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Read the rules in the OP before posting, please.In order to ensure that this thread continues to meet TL standards and follows the proper guidelines, we will be enforcing the rules in the OP more strictly. Be sure to give them a re-read to refresh your memory! The vast majority of you are contributing in a healthy way, keep it up! NOTE: When providing a source, explain why you feel it is relevant and what purpose it adds to the discussion if it's not obvious. Also take note that unsubstantiated tweets/posts meant only to rekindle old arguments can result in a mod action. |
Trump is the president, you now can quote anyone, chances are trump agreed with him at some point...
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User was warned for this post
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thats funny, considering bannon is registered to vote in two states.
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What is he going to say once the huge investigation that'll be paid for with taxpayer money turns up a couple hundred instances of voter fraud, split more or less evenly on each side? Deny that too? Or take responsibility? (lol!)
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On January 26 2017 02:17 Djzapz wrote:
What is he going to say once the huge investigation that'll be paid for with taxpayer money turns up a couple hundred instances of voter fraud, split more or less evenly on each side? Deny that too? Or take responsibility? (lol!)
Details will never be released, just like his "top men" who were finding "big things" on Obama's birth certificate
Especially if the gag order preventing any press contact keeps up
This is assuming he isn't quietly persuaded to shut up, like McCrory was in NC, so that the GOP can preserve the voter fraud boogeyman
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On January 26 2017 02:17 Djzapz wrote:
What is he going to say once the huge investigation that'll be paid for with taxpayer money turns up a couple hundred instances of voter fraud, split more or less evenly on each side? Deny that too? Or take responsibility? (lol!)
Either no info is released or the entire investigation is a scam, the evidence will be manufactures and once it is discovered that Trump ordered it so he is impeached.
Tho he is probably smart enough not to go on record somewhere that he wants it doctored.
(there is also a 1/100000000 chance there was some actual fraud that still had no actual effect on the results)
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On January 26 2017 00:12 xDaunt wrote:Show nested quote +On January 25 2017 19:03 kwizach wrote:+ Show Spoiler +Remember the discussions on Aetna? On November 17 2016 05:02 xDaunt wrote:Show nested quote +On November 17 2016 04:56 farvacola wrote:
To hone in on one of many flaws in that reasoning, if the Medicare expansion had gone through without Supreme Court interference, millions of borderline eligible folks in states that refused to set up their own exchanges would have been covered (there's reason to think that problems with federal exchange implementation in states without their own exchange lies at the locus of Obamacare's price control problems). That alone throws a wrench into this "all smart people knew it was going to fail" reasoning. I don't think it would have mattered: Show nested quote +Aetna's decision to abandon its ObamaCare expansion plans and rethink its participation altogether came as a surprise to many. It shouldn't have. Everything that's happened now was predicted by the law's critics years ago.
Aetna CEO Mark Bertolini said that this was supposed to be a break-even year for its ObamaCare business. Instead, the company has already lost $200 million, which it expect that to hit $320 million before the year it out. He said the company was abandoning plans to expand into five other states and is reviewing whether to stay in the 15 states where Aetna (AET) current sells ObamaCare plans.
Aetna's announcement follows UnitedHealth Group's (UNH) decision to leave most ObamaCare markets, Humana's (HUM) decision to drop out of some, Blue Cross Blue Shield's announcement that it was quitting the individual market in Minnesota, and the failure of most of the 23 government-created insurance co-ops. And it follows news that insurance companies are putting in for double-digit rate hikes that in some cases top 60%, and news that the Congressional Budget Office has sharply downgraded its long-term enrollment forecast for the exchanges.
Who could have envisioned such problems? Not ObamaCare backers. They were endlessly promising that the law would create vibrant, highly competitive markets that would lower the cost of insurance.
Critics, however, were spot on. They said that, despite the individual mandate, ObamaCare wouldn't attract enough young and healthy people to keep premiums down.
The Heritage Foundation, for example, said that under ObamaCare, "many under age 35 will opt out of buying insurance altogether, choosing to pay the penalty instead." That's just what has happened.
Critics predicted sharp hikes in premiums and big increases in medical claims. That's what's happened.
