quote:

Originally posted by smschulz:
Watching the wreath ceremony make me feel very proud and humbled by the service of so many.

quote:

Originally posted by Wishbone:
This Kushner in bed with Russians thing is getting serious. It will be interesting to see how it all plays out.

quote:

Originally posted by smschulz:
Watching the wreath ceremony make me feel very proud and humbled by the service of so many.

quote:

It's bullshit pure and simple. Back channel communications have been used for years between countries.

quote:

Originally posted by 12131:
Aw, the corrupt media's narrative is falling apart, again:


http://www.foxnews.com/us/2017...ing-source-says.html

MORNING BRIEF: Kushner didn't suggest Russian communications channel in meeting, source says

Published May 30, 2017 Fox News


A December meeting between Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and one of the senior advisers in the Trump administration, and Russian ambassador Sergei Kislyak at Trump Tower focused on Syria, a source familiar with the matter told Fox News Monday.

During the meeting the Russians broached the idea of using a secure line between the Trump administration and Russia, not Kushner, a source familiar with the matter told Fox News.

quote:

Originally posted by Skins2881:

quote:

Originally posted by 12131:
Aw, the corrupt media's narrative is falling apart, again:


http://www.foxnews.com/us/2017...ing-source-says.html

MORNING BRIEF: Kushner didn't suggest Russian communications channel in meeting, source says

Published May 30, 2017 Fox News


A December meeting between Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and one of the senior advisers in the Trump administration, and Russian ambassador Sergei Kislyak at Trump Tower focused on Syria, a source familiar with the matter told Fox News Monday.

During the meeting the Russians broached the idea of using a secure line between the Trump administration and Russia, not Kushner, a source familiar with the matter told Fox News.

This has zero to do with their original claims. Trying to get ahead of a humanitarian situation in which people are getting slaughtered daily or terrorist attacks is reasonable and prudent. What the hell does this have to do with the original claims that his election team colluded with Russia to sway the election?

I hope the reached out to all leaders leading up to inauguration, especially ones with pressing matters that involved life and death.

Just a bunch of reaching.

quote:

Originally posted by Bassamatic:
Mattis's comment in that video was priceless.

quote:

Originally posted by 12131:
The TDS is so bad that, if they don't succeed, their heads will explode.

quote:

Originally posted by flashguy:

quote:

Originally posted by 12131:
The TDS is so bad that, if they don't succeed, their heads will explode.

Let's get on with it, then! It will reduce the pool of Libs.

flashguy

quote:

Inside Trump's war on regulations
The push to block, rewrite and delay scores of Obama-era rules may be the administration's biggest untold success.
By ANDREW RESTUCCIA and NANCY COOK | 05/28/17 05:00 AM EDT

[Go to URL to view photo of Trump] An awesome picture

The chaos of Donald Trump’s first four months as president has overshadowed a series of actions that could reshape American life for decades — efforts to rewrite or wipe out regulations affecting everything from student loans and restaurant menus to internet privacy, workplace injuries and climate change.

Trump and his agencies have already wielded executive actions and Republican control of Congress to postpone, weaken or outright kill dozens of regulations created by Barack Obama’s administration, often using delays in the courtroom to buy time to make those changes. Their targets have included protections for streams from coal-mining pollution and a directive on the rights of transgender students.

Other Obama-era regulations are in the crosshairs for possible elimination or downsizing, such as limits on greenhouse gases from power plants and rules meant to prevent concentrated ownership of media companies.

Rolling back the regs

The administration’s efforts to unwind regulations span the U.S. economy. The president’s aides say the goal is "systemic" change.

The administration said it intends to take future "regulatory actions" on an Obama-era rule that made it easier for borrowers defrauded by colleges to have their student loans forgiven.

But Trump is going after even bigger targets, setting bureaucratic wheels in motion that could eventually ax or revise hundreds of regulations as agencies reorient themselves toward unwinding red tape and granting speedier approvals to projects. Just one of those efforts — an upcoming plan by Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross for reducing burdens on manufacturers — yielded 171 suggestions from business groups and others who submitted comments. Another executive order, requiring agencies to repeal two regulations for every new one they create, “will be the biggest such act that our country has ever seen,” Trump said in January.

