"Finland’s Ministry of Social Affairs and Health drafted the legislative proposal for the experiment in August, and submitted the proposal to Parliament after hearing public opinions on the draft proposal. The proposal elicited some controversy, in part due to the relatively small size of the basic income (560 EUR) as well as the choice of sample population, which will consist only of recipients of the country’s unemployment benefits. However, the basic design of the experiment remains unchanged: a random sample of 2,000 individuals, drawn from current working-age beneficiaries of unemployment benefits, will receive an unconditional basic income of 560 EUR per month for a two-year period. (Brief responses to the objections are included in the most recent version of Kela’s report on the experiment.)

The primary objective of the experiment is to assess whether an unconditional basic income promotes employment. Experimenters will compare the employment rate among basic income recipients to that within a control group of individuals who continue to receive traditional unemployment benefits. As Kela’s website states, the Finnish government is interested in basic income due to its potential to “reduce the amount of work involved in seeking financial assistance” and “free up time and resources for other activities such as working or seeking employment”. The experiment will also provide data used to estimate the cost of implementing a nationwide basic income."

Newt Gingrich said Wednesday that Donald Trump’s “drain the swamp” catch phrase was “cute” but that the President-elect now disclaims it.

During an interview with NPR’s “Morning Edition” Wednesday, host Rachel Martin asked if the former House speaker had been “working in the swamp, to use Donald Trump’s language.”

“I’m told he now just disclaims that. He now says it was cute, but he doesn't want to use it anymore,” Gingrich said, referring to the phrase. “I'd written what I thought was a very cute tweet about ‘the alligators are complaining,’ and somebody wrote back and said they were tired of hearing this stuff.”

Later, Gingrich added: “I personally, as a sense of humor, like the alligator and swamp language, and I think it vividly illustrates the problem, because all the people in this city who are the alligators are going to hate the swamp being drained. And there's going to be constant fighting over it. But, you know, he is my leader and if he decides to drop the swamp and the alligator I will drop the swamp and the alligator.”

On Monday, Gingrich drew scrutiny for asserting during an interview on “The Diane Rehm Show” that Trump would be able to simply pardon members of his family who broke anti-nepotism laws by working in his administration. Richard Painter, who was President George W. Bush’s chief White House ethics lawyer from 2005 to 2007, responded that “If the pardon power allows that, the pardon power allows the president to become a dictator.”

Martin asked Gingrich about the presidential pardon on Wednesday. Gingrich defended his comment by arguing that the Constitution “gives the president of the United States an extraordinarily wide grant of authority to use the power of the pardon. I'm not saying he should. I'm not saying he will.

"international firms became less invested in “the commons”—shared resources such as pools of skilled labor, supplier networks, an educated populace, andthe physical and technical infrastructure on which U.S. productivity and competitiveness depend.

"How did America respond to pressure on its middle class? Unfortunately,our society did not mobilize to invest so that the middle class could compete in the global marketplace. Instead, America and Americans maintained an illusion of growing prosperity. Abetted by lenders and government institutions, consumers with stagnant incomes borrowed more to buy houses and fund consumption.

Government itself made unsustainable promises to the middle class, pledging to cover more healthcare expenses of future retirees, to employ more individuals in government jobs, and to pay generous pensions to many in the public sector, while reducing effective tax rates across the board between 1980 and 2010. These promises, coupled with a deep recession and two wars, have left government finances in a fragile state.

As debts and unfunded liabilities have risen, federal, state, and local government expenditures that support long-run growth in productivity and competitiveness—on items such as infrastructure, training, education, and basic research—have stagnated or fallen as a portion of GDP. Moreover, a resulting need to make tough, unpalatable choices has contributed to paralysis in our political process."

"McGraw.... stated, “I’m not going to say you were wrong or I’m wrong,” but he actually decided to fully commit to sidestepping any form of qualitative atonement. In his mind and his words, the offense of flying his former Golden Glove fists into the face of an unsuspecting Black man was of equal sin to that Black man simply existing in a shared space with him. That sort of problematic thinking should not be rewarded by a round of applause in a court of law, and it definitely should not be repaid in absolution."

"I am completely over the idea that Black folks strength is predicated in how much oppressive abuse we can absorb. I’m done with believing that people who intentionally harm us due to our melanin are deserving of forgiveness without conducting their own introspective moral review. I wholeheartedly refuse to provide exculpation without recompense."

If confirmed by the Senate to lead the Office of Management and Budget, Mulvaney, a deficit hawk who recently spoke before a chapter of the right-wing-fringe John Birch Society, would be in charge of crafting Trump's budget and overseeing the functioning of federal agencies. One thing he seems to believe the budget and the agencies should not be funding is research into diseases like the Zika virus.

