Trump and his cabinet/buffoonery- Get your bunkers ready!

[Sacks 'n' Stuff]

11 minutes ago, twa said:

Hersh do you know what Pruitt objected to in the clean water act?.

 

I was done trying long ago ,like talking to flat earthers.

Well it's not exactly flat. There are various hills and mountains. Valleys, gorges, volcanoes and such as well.

[alexey]

9 hours ago, Larry said:

 

And no doubt the therapist who's job is to cure those people of their dangerous delusions, have to study where said delusions come from.  So that they can more effectively treat them.  

 

However, there is no obligation on the part of society, when they observe a person cooing about how pretty the purple dinosaur they see in the spaceship, to refrain from pointing out that said dinosaur isn't real.  (Other than, perhaps, in the form of "just humor him till the ambulance gets here.")  

 

The fact that something is or is not true is a kinda important factor when discussing a topic.  

If that's what works, great.  Hillary's approach seemed to have been: ignore it or to respond with outrage, ride the slim poling margin to victory.  That did not work.

[Rskins06]

8 hours ago, LadySkinsFan said:

Anything good?  Watching Hunting Hitler.

 

Wondering how many of Trump's appointments actually get confirmed.  I have a lot of letters to write to my Senators and Congressman.

All of his appointments will get confirmed.  Don't you remember Harry Reid changing the rules in the Senate?  Only need a simple majority for appointees now.  Maybe the only good thing that guy ever did.

[Riggo-toni]

9 hours ago, LadySkinsFan said:

I absolutely loath people who refer to themselves in the third person.  Trump does it all the time.

Riggo-toni would never do such a thing.

[Boo-urns]

10 hours ago, Hersh said:

I think the Dems, if they are smart, will really push back hard on 2 or 3. EPA should be an automatic no and possible filibuster. I suspect Sessions or Commerce or someone like that is the other. I would not recommend push back on all of them simply because it will fall on deaf ears.  

 

Still ask very tough questions on all. 

 

Yeah I think the Sos and AG would probably be the best options to get a Few R's to help block the nominations. I don't really see any R's trying to stop the EPA confirmation. However I don't think the mainstream R's have the balls to do anything and go against Trump.

[DogofWar1]

There are a not insignificant number of Republicans (not insignificant number being like, 3-5, but still enough) that are very anxious about Russian interference.  I could see several pushing back against Tillerson.

 

McCain and Graham don't really give two craps about Trump's entourage, they are probably not gonna vote for Tillerson.  But we'll see.

[Why am I Mr. Pink?]

I dont know anything about Pruitt so I looked him up. Since he is the Oklahoma AG, I used OK news sources ---

 

Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt vowed Wednesday to sue the Obama administration if a pending regulation on clean water isn’t modified.

Testifying at a Senate-House committee hearing, Pruitt said the state has already filed its objections to the proposed rule. As currently proposed, he said, the rule would burden business, including farmers, homebuilders and energy producers.

 

Gina McCarthy, administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, said current Clean Water Act exemptions for agriculture would continue under the proposed rule. Those activities include plowing, tilling, planting, harvesting and building roads, ponds and ditches, she said.

Pruitt was skeptical, saying the rule “reeks of federal expansion, overreach and interference with local land use decisions.”

 

http://newsok.com/article/5390677

 

As Oklahoma’s attorney general since 2011, Scott Pruitt has a lengthy record of fighting regulations imposed by the EPA.

He has been a party to at least eight federal lawsuits challenging the agency’s authority to impose regulations on states and businesses, particularly the oil and gas industry and coal-fired power generation plants.

 

• May 2011: As Oklahoma Attorney General, Scott Pruitt sues the EPA, alleging that the federal agency violated its own procedures in rejecting a state plan to reduce regional haze at three coal plants. In May 2014, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to review Pruitt’s challenge of the EPA’s plan for reducing haze. The EPA’s plan is designed to reduce pollution from coal-fired power plants and industrial sources to improve visibility at federally managed wilderness areas such as the 59,000-acre Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge near Lawton.

It would target coal-fired power plants operated by Oklahoma Gas and Electric Co. at Red Rock and Muskogee and another operated by American Electric Power-Public Service Company of Oklahoma at Oologah.

 

• September 2011: Oklahoma joins other states in challenging an EPA regulation of power-plant air pollution that crosses state lines. In 2014, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the cross-state air pollution rule, which is scheduled to take effect in May 2017.

