Trump is the Biggest Failure in History As His Disapproval Rating Skyrockets to 58%
Apr 18, 2017 14:23:50 #
Apr 18, 2017 17:00:25 #
Progressive One wrote:
Border Wall Construction Companies
58%??? LOLOLOLOL
We love dem poles
Watch Rachel Maddow get that STUPID SMIRK wiped off her face by Trump's Election
https://youtu.be/Ut0TaegQ-kw
Apr 18, 2017 18:01:17 #
Trump is a FK-UP
Trump is tarnishing Republicans: Jesse Ferguson
Jesse Ferguson 3:18 a.m. ET April 18, 2017
For a political party that often seems to be Lost in Space, Republicans should be hearing “Danger, Will Robinson!” alarms.
We need look no further than the special election in Kansas’s Fourth Congressional District to see the warning signs: a Republican won by 7 points in a seat that Trump won by 27 points only six months ago. That’s a 20-point swing. By my count, there are 120 Republican-held congressional districts where Trump won by 20 or fewer points. Obviously, that doesn’t mean that Democrats are going to win all 120 of those seats in 2018 — but 120 Republican members of Congress probably didn’t sleep well last Tuesday night.
The problem is the party's legislative and political stumbles are piling up. For instance, they won the battle to get Justice Neil Gorsuch on to the Supreme Court, but the way they did it — by depriving former President Barack Obama of an appointment and then overturning the Senate rules — is the latest data point that leads them to lose the war. Gorsuch’s confirmation will be a distant memory by the 2018 midterm election campaign. What will last is the impression that Republicans in Congress will do anything it takes to get their way.
Part of that includes sticking with and protecting a compromised and unpopular president. Trump pushes Republicans to walk the plank for him on issue after issue, from health care repeal to budget cuts and much more, even if it hurts his own voters. And he expects them to defend him in self-inflicted scandal after scandal — so much that they are coming dangerously close to being seen as accomplices in Trump’s sustained effort to hide his tax returns and ties to Russia. If that happens, they can wave goodbye to their control of Congress.
A Quinnipiac University survey this month shows the peril for Republicans in standing behind Trump. His job approval rating was negative by a staggering 22 points (35% approval compared to 57% disapproval). More alarmingly, 49% of the 57% who disapprove are people who “strongly” disapprove, while a meager 25% strongly approve. That 2-to-1 intensity ratio should jar anyone looking at the 2018 electorate.
Trump’s approval rating is tanking for the same reason that association with him is so dangerous for the GOP: He is losing on the key traits and qualities that matter most to ordinary people. He’s considered not honest by 27 points (61% to 34%), thought not to care about average Americans by 18 points (57% to 39%), found to be not level-headed by 37 points (66% to 29%), and believed not to share their values by 27 points (61% to 34%).
Voters certainly don’t believe that every Republican in Congress is a carbon copy of Trump. But a Congress filled with Trump apologists and rubber stamps, even if they’re not replicas, would be held just as responsible for the untold damage that he and his agenda would do to the country.
Two GOP congressmen are a cautionary tale. House Intelligence chairman Devin Nunes tried so hard to protect Trump that’s he’s no longer in charge of his own committee's Russia probe. And Rep. Ted Yoho defended Nunes by arguing: “You’ve got to keep in mind who he works for. He works for the president, and he answers to the president.”
Not quite, as Yoho belatedly admitted. All members of Congress answer to their constituents. They want to know that their elected officials will represent their interests. What they’re seeing in Washington is a Republican Party that represents Trump’s interests instead.
When it came to health care, only 17% of the country supported the GOP’s repeal bill. Three-quarters want Trump to release his tax returns, so we can uncover what is or isn't driving his financial interests. And most people now support an independent investigation into the Trump team’s Russia ties.
Any direction you look, you can see the damage Trump is doing to his party. Republicans in Congress are at 70% disapproval. House Speaker Paul Ryan is increasingly disliked. “As President Trump’s approval tanks, Congress, especially Republicans, follow right behind him,” Tim Malloy, assistant director of the Quinnipiac poll, said recently.
Voters back home are showing Republicans during the congressional recess how they feel about unwavering support for Trump. A town hall meeting last week in a swing district in Colorado prompted CNN to report, “Angry constituents ask GOP Rep. Mike Coffman to choose between them or Trump.” We should expect to see more of this unless and until Republicans in Congress step up and show they’re not Trump rubber-stamps or accomplices.
Issues like hiding tax returns are no longer insider baseball in Washington — they are proof points in a narrative. It’s a time for choosing for Republicans. Will they put country over party? If they give the wrong answer, they’ll be answering for it all election season.
Jesse Ferguson was deputy national press secretary for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign. Earlier he was executive director of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s Independent Expenditure Program and communications director of the DCCC. Follow him on Twitter @JesseFFerguson.
You can read diverse opinions from our Board of Contributors and other writers on the Opinion front page, on Twitter @USATOpinion and in our daily Opinion newsletter. To submit a letter, comment or column, check our submission guidelines.
Trump is tarnishing Republicans: Jesse Ferguson
Jesse Ferguson 3:18 a.m. ET April 18, 2017
For a political party that often seems to be Lost in Space, Republicans should be hearing “Danger, Will Robinson!” alarms.
We need look no further than the special election in Kansas’s Fourth Congressional District to see the warning signs: a Republican won by 7 points in a seat that Trump won by 27 points only six months ago. That’s a 20-point swing. By my count, there are 120 Republican-held congressional districts where Trump won by 20 or fewer points. Obviously, that doesn’t mean that Democrats are going to win all 120 of those seats in 2018 — but 120 Republican members of Congress probably didn’t sleep well last Tuesday night.
The problem is the party's legislative and political stumbles are piling up. For instance, they won the battle to get Justice Neil Gorsuch on to the Supreme Court, but the way they did it — by depriving former President Barack Obama of an appointment and then overturning the Senate rules — is the latest data point that leads them to lose the war. Gorsuch’s confirmation will be a distant memory by the 2018 midterm election campaign. What will last is the impression that Republicans in Congress will do anything it takes to get their way.
Part of that includes sticking with and protecting a compromised and unpopular president. Trump pushes Republicans to walk the plank for him on issue after issue, from health care repeal to budget cuts and much more, even if it hurts his own voters. And he expects them to defend him in self-inflicted scandal after scandal — so much that they are coming dangerously close to being seen as accomplices in Trump’s sustained effort to hide his tax returns and ties to Russia. If that happens, they can wave goodbye to their control of Congress.
A Quinnipiac University survey this month shows the peril for Republicans in standing behind Trump. His job approval rating was negative by a staggering 22 points (35% approval compared to 57% disapproval). More alarmingly, 49% of the 57% who disapprove are people who “strongly” disapprove, while a meager 25% strongly approve. That 2-to-1 intensity ratio should jar anyone looking at the 2018 electorate.
Trump’s approval rating is tanking for the same reason that association with him is so dangerous for the GOP: He is losing on the key traits and qualities that matter most to ordinary people. He’s considered not honest by 27 points (61% to 34%), thought not to care about average Americans by 18 points (57% to 39%), found to be not level-headed by 37 points (66% to 29%), and believed not to share their values by 27 points (61% to 34%).
Voters certainly don’t believe that every Republican in Congress is a carbon copy of Trump. But a Congress filled with Trump apologists and rubber stamps, even if they’re not replicas, would be held just as responsible for the untold damage that he and his agenda would do to the country.
Two GOP congressmen are a cautionary tale. House Intelligence chairman Devin Nunes tried so hard to protect Trump that’s he’s no longer in charge of his own committee's Russia probe. And Rep. Ted Yoho defended Nunes by arguing: “You’ve got to keep in mind who he works for. He works for the president, and he answers to the president.”
Not quite, as Yoho belatedly admitted. All members of Congress answer to their constituents. They want to know that their elected officials will represent their interests. What they’re seeing in Washington is a Republican Party that represents Trump’s interests instead.
When it came to health care, only 17% of the country supported the GOP’s repeal bill. Three-quarters want Trump to release his tax returns, so we can uncover what is or isn't driving his financial interests. And most people now support an independent investigation into the Trump team’s Russia ties.
Any direction you look, you can see the damage Trump is doing to his party. Republicans in Congress are at 70% disapproval. House Speaker Paul Ryan is increasingly disliked. “As President Trump’s approval tanks, Congress, especially Republicans, follow right behind him,” Tim Malloy, assistant director of the Quinnipiac poll, said recently.
Voters back home are showing Republicans during the congressional recess how they feel about unwavering support for Trump. A town hall meeting last week in a swing district in Colorado prompted CNN to report, “Angry constituents ask GOP Rep. Mike Coffman to choose between them or Trump.” We should expect to see more of this unless and until Republicans in Congress step up and show they’re not Trump rubber-stamps or accomplices.
Issues like hiding tax returns are no longer insider baseball in Washington — they are proof points in a narrative. It’s a time for choosing for Republicans. Will they put country over party? If they give the wrong answer, they’ll be answering for it all election season.
Jesse Ferguson was deputy national press secretary for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign. Earlier he was executive director of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s Independent Expenditure Program and communications director of the DCCC. Follow him on Twitter @JesseFFerguson.
You can read diverse opinions from our Board of Contributors and other writers on the Opinion front page, on Twitter @USATOpinion and in our daily Opinion newsletter. To submit a letter, comment or column, check our submission guidelines.
Apr 18, 2017 19:23:52 #
A stupid ass president who is a pathological liar:
A U.S. aircraft carrier that the White House declared a deterrent to North Korea was at the time sailing in the opposite direction
Tuesday, April 18, 2017 1:59 PM EDT
As worries deepened last week about whether North Korea would conduct a missile test, the White House declared that ordering an American aircraft carrier into the Sea of Japan would send a powerful deterrent signal and give President Trump more options in responding to the North’s provocative behavior.
The problem was, the carrier, the Carl Vinson, and the four other warships in its strike force were at that very moment sailing in the opposite direction, to take part in joint exercises with the Australian Navy in the Indian Ocean, 3,500 miles southwest of the Korean Peninsula.
A U.S. aircraft carrier that the White House declared a deterrent to North Korea was at the time sailing in the opposite direction
Tuesday, April 18, 2017 1:59 PM EDT
As worries deepened last week about whether North Korea would conduct a missile test, the White House declared that ordering an American aircraft carrier into the Sea of Japan would send a powerful deterrent signal and give President Trump more options in responding to the North’s provocative behavior.
The problem was, the carrier, the Carl Vinson, and the four other warships in its strike force were at that very moment sailing in the opposite direction, to take part in joint exercises with the Australian Navy in the Indian Ocean, 3,500 miles southwest of the Korean Peninsula.
Apr 19, 2017 13:12:56 #
White House flubs warship report
‘Armada’ was headed away from North Korea, not toward it.
By W.J. Hennigan
WASHINGTON — An aircraft carrier strike group that the Trump administration had warned was headed toward North Korea in a powerful show of force has instead spent the last week thousands of miles away — and heading in the opposite direction.
The Pentagon’s disclosure on April 8 that the Carl Vinson carrier strike force was being diverted to waters near North Korea had contributed to rising global tensions over a possible U.S. conflict with the nuclear-armed regime in Pyongyang.
Senior administration officials repeatedly cited the orders to rush the Carl Vinson strike force from Singapore to North Korea as a sign of President Trump’s willingness to directly confront a regime that has conducted five nuclear tests and multiple missile launches in violation of United Nations resolutions.
It was widely assumed that the carrier group was patrolling somewhere within range last weekend, when U.S. officials feared Kim Jong Un’s military would conduct a sixth underground nuclear test, or would try to test-launch an intercontinental ballistic missile for the first time.
The U.S. ships have the ability to shoot down incoming missiles and launch cruise missiles of their own.
