Michael1942's Blog

It is well documented that TOTUS is no more than a Well known “Con Man” on a scale much larger than Bernie Madoff except he gives nothing back! MA.

Valentina Caval 13 hours ago

The United States and China have been battling on trade for more than a year now. The tariffs started slowly. In the first few months of the war, President Donald Trump placed tariffs on less than 3% of Chinese imports, but by December 15 the president plans to hit nearly everything the U.S. imports from China.
Despite rising tensions in recent months, Trump has said he wants a trade deal before his reelection bid in 2020. He has also insinuated that Beijing may be holding out for a Democratic candidate. In a speech in Baltimore Thursday night, the president mocked Democratic presidential candidate and former U.S. Vice President Joe Biden.
“Whoa boy. He’s a furious kind of a guy. Great guy. [Chinese President Xi Jinping is] dying to see…he wants Sleepy Joe,” Trump said, referring to Biden. “Could you imagine those two guys in a room…”
But despite Trump’s comments, former White House Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci thinks China is actually hoping for a Trump win in the 2020 presidential.
“You have an orange rag doll, Donald J. Trump, and you have a Doberman pinscher, China, shaking the rag doll,” Scaramucci said on Yahoo Finance’s On the Move. “And then what they’re going to do in a couple months, they’re going to throw that rag doll into the corner, and they’re going to cut a deal with him because they absolutely want Trump to be reelected.”
So why does China want Trump to remain president of the U.S.? Trump is damaging the U.S. and undermining the country’s global standing, according to Scaramucci. Trump is ‘burying the U.S.’
Trump has repeatedly said China wants a deal with the U.S. On Thursday, he said he preferred a to get a “whole deal” with China but did not rule out the possibility of an interim deal.
The trade tensions between the two countries have rocked global markets. In early August, stocks plunged after Trump announced — through a series of tweets— that he planned to place an additional 10% tariffs on $300 billion worth of imports from China. The word “tariff” has been mentioned in Trump’s tweets 165 times across 95 days, according to Barron’s, and on those days the S&P 500 fell by an average of 0.05%.
Earlier this month, Trump labeled China “the enemy” and just a few days later he claimed China officials had called him in a pursuit of a trade deal, but China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs denied any calls.
“He is disrupting the global alliance and bringing down the international trading system. And he is hurting our hard and soft power and our standing,” Scaramucci said. “Literally, the way he acts is a full-blown embarrassment on the global stage. He’s stumbling and bumbling along. The Chinese is laughing. This guy’s burying the U.S.”
Valentina Caval is a producer for Yahoo Finance’s On the Move.

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The current administration with its revolving door cabinet and advisors is set to be deluged with lawsuits ranging from State to Federal during and after serving. The wide range of executive orders, ill-considered Tax reforms, immigration laws and rules on tariffs will weigh heavily in the upcoming election.TOTUS has allowed the influence of bad actors from other countries to be inserted into our government and politics through his tweeting and off-hand comments when meeting Foreign dignitaries. MA
Israel accused of planting mysterious spy devices near the White House

By Daniel Lippman 1 hr ago
But unlike most other occasions when flagrant incidents of foreign spying have been discovered on American soil, the Trump administration did not rebuke the Israeli government, and there were no consequences for Israel’s behavior, one of the former officials said.

The miniature surveillance devices, colloquially known as “StingRays,” mimic regular cell towers to fool cell phones into giving them their locations and identity information. Formally called international mobile subscriber identity-catchers or IMSI-catchers, they also can capture the contents of calls and data use.