Critics said people would game the system, waiting until they got sick to buy insurance, then canceling it once the bills were paid, because of the law's "guaranteed issue" mandate. That's happening, too. In fact, administration officials are trying to tighten the rules to mitigate this problem.
Critics said insurers would abandon ObamaCare amid substantial losses. Anyone want to dispute that this is happening?
These dire predictions weren't pulled out of thin air. Several states had already tried ObamaCare-style market reforms in the 1990s, only to see their individual insurance markets collapse. A 2007 report by Milliman Inc. looked at eight states that had adopted the "guaranteed issue" and "community rating" reforms at the heart of ObamaCare.
Like Obama, these states wanted to create insurance markets where no one could be denied coverage, or charged more, just because they were sick. But Milliman found that these regulations resulted in fast-rising premiums, a drop in enrollment in the individual market, and an exodus of health insurers.
Sound familiar?
By the time ObamaCare came around, most of those states either abandoned or overhauled this regulatory scheme, only to have it reimposed on them.
ObamaCare architects figured they could avoid the fate of those state experiments by including the individual mandate and subsidies for lower income families.
However, consulting firm Oliver Wyman correctly predicted in 2009 that these wouldn't work, either. "The subsidies and mandates," it concluded, "are not sufficient to drive high participation of younger, healthier members."
Aetna's Bertolini says that what's needed now to keep ObamaCare functioning are bigger and more generous taxpayer financed insurance subsidies — i.e., bailouts. Democrats say what's needed is a "public option" so that consumers in states abandoned by private insurers will be able to get coverage.
How about instead policymakers listen to the original ObamaCare critics? For decades, they've been calling for reforms that lift myriad anti-competitive government regulations, as well as fixes to the tax code so that it no longer massively distorts the insurance market.
The resulting free market competition in health care would do what it does everywhere it's allowed to function — improve quality while improving affordability. In other words, it would achieve the things ObamaCare promised but miserably failed to deliver. Source. Edit: And to take things further, my recollection is that the Obamacare skeptics predicted that the financial collapse of Obamacare would happen right about now. On August 18 2016 11:18 Plansix wrote:Show nested quote +On August 18 2016 11:06 xDaunt wrote:On August 18 2016 11:01 Plansix wrote:On August 18 2016 10:58 xDaunt wrote:On August 18 2016 10:35 {CC}StealthBlue wrote:The big health care news this week came from Aetna, which announced on Monday it was dramatically scaling back participation in the Affordable Care Act ― thereby reducing insurer competition and forcing customers scattered across 11 states to find different sources of coverage next year.
Aetna officials said the pullout was necessary because of Obamacare’s problems ― specifically, deep losses the insurer was incurring in the law’s health insurance exchanges.
But the move also was directly related to a Department of Justice decision to block the insurer’s potentially lucrative merger with Humana, according to a letter from Aetna’s CEO obtained by The Huffington Post.
Paired with some looming rate increases for next year’s health plans, the abrupt departure of Aetna has triggered new worries that Obamacare ― a subsidized public-private system of health insurance plans competing for beneficiaries ― is in serious trouble and may even be unsustainable.
That’s despite millions who have obtained coverage through these marketplaces, contributing to a historically low uninsured rate. It’s also despite optimism about Obamacare from at least some insurers and experts ― optimism that Aetna’s own leaders had expressed just a few months ago.
Publicly, Aetna representatives this week framed their about-face as a reaction to losses the company was taking on Obamacare customers, and in particular figures from the second quarter of 2016 that the company had just analyzed, showing them to be sicker and costlier than predicted.
When reporters on Monday asked whether Aetna was also reacting to the administration’s attempt to thwart its merger with Humana, company officials brushed off the questions, according to accounts in the Hartford Courant, Politico and USA Today. Source If I recall correctly, opponents, prior to Obamacare's passing, were predicting massive rate hikes and the demise of Obamacare as a consequence of fiscal unsustainability in 2017. As just one example, Colorado is getting fucked hard, and the exchanges are going to fail next year. Except the company that is threatening to pull out said the exact opposite of what they claimed during an investor call. Then they are free to be sued by shareholders. Doesn't change the fact that Obamacare is going down in flames as predicted. Or they are lying about pulling out because they are mad about being denied a merger and they want to use that as leverage. On August 18 2016 11:11 farvacola wrote:
"Here's this thing that Aetna did, it's a clear signal that Obamacare is failing."