On Saturday, Pyongyang staged a massive parade that displayed new missiles and had warned that it would counter a U.S. attack with “a nuclear war of our own.” The next day, the regime attempted to test a midsize ballistic missile, but it exploded seconds after launch in the sea off the east coast.
The Navy’s admission that the Carl Vinson and four other warships were, in fact, conducting exercises in the Indian Ocean last week and were still in Indonesian waters as of Saturday has raised fresh questions about the credibility of the White House, which has frequently come under attack for making false claims.
Officials said Tuesday that the false narrative about the Carl Vinson resulted from mistakes and miscommunication up the military chain of command to the White House, and was not part of a deliberate military attempt to psych out North Korea’s leaders and mislead the public.
The embarrassing saga began when Adm. Harry Harris, who heads U.S. Pacific Command, initially announced in a news release on April 8 that he had directed the Carl Vinson carrier strike group to “sail north” from Singapore, adding that the ships were being diverted from planned port visits to Australia.
The Trump administration cited the deployment of the naval strike force, which includes the carrier and four warships, as a clear warning to North Korea, which was said to be planning a nuclear test last weekend in con-junction with a national holiday.
“We are sending an armada, very powerful,” to the waters off the Korean peninsula, President Trump told Fox Business News on April 12.
A day earlier, Defense Secretary James N. Mattis told Pentagon reporters that the aircraft carrier was “on her way up there.”
Some news organizations cited the armada’s apparent race northward as a sign of a possible preemptive attack on North Korea, spurring global concerns of a possible war.
Although the Pentagon sought to downplay those reports late last week, at no point did it or the White House suggest the Carl Vinson was not, in fact, nearing the Korean peninsula to give Trump a more robust military option should he decide he needs one.
Pundits cited the warships’ approach as evidence of Trump’s muscular style in the same week that he had ordered a cruise missile strike on Syria in response to a poison gas attack, and the Air Force had dropped the so-called mother of all bombs on an Islamic State stronghold in Afghanistan.
But on Saturday, a full week after the initial news release, the Navy posted a photograph showing the Carl Vinson traveling south through the Sunda Strait between the Indonesian islands of Sumatra and Java — about 3,500 miles southwest of the Korean peninsula.
As Defense News first reported Monday, the strike force has been taking part in exercises with Australian forces in the Indian Ocean over the last week.
It is now — really — steaming northward and is expected to arrive in the Sea of Japan next week, U.S. officials said.
william.hennigan
@latimes.com
‘Armada’ was headed away from North Korea, not toward it.
By W.J. Hennigan
WASHINGTON — An aircraft carrier strike group that the Trump administration had warned was headed toward North Korea in a powerful show of force has instead spent the last week thousands of miles away — and heading in the opposite direction.
The Pentagon’s disclosure on April 8 that the Carl Vinson carrier strike force was being diverted to waters near North Korea had contributed to rising global tensions over a possible U.S. conflict with the nuclear-armed regime in Pyongyang.
Senior administration officials repeatedly cited the orders to rush the Carl Vinson strike force from Singapore to North Korea as a sign of President Trump’s willingness to directly confront a regime that has conducted five nuclear tests and multiple missile launches in violation of United Nations resolutions.
It was widely assumed that the carrier group was patrolling somewhere within range last weekend, when U.S. officials feared Kim Jong Un’s military would conduct a sixth underground nuclear test, or would try to test-launch an intercontinental ballistic missile for the first time.
The U.S. ships have the ability to shoot down incoming missiles and launch cruise missiles of their own.
On Saturday, Pyongyang staged a massive parade that displayed new missiles and had warned that it would counter a U.S. attack with “a nuclear war of our own.” The next day, the regime attempted to test a midsize ballistic missile, but it exploded seconds after launch in the sea off the east coast.
The Navy’s admission that the Carl Vinson and four other warships were, in fact, conducting exercises in the Indian Ocean last week and were still in Indonesian waters as of Saturday has raised fresh questions about the credibility of the White House, which has frequently come under attack for making false claims.
Officials said Tuesday that the false narrative about the Carl Vinson resulted from mistakes and miscommunication up the military chain of command to the White House, and was not part of a deliberate military attempt to psych out North Korea’s leaders and mislead the public.
The embarrassing saga began when Adm. Harry Harris, who heads U.S. Pacific Command, initially announced in a news release on April 8 that he had directed the Carl Vinson carrier strike group to “sail north” from Singapore, adding that the ships were being diverted from planned port visits to Australia.
The Trump administration cited the deployment of the naval strike force, which includes the carrier and four warships, as a clear warning to North Korea, which was said to be planning a nuclear test last weekend in con-junction with a national holiday.
“We are sending an armada, very powerful,” to the waters off the Korean peninsula, President Trump told Fox Business News on April 12.
A day earlier, Defense Secretary James N. Mattis told Pentagon reporters that the aircraft carrier was “on her way up there.”
Some news organizations cited the armada’s apparent race northward as a sign of a possible preemptive attack on North Korea, spurring global concerns of a possible war.
Although the Pentagon sought to downplay those reports late last week, at no point did it or the White House suggest the Carl Vinson was not, in fact, nearing the Korean peninsula to give Trump a more robust military option should he decide he needs one.
Pundits cited the warships’ approach as evidence of Trump’s muscular style in the same week that he had ordered a cruise missile strike on Syria in response to a poison gas attack, and the Air Force had dropped the so-called mother of all bombs on an Islamic State stronghold in Afghanistan.
But on Saturday, a full week after the initial news release, the Navy posted a photograph showing the Carl Vinson traveling south through the Sunda Strait between the Indonesian islands of Sumatra and Java — about 3,500 miles southwest of the Korean peninsula.
As Defense News first reported Monday, the strike force has been taking part in exercises with Australian forces in the Indian Ocean over the last week.
It is now — really — steaming northward and is expected to arrive in the Sea of Japan next week, U.S. officials said.
william.hennigan
@latimes.com
Apr 19, 2017 13:20:35 #
Why the Paris accord matters
Trump may be moving away from his pledge to withdraw the U.S. from the 2015 climate agreement.
D onald Trump has been president for only three months and already he’s given up or reversed course or been stymied on a wide range of campaign promises. Given how awful some of those ideas were — ending Obamacare, declaring China a currency manipulator, ordering a blanket federal hiring freeze (done, but since lifted) — it is not necessarily a bad thing for the country that he’s fallen down on the job.
Now, we’re mildly heartened to learn that Trump also may be moving away from his ill-advised campaign pledge to withdraw the U.S. from the Paris climate agreement of 2015, under which nearly 200 nations pledged to reduce emissions of the greenhouse gases that cause global warming.
Climate change, of course, is viewed skeptically by the new president. He once described the idea that human activity is heating up the oceans and atmosphere in potentially catastrophic ways as “a total, and very expensive, hoax ” that was “ created by and for the Chinese” in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive. He appointed a climate skeptic, Scott Pruitt, to run the Environmental Protection Agency, a department Trumps hopes to reduce by 31%, according to the budget proposal he sent to Congress. The administration also is pushing plans to roll back limitations on methane emissions from oil and gas wells on public lands (an effort that, fortunately, may die in the Senate), and to consider weakening the aggressive fuel-efficiency standards for motor vehicles established under President Obama.
Trump also has drawn a target on the Clean Power Plan , which was designed to significantly reduce emissions from primarily coal-fired power-generating plants responsible for a third of the nation’s greenhouse gases.
His hostility to the science of climate change poses a global risk. The U.S. is the world’s largest economy and second-largest emitter of carbon compounds and other greenhouse gases. It was instrumental in crafting the Paris agreement, a milestone in international environmental cooperation even if experts say its goal of capping the rise in temperatures by 2100 to less than 2 degrees Celsius isn’t ambitious enough if the world is to avoid the worst effects of global warming.
It’s slightly encouraging that there seems to be an internal debate underway between a set of Trump advisors who want the president to keep his promise to withdraw the U.S. from the Paris agreement and another set urging him to stick with the pact but loosen the Obama goal of reducing U.S. emissions up to 28% below their level in 2005 by 2025. That the Trump administration is even debating the issue rather than blindly carrying out its ill-conceived campaign promise offers a hopeful sign that the president’s position could change, and that he might still join the rest of the world in trying to address the potentially existential threat of global warming. For the United States to back off from the Paris accord now not only would imperil the chances of global success, but would marginalize the U.S. as a leader in a defining issue of our era.
At the same time, if the U.S. were to stay in the Paris agreement while weakening the United States’ commitments, that still would be a losing proposition for the nation, and the world, given that emissions need to be even more sharply curtailed than already planned. Reducing reliance on fossil fuels is a difficult challenge, but it needs to be done. Yes, there will be economic hits to the oil and gas industries, but renewable energy already has become a significant part of the global economy and it is growing quickly. Given the worldwide damage that will be caused by rising seas — one estimate puts it at $1 trillion a year by 2050 — insuring jobs today at the expense of the future is the definition of penny-wise, pound-foolish.
The president is in a position to prove his critics wrong — to demonstrate that he can weigh (actual, not alternative) facts and frame positions based on reality and in the best interests of the nation. We invite him to do so by sticking with the Paris agreement and the Clean Power Plan, and by directing the government to find ways to reduce U.S. emissions even further. Those are steps that a sagacious and respected world leader would take.
We hope Trump moves in that direction, away from his reckless campaign stance on this enormously important issue.
Trump may be moving away from his pledge to withdraw the U.S. from the 2015 climate agreement.
D onald Trump has been president for only three months and already he’s given up or reversed course or been stymied on a wide range of campaign promises. Given how awful some of those ideas were — ending Obamacare, declaring China a currency manipulator, ordering a blanket federal hiring freeze (done, but since lifted) — it is not necessarily a bad thing for the country that he’s fallen down on the job.
Now, we’re mildly heartened to learn that Trump also may be moving away from his ill-advised campaign pledge to withdraw the U.S. from the Paris climate agreement of 2015, under which nearly 200 nations pledged to reduce emissions of the greenhouse gases that cause global warming.
Climate change, of course, is viewed skeptically by the new president. He once described the idea that human activity is heating up the oceans and atmosphere in potentially catastrophic ways as “a total, and very expensive, hoax ” that was “ created by and for the Chinese” in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive. He appointed a climate skeptic, Scott Pruitt, to run the Environmental Protection Agency, a department Trumps hopes to reduce by 31%, according to the budget proposal he sent to Congress. The administration also is pushing plans to roll back limitations on methane emissions from oil and gas wells on public lands (an effort that, fortunately, may die in the Senate), and to consider weakening the aggressive fuel-efficiency standards for motor vehicles established under President Obama.
Trump also has drawn a target on the Clean Power Plan , which was designed to significantly reduce emissions from primarily coal-fired power-generating plants responsible for a third of the nation’s greenhouse gases.
His hostility to the science of climate change poses a global risk. The U.S. is the world’s largest economy and second-largest emitter of carbon compounds and other greenhouse gases. It was instrumental in crafting the Paris agreement, a milestone in international environmental cooperation even if experts say its goal of capping the rise in temperatures by 2100 to less than 2 degrees Celsius isn’t ambitious enough if the world is to avoid the worst effects of global warming.
It’s slightly encouraging that there seems to be an internal debate underway between a set of Trump advisors who want the president to keep his promise to withdraw the U.S. from the Paris agreement and another set urging him to stick with the pact but loosen the Obama goal of reducing U.S. emissions up to 28% below their level in 2005 by 2025. That the Trump administration is even debating the issue rather than blindly carrying out its ill-conceived campaign promise offers a hopeful sign that the president’s position could change, and that he might still join the rest of the world in trying to address the potentially existential threat of global warming. For the United States to back off from the Paris accord now not only would imperil the chances of global success, but would marginalize the U.S. as a leader in a defining issue of our era.
