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Trump Administration Tag

Posted by Mike LaChance on June 18, 2017 18 Comments
If you're wondering why President Trump's Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos needs millions of dollars in security, this is one of the reasons. DeVos is trying to make improvements in her department but is being predictably cast as someone who doesn't care about civil rights. Erica L. Green writes at the New York Times:
Education Dept. Says It Will Scale Back Civil Rights Investigations The Department of Education is scaling back investigations into civil rights violations at the nation’s public schools and universities, easing off mandates imposed by the Obama administration that the new leadership says have bogged down the agency.

Posted by Leslie Eastman on June 18, 2017 14 Comments
As we approach the 150 day mark for President Donald Trump's first term, I thought in might be useful to have a retrospective post about how the American press has presented his record, outside of Twitter, Russia and Comey hearings...and highlight some of his underreported victories. Professor Jacobson so noted, the news cycle is essentially over for the assassination attempt on the Republican congressional baseball team. To be sure, if the Democratic congressional representatives had been targeted (and the assassin found with a list of Democratic targets in his pocket), this would have been "top of the fold" for many more weeks to come.

Posted by Mike LaChance on June 15, 2017 12 Comments
Last night, Professor Jacobson pointed out that the shooting in Virginia yesterday has been in the works for a long time. Our political climate is like a powder keg and people on the left have been whipped up into a frenzy. That might explain why Trump's Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos requires so much security. When was the last time that a person in this role required such protection? Do people on the left who despise DeVos even know who was Education Secretary under Obama? Emma Brown and Devlin Barrett reported at the Washington Post in April:
The cost of Betsy DeVos’s security detail — nearly $8 million over nearly 8 months Federal marshals are protecting Education Secretary Betsy DeVos at a cost to her agency of nearly $8 million over nearly eight months, according to the U.S. Marshals Service.

Posted by Fuzzy Slippers on May 27, 2017 20 Comments
In a move that is sure to go uncelebrated on the regressive left and to leave many Trump supporters scratching their heads, the State Department has lifted the limit on the number of refugees admitted to the U. S.   This change will result in almost twice as many refugees flooding into our country each day. It is not clear at this time if President Trump is aware of or has approved this change of policy, though it seems highly unlikely he would be unaware of such a substantive change.

Posted by Fuzzy Slippers on May 21, 2017 19 Comments
Back when Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) still claimed to be a Republican, she came up with the idea of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). That idea, however, morphed into a partisan Democrat operation under Obama, with a structure that sought to exclude itself from Executive or Congressional oversight.  The constitutionality of the CFPB will be decided, yet again, on Wednesday by the D. C. Circuit Court.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on May 11, 2017 19 Comments
I was a guest on the Crane Durham Nothing But Truth  radio show on Wednesday night, May 10, 2017, talking about the firing of James Comey the prior Tuesday. My interview is almost 30 minutes, and is embedded at the bottom of this post. In the day since the interview there have been further developments which support many of the points I made. In particular, Donald Trump has been interviewed on NBC and focused heavily on Comey's media presence: "He’s a showboat, he’s a grandstander." That's a point I made in the interview in similar (but not identical) terms.

Posted by Leslie Eastman on April 15, 2017 12 Comments
Shortly after his inauguration, President Donald Trump signed a series of executive orders, including one that led to a complete halt in the hiring of federal workers with few exceptions. There has been a slight melting in that freeze, as a more tailored approach is implemented.
Mick Mulvaney, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, described the new stay on hiring as a more "surgical" freeze than the first.

Posted by Mary Chastain on April 14, 2017 43 Comments
President Donald Trump has decided not to release White House visitor records, breaking from former President Barack Obama. The Wall Street Journal reported:
Under President Donald Trump’s policy, formally announced on Friday, the U.S. Secret Service will maintain visitor logs only for certain executive branch offices, including the Office of Management and Budget and the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative. Those logs won’t be regularly released, but rather will be subject to requests under federal open records laws.

Posted by Kemberlee Kaye on April 12, 2017 20 Comments
According to a report by the Washington Post, the FBI obtained a FISA warrant last summer to monitor former Trump adviser, Carter Page. WaPo's report is based on information provided by anonymous sources not at liberty to discuss the investigation. The FBI and DOJ believed Page may have been acting as a foreign agent. So far, this is the closest public evidence that there may have been Trump camp/Russian collaboration, but even at that, obtaining a warrant is not indicative of collusion, simply a suspicion of.

Posted by Kemberlee Kaye on April 05, 2017 6 Comments
A recent revamp of Trump's National Security Council cut former Breitbart News Chief Executive Steve Bannon's role entirely. Bannon's role as a National Security Advisor was controversial from the get-go.

Posted by Leslie Eastman on April 01, 2017 20 Comments
The election of President Donald Trump continues to have a profound influence on this country in nearly every area of government. The upcoming census of the American people is a good example of a Trump-era change that is going mostly unnoticed. In 2012, Legal Insurrection reported that the Obama administration was proposing sexual orientation/gender identity questions for the 2020 census.  Such questions have never been included in any U. S. Census.

Posted by Leslie Eastman on March 11, 2017 12 Comments
The Environmental Protection Agency's new chief is now on-the-record as declaring that the life-sustaining gas, carbon dioxide, is not responsible for "global warming".
Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt said Thursday he does not believe carbon dioxide is a primary contributor to global warming. "I think that measuring with precision human activity on the climate is something very challenging to do and there's tremendous disagreement about the degree of impact, so no, I would not agree that it's a primary contributor to the global warming that we see," he told CNBC's "Squawk Box."
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