Read About The Tarbaby Story under the Category: About the Tarbaby Blog
Thanks to trump’s administration to reverse all the EPA protections for our food chains, soon you will be able to buy poison to feed your family from your local grocery stores or Walmart. Well let’s make sure trump is fed this pesticide foods!! Although he eats from McDonald’s because he’s afraid of being poisoned.
Trump's EPA and Nerve Gas Pesticide
Trump's EPA is allowing a nerve gas pesticide to be sprayed on your food
Posted by NowThis Politics on Tuesday, January 9, 2018
Ugh. Trump’s idiotic policies are moving us backwards!
Read more: https://ind.pn/2FdZFTs
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January 25, 2018
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INSH: 20 Under-Reported Good News Stories That Deserve Your Attention
These stories were under-reported but definitely deserve your attention! (via INSH) GET THE LATEST TOP NEWS ==> on.rare.us/news
Posted by Rare Media on Thursday, January 25, 2018
By Charles P. Pierce January 26, 2018
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It came with the wind through the silence of the night, a long, deep mutter, then a rising howl, and then the sad moan in which it died away. Again and again it sounded, the whole air throbbing with it, strident, wild and menacing.
—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Hound of the Baskervilles, 1902.
So, if I read the state of play correctly, special counsel Robert Mueller is investigating the president* and the president*’s administration* for obstruction of justice, and Mueller has been running this investigation for seven months knowing that the president* came within an ace of firing him last June for the purposes of, ah, obstructing justice. He’s had this information in his back pocket every time a member of the administration* came before him under oath. I’ve never been a criminal defendant charged with obstruction of justice, but this seems to me to be a bad situation for an obstructor of justice to be in.
The major scoop in The New York Times that has shaken up the world can be read in a number of different ways that all lead to the same conclusion. Right from jump, the president* has been scared right down to his silk boxers of what Mueller would discover regarding his campaign’s connections to Russian ratfcking and regarding his business connections to freshly laundered Russian cash. This conclusion does not change even if you think that White House counsel Don McGahn leaked this story to make himself the hero or to cover his own ass. This conclusion does not change even if you think the ratlines off the listing hulk of this administration are thick with fleeing rodents. This whole thing remains a product of the president*’s guilty mind.
Trump speaks to reporters at Davos.
Getty Images
(And the story did shake up the world. The president* went before a gathering in Davos on Friday and began raving about “fake news” and the perfidy of the American media. He got booed. Many cats were called. No shoes were thrown, but George W. Bush set a pretty high bar there.)
The story does explain the curious frenzy over the last week: the president*’s saying that he’s “looking forward” to a chat with Mueller, and that he might even deign to have the chat under oath; the apparent rush to present the Congress with a half-baked “compromise plan” on immigration that has no chance of passing the House of Representatives; and the fact that the president* took every member of his inner circle except his wife to Switzerland. I suspect those folks heard the baying of the hound even before Michael Schmidt and Maggie Haberman did. More ominous is the possibility that McGahn—or whomever—leaked this story because the president* is thinking about firing Mueller now, or in the near future, and whoever the leaker was understands very well what a monumental calamity that would be for all concerned.
You would think that we would see the wheels turning now. You would think that Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell would find some slivers of patriotism between the cushions of their sofas and step up to fulfill the constitutional obligations of their respective offices. There is a genuine crisis on their doorsteps right now, and, next week, the president* is supposed to give his State of the Union address, and god alone knows what he’s going to say. They have not moved. They have given no indication that they will move. History will brand them as cowards and as traitors to the country’s best ideals. History’s not going to be kind to a lot of people who are living through these insane times.
Jon Queally January 22, 2018
New report finds skyrocketing wealth growth among the already rich is coupled with stagnant wages and persistent poverty among the lowest economic rungs of society. (Maslowski Marcin / Shutterstock.com)
This originally appeared on Common Dreams.
In 2017, a new billionaire was created every two days and while 82 percent of all wealth created went to the top 1 percent of the world’s richest while zero percent—absolutely nothing—went to the poorest half of the global population.
That troubling information is included in Oxfam’s latest report on global inequality—titled Reward Work, Not Wealth—released Monday. In addition to the above, the report details how skyrocketing wealth growth among the already rich coupled with stagnant wages and persistent poverty among the lowest economic rungs of society means that just 42 individuals now hold as much wealth as the 3.7 billion poorest people on the planet.
