(07-05-2017, 10:26 PM)StLucieBengal Wrote: This always happens in the WH.   Difference is that Trump isn't going on and on about a gender pay gap.   That's the dems.

(07-06-2017, 10:12 AM)Dill Wrote: How about the Freedom Caucus?

(07-06-2017, 10:34 AM)GMDino Wrote: Didja notice how the gap was closing...until it jumped suddenly under Trump?

(07-06-2017, 10:45 AM)StLucieBengal Wrote: Trump has never that he would do anything about the alleged pay gap.   That's always been a democrat issue.... and it's an issue when the WH has a pay gap under a president who campaigned against the phantom pay gap.

Quote:Republican presidential nominee, Donald Trump, supports pay equality at least in theory. However, in practice it’s hard to pin him down. Mr. Trump claims to “cherish” women, often using his wife, Melania, and daughter, Ivanka, as examples of his feminism within the Trump organization, yet his official position on the gender pay gap remains elusive.

Mr. Trump has no official policy for the wage gap listed on his campaign website. He told MSNBC hosts Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough that “women should have absolute access to capital.” He then added, “If they do the same job, they should get the same pay.” Yet his campaign has no official policy on pay equality. Moreover, according to data examined by The Boston Globe, the Trump presidential campaign employs few women and pays them less than their male colleagues. In fact, one former staffer is suing the Trump organization for sex discrimination. In the complaint, the former staffer alleges she was paid less and not allowed to plan or speak at rallies unlike her male colleagues.

(07-06-2017, 10:51 AM)GMDino Wrote: True.  He had no official policy.  (Not that that matters as he has changed his official policies over and over.)

However:

http://www.scarymommy.com/hillary-clinton-donald-trump-equal-pay-equal-work/





Nonetheless saying it is a non-issue for the GOP while the gap triples under them is pretty telling. 

(07-06-2017, 11:14 AM)StLucieBengal Wrote: No officlal policy on pay gap..... thanks for making my point.   You could have just as easily posted .....  you are right.

(07-06-2017, 11:17 AM)GMDino Wrote: But that would have ignored the other stuff Trump said about equal pay.

(07-07-2017, 12:12 AM)Dill Wrote: I think Lucie wants to ignore that stuff.

More DOE's Rick Perry at West Virginia coal plant: "Regulations don't mean anything other than this is going to be more cost. " pic.twitter.com/Tq6akziDEV

— Taylor Kuykendall (@taykuy) July 7, 2017

Quote:Trump Recertifies Iran Nuclear Deal, but Only Reluctantly



President Trump and Vice President Mike Pence on the South Lawn on Monday.CreditTom Brenner/The New York Times

WASHINGTON — President Trump agreed on Monday to certify again that Iran is complying with an international nuclear agreement that he has strongly criticized, but only after hours of arguing with his top national security advisers, briefly upending a planned announcement as a legal deadline loomed.

Mr. Trump has repeatedly condemned the deal brokered by President Barack Obama as a dangerous capitulation to Iran, but six months into his presidency he has not abandoned it. The decision on Monday was the second time his administration certified Iran’s compliance, and aides said a frustrated Mr. Trump had told his security team that he would not keep doing so indefinitely.

Administration officials announced the certification on Monday evening while emphasizing that they intended to toughen enforcement of the deal, apply new sanctions on Iran for its support of terrorism and other destabilizing activities, and negotiate with European partners to craft a broader strategy to increase pressure on Tehran. Aides said Mr. Trump had insisted on such actions before agreeing to the consensus recommendation of his national security team.

“The president has made very clear that he thought this was a bad deal — a bad deal for the United States,” Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, told reporters at a briefing on Monday before the decision was made.

By law, the administration is required to notify Congress every 90 days whether Iran is living up to the deal, which limited its nuclear program in exchange for the lifting of many international sanctions. With the latest deadline approaching on Monday, the issue set off a sharp debate between the president and his own team, starting last week, aides said.

At an hourlong meeting last Wednesday, all of the president’s major security advisers recommended he preserve the Iran deal for now.
Among those who spoke out were Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson; Defense Secretary Jim Mattis; Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster, the national security adviser; and Gen. Joseph F. Dunford Jr., the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, according to an official who described internal discussions on the condition of anonymity. The official said Mr. Trump had spent 55 minutes of the meeting telling them he did not want to.

Mr. Trump did not want to certify Iran’s compliance the first time around either, but was talked into it on the condition that his team come back with a new strategy to confront Tehran, the official said. Last week, advisers told the president they needed more time to work with allies and Congress. Mr. Trump responded that before he would go along, they had to meet certain conditions, said the official, who would not outline what the conditions were.

