Donald is here to stay, now what? Cursing and swearing OK

[Tero]

Republicans embarrassed by Trump nomimees, shifting to middle ground:
http://www.rollcall.com/news/politics/r ... p-nominees

[Tero]

No more black helicopters: funds cut
http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/us-n ... t-51989581

[Tero]

It seemed like a fun thing at the time. "If only i hadn't let the prostitutes come up to the penthouse suite in Moscow..."
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/trump ... le/2644364

[JimC]

I must remember that. Next time I stay in a Moscow penthouse suite, definitely no prostitutes!

[Woodbutcher]

I think the meet with the prostitutes peeing on him was a Trump version of trickle down...

[Seabass]

So presidential.



Trump has not attacked: white supremacists, Vladimir Putin.

[JimC]

Has he attacked retired Physics teachers?

I mean, I'd hate to be left out...

[Tero]

Trump Believes That Democrats and Republicans Will Work Together to Craft New Health Care Plan. He’s Also an Idiot
https://www.theroot.com/trump-believes- ... 1821582192
comment there
BadOmbre
strangeWindmill
12/27/17 1:35am
How many more times do they have to clearly state that? Seriously, what are you talking about? They’ve been crystal clear that they will opt for no changes that reduces access to healthcare and have voted for such every time. There are some things you can be skeptical of, the Dems commitment to the ACA isn’t one of them.

Dems have even less motivation to cooperate with Trump and the GOP than they already did what with 2018 being an election year and Democrats taking Jeff Session’s Senate seat. Even Mitch McConnell has basically said that any big-ticket GOP dream stuff is dead for the next year with Doug Jones coming into Congress.

[Brian Peacock]

Polls show Trump is the most popular President all time... the best ever.

Wednesday brought bad news for Donald Trump: Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are still the man and woman most admired by Americans, according to the results of an annual Gallup poll.

The current president, who is suffering brutally low approval ratings as his first year in the White House comes to a close, was second to Obama, polling 14% to 17% for his predecessor. In 2016, Obama led Trump by 22% to 15%.

Clinton, who lost the presidency to Trump in the electoral college despite beating him in the popular vote by nearly three million ballots, was named as most-admired American woman by 9% of Gallup respondents.

That was enough to put her two points ahead of Michelle Obama and five ahead of Oprah Winfrey in third. Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren took 3% of the vote, just ahead of German chancellor Angela Merkel and Queen Elizabeth II, both with 2%....

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/201 ... an-in-poll

[Tero]

The Swamp is draining Trump
https://www.politico.com/story/2017/12/ ... sis-319382

[Brian Peacock]

In what way?

[Tero]

The Wall street swamp. No regulation, leads to bank bailouts 5 years later, under a Democrat once again.

[L'Emmerdeur]

It's good that they're slashing regulation, though. A real fine thing that they did.

[L'Emmerdeur]

It's common knowledge that President Bogus has installed as heads of departments people who've worked for years to destroy those same departments. Probably every one of these shitheels deserves a thread of their own, but for now they get lumped in with the Mountebank in Chief.

'Betsy DeVos’s Gut Punch to Defrauded Students'

Victims of the corrupt diploma mill [Corinthian Colleges] will not have their student loans discharged; instead, they will get a portion of relief based on their current income. The more professional ingenuity they showed despite being defrauded by Corinthian, the less money they will get in restitution.

It’s yet another way in which DeVos has acted in favor of the for-profit college industry, which was left for dead after several major companies’ deceptive schemes finally caught up with them. Not only is DeVos shielding the industry from the consequences of those misdeeds, she’s rewriting the rules to legalize those practices.

Corinthian targeted single mothers and returning veterans with high-pressure recruitment, lying about job placement statistics to make enrollment seem like a good bet. Once signed up, Corinthian would pile on tens of thousands of dollars of unanticipated debt and deliver a substandard educational experience. One student alleged that some final exams involved board games and that he got course credit from an “internship” working at a fast-food restaurant. In the end, the useless degrees did not help, and sometimes even hurt, graduates’ job prospects.

Corinthian shut down in April 2015, after the Education Department fined it $30 million for misrepresenting job placement rates. State and federal regulators eventually won billions in fraud judgments against the bankrupt firm.

A coalition of students refused to pay their debts to Corinthian, citing a clause in their loan contracts allowing “defense to repayment” if they were defrauded. Even under Obama, the Education Department made loan relief unnecessarily burdensome, forcing students to prove the fraud instead of instituting blanket relief. Thousands of cases were left to DeVos to adjudicate, delaying forgiveness of billions of dollars.

And DeVos did almost nothing about them. In the final year of the Obama administration, 27,986 of 46,274 debt cancellation claims were dealt with; in the first several months under DeVos, only two claims were addressed—and both were denied. By early December, the backlog had grown to 95,000 unprocessed claims, mostly from Corinthian students. Interest accrued on the loans while students waited in limbo for a ruling. The Education Department even used debt collectors to garnish wages and seize tax refunds on some borrowers. Several state attorneys general sued the department to deal with the backlog.

DeVos finally announced a resolution last week, approving 12,900 “defense to repayment” applications and denying 8,600 others. But the new relief plan was noteworthy. The Education Department will now compare the earnings of an applicant for debt relief to the average earnings of students who took similar vocational courses. So if you trained at Corinthian as a medical technician, the agency will look at your salary compared to other medical technicians, and deliver relief on a sliding scale. Students making 50 percent of the average rate of their program will get 50 percent of their debt cancelled; those making 60 percent will get 40 percent cancelled; and so on.

This is a highly uncommon approach to fraud resolution. Whether a student debtor succeeded after being defrauded bears no direct relationship to the fraud itself. Plus, the data used to determine the average wage comes from those who completed vocational programs. But many of the defrauded students didn’t finish, because Corinthian shut down before they completed their coursework. Judging defrauded holders of partial credits against graduates seems unfair.

The action may also be illegal, because the agency is changing the parameters for debt cancellation midstream. ...

DeVos has intervened on behalf of for-profit colleges several times in her young tenure. In addition to the “defense to repayment” rule, the Education Department has moved to rewrite a “gainful employment” rule, which eliminates financial aid for college programs that fail to provide a career path for students. The head of the group policing fraud in higher education is a former dean at DeVry University, itself charged with misleading students and subject to a $100 million fine.

[Emphasis mine. L'E]

[Animavore]

Utter scum, the lot of them.