The devices were likely intended to spy on President Donald Trump, one of the former officials said, as well as his top aides and closest associates — though it’s not clear whether the Israeli efforts were successful.
President Trump is reputed to be lax in observing White House security protocols. POLITICO reported in May 2018 that the president often used an insufficiently secured cell phone to communicate with friends and confidants. The New York Times subsequently reported in October 2018 that “Chinese spies are often listening” to Trump’s cell-phone calls, prompting the president to slam the story as “so incorrect I do not have time here to correct it.” (A former official said Trump has had his cell phone hardened against intrusion.)
By then, as part of tests by the federal government, officials at the Department of Homeland Security had already discovered evidence of the surveillance devices around the nation’s capital, but weren’t able to attribute the devices to specific entities. The officials shared their findings with relevant federal agencies, according to a letter a top DHS official, Christopher Krebs, wrote in May 2018 to Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.).
Based on a detailed forensic analysis, the FBI and other agencies working on the case felt confident that Israeli agents had placed the devices, according to the former officials, several of whom served in top intelligence and national security posts.
That analysis, one of the former officials said, is typically led by the FBI’s counterintelligence division and involves examining the devices so that they “tell you a little about their history, where the parts and pieces come from, how old are they, who had access to them, and that will help get you to what the origins are.” For these types of investigations, the bureau often leans on the National Security Agency and sometimes the Central Intelligence Agency (DHS and the Secret Service played a supporting role in this specific investigation).
“It was pretty clear that the Israelis were responsible,” said a former senior intelligence official.
An Israeli Embassy spokesperson, Elad Strohmayer, denied that Israel placed the devices and said: “These allegations are absolute nonsense. Israel doesn’t conduct espionage operations in the United States, period.”
A senior Trump administration official said the administration doesn’t “comment on matters related to security or intelligence.” The FBI declined to comment, while DHS and the Secret Service didn’t respond to requests for comment.
But former officials with deep experience dealing with intelligence matters scoff at the Israeli claim — a pro forma denial Israeli officials are also known to make in private to skeptical U.S. counterparts.
One former senior intelligence official noted that after the FBI and other agencies concluded that the Israelis were most likely responsible for the devices, the Trump administration took no action to punish or even privately scold the Israeli government.
“The reaction … was very different than it would have been in the last administration,” this person said. “With the current administration, there are a different set of calculations in regard to addressing this.”
The former senior intelligence official criticized how the administration handled the matter, remarking on the striking difference from past administrations, which likely would have at a very minimum issued a démarche, or formal diplomatic reprimand, to the foreign government condemning its actions.
“I’m not aware of any accountability at all,” said the former official.
Beyond trying to intercept the private conversations of top officials — prized information for any intelligence service — foreign countries often will try to surveil their close associates as well. With the president, the former senior Trump administration official noted, that could include trying to listen in on the devices of the people he regularly communicates with, such as Steve Wynn, Sean Hannity and Rudy Giuliani.
“The people in that circle are heavily targeted,” said the former Trump official.
Another circle of surveillance targets includes people who regularly talk to Trump’s friends and informal advisers. Information obtained from any of these people “would be so valuable in a town that is like three degrees of separation like Kevin Bacon,” the former official added.
That’s true even for a close U.S. ally like Israel, which often seeks an edge in its diplomatic maneuvering with the United States.