 

• July 2013: Pruitt and his counterparts in 11 other states sue the EPA in federal court, alleging violations of the Freedom of Information Act. The states sued after the EPA denied a request for communication records between the federal agency and nonprofit environmental groups. Pruitt claimed that the agency encourages certain types of lawsuits by nonprofit environmental organizations, such as Greenpeace, Defenders of Wildlife, WildEarth Guardians and the Sierra Club. The EPA then settles the suits by entering consent decrees that contain obligations not found in federal law, Pruitt claimed.

A district judge dismissed the lawsuit in December 2013, siding with the EPA’s claims that the records request was overly broad and vague.

 

• April 2014: Pruitt sent a letter to the EPA’s Office of the Inspector General, questioning plans to evaluate how the agency and states have done in regulating hydraulic fracturing.

“I am concerned that this project is politically motivated and ignores the EPA’s three previous failed attempts to link hydraulic fracturing to water contamination,” Pruitt wrote. “The U.S. Department of Energy has investigated hydraulic fracturing’s potential harm to water supplies and found no evidence linking the drilling technique to groundwater contamination.”

 

• August 2014: Pruitt joined 11 other states in a suit challenging the Environmental Protection Agency’s regulation of greenhouse gases. Filed in the District of Columbia Circuit Court of Appeals, the suit specifically seeks to throw out a 2011 settlement in a lawsuit brought against the EPA by 12 states, the District of Columbia and three environmental organizations. In the settlement, the EPA agreed to begin regulation of greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act.

 

• July 2015: Pruitt sues the EPA in Tulsa federal court over the agency’s plan to rein in pollution from coal-fired power plants. In a news release, Pruitt described the EPA’s Clean Power Plan as “an unlawful attempt to expand federal bureaucrats’ authority over states’ energy economies in order to shutter coal-fired power plants and eventually other sources of fossil-fuel generated electricity.” The lawsuit was later dismissed by a judge on jurisdictional grounds.

 

• July 2015: Pruitt files a lawsuit in Tulsa federal court challenging the EPA’s new rules governing pollution controls on waters governed by the Clean Water Act. A judge later dismissed the lawsuit on jurisdictional grounds. An appeal is pending.

 

• October 2015: Pruitt joins 26 other states in challenging the EPA’s Clean Power Plan rules just after they became effective. The new rules require states to cut carbon emissions by 30 percent by 2030. Each state has a customized target and is responsible for drawing up an effective plan to meet its goal. All but two of the state challenges were filed by Republicans. The case is still pending in U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

 

• August 2016: Pruitt joined a dozen other states in a lawsuit challenging federal regulations for methane emissions from new equipment at oil and natural gas sites. The rules are part of the Obama administration’s goal to cut methane emissions from the oil and gas industry more than 40 percent from 2012 levels by 2025.

 

http://m.tulsaworld.com/news/courts/pruitt-lawsuits-other-actions-taken-against-epa/article_c2b975d2-0df0-5e6c-aa8b-ce6d1758ea9e.html?mode=jqm

 

It appears that he sues the EPA a lot .... and he is going to head the EPA? 

 

m'kay. 

[twa]

You will have better luck playing up Tillersons supporting gays in the boy scouts .

McCains russian concerns are easily dealt with.

[Boo-urns]

6 minutes ago, DogofWar1 said:

There are a not insignificant number of Republicans (not insignificant number being like, 3-5, but still enough) that are very anxious about Russian interference.  I could see several pushing back against Tillerson.

 

McCain and Graham don't really give two craps about Trump's entourage, they are probably not gonna vote for Tillerson.  But we'll see.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/12/26/four-cabinet-nominations-that-could-blow-up-in-donald-trumps-face/?utm_term=.45559f8b7281

 

Don't know if this article was posted but it lays out the most likely ones to receive resistance.

[LD0506]

Damn Pink, you rock! That's what you (and everyone else) is SUPPOSED to do! Stop, look it up, read, research, learn and come back with an informed opinion.

 

You get a cookie

[twa]

What did you learn from his research? 

[zoony]

The right needs to recognize the Russian influence within their party.  They are too busy trying to win to realize theyve made a deal with the devil

[BornaSkinsFan83]

6 minutes ago, zoony said:

The right needs to recognize the Russian influence within their party.  They are too busy trying to win to realize theyve made a deal with the devil

Do they not realize it or is the winning just more important?

