Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff told business leaders that the depreciation of the dollar impairs emerging countries’ growth following a 2012 meeting with President Barack Obama at the White House. (Photo: SHFWire/Robin Siteneski)
The Brazilian Senate after a session that lasted more than 20 hours voted 55 to 22 to impeach the country’s far left-wing president, Dilma Rousseff. In April, the lower house voted overwhelmingly to impeach Rousseff, a key ideological ally of U.S. President Barack Obama, on charges of using accounting tricks to hide large budget deficits.
While Brazil is also the most powerful economy in Latin America, it has suffered under the leadership of President Rousseff. In the end, her support in the government coalition fell away.
Rousseff will be suspended from office for up to six months and be replaced by her vice president. However, the nation’s future leadership is still anything but certain. The measure now effectively puts the president on trial. Rousseff will be suspended and replaced by Vice President Michel Temer while the process moves forward. She will have to defend herself in the trial-like setting.
Eduardo Cunha, the house speaker who led the push in the lower chamber for impeachment, is second in line to replace Rousseff in the event she is fully ousted. He is facing various charges including money laundering and allegedly accepting roughly $5 million in kickbacks in connection with the Petrobras scheme. Mr. Cunha could also be stripped of office over allegations he lied when he told a congressional committee he didn’t hold any foreign bank accounts.
Documents later emerged linking him and his family to Swiss bank accounts, but as is the case with most other leftwing regimes, Brazilian legislators and other top politicians are afforded “special legal status,” meaning they must be tried by the Supreme Court for crimes and are largely protected from prosecutions.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg speaks at the F8 summit in San Francisco, California, on March 25, 2015. (Photo: AFP/Getty Images)
Facebook remains uncontested as the social media champ of Wall Street. Its stock recently hit an all-time high while Twitter’s hit its low. As an enrollee in both, I can tell you why — and the why of it is reason for concern.
Beneath those warm visuals of Thanksgiving pies and bulldogs playing with canaries lies a data-gathering megalopolis focused on gathering one’s personal information and selling it. Facebook knows your social connections, your shopping habits and your likes. It does offer privacy settings, but they take effort. Meanwhile, users are under constant assault to “give it up” in the name of some convenience or pleasure.
Facebook’s genius is in its ability to hide this machinery. It seems a safe place. Users must reveal their identities, which cuts down on the careless hurling of snark.
Twitter users, by contrast, may operate under the veil of anonymity. That opens the forum to miscreants on destructive romps, posting blatant lies and sneak attacks. There are controls that let users block pests, but it requires being on constant patrol. Twitter is a tundra, offering little shelter to those lacking thick hides.
Some privacy advocates criticize Facebook for making users identify themselves. Not offering cover, they say, discourages those airing controversial political views. There may be some truth in that, but it also curbs outright deceit and baseless attacks. (One might add that protections against nasty assaults by masked creeps encourages free speech.)
On the subject of political speech, let’s address reports that Facebook employees have been jiggering the site’s trending news to favor liberal political views. The claims are hard to assess in that the former Facebook news curators making them have gone nameless.
Whether the charges are true or not, Facebook is a private company entitled to dish out the news as it chooses. What disturbs me more is that a not-very-skeptical public is more and more willing to submit to a single source for news.
The Facebook takeover of so much of our time, meanwhile, has dulled us to its business agenda, which relies on entering one’s mind and moving the furniture.
Consider its recent innovation — those adorable new reaction emoticons. They are an alternative to the problematic “like” button. When a friend posts a moving account of a father’s funeral, you want to be supportive, but is it appropriate to click “like”? You can instead click the new “sad” face to indicate sympathy.
This discussion makes me a little queasy, because the old style of delivering condolences — pressing ink on heavy vellum paper — was so much more human. Thanks to the ubiquity of Facebook, many probably now think clicking an emoji is a genuine expression of sympathy.
Though most users may regard the reaction buttons as a harmless amusement, for Facebook, they provide a massive source of new personal data to dump in the giant vat and get turned into algorithms. The end goal is enabling advertisers to efficiently place themselves into your feed and get in your Facebook face.
