Well, that's a record of its own.“You know, one of the things that people don’t understand — we have signed more legislation than anybody,” the president said [yesterday] in remarks to roughly four dozen first responders at a firehouse in West Palm Beach, Florida. “We broke the record of Harry Truman.”
It is true that Trump had signed more bills in his first 100 days than any president since Truman, but as Trump nears the anniversary of his Jan. 20 inauguration, he is far removed from his 100th day. And he has now signed the fewest number of bills into law of any first-year president dating back to Dwight Eisenhower, according to a recent report from the website GovTrack.
[...]
And, according to GovTrack, Trump has signed fewer bills at this point in his presidency than George W. Bush had — and less than half as many bills as Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush had at this point.
Politico
I'm confused. I thought the media were liars. Fake News?“I believe we have — and you’ll have to ask those folks, but I think they know the real answer,” Trump said, apparently referring to the media. “We have more legislation passed, including — the record was Harry Truman. That’s a long time ago. And we broke that record. So we have a lot done.”
Trump’s visit had not previously been announced — the president’s schedule had no public events listed. He spent about five hours at Trump International Golf Club, where he presumably hit the links on Wednesday.
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Trump had tweeted Monday night that he hopes “everyone is having a great Christmas,” adding that “tomorrow it’s back to work in order to Make America Great Again (which is happening faster than anyone anticipated)!”
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On Tuesday, Trump spent about four hours playing golf with Sen. David Perdue of Georgia, professional golfer Bryson DeChambeau and former pro golfer Dana Quigley.
I don't think that will matter. It's the attempt that counts.According to Yahoo News’ Michael Isikoff, Mueller’s team is examining whether the joint digital operation between the RNC and President Trump’s campaign “was related to the activities of Russian trolls and bots aimed at influencing the American electorate.”
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In public interviews, representatives from social media companies have played coy when asked the question and merely have confirmed that they were handing all the relevant data to congressional investigators. The tech companies in question have reportedly also been cooperating with Mueller’s probe.
Cambridge Analytica, a data company that also worked with the Trump campaign, has come under the scrutiny of the congressional investigations. Company CEO Alexander Nix reportedly offered to help Wikileaks founder Julian Assange organize the hacked Democratic emails the website had been publishing, but Assange has denied accepting Nix’s entreaty.
TPM
Surely Americans don't admire Obama more than anyone.Americans named former President Barack Obama the most admired man in the world for the 10th year in a row, making President Donald Trump one of a handful of sitting presidents who have fallen short of that accolade, according to a Gallup poll released Wednesday.
TPM
Okay, that looks a little more like it.Obama narrowly beat current Trump by three percentage points, with 17 percent of respondents naming him the most admired man in the world to Trump’s 14 percent.
What does it say about Americans that the person they most admire is their current president? Nothing good.According to Gallup, only a few incumbent presidents have not been named the most admired man in the world since the research company began asking the question in 1946. Trump joins a list that includes Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter and George W. Bush.
Are they just asking the same people every year?Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was Americans’ most admired woman in the world, according to the poll. She beat former first lady Michelle Obama by two percentage points, with 9 percent of respondents choosing Clinton. Only one percent of respondents did the same for current first lady Melania Trump.
According to Gallup, Clinton has retained her title for 16 consecutive years, while Obama has retained his for 10 years, including the current year, all eight years he was in office as president and the year he was first elected, in 2008.
If you say so.Gallup conducted its survey from Dec. 4–11, 2017, via cell phone and landline interviews, from a random sample of 1,049 adults living in the United States, with a margin of error of plus or minus 4 percentage points.
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.Despite vowing not to use depleted uranium (DU) weapons in its military action in Syria, the U.S. government has now admitted that it has fired thousands of the deadly rounds into Syrian territory. As Foreign Policy Magazine reports:
“U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) spokesman Maj. Josh Jacques told Airwars and Foreign Policy that 5,265 armor-piercing 30 mm rounds containing depleted uranium (DU) were shot from Air Force A-10 fixed-wing aircraft on Nov. 16 and Nov. 22, 2015, destroying about 350 vehicles in the country’s eastern desert.”
Operation Inherent Resolve spokesman John Moore said in 2015 that:
“U.S. and coalition aircraft have not been and will not be using depleted uranium munitions in Iraq or Syria during Operation Inherent Resolve.” Now we know that is not true.
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We should remember that the United States is engaged in military activities in Syria in violation of international and U.S. law. There is no Congressional authorization for U.S. military action against ISIS in Syria and the United Nations has not authorized military force in violation of Syria’s sovereignty either.
The innocent citizens of Syria will be forced to endure increased risks of cancer, birth defects, and other disease related to exposure to radioactive materials. Depleted uranium is the byproduct of the enrichment of uranium to fuel nuclear power plants and has a half-life in the hundreds of millions of years. Damage to Syrian territory will thus continue long after anyone involved in current hostilities is dead.
The AntiMedia
Well then.[T]his year, as many times in the past, The Tribune has assigned the label to the Utahn who, over the past 12 months, has done the most. Has made the most news. Has had the biggest impact.
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The selection of Sen. Orrin G. Hatch as the 2017 Utahn of the Year has little to do with the fact that, after 42 years, he is the longest-serving Republican senator in U.S. history, that he has been a senator from Utah longer than three-fifths of the state’s population has been alive.
It has everything to do with recognizing:
- Hatch’s part in the dramatic dismantling of the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments.
- His role as chairman of the Senate Finance Committee in passing a major overhaul of the nation’s tax code.
- His utter lack of integrity that rises from his unquenchable thirst for power.
