***OFFICIAL TRUMP CABINET THREAD***

[Wild Cobra]

I don't know if this is paywalled or not, but this is pretty good:

Link in the journal Nature: Tracking the Trump transition, agency by agency; 30 November 2016

[boutons_deux]

Conspiracies And ‘Witch Doctor’ Obama: Tom Price’s Ties To The Medical Fringe



President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Health and Human Services is a member of a far-right medical group that peddles conspiracy theories, and has ties to an anti-health care reform activist infamous for sharing a racist image of President Obama on a Tea Party email listserv.

AAPS, established in 1943, aims “to fight socialized medicine and to fight the government takeover of medicine” and in its statement of principles urges members to refuse to treat Medicare patients, reasoning

government involvement in healthcare is “evil” and “immoral." The group also rejects required vaccination programs in schools.

The group's publication, the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons, also has publicized a variety of dubious or debunked medical theories over the years.

One 2005 article in AAPS' journal advocated for rescinding the citizenship of so-called “anchor babies,” or the children of undo ented immigrants, who it claimed were responsible for increased leprosy rates.

Other articles pushed the myth of a link between vaccines and autism, suggested a link between abortion and breast cancer, and questioned the relationship between HIV and AIDS.

The group also once urged the U.S. Supreme Court to release post-mortem photos of Vince Foster, the Bill Clinton White House counsel whose suicide conspiracy theorists believe actually was an assassination.

An article separately posted on AAPS’ website even speculated that

President Obama’s oratory could in fact be a form of hypnosis, suggesting that he won the presidency by hypnotizing impressionable voters like young people and Jews.
The group's executive director, Dr. Jane Orient, on Thursday declined to verify Price's membership in an email and referred TPM to Price's office. However, Orient confirmed to Stat News that Price's membership was indeed current.

In March 2009, the AAPS published an angry press release responding to its exclusion from a White House health care summit.

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/dc/tom-...+%28TPMNews%29

AAPS, the Alex Jone Medical Society!

[boutons_deux]

more on extremist asshole Tom Price

"As for coverage of pre-existing medical conditions — a key element of the current law, requiring insurers to sell plans to those with health problems — Mr. Price’s bill has that protection only for those who maintained continuous health coverage with any insurer for the previous 18 months. This means that

insurers would not be required to sell an affordable plan to anyone who did not have coverage for, say, a month while he or she was between jobs."
Beyond his commitment to tearing apart the health care law, Mr. Price, who leads the House Budget Committee, published a budget proposal last year that would convert Medicaid into a block grant to state governments.

This would reduce federal spending on the program by 34 percent by 2025, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

Such a cut would inevitably cause states to offer fewer benefits and reduce the number of people covered, far beyond the 14 million who would lose their coverage if Medicaid expansion is rolled back.
Mr. Price also supports big changes to Medicare that could hurt older Americans by increasing their health care costs.

A plan backed by Mr. Price and the House speaker, Paul Ryan, would turn Medicare, which covers the cost of medical care for people over 65, into a program in which people would buy private insurance through what is known as premium support. The idea is to turn Medicare into a voucher program, designed to limit federal spending while forcing seniors to bear more of the cost.

Given that most American families have little or no retirement savings, this would be disastrous. It also stands in stark contrast to Mr. Trump’s campaign promise not to “cut” Medicare and Social Security.

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/11/30...secretary.html

iow, Trash and the establishment Repugs like Price, Ryan, etc. gonna Trash's red/slave state supporters real, real hard, in every orifice.

[boutons_deux]

Trash as populist, for the Little Man

Trump to preside over the richest Cabinet in U.S. history

Trump won the election by appealing to America's disaffected working class, promising to drain the Washington swamp of insiders, and railing against segments of the financial elite.

But the New York businessman has tapped a slate of people very much in his own vein to serve alongside him — billionaires and multimillionaires, including Wall Street financiers, industrialists and scions of the super-rich.

"Trump's appointees will probably wind up being the most wealthy group of people who have served in a presidential Cabinet in history,"

http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-n...201-story.html

Trash's cabinet epitomizes the oligarchy, the plutocracy that has totally proven USA is not a democracy.

