In order to get Amazon to locate in the Long Island City neighborhood of Queens, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo (D-NY) and Mayor Bill de Blasio (D-NYC) gave the company the largest package of subsidies the state has ever offered. The eventual total could far exceed $2 billion, most of which come from a state tax credit.

• $1.2 billion: Tax credit.
• $325 million: Direct grant to build new offices.
• $1 billion: “As-of-right” incentives including New York City's Industrial & Commercial Abatement Program and New York City's Relocation and Employment Assistance Program.

Total: $2,525,000,000.

If Amazon brings 25,000 jobs to the area, that amounts to a taxpayer funded subsidy of $101,000 per job.

Which, coincidentally or not, exceeds the $100,000 average salary Amazon says the new employees will earn.

Now, broadly speaking, why would Democrats, even partisan Democrats vote for a Taliban apologist over a war hero?

Well there is a new study out today from Axios/SurveyMonkey which might give the answer which is that 61% of Democrats believe that Republicans are racist, sexist, and bigoted.

61%.First of all, kudos to you, 39% of Democrats who don't think that. Thank you for being adults. Good job.

But 61%, the majority. A strong majority of Democrats believe that Republicans are racist, sexist, and bigoted compared to Republicans. Even now, at the pitch of the battle as hot as it is, only 31% of Republicans believe that Democrats are racist, sexist, and bigoted and so you've got less, or you've got about half, roughly half the number of Republicans as Democrats believe that their opponents are racist, sexist, and bigoted according to this study.
One-third of Americans say that they would be disappointed if a close family member married someone with different political views.

A third of Americans.

I was wondering about this, because, I thought, you know someday, hopefully, when it's the day of my daughter's wedding, I'm sitting up like Don Corleone in my office granting favors to people and some lefty comes in and he's gonna marry my daughter. Would I be a little disappointed? I don't know. It depends on the guy. I know good left-wingers. I'm friends with a number of left wingers, probably the majority of my friends are left-wing, just by virtue of the places that I've lived, so it depends on the person. If it were a Democrat who believes that all Republicans are racist, sexist, bigots, I probably wouldn't like that guy.

But if it's a little bit more of a sane Democrat, I guess that would be fine, but a third of Americans now say they would be troubled by that. The most interesting part of this survey is on the question of evil, because I actually understand the 1/3 answer. I actually understand why a 1/3 of Americans would be troubled if a family member married someone of the other political party. If you're in a situation where the majority of Democrats believe that Republicans are racist, sexist, and bigoted then you're basically saying that they're evil because in America that's the worst thing you can call somebody is a racist and to say that you want to discriminate against people on the basis of their skin, you want to be unfair to people. You want to keep people down. You want to oppress people based on immutable characteristics like race and sex. That's pretty wicked. That's pretty bad stuff, so if you think that the other person is evil, you probably don't want your little sister to marry that guy. However, look at the breakdown.

The question of evil, because it asked Democrats and Republicans do you think the other side is evil. So, 61% of Democrats say the GOP and Republicans are racist, sexist, bigoted, but only 21% of them say that they're evil. As for Republicans, 31% of Republicans think that Democrats are racist, sexist, bigoted, but 23% of them think that they're evil. So, you've got 31% and 23%, that means that you've got 8% of Republicans who don't seem to think that being racist, sexist, and bigoted is evil compared to 40% of Democrats who don't believe that being racist, sexist, and bigoted is evil.

That number is actually pretty interesting. You've got 40% of Democrats who are so quick to throw around those words: racist sexist this is that is, but they don't really think it's evil. They're just using it. They use it like water. They just can’t say I don't like you, you're a meanie, and it shows how unseriously they take those questions. How unseriously they take issues of racial discrimination, sexual assault. They don't take it seriously at all. They bandied about like nothing.

Quite interesting though how much more seriously, how much more evil Republicans consider those sorts of things than Democrats. That part of the poll isn't being reported, but it's probably the most interesting thing in there.

