This week, the Senate is expected to vote on Trump’s pick to run the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Kathy Kraninger. Here are the top three things to know about her nomination:
A CONTINUATION OF MULVANEY: Kathy Kraninger has been working closely under Mulvaney at OMB and followed his lead by recommending a massive budget cut to the CFPB.
Reuters: “The agency’s acting head Mick Mulvaney is also the OMB chief and works closely with Kraninger. He took over at the CFPB from President Barack Obama’s appointee Richard Cordray in November, and the agency has since dropped cases against payday lenders, shelved proposed regulations and overhauled some units.”
Palm Beach multimillionaire Jeffrey Epstein is a free man, despite sexually abusing dozens of underage girls according to police and prosecutors. His victims have never had a voice, until now. Credit: Emily Michot and Julie K. Brown
They are young women now living in the empowering #MeToo movement of the times. But when wealthy Palm Beach hedge-fund manager Jeffrey Epstein sexually abused them, they were only 14 to 17.
Remember that age?
The naïveté behind the façade of grown-up girl. The peer pressure and the boy pressure you don’t know you’re under until you’re an adult looking back. And, if you’re poor and had a troubled childhood, add to the mix the need to make money too early in life.
View the complete November 30 article by Fabiola Santiago on The Miami Herald website here.
Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen speak with troops deployed to the Mexico border in Texas. Credit: Reuters
The Department of Homeland Security asked the Pentagon on Friday for a 45-day extension of the U.S. military presence at the Mexico border, a request that would stretch the deployment until at least the end of January.
The Defense Department is expected to agree to the extension in the coming days, well ahead of the mission’s current expiration date, which is Dec. 15. Pentagon officials have said some of the 6,000 active-duty personnel stationed along the border in Texas, Arizona and California would be brought home and replaced by other units.
President Trump ordered the deployment to preempt the arrival of thousands of Central American migrants traveling in caravan groups and seeking to enter the United States. His administration has characterized the migrants, who have concentrated along Mexico’s border with California, as a grave security threat.
In past interviews, acting attorney general Matthew G. Whitaker has criticized President Trump for not releasing his tax returns and for playing with the truth. (JM Rieger/The Washington Post)
A review of hundreds of public comments by acting attorney general Matthew G. Whitaker shows that while he has primarily functioned as a defender of President Trump, he has also criticized the president on numerous occasions, sometimes harshly, while working as a commentator on radio and television.
Whitaker has repeatedly suggested that Trump plays with the truth. He has said Trump should release his tax returns and was “self-serving” in the way he fired FBI Director James B. Comey. Whitaker said during the run-up to the 2016 election that neither Trump nor Hillary Clinton was a very good option for the presidency. “I mean, both these candidates are unlikable,” he said.
The critique of the president by Whitaker, a former U.S. attorney who rose to prominence over the past four years as the head of a conservative nonprofit group, has often come in unguarded moments, and sometimes late into on-air discussions. “Sometimes I wonder if anybody has the president’s ear or if he just kind of watches news accounts and responds to, which is a little dangerous,” Whitaker said in June 2017 on a radio show.
Americans will not be fooled into allowing Mick Mulvaney to make what he deemed “easy” cuts to earned benefits.
Opponents of Social Security and Medicare are so eager to end these two overwhelmingly important and popular earned benefits that they can’t contain themselves. Mick Mulvaney, the Trump administration’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, is the latest to make crystal clear the longstanding plan to destroy both programs.
Speaking at a conference of state legislators hosted by the anti-government American Legislative Exchange Council (“ALEC”), Mulvaney just revealed that he plans first to go after what he sees as more politically achievable cuts. He explained that the next step, presumably after Trump is in his second term, will be for the administration not just to cut these programs but to end them as we know them.
Mulvaney is apparently so eager to go after our earned benefits that he threw the point into a speech to state legislators, even though both Social Security and Medicare are federal programs.
