What's going on with the Executive Departments

[GreyhoundFan]

"EPA won’t be able to do the ‘right thing’ under Trump, says latest protesting official"

Spoiler

Elizabeth “Betsy” Southerland loved her work at the Environmental Protection Agency.

Then Donald Trump and Scott Pruitt came along.

Now Southerland, who was director of science and technology in the agency’s Office of Water, said she is “heartbroken about the impact of the new administration on environmental protection in this country.”

After 30 years at EPA, her last day was Monday.

Southerland becomes the latest in a series of protesting federal scientists. She denounced the destructive environmental policies of President Trump and EPA Administrator Pruitt. Family concerns played an important role in her decision to leave, but she also can’t stomach the current direction of an agency that answers to a White House wallowing in disarray and disgrace.

In a statement planned for release Tuesday by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) and during email and phone interviews with The Washington Post, she talked about how “EPA has been the guiding light to make the ‘right thing’ happen for the greater good, including public health and safety.”

But with Trump and Pruitt in charge, “that will not be possible under the current administration.”

Their attack on environmental protections marks the “abandonment of the polluter pays principle that underlies all environmental statutes and regulations,” she said. “The best case for our children and grandchildren is that they will pay the polluters bills through increased state taxes, new user fees, and higher water and sewer bills. The worst case is that they will have to live with increased public health and safety risks and a degraded environment.” Furthermore, she warned that  Trump’s planned 31 percent EPA budget cut would lead to the loss of thousands of public- and private-sector jobs.

“There is no question,” she said, “the administration is seriously weakening EPA’s mission by vigorously pursuing an industry deregulation approach and defunding implementation of environmental programs.”

Southerland went public with her opposition to Trump’s environmental program, because she said “I felt it was my civic duty to explain the impact of this administration’s policies on public health and safety.”

A PhD in environmental science and engineering, Southerland called her more than four decades of environmental work, including three with EPA, “the most wonderful 40 years.” Two years ago she was honored with the Distinguished Presidential Rank Award, given to just 1 percent of Senior Executive Service members for “sustained extraordinary accomplishment.” In Southerland’s case, she was recognized for her work in lowering swimming health risks by developing new national bacteria water quality standards.

Raised in Alexandria and residing in Fairfax Station, Southerland, 68, is married, has two sons and enjoys hiking. She will volunteer with the Environmental Protection Network, a group of former EPA staffers.

Southerland’s resignation comes during the same month a Union of Concerned Scientists report said Trump is creating a “hostile environment for scientific staff.”

That report was released the day after Interior Department scientist Joel Clement wrote a Washington Post opinion article saying Trump’s crowd retaliated against him “for speaking out publicly about the dangers that climate change poses to Alaska Native communities.”

In March, Mike Cox also cited the dangers Alaska Natives face from climate change when he quit EPA. In a letter to Pruitt, Cox said administration policies “are contrary” to those Americans want “to ensure the air their children breath is safe; the land they live, play, and hunt on to be free of toxic chemicals; and the water they drink, the lakes they swim in, and the rivers they fish in to be clean.”

Reacting to Southerland’s remarks, EPA spokesman Jahan Wilcox said that “it’s hard to believe that Elizabeth Southerland is retiring because of a budget proposal and not because she’s eligible for her government pension.  We wish Elizabeth Southerland the best in her retirement and the EPA will continue to re-focus on our core mission of protecting our air, land and water.”

Kyla Bennett, PEER’s New England director, placed Southerland’s departure in a broader context: “Increasingly principled professionals, who have proudly served administrations from both parties, are under orders to betray, rather than serve, the public interest by remaining at EPA.”

But don’t get the impression these examples of dissent are proof of revolt among federal employees. That is not the case.

“Everyone is focused on presenting all the facts to the new political team in hopes the facts will change their minds about defunding existing environmental programs and repealing existing rules,” Southerland said by email. “I do not know even one EPA employee who is doing anything to sabotage the existing political team. They are all doing their absolute best to give the politicals all the facts so they can make the right decision if they are open-minded. I personally do not know anyone who is planning to resign in protest, but I can confirm that staff involved in the [regulatory] repeal efforts already underway are heartbroken.”

She closed her written farewell to colleagues with a message that mixed rebuttals to Trump and Pruitt with the hope others in government will save us from them.

EPA suffers “from the temporary triumph of myth over truth. The truth is there is NO war on coal, there is NO economic crisis caused by environmental protection, and climate change IS caused by man’s activities,” she wrote using capital letters for emphasis.

“It may take a few years and even an environmental disaster, but I am confident that Congress and the courts will eventually restore all the environmental protections repealed by this administration because the majority of the American people recognize that this protection of public health and safety is right and it is just.”

Another good person pushed out by this sham administration.

[Cartmann99]

12 hours ago, candygirl200413 said:

Many of President Trump's Cabinet members gather at a weekly session to study the Bible, the Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN) reported Monday.

Ralph Drollinger, the founder of Capitol Ministries, says he leads a weekly Bible study with Cabinet members such as Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, Energy Secretary Rick Perry, Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price and CIA Director Mike Pompeo.

"It's the best Bible study that I've ever taught in my life. They are so teachable. They're so noble. They're so learned," Drollinger told CBN

Mr. Drollinger, perhaps after you are through sucking up to your important new friends, trying to attract the world's attention to the piety of your group, and naming names on an interview with CBN, you could lead a study on Matthew 6:5?

Quote

And when thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites are: for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men. Verily I say unto you, They have their reward.

If Drollinger had just said that there's a Bible study every Wednesday night at location X and that everyone is welcome to attend, I wouldn't care in the slightest. That's not what's going on here. He's trying to impress the CBN viewers by showing that he knows important people, and make Grandma Jones in Bugtussle Flats think that "good Christians" are running the government, so that she don't think too hard and goes along with whatever the Trump administration wants to do. 

[GrumpyGran]

6 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

“We do not seek to impose our way of life on anyone, but rather to let it shine as an example for everyone to follow,” Trump said.

Except for that part where our god is the only god and the rest of you heathens need to either convert or prepare to die!

[GrumpyGran]

6 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

"The most dangerous man in Washington"

  Hide contents

Mirror mirror on the wall, who’s the most dangerous White House official of them all?

The Mooch may be out of the running, but there’s still a lot of competition. 

It’s not the guy in charge of our nuclear arsenal, who may or may not have realized that was the core of his job description before accepting the post (Rick Perry).

Nor is it the woman meeting with men’s rights advocates (Betsy DeVos). 

And it’s not the guy who keeps adding financial assets and meetings with Russian officials to his federal disclosure forms (Jared Kushner). 

It’s neither of the guys rolling back climate change regulations and sidelining scientists at the Environmental Protection Agency and Interior Department (Scott Pruitt and Ryan Zinke, respectively).

It’s not the guy who worries that homeless shelters are too comfortable (Ben Carson). Not the guy arguing to dismantle lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights (Jeff Sessions). Not the mastermind of the Bowling Green Massacre (Kellyanne Conway). 

Strangely enough, it’s not the fellow who built a media empire by playing footsie with the alt-right (Stephen K. Bannon). Nor is it even the guy whom a Nazi-allied Austrian nationalist group claims as a sworn member (Sebastian Gorka).

To be sure, all these aides and bureaucrats are doing damage. They are degrading norms, enacting bad policy and putting our country and planet at grave risk. 

But right now the “most dangerous” title belongs — aside from the tweeter in chief, of course — to someone in a much less sexy job, with a much less scandalous background. 

It’s Mick Mulvaney, director of the Office of Management and Budget.  

In terms of both immensity and immediacy, the threat Mulvaney presents is far greater than any of the slow-motion train wrecks happening elsewhere in the administration. That’s because he seems hell-bent on wreaking a global crisis within the next two months. 

Not a century from now. Not a decade from now. In two months.  

That’s when the government will run out of money needed to pay bills Congress has already incurred, according to Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, if Congress does not act to raise the debt limit. 

What would follow? Just a constitutional, political and global financial crisis.

Arguably, the U.S. government would be in violation of the 14th Amendment (“The validity of the public debt of the United States . . . shall not be questioned”). The government’s ability to continue paying Social Security checks, interest on the debt and other basic obligations would likewise be at risk. 

Most important, this would irrevocably destroy the United States’ sterling reputation as a borrower. 

U.S. debt is considered the safest of safe assets, and as such, Treasury securities are the benchmark of the global financial system. Causing creditors to question whether they’ll receive full and timely payments would trigger panic in markets throughout the world. 

Technically, we already hit the debt ceiling in March. In the months since, Treasury has engaged in extraordinary accounting measures to avoid outright default. But come early fall, those measures will be exhausted. The United States will become a deadbeat. 

The debt ceiling is a product of the misguided belief that limiting the official borrowing capacity of the government would force legislators into frugality. In reality, it has done nothing to curb financial profligacy. Its chief effect is to periodically offer some political faction — sometimes the minority party, sometimes the nuttier fringe of the majority party — the power to take a very valuable hostage. 

Mnuchin has urged Congress to pass a debt-limit hike with no strings attached. The government would thereby dodge default with minimal drama and without spooking markets. 

But Mulvaney has other plans. 

During his six years in Congress, he voted against raising the debt limit four times. One might hope he was merely posturing, since he was able to cast such votes with the knowledge that his colleagues would ultimately pass the bills.

