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Category Archives: Trumpedation

No Collusion(?) But A Lot Of Covfefe


In the ongoing saga of  Administrative mismanagement, chaos and Congressional malfeasance anything that occurs in this current administration should be of no surprise to anyone who is paying attention. The supporters of this Resident will probably not see the light until  they are blinded by the long range effects. The recent tariff’s while not immediately, will affect many products  we send overseas and now China (one of our biggest trading partners) is imposing tariffs, if China decides to enforce more tariffs on items like Soybeans or automobiles, those 2 items would have a severe effect on many of TOTUS’ supporters. This Tariff issue is more about intellectual properties than physical issues and there are many. The installation of a vindictive child as Leader will over time push us ALL back 2 decades and alienate our allies. The rush to get things done with no apparent discussion is the wrong way to Govern. We already have an inept Congress lead by two self servers, adding a self aggrandizing child has only exacerbated our declining position on the world stage. There appears to be no understanding of how diplomacy  works or  what diplomacy is, yet policy is made and enacted much like a fleeting thought. Looking at the ongoing tweet storm method of Governing, we have a poor Tax reform enacted that on the face looks great but underneath the dirty end of the stick still falls to the mid to lower income Americans. Just because companies have given pay increases or bonuses to employees does not mean a boon to those employees and their families. More taxes will have to be paid on these increases and bonuses, the larger deduction will not offset these taxes. Larger deductions do not directly offset pay increases, there is only a percentage advantage. The Corporate tax cuts allow for the wage increases and bonuses but at the same time allows the investors and share holders to gain (how many low to middle income taxpayers own stock?). In the long run these tax cuts, tariffs and other executive orders will bite the low to middle class tax payers in many more ways that we never think of. For instance: The TOTUS has through his actions allowed for EPA regulations that protect our air and water but benefit the main polluters (our vehicles and certain industries), These actions do not produce any new jobs but have the capacity to cause and aggravate more illnesses for many of us. There is no upside for this Administration and the slide downward is getting slicker. To be clear we collectively do not have very good Congressional representation or Top down leadership and that falls on our shoulders because we as voters do not or will not investigate the people we vote for. The political ads are no more than buzzwords and soundbites that sound good enough to get someone elected but once in office, they do what is best for them and their party while our needs became tertiary or lower. This is again a call for all voters to forgo the entertainment value of our current administration and see behind the curtain. All of the actions of  “TOTUS” is for his edification and pursuit of adoration as evidenced by the ongoing campaign style meetings. Being adored is not the role of the Leader of our country, it is a thankless job if done as correct as possible and we see this administration tumbling into an abyss that will take many years to get out of and only if have the courage to make changes in our lackluster Congress along with electing a Leader (no matter which party) who is not Jar Jar Binks!

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U.S. Obamacare 2018 exchange enrollment drops 3 percent: CMS


Explain to me how can a program work when it is restricted as the Current administration has restricted the ACA (aka Obamacare). This program which benefitted many more people than the GOP wants you to believe has been under attack since it’s inception. The current administration has derided it as a failure but not telling the whole truth. Campaign rhetoric and promises that harm the public are as criminal as bodily harm. The administration will point to this decrease as a victory but ask the people who are affected by the loss or decrease of health care. If you are affected by these changes then you need to step up and engage in getting people elected who will do what good for you. MA.
Reuters 15 hours ago

CMS’s Verma says 11.8 million signed up for 2018 Obamacare exchange plans
(Reuters) – About 11.8 million consumers nationwide enrolled in 2018 Obamacare exchange plans, a 3 percent drop from last year when 12.2 million consumers signed up, according to a final government tally released on Tuesday by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
The tally includes both sign-ups on the exchange run by the federal government for 39 states, which was released on a provisional basis late in 2017, and on the 12 other exchanges run by Washington, D.C. and the remaining states.
CMS said the average premium before tax credits in 2018 is $621 a month, an increase of more than 30 percent from last year.
However, those receiving tax credits – around 83 percent of consumers on Obamacare – will pay around $89 a month on average in premiums, the agency said. That is down 16 percent from $106 a month last year.
Private insurers sell strictly regulated individual insurance plans through the Obamacare online exchanges that the government subsidizes based on a person’s income.
U.S. President Donald Trump in October cut off billions of dollars in subsidy payments to insurers that help people pay for medical costs, causing insurers to raise 2018 premiums or drop out of selling plans in the Obamacare marketplace.
His administration also halved the enrollment period to six weeks and cut the federal advertising and outreach budget by 90 percent. It also has proposed putting cheaper insurance policies offering bare-bones medical coverage on the Obamacare market in 2019 or 2020.