"Actually, Aetna has leveraged market pullouts before and there's reason to believe that that is what is happening here."
"Yeah well clearly Obamacare is failing anyhow!" Looks like farva and Plansix were spot-on: U.S. judge finds that Aetna deceived the public about its reasons for quitting Obamacare
Aetna claimed this summer that it was pulling out of all but four of the 15 states where it was providing Obamacare individual insurance because of a business decision — it was simply losing too much money on the Obamacare exchanges.
Now a federal judge has ruled that that was a rank falsehood. In fact, says Judge John D. Bates, Aetna made its decision at least partially in response to a federal antitrust lawsuit blocking its proposed $37-billion merger with Humana. Aetna threatened federal officials with the pullout before the lawsuit was filed, and followed through on its threat once it was filed. Bates made the observations in the course of a ruling he issued Monday blocking the merger.
Aetna executives had moved heaven and earth to conceal their decision-making process from the court, in part by discussing the matter on the phone rather than in emails, and by shielding what did get put in writing with the cloak of attorney-client privilege, a practice Bates found came close to “malfeasance.”
The judge’s conclusions about Aetna’s real reasons for pulling out of Obamacare — as opposed to the rationalization the company made in public — are crucial for the debate over the fate of the Affordable Care Act. That’s because the company’s withdrawal has been exploited by Republicans to justify repealing the act. Just last week, House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) cited Aetna’s action on the “Charlie Rose” show, saying that it proved how shaky the exchanges were. Source It would behoove you to read the opinion rather than simply quote the blog of some guy who only cites select portions and may very well have an axe to grind. The big tip off is where the Court says that says the decision to withdraw from the exchanges was " partially" motivated by the anti-trust litigation and Aetna's desire to improve its litigation position. Gee, I wonder what the other part could be? I don't have time to fully respond, but the opinion is here, and I'll give you a chance to amend your post and argument.
Uh, what? Firstly, the author of the column I linked to precisely mentions what you just referred to -- from the quote I used: "Aetna made its decision at least partially in response to a federal antitrust lawsuit blocking its proposed $37-billion merger with Humana." (emphasis mine)
Secondly, I had read the relevant sections of the opinion (specifically, pages 124 ff) prior to linking the column. The court specifically looked at the aforementioned 17 counties because that's where the government argued the merger between Aetna and Humana would substantially lessen competition in the public exchange markets. Regarding Aetna's decision to withdraw from these markets, the court found that it was part of a strategy to improve its litigation position and not the result of business considerations:
p. 127: This is persuasive evidence that when Aetna later withdrew from the 17 counties, it did not do so for business reasons, but instead to follow through on the threat that it made earlier.
p. 137: But the documents that team put together clearly show that they did not approach the 17 complaint counties as part of the business decision. Those three states were not mentioned in the draft documents before the request to include the 17 counties. And once those counties were included in the recommendation documents, they were a separate bloc not evaluated by the same business criteria (e.g., profitability) as the other markets. Hence, while Aetna puts on a persuasive case that information received in July 2016 changed the value proposition for Aetna participating on the exchanges generally, the Court nonetheless finds on the basis of all the evidence that Aetna’s decision with respect to the 17 complaint counties was not based on that value proposition. Instead, Aetna’s decision not to offer on-exchange plans in the 17 counties for 2017 was a strategy to improve its litigation position.
In fact, among those 17 counties were counties where Altea already had profitable operations on the exchanges:
p. 140:
In Florida, Aetna operated at a profit both on-exchange and overall in 2015. Aetna projects that it will operate at a profit again both on-exchange and overall in 2016. In fact, Florida’s overall profit is due to the strength of its on-exchange offerings—Aetna’s off-exchange offerings in Florida lost money. This is strong evidence that Aetna is likely to compete on-exchange in Florida after 2017. The email exchange between Mayhew and Ciano supports this inference as well. Ciano is, presumably, knowledgeable about the Florida market, and he predicted that it would be in Aetna’s best interest to remain in Florida—as reflected by his incredulity that Aetna would withdraw from Florida.