Unfortunately, as OMB director, Mulvaney has continued to be breathtakingly irresponsible with the creditworthiness of the United States. 

In May, he publicly contradicted Mnuchin by arguing that a debt-ceiling increase should be coupled with divisive spending cuts, which would inevitably complicate an already politically fraught process. 

And on Sunday, he told CNN’s Jake Tapper that Congress must not pass any legislation — not even a debt-ceiling hike — until the notoriously impossible Obamacare repeal is done. President Trump echoed this thinking on Twitter as well. 

No surprise, given that the self-proclaimed King of Debt has also been cavalier about the full faith and credit of the United States. 

So long as Mulvaney still has the president’s ear, we’re all living dangerously.

Sobering, but true.

Yeah, but Trump doesn't understand how much government money he spends everyday. When he finds out what he will have to do without if there's a shut-down he'll flip on Mulvaney so fast Mick won't have time to clean his desk out. He's got no friends to protect him, his agenda is not popular.

[GreyhoundFan]

45 minutes ago, GrumpyGran said:

Yeah, but Trump doesn't understand care how much government money he spends everyday.

There, fixed it for you.

[candygirl200413]

WE GET IT SESSIONS YOU HATE POC! (even though it's been shown to benefit white women).

Justice Dept. to Take On Affirmative Action in College Admissions

Quote

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration is preparing to redirect resources of the Justice Department’s civil rights division toward investigating and suing universities over affirmative action admissions policies deemed to discriminate against white applicants, according to a document obtained by The New York Times.

The document, an internal announcement to the civil rights division, seeks current lawyers interested in working for a new project on “investigations and possible litigation related to intentional race-based discrimination in college and university admissions.”

The announcement suggests that the project will be run out of the division’s front office, where the Trump administration’s political appointees work, rather than its Educational Opportunities Section, which is run by career civil servants and normally handles work involving schools and universities.

The document does not explicitly identify whom the Justice Department considers at risk of discrimination because of affirmative action admissions policies. But the phrasing it uses, “intentional race-based discrimination,” cuts to the heart of programs designed to bring more minorities to university campuses.

Supporters and critics of the project said it was clearly targeting admissions programs that can give members of generally disadvantaged groups, like black and Latino students, an edge over other applicants with comparable or higher test scores.

The project is another sign that the civil rights division is taking on a conservative tilt under President Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions. It follows other changes in Justice Department policy on voting rights, gay rights and police reforms.

Roger Clegg, a former top official in the civil rights division during the Reagan and George Bush administrations who is now the president of the conservative Center for Equal Opportunity, called the project a “welcome” and “long overdue” development as the United States becomes increasingly multiracial.

“The civil rights laws were deliberately written to protect everyone from discrimination, and it is frequently the case that not only are whites discriminated against now, but frequently Asian-Americans are as well,” he said.

But Kristen Clarke, the president of the liberal Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, criticized the affirmative action project as “misaligned with the division’s longstanding priorities.” She noted that the civil rights division was “created and launched to deal with the unique problem of discrimination faced by our nation’s most oppressed minority groups,” performing work that often no one else has the resources or expertise to do.

“This is deeply disturbing,” she said. “It would be a dog whistle that could invite a lot of chaos and unnecessarily create hysteria among colleges and universities who may fear that the government may come down on them for their efforts to maintain diversity on their campuses.”

The Justice Department declined to provide more details about its plans or to make the acting head of the civil rights division, John Gore, available for an interview.

“The Department of Justice does not discuss personnel matters, so we’ll decline comment,” said Devin O’Malley, a department spokesman.

The Supreme Court has ruled that the educational benefits that flow from having a diverse student body can justify using race as one factor among many in a “holistic” evaluation, while rejecting blunt racial quotas or race-based point systems. But what that permits in actual practice by universities — public ones as well as private ones that receive federal funding — is often murky.

Mr. Clegg said he would expect the project to focus on investigating complaints the civil rights division received about any university admissions programs.

He also suggested that the project would look for stark gaps in test scores and dropout rates among different racial cohorts within student bodies, which he said would be evidence suggesting that admissions offices were putting too great an emphasis on applicants’ race and crossing the line the Supreme Court has drawn.

Some of that data, he added, could be available through the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights, which did not respond to a request for comment.

The Supreme Court most recently addressed affirmative action admissions policies in a 2016 case, voting 4 to 3 to uphold a race-conscious program at the University of Texas at Austin. But there are several pending lawsuits challenging such practices at other high-profile institutions, including Harvard University and the University of North Carolina. The Justice Department has not taken a position in those cases.

The pending start of the affirmative action project — division lawyers who want to work on it must submit their resumes by Aug. 9, the announcement said — joins a series of changes involving civil rights law since Mr. Trump’s inauguration.

In a lawsuit challenging Texas’ strict voter identification law, the Justice Department switched its position, dropping the claim that the law was intentionally discriminatory and later declaring that the law has been fixed. Mr. Sessions has also made clear he is not interested in using consent decrees to impose reforms on troubled police departments and has initiated a sweeping review of existing agreements.

Last week, the Justice Department, without being asked, filed a brief in a private employment discrimination lawsuit. It urged an appeals court not to interpret the ban on sex-based discrimination in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as covering sexual orientation. The Obama administration had shied from taking a stand on that question.

Vanita Gupta, who ran the civil rights division in the Obama administration’s second term and is now president of the liberal Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, noted that the briefs in the Texas voter identification and gay-rights cases were signed only by Trump administration political appointees, not career officials, just as the affirmative action project will apparently be run directly by the division’s front office.

“The fact that the position is in the political front office, and not in the career section that enforces antidiscrimination laws for education, suggests that this person will be carrying out an agenda aimed at undermining diversity in higher education without needing to say it,” Ms. Gupta said.

The civil rights division has been a recurring culture-war battleground as it passed between Democratic and Republican administrations.

During the administration of George W. Bush, its overseers violated Civil Service hiring laws, an inspector general found, by filling its career ranks with conservatives who often had scant experience in civil rights law. At the same time, it brought fewer cases alleging systematic discrimination against minorities and more alleging reverse discrimination against whites, like a 2006 lawsuit forcing Southern Illinois University to stop reserving certain fellowship programs for women or members of underrepresented racial groups.

In 2009, the Obama administration vowed to revitalize the agency and hired career officials who brought in many new lawyers with experience working for traditional, liberal-leaning civil-rights organizations.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

From Jennifer Rubin: "State Department dysfunction reaches new highs"

Spoiler

We’ve written recently about widespread concerns in the foreign policy community — both within and outside the State Department — over the management, direction and role of the State Department under former oil company chief executive Rex Tillerson. The combination of unfilled political slots, insular leadership, failure to defend the department’s budget, and a fundamental misunderstanding of the role of democracy and values in our foreign relations have made this the worst-run and least-effective State Department in recent memory — yes, worse than the Obama years, my conservative friends.

Now the amateurism and arrogance has reached constitutional dimensions. On the day President Trump grudgingly and without public ceremony signs Russia sanctions legislation, State has managed to undermine the impression we are serious about curbing Russian behavior.

Politico reports:

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson is resisting the pleas of State Department officials to spend nearly $80 million allocated by Congress for fighting terrorist propaganda and Russian disinformation.

It is highly unusual for a Cabinet secretary to turn down money for his department. But more than five months into his tenure, Tillerson has not issued a simple request for the money earmarked for the State Department’s Global Engagement Center, $60 million of which is now parked at the Pentagon. Another $19.8 million sits untouched at the State Department as Tillerson’s aides reject calls from career diplomats and members of Congress to put the money to work against America’s adversaries.

This is money already appropriated by Congress that Tillerson is legally obligated to spend. The notion that money to combat Russian espionage and subversion of Western democracies should not be spent merely underscores the sickening suspicion that Trump puts Russian interests above America’s. (A former State Department official is quoted in the Politico article saying, “The Global Engagement Center is one of the few, if only, areas in the U.S. government that could be tasked with countering and rebutting disinformation against America.”)

Moreover, there is a display of executive-suite bickering in which R.C. Hammond, a top communications person at State and former Newt Gingrich spokesman with no particular foreign policy expertise and zero State Department experience, typifies the secretary’s stubborn refusal to enlist people in the building who know what they are doing:

Hammond threw up objections to the request on multiple fronts, the former senior State official said. Hammond indicated to officials involved with the Global Engagement Center that with the department facing potential budget and staffing cuts, it didn’t make sense to take an infusion of new funds, the former senior State official said. Hammond also questioned why the U.S. doesn’t ask other governments, particularly in Muslim countries, to play a larger role in the information battle.

Hammond further expressed hesitation about needling the Russians at a time when Tillerson was trying to find common ground with the Kremlin on sensitive matters such as the war in Syria.

The reaction to this may dwarf blowback to any other single episode because Tillerson and his gang are defying Congress, Republicans in particular who pushed for the legislation. Moreover, as one former State Department hand put it to me, “This is so obviously, ridiculously stupid in so many ways — it’s like being asked to explain why it might not be such a good idea to chop off one’s own fingers one by one.”) One State Department official not authorized to speak on the record suggested to me that Hammond would not be likely to play an active policy role.

Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) and Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), who co-authored the legislation, are appropriately irate. In a written statement, they declared:

“Congress has provided substantial resources to combat foreign propaganda, particularly from Russia. There is broad agreement that the U.S. Government is behind the curve on this threat,” said Portman. “Countering foreign propaganda should be a top priority, and it is very concerning that progress on combatting this problem is being delayed because the State Department isn’t tapping into these resources. The State Department should take swift action to fully fund the GEC and ensure that it is capable of carrying out the purposes Congress directed, particularly as they relate to Russia and other state-sponsored foreign disinformation.”

“This is indefensible. Every day, ISIS is spreading terrorist propaganda and Russia is implementing a sophisticated disinformation campaign to undermine the United States and our allies.  There should be no doubt these are critical challenges to our national security. My bill with Senator Portman finally set our country up to fight back. Congress did our part, now it’s up to the administration to pick up the ball and run with it,” said Murphy. “I strongly urge Secretary Tillerson to take this issue seriously and use the tools and resources he has at his disposal to stand up to our adversaries.”

That’s a widely held view by those who have served in the State Department. “Expanding the capacity of the Global Engagement Center is critical,” says former Obama State Department official and Russia hawk Max Bergmann. “It is the most direct and important tool we have to counter Russian active measures campaigns that target us and our democratic allies, especially in Eastern Europe.” He adds, “Turning down the money needed to expand our efforts is just incomprehensible from a policy standpoint. You really have to start asking questions about Tillerson’s motivations.” He concludes, “It is becoming abundantly clear that Trump and Tillerson want to pursue a policy of appeasement toward Russian aggression. That sort of weakness just invites further aggression and aggression and is incredibly dangerous.”

Bergmann is not alone in seeing the importance of combating Russian efforts to destabilize the West. But regardless of the merits, this issue was decided when Congress passed a law and appropriated funds. “When Congress has passed and the president signed a law appropriating funds, the Secretary of State can’t simply decline to spend them,” says former assistant secretary for democracy, human rights and labor Tom Malinowski. “This goes beyond the usual self-defeating dysfunction of Tillerson’s management of the State Department, or his already well-established disinterest in confronting Russian threats to Western democracy. It shows contempt for his legal responsibilities, which Congress can and should do something about.”

For starters, Congress should call Tillerson up to the Hill to find out what is going on over there. Does he understand spending appropriated money is not optional? Is the State Department really afraid to defend against Russian counterintelligence and use our own resources against the Kremlin? Is this a result of some kind of directive from the White House?

We’ve said it before, but it bears repeating: Tillerson is in over his head, and his continued dependence on a small clique of advisers is proving disastrous. If White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly is really on his game, he’ll recommend that Trump fire Tillerson and get professional leadership installed at Foggy Bottom. Right now the State Department is causing more problems for the United States than it is solving.

 

[fraurosena]

19 hours ago, candygirl200413 said:

WE GET IT SESSIONS YOU HATE POC! (even though it's been shown to benefit white women).

Ah, but he's got a widdle white penis. Therefore all women, even the white ones, are deemed inferior beings.

[AmazonGrace]

Reported on Twitter that Kelly is cleaning house: 

 

Helped with McMaster, apparently: 

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/08/a-national-security-council-staffer-is-forced-out-over-a-controversial-memo/535725/

Quote

 

A top official of the National Security Council was fired last month after arguing in a memo that President Trump is under sustained attack from subversive forces both within and outside the government who are deploying Maoist tactics to defeat President Trump’s nationalist agenda.

His dismissal marks the latest victory by National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster in the ongoing war within Trump’s White House between those who believe that the president is under threat from dark forces plotting to undermine him, and those like McMaster who dismiss this as conspiratorial thinking.

Rich Higgins, a former Pentagon official who served in the NSC’s strategic-planning office as a director for strategic planning, was let go on July 21. Higgins’s memo describes supposed domestic and international threats to Trump’s presidency, including globalists, bankers, the “deep state,” and Islamists. The memo characterizes the Russia story as a plot to sabotage Trump’s nationalist agenda. It asserts that globalists and Islamists are seeking to destroy America. The memo also includes a set of recommendations, arguing that the problem constitutes a national-security priority.

 

Not really sure how the admin that consists largely of bankers is under such dire danger from bankers but hey. 

[Howl]

Hey, @AmazonGrace, you beat me to it.  Shit's getting real.  McMaster is cleaning house and this can only be for the best.  I suspect that McMaster just bided his time and delivered the coup de grâce at the first appropriate moment.  Cohen-Watnick was way out of his depth and is only 30 years old.  Old age and cunning....

According to Talking Points Memo: 

Quote

McMaster reportedly tried to fire him [Cohen-Watnick] in March after replacing Flynn, but Bannon and Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, intervened in Cohen-Watnick’s favor.

The dispatch of Cohen-Watnick and others close to Bannon (as discussed in the Atlantic article linked by @AmazonGrace) indicates to me that Bannon is no longer invincible/influential and perhaps Jared has lost a little luster as well.    If y'all will recall, Ezra Cohen-Watnick was involved in the weird Devin Nunes caper. From Heavy.com: 

Quote

A week after House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes told President Donald Trump that he had seen intelligence showing that his transition team was “incidentally” monitored, it was reported that Nunes’ sources for the intelligence were three White House staffers. One of them was Ezra Cohen-Watnick, a senior director for intelligence at the National Security Council. Over four months after the strange sequence of events with Nunes, National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster finally pushed Cohen-Watnick out of the NSC.

Now if John Kelly can get rid of Stephen Miller...

[AmazonGrace]

 

[AmazonGrace]

http://www.politico.com/story/2017/08/03/mcmaster-winning-west-wing-fight-trump-241309

Kelly gives McMaster cover in West Wing battles

Trump’s national security adviser has emerged as one of the most volatile personalities in White House.

By BRYAN BENDER, JOSH DAWSEY and NAHAL TOOSI

08/03/2017 07:44 PM EDT

TL;DR McMaster has a temper:

 

 

Spoiler

 

National security adviser H.R. McMaster, who has waged a pitched battle with other senior staff for control over policy and personnel on the National Security Council, is taking advantage of the shield offered by the arrival of his old military colleague John Kelly as White House chief of staff.

Kelly told McMaster this week that he wanted him to remain as national security adviser, said two senior White House aides, and has encouraged him to make any staffing changes he deems necessary. McMaster took that as a green light this week to oust top intelligence aide Ezra Cohen-Watnick — a Michael Flynn hire who has a warm relationship with Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump’s senior adviser and son-in-law — after months of trying.

Kelly's arrival did not lead directly to Cohen-Watnick's dismissal, officials said, but was months in the making.

McMaster, a three-star general who was enlisted by Trump to replace Flynn in February, has been an increasingly volatile presence in the West Wing, operating under a cloud of rumors that Trump, with whom he is said to have a testy relationship, was considering reassigning him to another post, possibly sending him to oversee the war in Afghanistan.

In recent weeks, according to more than half a dozen current and former officials who have had direct interaction with him, McMaster has bristled at White House aides close to Trump whom he perceives as undercutting his authority. He seethes over every national security leak and lashes out over negative news stories he thinks are spread by his enemies. And McMaster, whose temper is legendary, frequently blows his top in high-level meetings.

“He can be very intense,” a McMaster confidant who speaks with him regularly and is a major supporter, told POLITICO Thursday. “Some find that difficult.”

McMaster is fiercely at odds with Steve Bannon, the Trump strategist who was removed from the principals committee of the National Security Council in April after McMaster’s appointment. In mid-July, the two sparred openly, in a widely attended policy meeting about Afghanistan, with McMaster advocating greater U.S. involvement and Bannon arguing for a major pullback.

The dispute got so out of hand, according to a pair of senior White House officials, that Secretary of Defense James Mattis had to intervene to get the discussion back on track.

While he has occasionally clashed with Kushner, the influential son-in-law, has a better relationship with him these days, a White House official with direct knowledge said.

The officials also said that McMaster fumes that he believes Bannon is responsible for leaking negative information about him to the news media — including via Breitbart.com, the far-right news site Bannon ran before joining the Trump campaign in 2016.

Several of the officials, who like others spoke on the condition they not be identified for fear of losing their jobs, said McMaster, who holds a Ph.D. in American history, remains on shaky ground with Trump, who they said wants to keep him -- for now.

A spokesman for McMaster declined to address questions about McMaster's relationship with key White House officials and his plans in the days ahead.

McMaster has steadily changed the complexion of the top White House policy shop in the past six months, going after people brought into the NSC by Flynn, who was forced to resign in February after failing to be truthful to Vice President Mike Pence about his contacts with the Russian ambassador during the presidential transition.

Officials say McMaster had a leading role in pushing out K.T. McFarland, a former Fox News analyst and Reagan administration official who served as Flynn's deputy and has been nominated to be ambassador to Singapore. He ousted the top Middle East adviser, an Iran hawk, replacing him with a retired Army colonel and military academic. Another top aide was dismissed after penning a memo that accused globalists, bankers and the “deep state” of undermining Trump — somethingMcMaster saw as trafficking in conspiracy theories.

His assault on those whom some have derided as “Flynnstones” reached its pinnacle on Wednesday when he removed Cohen-Watnick. He had been trying to push him out at least since March, when it was alleged in some reports that without authorization he shared classified information with Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), who at the time was leading the House investigation of potential ties between the Trump campaign and the Russian government. Other reported accounts disputed that Cohen-Watnick shared the information with Nunes.