There’s been so much breast-beating over national security programs that monitor social media. But the scouring of the same personal information for commercial purposes proceeds with little resistance. (Amazing but apparently true, Twitter has cut off American counterterrorism agencies from a service that mines its vast trove of postings but still sells it to banks and others in the private sector.)
As for Facebook, it continues to suck us in with its sunny smile and the seemingly intimate connections it fosters. Leave it? I can’t, but perhaps the time has come for heightened vigilance over what one does there and how those doings are being sold.
Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton greets supporters as she arrives to speak to supporters at her election night watch party for the South Carolina Democratic primary in Columbia, S.C., Saturday, Feb. 27, 2016. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)
The bad legal news for Hillary Clinton continued to cascade upon her presidential hopes during the past week in what has amounted to a perfect storm of legal misery. Here is what happened.
Last week, Mrs. Clinton’s five closest advisors when she was Secretary of State, four of whom remain close to her and have significant positions in her presidential campaign, were interrogated by the FBI. These interrogations were voluntary, not under oath, and done in the presence of the same legal team which represented all five aides.
The atmosphere was confrontational, as the purpose of the interrogations is to enable federal prosecutors and investigators to determine whether these five are targets or witnesses. Stated differently, the feds need to decide if they should charge any of these folks as part of a plan to commit espionage, or if they will be witnesses on behalf of the government should there be such a prosecution; or witnesses for Mrs. Clinton.
In the same week, a federal judge ordered the same five persons to give videotaped testimony in a civil lawsuit against the State Department which once employed them in order to determine if there was a “conspiracy” — that’s the word used by the judge — in Mrs. Clinton’s office to evade federal transparency laws. Stated differently, the purpose of these interrogations is to seek evidence of an agreement to avoid the Freedom of Information Act requirements of storage and transparency of records, and whether such an agreement, if it existed, was also an agreement to commit espionage — the removal of state secrets from a secure place to a non-secure place.
Also earlier this week, the State Department revealed that it cannot find the emails of Bryan Pagliano for the four years that he was employed there. Who is Bryan Pagliano? He is the former information technology expert, employed by the State Department to problem shoot Mrs. Clinton’s entail issues.
Pagliano was also personally employed by Mrs. Clinton. She paid him $5,000 to migrate her regular State Department email account and her secret State Department email account from their secure State Department servers to her personal, secret, non-secure server in her home in Chappaqua, New York. That was undoubtedly a criminal act. Pagliano either received a promise of non-prosecution or an actual order of immunity from a federal judge. He is now the government’s chief witness against Mrs. Clinton.
It is almost inconceivable that all of his emails have been lost. Surely this will intrigue the FBI, which has reportedly been able to retrieve the emails Mrs. Clinton attempted to wipe from her server.
While all of this has been going on, intelligence community sources have reported about a below the radar screen, yet largely known debate in the Kremlin between the Russian Foreign Ministry and the Russian Intelligence Services. They are trying to come to a meeting of the minds to determine whether the Russian government should release some 20,000 of Mrs. Clinton’s emails that it obtained either by hacking her directly or by hacking into the email of her confidante, Sid Blumenthal.
As if all this wasn’t enough bad news for Mrs. Clinton in one week, the FBI learned last week from the convicted international hacker, who calls himself Guccifer, that he knows how the Russians came to possess Mrs. Clinton’s emails; and it is because she stored, received and sent them from her personal, secret, non-secure server.
Mrs. Clinton has not been confronted publicly and asked for an explanation of her thoughts about the confluence of these events, but she has been asked if the FBI has reached out to her.
It may seem counter-intuitive, but in white collar criminal cases, the FBI gives the targets of its investigations an opportunity to come in and explain why the target should not be indicted.
This is treacherous ground for any target, even a smart lawyer like Mrs. Clinton. She does not know what the feds know about her. She faces a damned-if-she-does and damned-if-she-doesn’t choice here.
Any lie and any materially misleading statement — and she is prone to both — made to the FBI can form the basis for an independent criminal charge against her. This is the environment that trapped Martha Stewart. Hence the standard practice among experienced counsel is to decline interviews by the folks investigating their clients.
But Mrs. Clinton is no ordinary client. She is running for president. She lies frequently. We know this because, when asked if the FBI has reached out to her for an interview, she told reporters that neither she nor her campaign had heard from the FBI; but she couldn’t wait to talk to the agents.