Pitching Droppings


President Donald Trump pitched his steel tariffs as a way to save U.S. steel jobs, saying it was a move designed to urge “all companies to buy American.”
However, some small businesses, like LOOK Trailers in Indiana, are feeling the heat from Trump’s trade move.

“LOOK’s president, Matt Arnold, said the company has seen steel prices increase 25 percent and aluminum as high as 35 percent. He told CNBC that he’s afraid his suppliers’ prices have even further to run in the months ahead.
Although the company already uses 75 percent U.S. steel and aluminum, now its competitors are also moving from foreign to domestic steel. That’s driving up the demand for steel producers domestically and adding costs to businesses’ bottom lines.
Arnold said that the company has managed to honor fixed prices on committed orders, but that means they’ve been “getting hit and absorbing price increases and then pricing out three months.”
He said the net effect has been the same on the whole industry in this area.
“Whether you’re public or private the hit has been to your bottom line,” Arnold said.
Trump has said he hopes shuttered steel mills will reopen and add new life into the American steel industry. But that process could take more than year, if not longer, leaving some businesses without enough U.S.-made steel and aluminum.
Arnold said another factor affecting his business is rising wages because of a tightening labor market.
“It’s a battle every day. It’s how to get more out per man hour. While battling rising wages, competitive workforce, and now you add the third one, which is rising raw materials. You have to be right today. There’s no margin for error,” he said.
The average cost of a trailer from LOOK is about $3500, which is already a 9 percent jump from 2017.
The last time the U.S. slapped major tariffs on steel imports, under President George W. Bush in 2002, companies like LOOK Trailers experienced a 10 to 15 percent hike in prices and a drop in sales. Businesses are hoping this time will be different.”

CNBC News , 3/29/2018

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Trump 2020 Census Question Could Cost Texas Billions


 The ongoing Trump influence again shows no pretense of correctness even in areas that “like” him.MA

Newsweek

Nicole Goodkind

2 hrs ago 

President Donald Trump won Republican-friendly Texas by nine points in 2016, securing his path to the White House and the GOP’s hold over Washington. But now this ruby red state, with its mélange of arid landscapes, oversized steaks and cosmopolitan cities brimming with people from around the world, could lose representation in Congress and billions of federal dollars because of a Trump administration decision to add a question about citizenship status to the U.S. Census in 2020.

The change, instated by Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross Monday night, would bring back a question last seen in the 1950s. Ross claims the citizenship question will be used to increase data and prevent voter discrimination. But detractors argue the shift is intended to scare immigrants and prevent them from participating, and it’s the voters in Texas, many of whom backed Trump, who could be among the hardest hit.

Once the new federal survey lands, Texas, a state that already exceeds the national average for low Census response scores, could face new obstacles in accurately representing its population, a figure that determines Congressional representation and federal funding. A vocal group of bipartisan critics say that questions about citizenship would dissuade a large percentage of legal and undocumented Texas residents from answering the Census, which is used to calculate the state’s official population. There are nearly five million immigrants living in Texas, and more than half of them are undocumented or live with someone who is. 

An undercount of Texas’s immigrant population could lead to underrepresentation in Congress, less federal funding for citizens still recovering from Hurricane Harvey and fewer Congressional districts, which could stymie the so-called blue wave of Democrats winning office in the typically Republican state.

The new Census question “will scare away millions of people in our country from participating, skewing the results and costing Texas billions of dollars in federal funds over the next 10 years,” said U.S. Representative Joaquín Castro, a Democrat representing parts of San Antonio and Austin, in email to Newsweek.

Texas is one of a handful states slated to gain seats in Congress after the 2020 Census count, in part because of its growing immigrant community. In 2010, the state added four new seats fueled largely by a 42 percent growth in its Hispanic population.

“Texas was supposed to pick up three seats in Congress after the next Census and this decision could cost us one of those,” said Castro.

Funding and representation often go hand-in-hand, and an undercount could limit both. The Census is used by the federal government to allocate more than $675 billion in federal funds annually for health, welfare, infrastructure and other federal services. Nearly 600,000 undocumented immigrants reside in Houston alone.

“While our immigrant communities include both documented and undocumented, today’s anti-immigrant rhetoric can only suppress an accurate Census count–in Houston and across our country,” Margaret Wallace Brown, deputy director for the Houston Planning and Development Department, told the U.S. Conference of Mayors in January. Brown expressed concern about “the diaspora of Houstonians flooded out of their homes and businesses due to Hurricane Harvey. The interruption of established social and community networks will further complicate an accurate count.”

