Bill USA
Bill USA's Journalnew Exec Order: mindless elimination of regulations - scrap two regulations for each new one adopted
...this is a perfect DT moronic executive order: agencies must scrap two regulations for every new regulation enacted. This probably isn't even do-able.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2017/01/30/trump-wants-to-cut-two-regulations-on-businesses-for-every-new-one-imposed/?utm_term=.3665f274ea26
President Trump signed an order Monday aimed at cutting regulations on businesses, saying that agencies should eliminate at least two regulations for each new one.
The White House later released the text of the order, which added that the cost of any new regulation should be offset by eliminating regulations with the same costs to businesses. It excluded regulations regarding the military.
The impact of the order was difficult to judge based on the presidents remarks. It could be difficult to implement under current law and would concentrate greater power in the Office of Management and Budget, which already reviews federal regulations.
Moreover, any effort to scrap a regulation triggers its own process, complete with draft rules, comment periods, and regulation rewriting. That process can be subject to litigation. At the least, Trumps proposal would add a new time-consuming requirement for any new congressional legislation or agency regulation on topics as varied as banking, health care, environment, labor conditions and more.
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[font size="5"] My first policy is insanity. My second is inanity. [/font]
Bill Moyers: Donald Trump Is Turning American Democracy into a Demolition Derby
http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/bill-moyers-donald-trump-flattening-our-democracy-monster-truckWere a week into the Trump administration and its pretty obvious what hes up to. First, Donald Trump is running a demolition derby: He wants to demolish everything he doesnt like, and he doesnt like a lot, especially when it comes to government.
Like one of those demolition drivers on a speedway, he keeps ramming his vehicle against all the others, especially government policies and programs and agencies that protect people who dont have his wealth, power or privilege. Affordable health care for working people? Smash it. Consumer protection against predatory banks and lenders? Run over it. Rules and regulations that rein in rapacious actors in the market? Knock em down. Fair pay for working people? Crush it. And on and on.
Trump came to Washington to tear the government down for parts, and as far as we can tell, he doesnt seem to have anything at all in mind to replace it except turning back the clock to when business took what it wanted and left behind desperate workers, dirty water and polluted air.
In this demolition derby, Trump seems to have the wholehearted support of the Republican Party, which loathes government as much as it worships the market as god. Remember Thomas Franks book, The Wrecking Crew? Published in 2008, it remains one of the best political books of the past quarter-century. Frank took the measure of an unholy alliance: the century-old business crusade against government, the conservative ideology that looks on government as evil (except when its enriching its allies), and the Republican Party of George W. Bush and Karl Rove the one that had just produced eight years of crony capitalism and private plunder.
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4 those who enjoy good singing, She by Jack Jones (much better that Elvis Costello) w some orchest'n
CAUTION: THis is NOT rock and roll!
A trace of pleasure or regret
Maybe my treasure or the price I have to pay
She maybe the song that Salome sings
Maybe the chill that autumn brings
Maybe a hundred different things
Within the measure of a day
She may be the beauty or the beast
May be the famine or the feast,
May turn each day into a heaven or a hell
She may be the mirror of my dream
A smile reflected in a stream
She may not be what she may seem
Inside her shell
She who always seems so happy in a crowd
Whose eyes can be so private and proud
No one's allowed to see them when they cry
She may be the love that cannot hope to last
May come to me from shadows of the past
That I remember 'till the day I die
She may be the reason I survive
The why and wherefore I'm alive
The one I'll care for through the rough and ready years
Me I'll take her laughter and her tears
And make them all my souvenirs
For where she goes I've got to be
The meaning of my life is she
Read more: Charles Aznavour - She Lyrics | MetroLyrics
Diamond vise turns hydrogen into a metal, potentially ending 80-year quest (check out whose reading)
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/01/diamond-vise-turns-hydrogen-metal-potentially-ending-80-year-questLast October, Harvard University physicist Isaac Silvera invited a few colleagues to stop by his lab to glimpse something that may not exist anywhere else in the universe. Word got around, and the next morning there was a line. Throughout the day, hundreds filed in to peer through a benchtop microscope at a reddish silver dot trapped between two diamond tips. Silvera finally closed shop at 6 p.m. to go home. "It took weeks for the excitement to die down," Silvera says.
That excitement swirled because by squeezing hydrogen to pressures well beyond those in the center of Earth, Silvera and his postdoc Ranga Dias had seen a hint that it had morphed into a solid metal, capable of conducting electricity. "If it's true it would be fantastic," says Reinhard Boehler, a physicist at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, D.C. "This is something we as a community have been pushing to see for decades."
