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Here’s Why Congress Exempted Itself From The New Healhcare Bill


Josh Barro
Business Insider 22 hours ago

l reaction to passage of health care – Buffalo Scripps
Last week, Vox dug into the Republican healthcare bill and found a provision that would exempt Congress and its staff from many of the bill’s effects.
This provision was bad “optics,” as they say in Washington.
But instead of taking it out — like you would usually do with a provision you aren’t wedded to and can’t defend politically — the House passed the American Health Care Act with the exemption intact after first passing a separate bill that would repeal the exemption that would be created by the AHCA if both bills became law.
There’s a reason for this mess, and it’s not about Republicans in Congress not wanting to be subject to their law.
It’s about Senate procedure.
Republicans are attempting to pass the AHCA through a process called reconciliation. This process, created by the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974, allows the Senate to pass certain bills relating to the federal budget with just a simple majority. There is no need to get 60 votes — and, in this case, some Democratic support — as there is for other legislation.
A variety of complex rules govern what matters may and may not be considered through reconciliation.
One of those is that reconciliation must be conducted pursuant to reconciliation instructions passed by both chambers of Congress. That happened earlier this year — Congress sent reconciliation instructions to two Senate committees (finance; and health, education, labor, and pensions) that were designed to allow those committees to write bills making changes to healthcare policy.
The problem, as the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget explains, is that Congress’ healthcare is governed by the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, and that committee was not sent any reconciliation instructions.
Therefore, if a reconciliation bill makes changes to the way Congress gets its healthcare, it might become subject to a 60-vote threshold because it addresses a matter that is supposed to be the purview of a committee that doesn’t get to participate in reconciliation this year.
Why would the AHCA need to touch Congress’ healthcare in the first place? Because Obamacare included, at Republican urging, a provision requiring members of Congress and their staffs to buy insurance through the Obamacare exchanges.
That Republicans are in this position at all reflects how rushed and ad hoc their healthcare policymaking has been. They set about passing reconciliation instructions right after taking office because they hoped to repeal Obamacare very quickly. Since they didn’t know what their repeal strategy would be, they didn’t know which committees would ultimately need reconciliation instructions, and now it’s too late for them to change which ones have them.
Now their hope is to enact the AHCA and the companion bill that would undo the congressional exemption created by the AHCA. That companion passed the House on Thursday unanimously with Democratic and Republican votes.
In the Senate, that bill would need 60 votes to pass because it’s not a reconciliation matter.
Democrats clearly like the talking point that Republicans exempted Congress from the AHCA — and if the AHCA were enacted, Democrats would have the power to filibuster the companion bill and make it a matter of law. But politically, I’m not sure how it would land, as Republicans could say they are trying to apply the AHCA to Congress and it’s Democrats who are blocking that simple bill from becoming law.
Of course, in all likelihood, the Senate will pass a healthcare bill that differs extensively from the AHCA, which might make moot the whole matter of needing to change the rules about Congress’ healthcare.

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Trump Isn’t A Do-Nothing President, He’s Done A lot of Undoing


 

Apr. 21, 2017 at 6:01 AM

 

 

By Ben Casselman, Kathryn Casteel, Anna Maria Barry-Jester and Maggie Koerth-Baker

Filed under The Trump Administration

 

Welcome to TrumpBeat, FiveThirtyEight’s weekly feature on the latest policy developments in Washington and beyond. Want to get TrumpBeat in your inbox each week? Sign up for our newsletter. Comments, criticism or suggestions for future columns? Email us or drop a note in the comments.

In the whirlwind first weeks of President Trump’s administration, it often seemed as though he was trying to enact his entire agenda within his first 100 days in office. On Day 1, he moved to undo parts of the Affordable Care Act. Within his first week, he instituted a federal hiring freeze; issued orders on abortion, immigration and manufacturing; and took the first steps toward building his signature border wall. And on the one-week anniversary of his swearing in, he issued the first iteration of his ban on travel from certain Muslim-majority countries.

In retrospect, the travel ban looks like the high-water mark for the “shock and awe” phase of Trump’s presidency. The ban, of course, was quickly blocked by the courts, and from there his momentum stalled. In recent weeks, the narrative has reversed to the point that some pundits are suggesting Trump is already a failure — that Trump, as Josh Barro of Business Insider put it this week, is heading for a “do-nothing presidency.”

That may be wishful thinking on the part of Barro and other Trump critics, however. Yes, Trump has encountered a string of setbacks, perhaps most notably the embarrassing defeat of his effort to repeal and replace Obamacare. And yes, many key elements of his agenda — tax reform, infrastructure spending, a rethinking of U.S. trade policy — are still stuck at the starting gate, or in some cases seem to have been abandoned altogether. But Trump has found plenty of other ways to make his influence felt, often by reversing policies put in place by his predecessor, Barack Obama.