I'm not arguing anything else than what the court found with regards to this specific case. Nobody is denying the existence of profitability issues in many cases -- those are notably due to some insurers' own flawed strategies in approaching the new ACA markets, to imperfections in the ACA, as well as to the GOP's refusal to address those imperfections and to expand Medicaid programs in some states. Yet as farva and Plansix were pointing out, the news that came from Aetna last summer was not a great example of the issues with the ACA for the reasons highlighted above.
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On January 26 2017 02:17 Djzapz wrote:
What is he going to say once the huge investigation that'll be paid for with taxpayer money turns up a couple hundred instances of voter fraud, split more or less evenly on each side? Deny that too? Or take responsibility? (lol!)
He will point to the millions of dead people still on voting rolls and the people who are registered to vote in multiple states, even if there is no evidence that any of them voted illegally. And his supporters will lap it up like good little zombies.
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He also believes that simply being registered in two states or being registered and dead constitutes voter fraud, I think. So any investigation will turn up that those people exist (heck, we already know Steve Bannon is one).
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On January 26 2017 01:24 TheTenthDoc wrote:
Have fun launching a major federal investigation into voter fraud during a federal hiring freeze, Trump. I don't think he remembers day to day what he's done anymore.
(Also, haven't Republicans spent decades arguing voter fraud issues are a state and not a federal responsibility?)
Not to mention the border wall and 2020 census lol.
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Trump pissing all over US Mexico relations. This wall issue and who pays for it will throw a yugeeeee wrench in possible NAFTA renegotiations.
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On January 26 2017 03:16 TheTenthDoc wrote:
He also believes that simply being registered in two states or being registered and dead constitutes voter fraud, I think. So any investigation will turn up that those people exist (heck, we already know Steve Bannon is one).
I'm having trouble finding the sources, but I know I've read previously that some of the voter fraud claims are based on really questionable data. Basically they just systematically compare lists and will see similar/same names voting twice in a small area and claim they are one person committing voter fraud. Anyone else remember seeing such a story? Google searches around voting are clogged full of the less substantive news stories on the subject that have been occurring since the election.
I basically expect a similar methodology with something like illegal immigrant voting claims too. That people will just compare lists of names & locations as proof of voter fraud.
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Trump is still using his unsecured android phone
President Trump, who flew across the country on hundreds of nights during the 2016 campaign to sleep in his own bed, has now spent five straight days in the unfamiliar surroundings of the White House. His aides said privately that he seemed apprehensive about the move to his new home, but Mr. Trump has discovered there is a lot he likes.
“These are the most beautiful phones I’ve ever used in my life,” Mr. Trump said in a telephone interview Tuesday evening.
“The world’s most secure system,” he added, laughing. “The words just explode in the air.” What he meant was that no one was listening in and recording his words.
The president sat at his desk — the one used by former Presidents Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan and John F. Kennedy, among others — at the end of his fourth full day in office.
His mornings, he said, are spent as they were in Trump Tower. He rises before 6 a.m., watches television tuned to a cable channel first in the residence, and later in a small dining room in the West Wing, and looks through the morning newspapers: The New York Times, The New York Post and now The Washington Post.
But his meetings now begin at 9 a.m., earlier than they used to, which significantly curtails his television time. Still, Mr. Trump, who does not read books, is able to end his evenings with plenty of television.
In between, Mr. Trump signs executive orders in the Oval Office and has meetings in the West Wing.
“They have a lot of board rooms,” he said of the White House, an apparent reference to the Cabinet Room and the Roosevelt Room.
The White House is the only property that Mr. Trump has slept in that is more famous than one of his own, and he seems in awe. Although he made his name building extravagant, gold-gilded properties, the new president has marveled to aides about the splendor of the White House and the lengths he must walk to retrieve something from a far-flung room.
