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SoxFan, and all -- the direct source link for that one: https://margaretandhelen.com/2017/04/28/if-only-jokes-about-assaulting-women-were-reason-enough-to-lose-elections/ [with comments]
JimLur -- who said precisely nothing about anything 'communist'
you might -- might -- have a better grip on things if you were a 30-year-old truck driver with a young family looking at automation completely and utterly ending your career within the next 5 years to maybe 10 years at the very most -- rather than an old burnt-out retired truck driver ranting stupidly and incoherently while comfy in your retirement with your 'communist' Medicare and Social Security
Full Show - Globalist Technocratic Systems Worldwide Attempt To Control The Population - 05/09/2017
JimLur -- rubbish
(linked in) http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=129127759 and preceding and following
JimLur -- perfectly easy to believe you'd post such a presumptuously asinine comment -- you sanctimonious little Christo-fascist ([linked in] http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=131335401 [and any future following]) snowflake
JimLur -- you must have meant "short-circuited stinkers" -- (linked in) http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=131196144 and preceding and following, http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=131199305 and preceding (and any future following)
in-depth analyses of the vote have consistently very clearly shown that Trump was not elected by what by any reasonable/meaningful definition could be considered our "thinkers"
JimLur -- false -- knock off that taunt (eom)
JimLur -- uhh, nope -- electors, yes; voters, no
2016 National Popular Vote Tracker
http://cookpolitical.com/story/10174
In Win for Environmentalists, Senate Keeps an Obama-Era Climate Change Rule
Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, broke with his party on Wednesday to help keep a regulation to control the release of methane.
MAY 10, 2017
WASHINGTON — In a surprising victory for President Barack Obama’s environmental legacy, the Senate voted on Wednesday to uphold an Obama-era climate change [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/science/topics/globalwarming/index.html ] regulation to control the release of methane from oil and gas wells on public land.
Senators voted 51 to 49 to block consideration of a resolution to repeal the 2016 Interior Department rule to curb emissions of methane, a powerful planet-warming greenhouse gas. Senators John McCain of Arizona, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Susan Collins of Maine, all Republicans who have expressed concern about climate change and backed legislation to tackle the issue, broke with their party to join Democrats and defeat the resolution.
The vote also was the first, and probably the only, defeat of a stream of resolutions over the last four months — pursued through the once-obscure Congressional Review Act — to unwind regulations approved late in the Obama administration.
It also could worsen the Trump administration’s problems on Capitol Hill, where there are signs the president’s grip on his party is loosening.
“People of America and people of the world can breathe a sigh of relief,” said Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader.
In anticipation of Republican defections, President Trump sent Vice President Mike Pence to the Senate floor to break a tie vote. But with three members of his own party breaking away, Mr. Pence could do nothing.
“We were surprised and thrilled to win on this,” said Tiernan Sittenfeld, senior vice president of the League of Conservation Voters, which, along with other environmental groups, has been lobbying Republicans for weeks to vote against the repeal of the methane rule. “This is clearly a huge win for our health and our climate.”
While Ms. Collins and Mr. Graham had publicly announced their opposition to the measure, Mr. McCain’s vote was a surprise.
[...]
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/10/us/politics/regulations-methane-climate-change.html
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More bad news for Trump: His poll numbers just hit a bunch of new lows
By Aaron Blake
May 10, 2017
President Trump is dealing with a budding scandal after firing FBI Director James B. Comey on Tuesday.
But even before that, he appears to have hit a new low with the American people.
A new poll from Quinnipiac University [ https://poll.qu.edu/national/release-detail?ReleaseID=2456 ] shows Trump's disapproval rating rising to 58 percent — a new high in Quinnipiac's regular polling and the highest in a high-quality, non-tracking poll [ http://elections.huffingtonpost.com/pollster/trump-job-approval ] since his inauguration. Just 36 percent approved of Trump's job performance.
The only other poll to show his disapproval that high since his inauguration was Gallup, which briefly showed his disapproval rating ticking up to 59 percent in March before it dropped to 52 percent a week later. Quinnipiac's polls have been among the worst for Trump, but it's also one of the most frequent, and the trends are looking bad for Trump.
The Quinnipiac poll also shows the president's favorable rating — more of a personal measure than a job measure — dropping to a new low of 35 percent. The percentage of Americans who strongly approve of him is tied for an all-time low at 25 percent. And the percentage who strongly disapprove has reached an all-time high of 51 percent.
Trump also has his worst numbers to date — across 10 Q polls since the 2016 election [ https://poll.qu.edu/national/ ] — on the following measures:
• Honesty: 33 percent say he is
• Good leadership skills: 56 percent say he doesn't have them
• Caring about average people: 59 percent say he doesn't
• Being levelheaded: Voters say 66-29 percent that he's not (unlike the other numbers here, this is tied for all-time worst, not setting a new one)
• Being intelligent: Voters say 56-41 percent that he is
• Sharing your values: Voters say 64-32 percent that he doesn't
• How he has treated the news media: Voters disapprove 65-31 percent
• Whether people trust him or the media more for the truth: 57 percent media, 31 percent Trump (even 17 percent of Republicans pick the media over their president)
Interestingly, the reason the numbers have ticked down appears to be the group that elected Trump in the first place: white, working-class voters. Whites without college degrees approved of Trump 57 percent to 38 percent in the mid-April Q poll and 51-39 percent in late March/early May; today they are split, with 47 percent approving and 46 percent disapproving.
Republicans still haven't deserted him, which means it might take some doing before his approval rating drops much lower. But there certainly seem to be some slight cracks in Trump's base. And you have to wonder whether the Comey decision — which even congressional Republicans are criticizing — might pry those cracks open just a bit wider.
© 2017 The Washington Post (emphasis in original)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2017/05/10/more-very-bad-news-for-trump-his-poll-numbers-just-hit-a-bunch-of-new-lows/ [with embedded videos, and comments]
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NVIDIA Goes Beyond The GPU For AI With Volta
NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPU/Tensor Processor
May 10, 2017
At the company’s annual GPU Technology Conference (GTC), NVIDIA took the giant step toward an accelerator processor architecture customized for artificial intelligence (AI). NVIDIA pioneered the development of artificial neural networks through deep learning with the company’s GPUs and CUDA software platform. While the market is now flush with other solutions, NVIDIA accounts for the clear majority of deep learning networks in use today. The company is engaged with over 40,000 companies and over a half a million developers for neural network applications. However, while the GPU has proven very effective in parallel processing since the addition of shader cores, TIRIAS Research has maintained that even NVIDIA would need to eventually migrate to architectures dedicated to AI while preserving its tools and ecosystem to advance platforms further.
At GTC, NVIDIA announced that step forward with the next generation GPU architecture called Volta. While still referred to as a GPU, Volta is much more. In addition to enhancing the GPU architecture, NVIDIA added 640 new tensor cores capable of processing 4x4x4 matrix multiplies. This provides a specialized math core that works in conjunction with the standard GPU CUDA cores to add additional processing for deep learning environments. It also accelerates the process of inferring a value based on a trained model, making it useful as an inference engine. Essentially, NVIDIA put accelerator cores in an accelerator. This is similar the route Google took in developing its proprietary Tensor Processing Unit (TPU). With the tensor core capabilities incorporated into the NVIDIA SDK libraries and runtimes like cuDNN and TensorRT, developers will be able to take advantage the increase in performance from the tensor cores in their AI frameworks without rewriting their applications.
Volta also includes over 5,000 GPU CUDA cores, 300 GB of system communications bandwidth through six high-speed NV Link interconnects, and 16 GB of the second generation high-bandwidth memory (HBM2) on TSMC’s new 12FFN manufacturing process technology. In all, the new Volta architecture fits in the same power envelope and form factor as the previous Pascal generation GPU with 1.5x the memory performance, 2x the NVLink performance, and 7.5 teraflops of FP64 processing (15 teraflops at FP32) on the GPU (CUDA) cores and a total of 120 teraflops of processing performance with the tensor cores. The first product using the Volta architecture is the Tesla V100. No matter how you look at it, the Volta architecture and Tesla V100 set a new level of computing performance on a chip that will benefit AI. Now imagine what eight of these are capable of in NVIDIA’s DGX-1 platform with the industry’s most mature AI software environment and tools. The Volta architecture and Tesla will also accelerate many high-performance computing (HPC) applications and is already slated for use in the next US supercomputer, the Summit Supercomputer, which is slated to have over 200 petaflops of performance. But, the performance of Volta is only half of the story.
The significance of Volta is that this marks a transition of the most pervasive deep learning engine from a GPU or general processing engine to a more specialized engine for AI. This is a trend that is likely to accelerate and will lead to more innovation in the semiconductor industry. AI is creating a new vector in computing performance that will eventually lead us away from the binary computing solutions we have today to more specialized and revolutionary architectures in the future. While Volta is aimed at the high-end Tesla platform now, TIRIAS Research expects this technology will quickly trickle down to other platforms, such as NVIDIA’s Jetson platform for inference engines that can be incorporated into almost any application from robots to cars. TIRIAS Research projects that within 15 years every new electronics device and system will use some form of AI.