The most obvious accomplishment — the one that even Trump’s sharpest critics acknowledge — is the confirmation of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court. The vote was a key political win for a president in dire need of one. But its real significance is in the longer term. Gorsuch restored (and perhaps deepened, if he proves to have influence with Justice Anthony Kennedy, for whom he once clerked) the court’s conservative majority. And at only 49, he could serve for decades. It’s too soon to say what effect the new justice could have on abortion or other contentious issues, but it’s safe to assume that Gorsuch’s confirmation will help ensure that Trump’s impact is felt long after he leaves office.

Outside of Gorsuch, Trump’s influence is subtler, but no less real. Take immigration: Courts may have blocked Trump’s travel ban, but they haven’t intervened to stop him from stepping up immigration enforcement and increasing deportations — including of immigrants who had been granted protected status by the Obama administration. Or look at law enforcement, where Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions have said they will pull back on the investigations of law-enforcement agencies that were a major part of Obama’s police-reform efforts. Sessions also announced he would end a Justice Department commission working to improve standards for forensic evidence.

Then there is regulation. Trump (with help from the Republican-controlled Congress) has delayed, suspended or reversed dozens of Obama-era rules on banking, data privacy, firearm purchases and other issues. And he has ordered a “one in, two out” policy in which agencies must repeal two rules for every new one they create. (It isn’t clear how that policy will be implemented.) Some of the most significant rule changes are at the Environmental Protection Agency, where Trump and EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt have moved to halt new fuel-economy standards and block new rules on coal-fired power plants, among other changes. Some scientists warn that these steps could put out of reach the greenhouse gas emissions cuts that the U.S. agreed to in Paris in 2015.

In some cases, Trump doesn’t need to do anything to have an impact. Republicans may have failed to repeal the Affordable Care Act, but Trump has thrown into disarray one of the key features of the ACA: the health insurance marketplaces that collectively insure more than 12 million Americans who don’t get coverage through their employers. Some insurers were backing away from the marketplaces even before Trump took office, but uncertainty over the future of the law is threatening to spark an outright exodus. There are steps Trump could take to shore up the marketplace system, but so far he hasn’t taken them — and he has hinted that he will let the marketplaces collapse through inaction.

Taking all these things together, it appears that Trump may not yet have done much to secure his own legacy, but he is making significant progress toward undoing Obama’s. In the long term, for Trump’s presidency to be a success, he will need to begin making policies and passing legislation, steps he has so far been slow to take. But don’t mistake the lack of clear early-term victories for inaction — the consequences of Trump’s first 100 days, good or ill, will be felt for years.

Immigration: Back to square one

Some of Trump’s first actions in office were two executive orders meant to crack down on illegal immigration by implementing tougher enforcement not just at the border but also within the country. This week The Washington Post reported that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement had arrested 21,362 unauthorized immigrants across the country since Trump took office, a 32.6 percent increase from the previous year. (The data runs through mid-March.) At first glance these numbers might seem consistent with Trump’s promise to get “the bad ones” out of the country. But the Post also noted that of those arrested roughly a quarter, or 5,441, had no criminal record. That’s more than double the number of noncriminal arrests of undocumented immigrants during the same period in 2016. (Many of those arrested eventually will be deported, but because that process can be slow, changed enforcement patterns show up more quickly in arrest data.)

Look back a bit further, however, and the recent increase in enforcement looks less dramatic. The pace of arrests is running well behind the 29,238 made during the same period in 2014; that year, there were 7,483 noncriminal arrests through mid-March, which represented a similar share of the total as this year’s numbers.

Immigration arrests from Jan. 20 to March 13, by year
YEAR ADMINISTRATION NONCRIMINAL CRIMINAL TOTAL
2017 Trump 5.4k 15.9k 21.3k
2016 Obama 2.2 13.8 16.1
2015 Obama 2.3 15.6 18.0
2014 Obama 7.4 21.7 29.2

Source: Immigration Customs and Enforcement

In the final two years of Obama’s term, however, both arrests and deportations dropped sharply. That was no accident: In November 2014, then-Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson issued a memorandum setting out new priorities for immigration enforcement. Under the new policy, the administration said it would focus on deporting noncitizens who were considered national security threats, who were convicted felons or gang members, or who were apprehended immediately at the border. In fiscal year 2016, 83.7 percent of people deported fell into one of those groups.

Trump’s orders reset these priorities. ICE agents no longer exempt any categories of unauthorized immigrants from enforcement, and the general rhetoric from the Trump administration surrounding who is considered a “criminal” has become broader. “It is fair to say that the definition of criminal has not changed, but where on the spectrum of criminality we operate has changed,” said Secretary of Homeland Security John Kelly on NBC’s Meet the Press.

Drug policy: Will opioid use be treated as a crime or a health problem?

Promising to end the opioid crisis was a frequent refrain of Trump’s campaign, and the issue was one of the few for which he laid out policy approaches. He would close the borders so drugs couldn’t get across and instate tough sentences for dealers while simultaneously improving treatment options for people with addiction. He has begun to follow through on the latter, with his health and human services secretary’s announcement of $485 million in grants that states can use for addiction treatment. (The funding came from a bipartisan bill signed by Obama.) He also tasked New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie — who has supported treating drug addiction as a public health problem rather than only a criminal one — with leading a commission on the opioid crisis.

