hit him with the top marginal tax rates of the countries where all the best cars and phones are manufactured.
on debtor prisons https://video.vice.com/en_us/video/...rofit-justice-system/56f95141d675f3a8077011bd
Poll: Hutchinson, Cotton, Boozman under 50% with job approval ratings More polling in Arkansas Spoiler Latest NewsTalk Politics by Talk Business & Politics staff ( Hutchinson, the first-term GOP governor, is up for re-election in 2018, while Republican senators Boozman and Cotton are in the middle of their six-year senate terms. As part of a statewide poll of 784 voters, respondents were asked: Q. Do you approve or disapprove of the job Gov. Asa Hutchinson is doing? 45% Approve 26.5% Disapprove 28.5% Don’t Know Q. Do you approve or disapprove of the job Senator Tom Cotton is doing? 46% Approve 39% Disapprove 15% Don’t Know Q. Do you approve or disapprove of the job Senator John Boozman is doing? 35% Approve 36% Disapprove 29% Don’t Know In April 2017, Hutchinson’s job approval standing was 53-39%, while Cotton and Boozman have not been surveyed this year. “As a longtime observer of Arkansas politics, the variance in these numbers is very telling,” said Roby Brock, TB&P Editor-in-Chief. “My take is that Republicans don’t think enough is being done, Democrats don’t like what’s trying to be done, and Independents are unhappy with hyper-partisanship from both parties. People of all political persuasions are very frustrated and they’re signaling this in these job performance numbers.” ANALYSIS Dr. Jay Barth, professor of political science at Hendrix College, helped craft and analyze the poll. He offered this analysis: Hutchinson Governor Asa Hutchinson remains solidly “above water” with 46% of Arkansans approving of his work while 26.5% disapproving. That said, he does so with a somewhat atypical coalition of support. Importantly, the Governor is running a full 20 percent behind President Trump among Arkansas Republicans at 59% approval (as we reported earlier, Trump is at 79%). This shows a vulnerability for Hutchinson — who sharply criticized Trump during the 2016 GOP primary season — among “Country First” Conservatives, as core Trump supporters were described in last week’s Pew analysis of the American electorate. Hutchinson eventually threw strong support behind Trump and spoke positively for his candidacy from the convention through the election. While Gov. Hutchinson has numerous advantages in any GOP primary — name recognition, fundraising, and control of the state Republican party — he could have some vulnerability if a Trump-like opponent was able to gain external support and resources in next May’s primary. Gun activist and Fox News personality Jan Morgan has announced an exploratory campaign against Hutchinson. Hutchinson’s comparative weakness with his fellow partisans is compensated by his relative strength with Independents (they break 43% approve/33% disapprove for Hutchinson) and Democrats (31% approve of his performance). In particular, for a Republican, Hutchinson shows distinct popularity among African-Americans who break for Hutchinson 44% approve to 32% disapprove. The Governor does perform relatively poorly with voters under 45. Among both those under 30 and those 30-44, his approval numbers are in the 20s, but there is relatively little variation across gender or geography in his ratings. Cotton U.S. Senator Tom Cotton has developed his own “brand” during his relatively short time in electoral politics. To be sure, he is a polarizing figure, but the fact that he has loyal supporters aids him during a tough time for his party nationally and, to a lesser degree, in Arkansas. All told, 46% approve of Cotton’s performance, 39% disapprove, and 15% “don’t know.” Cotton performs strongly with Republicans (73% approve), among men (50% approve), and in Northwest Arkansas (55% approve). He also nears a majority among white respondents. Democrats disapprove of his performance (15% approve to 68% disapprove) as do a plurality of Independents (40% approve to 45% disapprove). He also does poorly with African-Americans (53% disapproval) and also lags with women (although his approval rate is higher than disapproval slightly). As he has been since his arrival on the political scene, Cotton is a lightning rod, but through being high-profile on issues of foreign affairs and immigration, he has been able to stand out at a time when most D.C. figures are seen as part of the problem rather than as part of the solution. Boozman Despite his two overwhelming elections for U.S. Senate, Senator John Boozman remains amazingly unknown among his constituents with nearly three in ten Arkansans without a clear opinion of his job performance. Because of the ill-will towards D.C. and towards the GOP establishment of which Boozman is a low-profile member, Boozman’s overall popularity suffers. The good news for the veteran politician is that his re-election was last year and another campaign is well in the future. Boozman performs particularly poorly with Republican voters (only 49% approval) and trails with Independents (31% approval to 42% disapproval). More unsurprisingly, 53% of Democrats disapprove of Boozman’s work in the Senate. As a former Third Congressional District congressman, the highest recognition numbers for Boozman are in Northwest Arkansas although his approval numbers are lower in that region than are those of Hutchinson, Cotton, or Trump. Boozman is relatively strong with African-Americans and with women, but attitudes of other groups (whites and men) with whom he has traditionally performed well pull down his overall numbers. In short, Sen. Boozman is a victim of a time in which his party is both divided and is blamed for the country’s being off the track. METHODOLOGY This survey was conducted on Monday, October 23, 2017. The poll, which has a margin of error of +/-3.5%, was completed using IVR survey technology among 784 Arkansas voters statewide. Age and gender were weighted. Age (weighted) 12% Under the age of 30 24% Between the ages of 30 and 44 39% Between the ages of 45 and 64 24% 65 or older Ethnicity 9% African-American 1% Asian-American 2% Latino 78% Caucasian or White 10% Other Party Identification 31% Democratic 36.5% Republican 27.5% Independent 5% Other Gender (weighted) 48% Male 52% Female All media outlets are welcome to reprint, reproduce, or rebroadcast information from this poll with proper attribution to Talk Business & Politics and Hendrix College.