Yet for at least a few weeks, Kushner and others close to Cohen-Watnick have tried to land him a different job, knowing his days at the NSC were probably numbered.

McMaster, several of the officials related, was overruled by Kushner and Bannon when he first sought to fire Cohen-Watnick, and he seethed about his inability to get rid of Cohen-Watnick when an article appeared in The Atlantic last month titled “The Man McMaster Couldn't Fire.”

McMaster has prevailed in some fierce policy fights — part of a broader battle between Trump administration officials with a more establishment and internationalist worldview, like Mattis and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson — to prevail over the more nationalist vision espoused by Bannon and Trump advisers Stephen Miller and Sebastian Gorka.

McMaster has achieved some big victories, like preventing Trump from using the controversial phrase “radical Islamic terrorism” that Flynn insisted upon and getting the president to explicitly endorse the NATO charter’s Article 5 — which commits the United States to the defend its European allies — after sending mixed signals about the U.S. commitment to the alliance.

But McMaster was excluded from Trump’s discussions with Russian President Vladimir Putin last month at the G-20 summit in Germany, has failed to convince Trump to send more troops to Afghanistan, and was barely able to keep the president from ditching the Obama-era deal with Iran to halt its nuclear weapons program.

“There is a split in the White House between the Bannon camp of ideologues and the McMaster-Mattis-Tillerson camp of more centrist intellectuals,” said Pete Mansoor, a retired Army colonel who worked closely with McMaster and now teaches at Ohio State University. “And this conflict is playing out in real time as the Trump administration tries to flesh out its foreign policy and national security policy.”

“The centrists appear to be winning the battle,” Mansoor added. “But not always.”

Despite what he has accomplished, McMaster is clearly still very much under fire.

He is accused by his detractors of trying to undercut the president's agenda and has been the subject of a series of negative news stories that he blames on his enemies in the West Wing — especially Bannon, who people close to him say he believes was behind a recent string of stories on Breitbart that accuse him, among other things, of being anti-Israel.

Before his White House arrival, McMaster was a darling of the media. His best-selling 1997 book, an indictment of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the early years of the Vietnam War, gained him a reputation as one of the Army's leading thinkers.

His later exploits as commander of an armored cavalry regiment near the Syrian border in 2006 formed the building blocks of the counterinsurgency strategy that underpinned the surge of American forces a year later to tamp down a sectarian war — and earned him public accolades from President George W. Bush.

But in spite of all that — or because of it — he had his share of detractors inside the ranks. As an iconoclast he rubbed many of the top generals, who also saw him as a publicity hound, the wrong way. It is unlikely he would have ever been promoted to general had it not been for a mentor named David Petraeus, the most accomplished general of his generation and another leading "warrior-intellectual."

In the White House, McMaster finds the fierce public scrutiny grating, according several of his close supporters, including articles that have suggested he sullied his reputation by agreeing to work for Trump in the first place and for defending him publicly — particularly when he went to bat for his boss after reports that Trump shared classified information with visiting Russian officials in the Oval Office.

“It’s hard to know how much of H.R.’s reported troubles are real and how much are just crafted by his enemies inside the White House,” said Douglas Ollivant, a retired Army officer who served with McMaster in Iraq and is now a senior fellow at New America, a centrist think tank. "It’s difficult to know what reality is.”

Another salvo was launched at McMaster on Thursday, after the Washington Post published embarrassing transcripts of Trump's calls with the leaders of Australia and Mexico, citing the National Security Council.

A conservative activist group immediately called for his ouster.

“If you are in charge of something and can’t keep control of your own staff, you lose your job,” said Rick Manning, a former official in the Bush administration and now president of the nonpartisan Americans for Limited Government, which blasted out a news release calling on Trump to fire his national security adviser. "He has lost control of the national security apparatus.”

But McMaster's supporters are certainly not counting him out yet and said his approach may ultimately win over who counts the most: Trump, who admires his hard-charging but thorough approach.

“He does respect those who produce at the end of the day and come in with a well-thought-out plan,” said the confidant. “McMaster knows how to run a rigorous process. He seriously wants America to achieve its objectives and to provide the president thoroughly developed, integrated policy options.”

 

 

[AmazonGrace]

http://nordic.businessinsider.com/hr-mcmaster-steve-bannon-russia-trolls-2017-8?r=US&IR=T

The knives are coming out for H.R. McMaster

Spoiler

 

Allies of White House chief strategist Steve Bannon intensified their battle against national security adviser H.R. McMaster this week as McMaster began asserting more control over the National Security Council and fired officials appointed by his immediate predecessor, Michael Flynn.
The dismissals of Ezra Cohen-Watnick, Rich Higgins, and Derek Harvey have exacerbated friction between McMaster and the White House's more nationalist wing, which is led by Bannon and has President Donald Trump's ear.
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"There is a split in the White House between the Bannon camp of ideologues and the McMaster-Mattis-Tillerson camp of more centrist intellectuals," Pete Mansoor, a retired Army colonel who worked closely with McMaster, told Politico. "And this conflict is playing out in real time as the Trump administration tries to flesh out its foreign policy and national security policy."
John Kelly's recent move from homeland security secretary to White House chief of staff should ensure McMaster's independence and control over the NSC - for now.

But the nationalists may have a competitive advantage: Trump, who already thinks McMaster is a "pain" who talks too much and has complained to aides that he wants Flynn back at the White House, is reportedly considering sending McMaster to replace Gen. John Nicholson as the top commander of American and NATO troops in Afghanistan.
"What the nationalists are saying about McMaster: 'He wants to send more troops to Afghanistan, so we're going to send him,'" Axios' Mike Allen reported Thursday.

Whether McMaster is ousted or not, efforts to undermine him both inside and outside the West Wing seem to be well underway.
McMaster has gone to bat for Trump in the past. He defended him to reporters after Trump disclosed Israeli intelligence to Russian diplomats in the Oval Office. And he said he "would not be concerned" if Trump's son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner, had asked to set up a secret back-channel method of communication with Moscow during the transition period.

But right-wing media outlets like Breitbart have long harbored suspicions about McMaster, who persuaded Trump to stay away from the phrase "radical Islamic terrorism" in a speech to Middle Eastern leaders in Saudi Arabia earlier this year.
Michael Warren, a writer for The Weekly Standard, told CNN on Friday that Bannon and his allies saw McMaster's sudden purge of Flynn appointees as an overt attempt to sabotage Trump's agenda.

Laura Ingraham, a conservative political commentator and Trump ally, on Thursday tweeted, "Obama holdovers at NSC or State Dept who are leaking [should] do real time for these leaks," and questioned why McMaster had "fired actual Trump supporters."
Since the firings, administration officials speaking anonymously to conservative-leaning news outlets have accused McMaster of being "anti-Israel" and opposing "everything the president wants to do."

One former NSC official told The Daily Caller that McMaster was a "sycophant" of retired Gen. David Petraeus. The official seemed to try to appeal directly to the president's ego, adding that he didn't understand why Trump was "allowing a guy who is subverting his foreign policy at every turn to remain in place."

On Thursday, a letter McMaster wrote to Susan Rice, a national security adviser during the Obama administration, allowing her to keep her security clearance was leaked to Circa - an outlet seen as friendly to Trump. Circa paired the letter, which immediately stirred outrage in far-right circles, with quotes from anonymous West Wing officials claiming it undermined the president's judgment.

"What is this? Does H.R. McMaster need to go? Susan Rice? Omg," Sean Hannity, a Trump ally and Fox News host who dined with the president last week, tweeted on Thursday.

"H.R. McMaster is a Deep State Plant who Opposes the Trump Agenda," tweeted Mike Cernovich, a prominent far-right provocateur who describes himself as an "American nationalist."

Cernovich set up a website this week called McMaster Leaks, on which he alleged the general had "been leaking information to David Petraeus and has had direct contact with George Soros," a billionaire, left-leaning philanthropist and frequent bogeyman of the far right.
"America needs Rich Higgins in office, not HR McMaster," tweeted Frank Gaffney, the president of the Center for Security Policy, a far-right think tank. He added that if McMaster weren't "fired for sabotaging" Trump's agenda, "it will be the McMaster administration."
"Why is Gen McMaster making decisions without even informing Gen Kelly?" tweeted Jack Posobiec, a far-right internet activist and pro-Trump conspiracy theorist. "Is this proper chain of command?"

Twitter accounts that have been linked to Russian influence operations have jumped on the anti-McMaster bandwagon, too, using hashtags like #FireMcMaster and #deepstate, according to a newly launched website that aims to track Russian propaganda efforts in real time.

On Friday, the top and trending websites the accounts were sharing were the Circa story about McMaster letting Rice keep her security clearance. Shares of a Breitbart story titled "NSC Purge: McMaster 'Deeply Hostile to Israel and to Trump'" have increased by 2,300% since Wednesday, according to the site, and "clearance," "McMaster," and "Susan Rice" were among the top and trending topics.

 

 

[fraurosena]

If you had just a smidgin of sympathy for Sessions after the presidunce threatened to fire him last week, here's why he doesn't deserve it:

 

[GrumpyGran]

9 hours ago, AmazonGrace said:

http://www.politico.com/story/2017/08/03/mcmaster-winning-west-wing-fight-trump-241309

Kelly gives McMaster cover in West Wing battles

Trump’s national security adviser has emerged as one of the most volatile personalities in White House.