At the same time, if the U.S. were to stay in the Paris agreement while weakening the United States’ commitments, that still would be a losing proposition for the nation, and the world, given that emissions need to be even more sharply curtailed than already planned. Reducing reliance on fossil fuels is a difficult challenge, but it needs to be done. Yes, there will be economic hits to the oil and gas industries, but renewable energy already has become a significant part of the global economy and it is growing quickly. Given the worldwide damage that will be caused by rising seas — one estimate puts it at $1 trillion a year by 2050 — insuring jobs today at the expense of the future is the definition of penny-wise, pound-foolish.
The president is in a position to prove his critics wrong — to demonstrate that he can weigh (actual, not alternative) facts and frame positions based on reality and in the best interests of the nation. We invite him to do so by sticking with the Paris agreement and the Clean Power Plan, and by directing the government to find ways to reduce U.S. emissions even further. Those are steps that a sagacious and respected world leader would take.
We hope Trump moves in that direction, away from his reckless campaign stance on this enormously important issue.
Apr 19, 2017 14:02:03 #
To see the hypocrite and phony, "the Progressive One" is; these quotes and questions have been presented;
"You can tell that this is the wakeup call to action many needed.....you can see the new level of mobilization, awareness and consciousness. the freeways have been blocked with thousands out here in LA.....Trump has his work cut out for him and his racist supporters in the sticks got him there.....will not be of any help to him…" - Progressive? One
So it is anarchy that Progressive One is behind!
At least he is out in the open.
The "professor" is a Marxist.
No wonder the professor avoids responding to these questions!
Why do liberals side with a Bilderberger Billionaire elitists like George "Giorgi" Soros?
PO; do you believe this should be what guides America?
“This system to be controlled in a feudalistic fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent private meetings and conferences.” - Insider, Professor Carroll
The Bilderberg Group meets once a year, and is blacked out by the MSM.
Quigley – ‘Tragedy and Hope’,( p. 324)
10 Things liberals ignore About "Giorgi" George Soros
https://youtu.be/tfBHYxEojZk
SOROS ROTHSCHILD RACE WAR PROPAGANDA EXPOSED
https://youtu.be/lhqqz3QFQKE
George Soros: Evil Puppet Master Exposed
https://youtu.be/1eRFTHD2CTg
"You can tell that this is the wakeup call to action many needed.....you can see the new level of mobilization, awareness and consciousness. the freeways have been blocked with thousands out here in LA.....Trump has his work cut out for him and his racist supporters in the sticks got him there.....will not be of any help to him…" - Progressive? One
So it is anarchy that Progressive One is behind!
At least he is out in the open.
The "professor" is a Marxist.
No wonder the professor avoids responding to these questions!
Why do liberals side with a Bilderberger Billionaire elitists like George "Giorgi" Soros?
PO; do you believe this should be what guides America?
“This system to be controlled in a feudalistic fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent private meetings and conferences.” - Insider, Professor Carroll
The Bilderberg Group meets once a year, and is blacked out by the MSM.
Quigley – ‘Tragedy and Hope’,( p. 324)
10 Things liberals ignore About "Giorgi" George Soros
https://youtu.be/tfBHYxEojZk
SOROS ROTHSCHILD RACE WAR PROPAGANDA EXPOSED
https://youtu.be/lhqqz3QFQKE
George Soros: Evil Puppet Master Exposed
https://youtu.be/1eRFTHD2CTg
Progressive One wrote:
Why the Paris accord matters br Trump may be movin... (show quote)
Check out topic: Geoengineering Watch Global Alert News, May 18, 2024, #458
Apr 20, 2017 12:54:48 #
SNL needs to send this fool a check....for making their job so easy.......
BACK STORY
Some tips for Sean Spicer
Experts offer guidance for succeeding as White House press secretary
SEAN SPICER’S predecessors know what it’s like to make a gaffe — as well as how to recover and command more respect from the press and the public. (Mark Wilson Getty Images)
By Michael Finnegan
In the 88 years since President Hoover named a former Minneapolis Tribune reporter as the first White House press secretary, nobody who has held that job has stumbled as quickly or dramatically as Sean Spicer.
Millions have gaped at the spectacle of Spicer’s daily briefings on cable news. Melissa McCarthy’s impersonation of him on NBC’s “Saturday Night Live,” most recently in an Easter Bunny outfit similar to one he wore for the holiday in George W. Bush’s White House, has turned Spicer into an improbable pop-culture figure. She portrays him as a lying buffoon who badgers the press.
By all accounts, the press secretary’s job is hard, and missteps are inevitable.
“Even the best trip themselves up,” said Joe Lockhart, who took the job just weeks before President Clinton was impeached in the Monica Lewinsky sex scandal.
Last week, Spicer profusely apologized for saying that Adolf Hitler did not use poison gas against his own people the way Syrian President Bashar Assad did. If it wasn’t the worst blunder of any White House press secretary since 1929, it was close.
But anyone who has held Spicer’s job knows what it feels like to make a gaffe at the White House lectern.
“When you get to a place where it doesn’t sound right, you just literally have to stop, even if it’s uncomfortable, and do a quick damage assessment in your head, and — particularly if it’s not what you meant — take a step back and overtly say, ‘I misspoke there,’ ” Lockhart said.
The White House Transition Project, a nonpartisan group that helps new administrations organize their takeover of the government, has compiled a list of “lessons learned” from previous press secretaries.
It’s part of a report prepared by the project’s director, Martha Joynt Kumar, also the author of “Managing the President’s Message: The White House Communications Operation.” A few of the key lessons:
Never lie to the news media
“Providing reporters with misinformation is a cardinal sin no matter whether it is willful or unintentional,” Kumar wrote in the report.
In Spicer’s case, that happened his first day on the job, at President Trump’s behest. Spicer harangued reporters for questioning Trump’s untrue statement that his inauguration crowd was the biggest in history. He antagonized the media further by taking no questions.
He also annoyed his boss. Trump reportedly was upset because Spicer wore a baggy suit to the news briefing.
It soon got worse. Spicer defended Trump’s false allegation that millions of immigrants committed voter fraud in November. He stood behind Trump’s unsubstantiated charge that President Obama illegally tapped his phones in Trump Tower. And he touched off a rare diplomatic spat with a key ally when he repeated a Fox News report that British intelligence agents helped Obama bug Trump’s phones, an accusation Britain adamantly denied.
False statements at White House briefings are nothing new.
In 1960, President Eisenhower’s press secretary, James Hagerty, shook reporters’ trust when the administration was caught lying about an American U-2 spy plane shot down in the Soviet Union, Kumar recalled in an interview. Eisenhower had to admit that the cover story — a NASA weather plane flying over Turkey had drifted off course — was a lie.
Falsehoods about U.S. military action in Southeast Asia dogged press secretaries under Presidents Johnson and Nixon. But the White House spokesman was a less visible public figure in that era. The daily briefings were not televised live by cable networks that draw millions of viewers, and there was no social media to instantly amplify misstatements.
During the Watergate scandal, Press Secretary Ron Ziegler got entangled in a web of lies by the president and his top advisors. Ziegler, who’d dismissed the break-in at Democratic Party headquarters as a “third-rate burglary” and denied any involvement by Nixon’s reelection campaign, famously told reporters in April 1973 that some of his previous statements had become “inoperative.”
Scott McClellan, who was press secretary under President George W. Bush, said in 2007 that he “unknowingly passed along false information” about the role of White House aides in leaking the identity of CIA operative Valerie Plame. McClellan blamed Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and several top White House aides.
To Kumar, that was no small thing. “I think the most important thing for a press secretary is to be seen as providing credible information, and being knowledgeable of what’s going on in the administration,” she said.
Keep it cool, and sometimes light
Marlin Fitzwater, press secretary under Presidents Reagan and George H.W. Bush, told Kumar that patience and tolerance were important.
“The tolerance side is you have to tolerate smart people, dumb people, early risers, late risers, early callers, late callers, every kind of physical and personal abuse you can come up with,” Fitzwater told her. “It’s like being a waitress in a restaurant.”
Fitzwater and Clinton Press Secretary Mike McCurry both noted that humor can cool down a tense briefing.
Spicer’s are tense more often than not. Last month, he snapped at veteran White House reporter April Ryan. “Stop shaking your head,” he told her.
The remark drew scathing criticism, so at his briefing the next day Spicer tried to lighten the mood by turning to Ryan for the first question.
“How are you today?” he asked.
“I’m fine, and how are you?” said Ryan, Washington bureau chief of American Urban Radio Networks.
“Fantastic!” Spicer responded to laughter.
Avoid playing the role of persuader
Press secretaries often come from campaigns or political parties, where their job — like Spicer’s at the Republican National Committee — was not just to share facts with reporters, but to make a persuasive case to them.
McCurry argued that was a bad approach for the White House press office, however common it has become.
“In retrospect, [I] think the whole spin, the propaganda, the looking like you’re trying to spin the politically attractive side of the argument I think is very unsettling,” McCurry told Kumar. “I think it also diminishes the authority that you need to have in that process so people understand this is good information they’re getting.”
Ron Nessen, press secretary under President Ford, said in a phone interview that the most important part of the job is to meet daily with the president to review what’s in the news.
“My main rule for that job was, I’m the president’s spokesman, and therefore I ought to answer the reporters’ questions as the president would answer them if he were there,” Nessen said. “I’m just speaking for him.”
michael.finnegan@latimes.com
BACK STORY
Some tips for Sean Spicer
Experts offer guidance for succeeding as White House press secretary
SEAN SPICER’S predecessors know what it’s like to make a gaffe — as well as how to recover and command more respect from the press and the public. (Mark Wilson Getty Images)
By Michael Finnegan
In the 88 years since President Hoover named a former Minneapolis Tribune reporter as the first White House press secretary, nobody who has held that job has stumbled as quickly or dramatically as Sean Spicer.
Millions have gaped at the spectacle of Spicer’s daily briefings on cable news. Melissa McCarthy’s impersonation of him on NBC’s “Saturday Night Live,” most recently in an Easter Bunny outfit similar to one he wore for the holiday in George W. Bush’s White House, has turned Spicer into an improbable pop-culture figure. She portrays him as a lying buffoon who badgers the press.
By all accounts, the press secretary’s job is hard, and missteps are inevitable.
“Even the best trip themselves up,” said Joe Lockhart, who took the job just weeks before President Clinton was impeached in the Monica Lewinsky sex scandal.
Last week, Spicer profusely apologized for saying that Adolf Hitler did not use poison gas against his own people the way Syrian President Bashar Assad did. If it wasn’t the worst blunder of any White House press secretary since 1929, it was close.
But anyone who has held Spicer’s job knows what it feels like to make a gaffe at the White House lectern.
“When you get to a place where it doesn’t sound right, you just literally have to stop, even if it’s uncomfortable, and do a quick damage assessment in your head, and — particularly if it’s not what you meant — take a step back and overtly say, ‘I misspoke there,’ ” Lockhart said.
The White House Transition Project, a nonpartisan group that helps new administrations organize their takeover of the government, has compiled a list of “lessons learned” from previous press secretaries.
It’s part of a report prepared by the project’s director, Martha Joynt Kumar, also the author of “Managing the President’s Message: The White House Communications Operation.” A few of the key lessons:
Never lie to the news media
“Providing reporters with misinformation is a cardinal sin no matter whether it is willful or unintentional,” Kumar wrote in the report.
In Spicer’s case, that happened his first day on the job, at President Trump’s behest. Spicer harangued reporters for questioning Trump’s untrue statement that his inauguration crowd was the biggest in history. He antagonized the media further by taking no questions.
He also annoyed his boss. Trump reportedly was upset because Spicer wore a baggy suit to the news briefing.
It soon got worse. Spicer defended Trump’s false allegation that millions of immigrants committed voter fraud in November. He stood behind Trump’s unsubstantiated charge that President Obama illegally tapped his phones in Trump Tower. And he touched off a rare diplomatic spat with a key ally when he repeated a Fox News report that British intelligence agents helped Obama bug Trump’s phones, an accusation Britain adamantly denied.