Breitbart, other conservative outlets escalate anti-SpaceX campaign In Washington D.C., politics sometimes matter more than a rocket's power or price. Eric Berger - 11/1/2017, 8:09 AM Enlarge / SpaceX has launched 16 rockets this year, including two national security missions for the US military. SpaceX Spoiler The articles began appearing in late August, mostly in conservative publications such as Town Hall, Breitbart, and the Daily Caller and have since continued to trickle out through October. All of the dozen or so Web commentaries, variously styled as op-eds or contributions, have made the same essential point—that Elon Musk is benefiting from crony capitalism and must be stopped. This is not a particularly new line of attack against Musk, especially among some conservatives who decry the public money his companies have received to build solar power facilities, electric cars, and low-cost rockets. Yet most of these articles have been quite specific in their attacks, pinpointing a single section in the 2018 National Defense Authorization Act as particularly troublesome to the republic. Further Reading For some reason, Ron Paul has taken to Fox News to skewer SpaceX The articles, several of which are written by former US Rep. Ron Paul or his associates, have the same general theme: Musk has given lavishly to politicians, especially Arizona senator John McCain (R). In return, McCain added Section 1615 to this year's defense authorization bill, which includes language to restrict the military from investing in new launch systems. With this language, the articles assert, Musk seeks a monopoly on the US national security launch market. In addition to saying this allows Musk to fleece taxpayers, some of the more overdone authors assert that it could kill Americans. This gallery highlights selected quotes from various anti-SpaceX op-eds published in recent months. Washington Times Fox News: Crony defense budget hands SpaceX a monopoly - why? (Sept. 12, 2017) Fox News Town Hall: Can Space Flight Rise Above Parochial Politics? (Aug 31, 2017) Town Hall The Federalist: Why Congress Would Be Insane To Give SpaceX A Monopoly Over Space Launches. (Sept. 15, 2017) The Federalist Rare: Cronyism in space? Ron Paul is right to blast it. (Sept. 18, 2017) Rare American Thinker: Is Elon Musk Undercutting National Security? (Sept. 19, 2017) American Thinker Washington Times: Patriotism is last refuge of John McCain, Elon Musk (Oct. 17, 2017) Washington Times Breitbart: Elon Musk Giveaways Won’t "Make America Safe Again" Breitbart The Hill: Congress should encourage, not eliminate, competition in spaceflight. (Oct. 26, 2017) The Hill The American Spectator: Elon Musk’s Latest Crony Score The American Spectator Daily Caller: NDAA Should Not Give Elon Musk A Monopoly. (Oct. 27, 2017) Daily Caller "As the Senate deliberates the FY 2018 [National Defense Authorization Act], it should listen to the real experts on space-related matters, not pseudo experts with vested financial interests, like Musk donor recipient John McCain," wrote Jerry Rogers, in The Federalist, in a typical op-ed. "Musk’s business model of using the government to corner the market in the electric car industry isn’t optimal, but at least it doesn’t threaten American lives." Section 1615 The central canard of these attacks is that John McCain did not, in fact, add "Section 1615" to the defense authorization act, which is now being finalized by a conference between the House and Senate. This clause does not exist at all in the Senate language. Rather, it was inserted into the House legislation by U.S. Rep. Mike Rogers, a Republican from Alabama. Rogers' language concerns the procurement of new US-made rockets. The US military is required to have assured access to space, and this means two separate launch systems to get its spy and communications satellites into orbit. It currently has three—the Delta and Atlas families of rockets built by United Launch Alliance (ULA), and the Falcon 9 rocket by SpaceX. However, ULA wants to stop building the Delta rockets because they are expensive, and the Atlas fleet uses Russian-made RD-180 rocket engines, which Congress wants to phase out. Further Reading Air Force budget reveals how much SpaceX undercuts launch prices This leaves the possibility that, absent Congressional action, the US military could find itself with only SpaceX's rocket to reach space within a few years. Therefore, the US military is spending a few billion dollars over this decade to develop one or more new launch systems to replace the Delta and Atlas fleets with vehicles powered by US-made engines. As a long-time national defense contractor for the government, ULA is at the front of the line for these funds. The Colorado-based company, which was formed by Boeing and Lockheed Martin in 2005, prefers to build a new rocket, named Vulcan. ULA has said it wants to use Blue Origin's American-made BE-4 rocket engine for Vulcan because this engine is further along in development. However, Vulcan could also use an engine under development by Aerojet Rocketdyne, the AR1. Finally, it's possible the AR1 engine could be a "drop in" replacement for the RD-180 engine in the existing Atlas V rocket, although there is some debate about how simple it would be to use the AR1 in this manner. Section 1615 restricts how the Secretary of Defense can spend money on these new launch systems, allowing funds to only be spent on engine development, the interface between a new engine (i.e., AR1) and an existing launch vehicle (i.e., Atlas V), or to pay for expenses unique to military launches, such as certification costs and vertical integration of payloads. Critically, for ULA, it does not allow for spending on other parts of the rocket. This restriction is what the conservative editorial writers are railing against. Who benefits, who doesn’t Two sources familiar with the legislation told Ars that Rogers added Section 1615 specifically to benefit Aerojet and its AR1 rocket engine. "The purpose of the provision is simple," one Washington DC source said. "Instead of the Department of Defense continuing their open-ended, market-friendly risk reduction investment across several providers to enable Russian-engine-free launch capabilities, Rogers wants DOD to fund Aerojet to build AR1 to be inserted into Atlas V." In other words, the language benefits Aerojet by favoring its "drop in" engine solution over building a completely new Vulcan rocket. Further Reading Blue Origin’s new engine isn’t good enough for some congressmenOne of the battles here, then, is between Aerojet on one side and ULA and Blue Origin on the other. Ars has previously reported that Rogers appears to