An undercount could mean “a loss of millions in resources for health care, public education, infrastructure and transportation, disaster relief and preparedness, and the distribution of billions in federal funds critical to projects in Texas,” said U.S. Representative Beto O’Rourke, a Democrat from El Paso running for the Senate against incumbent Ted Cruz, in email to Newsweek.

Cruz, who was born in Canada and maintains hardline anti-immigration views, was part of a group that recommended the additional Census question to the Department of Commerce. The senator called the question a “reasonable, common-sense addition” to the Census in a group statement with Republican Senators Tom Cotton, of Arkansas, and Jim Inhofe, of Oklahoma Monday night. “It is imperative that the data gathered in the Census is reliable, given the wide-ranging impacts it will have on U.S. policy,” Cruz added.

Democrats argue that the citizenship question would undermine a growing left-leaning populace that Democrats are hoping can turn Texas from a deeply red to purple state. In Texas’s three largest counties, Democratic primary voters outnumbered Republicans in 2018, a significant change from 2014 when the opposite was true.

“This change is purely political,” said Ryan Robinson, Austin City demographer who has worked through four decennial Censuses, to Newsweek. “There’s nothing we’re going to gain from an efficiency standpoint. This is all about Democrats versus Republicans.”

Immigrants tend to congregate in cities, which largely vote Democratic in Texas. But having fewer Congressional districts representing these population centers, “will slow the march toward purple; this will be a step or two backwards,” said Robinson.

Democrats also fear that Texas Republicans will use the new data to redraw Congressional districts to limit the power of immigrant voters, who tend to lean left.

“Beyond decade-long impacts on Texas families, it will also work in tandem with gerrymandering to erode the voting rights of those in our state and threaten our representation in the Federal government,” said O’Rourke.

Outrage around the issue, however, could work in Democrats’ favor ahead of the November midterm elections. American Bridge, a progressive group that supports Democratic candidates, says the change would fuel voter turnout among Latino and other immigrant groups. “This cowardly attack on the Constitution and the democratic process is an attempt by Donald Trump to sell Texas and a host of other states short, denying them the federal dollars that they deserve,” said spokesperson Andrew Bates to Newsweek. “Keeping this bigoted dog whistle of a question from being part of the 2020 Census is yet another reason the American public will vote for a Democratic Congress in November.”

Ross defended the addition of the question, saying that the value of the data would outweigh any underrepresentation. “Secretary Ross carefully considered the argument that the reinstatement of the citizenship question on the decennial Census would depress response rate,” a Department of Commerce spokesperson told Newsweek. “Secretary Ross found that the need for accurate citizenship data and the limited burden that the reinstatement of the citizenship question would impose outweigh fears about a potentially lower response rate.”

But a letter circulated internally at the U.S. Census bureau in September showed that the government workers had found that asking about citizenship caused fear and could possibly reduce the response rate of immigrants. There had been a “recent increase in respondents spontaneously expressing concerns about confidentiality in some of our pretesting studies conducted in 2017,” the memo said, referring to the American Community Survey, an ongoing Census survey that already collects data about citizenship status.

Adding a question to the Census less than two years before 2020 is irresponsible, said Lloyd Potter, former Texas state demographer and director of the Texas State Data Center at the University of Texas San Antonio. “We’ve been working on these questions for a decade and to all of a sudden put a question out there that hasn’t been tested is unprecedented,” he told Newsweek. The Census typically needs about five years to accurately test the impacts and validity of a question, he said.

“The Census is a huge logistic problem and the bureau is very good at systematically developing methods and testing them, and to throw something so rushed into this very structured and well-regulated process is my biggest concern,” said Potter.

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Perhaps WE Are Not Sure?


Why does it take a large event to focus on the failings of our Congress and the current (lack of) administration? We already know we do not have a  national leader in the “normal” sense yet many of us have not turned the corner and understand that our Resident is lost. The packing of his cabinet with supporters and adorers is a huge red flag that should enrage us all. The idea of a cabinet is to have people who hopefully have integrity and an ability to do the work or learn to do the work. The current cabinet is staffed with folks who are not in it for the service but more for themselves and Resident. Unfortunately there appears to be no “public” in their public service. The Resident in under fire for current and past transgressions yet he was elected to lead (?) us. This leadership is steeped in entertainment style activities designed to get ratings instead of accomplishing the work of the people. If the many pronouncements, announcements and campaign (still) meetings are not an indication of the mismanagement of the office and are not offensive to you then perhaps we are not sure. Not one of us will ever be completely satisfied with whatever administration is in but there is usually some rationality in it’s actions. This administration along with a neer do well Congress are not putting their best foot forward. It appears to be more of a foot in the mouth.

