Trump Takes Credit for 1 Million Jobs. Not True.

President Trump proclaimed Thursday that he has created “more than 1 million private sector jobs.”

That’s not true.

Official government data from the Labor Department show only 601,000 private sector jobs have been added since January, when Trump took office. Trump is trying to take credit for far more.

Trump was talking up his jobs record as he withdrew from the Paris climate agreement — a deal he described as a jobs-killer. Here’s the president’s exact quote on jobs:

“Before we discuss the Paris Accord, I’d like to begin with an update on our tremendous, absolutely tremendous economic progress since Election Day on November 8th. The economy has started to come back and very, very rapidly. We’ve added $3.3 trillion in stock market value to our economy and more than a million private sector jobs.”

Notice that Trump specifically said “private sector jobs,” a term that excludes government jobs at the local, state or federal level.

CNNMoney’s Trump Jobs Tracker gives the president credit for 594,000 jobs so far. That’s because we’re counting both private and public jobs, and there have been a lot of state government job losses since the start of the year.

So where in the world does Trump get his 1 million figure?

Gary Cohn, Trump’s top economic adviser, says the statistic comes from the ADP employment report. In other words, the the White House is ignoring its own government report.

“I’m standing by that if you add up the ADP numbers, you would get to the number the president put in his speech today,” Cohn told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer.

The latest ADP report came out Thursday — the day of Trump’s speech — and it only measures private sector jobs. It shows 1.2 million private sector jobs added since the start of the year. But there are two big catches.

First, the only way to get to Trump’s figure is to include jobs added in January. Trump was only president for 11 days in January. It’s unusual to give a new president credit for that month.

Second, ADP is just an estimate. It’s not the real data.

ADP is a company that prints (or direct deposits) paychecks for about 24 million Americans. A few days before the official Labor Department jobs data comes out, ADP puts out an estimate of how many jobs were added or lost based on what ADP is seeing in the hiring and firing patterns of companies that it works with.

For years economists and Wall Street investors have kept an eye on the ADP data, but they don’t consider it the official jobs data. The ADP report is often widely different from the government data. That’s because there are over 153 million Americans working today and ADP only gets a good look at the paychecks and employment of 24 million of them.

The latest government report on American jobs came out Friday morning. It shows that U.S. unemployment rate has fallen to 4.3%, the lowest level since 2001. That’s good news, but the bad news for Trump is that job growth is slowing.

[CNN]

 

Vladimir Putin praises Trump as ‘straightforward’ and ‘frank’

Russian President Vladimir Putin praised President Trump on Thursday as a “straightforward” and “frank person” who looks at issues with a “fresh set of eyes.”

Speaking to foreign reporters at an economic forum in St. Petersburg, Putin denied that the Russian state had ever engaged in election hacking, but conceded it is theoretically possible some individual “patriotic” Russians could have mounted some cyberattacks.

He rejected charges by U.S. intelligence agencies that Russia hacked into Democratic Party emails, helping Trump’s election victory and railed against “Russo-phobic hysteria” that he said makes it “somewhat inconvenient to work with one another or even to talk.”

“It’s having an impact, and I’m afraid this is one of the goals of those who organize it are pursuing and they can fine-tune the public sentiments to their liking, trying to establish an atmosphere that is going to prevent us from addressing common issues, say with regard to terrorism,” Putin said.

He indicated, however, that Trump is an American leader he could work with.
Putin praised Trump as “a straightforward person, a frank person,” adding that some view Trump’s lack of political experience as a disadvantage, while the Russian leader considers it a plus.

“He can’t be put in the same category as normal politicians,” Putin said. “I see that as an advantage. He has a fresh set of eyes.’’

Putin noted that the two leaders have only talked by phone and it is difficult to form an opinion from a distance. They plan to meet for the first time at the G-20 summit in Hamburg in July.

“How can you be friends with someone you don’t know?’’ Putin said. “I don’t think he can call me a friend. We have never seen each other in person.’’

As for the strains between Russia and the West, Putin predicted “this will end, sooner or later,” adding that “we are patient, we know how to wait and we will wait.”