If successful, these efforts could represent the most far-reaching rollback of federal regulations since Ronald Reagan’s presidency, especially if Trump’s proposed budget cuts make it hard for a future Democratic president to reaccelerate the rule-making apparatus. But Trump’s retrenchment faces multiple obstacles, including his slow pace in naming political appointees and his team’s overall inexperience in navigating the federal bureaucracy.

The goal of the effort is “systemic reform,” said Andrew Bremberg, director of the White House’s Domestic Policy Council — aiming for results that last well beyond Trump’s presidency.

In one sign of their ambition, administration officials say legislation to carry out Trump’s infrastructure plan will seek to overhaul the federal permitting process, including by proposing to rewrite the landmark 1969 law that undergirds agencies’ reviews of projects’ environmental impacts.

“I think it’s something that’s just been lost on people in terms of the regulatory sediment that has built up — decade after decade after decade in many of these areas,” Bremberg said in a telephone interview. “You’re talking about legislation that was either passed at the beginning of the last century or somewhere in the middle of the last century, amended a couple times here and there, but whose statutory structure has largely stayed the same. Yet the regulatory structure has just layered — layer after layer after layer on a seemingly constant basis.”

Some progressives are unnerved by what Trump’s deregulation campaign has achieved already.

“He’s done tremendous damage,” said Rena Steinzor, a University of Maryland law professor who has tracked regulations for decades. “I’ve been watching through six presidents, and all that pales in comparison to this.”

Trump’s team has more executive orders and memorandums meant to further accelerate the deregulatory effort that have yet to be released, according to two people familiar with the administration’s planning.

Much of Trump’s rollback is an aggressive repudiation of one of Obama’s proudest legacies, his crusade to enlist the U.S. in the fight against climate change.

Trump signed off on congressional actions that used a seldom-invoked 1996 law to block four energy-related rules, including an anti-corruption regulation that required oil and gas companies to disclose their payments to foreign governments. He has also ordered the EPA to review — and most likely rescind — two sweeping Obama-era rules, one restricting power plants’ greenhouse gas pollution and one spelling out Clean Water Act protections for wetlands and waterways.

The administration has left the fate of several regulations in limbo by persuading federal judges to postpone action on legal challenges filed by industry groups and GOP-led states. Such delays have affected EPA’s power plant climate rules, along with regulations on toxic mercury pollution and smog-causing ozone. Administration lawyers have similarly sought to delay court action on rules regarding overtime pay, anti-union “persuaders” and Obamacare’s birth control mandate.

The fight is getting personal attention from Trump, whose desire to streamline regulations and speed up permits originated with his decades-long career as a real estate developer, according to people who have spoken to the president and his top advisers. Which regulations the administration should eliminate often comes up in Trump’s White House meetings with CEOs, according to three people briefed on the meetings.

Executives who meet with the administration often name regulatory reform as their top agenda item, even ahead of tax reform, according to officials have held discussions with hundreds of business leaders.

But the administration doesn’t automatically take every industry suggestion, said Chris Liddell, the White House’s director of strategic initiatives. “We’re not just taking away regulations for the sake of it,” he said, adding: “This is not about making companies more profitable. It’s about facilitating job creation.”

Bremberg said the administration recognizes that “we’re not the private sector industry. We are the government. We set the rules and we enforce the rules.”

“But we also have to recognize that the private sector is largely made up of entities that want to follow the rules,” Bremberg said. “They just experience a lot of frustration about the rules not being clear or the regulatory agencies taking a gotcha approach.”

Not every Obama administration rule is falling prey immediately to the anti-regulation campaign. The Labor Department’s much-contested “fiduciary rule,” which requires financial advisers to consider only their clients’ best interest when providing retirement advice, will be allowed to take effect June 9 after initially being delayed 60 days, Secretary Alexander Acosta said last week. (Acosta said he could find “no principled legal basis” for delaying it further, but left the door open to changing the rule later.) The Energy Department has also given final approval to an efficiency regulation for ceiling fans after two delays.