His preference during the day is to work in the Oval Office. And to stare at it, still. So do his staff members and relatives. “I’ve had people come in; they walk in here and they just want to stare for a long period of time,” Mr. Trump said.
Among modern American presidents, Mr. Trump may be best situated to work where he lives. For decades, he has lived in a penthouse apartment on the 58th floor of Trump Tower and taken an elevator down to the 26th floor, where he has a corner office with views of Central Park. Many presidents have complained of being cooped up inside the White House — George W. Bush in particular said he missed the outdoors — but Mr. Trump can go for days without breathing in fresh outside air.
Mr. Trump’s wife, Melania, went back to New York on Sunday night with their 10-year-old son, Barron, and so Mr. Trump has the television — and his old, unsecured Android phone, to the protests of some of his aides — to keep him company. That was the case after 9 p.m. on Tuesday, when Mr. Trump appeared to be reacting to Bill O’Reilly’s show on Fox News, which was airing a feature on crime in Chicago.
In the interview, Mr. Trump demurred when asked about whether it was hard having his family away from him, and he pointed to Thursday, when Mrs. Trump and Barron, who is finishing the school year in New York, are expected to return.
“They’ll come down on weekends,” Mr. Trump said. “She’ll come down on Thursdays and stay.”
He said he was enjoying himself so far, despite his visible displeasure with the coverage of his inauguration and the first performance of his press secretary, Sean Spicer, who shouted at the news media and made numerous false statements about Mr. Trump’s inaugural crowds in the White House briefing room on Saturday.
Mr. Trump and his chief strategist, Stephen K. Bannon, and his chief of staff, Reince Priebus, watched Mr. Spicer’s do-over on Monday while eating lunch in the West Wing dining room, where the president murmured approval of Mr. Spicer’s Monday performance and called his press secretary a “superstar.”
His first breakfast at the White House was Saturday morning — a buffet in the residence spread with fresh fruit, pastries and other treats — where his adult children and their families joined him. The kitchen has been stocked with the same types of snacks that Mr. Trump had on his private plane, including Lay’s potato chips.
His oldest daughter, Ivanka, and her husband, Jared Kushner, the president’s senior adviser, stayed with him in the White House through Sunday. They left for their own new home at the end of the weekend to get their children ready for their new schools. Mr. Trump has not brought along any household staff from Trump Tower, an aide said.
The president spent a part of Tuesday poring over artwork from the White House collections, settling on a portrait of Andrew Jackson — America’s first populist president, who has been invoked by Mr. Trump’s aides as inspiration — to hang in the Oval Office.
“Now, I’m working,” Mr. Trump said in the interview, punctuating his focus by cataloging the work of the day: an executive order restarting the Keystone XL pipeline and his plans for border-related actions over the next days.
Mr. Trump is in the meantime pondering his first break away from the White House, a potential trip to Mar-a-Lago, his private club in Palm Beach, Fla., possibly the weekend of Feb. 3.
Until then, he is breaking in the residence, which Mrs. Trump is still working on decorating.
“It’s a beautiful residence, it’s very elegant,” Mr. Trump said, deploying one of his highest forms of praise.
“There’s something very special when you know that Abraham Lincoln slept there,” Mr. Trump said. “The Lincoln Bedroom, you know, was his office, and the suite where I’m staying is actually where he slept.”
Mr. Trump was referring to the White House master bedroom, which is now his own.
“Knowing all of that, it’s different, than, you know, just pure elegance and room size,” Mr. Trump said. “There’s a lot of history.”
https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/01/25/us/politics/president-trump-white-house.html?referer=
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Hopefully he doesn't handle classified documents on that unsecured phone.
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On January 26 2017 04:20 Nevuk wrote:Trump is still using his unsecured android phone Show nested quote +President Trump, who flew across the country on hundreds of nights during the 2016 campaign to sleep in his own bed, has now spent five straight days in the unfamiliar surroundings of the White House. His aides said privately that he seemed apprehensive about the move to his new home, but Mr. Trump has discovered there is a lot he likes.