[...]
https://www.forbes.com/sites/tiriasresearch/2017/05/10/nvidia-goes-beyond-the-gpu-for-ai-with-volta/
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Comey Got ‘Uncomfortably Close’ to Exposing Trump
A senior law-enforcement official dismisses the White House excuse for firing the FBI director, says Comey was ‘inching closer to Trump.’
05.10.17
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2017/05/10/comey-gets-uncomfortably-close-then-gets-fired-by-trump
*
Mitch McConnell just shut down any hopes Democrats had of an independent Russia investigation
May 10, 2017
President Trump just cut off the head [ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2017/05/10/how-firing-james-comey-could-backfire-on-trump/ ] of Washington's most apolitical investigation of his presidential campaign associates' connections with Russia. To make up for it, Democrats think Congress should appoint a special investigator unbeholden to them or the Trump administration.
Except, it looks as though that's not going to happen.
On Wednesday, one of the most powerful lawmakers in Washington, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), basically flat-out said he wouldn't support a special investigation. The various committees in Congress already looking into Russian meddling will suffice, he said: “Today we'll no doubt hear calls for a new investigation, which could only serve to impede the current work being done.”
[...]
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2017/05/10/mitch-mcconnell-just-shut-down-any-hopes-democrats-had-of-an-independent-russia-investigation/ [with embedded videos, and comments]
*
Days Before Firing, Comey Asked for More Resources for Russia Inquiry
MAY 10, 2017
WASHINGTON — Days before he was fired as F.B.I. director [ https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/09/us/politics/james-comey-fired-fbi.html ], James B. Comey asked the Justice Department for more prosecutors and other personnel to accelerate the bureau’s investigation into Russia’s interference in the presidential election.
It was the first clear-cut evidence that Mr. Comey believed the bureau needed more resources to handle a sprawling and highly politicized counterintelligence investigation.
His appeal, described on Wednesday by four congressional officials, was made to Rod J. Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general, whose memo was used to justify Mr. Comey’s abrupt dismissal on Tuesday.
It is not yet known what became of Mr. Comey’s request, or what role — if any — it played in his firing. But the future of the F.B.I.’s investigation is now more uncertain than at any point since it began in late July, and any fallout from the dismissal is unlikely to be contained at the bureau.
[...]
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/10/us/politics/comey-russia-investigation-fbi.html [with comments]
*
After meeting with Trump, Russian foreign minister again denies interference in U.S. election
May 10, 2017
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Wednesday that no evidence exists linking Russia to hacked emails during last year's election and that the issue never arose during his meeting in the morning with President Trump.
Speaking to reporters at the Russian Embassy after his White House talks with Trump and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, Lavrov showed his irritation over repeated questions about Moscow’s alleged interference in the presidential elections.
“I never thought I’d have to answer such questions, particularly in the United States given your highly developed democratic system,” he said, according to a simultaneous translation of his remarks into English.
Lavrov frequently disparaged the suspicions of Russian election intrusion, which U.S. intelligence agencies have all pinned on Moscow. He at turns characterized the allegations as “noise” and a “humiliation” for the American people.
“We are monitoring what is going on here concerning Russia and its alleged ‘decisive role’ in your domestic policy,” he said, according to a quote reported in Tass, which added a remark phrased less colorfully by the embassy interpreter. “We have been discussing specific issues but never touched upon this bacchanalia.”
[...]
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/trump-to-meet-russian-foreign-minister-at-the-white-house-as-moscows-alleged-election-interference-is-back-in-spotlight/2017/05/10/c6717e4c-34f3-11e7-b412-62beef8121f7_story.html [with embedded videos, and comments]
*
Comey sought more resources for Russia probe days before he was fired by President Trump, officials say
May 10, 2017
Last week, then-FBI Director James B. Comey requested more resources from the Justice Department for his bureau’s investigation into collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government, according to two officials with knowledge of the discussion.
Comey, who was fired by President Trump on Tuesday, made the request in a meeting last week with Rod J. Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general, and later briefed the chair and Democratic ranking member of the Senate Intelligence Committee on Monday, the officials said.
Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.), the chairman, and Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) the ranking member, met on Monday with Comey, according to several people familiar with the meeting.
Later, at a regular meeting of Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee, Warner informed them that Comey told the two committee chiefs about his request for more resources, said two officials, who were not authorized to speak publicly about the matter.
However, Justice Department spokeswoman Sarah Isgur Flores said reports that Comey had requested more funding or other resources for the Russia investigation are “totally false.” Such a request, she said, “did not happen.”
Rosenstein wrote the memo that was used to justify Trump’s swift and unexpected firing of Comey on Tuesday evening.
[...]
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2017/05/10/comey-sought-more-money-for-russia-probe-days-before-he-was-fired-officials-say/ [with embedded videos, and (over 6,000) comments]
*
Turkey threatens military action against U.S.-allied Syrian Kurdish fighters
May 10, 2017
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle_east/turkey-threatens-military-action-against-us-allied-syrian-kurdish-fighters/2017/05/10/3936260c-3595-11e7-ab03-aa29f656f13e_story.html [with comments]
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Why Trump expected only applause when he told Comey, ‘You’re fired.’
May 10, 2017
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/why-trump-expected-only-applause-when-he-told-comey-youre-fired/2017/05/10/b66e2b48-358f-11e7-b4ee-434b6d506b37_story.html [with embedded videos, and comments]
*
Trump meets Russia foreign minister amid Comey controversy
May 10, 2017
Russia's top diplomat met President Donald Trump on Wednesday and praised the U.S. administration as problem solvers, just as the White House drew criticism over the firing of the FBI director who was leading a probe into Moscow's alleged interference in U.S. politics.
The talks with Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov were the highest-level public contact between Trump and the government of Russian President Vladimir Putin since the Republican took office on Jan. 20.
While not unprecedented, it is a rare privilege for a foreign minister to be received by a U.S. president for a bilateral meeting in the White House.
In a stunning development, Trump on Tuesday fired FBI Director James Comey, whose agency is investigating alleged Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election and the possibility Trump associates may have colluded with Moscow. Democrats accused Trump of trying to slow down the investigation by firing the FBI chief.
Trump described his talks with Lavrov as "very, very good." When asked whether the Comey dismissal had affected his meeting, Trump said, "not at all." He and Lavrov said they discussed the civil war in Syria, where Russia backs President Bashar al-Assad.
"We want to see the killing, the horrible killing, stopped in Syria as soon as possible and everyone is working toward that end," Trump told reporters.
Lavrov, who earlier met with U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, said his discussions with members of the Trump administration had convinced him they were people who wanted to cut deals and solve problems.
"The Trump administration, and the president himself, and the secretary of state, I was persuaded of this once again today, are people of action," Lavrov said.
[...]
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-russia-idUSKBN1861V4 [with embedded video]
*
White House Lawyers Warned Trump: Stay Away From Michael Flynn
The president may have fired his national security adviser, under investigation for his Russia ties and foreign lobbying. But Trump still wants to talk with Michael Flynn.
05.10.17
White House lawyers have had to warn President Donald Trump [ http://www.thedailybeast.com/keyword/donald-trump ] repeatedly against reaching out to his fired National Security Adviser Michael Flynn [ http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2017/04/10/is-the-white-house-scapegoating-michael-flynn.html ], two people familiar with the matter tell The Daily Beast.
[...]
If Trump spoke directly with Flynn amid ongoing investigations, it could be portrayed as witness tampering. Such conversations would create “HUGE issues,” according to national security attorney Brad Moss. “Talking with witnesses got Nixon in trouble.”
“The last thing they would want is an allegation of conspiracy, witness tampering or coordination,” said Mark Zaid, Moss’s partner, in an email. “If Flynn is going to be indicted, or certainly under investigation, then I would want the president to be as far away from him as possible.”
[...]
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2017/05/10/white-house-lawyers-warned-trump-stay-away-from-michael-flynn
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Commentary: Firing Comey won’t make Russia probe vanish. But it will have consequences for Trump.
This picture shows a copy of the letter by U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions to U.S. President Donald Trump recomending the firing of Director of the FBI James Comey, at the White House in Washington, U.S., May 9, 2017.
May 10, 2017
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-comey-trump-commentary-idUSKBN1862W4
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Why Trump’s efforts to shake his Russia problem only make it worse
May 10, 2017
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/why-trumps-efforts-to-shake-his-russia-problem-only-makes-it-worse/2017/05/10/8b322598-35cf-11e7-b373-418f6849a004_story.html [with embedded videos, and comments]
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Senate Intelligence Committee subpoenas documents from Flynn in Russia probe
May 10, 2017
President Barack Obama warned Donald Trump against hiring Michael Flynn as national security adviser during an Oval Office meeting in the days after the 2016 election.
May 10, 2017
The Senate Intelligence Committee issued a subpoena Wednesday to force former national security adviser Michael Flynn to turn over documents related to the panel’s probe into alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 elections, including possible ties between the Kremlin and the presidential campaigns.
It is the first subpoena the committee has announced in the course of its Russia investigation — a step Chairman Richard Burr (R-N.C.) was long reluctant to take. But the chairman began signaling this week that if Trump surrogates did not turn over requested materials to the committee by Tuesday — a deadline that some missed — he and Vice Chairman Mark R. Warner (D-Va.) might begin issuing subpoenas.