False statements at White House briefings are nothing new.
In 1960, President Eisenhower’s press secretary, James Hagerty, shook reporters’ trust when the administration was caught lying about an American U-2 spy plane shot down in the Soviet Union, Kumar recalled in an interview. Eisenhower had to admit that the cover story — a NASA weather plane flying over Turkey had drifted off course — was a lie.
Falsehoods about U.S. military action in Southeast Asia dogged press secretaries under Presidents Johnson and Nixon. But the White House spokesman was a less visible public figure in that era. The daily briefings were not televised live by cable networks that draw millions of viewers, and there was no social media to instantly amplify misstatements.
During the Watergate scandal, Press Secretary Ron Ziegler got entangled in a web of lies by the president and his top advisors. Ziegler, who’d dismissed the break-in at Democratic Party headquarters as a “third-rate burglary” and denied any involvement by Nixon’s reelection campaign, famously told reporters in April 1973 that some of his previous statements had become “inoperative.”
Scott McClellan, who was press secretary under President George W. Bush, said in 2007 that he “unknowingly passed along false information” about the role of White House aides in leaking the identity of CIA operative Valerie Plame. McClellan blamed Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and several top White House aides.
To Kumar, that was no small thing. “I think the most important thing for a press secretary is to be seen as providing credible information, and being knowledgeable of what’s going on in the administration,” she said.
Keep it cool, and sometimes light
Marlin Fitzwater, press secretary under Presidents Reagan and George H.W. Bush, told Kumar that patience and tolerance were important.
“The tolerance side is you have to tolerate smart people, dumb people, early risers, late risers, early callers, late callers, every kind of physical and personal abuse you can come up with,” Fitzwater told her. “It’s like being a waitress in a restaurant.”
Fitzwater and Clinton Press Secretary Mike McCurry both noted that humor can cool down a tense briefing.
Spicer’s are tense more often than not. Last month, he snapped at veteran White House reporter April Ryan. “Stop shaking your head,” he told her.
The remark drew scathing criticism, so at his briefing the next day Spicer tried to lighten the mood by turning to Ryan for the first question.
“How are you today?” he asked.
“I’m fine, and how are you?” said Ryan, Washington bureau chief of American Urban Radio Networks.
“Fantastic!” Spicer responded to laughter.
Avoid playing the role of persuader
Press secretaries often come from campaigns or political parties, where their job — like Spicer’s at the Republican National Committee — was not just to share facts with reporters, but to make a persuasive case to them.
McCurry argued that was a bad approach for the White House press office, however common it has become.
“In retrospect, [I] think the whole spin, the propaganda, the looking like you’re trying to spin the politically attractive side of the argument I think is very unsettling,” McCurry told Kumar. “I think it also diminishes the authority that you need to have in that process so people understand this is good information they’re getting.”
Ron Nessen, press secretary under President Ford, said in a phone interview that the most important part of the job is to meet daily with the president to review what’s in the news.
“My main rule for that job was, I’m the president’s spokesman, and therefore I ought to answer the reporters’ questions as the president would answer them if he were there,” Nessen said. “I’m just speaking for him.”
michael.finnegan@latimes.com
Apr 20, 2017 13:32:48 #
U.S. tech firms raise alarm over H-1B visa reform
Foreign workers are needed, they say, but overseas outsourcers exploit the program.
PRESIDENT TRUMP’S “Buy American, Hire American” order aims to tighten rules for H-1B visas. (Susan Walsh Associated Press)
By David Pierson
President Trump says his new executive order will force tech companies to hire more American workers. But Silicon Valley leaders, who rely heavily on H-1B visas for high-skilled employees, say they’re not the problem.
The Trump administration introduced an executive order Tuesday named “Buy American, Hire American” that directs federal agencies to review the H-1B visa program. The goal is to eventually require companies to recruit higher-skilled and higher-paid workers rather than cheaper workers from other countries.
“With this action we are sending a powerful signal to the world that we are going to defend our workers and protect our jobs and finally put America first,” Trump said at speech in Wisconsin on Tuesday in which he called for a “long overdue” reform of an H-1B program riddled by “widespread abuse.”
The order was met with skepticism within the tech industry, which has long argued that the U.S. economy needs to attract the best workers from across the globe, not just the best on American soil, to prosper. They say others, namely outsourcing firms based overseas, are exploiting the visa program. And they say if the administration cracks down on the tech industry’s foreign hiring, it could result in just the opposite of what Trump wants.
“It is an extremely competitive and fast-moving industry,” said Ayda Akalin, an immigration attorney whose clients include Silicon Valley start-ups and entrepreneurs. “If they can’t find top engineers locally, and they also can’t otherwise hire foreign talent through the H-1B program, then they are certainly going to look elsewhere.”
That could mean a rise in outsourcing or tech companies setting up more offices in other countries such as Ireland and Canada, which are more welcoming to foreign workers, Akalin said.
“I can’t imagine that was the intended result,” she said.
Under the Trump administration, the Department of Homeland Security has already said it would establish a stricter vetting process for computer programmers. The United States Citizenship and Immigration Services also said it would conduct more site visits to catch H-1B visa fraud, and the Justice Department warned employers seeking visas to not discriminate against American workers.
The executive order signed Tuesday calls for federal agencies to review the H-1B program and also government procurement practices so that more contracts are awarded to American manufacturers.
The order itself doesn’t bring substantive change; Akalin chided it as mere “tokenism.” But the changing attitude toward foreign workers is already having a chilling effect in Silicon Valley, according to immigration attorney Reaz Jafri.
Jafri is currently representing two clients struggling to get H-1B visas to stay in the U.S. One, a Spanish national who graduated from the Stanford Graduate School of Business, has decided to establish his robotics start-up in Spain rather than wait to see if he can stay in the U.S. Another is a Chinese national who has already raised money for an artificial intelligence start-up that will probably have to be headquartered overseas.
“This will hurt our country and our economy,” Jafri said of the executive order. “The reason why Google, IBM and Apple are what they are today is because they were able to recruit the best from around the world.”
The U.S. issues 85,000 H-1B visas a year through a lottery system. Facing what they describe as a lack of qualified talent, many tech firms bolster their ranks with H-1B workers.
Google, for instance, hired as many as 743 workers on H-1B visas as recently as 2013, according to technology website Recode . A Brookings Institute study found in 2012 that there were 17 H-1B visa requests for every 1,000 jobs in Silicon Valley.
Both Jafri and Akalin agree that reform is needed, specifically in regards to large India-based outsourcing companies such as Infosys and Tata Consultancy Services that grab thousands of H-1B visas each year. The companies are accused of gaming the system by inundating the federal government with applications. Complaints also persist that the firms are undercutting American job-seekers by providing foreign workers for jobs that don’t require special skills at wages lower than market rates.
“We support immigration policies that create jobs rather than outsource them,” Silicon Valley venture capital firm Unshackled Ventures said in a statement. “The H-1B is designed for the highest-skilled worker, but when 13 of the top 15 H-1B visa filers are global outsourcing companies, who pay lower than market rate wages, the H-1B program’s purpose is in jeopardy.”
In a series of tweets Monday after the news broke about the Trump administration’s order, Todd Schulte, president of tech advocacy group FWD.us, said companies that are too dependent on H-1B visas should have less priority in the lottery for the visas and argued for a ban of third-party placement of workers.
Infosys said in a statement that it was helping U.S. companies remain competitive.
“It is our endeavor to help clients leverage the best U.S. talent together with the best global talent to drive economic growth in the U.S., ensure the U.S. continues to be at the forefront of innovation, and bring skills and education in the new technologies that will transform our world,” the company said.
The criticism of outsourcing firms from the tech industry is hypocritical, said Norman Matloff, a professor of computer science at UC Davis who noted that Silicon Valley was only recently “falling over itself” to be critical of Trump’s immigration policies.
“It’s a deliberate attempt to deflect attention from themselves,” said Matloff, who believes that both Indian outsourcing firms and the biggest U.S. tech firms are guilty of abusing the visa program. “This is exactly their PR strategy. Blame the outsourcing companies.”
Meanwhile, the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a nonpartisan Washington think tank, said Trump’s merit-based system could work under certain conditions.
“Replacing the H-1B lottery with a more merit-based system could advance the program’s goals of attracting people with advanced STEM skills,” the group’s president, Robert D. Atkinson, said using the common acronym for science, technology, engineering and math. “We also welcome efforts to root out abuse, better enforce the existing rules, and increase the salary requirements, as long as we continue to welcome highly qualified STEM workers.”
Atkinson is less optimistic about any attempts to delay hiring decisions, such as a requirement that employers keep job openings unfilled for a certain period to give American applicants more time.
“We are talking about fast-moving industries,” he said. “Companies get opportunities and they have to jump on them. Delaying them for too long would be bad for innovation, job creation and growth.”
Demand for H-1B visas isn’t restricted to the tech world. Snap-on, the tools maker that hosted Trump’s speech Tuesday in Kenosha, Wis., employs at least 17 people on H-1B visas, according to public records .
david.pierson@latimes.com
Twitter: @dhpierson
Foreign workers are needed, they say, but overseas outsourcers exploit the program.
PRESIDENT TRUMP’S “Buy American, Hire American” order aims to tighten rules for H-1B visas. (Susan Walsh Associated Press)
By David Pierson
President Trump says his new executive order will force tech companies to hire more American workers. But Silicon Valley leaders, who rely heavily on H-1B visas for high-skilled employees, say they’re not the problem.
The Trump administration introduced an executive order Tuesday named “Buy American, Hire American” that directs federal agencies to review the H-1B visa program. The goal is to eventually require companies to recruit higher-skilled and higher-paid workers rather than cheaper workers from other countries.
“With this action we are sending a powerful signal to the world that we are going to defend our workers and protect our jobs and finally put America first,” Trump said at speech in Wisconsin on Tuesday in which he called for a “long overdue” reform of an H-1B program riddled by “widespread abuse.”
The order was met with skepticism within the tech industry, which has long argued that the U.S. economy needs to attract the best workers from across the globe, not just the best on American soil, to prosper. They say others, namely outsourcing firms based overseas, are exploiting the visa program. And they say if the administration cracks down on the tech industry’s foreign hiring, it could result in just the opposite of what Trump wants.
“It is an extremely competitive and fast-moving industry,” said Ayda Akalin, an immigration attorney whose clients include Silicon Valley start-ups and entrepreneurs. “If they can’t find top engineers locally, and they also can’t otherwise hire foreign talent through the H-1B program, then they are certainly going to look elsewhere.”
That could mean a rise in outsourcing or tech companies setting up more offices in other countries such as Ireland and Canada, which are more welcoming to foreign workers, Akalin said.
“I can’t imagine that was the intended result,” she said.
Under the Trump administration, the Department of Homeland Security has already said it would establish a stricter vetting process for computer programmers. The United States Citizenship and Immigration Services also said it would conduct more site visits to catch H-1B visa fraud, and the Justice Department warned employers seeking visas to not discriminate against American workers.
The executive order signed Tuesday calls for federal agencies to review the H-1B program and also government procurement practices so that more contracts are awarded to American manufacturers.
The order itself doesn’t bring substantive change; Akalin chided it as mere “tokenism.” But the changing attitude toward foreign workers is already having a chilling effect in Silicon Valley, according to immigration attorney Reaz Jafri.
Jafri is currently representing two clients struggling to get H-1B visas to stay in the U.S. One, a Spanish national who graduated from the Stanford Graduate School of Business, has decided to establish his robotics start-up in Spain rather than wait to see if he can stay in the U.S. Another is a Chinese national who has already raised money for an artificial intelligence start-up that will probably have to be headquartered overseas.