“These are the most beautiful phones I’ve ever used in my life,” Mr. Trump said in a telephone interview Tuesday evening.
“The world’s most secure system,” he added, laughing. “The words just explode in the air.” What he meant was that no one was listening in and recording his words.
The president sat at his desk — the one used by former Presidents Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan and John F. Kennedy, among others — at the end of his fourth full day in office.
His mornings, he said, are spent as they were in Trump Tower. He rises before 6 a.m., watches television tuned to a cable channel first in the residence, and later in a small dining room in the West Wing, and looks through the morning newspapers: The New York Times, The New York Post and now The Washington Post.
But his meetings now begin at 9 a.m., earlier than they used to, which significantly curtails his television time. Still, Mr. Trump, who does not read books, is able to end his evenings with plenty of television.
In between, Mr. Trump signs executive orders in the Oval Office and has meetings in the West Wing.
“They have a lot of board rooms,” he said of the White House, an apparent reference to the Cabinet Room and the Roosevelt Room.
The White House is the only property that Mr. Trump has slept in that is more famous than one of his own, and he seems in awe. Although he made his name building extravagant, gold-gilded properties, the new president has marveled to aides about the splendor of the White House and the lengths he must walk to retrieve something from a far-flung room.
His preference during the day is to work in the Oval Office. And to stare at it, still. So do his staff members and relatives. “I’ve had people come in; they walk in here and they just want to stare for a long period of time,” Mr. Trump said.
Among modern American presidents, Mr. Trump may be best situated to work where he lives. For decades, he has lived in a penthouse apartment on the 58th floor of Trump Tower and taken an elevator down to the 26th floor, where he has a corner office with views of Central Park. Many presidents have complained of being cooped up inside the White House — George W. Bush in particular said he missed the outdoors — but Mr. Trump can go for days without breathing in fresh outside air.
Mr. Trump’s wife, Melania, went back to New York on Sunday night with their 10-year-old son, Barron, and so Mr. Trump has the television — and his old, unsecured Android phone, to the protests of some of his aides — to keep him company. That was the case after 9 p.m. on Tuesday, when Mr. Trump appeared to be reacting to Bill O’Reilly’s show on Fox News, which was airing a feature on crime in Chicago.
In the interview, Mr. Trump demurred when asked about whether it was hard having his family away from him, and he pointed to Thursday, when Mrs. Trump and Barron, who is finishing the school year in New York, are expected to return.
“They’ll come down on weekends,” Mr. Trump said. “She’ll come down on Thursdays and stay.”
He said he was enjoying himself so far, despite his visible displeasure with the coverage of his inauguration and the first performance of his press secretary, Sean Spicer, who shouted at the news media and made numerous false statements about Mr. Trump’s inaugural crowds in the White House briefing room on Saturday.
Mr. Trump and his chief strategist, Stephen K. Bannon, and his chief of staff, Reince Priebus, watched Mr. Spicer’s do-over on Monday while eating lunch in the West Wing dining room, where the president murmured approval of Mr. Spicer’s Monday performance and called his press secretary a “superstar.”
His first breakfast at the White House was Saturday morning — a buffet in the residence spread with fresh fruit, pastries and other treats — where his adult children and their families joined him. The kitchen has been stocked with the same types of snacks that Mr. Trump had on his private plane, including Lay’s potato chips.
His oldest daughter, Ivanka, and her husband, Jared Kushner, the president’s senior adviser, stayed with him in the White House through Sunday. They left for their own new home at the end of the weekend to get their children ready for their new schools. Mr. Trump has not brought along any household staff from Trump Tower, an aide said.
The president spent a part of Tuesday poring over artwork from the White House collections, settling on a portrait of Andrew Jackson — America’s first populist president, who has been invoked by Mr. Trump’s aides as inspiration — to hang in the Oval Office.
“Now, I’m working,” Mr. Trump said in the interview, punctuating his focus by cataloging the work of the day: an executive order restarting the Keystone XL pipeline and his plans for border-related actions over the next days.
Mr. Trump is in the meantime pondering his first break away from the White House, a potential trip to Mar-a-Lago, his private club in Palm Beach, Fla., possibly the weekend of Feb. 3.