[boutons_deux]

Trump’s Treasury Secretary Pick Once Foreclosed on 90-Year-Old Woman Over 27 Cents

According to Politico, OneWest, a bank Mnuchin created in the aftermath of the 2007-08 financial collapse, once foreclosed on an elderly woman over a 27-cent payment error.

Two years ago, OneWest filed foreclosure papers on the Lakeland, Fla., home of Ossie Lofton, who had taken a reverse mortgage, a loan that supplies cash to elderly homeowners and doesn’t require monthly payments.

After confusion over insurance coverage, a OneWest subsidiary sent Lofton a bill for $423.30.

She sent a check for $423.

The bank sent another bill, for 30 cents.

Lofton, 90, sent a check for three cents.

In November 2014, the bank foreclosed.

A nonprofit legal service contested the foreclosure on Lofton’s behalf and asked for a jury trial last month.

http://www.mediaite.com/online/trump...over-27-cents/



Shylock Mnuchin getting his pound of flesh.

[boutons_deux]

CHRIS CHRISTIE ARRESTED FOR KEYING TRUMP’S LIMO

NEW YORK — A once-prominent political career came to a shocking end on Friday as New Jersey Governor Chris Christie was arrested for keying the limo of President-elect Donald J. Trump.

The incident, which rocked political circles in Trenton and Washington, happened in full view of the midtown-Manhattan crowds outside of Trump Tower, where the vandalized limo had been parked.

“Suddenly, this guy broke through security, whipped out his keys, and made a gigantic gash along the side of the limo,”

said Harland Dorrinson, a tourist from Missouri who witnessed the incident.

“Police started wrestling him to the ground, and I was, like, ‘Holy crap, that’s Chris Christie.’ ”

Fellow-Republicans reacted to Christie’s arrest with sadness and sympathy.

“This whole transition period has been tough on a lot of folks,” former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney said.

Across New Jersey, residents like Carol Foyler, of Teaneck, said that they were shocked by their governor’s spectacular fall.

“I never would have guessed that this would be the thing he’d go to jail for,” she said.

http://www.newyorker.com/humor/borowitz-report/chris-christie-arrested-for-keying-trumps-limo

[boutons_deux]

Betsy DeVos has a disastrous education legacy in Michigan

The troubling stories about Betsy DeVos keep coming. DeVos, Donald Trump’s education secretary nominee, has no educational experience beyond spending her massive wealth to undermine public schools by sending public education money to private schools in the form of vouchers and to charter schools.

She and her family are major driving forces in Michigan’s laxness on “school choice,” and it’s been a disaster.

Bridge Magazine recently looked at how “choice” has spelled segregation in DeVos’s hometown of Holland, Michigan:

In the two decades since Michigan adopted school choice, Holland’s white enrollment has plummeted 60 percent, with 2,100 fewer white students. Today, whites comprise 49 percent of school-age children living in the district, but only 38 percent the school population (Hispanics make up 47 percent of Holland schools). [...]

Many of those who left Holland’s schools didn’t go far. More than 400 students who live in the district now attend Black River Public School, a charter where 74 percent of students are white. Black River is just over a mile from Holland High School.

Another 255 Holland students drive east to the Zeeland Public Schools, which are 77 percent white.

This is a direct result of policies pushed by the person Donald Trump wants to put in charge of education at the federal level. Another reason for the white supremacists to love him, I guess. And it’s not like all that segregation and privatization has helped even on the limited measure of test scores:

… after more than a decade of Ms. DeVos’s getting her way on a host of statewide education policies,

Michigan has the dubious distinction of being one of five states with declining reading scores.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2016/1...28Daily+Kos%29

[boutons_deux]

'They Are Both Profiteers': Meet The Two Most Repellent Reptiles to Slither into Trump's Swamp

Steven Mnuchin and Wilbur Ross will bleed the country dry.

Mnuchin has deep ties on Wall Street, including working as a partner for Goldman Sachs, and his hedge fund played a role in the housing crisis after it scooped up the failing California bank IndyMac in 2008.