[USA Today]

 

Trump Officials Pressed State Dept Staffers for Plans to Lift Russia Sanctions

Trump administration officials pressed State Department staffers to develop plans for removing sanctions against Russia almost immediately after President Trump took office in January, Yahoo News reported Thursday.

In turn, according to Yahoo News, State Department employees sought to convince lawmakers to codify the sanctions, which were put in place by former President Barack Obama in response to Russia’s military intervention in Ukraine and the Kremlin’s efforts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election.

Former Coordinator of Sanctions Policy Dan Fried, who retired from the State Department in February, said that he received phone calls from concerned officials tasked with developing plans to lift the sanctions asking him to intervene and “stop this.”

“There was serious consideration by the White House to unilaterally rescind the sanctions,” Fried told Yahoo News, saying he eventually contacted lawmakers, including Senate Foreign Affairs Committee Ranking Member Ben Cardin (D-Md.), in an effort to codify the sanctions, which would complicate efforts by Trump to lift them.

Former Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor Tom Malinowski, who, at the time, had just left the State Department, also brought the issue up with members of Congress.

The revelation State Department officials had scrambled to prevent the Trump administration from doing away with Obama-era sanctions on Russia comes as the FBI and at least four congressional committees are investigating possible coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia.

It also follows reports last week that Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner had discussed setting up a backchannel line of communication between the Trump transition team and the Kremlin with the country’s Ambassador Sergey Kislyak.

Kushner is currently under FBI scrutiny for his meetings with Kislyak and Russian banking executive Sergey Gorkov in December. He did not disclose those meetings.

Also present at the meeting with Kislyak was former national security adviser Michael Flynn, who was forced to resign from the White House in February amid revelations that he had discussed sanctions with Kislyak in the month before Trump took office.

As a presidential candidate and since taking office, Trump has expressed a desire to improve U.S.-Russia relations, though he has repeatedly denied any collusion between his campaign and Moscow and has called the federal investigations into the matter a “witch hunt.”

[The Hill]

After Leaving Paris Accord, Trump Surrogates Go To Absurd Lengths To Deny Science

After Donald Trump isolated America from the rest of the world by pulling us out of the historic Paris Accord, there was a race to the bottom from his surrogates to see who could spit out the dumbest excuse to deny settled science.

Trump’s former communications director Jason Miller was caught by Daily Beast editor John Avlon using fake statistics to support absurd points. EPA head Scott Pruitt also claimed Thursday that the president’s decision isn’t about climate denial. Today, Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA) also claimed the 4.5 billion-year-old sun is no longer reliable and Trump’s economic advisor Steve Moore didn’t know the difference between 1,000-year-old windmills in Holland and wind energy mills in western Kansas. And finally, Trump apologist Jeffrey Lord called coal “the wave of the future.”

[Raw Story]

Trump Announces U.S. Will Exit Paris Climate Deal

President Donald Trump announced his decision to withdraw the US from the Paris climate accord Thursday, a major step that fulfills a campaign promise while seriously dampening global efforts to curb global warming.

The decision amounts to a rebuttal of the worldwide effort to pressure Trump to remain a part of the agreement, which 195 nations signed onto. Foreign leaders, business executives and Trump’s own daughter lobbied heavily for him to remain a part of the deal, but ultimately lost out to conservatives who claim the plan is bad for the United States.

“In order to fulfill my solemn duty to protect America and its citizens, the United States will withdraw from the Paris climate accord but being negotiations to reenter either the Paris accord or an entirely new transaction under terms that are fair to the United States,” Trump said from the White House Rose Garden.

“We’re getting out. And we will start to renegotiate and we’ll see if there’s a better deal. If we can, great. If we can’t, that’s fine,” he added.

[Washington Post]

Reality

The U.S. now joins Syria, which has been mired in a war and Nicaragua, which has said it didn’t join because they didn’t think the climate agreement went far enough, in not taking part in the global agreement.

For years conservatives railed against Barack Obama for what they perceived was “leading from behind.” This is exactly leading from behind. Other countries like China will now take over as global leaders in green energy and reap the economic benefits while Trump at home will push for more oil and coal.

Trump Incorrectly Labels Philippines Robbery a Terror Attack

President Donald Trump incorrectly labeled violence in the Philippines on Thursday a “terrorist attack” just minutes before officials said it was the result of a suspected robbery.
Trump, before announcing the United States was leaving the Paris climate agreement, opened the event by saying “our thoughts and our prayers” are with those affected by the “terrorist attack in Manila.”