Targeting the supply of drugs once they are in the U.S. is a more complicated matter, however. Is a person with an addiction to prescription pain pills a criminal if he or she sells a handful of pills to a friend or a person in need of treatment? A recent analysis in Florida by the libertarian publication Reason found that local law-enforcement agencies have made a habit of convincing pain patients to sell pills and then doling out long prison sentences. Of the estimated 2,300 people serving time in Florida for trafficking opioids (overwhelmingly oxycodone or hydrocodone) under laws meant to target large-scale traffickers, 63 percent are in prison for the first time. Many worked as confidential informants in exchange for reduced sentences, helping to expand the web of people in jail for relatively minor drug offenses.

Tough approaches to minor drug crimes are hardly isolated to Florida. One Ohio city is charging people who overdose with misdemeanors. An analysis from The New York Times found that nationally, prison admissions from counties with fewer than 100,00 people have risen, even though crime has fallen in those same places, largely because of drug-related crimes.

Under Trump, Sessions has supported using criminal prosecution as a primary tool for reducing drug-related crimes, as well as tough sentencing laws. He recently hired Steven H. Cook, one of the most vocal supporters of policies from the 1980s and ’90s that filled state prisons with people serving long, mandatory minimum sentences for drug-related crimes. The Obama administration had begun moving away from these strict approaches, which disproportionately penalized-African Americans, and granted clemency to hundreds of people serving prison terms for nonviolent drug offenses. Trump’s administration appears to be bringing that old model back.

With the opioid crisis in front of us, many politicians have pushed for a public health approach to drug-related crimes. But so far under Trump, such crimes are still often being treated with jail time.

Environmental policy: Honest work

The Trump administration has faced lots of criticism for its steps to roll back open data and its proposed cuts to environmental and scientific programs. So it might seem like the scientific community would embrace a Republican-backed effort to promote transparency in decision making at the EPA. But the HONEST Act, as it is known, is getting a chilly reception from many scientists who say the bill is really a stealth effort to undermine the EPA’s ability to protect the environment.

The act, which passed the House at the end of March, sure sounds good on paper. It would require the EPA to base its decisions on scientific research that is publicly available for independent analysis. But the biggest issues are tied to that “publicly available” part. Most of the academic journals that edit, coordinate the peer-review of, and publish scientific research exist to make money. So they charge for access, making most scientific papers not exactly publicly available by many standards. The HONEST Act goes even further, requiring that raw data behind a published research paper also be publicly available in order for the EPA to use it. There are hundreds of open data repositories online, but using them is not yet the norm — and definitely wasn’t common just a few years ago. A 2016 review found that for all the research published before 2010, just over 2,200 data sets had been uploaded to the five most-respected generalist repositories. There are 2.5 million research papers published every year. Even the 77,000 data sets published by those five repositories in 2015 don’t come close to keeping pace.

There are some good reasons why scientists should be making their data publicly available — and, increasingly, they’re doing so. But making data, especially old data, public is expensive, time-consuming work that requires workers to convert data, servers to store it and funding to pay commercial publishers for rights. Then there is the cost of making sure that the data stays secure and anonymous.

Officially, the EPA says implementing the HONEST Act would require only “minimal funding.” But according to an internal EPA estimate that was leaked to the public radio program Marketplace, the bill would cost $250 million a year — a big deal for an agency that has proposed to cut or freeze funding to damn near every program it operates. Pruitt’s office appears to have gotten around that hurdle by assuming that the agency will simply not use any research that doesn’t already meet the open-data standard, which according to the leaked document could reduce the research the EPA is allowed to reference by as much as 95 percent. No wonder scientists are nervous.

Ben Casselman is a senior editor and the chief economics writer for FiveThirtyEight. @bencasselman

Kathryn Casteel writes about economics and policy issues for FiveThirtyEight. @kathryncasteel

Anna Maria Barry-Jester reports on public health, food and culture for FiveThirtyEight. @annabarryjester

Maggie Koerth-Baker is a senior science writer for FiveThirtyEight. @maggiekb1

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The Most Complicated Word In English?


