Trump was basically running two sets of books to distort the amount that he owed the city.
- The auditors were physically blocked from accessing the books.
- A staggering amount of information was lost: 7 months out of 12 months of the data
- Trump offered the auditor’s brother a job.
- A city clerk mis-labeled the report
- Years later they reached an undisclosed settlement.
So that’s why Sarah Huckabee Sanders wants the cameras off
It’s easy to see why Sarah Huckabee Sanders wants the TV cameras off during her White House news briefings.
.. But above all is a more simple explanation: Sanders has no earthly idea what’s going on in the White House she purports to represent.
.. The Trump White House move to have fewer briefings and to move them off camera is just a symptom. The real problem is that the people giving the briefings don’t have a clue; they can’t, as Trump put it, “stand at podium with perfect accuracy.”.. The humiliations that ruined Sean Spicer will do the same to Sanders or whoever fills the role. Trump doesn’t seem to tell his people what he’s doing, if he knows himself. ABC News’s Jon Karl published a list last month of 26 times Sanders and Spicer said they would “get back to you” but never did. There are, surely, many more... She brought out Marc Short, Trump’s legislative director, to deliver a diversionary statement about Democrats’ “needless obstruction” of Trump’s nominees. But the distraction failed when half a dozen reporters used the opportunity to quiz Short about the floundering effort in the Senate to pass Trumpcare... Then came a barrage of questions about Donald Jr.’s newly reported meeting with the Russians, which negated, as CBS’s Major Garrett noted, the White House’s “long history of blanket denials” that there had been campaign contacts with the Russians... “There was simply no collusion,” she said, eyebrow cocked and lip corner raised.“That’s a different question,” Garrett pointed out... She also declined to echo Trump’s tweeted suggestion Monday morning that former FBI director James Comey had leaked classified information — which means he would have perjured himself when he said he didn’t. “Uh, I think there are a lot of questions out there and a lot of reports,” Sanders demurred.
.. In fairness to Sanders, there are no good answers to these questions. Trump, with his reckless tweets and nonsense claims, leaves his mouthpieces in an impossible position. No less an authority than former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee said after Trump’s vulgar tweet about Mika Brzezinski that “he makes my daughter’s job very difficult.”
But that’s no excuse. Sanders has agreed to interpret the nonsensical and to rationalize the indefensible. Like Spicer, she will fail.
Why Mitch McConnell’s secrecy gambit on his health-care bill could backfire
the secrecy with which this bill is being crafted is a tacit admission on Republicans’ part that its likely effects on Americans’ health care and financial security are so gruesome that it must be kept hidden until the last possible moment, lest the public have time to understand what’s in it.
.. it will do what the bill the House passed to repeal the Affordable Care Act does:
- take health coverage away from millions of people in order to give a tax break to the wealthy.
.. It will likely undo the ACA’s mandates for essential health benefits, allowing the sale of “insurance” that in practice covers almost none of the needs people actually have. It will probably allow insurers to once again impose yearly and lifetime caps on coverage, which can turn a life-threatening illness or accident into a financial catastrophe as well. And it could undermine the protections the tens of millions of Americans with preexisting conditions now enjoy.
.. The Kaiser Family Foundation looked at what non-group plans (analogous to what people now purchase on the ACA exchanges) covered before ACA’s essential benefits mandate was in place. They found that 75 percent of the plans didn’t cover maternity care, 45 percent didn’t include coverage for substance abuse, and 38 percent didn’t cover mental and behavioral health.
.. And as any marketer knows, suspense is a terrific tool to increase public interest in your product.
What’s My Investing Fee? A Frustrating Quest
Our reporter thought she had a simple question, but the answers were anything but
I thought my question was simple: How much was I paying my investment adviser in fees?After a series of phone calls that elicited the kind of confusion and frustration I have rarely experienced outside of interactions with cable-company customer-service representatives, I think I have an idea. Barely.
Describing the fee disclosures of my adviser as opaque would be generous. The experience left me wondering whether someone even less savvy than me, a Wall Street Journal reporter, would be able to navigate this system, to ferret out the good information from the bad.
.. My combined fee was 1.4%.