Msnbc

Senator Accidentally Speaks His Mind About Trump's Cabinet Picks

... Trump’s nominees than they did for Obama’s nominees. The Huffington Post found one GOP senator who was surprisingly candid on the matter. When The Huffington Post asked [Oklahoma Sen. Jim Inhofe] on Monday night if this same standard of disclosing foreign payments should apply to Trump’s Cabinet nominees, he said it shouldn’t. “So it’s different now because it’s Trump?” we asked. “That’s just right,” Inhofe said. “That’s right?” we asked to clarify. “Yeah,” he said. The disclosure question arose because Inhofe signed onto a 2013 letter demanding “unprecedented disclosures” from former Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.), at the time Obama’s nominee for Secretary of Defense, because Senate Republicans were concerned about “the potential for foreign conflicts of interest.”. Inhofe seems to have no comparable concerns now – because it’s “different.”. The Oklahoma Republican’s spokesperson tried to walk back the comments soon after, telling the Huffington Post that Inhofe doesn’t support “a double standard,” even though he’d just said the exact opposite. This appears to be one of those classic moments in which a politician makes a mistake by accidentally saying what he genuinely ...

Obama, Trump, And A Tale Of Two Appearances

... emphasized how impressed he is with his own awesomeness. Granted, there are important differences between a farewell address and a press conference. Obama had a prepared text, while Trump was answering reporters’ questions. Nevertheless, the differences between the two men that emerged from these competing events were breathtaking in their scope. Even looking past the settings and substantive disagreements between Trump and Obama, it’s worth pausing to appreciate the gap between the two solely in tone and decency. At one point last night, the president declared, “In the course of a healthy debate, we prioritize different goals, and the different means of reaching them. But without some common baseline of facts – without a willingness to admit new information, and concede that your opponent might be making ...

On The Russia Scandal, Trump's Lies Start To Pile Up

... clear – Mr. Clapper in his testimony made very clear on Thursday under oath – that any attempt, any aspiration to influence our elections failed.”. That’s spectacularly untrue. The report does not say that, and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper did not testify to that to the Senate Armed Services Committee. Trump and Conway are telling a plain and demonstrable lie. What the intelligence does say is that Russia’s alleged cyber-attack did not  affect specific vote tallies. In other words, Moscow stole American materials and hatched a propaganda campaign, but Russian agents did not literally hack into voting machines or state election offices to alter the quantitative results. And while that’s certainly important, Trump, Conway, and their allies have tried to make a leap from “Russia’s attack didn’t include voting machines” to “Russia’s attack didn’t affect the election.”. Even for Trump World, this is ridiculous. According to a Think Progress tally, Donald Trump mentioned the Wiki Leaks materials 164 times during the month leading up to Election Day. ...

On Health Care, Trump Seems Deeply Confused About Policy And Process

... doesn’t make any sense. Republicans are scheduled to vote this week – the Senate on Thursday, the House on Friday – on a reconciliation bill that would merely open the door to Congress eventually repealing the ACA by majority rule. In practical terms, this week’s measure wouldn’t actually affect the law, so much as it would give Congress permission to circumvent a filibuster when repealing some elements of the reform law. The Republican alternative to “Obamacare,” meanwhile, is already seven years in the making – they started working on this in June 2009 – and nearly everyone involved believes it’s still at least two years away from completion. By all appearances, Trump doesn’t understand literally any of these details. Based on what he told the Times, the president-elect, who’s never demonstrated any familiarity with even the more basic details of health care policy, is under the assumption that the whole thing will be worked out by Valentine’s Day, if not sooner. That’s bonkers. The amateur president-elect added in his Times interview that he wouldn’t accept a delay of more than a few weeks before a replacement plan was voted on. “Long to me would be weeks,” ...