The feat, reported online this week in Science, is more than an oddity. Solid metallic hydrogen is thought to be a superconductor, able to conduct electricity without resistance. It may even be metastable, meaning that like diamond, also formed at high pressures, the metallic hydrogen would maintain its stateand even its superconductivityonce brought back to room temperatures and pressures.
Still, claims of solid metallic hydrogen have come and gone before, and some experts want more proof. "From our point of view it's not convincing," says Mikhail Eremets, who is pursuing solid metallic hydrogen at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz, Germany. Others in the contentious field are downright hostile to the result. "The word garbage cannot really describe it," says Eugene Gregoryanz, a high-pressure physicist at the University of Edinburgh, who objects to several of the experiment's procedures.
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Look whose reading Dr. Silvera's research:
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Isaac_Silvera/stats
Institution ....................................No. of Reads
Center for High Pressure Science
and Technology Advanced Research............. 13
Pudong, China
Harvard University .....................................9
Cambridge, United States
Technische Universität Dortmund ................. 9
Dortmund, Germany
By country:
Germany .............................................1,128
United States ......................................... 351
India .................................................... 124
China ....................................................113
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I hope our scientific community isn't missing something here.....
The State Departments entire senior administrative team just resigned
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/josh-rogin/wp/2017/01/26/the-state-departments-entire-senior-management-team-just-resigned/?utm_term=.a47a94348645Secretary of State Rex Tillersons job running the State Department just got considerably more difficult. The entire senior level of management officials resigned Wednesday, part of an ongoing mass exodus of senior Foreign Service officers who dont want to stick around for the Trump era.
Tillerson was actually inside the State Departments headquarters in Foggy Bottom on Wednesday, taking meetings and getting the lay of the land. I reported Wednesday morning that the Trump team was narrowing its search for his No. 2, and that it was looking to replace the State Departments long-serving undersecretary for management, Patrick Kennedy. Kennedy, who has been in that job for nine years, was actively involved in the transition and was angling to keep that job under Tillerson, three State Department officials told me.
Then suddenly on Wednesday afternoon, Kennedy and three of his top officials resigned unexpectedly, four State Department officials confirmed. Assistant Secretary of State for Administration Joyce Anne Barr, Assistant Secretary of State for Consular Affairs Michele Bond and Ambassador Gentry O. Smith, director of the Office of Foreign Missions, followed him out the door. All are career Foreign Service officers who have served under both Republican and Democratic administrations.
Kennedy will retire from the Foreign Service at the end of the month, officials said. The other officials could be given assignments elsewhere in the Foreign Service.
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Making It Up As They Go: Trump Team Now Pretending They Never Proposed 20% Wall Tax
[font size="3"]It's clear the White House doesn't have a clue what they're doing and it seems to span all levels of the administration[/font]
http://www.politicususa.com/2017/01/26/making-go-trump-team-abandons-plan-fund-wall-20-tax.html
Just hours after White House spokesman Sean Spicer said Donald Trumps proposed border wall would be funded by a 20 percent tax on goods coming into the U.S., the administration is backing away, telling reporters that they were just suggesting one way to fund it.
Our job right now isnt to roll something out or be prescriptive, Spicer said not long after rolling out the idea aboard Air Force One. Its to show that there are ways that the wall could be paid for. Full stop. Thats it.
The full Spicer walk-back:
[blockquote style="border:1px solid #000000;"]
Cameron Joseph Verified account
?@cam_joseph
.@PressSec clarifies remarks on Mexico tariff, says they werent supposed to be prescriptive," from the pool report I just filed:
5:34 PM - 26 Jan 2017
As Jason Easley noted earlier, the Trump spokesman had initially put forward the plan as if it was already in motion, saying that the 20 percent import tax was taking shape.
What likely happened, though, is that the administration saw the immediate backlash that ensued once Spicer made the first announcement. After all, Trump seems to spend most of his day watching cable news, and the response to the plan wasnt good.
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Trump pressured Park Service to find proof for his claims about inauguration crowd -- ROFL!!!!
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-pressured-park-service-to-back-up-his-claims-about-inauguration-crowd/2017/01/26/12a38cb8-e3fc-11e6-ba11-63c4b4fb5a63_story.html?hpid=hp_hp-top-table-main_trumpcall725p%3Ahomepage%2Fstory&utm_term=.4dd15bb48ce6On the morning after Donald Trumps inauguration, acting National Park Service director Michael T. Reynolds received an extraordinary summons: The new president wanted to talk to him.