That is a mouthful, and the FBI knows it. First, the FBI does not come calling upon her campaign or even upon her. The Department of Justice prosecutors will call upon her lawyers — and that has already been done, and Mrs. Clinton knows it. So her statements about the FBI not calling her or the campaign were profoundly misleading, and the FBI knows that.
Mrs. Clinton’s folks are preparing for the worst. They have leaked nonsense from “U.S. officials” that the feds have found no intent to commit espionage on the part of Mrs. Clinton. Too bad these officials — political appointees, no doubt — skipped or failed Criminal Law 101. The government need not prove intent for either espionage or for lying to federal agents.
Volunteer Donna Cowan wears a Donald Trump bumper sticker on her leg as she hands out signs before a the start of a rally for the Republican presidential candidate in Eugene, Ore., Friday, May 6, 2016. (Photo: AP/Ted S. Warren)
A new Oregon primary poll conducted by DHM Research finds Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump on track to win their respective contests in The Beaver State next week. Looking forward to the general election in November, the poll both suggests Mrs. Clinton holds a lead over Mr. Trump and is rather weak for a Democratic presidential candidate in a deep blue state.
DHM Research, which is not graded for the PPD Pollster Scorecard, surveyed 901 likely Oregon voters from May 6 to May 9 for OPB and Fox 12. Mrs. Clinton leads Sen. Bernie Sanders 48% to 33% in the closed Democratic primary. There is no doubt the rules are hurting the self-described socialist, as he has largely swamped the frontrunner among independents.
Even in a higher turnout closed contest, Mrs. Clinton still leads Sen. Sanders 45% to 38%.
Unsurprisingly, the age gap seen in previous contests to date remains. Among younger Democratic voters, or those younger than 45, a whopping 64% support Sen. Sanders, while just 20% go for Clinton. Among those 45 and older, Mrs. Clinton draws 56% to just 25% for Sen. Sanders.
“I suspect Bernie Sanders will carry the younger vote by a larger margin than the poll indicates,” said PPD’s senior political analyst Richard Baris. “That’s rather low compared to the national average.”
Oregon may prove to be Mrs. Clinton’s last chance to stop Sen. Sander from gaining even more momentum. The senator, who is nearly mathematically incapable of reaching the needed delegates to secure the nomination, pulled off a double-digit win in West Virginia Tuesday night. In 2008, Mrs. Clinton defeated then-Sen. Barack Obama in coal country by 40 points.
On the Republican side, 45% of likely voters surveyed said they have voted or plan to vote for Mr. Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee for president. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and Ohio Gov. John Kasich, both of whom suspended their campaigns last week, garnered 14% each.
If the general election were held today, 43% said they would vote for Mrs. Clinton, the former secretary of state. Mr. Trump grabs 32% in a state that hasn’t voted for a Republican presidential candidate since 1984.
With his big wins in West Virginia and Nebraska on Tuesday night, Mr. Trump has broken the previous record for the most votes received in a Republican primary, beating out former President George W. Bush who received roughly 10.8 million votes in 2000.
FBI Director James Comey discusses race and law enforcement, Thursday, Feb. 12, 2015, at Georgetown University in Washington. (AP Photo/Cliff Owen)
Hillary Clinton has long claimed the investigation into her use of a private email server to conduct official State Department business was a security inquiry or review, as opposed to a criminal investigation. But FBI Director James Comey said on Wednesday in response to the claim that he doesn’t “know what that [a security inquiry] means,” meaning point blank there is no such thing.
“We’re conducting an investigation. That’s the bureau’s business. That’s what we do here at the FBI,” Director Comey said. “I’m not familiar with the term ‘security inquiry’.”
The Federal Bureau of Investigation has been conducting an investigation in order to discern whether Mrs. Clinton, the former secretary and frontrunner for the Democratic nomination, broke federal laws. As PPD previously reported, the investigation in January was expanded to include potential “public corruption” relating to her activities at the Clinton Foundation during her tenure at the State Department.
The director, who is personally involved in the investigation, made his remarks during what is called “a pen and pad” briefing with reporters in D.C. on Wednesday in response to a question from FOX News’ chief intelligence correspondent Catherine Herridge. Mr. Comey also wanted to assure the American people that there would be “no special set of rules” in this case or any other.