“Everything has been voluntary up to this point, and we’ve interviewed a lot of people, and I want to continue to do it in a voluntary fashion,” Burr said Wednesday morning.
“But if in fact the production of things that we need are not provided, then we have a host of tools,” Burr added, indicating that a subpoena was one of them.
[...]
https://www.washingtonpost.com/powerpost/senate-intelligence-committee-subpoenas-documents-from-flynn-in-russia-probe/2017/05/10/d8153e8a-35d0-11e7-b4ee-434b6d506b37_story.html [with embedded videos, and comments]
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Comey’s Firing Came as Investigators Stepped Up Russia Probe
FBI director had been providing updates to top members of the Senate Intelligence Committee
May 10, 2017
WASHINGTON - In the weeks before President Donald Trump fired FBI Director James Comey, a federal investigation into potential collusion between Trump associates and the Russian government was heating up, as Mr. Comey became increasingly occupied with the probe.
[...]
https://www.wsj.com/articles/james-comey-had-requested-more-money-for-fbi-s-russia-investigation-before-being-fired-u-s-official-1494433061
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‘Enough Was Enough’: How Festering Anger at Comey Ended in His Firing
The White House on Tuesday. President Trump, according to people close to him, had been openly talking about firing James B. Comey for at least a week.
MAY 10, 2017
WASHINGTON - By the end, neither of them thought much of the other.
After President Trump accused his predecessor [ https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/04/us/politics/trump-obama-tap-phones.html ] in March of wiretapping him, James B. Comey, the F.B.I. [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/f/federal_bureau_of_investigation/index.html ] director, was flabbergasted. The president, Mr. Comey told associates, was “outside the realm of normal,” even “crazy.”
For his part, Mr. Trump fumed when Mr. Comey publicly dismissed the sensational wiretapping claim [ https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/20/us/politics/fbi-investigation-trump-russia-comey.html ]. In the weeks that followed, he grew angrier and began talking about firing Mr. Comey. After stewing last weekend while watching Sunday talk shows at his New Jersey golf resort, Mr. Trump decided it was time. There was “something wrong with” Mr. Comey, he told aides.
[...]
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/10/us/politics/how-trump-decided-to-fire-james-comey.html
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Inside Trump’s anger and impatience — and his sudden decision to fire Comey
May 10, 2017
Every time FBI Director James B. Comey appeared in public, an ever-watchful President Trump grew increasingly agitated that the topic was the one that he was most desperate to avoid: Russia.
Trump had long questioned Comey’s loyalty and judgment, and was infuriated by what he viewed as the director’s lack of action in recent weeks on leaks from within the federal government. By last weekend, he had made up his mind: Comey had to go.
At his golf course in Bedminster, N.J., Trump groused over Comey’s latest congressional testimony, which he thought was “strange,” and grew impatient with what he viewed as his sanctimony, according to White House officials. Comey, Trump figured, was using the Russia probe to become a martyr.
Back at work Monday morning in Washington, Trump told Vice President Pence and several senior aides — Reince Priebus, Stephen K. Bannon and Donald McGahn, among others — that he was ready to move on Comey. First, though, he wanted to hear from Attorney General Jeff Sessions, his trusted confidant who soon arrived at the White House for a scheduled meeting with the president. He brought along the deputy attorney general, Rod J. Rosenstein, to whom Comey reported directly.
When the conversation shifted to concerns about the FBI, which both men outlined in detail, the president gave Sessions and Rosenstein a directive: to explain in writing the case against Comey.
[...]
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/how-trumps-anger-and-impatience-prompted-him-to-fire-the-fbi-director/2017/05/10/d9642334-359c-11e7-b373-418f6849a004_story.html [with embedded videos, and comments]
*
Comey had pushed for more resources for Russia probe before being fired by Trump: source
May 10, 2017
FBI Director James Comey, days before President Donald Trump fired him, told lawmakers he sought more resources for his agency's probe into possible collusion between Trump's presidential campaign and Russia to sway the 2016 U.S. election, a congressional source said on Wednesday.
With the Republican president facing a storm of criticism from many Democratic lawmakers and some in his own party, the Trump administration accused Comey of "atrocities" on the job and denied his firing was related to the FBI's Russia investigation.
Trump, who met Russia's foreign minister at the White House on Wednesday, lashed out at critics, calling Democrats "phony hypocrites," and defended his decision to abruptly oust Comey on Tuesday from the law enforcement post he held since 2013.
[...]
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-comey-replacement-idUSKBN1861HK [with embedded video]
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Comey infuriated Trump with refusal to preview Senate testimony: aides
U.S. President Donald Trump speaks to reporters after his meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov at the White House in Washington, U.S., May 10, 2017.
May 10, 2017
The anger behind Donald Trump's firing of FBI Director James Comey on Tuesday had been building for months, but a turning point came when Comey refused to preview for top Trump aides his planned testimony to a Senate panel, White House officials said.
Trump, Attorney General Jeff Sessions and deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein had wanted a heads-up from Comey about what he would say at a May 3 hearing about his handling of an investigation into former Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server.
When Comey refused, Trump and his aides considered that an act of insubordination and it was one of the catalysts to Trump’s decision this week to fire the FBI director, the officials said.
"It gave the impression that he was no longer capable of carrying out his duties," one official said. ...
[..]
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-comey-decision-idUSKBN1862WP
*
Trump Bars U.S. Press, but Not Russia’s, at Meeting With Russian Officials
A photographer from TASS, Russia’s official news agency, captured President Trump’s meeting with the Russian foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, in the Oval Office on Wednesday. The American press was denied access.
MAY 10, 2017
WASHINGTON — When President Trump met with top Russian officials in the Oval Office on Wednesday, White House officials barred reporters from witnessing the moment. They apparently preferred to block coverage of the awkwardly timed [ https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/10/world/europe/trump-russia-foreign-minister-sergey-lavrov-meeting.html ] visit as questions swirled about whether the president had dismissed his F.B.I. director in part to squelch the investigation into possible ties between his campaign and Moscow.
But the Russians, who have a largely state-run media, brought their own press contingent in the form of an official photographer. They quickly filled the vacuum with their own pictures of the meeting with Mr. Trump, Sergey V. Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, and Sergey I. Kislyak, Moscow’s ambassador to the United States.
Within minutes of the meeting, the Foreign Ministry had posted photographs on Twitter of Mr. Trump and Mr. Lavrov smiling and shaking hands. The Russian embassy posted images of the president grinning and gripping hands with the ambassador. Tass, Russia’s official news agency, released more photographs of the three men laughing together in the Oval Office.
The White House released nothing.
The result was a public relations coup of sorts for Russia and Mr. Lavrov in particular, who not only received a collegial Oval Office welcome from the president, but the photographic evidence to prove it. By contrast, when Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson traveled to Moscow last month, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia kept him waiting for hours before granting him an audience at the Kremlin. Then, too, Mr. Tillerson left his American press contingent behind.
[...]
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/10/us/politics/trump-russia-meeting-american-reporters-blocked.html
Trump bans American journalists, but not Russian press, from meeting with Russian foreign minister
Photos of Trump's meeting with Lavrov and Kislyak just hit the Getty wire and they're all credited to Russian news agency TASS
[ https://twitter.com/paleofuture/status/862330774644637696 (with comments)]
It was Trump’s only scheduled event the day after he fired the FBI director amid an investigation into his campaign’s Russia ties.
May 10, 2017
https://thinkprogress.org/trump-bans-american-journalists-from-lavrov-russia-meeting-5ed59b516845 [with comments]
Presence of Russian photographer in Oval Office raises alarms
May 10, 2017
A photographer for a Russian state-owned news agency was allowed into the Oval Office on Wednesday during President Trump’s meeting with Russian diplomats, a level of access that was criticized by former U.S. intelligence officials as a potential security breach.
The officials cited the danger that a listening device or other surveillance equipment could have been brought into the Oval Office while hidden in cameras or other electronics. Former U.S. intelligence officials raised questions after photos of Trump’s meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov were posted online by the Tass news agency.
[...]
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/trump-to-meet-russian-foreign-minister-at-the-white-house-as-moscows-alleged-election-interference-is-back-in-spotlight/2017/05/10/c6717e4c-34f3-11e7-b412-62beef8121f7_story.html [with embedded videos, and comments]
White House 'misled over Russian photographer in Oval Office' amid security concerns
11 May 2017
The White House was reportedly misled over the Russian photographer who was present during the meeting between Donald Trump and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov.
[...]
The only people taking pictures in the room were the official White House photographer and a Russian, who had been described as Mr Lavrov’s official photographer. The Russian side did not disclose that he also worked for Tass, a state-run news agency.
“We were not informed by the Russians that their official photographer was dual-hatted and would be releasing the photographs on the state news agency,” the administration official told the Washington Post [ https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/trump-to-meet-russian-foreign-minister-at-the-white-house-as-moscows-alleged-election-interference-is-back-in-spotlight/2017/05/10/c6717e4c-34f3-11e7-b412-62beef8121f7_story.html ].
