What's going on with the Executive Departments

[GreyhoundFan]

"The General Services Administration removed Trump hotel data from its website. You can read it here."

Spoiler

On Thursday afternoon, three documents providing detailed financial information about President Trump’s D.C. hotel could be found posted on the website of the General Services Administration.

Later that night, they were gone. What happened?

First, some background.

The hotel is in the Old Post Office Pavilion, a government-owned property managed by the GSA. Under a 2013 deal between the GSA and the Trump Organization, the company sends the government $3 million in base rent and a share of profits beyond a certain threshold. The deal requires the Trump Organization to share its financial information with the government on a routine basis.

Sharing that data might normally be a matter of little controversy, but this project now falls well outside the boundaries of normal. Trump is president, he is still benefiting financially from the hotel, and congressional Democrats, ethical experts, government watchdogs and competing hotels aren’t happy about it.

The documents show the hotel’s financial performance in February, March and April of this year, as well as year-to-date totals, offering far more information about the hotel’s operations than previous disclosures. Up until Thursday, the GSA had only posted heavily redacted versions of the “monthly statement certificates” providing no financial information.

This time, the certificates for February, March and April were almost completely free of redaction, allowing anyone to see the company’s budgeted and actual financial performance for every segment of the hotel (rooms, food/beverage, spa and parking, for instance) along with an analysis of how it is faring against competitors.

At the top of the documents is an all-caps warning: “PRIVILEGED AND CONFIDENTIAL INFORMATION. NOT SUBJECT TO RELEASE TO THE PUBLIC UNDER THE FREEDOM OF INFORMATION ACT.”

GSA press secretary Pamela A. Dixon said the documents were posted by accident. “The documents were posted inadvertently and have been removed from our website,” she said in an email.

Critics of the lease deal immediately wondered if the White House had intervened to have the documents removed. Dixon said no such thing happened. “The White House was not involved,” she wrote. President Trump and his daughter and senior adviser, Ivanka Trump, have resigned from the family business and pledged to remove themselves from its operations.

The Washington Post decided to publish the documents, which it downloaded before they were removed. They are below.

... <links>

Some interesting numbers on the financial documents. I bet the TT will have a hissy when he is told that the docs were "mistakenly" released. I'm sure he'll force some low-level career employees out.

[GreyhoundFan]

I put this here because it's mostly about the exec departments: "5 things Trump did this week while you weren't looking'

Spoiler

It was supposed to be a quiet week in Washington, with Congress on recess and President Donald Trump staying at his golf course in Bedminster, New Jersey. But Trump shattered any respite with his unexpected threats towards North Korea and wide-ranging news conference Thursday, including a string of attacks on Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.

Even if Trump hadn't loudly waved those sticks, things wouldn’t have exactly been quiet within the administration itself. With far less attention, Trump’s agencies continue to crank out new policies, rolling back Obama’s regulatory legacy and imposing a new era of conservative reforms on everything from protections for a funky-looking bird to a controversial rule for stockbrokers. Here’s how Trump is changing policy in America this week:

1. Interior relaxes Obama-era Sage Grouse rules
In September 2015, the Obama administration announced new protections for the sage grouse, a bird whose habitat happens to cover some of the most resource-rich lands in the American West. The administration declined to list the bird on the endangered species list—a big victory for oil and gas companies—but the new conservation plan included strong measures to protect sage grouse habitat.

This week, the Interior Department, led by Secretary Ryan Zinke, began rolling back the conservation plan, directing the Bureau of Land Management to shrink the buffer zones between sage grouse breeding grounds, among other changes. Environmentalists slammed the move, saying it jeopardized the carefully crafted Obama-era compromise between oil and gas interests and environmental groups. The changes won’t take effect overnight: It can take years for the agency and states to implement new land-use policies that determine where companies can drill for gas and oil, but it was another big sign of the Interior Department’s new priorities under Zinke.

2. EPA eases the approval process for new chemicals
Last year, in the largest revamp of America’s chemical safety laws in 40 years, Congress required that the Environmental Protection Agency examine “reasonably foreseen uses” of chemicals when they evaluate them for safety. The changes were designed to ensure that the EPA examines chemicals for their likely real-world impact, instead of narrowly evaluating them on the specific uses for which they were intended.

On Monday, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt announced new “operating principles” for how the agency will apply the law. In a surprise, the EPA will first assess chemicals based only on their intended use—similar to how the agency operated before passage of the new law. If the EPA has any concerns about other potential uses, “as a general matter,” those will be adjudicated through a separate rule-making. In other words, new chemicals may still be approved while the EPA is reviewing their potential further impact—the exact outcome lawmakers were trying to avoid. The change is a big victory for industry groups, which wanted a lighter touch approach to regulation. Pruitt also announced Monday that the agency had cleared a backlog of 600 new chemicals awaiting approval—another move that drew praise from the chemical industry and strong rebukes from consumer groups.

3. DOJ switches sides in Ohio voting case
Under Obama, the Department of Justice frequently challenged voter ID laws and similar state-level laws in court, arguing they unfairly affected minority voters while “solving” a voter-fraud problem that was essentially nonexistent. Under Trump, the DOJ is taking the opposite position; this week the Justice Department reversed its position on a controversial Ohio voting law, under which the state has purged tens of thousands of people from the voter rolls if they haven’t cast a ballot in the past two years and don’t respond to a piece of mail asking them to confirm their registration.

The Obama-era DOJ had argued that the Ohio law discriminated against minorities and thus violated federal voting laws, but in a filing on Monday, the department said it had reconsidered its position and determined that the Ohio voting roll purge was legal.

Since the election, Trump has repeatedly claimed—without evidence—that millions of people cast illegal ballots, allowing Hillary Clinton to win the popular vote. In response, he created a commission to investigate voter fraud, led by controversial Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, which has done little so far. In addition, the Justice Department in February, dropped its opposition to a Texas voter ID law, a major shift that signaled the priorities of the new administration.

4. The fiduciary standard gets punted
Perhaps the biggest financial reform of the late Obama era was the “fiduciary rule,” the 2015 Obama regulation that requires investment advisers to act in the best interest of their clients when selling products like retirement investments. (The concern was that many advisers were pushing investments with a higher commission for the adviser, rather than a better return for the client.) It was assumed to be doomed under the new administration, but Democrats enjoyed a brief moment of celebration in May when Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed that he would allow the rule to take effect in early June.

It now appears the celebration was premature. Only part of the rule took effect in June, and the Labor Department isn’t enforcing that part until the entire rule takes effect on January 1, 2018. But now even that won’t be happening: This week, in a court filing, the Labor Department revealed that it had sent a rule to the White House for review that would delay full implementation of the fiduciary rule for 18 months, until July 1, 2019—enough time for the Trump administration to make significant changes or repeal it altogether.

5. The nuclear waste storage fight warms up
Where should America stash its spent nuclear fuel? A decades-old plan to create a central dumping site in Nevada’s Yucca Mountain stalled out during the Obama administration, with Nevada powerhouse Harry Reid leading Democrats in the Senate. But the Trump administration has re-opened that dormant fight over the past few months, and it’s starting to really heat up. First, Trump requested $120 million in his 2018 budget to restart the licensing process for the Yucca site. Then, in June, Energy Secretary Rick Perry announced that he was reconstituting the key office that oversaw the Nevada site for long-term waste storage, setting off protests from Nevada lawmakers and forcing Perry to walk back some of this comments.