“The Israelis are pretty aggressive” in their intelligence gathering operations, said a former senior intelligence official. “They’re all about protecting the security of the Israeli state and they do whatever they feel they have to to achieve that objective.”
So even though Trump has formed a warm relationship with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and made numerous policy moves favorable to the Israeli government — such as moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, ripping up the Iran nuclear deal and heavily targeting Iran with sanctions — Israel became a prime suspect in planting the devices.
While the Chinese, who have been regularly caught doing intelligence operations in the U.S., were also seen as potential suspects, they were determined as unlikely to have placed the devices based on a close analysis of the devices.
“You can often, depending upon the tradecraft of the people who put them in place, figure out who’s been accessing them to pull the data off the devices,” another former senior U.S. intelligence official explained.
Washington is awash in surveillance, and efforts of foreign entities to try to spy on administration officials and other top political figures are fairly common. But not many countries have the capability — or the budget — to plant the devices found in this most recent incident, which is another reason suspicion fell on Israel.
IMSI-catchers, which are often used by local police agencies to surveil criminals, can also be made by sophisticated hobbyists or by the Harris Corporation, the manufacturer of StingRays, which cost more than $150,000 each, according to Vice News.
“The costs involved are really significant,” according to a former senior Trump administration official. “This is not an easy or ubiquitous practice.”
Among professionals, the Israeli intelligence services have an especially fearsome reputation. But they do sometimes make mistakes and are “not 10 feet tall like you see in the movies,” a former senior intelligence official noted.
In 2010, the secret covers of a Mossad hit team, some of whom had been posing as tennis players, were blown after almost 30 minutes of surveillance video was posted online of them going through a luxury Dubai hotel where they killed a top Hamas terrorist in his room.
Still, U.S. officials sometimes have been taken aback by Israel’s brazen spying. One former U.S. government official recalled his frequent concern that Israel knew about internal U.S. policy deliberations that were meant to be kept private.
“There were suspicions that they were listening in,” the former official said, based on his Israeli counterparts flaunting a level of detailed knowledge “that was hard to explain otherwise.”
“Sometimes it was sort of knowledge of our thinking. Occasionally there were some turns of phrase like language that as far as we knew had only appeared in drafts of speeches and never been actually used publicly, and then some Israeli official would repeat it back to us and say, ‘This would be really problematic if you were to say X,’” said the former official.
Back when the Obama administration was trying to jump-start negotiations with the Palestinians, for example, the Israelis were eager to get advance knowledge of the language being debated that would describe the terms of reference of the talks.
“They would have had interest in what language [President Barack] Obama or [Secretary of State John] Kerry or someone else was going to use and might indeed try to find a way to lobby for language they liked or against language that they didn’t like and so having knowledge of that could be advantageous for them,” the former official said.
“The Israelis are aggressive intelligence collectors, but they have sworn off spying on the U.S. at various points and it’s not surprising that such efforts continue,” said Daniel Benjamin, a former coordinator of counterrorism at the State Department and now director of the John Sloan Dickey Center for International Understanding at Dartmouth.
He recalled once meeting with a head of Mossad, the premier Israeli intelligence agency. The first thing the official told Benjamin was that Israel didn’t spy on the U.S.
“I just told him our conversation was over if he had such a low estimate of my intelligence,” Benjamin said.
Israeli officials often note in conversations with their American counterparts — correctly — that the U.S. regularly gathers intelligence on Israeli leaders.
As for Israel’s recent surveillance of the White House, one of the former senior U.S. intelligence officials acknowledged it raised security concerns but joked, “On the other hand, guess what we do in Tel Aviv?”