Trump’s commerce secretary pick, Wilbur Ross, is a billionaire private equity investor who specializes in flipping bankrupt companies for profit, often buying the U.S. companies at low prices and then selling them to overseas investors. He and his companies have sometimes shipped jobs and factories overseas—practices Donald Trump has railed against.

Mnuchin’s hedge fund also played a role in the housing crisis after it scooped up the failing California bank IndyMac in 2008. Under Mnuchin’s ownership, IndyMac foreclosed on 36,000 families, particularly elderly residents trapped in reverse mortgages. Mnuchin was accused of running a foreclosure machine. People protested outside his home. The bank, which was renamed OneWest, was also accused of racially discriminatory lending practices. In 2015, Mnuchin sold the bank for $3.4 billion, $1.8 billion more than he bought it for.

Ross specializes in flipping bankrupt companies for profit, often buying the U.S. companies at low prices, then selling them to overseas investors.

He, too, had a role in the foreclosure crisis. In 2007, Wilbur Ross bought the second-largest servicer of subprime loans in America, a company called American Home Mortgage Servicing.

they are both—I call them profiteers because they, like most banks and mortgage servicing companies, just profited from the lack of attention to the foreclosure crisis at the federal level. Mnuchin foreclosed on 36,000 people—in California alone. He foreclosed on much more through OneWest Bank, where he was CEO.

And Wilbur Ross, through American Home Mortgage Servicing, which eventually became a company called Ocwen, also did so, and they did so illegally.

These were fraudulent foreclosures, where fake do ents were used to prop up those foreclosures.

There are depositions with individuals from OneWest Bank saying that they spent 30 seconds looking at foreclosure files before signing affidavits that said that they knew everything in that file and reviewed all the business practices.

There were forged do ents routinely from Wilbur Ross’s American Home Mortgage Servicing.

They were done by a third-party company known as DocX, where the CEO of that company actually is in prison right now, went to prison for five years for forging millions of mortgage assignments to be used as evidence in court cases all over the country.
http://www.alternet.org/economy/stev...r-trumps-swamp

SlimeBag Trash hiring slimebags. "(slimebag) Personnel is (slimebag) policy"

[boutons_deux]

Obscure law would allow Trump’s billionaire pals to skip out on millions in taxes if they join his cabinet

wealthy cabinet members may be in line to duck out on paying hundreds of million dollars in federal taxes on capital gains.

Buried deep in Section 2634 of federal ethics laws is a tax avoidance maneuver called a “certificate of dives ure,” that allows incoming cabinet picks to sell off billions of dollars in assets — in order to avoid future conflicts of interest — much of them tax-free.

When former President George W. Bush selected Goldman Sachs CEO Henry Paulson top serve as his treasury secretary,

Paulson sold off approximately a half a billion dollars’ worth of Goldman stock and avoided what might have totaled over $200 million in capital gains taxes.

http://www.rawstory.com/2016/12/obsc...e+Raw+Story%29

[boutons_deux]

Trump's treasury secretary pick has a very different tax plan than his boss

Steven Mnuchin says his tax plan would offset any reduction in upper-income taxes with fewer deductions, something that bears little resemblance to any of the multiple plans President-elect Trump proposed during the campaign.

Mnuchin said, “Any reductions we have in upper-income taxes will be offset by less deductions, so there will be no absolute tax cut for the upper class.”

I don’t know what Mnuchin means by the upper class. However, the Tax Policy Center estimates that under Trump’s most recent plan, the average net tax cut for the highest income 1 percent of households (those making $700,000 or more) would be $215,000 in 2017.

The top 0.1 percent, who make north of $3.7 million, would enjoy an average tax cut of more than $1 million, boosting their after-tax income by 14.2 percent.

http://www.csmonitor.com/Business/Ta...-than-his-boss

Don The Con doesn't care WTF any tax plan is, as long as he has his taxes cut.

btw, how are the KKK/white nationalists swallowing Trash's predatory Shylock Jew at Treasury?

[baseline bum]

Don The Con doesn't care WTF any tax plan is, as long as he has his taxes cut.

How do you cut down from zero?

[boutons_deux]

How do you cut down from zero?

his taxes includes taxes on his companies, and killing the estate, worth $4B to his family.

