Octopus Overlords

Kraken wrote: ↑Wed Dec 26, 2018 12:38 pm "Reportedly" always makes me ask who's reporting it. The linked Slate article references a Bloomberg report that cites: "one person familiar with the president’s thinking said that Trump had weighed dismissing Mnuchin, while another said that Mnuchin’s tenure may depend in part on how much markets continue to drop." I don't give much credence to two unnamed persons "familiar with the president's thinking." They aren't even ID'd as WH sources.

Also, there is one person causing some specific problems with this kind of sourcing: Trump. The president seems to speak with a wide range of people, both inside and outside the White House. And many of these people then tell reporters that they talked to the president. That leaves a lot of people for journalists to credibly say are “familiar with Trump’s thinking,” but that does not necessarily mean that these sources give an accurate picture of what the president will do. The constant stories about staff shake-ups at the White House may indeed come from people who have heard Trump muse about changes that he will never actually follow through on.

Isgrimnur wrote:

Kraken wrote: ↑Mon Dec 24, 2018 2:33 pm I do know this much: recessions are driven by mass psychology -- when enough people/companies expect hard times ahead and start retrenching, we get hard times.

The aftermath of the 2000 recession taught me this. My hindsight was able to pick out the drumbeats that led to it. On the other hand, the best laugh I ever got from a textbook was the line, "Economics is a science."

When current acting U.S. Attorney General Matt Whitaker joined the advisory board of a Florida patent firm in 2014, he was quoted in a company press release saying he "would only align myself with a first class organization."

Three years later, the company was shut down, but not before it bilked hundreds of customers, some of them elderly veterans, out of millions of dollars.

In response to a public records request to the Florida Attorney General's Office, Reason received 47 pages of consumer complaints regarding World Patent Marketing. The complaints date from 2014, when Whitaker joined the firm's advisory board, to 2017, when the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) shut the firm down for deceptive business practices.

An FTC investigation concluded that the Miami patent firm, which claimed to patent and market promising inventions, scammed 1,504 customers out of more than $26 million in its three years of existence.

$iljanus wrote: ↑Wed Dec 07, 2016 8:14 pm

malchior wrote:Almost 2 years ago to the day this story was published about how the AG of Oklahoma took an energy company's letter complaining about energy regulations, copied it onto OK state letterhead, signed it, and sent it to the EPA. That AG is now the named nominee to head that Agency. This is starting to look a whole lot like a Harding administration - but only worse with authoritarian overtones as well.

Yea, I always thought my water was lacking such essential minerals like arsenic, mercury, and cadmium!

In another proposed reversal of an Obama-era standard, the Environmental Protection Agency Friday said limiting mercury and other toxic emissions from coal- and oil-fired power plants is not cost-effective and should not be considered "appropriate and necessary."

The EPA says it is keeping the 2012 restrictions in place for now, in large part because utilities have already spent billions to comply with them. But environmental groups worry the move is a step toward repealing the limits and could make it harder to impose other regulations in the future.
...
The National Mining Association welcomed the move, calling the mercury limits "punitive" and "massively unbalanced."
...
Even though the EPA's mercury standards have faced court challenges, utilities spent more than $18 billion to comply with the requirements. In a letter to the EPA last summer, utilities and regulatory and labor groups said mercury emissions had been reduced by nearly 90 percent over the past decade.

In that letter they also asked the Trump administration's EPA to leave the existing standards in place.

Isgrimnur wrote:

$iljanus wrote: ↑Wed Dec 07, 2016 8:14 pm

malchior wrote:Almost 2 years ago to the day this story was published about how the AG of Oklahoma took an energy company's letter complaining about energy regulations, copied it onto OK state letterhead, signed it, and sent it to the EPA. That AG is now the named nominee to head that Agency. This is starting to look a whole lot like a Harding administration - but only worse with authoritarian overtones as well.

Yea, I always thought my water was lacking such essential minerals like arsenic, mercury, and cadmium!

Well, you may be in luck:

In another proposed reversal of an Obama-era standard, the Environmental Protection Agency Friday said limiting mercury and other toxic emissions from coal- and oil-fired power plants is not cost-effective and should not be considered "appropriate and necessary."