By BRYAN BENDER, JOSH DAWSEY and NAHAL TOOSI

08/03/2017 07:44 PM EDT

TL;DR McMaster has a temper:

 

 

  Hide contents

 

National security adviser H.R. McMaster, who has waged a pitched battle with other senior staff for control over policy and personnel on the National Security Council, is taking advantage of the shield offered by the arrival of his old military colleague John Kelly as White House chief of staff.

Kelly told McMaster this week that he wanted him to remain as national security adviser, said two senior White House aides, and has encouraged him to make any staffing changes he deems necessary. McMaster took that as a green light this week to oust top intelligence aide Ezra Cohen-Watnick — a Michael Flynn hire who has a warm relationship with Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump’s senior adviser and son-in-law — after months of trying.

Kelly's arrival did not lead directly to Cohen-Watnick's dismissal, officials said, but was months in the making.

McMaster, a three-star general who was enlisted by Trump to replace Flynn in February, has been an increasingly volatile presence in the West Wing, operating under a cloud of rumors that Trump, with whom he is said to have a testy relationship, was considering reassigning him to another post, possibly sending him to oversee the war in Afghanistan.

In recent weeks, according to more than half a dozen current and former officials who have had direct interaction with him, McMaster has bristled at White House aides close to Trump whom he perceives as undercutting his authority. He seethes over every national security leak and lashes out over negative news stories he thinks are spread by his enemies. And McMaster, whose temper is legendary, frequently blows his top in high-level meetings.

“He can be very intense,” a McMaster confidant who speaks with him regularly and is a major supporter, told POLITICO Thursday. “Some find that difficult.”

McMaster is fiercely at odds with Steve Bannon, the Trump strategist who was removed from the principals committee of the National Security Council in April after McMaster’s appointment. In mid-July, the two sparred openly, in a widely attended policy meeting about Afghanistan, with McMaster advocating greater U.S. involvement and Bannon arguing for a major pullback.

The dispute got so out of hand, according to a pair of senior White House officials, that Secretary of Defense James Mattis had to intervene to get the discussion back on track.

While he has occasionally clashed with Kushner, the influential son-in-law, has a better relationship with him these days, a White House official with direct knowledge said.

The officials also said that McMaster fumes that he believes Bannon is responsible for leaking negative information about him to the news media — including via Breitbart.com, the far-right news site Bannon ran before joining the Trump campaign in 2016.

Several of the officials, who like others spoke on the condition they not be identified for fear of losing their jobs, said McMaster, who holds a Ph.D. in American history, remains on shaky ground with Trump, who they said wants to keep him -- for now.

A spokesman for McMaster declined to address questions about McMaster's relationship with key White House officials and his plans in the days ahead.

McMaster has steadily changed the complexion of the top White House policy shop in the past six months, going after people brought into the NSC by Flynn, who was forced to resign in February after failing to be truthful to Vice President Mike Pence about his contacts with the Russian ambassador during the presidential transition.

Officials say McMaster had a leading role in pushing out K.T. McFarland, a former Fox News analyst and Reagan administration official who served as Flynn's deputy and has been nominated to be ambassador to Singapore. He ousted the top Middle East adviser, an Iran hawk, replacing him with a retired Army colonel and military academic. Another top aide was dismissed after penning a memo that accused globalists, bankers and the “deep state” of undermining Trump — somethingMcMaster saw as trafficking in conspiracy theories.

His assault on those whom some have derided as “Flynnstones” reached its pinnacle on Wednesday when he removed Cohen-Watnick. He had been trying to push him out at least since March, when it was alleged in some reports that without authorization he shared classified information with Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), who at the time was leading the House investigation of potential ties between the Trump campaign and the Russian government. Other reported accounts disputed that Cohen-Watnick shared the information with Nunes.

Yet for at least a few weeks, Kushner and others close to Cohen-Watnick have tried to land him a different job, knowing his days at the NSC were probably numbered.

McMaster, several of the officials related, was overruled by Kushner and Bannon when he first sought to fire Cohen-Watnick, and he seethed about his inability to get rid of Cohen-Watnick when an article appeared in The Atlantic last month titled “The Man McMaster Couldn't Fire.”

McMaster has prevailed in some fierce policy fights — part of a broader battle between Trump administration officials with a more establishment and internationalist worldview, like Mattis and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson — to prevail over the more nationalist vision espoused by Bannon and Trump advisers Stephen Miller and Sebastian Gorka.

McMaster has achieved some big victories, like preventing Trump from using the controversial phrase “radical Islamic terrorism” that Flynn insisted upon and getting the president to explicitly endorse the NATO charter’s Article 5 — which commits the United States to the defend its European allies — after sending mixed signals about the U.S. commitment to the alliance.

But McMaster was excluded from Trump’s discussions with Russian President Vladimir Putin last month at the G-20 summit in Germany, has failed to convince Trump to send more troops to Afghanistan, and was barely able to keep the president from ditching the Obama-era deal with Iran to halt its nuclear weapons program.

“There is a split in the White House between the Bannon camp of ideologues and the McMaster-Mattis-Tillerson camp of more centrist intellectuals,” said Pete Mansoor, a retired Army colonel who worked closely with McMaster and now teaches at Ohio State University. “And this conflict is playing out in real time as the Trump administration tries to flesh out its foreign policy and national security policy.”

“The centrists appear to be winning the battle,” Mansoor added. “But not always.”

Despite what he has accomplished, McMaster is clearly still very much under fire.

He is accused by his detractors of trying to undercut the president's agenda and has been the subject of a series of negative news stories that he blames on his enemies in the West Wing — especially Bannon, who people close to him say he believes was behind a recent string of stories on Breitbart that accuse him, among other things, of being anti-Israel.

Before his White House arrival, McMaster was a darling of the media. His best-selling 1997 book, an indictment of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the early years of the Vietnam War, gained him a reputation as one of the Army's leading thinkers.

His later exploits as commander of an armored cavalry regiment near the Syrian border in 2006 formed the building blocks of the counterinsurgency strategy that underpinned the surge of American forces a year later to tamp down a sectarian war — and earned him public accolades from President George W. Bush.

But in spite of all that — or because of it — he had his share of detractors inside the ranks. As an iconoclast he rubbed many of the top generals, who also saw him as a publicity hound, the wrong way. It is unlikely he would have ever been promoted to general had it not been for a mentor named David Petraeus, the most accomplished general of his generation and another leading "warrior-intellectual."

In the White House, McMaster finds the fierce public scrutiny grating, according several of his close supporters, including articles that have suggested he sullied his reputation by agreeing to work for Trump in the first place and for defending him publicly — particularly when he went to bat for his boss after reports that Trump shared classified information with visiting Russian officials in the Oval Office.

“It’s hard to know how much of H.R.’s reported troubles are real and how much are just crafted by his enemies inside the White House,” said Douglas Ollivant, a retired Army officer who served with McMaster in Iraq and is now a senior fellow at New America, a centrist think tank. "It’s difficult to know what reality is.”

Another salvo was launched at McMaster on Thursday, after the Washington Post published embarrassing transcripts of Trump's calls with the leaders of Australia and Mexico, citing the National Security Council.

A conservative activist group immediately called for his ouster.

“If you are in charge of something and can’t keep control of your own staff, you lose your job,” said Rick Manning, a former official in the Bush administration and now president of the nonpartisan Americans for Limited Government, which blasted out a news release calling on Trump to fire his national security adviser. "He has lost control of the national security apparatus.”

But McMaster's supporters are certainly not counting him out yet and said his approach may ultimately win over who counts the most: Trump, who admires his hard-charging but thorough approach.

“He does respect those who produce at the end of the day and come in with a well-thought-out plan,” said the confidant. “McMaster knows how to run a rigorous process. He seriously wants America to achieve its objectives and to provide the president thoroughly developed, integrated policy options.”

 

 

Yep, still like a cafeteria food fight gone crazy in there. And seeing Petraeus called a warrior-intellectual... Whaaaa? Just imagine what he could have accomplished if he had been thinking with his big brain instead of his little one!

1 hour ago, fraurosena said:

If you had just a smidgin of sympathy for Sessions after the presidunce threatened to fire him last week, here's why he doesn't deserve it:

 

Ifa y'alls doan tell me who's a talkin to ya, I'm gonna sent y'alls to the big house! Unless I gits thur firsts.

[AmazonGrace]

 

[fraurosena]

And another lying liar that lies is exposed...

Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin allegedly lied under oath, will the Justice Department investigate?

Spoiler

A WATCHDOG ORGANIZATION has asked the Justice Department to investigate Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin for allegedly making repeated false statements to Congress about the conduct of OneWest Bank, where he served as CEO and later chair between 2009 and 2015.

In the letter, the Campaign for Accountability writes, “Even today, Americans have a right to expect that those who seek and hold top government positions will not lie to their elected representatives and that if they do, the consequences will be swift and severe.”

On three separate occasions, both in written testimony and in live hearings, Mnuchin has denied that OneWest engaged in robosigning of foreclosure documents, when copious evidence exists to the contrary. Most recently, Mnuchin appears to have lied about robosigning while under oath last week in testimony before the House Financial Services Committee.