Former US intelligence officials criticised the presence of a Russian state-owned news agency photographer in the Oval Office.
[...]
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/05/11/white-house-misled-russian-photographer-oval-office-amid-security/ [no comments yet]
*
Russia’s Oval Office Victory Dance
The cozy meeting between President Trump and Russia’s foreign minister came at Vladimir Putin’s insistence.
May 10, 2017
When President Donald Trump hosted Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in the Oval Office on Wednesday just hours after firing the FBI director who was overseeing an investigation into whether Trump’s team colluded the Russians, he was breaking with recent precedent at the specific request of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The chummy White House visit—photos of the president yukking it up with Lavrov and Russian Ambassador to the United States Sergey Kislyak were released by the Russian Foreign Ministry since no U.S. press was allowed to cover the visit—had been one of Putin’s asks in his recent phone call with Trump, and indeed the White House acknowledged this to me later Wednesday. “He chose to receive him because Putin asked him to,” a White House spokesman said of Trump’s Lavrov meeting. “Putin did specifically ask on the call when they last talked.”
The meeting was Lavrov’s first in the White House since 2013—and came after several years of the Obama administration’s flat-out refusal to grant him an Oval Office audience, two former senior White House officials told me. “The Russians were begging us for years to do that,” one of the former officials said. “They were constantly pushing for it and we were constantly saying no.”
The images of Trump putting his arm genially on Lavrov’s back—and a later White House official readout of the meeting that said Trump “emphasized his desire to build a better relationship between the United States and Russia”—couldn’t have come at a more fraught political moment for Trump, amid a barrage of bipartisan criticism of his firing of FBI Director James Comey. On Wednesday morning before meeting with Trump, Lavrov even cracked a joke about his hosts’ political predicament, laughingly claiming not to have heard of the Comey firing while standing alongside Trump’s secretary of state, Rex Tillerson.
In other words, Lavrov was right where he has always wanted to be Wednesday: mocking the United States while being welcomed in the Oval Office by the president himself.
Russia’s longest-serving foreign minister of the post-Cold War era, Lavrov has worked alongside Putin since 2004 with a single-minded goal: to make Russia great again—and all the better if he could do so at America’s expense. So, for Lavrov and Putin, the scene was more than just a bizarre moment of Washington political theater in which they played walk-on roles. It was vindication, proof that their tilt toward Trump after years of tense dealings with two successive American presidents could yet pay off.
In some key respects, this already is a down payment on the Russian reset Trump promised on the campaign trail. Or at least an appearance-laden first step toward the renewed relations and potential grand bargain with Putin that Trump has never disavowed even as the politics of doing a deal with Russia have gotten dicier amid the political furor here in Washington over the Russiagate investigation of team Trump that Comey was overseeing. “The fact of the matter is the president and secretary of state have said relations are at a low ebb and it’s important to get them back up from the floor, and to do that we’ve got to talk,” Michael Anton, head of strategic communications at the National Security Council, told me about the “warm” session between Trump and the Russians. “Maybe we can see some semblance of cooperation in Syria. Some semblance in Ukraine. We certainly don’t have much prospect of progress if we don’t talk.”
“For Lavrov, just having this meeting and the photo-op itself is a big demonstration to the world and to the Russian people that Russia is back, and that isolation has failed, irrespective of whether anything gets agreed,” said Alexander Vershbow, who served as ambassador to Russia under President George W. Bush and as a top Pentagon and NATO official with the Russia portfolio during Barack Obama’s presidency.
[...]]
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/05/10/james-comey-firing-trump-lavrov-putin-215124 [with comments]
*
Trump's deputy attorney general reportedly threatened to resign after being painted as the mastermind behind Comey's firing
Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein.
May 10, 2017
While President Donald Trump's decision to fire FBI director James Comey came as a shock for many, one of the alleged architects of the dismissal was also reported to have been surprised after the hammer came down.
Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who wrote a three-page memorandum detailing the reasons behind his recommendation for Comey's dismissal on Monday, was painted as the main arbiter of the decision.
Trump had asserted that he acted based on Rosenstein's and Attorney General Jeff Sessions' recommendations.
But as Rosenstein was thrust into the spotlight shortly after news of Comey's dismissal broke, he was reported to be taken aback and even threatened to resign, according to an unnamed person close to the White House who was cited by The Washington Post [ https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/how-trumps-anger-and-impatience-prompted-him-to-fire-the-fbi-director/2017/05/10/d9642334-359c-11e7-b373-418f6849a004_story.html ].
According to multiple news reports on Wednesday night, Trump himself had grown increasingly angry and frustrated with Comey over his handling of the Russia investigation. The New York Times reported [ https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/10/us/politics/how-trump-decided-to-fire-james-comey.html ] that Trump was also bothered by his inability to gain assurances of loyalty from the now-former FBI director.
"[Comey] wasn’t doing a good job," Trump said on Wednesday. "Very simple. He wasn’t doing a good job.
Comey was further criticized by the White House after deputy press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said on Wednesday that he had committed “atrocities” for his handling of Hillary Clinton’s email server scandal.
But sources cited by CNN said that Rosenstein’s alleged role in Comey's firing seemed out of place [ http://www.cnn.com/2017/05/10/politics/rod-rosenstein-unlikely-hatchet-man/ ].
“It’s not consistent that he walked in here with a hit list and James Comey’s name was on the top of it,” one law enforcement official told the network. “That’s inconsistent with who he is and what everyone says. This doesn’t pass the smell test of Rod Rosenstein.”
It was not immediately clear Wednesday night whether Rosenstein would remain at the Department of Justice.
http://www.businessinsider.com/rod-rosenstein-james-comey-firing-2017-5
*
HHS Secretary says police ‘did what they felt was appropriate’ in arresting a West Virginia journalist
May 11, 2017
Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price defended police who arrested a reporter at West Virginia’s state capitol, saying they “did what they felt was appropriate.”
When asked if he felt the reporter, Public News Service journalist Dan Heyman, had been too aggressive and whether it was appropriate to arrest him, Price said it was “not my decision to make,” according to the Associated Press. He gave the statements during a meeting on the opioid crisis in Concord, N.H., on Wednesday.
“That gentleman was not in a press conference,” Price said, according to STAT [ https://www.statnews.com/2017/05/10/tom-price-reporter-arrest/ ].
A day earlier, Price and Kellyanne Conway, special counsel to the president, had been walking through a hallway in the West Virginia state capitol when veteran reporter Heyman began following alongside him, holding up his phone to Price while attempting to ask him a question.
Heyman repeatedly asked the secretary whether domestic violence would be considered a preexisting condition under the Republican bill to overhaul the nation’s health care system, he said.
“Do you think that’s right or not, secretary?” Heyman asked, according to a recording an audio recording Heyman provided to The Washington Post. “You refuse to answer? Tell me no comment.”
A male voice is heard telling Heyman, “Do not get close to her. Back up.”
Moments later, an officer in the capitol pulled Heyman aside, handcuffed him and arrested him. Heyman was jailed on the charge of willful disruption of state government processes and was released later on $5,000 bail.
Authorities said while Secret Service agents were providing security in the capitol for Price and Conway, Heyman was “aggressively breaching” the agents to the point where they were “forced to remove him a couple of times from the area,” according to a criminal complaint.
Heyman “was causing a disturbance by yelling questions at Ms. Conway and Secretary Price,” the complaint stated.
But Heyman said he was simply fulfilling his role as a journalist and feels that his arrest sets a “terrible example” for members of the press seeking answers to questions.
“This is my job, this is what I’m supposed to do,” Heyman said in a news conference Tuesday after being released from jail. “I think it’s a question that deserves to be answered. I think it’s my job to ask questions and I think it’s my job to try to get answers.”
[...]
Before Heyman’s arrest, no police officer told him he was in the wrong place, Heyman said. He was wearing a press pass as well as a shirt with a Public News Service logo on the front, and identified himself to police as a reporter, he said.
[...]
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2017/05/10/west-virginia-journalist-arrested-after-asking-hhs-secretary-tom-price-a-question/ [with embedded videos, and comments]
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Stephanie -- yours stays -- original source; it is the complete letter; some might not be able to access the wapo -- thank you
conix -- Betsy McCaughey's a fine one to be wailing about 'sick lies'
Betsy McCaughey
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betsy_McCaughey
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James Comey’s farewell letter to his FBI colleagues, annotated
May 10, 2017
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2017/05/10/james-comeys-farewell-letter-to-his-fbi-colleagues-annotated/ [with embedded video and annotations, and comments]
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Religiousil
fuagf, and all -- and see related and further (linked) at http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=131201693 and preceding and following
conix -- you failed to understand my reply
no surprise there
CNN exclusive: Grand jury subpoenas issued in FBI's Russia investigation
Updated May 9, 2017
Washington (CNN) - Federal prosecutors have issued grand jury subpoenas to associates of former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn seeking business records, as part of the ongoing probe of Russian meddling in last year's election, according to people familiar with the matter. CNN learned of the subpoenas hours before President Donald Trump fired FBI director James Comey [ http://www.cnn.com/2017/05/09/politics/james-comey-fbi-trump-white-out/index.html ].