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Apparently “Botch McConnell” does not have the same enthusiasm for running the Senate as he had when President Obama was in office. He has stalled legislation because he either did not want to fight for legislation or he is afraid of criticism from TOTUS. It is time for: Botch” to go as he is not good for the country as he has aided and abetted a loose cannon of a Leader. MA.

Alexander Bolton 9 hrs ago
President Trump and his Republican allies are conflicted over whether to move forward with expanded background checks, a proposal that has overwhelming public support but risks a clash with the National Rifle Association and other Second Amendment advocates ahead of the 2020 election.

The overwhelming majority of the Senate GOP conference is already on the record as opposing a compromise measure to expand background checks sponsored by Sens. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.) and Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), which the Senate defeated in 2013 and 2015.

But many of them are likely to flip if Trump endorses a proposal to strengthen background checks, an idea that has consistently garnered strong ratings in public polls.

“I can tell you that there are Republican senators who were not here in 2015, the last time we had a vote, who are interested in this. There are Republican senators who were here and voted ‘no’ and they are rethinking,” Toomey said.
Sen. Mike Braun (R-Ind.), who was elected to the Senate last year, on Tuesday said he is open to expanded background checks.
“I’m interested in that as well as long as it doesn’t cross the threshold of impacting a law-abiding citizen in any way in terms of how he or she might want to access a weapon,” he said.
White House officials told Senate Republicans on Tuesday they are working on a package of proposals to address gun violence after several mass shootings rocked the nation over the August recess.
White House legislative affairs director Eric Ueland has told GOP leaders the proposal could come as soon as this week.
One Republican senator who voted against Toomey-Manchin six years ago told The Hill that he would consider changing his position.
“Ninety-five percent of the transfers at gun shows are not between individuals, they’re with dealers. When people go to gun shows, they’re prepared to have a background check and they do it instantly. Background checks at gun shows are most often the rule,” the senator said. “As much as I support the Second Amendment, I just cannot understand how it’s that much of an intrusion to have a background check between individuals.”
Toomey and other advocates of expanded background checks note that National Rifle Association chief executive Wayne LaPierre testified before the House in 1999 in favor of universal background checks, a position the gun rights group has since abandoned.
Toomey, who has been in regular contact with the president, on Tuesday said the president has expressed a willingness to strengthen background checks and described Toomey’s proposal as having the most “resonance” and the best chance of becoming law.
“I’ve spoken with the president repeatedly, probably a half a dozen times by now,” Toomey told reporters. “The president has been very engaged. He’s been very receptive.”
“He is open to doing something in this space and from my conversations with him and confirmed by his staff, he has not yet made a decision regarding exactly what he’s going to support,” he said.
GOP leaders on Monday said Trump is expected to get a full briefing on policy options as soon as Thursday and then make his recommendation to Capitol Hill Republicans about what he’s willing to support.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and other Republican lawmakers are waiting for a sign from Trump before taking a position on expanded background checks.
“We’re waiting for something we know if it passed would actually become law, and until the White House gives us some indication of what the president is willing to sign, we’re waiting to see what it looks like,” McConnell said.
Asked whether he personally thought it reasonable to mandate background checks for all commercial gun sales, McConnell replied, “I’m going to wait and assess the proposal that actually could become law.”
White House officials at this point are mulling whether to include background checks legislation in a bigger package along with several other proposals addressing gun violence, according to senators familiar with the negotiation.
Other proposals under consideration include so-called red-flag legislation, which would allow courts to temporarily confiscate weapons from individuals considered dangerous, and a bill sponsored by Toomey and Sen. Christopher Coons (D-Del.) that would require law enforcement officers to be notified when someone fails a background check while attempting to purchase a gun.
Toomey said he is working with GOP colleagues to address their concerns about his old legislation.
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), who represents Parkland where 17 people were killed at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in 2018, said on Tuesday there are concerns that expanded background-check requirements would make it tougher for nondealers to sell their guns online.
“I haven’t voted for it in the past,” he said. “I have concerns throughout that I have expressed in the past, in particular about putting an undue burden on an everyday person who’s not in the business of selling guns.”
Rubio said he’s worried about requiring a nondealer who wants to sell a gun “to potentially go out and undertake a background check they’d be liable for.”
“The NICS system is not an easy-to-access system,” he said of the National Instant Criminal Background Check System.
One possible change to the Toomey-Manchin proposal would make it easier for individuals who live in remote rural areas to obtain background checks through federally licensed firearms dealers.
Democrats, meanwhile, are trying to pressure McConnell to bring to the Senate floor a gun-violence package that passed the House in February.
“Enough is enough. Too many Americans are losing their lives to gun violence. It’s time to bring H.R. 8, the House-passed, bipartisan universal background checks bill to the floor for a vote,” Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) said Tuesday.
McConnell dismissed the Democrats’ call for action as a political “stunt” because Trump has already said he will veto the House bill.
“For months, what I have said consistently is let’s see if we can actually make a law here. And making a law when you have divided government is challenging,” McConnell said. “My members know the very simple fact that to make a law you have to have a presidential signature.”

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A misspelling got TOTUS a lesson in civility. MA

Julie Zauzmer 9 hrs ago

The Rev. Jonathan Carl glanced at Twitter and laughed out loud in disbelief.

© ASSOCIATED PRESS President Donald Trump speaks with reporters before departing on Marine One from the South Lawn of the White House, Monday, Sept. 9, 2019, in Washington. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
The president of the United States had just tweeted at him, a Baptist pastor in Kentucky who up until now hadn’t had any reason to be the subject of national attention. And President Trump was, online, in public, out of the blue, insulting him.
The president had mixed up Jonathan Carl, the Kentucky minister with fewer than 375 Twitter followers, with Jonathan Karl, the ABC News reporter whose journalism had ruffled the feathers of the commander in chief.
© Screenshot by Jonathan Carl/Screenshot by Jonathan Carl The screenshot that the Rev. Jonathan Carl took when he saw that the president had tweeted at him by mistake
Carl’s laughter soon turned into concern. Trump had called Carl a “lightweight reporter.” And some of Trump’s ardent fans weren’t happy with Jonathan Carl — not realizing that he wasn’t Jonathan Karl.

