http://thehill.com/policy/national-secu ... gitmo-open
President Trump on Tuesday signed an executive order to keep open the military detention facility at Guantánamo Bay.
The order does not make explicit that the Trump administration will immediately begin sending new detainees to the controversial prison, but preserves the option for the president who on the campaign trail called for it to be loaded “up with some bad dudes.”
http://thehill.com/policy/defense/37151 ... -sanctions
The Trump administration faced blowback on Capitol Hill Tuesday for declining to implement new sanctions against Russia for interfering in the 2016 presidential election.
...Lawmakers last year passed legislation to punish Moscow with a veto-proof majority in both chambers of Congress, forcing President Trump to sign it.
I don't know whether this means we're getting cozier with Russia, or this sort of thing is routine. But is certainly seems to suggest that the Trump administration is completely uninterested in Congress's sanctions:
http://thehill.com/policy/national-secu ... -us-report
Top Russian spies reportedly met recently with CIA Director Mike Pompeo. ...Russian media reported that Moscow's sanctioned spy chief, Sergey Naryshkin, may have been one of the people Pompeo met with, CNN noted. Both Russia and the U.S. confirmed that Pompeo met with his intelligence counterparts.
...In 2014, Naryshkin was sanctioned by the Obama administration. He was also among the names included on a Treasury Department list released earlier this week of Russia business and political figures.
We all trust Trump so much that a fact-checking website went down during his State of the Union address.
I assume it was caused by too much traffic:
http://thehill.com/homenews/media/37155 ... -the-union
PolitiFact’s website went down briefly during President Trump’s first State of the Union address. The fact-checking website tweeted at 9:49 p.m., about halfway through Trump’s speech, that the website had crashed.
...PolitiFact fact-checked the president’s speech, writing that “several of his points were factually flawed.” They rated many of his claims about tax cuts as “mostly false” or “false.”
FYI, their ratings of Trump's past statements:
True → 4 percent
Mostly True → 12 percent
Half True → 15 percent
Mostly False → 21 percent
False → 33 percent
Pants on Fire → 15 percent
btw, this seems like one of the most disturbing statements Trump made.
http://thehill.com/homenews/administrat ... -employees
“So tonight, I call on the Congress to empower every Cabinet secretary with the authority to reward good workers and to remove federal employees who undermine the public trust or fail the American people," he said.
In other words, make the entire government subject to political whims, so he, Zinke and Pruitt can remove career employees without due process.
Rep. Todd Rokita (R-Ind.) introduced legislation in July to make all new federal workers at-will employees. That change would mean they could be “removed or suspended, without notice or right to appeal, from service by the head of the agency at which such employee is employed for good cause, bad cause, or no cause at all,” according to the text of the bill.
http://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch ... hite-house
Mayors of major American cities — many of them Democrats — say the long-standing bipartisan relationship between urban leaders and the federal government is atrophying one year into the Trump administration. Some mayors say their calls to government agencies or the White House go unreturned. Others said they do not know to whom they are supposed to reach out in an administration still struggling to staff up.
...Partisan squabbling has infected a once-productive relationship between big cities, which increasingly drive the national economy, and the federal government. That schism was on display last week, when the U.S. Conference of Mayors met at a Washington hotel just blocks from the White House. The Trump administration broke decades of bipartisan tradition when it left some mayors off the list of invitees to attend a meeting with President Trump.
...The White House said space constraints in the East Room, where the event was held, were the only reason some mayors were left out.
So the White House has shrunk so much during the Trump administration that they can no longer find a room big enough to meet with everyone. What bullshit this bunch expects us to believe.