“This will hurt our country and our economy,” Jafri said of the executive order. “The reason why Google, IBM and Apple are what they are today is because they were able to recruit the best from around the world.”
The U.S. issues 85,000 H-1B visas a year through a lottery system. Facing what they describe as a lack of qualified talent, many tech firms bolster their ranks with H-1B workers.
Google, for instance, hired as many as 743 workers on H-1B visas as recently as 2013, according to technology website Recode . A Brookings Institute study found in 2012 that there were 17 H-1B visa requests for every 1,000 jobs in Silicon Valley.
Both Jafri and Akalin agree that reform is needed, specifically in regards to large India-based outsourcing companies such as Infosys and Tata Consultancy Services that grab thousands of H-1B visas each year. The companies are accused of gaming the system by inundating the federal government with applications. Complaints also persist that the firms are undercutting American job-seekers by providing foreign workers for jobs that don’t require special skills at wages lower than market rates.
“We support immigration policies that create jobs rather than outsource them,” Silicon Valley venture capital firm Unshackled Ventures said in a statement. “The H-1B is designed for the highest-skilled worker, but when 13 of the top 15 H-1B visa filers are global outsourcing companies, who pay lower than market rate wages, the H-1B program’s purpose is in jeopardy.”
In a series of tweets Monday after the news broke about the Trump administration’s order, Todd Schulte, president of tech advocacy group FWD.us, said companies that are too dependent on H-1B visas should have less priority in the lottery for the visas and argued for a ban of third-party placement of workers.
Infosys said in a statement that it was helping U.S. companies remain competitive.
“It is our endeavor to help clients leverage the best U.S. talent together with the best global talent to drive economic growth in the U.S., ensure the U.S. continues to be at the forefront of innovation, and bring skills and education in the new technologies that will transform our world,” the company said.
The criticism of outsourcing firms from the tech industry is hypocritical, said Norman Matloff, a professor of computer science at UC Davis who noted that Silicon Valley was only recently “falling over itself” to be critical of Trump’s immigration policies.
“It’s a deliberate attempt to deflect attention from themselves,” said Matloff, who believes that both Indian outsourcing firms and the biggest U.S. tech firms are guilty of abusing the visa program. “This is exactly their PR strategy. Blame the outsourcing companies.”
Meanwhile, the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a nonpartisan Washington think tank, said Trump’s merit-based system could work under certain conditions.
“Replacing the H-1B lottery with a more merit-based system could advance the program’s goals of attracting people with advanced STEM skills,” the group’s president, Robert D. Atkinson, said using the common acronym for science, technology, engineering and math. “We also welcome efforts to root out abuse, better enforce the existing rules, and increase the salary requirements, as long as we continue to welcome highly qualified STEM workers.”
Atkinson is less optimistic about any attempts to delay hiring decisions, such as a requirement that employers keep job openings unfilled for a certain period to give American applicants more time.
“We are talking about fast-moving industries,” he said. “Companies get opportunities and they have to jump on them. Delaying them for too long would be bad for innovation, job creation and growth.”
Demand for H-1B visas isn’t restricted to the tech world. Snap-on, the tools maker that hosted Trump’s speech Tuesday in Kenosha, Wis., employs at least 17 people on H-1B visas, according to public records .
david.pierson@latimes.com
Twitter: @dhpierson
Apr 20, 2017 15:04:12 #
To see the hypocrite and phony, "the Progressive One" is; these quotes and questions have been presented;
"You can tell that this is the wakeup call to action many needed.....you can see the new level of mobilization, awareness and consciousness. the freeways have been blocked with thousands out here in LA.....Trump has his work cut out for him and his racist supporters in the sticks got him there.....will not be of any help to him…" - Progressive? One
So it is anarchy that Progressive One is behind!
At least he is out in the open.
The "professor" is a Marxist.
No wonder the professor avoids responding to these questions!
Why do liberals side with a Bilderberger Billionaire elitists like George "Giorgi" Soros?
PO; do you believe this should be what guides America?
“This system to be controlled in a feudalistic fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent private meetings and conferences.” - Insider, Professor Carroll
The Bilderberg Group meets once a year, and is blacked out by the MSM.
Quigley – ‘Tragedy and Hope’,( p. 324)
10 Things liberals ignore About "Giorgi" George Soros
https://youtu.be/tfBHYxEojZk
SOROS ROTHSCHILD RACE WAR PROPAGANDA EXPOSED
https://youtu.be/lhqqz3QFQKE
George Soros: Evil Puppet Master Exposed
https://youtu.be/1eRFTHD2CTg
"You can tell that this is the wakeup call to action many needed.....you can see the new level of mobilization, awareness and consciousness. the freeways have been blocked with thousands out here in LA.....Trump has his work cut out for him and his racist supporters in the sticks got him there.....will not be of any help to him…" - Progressive? One
So it is anarchy that Progressive One is behind!
At least he is out in the open.
The "professor" is a Marxist.
No wonder the professor avoids responding to these questions!
Why do liberals side with a Bilderberger Billionaire elitists like George "Giorgi" Soros?
PO; do you believe this should be what guides America?
“This system to be controlled in a feudalistic fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent private meetings and conferences.” - Insider, Professor Carroll
The Bilderberg Group meets once a year, and is blacked out by the MSM.
Quigley – ‘Tragedy and Hope’,( p. 324)
10 Things liberals ignore About "Giorgi" George Soros
https://youtu.be/tfBHYxEojZk
SOROS ROTHSCHILD RACE WAR PROPAGANDA EXPOSED
https://youtu.be/lhqqz3QFQKE
George Soros: Evil Puppet Master Exposed
https://youtu.be/1eRFTHD2CTg
Apr 21, 2017 13:30:24 #
Iran ignores threats from Trump officials
With the economy improving, Tehran appears unwilling to heighten tension.
SECRETARY of State Rex Tillerson this week accused Iran of destabilizing the world and compared it to the largely isolated but aggressiveNorth Korea. (Ivan Sekretarev Associated Press)
By Ramin Mostaghim and Shashank Bengali
TEHRAN — With Iran’s presidential election weeks away and its beleaguered economy showing signs of improvement, the nation’s ruling clerics seem uninterested in a new round of hostilities with the United States.
The Trump administration’s escalating threats against the Islamic Republic have elicited muted responses from the theocracy and President Hassan Rouhani’s government, signaling that the Tehran establishment may ride out the current wave of criticism from Washington.
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson this week accused Iran of destabilizing the world, compared it to the largely isolated but aggressive North Korea, which has a nuclear arsenal, and said the Trump administration was reviewing the U.S. decision to lift economic sanctions as required under Iran’s 2015 agreement to curb its nuclear program.
On Thursday, President Trump said Iran was doing a disservice to an agreement he called terrible.
“They are not living up to the spirit of the agreement, I can tell you that,” he said during a White House news conference with Italian Prime Minister Paolo Gentiloni. “They have to do that. So we will see what happens.”
The Trump administration has certified that Iran is complying with the nuclear pact, allowing the extension of what Trump previously called “the worst deal ever.”
The agreement has enabled Iran to resume oil sales and solicit foreign investment to jump-start its economy, which had been all but disconnected from the world under one of the toughest sanctions programs.
Analysts say Iranian hard-liners believe that the U.S. is unlikely to withdraw from the deal and risk a diplomatic crisis with the five other signatories — Britain, China, France, Germany and Russia.
Abdullah Gangi, editor of the Javan daily newspaper, a mouthpiece of Iran’s hard-line Revolutionary Guard, dismissed Tillerson’s remarks as contradictory.
“On one hand he and others in the U.S. administration confirm that Iran has abided by the terms of the nuclear agreement, and on the other hand they threaten Iran and draw parallels to North Korea,” Gangi said.
“This is an absolute fallacy,” he said. “The new U.S. administration tries to mask its own domestic problems and illegitimacy by accusing Iran of sponsoring terrorism or nuclear noncompliance from time to time. These are sheer lies and irrelevant.”
Iran has long denied allegations that it supports an array of Shiite Muslim militant groups in the Middle East, including Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in the Palestinian territories and Houthi rebels in Yemen — all of which the U.S. opposes.
Tehran is also one of the staunchest allies of Syrian President Bashar Assad, whose forces the Trump administration targeted this month with missile strikes on an airfield. The U.S. airstrikes came in response to a chemical gas attack, apparently by the Syrian government, that killed dozens of people in a rebel-held town in Idlib province.
Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, Iran’s lead negotiator on the nuclear deal, tweeted that the United States’ “worn-out accusations cannot mask its admission of Iran’s compliance” with the nuclear agreement.
Analysts said Iran’s ruling establishment, including Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, doesn’t want to raise tension with the U.S. just as the economy is picking up.
This week, at the annual military parade to mark National Army Day, amid the usual fanfare of hardware and missiles — including one that carried the sign “Death to Israel” — the semiofficial Fars News Agency quoted Khamenei as telling a group of commanders: “Today, strengthening the economic foundation is the top priority of the country.”
Tehran also showed restraint in its response to Trump’s executive order in January banning citizens of Iran and several other Muslim-majority countries from visiting the United States. After a federal judge blocked the order, Iran granted visas to wrestlers from the U.S. to participate in a major international tournament in a move widely seen as a bid to lower tension.
“While they want to keep their anti-American slogan as an undertone, they want more American tourists here in Iran and more Iranian students studying in America,” said Nader Karimi Juni, a political analyst close to Iran’s reformists.
Juni said Iran “is not following suit with North Korea,” which test-fired a missile this week in a move that the Trump administration called a “provocation.”
But Iran’s response could change depending on the outcome of the May 19 presidential election. Rouhani, a relative moderate, remains popular despite concerns that ordinary Iranians are not reaping economic gains from the nuclear deal that he championed.
Although there are no reliable opinion polls in Iran, analysts say there is little sign that voters are tilting toward more conservative candidates in response to U.S. threats.
“This is rhetoric for American domestic consumption,” said Ali Nori, a 50-year-old bread vendor distributing lavash in west Tehran.
But the National Iranian American Council, a Washington-based advocacy group that supports the nuclear deal, said Tillerson’s comments “lend credence to hard-liners in Iran who warned of any negotiation with the United States” and politically isolate Iran’s voices of moderation.
Iran’s Interior Ministry said Thursday that the Guardian Council, which oversees elections, had finalized the slate of presidential candidates. They include Rouhani, hard-line former Judge Ebrahim Raisi and four other candidates.
Former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who surprised many by filing papers to run last week, was disqualified. Though the council does not give reasons for disqualifying candidates, Khamenei had advised Ahmadinejad to not run again.
If a hard-liner wins, he might respond more forcefully to U.S. threats. That could also embolden members of Congress who support imposing tougher unilateral sanctions against Iran, which would torpedo the nation’s nascent economic recovery and could provoke Tehran into resuming its nuclear program.
Iranian hard-liners say that new sanctions would amount to the U.S. breaking the nuclear deal. But they refuse to express concern.
shashank.bengali@latimes.com
Twitter: @SBengali
Special correspondent Mostaghim reported from Tehran and Times staff writer Bengali from Mumbai, India.
With the economy improving, Tehran appears unwilling to heighten tension.
SECRETARY of State Rex Tillerson this week accused Iran of destabilizing the world and compared it to the largely isolated but aggressiveNorth Korea. (Ivan Sekretarev Associated Press)
By Ramin Mostaghim and Shashank Bengali
TEHRAN — With Iran’s presidential election weeks away and its beleaguered economy showing signs of improvement, the nation’s ruling clerics seem uninterested in a new round of hostilities with the United States.
The Trump administration’s escalating threats against the Islamic Republic have elicited muted responses from the theocracy and President Hassan Rouhani’s government, signaling that the Tehran establishment may ride out the current wave of criticism from Washington.
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson this week accused Iran of destabilizing the world, compared it to the largely isolated but aggressive North Korea, which has a nuclear arsenal, and said the Trump administration was reviewing the U.S. decision to lift economic sanctions as required under Iran’s 2015 agreement to curb its nuclear program.