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The Truth Is In The Movies


In the Movie: Hunt For Red October, Richard Jordan’s Character NSA director Jeffrey Pelt stated to Jack Ryan: “Listen, I’m a politician which means I’m a cheat and a liar, and when I’m not kissing babies I’m stealing their lollipops. But it also means I keep my options open”. This sums up our own political system at this time or possibly for a long time before now, except this administration keeps no options open. While there will always be some subterfuge and unspoken information from the government (from local to Federal) and I believe most us understand that, whether we like it or not. The above quote seems more resonant now and probably has been the case for the last 20 years, the difference now is that media coverage has put the lies out faster than ever. This being the situation, isn’t it on the shoulders of the citizens to examine the various outlets to garner the truth rather follow one line of thought with impunity and be terribly misinformed? We now have the Resident who has what appears to be a revolving door on the oval office. This “swap out” of personnel  seems to be a quest for the perfect set of folks who will agree with the Resident no matter what he says or does. This is not how Government is run. Our majority Congress appears to be afraid to stand against the obvious actions that could bring us to the brink of war and isolation. Meanwhile the major source for the Resident’s information (Faux News) has become his go to for White House advisors. The Extreme conservative contributors of the same News system are now espousing a trend toward impeachment for the President. This indicates that the extremists on the right are not happy and it begs to wonder  how it will affect the actions of the already volatile Residents actions. This could very well prove to be a watershed years for this administration with the revolving door method of staffing. The world is watching that includes allies and enemies alike while we wait for the other shoe to drop.

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Is This The Other Shoe?


Soviet-born Donald Trump adviser Felix Sater: ‘Send ’em to jail’ if Robert Mueller finds collusion

PETE MADDEN and MEGHAN KENEALLY
Good Morning America
March 16, 2018

Felix Sater is a lot of things. One of them, he says, is misunderstood.
The Soviet-born American businessman, who says he was a “senior advisor to Donald Trump,” has become known for his supporting role in the unfolding drama that is Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of Russian efforts to interfere in the 2016 election. Sater is often referred to as the convicted felon and onetime stock scammer who promised to “get all of Putins team to buy in” on a proposed plan to build “Trump Tower Moscow” in the heat of the presidential campaign.
“I know how to play it, and we will get this done,” Sater wrote to Trump attorney and confidant Michael Cohen, his childhood friend, in emails published by The Washington Post and The New York Times. “Buddy, our boy can become president of the USA, and we can engineer it.”
The project was abandoned, but as federal investigators launched a wide-ranging probe of alleged Russsian interference in the 2016 election including possible connections to Trump’s campaign and personal businesses, Sater quickly found himself caught in the dragnet. Now, in an exclusive interview with George Stephanopoulos airing Friday morning on Good Morning America, Sater tells ABC News that there is much, much more to his life story.
And he’s right.
“I don’t think if a screenwriter was trying to write this movie that they could make this up,” Sater said.