favor Aerojet, as he has called into question the ability of Blue Origin to develop the BE-4 rocket engine. With Section 1615, Rogers is preventing the military from giving ULA money to develop the Vulcan launch system, including the core stage, boosters, second stage, and other rocket components. This leaves ULA is in a difficult spot. Its parent companies, Boeing and Lockheed Martin, have indicated that they are unlikely to invest significantly in the Vulcan rocket without substantial money from the US military. For example, during an earnings call in January, 2016, Lockheed's chief financial officer, Bruce Tanner, said of the Vulcan rocket, "Right now, it is not our expectation that that will require contributions from the parents, but that’s something that we got to work out sort of between our partner and the US government to ensure that." SpaceX gets the blame? If Aerojet benefits from Section 1615, and ULA the loser, why does SpaceX get the blame in these editorials? Although the California company does not appear to be responsible for Section 1615, it does make a convenient target. After all, SpaceX would not oppose this language, because it allows the military to continue providing funding for SpaceX's own methane-based Raptor engine. There is also little love lost between SpaceX and its competitor ULA, so SpaceX would be fine with legislation that hurts ULA. For opponents of Section 1615, therefore, SpaceX, its lightning rod chief executive Musk, and known political ally McCain are convenient stooges rather than Rogers, the chairman of the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Strategic Forces. All the same, it does seem like a cheeky line of attack to accuse SpaceX of crony capitalism. While the company did receive some NASA funding to bring the Falcon 9 rocket to fruition, most of the research and engine development was funded privately. And it was only because of the Falcon 9 that SpaceX broke ULA's monopoly on the national security launch market, and substantially lowered the price taxpayers pay for government launches. Further Reading How America’s two greatest rocket companies battled from the beginningArs spoke with half a dozen industry officials about these op-eds on background, to try and discern who or what was behind them. SpaceX declined comment. A spokeswoman for ULA did not respond to a request for comment about these articles. One source speculated that there are probably several stakeholders behind this Astroturf-like activity. "This is business as usual," one aerospace industry source said of the litany of anti-SpaceX commentaries. "I don’t think it is that effective. It’s like going to a space conference and it’s a bunch of space people that hear what they expect to hear with no new listeners."
If you were beginning to doubt that we're fucked, enjoy this read The State of Free Speech and Tolerance in America Attitudes about Free Speech, Campus Speech, Religious Liberty, and Tolerance of Political Expression https://www.cato.org/survey-reports/state-free-speech-tolerance-america#23 example: 51% of strong liberals say it’s “morally acceptable” to punch Nazis. 53% of Republicans favor stripping U.S. citizenship from people who burn the American flag. 51% of Democrats support a law that requires Americans use transgender people’s preferred gender pronouns. 47% of Republicans favor bans on building new mosques. 58% of Democrats say employers should punish employees for offensive Facebook posts. 65% of Republicans say NFL players should be fired if they refuse to stand for the national anthem.
damn, depressing. The one thing where I think i could be considered against free speech is the facebook thing. If you have a job where you significantly uphold the image of a company your social media should reflect that. So I think the twitter account of a reporter should be treated differently from that of a factory worker. In 1 such case the difference between private and public is clear, when its not clear, the employer has certain rights to limit free speech id say. People in media could still post such opinions if theyd explicitely state it was a privately held belief etc
Those numbers have to be way off. 51 percent of Dems seriously think it should be a law that you have to use preferred pronouns? As open-minded as I want to be, I find that hard to believe.
Kelly also stubbornly said that he would “never” apologize to Rep. Frederica Wilson after his inaccurate and thinly-veiled racist comments directed toward her in a nationally televised press conference were proven wrong when video surfaced affirming Rep. Wilson’s recollection of the event. Needless to say, the entire interview set social media on fire and none responded better than Ta-Nehisi Coates, one of the best writers in America. He wasted no time delivering an absolutely brutal takedown of John Kelly’s historically inaccurate comments set the record straight with an impromptu class on the Civil War. If you do nothing else today, read this thread
I don't really trust Donna Brazile to give an impartial account of anything involving the Democratic primary or the inner machinations of the party. I have no doubt DWS was a shit party head, but the picture Donna paints of concern for Bernie and party unity doesn't jive with what we know about Donna's handling of primary debate questions. She's in CYA mode, same as every other party hack responsible for this loss.
If even half the shit she says is true then that's still concerning, especially about the down ballot funding.
Well, they're a pro corporate party, but not as pro corporate as the other guys, so they are stuck in a weird middle ground where neither the corporate bloodsuckers nor the average small donor is especially inclined to donate.
She's trying to patch the wounds between Bernie Bros and the DNC because Bernie is the candidate in 20.
Who is they And if he wants it it's likely his, he's got the best approval and name recognition by a sizable margin. He might continue doing things like his webcast with Warren today then anoint her but I'm not sure.
tell him the car was invented by a French monarchist, and the cell phone was invented by a highly-regulated utility.
Ana Kasparian from TYT is apparently announcing tomorrow that she will be running for Feinstein's senate seat
The DNC couldn't stop Bernie now. Those around him have built campaign infrastructures that rival both major political parties. He's flush in cash. The biggest reason you see Bernie still positioning himself for a run is that there are no other Alphas stepping up to do so as of yet. Having said all that. those resources would be better spent on getting progressives in the legislature.