“The billionaire boom is not a sign of a thriving economy but a symptom of a failing economic system,” Winnie Byanyima, Oxfam’s executive director of Oxfam International. “The people who make our clothes, assemble our phones and grow our food are being exploited to ensure a steady supply of cheap goods, and swell the profits of corporations and billionaire investors.”
Among the report’s key findings:
The report comes just as the world’s economic and political elite are set to open the World Economic Forum, held annually in Davos, Switzerland. And why the global elite argue the summit’s focus is addressing the world’s most pressing problems, Oxfam found that the amount of new wealth which went to the world’s top one percent in 2017 was roughly $762 billion—a figure large enough, the group points out, to end extreme global poverty seven times over.
What the report ultimately exposes, Mark Goldring, Oxfam GB chief executive, told the Guardian, is a “system that is failing the millions of hardworking people on poverty wages who make our clothes and grow our food.”
“For work to be a genuine route out of poverty we need to ensure that ordinary workers receive a living wage and can insist on decent conditions, and that women are not discriminated against,” he added. “If that means less for the already wealthy then that is a price that we—and they—should be willing to pay.”
Not just cataloging and lamenting the metrics of inequality, the new report also puts forth a number of policy solutions that should be embraced by people and governments worldwide to reduce levels of inequality and lift billions of people out of extreme poverty. They include:
Though Oxfam has been calculating global inequality on an annual basis for more than a decade, the anti-poverty group notes that this year’s report used new data from Credit Suisse and a separate kind of model. Specifically, Oxfam noted, the fact that the world’s 42 richest billionaires have as much wealth as the poorest bottom half “cannot be compared to figures from previous years – including the 2016/17 statistic that eight men owned the same wealth as half the world – because it is based on an updated and expanded data set published by Credit Suisse in November 2017. When Oxfam recalculated last year’s figures using the latest data we found that 61 people owned the same wealth as half the world in 2016 – and not eight.”
Jon Queally is senior editor and staff writer for Common Dreams.
Over the past 20 years, Lake Michigan has undergone a dramatic transformation. Here’s a look at how invasive mussels have changed the lake’s landscape. (Jemal R. Brinson / Chicago Tribune)
Tony Briscoe Chicago Tribune January 26, 2018
Decades ago, Lake Michigan teemed with nutrients and green algae, casting a brownish-green hue that resembled the mouth of an inland river rather than a vast, open-water lake.
Back then, the lake’s swampy complexion was less than inviting to swimmers and kayakers, but it supported a robust fishing industry as several commercial companies trawled for perch, and sport fishermen cast their lines for trout. But in the past 20 years, Lake Michigan has undergone a dramatic transformation.
In analyzing satellite images between 1998 and 2012, researchers at the Michigan Tech Research Institute were surprised to find that lakes Michigan and Huron are now clearer than Lake Superior. In a study published late last year, the researchers say limiting the amount of agricultural and sewage runoff in the lake has had an immense impact. However, the emergence of invasive mussels, which number in the trillions and have the ability to filter the entire volume of Lake Michigan in four to six days, has had an even greater effect.
“When you look at the scientific terms, we are approaching some oceanic values,” said Michael Sayers, a research engineer at Michigan Tech and co-author of the study. “We have some ways to go, but we are getting a lot closer to Lake Tahoe. A lot of times, you’ll hear from people that the water is so blue it compares to something in tropical areas.”
While appealing, the clarity comes at a significant cost to wildlife. In filtering the lake, the mussels have decimated the phytoplankton, a single-celled, green algae that serves as the base of the food chain. For much of the past decade, prey fish, like alewives, have remained at historic lows, prompting state managers to scale back the annual stocks of prized predators, such as king salmon.
The startling evolution has called into question the future of Great Lakes marine life and the region’s $7 billion fishing industry.
“Clearer is not necessarily better,” said Robert Shuchman, co-director of the Michigan Tech Research Institute. “Clearer water means less phytoplankton in the water column, and they’re the basic building block in the food web. The idea is, the little fish eat algae, and the bigger fish eat the little fish.
“There are some folks out there now that think Lake Michigan and Huron could become ecological deserts from a fishing standpoint. The food web could totally collapse because you don’t have the various organisms you need to sustain it.”
For ages, the phytoplankton fed the zooplankton, which were eaten by small, foraging fish. As the fast-filtering mussels reduce the plankton populations, there isn’t enough food to support the diet of many foraging fish. In addition, there’s not enough plankton or nutrients clouding the water to hide these small prey fish from predator fish.