© Tatiana Ayazo/Rd.com
Imagine you’re a dictionary editor. For eight hours a day, five days a week, every week until the heat death of the universe or the day human beings stop speaking English (whichever comes first), it’s your job to ensure that your trusted reference book keeps pace with the relentlessly evolving definitions of our ceaselessly expanding English language. ‘No sweat,’ you think, picking up two boxes of citations for words beginning with the letter R. ‘Where do I start?’ That’s when you realize these boxes of citations, hundreds of scraps of paper showing each word in every possible context, are all for a single word. A three-letter word—the most complicated, multifaceted word in the English language.You might think it’s absurd (and maybe it is), but Oxford English Dictionary editors recently revealed that ‘run’ has indeed become the single word with the most potential meanings in all of English, boasting no fewer than 645 different usage cases for the verb form alone. The copious definitions of ‘run’ featured in the OED’s upcoming third edition begin with the obvious, ‘to go with quick steps on alternate feet,’ then proceed to run on for 75 columns of type. This entry, in all its girth, took one professional lexicographer nine months of research to complete. How could three little letters be responsible for so much meaning?
Context is everything. Think about it: When you run a fever, for example, those three letters have a very different meaning than when you run a bath to treat it, or when your bathwater subsequently runs over and drenches your cotton bath runner, forcing you to run out to the store and buy a new one. There, you run up a bill of $85 because besides a rug and some cold medicine, you also need some thread to fix the run in your stockings and some tissue for your runny nose and a carton of milk because you’ve run through your supply at home, and all this makes dread run through your soul because your value-club membership runs out at the end of the month and you’ve already run over your budget on last week’s grocery run when you ran over a nail in the parking lot and now your car won’t even run properly because whatever idiot runs that Walmart apparently lets his custodial staff run amok and you know you’re letting your inner monologue run on and on but, God—you’d do things differently if you ran the world. Maybe you should run for office,to run through the whole list of definitions? Alas, to read all 645 meanings you’ll have to wait for the next edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. The print run is expected in 2037.

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Judge rejects motion to dismiss suit against Trump


The beat goes on, President Trump has incited National unrest primarily due to his rhetoric. I believe he is no more than a shoot from the hip idiot..MA.

USA TODAY
Grace Schneider
9 hrs ago

LOUISVILLE, Ky. — A federal judge said in a ruling that then-candidate Donald Trump incited the use of violence against three protesters when he told supporters at a campaign rally a year ago to “get ’em out of here.”

U. S. District Judge David J. Hale of the Western District of Kentucky also wrote in an opinion and order released Friday that because violence had broken out at a prior Trump rally and that known hate group members were in the Louisville crowd, Trump’s ordering the removal of an African-American woman was “particularly reckless.”
Citing case law from tumultuous 1960s race riots and other student protests, Hale rejected motions to dismiss the pending complaint against Trump and three supporters in the crowd that was filed by three protesters after a March 1, 2016, campaign rally in Louisville. Only a portion of the defendants’ motion was granted, but the decision means that the bulk of the claims will proceed.
The protesters, Henry Brousseau, Kashiya Nwanguma and Molly Shah, are seeking unspecified monetary damages. They claim they were assaulted by audience members who were riled up by Trump. Besides Trump, the lawsuit names three defendants in attendance — Matthew Heimbach, a leader with the white supremacist group Traditional Youth Network from Paoli, Ind.; Alvin Bamberger, a member of the Korean War Veterans Association from Ohio; and an unknown individual.
The men were caught on video pushing and shoving Nwanguma to usher her out of the Kentucky International Convention Center after Trump’s urging from the stage.
Trump’s lawyer, R. Kent Westberry of Louisville, had argued that the suit’s allegations threaten fundamental constitutional protections by chilling political speech and that those accused of assaulting the three were not acting for or at the direction of Trump or the campaign. Instead, they were acting on their own initiative and for their own purposes, Westberry wrote.
Hale pointed out that, as the protesters had alleged, the violence began as soon as Trump gave a command and an order to get the protesters out of the rally.
The judge dismissed one of the plaintiffs’ claims that Trump was vicariously liable for Heimbach and Bamberger’s actions. The men weren’t employed by Trump or his campaign and therefore weren’t under his control during the rally, Hale wrote.

Follow Grace Schneider on Twitter: @gesinfk

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Republicans Eye Cutting More Obama Era Regulations


 

Kerry Picket

Reporter

10:11 PM 02/16/2017
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump signed two of the three pieces of legislation this week passed by Congress that roll back Obama-era regulations.
Republicans are repealing the regulations through the Congressional Review Act (CRA). The president’s signature on such legislation Tuesday is the first time the CRA has been used to repeal regulation in 16 years, when Trump signed legislation to roll back a Securities and Exchange Commission rule that would mandate energy companies to show their payments to foreign governments.
The coal industry cheered on another CRA piece of legislation Thursday that came to Trump’s desk for his signature that repealed an Obama-era Department of the Interior rule on coal mine discharge into nearby streams. (RELATED: Trump Signs Repeal Of Obama Coal Mining Regulations)
The CRA allows for Congress to review and repeal federal government department regulation within a 60-day window after the rule has been established. Legislation under the CRA cannot be filibustered in the Senate.