[zoony]

5 minutes ago, BornaSkinsFan83 said:

Do they not realize it or is the winning just more important?

 

Winning is way more important especially against Hillary

 

Most are in denial

[Corcaigh]

21 minutes ago, zoony said:

 

Winning is way more important especially against Hillary

 

Most are in denial

 

I work with a very bright and pretty reasonable guy who voted for Trump. Simply because he was the R candidate. He has convinced himself that all the things that Trump has said and done (that any reasonable person would consider disqualifying) were all misconstrued by the media.

[The Evil Genius]

One day, middle america ('murica!) is going to realize that right wing news sources (like Fox News) are exactly the mainstream media that they've been warned about trusting.

 

 

 

[Hersh]

I seem to have less of a problem with Tillerson than most that have concerns but it really comes down to how he answers questions on what the Trump administration should do with the sanctions on Russia. If he favors dropping them, that's problematic. If he understands their importance and really puts on a different hat as SoS verse his role as a CEO of a multinational corporation, I will be less concerned. He needs to be fully divested from investments in any other country. 

 

What Trump does early on with Russia will define his entire first term on foreign policy and whether he is even trusted by the US government. 

[The Evil Genius]

Fascinating article. Click the link to see the 3 charts - they wouldn't paste correctly. 

 

http://www.npr.org/2016/12/28/506299885/how-the-donald-trump-cabinet-stacks-up-in-3-charts

 

How The Donald Trump Cabinet Stacks Up, In 3 Charts

 

Quote

Donald Trump has explained on multiple occasions how he picks his closest advisers. He seems to like well-qualified, dependable people ("I surround myself with good people, and then I give myself the luxury of trusting them," he wrote in 1990). Then again, trustworthiness may not be a prerequisite ("My motto is 'Hire the best people, and don't trust them,' " he wrote in 2007). And now, there are even reports that he is seeking a particular "look" for staffers, as the Washington Post reported on Dec. 22.

Numbers give a more concrete sense of how he is choosing his advisers, though. For instance, Trump's Cabinet looks a lot like one might expect from a fiercely anti-establishment candidate: He has relatively few appointees with government experience. Instead, he has reached out to people from the business community.

 

 

 

[LadySkinsFan]

Interesting article, Trump more like Reagan, except we don't have the education levels for Reagan.

 

Still don't trust him or his proposed cabinet/executives.

[visionary]

 

[LadySkinsFan]

He's so full of ****.

[twa]

23 minutes ago, LadySkinsFan said:

He's so full of ****.

 

Obama? 

[Sacks 'n' Stuff]

12 minutes ago, twa said:

Obama? 

Yes.

[Larry]

Hey, get used to a whole lot of this.  (Trump pointing at one factory, here or there, that hired some people, or didn't fire some people, or some such.)  

 

Because there's going to be places like that, that the R's can cherry pick, and then try to create a narrative that their policies are working.  

 

Now, the actual, fair way to measure Trump's ability to "create jobs", (Or preserve them), will be to look at the BLS data on the total number of jobs.  And compare job growth (There's going to be growth.  Unless there's another major crash.  And I hope that there isn't one.) against previous administrations.  

 

I mean, if that's the goal that you wish to establish for yourself (and it's a worthy goal), then that's the way you measure it.  

 

Just for comparison, I pulled up the data.  

 

Go to this link.  Choose seasonally adjusted, total nonfarm, all employees, all employees, total nonfarm, and retrieve data.  Then tell it, up at the top, to show you data since 1980, and click "go".  Look at how many jobs there were, in the US, the month before a President took office.  (In the case of Reagan, that was January, 1981), the number of jobs when he left office (January, 1989), divided by the number of months (96).  

 

Jobs "created" (net change in employment), by month, per President.  (thousands)

 

Reagan - 168

Bush 1 - 55

Clinton - 238

Bush 2 - 14

Obama - 117

 

Average, for all Presidents, over that time period:  126.

 

(Obama still has a few months of statistics to go.  And I ignored the two months of preliminary data, and only used the last month for which final statistics were in.)  

 

Somehow, I dount that the Trumpistas will commit themselves to adding 100,000 jobs, per month, for the next three years.  (And note, that would be a below average performance.)  But it certainly would be OK, if they did.  

 

 

[LadySkinsFan]

Using official BLS data is the only way to get real numbers, because Trump will lie, because he's a liar just for lying's sake.