LOL wat? Announce Michelle as the 2020 candidate, go on vacation until December 2019, and fly her ass in to be sworn into office. Michelle Obama would double the votes Hillary got or Bernie would get, and play directly into the Left's need to rescue oppressed groups. A black woman? winner winner "whatever the hell they eat" (-Fuzzy Zoeller) dinner
So much is being made about Clinton and the DNC, but the bigger story is of how involvement and participation on the Left declined after Obama was elected. It's a lesson to be learned. The Democrats were busy celebrating the victory, they decided that the job was done. The DNC basically became a shell of what it should be, and was basically funded by only wealthy donors. We wonder how we lose 1500 seats in 8 years, but we come to find our the main support vehicle is deeply in debt. Worse, it was spending money on consultants and pollsters instead of using resources to motivate the base to activism. Progressives upset at the 2016 primaries need to point the finger at ourselves. The DNC is just like the government in that it will assume the "personality" of those who choose to serve. From building our county party and on the trail, I can say without a doubt w are on the way to becoming strong again. It's going to take long term commitment. An understanding that getting into office isn't the goal, but just another milestone on the path to transforming our government.
Haven't finished but yuck Is Tom Cotton the Future of Trumpism? The junior senator from Arkansas is a hybrid of insurgent and old guard. Spoiler By Jeffrey Toobin Cotton plays successfully to the warring constituencies of the Republican party. Illustration by Justin Renteria; photograph by Zach Gibson / Pool / Getty If you believed the national media, the week of the annual Republican Party fund-raising dinner, in Fort Smith, Arkansas, in late August, was one of the worst of Donald Trump’s Presidency. The President had just responded to the unrest in Charlottesville with statements that appeared sympathetic to neo-Nazi demonstrators, and even some members of his own party were denouncing him. The White House staff was in turmoil, following the departure of Reince Priebus as chief of staff, and the Senate had failed to pass a replacement for the Affordable Care Act. The featured speaker for the evening was the state’s junior senator, Tom Cotton, who seized the chance to address the disquiet in the nation’s capital. At forty years old, Cotton is the youngest member of the Senate, and he retains the erect posture and solemn bearing that he displayed as a member of the Army’s Old Guard, which presides at military ceremonies, including funerals, in Washington. He’s let his hair grow, a little, since his Army days. When he first ran for office, in 2012—he served a single term in the House of Representatives before winning his Senate seat, in 2014—Cotton was often described as robotic on the stump, but he’s improved somewhat as a speaker, even if he still projects more intelligence than warmth. In this manner, he gave an assignment to the two hundred or so guests in the hotel ballroom. “Go home tonight and turn on one of the nighttime comedy shows. Tomorrow morning, turn on one of the cable morning-news shows. This Saturday, watch ‘Saturday Night Live,’ ” he said. “All the high wardens of popular culture in this country, they love to make fun of Donald Trump, to mock him, to ridicule him. They make fun of his hair, they make fun of the color of his skin, they make fun of the way he talks—he’s from Queens, not from Manhattan. They make fun of that long tie he wears, they make fun of his taste for McDonald’s.” He went on, “What I don’t think they realize is that out here in Arkansas and the heartland and the places that made a difference in that election, like Michigan and Wisconsin, when we hear that kind of ridicule, we hear them making fun of the way we look, and the way we talk, and the way we think.” It was, on one level, a breathtaking leap—to equate mockery of a louche New York billionaire with attacks on the citizens of this small, conservative city, which lies across the Arkansas River from Oklahoma. But Cotton’s appeal to his audience for solidarity with Trump, which was greeted with strong applause, represented just one part of his enthusiastic embrace of the President. Stephen Bannon, Trump’s former top strategist and the chairman of the right-wing Web site Breitbart News, told me, “Next to Trump, he’s the elected official who gets it the most—the economic nationalism. Cotton was the one most supportive of us, up front and behind the scenes, from the beginning. He understands that the Washington élite—this permanent political class of both parties, between the K Street consultants and politicians—needs to be shattered.” At the same time, Cotton has maintained strong ties with the establishment wing of the G.O.P. Karl Rove, President George W. Bush’s chief political adviser, told me, “Cotton is not like a Steve Bannon, who wants to blow up the existing structure, uproot the ideology of the Republican Party and replace it with something new. He’s a rising star. He’s capable of building bridges within the Party. He wants to get things done.” In recent weeks, several Republican Senators have denounced Trump for his intemperance and his dishonesty. Jeff Flake, of Arizona, and Bob Corker, of Tennessee, condemned Trump and announced that they would not seek reëlection in 2018. Ben Sasse, of Nebraska, whose term is not up until 2020, said that, by threatening journalists, Trump was violating his oath to defend the Constitution. Cotton has made a different bet, offering only the gentlest of criticisms of the President. When, in the course of several weeks of conversations, I asked Cotton about one or another of Trump’s controversial statements or tweets, he always responded in the same manner. “The President puts things sometimes in a way that I would not,” he said in early October. “But he was still nominated by our voters and elected by the American people to be our President, and if we want him to accomplish our agenda we need to set him up for success.” Even Trump’s latest political traumas have not shaken Cotton’s faith in him. Following the indictment of Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort and former campaign adviser Rick Gates, last week, Cotton urged a prompt resolution of the investigation into the Trump campaign, but he did not call for the removal of Robert Mueller, the special counsel. “What’s in the best interest of everyone is for these inquiries to move forward, and to follow them to their proper conclusion as quickly as possible,” Cotton said. Roby Brock, who hosts the leading public-affairs television program in Arkansas, told me, “From the beginning, Tom could play to both the establishment and the Tea Party. Everyone recognizes he’s got a firm set of conservative principles, but that makes him a polarizing figure. There are a lot of people here, too, who hate him and think he’s the Antichrist. The only thing