While Mr. Trump headed to Paris and then spent the weekend in New Jersey, his team developed a strategy that it hoped would satisfy him and planned to notify Congress and make the case publicly on Monday. But even as allies were quietly being informed, Mr. Trump balked when he heard the plan at his morning security briefing, the official said. The argument continued during a separate meeting with
Mr. Tillerson as Mr. Trump pressed for more action, the official said.

Suddenly, a background briefing to announce the decision was postponed and Mr. Spicer was sent out to assure reporters that a decision would be coming “very shortly,” while aides scrambled to satisfy Mr. Trump. He agreed only late in the day after a final meeting in the Oval Office, in effect telling his advisers that he was giving them another chance and this time they had to deliver. The announcement was then rescheduled for the early evening and a notice was sent to Congress to continue withholding nuclear-related sanctions against Iran.

Under the agreement, the United States can still penalize Iran for behavior such as its development of ballistic missiles or support for terrorism, but it cannot simply reapply the same sanctions that were lifted under a different guise. Iran has the right to appeal to a joint committee and make the argument that the United States is in violation.


European officials have long argued that the agreement was intended only to restrict Iran’s nuclear program, not the panoply of other issues. If the international community were to do more to confront Tehran over its efforts to destabilize neighbors in the Middle East, European officials have said, it would be better to face an Iran without nuclear weapons. They have shown little enthusiasm for revisiting the deal, much less undercutting it.

That Mr. Trump’s actions will satisfy conservatives who have been urging him to rip up the Iran deal seemed unlikely. In a column in The Hill, a Capitol Hill newspaper, John R. Bolton, a former ambassador to the United Nations who has interviewed with the president for several jobs in the administration, argued that the nuclear agreement “remains palpably harmful to American national interests.”
Withdrawing from it, he said, “should be the highest priority.”

Israel and its supporters in Washington have also bristled at a new cease-fire in southwest Syria that was brokered by Mr. Trump and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, fearing it will leave Iran as a major player on the ground in the six-year civil war. Mr. Spicer said the administration would address that with Israel. “There’s a shared interest that we have with Israel, making sure that Iran does not gain a foothold, military base-wise, in southern Syria,” Mr. Spicer said.

Tehran’s clerical government argues that Mr. Trump has already violated the nuclear agreement by pressuring businesses not to engage with Iran even though the nuclear sanctions have been lifted. “That is violation of not the spirit but of the letter of the J.C.P.O.A. of the nuclear deal,” Mohammad Javad Zarif, Iran’s foreign minister, said on CNN’s “Fareed Zakaria GPS” on Sunday, using the initials for the agreement.

Mr. Zarif, visiting New York, told a gathering of the Council on Foreign Relations on Monday that he has yet to talk with Mr. Tillerson, unlike his frequent conversations with former Secretary of State John Kerry, with whom he negotiated the nuclear accord.

In an interview on Monday with Jacob Heilbrunn, editor of The National Interest, a foreign policy journal, Mr. Zarif raised the prospect that Iran would be the one to back out. “If it comes to a major violation, or what in the terms of the nuclear deal is called significant nonperformance, then Iran has other options available, including withdrawing from the deal,” he said.

That would be an outcome welcomed by the Trump administration. Top officials like Mr. Tillerson and Mr. Mattis have expressed concern about the effect on American relations with European allies if Mr. Trump were to unilaterally pull out, especially after he already announced his intention to back out of the Paris climate change accord that Europeans strongly support.

But some advisers to the president argue that if they can provoke Iran into being the one to scrap the nuclear deal, it will leave the United States in a stronger position.

Mr. Trump has aligned the United States with Sunni Arab states, like Saudi Arabia, as well as Israel in their mutual struggle with Shiite-led Iran over control of the Middle East. His administration has already announced modest new sanctions against Iran, but nothing on the scale of those imposed before the nuclear agreement.

(07-18-2017, 04:22 PM)GMDino Wrote: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/17/us/politics/trump-iran-nuclear-deal-recertify.html



Another flip.  A correct one...IMHO...but will his base understand?

(07-05-2017, 08:07 PM)GMDino Wrote: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/07/05/white-house-gender-pay-gap-more-than-triples-under-trump/?utm_term=.0cd30bdaef22


In President Barack Obama's first year, the gender pay gap was about 16 percent, according to an earlier Wonkblog analysis. It peaked at 18 percent in 2014.

