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WASHINGTON -- President Trump seems convinced that he has found the formula for success in foreign policy: Bully your adversaries, sanction them, squeeze them -- and then flatter them and make a deal. Trump followed this approach with North Korea and he got a showy summit meeting in Singapore in June with Kim Jong Un and a pledge (encouraging but so far undelivered) for denuclearization. He adopted the hard-talk/sweet-talk tactics with Mexico and, eventually, after a long pout, with Canada, and he got a trade deal that's a modest but real improvement over NAFTA.

Women always paint themselves as innocent helpless victims, not responsible for anything bad in their lives, all externalcthings are the cause of their woes. Usually men. All the good stuff though, they happily take credit for. But to abortion and the kavanaugh hearing, we see hypocrisy from women again. Women claim to have no power when it comes to babies. You would think if you believed them every man in the world is responsible for a woman getting an abortion, or not getting one, and they are just doing what the man tells them. In reality men have zero control....

OTTAWA — From the get-go, the Liberal government’s goal in rewriting NAFTA was to get a “progressive” trade deal for Canada that was “free and fair.” So did it? While there are lots of ways to tally the winners — and losers — in the new United States Mexico Canada Agreement, or USMCA, one is to look at the six objectives that Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland herself articulated on the eve of the renegotiation. [photo caption] As part of the trade deal with the U.S. and Mexico, Canada will ease protections on dairy. [photo credit: CHRISTINNE MUSCHI THE NEW...

Hundreds of female attorneys urged on Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alask) and Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska) to vote against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. More than 350 attorneys made the request in a joint letter sent to the Republican senators, according to the Daily News-Miner. "We are Alaskan women attorneys who work in a variety of settings, including public interest organizations, government agencies, and private practice," the letter states, the newspaper reported. "Among us are Republicans, Democrats, Nonpartisan and Undeclared voters. We ask you, as your constituents and as fellow lawyers, to vote against confirmation of Judge Brett Kavanaugh as Justice...

...Senate Republicans declared in effect that all allegations against Brett Kavanaugh must be heard no matter how frivolous or obviously fraudulent they are...If Brett Kavanaugh, who is a mainstream, moderate judge, a man who's literally married to George W. Bush's assistant, can't get confirmed to Supreme Court, then no Republican can...You wanted secure borders. You wanted an end to ObamaCare and you wanted non-crazy people on the Supreme Court of the United States...Republicans in the Senate don't care...

Subtle: POTUS Donald Trump said Tuesday he’s supportive of the current FBI probe into allegations of sexual assault leveled at his Supreme Court nominee, Judge Brett Kavanaugh, and for one particular reason only our unconventional president would claim. “I think, actually, this could be a blessing in disguise. Because, having the FBI go out, do a thorough investigation – whether it’s three days or seven days – I think it’s going to be less than a week. But, having them do a thorough investigation, I actually think will be a blessing in disguise. It’ll be a good thing,” he said...

WASHINGTON — In the days leading up to a public allegation that Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh exposed himself to a college classmate, the judge and his team were communicating behind the scenes with friends to refute the claim, according to text messages obtained by NBC News. Kerry Berchem, who was at Yale with both Kavanaugh and his accuser, Deborah Ramirez, has tried to get those messages to the FBI for its newly reopened investigation into the matter but says she has yet to be contacted by the bureau. The texts between Berchem and Karen Yarasavage, both friends of Kavanaugh,...

The Trump administration has begun denying visas to some unmarried, same-sex partners of foreign diplomats and employees of the United Nations, Foreign Policy reported on Monday. The administration is requiring couples already in the United States to show proof that they’ve married by Dec. 31, 2018 or to leave the country within 30 days. The outlet noted that this new policy means at least 10 unmarried U.N. employees currently in the country will have to get married in order for their partners’ visas to be extended. Since the 2015 Supreme Court decision legalizing same-sex marriage, U.S. policy has dictated that...

Few areas of historical research have provoked such intensive study as the origins of America’s Great Depression. From 1929 to 1933 America suffered the worst economic decline in its history. Real national income fell by 36 percent; unemployment increased from 3 percent to over 25 percent; more than 40 percent of all banks were permanently closed; and international investment and trade declined dramatically. The dimensions of the economic catastrophe in America and the rest of the world from 1929 to 1933 cannot be captured fully by quantitative data alone. Tens of millions of humans suffered intense misery and despair. Because...

Donald Trump’s candidacy raises more urgent issues than the Donald’s sometimes poor choice of words: Trump has sparked a less-noticed but far more important debate about the future of our nation’s economy, the sustainability of American life, jobs, and a decent salary for Americans. This ultimately fuels the economic strength of the United States that makes it possible to defend our nation and its people. It’s about Smoot-Hawley. I am talking about the myth, the ghost, the coat hanging on the back of the door that looks like a monster in the dark, the nightmare that makes uninformed and gutless...