Sater, 52, says that for the past two decades he has served as a high-level intelligence asset for the DIA, CIA and the FBI. As first reported this week by Buzzfeed News, Sater has helped bust mafia families, capture cybercriminals and pursue top terrorists — including Osama bin Laden — earning praise from some of the country’s top law enforcement officials.
He won’t say whether or not he’s been interviewed by the special counsel, but it’s almost certain that Mueller knows his body of work well. He served as FBI Director for much of Sater’s clandestine career.
As questions have swirled about his supposed loyalty to Russia, Sater is speaking out, recasting himself as an unheralded protector of the United States.
“I am a patriot,” Sater said. “Having the opportunity to serve my country and do anything in its defense was a no brainer. It was, ‘Where do I sign up?’”
A SURPRISING COVERT PAST
Sater says he was recruited as an intelligence asset in perhaps the unlikeliest of places — the bathroom.
He was a young man living in Russia, where he was born, trying to rebuild a business career derailed by what he calls “a bad, stupid, drunken night in a bar.” He had been convicted of felony assault charges and spent a year in prison following a bloody bar fight in which he stabbed a man in the face with a margarita glass.
He needed money so desperately upon his release, he says, that he started working on what he calls “the dark side of Wall Street,” a reference to a so-called “pump-and-dump” stock scheme that reportedly defrauded investors of nearly $40 million.
He was at a dinner party in Moscow when he says one of the guests followed him into the bathroom and identified himself as an agent of the U.S. government. He told Sater that he had unwittingly gained access to a group of high-level Russian intelligence operatives who had valuable information about Russian defense technology.
“They seem to like you,” Sater recalls being told. “You speak Russian. You blend in there. And your country needs you.”
So began, Sater says, his career in espionage. He says he developed assets in several different countries by cultivating cover as a corrupt businessman offering access to illicit schemes and passed information to U.S. agents tasked with handling a variety of threats to national security.
“They used to come to me with cases that had nothing to do with me and ask for my assistance, in which I would enthusiastically and wholeheartedly dive in and try to help,” he said.
He says he tipped off law enforcement to potential assassination attempts on Secretary of State Colin Powell and President George W. Bush; obtained information and photographs about North Korea’s burgeoning nuclear program; lured Russian cybercriminals hacking the U.S. financial system out of hidings so that they could be unmasked and captured.
And, he says, he was even tasked with hunting for Osama bin Laden and managed to turn Mullah Omar’s personal secretary into a key source that provided intelligence about al-Qaeda hideouts.
The information he had obtained was so valuable that when his past caught up with him and he finally faced his sentencing in connection with that multimillion-dollar fraud, the judge let him off with a mere $25,000 fine.
Former U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch told the Senate during her confirmation hearing that Sater “provided valuable and sensitive information to the government” and that information was “crucial to national security.”
That work, he says, continues in some unspecified capacity to this day. He said as recently as last year he was asked for “assistance in making evaluations of various foreign governments [and] foreign individuals.”
He reportedly told this story under oath when he testified recently before the House Intelligence Committee, at which point he said even “the Democratic aides who were there to question [me] regarding the Russia-Trump investigation stopped, paused and thanks me for my service to my country.”
“One of the few times in my life that I almost cried,” Sater said.
WHAT HE SAYS HE DID – AND DIDN’T – KNOW
Sater says he made himself valuable to the U.S. government by knowing everything. When it comes to Trump, however, he says he knows next to nothing.
His company, Bayrock Group, began renting office space in Trump Tower. Sater says he introduced himself to Trump in 2000 and began funneling development proposals to Trump’s desk shortly thereafter.
“I would bring him deals,” Sater said.
Sater claims he has helped the Trump Organization secure financing on several major projects, but none has garnered more scrutiny than a failed proposal to build “Trump Tower Moscow” amid the launch of Trump’s controversial campaign for the presidency.
In 2015, Trump signed a non-binding letter of intent, which promised a $4 million initial payment to the Trump Organization, to build the tallest building in the world in Moscow. In emails sent to Cohen published by the Post and the Times, Sater appears to celebrate an apparent merger of Trump’s business and political fortunes.
Faced with questions about his boast that he and Cohen could “engineer” a Trump presidency using the deal to court Russian President Vladimir Putin’s support, Sater pleaded ignorance.
“I am not a political person,” Sater said. “I don’t understand the implications of the politics or the various strings that get attached to it and how good or bad it may look.”
Any perceived alignment of Trump’s business and political interests, he said, was purely coincidental.
“I was trying to do a real estate transaction,” Sater told ABC News. “I clearly was not involved in the campaign, nor was I involved in any of the political end, and the hope that a large transaction like that would be built, if that was helpful to his run, that would be great.”
Asked if he knew certain key member of the Trump campaign, he claimed to have had “zero contact” with many of the Trump allies who have fallen under the spotlight. He denied knowing Michael Flynn. And Paul Manafort. And Rick Gates. And George Papadopoulos. And Carter Page.
Asked if then-candidate Trump could have softened his stance on Russia because he was simultaneously pursuing a business deal there, Sater demurred.
“I can’t speak for the president,” he said.
And asked if — given his extensive sources in the both the Russian foreign intelligence services and the Russian criminal underworld — he knew of the effort underway to influence the U.S. election, he issued a forceful denial.
“I was not aware of what they were doing,” Sater said. “I read about it, just like everyone else, in the newspapers.”
Sater called Trump’s claim that he couldn’t pick him out of a lineup “disappointing,” but says Trump has nothing to fear from his testimony to investigators. He is unaware, he said, of any Russian money in any of the Trump projects he worked on and unaware of anyone in Trump’s orbit who may have colluded with foreign powers during the campaign.
If Mueller finds any, Sater recommended stiff penalties.
“Send ‘em to jail,” he said. “Anybody who colluded with anybody– with any other country against America — is guilty of crimes against our country.”
But as for himself, Sater isn’t worried.
“Eventually, it will become known that I’m guilty of trying to build the world’s tallest building,” Sater said, “and that’s about it.”
ABC News’ Matthew Mosk contributed to this report

