Voters Will Hold Candidates Responsible for Tax Plan

55% to 26%

A new Quinnipiac poll finds American voters disapprove of the pending Republican tax plan by a wide margin, 55% to 26%, and 43% say they are less likely to vote for a U.S. Senator or Congressperson who supports the plan. Key finding: “Only 16% of American voters say the tax plan will reduce their taxes, while 44% say it will increase their taxes and 30% say the tax plan will have little impact.”

The Cost of Republican Extremism

“Starting around the 2010 Tea Party surge, Republican voters have repeatedly chosen the most extreme candidates during primaries, and have paid a real electoral price, particularly in the Senate. … If Republicans held all these seats today, and if they hadn’t run and lost with Roy Moore on Tuesday, they would hold a 57-43 margin in the Senate, and Democrats would have no shot at taking back the chamber next year. Extremism has cost the GOP a lot of power, and blunted the natural advantage the Senate’s small-state bias gives the Republican coalition.”

Ezra Klein

Omarosa Will Wait to Tell All

“I’m not going to expand on it because I still have to go back and work with these individuals, but when I have a chance to tell my story, Michael, quite a story to tell as the only African-American woman in this White House as a senior staff and assistant to the president, I have seen things that made me uncomfortable, that have upset me, that have affected me deeply and emotionally, that has affected my community and my people. And when I can tell my story, it is a profound story that I know the world will want to hear.”

— Outgoing White House aide Omarosa Manigault, telling ABC News that she observed things in the White House during her tenure that made her uncomfortable and that upset her.

CPJ Annual Report Describes a Bleak Year for Press Repression

downloadThe Committee to Protect Journalists has issued its annual report, and it details a pretty bleak year for journalists worldwide, and it doesn’t look like it’s going to get better in 2018:

For the second year in a row, the number of journalists imprisoned for their work hit a historical high, as the U.S. and other Western powers failed to pressure the world’s worst jailers — Turkey, China, and Egypt — into improving the bleak climate for press freedom.