“It’s a game of hide-and-seek in a brightly lit environment,” said Henry Vanderploeg, a research ecologist for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
After years of working aboard a relative’s charter boat, Rick Bentley was leaving the fishing industry in the early ’90s to pursue a career in finance when the mussels began arriving.
“A lot of people were sounding massive alarms about how the mussels could change everything,” recalled Bentley, 46.
Their fears turned out to be prophetic. As the water cleared up, the fish cleared out. Since the introduction of the mussels, there’s been a sharp decline in nearly all fish species in Lake Michigan, including king salmon, scientists say.
In this May 3, 2007 photo, Inland Seas Education Association instructor Conrad Heins holds a cluster of zebra mussels that were taken from Lake Michigan off Suttons Bay, Mich. (John L. Russell / AP)
At the height of king salmon fishing in the mid- to late-80s, around 10 million pounds of the fish were harvested from the lake each year, according to research by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and agencies from four states. In recent years, fishermen are managing to nab only about 3 million pounds.
Despite the drop, Bentley, who had fond memories of fishing’s heyday, returned to the lake in 2007 with his own charter company, Windy City Salmon. The passion from his fishing days brought him back, but to survive, Bentley said, fishermen have to alter their age-old techniques.
“As a captain, fisherman and a businessman who wants to put out a good product, I know the lake is adapting, and we need to adapt with it,” Bentley said. “When I came back 10 years ago, many of the captains I knew were winding down their careers, ready to hang it up. Some adapted. Some of them stayed in their old ways, and their catches tended to suffer.”
King salmon are low-light-feeding fish, so with sunlight reaching into lower depths, it’s become increasingly difficult to catch them during midday hours, Bentley said. He’s found fishing at dawn and sundown provides the best chance to catch salmon.
The clearer waters have made flashers and dodgers, devices that reflect light and attract fish, more effective tools, Bentley said. Still, remaining undetected is a challenge.
“Generally, fish are more likely to keep their distance because they can see the boat and gear now,” he said.
Over the years, the Great Lakes have endured numerous encounters with invasive species. The mussels may be the worst Lake Michigan has seen since the sea lamprey, an eel-like parasitic fish that slithered into the Upper Great Lakes in the 1940s through the Erie and Welland canals, according to David “Bo” Bunnell, a research fishery biologist at the U.S. Geological Survey’s Great Lakes Science Center. Sea lampreys latched onto large fish and drained their blood, leading to a collapse in populations of native predators like lake trout.
“They pretty much devastated native lake trout, lake whitefish and other native species that were already suffering from overfishing,” Bunnell said. “That was the one-two death punch.”
Without predators, the population of alewives, another nonnative species that came through the canals around the same time, went unchecked. Though they were abundant, the saltwater fish, already weakened from living in freshwater, befouled local beaches in spring die-offs after being exposed to higher temperature fluctuations when they came close to shore to spawn.
In the 1960s, coastal managers introduced two species of Pacific salmon to contain the alewives and boost fishing: coho and king. The king salmon brought the alewives under control and quickly became a favorite of sport fishermen.
“They get the biggest, they’re a very strong fish and they offer a helluva fight. They’re a 20-pound class fish, so they take 8 or 9 yards off the reel, and it might take 15 to 20 minutes to bring them in,” Bentley said.
The arrival of zebra and quagga mussels led to the collapse of alewives and king salmon in Lake Huron in the early 2000s. Scientists say the crash in alewives stemmed from less food availability and more predation by the king salmon, which was stocked bythe Michigan Department of Natural Resources and naturally reproducing. The king salmon diet is almost exclusively made up of alewives.
The Lake Huron king salmon, emaciated as their favorite prey became harder to find, migrated to Lake Michigan in search of alewives.
Nearly two decades later, the same progression is underway in Lake Michigan.
“There’s an old Chinese saying, ‘When there is crystal-clear water, there is no fish,’ ” said Yu-Chun Kao, a postdoctoral scientist at Michigan State University.
For a doctoral dissertation at the University of Michigan, Kao examined Lake Huron’s king salmon collapse, concluding the fishery that once existed likely won’t ever return to its glory days because of the alewife shortage.
Last year, Kao ran hundreds of computer simulations to consider changes in mussels, nutrients and fish stocking in Lake Michigan. His study suggested Lake Michigan might be better suited for lake trout and steelhead, given the two species of trout can switch from eating alewives to bottom-dwelling round goby, an invasive prey fish that eats cladophora and tiny quagga mussels.