(07-06-2017, 10:34 AM)GMDino Wrote: Didja notice how the gap was closing...until it jumped suddenly under Trump?

(07-18-2017, 08:53 PM)TheLeonardLeap Wrote: It went up under Obama as of 6 years into his Presidency according to your own source material. Lemme screw you over 75% of the time, then try and make it right for the last 25%, so you can make me out to be heroic, too.

:andy:

(07-18-2017, 08:11 PM)Dill Wrote: Wait, where's the flip?

(07-18-2017, 09:18 PM)GMDino Wrote: Trump said it was awful deal...then he went ahead and extended it.

Quote:Robert Reich
1 hr · [url=https://www.facebook.com/RBReich/posts/1639697439376179#][/url]

Update for Trump Voters

1. He told you he’d repeal Obamacare and replace it with something “beautiful.” You bought it. But he didn’t repeal and he didn’t replace. (Just as well: His plan would have knocked 22 million off health insurance, including many of you.)

2. He told you he’d cut your taxes. You bought it. But tax “reform” is stalled. And if it ever moves, the only ones whose taxes will be cut are the wealthy.

3. He told you he’d invest $1 billion in our nation’ crumbling infrastructure. You bought it. But his infrastructure plan, which was really a giveaway to rich investors, is also stalled.

4. He said he’d clean the Washington swamp. You bought it. But he's brought into his administration more billionaires, CEOs, and Wall Street moguls than in any administration in history, to make laws that will enrich their businesses, along with former lobbyists, lawyers and consultants who are crafting new policies for the same industries they recently worked for.

5. He said he’d use his business experience to whip the White House into shape. You bought it. But he created the most chaotic, dysfunctional, back-stabbing White House in modern history, in which no one is in charge.

6. He said he’d close “special interest loopholes that have been so good for Wall Street investors but unfair to American workers." You bought it. But he picked a Wall Street financier Stephen Schwarzman to run his strategic and policy forum, who compares closing those loopholes to Hitler’s invasion of Poland.

7. He told you he’d “bring down drug prices” by making deals with drug companies. You bought it. But now the White House says that promise is “inoperative.”

8. He said that on Day One he’d label China a “currency manipulator.” You bought it. But then he met with China’s president and declared "China is not a currency manipulator."

9. He said he wouldn’t bomb Syria. You bought it. But then he bombed Syria.

10. He called Barack Obama “the vacationer-in-Chief” and accused him of playing more rounds of golf than Tiger Woods. He promised to never be the kind of president who took cushy vacations on the taxpayer’s dime, not when there was so much important work to be done. You bought it. But in his first 6 months he has spent more taxpayer money on vacations than Obama did in the first 3 years of his presidency. Not to mention all the money taxpayers are spending protecting his family, including his two sons who travel all over the world on Trump business.

11. He said he’d force companies to keep jobs in America. You believed him. But despite their promises, Carrier, Ford, GM, and the rest are shipping jobs to Mexico and China.

12. He said he’d create coal jobs. You believe him. He hasn’t. But here's what he has done: Since 1965 a federal program called the Appalachian Regional Commission has spent $23 billion helping communities in coal states fund job retraining, reclaim land, and provide desperately needed social services. A.R.C. helped cut poverty rates almost in half, double the percentage of high-school graduates, and reduce infant mortality by two-thirds. Trump’s first proposed budget eliminates A.R.C.

(07-18-2017, 09:17 PM)GMDino Wrote: Sometimes it takes time correct what happened before you...doesn't take near as long to screw it up again.  :andy:

(07-18-2017, 10:54 PM)TheLeonardLeap Wrote:
Then just pretend that Trump is working towards everything you want, dream, and hope for... it'll just take 6 years of working in the opposite direction before you see it reap benefits.

So it will be your own fault that Trump had a shitty Presidency if you don't elect him for a second term so that 6 year plan of getting worse before getting better kicks in.  

Quote:...doesn't take near as long to screw it up again.

Quote:Trump set out to uproot Obama's legacy. So far, that's failed


 
Rarely has a president taken office so focused on undoing his predecessor’s works as Donald Trump. Six months in, he has little to show.

Monday brought twin blows. Not only did the Affordable Care Act survive another Republican repeal effort, maintaining President Obama’s signature domestic achievement, but Trump was forced to certify that Iran continues to comply with the nuclear deal that was the biggest foreign policy accomplishment of Obama’s second term.