everyone agrees on is that he wants to be President someday.” To make that next leap, Cotton expresses the militarism, bellicosity, intolerance, and xenophobia of Donald Trump, but without the childish tweets. For those who see Trump’s Presidency as an aberration, or as a singular phenomenon, Cotton offers a useful corrective. He and his supporters see Trump and Trumpism as the future of the Republican Party. In the early days of the Trump Administration, Cotton exercised influence from behind the scenes. Bannon told me, “He spent a lot of time in my little war room, and he gave us a lot of good advice. He was the one who told us about John Kelly,” the former Marine Corps general who is now Trump’s chief of staff. (The Senator and Kelly had met at a security conference when Cotton was in the House.) In recent months, however, Cotton’s influence has become more apparent, as Trump has embraced some of his most high-profile positions. In September, President Trump repealed the Obama-era executive order known as DACA, which protected the so-called Dreamers from deportation, but he said that he also wanted Congress to pass a law that would allow them to remain in the United States, even making a preliminary deal with Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic congressional leaders. But, after Cotton spoke out against a quick deal to protect the Dreamers, Trump made a formal proposal to Congress that attached many strings Cotton had demanded. “I had dinner with the President and General Kelly on October 2nd, and we talked about DACA,” Cotton told me. “They said that Chuck and Nancy had done some post-dinner spin, to go along with the post-dinner dessert, about what the President actually agreed to on DACA. I think the fix that the President announced is a better step in the right direction.” The following month, Trump gave Cotton a victory on the touchstone issue of his Senate career by decertifying Iran’s compliance with the nuclear-arms deal that the Obama Administration had negotiated. “I told the President in July that he shouldn’t certify that Iran was complying with the agreement,” Cotton told me. “Putting aside the issue of technical compliance or noncompliance, it’s clear that the agreement is not in our national interest.” Following Trump’s action, Cotton joined forces with Senator Corker, the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, on a proposal that, if passed, would likely lead to the termination of the Iran nuclear deal and the reimposition of American sanctions. “Let there be no doubt about this point,” Cotton said, in a recent speech to the Council on Foreign Relations. “If we are forced to take action, the United States has the ability to totally destroy Iran’s nuclear infrastructure. And, if they choose to rebuild it, we could destroy it again, until they get the picture. Nor should we hesitate if compelled to take military action.” In describing his preferred approach to negotiations with Iran, Cotton said, “One thing I learned in the Army is that when your opponent is on his knees you drive him to the ground and choke him out.” In response, a questioner pointed out that killing a prisoner of war is not “American practice.” (It is, in fact, a war crime.) Similarly, in North Korea, Cotton supports Trump’s brinkmanship with Kim Jong Un, and excoriates China for its failure to rein in its ally. “Time and time again, Beijing shows that it is not up to being the great power it aspires to be,” Cotton said. (His hostility toward China endears him to the Bannon wing of the Republican Party, which views the U.S.-China relationship as the defining conflict of the modern world.) Cotton has emerged as such a close ally of the Trump White House that one recent report suggested that the President would name him director of the C.I.A. if Mike Pompeo, the current director, were to replace Rex Tillerson as Secretary of State. (Trump is widely believed to be dissatisfied with Tillerson.) In a conversation in mid-October, Cotton did not dismiss the possibility of taking the C.I.A. job. “I am pleased to be a senator,” he told me. “But, of course, I will always take a call from the President, and he has called me many times.” As a member of Trump’s Administration, Cotton would ratify the President’s instincts. He offers Trump a certainty that matches his own, especially about the threats the nation faces and the best ways to address them. In August, I visited Cotton in the house where he grew up, in Yell County, Arkansas. When I arrived, Cotton’s father was also walking in the door. Len Cotton did not offer to shake hands right away, because he had just welcomed two newborn calves to the family farm, and he thought it prudent to wash up first. The Cottons have been in Arkansas for six generations, and Tom’s parents make their living running what’s known as a cow-calf operation, on several plots of land in the Arkansas River Valley. In the specialized world of beef-and-dairy production, the Cottons’ business is the first stage—the production of the cows, which are sold to ranchers. The Cottons have always done some farming, but when Tom was a boy his mother was a public-school teacher and a middle-school principal, and his father worked for state government, doing inspections for the Department of Health. Like most people in Arkansas at the time, Tom’s parents were Democrats. But the leitmotif of Tom Cotton’s political career has been the decline of the Democratic Party among white voters in Arkansas. “The Democratic Party has drifted away from them,” Tom told me, as his parents sat nearby. “Bill Clinton would be repudiated by his own party today. Hillary Clinton repudiated a lot of her husband’s chief accomplishments when he was in office. So that’s a real fundamental story about politics in Arkansas and politics across the heartland.” Tom had an idyllic boyhood in the town of Dardanelle, centered on sports and school, where he excelled, and he won admission to Harvard. When he arrived in Cambridge, in the fall of 1995, he still had braces on his teeth, though he had grown to a full six feet five; friends remember him as a bit of a loner, at least at first. He was also already a conservative, if not a Republican, as he was not afraid to let his new neighbors know. One late night during his freshman year, he and his roommates were joined by Kristin Gore, the daughter of the Vice-President, who had a room nearby. Gore began discussing the environmental ills of cattle farming. As one roommate recalled, Cotton listened for a time, and then fumed, “Kristin, you don’t know shit about cows!” (Neither Gore nor Cotton remembered this exchange, though Cotton, who said he had a friendly relationship with the Vice-President’s daughter, remarked, “That sounds like something I might say.”) Cotton began writing an opinion column for the Crimson, the campus daily, where he made a name for himself as an outspoken dissenter on a liberal campus. Shortly before he graduated, in 1998, Thomas B. Cotton wrote a farewell to his readers. “I never