The king salmon, he found, is the most susceptible to changes driven by the mussels, meaning its numbers will likely continue to decline as the mussels continue to spread. But there’s still a chance Lake Michigan could support a substantial salmon population if stocking is reduced to alleviate pressure on the struggling alewife population.
Lake Superior may have relinquished its title of clearest of the Great Lakes, but it also doesn’t have the same vulnerabilities to some invasive species as the other lakes. It has staved off the mussel migration because it’s colder and there’s less calcium in its water, a mineral the mussels need to make their shells.
Since 1984, the state of Illinois has raised fish to stock Lake Michigan at Jake Wolf Memorial Hatchery in Topeka, Ill., where the staff oversees eggs until they grow into fingerlings. Built atop a massive aquifer, the facility draws water into its network of concrete raceways and plastic-lined ponds, where it has up to 15 species of cold-, cool- and warm-water fish.
Each year, the hatchery staff, which works with state biologists, rears millions of fish in hopes of supporting a stable ecosystem and decent season for anglers. The upheaval in the food chain has made it all the more challenging.
Rainbow trout in a “raceway” at the Jake Wolf Memorial Fish Hatchery located in Topeka, Ill. on July 18, 2017. (Jose M. Osorio / Chicago Tribune)
“It’s a daunting task,” hatchery manager Steve Krueger said. “Without stocking, I think the fishery in Lake Michigan would continue to falter.”
Stocking has also become more calculated in recent years — for Illinois and the three other states, Wisconsin, Indiana and Michigan, that border the lake.
In 2006, all of the alewives in Lake Michigan weighed nearly 10,000 metric tons, roughly the weight of the Eiffel Tower, according to U.S. Geological Survey estimates. By 2016, the entire prey fish population in Lake Michigan, including alewives and a half-dozen other species, weighed about 11,000 metric tons.
In response to the lack of alewives, fishery managers around Lake Michigan have called for reducing the number of king salmon at least twice in the past decade. In 2013, they slashed the number by 50 percent, releasing 1.8 million into the lake, down from 3.3 million the previous year. Last year, managers proposed making even deeper cuts, stocking only 690,000 king salmon, a 62 percent reduction from 2016.
People walk along the Lakefront Trail near North Avenue Beach in Chicago on Saturday, July 29, 2017. (Alexandra Wimley/Chicago Tribune) (Alexandra Wimley / Chicago Tribune)
In addition to filtering the water, mussels have also altered the landscape of the lake bed.
The voracious eaters are polluting the lake bottom with feces. As sunlight reaches greater depths, it converts nutrients from the mussels’ excrement into a nuisance algae known as cladophora.
During storms, wave action rips up the carpet-esque algae and washes it ashore, where it is known for its potent stench and propensity to kill birds.
The growth in cladophora raises alarms, because it could help establish Lake Michigan’s next potential invasive species: Asian carp. The species has invaded the Mississippi River system and has been reported just 9 miles from Lake Michigan.
Asian carp rely on plankton, which they may not find if it reaches the lake, but researchers say the fish also feed on cladophora. Researchers say there may no longer be enough food for the Asian carp in open waters, but there is likely enough floating algae and cladophora near shore to sustain them.
Scientists say the invasive mussels may have reached their limits. With less plankton, the concentration of mussels in Lake Michigan dropped 40 percent between 2010 and 2015, according to a yet-to-be published report by Buffalo State University’s Great Lakes Center. But the total weight of mussels in the lake has risen, suggesting the surviving mussels are growing larger, said Alexander Karatayev, the center’s director. It’s unclear what this might mean in the future.
“However, it is extremely important to keep monitoring the (quagga mussel) population to understand if this decline is a long-term trend and if the population eventually will stabilize or will fluctuate substantially,” Karatayev said.
For now, better fisheries management has helped Lake Michigan see a return of lake trout.
The sport has changed for fishermen like Bentley, but he said there’s always been something biting on the end of his line.
Last year was the best in several years, he said. Though king salmon catches remained low, many of the fish from yesteryear, like lake trout, seem to be returning.
“We’ve seen Lake Michigan go through a lot of changes, but it all seems to work out and it always ends up being OK,” Bentley said. “Last two years, I’ve been encouraged by the comeback. I don’t think we’ll ever see the heyday of king salmon, but I think they’ll always be available.”