Beyond those two headlines, Obama’s program to shield some 750,000 so-called Dreamers from deportation continues intact, much to the frustration of some of Trump’s most ardent backers. The tax hikes on upper-income earners which were among the hardest-won battles of Obama’s first term remain in effect. U.S. relations with Cuba remain open, following Obama’s normalization policy, despite Trump’s public show last month of tightening some travel and trade restrictions. And the sharp increases in U.S. use of solar, wind and other forms of renewable energy, largely at the expense of coal, continues, Trump’s rhetoric notwithstanding.

None of that means Trump has failed. Halfway through his first year, Trump has achieved some of his goals, although his repeated boast that he has “signed more bills — and I’m talking about through the legislature — than any president, ever,” is untrue no matter how one counts.

His announcement that the U.S. will withdraw from the Paris climate accord in 2020 has been the best known part of a concerted administration effort to roll back Obama-era environmental initiatives.

And even before his election, Trump’s campaign against trade agreements roused opposition that helped kill Obama’s proposed 12-nation Pacific trade pact and slow the expansion of global trade deals. Trump formally withdrew the U.S. from the by-then-moribund Trans-Pacific Partnership on his first workday after his inauguration.

But Trump’s unusual concentration on repealing what his predecessor did, rather than putting forward initiatives of his own, has also hampered his effectiveness to a remarkable degree.

One of the truisms of American government — as Trump is now learning to his dismay — is that taking away a benefit is generally harder than starting something new.

That’s one reason why presidents typically prefer to push their own agendas, rather than focus to the extent Trump has on uprooting their predecessors’ actions.

Presidents Eisenhower and Nixon did not, for example, undo the New Deal or Great Society programs of, respectively, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon B. Johnson. President Reagan moved quickly to repeal the Jimmy Carter administration’s regulations on oil and natural gas production. But his administration’s chief focus was on its own plans for tax cuts and a military buildup.

President Clinton devoted his first couple of years in office to winning a tax increase on high-income Americans, a healthcare plan which failed, the North American Free Trade Agreement (another Trump target, as it happens) and two major gun control measures.
George W. Bush’s first year seemed set to be built around tax cuts and his No Child Left Behind school reform plan until the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks redefined his presidency. Obama’s opening year centered on efforts to recover from an economic crisis, re-regulate Wall Street and, of course, pass what became the Affordable Care Act.

Trump’s campaign did feature elements of what could form the basis of a distinctive first-year agenda. He talked about a massive plan to rebuild the nation’s roads, bridges and airports. He called for wholesale renegotiation of trade agreements. He advocated a sharp reduction in the number of legal immigrants allowed into the country. He endorsed a multibillion-dollar plan to give tax money to families to pay tuition for private or religious schools. And he touted a complete rewrite of the tax code, along with deep tax cuts.

He has not delivered concrete proposals on any of those ideas.

In part, that failure to follow through on those ideas stems from the reality that each of them, with the possible exception of tax reform, deeply divides the GOP. Some of Trump’s proposals, such as those on trade, divide his own administration. Whether Trump’s ideas on taxes fit those of his party remains unknown because -- as with health insurance — he has never specified what he has in mind.

Compounding the problem of a divided party is Trump’s clear lack of interest in developing policy and his slowness in choosing people for top government jobs. Together, those deficits have left his administration hamstrung in efforts to define an agenda of its own. By default, that’s left Trump with the agenda the Republicans developed during the Obama years — one built around opposition to the party then in the White House.

The administration’s weakness on policy advocacy has been glaring over the last week as the effort to repeal and replace Obamacare dangled in the Senate. Trump made no concerted effort to win over public opinion — no extended speeches laying out a case for the Republican bill, no news conference to answer questions about his position.

On his preferred method of communication, Twitter, Trump sent more than 60 messages in the week leading up to the collapse of the GOP Obamacare repeal effort Monday night. Only six concerned healthcare — fewer than his tweets about the Women’s Open golf tournament that was held at the country club he owns in New Jersey. None of the tweets defended the plan’s controversial elements; instead they simply demanded that senators act.

When Trump did speak about the bill, he sometimes undermined the positions taken by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. Senators who discussed the measure with Trump came away suggesting that he didn’t understand what the plan contained.

When all was over, Trump’s response Tuesday was to express deep frustration.

“Let Obamacare fail," he declared at the White House. "We're not going to own it. I'm not going to own it. I can tell you, the Republicans are not going to own it."

As Trump staffs up government departments and regulatory agencies, his administration should be in stronger position to build an agenda around initiatives he’ll be more willing to own. But so long as he remains more focused on undoing his predecessor’s work than building something of his own, that cry of frustration is unlikely to be his last.