On Thursday, President Trump said Iran was doing a disservice to an agreement he called terrible.
“They are not living up to the spirit of the agreement, I can tell you that,” he said during a White House news conference with Italian Prime Minister Paolo Gentiloni. “They have to do that. So we will see what happens.”
The Trump administration has certified that Iran is complying with the nuclear pact, allowing the extension of what Trump previously called “the worst deal ever.”
The agreement has enabled Iran to resume oil sales and solicit foreign investment to jump-start its economy, which had been all but disconnected from the world under one of the toughest sanctions programs.
Analysts say Iranian hard-liners believe that the U.S. is unlikely to withdraw from the deal and risk a diplomatic crisis with the five other signatories — Britain, China, France, Germany and Russia.
Abdullah Gangi, editor of the Javan daily newspaper, a mouthpiece of Iran’s hard-line Revolutionary Guard, dismissed Tillerson’s remarks as contradictory.
“On one hand he and others in the U.S. administration confirm that Iran has abided by the terms of the nuclear agreement, and on the other hand they threaten Iran and draw parallels to North Korea,” Gangi said.
“This is an absolute fallacy,” he said. “The new U.S. administration tries to mask its own domestic problems and illegitimacy by accusing Iran of sponsoring terrorism or nuclear noncompliance from time to time. These are sheer lies and irrelevant.”
Iran has long denied allegations that it supports an array of Shiite Muslim militant groups in the Middle East, including Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in the Palestinian territories and Houthi rebels in Yemen — all of which the U.S. opposes.
Tehran is also one of the staunchest allies of Syrian President Bashar Assad, whose forces the Trump administration targeted this month with missile strikes on an airfield. The U.S. airstrikes came in response to a chemical gas attack, apparently by the Syrian government, that killed dozens of people in a rebel-held town in Idlib province.
Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, Iran’s lead negotiator on the nuclear deal, tweeted that the United States’ “worn-out accusations cannot mask its admission of Iran’s compliance” with the nuclear agreement.
Analysts said Iran’s ruling establishment, including Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, doesn’t want to raise tension with the U.S. just as the economy is picking up.
This week, at the annual military parade to mark National Army Day, amid the usual fanfare of hardware and missiles — including one that carried the sign “Death to Israel” — the semiofficial Fars News Agency quoted Khamenei as telling a group of commanders: “Today, strengthening the economic foundation is the top priority of the country.”
Tehran also showed restraint in its response to Trump’s executive order in January banning citizens of Iran and several other Muslim-majority countries from visiting the United States. After a federal judge blocked the order, Iran granted visas to wrestlers from the U.S. to participate in a major international tournament in a move widely seen as a bid to lower tension.
“While they want to keep their anti-American slogan as an undertone, they want more American tourists here in Iran and more Iranian students studying in America,” said Nader Karimi Juni, a political analyst close to Iran’s reformists.
Juni said Iran “is not following suit with North Korea,” which test-fired a missile this week in a move that the Trump administration called a “provocation.”
But Iran’s response could change depending on the outcome of the May 19 presidential election. Rouhani, a relative moderate, remains popular despite concerns that ordinary Iranians are not reaping economic gains from the nuclear deal that he championed.
Although there are no reliable opinion polls in Iran, analysts say there is little sign that voters are tilting toward more conservative candidates in response to U.S. threats.
“This is rhetoric for American domestic consumption,” said Ali Nori, a 50-year-old bread vendor distributing lavash in west Tehran.
But the National Iranian American Council, a Washington-based advocacy group that supports the nuclear deal, said Tillerson’s comments “lend credence to hard-liners in Iran who warned of any negotiation with the United States” and politically isolate Iran’s voices of moderation.
Iran’s Interior Ministry said Thursday that the Guardian Council, which oversees elections, had finalized the slate of presidential candidates. They include Rouhani, hard-line former Judge Ebrahim Raisi and four other candidates.
Former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who surprised many by filing papers to run last week, was disqualified. Though the council does not give reasons for disqualifying candidates, Khamenei had advised Ahmadinejad to not run again.
If a hard-liner wins, he might respond more forcefully to U.S. threats. That could also embolden members of Congress who support imposing tougher unilateral sanctions against Iran, which would torpedo the nation’s nascent economic recovery and could provoke Tehran into resuming its nuclear program.
Iranian hard-liners say that new sanctions would amount to the U.S. breaking the nuclear deal. But they refuse to express concern.
shashank.bengali@latimes.com
Twitter: @SBengali
Special correspondent Mostaghim reported from Tehran and Times staff writer Bengali from Mumbai, India.
Check out topic: Hannity Attacks CNN Anchor Jake Tapper
Apr 21, 2017 13:41:59 #
ICE unlikely to increase deportations
Issues at immigration enforcement agency will slow the removal of those here illegally, a harsh report warns.
ICE AGENTS arrest a green-card holder Tuesday in El Monte. A government report says the agents are ill-equipped to monitor their caseloads so they can identify, detain and deport people in the country illegally. (Photographs by Brian van der Brug Los Angeles Times) JORGE FIELD, an ICE fugitive operations official, talks with agents in Downey. ICE tries to monitor more than 368,000 convicted criminals, a new report notes. ()
By Joseph Tanfani
WASHINGTON — U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, hampered by poor organization and an overworked staff, will have trouble keeping up with the Trump administration’s plans to ramp up deportations of people in the country illegally, government inspectors have concluded.
ICE has “overwhelming caseloads,” its records are “likely inaccurate” and its deportation policies and procedures “are outdated and unclear,” said a report released Thursday by the inspector general of the Homeland Security Department.
“ICE is almost certainly not deporting all the aliens who could be deported and will likely not be able to keep up with the growing number of deportable aliens,” the 19-page report concludes.
The harsh assessment is the latest dash of cold reality for Trump, who was swept into Washington promising vastly tougher enforcement of immigration laws, including more removals, thousands more Border Patrol agents and deportation officers, and construction of a formidable wall on the U.S.-Mexico border.
Congress faces a looming deadline to fund the federal government after members return next week, and the proposed wall and other new border security measures probably won’t get anything extra in this round of spending. Trump had asked Congress to provide an additional $5 billion this year.
A vast surge of new hiring is also problematic. Although Trump has signed an executive order directing the Border Patrol and ICE to hire 15,000 more agents and officers to boost enforcement, that goal will be nearly impossible to achieve anytime soon.
An internal memo in February from Kevin McAleenan, acting director of Customs and Border Protection, revealed that Border Patrol was able to vet and hire only about 40 agents a month last year despite aggressive efforts to streamline the hiring process.
Reports this year that Customs and Border Patrol might stop using polygraph tests, intended to ferret out unqualified agents, drew a storm of criticism. So did the reason: Two out of three new applicants had failed the lie detector.
The agency first required polygraph tests for prospective employees in 2012 after an Obama-era hiring surge led to a sharp increase in agents getting charged or arrested for bribery, drug smuggling and other crimes on or near the border.
Moreover, the Border Patrol — the nation’s largest federal law enforcement agency — has more than 2,000 jobs empty even before a Trump-led hiring surge. The force fell below 20,000 agents this year for the first time since 2009, when Obama came to office.
Homeland Security Secretary John F. Kelly said Sunday that Customs and Border Protection would continue to use the polygraph as a hiring tool, although he added that the agency was considering changes to make the process less “arduous.”
Kelly, a retired Marine general, took the offensive in a speech at George Washington University on Tuesday, blaming poor morale in his department on what he called “pointless bureaucracy” and “disrespect and contempt” from political leaders.
“If lawmakers do not like the laws that we enforce…. then they should have the courage and the skill to change those laws,” he said. “Otherwise, they should shut up and support the men and women on the front lines.”
Under the Trump administration, the Border Patrol and ICE have ramped up arrests of people in the country illegally —– 21,362 from mid-January to mid-March, compared with about 16,100 for the same period last year.
Removals by ICE reached a peak of 409,000 a year under President Obama before plummeting to 235,000 in 2015 and 240,000 last year.
In the first three months of this year, ICE has deported 54,936 people, a rate that appears to put the Trump administration on track to remove fewer people than the Obama administration.
On Thursday, Atty. Gen. Jeff Sessions boasted during a visit to El Paso of making progress, saying the number of people trying to cross the border illegally had fallen to the lowest in 17 years.
“For those that still seek to violate our laws and enter the country illegally, let me be very clear: Don’t come. When you are caught, you will be detained, adjudicated and deported,” he said.
Sessions said he had ordered each of the 94 U.S. attorneys offices to make criminal immigration enforcement a priority, and said each now has a “border security coordinator” who is personally responsible for overseeing immigration enforcement.
After taking office, Sessions ordered nearly every U.S. attorney in the country to resign. He has yet to nominate any replacements to the Senate, which must confirm each one, so it’s unclear when federal prosecutors will start to change their focus.
Sessions also said he had streamlined the hiring of immigration judges, and that the Justice Department would add 50 such judges this year and 75 next year to help adjudicate asylum claims, deportation orders and other disputes.
That will help but hardly solve the problem. There are now 250 immigration judges, and a backlog of 542,000 cases in immigration courts.
Moreover, the latest report from the inspector general’s office at Homeland Security said ICE agents, who are supposed to identify, detain and deport people in the country illegally, are ill-equipped to monitor those on their caseloads.
ICE tries to keep track of about 2.2 million foreigners who are not in jail, including more than 368,000 convicted criminals, the report said. Some officers have more than 10,000 cases, the report said, criticizing agency officials for not managing the problem.
“Although many ICE deportation officers … reported overwhelming caseloads and difficulty fulfilling their responsibilities, ICE does not collect and analyze data” that could be used to ease the pressure.
In one office, according to the report, officers complained that they had to manage so many thousands of cases that they couldn’t keep track of some migrants who had been flagged as risks to national security.
The report faulted ICE for insufficient training and failing to issue “up-to-date, comprehensive and accessible” guidelines on deportation. Resolving the failures, it said, “may require significant time and resources.”
“These management deficiencies and unresolved obstacles make it difficult for ICE to deport aliens expeditiously,” it said.
The inspector general’s office launched the review last year after Jean Jacques, a Haitian national, was released from ICE custody in 2015 even though he had been convicted of attempted murder and given a final order of deportation. While on the street, he killed another man.
ICE said it agreed with the report’s recommendations and that it was prioritizing deportation efforts to focus on those who pose the greatest threats.
The agency “remains committed to implementing safeguards to ensure that its deportation operations are executed in a way that promotes public safety and protects our communities,” Jennifer D. Elzea, an acting press secretary, said Thursday.
Randy Capps, research director at the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank, said the Trump administration may have promised more than it can deliver given the systemic problems.
“Sooner or later, they are going to have to narrow down [deportation priorities] or the system is going to be overwhelmed,” he said. “That’s certainly what the Obama administration found. There’s a certain size past which the system is very hard to manage efficiently.”
joseph.tanfani@latimes.com
Twitter: @jtanfani
Issues at immigration enforcement agency will slow the removal of those here illegally, a harsh report warns.
ICE AGENTS arrest a green-card holder Tuesday in El Monte. A government report says the agents are ill-equipped to monitor their caseloads so they can identify, detain and deport people in the country illegally. (Photographs by Brian van der Brug Los Angeles Times) JORGE FIELD, an ICE fugitive operations official, talks with agents in Downey. ICE tries to monitor more than 368,000 convicted criminals, a new report notes. ()
By Joseph Tanfani
WASHINGTON — U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, hampered by poor organization and an overworked staff, will have trouble keeping up with the Trump administration’s plans to ramp up deportations of people in the country illegally, government inspectors have concluded.
ICE has “overwhelming caseloads,” its records are “likely inaccurate” and its deportation policies and procedures “are outdated and unclear,” said a report released Thursday by the inspector general of the Homeland Security Department.