“We are closely monitoring the situation and I will continue to give updates, anything happens, during this period of time,” he said. “But is really pretty sad what is going on throughout the world with terror. Our thoughts and our prayers are with all of those affected.”

But officials on the ground in the Philippines said the opposite.

Shortly after Trump’s comment, Philippines national police chief General Dela Rosa said the shooting incident at a Manila resort was an attempt by a lone thief to rob gamblers rather than a terrorist attack.

This was echoed by Resorts World Manila Chief Operating Officer Steven James Riley, who told reporters gathered outside the building that only one assailant was involved.
“At the moment we only know of one suspect,” he said.

Trump was briefed by national security adviser H.R. McMaster on the Philippines incident before he went into the Rose Garden, a White House official said. The official declined to comment on whether the incident was called a terrorist attack in the briefing or if Trump would like to amend his statement.

A spokesman for the National Security Council did not respond to request for comment.

[CNN]

US Approves Social Media Background Checks for Visa Applicants

The U.S. is buttressing its paperwork walls with new requirements for social media disclosures as part of revised visa applications.

Reported by Reuters earlier today, the decision from the U.S. government’s Office of Management and Budget was made over strenuous objections from education and academic groups during a public comment period.

The new questionnaire will ask for social media handles dating back over the last five years and biographical information dating back 15 years.

For critics, the new questionnaire represents yet another obstacle that the government is putting in the path of potential immigrants, would-be students and qualified researchers and teachers that may otherwise want to come to the United States.

Check out the new visa questionnaire here.

Quoting an unnamed State Department official, Reuters reported that the additional information would only be requested when the department determines that “such information is required to confirm identity or conduct more rigorous national security vetting.”

In an earlier Reuters report, the news service quoted an immigration attorney railing against the new procedures:

“What this language effectively does is give the consular posts permission to step away from the focused factors they have spent years developing and revising, and instead broaden the search to large groups based on gross factors such as nationality and religion,” Gairson said.

[TechCrunch]

Mick Mulvaney: The Day of the CBO ‘Has Probably Come and Gone’

During an interview with the Washington Examiner on Wednesday, Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney trashed the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) as partisan and made a case that the country would be better off without it.

“At some point, you’ve got to ask yourself, has the day of the CBO come and gone?” Mulvaney said. “Certainly there is value in having that information, especially if they could return to their nonpartisan roots. But at the same time you can function, you can have a government, without a Congressional Budget Office.”

Mulvaney honed in on the CBO’s recently released analysis of the American Health Care Act (AHCA), passed by House Republicans last month and vociferously supported by President Trump. The nonpartisan office estimated that the AHCA will cost 23 million Americans their health insurance while dramatically increasing costs for older Americans and people with pre-existing conditions, in part because of the bill’s $834 billion cut to Medicaid over the next decade.

“Did you see the methodology on that 23 million people getting kicked off their health insurance?” Mulvaney said. “You recognize of course that they assume that people voluntarily get off of Medicaid? That’s just not defensible. It’s almost as if they went into it and said, ‘Okay, we need this score to look bad. How do we do it?’”

Mulvaney characterized the CBO’s analysis of coverage losses as “just absurd” and said, “ To think that you would give up a free Medicaid program and choose instead to be uninsured is counterintuitive.”

The CBO, however, doesn’t assume that people will “give up Medicaid.” Instead, it assumes people will lose Medicaid coverage nonvoluntarily because of eligibility lapses, raises at their jobs, and other developments that under the House Republican plan will cause them to become ineligible. Vox explains:

The AHCA would effectively end the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion by freezing federal support for it starting in 2020. Under current law, the federal government initially paid 100 percent of costs of Medicaid expansion beneficiaries, a percentage set to wind down to 90 percent in 2020 and stay at that level permanently. Under the AHCA, the federal government would keep paying for people who signed up for Medicaid expansion coverage before January 1, 2020, but not anyone who signs up after that.