Msnbc Poaches A Fox, Continues Writing Off Progressives

...  held  a private party for the Clinton campaign’s communication director Jennifer Palmieri in late 2015. A separate  email  provided a list of journalists who attended a private party with Clinton staffers to kick off Clinton’s announcement to run. The list included MSNBC President Phil Griffin, former MSNBC host Alex Wagner (before she  moved to CBS in April 2016), MSNBC senior editor Beth Fouhy, former MSNBC vice president of communications Rachel Racusen (before she moved  back to her previous position as White House communications director) and MSNBC host Rachel Maddow. Two days after the Clinton campaign staff exchanged emails strategizing to attack Sanders in the media by citing a Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC) retreat he attended several months earlier, MSNBC reporter and Center for American Progress alumnus Alex Seitz-Wald authored a piece  about Sanders using the same misleading talking ...

Trump Gives Key White House Post To Son-in-law

... It’s a safe bet there will be a lawsuit anyway, just as there was when then-President Clinton appointed his wife to lead a health care task force in 1993. Second, there are the potential conflicts of interest. Kushner has said he’ll step down from his real-estate company and sell many of his assets, but as the New York Times reported , “[B]ecause he plans to sell to his brother or to a family trust controlled by his mother, some ethics lawyers interviewed questioned how meaningful the divestiture would be.”. What’s more, just last week, Kushner was working on “a deal with a major Chinese financial group with close ties to the Chinese government. The Kushner family business has done billions of dollars of business with foreign companies that threatens to complicate his role at the White House.”. Finally, presidents usually appoint senior White House advisors who have some kind of political or governmental expertise. Kushner is the 36-year-old head of his family’s real-estate company, with no relevant experience ...

Wednesday's Mini-report, 1.11.17

... Black Caucus testified against Sen. Jeff Sessions on Wednesday, staking a clear opposition to the Alabama senator’s appointment as attorney general.”. * Rex Tillerson , Donald Trump’s choice for Secretary of State, did not have an easy day: “After prodding, he acknowledged during Wednesday’s confirmation hearing that [Russia’s] cyber intrusion would not have happened without Putin’s sign off. But the longtime Exxon Mobil CEO told the committee he has not yet spoken to Trump about one Russia, one of the top foreign policy challenges facing the U. S. ‘That’s pretty amazing,’ Democratic Sen. Bob Menendez said.”. * More on this story tomorrow: “President-elect Donald Trump announced Wednesday that he has tapped David Shulkin, a physician who is currently serving in the Obama administration as VA undersecretary, to lead the Department of Veterans Affairs.”. * Asia-Pacific : “Taiwan scrambled F-16 fighter jets and ...

A Jobs Record Obama Can And Should Brag About

... Statistics released the final jobs report of the Obama era late last week, and it showed the United States added over 2.15 million jobs in 2016. That’s the sixth consecutive year in which the country has seen job growth over 2 million – a streak unseen since the late 1990 s. I created the above chart showing job growth by year for the four most recent presidential administrations – two Democratic and two Republican. The blue columns point to the two Democratic administrations (darker blue for overall job growth, lighter blue for private-sector-only growth), and the red columns point to the two Republican administrations (darker red for overall job growth, lighter red for private-sector-only growth). It’s always tempting at the end of a presidency to compare various administrations’ records, but there’s some important context with Obama’s record: he inherited a global economic crisis unlike anything we’ve seen in the modern era. And yet, the president’s record on job creation – over 15 million jobs created during the last seven years – stacks up quite well, and easily surpasses the totals from ...

Trump's Plan To Address Conflicts Of Interest Falls Far Short

... to his sons and that an ethics adviser will be appointed to its management team to review all new transactions. But he also will not divest or create a completely blind trust – the solutions overwhelmingly endorsed by ethics experts to eliminate the risk that the president’s assets could become ripe for corruption and influence-peddling. NBC talked to an ethics expert who described the arrangement as untenable. “This does not address the emoluments clause concerns, this does not address the conflict concerns,” Kathleen Clark, an ethics specialist at University of Washington law school, said. “This is using the language of ethics without addressing the actual ethics concerns.”. MSNBC’s Ari Melber, an attorney who tweeted throughout this morning’s press conference, added , “Trump’s plan reads more like a management structure to keep Trump in charge of his company, not a conflicts structure for independence.”. Postscript: In the final moments of ...