sought to be loved or to be treated justly,” he said. “How could I? I wrote against sacred cows, such as the cult of diversity, affirmative action, conspicuous compassion and radical participatory democracy. I wrote in favor of taboo notions, such as Promise Keepers, student apathy, honor and (most unforgivably) conservativism.” After college, Cotton went to Harvard Law School. He worked in law firms during the summers and landed a clerkship with a federal appeals-court judge. He appeared headed for a life of prosperous anonymity in law, but the attacks of September 11, 2001, upended his plans. “I was going to play intramural basketball, enjoy my last year in school, and then, in the second week of school, the attacks happened, and that changed my orientation,” he told me. “I spent a lot more time from that point forward thinking about the threat we faced, reading about history, reading military history, started thinking about joining the Army.” Cotton approached the matter with the careful deliberation that has characterized his career. He decided to take the clerkship he had already accepted, with Judge Jerry Smith, on the Fifth Circuit, then work at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, in Washington, to start paying off his student loans. “I thought he had a great future at the firm,” Bill Kilberg, the partner who supervised Cotton’s work, told me. “Then, one day in 2004, Tom came and said he was thinking about leaving the firm to join the Army. I said, ‘Tom, the Army has plenty of lawyers, they really don’t need you, and it’s not necessary for you to join the Army to serve.’ He said, ‘Oh, no, I’m not going to be a lawyer. I’m going to be an Airborne Ranger.’ And I looked at him and said, ‘Tom, have you talked to your mother about this?’ ” When I asked Cotton about the decision, he said, “The Army needs lawyers, but that’s not the heart of the Army’s mission. The Army’s mission is the infantry’s mission.” He went on, “So I wanted to do that mission, wanted to do the heart of it. I wanted to lead troops in combat.” Cotton served with the 101st Airborne Division in Iraq. He led ninety-six-hour patrols in the field, followed by thirty-six-hour stretches at a base near Baghdad. The base had Internet access, and one day in the summer of 2006 Cotton saw that the Times had disclosed, over objections from the Bush Administration, the existence of certain terrorist-surveillance programs. Cotton fired off a letter to the editor, copying several conservative Web sites, and then left on a patrol, where he was cut off from all electronic contact with the United States. “Congratulations on disclosing our government’s highly classified anti-terrorist-financing program,” the letter begins. “I apologize for not writing sooner. But I am a lieutenant in the United States Army and I spent the last four days patrolling one of the more dangerous areas in Iraq.” The letter combined outrage, overstatement, and savvy politics in a manner that Trump would perfect a decade later. “You may think you have done a public service, but you have gravely endangered the lives of my soldiers and all other soldiers and innocent Iraqis here,” Cotton wrote. “Next time I hear that familiar explosion—or next time I feel it—I will wonder whether we could have stopped that bomb had you not instructed terrorists how to evade our financial surveillance.” He continued, “And, by the way, having graduated from Harvard Law and practiced with a federal appellate judge and two Washington law firms before becoming an infantry officer, I am well-versed in the espionage laws relevant to this story and others—laws you have plainly violated. I hope that my colleagues at the Department of Justice match the courage of my soldiers here and prosecute you and your newspaper to the fullest extent of the law. By the time we return home, maybe you will be in your rightful place: not at the Pulitzer announcements, but behind bars.” When Cotton returned to the base, he learned that the Times hadn’t run the letter but the Web sites had, and the chief of staff of the Army had distributed it to his subordinates. “I started hearing about Tom when he was still in the military, when I was state chair of our party,” Dennis Milligan, who is now the Arkansas state treasurer, told me. “As chair, you’re always looking for new talent, and people were talking about him even then. They knew he had given up all that money in the law to serve his country.” From Iraq, Cotton was summoned to serve in the Old Guard. (Cotton hoped he had won appointment to the prestigious unit on merit, but the Army had simply summoned the six tallest lieutenants in Iraq.) Later, he volunteered for a tour in Afghanistan, where he won a Bronze Star, before leaving the service, in 2009. After a brief stint working at McKinsey, Cotton returned to Arkansas to run for Congress in his home district. Mike Ross, a Democrat, had retired, and Cotton, campaigning with a heavy emphasis on his military service, won the open seat with about sixty per cent of the vote. Arkansas, though generally regarded as a Southern state, exists at a crossroads of regions that have been slipping away from Democrats for decades. The booming north, along the Missouri border, has a Midwestern feel, especially because Walmart’s headquarters, in Bentonville, has attracted so many newcomers. The mountainous west owes much to its neighbors in Texas and Oklahoma; the plains of the east and the south, with their cotton fields and rice farms, are conspicuously Southern. “You can tell from the music,” Mark Pryor, a former Democratic senator from Arkansas, told me. “In the mountains, it’s bluegrass and folk music, but in the east and south it’s blues. Memphis is just across the Mississippi. Half of those people at Sun Records were originally from Arkansas.” Pryor, more than anyone, has lived the recent political evolution of his state. His father, David (governor from 1975 to 1979, and senator from 1979 to 1997), along with Dale Bumpers (governor from 1971 to 1975, and senator from 1975 to 1999), and Bill Clinton (governor from 1979 to 1981 and 1983 to 1992), constitute the gifted political triumvirate that kept the Democratic Party alive in Arkansas after it had faded in nearby states. Clinton, of course, parlayed his moderate liberalism into two terms as President. Mark Pryor was elected state attorney general in 1998, and then won his Senate seat in 2002. Six years later, Republicans didn’t even field an opponent against him. But just six years after that, in 2014, Pryor lost in a landslide to the thirty-seven-year-old Tom Cotton. “For a long time, Arkansas Democratic politics was kept separate from national Democratic politics,” John Brummett, a political columnist at the Democrat-Gazette, the leading newspaper in the state, told me. “That continued in Arkansas through the nineties and into the two-thousands, because of Clinton. White rural conservatives here could look on the national Democratic Party and see the same guy as President that they were happy enough