[boutons_deux]

McCaul at DHS would be hilarious. White supremacist/xenphobes, aka "conservatives", would be furious!

Why this potential pick for DHS would be a huge reversal on Trump’s biggest campaign promise

The possible appointment of Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Tex. (F, 56%) to the position of Homeland Security chief may finally signal to Donald Trump’s most loyal supporters that the president-elect is not going to follow through on his chief campaign proposals of border security and immigration.

“We certainly hope that Donald Trump would not reward a deceptive pro-amnesty lawmaker like Michael McCaul with a Cabinet position,” William Gheen, president of Americans for Legal Immigration PAC, told the Washington Times on Tuesday. “That would be very disappointing to all of us that believed his campaign promises to secure our borders and deport millions of illegal immigrants under current U.S. laws.”

Immigration hawks are particularly startled by McCaul’s 2015 Secure Our Borders First Act.

Critics say the Texas representative’s co-authored bill ignored policy solutions to deal with the millions of people living in America illegally, like the administration’s “catch and release” policy.

https://www.conservativereview.com/c...mpaign-promise

[boutons_deux]

After Benghazi, incompetent Trump pick Mike Flynn ordered his staff to prove Iran did it

It is a high bar, but Trump's would-be national security adviser, Lt. Gen. Mike Flynn, may be the single worst Trump pick so far.

He is the sort of paranoid dimwit who would eagerly get us into a shooting war for the sake of getting into a shooting war.

Days after Islamist militants stormed the American diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, in 2012, Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn reached a conclusion that stunned some of his subordinates at the Defense Intelligence Agency: Iran had a role in the attack, he told them.

Now, he added, it was their job to prove it — and, by implication, to show that the White House was wrong about what had led to the attack.

So faced with a genuine act of terrorism that claimed American lives, Mike Flynn's official reaction as intelligence gatherer was to brush aside work to determine who was behind the attack and order his staff to prove his own preferred theory.

That he was booted from his previous intelligence job for take-your-pick has so far been glossed over by the Trump crowd, but there is information enough to deduce the man is a military version of Trump himself.

Mr. Flynn said that the first thing everyone needed to know was that he was always right.

His staff would know they were right, he said, when their views melded to his. [...]

Some also described him as a Captain Queeg-like character, paranoid that his staff members were undercutting him and credulous of conspiracy theories.

That last bit is evident from his own comments. The man is clearly not playing with a full deck.

Nevertheless, it still doesn't seem likely the entire collected Republican Party has either the remaining dignity or remaining expertise to object to Flynn.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2016/1...28Daily+Kos%29

[spurraider21]

flynn has that kermit the frog/ray romano voice

[Spurminator]

Flynn is a pizzagate nutter.

[spurraider21]

this dude's gonna be in trump's ear all the time ...

[Nbadan]

Meanwhile at the Trump Victory Lap...



Crickets..

[boutons_deux]

Trump nominates former presidential hopeful Ben Carson as HUD chief

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/...=.0b1ee4f33a02

[spurraider21]

why would carson want HUD but not surgeon general?

[johnsmith]

this dude's gonna be in trump's ear all the time ...

Lol....this provided me with my first laugh of the day whilst enjoying my morning poop.

[johnsmith]

It's like he loses his train of thought and just starts saying words.

[spurraider21]

Lol....this provided me with my first laugh of the day whilst enjoying my morning poop.

thats the sign of a man who prepared a 5 minute speech but was told he was supposed to go up for 20

[rmt]

why would carson want HUD but not surgeon general?

I think he wants to address inner city/low income housing (supposedly because he was raised in both) - not medical stuff. That's a scratch your head pick.

[boutons_deux]

I think he wants to address inner city/low income housing (supposedly because he was raised in both) - not medical stuff. That's a scratch your head pick.

BC, even with Jesus' hand on his shoulder, has never managed , never been in govt.

BD as head HUD is a Trash/Repug tactic to up HUD and knitters.

And Trash has lots of property, and probably wants more, in inner cities, to turned into luxury buildings. Trash was sued successfully for housing discrimination, biggest settlement EVER of such suits.