The Artifice of the Deal


Explanation of The Con.MA

Matt Bai 1 hour 16 minutes ago

Remember that time, way back about two weeks ago, when President Trump berated leaders of his own party, in front of a room full of cameras, for being afraid of the NRA, and he vowed to pass a bipartisan bill that would make it harder for kids to get assault rifles?
Yeah, well, in case you missed the latest — which wouldn’t have been hard, since the one-day story was instantly eclipsed by a Cabinet shakeup and a special election — that whole thing went away Monday with a mumbled “never mind” from the White House.
Apparently gun control is really hard, and you actually have to focus on it and change some minds and anger some of your friends. Why go through all that when you’ve already gotten the headline you were after?
Kind of like the time in January when Trump did the same thing on immigration, summoning lawmakers from both parties to the White House and declaring his full support for a bipartisan compromise. That lasted until breakfast the next day.
And you can already see where this alleged breakthrough summit with the North Korean dictator, Kim Jong Un, is probably headed. The shocking announcement last Thursday played on TV like the dramatic opening of a thriller. It’s been a silent movie ever since.
We’ve been covering this presidency for more than a year now, and we’ve seen enough to know that it really isn’t the wild, unpredictable ride we keep saying it is, which is also what Trump would like you to believe. In fact, there’s a highly predictable pattern here, and it all adds up to a breathtaking hypocrisy.
The president who ran an entire campaign against the phoniness and timidity of conventional politics turns out to be phonier and more timid than any of those who came before.

This was Trump’s big appeal to a lot of moderate and independent voters who were understandably disgusted by the state of Washington — the ones who didn’t find his neo-nativism all that inspiring. Trump was supposed to be a man of action and deal making.
Whatever came of it, good or ugly, this wasn’t a guy who would settle for a presidency built on empty slogans and Rose Garden photo-ops.
Trump’s pitch was that candidates were always talking about challenging the norms of Washington, but once they got elected, all they ever did was mouth platitudes from a teleprompter. That’s what Trump meant when he told an Ohio audience last year: “It’s so easy to act presidential, but that’s not going to get it done.”
He was back on this theme even last week, at a rally in Pennsylvania, when he comically mimicked the way a typical president is supposed to endorse candidates, shuffling around the stage and mumbling like a zombie.
Well, all right. But can you imagine, for a moment, what would have happened if President Obama had announced to the world a plan to remake the health care system, and then decided never to bring it up again?
Can you picture a world in which George W. Bush would have gone before Congress vowing to drive the Taliban from Afghanistan, and then issued a terse statement a few days later saying it was too hard so never mind?
This is exactly what Trump does, again and again. Forget the standard photo ops; his entire presidency, save for a giveaway-laden tax bill that actually originated in Congress, is a string of dramatic flourishes, without even the aspiration to translate them into something like actual governance.
Even this big tariff program he announced, which instantly sent world markets into a spiral, turns out to be mostly bravado. The administration is exempting our biggest source of steel imports, Canada, along with Mexico, and it’s already hinting at a deal with the Europeans. In the end, for all the big (and, I think, misguided) talk of protectionism, a fraction of imports will be affected.
And then there was Trump, just this week, visiting the prototype for his long-promised wall in San Diego. You know, the one the Mexicans were supposed to be paying for.
Theatrics, nothing more.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention, too, another idea Trump floated the other day, bringing a thousand sleepy headline writers to life: a new space force for the military. (“That could be the big, breaking story,” Trump said helpfully, in case the assembled reporters didn’t know an entertaining nugget when they heard one.)
Never mind that this idea, as the Atlantic wisely noted, has already been out there a while, and Trump’s administration is on record opposing it. Trump was just looking for an attention-getter. He’ll have Mattis training junior Jedi’s in Disneyland before he ever gets around to following up on that one.