with in Arkansas.” But the trends that were altering the politics of neighboring states were percolating in Arkansas as well. “ ‘God, guns, and gays’—social issues—were driving white conservatives to the Republicans all along,” Brummett said. “It just exploded when Obama became President.” Before the Obama years, Republicans had won the occasional race in Arkansas; Mike Huckabee was first elected governor in the nineties. But in the past decade the state’s six-person congressional delegation and seven statewide elected officials have gone from nearly all Democrats to all Republicans. Toxic racial politics contributed to this shift. Max Brantley, a longtime local journalist, now with the Arkansas Times, said, “It is impossible not to see race as a central element in the fall of the Democratic Party here.” After the crisis over the integration of Little Rock Central High School, in 1957, racial politics in the state calmed for a time. This was in part because of the relatively small number of African-Americans; they make up roughly fifteen per cent of the population, as opposed to thirty per cent in the Deep South. “Discrimination was not as evident in Arkansas as it was in other Southern states,” Joyce Elliott, a veteran state senator, said. “It took a black President to bring out the threat.” She added, “I would always say to my liberal white friends, ‘Oh, come on, surely it’s gotten better.’ And they’d say to me, ‘Oh, no, it hasn’t. You can’t believe what white people say about Obama in private—he’s Kenyan, he’s Muslim, they’d call him unprintable racial epithets.’ ” Brantley told me, “You needed to be here to see how quickly the politics changed after Obama came in. He is so deeply disliked here. I think a lot of people in Arkansas thought he was ‘uppity,’ to use the old smear.” Obama’s Presidency certainly coincided with, if it didn’t directly cause, the decimation of the Democratic Party in Arkansas. Republicans thrived by targeting Obama even in contests that had nothing to do with him. Republican candidates for justice of the peace inveighed against Obamacare, which they never referred to as the Affordable Care Act. When Cotton challenged Pryor, in 2014, he put Obama at the center of his campaign. In one television advertisement, featuring a grainy black-and-white video of Obama, Cotton vowed, “We need a senator who will hold the President accountable.” Another showed Obama saying that he wasn’t on the ballot but his policies were. “President Obama is finally right about something,” Cotton said, in response. A third ad ended with the tagline “Mark Pryor—voting with Obama, voting against Arkansans like you.” Cotton also benefitted from enormous outside spending by conservative groups, including some affiliated with the Koch brothers, who have substantial holdings in Arkansas. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, outside groups spent twenty-three million dollars for Cotton, compared with fourteen million for Pryor. Cotton rejects the notion that race had anything to do with his victory, or with the rise of the Republican Party in Arkansas. “I don’t think that’s all that different from the intense unpopularity of George Bush in 2006 and 2008,” he told me, in a conversation in his Senate office. “The President’s the head of the Party, he takes up most of the attention in American politics, and when he’s very unpopular opponents in the other party tend to run against him, whether they’re running for the United States Senate or whether they’re running for justice of the peace.” Besides, he said, Democrats in Arkansas had a special reason to disdain Obama: “It wasn’t because Barack Obama was black, it was because Barack Obama stopped the Clinton restoration.” As reviled as President Obama was in Arkansas, the Affordable Care Act has proved successful and popular in the state. About three hundred thousand people, which amounts to more than ten per cent of the state’s population, have taken advantage of the law to obtain health insurance. The state’s governor, Asa Hutchinson, is a conservative Republican, but he’s urged Congress to protect the money that the state receives under the program. He has, however, made a change. The program is not called Obamacare but, rather, Arkansas Works. It apparently took the removal of the President’s name to make the law palatable to Arkansans. On the day after I visited Cotton’s family’s home, I told him that I had driven the scenic route back to Little Rock. “That’s because you drove along the Ouachita Mountains, which is the only range in Arkansas that goes west to east,” he said. “It provides more attractive views of the sunset than the north-south ranges.” This was an accurate, if rather bloodless, assessment of the aesthetics of the countryside, one that might be made by “Star Trek” ’s Mr. Spock, whom Cotton, with his air of icy certainty, somewhat resembles. “I remember the first time I met Tommy,” Trey Gowdy, a South Carolina congressman, told me. “We were debating a medical-malpractice bill on the floor of the House, and he comes up and starts talking about the details of the bill. And I said, ‘First of all, who are you?’ He said he was the new congressman from Arkansas. And I said, ‘You can’t be from Arkansas, because you’re wearing shoes.’ And then he starts telling me to read some law-review article about malpractice by Robert Bork or someone. And I said, ‘Dude, the chess club meets around the corner.’ ” (Gowdy later became a close friend of Cotton and his wife, Anna, a lawyer and former prosecutor.) Shortly after Cotton was elected to the House, the Senate passed a comprehensive immigration-reform bill, which offered a path to citizenship for some undocumented aliens. Cotton was among the leaders of the successful effort to persuade John Boehner, then the Speaker, to block the bill from even coming up for a vote in the House. When we chatted at the kitchen table of his boyhood home, Cotton explained his opposition. “It was the élite, bipartisan consensus—‘It’s the only possible solution’—another idea which the great and the good in Washington love, but wrongheaded in almost every particular,” he said. “If you live in a big city and you work in an office building, immigration is almost an unalloyed good for you. . . . It makes the price of services that you pay for a little bit more affordable—whether it’s your nanny to take care of your kids for you, or landscaping your yard, or pedicures, manicures, that sort of thing. And you get a lot of exciting new fusion restaurants as well. “But if you live and work in a community where they have a large illegal-immigrant population that’s straining the public school, that’s clogging up the emergency room when you’re trying to get care, that makes it more dangerous to drive in the roads because people don’t have driver’s licenses or they don’t have insurance, or if they are bidding down the wages or even taking jobs away from you, then it doesn’t look nearly so good,” Cotton said. He endorses Trump’s plan to build a wall on the Mexican