Congress initially proposed 37 resolutions under the CRA as a means to repeal the Obama-era rules.
“Congressional Review Act legislation provides relief for Americans hurt by regulations rushed through at the last minute by the Obama administration. This means freeing up American entrepreneurs, creating jobs, and jump-starting our economy,” House Speaker Paul Ryan said in a statement of the numerous bills passed under CRA.
One piece of legislation waiting for Trump’s signature that passed the Senate Wednesday under the CRA repealed a Social Security Administration rule established in December. The regulation mandated that the agency would submit Social Security recipients’ information to the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) with the intent of showing those who may not be eligible to purchase a firearm.
Democrats say the rule would keep guns out of the hands of the mentally ill, but Republicans argue the rule cast way too large of a net around social security recipients.
“Over the last several weeks we’ve been using a Congressional Review Act or what is known as CRA’s to take action on the explosion of Obamacare regulations. Hundreds and hundreds of pages of regulations that we’ve seen hurting families destroying jobs all across the country and here’s why our work is so historic. Up until now only six of those bills have ever reached the president’s desk in 21 years and only one was ever signed into law by the end of this week. We will have passed 13 in the last three weeks,” House Republican Conference Chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers said at a press conference Thursday.
The Senate is expected to take up two more resolutions passed by the House in the coming days, one of which repeals a regulation established by the Bureau of Land Management as well as a rule put forth by the Department of Labor.
The House passed three resolutions under the CRA last week and by the end of Friday, the Senate will be on track to consider 10 resolutions that repeal Obama administration regulations in the next legislative period.
Follow Kerry on Twitter

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Charles Barkley hammers Democrats and Republicans, calls them ‘fools’ that ‘lie to real people’


Very well stated. MA

On the eve of the college basketball spectacle known as March Madness, CNBC sat down with announcer Charles Barkley and discussed the NCAA, politics and everything in between.
True to form, the basketball Hall of Famer didn’t mince his words.
Barkley, who will be part of the broadcast team airing on CBS and Turner, had a good reason for how March Madness can really make a difference in everyday life.

“I love sports because it takes me away from reality and I tell people, no matter how bad your life is, if you are having problems at home, you are having problems at work, that’s the beauty of sports.”
When applying that principle to the current environment, the NBA great was his usual outspoken self: “If it wasn’t for sports we would have to isolate ourselves in just reality and right now reality sucks.”
In the interview Tuesday, Barkley spoke of the political situation in Washington and the aftermath of President Donald Trump’s election. He also didn’t spare either side of the aisle. Currently, both major parties are sparring over just about everything, including health-care reform and Russia’s accused meddling in the U.S. elections.
“What bothers me the most are the Republicans and the Democrats, they act like little kids,” Barkley said. “They are lying to real people out here trying to get through life. … It’s both parties: They disagree on every single issue and it [angers] me … because their job is to work for us.”
He took offense at their usual approach of showing up “on TV yelling and screaming they are fighting each other” rather than what he expects from them. “They are supposed to take care of people and they are not doing that.”
Barkley didn’t stop there. He denounced Trump’s proposed travel ban as “stupid” and “ridiculous” and lashed out at the way the U.S. is treating immigrants. After suffering several decisive legal rebukes last month, Trump’s revised plan restricts travel from six majority-Muslim countries linked to terrorism and imposes new levels of vetting on refugees.
That is “probably bugging me the most right now,” Barkley said, especially the treatment against people “who have been here many years.”
He also railed against the nation’s divide between rich and poor. “My perspective is never gonna change on that. … We’ve got to do a much better job to take care of poor people, because you cannot put all the poor people in bad neighborhoods send them to bad schools and say good luck in life. That’s just not right.”
Barkley, 54, has undertaken his own efforts to make it better, discussed donations he’s made to three schools: Morehouse, Clark Atlanta University, and Alabama A&M. “I wanted to help historically black colleges,” said Barkley, who is from Alabama.
Asked whether he would run for office himself, he said no. His reason was characteristically blunt: “Because I don’t have time to go to work and argue with fools every day,” said the former member of the Philadelphia 76ers, Phoenix Suns and Houston Rockets.

Eric Chemi
Sr. Editor-at-Large, Data Journalism

Jessica Golden

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Don’t ever answer calls with phone numbers with THESE area codes


The Scammers will never stop trying to get you, so beware of these listed below, rule of thumb: if you do not recognize the number or caller ,let your answering device pick up or do not answer! MA 

10 / 26

Hello Giggles
Gina Florio   16 hrs

There’s nothing more frustrating than eagerly answering a call only to find out it’s a telemarketer or, worse, a scammer. You’d think that as technology gets more and more advanced we could avoid moments like this, but there are plenty of people out there who have found loopholes in the system in order to steal money from innocent people like you. Luckily, there is a way for you to avoid getting roped into these scams. There are some phone calls with certain area codes that you should never pick up under any circumstances.
Joseph Steinberg, CEO of SecureMySocial, lays out some easy guidelines to follow to avoid scammers. First, it’s important to know what their scam game is. These callers essentially call you and either don’t say anything or play disturbing sounds of someone crying for help, all in an attempt to get you to call them back once they hang up. Or they just try to get you to stay on the phone, which will charge you an exorbitant amount of money.
Steinberg says you should never ever call someone back if you happen to pick up this kind of call, but there’s a way to avoid answering the call altogether. And that’s by looking at the area codes of the scam call.
Any phone number that starts with 473 is a surefire sign that the call is a scam. “The name ‘473 scam’ comes from the fact that criminals have been known to use caller IDs with the area code 473–which appears to be domestic, but is actually the area code for the island of Grenada and several other islands outside the United States,” Steinberg writes for Inc.com.
809 is another area code to be wary of, since scammers use this area code from the Caribbean Islands. 900 is another classic one to look out for, since it was one of the first area codes to indicate a suspicious call.
When in doubt, just don’t answer the call and let it go to voicemail. If it’s not a scam and it’s instead someone who needs to speak with you, they’ll leave a message and you can just call them back.
10 signs you’re getting scammed while shopping online
To err on the side of caution, these are the other international area codes with a +1 country code you should avoid.
242 — Bahamas
246 — Barbados
268 — Antigua
284 — British Virgin Islands
345 — Cayman Islands
441 — Bermuda
473 — Grenada, Carriacou and Petite Martinique
649 — Turks and Caicos
664 — Montserrat
721 — Saint Maarten
758 — St. Lucia
767 — Dominica
784 — St. Vincent and Grenadines
809, 829 and 849 — Dominican Republic
868 — Trinidad and Tobago
869 — St. Kitts and Nevis
876 — Jamaica
Remember, it’s always better to be safe than sorry. If you don’t recognize the number, don’t pick it up.