A North Atlantic right whale appears at the surface of Cape Cod bay off the coast of Plymouth, Mass. Credit: Michael Dwyer, AP
The Trump administration took an important step toward future oil and natural gas drilling off the Atlantic shore, approving five requests allowing companies to conduct deafening seismic surveys that could harm tens of thousands of dolphins, whales and other marine animals, according to studies.
In an announcement Friday, the National Marine Fisheries Service, a division of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, declared that it issued final “incidental take” authorizations permitting companies conducting the surveys to harm wildlife if its unintentional.
“NOAA Fisheries is clear in the documentation related to [incidental take authorizations] that we do not expect mortality to occur as a result of these surveys,” said a spokeswoman, Katherine Brogan. But numerous scientific studies show acoustic sound can harm and potentially kill animals.
Seema Verma, administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, issued new guidance to states that would allow weakening of provisions of the Affordable Care Act. Credit: Kate Patterson, The Washington Post)
The Trump administration is urging states to tear down pillars of the Affordable Care Act, demolishing a basic rule that federal insurance subsidies can be used only by people buying health plans in marketplaces created under the law.
According to advice issued Thursday by federal health officials, states should be free to redefine the use of those subsidies, which began in 2014. They represent the first help the government ever has offered middle-class consumers to afford monthly premiums for private insurance.
States could allow the subsidies to be used for health plans the administration has been promoting outside the ACA marketplaces that are less expensive because they provide skimpier benefits and fewer consumer protections. In an even more dramatic change, states could let residents with employer-based coverage set up accounts in which they mingle the federal subsidies with health-care funds from their job or personal tax-deferred savings funds to use for premiums or other medical expenses.
“I’m not blaming anybody, but I’m just telling you I think that the Fed is way off base with what they’re doing, number one. Number two, a positive note, we’re doing very well on trade, we’re doing very well — our companies are very strong. Don’t forget, we’re still up from when I came in, 38 percent or something. You know, it’s a tremendous — it’s not like we’re up — and we’re much stronger. And we’re much more liquid. And the banks are now much more liquid during my tenure. And I’m not doing — I’m not playing by the same rules as Obama. Obama had zero interest to worry about; we’re paying interest, a lot of interest. He wasn’t paying down — we’re talking about $50 billion lots of different times, paying down and knocking out liquidity. Well, Obama didn’t do that. And just so you understand, I’m playing a normalization economy, whereas he’s playing a free economy. It’s easy to make money when you’re paying no interest. It’s easy to make money when you’re not doing any pay-downs, so you can’t — and despite that, the numbers we have are phenomenal numbers.”
This long section of President Trump’s Nov. 27 interview with The Washington Post caused a fair amount of puzzlement among our readers. It came in the middle of an attack on Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome H. Powell. The White House declined to answer our questions intended to clarify the president’s words, so we consulted with experts in an effort to deconstruct his rhetoric.
We cannot claim complete success, and it’s fairly amazing the White House would not try to offer an explanation. But perhaps aides do not know what he meant, either. Anyway, here’s a tour through his spin, bluster and puzzling claims.
View the complete November 29 article by Glenn Kessler on The Washington Post website here.
As President Donald Trump prepares to meet with his Chinese counterpart on the sidelines of the G-20 summit on Nov. 30, the stakes could hardly be higher.
The two countries are in the middle of a trade war Trump launched earlier this year, one of the hardball negotiating strategies he believes can extract more benefits from trading partners. Such “economic bullying” was blamed for creating a first-ever deadlock at a recent Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation meeting.
So far, China shows few signs of budging in the face of mounting tariffs. Could Trump’s tough talk work? Or will it backfire on him and the Americans he represents?
After years of steady decline, the number of U.S. children without health insurance rose by 276,000 in 2017, according to a Georgetown University report released Thursday.
While not a big jump statistically — the share of uninsured kids rose to 5 percent in 2017 from 4.7 percent a year earlier — it is still striking. The uninsured rate typically remains stable or drops during times of economic growth. In September, the U.S. unemployment rate hit its lowest level since 1969.