border—“Walls work,” he often says—and is a lead sponsor of a bill, strongly supported by the White House, that would cut legal immigration roughly in half. (Cotton’s views on immigration are debatable in every particular. It’s far from clear that a border wall with Mexico would “work” to stop illegal immigration in any meaningful way. Most economists believe that immigrants, legal and otherwise, add more to the economy than they take from it, and that their presence in the labor force does not lead to lower wages over all.) As a legislator, Cotton has shown little deference to his elders. John Cornyn, the senior senator from Texas, told me that new senators used to sit back for a while. “But Tom proved right away that he was very engaged and knowledgeable,” Cornyn said. “He probably knows more about geopolitics than most senators.” In March of his first year in the Senate, Cotton wrote an open letter to the “Leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran,” which was co-signed by forty-six other Republican senators, warning the mullahs that Congress might undo any agreement they reached with Obama. The letter was denounced by Executive Branch officials as an attempt to interfere in a diplomatic initiative, but Cotton regards it as a triumph. In his recent speech at the Council on Foreign Relations, he boasted about the letter: “Didn’t I warn the ayatollahs that this deal might not survive if it wasn’t a treaty? I think I did.” When I asked Cotton what he learned during the Iraq War, he replied, “Security comes first.” He continued, “In 2003, there were a lot of grand ambitions of what a postwar Iraq would look like, and all the different things that needed to happen. And we neglected the most basic thing, which is physical security for the people there and for our troops. You see that now in Afghanistan as well. You see it in so many places around the world. You simply cannot neglect security, and without security there cannot be political compromise and reconciliation, there cannot be good governance, there cannot be economic development, there can’t be anything.” If Rand Paul is the leading Republican isolationist in the Senate, Cotton, in short order, has become heir to the opposing wing of the Party, the one associated with Senator John McCain, whose efforts to increase the defense budget Cotton has championed. “Tom is a veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan. He’s got mud on his boots,” McCain told me. “That means he has special credibility on those issues, just like the World War Two generation did around here for a long time. We need Tom and people like him.” But Cotton has gone well past McCain in his swaggering belligerence. In a February, 2015, hearing of the Armed Services Committee, Cotton announced that he favored keeping open the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay. “In my opinion, the only problem with Guantánamo Bay is there are too many empty beds and cells there right now,” Cotton said. “We should be sending more terrorists there for further interrogation to keep this country safe. As far as I’m concerned, every last one of them can rot in hell, but as long as they don’t do that they can rot in Guantánamo Bay.” (Even McCain favors closing Guantánamo, which he believes stains the reputation of the United States and serves as a recruitment tool for terrorists.) During the last days of the Obama Administration, Cotton also helped to sabotage a criminal-justice-reform bill, which had a meaningful chance of passage. Senator Cornyn, the second-ranking Republican, was pushing the bill, which would have ended mandatory minimum sentences for some narcotics offenders. Cotton took the public lead in making statements about the proposal which, as with his comments on Guantánamo, skirted the edge of demagoguery. “I don’t think any Republicans want legislation that is going to let out violent felons, which this bill would do,” Cotton said. His rhetoric helped turn a difficult political challenge into an impossible one, and the Republican leadership in the Senate never even brought the bill up for a vote. Cotton told me, “I think most Arkansans believe they elected me to help keep dangerous people in prison.” Jeff Sessions, Trump’s Attorney General, shares Cotton’s disdain for criminal-justice reform, and the move toward shorter sentences at the federal level has halted. For some Democrats, however, Cotton made his name in the Senate in a more personally poisonous way. In his first year, Cotton placed a hold on Obama’s nominations for the Ambassadors to Sweden, Norway, and the Bahamas, because of an unrelated dispute regarding the Secret Service. As months passed, Cotton released the holds on the Sweden and Norway envoys—because, he said, those countries were NATO allies—but he prevented a vote on Cassandra Butts, an old friend of the President’s, as the Ambassador to the Bahamas. Butts had been waiting for a Senate vote for eight hundred and thirty-five days when, in May, 2016, she died suddenly, of an undiagnosed cancer. Cotton said, “I feel very badly about her death and the timing of it. I wish the White House had just addressed this much earlier.” Still, Cotton’s actions left a bitter aftertaste for some of his colleagues. “I thought what he did was outrageous,” Richard Durbin, an Illinois Democrat and the assistant minority leader, said. “There is a point where winning a political battle isn’t worth it.” For the moment, at least, Cotton appears to be a hybrid of insurgent and old guard, who can play successfully to the warring constituencies of the Republican Party. As Bannon put it, “How many guys in town can give a speech at the Council on Foreign Relations and also get kudos in the pages of Breitbart? The answer is, one guy.” Cotton has carved out a clear Trumpism-without-Trump agenda: limits on immigration through legislation, deportations, and a wall; longer prison sentences for American convicts and suspected terrorists abroad; a bigger budget for the Department of Defense. The question is whether he has the charisma to sell that agenda to a broader public. Recently, at his Little Rock office, Cotton presented several medals to the family of George Anderson, a Second World War veteran who had died in 2006. Cotton began with a solemn introduction, but then, unexpectedly, Anderson’s family members, most of whom were elderly, took over the proceedings and began telling stories about George, who had made his living running car washes and coin-operated laundries. Cotton’s staff members and the assembled local reporters began chuckling at the rambling accounts of how George stacked his coins. A more deft politician might have joined in the fun, but Cotton just stood there, seemingly paralyzed by the deviations from good order. The ceremony came to a close when George Anderson’s surviving sister turned to Cotton and said, “As for you—you keep standing up for our President.” ♦ This article appears in the print edition of the November 13, 2017, issue, with the headline “Trump’s Inheritor.”