The “drive-by tweet” brought on “intense vitriol and hatred,” Carl said. He was suddenly experiencing what many of Trump’s intended Twitter targets go through almost daily: a barrage of infuriated tweets from Trump’s followers.
The pastor stopped laughing. And on Monday, a week after his evening as a sudden Twitter target, he published an open letter to Trump.
“Although I was an accidental casualty caught in the cross-fire of your ‘lightweight’ tweet, your attack was very purposeful and hurtful. Many others, whether American citizens or global citizens, feel wounded and hurt by the shrapnel and side-effects of your ongoing Twitter attacks,” Carl wrote in his letter.
He hurled the same insult back at Trump that Trump had mistakenly leveled at him — but then turned it into a theological point. “Let’s be honest, you are a lightweight too,” Carl wrote. “We all are. God is the only heavyweight who knows it all and gets it right all the time.”
He pleaded with the president: “Please don’t make the Twitter-universe such a dark and depressing place. It shouldn’t be a place to argue, fight, or jockey for position. We can disagree and debate without childish name-calling. You can make Twitter a better place.”
Carl, who did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Washington Post, is the lead pastor at South Fork Baptist Church in Hodgenville, Ky. According to an online biography, he is an Iraq War veteran, holds a PhD from Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and is raising three daughters with his wife.
His church is part of the Southern Baptist Convention — the nation’s largest Protestant denomination, and one of its most Republican-leaning. Sixty-four percent of Southern Baptists described themselves as “conservative” to Pew Research Center, and 9 percent described themselves as “liberal.” Last year, Vice President Pence showed up as a surprise guest at the denomination’s annual convention, where he thanked more than 9,000 attendees from churches “to the Southern Baptist Convention for the essential and irreplaceable role you play in America.”
But Carl didn’t mince words for the president. “Your heart must be in a dangerous place to have such a consistent flow of defamation and disrespect towards so many,” he said.
He interspersed his own comments throughout the letter with quotes from Abraham Lincoln, a president who never got to use Twitter but still came up with plenty of bon mots. Carl said that he passes Lincoln’s birthplace, which is now a National Park Service site, in his church’s town of Hodgenville, almost every day on his commute.
Perhaps Lincoln would not have been overly fond of Twitter, based on one 1861 quotation that Carl selected from the great emancipator: “I am rather inclined to silence, and whether that be wise or not, it is at least more unusual nowadays to find a man who can hold his tongue than to find one who cannot.”

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I am sure many TOTUS followers will take issue with this article (as stated by the author within the article but facts are facts and essentially undisputable. MA
Accepting the reality about the president’s disordered personality is important—even essential.
6:00 AM ET
Peter Wehner
Contributing editor at The Atlantic and senior fellow at EPPC

During the 2016 campaign, I received a phone call from an influential political journalist and author, who was soliciting my thoughts on Donald Trump. Trump’s rise in the Republican Party was still something of a shock, and he wanted to know the things I felt he should keep in mind as he went about the task of covering Trump.

At the top of my list: Talk to psychologists and psychiatrists about the state of Trump’s mental health, since I considered that to be the most important thing when it came to understanding him. It was Trump’s Rosetta stone.

I wasn’t shy about making the same case publicly. During a July 14, 2016, appearance on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal, for example, I responded to a pro-Trump caller who was upset that I opposed Trump despite my having been a Republican for my entire adult life and having served in the Reagan and George H. W. Bush administrations and the George W. Bush White House.
“I don’t oppose Mr. Trump because I think he’s going to lose to Hillary Clinton,” I told Ben from Purcellville, Virginia. “I think he will, but as I said, he may well win. My opposition to him is based on something completely different, which is, first, I think he is temperamentally unfit to be president. I think he’s erratic, I think he’s unprincipled, I think he’s unstable, and I think that he has a personality disorder; I think he’s obsessive. And at the end of the day, having served in the White House for seven years in three administrations and worked for three presidents, one closely, and read a lot of history, I think the main requirement for president of the United States … is temperament, and disposition … whether you have wisdom and judgment and prudence.”
That statement has been validated.
Donald Trump’s disordered personality—his unhealthy patterns of thinking, functioning, and behaving—has become the defining characteristic of his presidency. It manifests itself in multiple ways: his extreme narcissism; his addiction to lying about things large and small, including his finances and bullying and silencing those who could expose them; his detachment from reality, including denying things he said even when there is video evidence to the contrary; his affinity for conspiracy theories; his demand for total loyalty from others while showing none to others; and his self-aggrandizement and petty cheating.
It manifests itself in Trump’s impulsiveness and vindictiveness; his craving for adulation; his misogyny, predatory sexual behavior, and sexualization of his daughters; his open admiration for brutal dictators; his remorselessness; and his lack of empathy and sympathy, including attacking a family whose son died while fighting for this country, mocking a reporter with a disability, and ridiculing a former POW. (When asked about Trump’s feelings for his fellow human beings, Trump’s mentor, the notorious lawyer Roy Cohn, reportedly said, “He pisses ice water.”)