The subpoenas represent the first sign of a significant escalation of activity in the FBI's broader investigation begun last July into possible ties between Trump campaign associates and Russia.
The subpoenas issued in recent weeks by the US Attorney's Office in Alexandria, Virginia, were received by associates who worked with Flynn on contracts after he was forced out as director of the Defense Intelligence Agency in 2014, according to the people familiar with the investigation.
Robert Kelner, an attorney for Flynn, declined to comment. The US Attorney's Office in Alexandria, the Justice Department and the FBI also declined to comment.
Investigators have been looking into possible wrongdoing in how Flynn handled disclosures about payments from clients tied to foreign governments including Russia and Turkey, US officials briefed on the matter have told CNN.
The Flynn inquiry is one piece of the broader investigation, which FBI Director James Comey testified in a Senate hearing last week is led jointly by the Alexandria US Attorney's Office and the Justice Department's National Security Division.
Flynn was forced to resign as Trump's national security advisor in February after failing to disclose the nature of phone discussions with Russia's ambassador in Washington, Sergey Kislyak.
Congressional investigators have also accused Flynn of possibly breaking the law by not properly disclosing a $45,000 payment for an appearance he made at an event in Moscow to celebrate Russia Today. The Russian government-funded news outlet that US intelligence agencies say played a key role in disseminating stolen emails intended to damage the candidacy of Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election.
[...]
US Attorney Dana Boente, whose office issued the subpoenas, is also leading the investigation into WikiLeaks and the effort to bring possible charges against the group's founder, Julian Assange. Boente is also acting as head of the Justice Department's national security section.
[...]
http://www.cnn.com/2017/05/09/politics/grand-jury-fbi-russia/ [with embedded video]
*
Sean Spicer on Trump firing FBI Director Comey
White Cop Who Finds He Has African Ancestry Sues City, Chief Over Racism
Hastings police Sgt. Cleon Brown says he began to face racist comments and jokes after he told fellow officers about his Ancestry.com results.
The officer claims his colleagues began to make derogatory comments and jokes after he told them of his DNA results.
05/09/2017
Michigan police officer Cleon Brown is suing his chief and the city after a chain of events that began when he took a genetic test through Ancestry.com [ https://www.ancestry.com/ ] in December and was surprised to learn he could trace 18 percent of his DNA to regions in Africa.
Brown was also surprised by how his fellow officers in the Hastings Police Department reacted to the news.
He said the police chief called him “Kunte,” after the character in Alex Haley’s novel “Roots: The Saga of an American Family,” while other officers whispered “Black lives matter [ http://www.mlive.com/news/grand-rapids/index.ssf/2017/05/white_cop_accuses_others_of_ra.html ]” when they walked past, according to MLive.com.
Even the mayor, who has since retired, made cracks, according to Brown’s attorney, Karie Boylan, who has filed a lawsuit on Brown’s behalf [ https://cbsdetroit.files.wordpress.com/2017/05/2017-04-11-brown-cleon-ecf-001-plaintiffs-complaint-and-jury-demand.pdf ].
[...]
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/michigan-white-officer-african-ancestry-lawuit_us_59121a90e4b05e1ca202840e [with embedded video]
*
It’s Time For White Parents Of White Kids To Bring The Resistance Home
Conversations about race have to start much earlier than most white people think they do.
05/08/2017 Updated May 9, 2017
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/time-for-white-parents-of-white-kids-to-bring-the-resistance_us_5910a2f3e4b056aa2363d794
*
Trump Administration Cites Segregation-Era Ruling To Defend Its Travel Ban
President Donald Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions at a White House discussion on March 29. Sessions’ Justice Department has cited a ruling in a swimming pool closure case in its defense of the travel ban.
In 1971, the Supreme Court decided that courts shouldn’t investigate the motivations of officials who closed public pools rather than integrate them.
05/08/2017 Updated May 9, 2017
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/trump-administration-travel-ban-cites-segregation-ruling_us_5910da0ee4b0e7021e9a5cda
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conix -- vapid unanchored/unnormed tripe (eom)
Birth of a Radical
Julia Hahn on July 24, 2015, at the Breitbart offices in Washington.
Photo: Jeremy Liebman
White Fear in the White House: Young Bannon Disciple Julia Hahn Is a Case Study in Extremism
Peter Maass
May 7 2017, 8:45 a.m.
Steve Bannon, who is no stranger to controversy, faced a torrent of reproval when it was revealed [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/steve-bannon-camp-of-the-saints-immigration_us_58b75206e4b0284854b3dc03 ] not long ago that he had praised a detestable novel envisioning France invaded by an armada of brown-skinned migrants from India. The French novel is called “The Camp of the Saints,” and Bannon recommended it on several occasions when he was executive chairman of Breitbart News, to justify what he perceived as a mortal threat that whites face from immigration.
The book, published in the 1970s, had existed for decades as an obscure cornerstone of the utmost fringes of white racism. The Indian children in the novel were referred to as “little monsters,” and the adults were described as sexual maniacs who filled their ships with “rivers of sperm, streaming over bodies, oozing between breasts, and buttocks, and thighs, and lips, and fingers.” The novel ended with hundreds of thousands of them taking over France and, by extension, the West. When it came out in the United States, Kirkus Reviews noted that “the publishers are presenting ‘The Camp of the Saints’ as a major event, and it probably is, in much the same sense that Mein Kampf was a major event.”
Bannon, now a senior adviser to President Donald Trump, made his glowing comments during radio programs he hosted in 2015 and 2016. But his comments were brief and in passing. The most enthusiastic endorsement of the book from anyone at Breitbart, and certainly the longest endorsement, came from a young reporter who wrote a gushing 4,000-word article [ http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/09/24/camp-saints-seen-mirrored-popes-message/ ] that said “all around the world, events seem to be lining up with the predictions of the book.” The article, which neglected to mention that “The Camp of the Saints” is widely regarded as utterly racist, merely described it as controversial, and made conspiratorial parallels between its fictional characters and Pope Francis, Marco Rubio, and even Glenn Beck.
The Breitbart reporter was Julia Hahn, a Bannon protégé who followed him into the White House as a special assistant to President Trump. Bannon and other alt-right figures in the West Wing, including Sebastian Gorka, have received enormous amounts of criticism for espousing ideas that are seen as racist or ridiculous. Gorka is reported [ https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/30/us/politics/sebastian-gorka-white-house.html ] to be leaving the White House, and there have been reports [ https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/12/us/politics/steve-bannon-white-house-trump.html ] that Bannon might be edged out, too. But Hahn has gotten almost no notice for writing what appears to be the longest and most laudatory article about “The Camp of the Saints” that has appeared in the American media in recent years. The few in-depth stories about her getting a job at the White House have mostly focused on her lashing criticism of Paul Ryan, the House speaker whose conservative positions on immigration were far too permissive for Bannon, Hahn, and the rest of Breitbart.
At a glance, Hahn is an outlier among outliers. She was raised in Beverly Hills, attended a private high school, and the only wisp of political activity in her adolescence was a decidedly liberal, pro-immigration gesture: She raised money for a group that brought foreign orphans to the United States. She majored in philosophy at the University of Chicago, and the sole public trace of her time there is a video [ https://vimeo.com/71347395 ] of a panel discussion in which she discussed Michael Foucault’s idea that psychoanalysis stigmatizes human sexuality.
Not long after she was appointed to the White House at the age of just 25, one of her college friends reacted by writing on Facebook, “It’s weird because she was always very nice and it’s disappointing when seemingly nice people turn out to be Nazis/Nazi-adjacent.” Another friend asked, “WTF happened???”
The question of what happened offers an opportunity of sorts. There has been a lot of discussion about countering extremism and identifying extremists before they do something that harms themselves or the nation. How do young people become radicalized? The preferred means for answering these questions are not mysterious — find out the ideas that young people are exposed to, find out the social environment they are raised in, and work from there. This framework has been applied mostly to Islamic extremism, with the goal of figuring out why some Muslims become terrorists.
But the tools of “countering violent extremism,” as it’s known, work extremely well for figuring out the riddle of rich white kids who turn to the fringes of the right. How does someone who raised money for foreign orphans write, a few years later, a screed for Breitbart headlined “Muslim Immigration Puts Half a Million U.S. Girls at Risk of Genital Mutilation”? One of the first things you would seek to do, in the effort to understand the creation of this extremist, is to investigate the place where she was raised. It turned out that I didn’t need to search far, because I grew up less than a mile from Hahn’s home, and attended the same high school.
* * *
An athletic field at Harvard-Westlake School in Los Angeles, California. The private school, attended by Julia Hahn, costs about $40,000 a year for tuition and boasts a high success rate in getting its students admitted into Ivy League universities.
Photo: Luis Sinco/Los Angeles Times/Getty Images
In a way, Julia Hahn is the Patty Hearst of the far right, a daughter of privilege who veered wildly off the expected course. While she has said almost nothing about her journey to the virulent corners of white nationalism, and has not granted any interviews since starting in the White House (she turned down a request from The Intercept), the puzzle of her journey to the alt right can be assembled.
