THE MAGA SIGNAL
Moody’s Investors Service late Friday cut its outlook on the U.S. sovereign credit rating to negative from stable, citing higher interest rates and doubts about the government’s ability implement effective fiscal policies. A negative outlook means that a rating may be cut in the future, but doesn’t mean that it will be. Moody’s continues to rate U.S. sovereign debt Aaa — the only one of the three major credit-rating companies to maintain a triple-A rating on the world’s largest economy. “The sharp rise in U.S. Treasury bond yields this year has increased pre-existing pressure on U.S. debt affordability. In the absence of policy action, Moody’s expects the U.S.’s debt affordability to decline further, steadily and significantly, to very weak levels compared to other highly-rated sovereigns, which may offset the sovereign’s credit strengths explained below,” the company said, in a statement.
In Trump World, all the discussion was about the former president’s highly politicized civil fraud trial in New York and how it would backfire by making Trump a more formidable candidate. Meanwhile, left-leaning outlets were hyping GOP dysfunction in the House and the Republican losses in the off-year elections as an early indicator that Biden will fare better than expected next November. But one development that sent shock waves through the entire class of paid political consultants inside the Beltway went almost unmentioned publicly. A topic of constant discussion and not a little bit of anxiety on both sides was the extraordinarily strong showing of third-party candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in two recent national polls. Both of the polls showed Kennedy leading both President Biden and former President Trump among the key electoral demographics of independent voters and voters under 45 years of age.
By Laura Rodríguez Presa- November 13, 2023
Over the past five months since arriving in Chicago, Andrea Carolina Sevilla’s parents have been unable to enroll her in school even though the reason they left everything behind in their native Venezuela was for her to have access to better education. In Venezuela, she said, she was lucky she could even attend school. Many other teenagers start working at an early age to help out their families, who often face extreme poverty. But she did not have the same luck in the city that she once dreamed of visiting. The family went from sleeping on the floor of a police station, to a crowded shelter, to a house on the Far South Side, and then back to the floor of the police station after her stepfather Michael Castejon, 39, couldn’t afford the rent. He could not find a job that paid enough without a work permit, he said.
By Nnamdi Egwuonwu and Alex Tabet- November 13, 2023
Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina announced Sunday night that he is dropping out of the 2024 Republican presidential campaign, shocking a TV interviewer and even his own campaign staff with an abrupt departure from the race. “When I go back to Iowa, it will not be as a presidential candidate. I am suspending my campaign," Scott said in an appearance on former GOP Rep. Trey Gowdy's Fox News program.
Former President Donald Trump is planning a widespread expansion of his first administration’s hardline immigration policies if he is elected to a second term in 2024, including rounding up undocumented immigrants already in the US and placing them in detention camps to await deportation, a source familiar with the plans confirmed to CNN. The plans, first reported by The New York Times, would necessitate building large camps to house migrants waiting for deportation and tapping federal and local law enforcement to assist with large-scale arrests of undocumented immigrants across the country.