The most recent example is the president’s bizarre fixation on falsely insisting that he was correct to warn that Alabama faced a major risk from Hurricane Dorian, to the point that he doctored a hurricane map with a black Sharpie to include the state as being in the path of the storm.
“He’s deteriorating in plain sight,” one Republican strategist who is in frequent contact with the White House told Business Insider on Friday. Asked why the president was obsessed with Alabama instead of the states that would actually be affected by the storm, the strategist said, “You should ask a psychiatrist about that; I’m not sure I’m qualified to comment.”
We have repeatedly heard versions of that sentiment over the course of Trump’s presidency. It’s said that speculating on Trump’s mental health is inappropriate and unwise, especially for those who are not formally trained in the field of psychiatry or psychology.
That’s true, up to a point. Yes, it is best to leave it to experts to determine whether Trump satisfies the criteria for a clinical diagnosis of antisocial personality disorder, narcissistic personality disorder, some combination of both, or nothing at all.

But if a clinical diagnosis is beyond my own expertise, Trump’s psychological impairments are obvious to all who are not willfully blind. On a daily basis we see the president’s chaotic, unstable mind on display. Are we supposed to ignore that?

An analogy may be helpful here. If smoke is coming out from under the hood of your car, if you notice puddles of oil under it, if the engine is overheating and you smell burning oil, you don’t have to be a car mechanic to know that something is wrong with your car.
Accepting the reality about Trump’s disordered personality is important and even essential. For one thing, it will help us to better react to Trump’s freak show.
Even now, almost a thousand days into his presidency, the latest Trump outrage elicits shock and disbelief in people. The reaction is, “Can you believe he said that and did this?”
To which my response is, “Why are you surprised?” It’s a shock only if the assumption is that we’re dealing with a psychologically normal human being. We’re not. Trump is profoundly compromised, acting just as you would imagine a person with a disordered personality would. Many Americans haven’t yet come to terms with the fact that we elected as president a man who is deeply damaged, an emotional misfit. But it would be helpful if they did.

Among other things, it would keep us feeling less startled and disoriented, less in a state of constant agitation, less susceptible to provocations. Donald Trump thrives on creating chaos, on gaslighting us, on creating antipathy among Americans, on keeping people on edge and off balance. He wants to dominate our every waking hour. We ought not grant him that power over us.
It might also take some of the edge off the hatred many people feel for Trump. Seeing him for what he is—a terribly damaged soul, a broken man, a person with a disordered mind—should not lessen our revulsion at how Trump mistreats others, at his cruelty and dehumanizing actions. Nor should it weaken our resolve to stand up to it. It does complicate the picture just a bit, though, eliciting some pity and sorrow for Trump.
But above all, accepting the truth about Trump’s mental state will cause us to take more seriously than we have our democratic duty, which is to prevent a psychologically and morally unfit person from becoming president.

The office is too powerful, and the consequences are too dangerous, to allow a person to become president who views morality only through the prism of whether an action advances his own narrow interests, his own distorted desires, his own twisted impulses. When an individual comes to believe his interests and those of the nation he leads are one and the same, it opens the door to all sorts of moral and constitutional devilry.
Whether or not his disorders are diagnosable, the president’s psychological flaws are all too apparent. They were alarming when he took the oath of office; they are worse now. Every day Donald Trump is president is a day of disgrace. And a day of danger.
We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor

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There have been statements made that our system of government is broken, well it isn’t the administrators are broken or at the least ineffective while taking money for a poor job. In any other industry, they would all be fired! Current legislators (Scamocrats and Dupublicans) are failures working under the cover of an aspiring depot steeped in his own ignorance. The long list os failures by our long serving Congress would fill pages and pages yet we have still elected them time and time again. Do you find it odd that so many deals are made out of the spotlight? With TOTUS in the drivers, seat money is being spent with little to no oversight and the powerful Senate leader has maintained silence except in the case of his state being affected by this robbery from now much needed FEMA funds for 40 to127 miles (according to various reports) of unnecessary border wall. see the article that follows MA:

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Projects defunded for Trump’s border wall include military buildings with ‘life safety violations’ and hazmat concerns

By Aaron Gregg and
Paul Sonne
September 7 at 6:55 AM

[Pentagon approves diversion of military construction funds for Trump’s border wall] Mark Esper a TOTUS appointee gave this approval)
The U.S. Navy has been forced to stand down on construction projects meant to fix “life safety violations” and fire risks at dilapidated ship maintenance buildings and hazardous materials warehouses in Virginia after funds were diverted to pay for President Trump’s border wall.
The pending construction projects at Norfolk Navy Shipyard are among 127 that the Pentagon has defunded to free up $3.6 billion in funding for fences and barriers on the southern border with Mexico using emergency powers.
One of the military facilities — a 1957 structure on the Portsmouth, Va., shipyard known as “Building #510″ — had been cited for numerous “life safety violations” that threatened the well-being of hundreds of workers if not heavily renovated, the Navy warned in its budget request to Congress last year.

The building has been labeled a “high risk environment,” largely due to fire safety concerns. As of last year it had no sprinkler protection, inadequate fire alarm systems and not enough exits. Excessive heat and humidity inside have caused equipment problems despite a 60-ton portable HVAC system brought in to clear the air, according to Navy budget documents.
To compensate for the risk of fire, the Navy had been reassigning workers to staff “roving fire watches” around the clock, seven days a week. The budget request sought to revamp the building, including relocating personnel overseeing nuclear containment and repairing Navy life rafts from an even more dangerous building.

If the building isn’t replaced, the Navy wrote in its 2018 request, “approximately 330 personnel, working more than 256,000 manhours annually will remain in a high risk environment, with continuing significant rework, high stress, and additional operating costs due to inadequate working environment.” The Navy received $26 million from Congress for a construction project that would have upgraded the building, only to see that funding taken away to pay for Trump’s border wall project.

The project is one of eight military construction projects in Maryland and Virginia that will lose $155 million in funding being diverted to construct fencing and barriers along the southern border.
The episode highlights how long-neglected military facilities that suffered under the sequestration-induced budget restrictions are now being buffeted by a different political headwind.
The defunded projects include a Maryland child-care facility for soldiers’ children, Virginia warehouses designed to hold hazardous materials and a secure facility for classified cyberwarfare operations. They are among 127 military construction projects across 23 states, three U.S. territories and 20 countries that have been sidelined to pay for fencing and barriers on the border with Mexico. Shooting ranges, airfields, drone facilities, schools, a missile field and a treatment center for working dogs are among the projects that have seen their funding rescinded.

Members of Congress representing Maryland and Virginia said the diversion of funds will hurt U.S. national security.
“I’m deeply concerned about President Trump’s plan to pull funding from critical national security projects — including millions of dollars from important projects in Virginia — so he can build his border wall,” Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) said in a statement. His state will lose an estimated $89 million in funded projects to pay for the wall effort, making it one of the most affected.
Trump declared a national emergency in mid-February after Congress refused to give him the sum he wanted for border barrier construction. An obscure U.S. Code section governing the military allows the defense secretary, in the event of a national emergency requiring the use of the armed forces, to carry out construction projects in support of those troops without approval from Congress. The statute permits the defense secretary to take money that Congress has given the Pentagon for other military projects that have yet to start contracting.

Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper on Tuesday determined that 11 border barrier projects proposed by the Department of Homeland Security would support troops deployed to the border, and authorized the Pentagon to divert $3.6 billion from 127 military projects to finance them. On the campaign trail, Trump regularly said Mexico would pay for his planned wall along the southern border.
[Trump administration tells judge Congress did not deny border wall funds when it declined to appropriate money for it]
For the defunded projects to proceed, Congress must once again appropriate funds for them. Republican lawmakers on Capitol Hill broadly support “backfilling” the $3.6 billion worth of projects, and the Republican-led Senate has included a provision to do so in its version of the annual defense policy bill. Democrats, however, have balked at the suggestion, saying Trump’s action flies in the face of Congress’s constitutionally mandated power of the purse. Democratic lawmakers, including Kaine, have argued that “backfilling” the projects would set a precedent allowing any future president to do an end run around Congress when confronted with funding he or she deems insufficient.

Top Pentagon officials say they are committed to making sure the defunded projects are still completed, and say they will work with Congress to ensure that the funding for the projects is replenished. Still, they have admitted there is no guarantee the funding will be forthcoming.
The Portsmouth ship repair facility is part of the Norfolk Navy Shipyard, the U.S. Navy’s oldest shipyard, where workers repair and build naval vessels ranging from submarines to aircraft carriers. Among other activities, federal workers and contractors there are responsible for maintaining nuclear-powered aircraft carriers and submarines, as well as disposing of the radioactive waste they generate. The shipyard processed approximately 8,000 cubic feet of radioactive solid waste from nuclear submarines between 2013 and 2017, according to a recent report from the Energy Department.
But the infrastructure supporting the U.S. military’s nuclear waste disposal efforts has crumbled in recent decades under successive waves of budget restrictions. In some cases, that work has been carried out using antiquated 40-year-old pipes, valves and tanks, according to a 2011 budget document.
Other projects that have been sidelined in favor of the border wall include $41 million for a pair of “non-combustible hazardous materials warehouses” at the Norfolk shipyard. One of the warehouses was to include a new storage shed for gas cylinders; according to Navy budget documents, the existing one is too small and doesn’t have the necessary fire safety systems.
The Norfolk warehouses currently being used to store hazardous materials “are World War II-era structures that are inefficient and not designed for HAZMAT warehouse operations,” Navy officials wrote.
“If this project is not provided, [the Defense Department] will continue storing hazardous materials in non-conforming storage facilities that do not meet current life safety/fire safety code requirements,” Defense officials told members of Congress in 2018.

Defense Department public affairs representatives did not respond to questions about the current status of the shipyard buildings, or whether the problems had been fixed.
Another project that is to be defunded to pay for the border wall is a $10 million cyber operations facility, planned for Joint Base Langley-Eustis, in Hampton Roads, Va.
According to 2018 budget documents, the construction project is meant to create a Secure Compartmentalized Information Facility, or SCIF, a name commonly used to describe areas of U.S. government buildings designed for handling classified material. The facility is to replace a temporary leased one currently being used by the Air Force’s 185th Cyberspace Operations Squadron, a cyberwarfare division reporting to U.S. Cyber Command. A recent assessment found that the unit needs a new facility to meet its full potential.

A 2018 Air Force budget document stated that continuing use of the leased facility “is costly and represents an enhanced security risk.”As of Friday it was still leasing a facility, an Air Force public affairs representative said.
Military construction projects in Maryland took a slightly smaller economic hit, with a total of $66.5 million in funds deferred. Maryland Reps. Jamie B. Raskin and C.A. Dutch Ruppersberger, both Democrats, said in published statements that the funding decision would inconvenience U.S. troops.
[Pentagon takes money from Puerto Rico, European projects to pay for Trump’s border wall]
“This is blatantly stealing billions from crucial projects that directly benefit our military families, their quality of life and troop readiness,” Ruppersberger said.
Defunded projects in Maryland include $16.5 million from an unspecified project called “Cantonment Area Roads” at Fort Meade, which houses the headquarters of the National Security Agency. The border wall project will take $50 million from Joint Base Andrews, a military base in suburban Maryland eight miles from the D.C. border. Construction projects put on hold there include a planned cargo pad for hazardous materials, a designated training facility for U.S. service members trained to defuse and dispose of bombs, and a $13 million child development facility.

Aaron Gregg
Aaron Gregg covers the defense industry, commercial aviation and government contractors for the Washington Post’s business section. Follow

Paul Sonne
Paul Sonne covers the U.S. military and national security. He previously reported for the Wall Street Journal from Moscow, London and Washington.

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