Trump’s efforts go well beyond reining in individual rules. He has issued broad directives meant to speed up environmental reviews for “high priority” infrastructure projects, ordered a wide-ranging review of tax regulations and created a task force to examine laws and rules that affect rural America, in addition to Ross’ review of impediments to domestic manufacturing.

The president has also directed Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin to conduct a comprehensive examination of financial regulations, with the first report expected to come in early June.

White House officials say these actions are the first step in a broader rethinking of how the government regulates. Strategy discussions on that effort include regular meetings with Bremberg, Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney, senior adviser and presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner, White House counsel Don McGahn and Reed Cordish, who is helping to organize a new office tasked with downsizing the federal bureaucracy.

The administration also hopes to advance its deregulatory agenda through legislation to promote its infrastructure plan, which White House officials said will include an overhaul of the federal permitting process. That will include a push to revise the National Environmental Policy Act, a 1969 law that Republicans say slows projects’ approvals with overly burdensome environmental assessments.

“We will be fixing what is a broken permit process,” Cordish said in an interview, adding, “It’s literally hundreds of individual changes that we need to make legislatively and administratively to the current process.”

Trump’s advisers also hope to use data to find efficiencies in the permitting and regulatory process, an issue that Kushner and his Office of American Innovation have made a top priority.

Then again, most administrations come into office with grand ideas about making the government more efficient. But the federal bureaucracy is a slow-moving machine, and sweeping changes usually face skepticism in Congress.

Compounding those obstacles are Trump’s slowness to fill the ranks of the political appointees who would carry out his agenda — perhaps over the resistance of career employees — and the lack of government experience among the president and his top aides. Trump may see newness to Washington as a positive trait, but it could also keep him from accomplishing his goals.

“The administration might have some visions of what they want the agencies to be doing — not just about reversing course from the Obama years but advancing the jobs agenda or ‘America First,’” said Philip Wallach, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and expert on the administrative state. “Those moves require skillful coordination of the bureaucracy rather than a deconstruction of it.”

“If you don’t have political leadership in the agencies, then you’ve handed the keys to the bureaucrats,” said Jay Lefkowitz, who was OMB’s general counsel under President George W. Bush.

Even one White House official acknowledged that the administration’s unfamiliarity with government is getting in the way of restructuring it.

“In order to reshape it, you need to have an understanding of how it works,” said the official, who requested anonymity to speak freely. “I have not seen a lot of it among the folks I have worked with so far. It is an issue of folks not being able to get out of their own way.”

Officials in some agencies have been confused about how to implement Trump’s executive orders, such as the two-for-one mandate that includes strict limits on the costs of new regulations. (Groups including Public Citizen and the Natural Resources Defense Council have sued to block that order, saying it would force agencies to cancel regulations arbitrarily.)

The administration has also lagged in setting up regulatory reform task forces within agencies, as required by a separate order.

One career government official argued that Trump’s political appointees don’t understand the complexities of undoing regulations, which requires additional cost-benefit analysis, public comment periods and a lengthy process to rewrite rules — not to mention inevitable legal challenges.

Still, administration officials cite a series of early victories, including lawmakers’ use of the 1996 Congressional Review Act — never before invoked so aggressively — to overturn a flurry of late-Obama-era regulations. Trump signed 14 CRA resolutions, killing regulations that protected Planned Parenthood’s state funding, restricted gun sales to the mentally ill and safeguarded the privacy of broadband customers, among others.

But the deadline for using that law to thwart Obama’s rules has passed, so the administration will have to focus on other ways to deregulate.

Administration officials also note that Trump-appointed Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch has shown some skepticism toward federal regulations, a position that could help them if legal challenges reach the high court. Trump has also chosen Neomi Rao, a former George W. Bush appointee well-liked in conservative circles, to head the White House’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, the gatekeeper for new regulations.

Some Democrats are still deeply skeptical of the Trump administration’s boasts about reshaping the government.