Two weeks before Congress finally passed more than $1 billion to fight the spread of Zika and its effects, Mulvaney questioned whether the government should fund any scientific research. "[D]o we need government-funded research at all," he wrote in a Facebook post on September 9 unearthed by the Democratic opposition research group American Bridge. Mulvaney appears to have deleted his Facebook page since then.

"The second CNN and FOX News called the election for Donald Trump, the engines that power the cottage industry of political second-guessing were fired up. Within minutes, a steady stream of simplistic hot takes began flying off the assembly line. This was especially true in the progressive areas of politics and punditry. Headlines like, “What The Democrats Got Wrong,” and “Progressives Need To Completely Reevaluate” were put together like a game of Mad Libs. Not wanting to be left out of the buzz of the twenty-four-hour news cycle, many elected Democratic officials jumped in and manned a station hoping to be promoted to pundit manager when the dust settled from the inevitable finger pointing and layoffs. The most common response from these opportunistic progressives has been, “Democrats need to learn how to talk to and attract working white class voters.” Senator Bernie Sanders has been one of the most adamant proponents of this strategy. He and every single progressive taking this tack are pushing a defective product. Don’t buy it! The problem is not the product or the message. The problem is too many progressives are complete idiots when it comes to politics and political strategy."

"“Progressives have no one to blame but themselves for the lack of a progressive government and policies. No one. They bitch and moan about not having FDR-like progress but refuse to give Democratic Presidents FDR-like majorities in Congress. They bitch and moan about the government failing them but they don’t do anything about making sure the party that hates and wants the government to fail from getting and wielding power. They pursue idealistic policy ideas without building the political infrastructure necessary to implement them. [bToo many have a fucked up political and moral calculus where they think a candidate who supports their causes 75% of the time is the same as one who supports them 0% of the time. Most of all, too damn many progressives refuse to acknowledge their role in all of this and make any changes. If you claim to be a progressive and your top priority isn’t keeping conservatives out of government, then you are as much the problem as conservatives for the government we have.”]

"Let’s begin by making clear that identity politics isn’t really the name of a new phenomenon. Relative to an Old Left expectation that economic classes are the fundamental lines of political division, the New Left of the 1960s and 1970s associated with the civil rights movement, with American Indian politics, and with women’s and gay liberation seemed anomalous. But there was never any reason to believe the Old Left’s story in the first place, least of all in the United States where a large proportion of the country had almost always been governed by a political coalition defined by white identity politics.

There is something particularly absurd in the post-election morality plays that say “whites [or white Christians, or white Christian men] have now learned how to do identity politics and how to vote like an aggrieved ethnic group, because that’s what other groups have been doing all these years.” White identity politics is a constitutive fact of American politics, and if an election in which the Republican got the normal share of the white vote counts as white identity politics in action, well, that suggests a deep problem, but it doesn’t suggest a new problem.

White identity politics has moreover been a constitutive fact of the illiberal expansion of state power. The effect of some of the oldest instances of this are still with us, as is seen in the recent struggle over placing the Dakota Access Pipeline on lands that were reserved to the Sioux nation in an 1851 treaty that was subsequently violated but never voided. The effects of the decades-long white welfare state and the redistributive subsidizing of white wealth accumulation through housing policy are very much still with us in the wealth gap between whites and blacks, to say nothing of the enduring effects of racially discriminatory housing and urban policy on the shape of American cities. But the most currently politically salient effect of white identity politics as a source of state power is the combination of policing, imprisonment, crime policy, and drug policy."

"But a revitalized liberalism must be a vital liberalism, one with energy and enthusiasm. The defense of liberal principles—freedom of speech and religion, the rule of law and due process, commerce and markets, and so on—has to happen at least in part in the political arena. In that arena, in liberal politics, we’ll always depend on the passionate and self-conscious mobilization of those who are the victims of state power and domination.

Lilla insists that liberalism is founded on principles that all could share, and that liberal politics should “speak to the nation as a nation of citizens who are in this together and must help one another,” then appeals to FDR, one of the architects of the white welfare state and the imprisoner of Japanese-Americans, to drive the point home.

As political scientist Ira Katznelson has documented, Roosevelt’s ability to bring the New Deal into existence depended on active complicity with southern white identity politics—an easy and tempting thing to do for those who are too convinced that their political goals represent neutral and universal political truth.

Political fights aren’t won with universal principled arguments alone, and pretending that they are is often a mask for the identity politics of the staatvolk. As citizens of a liberal state trying to preserve it, we need to be able to hear each other talking about particularized injustices, and to cheer each other on when we seek to overturn them. Members of disadvantaged minorities standing up for themselves aren’t to blame for the turn to populist authoritarianism; and their energy and commitment is a resource that free societies can’t do without in resisting it."