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Of course Trump needs to lie about State ofthe Union ratings
@realDonaldTrump
Thank you for all of the nice compliments and reviews on the State of the Union speech. 45.6 million people watched, the highest number in history. @FoxNews beat every other Network, for the first time ever, with 11.7 million people tuning in. Delivered from the heart!
Meanwhile, back in reality:
But it was smaller than the 48 million who watched Trump’s address to a joint session of Congress last year and smaller than several speeches delivered by recent predecessors. Barack Obama's joint session speech in 2009 drew 52 million viewers; George W. Bush's State of the Union address in 2003 drew 62 million viewers; and Bill Clinton's joint session speech in 1993 drew 67 million viewers. (A newly elected president's first address to a joint session of Congress is not considered a State of the Union speech.)
Trump says his State of the Union viewership was the highest ever. The ratings say otherwise.
Remember when the President of the United States lying was considered a bad thing?
Trump ordered Mueller fired back in June; then lied about it
Trump signs FISA law he claims was used to spy on him
President Trump signed a bill Friday to reauthorize a controversial government surveillance program, extending the ability of law enforcement officials to collect and keep — but not always see — the private communications of American citizens.
Trump first suggested a year ago — with no supporting evidence — that Obama authorized eavesdropping on Trump Tower during the election. He made a similar suggestion last week when he tweeted that the law had been used "to so badly surveil and abuse the Trump campaign by the previous administration."
The bill was set to expire Friday unless Trump signed the renewal into law. It has now been approved by Congress three times under three different presidents.
Trump signs bill extending surveillance law — the same law he says was used to spy on him
Trump Censors His Own Transcript, Again
As part of his ongoing effort to prove he’s “a very stable genius” and “like, really smart” following the release of a book that portrays him as the exact opposite, on Tuesday afternoon President Trump held a televised meeting with members of Congress on the topic of immigration.
This did not go as planned. The most notable moment was when Trump responded with enthusiasm to Democratic senator Dianne Feinstein’s suggestion that they pass a “clean” bill making the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program permanent. House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy quickly jumped in to remind Trump that Republicans don’t want to protect DACA recipients without getting some border-security measures (or maybe even a big, beautiful wall) in return.
But that’s not what one might take away from the exchange if, for some reason, they opted to read the transcript released by the White House. The Washington Post’s Ashley Parker noticed that the line where Trump agrees with Feinstein’s proposal — saying, “Yeah, I would like to do it” — is “curiously missing” from the document.
Guess Which Line Was Missing From the Transcript of Trump’s Immigration Meeting
Trump plays golf 3 times as much as Obama, costing $43 mil.
Donald Trump has spent 81 days on the golf course in his first year as President, racing past his predecessors.
Mr Trump, after a weekend at his Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach, Florida, has spent more time on the green than George W Bush did during eight years in office.
The President has also been on the golf course almost three times as much as Barack Obama did during his first year.
The American public spent at least $43 million in order to support President Donald Trump‘s considerable golf habit in 2017.
The American Public Reportedly Spent $43 Million Last Year So Trump Could Play Golf
Donald Trump plays golf almost three times as much as Barack Obama after one year in office
Virginians react to House race decided by 1-vote
Every Vote Counts!
RICHMOND, Va. -- Among the holiday hustle and bustle of Carytown, Virginia voters react to what some might call a "Christmas Miracle" for Democrats in the Commonwealth.
"That's sort of amazing," voter Scott Williams said.
"That's pretty amazing," voter Ariel Furler said.
In a stunning turn of events, Democrat Shelly Simonds gained eleven votes in a recount to beat the Republican incumbent in the 94th District by just one vote.
The final tally: 11608 votes to 11607 votes.
UPDATE: Apparently it's a tie now. By state law, the winner of the tie will be determined "by lot."
"I study liars. I’ve never seen one like President Trump."
I spent the first two decades of my career as a social scientist studying liars and their lies. I thought I had developed a sense of what to expect from them. Then along came President Trump. His lies are both more frequent and more malicious than ordinary people’s.
...
The college students in our research told an average of two lies a day, and the community members told one. (A more recent study of the lies 1,000 U. S. adults told in the previous 24 hours found that people told an average of 1.65 lies per day; the authors noted that 60 percent of the participants said they told no lies at all, while the top 5 percent of liars told nearly half of all the falsehoods in the study.) The most prolific liar among the students told an average of 6.6 lies a day. The biggest liar in the community sample told 4.3 lies in an average day.
In Trump’s first 298 days in office, however, he made 1,628 false or misleading claims or flip-flops, by The Post’s tally. That’s about six per day, far higher than the average rate in our studies. And of course, reporters have access to only a subset of Trump’s false statements — the ones he makes publicly — so unless he never stretches the truth in private, his actual rate of lying is almost certainly higher.
A $300 Bil. Mistake in the Handwritten Tax Bill, shocking!
It appears that Senate Republicans managed to make a $289 billion or so mistake while furiously hand-scribbling edits onto the tax bill they passed in the wee hours of Saturday morning. The problem involves the corporate alternative minimum tax, which the GOP initially planned to repeal, but tossed back into their stew at the last second in order to raise some desperately needed revenue. The AMT is basically a parallel tax code meant to prevent companies from zeroing out their IRS bills. It doesn’t allow businesses to take as many tax breaks but, in theory, is also supposed to have a lower rate.
Except not under the Senate bill. When Mitch McConnell & co. revived the AMT, they absentmindedly left it at its current rate of 20 percent, the same as the new, lower rate of the corporate income tax that the bill included. As a result, many companies won’t be able to use tax breaks that were supposed to be preserved in the legislation, including the extremely popular credit for research and development costs. Corporate accountants started freaking out about this over the weekend, but the situation reached high farce when a group of lawyers from Davis Polk pointed out that, by leaving the AMT intact, Republicans had essentially undermined their bill’s most important changes to the international tax code.
They need to pass the tax bill to find out what's in it?
Republicans say they have the votes! They're going to pass a massive tax reform bill Friday night that would permanently lower corporate tax rates and undo the Obamacare individual coverage mandate. And a bunch of other stuff. We're not exactly sure about everything it would do yet. Why? Because we haven't read the tax reform bill.
The Senate is about to vote on a tax bill it's still writing
17 STEM Politicians Won Elections Tuesday
There’s now a lot more nerds in elected office. Seventeen candidates with STEM-backgrounds ran their respective races Tuesday, from Virginia governor-elect Ralph Northam—a doctor—to Tiffany Hodgson, a neuroscientist who won a seat on the Wissahickon School Board in eastern Pennsylvania.
Many candidates decided to run only after President Donald Trump ushered in one of the most anti-science administrations in history. And a number of the campaigns sprung out of meetings with 314 Action, a political advocacy group that is helping scientists run for office.
“Voters are ready for candidates who are going to use their STEM training to base policy on evidence rather than intuition,” Shaughnessy Naughton, the founder of 314 Action, said in a press release. “Science will not be silenced.”