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This former British lawmaker is at the heart of the Trump wiretap allegations


3/06/2017. This story from the Washington Post appears to show the Trump allegation of wiretapping is gleaned from a British Writer last year . It seems that the Trump administration is too busy looking for distractions rather than solutions to the Countries issues and possibly his own (external and internal). He is continuing on the campaign trail rather than the solution trail, What makes more sense, putting millions (or billions) toward infrastructure (which will create jobs, long-term) or towards a wall (which will create jobs temporarily)? The wall will also create more problems as Mexico cannot be forced to pay for it and we risk losing a partner in the fight against the drug cartels who are supplying Americans in a bad way, creating a rift in the trade agreements now in place which could  affect many corn producing states in the U.S.A . To top it off the wiretapping is old news and unrelated to the current Tweetstorm. MA

2 / 23

The Washington Post
Karla Adams hrs ago

LONDON — A former British legislator is at the heart of the Trump administration’s explosive allegation that President Barack Obama was spying on him during the 2016 campaign.
But who exactly is Louise Mensch?
For starters, the politician-turned-journalist is the writer behind an article published on the eve of the election titled: “EXCLUSIVE: FBI ‘Granted FISA Warrant’ Covering Trump Camp’s Ties To Russia.”
The article, published on the right-leaning, libertarian website Heat Street, did not create much of a stir at the time. But it has come under the spotlight after Trump, in a tweetstorm over the weekend, accused Obama of wiretapping his offices during the election campaign. Trump compared the alleged bugging to the Watergate scandal, but he has not offered any evidence to back up his claims.
In tweets on Monday, Mensch emphasized that her reporting does not back up Trump’s wiretapping claim, even though the White House cited her article to justify the allegation. She stressed that her reporting refers to a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court warrant and does not mention anything about wiretapping.
Over the weekend, the White House cited reports “from BBC, Heat Street, New York Times, Fox News, among others” to justify the claims. Former Obama administration officials and aides have denied the accusation.
After combing through these news reports, The Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler concluded that the piece by Mensch in Heat Street was “the most important” of the lot.
In her report, published Nov. 7, Mensch said the FBI was granted a FISA court warrant in October “giving counter-intelligence permission to examine the activities of ‘U.S. persons’ in Donald Trump’s campaign with ties to Russia.”
She cited “two separate sources with links to the counter-intelligence community” as evidence for those claims.
Mensch, who is based in New York, said her sources contacted her because of her outspoken backing for the intelligence community. She has, for instance, called Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor who leaked classified documents, “a loathsome traitor.”
“They gave me one of the most closely guarded secrets in intelligence,” she said, referring to her sources. Speaking to the Guardian, a left-leaning British newspaper, she added: “People are speculating why someone trusted me with that. Nobody met me in a darkened alley in a fedora, but they saw me as someone who has political experience and is their friend. I am a pro-national security partisan. I don’t have divided loyalties.”
Mensch, 45, is a force on social media and describes herself on Twitter as a “Conservative. Feminist. Optimist. Patriot.”
Anyone who follows her on Twitter — and more than 170,000 people do — knows that she is not a Trump supporter and has been probing Trump-Russia links for some time.
Her name also appeared in the hacked emails of John Podesta, the former chairman of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. In an email she sent to the Creative Artists Agency that was forwarded to Podesta, Mensch described herself as a “committed Republican” who was concerned about a Trump presidency and offered a suggestion for a campaign ad for Clinton.
In Britain, Mensch is best known for her stint as a Conservative lawmaker and for her work as a successful chick-lit novelist under her maiden name, Louise Bagshawe.
She resigned as a lawmaker in 2012, saying it “proved impossible to balance the needs of my family.” The mother of three moved to New York to live with her husband, Peter Mensch, manager of the bands Metallica and the Red Hot Chili Peppers.
Although she served as a member of Parliament for only two years, she quickly became a high-profile figure, partly because of her leading role in a parliamentary committee investigating phone hacking at Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World tabloid.
Mensch was one of four Conservative lawmakers on the committee who refused to endorse the panel’s conclusions. The committee’s description of Murdoch as “not a fit person” to run a major international company, Mensch said, was “partisan” and unjustified. She also apologized to the broadcaster Piers Morgan after falsely accusing him of admitting to phone hacking.
Mensch was regularly featured in the news when she was a politician. She was once contacted by an investigative journalist who claimed to have pictures proving that Mensch had taken drugs in a nightclub in the 1990s with the violinist Nigel Kennedy.
Mensch responded in a statement by saying it was “highly probable” and apologized for her dancing.
“Since I was in my twenties, I’m sure it was not the only incident of the kind; we all do idiotic things when young. I am not a very good dancer and must apologise to any and all journalists who were forced to watch me dance that night at Ronnie Scott’s,” she said.
She works as an executive for News Corp., a media company owned by Murdoch. She helped to launch Heat Street last year but left that role in December and is focusing on creating digital media projects for the company.
This story has been updated.