Mid Continent Nail Corporation says it could shutter its Poplar Bluff plant, which employs about 335 workers, as early as this month without an exemption to tariffs, the site’s operations general manager, Chris Pratt, told reporters in early September. The company previously had said that it might not survive through Labor Day but stayed open. After Trump imposed a 25 percent tariff on imported steel, the company in June cut 60 of 500 positions at the plant in rural Butler County, where the unemployment rate is above the national average and the company is the area’s second-largest employer. Pratt said...

As bad as the situation is with Greitens, the trend is actually in his favor, isn't it, with so many serious and growing problems in his prosecution? Even establishment KMOX and silly Charlie Brennan are calling out how bad the prosecution is. So, what the hell is going on with Hawley? I think he is an idiot. How much stupider can MO Republicans get?

FENTON, Mo. — As GOP Rep. Ann Wagner prepared to introduce candidates in a Republican Senate debate here Friday, she took a pointed jab at one contender who didn’t make it — front-runner Josh Hawley. “I try not to tell candidates how to run their races. I don’t know where some of the other candidates are,” she told POLITICO before taking the stage in a high school auditorium, referring specifically to Hawley. “Perhaps they have conflicts. But you gotta show up to win. And I’m going to tell that to the crowd tonight.” Moments later, Wagner followed through, declaring to...

Gold has gotten a bad rap. Long seen as the investment choice of the cranky and the fearful, the metal yields nothing; as Warren Buffett has said, it just “looks at you.” This year has been especially lackluster for gold. Its price has slumped 8%, to about $1,200 an ounce, and is off more than 35% from its high of $1,900 in 2011. Adding insult to injury, Vanguard will soon rechristen the largest gold-oriented U.S. mutual fund and shift its focus away from the metal. But this out-of-favor asset class now deserves a place in investment portfolios. Compared with stocks...

A mutual friend of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh and Deborah Ramirez, one of his sexual misconduct accusers, has asked the FBI to investigate text messages that Kavanaugh and his allies sent to friends before her story was made public. Kerry Berchem, who was at Yale when Kavanaugh is accused of exposing himself to Ramirez, emailed FBI agent J.C. McDonough asking the agency to review those messages as part of its reopened background investigation of Kavanaugh, NBC News reported Monday. NBC reported that text messages between Berchem and Karen Yarasavage, a friend of Kavanaugh, suggest the high court nominee was...

"US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo urged Myanmar's government to take concrete steps to investigate human right's abuses against Rohingya Muslims...." "Reuters" Report Friday 9/28/2018 "The Syrian regime's butcher is enabled by Russia and Iran" President Donald J. Trump at United Nations 9/26/2018 The pattern of Western nations taking the side of jihadist opposition forces seen in Syria and Libya on "humanitarian" grounds is again being revealed in the controversy over the nation of Myanmar (commonly called "Burma") The majority Buddhist country has a minority of Muslims called Rohingyas who were engaged in a revolt that included acts of terrorism....

There is entirely insufficient evidence to prove even one of the terrible allegations against President Trump’s Supreme Court nominee. A very strange thing happened over the weekend: If you follow Twitter closely, you’ll notice that the debate over Brett Kavanaugh moved significantly from the central question of last Thursday’s hearing — did he commit sexual assault? — to a raging debate over whether he lied about high-school slang, college drinking, and inside jokes, and whether he was just too “angry” to be a Supreme Court judge. This torrent of commentary (most of it silly, including competing, furious arguments about how...

For the last century control of the United States has cycled between the 19th Century Democratic and Republican parties. Voters choose between the old ideas of the Democratic Party and the old ideas of the Republican Party. The two parties are mired in the same old partisan conflicts election after election. The Democrats in particular seem more interested in playing partisan political games than in dealing seriously with the nation's problems. Republicans are increasingly following their example. Millennials need to decide whether they want to continue the politics of their grandparents' generation or replace the 19th Century parties with 21st...

The decade-old program has been on hold since 2016 amid concerns that immigrant recruits were not being screened well enough, and security threats were slipping through the system. Defense officials shored up the vetting process, and planned to relaunch the program earlier this month. But there was an unexpected barrier when Homeland Security officials said they would not be able to protect new immigrant recruits from being deported when their temporary visas expired after they signed a contract to join the military, the U.S. officials said. They were not authorized to publicly describe internal discussions and spoke on condition of...

Given the speed at which Trump-era news cycles move, I should stress that I’m writing this at 5:30 p.m. ET. By the time you read it, eight to 10 different major news stories might have broken that’ll affect the midterms dramatically one way or another. And 2018 being what it is, they’re apt to be off-the-wall crazy. Michael Avenatti might prove that Kavanaugh has spent the last 30 years secretly moonlighting as a pimp. Trump might fire Rod Rosenstein and then nominate him to the Supreme Court in lieu of Kavanaugh. Jeff Sessions might get caught smoking crack.The only...