“The vast majority of what he’s done so far is purely symbolic,” said Shaun Donovan, who was Obama’s OMB director from 2014 to 2017.

“Sound bites are one thing, but changing government really requires rolling up your sleeves and doing the work,” Donovan said in a recent interview. “And I haven’t seen any sleeves rolled up.”

Michael Stratford, Marianne LeVine, Alex Guillén, Jenny Hopkinson, Helena Bottemiller Evich, Patrick Temple-West and Margaret Harding McGill contributed to this report.

quote:

Byron York: While other controversies rage, work on border wall moves forward
by Byron York | May 29, 2017, 11:03 PM

[Go to URL to view video] Two Important Points About "The Wall"
Washington Examiner
00:0500:34

New revelations come almost by the minute in the Trump-Russia affair. The White House moves into full-defense mode. The Trump agenda stalls on Capitol Hill.

A reasonable observer might conclude that is all that is happening in the Trump administration. But even as those troubles fill news sites and cable TV, administration officials are quietly moving ahead on one of the president's top campaign promises: the construction of a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border. Although it hasn't received much attention relative to the president's many problems, extensive planning for the wall is under way, officials are evaluating specific proposals, sites are being studied, and yes, there is money available to get going.

[Go to URL to view video] Israel's Netanyahu Uses Trump Visit To Jab Obama
Watch Full Screen

The work is being done under President Trump's executive order of Jan. 25, which declared the administration's policy to "secure the southern border of the United States through the immediate construction of a physical wall …" The order went on to set a high standard of effectiveness: "the prevention of all unlawful entries into the United States" along the border. Finally, the order cited an existing law, the Secure Fence Act, which in 2006 called for the construction of "at least two layers of reinforced fencing" and "additional physical barriers" on up to 700 miles of the 1,954-mile border.

"The executive order calls on the authority in the Secure Fence Act for us to begin immediately," said a senior administration official who recently provided an extensive update on the state of the wall project. In March, U.S. Customs and Border Protection sent out a request for proposals for companies to bid on the construction of prototypes — not little models to sit on someone's desk, but full-scale sections of proposed wall designs that will be put in place on the border. So far, Border Protection has received more than 100 proposals.

"We are evaluating what started out as a solicitation to industry and request for proposals — 18 to 30 feet high, concrete, impenetrable, hard-to-scale, the correct aesthetics," the official said. "We've tried to capture the intent [of the executive order] in the requests for proposals, and those proposals are being evaluated now."

There are some important points to remember before going any further. First, there is no intention to build a wall to stretch the entire border, from San Diego, Calif., to Brownsville, Texas. In his campaign, the president made clear that the wall need not cover every mile of the border. Certainly, no expert who supports more barriers at the border believes it should, either.

And the wall does not always mean a wall. The Jan. 25 executive order defined "wall" as "a contiguous, physical wall or other similarly secure, contiguous and impassable physical barrier." Planners say that in practice, that will certainly mean extensive areas with an actual wall. But other areas might have the type of fencing outlined in the Secure Fence Act, or some other barrier yet to be designed.

And that leads to a third point: The border barrier will not look the same at all points along the border. The terrain of the border is different — some parts are so imposing they don't need a barrier at all — and officials plan to design walls and barriers that fit each area, rather than one long, unchanging structure.

Right now, officials are studying how many "buildable miles" will need a barrier. Whatever the precise number, it will be big. In 2015, the Department of Homeland Security told Congress that, of the 1,954 miles of border, 1,300 miles, or 66.5 percent, have no fencing or barriers at all; 299.8 miles, or 15.3 percent, have vehicle fence; and 316.6 miles, or 16.2 percent, have pedestrian fence. Only 36.3 miles, or 2 percent, have the kind of double-layer fencing required by the Secure Fence Act. (The law was passed by Congress and signed by President George W. Bush, but neither Bush nor Congress really wanted to build the fence. So they didn't.)