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Trump’s Help For Harley Is Hurting The Bike Maker


A little more evidence that the current White House resident is not as in touch with world events as he would (or his staff) would like you to believe.MA

David Kiley, Contributor
2 days ago

© Provided by Forbes Media LLC
There aren’t too many brands that are as iconically “American” as Harley Davidson. And when Donald Trump invoked the “Hogs” in his speech to the nation Tuesday night, he thought he was calling attention to unfair trade deals inhibiting American companies and workers abroad.
Not so fast. It turns out that the high tariffs faced by Harley when trying to sell its bikes overseas would have been substantially removed by the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which Trump squashed his first days in office. In Vietnam, for example, Harley faces a 74% tax. It would have been zero if the U.S. signed on to TPP. Indeed, Harley’s CEO and chief lobbyist publicly advocated for TPP last year.

Trump repeatedly called TPP a U.S. “job killer.” Trade experts disagree, arguing that it was just the opposite, but got caught up in the political rancor and rhetoric of a campaign, rightfully referred to as “the silly season.”
Trump seems fairly fact-challenged in his use of Harley to call attention to unfair trade. He complained that there is one country that charges a 100% tariff on imported motorcycles. That’s true. It’s India. But Harley has a factory in India that supplies bikes to consumers there, so those bikes aren’t subject to the tariff. India, a developing country, put heavy tariffs on some categories of products to force companies to build factories in their country and create jobs for their working class. Indonesia, another country with a tariff, hits imported motorcycles with a 40% tax for the same reason.
In a statement, Harley-Davidson said it opened the plant in India in 2011 “to improve production flexibility, market responsiveness and strengthen operations in the country.” It doesn’t address whether the tariff played a part in its decision, but it did, of course.
India is a huge market for motorcycles and scooters – 16.5 million per years. Harley has less than a 1% share of that market. But that is because Harley does not make the kinds of bikes that are most popular in India, where there are many manufacturers vying for share at much lower price points.
Tariffs on motorcycles are common across the Asia-Pacific region. Besides India and Indonesia, China levies a 30% tariff, as does Malaysia. Thailand hits Harley with a 60% tariff, and Taiwan’s tariff is 20%. Malaysia and Singapore were also part of TPP, and there was hope that Indonesia would have joined it eventually.
The 12 countries in TPP account for one-third of global trade, according to The Peterson Institute for International Economics.
Harley relies heavily on overseas sales. Last year, the company reported 40% of its sales were outside the U.S. And despite the tariffs in Asia, it had a record year in the Pan-Asian region, selling 33,000 bikes – not bad considering Harley’s bikes are among the most expensive available in those markets.
Ironically, while Harley has been a big loser from Trump’s pull-out from TPP, the big winner is China, the country he has been most vocal about in terms of wanting to make it harder for Chinese goods to get into the U.S.
Without the U.S. in TPP, China is free to dominate the Pan-Pacific region through trade. “China’s ambitious One-Belt-One-Road and Asian Infrastructural Investment Bank initiatives will also be strengthened by a perceived or actual U.S. pullback from Asia [as a result of leaving the TPP],” says Linda Lim, professor of a strategy at the Stephen M. Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan.
No wonder Harley CEO Matthew Levatich seems uneasy in the spotlight with Donald Trump using Harley as a poster-brand for his supposed fair-trade policy. The new president already killed the one deal that would have helped the motorcycle company.
The focus on Harley isn’t all bad, though. Shares of Harley climbed 3.58% Wednesday, compared with the Dow Jones Industrial Average, which was up 1.46%.

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Congressional Members Who Avoid Townhalls Et al.