The investigation also turned to Mrs. Clinton’s longtime aides–Huma Abedin and Cheryl Mills–who had worked for her at the State Department, as well as former IT specialist Bryan Pagliano, who helped set up and maintain the server. The State Department revealed this week that it miraculously could not locate a single email from Mr. Pagliano during the four years he served as Clinton’s senior information technology staffer.
Mr. Pagliano was working for Mrs. Clinton on the side and was also paid by her “off the books” personally, at the same time he was collecting a government paycheck. He failed to disclose both the job and the salary, which is a potential crime all on its own. He had invoked the Fifth Amendment before he negotiated immunity from criminal prosecution. An intelligence source close to the case, as reported by Herridge, said Pagliano has been “a devastating witness” for the FBI against Mrs. Clinton.
Mr. Comey also said he is not phased by the presidential election cycle or timeline, making crystal clear the FBI will conduct its investigation thoroughly and on its own timeline. They have begun to hall in several key witnesses and will interview Mrs. Clinton, who has a known record of lying to the FBI, herself in the near future.
Mills, a top senior aide to Mrs. Clinton, reportedly stormed out of an interview with the FBI after they allegedly raised a question the two parties had previously negotiated to be off limits. Both Ms. Mills and Ms. Abedin, the latter being the wife to disgraced New York congressman Anthony Weiner, have lawyered up.
The Washington Post reported that Mills and her lawyer, Beth Wilkinson, inevitably returned to the interview room after a brief exit. However, Mills and Wilkinson repeated asked for breaks during the interview and conferred more than once. the FBI investigator’s questions that caused Mills and Wilkinson to walk out were related to the procedure used to produce emails for possible public release by the State Department. Mills ultimately did not answer questions about it because her attorney and Justice Department prosecutors deemed it confidential under attorney-client privilege.
Intersting Tidbit
One of Mr. Pagliano’s mysterious missing emails surface. In it he wishes Mrs. Clinton a “Happy Birthday Madam Secretary”. However, she didn’t just reply herself with a “thanks,” but rather forwarded the email to another staffer and instructed him to “please respond.” In simple pleasantry emails, it would Mrs. Clinton demands her underlings “respond.”
[brid video=”37364″ player=”2077″ title=”FULL Bill O’Reilly Interview with Donald Trump on May 10 2016″]
Donald Trump sat for an interview with Bill O’Reilly on May 10, 2016, on the night of his big wins in West Virginia and Nebraska, and reacted to new swing state polls. A slew of polling released on Tuesday showed Mr. Trump leading Hillary Clinton in Ohio, and trailing by a statistically insignificant 1-point margin in Pennsylvania and Florida.
Democratic presidential candidate and Vermont socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders holds a rally in Morgantown, West Virginia on May 5, 2016 at the Waterfront Place Hotel. (Photo: Video/PPD)
Vermont socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders defeated Hillary Clinton in the West Virginia Democratic Primary by double-digits, but the superdelegates don’t seem to care. With 96% of precincts reporting, Sen. Sanders crushed Mrs. Clinton 51.4% to 36%. The result, which were significantly underestimated by the polling average, stands in stark contrast from her performance in 2008. Mrs. Clinton clobbered then-Sen. Barack Obama 67.0% to 25.7% and took 20 of the state’s delegates to his 8.
Yet, Mrs. Clinton remains the disproportional choice for superdelegates in the state, a list of most West Virginia Democratic political leaders who cast an independent ballot at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, despite the statewide vote. Speaking of which, exit polls show that the vast majority of Democratic primary voters say they want the next president to moderate policy, or put another way, pursue policy less liberal than Obama’s policies. That’s how badly they view Mrs. Clinton.
In total, West Virginia has 37 delegates to the convention, with 29 of those awarded based on the results of the Tuesday presidential primary. The remaining eight superdelegates are simply not bound by the will of the voters. PPD has reached out to these people and those who have responded indicated they are not changing their minds. Six are supporting Clinton, barring some unforeseen and highly unlikely circumstances. Regan is supporting Sanders. Harris has not publicly announced her support and did not respond to several phone and email messages.
