Michael1942's Blog

A perfect example of how a consummate liar works- a reminder of 1930’s German propaganda which eventually devastated Europe and resulted in the murders of millions.MA

 
10 hrs ago
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump brought his enduring fiction about hurricane aid for Puerto Rico to a rally crowd in Florida on Wednesday.
Pledging unstinting support for more hurricane recovery money for Floridians, he vastly exaggerated how much Puerto Rico has received.
Trump laced his speech in Panama City Beach with a recitation of falsehoods that never quit, touching on veterans’ health care, the economy, visas and more. A sampling:
TRUMP: “We gave to Puerto Rico $91 billion” — and that’s more, he said, than any U.S. state or entity has received for hurricane aid.
THE FACTS: His number is wrong, as is his assertion that the U.S. territory has set some record for federal disaster aid. Congress has so far distributed only about $11 billion for Puerto Rico, not $91 billion.
He’s stuck to his figure for some time. The White House has said the estimate includes about $50 billion in expected future disaster disbursements that could span decades, along with $41 billion approved.
That $50 billion in additional money is speculative. It is based on Puerto Rico’s eligibility for federal emergency disaster funds for years ahead, involving calamities that haven’t happened.
That money would require future appropriations by Congress.
Even if correct, $91 billion would not be the most ever provided for hurricane rebuilding efforts. Hurricane Katrina in 2005 cost the U.S government more than $120 billion — the bulk of it going to Louisiana.
___
TRUMP, boasting that his economic record has delivered the “highest income ever in history for the different groups — highest income.”
THE FACTS: Not so. He did not achieve the best income numbers for all the racial groups. Both African Americans and Asian Americans had higher income prior to the Trump administration.
The median income last year for a black household was $40,258, according to the Census Bureau. That’s below a 2000 peak of $42,348 and also statistically no better than 2016, President Barack Obama’s last year in office.
Many economists view the continued economic growth since the middle of 2009, in Obama’s first term, as the primary explanation for recent hiring and income gains. More important, there are multiple signs that the racial wealth gap is now worsening even as unemployment rates have come down.
As for Asian Americans, the median income for a typical household last year was $81,331. It was $83,182 in 2016.
___
TRUMP, claiming countries are taking advantage of the U.S. diversity visa lottery program: “They’re giving us some rough people.”
THE FACTS: A perpetual falsehood from the president. Countries don’t nominate their citizens for the program. They don’t get to select people they’d like to get rid of.
Foreigners apply for the visas on their own. Under the program, citizens of countries named by the U.S. can bid for visas if they have enough education or work experience in desired fields. Out of that pool of qualified applicants, the State Department randomly selects a much smaller pool of tentative winners. Not all winners will have visas approved because they still must compete for a smaller number of slots by getting their applications in quickly.
Those who are ultimately offered visas still need to go through background checks, like other immigrants.
___
TRUMP, describing how veterans used to wait weeks and months for a VA appointment: “For the veterans, we passed VA Choice. … (Now) they immediately go outside, find a good local doctor, get themselves fixed up and we pay the bill.”
THE FACTS: No, veterans still must wait for weeks for a medical appointment.
While it’s true the VA recently announced plans to expand eligibility for veterans in the Veterans Choice program, it remains limited due in part to uncertain money and longer waits.
The program currently allows veterans to see doctors outside the VA system if they must wait more than 30 days for an appointment or drive more than 40 miles to a VA facility. Under new rules to take effect in June, veterans will have that option for a private doctor if their VA wait is only 20 days (28 for specialty care) or their drive is only 30 minutes.
But the expanded Choice eligibility may do little to provide immediate help.
That’s because veterans often must wait even longer for an appointment in the private sector. In 2018, 34 percent of all VA appointments were with outside physicians, down from 36 percent in 2017. Then-Secretary David Shulkin said VA care was “often 40 percent better in terms of wait times” compared with the private sector.
Choice came into effect after some veterans died while waiting months for appointments at the Phoenix VA medical center.
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TRUMP, on the Choice program: “That’s a great thing for our veterans. They’ve been trying to get it passed for 44 years. We got it passed.”
THE FACTS: He’s incorrect. Congress approved the private-sector Veterans Choice health program in 2014 and President Barack Obama signed it into law. Trump is expanding it.
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TRUMP, on Democrat Beto O’Rourke’s crowd size at a Texas rally, before he launched his presidential campaign: “He had like 502 people.”
THE FACTS: Trump sells short O’Rourke’s crowd, though it has grown in his mind since he claimed the Democrat only got 200-300 at his El Paso gathering in February. Trump had a rally there the same day.
O’Rourke’s march and rally drew thousands. Police did not give an estimate, but his crowd filled nearly all of a baseball field from the stage at the infield to the edge of outfield and was tightly packed.
___
Find AP Fact Checks at http://apne.ws/2kbx8bd
Follow @APFactCheck on Twitter: https://twitter.com/APFactCheck