In a Saturday phone call, Trump personally ordered Reynolds to produce additional photographs of the previous days crowds on the National Mall, according to three individuals who have knowledge of the conversation. The president believed that they might prove that the media had lied in reporting that attendance had been no better than average.
Trump also expressed anger over a retweet sent from the agencys account, in which side-by-side photographs showed far fewer people at his swearing-in than had shown up to see Barack Obamas inaugural in 2009.
According to one account, Reynolds had been contacted by the White House and given a phone number to call. When he dialed it, he was told to hold for the president.
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?1470965683
The leaks coming out of the Trump White House cast the president as a clueless child
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2017/01/26/the-leaks-coming-out-the-trump-white-house-cast-the-boss-as-a-clueless-child/?utm_term=.6a66923f21abAll White Houses leak. Sometimes the leaks are big, sometimes small. But there are always people willing to talk to reporters about the real story or about why the chief executive made a mistake in regards to some decision he made.
That said, I've never seen so much leaking so quickly and with such disdain for the president as I have in the first six days of Donald Trump's presidency.
Two recent examples:
1. This from the New York Times today on Trump's impulsiveness:
Mr. Trumps advisers say that his frenzied if admittedly impulsive approach appeals to voters because it shows that he is a man of action. Those complaining about his fixation with fictional voter fraud or crowd counts at his inauguration, in their view, are simply seeking ways to undercut his legitimacy.
Yet some of his own advisers also privately worry about his penchant for picking unnecessary fights and drifting off message. They talk about taking away his telephone or canceling his Twitter account, only to be dismissed by a president intent on keeping his own outlets to the world.
2. This from WaPo on Trump's inauguration crowd estimates:
Trumps advisers suggested that he could push back in a simple tweet. Thomas J. Barrack Jr., a Trump confidant and the chairman of the Presidential Inaugural Committee, offered to deliver a statement addressing the crowd size.
But Trump was adamant, aides said. Over the objections of his aides and advisers who urged him to focus on policy and the broader goals of his presidency the new president issued a decree: He wanted a fiery public response, and he wanted it to come from his press secretary.
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America's Shame: what Googling 'Trump corruption' gets you(those who sat out th election please note
We have 100 days to stop Donald Trump from systemically corrupting our institutions - Matthew Yglesias, Vox.comThe country has entered a dangerous period. The president-elect is the least qualified man to ever hold high office. He also operated the least transparent campaign of the modern era. He gave succor and voice to bigoted elements on a scale not seen in two generations. He openly praised dictators not as allies but as dictators and threatened to use the powers of his office to discipline the media.
He also has a long history of corrupt behavior, and his business holdings pose staggering conflicts of interest that are exacerbated by his lack of financial disclosure. But while most journalists and members of the opposition party think they understand the threat of Trump-era corruption, they are in fact drastically underestimating it. When we talk about corruption in the modern United States, we have in mind what Andrei Shleifer and Robert Vishny define as the sale by government officials of government property for personal gain.
This is the classic worry about campaign contributions or revolving doors the fear that wealthy interests can give money to public officials and in exchange receive favorable treatment from the political system. But in a classic essay on The Concept of Systemic Corruption in American History, the economist John Joseph Wallis reminds us that in the Revolutionary Era and during the founding of the republic, Americans worried about something different. Not the venal corruption we are accustomed to thinking about, but what he calls systemic corruption. He writes that 18th-century thinkers worried much more that the king and his ministers were manipulating grants of economic privileges to secure political support for a corrupt and unconstitutional usurpation of government powers.
We are used to corruption in which the rich buy political favor. What we need to learn to fear is corruption in which political favor becomes the primary driver of economic success.
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Trumps history of corruption is mind-boggling. So why is Clinton supposedly the corrupt one? - WaPo .... a good question for M$M-TV to answer
In Donald Trumps Washington, corruption will be utterly shameless - WaPo
What it means when Trump talks about 'corruption' - The Hill
The Most Corrupt Candidate Ever Is Donald Trump - Jonathan Chait, New York magazine
The Many Scandals of Donald Trump: A Cheat Sheet - The Atlantic
While the world is tackling corruption, Trump's America is taking a step backward
DT has deligitimized himself by acting as if he received a mandate, instead of losing the democratic
election to Hillary Clinton. Just because he won a rigged election (Electoral college proportional disenfranchisement of millions of Americans) he wants to ignore how the electorate voted. Instead of a moving toward a moderation of his policies, he's going ahead as if he won a landslide victory instead of losing the popular vote.
Issues Where Trumps Cabinet Picks and Most Americans Differ - NYT
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Member since: Wed Mar 3, 2010, 05:25 PMNumber of posts: 6,436