Until then, he is breaking in the residence, which Mrs. Trump is still working on decorating.
“It’s a beautiful residence, it’s very elegant,” Mr. Trump said, deploying one of his highest forms of praise.
“There’s something very special when you know that Abraham Lincoln slept there,” Mr. Trump said. “The Lincoln Bedroom, you know, was his office, and the suite where I’m staying is actually where he slept.”
Mr. Trump was referring to the White House master bedroom, which is now his own.
“Knowing all of that, it’s different, than, you know, just pure elegance and room size,” Mr. Trump said. “There’s a lot of history.”
https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/01/25/us/politics/president-trump-white-house.html?referer=
I'm trying to decide whether that is just nice and personal coverage of Trump's new life as the POTUS, or whether the choice of adjectives, and editorial clarifications all over, is the author pokingfun at him. It's subtle, but I can't shake the feeling that this was written by someone who just really doesn't have a high opinion of Trump.
Or maybe it's due to my low opinion of Trump that I am reading more into the text than is there.
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On January 26 2017 04:31 Acrofales wrote:Show nested quote +On January 26 2017 04:20 Nevuk wrote:Trump is still using his unsecured android phone President Trump, who flew across the country on hundreds of nights during the 2016 campaign to sleep in his own bed, has now spent five straight days in the unfamiliar surroundings of the White House. His aides said privately that he seemed apprehensive about the move to his new home, but Mr. Trump has discovered there is a lot he likes.
“These are the most beautiful phones I’ve ever used in my life,” Mr. Trump said in a telephone interview Tuesday evening.
“The world’s most secure system,” he added, laughing. “The words just explode in the air.” What he meant was that no one was listening in and recording his words.
The president sat at his desk — the one used by former Presidents Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan and John F. Kennedy, among others — at the end of his fourth full day in office.
His mornings, he said, are spent as they were in Trump Tower. He rises before 6 a.m., watches television tuned to a cable channel first in the residence, and later in a small dining room in the West Wing, and looks through the morning newspapers: The New York Times, The New York Post and now The Washington Post.
But his meetings now begin at 9 a.m., earlier than they used to, which significantly curtails his television time. Still, Mr. Trump, who does not read books, is able to end his evenings with plenty of television.
In between, Mr. Trump signs executive orders in the Oval Office and has meetings in the West Wing.
“They have a lot of board rooms,” he said of the White House, an apparent reference to the Cabinet Room and the Roosevelt Room.
The White House is the only property that Mr. Trump has slept in that is more famous than one of his own, and he seems in awe. Although he made his name building extravagant, gold-gilded properties, the new president has marveled to aides about the splendor of the White House and the lengths he must walk to retrieve something from a far-flung room.
His preference during the day is to work in the Oval Office. And to stare at it, still. So do his staff members and relatives. “I’ve had people come in; they walk in here and they just want to stare for a long period of time,” Mr. Trump said.
Among modern American presidents, Mr. Trump may be best situated to work where he lives. For decades, he has lived in a penthouse apartment on the 58th floor of Trump Tower and taken an elevator down to the 26th floor, where he has a corner office with views of Central Park. Many presidents have complained of being cooped up inside the White House — George W. Bush in particular said he missed the outdoors — but Mr. Trump can go for days without breathing in fresh outside air.
Mr. Trump’s wife, Melania, went back to New York on Sunday night with their 10-year-old son, Barron, and so Mr. Trump has the television — and his old, unsecured Android phone, to the protests of some of his aides — to keep him company. That was the case after 9 p.m. on Tuesday, when Mr. Trump appeared to be reacting to Bill O’Reilly’s show on Fox News, which was airing a feature on crime in Chicago.
In the interview, Mr. Trump demurred when asked about whether it was hard having his family away from him, and he pointed to Thursday, when Mrs. Trump and Barron, who is finishing the school year in New York, are expected to return.
“They’ll come down on weekends,” Mr. Trump said. “She’ll come down on Thursdays and stay.”