“ICE is almost certainly not deporting all the aliens who could be deported and will likely not be able to keep up with the growing number of deportable aliens,” the 19-page report concludes.
The harsh assessment is the latest dash of cold reality for Trump, who was swept into Washington promising vastly tougher enforcement of immigration laws, including more removals, thousands more Border Patrol agents and deportation officers, and construction of a formidable wall on the U.S.-Mexico border.
Congress faces a looming deadline to fund the federal government after members return next week, and the proposed wall and other new border security measures probably won’t get anything extra in this round of spending. Trump had asked Congress to provide an additional $5 billion this year.
A vast surge of new hiring is also problematic. Although Trump has signed an executive order directing the Border Patrol and ICE to hire 15,000 more agents and officers to boost enforcement, that goal will be nearly impossible to achieve anytime soon.
An internal memo in February from Kevin McAleenan, acting director of Customs and Border Protection, revealed that Border Patrol was able to vet and hire only about 40 agents a month last year despite aggressive efforts to streamline the hiring process.
Reports this year that Customs and Border Patrol might stop using polygraph tests, intended to ferret out unqualified agents, drew a storm of criticism. So did the reason: Two out of three new applicants had failed the lie detector.
The agency first required polygraph tests for prospective employees in 2012 after an Obama-era hiring surge led to a sharp increase in agents getting charged or arrested for bribery, drug smuggling and other crimes on or near the border.
Moreover, the Border Patrol — the nation’s largest federal law enforcement agency — has more than 2,000 jobs empty even before a Trump-led hiring surge. The force fell below 20,000 agents this year for the first time since 2009, when Obama came to office.
Homeland Security Secretary John F. Kelly said Sunday that Customs and Border Protection would continue to use the polygraph as a hiring tool, although he added that the agency was considering changes to make the process less “arduous.”
Kelly, a retired Marine general, took the offensive in a speech at George Washington University on Tuesday, blaming poor morale in his department on what he called “pointless bureaucracy” and “disrespect and contempt” from political leaders.
“If lawmakers do not like the laws that we enforce…. then they should have the courage and the skill to change those laws,” he said. “Otherwise, they should shut up and support the men and women on the front lines.”
Under the Trump administration, the Border Patrol and ICE have ramped up arrests of people in the country illegally —– 21,362 from mid-January to mid-March, compared with about 16,100 for the same period last year.
Removals by ICE reached a peak of 409,000 a year under President Obama before plummeting to 235,000 in 2015 and 240,000 last year.
In the first three months of this year, ICE has deported 54,936 people, a rate that appears to put the Trump administration on track to remove fewer people than the Obama administration.
On Thursday, Atty. Gen. Jeff Sessions boasted during a visit to El Paso of making progress, saying the number of people trying to cross the border illegally had fallen to the lowest in 17 years.
“For those that still seek to violate our laws and enter the country illegally, let me be very clear: Don’t come. When you are caught, you will be detained, adjudicated and deported,” he said.
Sessions said he had ordered each of the 94 U.S. attorneys offices to make criminal immigration enforcement a priority, and said each now has a “border security coordinator” who is personally responsible for overseeing immigration enforcement.
After taking office, Sessions ordered nearly every U.S. attorney in the country to resign. He has yet to nominate any replacements to the Senate, which must confirm each one, so it’s unclear when federal prosecutors will start to change their focus.
Sessions also said he had streamlined the hiring of immigration judges, and that the Justice Department would add 50 such judges this year and 75 next year to help adjudicate asylum claims, deportation orders and other disputes.
That will help but hardly solve the problem. There are now 250 immigration judges, and a backlog of 542,000 cases in immigration courts.
Moreover, the latest report from the inspector general’s office at Homeland Security said ICE agents, who are supposed to identify, detain and deport people in the country illegally, are ill-equipped to monitor those on their caseloads.
ICE tries to keep track of about 2.2 million foreigners who are not in jail, including more than 368,000 convicted criminals, the report said. Some officers have more than 10,000 cases, the report said, criticizing agency officials for not managing the problem.
“Although many ICE deportation officers … reported overwhelming caseloads and difficulty fulfilling their responsibilities, ICE does not collect and analyze data” that could be used to ease the pressure.
In one office, according to the report, officers complained that they had to manage so many thousands of cases that they couldn’t keep track of some migrants who had been flagged as risks to national security.
The report faulted ICE for insufficient training and failing to issue “up-to-date, comprehensive and accessible” guidelines on deportation. Resolving the failures, it said, “may require significant time and resources.”
“These management deficiencies and unresolved obstacles make it difficult for ICE to deport aliens expeditiously,” it said.
The inspector general’s office launched the review last year after Jean Jacques, a Haitian national, was released from ICE custody in 2015 even though he had been convicted of attempted murder and given a final order of deportation. While on the street, he killed another man.
ICE said it agreed with the report’s recommendations and that it was prioritizing deportation efforts to focus on those who pose the greatest threats.
The agency “remains committed to implementing safeguards to ensure that its deportation operations are executed in a way that promotes public safety and protects our communities,” Jennifer D. Elzea, an acting press secretary, said Thursday.
Randy Capps, research director at the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank, said the Trump administration may have promised more than it can deliver given the systemic problems.
“Sooner or later, they are going to have to narrow down [deportation priorities] or the system is going to be overwhelmed,” he said. “That’s certainly what the Obama administration found. There’s a certain size past which the system is very hard to manage efficiently.”
joseph.tanfani@latimes.com
Twitter: @jtanfani
Apr 21, 2017 13:43:21 #
A new push to repeal Obamacare
Trump says the GOP replacement plan ‘gets better and better and better,’ but the votes still aren’t there.
By Noam N. Levey
WASHINGTON — Approaching the 100-day mark in office without action on the Affordable Care Act, President Trump is pushing again for a vote on the sweeping House bill to roll back the 2010 law.
But even as House Republicans and administration officials continue to discuss potential changes to the legislation, there is little evidence GOP leaders are close to getting the votes needed to get the bill out of the House.
As of Thursday afternoon, no new vote had been scheduled by House Republican leaders. “The question is whether it can get 216 votes in the House, and the answer isn’t clear at this time,” said a senior GOP aide, who asked not to be identified discussing internal party discussions.
Trump, speaking at a White House news conference, also did not commit to seeking a vote next week, saying instead that he was hopeful the bill could come back for a vote soon. “The plan gets better and better and better, and it has gotten really, really good,” he said.
More immediately, the White House faces a potential government shutdown unless lawmakers can agree on a new spending measure by the end of next week.
Further complicating that are demands from insurers and patient advocates that the Trump administration commit to continuing to provide additional financial aid to low-income Americans who buy health coverage through Affordable Care Act marketplaces.
Many lawmakers would like the aid to be included in the new spending bill, but Trump has suggested that he might oppose that to force Democrats to accept other changes to the health bill.
House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) had to cancel a planned vote on the GOP repeal bill last month after it became clear that too many rank-and-file Republicans opposed the legislation.
Since then, several lawmakers have been working to amend the bill to win support from holdouts in the conservative House Freedom Caucus and from more centrist lawmakers, many of whom were loath to support legislation that would leave millions more Americans without health insurance.
The original bill — called the American Health Care Act — would have resulted in 24 million fewer Americans with health coverage over the next decade, according to an independent analysis by the Congressional Budget Office.
And while health insurance premiums would have been lower for some consumers, many older and lower-income Americans would have been priced out of coverage by the GOP plan.
The House legislation would dismantle the Obamacare extensive system for expanding health insurance coverage to millions of Americans, cutting nearly $1 trillion in federal aid that has allowed states to expand the Medicaid safety net programs and scaling back tax subsidies that help millions of low- and middle-income Americans buy commercial health plans.
At the same time, the House bill would repeal major taxes that the current law imposed to fund the expansion of health coverage.
That would deliver major tax breaks to the medical device and insurance industries and to wealthy Americans. The House bill also would scrap the unpopular requirement in the current law that Americans have insurance or pay a penalty.
Despite rolling back key pillars of Obamacare, the House bill still generated fierce resistance from many conservative lawmakers, who said it did not go far enough.
Trump administration officials, eager to score a win amid a rocky start to the president’s term, have been pushing for a new vote.
But an increasing number of GOP lawmakers have been voicing new concerns, amid a widespread public backlash against the House legislation.
On Monday, Rep. Jeff Denham (R-Turlock) announced that he would not support his party’s healthcare legislation unless it left significant parts of Obamacare intact.
“They go further right, they’re going to lose more moderates,” said Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Torrance). “I’m not sure how they do this…. Everyone knows it’s just going to die in the Senate. Really this is all about face-saving.”
The changes to the House Republican bill now under discussion — first reported by Huffington Post — would further weaken several key consumer protections in the current law, including the guarantee that Americans can get coverage even if they are sick.
Republican lawmakers have been exploring ways to give states the flexibility to scrap these protections. States could, for example, once again allow insurers to charge sick consumers more than healthy ones and could lift requirements that all health plans cover a basic set of benefits, such as mental health and maternity care.
Rep. Tom MacArthur (R-N.J.), a centrist who has been working on the new language, said in a Facebook post that sick patients would still be able to get coverage because states would be required to offer a special health plan, known as a high-risk pool, for people unable to get other coverage.
“This amendment will make coverage of preexisting conditions sacrosanct for all Americans,” he said.
But these high-risk pools were almost universally unsuccessful before the advent of Obamacare, and the new GOP proposals drew swift criticism from many patient advocates and others.
“This latest attempt to repeal the ACA is full of broken promises and deceptive rhetoric,” said Debra Ness, president of the National Partnership for Women & Families.
“While President Trump and leaders in Congress promised to protect health coverage for those with preexisting conditions, this new plan undermines this critically important and wildly popular ACA provision.”
noam.levey@latimes.com
Times staff writer Lisa Mascaro contributed to
this report.
Trump says the GOP replacement plan ‘gets better and better and better,’ but the votes still aren’t there.
By Noam N. Levey
WASHINGTON — Approaching the 100-day mark in office without action on the Affordable Care Act, President Trump is pushing again for a vote on the sweeping House bill to roll back the 2010 law.
But even as House Republicans and administration officials continue to discuss potential changes to the legislation, there is little evidence GOP leaders are close to getting the votes needed to get the bill out of the House.
As of Thursday afternoon, no new vote had been scheduled by House Republican leaders. “The question is whether it can get 216 votes in the House, and the answer isn’t clear at this time,” said a senior GOP aide, who asked not to be identified discussing internal party discussions.
Trump, speaking at a White House news conference, also did not commit to seeking a vote next week, saying instead that he was hopeful the bill could come back for a vote soon. “The plan gets better and better and better, and it has gotten really, really good,” he said.
More immediately, the White House faces a potential government shutdown unless lawmakers can agree on a new spending measure by the end of next week.
Further complicating that are demands from insurers and patient advocates that the Trump administration commit to continuing to provide additional financial aid to low-income Americans who buy health coverage through Affordable Care Act marketplaces.
Many lawmakers would like the aid to be included in the new spending bill, but Trump has suggested that he might oppose that to force Democrats to accept other changes to the health bill.
House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) had to cancel a planned vote on the GOP repeal bill last month after it became clear that too many rank-and-file Republicans opposed the legislation.
Since then, several lawmakers have been working to amend the bill to win support from holdouts in the conservative House Freedom Caucus and from more centrist lawmakers, many of whom were loath to support legislation that would leave millions more Americans without health insurance.
The original bill — called the American Health Care Act — would have resulted in 24 million fewer Americans with health coverage over the next decade, according to an independent analysis by the Congressional Budget Office.
And while health insurance premiums would have been lower for some consumers, many older and lower-income Americans would have been priced out of coverage by the GOP plan.