Hahn comes from fabulous wealth. Her grandfather Harold Honickman presided over a soft-drink bottling company that became one of the largest in the nation; in 2002, his net worth was estimated [ http://philadelphia.about.com/cs/neighborhoods/a/rich_in_philly.htm ] at $850 million. Honickman has used his wealth to support liberal causes, including organizations that help the homeless and efforts to tighten gun control. His family foundation has even provided funding for a poetry prize, and his wife wrote a genteel letter on the foundation website [ http://www.honickmanfoundation.org/about/index.php ] that said, “Our personal belief, at the end of the day, is that we are here to take care of one another.”
One of the Honickman children, Shirley, is the mother of Hahn, who was born on April Fools’ Day in 1991. Hahn was raised in a house that’s not far from Rodeo Drive and is valued at more than $5 million by Zillow. (Hahn’s White House financial disclosure form [ https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3533918-Julia-Hahn-s-2017-Financial-Disclosure-Form.html ] shows she owns bank and stock funds worth as much as $2 million [ https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/04/01/us/politics/how-much-people-in-the-trump-administration-are-worth-financial-disclosure.html?smid=fb-share ].) The private school she attended (as I did, a generation earlier) is Harvard-Westlake. It’s hard to imagine a class of people who benefit more from immigrant and undocumented workers — who clean their homes, mow their lawns, maintain their pools, and cook their meals — than Hahn and other children of privilege in Los Angeles. The comfortable life she enjoyed was due, in no small part, to the immigrants she demeaned as a writer for Breitbart.
The dissonance appears to widen when you look at her secondary education. Harvard-Westlake is a model of West Coast liberalism. It is generally regarded as the most competitive school in Los Angeles, its student body drawing on the city’s entertainment and business worlds. When Hahn was named to the White House, the flummoxed student newspaper at Harvard-Westlake published a story [ http://hwchronicle.com/alumna-hops-on-trump-train/ ] in which her history teacher wondered aloud, “She was rather soft-spoken as I recall, so I guess no, I didn’t really see her headed to work for an organization like Breitbart or a person like Bannon.”
Steve Bannon walks to a House Republican meeting at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., on March 23, 2017.
Photo: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg News/Getty Images
Paradoxically, a clue to Hahn’s radicalization is located at Harvard-Westlake. The school has a surplus of famous alumni, from Shirley Temple to Sally Ride, Jake and Maggie Gyllenhaal, and Matthew Weiner (the creator of “Mad Men” who named one of his show’s characters for a popular teacher at Harvard). But the school has another alum who is more infamous than famous: Alex Marlow, the editor-in-chief of Breitbart.
Marlow graduated from Harvard-Westlake in 2004, before Hahn, and for a long time nobody at the school seemed to know or care where he had ended up. The school took notice in 2016, when Marlow was quoted in a New York Times profile of Bannon. A school official posted the story on Facebook. Parents and alumni of Harvard-Westlake were aghast. “This is an embarrassment to our school, and to our fantastic community,” read one of the comments [ https://www.buzzfeed.com/salvadorhernandez/ties-to-trump-and-breitbart-divide-exclusive-los-angeles-sch ] on the post.
The controversy was duly reported by the school’s student newspaper, which published [ http://hwchronicle.com/alums-position-as-breitbart-news-editor-in-chief-sparks-controversy/ ] a story on Marlow and quoted some of his teachers who remembered him as a smart and polite student — just like Hahn. “I would never have imagined that he would get involved with an organization as deplorable as Breitbart News,” said his history teacher Dave Waterhouse.
The upshot is that a single school in Los Angeles was the breeding ground for two of the youngest and most vehement stars of the Trump movement. This raises the prospect of what is known, among experts who study extremism, as a cluster. It goes beyond Hahn and Marlow.
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Andrew Breitbart at the Occupy L.A. site, where he was interviewing occupiers in 2011.
Photo: Ted Soqui/Corbis/Getty Images
Where do America’s far-right leaders come from? Hahn and Marlow, who grew up 5 miles apart, are clues to an intriguing fact of political epidemiology. A surprising number of alt-right leaders come from a single wealthy liberal enclave: the west side of Los Angeles.
Andrew Breitbart, who founded the site that bears his name, was raised in Brentwood, at the center of the west side, and was living there when he died in 2012. Bannon, before becoming famous as the chairman of Breitbart and then Trump’s ideologue, was a Hollywood producer who sent his daughters to a private school in Brentwood. Stephen Miller, the 31-year-old presidential adviser who has been wildly provocative on immigration issues, was raised in neighboring Santa Monica, also known as the People’s Republic of Santa Monica because of its liberal politics.
This might seem weird. California voted in a landslide for Hillary Clinton. All of the state’s elected officials are Democrats, from the governor on down. Since 1961, only one Republican has been elected mayor of Los Angeles. But look again. While Trump got far fewer votes than Clinton, California’s population is so large that the only other state where Trump got more votes was Texas (which he won). According to a report [ https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/intelligence-report/2013/active-%27patriot%27-groups-united-states-2012 ] from the Southern Poverty Law Center, California has more far-right conspiratorial “Patriot” groups, 81, than any other state in the country (Texas, the runner-up, has 79). California may be the “Left Coast,” but it is also the beating heart of the far-right coast.
This is not an accident. People don’t like to be told what to think, so it shouldn’t be a surprise that an atmosphere of doctrinaire liberalism might produce reactionaries who delight in defying the dogmas that seemed so repressive when they were growing up. For instance, Miller, a key advocate of Trump’s Muslim travel ban, chafed [ http://www.univision.com/univision-news/politics/how-white-house-advisor-stephen-miller-went-from-pestering-hispanic-students-to-designing-trumps-immigration-policy ] at the multiculturalism of his high school and its tolerance of gays.
Social progress always seems to trigger a backlash. It’s a paradox that makes sense — environments that are constructed to stop extremism can, instead, provoke it. Trump’s whole rise cannot be viewed through this single lens, of course. But the dynamic is crucial to understanding how and where some extremists are born: when people feel the privileges of their race, gender, language, or religion are threatened.
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The skyline of Washington, D.C., including the Lincoln Memorial, Washington Monument, U.S. Capitol, and National Mall, seen from the air at sunset in 2014.
Photo: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images
In the popular telling, a common scenario of Muslim extremism occurs when a susceptible mind falls under the spell of a charismatic leader at a mosque or madrassa, though sometimes the contact occurs online (this happened with followers [ http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/dead-cleric-anwar-al-awlaki-still-sways-terror-wannabes-n397506 ] of Anwar al-Awlaki, for instance). I have reported on this dynamic in Pakistan, Iraq, and other countries that were like emotional depots for the unformed zeal of drifting youths. The spiritual leaders were spellbinding, their warnings were often apocalyptic, and the devotion of their youthful followers was complete, even if the logic of their maximalist ideologies was flawed and inhuman. Young minds, unshaped, were tinder for an ideological spark.
This scenario isn’t true only for Islamic extremists. When Hahn arrived in Washington, D.C., as another just-out-of-college aspirant, she was not political, according to every account of her that I’ve read and heard (I talked with more than a half dozen people who knew her at the University of Chicago). According to the Washington Post, Hahn jolted to ideological life in the first job she landed — as a producer for right-wing radio host Laura Ingraham. “It sparked her evolution,” the Post stated [ https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/who-is-julia-hahn-the-unlikely-rise-of-steve-bannons-right-hand-woman/2017/03/29/c242504c-125e-11e7-ada0-1489b735b3a3_story.html ]. “She moved quickly to the right.” A short article [ http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/02/13/becoming-steve-bannons-bannon ] in the New Yorker reported much the same, that an apolitical Hahn moved to Washington to get a media job and turned to the far right after she started working for Ingraham. The Post quoted a former Ingraham employee as saying, “Laura will do that to people. She can be very convincing.”
This evokes a strange parallel between far-right radio and television empires presided over by the likes of Ingraham, Sean Hannity, Alex Jones, and Steve Bannon, and fundamentalist mosques and madrassas that manufacture the extremists of the Islamic world. Radical ideologies presented to impressionable minds in these locations are totalistic and comforting in an unsteady world. They offer simplistic antagonists — such as the infidels and the immigrants — and provide simplistic answers to social or economic problems (shut down immigration, eliminate education for girls, and so on). These spellbinding leaders, and the infrastructures around them, are vectors of youthful extremism.
Hahn worked for Ingraham for about a year, then became a spokesperson for David Brat, an insurgent Republican who used the issue of immigration to defeat House Majority Leader Eric Cantor. Brat, a total outsider, raised just $200,000 for his challenge to Cantor, and part of his upset victory was due to strong support from Ingraham as well as other right-wing media figures, including Mark Levin and Ann Coulter. Whether by design or chance, Hahn was at the center of the alt-right rebellion against not just the Democratic Party but the Republican establishment, too.
The late founder of Breitbart News, Andrew Breitbart, is seen on a T-shirt at the 44th Annual Conservative Political Action Conference at the Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center in National Harbor, Md., on Feb. 23, 2017.