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“Botch” McConnell is again hiding from his duties and maintaining silence while “his” President continues to run the country into the ground. It is odd that he fought the previous administration tooth and nail but allows this one to assail the Constitution and twist the law with the help of his gang of miscreants. The question is: who does he work for, the people or his party?

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It has been shown through the past several years that TOTUS is easily distracted by “shiny objects”. This is the latest

“The Kentuky Derby decision was not a good one. It was a rough and tumble race on a wet and sloppy track, actually, a beautiful thing to watch. Only in these days of political correctness could such an overturn occur. The best horse did NOT win the Kentucky Derby – not even close!
– Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 5, 2019″

The “intelligent” Leader belies that intelligence with every word and action, it must be the “bone spurs”!.

As usual, the Current administration speaks out of the wrong end about policies they have created out of ignorance. MA. 

© The Hill

Morgan Gstalter 5 hrs ago
Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) fired back on Friday after Vice President Pence said she “doesn’t know what she’s talking about” regarding the ongoing conflict in Venezuela.
Omar took to Twitter to say that Pence’s criticism is something “women of color have heard” before.
“Instead of ‘we disagree,’ it’s ‘she doesn’t know what she’s talking about,’ ” Omar wrote. “They have to make us feel small.”
“This from an Administration that thinks climate change is a Chinese hoax,” she added.

Omar was responding to the vice president’s remarks after she warned against U.S. military involvement in Venezuela amid political turmoil in the country.

When asked by Fox News anchor Sandra Smith why he has chosen to criticize Omar on social media, Pence said it was “because the congresswoman doesn’t know what she’s talking about.”
“Nicolás Maduro is a socialist dictator who has taken what was once one of the most prosperous nations in this hemisphere and brought it literally to a level of deprivation and oppression and poverty that we have never seen,” Pence said of the Venezuelan leader. “That’s not a result of U.S. policies.”
The freshman Democrat has been critical of the Trump administration’s efforts to pressure Maduro out of office and previously said that the U.S. “helped lead the devastation” in the South American country.
Omar said the economic turmoil in Venezuela has been exasperated in recent years by U.S.-led sanctions that have cost the economy millions from lost oil revenue.
“A lot of the policies that we have put in place has kind of helped lead the devastation in Venezuela,” Omar told Democracy Now this week, adding that U.S. sanctions had “set the stage” for the current humanitarian crisis.
The Trump administration announced support for National Assembly leader Juan Guaidó in January, recognizing him as the country’s interim president over Maduro.
Supporters of Guaidó have taken to the streets in recent days in an effort to overthrow Maduro’s government in a political rebellion.

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The 2017 Tax and Jobs Act – does this have anything to do with the “Audit” of Trump Org.’s taxes? MA.

By Peter Cary and Allan Holmes of the Center for Public Integrity 7 hrs ago

Big companies drove Donald Trump’s tax cut law but refused to commit to any specific wage hikes for workers, despite repeated White House promises it would help employees, an investigation shows.

The 2017 Tax and Jobs Act – the Trump administration’s one major piece of enacted legislation – did deliver the biggest corporate tax cut in US history, but ultimately workers benefited almost not at all.
This is one of the conclusions of a six-month investigation into the process that led to the tax cut by the Center for Public Integrity, a not-for-profit news agency based in Washington DC.