None of this should surprise us. As I’ve written many times, Trump personifies the entangling of politics and entertainment.
He comes from the world of “unscripted television,” which is only unscripted in the sense that the actual words aren’t written down for the actor to recite. The plot lines are pre-ordained and calibrated to explode in primetime, the overarching directive being to never bore an audience.
Before that, in the 1980s, Trump honed his celebrity as New York’s serial self-promoter, gaming the gossip columnists the way J. Edgar Hoover once played Walter Winchell. Trump the socialite developer learned at least as much about building brands and expectations as he did about building gaudy towers.
Trump isn’t really a man of action. He’s a man of artifice. He talks and he talks and he talks, the world’s foremost expert on dominating a news cycle, knowing all along that by the time we realize none of it’s real, he’ll have ushered us along to whatever’s next.
And this is the point – that, as an industry, we who chronicle this president and his novel brand of politics seem always to be a step behind the game. During the primaries in 2016, the ratings-obsessed cable channels let Trump call in to shows and carried his rallies live and unedited. (They still do, apparently.)
Only when Trump was well on his way to the nomination did they realize that they’d been played for free advertising. By then, though, Trump had figured out that he could manipulate campaign coverage just by tweeting something outrageous whenever he wanted to change the subject.
Now that Trump is president, we’ve done what we must, which is to cover his various pronouncements with at least some of the solemnity the office demands. When the president of the United States says he’s warming to the idea of a new fleet of space soldiers, because maybe he caught the last half hour of “Contact” on Starz last weekend, we are duty bound to note it.
Generally, I think the media have done a pretty good job of injecting both fact-checking and skepticism into our coverage of Trump, in a way we would have resisted a generation ago.
But we’re still letting this president perform for the cameras as if he were actually planning to govern, without giving nearly as much attention to what happens on the issue once the cameras are gone. We’re still allowing ourselves to be carried along by one dramatic turn after another, because Trump knows instinctively that if he keeps us moving today, we won’t have time to dwell on whatever he promised yesterday.
Trump was dead right about our politics over the years — too much of it became a tired kind of stagecraft. But that kind of stagecraft was almost always designed to sell an agenda.
And that’s the distinction between a serious politician and a con artist. The latter only sells himself.

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Do As I Say Not As I Do


People
Stephanie Petit 20 hrs ago

Ben Carson Reportedly Has a $31K Dining Set in His Office
A Housing and Urban Development (HUD) official claims she was demoted after failing to “find money” beyond a $5,000 cap to redecorate the dining room in incoming Secretary Ben Carson’s office.
Helen Foster was told “$5,000 will not even buy a decent chair” after pointing out the legal spending limit for decorating the office, CNN reports, citing a November 2017 complaint. The former senior official said she was told about the redecorating initiative by Acting Secretary Craig Clemmensen, who said Carson’s wife Candy wanted the office upgraded. This occurred ahead of Carson’s appointment to the position.
Foster also claims she was demoted in retaliation, and reassigned to oversee privacy and Freedom of Information Act requests.
“I was put into a job that was made up, something in the federal government we call the ‘rubber room,’ and then I protested and asked to be put on detail until I could find another job,” she told CNN.

The department later spent over $31,000 on a new hardwood table, chairs and hutch for the dining room adjacent to Carson’s office. The furniture has reportedly not yet been delivered. A department official says they replaced the original set because it was in disrepair.
The former esteemed brain surgeon “didn’t know the table had been purchased” but has no plans to return it, HUD spokesman Raffi Williams told The New York Times.
ABC News also reported that HUD, whose responsibilities include providing affordable housing to more than 4.3 million low-income families, spent $1,100 trying to repair the chairs in the dining set before buying the new furniture. They also spent about $3,400 on new blinds for the office.
“The most frustrating part of all this was spending so much time on this issue,” a former HUD employee with knowledge of the situation told CNN. “Instead of focusing on HUD’s mission, we were talking about furniture for the Secretary’s office.”

The White House’s 2019 budget proposes to slash HUD’s budget by $8.8 billion. In a tweet earlier this month, Carson said, “The proposed budget is focused on moving more people toward self-sufficiency through reforming rental assistance programs and moving aging public housing to more sustainable platforms.

It’s worth mentioning that EPA manager Scott Pruitt is spending $139,000 for new doors, Secretary Ryan Zinke has a” special” flag raising ceremony when he is in or out of the office aside from his tax payer financed charter flights. How many other “perks” are being accessed on the public dime by this administration aside from the “Resident’s” trips to Mar-a-Lago? MA.

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Trump’s outdated view of the economy