Photo: Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA/Redux
Her next step took her to the forefront — as one of the most prolific and strident reporters for the norm-pulverizing machine at Breitbart. Bannon was the dominant figure at Breitbart at the time, “prone to surrounding himself with like-minded young acolytes,” as the New York Times later noted [ https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/02/24/us/politics/trump-conservative-political-action-conference-speech.html ]. In an unusual look inside Bannon’s life before he joined Trump’s campaign, a Bloomberg reporter visited Bannon’s townhouse-turned-newsroom and wrote that he had a “group of young, female Breitbart News reporters whom he’s dubbed the Valkyries.” The Bloomberg story had a photo of Bannon at his Capitol Hill home with nine young reporters, including Hahn. After Politico published a story that criticized Bannon, Hahn rose to his defense and described [ http://www.breitbart.com/big-journalism/2016/09/03/politico-censors-black-jewish-women-hispanic-immigrant-voices-silence-defenders-steve-bannon/ ] him as “one of the most supportive, kind, inspiring and selfless bosses a reporter could ask for.”
Under Bannon, Hahn produced a torrent of articles that mimicked his incendiary ideas on immigration, Muslims, and Democrats. Her stories were perfectly attuned to the extremist ideas for which Bannon has become celebrated and despised; Bannon and Hahn even co-wrote a story [ http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/12/16/paul-ryan-betrays-america-1-1-trillion-2000-plus-page-omnibus-bill-funds-fundamental-transformation-america/ ] that flayed Paul Ryan. One of Hahn’s stories accused Hillary Clinton of planning to resettle a million Muslims in America, and another article warned ominously that under Clinton the number of Muslims in America would exceed the number in Germany — an irrelevant comparison because Germany’s population is several times smaller. One of Hahn’s anti-immigration articles was headlined “Clinton Releases Plan to Dissolve U.S. Border Within 100 Days.”
That was the usual alt-right noise from Breitbart. But in 2015, when Bannon started talking about “The Camp of the Saints,” Hahn wrote about it too. Her story argued that the book was prophetic because it warned that “the liberalism of the West would cause Western nations to throw open their doors to so many migrants that it would spell the doom of liberal society itself.” Hahn’s story used the book to warn that, as she wrote, immigrants from failed countries will “remake the West in the image of those failed countries.” The book, however, is widely regarded as a racist fever dream. One of its most enthusiastic supporters is Marine Le Pen, the leader of the far-right National Front in France, who has a copy of it in her office and has tweeted [ https://twitter.com/MLP_officiel/status/638959623215706112 ] out her endorsement of it.
Even in the conservative world, Hahn went too far for the comfort of some people. At the end of 2015, when she asked a panel of Republican legislators to raise their hands to indicate whether they would suspend or reduce Muslim immigration, Rep. Raul Labrador, a conservative from Idaho, lashed out [ http://www.politico.com/blogs/on-media/2015/11/rep-labrador-refuses-to-take-questions-from-breitbart-reporter-215994 ] at her. “I don’t answer questions from you,” he told Hahn, “because you are not a truthful reporter.”
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Young Republicans holding iPads take a test, offered by the right-wing organization Generation Opportunity, about economic issues that are important to them at the 40th Annual Conservative Political Action Conference in National Harbor, Md., in 2013.
Photo: Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA/Redux
The handful of published stories about Hahn have tended to focus on a seeming paucity of information that would explain who she is or how she ended up on the far right. “Hahn’s increasingly watched byline was all the more extraordinary for her utter anonymity,” the Washington Post reported [ https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/who-is-julia-hahn-the-unlikely-rise-of-steve-bannons-right-hand-woman/2017/03/29/c242504c-125e-11e7-ada0-1489b735b3a3_story.html ]. “Not only did she never appear on TV, she had no public social media presence whatsoever. Photos of her were hard to come by — and conspiracy theories about her true identity were beginning to circulate.” This makes for a good mystery story, but it misses the point. It took little effort for The Intercept to find photos of Hahn (there are some on Facebook, and Bloomberg had published a series of photos that included Hahn and listed her by name). While she does not appear to have been on television, Hahn was frequently on Breitbart radio [ https://soundcloud.com/breitbart/breitbart-news-daily-julia-hahn-november-29-2016 ] and other right-wing radio shows.
The mysterious thing about Julia Hahn is that there is any mystery at all. Washington is bursting with strivers in their 20s just like her, eager to find their spot on the terrain of political power, while unsure of what their own attitudes about power really are. The lack of a political center in the young creatures of Washington is the stuff of parody; just watch an episode of “Veep.” Long ago, I was one of these creatures — as a student at Georgetown University, I applied for internships on Capitol Hill and took the first one I was offered, from a Republican representative famous for one thing — his father was Barry Goldwater, the iconic senator from Arizona. The son had little of his father’s charisma and his politics were vague, though he was kind to me and let me drive his Aston Martin. He was no Laura Ingraham.
Karachi and Kabul are a long ways from Capitol Hill but the hydraulics of youthful extremism are remarkably similar in all of them. Julia Hahn’s opposites are not the young and impressionable Muslims who adopt hate-filled ideas about infidels. They are her mirror image.
Copyright 2017 The Intercept
https://theintercept.com/2017/05/07/white-fear-in-the-white-house-young-bannon-disciple-julia-hahn-is-a-case-study-in-extremism/
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Christian VS Muslim
Top 5 Dangerous Short Circuit
What is Short Circuit? | Electricity-Science | GyanLab
Daily dose of cannabis extract could reverse brain's decline in old age, study suggests
Older mice given THC improved so much that their performance in tests matched those of healthy drug-free young mice – and benefits lasted for weeks after the infusions ended.
Regular low doses of THC dramatically boosted memory and learning in older mice, say scientists, who plan a clinical trial in humans later this year
8 May 2017
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/may/08/daily-dose-of-cannabis-extract-could-reverse-brains-decline-in-old-age-study-suggests-thc [with comments]
study: http://www.nature.com/nm/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nm.4311.html
7,000 bodies could be buried on UMMC campus
In this 2013 UMMC photo, Forrest Follet from the Cobb Institute of Archaeology, Mississippi State University, removes the soil from the lids of the dozens of unmarked graves uncovered during construction on the UMMC campus.
May 6, 2017 Updated May 7, 2017
http://www.clarionledger.com/story/news/local/2017/05/06/7000-bodies-could-be-buried-beneath-ummc-campus/101216178/ [with embedded video, and comments]
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Donald Trump’s Penthouse Is Way Smaller Than He Claims
So strange that he exaggerated about something.
May 8, 2017
http://nymag.com/thecut/2017/05/donald-trump-penthouse-new-york-size-worth.html [with comments]
fuagf -- that was a very nice moment
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Texas officer charged with murder in shooting of teen released on bond
A combination photo shows Roy Oliver in Parker County Sheriff's Office booking photos in Weatherford, Texas, U.S. on May 5, 2017.
May 6, 2017
A former Texas policeman who has been charged with murder in the shooting of a black teenager with a rifle has left jail after posting bond, authorities said on Saturday.
The bond for former Balch Springs officer Roy Oliver, 37, was $300,000, Dallas County Sheriff's Department spokeswoman Melinda Urbina said in a text message.
Oliver surrendered to authorities on Friday, after a warrant was issued for his arrest on a charge of murder, to the Parker County Sheriff's Office west of Dallas and a jail official for the county confirmed Oliver was released on bond the same day.
Oliver, who is white, was fired by the force of the suburban Dallas police department earlier this week for policy violations.
The shooting, which took place on April 29 in a primarily black and Hispanic neighborhood in Balch Springs, about 15 miles (24 km) southeast of Dallas, stoked simmering tensions over perceived racial bias in U.S. policing.
A lawyer representing Oliver did not return calls seeking comment.
Balch Springs police have said Oliver and another officer were responding to a disturbance on the Saturday night and heard multiple gunshots. They came across the vehicle with the teens and ordered it to stop, but it pulled away.
Jordan Edwards, a black high school student described by family and friends as a stand-out student and athlete, was struck by a bullet to the head and died.
[...]
The Balch Springs Police Department on Tuesday announced it had dismissed Oliver for violating department policies, but it declined to give details on which policies were violated.
Police body-camera footage from the scene was reviewed before the department made its decision to fire Oliver.
Balch Springs Police Chief Jonathan Haber told a news conference on Tuesday that the video contradicted an earlier version he gave of the incident in which he said the car was in reverse and heading toward the officer.
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-police-texas-idUSKBN1820N8
rooster -- you cackle from your coop (eom)
Debra Messing Goes After Ivanka Trump In Scathing GLAAD Acceptance Speech
rooster -- "when something is working right" -- like when dubya and Brownie let Hurricane Katrina drive mainly blacks out of New Orleans?
(don't forget -- I remember and can easily enough dig up your post celebrating that and lauding them for doing just that -- . . .)
New Orleans Mayor: Death Threats Won’t Stop Us From Taking Down Confederate Monuments
New Orleans police officers set up barricades at the Jefferson Davis monument on May 4, 2017 in New Orleans, Louisiana.
Republicans Are Building An Alternate Reality Around Their Health Care Bill
Does this plan cut Medicaid? Of course not. Does it protect people with pre-existing conditions? You betcha.
