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David Frum‏Verified account
@davidfrum
Time should give it to Hillary, just to mess with him

Koch Lobbyists and Opus Dei — Who’s Dropping in on Trump Budget Czar Mick Mulvaney?
The influential OMB director’s door is open to corporate and conservative interests, according to logs that the White House fought to keep secret.

One of President Donald Trump’s top cabinet officials has met with a long list of lobbyists, corporate executives and wealthy people with business interests before the government, according to calendars the Trump administration fought to keep secret.

The calendars for Mick Mulvaney, the former South Carolina congressman who now runs the White House Office of Management and Budget, offer a glimpse of who has access to the highest levels of the Trump administration.

Among those visiting Mulvaney: Trump friend and casino magnate Steve Wynn; a flurry of officials from the conservative Heritage Foundation; a string of health care and Wall Street CEOs; lobbyists for Koch Industries; a cryptocurrency evangelist; and a prominent member of the Catholic group Opus Dei.

Does anyone have a good take on why Tillerson seems hell-bent on de-stabilizing and disempowering the working of the State Department?

Do you really not see the difference?

Please tell me - are you proud of this president?

Apparently, while in prayer, God contacted Donald Trump and advised that Trump would probably be the Messiah.

I've noticed that Bill O'Reilly doesn't get mentioned much either.

Some good theories in the comments section.

Hard to accept that some factotum might actually be better informed than a real estate developer or a CEO in the fossil fuel industry.

The charge against Clarence Thomas was thoroughly investigated on TV for a week. Nothing was left to chance.

For more than five hours, Attorney General Jeff Sessions sat in a hearing room on Capitol Hill this month, fending off inquiries on Washington’s two favorite topics: President Trump and Russia.

But legislators spent little time asking Sessions about the dramatic and controversial changes in policy he has made since taking over the top law enforcement job in the United States nine months ago.

Former RNC chairman Michael Steele (@MichaelSteele) joins us for a live conversation from the Texas Tribune Festival in Austin, Tx. We discuss why Steele no longer recognizes the Republican party [10:00], whether he sees Trump as an existential threat to American democracy [43:00], and why those three words “We The People” mean so much to him [50:40].
"Can't countenance the bullshit anymore"

I grew up in the 1950s, an era when many believed that our society would inevitably progress toward ever greater economic equality. Desperate poverty would recede, it was assumed, as new federal programs addressed the needs of those at the very bottom of the ladder and as economic growth created new jobs. The average CEO at the time earned only twenty times as much as the average worker, and during the Eisenhower administration the marginal tax rate for the highest earners was 91 percent. Today, the goal of equality appears to be receding. The top marginal tax rate is only 39 percent, far below what it was during the Eisenhower years, and most Republicans would like to lower it even more. Employers now make 271 times as much as the average worker, and half the children in American schools are officially classified by the federal government as low-income and eligible for free or reduced-price lunch. Union membership peaked in the mid-1950s and has declined ever since; the largest unions today are in the public sector and only about 7 percent of private sector workers belong to a union.

... In uncatalogued stacks of papers she came across personal correspondence between Buchanan and the billionaire Republican donor Charles Koch.

What she pieced together, she writes, was a plan “to train a new generation of thinkers to push back against Brown and the changes in constitutional thought and federal policy that had enabled it.” This was indeed a bold project: most mainstream economists in the postwar era had long accepted Keynesian doctrines that affirmed the power of the federal government to regulate the economy and protect the rights of workers to organize in unions. Buchanan’s rejection of governmental actions that he thought infringed on individual liberty and his defense of states’ rights gave intellectual ammunition to those who opposed both Keynesian economics and federal interventions in the states to enforce desegregation.