Example of a Chaotic mind.MA

Rick Newman
Columnist Yahoo Finance March 6,2018

Donald Trump is ’70s Man. He loves beauty pageants. He puts ketchup on his steak. And he thinks the surest signs of economic might are thriving smokestack industries churning out the raw materials for skyscrapers and locomotives.
Businesses and investors everywhere are on edge as Trump, himself a lifelong builder, is now attempting to translate his industrial-era economic worldview into action. Trump has promised to impose tariffs of 10% on all aluminum imports to the United States, and 25% on all steel imports. The stock market has wobbled on that news, and now Trump’s top economic adviser, former Goldman Sachs president Gary Cohn, has quit in frustration over Trump’s tariffs. Investors have viewed Cohn as the strongest bulwark against economic nationalism that could trigger damaging trade wars, and his departure will undoubtedly unnerve markets further.
“If you don’t have steel, you don’t have a country!” Trump tweeted, in all caps, on March 2. It’s also true that you don’t have a country, or at least a prosperous country, if you don’t have software, data centers, accounting firms and teachers. Yet Trump talks little, if at all, about the segments of the economy that are the biggest source of wealth and power these days. And he seems ready to risk damaging the economy to protect industries that represent a small and declining share of American production.
The U.S. economy is in a long transition from building stuff to generating services, a trend that has been underway since the end of World War II. Goods-producing industries accounted for 41% of total output in 1948. Today, it’s just 18%. Services, meanwhile, have risen from 47% of gross domestic product in 1948 to 69% today. This isn’t the result of any policy out of Washington. It’s just the way modern economies evolve. As the economy becomes more productive, generating more wealth, capital naturally flows to activities that earn the highest return. Those tend to be innovative new industries that aren’t easily copied, where the value added by workers is high. So-called commodity products that are easy to duplicate—such as basic steel products, along with textiles, plastics, toys and many other routine things—offer a declining return on investment, and sometimes hardly any return. That’s why they tend to migrate to developing countries where production and labor costs are lower.
Trump is right that the United States needs a healthy steel industry. But it already has a $90 billion steel industry, and a $41 billion aluminum industry. The Pentagon says it can get all the steel it needs domestically, and that accounts for just 3% of the total domestic supply. That leaves quite a lot left for all the private-sector products that require steel.Here’s a breakdown of the changes by industry:

 

The United States also imports a lot of steel, and it’s true that cheap foreign competition has caused American job losses. But at the same time, booming industries such as renewable energy, hydraulic fracking, warehousing, data analysis and mostly anything relating to digital technology or health care have created millions of new jobs. Some companies in these industries can barely find workers. Pay is going up in many parts of the country, and workers willing to get new skills, certifications and he United States also imports a lot of steel, and it’s true that cheap foreign competition has caused American job losses. But at the same time, booming industries such as renewable energy, hydraulic fracking, warehousing, data analysis and mostly anything relating to digital technology or health care have created millions of new jobs. Some companies in these industries can barely find workers. Pay is going up in many parts of the country, and workers willing to get new skills, certifications and education often enjoy big income gains—as has almost always been the case in the U.S. economy.
There’s nothing wrong with championing the industries of yore. But there is something wrong with actions to protect those industries at the expense of others, which is what Trump’s tariffs would do. Analysis by the nonprofit group Trade Partnership says Trump’s protective tariffs would boost steel and aluminum employment by about 33,000 jobs. But they’d kill 179,000 jobs elsewhere in the economy, because of the higher prices manufacturers of cars, appliances, industrial equipment and many other things would face. That’s a net loss of 146,000 jobs—before accounting for retaliatory measures enacted by other countries that would hurt U.S. exports to other countries and further dent production.

The kind of global trade Trump seems to have a problem with does generate abuses. China’s communist government subsidizes that country’s enormous steel industry, which has caused a big overcapacity problem worldwide. But the U.S. government has also imposed numerous penalties on Chinese steel importers as a result, and now has more tariffs in place on steel imports from China than from any other country. Chinese steel imports, not surprisingly, plunged 82% from 2006 to 2016. China isn’t even among the top 10 steel importers to the United States any more.
That’s not good enough for Trump, apparently. His steel and aluminum tariffs would apply to all countries, and they wouldn’t be based on any finding of unfair trade practices. Instead, they’d be based on an obscure law that allows the president to impose tariffs as needed to protect national security—like, during a war. There is no war, of course. Trade expert Gary Hufbauer of the Peterson institute for International Economics recently told Yahoo Finance that Trump’s national-security pretext is a “complete sham.”
If Trump goes through with his steel and aluminum tariffs, the next step could be dismantling portions of the North American Free Trade Agreement, or withdrawing from it completely. Most economists say there are elements of NAFTA that can be updated and improved. But they also say the 25-year-old trade deal has generally made each of the three trading partners, Canada, Mexico and the United States, better off. Still, Trump wants products purchased in America to be made in America, case closed. He doesn’t seem to care about supply-chain efficiencies, low prices for consumers or the second-, third- and fourth-order effects of telling companies how and where to direct their capital.
If Trump really wanted to turbocharge the U.S. economy, he’d focus on the industries of the future and shepherd as many American workers as possible into those. That means improving education and making sure kids get schooling that prepares them for the digital economy. The government could make it easier for people to move where the jobs are and get needed technical skills mid-career, or even late-career. If Trump wants to take extraordinary measures to protect vital industries, he should be making sure the United States dominates vehicle electrification, quantum computing and the many revolutions artificial intelligence is likely to spawn. China is investing in all those fields, and not shooting itself in the foot along the way.