Over time, this would also lead people currently enrolled to lose their benefits, and they wouldn’t be able to go back on the program thereafter. The AHCA drops funding for enrollees whose eligibility lapses for two or more months, and many working poor people cycle in and out of Medicaid as their income changes: They get a raise and no longer qualify for Medicaid; then they lose that job or take a pay cut and enroll again.

Mulvaney’s vision for a post-CBO America would involve his office taking the lead on estimating the impacts of major legislation — “I would do my own studies here at OMB as to what the cost and benefits of that reg would be,” he said.

But the danger of that approach was illustrated just last week by Trump’s budget proposal, which included a glaringly basic arithmetic error involving double-counting the estimated economic impact of tax cuts. Instead of acknowledging that double-counting the $2 trillion in savings was a mistake, Mulvaney told reporters that he and other Trump administration officials who worked on the budget did it on purpose.

When the first version of the AHCA was unveiled in March, Mulvaney tried to discredit the CBO before it even had a chance to release its analysis of the bill, arguing on ABC’s This Week that the CBO’s analysis of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) was off.

It wasn’t. FactCheck.org concluded that despite overestimating the number of people who who get subsidized insurance through ACA exchanges, the CBO “actually nailed the overall impact of the law on the uninsured pretty closely.”

The CBO “predicted a big drop in the percentage of people under age 65 who would lack insurance, and that turned out to be the case,” FactCheck.org wrote. “CBO projected that in 2016 that nonelderly rate would fall to 11 percent, and the latest figure put the actual rate at 10.3 percent.”

In short, Mulvaney, Health and Human Services Director Tom Price, and other AHCA-supporting Republicans are attacking the CBO simply because of its tough assessment of their preferred health care plan, which involves a huge tax cut for the rich.

What Republicans like Mulvaney are saying about the CBO during the Trump era is the opposite of what GOP members of Congress said when Bill Clinton was president. In the 1990s, Congressional Republicans demanded that the CBO score President Clinton’s budgets, dismissing his Office of Management and Budget as partisan.

During congressional testimony last week, Mulvaney, defending Trump’s budget proposal, made a case that the fiscal interests of the unborn should take precedence over the lives of present-day Americans — or at least those who rely on food stamps to eat or public schools to educate their children.

[ThinkProgress]

Reality

Mick Mulvaney trashed the CBO because they scored Trumpcare saying it would kick 24 million people off of their healthcare. That’s totally crazy because Mulvaney’s Office of Budget Management did their own calculations and came to the exact same conclusion.

It would be nice if The Washington Examiner called Mulvaney on his bullshit.

Trump: ‘Big story’ is unmasking, surveillance during Obama administration

President Trump on Thursday turned his attention to “unmasking and surveillance” in the Obama administration, calling it the “big story.”

“The big story is the ‘unmasking and surveillance’ of people that took place during the Obama Administration,” Trump tweeted Thursday.

Trump’s comments come after the House Intelligence Committee on Wednesday issued seven new subpoenas in its investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.

Three of the subpoenas focus on allegations of improper “unmasking” of Trump campaign officials, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Those three subpoenas went to the CIA, FBI and National Security Agency and are related to questions — primarily from Republicans — about how the names of Trump associates were un-redacted and distributed in classified Obama administration reports during the transition period.

Republicans have signaled they see unmasking as the key to investigating the source of media leaks damaging to the Trump administration.

Trump and his aides have often railed against the leaking of information to the media and Trump has blasted the Russia probe as a “witch hunt.”

[The Hill]

 

 

Spicer offers cryptic explanation for Trump ‘covfefe’ tweet

White House press secretary Sean Spicer on Wednesday offered a cryptic explanation for President Trump’s incomplete, misspelled tweet that went viral overnight.

“The president and a small group of people know exactly what he meant,” Spicer told reporters.

The spokesman’s refusal to admit Trump made a mistake prompted laughter from members of the media at the White House.

Spicer said he wasn’t concerned about the president posting confusing tweets late at night.

Shortly after midnight, Trump tweeted, “Despite the constant negative press covfefe.”

The message unleashed a torrent of reactions from Twitter users who tried to define the term – or simply made fun of it.

Trump deleted the tweet shortly before 6 a.m., and posted a new message that read, “Who can figure out the true meaning of ‘covfefe’ ???”

[The Hill]

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