Quote:Trump campaign shoulders big legal bills as Russia probes rapidly expand

WASHINGTON — President Trump already has stockpiled nearly $12 million for his 2020 re-election campaign, but his spending on legal expenses is soaring as his administration deals with a rapidly expanding investigation into possible collusion between his campaign and the Russian government, documents released Saturday afternoon show.


Trump's campaign racked up more than $677,000 in "legal consulting" fees between April and June, more than twice the $249,000 he spent on legal bills during the first three months of his presidency, newly filed Federal Election Commission reports show.

Most of the legal expenses were tied to his longtime election law firm, Jones Day.


But the filings also show a nearly $90,000 payment for legal expenses to his company, the Trump Organization, and $50,000 payment on June 27 to the law firm of Alan Futerfas, the New York-based criminal attorney now representing Donald Trump Jr. 


The younger Trump is facing increased scrutiny over revelations that he met a Russian lawyer in the heat of the 2016 presidential campaign, believing that the Russian government had dirt to offer on Democratic presidential contender Hillary Clinton. 
[url=https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2017/07/14/donald-trump-jr-new-revelations-russia-meeting-trump-tower/480038001/][/url]
The payment to Futerfas came before The New York Times broke news of Trump Jr.'s meeting with the Russian lawyer and nearly two weeks before it was publicly announced that Futerfas would represent the president's oldest son.

Michael Glassner, the executive director of Trump's campaign, did not respond to requests for more information about the payment to Futerfas and whether it amounted to a plan to use campaign dollars for all of the younger Trump's future legal bills.


Futerfas did not immediately respond to an inquiry about the payment and its timing, and a White House official referred the question to the campaign.
Using donors' money to pay his son's legal bills "should be permissible," Washington election lawyer Ken Gross told USA TODAY, because the younger Trump's actions "were purportedly on behalf of the campaign."


New details have emerged in recent days about the meeting involving the president's son. On Friday, news broke that a Russian-American lobbyist who once served in the Soviet military also was part of the June 2016 meeting at Trump Tower.

On Saturday, the president formally announced the addition of a veteran Washington lawyer Ty Cobb to his legal team at the White House. Cobb, a partner in the investigations practice at the Hogan Lovells firm is expected to oversee the White House's legal and media response to the Russia probes.


Bob Biersack, a senior fellow at the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics, said if Trump campaign pays his son's legal expenses a key question will be whether it will underwrite the legal expenses related to the Russia investigation for other campaign staffers.


Big cash reserves


In all, Trump’s campaign spent more than $4.3 million during the April-to-June fundraising quarter. Nearly half the money went to “digital consulting” and “online advertising” conducted by Giles-Parscale, a Texas firm that oversaw Trump’s 2016 digital efforts.


(Brad Parscale, a firm owner and the campaign’s digital guru, announced Friday that he had accepted an invitation to testify before the House intelligence committee as it examines Russia’s election meddling. In a statement, Parscale said he was "unaware of any Russian involvement in the digital and data operations" of the Trump campaign.)


The campaign also spent more than $200,000 at Trump-owned properties during the three-month period covered by Saturday’s filings, including lodging expenses at the Trump International Hotel in Washington and rent to Trump Towers in New York, where his campaign is headquartered


Those earning salaries from the campaign include John Pence, the nephew of Vice President Pence, hired in January as the campaign’s deputy executive director. He’s earned $82,000 in the first six months of this year.


Still, the Trump political operation has big cash reserves.


In addition to the nearly $12 million Trump’s reelection campaign had stockpiled in the bank at the end of June, two other joint fundraising committees he shares with the Republican National Committee had a combined $10.6 million in leftover funds in their campaign accounts, Federal Election Commission filings show.


Those committees, Trump Victory and the Trump Make America Great Again Committee, allow the Trump campaign operation to solicit six-figure checks. And the new filings show big donors gravitating to the president, who relied largely on small-dollar contributors to fuel his 2016 campaign.



Among the biggest donors: Lianbo Wang and Sherry Li, who gave a combined $600,000.


In recent years, Li has pushed a development project near the Catskills Mountains in New York initially described in media accounts as a Chinese Disneyland.


The project now is touted as a higher-education center, The Thompson Education Center, to be funded by wealthy Chinese individuals, who could ultimately earn permanent residency in the United States through their investments.


Among other six-figure contributors to the Trump campaign operation: Washington Redskins owner Dan Snyder, who gave $100,000.