The House legislation would dismantle the Obamacare extensive system for expanding health insurance coverage to millions of Americans, cutting nearly $1 trillion in federal aid that has allowed states to expand the Medicaid safety net programs and scaling back tax subsidies that help millions of low- and middle-income Americans buy commercial health plans.
At the same time, the House bill would repeal major taxes that the current law imposed to fund the expansion of health coverage.
That would deliver major tax breaks to the medical device and insurance industries and to wealthy Americans. The House bill also would scrap the unpopular requirement in the current law that Americans have insurance or pay a penalty.
Despite rolling back key pillars of Obamacare, the House bill still generated fierce resistance from many conservative lawmakers, who said it did not go far enough.
Trump administration officials, eager to score a win amid a rocky start to the president’s term, have been pushing for a new vote.
But an increasing number of GOP lawmakers have been voicing new concerns, amid a widespread public backlash against the House legislation.
On Monday, Rep. Jeff Denham (R-Turlock) announced that he would not support his party’s healthcare legislation unless it left significant parts of Obamacare intact.
“They go further right, they’re going to lose more moderates,” said Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Torrance). “I’m not sure how they do this…. Everyone knows it’s just going to die in the Senate. Really this is all about face-saving.”
The changes to the House Republican bill now under discussion — first reported by Huffington Post — would further weaken several key consumer protections in the current law, including the guarantee that Americans can get coverage even if they are sick.
Republican lawmakers have been exploring ways to give states the flexibility to scrap these protections. States could, for example, once again allow insurers to charge sick consumers more than healthy ones and could lift requirements that all health plans cover a basic set of benefits, such as mental health and maternity care.
Rep. Tom MacArthur (R-N.J.), a centrist who has been working on the new language, said in a Facebook post that sick patients would still be able to get coverage because states would be required to offer a special health plan, known as a high-risk pool, for people unable to get other coverage.
“This amendment will make coverage of preexisting conditions sacrosanct for all Americans,” he said.
But these high-risk pools were almost universally unsuccessful before the advent of Obamacare, and the new GOP proposals drew swift criticism from many patient advocates and others.
“This latest attempt to repeal the ACA is full of broken promises and deceptive rhetoric,” said Debra Ness, president of the National Partnership for Women & Families.
“While President Trump and leaders in Congress promised to protect health coverage for those with preexisting conditions, this new plan undermines this critically important and wildly popular ACA provision.”
noam.levey@latimes.com
Times staff writer Lisa Mascaro contributed to
this report.
Apr 21, 2017 13:43:53 #
I voted for Trump. I feel betrayed
THE U.S. guided-missile destroyer Porter launches a missile in the Mediterranean Sea on April 7. Dozens of missiles hit Syria. (Ford Williams U.S. Navy )
B y J ustin R aimondo
I voted for Donald Trump because he promised to pursue a new foreign policy. As he said in December, “We will stop looking to topple regimes and overthrow governments. Our goal is stability, not chaos, because we want to rebuild our country.” He vowed to appoint those with “new approaches, and practical ideas, rather than surrounding myself with those who have perfect résumés but very little to brag about except responsibility for a long history of failed policies.”
After decades of disastrous interventions, Trump inspired me. But less than 100 days into his administration, I’m feeling the sting of betrayal. In recent weeks, Trump and his surrogates have abandoned virtually every foreign policy stance he took during the campaign.
He launched missiles against the regime of Syrian strongman Bashar Assad — mere months after telling the New York Times: “I thought the approach of fighting Assad and [Islamic State] simultaneously was madness, and idiocy.” Now Secretary of State Rex Tillerson is saying Assad must go, a clear indication that the Trump administration is “looking to topple regimes and overthrow governments.”
In another interview with the New York Times, Trump declared NATO “obsolete,” explaining, “When NATO was formed many decades ago we were a different country. There was a different threat.” Now we are told that “NATO is no longer obsolete.” Stay tuned for the Trump administration’s campaign to bring back Betamax.
“Wouldn’t it be nice,” Trump often said, “if we could get along with Russia?” This was music to my ears: finally a Republican candidate who wasn’t locked into a Cold War mentality. Yet, Trump’s appointees are now echoing the Washington policy wonks who want to start a new Cold War.
H.R. McMaster, Trump’s national security advisor, claims the Russians are engaged in a campaign of global “subversion.” Tillerson, during his recent visit to Moscow, denounced Russia’s alleged “interference” in the 2016 election — an echo of the Democrats’ unproved claim that the Kremlin colluded with his boss.
As Trump threatens to go to war with North Korea — which would spell doom for the 38,000 American troops stationed on the Korean peninsula — I am reminded of his comments on our military commitments in the region: “There is going to be a point at which we just can’t do this anymore .… At some point, we cannot be the policeman of the world …. [I]f we are attacked, [Japan doesn’t] have to do anything. If they’re attacked, we have to go out with full force…. That’s a pretty one-sided agreement.”
I’m not alone in feeling betrayed.
Ann Coulter, author of “In Trump We Trust: E Pluribus Awesome,” wrote recently that “Trump’s Syrian misadventure is immoral, violates every promise he ran on, and could sink his presidency.” At Breitbart News, the online headquarters of the Trump insurgency, a piece about the Syria attacks attracted more than 50,000 ferociously negative comments. Pat Buchanan, the ideological godfather of Trumpism, despaired that “the promise of a Trump presidency … appears, not 100 days in, to have been a mirage. Will more wars make America great again?” A baffled Laura Ingraham tweeted, “Missiles flying. Rubio’s happy. McCain ecstatic. Hillary’s on board. A complete policy change in 48 hrs.” Talk radio host Michael Savage complains that “People in Trump’s own sphere are turning him toward the beating war drums.” Nigel Farage, the leader of the Brexit forces in Britain who campaigned for Trump in the U.S., opined that the president’s supporters “will be scratching their heads” at these foreign policy reversals.
It’s the same sad story on the domestic front, Instead of repealing Obamacare, Trump pushed what the House Freedom Caucus dubbed “Obamacare lite.” Trump the campaigner denounced both Hillary Clinton and Ted Cruz as pawns of Goldman Sachs; as president, he’s appointed several Goldman Sachs executives to top spots in his administration. Not long ago, he told Federal Reserve Chairwoman Janet L. Yellen — whose visage was featured in a negative ad that ran in the last week of the campaign — that “she should be ashamed of herself,” accusing her of politicizing the Fed and creating “a very false economy.” Now he says he’s open to reappointing her.
The liberal media are thrilled by Trump’s transformation: The chorus of gushing praise on CNN and MSNBC as bombs fell on Syria was loud and practically unanimous. And Trump is reciprocating: Last week at a White House event honoring first responders, he characterized the media as “honorable people.” Remember when he called them out as “the world’s most dishonest people”? Ah, those were the good old days!
And while Trump praises his enemies, he denigrates his loyal friends, openly downgrading Stephen K. Bannon, the architect of his victory, as just “someone who works for me.”
As the elites rush to embrace the president, those of us who supported him are horrified, angry and increasingly convinced that instead of draining the swamp, Trump has jumped headlong into it.
Justin Raimondo is editorial director of Antiwar.com and author of “Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement.”
THE U.S. guided-missile destroyer Porter launches a missile in the Mediterranean Sea on April 7. Dozens of missiles hit Syria. (Ford Williams U.S. Navy )
B y J ustin R aimondo
I voted for Donald Trump because he promised to pursue a new foreign policy. As he said in December, “We will stop looking to topple regimes and overthrow governments. Our goal is stability, not chaos, because we want to rebuild our country.” He vowed to appoint those with “new approaches, and practical ideas, rather than surrounding myself with those who have perfect résumés but very little to brag about except responsibility for a long history of failed policies.”
After decades of disastrous interventions, Trump inspired me. But less than 100 days into his administration, I’m feeling the sting of betrayal. In recent weeks, Trump and his surrogates have abandoned virtually every foreign policy stance he took during the campaign.
He launched missiles against the regime of Syrian strongman Bashar Assad — mere months after telling the New York Times: “I thought the approach of fighting Assad and [Islamic State] simultaneously was madness, and idiocy.” Now Secretary of State Rex Tillerson is saying Assad must go, a clear indication that the Trump administration is “looking to topple regimes and overthrow governments.”
In another interview with the New York Times, Trump declared NATO “obsolete,” explaining, “When NATO was formed many decades ago we were a different country. There was a different threat.” Now we are told that “NATO is no longer obsolete.” Stay tuned for the Trump administration’s campaign to bring back Betamax.
“Wouldn’t it be nice,” Trump often said, “if we could get along with Russia?” This was music to my ears: finally a Republican candidate who wasn’t locked into a Cold War mentality. Yet, Trump’s appointees are now echoing the Washington policy wonks who want to start a new Cold War.
H.R. McMaster, Trump’s national security advisor, claims the Russians are engaged in a campaign of global “subversion.” Tillerson, during his recent visit to Moscow, denounced Russia’s alleged “interference” in the 2016 election — an echo of the Democrats’ unproved claim that the Kremlin colluded with his boss.
As Trump threatens to go to war with North Korea — which would spell doom for the 38,000 American troops stationed on the Korean peninsula — I am reminded of his comments on our military commitments in the region: “There is going to be a point at which we just can’t do this anymore .… At some point, we cannot be the policeman of the world …. [I]f we are attacked, [Japan doesn’t] have to do anything. If they’re attacked, we have to go out with full force…. That’s a pretty one-sided agreement.”
I’m not alone in feeling betrayed.
Ann Coulter, author of “In Trump We Trust: E Pluribus Awesome,” wrote recently that “Trump’s Syrian misadventure is immoral, violates every promise he ran on, and could sink his presidency.” At Breitbart News, the online headquarters of the Trump insurgency, a piece about the Syria attacks attracted more than 50,000 ferociously negative comments. Pat Buchanan, the ideological godfather of Trumpism, despaired that “the promise of a Trump presidency … appears, not 100 days in, to have been a mirage. Will more wars make America great again?” A baffled Laura Ingraham tweeted, “Missiles flying. Rubio’s happy. McCain ecstatic. Hillary’s on board. A complete policy change in 48 hrs.” Talk radio host Michael Savage complains that “People in Trump’s own sphere are turning him toward the beating war drums.” Nigel Farage, the leader of the Brexit forces in Britain who campaigned for Trump in the U.S., opined that the president’s supporters “will be scratching their heads” at these foreign policy reversals.
It’s the same sad story on the domestic front, Instead of repealing Obamacare, Trump pushed what the House Freedom Caucus dubbed “Obamacare lite.” Trump the campaigner denounced both Hillary Clinton and Ted Cruz as pawns of Goldman Sachs; as president, he’s appointed several Goldman Sachs executives to top spots in his administration. Not long ago, he told Federal Reserve Chairwoman Janet L. Yellen — whose visage was featured in a negative ad that ran in the last week of the campaign — that “she should be ashamed of herself,” accusing her of politicizing the Fed and creating “a very false economy.” Now he says he’s open to reappointing her.
The liberal media are thrilled by Trump’s transformation: The chorus of gushing praise on CNN and MSNBC as bombs fell on Syria was loud and practically unanimous. And Trump is reciprocating: Last week at a White House event honoring first responders, he characterized the media as “honorable people.” Remember when he called them out as “the world’s most dishonest people”? Ah, those were the good old days!
And while Trump praises his enemies, he denigrates his loyal friends, openly downgrading Stephen K. Bannon, the architect of his victory, as just “someone who works for me.”
As the elites rush to embrace the president, those of us who supported him are horrified, angry and increasingly convinced that instead of draining the swamp, Trump has jumped headlong into it.
Justin Raimondo is editorial director of Antiwar.com and author of “Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement.”
Apr 21, 2017 13:51:06 #
Left wing (communist) polls always support left wingnuts (communists). Third world, Pravda, Schiesters. Muslims fought for Hitler in WWII, now they fight for Communists. Is that a step up?
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