“The U.S. economy posted its strongest growth in more than a decade during the third quarter, supported by robust consumer spending and business investment,” the Wall Street Journal reports.
“Gross domestic product, the broadest measure of goods and services produced across the economy, grew at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 5.0% in the third quarter… That was up from the second quarter’s growth rate of 4.6% and the strongest pace since the third quarter of 2003.”
“The Senate basically didn’t do squat for years. I don’t think most members of the Senate wanted it run that way.”
— Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY), quoted by Politico.
Robby Mook “has emerged as a clear front-runner to manage Clinton’s expected presidential campaign after Guy Cecil, the political director for her 2008 bid, acknowledged Sunday he won’t have an official role this time around,” Bloomberg reports.
“Mook already is working on special projects for Clinton, according to two longtime Democratic strategists. One said Mook was influential in shaping her role helping Democrats during the 2014 midterm elections.”
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Associated Press: “It’s after 9 p.m. on a Sunday night in late November and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie is deep into a conference call talking about nuclear weapons and Iran. One voice is advocating a hard line, arguing against allowing Iran any capability to enrich uranium. Another summarizes the status of current negotiations and argues that forcing Iran to give up enrichment entirely isn’t realistic.”
“This is how Christie has spent many of his nights during a year in which he raised record-setting amounts of campaign cash for his fellow Republican governors and methodically tried to recover from a political scandal involving traffic jams near a New York City bridge. Late at night, away from the spotlight of the midterm elections and 2016 speculation, he’s been on the phone with some of the brightest foreign policy minds in the Republican Party, getting ready to run for president.”
“Bill de Blasio, like his progressive political idol Barack Obama, is finding out that you can’t do the New Politics if you don’t pay attention to the old politics,” Politico reports.
“In Obama’s case, it was a failure to recognize the threat posed to him by Republicans who didn’t buy into his calls for a post-partisan partnership with Congress. For New York’s ambitious liberal mayor, it was an inability to keep long-simmering tensions with the city’s traditionally powerful police department from boiling over in the last few days.”
“You can’t be big-city mayor and alienate the cops – and that’s just as true now as it was under three-term New York City Mayor Ed Koch, or even a century ago.”
“As he prepares to guide Republicans out of the wilderness of the Senate minority, Senator Mitch McConnell, the incoming majority leader, knows his real problem is not corralling mavericks in his party like Senator Ted Cruz. It is persuading other Senate Republicans conditioned to voting no that it is time to vote yes,” the New York Times reports.
Said McConnell: “One of my challenges is to try to convince some of my members that passing an appropriations bill is a good thing, not a bad thing.”
“North Korea’s already tenuous links to the Internet went completely dark on Monday after days of instability, in what Internet monitors described as one of the worst North Korean network failures in years,” the New York Times reports.
“The loss of service came just days after President Obama pledged that the United States would launch a ‘proportional response’ to the recent attacks on Sony Pictures, which government officials have linked to North Korea. While an attack on North Korea’s networks was suspected, there was no definitive evidence of it.”
“The loss of service is not likely to affect the vast majority of North Koreans, who have no access to the Internet. The biggest impact would be felt by the country’s elite, state-run media channels and its propagandists, as well as its cadre of cyberwarriors.”
The AP reports the White House declined to comment.
[speech_bubble type=”std” subtype=”a” icon=”pwdome.jpg” name=””]Of course, the most effective U.S. retaliation would be to open up the Internet to the North Korean people. [/speech_bubble]
Rep. Michael Grimm (R-NY) will plead guilty to a felony charge of cheating on his taxes before entering Congress, the New York Daily News has learned.
“Grimm said during the campaign that he would step down from his seat if he was ‘unable to serve.’ But he is expected to maintain he can continue to serve despite pleading guilty to one tax evasion count… If would then be up to House Republican leaders to decide whether to force him to resign.”
Al Hunt: “To oversimplify, there are two distinct candidate types: the mainstream conservatives and the movement conservatives. There really are no moderates.”
“Establishment conservatives are the favorites of Wall Street, big business and traditional Republicans. Movement candidates are embraced by the Tea Party, social and cultural conservatives, and the populist right.”
Gawker: “Long before the FBI made it official, North Korean blame for the attack against Sony was taken as a given… But independent, skeptical security experts have been poking holes in this theory for days now. Evidence provided by the FBI last week in an official accusation against the North Korean government was really more of a reference to evidence—all we got were bullet points, most of them rehashing earlier clues. It still doesn’t seem like enough to definitively pin the attacks to North Korea.”