The full findings, based on interviews with three dozen key players and independent tax experts, and analysis of hundreds of pages of government documents, are published today in an in-depth piece.
‘Just 6% spent on workers’
The tax hike was sold to citizens as a move that would boost the economy, add jobs and hike wages. The president said in one speech that it would bring the average American household “around a $4,000 pay raise”.
Seizing on that, the Communications Workers of America, a 700,000-member union, asked eight major corporations to sign a pledge to hike worker wages by $4,000 a year if their tax rate was cut to 20%, the initial proposed rate. The companies balked and signed nothing.
Still, big business got what it wanted.
The bill signed into law by Trump on 22 December 2017 cut the corporate tax rate from 35 to 21%, the largest such rate cut in US history. “The most excited group out there are big CEOs,” said the White House economic adviser Gary Cohn as the measure was making its way through Congress in 2017.
But the fears of ordinary workers in regard to those promised higher wages were realized.
The bulk of the $150bn the tax cut put into the hands of corporations in 2018 went into shareholder dividends and stock buy-backs, both of which line the pockets of the 10% of Americans who own 84% of the stocks.
Just 6% of the tax savings was spent on workers, according to Just Capital, a not-for-profit that tracks the Russell 1000 index.
In the first three months after the bill passed, the average weekly paycheck rose by $6.21. That would be $233 a year.
One retirement expert, J Mark Iwry, said more of the cut should be reaching workers: “It would seem appropriate for employers to share their tax savings with their workers – for example, through new employer 401k plan contributions or wage increases.”
Among the investigation’s other key takeaways:
– During the process deficit hawks who opposed adding any more to the existing $20tn in US debt, and who insisted on any tax cut having “revenue neutrality”, hemmed and hawed and finally folded, as one commentator put it, “like a cheap suit”. Still, some Republicans used $1.5tn in accounting devices to either hide the true cost of the bill or help justify their votes.
– One idea on the table for nearly six months was a so-called Border Adjustment Tax, which would have raised $1tn and largely paid for the tax cuts. But members of the Senate belittled it, saying it would never fly because it was opposed by a coalition of huge retailers. They were right. But when the border tax was abandoned, Congress had no plan B to offset the huge tax cuts.
– The bill was drafted in secret, partly to keep it from Congress’s own members who, it was feared, would leak it to lobbyists. Those crafting the bill worried that if the contents of their drafts leaked out, lobbyists would go to work gutting the bill. Hearings on the legislation were reduced to a bare minimum.
Limited scrutiny
The bill was passed with astonishing speed that limited scrutiny. The Joint Committee on Taxation, a trusted nonpartisan agency that tried to give an honest assessment of the cost of the bill, was virtually cut from the picture. Its final and most important assessment was not delivered until the day Trump signed the bill. Not a single member of Congress saw that analysis before voting.
In a meeting that was the key turning point in the entire process, the Senate’s most vocal deficit hawk, Republican Bob Corker of Tennessee, who wanted to create no new debt, sat down with the Senate’s most strident supply-sider, Republican Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania, who wanted to borrow $2.5tn to pay for the tax cuts. They agreed on borrowing $1.5tn over 10 years. The meeting lasted all of 10 minutes.
Ultimately, three main themes emerged from the Center’s reporting.
One is that the bill, with its 21% corporate tax rate, was first and foremost a gift to multinationals. They had wanted cuts in the corporate tax rate for foreign and domestic profits for decades. Everything else flowed from that: the tax cuts for smaller businesses known as “pass-throughs”, which had been their holy grail, and the cuts for individuals, which were needed to sell the bill to voters.
The second: all the posturing about real “reform” of the tax code and “revenue neutrality” for the legislation was meaningless. In fact, the bill had to create a $1.5tn 10-year deficit to pay for its generous tax cuts. Without the deficit, the corporate rate of 21% could never have been achieved and, more important, the bill could not have passed at all.
The third was that the bill as passed was hugely problematic. It contained egregious mistakes, created massive new loopholes and opened the door to new forms of tax avoidance. Thirteen tax law professors from around the country, in a 68-page study, blasted its “rushed and secretive process” that resulted, they said, “in deeply flawed legislation”.
Dana Trier, here at a 2018 Brookings Institution event, was hired by the Trump administration to help write the tax bill. ‘I thought I could make it work,’ he said of the tax bill. ‘And in fact, we didn’t reach my standard.’
Among the disappointed were people who had been hired by the Trump administration to craft the bill – including Dana Trier, a New York lawyer who had been a tax policy official in the Ronald Reagan and George HW Bush administrations. He allowed himself to be lured back into government for one more go because he thought the tax code had gotten out of whack and reform was overdue.
In the end, though, Trier counted himself among those who were severely troubled by how the bill turned out. Parts were not well thought through, he told the Center, and “known problems” were not corrected because of the speed with which it passed.
“So, I mean I want to be honest with you, I was completely sick,” he said. “You know from my perspective I took one for the team and my reason for taking one for the team had not been fulfilled. I thought I could make it work. I could be one of those people who could help make it work. And in fact we didn’t reach my standard.”
Read the full investigation on the Center for Public Integrity’s website. Peter Cary and Allan Holmes are reporters at the Center for Public Integrity

