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US President Donald Trump's boast that TV viewership for his speech to Congress this week was the "highest number in history" is under scrutiny.

Nielsen, which tracks US TV ratings, says Mr Trump's 45.6m viewers falls short of the numbers who tuned in to other State of the Union addresses.

Nielsen says Presidents Barack Obama, Bill Clinton and George W Bush all drew bigger ratings for their speeches.

Twitter said Mr Trump's speech attracted a record 4.5m tweets.

"Thank you for all of the nice compliments and reviews on the State of the Union speech," Mr Trump tweeted on Thursday morning.

"45.6 million people watched, the highest number in history."

But according to Nielsen data, Mr Obama's first official State of the Union speech in 2010 attracted 48 million viewers.

Mr Clinton's State of the Union pulled in a record 66.9 million television viewers in 1993.

Mr Bush pulled in 62.1 million in 2003.

About one quarter of total viewers watched the speech on Fox News, which Nielsen said received a total 11.5m viewers.

The Nielsen survey comprises data from 12 television networks and does not take into account those who watched online.

CNN said that roughly an hour into Mr Trump's speech, their video-streaming platform peaked at 321,000 simultaneous users.

It is not the first time Mr Trump's claims about audience figures have been questioned.

He estimated that 1.5 million people attended his inauguration speech at the National Mall in Washington DC last year.

But his then-press secretary's estimate gave Mr Trump a crowd size of around half that figure.

In a 2015 profile for Rolling Stone magazine, Mr Trump asserted that his own 757 plane was bigger than the presidential jet, Air Force One.

Air Force One is 225ft (68 metres); Mr Trump's plane is 153ft.

A federal appeals court has upheld the constitutionality of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's structure, a decision that preserves the agency's independence in the face of challenges from business interests and conservatives.

The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled 7-3 on Wednesday that a provision in the 2010 Dodd-Frank law that limits the president’s ability to remove the CFPB director during his or her five-year term does not violate the president’s authority to appoint and remove executive branch officers.

One might wonder why Trump would make an assertion that’s so easy to demonstrate as untrue. But the explanation for why he does so also comes easily. Trump is misrepresenting his ratings because Trump — who loves using numbers as a way of bolstering his exaggerations — has been misrepresenting his television ratings as exceptional for years and years.

One might wonder why Trump would make an assertion that’s so easy to demonstrate as untrue.

WASHINGTON — Aboard Air Force One on a flight home from Europe last July, President Trump and his advisers raced to cobble together a news release about a mysterious meeting at Trump Tower the previous summer between Russians and top Trump campaign officials. Rather than acknowledge the meeting’s intended purpose — to obtain political dirt about Hillary Clinton from the Russian government — the statement instead described the meeting as being about an obscure Russian adoption policy.

The statement, released in response to questions from The New York Times about the meeting, has become a focus of the inquiry by Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election. Prosecutors working for Mr. Mueller in recent months have questioned numerous White House officials about how the release came together — and about how directly Mr. Trump oversaw the process. Mr. Mueller’s team recently notified Mr. Trump’s lawyers that the Air Force One statement is one of about a dozen subjects that prosecutors want to discuss in a face-to-face interview of Mr. Trump that is still being negotiated.

The revelation of the meeting was striking: It placed the president’s son and his top campaign officials in direct contact with a Russian lawyer who promised damaging information on Mrs. Clinton, and an email to the president’s son emerged saying that the information was part of Russia’s effort to help the Trump campaign. The special counsel is investigating how those revelations were handled in real time in part because the president was involved in his administration’s response.

Some lawyers and witnesses who have sat in or been briefed on the interviews have puzzled over Mr. Mueller’s interest in the episode. Lying to federal investigators is a crime; lying to the news media is not. For that reason, some of Mr. Trump’s advisers argue that Mr. Mueller has no grounds to ask the president about the statement and say he should refuse to discuss it.

What is already clear is that, as Mr. Trump’s aides and family members tried over 48 hours to manage one of most consequential crises of the young administration, the situation quickly degenerated into something of a circular firing squad. They protected their own interests, shifted blame and potentially left themselves — and the president — legally vulnerable.

The latest witness to be called for an interview about the episode was Mark Corallo, who served as a spokesman for Mr. Trump’s legal team before resigning in July. Mr. Corallo received an interview request last week from the special counsel and has agreed to the interview, according to three people with knowledge of the request.

Mr. Corallo is planning to tell Mr. Mueller about a previously undisclosed conference call with Mr. Trump and Hope Hicks, the White House communications director, according to the three people. Mr. Corallo planned to tell investigators that Ms. Hicks said during the call that emails written by Donald Trump Jr. before the Trump Tower meeting — in which the younger Mr. Trump said he was eager to receive political dirt about Mrs. Clinton from the Russians — “will never get out.” That left Mr. Corallo with concerns that Ms. Hicks could be contemplating obstructing justice, the people said.

In a statement on Wednesday, a lawyer for Ms. Hicks strongly denied Mr. Corallo’s allegations.

“As most reporters know, it’s not my practice to comment in response to questions from the media. But this warrants a response,” said the lawyer, Robert P. Trout. “She never said that. And the idea that Hope Hicks ever suggested that emails or other documents would be concealed or destroyed is completely false.”

While speaking with a group of pastors in December, the leading Republican candidate for Senate in Missouri claimed that sex trafficking is the result of the sexual revolution in the 1960s and 1970s, despite the fact that sex trafficking has existed for as long as humanity has been keeping historical records.

“We have a human trafficking crisis in our state and in this city and in our country because people are willing to purchase women, young women, and treat them like commodities,” Missouri Attorney General Josh Hawley said in newly leaked audio first obtained by The Kansas City Star. “There is a market for it. Why is there? Because our culture has completely lost its way. The sexual revolution has led to exploitation of women on a scale that we would never have imagined, never have imagined.”

Oralloy is off the wall.

Missouri's governor, Eric Greitens, is facing growing controversy for using Confide, a messaging application that deletes messages after they are read, reports Cyrus Farivar at Ars Technica.

Two activists are heading to court this week, per the report, to ask for a temporary restraining order to stop the politician and his employees from using the app. They contend that its against state records law for Greitens and his staffers to use ephemeral messaging. Greitens is fighting that argument.


The bigger picture: The rise of encrypted and disappearing message apps has raised concerns about how easy it's become for public officials to communicate outside the view of the public. Last year, Axios was the first to report the increasing use of Confide by Republicans in Washington, including administration officials.

Trump seeks to screw over energy workers with massive cut to renewables program
White House seeks to gut energy programs with highest potential for job creation.

Your latest failure to point out any facts that I was wrong about is noted.

Alex Jones tells listeners to self-investigate “leftist churches” where he says people are planning a violent revolution
Jones: “You’ve got to go to leftist churches. We’ve all got to engage them, because they’re powering up right now a violent revolution. We have to infiltrate every one of their organizations now”

Your continued reposting of absolute nonsense which has been amply pointed out as bilge is noted

On Wednesday, Alex Jones claimed that an incident in which a train carrying GOP lawmakers crashed into a truck earlier that day was not simply an accident that claimed one life. Rather, he said it was a "kamikaze" attack and evidence that the U.S. is currently in the midst of a "civil war".

And "woke"? Are you not aware how your regular adoption of popular emerging right wing nomenclature isn't serving you well?