The EPA says it is keeping the 2012 restrictions in place for now, in large part because utilities have already spent billions to comply with them. But environmental groups worry the move is a step toward repealing the limits and could make it harder to impose other regulations in the future.
...
The National Mining Association welcomed the move, calling the mercury limits "punitive" and "massively unbalanced."
...
Even though the EPA's mercury standards have faced court challenges, utilities spent more than $18 billion to comply with the requirements. In a letter to the EPA last summer, utilities and regulatory and labor groups said mercury emissions had been reduced by nearly 90 percent over the past decade.

In that letter they also asked the Trump administration's EPA to leave the existing standards in place.

NPR wrote:JUST IN: Ryan Zinke has stepped down as Interior Secretary. President Trump has not nominated a replacement, so Zinke’s deputy, David Bernhardt, a lawyer and former oil industry lobbyist, will take over as acting secretary.

Trump announced Zinke would step down at the end of the year. Zinke maintains it was a personal decision. In his resignation letter to Trump, he blamed his departure on “vicious and politically motivated attacks.” But reporting by The Washington Post and others indicates that the embattled secretary, who’s faced nearly 20 federal investigations into his conduct and policy decisions, had known for weeks that he was being forced out.

In many ways, Zinke’s final month highlights the real legacy he’s likely to leave behind: not of stewardship but of cozying up to the industries he was tasked with regulating, rolling back safeguards for the environment and endangered species, and opening millions of acres of public land to drilling and mining.

Sen. Tom Udall (N.M.) was one of 15 Democratic senators who voted to confirm Zinke to the post. That decision, he said, was based on Zinke’s assurances that he understood the agency’s central mission, and his pledge to lead in the spirit of Roosevelt.

“It is abundantly clear from his time as Interior Secretary that those promises were empty, meaningless, and untrue,” Udall told HuffPost in an email. “His tenure was deeply destructive and I would not vote to confirm him again knowing what we know now ― that he always intended to carry the torch for the Trump administration’s campaign of relentless attacks on our public lands, waters, Tribal sovereignty, and the environment.”

Skinypupy wrote: ↑Wed Jan 02, 2019 3:25 pm "Restored public lands"? "Improved public access"?

Cool letter, wonder who he's talking about?

Civil penalties for polluters under the Trump administration plummeted during the past fiscal year to the lowest average level since 1994, according to a new analysis of Environmental Protection Agency data.

In the two decades before President Trump took office, EPA civil fines averaged more than $500 million a year, when adjusted for inflation. Last year’s $72 million in fines was 85 percent below that amount, according to the agency’s Enforcement and Compliance History Online database.

Cynthia Giles, who headed EPA’s enforcement office in the Obama administration and conducted the analysis, said the inflation-adjusted figures represent the lowest since the agency’s enforcement office was established.

The decline in civil penalties could undermine EPA’s ability to deter wrongdoing, some former agency officials said, because they help ensure it is more expensive to violate the law than to comply with it. But Trump administration officials have said they are focusing much of their effort on working with companies ahead of time so that they don’t run afoul of the law, rather than punishing them after the fact. That approach, they say, will ensure business operations can thrive without harming the environment.
...
During his confirmation hearing last week, EPA acting administrator Andrew Wheeler told lawmakers that there had been “a lot of misleading information” suggesting that the agency had gone easier on polluters under President Trump. He singled out recent reports from environmental and governance groups that said EPA’s enforcement had sagged.

Wheeler pointed to the fact that EPA had opened more criminal enforcement cases during 2018 than the year before, reversing a downward trajectory. He said enforcement actions last year resulted in removing “809 million pounds of pollution and waste” from the environment. And he emphasized that the agency had worked with companies it oversees to ensure they comply with federal rules, rather than levying charges against them or imposing fines.
...
But the analysis conducted by Giles, and reviewed by the Environmental Integrity Project, shows that in addition to the drop in civil penalties for polluting, the amount of money companies must pay to come into compliance with federal environmental laws also declined last fiscal year, to nearly $5.6 billion. That represents the lowest amount of injunctive relief since 2003, in inflation-adjusted dollars, and is below the roughly $7.8 billion average for the two decades before Trump took office.

A planned Senate Judiciary Committee vote on William P. Barr’s nomination to serve as attorney general has been delayed for a week, as Democrats continue to raise concerns about whether he would allow special counsel Robert S. Mueller III to finish his probe and publicize the results unimpeded.

The delay, which is customary for high-profile nominations, is not expected to impede Barr’s chances of being confirmed by the full Senate. But it is the latest reflection of the deep partisan tension surrounding Barr’s nomination, most of which centers on Democrats’ desire to protect Mueller’s probe from being unduly constrained.