Six of The Mountain State’s eight super delegates are still supporting the former secretary of state, who also has a big national lead among superdelegates. While she leads in pledged delegates, as well, it is not really as significant and largely the result of her strength in the South where electorates have more minority voters. However, these are also states that are going to vote for the Republican presumptive nominee, Donald Trump, regardless of what some polls indicate.
Who are they?
West Virginia Democratic Superdelegates: Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin, Sen. Joe Manchin, party chairwoman Belinda Biafore, vice-chairman Chris Regan, Secretary of State Natalie Tennant, state Treasurer John Perdue, Charleston lawyer Pat Maroney, and Elaine Harris, a union leader for the Communications Workers of America.
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump models a coal miner’s helmet during his rally in Charleston, West Virginia, on May 5, 2016. (Photo: Mark Lyons/Getty Images)
It’s official: Donald Trump has set a new popular vote record for the Republican Party following his big wins in West Virginia and Nebraska on May 1. As of Wednesday morning, according to the PPD Popular Vote Tracker, Mr. Trump has received more than 10,912,988 million popular votes. That tops the former record-holder George W. Bush, who received more than 10.8 million votes in 2000.
In April, Mr. Trump surpassed former 2012 Republican nominee and Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney and it became pretty clear he was going to break the record. Worth noting, the Bush family, to include both former presidents and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, who was defeated by Mr. Trump and suspended his campaign after losing South Carolina, all have decided to skip the Republican National Convention this summer.
Interestingly, President Bush also set the record for the least number of votes in 2004. But that was his reelection bid and wasn’t opposed by any serious candidate. The previous no-vote record was held by President Ronald Reagan, won around 7.7 million votes in 1980 (don’t forget about population growth people).
The feat is actually understated by the raw numbers because, unlike the prior two primary cycles, the fields weren’t as large and the votes weren’t split by so much for such a long period of time. For example, Mr. Trump lost the Ohio Republican Primary to home state Gov. John Kasich with more votes than Hillary Clinton received when she won the Buckeye State. So, in a nutshell, there are still some in the Republican Party who want to stop the one candidate who excites voting and non-voting Americans from earning the nomination.
The voters behind these totals reside in several states Republicans have been unable to carry in a general election since 1988, to include Pennsylvania and other Rust Belt states. With the disproportional backing of working class voters, truly at levels we haven’t ever seen, recent polls show Mr. Trump can overwhelm Hillary Clinton in the Keystone State, where Gov. Romney lost to President Barack Obama by roughly 5 points.
To be sure, we are still very early in the cycle to be concerned with head-to-head polls. But these voters are the very voters the party will need if they hope to compete amid changing demographics in the U.S. And yet, the party has largely failed to heed the message.
UnitedHealth Group Inc. headquarters based in Minnetonka, Minnesota. (Photo: Associated/PressAP)
President Obama’s proudest accomplishment is increasing the number of Americans with health insurance. A better idea would be to help people escape government care altogether.
As I wrote after my recent surgery, hospital bureaucracy is toxic for patients. Unfortunately, calls for reform usually come from people who want more of the same — more health insurance coverage, more Medicaid, more layers of government oversight.
Our likely next president will push for more government-run health care.
“Single payer would have lower costs,” she claimed when pushing HillaryCare.
Progressives love that phrase, “single payer.” It suggests that medical costs will be covered not by you but by some benign other, without the nastiness of profit.
“Get profit out, get the private health insurance company out,” says filmmaker Michael Moore.
I reminded him that under Canada’s government-run system, patients wait in line for care, often for months. He replied, “That’s the line where they live three years longer than we do! That’s the line I want to be in!”
It’s true — Canadians and Europeans live longer. Progressives cite that to plug single payer. But it’s deceitful. Canadians live longer not because their health care system is better, but because they behave differently. They drive less often and so have fewer accidents. They murder each other less often. They’re less likely to be fat, or as I said to Moore, to “look like you.”
I give him credit for laughing, but then he claimed Canadians live longer “because they never have to worry about paying to go see the doctor.”
Give me a break. It’s nice not to worry, but it won’t save your life. Some Canadians worry so much about not getting treatment that they travel to the U.S. to see doctors.
