Quote: The Trump administration's abrupt suspension of billions of dollars in payments to ObamaCare insurers has prompted new warnings of rising premiums as health companies scramble to adjust.
...The flurry of activity is the result of a surprise announcement Saturday by the administration that it had suspended $10.4 billion in funding that is supposed to be paid to insurers to help them provide coverage to particularly sick and costly enrollees.
http://thehill.com/policy/finance/39618 ... cting-no-2
Quote: The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) ... announced Monday that [Director] Mulvaney had appointed Brian Johnson to be the agency’s acting deputy director. Johnson had previously served as the CFPB’s principal policy director. He had been hired by Mulvaney last year to rein in and rebrand the controversial regulator.
...Johnson was a top aide to Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-Texas), the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee. Hensarling led House Republican efforts to investigate the CFPB, gut the agency’s powers and impose congressional oversight over the regulator designed to be independent from lawmakers’ whims.
Mulvaney also hired Kirsten Sutton Mork, another former Hensarling aide, to be his chief of staff at the CFPB.
http://thehill.com/homenews/senate/3962 ... boggles-my
Quote: Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) on Monday decried a "lack of information" from the Trump administration on how it plans to reunite migrant families that had been separated at the U.S.-Mexico border.
"If they got a process, they're not revealing the process to me," Johnson, the chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, told CNN. "These are human beings."
"I'm just not getting the answers I would have thought they should have on the tips of their fingers," he continued. "It boggles my mind. I just would assume that the connection in all these things are tracked — and that the reunification would have been a relatively simple matter."
http://thehill.com/homenews/administrat ... -be-detain
Quote: A federal judge on Monday rejected the Trump administration's request to change a legal settlement in order to detain migrant children with their parents for longer periods of time as officials struggle to reunite families separated at the border.
U.S. District Court Judge Dolly Gee in California dismissed as “tortured” the White House's arguments on the decades-old Flores consent from 1997, which declared that children in immigration detention cannot be held for more than 20 days.
"Defendants seek to light a match to the Flores Agreement and ask this Court to upend the parties’ agreement by judicial fiat," Gee, an appointee of former President Obama, wrote in the ruling. "It is apparent that Defendants’ Application is a cynical attempt...to shift responsibility to the Judiciary for over 20 years of Congressional inaction and ill-considered Executive action that have led to the current stalemate."
http://thehill.com/homenews/administrat ... pid-people
Quote: President Trump dismissed some of his own aides during a phone call earlier this year with Russian President Vladimir Putin as "stupid people," The New York Times reported Monday.
The Times, citing a source with direct knowledge of Trump's phone call in March, reported that the Russian president lamented that some White House officials tried to stop the conversation from even happening.
“Those are stupid people; you shouldn’t listen to them,” Trump responded, according to the Times.
The comment came in the same call in which Trump congratulated Putin on his reelection, despite warnings from his national security advisers not to do so after international observers said the Russian election was full of evidence of fraud and intimidation.
The Atlantic discusses Brett Kavanaugh, Trump's next Supreme Court nominee:
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/ar ... ck/564629/
EDIT to add:
http://thehill.com/homenews/administrat ... y-standoff
I guess law-and-order doesn't apply to right wing criminals. Trump is handing out pardons like candy when he thinks it will please his supporters.
Quote: President Trump on Tuesday pardoned a pair of Oregon ranchers whose arson conviction became a focus for opponents of federal government land ownership.
Dwight Hammond, 76, and his son Steven, 49, were convicted in 2012 and sent to prison on arson charges.
The Hill story says the Hammonds had a series of fires on their own property that spread to federal land. But that doesn't seem to be true, according to reports from an Oregon source.
https://www.kgw.com/article/news/local/ ... 6844952260
Quote: Inside the Hammonds' arson case at the center of the Oregon occupation
The Hammonds didn't care whether their fires could have killed firefighters, either, as long as their own crops were saved.
Quote: Prosecutors alleged in the indictment the Hammond family set fire to the rangeland after complaining the BLM was taking too long to complete required environmental studies before conducting controlled burn operations.
"The Hammonds also have ignited uncontrolled fires under cover of naturally occurring dry lightning storms which occur on the western slopes of the Steens Mountain in late summers," then-United States Attorney Dwight C. Holton wrote in the indictment. "For more than twenty years, Hammond family members have been responsible for multiple fires in the Steens Mountain area."
...Supporters of the two men maintain the Hammonds started fires to destroy invasive species and protect their property by removing wildfire fuels, and that flames spread to public lands inadvertently. But witnesses in the trial told a different story. The jury heard from three witnesses who were hunting in 2001 when they saw the Hammonds shoot over their heads to illegally slaughter a herd of deer, according to court documents. A short time later, the hunters testified, they had to abandon their camp because of a fire burning in the area.
A teenage relative of the Hammonds also testified during the trial that Steven Hammond gave him a box of matches and told him to drop lit matches on the ground to "light up the whole county on fire," Williams wrote.
Other information about the Hammonds - they made lots of death threats because they could no longer use a wildlife refuge for their cattle:
Quote: The second arson in 2006 came as firefighting crews were battling lightning-started wildfires on BLM land. A burn ban and red flag warning was in effect in the area at the time.
"Despite the burn ban, and knowing that firefighters were in the area, Steven Hammond set fires at night without notifying anyone," Williams wrote. "He did so to save his winter feed. After seeing the fires, the firefighters moved to a safer location."
https://www.oregonlive.com/politics/ind ... efore.html
Quote: Years before the arson fires that sent two Oregon ranchers to federal prison -- sparking an armed occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge -- federal officials reported several death threats from the men.
...Dwight Hammond Jr., now 73, and his son, Steven, now 46, wound up arrested by U.S. Fish and Wildlife officers after trying to stop federal workers inside Malheur from fencing off a canal they'd been using to water their cows.
...Earl Kisler, the special agent who arrested the Hammonds in 1994, ... said the dispute over the fence grew so heated that he and his partner agent were called from Wilsonville to Harney County to serve as a "small protection detail." "There had been so many threats against refuge people," he said. "They were trying to finish the boundary fence, and Dwight Hammond had vowed he wasn't going to let that happen." An article published by High Country News in 1994 said officials at the Malheur refuge had amassed a "thick" file detailing death threats against refuge managers -- in 1986, 1988 and 1991.
http://thehill.com/homenews/administrat ... ome-to-our
So the president of the US says it's OK to ignore a court order and OK to treat people vilely because they crossed the border illegally. Good to know.
Quote: President Trump on Tuesday responded to his administration missing a court-ordered deadline to reunite separated immigrant families by saying people shouldn’t “come to our country illegally.”
..."Well, I have a solution. Tell people not to come to our country illegally. That's the solution. Don't come to our country illegally. Come like other people do. Come legally,” Trump told reporters.
This particular issue has nothing to do with legal vs illegal immigration- this is about treating people decently, as human beings, and not traumatizing 3-year-olds or taking away breast-feeding infants in hopes of deterring illegal immigration.
Not all Republicans like Kavanaugh:
http://thehill.com/homenews/house/39625 ... rveillance
Quote: Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich.) on Monday called President Trump Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh a “disappointing pick,” ripping the judge’s past rulings on surveillance issues.
The congressman cited a 2015 opinion written by Kavanaugh while serving on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, that found “the Government’s metadata collection program is entirely consistent with the Fourth Amendment.”
...He also included a quote from Kavanaugh’s opinion in the case, stating “that critical national security need outweighs the impact on privacy occasioned by this program.”