The committee postponed its vote on Barr as one of 46 nominations the panel was scheduled to vote on Tuesday but decided to delay until its next meeting.

In both his public testimony and his written answers to senators’ questions, Barr has repeatedly refused to give senators any firm guarantee that he will release Mueller’s report to Congress and the public free of redactions. In similar fashion, he has only promised to ask for, but not necessarily heed, the advice of the Justice Department’s ethics counsel on the matter of whether he should recuse himself from oversight of the probe.

That has particularly frustrated Democrats, who take issue with a memo Barr penned last year arguing that in scrutinizing the actions of the Trump campaign, Mueller appeared to be interpreting an obstruction of justice statute too broadly. Democrats fear the memo is evidence that Barr, who served as attorney general under President George H.W. Bush during the early 1990s, might seek to limit the scope of Mueller’s probe.

Though Barr has said that, as a former attorney general, he often weighs in on topics of the day, he acknowledged in written answers to lawmakers that he could not recall another case in which he sent the Justice Department such a memo.

LordMortis wrote: ↑Wed Jan 30, 2019 12:44 pm accuweather

In 2005 a representative of AccuWeather, the commercial forecasting company, visited the office of then-U.S. Senator Rick Santorum. It might have been Joel Myers, AccuWeather’s founder, or his brother Barry Lee Myers, the company’s general counsel.
...
What Santorum does recall about the meeting is that his visitor had a gripe about the National Weather Service. The NWS was giving away forecasts on its website, radio stations, and elsewhere, when businesses such as AccuWeather charged its clients for theirs—never mind that AccuWeather relied on the service’s free data to formulate its own predictions. Santorum agreed that commercial weather companies deserved protection.
...
After the bill’s collapse, Barry, now AccuWeather’s chief executive officer, took a more conciliatory approach, proselytizing about the need for all parties involved in forecasting—the government, academics, businesses—to collaborate. Yet he remains a champion of limiting the agency’s public role, opposing its use of social media to spread warnings. “We fear that he wants to turn the weather service into a taxpayer-funded subsidiary of AccuWeather,” says Richard Hirn, attorney for the National Weather Service Employees Organization.

Myers may soon be in a position to do that. In October 2017, President Trump nominated him to be NOAA’s administrator. In December the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, which oversees the NWS, approved him on a party-line vote. “If confirmed, I think he will serve as an outstanding administrator,” Senator Patrick Toomey, a Pennsylvania Republican, said when he introduced Myers at his November confirmation hearing.

n the final hours of the 115th Congress, the Senate confirmed a new director for the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) but failed to act on a nominee for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
...
Among those nominations not taken up by the Senate is that of Barry Myers to be administrator of NOAA. Myers, the chief executive of AccuWeather, was nominated by the White House in October 2017 and favorably reported on a party-line vote by the Senate Commerce Committee in December 2017. The White House resubmitted the nomination in January 2018 to comply with a Senate rule, and the commerce committee again favorably reported it along party lines that month.

party-line vote

Fox Television Stations (FTS) and AccuWeather are partnering in 11 Fox markets starting this summer, with AccuWeather's content running on air and online at the Fox-owned stations in Dallas, Atlanta, Washington, Detroit, Phoenix, Tampa, Minneapolis, Orlando, Memphis, Austin and Gainesville (Fla.).
...
"Weather is one of the most important services our stations provide to their communities and has long been a major focus for FTS," said Ron Stitt, the group's vice president of digital media and internet operations. "This exclusive partnership with AccuWeather, a company who has been extremely effective in pursuing digital platform distribution, notably Connected TVs, will help us take our digital weather products to the next level."

Fox and AccuWeather will not partner in markets where AccuWeather has an existing relationship with other stations, such as New York and Los Angeles, where it partners with ABC.

Federal Emergency Management Agency Administrator William “Brock” Long has resigned from his post, the department announced Wednesday. Peter Gaynor, who has served as Long’s deputy, will assume acting administrator duties.

Long’s improper use of government resources cost taxpayers $94,000 in staff salary, $55,000 in travel expenses and $2,000 in vehicle maintenance, the Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general determined last year.

Long had served as the head of the agency for the past two years and will be temporarily replaced by Gaynor, Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen said.

