2. The Myth That Sanders Would Have Won Against Trump

So what would have happened when Sanders hit a real opponent, someone who did not care about alienating the young college voters in his base? I have seen the opposition book assembled by Republicans for Sanders, and it was brutal. The Republicans would have torn him apart. And while Sanders supporters might delude themselves into believing that they could have defended him against all of this, there is a name for politicians who play defense all the time: losers.
 
Here are a few tastes of what was in store for Sanders, straight out of the Republican playbook: He thinks rape is A-OK. In 1972, when he was 31, Sanders wrote a fictitious essay in which he described a woman enjoying being raped by three men. Yes, there is an explanation for it—a long, complicated one, just like the one that would make clear why the Clinton emails story was nonsense. And we all know how well that worked out.
 
Then there’s the fact that Sanders was on unemployment until his mid-30s, and that he stole electricity from a neighbor after failing to pay his bills, and that he co-sponsored a bill to ship Vermont’s nuclear waste to a poor Hispanic community in Texas, where it could be dumped. You can just see the words “environmental racist” on Republican billboards. And if you can’t, I already did. They were in the Republican opposition research book as a proposal on how to frame the nuclear waste issue.
 
Also on the list: Sanders violated campaign finance laws, criticized Clinton for supporting the 1994 crime bill that he voted for, and he voted against the Amber Alert system. His pitch for universal health care would have been used against him too, since it was tried in his home state of Vermont and collapsed due to excessive costs. Worst of all, the Republicans also had video of Sanders at a 1985 rally thrown by the leftist Sandinista government in Nicaragua where half a million people chanted, “Here, there, everywhere/the Yankee will die,’’ while President Daniel Ortega condemned “state terrorism” by America. Sanders said, on camera, supporting the Sandinistas was “patriotic.”
 
The Republicans had at least four other damning Sanders videos (I don’t know what they showed), and the opposition research folder was almost 2-feet thick. (The section calling him a communist with connections to Castro alone would have cost him Florida.) In other words, the belief that Sanders would have walked into the White House based on polls taken before anyone really attacked him is a delusion built on a scaffolding of political ignorance.

First, Hensarling would toss out the Volcker rule, which restricts speculative investments with taxpayer-protected bank deposits. Most banks have learned to accommodate the rule, despite years of foot-dragging and complaining, and the result is a safer system. Had it been in effect, it could have prevented JPMorgan's $6 billion loss in the London Whale fiasco, in which a trader gambled with such huge positions that he couldn't unwind the trades when they went sour.  
 
Second, the congressman would eliminate the authority of regulators to bring shadow banks under their wing. Thousands of mutual funds, hedge funds, insurers, private-equity firms, high-frequency traders and other non-bank financiers are only lightly regulated. They don't, for example, have to follow bank-capital rules.
 
[...]
 
Hensarling's third bad idea is to force insolvent banks to go through normal bankruptcy courts, rather than through Dodd-Frank's "orderly liquidation authority," which is a sort-of bankruptcy managed by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. The FDIC has the authority to borrow from the Treasury to keep a sick bank functioning as regulators wind it down, sell off the parts and pay creditors, to avoid a run on other banks. The failure of a giant institution, without the Treasury line of credit and the FDIC's decades of experience in shutting down insolvent banks, could trigger a global panic if the bank had to go through a normal bankruptcy.

Hardly a day passes without someone criticizing the Dodd-Frank law for burdening businesses with compliance costs, increasing financial instability and choking off bank lending. Sometimes what the critics really mean is that the law won't allow the financial industry to behave the way it did before the crisis.
 
Much of that activity wasn't illegal, but it is now. Some behavior was clearly illegal, leading to the banks' paying $177 billion in fines since 2010. It's a good thing that financiers can't do any of it again -- fingers crossed.

We, sir, we are the diverse America, who are alarmed and anxious that your new administration will not protect us, our planet, our children, our parents or defend us and uphold our inalienable rights. But we truly hope that this show has inspired you to uphold our American values and to work on behalf of all of us.

We, sir, we are the diverse America, who are alarmed and anxious that your new administration will not protect us, our planet, our children, our parents or defend us and uphold our inalienable rights. But we truly hope that this show has inspired you to uphold our American values and to work on behalf of all of us.

C’était couru d’avance. Pour éviter un micmac politico-judiciaire invraisemblable, Donald Trump a fait ce qu’il avait juré qu’il ne ferait jamais : il a négocié un accord à l’amiable pour mettre fin aux trois poursuites judiciaires liées à son ancien établissement Trump University.

L’ancien établissement était accusé de fraude et de publicité mensongère. Malgré son nom « d’université », il ne délivrait aucun diplôme reconnu par les autorités éducatives. Si les premiers cours étaient gratuits, certains étudiants ont dépensé jusqu’à 35.000 dollars pour le cursus complet.