Is It Trump’s Shutdown or Schumer’s?

By THOMAS KAPLAN and SHERYL GAY STOLBERG 10:07 PM ET

• With the government shut down and the two parties faulting each other, senators were looking for an agreement to end the crisis.
• The likeliest path to reopen the government is to agree on a stopgap bill that would be shorter than the four weeks that the House approved.
• Read more at the NYT...

Donald Trump used Twitter to urge Senate Republicans to end the impasse by taking the “nuclear option” if the “stalemate continues”.

Such a move would allow Republicans to pass legislation without Democratic support, by lowering the majority needed to pass a bill to just 51 votes. It is, however, not an option favoured by the GOP Senate leader, Mitch McConnell.

The president continued to blame Democrats for the shutdown, arguing that they were placing the nation’s borders under threat by opposing a short-term budget fix.

“The Dems just want illegal immigrants to pour into our nation unchecked,” Trump tweeted.

The remarks followed an agressive Trump campaign advert released on Saturday, which said Democrats opposing the president’s hardline immigration agenda were “complicit in every murder committed by illegal immigrants”. 

Marc Short, the White House director of legislative affairs, told NBC’s Meet the Press “that ad was produced by an outside group and not those of us in the White House”. 

The ad concludes with a picture of the president giving two thumbs up and his voice saying: “I’m Donald Trump and I approve this message.”

The Vermont senator Bernie Sanders condemned the ad. 

“It is really unbelievable and so sad for our country that we have a president of the United States who says such nonsense and such outrageous statements,” Sanders told CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday. 

Sanders, an independent who caucuses with Democrats, is helping lead efforts to secure talks safeguards for Dreamers, young undocumented migrants brought to the US who gained protected status under the Obama administration that was rescinded by Trump.

Republicans have argued that as Trump set a March deadline for a resolution to the Dreamers issue, negotiations can continue after government funding is passed.

Although the president remained in Washington over the weekend, missing a gala event at his private members’ club in Florida to celebrate his first year in office, Trump faced criticism for failing to lead negotiations since the shutdown began. 

News shows repeated Fox and Friends footage from 2013, when Republicans in Congress drove the last government shutdown, over healthcare reform. 

“Well, if you say who gets fired it always has to be the top,” Trump said then. “I mean, problems start from the top and they have to get solved from the top and the president’s the leader. And he’s got to get everybody in a room and he’s got to lead.”

On Saturday the White House released a photograph of the president sitting in the Oval Office, wearing a white Make America Great Again cap and surrounded by flags as he purportedly received “the latest updates from Capitol Hill”. 

It was later reported that Trump had not been in contact with the Democratic Senate minority leader, Chuck Schumer, since they negotiated over a cheeseburger lunch on Friday. Schumer said on Saturday that working with Trump was like “negotiating with Jell-O”.

Read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/jan/21/government-shutdown-trum...

President Trump took a victory lap on Tuesday and praised “Fake News CNN” for declaring him the winner over Democrats​ and Sen. Chuck Schumer​ ​in the negotiations to end a government shutdown. ​

“Even Crazy Jim Acosta of Fake News CNN agrees: ‘Trump World and WH sources dancing in end zone: Trump wins again…Schumer and Dems caved…gambled and lost.’ Thank you for your honesty Jim!​” Trump posted on Twitter.​

B​ut Acosta didn’t directly credit Trump with the win — he attributed that comment to a source.

“No doubt the president and his allies are spiking the football after the shutdown. Trump wins again is how one source described it to me,” Acosta said during a report Monday evening.

​Senate Democrats on Monday agreed to back a temporary spending bill that would fund the government until Feb. 8 after they got assurances from Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell that they’d revisit immigration reform to protect “Dreamers.”

Schumer, the minority leader in the chamber, praised the deal as a “real pathway to get a bill on the floor and through the Senate.”

read more:

https://nypost.com/2018/01/23/trump-praises-fake-news-cnn-in-shutdown-vi...

Democratic Rep. Joe Kennedy who delivered the Democratic Party’s response to Trump’s speech accused the White House of "targeting the laws" that protect Americans.

"This administration isn't just targeting the laws that protect us — they are targeting the very idea that we are all worthy of protection," Kennedy said.

A CNN instant poll also revealed that 48 percent of the viewers felt "very positive" about Trump’s speech, with 22 percent feeling "somewhat positive."

It turned out however that many did not share the grim assessments made by the Democratic lawmakers, with people on Twitter praising Trump’s speech and mocking the Democrats’ stance.

Read more:

https://sputniknews.com/us/201801311061214913-trump-speech-public-reaction/

Dumbdumb? winning the masses? Of course, the lowest denominator is the largest base ignorance can have... And the winner is, not the Democrats...

On Twitter, in speeches and in interviews, Mr. Trump has widely varied his tone and viewpoint, sometimes on the same issue.

Read more at the NYT...

Meanwhile the only media portrait of Obama was that of a saint.... The only true image of Obama that should be retained is that of a witty grand bullshitter...

On July 25, 2013, a high-ranking federal law enforcement officer took a public stand against malfeasance on Wall Street. Preet Bharara, then the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York, held a news conference to announce one of the largest Wall Street criminal cases the American justice system had ever seen.

Mr. Bharara’s office had just indicted the multibillion-dollar hedge fund firm SAC Capital Advisors, charging it with wire fraud and insider trading. Standing before a row of television cameras, Mr. Bharara described the case in momentous terms, saying that it involved illegal trading that was “substantial, pervasive and on a scale without precedent in the history of hedge funds.” His legal action that day, he assured the public, would send a strong message to the financial industry that cheating was not acceptable and that prosecutors and regulators would take swift action when behavior crossed the line.

Steven A. Cohen, the founder of SAC and one of the world’s wealthiest men, was never criminally charged, but his company would end up paying $1.8 billion in civil and criminal fines, one of the largest settlements of its kind. He denied any culpability, but his reputation was still badly — some might argue irreparably — damaged. Eight of his former employees were charged by the government, and six pleaded guilty (a few later had their convictions or guilty pleas dismissed). Mr. Cohen was required to shut his fund down and was prohibited from managing outside investors’ money until 2018.

Now, with the prohibition having expired in December, Mr. Cohen has been raising money from investors and is set to start a new hedge fund. He’ll find himself in an environment very different from the one he last operated in. His resurrection arrives as Wall Street regulation is under assault and financiers are directing tax policy and other aspects of the economy — often to the benefit of their own industry. Mr. Cohen is a powerful symbol of Wall Street’s resurgence under President Trump.

Read more:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/09/opinion/sunday/steven-cohen-wall-street.html