Ryan Zinke, who resigned as interior secretary last year amid scandal, is teaming up with Corey Lewandowski, President Donald Trump’s former campaign manager, to work as senior advisers at Washington lobbying firm Turnberry Solutions.

Isgrimnur wrote: ↑Wed Feb 13, 2019 8:41 pm I guess Turnstile or Turncoat would have been a bit too ‘on the nose.’

Holman wrote: ↑Mon Jun 18, 2018 7:55 pm Oh, hey: Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross is corrupt as fuck and in bed with oligarchs, but we're not noticing because it's only a third- or fourth-tier crime story in this administration.

The U.S. government’s top ethics watchdog has ruled that Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross violated his ethics agreement by inaccurately reporting stock holdings in his 2018 financial disclosure form.

Ross — one of the wealthiest members of President Trump’s Cabinet — did not sell stock he held in a bank despite reporting otherwise, said Emory Rounds, director of the Office of Government Ethics.

“Therefore, OGE is declining to certify Secretary Ross’s 2018 financial disclosure report,” Rounds wrote in a letter dated Feb. 15, “because that report was not accurate and he was not in compliance with his ethics agreement at the time of the report.”

Observers called the move highly unusual, and one told CNN that the office’s decision amounted to “a pretty giant red flag.” Richard Painter, an ethics lawyer for President George W. Bush, told the outlet that he has never seen a Cabinet member’s disclosure form rejected in this way.

In a statement Tuesday, Ross said he mistakenly believed he had sold the assets in question — 100 shares of BankUnited stock — in May 2017. When he realized his error, he said, he sold the stock and disclosed the sale in October 2018.

The shares, Ross said, were worth $3,700, an amount that federal regulations deem “below the threshold of a possible conflict of interest.” (According to a Bloomberg News report, that threshold is $15,000 for publicly traded securities.)

Jeffrey Epstein sex trafficked underage girls, and President Donald Trump’s Secretary of Labor, Alexander Acosta, then a federal prosecutor in Miami, illegally kept details of Epstein's plea deal from victims, a federal judge ruled on Thursday.

Acosta, now U.S. secretary of labor, which has oversight of international human trafficking and child labor violations, had agreed to seal the deal, withholding it from Epstein’s victims, many between 13 and 16 years old when they were abused, until it was too late for them to object in court.

Acosta played a major role in the deal that would immunize Epstein and his accomplices from federal prosecution and largely allowed Epstein’s lawyers to define the terms of the non-prosecution agreement, according to the Herald. The sealed agreement could potentially name other influential people from Epstein’s expansive network of elite friends.

Former acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker has left the Department of Justice.

A Justice Department spokesman told The Hill that Whitaker’s last day was Saturday but did not expand on the circumstances surrounding his departure or his plans after leaving. It is unclear where Whitaker might go, including whether he might seek another role in the Trump administration.

Food and Drug Commissioner Scott Gottlieb, who used his post to tackle difficult public health issues from youth vaping to opioid addiction – surprising early skeptics worried about his drug industry ties – resigned Tuesday, effective in about a month, according to an administration official.

Gottlieb, who has been commuting weekly to Washington from his home in Connecticut, wants to spend more time with his family, the official said. The 46-year-old physician, millionaire venture capitalist and cancer survivor known for a self-assured, sometimes brash, manner lives in Westport, with his wife and three daughters – nine-year-old twins and a five-year-old.

The resignation was not sought by the White House. A senior White House official said Gottlieb had spoken to the president, who liked the FDA chief and did not want him to leave. While Gottlieb had some policy disagreements with the White House, he is well respected, and could even be invited back to another post, two officials said.
...
The resignation comes as Gottlieb’s signature issue – youth vaping – is being reviewed by the White House Office of Management and Budget. The plan, detailed by Gottlieb last fall, would sharply restrict the sale of flavored e-cigarettes to curb a surge in underage vaping, which he argues could lead to a whole new generation addicted to nicotine.

His initiative has won praise for shining a spotlight on a national problem. But it has also been criticized by some anti-tobacco activists as being too weak and by e-cigarette supporters as being too aggressive. Some libertarians and conservatives recently complained his approach represented “regulatory panic” and went against Trump’s anti-regulatory agenda.

While in government— Shine receives $$ from Fox
Gives Hannity a high 5 at Trump event
Strips Fox competitor of WH credential
Ends regular press conferences, thereby giving Fox an advantage as to its access to POTUS + WH
Can't get financial disclosure approved
Quits abruptly