In Canada, we do find one pocket of free-market medicine: clinics that offer cutting-edge, life-saving technology without waiting lines.
But you need four legs to get that treatment. If Canadians want a CT scan, the waiting list is a month. But a private veterinary clinic will scan your dog today.
When government is in charge, you get long lines and someone else deciding if you get treatment.
I don’t claim that America’s partly private system is great. I wrote about bureaucracy and indifferent customer service. Some of you mocked my “whining”: “What a jerk. They save his life and he complains.”
You have a point. I’m now back at work, and playing beach volleyball, less than four weeks later. I’m grateful that I got good medical care.
But I’m a consumer reporter. I don’t see why the rest of the experience can’t be good, too.
On my TV show this week, my guests describe real reform: free-market medicine.
David Goldhill, author of “Catastrophic Care: Why Everything We Think We Know About Health Care Is Wrong,” points out that, “Unfortunately, the customer of the hospital isn’t the patient, it’s the insurer, it’s Medicare, it’s Medicaid … (T)hat difference explains a lot of the things that we are dissatisfied with in American health care.”
But Goldhill points to one favorable trend. “Increasingly, people have high deductible (insurance) plans … (I)t’s the most promising thing in health care.”
Many patients hate high deductibles. But they are useful because they make us realize that care is not “free.”
Patients with high deductibles and Health Savings Accounts ask important questions: “Doc, do I really need that test? What does it cost?” They shop around.
Suddenly, there’s the beginning of an actual market. When patients shop, doctors strive to please patients rather than distant bureaucrats. More doctors give out their email addresses and cellphone numbers, and shorten waiting times. Their bills are easier to read because the providers want customers to pay them!
Government and insurance companies don’t make health care free. Such third-party payments just hide the cost, which increases the costs and makes payment more complicated.
Even the fact that medical mistakes are now the third leading cause of death barely makes the bureaucracy sit up and take notice. All politicians care about is that you vote for them before you expire.
[mybooktable book=”no-cant-government-fails-individuals-succeed” display=”summary” buybutton_shadowbox=”true”]
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump models a coal miner’s helmet during his rally in Charleston, West Virginia, on May 5, 2016. (Photo: Mark Lyons/Getty Images)
Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, has won overwhelmingly victories in the West Virginia and Nebraska Republican primaries. Even though Mr. Trump was essentially running unopposed since his two rivals–Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and Ohio Gov. John Kasich–dropped out of the race, his win is still significant.
Exit polls show Mr. Trump would take 33% of Democratic primary voters who voted in their own primary today in the general election matchup against Hillary Clinton. He takes nearly half the supporters of Sen. Bernie Sanders, something he claimed he could do but the media chastised him for suggesting.
They were wrong. A whopping 67% of Republicans said trade takes from U.S. jobs, a number that is even higher among Sanders supporters.
As PPD previously reported, numbers in the Mountain State show a record turnout in both the early vote and Election Day voting. The Charleston County Clerk’s Office said they had already far surpassed the previous record on Monday for the early vote and traffic at polling stations has been heavy and steady.
According to officials, there were 100,962 early voting ballots and 5,252 absentee ballots received by Monday for a total 106,214 early votes. In 2008, they had less than 66,000 early ballots. Registration by party, officials say, can confuse just who exactly is heading to the polls. Traditional registered Democrats are flocking to presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump, who won endorsements from coal mining groups that have back Democrats in all of the last six elections.
“People just like his no-nonsense, take-the-gloves-off attitude,” Chris Hamilton, vice president of the West Virginia Coal Association said. Mr. Hamilton’s group represents 95% of the state’s coal production. The trade group officially endorsed Mr. Trump earlier this week and Mr. Hamilton handed him a white miners’s helmet onstage at the Charleston rally on May 5 (see below).
Nine in 10 Republican primary voters in West Virginia and more than eight in 10 in Nebraska, which also votes on Tuesday, said it’s likely Mr. Trump will beat Mrs. Clinton in November. That’s far higher than measured among West Virginia Democratic primary voters about Mrs. Clinton beating Mr. Trump.
You have %%pigeonMeterAvailable%% free %%pigeonCopyPage%% remaining this month. Get unlimited access and support reader-funded, independent data journalism.