The two articles below are just a small sampling of what Congress thinks about the “American People” so many of them are fond of citing. It has been pointed out that many of the serving legislators are Lawyers, attorneys or what ever the descriptive term for their profession maybe. The job is to argue for or against someone or something on behalf of someone or entity. It appears that our Congress for the past 10 to 15 years (or more have been arguing against the people who elected them.MA

A Texas member of Congress Key congressman: It’s ‘a good thing’ if more Americans lose coverage

02/24/17 11:20 AM—Updated 02/24/17 12:59 PM
By Steve Benen
Rep. Mike Burgess (R-Texas) chairs the House Energy and Commerce subcommittee related to health care, which makes his perspective on the issue rather important. If Republicans ever present their alternative to the Affordable Care Act, for example, Burgess’ panel would be among the first to tackle the policy.

It was therefore rather striking yesterday when the far-right congressman appeared at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) and shared an unusual insight. BuzzFeed reported:

Burgess was asked about concerns that repealing Obamacare will lead to a drop in the number of people with health insurance. He responded that it would be a good thing because it means fewer people are subject to the individual mandate.

“First off, we’re not going to send an IRS agent out to chase you down and make you buy health insurance,” said Burgess. “So if the numbers (of insured people) drop I would say that’s a good thing because we restored personal liberty in this country.”

It’s a fascinating perspective. It doesn’t matter if the ACA is helping bring health security to millions of Americans; what matters, in Burgess’ mind, is conservative ideological principles.

U.S. News’ Robert Schlesinger noted in response, “If you listened to Burgess, you’d think that all or most of [the 20 million people insured by the ACA] were dragged kicking and screaming into the system and that they yearn for liberation from the tyranny of being able to afford catastrophic illness.”

Burgess, however, isn’t the only one reading from this script. Vice President Mike Pence said this week he wants to gut “Obamacare” in order to bring back “freedom.” House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) added that his anti-ACA plans is based on a single principle: “Freedom is the ability to buy what you want to fit what you need. Obamacare is Washington telling you what to buy regardless of your needs.”

All of this must resonate with the focus groups Republicans convene, but it doesn’t make nearly as much sense as GOP officials want to believe. The New Republic’s Brian Beutler explained the other day:

Under the old order, far too many people didn’t have the ability to buy insurance in the first place. Or if they could, they were subjected to lifetime coverage limits, no coverage for pre-existing conditions, and any number of other personal barriers and restrictions.

And since Obamacare’s major accomplishment was to counter those forces, and thus enable people to get health insurance, that in turn opened up whole new areas of personal freedom: the ability to take risks and get new jobs, or start new businesses, and or simply have a sense of security and peace of mind.

So how exactly would it be a victory for “freedom” to pull out the rug from those who can finally buy health insurance?

Under the Republican approach, Americans can have the “personal liberty” of not receiving needed medical care. We can all be “free” to ration health services based on our individual wealth.

Ryan believes “freedom is the ability to buy what you want to fit what you need,” but the Speaker may not understand the point of insurance: we don’t always know what we’ll need, which is why we seek medical coverage in the first place.

I look forward to Republican policymakers telling countless Americans, “Your family is one serious illness away from financial ruin, and your health is at risk from treatable ailments, but look at how great your liberty is!”

SHY DEMOCRATS. It’s not just the GOP: Even some Democratic members of Congress are avoiding holding town halls. “From Montana to West Virginia, the nation’s most vulnerable Senate Democrats are avoiding town hall meetings as their Republican counterparts get pummeled by an energized electorate frustrated with President Donald Trump’s early agenda,” reports the Associated Press. “Some Democrats prefer to connect with constituents over the telephone or social media. Others are meeting voters in controlled environments with limited opportunities to ask questions. But few of the 10 Democratic senators facing re-election next year in states carried by Trump have scheduled in-person town hall meetings during this week’s congressional recess.”
‘HAVE SOME COURAGE.’ Former Democratic Rep. Gabby Giffords, who was shot in the head during a constituent meeting in Tucson, Ariz., in 2011, urged members of Congress to have the courage to meet with the people they represent after Texas Republican Rep. Louie Gohmert cited fears of violence as a reason to avoid town halls. “At this time there are groups from the more violent strains of the leftist ideology, some even being paid, who are preying on public town halls to wreak havoc and threaten public safety,” Gohmert said Thursday.
Giffords issued a blistering statement in reply via Americans for Responsible Solutions, the gun violence prevention group she co-founded:
“I was shot on a Saturday morning. By Monday morning my offices were open to the public. Ron Barber — at my side that Saturday, who was shot multiple times, then elected to Congress in my stead — held town halls. It’s what the people deserve in a representative.
“In the past year, campaigning for gun safety, I have held over 50 public events.
“Many of the members of Congress who are refusing to hold town halls and listen to their constituents concerns are the very same politicians that have opposed commonsense gun violence prevention policies and have allowed the Washington gun lobby to threaten the safety of law enforcement and everyday citizens in our schools, businesses, places of worship, airports, and movie theaters.
“To the politicians who have abandoned their civic obligations, I say this: Have some courage. Face your constituents. Hold town halls.”
One person who’s not afraid of town halls? Republican Rep. Justin Amash of Michigan. Sure, the libertarian-leaning lawmaker got yelled at plenty during his town hall on Thursday. But he took questions, and he’s out there telling Republicans to buck up and deal with the people they represent.

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