the talk about collusion, and I’m especially fed up with the speculation that all this will doom the Trump presidency.My weariness is not due to a lack of indignation at how a foreign country covertly helped a reckless con man become president. As were the 62,984,825 others who decided that such a troublesome, inflammatory figure expressed their desires and dreams. Trump could be impeached or resign, or his policies could simply implode under the weight of their malice, divisiveness and mendacity, and the country would still be defined and pressed by the same conditions and dread that enabled his rise. How could our attempt to build a nation free of exploitation have paved the way for a tyrannical regime?It took many years for the self-criticism to bear fruit, but without it the followers of Allende could never have built a coalition with the Christian Democrats, many of whose members were fierce opponents of the revolution’s radical measures.

Democrats hold biggest lead in congressional preference since 2008

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Republicans are refusing to continue Trump investigation, won't name new witnesses in probe

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• Firing off a nine-tweet thread on Friday, Adam Schiff warned he had become "increasingly worried Republicans will shut down the House Intelligence Committee investigation at the end of the month," before going on to explain that the Majority hasn’t lined anyone up to testify after Dec.
• We have dozens of outstanding witnesses on key aspects of our investigation that they refuse to contact and many document requests they continue to sit on," he wrote.
• "Despite our repeated urging, Majority has declined to issue subpoenas in numerous avenues of the investigation, where there's simply no other way to get the information.

Mark Hamill: FCC chair is 'unworthy' of using lightsaber

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