monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

Using Twitter on Christmas Eve to intimidate a witness (McCabe) in a criminal investigation is not a very Christian way to celebrate the holiday. But it does make Mr. Mueller's job easier and that's a nice thing to do. Merry Christmas!
- Richard W. Painter (@RWPUSA) December 24, 2017

When President George W. Bush presided over the Kennedy Center awards for the final time, in 2008, one of the honorees was Barbra Streisand, a vocal critic of his policies. After Mr. Bush read her biography, he added, “She’s also been known to speak her mind.” The audience laughed, then applauded. Ms. Streisand later wrote: “President Bush gave me his signature wink and mouthed, ‘We showed ’em.’ I guess in some small way, he and I proved that we could agree to disagree, and, for that weekend, art transcended politics.” The wink and the joke were actually profound — they signaled a functional democracy.

It was a holiday weekend, but President Donald Trump and rival Bernie Sanders didn’t exactly exchange greeting cards.

Instead, the political foes clashed via Twitter over the nation’s new tax legislation, which Trump signed into law Friday.

“Today, it was my great honor to sign the largest TAX CUTS and reform in the history of our country,” the president tweeted, soon after signing the $1.5 trillion bill.

On Saturday, Trump touted the plan as the culmination of a successful first year in the Oval Office.

“The Tax Cut/Reform Bill, including Massive Alaska Drilling and the Repeal of the highly unpopular Individual Mandate, brought it all together as to what an incredible year we had,” he tweeted.

Sanders, a U.S. senator from Vermont, prefaced his weekend tweets by posing a question Thursday.

“Doesn’t it tell us a lot about Republican priorities,” Sanders asked, “when the tax breaks for corporations are permanent, while the tax cuts for working families expire at the end of 8 years?”

Then on Saturday, Sanders poked fun at reports that Trump had told friends during a Mar-a-Lago dinner in Florida on Friday night that, “You all just got a lot richer.”

“At least Trump is finally telling the truth about his tax bill,” Sanders wrote.

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump has prematurely declared "Obamacare" dead and displayed a misunderstanding of where the money comes from to make the health law work.

A look at his remarks Wednesday about the tax plan he will soon sign into law and its effect on President Barack Obama's health insurance overhaul:

TRUMP: "Obamacare has been repealed in this bill."

THE FACTS: It hasn't. The tax plan ends fines for people who don't carry health insurance. That's a major change but far from the dismantling of the law.

Other marquee components of Obama's law remain, such as the Medicaid expansion serving low-income adults, protections that shield people with pre-existing medical conditions from being denied coverage or charged higher premiums, income-based subsidies for consumers buying individual health insurance policies, the requirement that insurers cover "essential" health benefits, and the mandate that larger employers provide coverage to their workers or face fines.

Also, the tax bill doesn't repeal fines for uninsured individuals until the start of 2019, meaning the "individual mandate" is still in force for next year unless the administration acts to waive the penalties.

TRUMP: "When you add it all up together, and then you add two things — the individual mandate is being repealed. When the individual mandate is being repealed, that means Obamacare is being repealed because they get their money from the individual mandate. "

THE FACTS: This is also wrong. The fines on people who don't carry health insurance only provide a small fraction of the financing for the program. Most of the money comes from higher taxes on upper-income people, cuts in Medicare payments to service providers, and other tax increases.

The Congressional Budget Office estimated that fines from uninsured people would total $3 billion this year, while the government's cost for the coverage provided under the health law would total about $117 billion.

From its inception, two things about special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation were clear: first, the White House’s biggest concern was that Mueller would follow the money; and second, Mueller is following the money.

It’s been seven months since Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein ordered Bob Mueller to take over the FBI’s counterintelligence probe into possible links between the Kremlin and people associated with the Trump campaign. Trump’s lawyers have long said they expected the probe to stay focused and end quickly. Instead, Mueller has assembled a team of prosecutors with expertise in handling financial investigations and white-collar crime, and obtained guilty pleas for crimes that weren’t committed during the election year.

And, most importantly, he’s sent a thinly veiled warning to the White House: No one’s finances are off limits. If 2017 had the president’s inner circle sweating, 2018 could feel like a sauna.

And no one may feel more heat than Paul Manafort. In Washington legal circles, there’s a broad expectation that Mueller will file what’s called a superseding indictment of Manafort and Rick Gates, his erstwhile business partner—and alleged partner in crime. Gates and Manafort both pleaded not guilty when Mueller’s team filed their indictment on Oct. 30. Legal experts say there may be more charges to come.

“I would expect a superseding indictment to come down relatively soon,” said Jonathan Turley, a professor at George Washington University’s law school.

“There was much in the narrative of the indictment that referenced crimes not charged,” he added. “Prosecutors will often issue a superseding indictment as the grand jury continues its work. There’s also a tactical reason for this, that superseding indictments tend to grind defendants a bit more over time.”

A superseding indictment would essentially replace the current indictment of Manafort. And in that current indictment, Mueller’s team hinted there was more to come. In particular, they hinted at potential tax charges for Manafort’s foreign financial transactions. Federal prosecutors can bring charges against any American who has money in a foreign bank account and doesn’t check a box on their tax forms disclosing it. The Manafort/Gates indictment describes financial behavior that may be liable for that kind of prosecution. And that’s an indicator that Mueller’s team may be preparing to formally charge both men with violating tax laws.

But they have to pay it back.

The federal government could do the same...

The neo-darwinists will be working 24/7 to discredit these claims, eh?

Quote:

This study was the first to prove RNA-mediated transfer of information from somatic (body) to germ cells (egg and sperm) (Cossetti et al., 2014), poking holes in the principle of the Weisman barrier, a previously forgone conclusion which posited that the information transmitted by egg and sperm to future generations remains independent of somatic cells and parental experience....

This confirms a long-discarded hypothesis of French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, who proposed that the features acquired over the life of an organism are transmitted to offspring.

For them the Wiesman barrier and the rejection of Lamarck is a fundamental article of faith which is crucial to their dogma and creed, ya know?

The federal government could do the same if those who hold its debt decided one day to call in their markers.