05/07/2017 Updated May 8, 2017
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/republicans-are-building-an-alternate-reality-around-their-health-care-bill_us_590f3160e4b0104c734f95d5 [with embedded video]
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Decoding HHS Secretary Price’s spin on the American Health Care Act
“The fact of the matter is that Medicaid spending under the proposal and under the budget goes up every single year.”
“We have got 20 million folks out there across this land who have told the federal government, ‘Phooey, nonsense. I’m not going to participate in your program because it doesn’t do what I need done.’ So, they are paying a penalty.”
— Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price, interview on CNN’s “State of the Nation,” May 7
May 8, 2017
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2017/05/08/decoding-hhs-secretary-prices-spin-on-the-american-health-care-act/ [with comments]
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My Pre-Existing Condition Wasn’t A Choice
Because of the protections of Obamacare, insurers were no longer allowed to put my health at risk.
05/06/2017 Updated May 8, 2017
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/in-life-we-have-choices_us_590df3f1e4b0f71180724500
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Illustrator Sums Up The Injustice Of AHCA In One Heartbreaking Drawing
“No one should have to choose between death and remaining alive but being unable to afford to live.”
05/05/2017
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/courtney-privett-health-care_us_590b8f29e4b0e7021e95fdf8
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A lot of Republican rhetoric on health care this weekend may haunt the party in 2018
May 8, 2017
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2017/05/08/this-weekend-saw-a-lot-of-republican-rhetoric-on-health-care-that-may-haunt-the-party-in-2018/ [with embedded videos, and comments]
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Oblivious Paul Ryan Poses For Photo With Man In Strongly Anti-GOP T-Shirt
The T-shirt, which reads “‘Repeal and go f**k yourself.’ – GOP,” makes a pointed comment about House Republicans who voted to end health insurance for millions of Americans [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/house-republicans-finally-pass-an-obamacare-repeal-and-replacement_us_590b5e1fe4b0e7021e956436 ] earlier this week. An American flag serves to censor the expletive on the shirt. @Minnysconsin [ https://twitter.com/Minnysconsin/status/860896913717166080 ] posted the photo with the caption, “Couple friends of the pod hanging out this morning.” The “pod” refers to the political podcast “Pod Save America [ https://getcrookedmedia.com/here-have-a-podcast-78ee56b5a323 ],” which also sells the shirt [ https://getcrookedmedia.com/merch-save-america-5496e5adc995 ]. Podcast co-host and former Barack Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau challenged other listeners to top the stunt.
05/06/2017 Updated May 7, 2017
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/fk-yourself-ryan-shirt_us_590e5f91e4b0d5d9049cf8b4 [with embedded video]
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JimLur -- profit? -- from that 'book'? -- AAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
and donated to -- wait for it -- the Ivanka M. Trump Charitable Fund? -- AAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
and is she donating the portion of her advance she'd already received? -- AAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
bagwa-john -- sounds good -- things must be looking a lot better with the all the precip this recently-concluded season
bagwa-john -- an important piece -- thanks
hope all's well
JimLur -- posting such shit, you most demean yourself
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Trump’s Tax Math Has a Big Problem
[tab headline: "The Impossible Math Behind Trump's Tax Cut"]
Photographer: Isaac Brekken/Getty Images
by Peter Coy
May 04, 2017 1:21 PM
There’s a reason Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin keeps insisting that his boss’s tax-cut plan [ https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-04-26/white-house-unveils-trump-s-opening-bid-for-biggest-tax-cut ] will fully pay for itself through faster economic growth. Budgetary politics make it hard for him to say anything else. Senate rules require 60 votes for any tax cut that would raise deficits beyond a window of 10 years from the date of passage. Conceding upfront that President Donald Trump’s plan would generate more red ink in the medium to long term would be accepting defeat before the legislative fight has even begun.
“This will pay for itself with growth and with reduction of different deductions and closing loopholes,” Mnuchin said at an April 26 briefing on the one-page outline of a tax plan. National Economic Council Director Gary Cohn didn’t go that far, though he did call the plan “a once-in-a-generation opportunity to do something really big."
This equation is the transversality condition for a government budget. Debt is B, the present time is t, the economy’s growth rate is g, the future time period is s, and infinity is the sideways 8. What all this means is that the present value of government spending has to be matched by the present value of all receipts...in other words, Trump’s tax plan is unsustainable.
Math is not on their side. The budgetary impact of tax legislation is scored by the nonpartisan staff of Congress’s Joint Committee on Taxation. Judging from its past calculations, the JCT is likely to agree with independent budget wonks, on the left and right, who have concluded that Trump’s plan would create a gusher of red ink. “No individual tax cut pays for itself,” says Alan Cole, an economist at the right-of-center Tax Foundation. “There has to be a strong mix of tax cuts and revenue-raisers—a good mix of both candies and vegetables. Right now I see things as a little short on vegetables.”
The Trump tax plan, because it generates deficits as far as the eye can see, violates what’s known as the transversality condition, which says that debt relative to the size of the economy cannot grow to infinity; fiscal policy is sustainable over the long run only if there will be surpluses in the future to offset deficits today. True, Keynesian-style tax cuts like President Barack Obama’s 2009 stimulus package also generate red ink, but they’re designed to phase out when the economy no longer needs the jolt.
What makes the Trump tax cuts violate the transversality condition is that they’re intended to be permanent. “If you propose a big tax cut without offsetting spending cuts, then it’s essentially an incomplete proposal,” says Eric Toder, co-director of the Tax Policy Center, a venture of the Urban Institute and Brookings Institution. “What you’re implicitly proposing is lower spending and higher taxes in the future.”
The federal budget was on the wrong track even before Trump took office. The Congressional Budget Office said on March 30 that, assuming current laws remain generally unchanged, federal debt held by the public would grow from 77 percent of gross domestic product now to 146 percent in 2046, with no end to the upward trend on the horizon. That’s unsustainable. “We have this enormous fiscal gap. We have to be cutting it, not raising it,” says Laurence Kotlikoff, a Boston University economist who harped on deficits when he ran for president last year as an independent.
Since Trump can’t credibly claim that his tax cuts will pay for themselves and not increase the deficit, he’s left with unpleasant options. One is to curtail his cuts in hopes of achieving a score of revenue neutrality from the JCT. He’s already dropped hints that he considers the one-pager as a starting point for negotiations, not a final demand. But while taking candy out of the tax package and adding vegetables would please the JCT, it would make it harder to pass the bill by creating some clear losers: If revenue is to be neutral, inevitably there will be groups whose taxes go up—such as New Yorkers and Californians who would lose the ability to deduct state and local income taxes.
A second option is to schedule the tax cuts to expire by the end of the JCT’s 10-year scoring period, so they can pass with a simple majority in the Senate. That’s what President George W. Bush did, although some of his cuts were later extended. But businesses don’t like to make investment decisions based on tax cuts that won’t last.
A tempting alternative is for Congress to change its rules. Senator Pat Toomey, a Pennsylvania Republican, issued a press release on April 26 disdaining “arbitrary budget constraints” and suggesting that it might not be necessary to make Trump’s tax plan revenue-neutral at the end of 10 years. “There are ways to navigate these obstacles,” the statement said, “including the use of a longer horizon,” meaning more time for cuts to generate growth and become revenue-neutral. The Wall Street Journal reported on May 2 that a senior administration official said in late April that no rule requires the window for scoring tax proposals to be 10 years long. A scoring window of 20 or 30 years wouldn’t magically make a deficit-generating tax cut into a surplus-generating one, but it would please businesses by giving them low tax rates for longer.
A third option is to press hard on the argument that any revenue losses are temporary and will be made up as the tax cuts boost economic growth. This is Mnuchin’s case. Likewise, Vice President Mike Pence said [ http://www.nbcnews.com/meet-the-press/video/full-pence-interview-healthcare-reform-is-just-around-the-corner-933158467659 ] on Meet the Press on April 30 that deficits could grow “maybe in the short term,” but added, “If we don’t get this economy growing at 3 percent or more, as the president believes that we can, we’re never going to meet the obligations that we’ve made today.”
Pence is right that stronger growth would solve a host of problems. This is where things get interesting. Suppose that Trump’s tax cuts raise economic growth over the long term, just not enough to fully pay for themselves. Deficits would rise. But if—hypothetically—debt grew more slowly than the economy, debt would shrink in relation to GDP, making it easier to bear. The tax cuts, despite not being revenue-neutral, would bring the budget closer to satisfying the transversality condition—i.e., being sustainable.
Mnuchin hinted at one point in the April 26 briefing that debt sustainability, not revenue neutrality, was the right standard by which to judge Trump’s tax cuts. He said that “this plan is going to lower the debt-to-GDP” ratio. Expect to hear more of that kind of talk in future GOP messaging.
The bottom line: Trump's plan to cut taxes might lead to higher GDP growth, but without spending cuts it will certainly increase the deficit.
©2017 Bloomberg L.P. (emphasis in original)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-05-04/the-impossible-math-behind-trump-s-tax-cut
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Full Show - Shadow Government Emerges, Announces Trump Overthrow - 05/05/2017