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The amount of plastic in the air and in the oceans has been an issue for years and now has become worse since the detection of airborne microparticles, the massing of plastic waste on beaches and its effect on wildlife. The recycling of plastics has been touted for a while but no big progress has been seen. One possible reason is the different melting temperatures of various plastics and the assorted chemical treatments needed to get a useable product. There is an extensive list that covers the many types and their use and recyclability and it is dull reading. What would be required to do an effective job of recycling is the separation of the different types and the proper processing of those assortments. Why are we not doing that? There seems to be a number of opinions but no collective ideas nor the will to do so due to cost and return on investment. So the bottom line is there is not enough money in it to do it but it is ok that cleanup costs millions (or perhaps billions) without counting the loss of wildlife which also affects the environment in general. The link from National Geographic below gives an extensive look at plastic’s effects on our environment

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2019/05/microplastics-impact-on-fish-shown-in-pictures/?cmpid=org=ngp::mc=crm-email::src=ngp::cmp=editorial::add=sunstills_20190428::rid=35125298195

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Mr. Graham’s statement below  Waffling between Politics and truth, perhaps he has been stung by a Trump Bee. MA

Rachael Bade 14 hrs ago , Washington Post

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey O. Graham on Sunday pushed back against White House senior adviser Jared Kushner’s recent downplaying of Russian interference in the 2016 election, calling Moscow’s actions a “big deal” deserving of new sanctions immediately.

Still, the South Carolina Republican insisted President Trump had done nothing wrong, citing special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s refusal to charge Trump with either conspiracy or obstruction of justice in the Russia probe.

“I think the idea that this president obstructed justice is absurd,” Graham, a fierce Trump ally, said on CBS News’s “Face the Nation.” “I can’t think of one thing that President Trump did to stop Mueller from doing his job. . . . I’ve heard all I need to really know.”
During the interview, however, Graham challenged the assertion by Trump’s son-in-law in a Time magazine interview on Tuesday that Russia’s bid to sway the 2016 election in Trump’s favor amounted to a “couple of Facebook ads” — and that Mueller’s investigation was more damaging to the country than the Russian effort.
“You look at what Russia did, you know, buying some Facebook ads to try to sow dissent . . . and it’s a terrible thing,” Kushner said last week. “But I think the investigations, and all of the speculation that’s happened for the last two years, has had a much harsher impact on our democracy than a couple of Facebook ads.”
Graham said Sunday that although “I like Jared a lot,” he’s “leaving out a big detail” — namely that the Russians hacked the emails of the Democratic presidential nominee’s campaign manager and the Democratic National Committee.
“Can you imagine what we would be saying if the Russians or the Iranians hacked into the presidential team of the Republican Party?” Graham asked. “So, no — this is a big deal. It’s not just a few Facebook ads. They were very successful in pitting one American against the other during the 2016 campaign.”
Graham also argued that “an attack on one party should be an attack on all” and said he has spoken to Trump about imposing more sanctions on Moscow.
“They’re coming at us again, and I’d like to stop them, and one way to stop them is to make them pay a price,” Graham said, later adding: “The Russians are up to it again. . . . Everything we’ve done with the Russians is not working. We need more sanctions, not less.”
Trump, however, demonstrates a continued unwillingness to accept that Russia interfered in the 2016 election, even questioning his own intelligence community’s findings about Russian hacking. Multiple news outlets have reported that Trump believes such an assertion undercuts his victory.
Graham’s words, however, are unlikely to satisfy Democrats, given his insistence that there is nothing to litigate following Mueller’s report at a time when House Democrats say they will use the document as a road map for their own investigations.
One of 10 instances of possible obstruction cited in the Mueller report, which is more than 400 pages long, involved Trump allegedly calling then-White House counsel Donald McGahn and telling him to fire Mueller. House Democrats have subpoenaed McGahn, but Graham said he has no plans to do the same in the Senate.
“I don’t care what he said to Don McGahn; it’s what he did. And the president never obstructed,” Graham said. “If you’re going to look at every president who pops off at a staffer and, you know, asks them to do something that’s maybe crazy, you wouldn’t have any presidents.”
Notably, however, Mueller argued in his report that he did not feel he had the authority to determine whether Trump had obstructed justice. The special counsel seemed to defer to Congress on the matter, citing Justice Department guidelines barring a president from being charged with a crime.
rachael.bade@washpost.com