This week, the National Regulatory Commission released a memo—dated July 31—directing staff to conduct preliminary “information-gathering” on restarting the licensing process. This is a small step, a $110,000 effort to “re-establish infrastructure” to get the licensing process underway. But it’s another sign that Trump is serious about storing nuclear waste in the Yucca site. This fight is just getting underway.

So many bad things going on.

[candygirl200413]

So Sessions is launching an investigation. But he is also racist, so we shouldn't expect this to go anywhere right? Especially when he took funding away in the DOJ to research white supermacists.

[GrumpyGran]

3 hours ago, candygirl200413 said:

So Sessions is launching an investigation. But he is also racist, so we shouldn't expect this to go anywhere right? Especially when he took funding away in the DOJ to research white supermacists.

It does seem like some kind of weird posturing, doesn't it? He's one of the last people I would expect to object so vehemently to these groups. I wonder if some straw investigation will "reveal" that the real crimes were committed by the left. An attempt to suppress opposition to Trump? 

[Cartmann99]

Trump is using the power of the government to go after his critics:

Edited to add: Look at the term used describe these American citizens who exercised their Constitutionally protected right to protest!

“In essence, the Search Warrant not only aims to identify the political dissidents of the current administration, but attempts to identify and understand what content each of these dissidents viewed on the website,” the company’s general counsel, Chris Ghazarian, said in a legal argument opposing the request."

Political dissident is not a term I am used to hearing used to describe American citizens. It's a term I've only read in articles or books used to describe people who lived in places where the people lived in fear of their governments.

My heart hurts tonight. I've just now come to the realization that I am a political dissident. 

[sawasdee]

6 hours ago, Cartmann99 said:

Political dissident is not a term I am used to hearing used to describe American citizens. It's a term I've only read in articles or books used to describe people who lived in places where the people lived in fear of their governments.

Exactly! In any country where freedom of speech is enshrined in the Constitution, they are usually known as 'the opposition'!

'Dissident' has become a loaded term. Although it technically means one who dissents, it now has the overtone of one who dissents against an authoritarian state.

However, it should be noted that it was counsel for the website that used the term, not the DOJ. He may be/almost certainly is invoking the term deliberately, to raise the spectre of political suppression.

And this certainly does smell of political suppression.

[fraurosena]

48 minutes ago, sawasdee said:

'Dissident' has become a loaded term. Although it technically means one who dissents, it now has the overtone of one who dissents against an authoritarian state.

That is a huge Freudian slip there. Because by using the term 'dissident' they are in essence confirming they are (aiming to be) an authoritarian state.

 

[Cartmann99]

2 hours ago, sawasdee said:

'Dissident' has become a loaded term. Although it technically means one who dissents, it now has the overtone of one who dissents against an authoritarian state.

However, it should be noted that it was counsel for the website that used the term, not the DOJ. He may be/almost certainly is invoking the term deliberately, to raise the spectre of political suppression.

I caught that it wasn't the DOJ saying this, but it still made my heart skip a beat.

[GreyhoundFan]

"Tech firm is fighting a federal demand for data on visitors to an anti-Trump website"

Spoiler

A Los Angeles-based tech company is resisting a federal demand for more than 1.3 million IP addresses to identify visitors to a website set up to coordinate protests on Inauguration Day — a request whose breadth the company says violates the Constitution.

“What we have is a sweeping request for every single file we have” in relation to DisruptJ20.org, said Chris Ghazarian, general counsel for DreamHost, which hosts the site. “The search warrant is not only dealing with everything in relation to the website but also tons of data about people who visited it.”

The request also covers emails between the site’s organizers and people interested in attending the protests, any deleted messages and files, as well as subscriber information — such as names and addresses — and unpublished photos and blog posts that are stored in the site’s database, according to the warrant and Ghazarian.

The request, which DreamHost made public Monday, set off a storm of protest among civil liberties advocates and within the tech community.

“What you’re seeing is pure prosecutorial overreach by a politicized Justice Department, allowing the Trump administration to use prosecutors to silence critics,” Ghazarian said.

A spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office in the District of Columbia, which sought the warrant, declined to comment. But prosecutors, in court documents, argued that the request was constitutional and there was no reason for DreamHost not to comply.

The search warrant was issued July 12 by a Superior Court judge in the District of Columbia and served on DreamHost on July 17.

The request marked an escalation from January when prosecutors investigating the protests asked DreamHost to preserve records and issued a subpoena for a limited set of data on the site. The company complied with both requests, Ghazarian said.

In April, the federal government charged more than 200 people in connection with the protests that injured six police officers and damaged store windows and at least one vehicle. The charges included property damage and assault.

After the search warrant was served, DreamHost raised concerns with Assistant U.S. Attorney John W. Borchert, according to court documents. The company thought the request was overbroad and that it sought information — such as draft blog posts — in violation of the 1980 Privacy Protection Act.

Prosecutors responded July 28 with a motion to compel the company to turn over the data on DisruptJ20. “That website was used in the development, planning, advertisement and organization of a violent riot that occurred in Washington, D.C. on January 20, 2017,” U.S. Attorney Channing Phillips said in the motion. DreamHost’s concern about breadth “simply is not a sufficient basis . . . to refuse to comply with the warrant.”

The prosecutors also argued that the warrant identified the “precise categories of information” that DreamHost must provide and “precise limitations” on the information that the government may seize. They also argued that the Privacy Protection Act does not preclude the government from seizing even “protected” materials with a search warrant.

On Friday, DreamHost filed a reply arguing that the warrant’s breadth violates the Fourth Amendment because it failed to describe with “particularity” the items to be seized. Asking for “all records or other information” pertaining to the site, including “all files, databases and database records” is far too broad, the company said.

The warrant also raises First Amendment issues, it said. Visitors to the protest site should have the right to keep their identities private, but if they fear that the Justice Department will have information on them, that will chill their freedom of speech and association, the company argued.

The company said that the warrant would require them to turn over data on potentially tens of thousands of law-abiding website visitors.

Mark Rumold, staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said that no plausible explanation exists for a search warrant of such breadth, “other than to cast a digital dragnet as broadly as possible.”

He said that the government appears to be investigating a conspiracy to riot, “but it’s doing it in a blunt manner that does not take into account the significant First Amendment interests.”

Even people who were nowhere near Washington on Inauguration Day who visited the website will have their data “swept into a criminal investigation,” he said.

A hearing is scheduled for Friday in Superior Court before Judge Lynn Leibovitz.

Wow.

[GrumpyGran]

2 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

"Tech firm is fighting a federal demand for data on visitors to an anti-Trump website"

  Hide contents

A Los Angeles-based tech company is resisting a federal demand for more than 1.3 million IP addresses to identify visitors to a website set up to coordinate protests on Inauguration Day — a request whose breadth the company says violates the Constitution.

“What we have is a sweeping request for every single file we have” in relation to DisruptJ20.org, said Chris Ghazarian, general counsel for DreamHost, which hosts the site. “The search warrant is not only dealing with everything in relation to the website but also tons of data about people who visited it.”

The request also covers emails between the site’s organizers and people interested in attending the protests, any deleted messages and files, as well as subscriber information — such as names and addresses — and unpublished photos and blog posts that are stored in the site’s database, according to the warrant and Ghazarian.

The request, which DreamHost made public Monday, set off a storm of protest among civil liberties advocates and within the tech community.

“What you’re seeing is pure prosecutorial overreach by a politicized Justice Department, allowing the Trump administration to use prosecutors to silence critics,” Ghazarian said.

A spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office in the District of Columbia, which sought the warrant, declined to comment. But prosecutors, in court documents, argued that the request was constitutional and there was no reason for DreamHost not to comply.

The search warrant was issued July 12 by a Superior Court judge in the District of Columbia and served on DreamHost on July 17.

The request marked an escalation from January when prosecutors investigating the protests asked DreamHost to preserve records and issued a subpoena for a limited set of data on the site. The company complied with both requests, Ghazarian said.

In April, the federal government charged more than 200 people in connection with the protests that injured six police officers and damaged store windows and at least one vehicle. The charges included property damage and assault.

After the search warrant was served, DreamHost raised concerns with Assistant U.S. Attorney John W. Borchert, according to court documents. The company thought the request was overbroad and that it sought information — such as draft blog posts — in violation of the 1980 Privacy Protection Act.

Prosecutors responded July 28 with a motion to compel the company to turn over the data on DisruptJ20. “That website was used in the development, planning, advertisement and organization of a violent riot that occurred in Washington, D.C. on January 20, 2017,” U.S. Attorney Channing Phillips said in the motion. DreamHost’s concern about breadth “simply is not a sufficient basis . . . to refuse to comply with the warrant.”

The prosecutors also argued that the warrant identified the “precise categories of information” that DreamHost must provide and “precise limitations” on the information that the government may seize. They also argued that the Privacy Protection Act does not preclude the government from seizing even “protected” materials with a search warrant.

On Friday, DreamHost filed a reply arguing that the warrant’s breadth violates the Fourth Amendment because it failed to describe with “particularity” the items to be seized. Asking for “all records or other information” pertaining to the site, including “all files, databases and database records” is far too broad, the company said.

The warrant also raises First Amendment issues, it said. Visitors to the protest site should have the right to keep their identities private, but if they fear that the Justice Department will have information on them, that will chill their freedom of speech and association, the company argued.

The company said that the warrant would require them to turn over data on potentially tens of thousands of law-abiding website visitors.

Mark Rumold, staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said that no plausible explanation exists for a search warrant of such breadth, “other than to cast a digital dragnet as broadly as possible.”

He said that the government appears to be investigating a conspiracy to riot, “but it’s doing it in a blunt manner that does not take into account the significant First Amendment interests.”

Even people who were nowhere near Washington on Inauguration Day who visited the website will have their data “swept into a criminal investigation,” he said.

A hearing is scheduled for Friday in Superior Court before Judge Lynn Leibovitz.

Wow.

Of all the scary things, this is the scariest. They are coming after us. All they have to do is find one person on that web site who was charged with a crime during the protest, find other web sites they have visited, and then collect the same information about EVERYONE on that web site. 

Are they going to do the same with the Daily Stupids? Then gather all the info on every single one of them and see who threatened Obama's life? The DOJ is becoming a partisan Trump tool because Sessions wants so badly to prove his fealty.

Another huge tool for voter suppression.

[sawasdee]

^^^ This scares the shit out of me.

Godwin!!!!

This is how authoritarianism starts - policing the thoughts and writings, not the actions, of opponents. Neither of the first two are by any stretch of imagination or law illegal. By making a dragnet that includes them, the DOJ is actually suppressing freedom of expression.

I have made , shall we say , strong anti tRump statements in a variety of places on the internet, and it is my right to do so. I have also advocated demonstrations if a State Visit by TT should come to London. But the British Government is not investigating me - at least not overtly..

Surely this is an attack on the 1st amendment? I can actually understand them sub poenaing the data of those arrested - although I think it wrong, and possibly illegal - but there is no possible justification for a fishing trip to find those who disagree strongly with the present administration.

Are they also sub poenaing Str--mtro-per site messages - who organised Charlottesville? And all those who logged in?

One resulted in death, the other didn't. Which is it more important to follow up?

And with both - RESPECT THE FIRST AMENDMENT!

[GreyhoundFan]

WTDH? "Ben Carson calls criticism of Trump’s Charlottesville response ‘little squabbles’ being ‘blown out of proportion’"

Spoiler

Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson this week played down the violence in Charlottesville, calling the controversy over President Trump’s response “little squabbles” that are “being blown out of proportion” and echoing the president’s equating of white nationalist hate groups with counterprotesters.

In a Facebook post after the protests in Charlottesville grew deadly on Saturday, Carson said, “Let us pray for those killed and injured during the unrest in Charlottesville today, but also for our nation as it is being severely threatened by hatred and bigotry on all sides.”

On Monday, touring communities in Louisiana ravaged by floods a year ago, Carson spoke at length about the widespread criticism leveled against Trump for seeming to blame equally the white supremacists and demonstrators protesting their presence in the Virginia city.

“When he talks about the fact that hatred and bigotry and these things are unacceptable,” Carson said of Trump, “he’s talking about everybody. … You’d think he was saying that hatred and bigotry are unacceptable except by neo-Nazis. We really have got to begin to think more logically and stop trying to stir up controversy and start concentrating on the issues that threaten us and threaten our children.”

“We the people have got to be smarter than this,” Carson, a retired neurosurgeon and the only African American Cabinet member in the Trump administration, said at a news conference at the offices of the Livingston Parish News, a community newspaper in Denham Springs.

He accused the media of overreacting to Trump’s comments — both his initial remarks on Saturday and his comments during a news conference on Tuesday — and said the country needs to focus on bigger problems.

“We all have to recognize that there are other things that are important here and don’t get caught up in these little squabbles and blow them out of proportion,” Carson said, “and spend all of our time talking about that.”

In his Facebook post on Saturday, Carson wrote that he was pleased that Trump “overtly disavowed any relationship with white supremacists.”

“We should all reject the forces of division on all sides of the political spectrum,” he wrote. “There are radical terrorists in the world who want to destroy us and are coming dangerously close to acquiring the means to accomplish their goals.”

On Sunday, he criticized “political pundits for arguing about whether President Trump went far enough in condemning the instigators of the violence.”

In his initial remarks on Saturday, Trump said, “We condemn in the strongest most possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides. On many sides.”

On Tuesday, the president doubled down on his weekend comments, a day after he directly condemned the KKK, neo-Nazis and white supremacists in a White House statement in the face of mounting pressure from both sides of the aisle.

Amid the furor over Trump’s Tuesday comments, Carson took to Facebook again with a personal story on Wednesday afternoon.

He wrote about a neighbor next to his farm in rural Maryland who hung a Confederate flag in front of his house when he and his wife moved in but was “shamed” by neighbors who hung American flags in protest.

He said that, more recently, his home in Virginia was vandalized by people “who wrote hateful rhetoric about President Trump.” The couple’s neighbors cleaned up the mess.

In both instances, Carson wrote, “less than kind behavior was met by people taking the high road.”

 

[Childless]

2 minutes ago, GreyhoundFan said:

WTDH? "Ben Carson calls criticism of Trump’s Charlottesville response ‘little squabbles’ being ‘blown out of proportion’"

  Reveal hidden contents

Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson this week played down the violence in Charlottesville, calling the controversy over President Trump’s response “little squabbles” that are “being blown out of proportion” and echoing the president’s equating of white nationalist hate groups with counterprotesters.

In a Facebook post after the protests in Charlottesville grew deadly on Saturday, Carson said, “Let us pray for those killed and injured during the unrest in Charlottesville today, but also for our nation as it is being severely threatened by hatred and bigotry on all sides.”

On Monday, touring communities in Louisiana ravaged by floods a year ago, Carson spoke at length about the widespread criticism leveled against Trump for seeming to blame equally the white supremacists and demonstrators protesting their presence in the Virginia city.

“When he talks about the fact that hatred and bigotry and these things are unacceptable,” Carson said of Trump, “he’s talking about everybody. … You’d think he was saying that hatred and bigotry are unacceptable except by neo-Nazis. We really have got to begin to think more logically and stop trying to stir up controversy and start concentrating on the issues that threaten us and threaten our children.”

“We the people have got to be smarter than this,” Carson, a retired neurosurgeon and the only African American Cabinet member in the Trump administration, said at a news conference at the offices of the Livingston Parish News, a community newspaper in Denham Springs.

He accused the media of overreacting to Trump’s comments — both his initial remarks on Saturday and his comments during a news conference on Tuesday — and said the country needs to focus on bigger problems.

“We all have to recognize that there are other things that are important here and don’t get caught up in these little squabbles and blow them out of proportion,” Carson said, “and spend all of our time talking about that.”

In his Facebook post on Saturday, Carson wrote that he was pleased that Trump “overtly disavowed any relationship with white supremacists.”

“We should all reject the forces of division on all sides of the political spectrum,” he wrote. “There are radical terrorists in the world who want to destroy us and are coming dangerously close to acquiring the means to accomplish their goals.”

On Sunday, he criticized “political pundits for arguing about whether President Trump went far enough in condemning the instigators of the violence.”

In his initial remarks on Saturday, Trump said, “We condemn in the strongest most possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides. On many sides.”

On Tuesday, the president doubled down on his weekend comments, a day after he directly condemned the KKK, neo-Nazis and white supremacists in a White House statement in the face of mounting pressure from both sides of the aisle.

Amid the furor over Trump’s Tuesday comments, Carson took to Facebook again with a personal story on Wednesday afternoon.

He wrote about a neighbor next to his farm in rural Maryland who hung a Confederate flag in front of his house when he and his wife moved in but was “shamed” by neighbors who hung American flags in protest.

He said that, more recently, his home in Virginia was vandalized by people “who wrote hateful rhetoric about President Trump.” The couple’s neighbors cleaned up the mess.

In both instances, Carson wrote, “less than kind behavior was met by people taking the high road.”

 

Obviously some self-loathing going on here.

[GrumpyGran]

25 minutes ago, Childless said:

Obviously some self-loathing going on here.

Is he saying that every time something bad has happened to him his neighbors have cleaned it up? So it's no big deal for him?

[candygirl200413]

Him and Condoleezza Rice are absolute trash.

[GrumpyGran]

9 hours ago, candygirl200413 said:

Him and Condoleezza Rice are absolute trash.

Yeah, I think she let her love of the W, and WTH? get in the way of her better self. Blinded by her obsessive love.

[GreyhoundFan]

"Newt Gingrich goes to spouse school"

Spoiler

Last week, Newt Gingrich sat in a classroom surrounded by 11 women and one other man, furiously jotting notes.

In the weeklong intensive, where classes ran from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. with only a short cafeteria lunch break in between, the former House speaker and onetime presidential candidate received a crash course in a new role: invisible spouse.

When he moves to Rome with his wife, Callista Gingrich, to become husband of the ambassador to the Holy See, the ubiquitous Fox News talking head will have no official diplomatic role abroad, beyond being generally presentable and essentially not heard from.

It will be a challenge for an outspoken sometime-booster, sometime-critic of the Trump administration, who said he does not plan to terminate his contract with Fox News.

But like former President Bill Clinton during his wife’s two bids for the presidency, Gingrich will be taking on the secondary role of booster after a public life spent demanding the limelight. Aware that this new, less celebrated role will take some getting used to, Gingrich eagerly enrolled himself in what he referred to, excitedly, as “spouse school.”

The program, run by the State Department and hosted on the Arlington, Virginia, campus of the Foreign Service Institute, was started in the 1950s, when it was referred to simply as the “Wives Seminar.”

Over the years, a State Department official said, it “has evolved into a variety of training and orientation programs for foreign affairs family members.” Today, topics include: “expectations and personal goals for your time overseas,” “post morale,” “the official residence,” “navigating a public diplomacy role,” “legal issues and ethics” and “stress management.”

The course is “designed to provide participants practical information to make informed decisions for personal growth and public service in their new roles,” the State Department official said.

But the inchoate role of ambassador’s partner — nothing is actually required of them — hasn’t changed so much over the years. It’s still mostly about entertaining and keeping a low profile.

Gingrich — a fixture of Washington who famously campaigned for president on a platform, in part, of colonizing the moon — doesn’t exactly fit the prim mold for the job. But he said he’s eager to try something new.

In a series of back-to-back 75-minute lectures he described as “tiring,” Gingrich and the 12 other spouses of waiting-to-be-confirmed ambassadors were educated on some basic rules of the road. “You always have two fridges,” Gingrich marveled in an interview with POLITICO, “one for personal food, one for entertaining, so you’re not eating out of the taxpayer refrigerator. I didn’t know that.”

The group was instructed on ground rules for entertaining. “If you invite eight or 10 ambassadors over for dinner,” Gingrich said, “there’s protocol for who sits where. A protocol officer who helps you think through everything.”

These are the kinds of concerns that will now fall under Gingrich’s portfolio — a new gambit for the onetime author of the austere, government-shrinking “Contract for America,” who will now sit in one of the most cushy and cosseted government roles of all.

He is expecting to love it.

“I’ll be the person at the front door saying, ‘Hi, I’m Newt Gingrich. The ambassador will be down shortly,’” he laughed. “It’s a great new role. Callista supported me in '12 when I ran for president; I get to support her now. And I get to join the spouse organization.”

President Donald Trump’s appointment of Callista Gingrich, a practicing Roman Catholic, to serve as U.S. ambassador to the Holy See is unusual.

Callista is Gingrich’s third wife, whose six-year-long affair with the House speaker famously ended his second marriage and contributed to his political undoing. If she is confirmed by the Senate, Callista will be sent to represent the United States at the seat of the Catholic Church, which still does not offer Communion to people who are divorced or remarried.

Her appointment has also been widely criticized as the ultimate patronage post, a reward of a coveted overseas gig for the wife of one of Trump’s earliest supporters.

Gingrich, who converted to Catholicism for his wife, defended her bona fides for the job. “She’s born Catholic, has spent 21 years singing at the Basilica [of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception], including for three popes,” he said, while also pointing to a documentary she produced for Gingrich Productions, about Pope John Paul II returning to Poland in 1979.

But for now, Gingrich is more concerned about prepping for his own new frontier as the silent spouse. He said he is eagerly anticipating the monthly meetings he will have with the 81 other husbands and wives of ambassadors to the Vatican. “It’s a much bigger break for me to be in the spouse world than to be in the ambassador world,” he said.

In the past, the ambassador’s spouse has played a very traditional role. In her memoir, “Vera and the Ambassador,” Vera Blinken, wife of former Hungarian Ambassador Donald Blinken, listed her duties in 1994: “keep a handsome, orderly, home; entertain; and avoid potential criticism by being personally gracious, amiable, and at all times presentable.”

Thomas Schneider, whose wife, Cynthia, was appointed U.S. ambassador to the Netherlands in 1998, recalled at a conference the odd space he occupied abroad. “My reputation was that she was supposed to be married, but nobody ever saw me,” he said, speaking at a Council on Women’s Leadership. “She still has very good friends over there who have never met me. It was a very strange type of relationship. I attended events, but I was literally invisible.”

Gingrich said he’s happy to delve into a world of decorating the embassy and entertaining at the residence. “We learned about art,” Gingrich marveled. “They have an entire loan program for trying to keep the embassies with appropriate art representing the United States.”

As for furnishing the place, he noted, “you can bring your own furniture and store theirs, but you’re moving into a furnished facility. I think we’re going to use theirs, but that’s not a decision I would pretend to be the final arbiter on.”

Despite decades of practice parrying with the press, Gingrich still received media training last week at school — tips on how to not make news.

“I sat through a couple of hours on how to do interviews,” Gingrich said. “The first point they make over and over is, you are not the principal. I’m wearing my spouse hat. I’ve got to be very circumspect. We don’t want to confuse people about who speaks for the United States. Callista speaks for the United States. I just speak for Newt Gingrich.”

That, however, doesn’t mean an end to his political commentary on Fox News, he said. He just plans to steer clear of issues that relate to the Vatican.

Gingrich bristled at the comparison to Clinton stumping for his wife, arguing that in his case, Callista’s pending position is something outside of his realm of experience. “I won’t be competitive,” he said. “I just think there’s a certain fairness in having a couple where each of you tries to help the other achieve something really exciting.”

Damn, I was hoping we'd be Newt-free on US media while Calista plays ambassador.

[Cartmann99]

1 hour ago, GreyhoundFan said:

Damn, I was hoping we'd be Newt-free on US media while Calista plays ambassador.

I don't care what noises he made in this article, Newt's too much of an immature attention whore to be a truly supportive spouse or partner to anybody. I think he'll eventually issue an ultimatum to Callista that she has to choose between being his wife, and being the ambassador to the Vatican.

[JMarie]

7 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

That, however, doesn’t mean an end to his political commentary on Fox News, he said. He just plans to steer clear of issues that relate to the Vatican.

Since The Vatican is never ever a topic of discussion on Fox News, he'll still be talking about all the stuff he now talks about:  Russia's non-interference in the election, Hillary's emails, Benghazi, evil Democrats and moderate Republicans, whoever most recently left their White House job, yada yada yada.

[JMarie]

http://www.cnn.com/2017/08/21/politics/kfile-sam-clovis-lgbt-comments/index.html

Quote

Sam Clovis, Donald Trump's pick to be chief scientist for the Department of Agriculture, has argued that homosexuality is a choice and that the sanctioning of same-sex marriage could lead to the legalization of pedophilia, a CNN KFile review of Clovis' writings, radio broadcasts, and speeches has found.

Clovis made the comments between 2012 and 2014 in his capacity as a talk radio host, political activist, and briefly as a candidate for US Senate in Iowa. His nomination has drawn criticism from Senate Democrats, who argue his lack of scientific background makes him unqualified for the USDA post overseeing science.

As expected, he really is unqualified for the position.

http://www.politico.com/story/2017/07/30/usda-sam-clovis-influence-trump-241114

Quote

Sam Clovis, President Donald Trump’s pick to be the Department of Agriculture's chief scientist, has been many things in life: He’s an F-16 fighter pilot turned defense contractor turned academic; he was a conservative radio host in Sioux City, Iowa; and he was a failed U.S. Senate candidate in the Hawkeye State who managed to become co-chair of the presidential campaign of a New Yorker who won — against all odds.

These days in Washington, Clovis’ critics are obsessing over what he is not: He's not an agricultural scientist, nor is he an agricultural economist, nor does he appear to be qualified for a position that, by law, must be drawn from “among distinguished scientists with specialized training or significant experience in agricultural research, education and economics.”

Senate Democrats, activists deeply concerned about climate change and left-leaning science groups predictably seized on Clovis’ weak credentials to attack his selection as yet another sign the Trump administration rejects science-based policymaking and endangers the integrity of federal research.

 

[candygirl200413]

But remember since it's fuckface's administration, when they seem very unqualified in our eyes, they are actually pretty qualified in fuckface's eyes.

[GreyhoundFan]

What a lovely woman (please note sarcasm): "Treasury secretary’s wife stirred controversy before, with memoir of her ‘living nightmare’ in Africa"

Spoiler

Before Louise Linton’s bizarre Instagram exchange Monday and before her lavish June wedding to U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, the wealthy Scottish actress wrote a memoir about her gap year in Zambia in the late 1990s.

The book, self-published last year, was condemned by the Zambian government, scorched by critics as a “white savior” fantasy and ultimately removed from sales, according to the Telegraph and the Scotsman.

If Linton, 36, was trying to put such controversy behind her, she appears to have done the opposite.

On Monday, Linton bragged on Instagram about flying on a government plane with her husband to Kentucky. She listed the slew of fashion brands she wore on the trip, tagging them by name. In response to a critical comment about her picture, the treasury secretary’s wife disparaged the woman, boasting about her extreme wealth.

“You’re adorably out of touch,” she said in her snarky response. “Your life looks cute”

As news of the exchange circulated, social media users were quick to remember last year’s Zambia memoir debacle, along with the hashtag it had prompted: #LintonLies

Linton’s book, “In Congo’s Shadow,” described how, as an 18-year-old, she “abandoned her privileged life in Scotland” in 1999 to live in Zambia for six months, a period that she described as “a living nightmare.” She wrote about becoming a “central character” in the “horror story” of Congolese war of the late 1990s, terrified of what the rebels across the border might do to the “skinny white muzungu with long angel hair.” (Muzungu is a Bantu term often used to refer to wealthy white people.)

She added: “Now that I’m a grown woman living in California and pursuing a very different dream — as an actress and film producer — I know that the skinny white girl once so incongruous in Africa still lives on inside me. Even in this world where I’m supposed to belong, I still sometimes feel out of place. Whenever that happens, though, I try to remember a smiling gap-toothed child with HIV whose greatest joy was to sit on my lap and drink from a bottle of Coca-Cola.”

The memoir, a 290-page account written with Wendy Holden, included what many Zambians characterized as cliches and misrepresentations of Africa. Linton wrote of the “inky blackness deep in the Zambian bush” and the “brutal tales of rape and murder.”

“With a cheery smile, I’d waved goodbye to Dad and jumped on a plane to Africa without researching anything about its tumultuous political history or realising that my destination — Lake Tanganyika — was just miles from war-torn Congo,” Linton wrote in an excerpt published in the Telegraph.

One publication, OkayAfrica, referred to Linton as “delusional” and called her account the “the dumbest, most egregious piece of writing on Africa of the 21st century.”

The memoir, it turns out, was also littered with inaccuracies, as Zambians pointed out on social media.

The Zambian High Commission in London denounced Linton and her “falsified” memoir for depicting the country as “savage.” It accused Linton of “tarnishing the image of a very friendly and peaceful country.”

“It is a historic fact that Zambia has never been at war but rather has been home to thousands of refugees fleeing wars from other African countries,” a statement from the Zambian embassy read. “The Congo war has never spilt into Zambia.” It also condemned how Linton identified children with HIV and published their photographs in the book.

“We join many others who have taken time to condemn the stereotyping of Africa and Zambia as a backward country in a jungle, thinking which is not of the 21st century,” the embassy said.

Lydia Ngoma, a Zambian poet and writer who read the book, told NPR many of Linton’s facts were wrong.

“Child soldiers in Zambia? Rebels violently crossing over into Zambian borders? Those are such shocking allegations that any Zambian will tell you did not happen,” she says. “She mixes Zambia, Congo and Rwanda so many times leading to the generalization of Africa as ‘one big country’ — something we have been trying to fight for a while now,” Ngoma said.

“She paints herself as a ‘savior’ in her memoir while the rest of the characters are either racists, or ignorant creatures.”

One Twitter user wrote at the time: “The only thing missing from the @LouiseLinton story is Tarzan and Mowgli.”

In response to the public outrage, Linton apologized on Twitter, saying she was “genuinely dismayed and very sorry to see that I have offended people.” Her Twitter account was later deleted but numerous news outlets captured screenshots, including the BBC and CNN.

“I was reflecting and remembering a personal experience as an idealistic teenager that changed my life many years ago,” she said in another statement, the Scotsman reported. “I mistakenly thought I could inspire readers by sharing my memories of my time in Africa. The sad truth is that my intent behind the book was to share an empathetic attitude but the result was the exact opposite.”

The Telegraph followed with its own apology, withdrawing the excerpt from its website. It also announced that Linton agreed to remove the book from sale and “give the profits to charity.”

The article “mistakenly implied that the conflicts in Congo and Rwanda had spilled over into Zambia, that Zambia was a war-torn country in 1999 and that armed rebels had crossed Lake Tanganyika to Zambia that year,” the Telegraph statement read. “Other claims of inaccuracy were also made.”

Social media users who recalled Linton’s memoir last year appeared less than surprised about her most recent controversy:

...

Linton, who was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, attended Fettes College, an elite Scottish boarding school, according to her online biography. She reportedly grew up in a luxurious castle in Dalkeith that she claimed was “haunted.”

The actress and producer has appeared in roles in television shows such as”CSI: NY” and “Cold Case” and the movies “Intruder,” “Lions for Lambs” and Cabin Fever.” Her biography speaks highly of her philanthropic work and roles on numerous boards, touting Linton as a “passionate advocate for people and animals.”

Linton has appeared in a number of magazine spreads — including a topless shoot for Maxim in 2009.

One of these magazine features — a particularly unusual one — was shared widely leading up to her June wedding to treasury secretary Mnuchin. In an extravagant spread in Town & Country, Linton shared her large collection of jewels, including many she said were gifts from Mnuchin, a former Goldman Sachs exec.

“You never really own a diamond,” she said. “You just get to keep it for a while before it begins a new journey with someone else.” Of a pair of earrings, she said: “I love how easy pearls are to wear with anything and everything.”

Her wedding to Mnuchin, 54, at the Andrew Mellon Auditorium proceeded in a similar posh fashion. She wore a full-skirted gown with a plunging neckline and “heaps of diamonds,” as The Washington Post’s Emily Heil reported.  It was the third marriage for Mnuchin and the second for Linton.

Vice President Pence officiated. Guests included President Trump and his wife, Melania, and first daughter Ivanka Trump and her husband and White House adviser, Jared Kushner. Other Trump administration officials and members of the Washington elite were in attendance.

She sounds like a real piece of work.

[GreyhoundFan]

"‘You’re Fired’ may be harder than Trump thinks when it comes to federal workers"

Spoiler

Anxious to remake the federal government, the Trump administration is cracking down on employees who break the rules, taking action in some instances in disciplinary cases that had languished under former president Barack Obama.

The White House in April instructed agencies to “remove poor performers” as they construct plans to shrink the workforce as part of a federal downsizing. Trump vowed during the campaign to shake up a government awash in “waste, fraud and abuse” — and the new administration has been vocal about its strategy.

Budget director Mick Mulvaney laid out detailed mandates to ensure that poor conduct be handled swiftly and poor performers monitored closely or given “appropriate discipline.”

After years criticizing the Obama administration for going easy on cases involving problem employees, Republicans are taking a hard line against misconduct at several troubled agencies.

Veterans Affairs, still recovering from criticism in 2014 that employee misconduct led to manipulated patient waiting lists at its medical centers, in July began publishing disciplinary actions online, including 525 firings since Trump took office. With 350,000 employees, VA in June became the model for a broader job protections shake-up sought by conservatives when Trump signed a bill creating a quick path for VA Secretary David Shulkin to fire employees who fail to meet conduct or performance standards.

At Homeland Security, the inspector general is conducting an agencywide review of misconduct actions. Employees were asked in a July survey whether the sprawling department created after the 9/11 attacks has “sufficient processes and procedures to address conduct issues.”

Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross is asking career officials at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to explain how they have handled improper time and attendance reporting, an agency official familiar with the inquiry said. Investigators and congressional Republicans say the problems related to time and attendance tracking have gone unaddressed for years.

Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke has vowed zero tolerance for sexual harassers. This month the Yellowstone National Park superintendent went public with disciplinary actions he is taking against a dozen employees involved in a harassment case.

But in its efforts to fulfill the president’s campaign promise to “drain the swamp”of entrenched federal workers, the new political leadership in Washington is meeting resistance from powerful federal employee unions and finding that maneuvering around long-guaranteed civil service protections is not easy.

This month an administrative board ordered a stay of the firing of the former director of the VA Medical Center in Washington, who had been removed from his post to an administrative job in April. An inspector general’s probe found that patient health was endangered by managerial dysfunction.

Brian Hawkins was fired for a “failure to provide effective leadership,” VA officials said. He claimed wrongful termination and is back at work while his case is independently reviewed. In a test of the new law, which offers fewer protections for employees, Shulkin plans to remove Hawkins again based on another inspector general’s investigation, VA officials said. That inquiry found that he violated agency rules by sharing sensitive information about employees with his wife on their personal email accounts. Hawkins did not respond to a request for comment.

Even cases that Trump officials inherited from the Obama administration have been challenging. The Census Bureau took over litigation that sprang from an inspector general’s findings two years ago that employees in its hiring office gamed the system to improperly collect $1.1 million in salaries. It is still unresolved, an agency spokesman said.

A case now playing out at the Patent and Trademark Office shows the complexities of carrying out Trump’s mandate.

After a three-year investigation, the office has moved recently to fire or suspend 18 of about two dozen employees in a clerical support unit that dockets trademark applications, according to current and former agency staff and other government officials familiar with the case. One worker has been fired.

Agency officials conducted an internal inquiry whose findings were shared with The Washington Post, showing that the employees improperly charged the government hundreds of thousands of dollars over several years. In the most egregious cases, officials found that some employees worked two hours a day but billed taxpayers for eight, plus two more overtime hours.

A union official denied any impropriety, saying his members “were available to work” but often finished their tasks quickly and awaited more assignments, a practice that went on for as long as a decade.

“My employees are not in the wrong,” said Harold Ross, president of Local 243 of the National Treasury Employees Union, which represents the unit. “They produce fast. They’re available for the whole time. All of a sudden, management wants to come against them.”

Patent office spokesman Paul Rosenthal said in an email the agency does not comment on specific personnel cases.

“More broadly, the USPTO has always taken its time and attendance policies seriously,” he wrote. “Employees must accurately record their time worked. And the overwhelming majority of our employees do just that. But employees who falsify their work records or work hours . . . will continue to be held accountable.”

In another sign of the Trump administration’s efforts to more forcefully address employee misconduct, Rosenthal cited an agreement — signed by the union representing patent examiners — to allow supervisors to monitor staff work habits with tracking software that indicates whether employees are at their computers. Labor had resisted these changes, which the union signed the day before Trump took office.

Timecard abuse has been documented over several years in reports by the inspector general at the Commerce Department, the patent office’s parent agency. The office has been praised for its flexible work hours and telework policies.

The Post reported in 2014 that an internal investigation found patent examiners repeatedly misrepresented their hours and received unsubstantiated overtime pay and bonuses. Top agency officials removed the most damaging revelations from material turned over to the inspector general, documents provided to The Post showed. Commerce officials said the material was in draft form.

At the time, Obama officials pledged to hold employees accountable. But critics said few patent examiners were punished or paid restitution.

Commerce’s then-acting inspector general, Dave Smith, opened an investigation into the trademark employees, according to government sources. But top patent officials prevailed after asking that they be allowed to conduct their own inquiry.

Last fall, Smith released a computer analysis showing discrepancies between the time claimed by patent examiners and hours worked. But privacy laws prevented the agency from acting against 415 employees identified as the worst offenders. Under a new law, management is allowed to pursue administrative or criminal enforcement in such cases. It is unclear if the patent office plans to act.

Republicans’ frustration with patent officials and the unions boiled over at a House hearing in December after Trump’s election. Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.), chairman of the Oversight and Government Reform Committee’s panel on government operations, dressed down the agency’s No. 2 Obama appointee, Russell Slifer, and the head of the patent examiners’ union for tolerating abuses.

The agency had long suspected timecard abuses in the trademark division, where jobs have been outpaced by automation. But managers could not document it until 2013, when they installed tracking software.

“We had never seen anything like it,” recalled Bill House, who retired in 2015 from the employee relations office, which investigates misconduct. The number of cases, the money allegedly bilked and the hours the employees spent not working “was so bad they pulled other [employee relations] specialists to work on it,” House recalled.

The treasury employees union is fighting the proposed discipline, said union and management officials who requested anonymity to discuss the subject. An arbitrator is scheduled in October to hear the first case, of the sole employee who has been fired.

Tim Hannapel, the NTEU’s national counsel, said the tracking software detects only part of the work employees are asked to do — tasks that include emails, phone calls, and monitoring rules and regulations.

“It’s substantive stuff, but there isn’t a code that tracks this work,” he said.

The union has turned down management’s offers to allow employees to resign with clean records if they reimburse taxpayers for unearned compensation, according to union officials and others familiar with the discussions. The employees, who are paid $59,693 annually on average, remain on the payroll.

The NTEU also is alleging disparate racial treatment because almost all of the employees are black. The union says relatively few higher-paid white patent examiners have been disciplined for similar misconduct claims.

The agency did not comment on the settlement negotiations or the discrimination claim.

“They turned a blind eye to the other employees,” Ross, the local union president, said of patent examiners.

Slifer, now an intellectual-property attorney in Boise, Idaho, said that when he and the unions worked together to respond to Congress’s accountability requests, it was clear that the relationship with the Trump administration would be different.

“The recognition that having a GOP majority in Congress and in the White House certainly put the unions on notice that they don’t necessarily enjoy the same support from Republicans as they have from Democrats,” he said.

He said employee accountability is more complicated than saying “if someone isn’t putting in their 80 hours [every two weeks] they need to be canned. It is important that you provide all employees due process and make sure they understand their responsibilities.”

The TT and his ilk don't understand that federal civil service rules are different from the rules that apply to a private firm. It is possible to remove federal employees, but it takes substantial effort and documentation. That is to prevent political firings of career employees. Unfortunately, it allows some bad apples to remain. Of course, the worst rotten apple is the one occupying the White House.

[GreyhoundFan]

Hmm, maybe Benny needs to do some time behind bars or lose his cabinet position? "Why Ben Carson’s appearance in Phoenix was likely a violation of federal law"

Spoiler

Right before Ben Carson took the stage at President Trump’s rally in Phoenix on Tuesday night, the announcer introduced him.

“The secretary of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, Dr. Ben Carson,” the voice intoned, prompting cheers from the audience.

And, as simply as that, a law was likely broken.

There are a lot of ways in which the federal government could be used to reward political friends and allies, of course, appointments being just one example. But the power of the government can also be leveraged to political advantage. Imagine a candidate who appeared at a campaign rally to be endorsed by the heads of each branch of the armed forces, for example. That would carry a lot of weight.

In 1939, Franklin Roosevelt signed the Hatch Act into law, a measure meant to preserve the impartiality of public servants. “The law’s purposes,” the Office of Special Counsel’s website explains, “are to ensure that federal programs are administered in a nonpartisan fashion, to protect federal employees from political coercion in the workplace, and to ensure that federal employees are advanced based on merit and not based on political affiliation.”

Among the prohibitions included in the Hatch Act is one prohibiting Cabinet secretaries from leveraging their positions for a political cause. That means that the head of, say, the Department of Housing and Urban Development can’t appear at a campaign rally in a way that implies he’s doing so in an official capacity. Say, by being introduced with his official title.

The act “prevents government employees from using their position and their station to promote candidates or political parties,” explained Larry Noble, senior director of the Campaign Legal Center. “The idea is that the government, once it’s in government, is supposed to be nonpartisan. It’s really to prevent the abuse of power.”

You might be wondering why this would apply to a Cabinet secretary appearing at an event for the president more than three years before he’s up for reelection. The reason, quite simply, is that Trump’s rallies over the past few months have, in a legal sense, been rallies on behalf of his 2020 bid.

In order to avoid criticism for the cost and tone of the events, the bills have been paid by a reelection campaign organization that was formed back in January. Meaning that the rally in Phoenix was a campaign event. And meaning, Noble said, that Carson should not have been introduced with his official title.

“He should have told them in advance that they cannot use his title,” Noble said. “Once hearing the introduction, he should have made clear he was speaking in his personal capacity and not as secretary.” Carson didn’t.

Trump’s team should know better. It should know better because Trump’s social media director ran afoul of the Hatch Act in April when he tweeted a political call to action from his Twitter account. It was his personal account — but since his account identified him as an employee of the administration, it was considered to be a violation. What’s more, Carson’s predecessor at HUD, Julián Castro, was himself found to have violated the act when, in April of last year, he indicated during a news interview conducted in the department’s offices that he endorsed Hillary Clinton.

Punishment for a willful violation of the act could include removal of an official from his position. The Office of Special Counsel left punishment for Castro to his boss, President Barack Obama. In this case, it seems unlikely that any punishment would follow from Carson’s appearance, especially if left to Trump.

In normal times, rules like the Hatch Act serve a role similar to the rumble strips that line the shoulders of highways, warnings that you may be entering a danger area. In 2017, though, with an administration that’s breaking norms with regularity, it’s a bit like a smoke detector going off in a building near the epicenter of a nuclear blast.

“Some of these things, in the total scheme of things, in a normal presidency, you might raise it,” Noble said. “In a presidency where they’re doing all of these things, it’s relatively minor. But you hate to let it go, because this is what it’s all about in the end.”

Update: HUD spokesman Raffi Williams responded by email.

We don’t believe there was a Hatch Act violation. Dr. Carson’s travel and lodging were not paid for by the Department. Dr. Carson was there in his personal capacity. Additionally, he did not discuss HUD during his speech. We are unaware of what instructions, if any, were provided to the announcer. All other references during the event refer to him as Dr. Carson. In this instance he did not hear his name before he was cued to go on. We are consulting with our Ethics Office on the matter to ensure it doesn’t occur again.

 

[Gobsmacked]

On 21 July 2017 at 4:13 AM, GreyhoundFan said:

More on our buddy Betsy. You couldn't make this up: "Betsy DeVos claims philosophy of Margaret ‘Iron Lady’ Thatcher as her own"

  Reveal hidden contents

Yes, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos went there — and a few other places, too.

Speaking at an annual conference of a powerful conservative organization, she invoked the words of Margaret Thatcher, the late prime minister of Great Britain, who instituted tough conservative policies that supporters say helped save the British economy and foes say hurt the poor and destroyed heavy industries and communities.  Thatcher became known as the “Iron Lady” for her tough policies, both domestic and foreign, and is a hero to conservatives here and abroad. (You can see DeVos’s entire speech below.)

DeVos, appearing at the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), framed her keynote speech around Thatcher’s philosophy of society, saying that it was hers as well. DeVos said:

What, exactly, is education if not an investment in students?

I was reminded of something another secretary of education once said. Her name was Margaret.  No, not Spellings — Thatcher.  Lady Thatcher regretted that too many seem to blame all their problems on “society.” But, “who is society,” she asked. “There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families” — families, she said — “and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first.”

 The Iron Lady was right then and she’s still right today.

(Margaret Thatcher was secretary of education and science under British Prime Minister Edward Heath before taking control of the Conservative Party herself.)

And that is as clear a distillation of DeVos’s philosophy of government as she has given since becoming education secretary in February after Mike Pence became the first vice president in American history to have to break a tie for the Senate to confirm a Cabinet member. To DeVos, public institutions are impediments to individuals who want freedom to access opportunities, and the traditional public education system, which has been the most important civic institution in America since its creation, is a failure that can’t be fixed.

DeVos was in friendly territory when she spoke in Denver at the annual conference of ALEC,  a powerful  organization of corporate lobbyists and conservative state legislators who craft “model legislation” on issues important to them and then help shepherd through legislatures. ALEC calls itself “the largest nonpartisan, voluntary membership organization of state legislators dedicated to the principles of limited government, free markets and federalism,” while it has been called a “stealth business lobbyist” by the New York Times and “a corporate bill mill” by the watchdog nonprofit Center for Media and Democracy.

At Thursday’s speech, DeVos luxuriated in a mutual admiration society. She praised ALEC, and Debbie Lesko, a member of the Arizona Senate and ALEC, told DeVos before conducting a Q & A with her onstage that they just loved what she said.

While being careful to say that “providing more educational options isn’t against public schools,” she repeated hailed alternatives to traditional school systems and bashed people who support them as people who care only about “systems” and not individual students, and are only interested in sustaining the “status quo.” (That’s an accusation, incidentally, that was used frequently by President Obama’s education secretary Arne Duncan, who accused his opponents of wanting to do the same thing, and it may be time for DeVos’s speechwriters to come up with a new insult.)

Having declared in 2015 that “government really sucks,” DeVos savaged the federal government in her ALEC speech:

If you need another reason to believe the federal government shouldn’t be involved in education, look no further than Obamacare. The federal government couldn’t build a website that worked, but progressives think it should run a national health care system?

We need health care reform that rewards innovation and puts patients at the center, just like we need changes in education that put students at the center, empowers educators and spurs creativity.

The same principle applies to fixing our nation’s broken tax code: we need to reduce the financial burden on hard-working individuals and job providers to unleash the economic potential that has been held captive for too long. Without reform, the next generation of entrepreneurs will swim upstream against the developed world’s highest corporate tax rate and a system that punishes risk-taking rather than encourages it.

She said President Trump was determined to return power “back in the hands of people” and she praised his executive order asking her department to review any regulation that “might obstruct parents, teachers, communities and states from best-serving their students.”

And then she said this about what is going on in the nation’s capital:

It’s a sad state of affairs in Washington when common sense requires an executive order.

Over and over, she hailed school choice — which is a euphemism for alternatives to traditional public schools — saying at one point:

Choice in education is good politics because it’s good policy. It’s good policy because it comes from good parents who want better for their children. Families are on the front lines of this fight; let’s stand with them! 

Does that mean she thinks parents who want to strengthen the public schools and not promote choice are not good parents?

DeVos praised the state legislators in the audience for playing “the long game,” using a “patient approach” to push school choice in one state after another. Indeed, DeVos and her husband, Dick DeVos, have been working and using some of their fortune to promote school choice for decades. She said, in another slight to her critics:

And for those of you here today, who have been on the front lines, you understand the struggle at the very core of this debate: There are those who defend a system that by every account is failing too many kids … and there are those who know justice demands we give every parent the right to an equal opportunity to access the quality education that best fits their child’s unique, individual needs.

That, of course, doesn’t always sit well with defenders of the status quo.  But despite the teachers unions’ not-so-veiled threats and millions of dollars, can anybody name a single legislator who has lost a seat for voting to support parents and students?

Here’s the speech as prepared for delivery and provided by the Department of Education:

...

She is beyond belief.

So was Margaret Thatcher when she began her taking apart of Britain in 1979. Britain has never recovered. Possibly never will.