"We've asked the nine sectors on the Southwest border, if you have to meet the standards in the executive order and the Secure Fence Act, where is it that barriers are required to complete the task?" said the senior administration official. "We've then evaluated those areas where the traffic [of illegal border-crossers] is highest." Planners are considering those factors in light of the executive order's "prevent all entries" standard — administration officials are taking that edict very seriously — to come up with areas in which a wall would be the best solution, or where some other type of physical barrier would do the job better.

At the moment, planners believe that about 700 "buildable miles" of the border will require a wall or other barrier. That just happens to be about the same amount called for in the Secure Fence Act.

Does the government have that much land available? The answer is mostly yes. Remember, from the numbers cited above, that there are more than 650 miles along the border with something on them — vehicle fence, simple pedestrian fence, whatever. That means the government has already gone through the land acquisition and approval process required to erect a barrier. "It's federal property now because we've either condemned it or purchased it," said the official.

There's no doubt that hundreds of miles of truly impenetrable barriers would have a huge effect on illegal border crossings. Talk to some experts who favor tougher border enforcement, and they will say that even as few as 100 well-chosen miles of barrier would make a difference.

In any event, there is a significant amount of border land that is already in government hands. "West of El Paso, a lot of the land is public," the official noted, while "as you go further east from El Paso towards Brownsville, a lot of that land is private." Going through the process of condemning or buying land — with all the legal and financial issues involved — will depend "on how we choose the priorities."

Once planners decide where to build, there will then be the question of what to build. If the decision is to build a wall, then the question is: a wall of what? Planners have decided that concrete will definitely be involved, even though it hasn't played much of a role in earlier barriers. Why concrete? "It's an interpretation of the vision," the senior administration official explained. By "vision," he meant it is a way to make Trump's oft-repeated promise of a "big, beautiful wall" a reality. Trump didn't mean a fence.

On the other hand, using concrete presents one obvious problem. Whatever barrier is built, Border Protection agents on the U.S. side need to be able to see through it. That's always been a requirement with earlier barriers. So now, officials are looking for creative ideas for a wall that will still allow them full sight of the Mexican side.

That touches on the most important consideration for planners. A wall isn't just a wall. It is a system — a "smart wall," as they call it. It involves building a barrier with the monitoring technology to allow U.S. officials to be aware of people approaching; to be able to track them at all times; to have roads to move people around; the facilities to deal with the people who are apprehended; and more. "It's not just a barrier," noted the official. (Last year, with the Obama administration still in office, a number of Border Protection officials traveled to Israel to study that country's highly effective barriers; they came home big believers in a smart wall.)

At this point, it's impossible to say what building a smart wall will cost, because officials haven't yet decided on a plan. But how much money does the administration have to get started now? Begin with money that was already to available to the Department of Homeland Security.

"Congress gave us a re-programming for money we were planning to do other things with — mostly technology — to get us through this request for proposals and to get the prototypes underway immediately," the senior administration official said. "That has happened already. We found $20 million to get that effort underway."

"Then, the 2017 budget resolution gives us substantial money to continue doing real estate and environmental planning and design, and then replace some fencing," he continued. "That's in the neighborhood of $900 million."

"You won't get a lot of new fence for that," the official conceded. "You'll get some upgrades. But you'll get some behind-the-scenes work underway — engineering, design, real estate acquisition, title searches, the kinds of things that have to happen to make it work."

That is a start. Republicans on the Hill argue that they got as much money in the recent spending bill as they could for the project, given that they had to work with Democrats to avoid a government shutdown and fund the government through Sept. 30. "We weren't going to get anything passed that said, quote-unquote, 'wall,'" noted one GOP staffer.

The next funding hurdle will come when Congress considers spending for 2018. Most House and Senate Democrats appear determined to stop a border barrier. They say it will be expensive and ineffective, while some Republicans believe Democrats oppose the wall mainly because they fear it will work.

After the recent spending bill passed, some opponents of the wall declared the project dead. (Sample headline: Vanity Fair's "How Trump's Wall Failure Will Forever Doom His Presidency.") But any victory dance right now is premature. Yes, it's certainly possible the wall won't be built. But it's also possible it will be built, or that significant parts of it will be built. The work is already under way.