Salt Lake Tribune
"His utter lack of integrity that rises from his unquenchable thirst for power."To all appearances — appearances promoted by Hatch — this anti-environmental, anti-Native American and, yes, anti-business decommissioning of [Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante] national monuments was basically a political favor the White House did for Hatch. A favor done in return for Hatch’s support of the president generally and of his tax reform plan in particular.
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The fact remains that tax reform has been talked about and talked about for decades and only now has anything been done. And Hatch, as chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, has his fingerprints all over it.
But perhaps the most significant move of Hatch’s career is the one that should, if there is any justice, end it.
The last time the senator was up for re-election, in 2012, he promised that it would be his last campaign. That was enough for many likely successors, of both parties, to stand down, to let the elder statesman have his victory tour and to prepare to run for an open seat in 2018.
Clearly, it was a lie.
[...]
It would be good for Utah if Hatch, having finally caught the Great White Whale of tax reform, were to call it a career. If he doesn’t, the voters should end it for him.
A big fuck you to the people they supposedly represent. Of course we all know who they actually represent, and they don't give a shit if we do.As the House and Senate moved toward approving the final version of the GOP tax bill, the International Business Times (IBT) revealed in an explosive story Friday that a loophole slipped into the bill in the final minutes will directly enrich President Donald Trump and his son-in-law Jared Kushner, as well as wealthy senators and key members of Congress, including the provision’s writers.
[...]
Controversy swirled around the timing of the measure and the fact that deficit hawk Senator Bob Corker of Tennessee abruptly switched his vote in favor of the bill, whose tax cuts the Congressional Budget Office estimated will add $1.4 trillion to the deficit by 2027. Corker had been the lone Republican holdout in the Senate and had previously voted with Democrats against the bill. [...] [Reporter] David Sirota’s IBT reporting quickly went viral as Corker’s apparent cushy accommodation was splashed across social media under the hashtag #CorkerKickback.
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IBT had been closely following the debate over how the tax measure would treat income passed through a tax shelter known as an LLC, a “pass-through” tax entity because profits pass through to its owners who report them on their personal tax returns.
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Which version of the pass through would end up in the final tax bill would be determined by the joint House and Senate conference committee. At 5:30 p.m. on Friday, the committee released a final version that appeared to follow the Senate approach, the more rational version, according to tax experts Sirota spoke to. “At 5:45 we were sort of like, ‘Okay, I don’t think there’s much to really write,’” Sirota said. “‘It looks like they kind of got it out.’ But I said, ‘I’ll talk to a couple of tax lawyers who have been following this.’ And what do you know? One of them comes back to me at 6:15 and is like, ‘You know, they added this one extra line that’s not in either of the bills. It talks about depreciable assets. This is the loophole.’ He said something along the lines of, ‘It’s narrow enough that it shows intent for a specific kind of investment vehicle.’”
[...]
The original House tax cut on pass-throughs, Sirota explained, was broad enough to argue that it was merely an ideological, across-the-board tax cut rather than something that picked specific winners and losers. But the additional line was included with one intent in mind. That line carved out a particular tax windfall for owners of rental-income generators like apartment buildings or commercial office complexes, depreciable property with few or no employees.
“That’s when we realized this is an absolutely enormous story,” Sirota said.
[...]
When asked to comment on the pass-through for a followup story, Corker didn’t seem to be familiar with it, Sirota said. “He called it ‘ridiculous,’” Sirota said. “But then he called back — he must have talked to somebody — and he said, ‘You know, I’m not sure I want to criticize it that way. You know, I need more information. I haven’t really read it. I’ve only read a summary of the bill. I haven’t read the bill.’ Which is, of course, another story: You’re the key vote on a $1.5 trillion [deficit] bill, and you’re announcing your support for it, admitting that you didn’t even read it. So your defense is, ‘I didn’t know about the provision because I didn’t read the bill that I’m voting for.’
[...]
To take the heat off Corker, [Utah Republican Orin] Hatch replied on Monday, insisting that he had authored the loophole.
[...]
However, the Hatch alibi could not withstand new reporting that revealed Corker’s chief of staff, Todd Womack, had been investing heavily in a real estate LLC in the run-up to the bill and also stood to profit from the provision. Worse, Texas Republican Senator John Cornyn, in a Sunday appearance on ABC’s This Week, admitted that the decision to include the pass-through came from an effort to “cobble together the votes we need to get this bill passed.”
[...]
Republicans have been redistributing the country’s wealth upwards since the days of Ronald Reagan. What actually is precedent-setting about this tax bill, [Sirota] said, is how explicit it is.
“There’s no pretense in this bill,” Sirota said. “There was a thing the Republicans put out in their summary when the bill came out. I tweeted out the graphic. It was sort of in a section about trying to prevent people from using their LLCs to put their wage income into their LLCs. They called it ‘safeguards’ — and I’m paraphrasing here — ‘We have put safeguards in to make sure that the business income taxes not go to wage earners.’ They are very crystal-clear that this is a tax bill not for workers. This is a tax bill for corporations and business owners."
Capital and Main
Come on. NO Democrats stand to benefit? I find that hard to believe.In all, 14 Republican senators (see list below) hold financial interests in 26 income-generating real-estate partnerships — worth as much as $105 million in total.
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While Republicans have argued the House version of the bill contained the controversial provision, experts have told IBT the provision appeared in the legislation only after the bill was finalized during House-Senate Conference Committee deliberations.
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Beyond Republican senators, other major beneficiaries of the provision could be President Donald Trump, who owns or directs over 560 companies, most of which are LLCs or LPs. Democrats in recent days have seized on the provision — and its potential benefits to Republican lawmakers.
Zero Hedge