Rep. Keith Ellison, D-Minn., confronted Mnuchin with the 2009 deposition of Erica Johnson-Seck, a OneWest vice president who admitted that her team of eight employees robosigned 6,000 affidavits a week attesting to verifying mortgage files while spending “not more than 30 seconds” reviewing the underlying material. Mnuchin replied defiantly, “I don’t think you know what robosigning is,” insisting there is no legal definition, and denied that there was any robosigning at OneWest, “for the record.”

Previously, in written answers for the record to Sen. Bob Casey, D-Pa., in January, in conjunction with his confirmation hearings, Mnuchin stated“OneWest did not ‘robo-sign’ documents,” and then when given a chance to clean up his answer, he maintained his denial. In fact, despite his claim last week that “robosigning is not a legal term,” Mnuchin provided such a definition to Casey, saying it referred to “(a) a signer of a foreclosure affidavit attested to facts that were not verified to be accurate; or (b) a signer of a foreclosure affidavit represented himself or herself to be someone else.”

Johnson-Seck admitted to both things. She attested to facts in foreclosure cases without verifying them in any way; in response to the question “Is it true that you don’t read each document before signing it,” she replied “That’s true.” She also represented herself as having the authority to sign documents for at least seven different financial institutions. In fact, the late Brooklyn judge Arthur Schack once threw out a OneWest foreclosurebecause Johnson-Seck had both assigned a mortgage to Deutsche Bank and executed an affidavit on behalf of Deutsche Bank, appearing as multiple officers in the same case.

In addition, the Columbus Dispatch found frequent instances of robosigning in Franklin County, Ohio, including three cases in 2010 where “a judge dismissed OneWest foreclosure proceedings specifically based on inaccurate robosignings.” A Reuters investigation in 2011 also alleged that OneWest issued “foreclosure documents of questionable validity.”

And a report assembled by the Florida attorney general’s office in 2010 includes a mortgage assignment signed by a representative of “IndyMac Bank,” OneWest’s predecessor, and dated July 2010, well after IndyMac closed down. The assignment was clearly “robosigned” by an employee claiming to work for IndyMac when it would have been impossible for them to do so.

None of this is surprising because it was the standard practice of every bank engaged in foreclosure operations at that time. For some reason, the campaign claims, Mnuchin doesn’t want to admit to a practice that most banks have acknowledged and paid billions of dollars in fines for.

“Sec. Mnuchin’s dissembling was shameful enough when he served as a CEO,” the Campaign for Accountability writes, “but once he began repeating this obvious untruth to Congress, Sec. Mnuchin crossed the line into potentially criminal conduct.” Indeed, it is a federal crime to commit perjuryor make a “false or misleading statement” to Congress.

The Justice Department is, of course, highly unlikely to investigate Mnuchin’s statements. This is especially the case given the questionable assertions made to Congress by its leader, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, that he had not met with any representatives of Russia during the Trump campaign.

Nevertheless, the Campaign for Accountability raised the complaint because of the principle of the rule of law. In the letter they cite federal Judge Barrington Parker, who in 1977 fined CIA Director Richard Helms and gave him a suspended prison term for lying to Congress about CIA operations in Chile. “Public officials at every level, whatever their position, like any other person,” Judge Parker said, “must respect and honor the Constitution and the laws of the United States.”

 Also, note that once again, there is a connection to Deutsche Bank.

[GreyhoundFan]

9 hours ago, fraurosena said:

And another lying liar that lies is exposed..

I think that being a liar is the primary "qualification" for getting appointed in this administration.

[GreyhoundFan]

I'm going with NOT: "Like it or not, Betsy DeVos has made a mark in six months as education secretary"

Spoiler

It is tempting to conclude that after six months as education secretary, Betsy DeVos hasn’t accomplished all that much.

Congress has not been kind to her legislative agenda, and Republicans have joined with Democrats in criticizing her proposed budget cuts. She faces protests at many public appearances, which is why she receives special protection from the U.S. Marshals Service, at an average cost so far this year of $1 million a month. Her department, like many others in the Trump administration, has yet to fill a long list of empty jobs.

But, like it or not, DeVos has taken some major steps to change education policy, and her very presence at the head of the U.S. Education Department signals something important about the past, present and future of public education in the United States.

DeVos is a Michigan billionaire who has labored tirelessly for decades to promote school choice, or alternatives to traditional public schools, and is seen by critics as the most ideological and anti-public-education secretary in the more than 40 years of the department’s history.

She has made clear her K-12 priority is expanding charter schools — which are publicly funded but privately operated — and vouchers or voucher-like programs,  which use public money to pay for private and religious schools in different ways. Her supporters say those measures offer parents more choices, but her critics say they drain resources from the public education system, the most important civic institution in the United States.

In every speech she delivers she finds a way to promote school choice, sometimes saying things that aren’t true, as in February when she said that historically black colleges and universities were “real pioneers when it comes to school choice.” They weren’t. They were founded because blacks were barred from white colleges. Graduating students at a historically black university in Florida, Bethune-Cookman, protested the comments, booing and turning their back on her while she made a commencement speech in May.

What she doesn’t talk about are the challenges that school choice options have presented in many communities. Some states have scandal-ridden charter sectors, and studies show that voucher programs don’t help and often hurt student achievement. One such study was released this April, showing that students in the only federally funded voucher program, in Washington, D.C., performed worse on standardized tests within a year after entering D.C. private schools than peers who did not participate.

Because of her role in promoting school choice and her history of denigrating traditional public schools — she called them “a dead end” in 2015 — DeVos was controversial before her nomination, but became even more so after her Jan. 17 confirmation hearing before a Senate committee. During that session, she betrayed ignorance of the basics of the federal law protecting students with disabilities, as well as other key education issues. She even lost the support of a few Republicans, so that her confirmation on Feb. 7 was secured only after Vice President Pence, as presiding officer of the Senate, cast the first tiebreaking vote in U.S. history to confirm a Cabinet nominee.

But that didn’t stop her from moving as much as possible on her agenda, which envisions running schools as if they were businesses and offering so many “choices” for parents that picking a school for their children would be equivalent to picking “an Uber, or Lyft, or another ridesharing service.”

Before her tenure began, DeVos was known as a reformer in the K-12 space, but her views on higher education were not well known. In her first six months, however, she has made a real mark in higher education, aggravating advocates of consumer protections and delighting the for-profit education industry. She and her staff moved swiftly to start to remake the student financial aid system by rolling back or rewriting regulations that were put in place by the Obama administration to protect student borrowers. For example:

• DeVos’s department reinstated hefty collection fees for some borrowers who have defaulted.
• The department started to take apart two major consumer protection rules. One of the rules is on gainful employment, which holds nondegree career education programs accountable when graduates have too much debt; the other is on borrower defense, which allows student borrowers defrauded by institutions to get loan forgiveness.
• DeVos tapped the chief executive of a private student-loan company to run the federal government’s trillion-dollar financial aid operations.

But it is worth noting that the department also took quick action to implement a bipartisan initiative to help low- and moderate-income college students get year-round access to Pell grants, after Congress approved the measure.

In the K-12 space:

• DeVos backed the administration’s decision to rescind guidance from the Obama administration that was aimed at protecting the rights of transgender students and directed the department’s Office for Civil Rights to consider transgender students’ discrimination complaints on a case-by-case basis.
• She exercised some muscle in evaluating some state plans for compliance with the K-12 Every Student Succeeds Act, making “suggestions” about things they should fix and drawing complaints from Republicans.
• She made science teachers shudder when she issued a statement praising President Trump for pulling the United States out of the Paris climate accord.

A crucial government function for K-12 and higher education is enforcing civil rights. DeVos hired Candice Jackson, who has made some controversial statements about sexual assault on campus, as acting head of the Office for Civil Rights.  DeVos also held “hearings” at the Education Department about how to change Obama-era rules on how colleges should address sexual assault complaints. She made clear that she believes men accused of sexual assault have been improperly treated by institutions of higher education, and need more rights of their own. And when it became known that Trump’s Justice Department is launching a project to sue universities they deem to have affirmative action policies that discriminate against whites in admissions  — rather than historically underserved populations — DeVos did not publicly protest.

Perhaps most important, being education secretary has given DeVos a national platform to mainstream her school choice ideas, which once were considered radical. And her repeated attacks on the federal government have laid the groundwork for potential future efforts to abolish the Education Department, a long-cherished goal of many conservatives. Trump himself, during the 2016 campaign, voiced support for dismantling or shrinking the department.

What public officials say matters. President Ronald Reagan famously said, “The most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the government and I’m here to help,” and his consistent portrayal of the U.S. government as an impediment to solving problems affected politics and the view many Americans hold of the role of public officials.

In the same way, DeVos’s denunciations of the federal government and her refusal to make even a tepid call-out to the value of the public education system, can’t help but have an effect on the way some Americans feel about their neighborhood public schools, which educate the vast majority of the country’s schoolchildren. Arne Duncan, education secretary under President Barack Obama, was a supporter of charter schools (though not vouchers) but still spoke about the need for — and the aspirational goals of — public education. Margaret Spellings, education secretary under President George W. Bush, also defended public education and the role of the U.S. Education Department.