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The “Leader” of the Free world shows his lack of knowledge as to how media works when told that Media companies routinely check and remove malicious bots and tweets. After having it explained to him, he still didn’t get it. Is this who we want for another 4 years? MA.

By William.Sommer@thedailybeast.com (Will Sommer) asawin.suebsaeng@thedailybeast.com (Asawin Suebsaeng)
, The Daily Beast•April 23, 2019
On Tuesday, President Trump hosted Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey in the Oval Office for a closed-door meeting, during which the leader of the free world spent an inordinate amount of time complaining about lost Twitter followers, according to a source familiar with the conversation.
The Twitter chief, for his part, tried to reassure the president that the company’s staff merely wants his follower count to be as bot-free as possible.
This is what the most powerful person in the world was preoccupied with Tuesday.
A large percentage of the meeting, which included senior White House officials such as Trump’s social media director Dan Scavino, was spent addressing the subject of @realDonaldTrump’s follower count. The president stated his belief that he had lost some of his roughly 59 million followers in anti-Trump, anti-conservative Twitter purges, according to a source familiar with the meeting.
Dorsey, according to this knowledgeable source, had to explain to the president that like other Twitter users, @realDonaldTrump periodically loses followers when the site deletes fake or bot accounts. Dorsey even said he himself had lost followers as a result of Twitter’s efforts to delete fake accounts.
During this private gathering in the West Wing, Dorsey assured Trump that the company wants him, and everyone else on Twitter, to have only real followers, according to the source.
Trump also said he’s heard from other prominent conservatives about problems with Twitter, though he declined to name names.
The summit with Twitter’s CEO is unlikely to assuage the president’s concerns about tech giants and social media, of which he has many. Two people close to Trump previously told The Daily Beast that Trump has repeatedly griped to associates about how his predecessor, President Obama, has had more Twitter followers than he has, even though—by Trump’s own assessment—he is so much better at Twitter than Obama is.
The Washington Post first reported that the president devoted much of the White House meeting to grumbling about his Twitter followers. Earlier in the day, Motherboard broke the news that Trump and Dorsey were meeting on Tuesday.
Dorsey also used the meeting to promote Twitter’s efforts to fight opioid addiction, which include using a special emoji to promote National Prescription Drug Take Back Day. It is unclear how interested Trump was in discussing those efforts, at least compared to his time spent inquiring about the alleged purging of his followers.
Beyond confirming that the meeting had indeed occurred, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders did not respond to The Daily Beast’s follow-up questions as of press time.
The discussion came a few hours after early morning tweets from the president accusing Twitter of playing “political games” with his follower count and calling for congressional intervention against the company.
“Constantly taking people off list,” Trump tweeted. “Big complaints from many people.”
Read more at The Daily Beast.

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