He said he was enjoying himself so far, despite his visible displeasure with the coverage of his inauguration and the first performance of his press secretary, Sean Spicer, who shouted at the news media and made numerous false statements about Mr. Trump’s inaugural crowds in the White House briefing room on Saturday.
Mr. Trump and his chief strategist, Stephen K. Bannon, and his chief of staff, Reince Priebus, watched Mr. Spicer’s do-over on Monday while eating lunch in the West Wing dining room, where the president murmured approval of Mr. Spicer’s Monday performance and called his press secretary a “superstar.”
His first breakfast at the White House was Saturday morning — a buffet in the residence spread with fresh fruit, pastries and other treats — where his adult children and their families joined him. The kitchen has been stocked with the same types of snacks that Mr. Trump had on his private plane, including Lay’s potato chips.
His oldest daughter, Ivanka, and her husband, Jared Kushner, the president’s senior adviser, stayed with him in the White House through Sunday. They left for their own new home at the end of the weekend to get their children ready for their new schools. Mr. Trump has not brought along any household staff from Trump Tower, an aide said.
The president spent a part of Tuesday poring over artwork from the White House collections, settling on a portrait of Andrew Jackson — America’s first populist president, who has been invoked by Mr. Trump’s aides as inspiration — to hang in the Oval Office.
“Now, I’m working,” Mr. Trump said in the interview, punctuating his focus by cataloging the work of the day: an executive order restarting the Keystone XL pipeline and his plans for border-related actions over the next days.
Mr. Trump is in the meantime pondering his first break away from the White House, a potential trip to Mar-a-Lago, his private club in Palm Beach, Fla., possibly the weekend of Feb. 3.
Until then, he is breaking in the residence, which Mrs. Trump is still working on decorating.
“It’s a beautiful residence, it’s very elegant,” Mr. Trump said, deploying one of his highest forms of praise.
“There’s something very special when you know that Abraham Lincoln slept there,” Mr. Trump said. “The Lincoln Bedroom, you know, was his office, and the suite where I’m staying is actually where he slept.”
Mr. Trump was referring to the White House master bedroom, which is now his own.
“Knowing all of that, it’s different, than, you know, just pure elegance and room size,” Mr. Trump said. “There’s a lot of history.”
https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/01/25/us/politics/president-trump-white-house.html?referer= I'm trying to decide whether that is just nice and personal coverage of Trump's new life as the POTUS, or whether the choice of adjectives, and editorial clarifications all over, is the author pokingfun at him. It's subtle, but I can't shake the feeling that this was written by someone who just really doesn't have a high opinion of Trump. Or maybe it's due to my low opinion of Trump that I am reading more into the text than is there.
Your not the only one. Definitely feels like the author is trying to make him look bad.
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Could anyone elaborate please on what it means to use a secured vs unsecured phone? What is the threat? Can people listen in on phone conversations easier? Can they remote hack his phone and get control of the device? I don't really know what's possible and what isn't in that regard.
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On January 26 2017 04:40 Tachion wrote:
Could anyone elaborate please on what it means to use a secured vs unsecured phone? What is the threat? Can people listen in on phone conversations easier? Can they remote hack his phone and get control of the device? I don't really know what's possible and what isn't in that regard.
Wikipedia page is pretty solid: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_telephone
Basically a secure phone is encrypted so if someone listens in they won't be able to understand what is being said.
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Um, why I was I warned for literally posting Trump making a policy announcement on Twitter?
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On January 26 2017 04:54 LegalLord wrote:Show nested quote +On January 26 2017 04:40 Tachion wrote:
Could anyone elaborate please on what it means to use a secured vs unsecured phone? What is the threat? Can people listen in on phone conversations easier? Can they remote hack his phone and get control of the device? I don't really know what's possible and what isn't in that regard. Wikipedia page is pretty solid: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_telephoneBasically a secure phone is encrypted so if someone listens in they won't be able to understand what is being said.
On the flip side in addition to encrypting the communication if his unsecured phone is still connecting to standard cell phone towers there's a lot of vulnerability there for fake tower signals to compromise the phone.
In terms of "what is the threat?" once you own the device you can make it do anything the hardware is capable of and access any data on it.
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EPT