This thing about leaders not listening was what you were seeing in France over the weekend. Everybody made a big fuss about Emmanuel Macron saying Europe needs an army – I think he said “you know, we can’t surrender enough people as it is, we want a big army that we can surrender, a big army instead of a little one” – no, he didn’t say that. But he did say he wants a European army so they can defend against Russia, China and the United States. So it was obviously a zing.

I thought that Macron and Trump were supposed to love each other, but I guess they’re on the outs. Trump said he took that as an insult, and there was all this fuss about the fact that Trump didn’t go to the ceremonies for Veterans Day, and he didn’t go to a cemetery. Of course, we had to be outraged by this. But then, at the ceremony that Trump was at, Macron got up and gave this speech where he attacked nationalism. He said “patriotism is the exact opposite of nationalism.” So Trump is sitting there, and looking very stony-faced, and Macron goes on – “nationalism is a betrayal of patriotism, because it says ‘our interests first, who cares about the others?’ We erase what a nation holds dearest, what gives it life, what makes it great, and most essential, it’s moral values.”

The problem with this is that it makes absolutely no sense and it’s entirely untrue, but other than that it’s great. Nationalism is an essential part of patriotism, you’re a patriot because you love your nation. Who’s he talking to? It’s Trump, because Trump has made a big deal about being an American nationalist and all this stuff, but he’s also talking to all the countries in Eastern Europe in saying “you have all these nationalist movements, this is not right! Because we are France, we are here to tell you all how to behave.”

This does arise out of World War 1. Americans do not understand WW1 like the Europeans do. We didn’t lose as many people there, we weren’t as involved in it. It wiped a generation away, Russia became the Soviet Union, the Austro-Hungarian empire vanished from the face of the earth. The Ottoman Empire ultimately vanished. Here in America it was the beginning of the progressive movement, with Woodrow Wilson, the first anti-constitution President, starting to install the deep state that we’re still fighting with today. It is still haunting all of our countries today. But the Left, as it always has managed to do in the past, seized the narrative. What was the reason we lost millions of men, all this disaster? Well, it was nationalism, that was the problem. You could just as easily have said, since nobody can really understand why and how the war got out of hand the way it did, you could easily say it was because of unions like NATO, it was because everyone was sworn to defend everybody else, so when a war started everybody had to take sides, and the entire continent went up in smoke.

For western Europe, the idea was this: we have got things figured out, everything should be like western Europe, our values are eternal values and therefore we don’t need nations, we just need to share our values. That’s the basis of the European Union, in the same way it’s the basis of the United States – but the difference is we don’t expect everyone to fall in line with our values. We are a big experiment on whether you can spread values without taking over other countries. In the old days, everybody hates imperialism and says empire was a bad thing, but not so bad, it was a way of spreading values.

Macron is not listening. He isn’t listening to the Eastern Europeans who were dominated by the USSR. Their nationalism stripped away and forced into this multinational structure where they were told “oh no, you’re not Poland, you’re just one of the Unions of Soviet Socialists Republics.” They’re fighting back from that, they want their nation and their identity, and France is secure in that, they have their nation and their identity. Trump actually tweeted out “there is no country more nationalist than France, a very proud people and rightfully so.” The French have laws about how many movies they can show because they don’t want American culture taking over theirs. So for Macron to sit up there and denounce nationalism is actually a nationalistic move. It’s just slapping Trump around for no reason. The leaders are not listening. The people in the capitols are not listening to the people. It’s a real problem, and we have got to start listening to each other.

Stormy Daniels lawyer Michael Avenatti has been arrested after a felony allegation of domestic violence, multiple senior law enforcement officials told NBC News.The sources told NBC News that they expect Avenatti to be booked into a local jail later Wednesday evening. The officials said officers in the West Los Angeles division took an incident report involving an allegation of domestic violence from an unidentified victim.