CNBC: North Korea suffering major internet outages
“Facebook conducted two experiments with Democratic Senate campaigns this year to see if advertisements on its site encouraged people to make political contributions. The company says the results show it did,” the New York Times reports.
“The results are potentially good news for online political fund-raising — and for Facebook’s advertising revenue, not incidentally — but there are questions about how much credit the social media platform should get for the money being raised. If the results can be replicated, it’s also likely that campaigns will introduce similar efforts on other platforms that combine ads with web content like videos and audio. Google, which offers both advertising and email services, is one logical candidate.”
The New York Times has a blistering editorial calling on President Obama to prosecute those who committed torture and the officials who authorized them.
“The nation cannot move forward in any meaningful way without coming to terms, legally and morally, with the abhorrent acts that were authorized, given a false patina of legality, and committed by American men and women from the highest levels of government on down.”
“Starting a criminal investigation is not about payback; it is about ensuring that this never happens again and regaining the moral credibility to rebuke torture by other governments. Because of the Senate’s report, we now know the distance officials in the executive branch went to rationalize, and conceal, the crimes they wanted to commit. The question is whether the nation will stand by and allow the perpetrators of torture to have perpetual immunity for their actions.”
In the wake of two New York City police officers being assassinated, Rudy Giuliani said that President Obama has engaged in “propaganda” encouraging people to “hate the police,” The Hill reports.
Said Giuliani: “We’ve had four months of propaganda starting with the president that everybody should hate the police. The protests are being embraced, the protests are being encouraged. The protests, even the ones that don’t lead to violence, a lot of them lead to violence, all of them lead to a conclusion: The police are bad, the police are racist. That is completely wrong.”
“Tea party favorite Mike Lee roiled the GOP establishment four years ago when he knocked off a sitting senator on his way to the Republican Senate nomination in Utah. Now, the establishment might strike back,” Politico reports.
“As the 43-year-old Lee plots his 2016 reelection bid, he is courting business leaders under the radar, hoping to head off a primary challenge backed by business leaders and other establishment figures in his home state, like billionaire Jon Huntsman Sr., an influential bank CEO and a former Utah GOP party chairman.”
“Jeb Bush’s announcement that he will explore a White House bid threatens years of painstaking spadework by other Republicans who have cultivated many of the wealthy donors loyal to the former Florida governor’s family,” the Wall Street Journal reports.
“Mr. Bush is heir to a vaunted network of Republican contributors built over his family’s two presidencies, his own governorship and other campaigns. It is one of the most formidable assets in GOP politics and could hamper the fund-raising of Republican potential rivals, including Florida Sen. Marco Rubio and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie. The donors’ ties to the Bushes also could undercut possible interest in a third White House campaign by Mitt Romney.”
New York Times: “Though few Republican strategists expect Mr. Carson, 63, to be the nominee, they acknowledge his potential to throw a wrench into the establishment’s desire to unify early, and the danger of turning off moderates if his divisive views continue to gain traction.”
“Mr. Carson has built a profile on heavy exposure as a commentator on Fox News, an uplifting biography and, especially, intemperate criticism of the Age of Obama that might seem to disqualify a major-party candidate. An African-American, he has called the president’s health care law ‘the worst thing that has happened in this nation since slavery.'”
Former Russian finance minister Alexei Kudrin warned that Russia will face a “full-blown economic crisis” next year that will cause a series of defaults and the loss of its investment grade credit rating, the Financial Times reports.
Wonk Wire: Russian tax collectors seize cats
Mother Jones notes the first person Jeb Bush followed on Twitter was none other than his brother’s former deputy chief of staff and political adviser, Karl Rove.
Taegan Goddard is the founder of Political Wire, one of the earliest and most influential political web sites. He also runs Political Job Hunt, Electoral Vote Map and the Political Dictionary.
Goddard spent more than a decade as managing director and chief operating officer of a prominent investment firm in New York City. Previously, he was a policy adviser to a U.S. Senator and Governor.
Goddard is also co-author of You Won - Now What? (Scribner, 1998), a political management book hailed by prominent journalists and politicians from both parties. In addition, Goddard's essays on politics and public policy have appeared in dozens of newspapers across the country.
Goddard earned degrees from Vassar College and Harvard University. He lives in New York with his wife and three sons.
Goddard is the owner of Goddard Media LLC.
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