A new episode of Five Minutes Five Issues posted on Saturday. You can listen to it, and read a transcript, below. You can also find previous episodes of the show at Stitcher, iTunes, YouTube, and SoundCloud.

Listen to the new episode here:

Read a transcript of the new episode, including links to further information regarding the topics discussed, here:

The Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity welcomes you to Five Minutes Five Issues.

Starting in five four three two one.

Hello, I am Adam Dick, a Ron Paul Institute senior fellow.

Let’s start.

Issue one.

A Pew Research Center study comparing the media coverage of United States Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump during their respective first 60 days in the presidency, concludes the Trump coverage was much more negative.

For Clinton and Bush, there was a rather small gap between positive and negative coverage, with Clinton’s coverage calculated at 27 percent positive and 28 percent negative, while Bush’s was 22 percent positive versus 28 percent negative.

For Obama’s first 60 days the coverage ratio changed significantly, with positive coverage at 42 percent about twice the negative coverage at 20 percent. For Trump, positive coverage plummeted to 5 percent and negative coverage ballooned to 62 percent.

Issue two.

When it looked like the Spanish government might arrest them for their secession leadership, Catalonia President Carles Puigdemont and several members of his cabinet fled to Brussels, Belgium.

Arguably, they can accomplish more for secession from abroad than if they were hiding or in prison.

But, there is more to the story. Brussels is in many ways the headquarters of the European Union, and Puigdemont said Tuesday that he came to what he terms “the institutional heart” and “capital” of Europe because the situation with Catalonia is “a European issue” and he wants “Europe to react.”

So who does an advocate for decentralized power root for: the nation seeking to suppress a region’s secession attempt or that region whose president wants the European Union to restrain the nation?

Issue three.

An excerpt posted Thursday at Politico from Donna Brazile’s soon-to-be-published book describes how, during the 2016 presidential primary, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) was in Hillary Clinton’s pocket.

Brazile, who was chairwoman of the DNC from July of 2016 through February of 2017, writes that Clinton campaign Chief Financial Officer Gary Gensler informed Brazile that the party was fully under the control of the Clinton campaign that had provided millions of dollars to the DNC. Brazile also writes that she discovered an agreement entered into in August of 2015, months before primary voting began, in which the DNC, in return for receiving Clinton campaign money, agreed to allow Clinton, among other things, to control the party’s finances, hiring decisions, and strategy.

Issue four.

From listening to the media you might think Twitter has presented convincing evidence that Russian government spies worked round the clock on Twitter to elect Donald Trump president.

Reality is much different. Sean J. Edgett, Twitter’s general counsel, explained in his Wednesday written testimony for the US Senate Intelligence Committee that Twitter took what he called an “expansive approach to defining what qualifies as a Russian-linked account.” This approach says that if an account was created in Russia, or if the account was registered using a Russian phone number or email address, or if the account’s displayed name contains Cyrillic characters, or if the account user tweeted frequently in Russian, or if the account was even once logged into from a Russian IP address, then it is deemed a Russian-linked account. And that is just a partial list.

Applying an analogous test to my Twitter account, it would be deemed a US-linked account by every measure Edgett mentioned. Of course, that neither shows that I am a US government spy nor that I am trying to influence any particular foreign election.

Issue five.

Sometimes police are held accountable for abusing individuals and the victims receive compensation. Pamela Manson reported this week at the Salt Lake Tribune that Alex Wubbels, the Salt lake City, Utah nurse who received much attention after she was arrested in July for refusing to allow police to draw blood without a warrant from an unconscious patient, will receive $500,000 in a settlement regarding the arrest and that the local police chief has fired one of the cops involved and demoted another.

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That’s a wrap.

Transcripts of Five Minutes Five Issues episodes, including links to related information, are at the Ron Paul Institute blog.

Five four three two one.

Reprinted with permission from the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity.