Trump 18: Info to Russia, With Love

[GreyhoundFan]

34 minutes ago, fraurosena said:

The WUT for today. Sorry, it's not funny.

Trump seeks to sell off half of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve

  Reveal hidden contents

As part of its 2018 budget, the Trump administration is proposing to reduce by half the size of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, a cushion against global price shocks and supply disruptions. The administration said it expects the drawdown to reduce the federal deficit by $16.6 billion, part of a package of deficit reduction measures over the next 10 years.

The proposal probably will run into sharp differences in Congress and among oil experts, most of whom say that the reserve should remain a buffer in an emergency. As of May 12, the reserve had 688.1 million barrels, equal to about 141 days of net imports of crude oil and refined petroleum products.

The administration included the words “Reduce Strategic Petroleum Reserve by half” among a long list of budget proposals distributed under embargo to journalists.

The sales would start at half a billion dollars in the next fiscal year and climb to $3.9 billion, for a total of $16 billion over the next decade. A policy brief floated by the conservative Heritage Foundation, a group that has exerted a major influence on the Trump budget, suggests selling off the entirety of the SPR over a two-to-three-year period (a more radical proposal than the Trump idea).

“The SPR has not served its purpose, as Presidents have used the SPR as a political tool or failed to release reserves in a timely and impactful manner,” Heritage fellow Nicolas Loris wrote in 2015. “It is time for Congress to recognize it is not the government’s role to respond to high prices. Congress should therefore pull the plug and drain the SPR once and for all.”

The Strategic Petroleum Reserve is the world’s largest stockpile of emergency crude oil, and lies near the largest U.S. refiners and pipeline networks in four large salt caverns in Louisiana and Texas.

It was established in December 1975 in the wake of the oil embargo imposed on the United States by Arab members of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC).

That cutoff of oil sales to the United States delivered a shock to the U.S. economy. More recently, strategists have defended the reserve as a bulwark against a possible disruption in supplies from Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest oil exporter, or a closure of the narrow Strait of Hormuz at the mouth of the Persian Gulf.

Some analysts have argued that the United States no longer needs a big stockpile because of the surge in domestic production resulting from shale oil output over the past decade and the reduction in U.S. imports of crude oil. Economist Philip Verleger has been among the leading advocates of shrinking the reserve. “The reserve was created at a time when the nation was very dependent on imported oil,” he wrote in a blog article for S&P Global Platts in 2014.  “The dependency is in the past.  The Reserve no longer serves the purpose for which it was developed.”

Other experts say that the reserve is as needed as ever.

“The risk of complete collapse in Venezuela is just one of many reminders that the world remains vulnerable to oil price shocks, and those will be felt by U.S. consumers at the pump just as much today even though we import less oil than we used to because oil is a global commodity,” said Jason Bordoff, director of the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University.

“The SPR is a 40-year-old national security asset that helps to protect the U.S., in partnership with other countries, from potential oil supply disruptions and price spikes. It would be foolish to sell it off just because our imports have fallen or to fill short-term budget holes, especially when oil prices are so low.” (Bordoff was President Barack Obama’s National Security Council adviser on energy and climate.)

This isn’t the first time the Strategic Petroleum Reserve has been tapped for revenue. A budget deal in October 2015 included sales of 58 million barrels — 8 percent of the reserve — from 2018 through 2025 to raise $5.1 billion, which would equal 0.125 percent of that year’s budget. In addition, Congress turned to sales of the reserve to meet financing needs of the Highway Trust Fund, which would drain the reserve of another 101 million barrels.

The administration’s plan to shrink the petroleum reserve would come after these earlier drawdowns, leaving the emergency buffer with about 270 million barrels, or less than 40 percent of the current level.

Let me get this straight. This administration is not interested in science, and therefore not interested in durable engergy resources. This means the dependency of what the US has now on oil, is not going to dimish soon. But hey, we need some money for the budget, so let's sell our oil reserves.

If a foreign oil-exporting country wants to mess with the US, or if Venezuela collapses as the article says could happen, things could get ugly very soon.

Get ready to travel by horse and carriages, everyone! Traveling by car (let alone airplane) is going to be something only the 1% will be able to afford...

Exactly. He is all about the short-term thinking. His wants money NOW, damn it, and it doesn't matter how it happens.

 

I liked this opinion piece: "The definitive book about the Trump administration was written in 1951"

Spoiler

Back in 1951, Herman Wouk published the definitive book about the Trump administration. He set it in the 1940s, during the war in the Pacific, aboard a destroyer-minesweeper skippered by a paranoid man with a compulsion to blame others for his mistakes. The captain was named Philip Francis Queeg, his ship was called the USS Caine, and the novel was “The Caine Mutiny.” It won the Pulitzer Prize. It’s a dead certainty President Trump never read it.

But maybe he saw the movie , in which Humphrey Bogart plays Queeg, a performance that earned him an Oscar nomination, or the Broadway play, “The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial” — but none of that is likely, either. The character of Queeq would have been too close to home for him and the mutiny too terrible to contemplate.

In seizing command, Queeg’s fellow officers invoked Article 184, which is the Navy’s version of the Constitution’s 25th Amendment. I wrote about this amendment — which provides for the removal of a president if he is incapacitated — in early January, convinced that the Trump presidency, like a winged pig, was an oxymoron that was bound to crash. The man was not yet president, but he had revealed his character over the years in his business dealings and his public pronouncements. It was enough for me that he had insisted that President Barack Obama was not American-born. Trump had no evidence — just a lack of scruples. Nothing has changed.

In “The Caine Mutiny,” our first hint that Queeg is unbalanced comes when he tries to cover up a serious mistake — running over a towline in a gunnery drill. Later, when the Caine has to participate in an invasion of a Pacific island, Queeg cuts and runs and then demands his officers support his decision. They choose instead to keep silent.

We have many such similarities with Trump. Maybe the most psychologically egregious occurred right after the inauguration when he sent out Sean Spicer to lie about the size of the crowd. This was seemingly a small matter, but the inability to distinguish between the trivial and the consequential is, we now know, a Trump character malfunction.

In Queeg’s case, the telling incident has to do with some missing strawberries. The captain orders an investigation and has the ship laboriously searched for a nonexistent duplicate refrigerator key. “They laughed at me and made jokes, but I proved beyond the shadow of a doubt, with geometric logic, that a duplicate key to the ward room icebox did exist,” Queeg says when he takes the stand at the court-martial of his mutinous officers.

But the actual mutiny is yet to come. It occurs when the Caine gets engulfed by a typhoon. Queeg seems unsure how to handle the boat in the storm. He does not come around into the wind, and the ship starts to founder. It is then that his officers take over — mutiny. They had already researched Article 184: “It is conceivable that most unusual and extraordinary circumstances may arise in which the relief from duty of a commanding officer by a subordinate becomes necessary.”

Trump has yet to have his monster storm. But his behavior is unmistakably Queeg-like. It could be that the allegation that he or someone close to him dealt with the Russians to corrupt the election, or that the allegation that his tax returns, if ever revealed, will show a zealously uncharitable man with dubious business associations — any of the many accusations — will come to nothing. We have the apparition of Billy Bush, dead but walking, to prove that Trump is a lot luckier than he is smart. No jury will convict Trump of competency.

The crunch will come with the ordinary — not a crime, but erratic or irresponsible behavior in a crisis. We have already seen modest examples of that — his loose lips with the Russian foreign minister, which may have exposed an Israeli intelligence asset.

The officers of the ship of state, members of the president’s own party, have to be prepared for such an eventuality — maybe not a constitutional coup via the 25th Amendment, but a determination to stand up to a president who is temperamentally and intellectually unsuited for the office. From the GOP, Trump needs pushback and criticism, not sycophantic applause.

The reason “The Caine Mutiny” was successful in many forms is that it spoke the truth about character and competence. Queeg was a fictional creation, but especially in Bogart’s interpretation, he oozed a sloppy humanity, a man who foundered long before his ship did. The same is true of Trump. His typhoon is coming.

Okay, a new name for the creature inhabiting the White House: Tangerine Queeg. I hadn't thought about how much TQ is like Captain Queeg, but it's true.

[GreyhoundFan]

No surprise here: "The Daily 202: Comey was not the only official to resist Trump entreaties"

Spoiler

THE BIG IDEA: James Comey was not alone. Even Donald Trump’s own pick for director of national intelligence, former Republican Sen. Dan Coats, refused to comply with a request by the president to push back against the FBI investigation into possible coordination between his campaign and the Russian government.

Trump also reached out to Adm. Mike Rogers, the director of the National Security Agency. He pressed both men to publicly deny the existence of any evidence of collusion during the 2016 election. Each saw the president’s entreaty as inappropriate.

The Post’s Adam Entous and Ellen Nakashima broke this latest bombshell last night: “Current and former senior intelligence officials viewed Trump’s requests as an attempt by the president to tarnish the credibility of the agency leading the Russia investigation. A senior intelligence official said Trump’s goal was to ‘muddy the waters’ about the scope of the FBI probe … Senior intelligence officials also saw the March requests as a threat to the independence of U.S. spy agencies, which are supposed to remain insulated from partisan issues. ‘The problem wasn’t so much asking them to issue statements, it was asking them to issue false statements about an ongoing investigation,’ a former senior intelligence official said of the request to Coats.”

This new scoop is hugely significant because it suggests a concerted, multi-front effort by the president and top White House staff to rein in an FBI investigation in the months before Trump fired Comey. You really should read Adam and Ellen’s full story, but here are three important nuggets:

1. There is a paper trail: “Trump’s conversation with Rogers was documented contemporaneously in an internal memo written by a senior NSA official.” This could wind up being a key evidence for special counsel Robert Mueller.

2. Trump staffers were enlisted: “In addition to the requests to Coats and Rogers, senior White House officials sounded out top intelligence officials about the possibility of intervening directly with Comey to encourage the FBI to drop its probe of Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser … The officials said the White House appeared uncertain about its power to influence the FBI. ‘Can we ask him to shut down the investigation? Are you able to assist in this matter?’ one official said of the line of questioning from the White House.”

3. “Current and former officials said that Trump either lacks an understanding of the FBI’s role as an independent law enforcement agency or does not care about maintaining such boundaries. Trump’s effort to use the director of national intelligence and the NSA director to dispute Comey’s statement and to say there was no evidence of collusion echoes President Richard Nixon’s ‘unsuccessful efforts to use the CIA to shut down the FBI’s investigation of the Watergate break-in on national security grounds,’ said Jeffrey H. Smith, a former general counsel at the CIA. Smith called Trump’s actions ‘an appalling abuse of power.’”

Reaction from a Democratic member of the House Judiciary Committee:

... <tweet from Rep Ted Lieu>

...

Yeah, the TT lacks understanding in pretty much every subject.

[47of74]

Washington State AG and accomplished chess player Bob Ferguson had this piece about Benedict Donald's aggression will be his undoing;

time.com/4783920/president-trumps-aggression-will-be-his-undoing/

Quote

The most aggressive opening in chess is called the King's Gambit. On the second move, White sacrifices a pawn that typically protects his king for a blitzkrieg assault on Black. It's audacious. With no preparation, no careful groundwork, White signals his intent to wipe his opponent off the board. In the early 20th century, the King's Gambit led to many brilliant victories. But through careful preparation, grand masters discovered that they could place White on the defensive by capitalizing on weaknesses created by the aggressive opening.

President Trump is playing the political version of the King's Gambit--and his electoral victory was certainly an example of early success. But his approach leaves vulnerabilities that undermine his attacks.

Trump's first defeat--his travel ban targeting people from Muslim-majority countries--is a good example. My office brought a lawsuit challenging that Executive Order and, within a week, stopped it nationwide. How did we do it?

After we stopped the President's original travel ban, Trump issued an all-caps tweet: "See you in court!" But we had already seen him in court--and defeated him there twice. His tweet revealed only one thing: that the President was playing two moves behind.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"Trump close to choosing outside counsel for Russia investigation"

Spoiler

President Trump is moving rapidly toward assembling outside counsel to help him navigate the investigations into his campaign and Russian interference in last year’s election, and in recent days he and his advisers have privately courted several prominent attorneys to join the effort.

By Monday, a list of finalists for the legal team had emerged, according to four people briefed on the discussions.

That search process, in which Trump has been personally involved, is expected to yield a formal legal unit in the coming days, made up of lawyers from several firms who would work together to guide Trump as he responds both to the ongoing federal probe and the congressional investigations, the people said.

Although the list of finalists remains somewhat fluid and names could be added, two people close to the search said the president has concluded that he would like a team of attorneys, rather than a single lawyer, to represent him. The team is likely to have lead counselors, those people said. 

The four people briefed on the discussions spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk about the matter publicly. 

The attorneys who have spoken to the White House and who are seen as the finalists are Marc E. Kasowitz; Robert J. Giuffra Jr.; Reid H. Weingarten; and Theodore B. Olson, the people said.

Two other attorneys who were originally viewed as contenders but have since drifted away from the mix, at least momentarily, because of legal or professional obstacles are Brendan V. Sullivan Jr. of Williams & Connolly and A.B. Culvahouse Jr., a partner at O’Melveny & Myers who is known for vetting political candidates.

Kasowitz, who has known Trump for decades, is expected to take a leading role. A partner at Kasowitz, Benson, Torres & Friedman in New York, Kasowitz has represented Trump in numerous cases, including on his divorce records, real estate transactions and allegations of fraud at Trump University. 

A potential complication for Kasowitz is that former senator Joseph I. Lieberman, Trump’s leading candidate to head the FBI, is currently a senior counsel at his firm. Were Lieberman officially chosen to run the FBI, and Kasowitz chosen to help with Trump’s legal advice, both men — the one leading the organization investigating possible Russian collusion and the one offering Trump legal counsel on that very issue — would hail from the same firm, a likely conflict of interest.

Giuffra, Olson and Weingarten have already spoken with senior administration officials about the team, said a person familiar with the process.

The White House did not respond to requests for comment about how Trump would pay for his outside legal team, the cost of which cannot be covered by the federal government. But campaign finance lawyers said Trump could probably draw funds from his reelection committee to cover legal expenses related to the Russia inquiries, including money donated this year.

“When it comes to legal expenses, the test is whether the expenses would have been incurred irrespective of the campaign,” said Daniel Petalas, a Washington campaign-finance lawyer who served as the Federal Election Commission’s acting general counsel and head of enforcement. “So if the allegation is Trump — either as candidate or officeholder — is facing legal costs as a result of those statuses, then he is entitled to use his campaign funds to defray the legal expenses.” 

In a break from precedent, Trump’s campaign committee has continued to aggressively solicit donations since his election. In recent days, the email and text appeals have invoked the controversies swirling around the White House.  

“What you’re seeing in the news is a WITCH HUNT,” said a fundraising solicitation seeking $1 donations sent Friday. “But the real victim isn’t me. It’s YOU and the millions of other brave Americans who refused to bow down to Washington by voting for REAL CHANGE last November.”

The president, a former New York real estate developer and reality television star, also has the personal wealth to cover his legal costs. 

Some outside experts noted that the president’s decision to consider a team of legal advisers, rather than a single outside counselor, could exacerbate his existing problem of competing power factions within an already chaotic White House.

“The one thing he’s trying to do is to manage some of the disorder that seems to have affected his legal position,” said a lawyer who worked in a previous administration, speaking on the condition of anonymity to talk candidly about the president. “And so to create a Tower of Babel within his legal team is sort of mirroring some of the problems that got him in trouble in the first place. What you don’t need is some complicated team approach in which various people are competing for his ear.”

Giuffra, a partner at Sullivan & Cromwell in New York, is the coordinating counsel for Volkswagen, which has admitted to cheating on emissions tests in the United States.

Olson, a former U.S. solicitor general, rose to prominence in 2000 when he argued the Supreme Court election case that delivered electoral victory to George W. Bush. He later teamed up with his former Democratic adversary in Bush v. Gore, David Boies, to successfully overturn the 2008 California ballot measure outlawing same-sex marriage.

Olson’s wife, Barbara, was killed in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks when the plane she was in crashed into the Pentagon. Olson, a partner at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher’s Washington office, is now married to Lady Booth Olson, a self-proclaimed lifelong Democrat.

Weingarten, a high-powered attorney at Steptoe & Johnson in Washington known for his folksy style, is a somewhat unlikely choice because he has represented Democratic clients and is close friends with Eric H. Holder Jr., who served as attorney general under President Barack Obama. Holder and Weingarten met during their early years at the Justice Department. 

The four finalists did not respond to requests for comment. A White House official said the administration had no comment.

Michael D. Cohen, a longtime attorney for Trump and an executive at the Trump Organization, remains the president’s personal attorney and confidant, and also is involved in the discussions, the people said.

The outside legal team would be separate from the White House Counsel’s Office, which is led by Donald F. McGahn, who served as the Trump campaign’s attorney. In past administrations, presidents such as Bill Clinton have named outside counsel to help them navigate thorny legal problems.

A government lawyer who participated in Clinton’s legal defense said the former president paid millions of dollars in legal fees to Williams & Connolly to compensate the firm for representing him. 

Trump’s push to put together an outside legal team comes as Robert S. Mueller III, a respected former federal prosecutor and FBI director, begins his work as a Justice Department-appointed special counsel on the possible ties between the Trump campaign and Russian officials.

Controversy and political drama swirling around the alleged Russia ties have engulfed Trump’s presidency from the start, fueling anger within a White House that feels under siege and unfairly scrutinized. That feeling, in part, drove the president to fire James B. Comey, the FBI director, and fallout from that decision led Justice officials to tap Mueller as special counsel.

Comey, who has agreed to testify before the Senate Intelligence Committee in an open session, has told friends that he took contemporaneous notes of his exchanges this year with Trump. Democrats have seized on those news reports as evidence of potential obstruction of justice, with some Trump critics suggesting that impeachment could eventually be a possibility.

Good, waste the money your base donated for your campaign on legal expenses...

[Howl]

19 hours ago, Howl said:

21 hours ago, sawasdee said:

I'm sure I'll think of more - tRump is opening more ways to evade the spirit of the law in quasi criminal ways daily.

No surprise there.  It's the way he's run his business dealings for the last 40 years. 

And what do you know?  CNN has an article today titled "Trump's casino was a money laundering concern shortly after it opened"

Spoiler

The Trump Taj Mahal casino broke anti-money laundering rules 106 times in its first year and a half of operation in the early 1990s, according to the IRS in a 1998 settlement agreement.

It's a bit of forgotten history that's buried in federal records held by an investigative unit of the Treasury Department, records that congressional committees investigating Trump's ties to Russia have obtained access to, CNN has learned.

The casino repeatedly failed to properly report gamblers who cashed out $10,000 or more in a single day, the government said.  Trump's casino ended up paying the Treasury Department a $477,000 fine in 1998 without admitting any liability under the Bank Secrecy Act.

full article here

Tee hee!  I bet the investigative committees dredges up incriminating details from the swamp that is Trump's business dealing on a daily basis.  And you have to know that most if not all of these investigators are MOTIVATED, I mean ON FIRE for the truth. 

(Hums a happy little tune to herself while rummaging in the pantry for the popcorn.)

[GreyhoundFan]

"The White House may claim Mueller has conflicts of interest. Oh, the irony."

Spoiler

All of a sudden, it seems, the Trump White House cares about conflicts of interest — even where they don’t exist.

For months, the administration has ignored conflicts of interest on a grand scale. The watchdog organization we help lead has documented dozens, capped by the president’s own insistence that by virtue of his office he cannot have conflicts of interest.

But now the White House and its allies may be preparing to claim that former FBI director Robert S. Mueller III has conflicts of interest that prevent him from assuming his role as special counsel in the Trump-Russia investigation. Like so many of their other ethics claims, this one does not hold up.

Their first argument is that Mueller must stand down from the investigation for at least a year because lawyers in the law firm from which he just resigned, WilmerHale, represent Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort, two people who may be involved in the investigation. It appears, however, that Mueller never represented either of these individuals nor obtained any confidential client information about either of them. Under the professional conduct rules of the District of Columbia, among the toughest in the nation on lawyers moving in and out of government, Mueller is free to leave the firm and, as special prosecutor, investigate and if appropriate prosecute either of these individuals represented by his former firm.

This makes perfect sense. Otherwise, a person involved in an investigation could hire one of Washington’s largest law firms (WilmerHale has hundreds of attorneys) and thereby prevent the Justice Department, including the special counsel’s office, from hiring any of that firm’s lawyers to investigate or prosecute him or any of his co-conspirators. With so many Trump administration officials potentially tangled up in this investigation and lawyering up all over Washington, such a recusal rule could make it extremely difficult for the special prosecutor to hire a staff.

According to press reports, the Trump administration is contemplating using ethics rules primarily intended for government officials who are not lawyers — and thus are not subject to other ethics rules — to block Mueller’s investigation of the Trump-Russia scandal. Under these ethics rules of the Office of Government Ethics and a related Trump executive order, a government official should not, without prior approval, participate in a particular matter in which his former employer is involved. For example, a Defense Department official who came to government from defense contractor Lockheed Martin should not, without authorization, be allowed to work on a Lockheed defense contract for at least a year after leaving the company.

In many such situations, the Trump administration has apparently given its prior approval for its political appointees to participate in particular matters in which their former employers are parties or represent parties. These approvals have so far been kept secret, and the Trump administration is resisting a request by the Office of Government Ethics for access to the waivers.

Ironically, it is in just such a situation as the Mueller case — if the government officials involved are lawyers and therefore subject to bar ethics rules on the revolving door — that a conflicts waiver would be appropriate. If the White House were to resist granting such a waiver for Mueller and his staff while secretly approving waivers to lobbyists and others, that action would represent not only an abuse of government ethics rules but also yet another data point in an emerging pattern of obstruction of justice.

It should also be noted that Trump’s ethics executive order relating to the Office of Government Ethics regulations does not on its face even apply here. That order, a watered-down version of one promulgated by President Barack Obama, extends the recusal rule for entering Trump appointees another year, to two years. But it applies only to political appointees, which Mueller of course is not.

Another supposed conflict involving Mueller is equally specious: that because Mueller and Comey worked together extensively in the past, the special counsel is inclined to be sympathetic to Comey’s version of events and credit that over Trump’s conflicting account. Fox News’s Gregg Jarrett contended that Mueller should resign because he “may harbor a conspicuous bias” stemming from his friendship with Comey. “It is reasonable to assume Mueller was not pleased to see Comey canned,” Jarrett wrote. “He may be tempted to conjure criminality where none really exists.”

This argument is ridiculous. Prosecutors are not precluded from an investigation because they have previously worked with defendants or witnesses in unrelated matters. Nobody heard of such an “ethics” rule until it was invented for purposes of derailing the Mueller investigation.

These attacks on Mueller are instances in which ethics is being turned on its head — not to protect the integrity of government but to undermine it. That cannot be allowed to succeed.

Yet another instance of "you couldn't make this shit up."

[Mela99]

"Evil losers." That's his heartfelt reaction to Manchester. Honest to god.... 

 

[Rachel333]

Poor Donald, Melania still doesn't want to hold his hand.  http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/rome-melania-refuses-hold-president-trump-hand-article-1.3189303

[GreyhoundFan]

A couple of good pieces analyzing the disastrous budget being put forth by the TT's cronies: "The impossible magic math of Trump’s budget proposal, explained"

Spoiler

Imagine that you’re in charge of a business — say, a high-end event space near Palm Beach, Fla.

Now imagine that you have an idea for an advertising campaign that you’re confident will bring in money. You pitch your proposal to the board of directors: Spend $100,000 on the ad campaign, and we’ll reap $250,000.

Let’s say that the chief executive then asks you for the bottom line on your proposal. Which is the honest response?

1. The company will gain $250,000.
2. The company will net $150,000, once you exclude the $100,000 spent on the advertising.

If you answered (2), you’re correct. If you answered (1), you may have a bright future awaiting you in the administration of Donald Trump.

The analogy above was offered to me by Jason Furman, senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics and former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Barack Obama. His goal was to explain the math at the heart of the Trump administration’s first budget, math that in the estimation of a number of outside observers falls prey to precisely the misrepresentation in that example.

Seth Hanlon, a former Obama economic adviser who now works with the Center for American Progress, walked through the specific numbers at play. It all begins with the tax-cut proposal offered by the administration this month. Those tax cuts, the administration argues, would spur 3 percent economic growth.

“Stipulating that that happens, they are in their budget claiming that growing the economy by that much will produce $2 trillion in additional revenue” over 10 years, Hanlon explained. “Stipulating the 3 percent growth, $2 trillion of additional revenue sort of follows from that.”

So, here’s that $2 trillion in additional revenue.

...

It’s worth noting that this runs contrary to what the administration claimed when it first proposed its tax-cut plan. At that point, Trump’s budget team said that the reductions would be revenue-neutral, arguing that the tax increases from economic growth would offset the revenue lost from taxation.

What the budget proposal does, Furman said, is include the expected gains from the tax cuts without accounting for the losses. In other words, if the tax plan is revenue-neutral, there would be $2 trillion in additional revenue from economic growth — but $2 trillion less in revenue from reduced tax rates. This proposal skips everything after the dash in that sentence. Going back to our analogy: It claims the $250,000 as a gain without taking out the $100,000 spent on ads.

Hanlon concurred. “At the same time,” he said, the administration is “not counting the static or the gross costs of their tax cuts. Their budget essentially ignores the tax cuts and pretends they don’t exist.”

Alan Cole, an economist at the Tax Foundation, agreed. “If you’re thinking about things from a conservative perspective,” Cole said, “they’ve got the good part of what the tax plan does, which is the growth, but they don’t have the bad part, which is the reduced Treasury receipts.”

He pointed out that Trump’s proposal wasn’t even consistent with the tax plan in broad strokes. “As I understand it, there’s a page in this budget which shows revenue coming in from the estate tax, which they’ve explicitly planned to repeal,” he said. If it’s repealed, obviously, the amount of revenue coming in from it will be zero.

All of this analysis is predicated on the idea that the tax plan itself would lead to the growth that Trump claims — the stipulation that Hanlon offered above. That stipulation is strongly contested.

Hanlon noted a recent survey of economists by the University of Chicago. Thirty-seven economists weighed in, saying that they didn’t think that Trump’s tax cuts, as loosely introduced, would be revenue-neutral, contrary to the claims of the administration. The two who held the opposing opinion? It turns out that they misread the question. And they were just referring to the idea of a revenue-neutral tax proposal, not the administration’s  prediction of an additional $2 trillion in revenue from out of thin air.

An estimate from the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget analyzed Trump’s tax proposal and figured that the net result would not be neutral, but instead would decrease revenue by $5.5 trillion over 10 years (including both the costs and proposed limits on deductions).

...

All three of the experts we spoke with offered unflattering summaries of the proposal.

“On the one hand,” Hanlon said, “they’re saying it is not fully formed. On the other hand, they’re saying it will boost the economy by more than any mainstream economist would say is at the outer limit of what’s possible.”

According to Cole, “a tax plan that’s dynamically neutral wouldn’t be enough” to hit $2 trillion. “They have more tax revenue in this budget than the [Congressional Budget Office] has in its baseline,” he said. “They have a greater amount of taxes collected. And that is — quite something.”

Furman’s view: “This is not an accidental mistake. This is a mistake that happens to people that have a ludicrously optimistic view of the impact of tax cuts and also don’t bother to actually specify or work out any of the policy details.”

For someone used to running a business, this mistake should be obvious.

 

 

And: "The White House justifies its savage budget with a divisive lie"

Spoiler

As the Trump White House works to sell its budget proposal, which was released today, there’s a revealing ideological argument emerging to justify the absolutely brutal cuts to social programs that the budget includes. Americans, the administration is saying, come in two types: the deserving and the undeserving, the taxpayers and the moochers.

You don’t have to worry about the way we’re eviscerating so many programs, because we’re only going after those people. It’s based on a fundamental lie: that there are taxpayers and then there are people who use social programs, and the two are not only not the same people, the groups don’t even overlap. Here’s how White House Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney describes it:

“If I had sort of a subtitle for this budget, it would be the Taxpayer First Budget. This is I think the first time in a long time that an administration has written a budget through the eyes of the people who are actually paying the taxes. So often in Washington I think we look only on the recipient side: How does the budget affect those who either receive or don’t receive benefits?…Can I ask somebody, a family in Grand Rapids, Michigan, to pay tax money to the government so that I can do X?”

The whole point here is to set “taxpayers” against the supposedly undeserving whose scams and schemes can be stopped with only indiscriminate cuts to social programs. Watching Mulvaney answer questions from the press this morning, that idea came through again and again. Every time he’d get a question about a specific cut the administration proposes — to Social Security disability, to food stamps, to Medicaid — Mulvaney would say that the only people who would suffer would be those who don’t deserve to get the benefit in the first place. “We are not kicking anybody off of any program who really needs it,” he said.

But if you paid close attention, you noticed a curious logical gap in his argument. See if you can spot it in this line of reasoning:

1. There are people on these programs who don’t deserve to be.
2. Therefore, we will slash the program.
3. Then, only the deserving will be receiving the benefit.

What’s missing is any suggestion that the administration has some sort of plan to distinguish the deserving from the undeserving. For instance, Mulvaney was asked about the administration’s desire to impose work requirements on those who get food stamps. What about people who are trying to find work but can’t? He promised that if that were the case, the government would “work with you” in some way that he wouldn’t specify. “It’s the folks who are on there who don’t want to work” who are the problem, he said. They’re proposing to cut the program by 25 percent, or $190 billion over the next decade; Is all that going to come from finding and expelling those “who don’t want to work”? How would they go about that? He didn’t say.

Or let’s take another example: help for those with disabilities. The administration is proposing $72 billion in cuts to disability programs, mostly from Social Security. When asked, Mulvaney said that while there are some people who are legitimately disabled getting that help, there are others who aren’t. But he didn’t discuss any new measures to identify these nefarious swindlers; instead, the White House just wants to cut the entire program. We see this logic at work again and again: White House officials assert that there are some unknown number of people mooching off the system, then use that as a justification for punishing everyone who gets that benefit, including the overwhelming majority of those who get it legitimately.

You’ll notice, however, that Republicans only propose doing that when the people they’re victimizing don’t have enough political power to fight back. Let’s take a counter-example: Medicare. Medicare fraud is an enormous problem; this Government Accountability Office report estimated that we lost $60 billion to it in 2014. So does the Trump administration use that as an excuse for sweeping across-the-board cuts to Medicare benefits? No it doesn’t, because seniors have enormous political power and would never stand for it. People who are poor or disabled, on the other hand, aren’t as organized, so they’re a target.

In making these arguments, the administration is playing on an extremely common bias. It says that the government programs I avail myself of either aren’t government programs at all, or are things I deserve because of my virtue, while the government programs you use are only for freeloaders.

We’ll even apply that division to the same programs. Many people who rely on safety-net programs will find someone nearby whom they can point to as the undeserving moocher. It’s their cousin who gets disability but is capable of going fishing, or their neighbor who’s on unemployment but has an under-the-table construction job, or someone else who gets food stamps but seems like they might not need them. It’s a way of saying, “When I use these programs it’s legitimate, because I’m a good and honest person. The problem is somebody else.” This sentiment exists at all income levels.

The Trump administration is obviously hoping it can play on that feeling to win support for a series of cuts to programs for poor people that is simply mind-boggling in its cruelty (and which will of course be combined with a massive tax cut for the wealthy). The administration can only do it if enough Americans agree that the real problem in this country is their fellow citizens, especially those who have the least and need the most help. Aim your resentment and your contempt downward, the Trump administration says. Those people are the ones holding us back, and the only way to deal with them is to make sure their suffering is as deep as possible. Then they’ll learn their lesson.

The whole thing just makes me sick. I had a good conversation with one of my representative's staffers. He's trying to fight for us, but it's an uphill battle.

[Rachel333]

Trump left a comment in the guestbook at the Holocaust Memorial. For reference, here is what Obama wrote:

Quote

I am grateful to Yad Vashem and all of those responsible for this remarkable institution. At a time of great peril and promise, war and strife, we are blessed to have such a powerful reminder of man’s potential for great evil, but also our capacity to rise up from tragedy and remake our world. Let our children come here, and know this history, so that they can add their voices to proclaim ‘never again.’ And may we remember those who perished, not only as victims, but also as individuals who helped and loved and dreamed like us, and who have become symbols of the human spirit.

And here is Trump's comment:

Quote

It is a great honor to be here with all of my friends - so amazing + will never forget!

 

[Mela99]

*Amazing* . . . ? 

I.. don't think that's the adjective I would choose. 

And he has a Jewish daughter and grandchildren  . . .

[onekidanddone]

Worst President ever! Bigly worst and most badest. Never has there been such worse bad President. SAD.

But in all seriousness; I log off work and read here and WoPo to catch up on White House news..and I say ...What the actual FUCK? No, really what? Huh? Do the Orange  Zombie STILL think he is for the little guy and is not a Wall Street 'elite'? 

 

[onekidanddone]

2 hours ago, Rachel333 said:

Poor Donald, Melania still doesn't want to hold his hand.  http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/rome-melania-refuses-hold-president-trump-hand-article-1.3189303

I can't see how anybody would want to hold his hand because you never know where tiny hand has been and if it has been washed. 

Do you all in FJ land think he will be working wife #4 by now while in office? Or is he waiting to be impeached first?

[formergothardite]

This is probably the longest Melania has had to spend with him in a while. She didn't really travel with him when he campaigned and she only sees him some weekends. I bet he is in a foul mood too. She is not even pretending anymore. 

I bet he is looking for wife #4, and I'm sure there is some young woman who will throw herself at him for a chance at getting some of his money. 

[RoseWilder]

Well, look at that, Trump hired an attorney to help him deal with his Russia legal troubles. 

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-russia-counsel-idUSKBN18J30W

Let's find out more about Trump's new attorney. From his new attorney's website: 

http://www.kasowitz.com/marc-e-kasowitz/

Quote

Marc regularly serves as national trial counsel in complex litigation in the areas of bank finance, fraudulent conveyance, RICO, corporate governance, antitrust, securities, mass tort, product liability, environmental, breach of contract, and other commercial cases. 

Trump just hired an attorney who specializes in RICO cases. Hmmmm. . . . 

 

[JMarie]

On ‎5‎/‎22‎/‎2017 at 1:13 PM, onekidanddone said:

Bill boy was only sorry he got caught. I shed no tear for him

Billy Bush will be interviewed tomorrow by Robin Roberts on Good Morning America.

 

[sawasdee]

@RoseWilder I think that's the attorney who handled his tRump U. case.

[RoseWilder]

24 minutes ago, sawasdee said:

@RoseWilder I think that's the attorney who handled his tRump U. case.

Yeah, it mentions on that attorney's page that he worked for Trump in the past.

Someone please refresh my memory. Didn't Trump lose the Trump U case? 

[sawasdee]

It was settled - I think the plaintiffs got about 25,000 each - cheaper for tRump than a protracted case, and of course, less publicity, and he didn't have to testify.

[onekidanddone]

1 hour ago, formergothardite said:

This is probably the longest Melania has had to spend with him in a while. She didn't really travel with him when he campaigned and she only sees him some weekends. I bet he is in a foul mood too. She is not even pretending anymore. 

I bet he is looking for wife #4, and I'm sure there is some young woman who will throw herself at him for a chance at getting some of his money. 

I don't want to get sued for libel, but is there any doubt he already has been philandering around on Melania? 

[GreyhoundFan]

4 minutes ago, onekidanddone said:

I don't want to get sued for libel, but is there any doubt he already has been philandering around on Melania? 

You know, if he weren't in the WH, I would think so, but he seems to be so overwhelmed, I wonder if he has the strength for roaming. My guess is that the divorce will be filed about 35 seconds after he exits the presidency. He'll pick up a newer model quickly at that point.

 

A good opinion piece: "Trump escalates the war on women"

Spoiler

“I just want to state some facts,” Deja Foxx, a 16-year-old activist, told Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) at a town hall meeting in April. “I’m a young woman, and you’re a middle-aged man. I’m a person of color, and you’re white. I come from a background of poverty, and I didn’t always have parents to guide me through life. You come from privilege, so I’m wondering, as a Planned Parenthood patient and someone who relies on Title X, who you are clearly not, why it’s your right to take away my right to choose Planned Parenthood.”

The confrontation, which went viral, occurred on the same day that President Trump signed a law allowing states to deny Title X family planning funds to health clinics that offer abortions. Flake supported the bill, along with 49 other Senate Republicans. With two Republican women breaking ranks, Vice President Pence cast the tiebreaking vote to force the bill through. As Foxx explained to Flake, the care she receives at Planned Parenthood is helping her take charge of her future and achieve the American dream. “I can’t sit idly by while women like me are countlessly and constantly being ignored on Capitol Hill,” she said in an interview after the exchange.

The Title X measure is just one of many unnerving examples of women having their interests ignored — or, worse, threatened — in Washington. While much of the media and political establishment are gripped by the scandals engulfing the administration, Trump and the Republican Party have been waging war on the health of women everywhere.

The latest attack came last Monday, when the Trump administration marked the beginning of National Women’s Health Week by announcing an unprecedented expansion of the “global gag rule,” which Republican presidents since Ronald Reagan have used to withhold U.S. funding from health organizations that provide abortions or even acknowledge the procedure as an option. The last time it was in effect, under George W. Bush, the policy restricted roughly $600 million in international family planning assistance. Trump is broadening it to include global health funding provided by the State Department, the U.S. Agency for International Development and the Defense Department, totaling $8.8 billion. The expanded ban will cause an increase in unintended pregnancies, unsafe abortions and maternal deaths. “Despite the Trump administration’s ludicrous rebranding of the policy,” says Suzanne Ehlers, president of the global reproductive health advocacy group PAI, “the Global Gag Rule is unmistakably deadlier than ever.”

The president’s top domestic priority — repealing the Affordable Care Act — would also be disastrous for women across the United States. The replacement bill passed by the House would take away coverage for millions of Medicaid recipients, the majority of whom are women. It would eliminate essential health benefits, such as maternity and newborn care, and strip federal funding from Planned Parenthood. And it would gut protections for preexisting conditions, meaning women could once again face discrimination as a result of “conditions” such as pregnancy and Caesarean sections. A Senate version of the bill is now being crafted by 13 Republicans — all men.

Meanwhile, the assault on women’s health is expanding in Republican-controlled states. In the first four months of 2017 alone, there were 31 abortion restrictions enacted at the state level, according to the Guttmacher Institute. In Iowa, Planned Parenthood announced last week that it will close four clinics serving nearly 15,000 patients as a result of a defunding measure slated to take effect in July. Under the new law, Iowa will forgo Medicaid family planning funds in favor of a state-run program that will exclude care providers that offer abortions. Since making a similar move in 2011, Texas has seen a steep drop in participation and a rise in Medicaid pregnancies, and is now asking the federal government to restore its funding — without requiring it to end the counterproductive ban on abortion providers.

Despite the grim developments, women are responding with an outpouring of political energy. Since the Women’s March in January, thousands of women have expressed interest in running for office. They are jamming the phone lines on Capitol Hill. And they are making a more powerful case than ever that reproductive rights are not merely a women’s health issue, but an essential component of economic health and security as well.

Trump may be escalating the war on women, but in doing so, he has awakened women and girls such as Deja Foxx. They will drive the anti-Trump resistance forward and, increasingly, shape the future of the progressive movement. As Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards said in a speech last month, “This White House and this Congress have shown they are willing to throw women under the bus — and we are fighting them every step of the way. That’s why we are building a progressive movement where women’s health and women’s economic empowerment aren’t an afterthought — they are at the forefront.”

 

[sawasdee]

It's the sheer illogic that gets to me.

We'll defund the clinics where you can get contraception,and when you get pregnant we'll stop you having a legal abortion.

But we won't fund any ante natal care, or maternity costs - so if your baby is then needing emergency care - oh, those charges just push up the bill for everyone else.

And since there's no affordable childcare, you'll be on welfare - but we want to cut that too, and food stamps.

So it's OK to force a baby to be born, but then also OK to let it starve/die from preventable disease/make it homeless.

It'd take a Dickens or a Steinbeck to do this story justice.

[GreyhoundFan]

@sawasdee -- I agree, it's completely illogical. Nobody ever accused the Repugs of being Vulcan.

 

Jennifer Rubin wrote another good one: "Trump learned nothing from the ‘skinny budget’ fiasco"

Spoiler

President Trump’s so-called “skinny budget” in March envisioned mammoth cuts to domestic programs, billions in funding for a wall that not even border-state Republicans support and only a modest increase in defense spending. The bill was proclaimed dead on arrival. Republicans and Democrats negotiated their own deal, one seen as very lopsided in favor of the Democrats. Lesson learned?

Nope. Trump sends up today a 2018 budget that is more draconian and unrealistic than the last effort. The Post reports:

President Trump on Tuesday will propose cutting federal spending by $3.6 trillion over 10 years, a historic budget contraction that would severely ratchet back spending across dozens of programs and could completely reshape government assistance to the poor.

The White House’s $4.094 trillion budget request for fiscal 2018 calls for cuts that hit Medicaid, food assistance and other anti-poverty programs. It would cut funding for the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), which provides benefits to the poor, by roughly 20 percent next year.

All told, the budget would ­reduce spending on safety-net programs by more than $1 trillion over 10 years.

Trump apparently is intent on repudiating his populist vision and handing Democrats powerful evidence that he is indifferent to the poor and, in the case of Medicaid cuts, breaking key campaign promises — just as every other politician has done.

Democrats were distressed but could barely contain their amazement that Trump would back a budget this easily portrayed as a coldhearted attack on the most vulnerable Americans. Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) went to the floor on Monday to denounce the president’s budget, echoing classic Democratic themes. “The president told the American people he would help create jobs and provide greater economic security for families. This budget does exactly the opposite. It’s not a jobs budget. It’s not an economic security agenda,” Schumer said. “It’s a budget that takes a meat cleaver to the middle class by gutting the programs that help them the most, including many that help create jobs and power the economy: Transportation is cut, education is cut, programs that promote scientific and medical research are cut, programs that protect clean air and clean water are cut. All of these are favored — these programs are favored by a vast majority of my Republican friends across the aisle, but the president’s budget is an outlier — way out there.” He reminded his colleagues that Medicaid covers “many Americans who need help: those suffering from opioid and heroin addiction, people in nursing homes and their families who care for them, the elderly, the disabled, and children. … Listen to this, Mr. President and my colleagues: Medicaid helps 1.75 million veterans (1 in 10). It provides services for Americans struggling with opioid addiction, a problem that affects so many.” He argued, “So if the reporting is accurate, the cuts to Medicaid in the president’s budget carries a staggering human cost.”

What would possess Trump to disregard his experience of just a couple of months ago and send up a budget that his own party will repudiate? Why, when he is offering enormous tax cuts for the very rich (both in the American Health Care Act and in his tax plan outline), would he chop away at the safety net, as if he was bent on a huge transfer of wealth from poorer to richer Americans?

One explanation is that Trump, never big on details, does not much care about the budget. He has left it to Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney, a former Freedom Caucus member who came up with a scheme that bears no resemblance to the needs of the country or the politics of the moment. Another explanation is that Trump’s populism was a con job from the get-go, a rhetorical device to get working-class Americans’ votes so that he could pass enormous tax cuts for his friends and dismantle the welfare state.

Whichever explanation you favor (and the two are not mutually exclusive), Trump is destroying his and his party’s attempt to redraw the political landscape. Democrats have not made much progress in devising their own agenda and message, but Trump is handing them both on a silver platter. In short, Democrats will be all too happy to tell voters: The president has taken working and middle-class Americans for a ride, and it will be up to Democrats to look after the real interests of Trump voters.

I am going with option C <both A & B> -- he doesn't know and care about details AND he has been a con job.

[GreyhoundFan]

I love Dana Milbank: "A not-so-innocent abroad: Trump bumbles across the Middle East"

Spoiler

President Trump arrived in Jerusalem this week with a most curious bit of information for Israeli President Reuven Rivlin.

“We just got back from the Middle East,” Trump announced. “We just got back from Saudi Arabia.”

At this, the Israeli ambassador to Washington, Ron Dermer, put his forehead in his palm.

Did Trump not know Israel is in the Middle East? Did he not know he was in Israel? There was little time to contemplate this mystery, because Trump was moving on to generate more puzzlement at his meeting with Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister.

The two men had wrapped up a news conference and reporters were shouting questions when Trump volunteered a confession. “Just so you understand,” he announced, “I never mentioned the word or the name Israel in conversation. Never mentioned it during that conversation. They are all saying I did. So you had another story wrong. Never mentioned the word Israel.”

Thus did Trump apparently confirm that Israel was the unnamed ally that had provided sensitive intelligence to the United States that Trump then handed over to Russia. U.S. officials were concerned that if the ally were identified, Russia might try to disrupt the source.

Mark Twain wrote “The Innocents Abroad” in 1869 while traveling through the Holy Land and Europe. This week, Trump wrote his own chapter as he bumbled his way through Saudi Arabia and Israel before heading for Rome. Americans by now have become accustomed to perpetual chaos. Now lucky friends and allies are seeing the Trump tornado firsthand.

After Monday night’s attack at a concert in Manchester, England, Trump reacted with outrage and sorrow for those “murdered by evil losers in life.” But then he made this aside: “I won’t call them monsters because they would like that term. . . . I will call them from now on losers because that’s what’s they are. They’re losers.”

Thus did the president apply the same label to murderous terrorists that he had previously bestowed on Rosie O’Donnell, Cher, Rihanna, Mark Cuban, George Will, Charles Krauthammer, Bill Maher, Ana Navarro, Chuck Todd, the attorney general of New York, an astrologer in Cleveland, Gwyneth Paltrow, Howard Stern, Jeb Bush, John McCain, Marco Rubio, Karl Rove, Megyn Kelly, the Huffington Post and the New York Daily News — among many others.

Beyond that, did Trump run a focus group to find out terrorists prefer being called “monsters” to “losers”? And does he suppose that taunting them as losers will be an effective counterterrorism strategy? If so, he might form an “L” on his forehead with thumb and forefinger when he invokes terrorist losers.

Presumably Trump didn’t think it through. Likewise, he didn’t mean to offend his hosts in Saudi Arabia by referring to “Islamic terror” rather than “Islamist terror.” He was “exhausted,” an aide explained. Perhaps fatigue also made him turn Saudi Arabia’s King Salman into “King Solomon” — he was off by 3,000 years — and expand the Strait of Hormuz into the “Straits of Hormuz.” Less clear is what made him leave a cheerful message in the guestbook at the Holocaust memorial Yad Vashem: “so amazing and will never forget!”

Trump, who once scolded President Barack Obama for bowing before a Saudi ruler, executed a similar stoop in Saudi Arabia. Trump, who once criticized Michelle Obama for failing to wear a headscarf in Saudi Arabia, gave a speech there while his bareheaded wife and daughter listened. (Melania Trump struck another blow for women when her husband, ungallantly walking ahead of her on the Tel Aviv tarmac, reached back for her hand; she flicked his away.)

Trump does best when he sticks to the script others have written for him, as he did in his well-received speech in Saudi Arabia. It’s when he ad-libs that he gets in trouble, as when he proclaimed recently that peace is “maybe not as difficult as people have thought over the years.” Diplomats of the past 70 years must have been losers.

Problem is, Trump has trouble sticking to the script. The White House distributed Trump’s prepared remarks for his meeting with Rivlin, making it possible to identify his ad-libs, a clutter of asides and superlatives. “Amazing.” “Very holy.” “And that’s number one for me.” “There’s no question about that.”

Had the president’s predecessors employed such filler, these immortal words might be etched in marble on the Potomac:

“Four score and seven years ago — that’s a long time ago, very long — our fathers, who spoke about this at great length, did what perhaps has virtually never been done before: brought forth on this continent, a new nation, a very great new nation — there’s no question about that — conceived in liberty — and that is so important! — and dedicated to the amazing proposition — and they felt very strongly about this, I can tell you — that all men are created equal. Number one for me.”

The world, hopefully, will not long remember the gaffes Trump made over there. But it can enjoy a good chuckle.

Yeah, it's pitiful that the only coherent sentences that come out of his mouth are scripted.

[Scribber]

This is probably the longest Melania has had to spend with him in a while. She didn't really travel with him when he campaigned and she only sees him some weekends. I bet he is in a foul mood too. She is not even pretending anymore. 
I bet he is looking for wife #4, and I'm sure there is some young woman who will throw herself at him for a chance at getting some of his money. 

Is it bad that my first thought is that obnoxious Tomi? She'd make a great Mrs Trump.