DeVos and her husband, Richard, have been working on school choice for decades, with the two instrumental in pushing through Michigan’s charter school law in 1993, and supporting voucher programs, and this work has convinced her critics that she seeks to privatize public education in the United States. They point to Dec. 3, 2002, when Richard DeVos gave a now-famous speech at the conservative Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C., laying out a state-by-state strategy to expand school choice. He advised that supporters call public schools “government schools,” as a pejorative, but urged them to “be cautious about talking too much about these activities” so as not to call attention and garner opposition.

Today, DeVos is the country’s top education official who no longer has to be careful about pushing her school reform vision. She is supportive of efforts by a conservative, pro-business group known as ALEC, or the American Legislative Exchange Council, to create model legislation for school vouchers and similar programs for states to pass in their legislatures. She spoke admiringly of ALEC at the group’s annual convention in July and took on the philosophy of conservative British Prime Minister Margaret “Iron Lady” Thatcher as her own, saying that there is no “such thing as society,” an attack on social and other government programs. The support of a U.S. education secretary, even an unpopular one, for such thinking emboldens like-minded state legislators and lobbyists to push the agenda.

To be sure, DeVos has had her challenges.

DeVos and Trump have advanced a pro-school-choice 2018 budget, which seeks broad funding cuts while pushing proposals to spend about $400 million to expand charter schools and vouchers for private and religious schools and an additional $1 billion to push public schools to adopt choice-friendly policies. It is also thought that they will push a federally funded tax credit program during any overhaul of the tax code.

Legislators have made clear that many of the proposed cuts won’t stand, especially in higher education. They don’t appear keen on approving money for a new voucher program, though a federal education tax credit program has some, though not overwhelming, support in Congress, and it could be slipped into a tax-overhaul bill.

Democrats have savaged DeVos over a number of issues, but Republicans recently have also been critical of her department’s review of state plans to deal with persistently low-achieving schools. Those Republicans thought that someone who keeps insisting that states and local school districts should make education policy should not be overseeing a process in which the federal government tells states what to do.

Meanwhile, protesters follow her almost everywhere, and Gail Collins, the New York Times columnist, ran a sarcastic contest for worst Cabinet member and published the results in June. It was DeVos.

Still, she has accomplished some things. Anybody who thought she’d do much more than that in six months, given the acrid political atmosphere in Washington these days, was being overly optimistic. Or pessimistic, as the case may be.

 

[GrumpyGran]

11 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

I'm going with NOT: "Like it or not, Betsy DeVos has made a mark in six months as education secretary"

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It is tempting to conclude that after six months as education secretary, Betsy DeVos hasn’t accomplished all that much.

Congress has not been kind to her legislative agenda, and Republicans have joined with Democrats in criticizing her proposed budget cuts. She faces protests at many public appearances, which is why she receives special protection from the U.S. Marshals Service, at an average cost so far this year of $1 million a month. Her department, like many others in the Trump administration, has yet to fill a long list of empty jobs.

But, like it or not, DeVos has taken some major steps to change education policy, and her very presence at the head of the U.S. Education Department signals something important about the past, present and future of public education in the United States.

DeVos is a Michigan billionaire who has labored tirelessly for decades to promote school choice, or alternatives to traditional public schools, and is seen by critics as the most ideological and anti-public-education secretary in the more than 40 years of the department’s history.

She has made clear her K-12 priority is expanding charter schools — which are publicly funded but privately operated — and vouchers or voucher-like programs,  which use public money to pay for private and religious schools in different ways. Her supporters say those measures offer parents more choices, but her critics say they drain resources from the public education system, the most important civic institution in the United States.

In every speech she delivers she finds a way to promote school choice, sometimes saying things that aren’t true, as in February when she said that historically black colleges and universities were “real pioneers when it comes to school choice.” They weren’t. They were founded because blacks were barred from white colleges. Graduating students at a historically black university in Florida, Bethune-Cookman, protested the comments, booing and turning their back on her while she made a commencement speech in May.

What she doesn’t talk about are the challenges that school choice options have presented in many communities. Some states have scandal-ridden charter sectors, and studies show that voucher programs don’t help and often hurt student achievement. One such study was released this April, showing that students in the only federally funded voucher program, in Washington, D.C., performed worse on standardized tests within a year after entering D.C. private schools than peers who did not participate.

Because of her role in promoting school choice and her history of denigrating traditional public schools — she called them “a dead end” in 2015 — DeVos was controversial before her nomination, but became even more so after her Jan. 17 confirmation hearing before a Senate committee. During that session, she betrayed ignorance of the basics of the federal law protecting students with disabilities, as well as other key education issues. She even lost the support of a few Republicans, so that her confirmation on Feb. 7 was secured only after Vice President Pence, as presiding officer of the Senate, cast the first tiebreaking vote in U.S. history to confirm a Cabinet nominee.

But that didn’t stop her from moving as much as possible on her agenda, which envisions running schools as if they were businesses and offering so many “choices” for parents that picking a school for their children would be equivalent to picking “an Uber, or Lyft, or another ridesharing service.”

Before her tenure began, DeVos was known as a reformer in the K-12 space, but her views on higher education were not well known. In her first six months, however, she has made a real mark in higher education, aggravating advocates of consumer protections and delighting the for-profit education industry. She and her staff moved swiftly to start to remake the student financial aid system by rolling back or rewriting regulations that were put in place by the Obama administration to protect student borrowers. For example:

• DeVos’s department reinstated hefty collection fees for some borrowers who have defaulted.
• The department started to take apart two major consumer protection rules. One of the rules is on gainful employment, which holds nondegree career education programs accountable when graduates have too much debt; the other is on borrower defense, which allows student borrowers defrauded by institutions to get loan forgiveness.
• DeVos tapped the chief executive of a private student-loan company to run the federal government’s trillion-dollar financial aid operations.

But it is worth noting that the department also took quick action to implement a bipartisan initiative to help low- and moderate-income college students get year-round access to Pell grants, after Congress approved the measure.

In the K-12 space:

• DeVos backed the administration’s decision to rescind guidance from the Obama administration that was aimed at protecting the rights of transgender students and directed the department’s Office for Civil Rights to consider transgender students’ discrimination complaints on a case-by-case basis.
• She exercised some muscle in evaluating some state plans for compliance with the K-12 Every Student Succeeds Act, making “suggestions” about things they should fix and drawing complaints from Republicans.
• She made science teachers shudder when she issued a statement praising President Trump for pulling the United States out of the Paris climate accord.

A crucial government function for K-12 and higher education is enforcing civil rights. DeVos hired Candice Jackson, who has made some controversial statements about sexual assault on campus, as acting head of the Office for Civil Rights.  DeVos also held “hearings” at the Education Department about how to change Obama-era rules on how colleges should address sexual assault complaints. She made clear that she believes men accused of sexual assault have been improperly treated by institutions of higher education, and need more rights of their own. And when it became known that Trump’s Justice Department is launching a project to sue universities they deem to have affirmative action policies that discriminate against whites in admissions  — rather than historically underserved populations — DeVos did not publicly protest.

Perhaps most important, being education secretary has given DeVos a national platform to mainstream her school choice ideas, which once were considered radical. And her repeated attacks on the federal government have laid the groundwork for potential future efforts to abolish the Education Department, a long-cherished goal of many conservatives. Trump himself, during the 2016 campaign, voiced support for dismantling or shrinking the department.

What public officials say matters. President Ronald Reagan famously said, “The most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the government and I’m here to help,” and his consistent portrayal of the U.S. government as an impediment to solving problems affected politics and the view many Americans hold of the role of public officials.

In the same way, DeVos’s denunciations of the federal government and her refusal to make even a tepid call-out to the value of the public education system, can’t help but have an effect on the way some Americans feel about their neighborhood public schools, which educate the vast majority of the country’s schoolchildren. Arne Duncan, education secretary under President Barack Obama, was a supporter of charter schools (though not vouchers) but still spoke about the need for — and the aspirational goals of — public education. Margaret Spellings, education secretary under President George W. Bush, also defended public education and the role of the U.S. Education Department.

DeVos and her husband, Richard, have been working on school choice for decades, with the two instrumental in pushing through Michigan’s charter school law in 1993, and supporting voucher programs, and this work has convinced her critics that she seeks to privatize public education in the United States. They point to Dec. 3, 2002, when Richard DeVos gave a now-famous speech at the conservative Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C., laying out a state-by-state strategy to expand school choice. He advised that supporters call public schools “government schools,” as a pejorative, but urged them to “be cautious about talking too much about these activities” so as not to call attention and garner opposition.

Today, DeVos is the country’s top education official who no longer has to be careful about pushing her school reform vision. She is supportive of efforts by a conservative, pro-business group known as ALEC, or the American Legislative Exchange Council, to create model legislation for school vouchers and similar programs for states to pass in their legislatures. She spoke admiringly of ALEC at the group’s annual convention in July and took on the philosophy of conservative British Prime Minister Margaret “Iron Lady” Thatcher as her own, saying that there is no “such thing as society,” an attack on social and other government programs. The support of a U.S. education secretary, even an unpopular one, for such thinking emboldens like-minded state legislators and lobbyists to push the agenda.

To be sure, DeVos has had her challenges.

DeVos and Trump have advanced a pro-school-choice 2018 budget, which seeks broad funding cuts while pushing proposals to spend about $400 million to expand charter schools and vouchers for private and religious schools and an additional $1 billion to push public schools to adopt choice-friendly policies. It is also thought that they will push a federally funded tax credit program during any overhaul of the tax code.

Legislators have made clear that many of the proposed cuts won’t stand, especially in higher education. They don’t appear keen on approving money for a new voucher program, though a federal education tax credit program has some, though not overwhelming, support in Congress, and it could be slipped into a tax-overhaul bill.

Democrats have savaged DeVos over a number of issues, but Republicans recently have also been critical of her department’s review of state plans to deal with persistently low-achieving schools. Those Republicans thought that someone who keeps insisting that states and local school districts should make education policy should not be overseeing a process in which the federal government tells states what to do.

Meanwhile, protesters follow her almost everywhere, and Gail Collins, the New York Times columnist, ran a sarcastic contest for worst Cabinet member and published the results in June. It was DeVos.

Still, she has accomplished some things. Anybody who thought she’d do much more than that in six months, given the acrid political atmosphere in Washington these days, was being overly optimistic. Or pessimistic, as the case may be.

 

"Made a mark"? Why was the next thought in my mind "That's gonna leave a mark"?

Yeah, I don't think a good scrub with the Mr. Clean eraser and a fresh coat of paint is going to cover up her "marks."

[AmazonGrace]

http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/345593-philippine-leader-to-tillerson-i-am-your-humble-friend

TL; DR: Tillerson went buddybuddy with Duterte and thinks human rights are kind of lame

Spoiler

 

Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte on Monday said Secretary of State Rex Tillerson should consider him a "humble friend" as the two met, NBC news reported Monday.

"I am your humble friend in Southeast Asia," Duterte said to Tillerson at the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) forum in Manila, according to the network.

Duterte's comments contrast with the tumultuous relationship the leader had with former President Obama, whom he told once told to "go to hell." Duterte later apologized for his hostile remarks to Obama.

President Trump, however, appears to be fostering a closer relationship with the controversial leader than his predecessor.

Tillerson and Duterte reportedly discussed their joint military efforts to combat militant fighters in the southern Philippines island of Mindanao.

The secretary of State said the U.S. is providing the Philippines with training, aid, information and military aircraft.

"We are providing some training and some guidance in terms of how to deal with an enemy that fights in ways that is not like most people have ever had to deal with, so it’s a tragic situation down there," Tillerson said at the forum, according to NBC News.

Duterte has largely been accused of human rights violations during his government's crackdown on drug dealers, which has reportedly cost thousands of people their lives.

Tillerson on Monday reportedly dismissed the notion that working with the controversial leader would create a “big contradiction.”

“We see no conflict at all in our helping them with that situation and our views of the human rights concerns we have with respect to how they carry out their counter narcotics activities,” Tillerson said, NBC News reported.

 

 

[GrumpyGran]

1 hour ago, AmazonGrace said:

http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/345593-philippine-leader-to-tillerson-i-am-your-humble-friend

TL; DR: Tillerson went buddybuddy with Duterte and thinks human rights are kind of lame

  Reveal hidden contents

 

Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte on Monday said Secretary of State Rex Tillerson should consider him a "humble friend" as the two met, NBC news reported Monday.

"I am your humble friend in Southeast Asia," Duterte said to Tillerson at the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) forum in Manila, according to the network.

Duterte's comments contrast with the tumultuous relationship the leader had with former President Obama, whom he told once told to "go to hell." Duterte later apologized for his hostile remarks to Obama.

President Trump, however, appears to be fostering a closer relationship with the controversial leader than his predecessor.

Tillerson and Duterte reportedly discussed their joint military efforts to combat militant fighters in the southern Philippines island of Mindanao.

The secretary of State said the U.S. is providing the Philippines with training, aid, information and military aircraft.

"We are providing some training and some guidance in terms of how to deal with an enemy that fights in ways that is not like most people have ever had to deal with, so it’s a tragic situation down there," Tillerson said at the forum, according to NBC News.

Duterte has largely been accused of human rights violations during his government's crackdown on drug dealers, which has reportedly cost thousands of people their lives.

Tillerson on Monday reportedly dismissed the notion that working with the controversial leader would create a “big contradiction.”

“We see no conflict at all in our helping them with that situation and our views of the human rights concerns we have with respect to how they carry out their counter narcotics activities,” Tillerson said, NBC News reported.

 

 

Oh, so it's back to the days of Ferdinand Marcos, is it? This crap has been going on there for a loooooong time. Factions there that were ISIS before ISIS became ISIS. I spent some fun times there in another lifetime but I would not go back now.

BTW, did you know Imelda Marcos is still alive? She's a congresswoman in the Philippines! 

That place is a hot mess. IMHO we should not touch it with a 10,000 mile pole.

[AmazonGrace]

Today in Orwellian news: Climate change will not happen if we don't talk about it

It's not climate change, it's "weather extremes". 

I suggest that hereafter tornadoes will be referred to as "inconvenient air spirals" 

 

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/aug/07/usda-climate-change-language-censorship-emails?CMP=share_btn_tw

US federal department is censoring use of term 'climate change', emails reveal

Spoiler

 

Exclusive: series of emails show staff at Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service advised to reference ‘weather extremes’ instead

A series of emails obtained by the Guardian between staff at the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), a USDA unit that oversees farmers’ land conservation, show that the incoming Trump administration has had a stark impact on the language used by some federal employees around climate change.

A missive from Bianca Moebius-Clune, director of soil health, lists terms that should be avoided by staff and those that should replace them. “Climate change” is in the “avoid” category, to be replaced by “weather extremes”. Instead of “climate change adaption”, staff are asked to use “resilience to weather extremes”.

The primary cause of human-driven climate change is also targeted, with the term “reduce greenhouse gases” blacklisted in favor of “build soil organic matter, increase nutrient use efficiency”. Meanwhile, “sequester carbon” is ruled out and replaced by “build soil organic matter”.

In her email to staff, dated 16 February this year, Moebius-Clune said the new language was given to her staff and suggests it be passed on. She writes that “we won’t change the modeling, just how we talk about it – there are a lot of benefits to putting carbon back in the sail [sic], climate mitigation is just one of them”, and that a colleague from USDA’s public affairs team gave advice to “tamp down on discretionary messaging right now”.

In contrast to these newly contentious climate terms, Moebius-Clune wrote that references to economic growth, emerging business opportunities in the rural US, agro-tourism and “improved aesthetics” should be “tolerated if not appreciated by all”.

 

In a separate email to senior employees on 24 January, just days after Trump’s inauguration, Jimmy Bramblett, deputy chief for programs at the NRCS, said: “It has become clear one of the previous administration’s priority is not consistent with that of the incoming administration. Namely, that priority is climate change. Please visit with your staff and make them aware of this shift in perspective within the executive branch.”

Bramblett added that “prudence” should be used when discussing greenhouse gases and said the agency’s work on air quality regarding these gases could be discontinued.

Other emails show the often agonized discussions between staff unsure of what is forbidden. On 16 February, a staffer named Tim Hafner write to Bramblett: “I would like to know correct terms I should use instead of climate changes and anything to do with carbon ... I want to ensure to incorporate correct terminology that the agency has approved to use.”

 

On 5 April, Suzanne Baker, a New York-based NRCS employee, emailed a query as to whether staff are “allowed to publish work from outside the USDA that use ‘climate change’”. A colleague advises that the issue be determined in a phone call.

Some staff weren’t enamored with the new regime, with one employee stating on an email on 5 July that “we would prefer to keep the language as is” and stressing the need to maintain the “scientific integrity of the work”.

In a statement, USDA said that on 23 January it had issued “interim operating procedures outlining procedures to ensure the new policy team has an opportunity to review policy-related statements, legislation, budgets and regulations prior to issuance”.

The statement added: “This guidance, similar to procedures issued by previous administrations, was misinterpreted by some to cover data and scientific publications. This was never the case and USDA interim procedures will allow complete, objective information for the new policy staff reviewing policy decisions.”

Kaveh Sadeghzadeh of the Natural Resources Conservation Service added that his organisation “has not received direction from USDA or the administration to modify its communications on climate change or any other topic”.

 

Trump has repeatedly questioned the veracity of climate change research, infamously suggesting that it is part of an elaborate Chinese hoax. The president has started the process of withdrawing the US from the Paris climate agreement, has instructed the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to scrap or amend various regulations aimed at cutting greenhouse gases, and has moved to open up more public land and waters to fossil fuel activity.

The nomenclature of the federal government has also shifted as these new priorities have taken hold. Mentions of the dangers of climate change have been removed from the websites of the White House and the Department of the Interior, while the EPA scrapped its entire online climate section in April pending a review that will be “updating language to reflect the approach of new leadership”.

 

 

[AmazonGrace]

A lengthy read about Trump's TPP withdrawal and its effects on farmers 

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/08/07/trump-tpp-deal-withdrawal-trade-effects-215459

[GrumpyGran]

19 minutes ago, AmazonGrace said:

"inconvenient air spirals"

Well done, you too can now have a job in the Trump administration.

So the people in Tulsa weren't resilient enough? I don't think that's the word they wanted. Never mind, when Trump comes back from vacation he's going to outlaw the dictionary.

They are good at "building soil organic matter" though. They do it every day when they open their mouths.