monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

Will Saletan‏Verified account @saletan 1h1 hour ago
We've long been told businessmen would run our gov't better than politicians do. Consider that hypothesis falsified.

Oliver Darcy‏Verified account @oliverdarcy 9h9 hours ago
Of note: @ericbolling has been removed from social media accounts for "The Specialists." Now just says hosted by @EboniKWilliams & @KatTimpf

Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump
Sexual pervert Anthony Weiner has zero business holding public office.
4/10/13, 4:12 PM

And when you're a star they let you do it. You can do anything…

Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything.

Populism: Trump administration style.

Quote:

Consumer groups are making a last ditch effort to stop the Trump administration from stripping nursing home residents and their families of the right to take facilities to court over alleged abuse, neglect or sexual assault.

The Hill
Finally, an administration who actually cares about the elderly, the weak, the ill and those with little power or wealth. The Christian ethos made manifest.

The Centers for Medicare & Medicare Services (CMS) announced plans in June to do away with an Obama-era rule that prohibited nursing homes that accept Medicare or Medicaid funds from including language in their resident contracts requiring that disputes be settled by a third party rather than a court.

The American Health Care Association (AHCA) and a group of nursing homes had sued CMS and the Department of Health and Human Services in October, claiming that the rule violated the Federal Arbitration Act, and that the agencies had overstepped their statutory authority in issuing the law. The AHCA said Congress has repeatedly rejected legislation to invalidate arbitration agreements.

CMS said it decided to reconsider the Obama rule after a federal district court judge in Mississippi issued an order in November temporarily blocking the rule from taking effect.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce fought back against the original rule, claiming that restricting arbitration would raise the cost of nursing home care and make it harder, and more costly, for residents to resolve disputes.

For many individual disputes, litigation in court is simply impractical. Litigation in court is procedurally complex, which means that non-lawyers need legal representation to have any hope of successfully navigating the system,” the chamber said in 2015 comments to the agency it provided The Hill.

“But many plaintiffs’ claims are too small to justify paying a lawyer to handle the matter and, in any event, most people do not have the resources to do so.”

Quote:

And when you're a star they let you do it. You can do anything…

Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything.

Baltimore's 'nobody kill anybody' weekend leaves at least 2 people dead

Baltimore has been marred by gun violence for years. The city has seen 204 murders by the end of July, a record number in the city's history, the Baltimore Sun reported.

Activist Erricka Bridgeford promoted the campaign as a "Baltimore ceasefire" and "Nobody kill anybody" weekend that began on Friday and ends Sunday night, garnering the support of thousands on social media since May.

But by Saturday, two men -- ages 24 and 37 -- were shot and killed in separate incidents just hours apart, according to the Baltimore Sun. Another man, 22, also suffered a gunshot wound to the arm.

The opinions of lawyers paid by WaPo to make money for WaPo are now the supreme law of the land, superseding the Supreme Court, Federal Statutes, and the Attorney General?

Who knew?

Reporters Not Being Pursued in Leak Investigations, Justice Dept. Says

WASHINGTON — Rod J. Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general, said on Sunday that the Justice Department was not pursuing reporters as part of its growing number of leak investigations, just two days after he and other department officials had appeared to signal a harsher line toward journalists.

“We don’t prosecute journalists for doing their jobs,” Mr. Rosenstein said on “Fox News Sunday.” “That’s not our goal here.”

He had declined to answer such a question on Friday, telling reporters who asked whether the department would prosecute reporters that he would not “comment on any hypotheticals.”

[...]

On Sunday, Mr. Rosenstein sought to clarify Mr. Sessions’s position.

“The attorney general has been very clear that we’re after the leakers, not the journalist,” Mr. Rosenstein said on Fox. “We’re after the people who are committing crimes.”

See that? The Justice Department says it's not going to prosecute those journalists. The Justice Department says it's going after the people who are committing crimes

On Sunday, Mr. Rosenstein left open the possibility that reporters could carry some legal responsibility for information published...

“Generally speaking, reporters who publish information are not committing a crime. But there might be a circumstance where they do,” Mr. Rosenstein said on Fox. “...I wouldn’t rule it out in the event that there were a case where a reporter was purposely violating the law.”

US Vice-President Mike Pence has dismissed as "disgraceful and offensive" a report suggesting he is preparing a run for president in 2020.
The New York Times said a "shadow campaign" had been set up by some Republicans on the assumption Donald Trump would not stand again.
Citing multiple sources, the article said Mr Pence had implied that he would plan to run if Mr Trump did not.
Mr Pence said the report was an attempt to divide the administration.
The Times story said the turmoil around the White House, including investigations into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia during last year's election, had prompted some Republicans to take steps "unheard-of so soon into a new administration".
Mr Pence, it said, had created an "independent power base" and set up a political fund-raising group.
In a statement, Mr Pence said: "The allegations in this article are categorically false.
"Whatever fake news may come our way, my entire team will continue to focus all our efforts to advance the president's agenda and see him re-elected in 2020. Any suggestion otherwise is both laughable and absurd."
Senior White House adviser Kellyanne Conway also dismissed the report as "complete fiction".
"It's absolutely true the vice president is getting ready for 2020 - for re-election as vice-president," she told ABC's This Week.
A New York Times spokeswoman stood by the article, saying: "We are confident in the accuracy of our reporting and will let the story speak for itself."

. . . and at the fact that in the first phone calls to other heads of state he was confessing that he never meant all that **** he said to his supporters at his campaign rallies. That's at least something, right?

Rosenstein said that reporters who publish information are not committing a crime.

I know it has to be disappointing for you that no journalist is going to be convicted for this...

North Korea has dismissed an offer of talks from the South as "insincere".
South Korean Foreign Minister Kang Kyung-wha had raised the issue with her North Korean counterpart Ri Yong Ho on the sidelines of a regional forum on Sunday in the Philippines.
North Korean state media later said there could be no negotiations over its controversial nuclear weapons programme while it faces threats from the US.
It also rejected fresh sanctions imposed by the UN on Saturday.
The KCNA state news agency said the sanctions were a "violent violation of our sovereignty" and vowed to take action.
The unanimous Security Council decision follows repeated missile tests by the North which have escalated tensions on the peninsula.
South Korean media reported that Ms Kang and Mr Ri shook hands in a brief and unarranged meeting at an official dinner event held by the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean) in the Philippine capital, Manila.
A South Korean foreign ministry official confirmed the meeting to the BBC.
South Korean news agency Yonhap reported Ms Kang as saying that Mr Ri's rejection of the talks proposal appeared to be connected with the new sanctions.
"I told him that [the two offers for talks] are an urgent matter that should be carried out immediately with any political agenda put aside and asked him to proactively react," she was quoted as saying.
The foreign minister of China, which is Pyongyang's closest ally, told journalists on Monday: "My feeling is that the North did not entirely reject the positive proposals raised by the South." Wang Yi added that China also supported the South's initiatives.
KCNA insisted on Monday that North Koreas would continue to its nuclear weapons programme and would "not put our self-defensive nuclear deterrent on the negotiating table" while it faces threats from the US.

Vice President Pence on Sunday sought to tamp down speculation that he is preparing for his own 2020 White House bid, characterizing the notion as “both laughable and absurd.”

“My entire team will continue to focus all our efforts to advance the President's agenda and see him re-elected in 2020,” Pence said in the statement in which he praised President Trump’s work on job creation, rebuilding the military and fighting terrorism.

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