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John Pavlovitz January 24, 2018
They saw you brandish Scriptures to malign him and use the laziest of racial stereotypes in criticizing him.
where was,
to a white Republican man so riddled with depravity, so littered with extramarital affairs, so unapologetically vile, with such a vast resume of moral filth—that the mind boggles.
is unmistakable. It has been an astonishing conversion to behold: a being born again.
Yes, you’ve gained a Supreme Court seat, a few months with the Presidency as a mouthpiece, and the cheap high of temporary power—but you’ve lost a whole lot more.
The fact that you’ve even made your bed with such malevolence, shows how far gone you are and how insulated you are from the reality in front of you.
It’s what Jesus would do.
Mitch McConnell; Donald Trump; Paul Ryan (Credit: AP/Alex Brandon/Reuters/Rick Wilking/AP/J. Scott Applewhite/Photo montage by Salon)
Robert Reich, RobertReich.org January 26, 2018
America has never had a president as deeply unpopular at this stage of his presidency, or one who has sucked up more political oxygen. This isn’t good news for the Republican Party this November or in the future, because the GOP has sold its soul to Trump.
Now, after a year with the raving man-child who now occupies the White House, the Republican Party has taken a giant U-turn. Budget deficits are dandy, state’s rights are obsolete, and Russian aggression is no big deal.
By embracing a man whose only principles are winning and getting even, the Republican Party no longer stands for anything other than Trump.
When George W. Bush took office in 2001, the Congressional Budget Office projected a $5.6 trillion budget surplus over 10 years. Yet even this propitious outlook didn’t stop several Republicans from arguing against the Bush tax cut out of concern it would increase the nation’s debt.
A few years later, congressional Republicans were apoplectic about Obama’s spending plan, necessitated by the 2008 financial crisis. Almost every Republican in Congress opposed it. They argued it would dangerously increase in the federal debt.
“Yesterday the Senate cast one of the most expensive votes in history,” intoned Senator Mitch McConnell. “Americans are wondering how we’re going to pay for all this.” Paul Ryan warned the nation was “heading for a debt crisis.”
Now, with America’s debt at the highest level since shortly after World War II — 77 percent of GDP — Trump and the GOP have enacted a tax law that by their own estimates will increase the debt by at least $1.5 trillion over the decade.
What happened to fiscal responsibility? McConnell, Ryan, and the rest of the GOP have gone mum about it. Politics came first: They and Trump had to enact the big tax cut in order to reward their wealthy patrons.
For decades, Republicans argued that the Constitution’s Tenth Amendment protected the states from federal inter-meddling.
They used states’ rights to resist desegregation; to oppose federal legislation protecting workers, consumers, and the environment; and to battle federal attempts to guarantee marriage rights for gays and lesbians.
When, in 2013, the Supreme Court relied on states’ rights to strike down the heart of the Voting Rights Act, then-Senator Jeff Sessions broke out the champagne. “good news!“ said the GOP’s leading advocate of states’ rights.
But after a year of Trump, Republicans have come around to thinking states have few if any rights.
As Attorney General, Sessions has green-lighted a federal crackdown on marijuana in states that have legalized it.
He and Trump are also blocking sanctuary cities from receiving federal grants. (A federal judge recently stayed Trump’s executive order on grounds that it violates the Tenth Amendment, but Trump and Sessions are appealing the decision.)
Trump is also seeking to gut California’s tough environmental rules. His Interior Department is opening more of California’s federal land and coastline to oil and gas drilling, and Trump’s EPA is moving to repeal new restrictions on a type of heavily-polluting truck California was relying on to meet its climate and air quality goals.
Meanwhile, the Republican House has approved the Concealed Carry Reciprocity Act, which would prevent states from enforcing their own laws barring concealed handguns against visitors from other states that permitted them.
For the new GOP, states’ rights be damned. Now it’s all about consolidating power in Washington, under Trump.
When Obama forged the New Start treaty with Moscow in 2010, Republicans in Congress charged that Vladimir Putin couldn’t be trusted to carry out any arms control agreement.
And they complained that Obama wasn’t doing enough to deter Putin in Eastern Ukraine. “Every time [Obama] goes on national television and threatens Putin or anyone like Putin, everybody’s eyes roll, including mine,” said Republican Senator Lindsey Graham. “We have a weak and indecisive president that invites aggression.”
That was then. Now, despite explicit findings by American intelligence agencies that Russia interfered in the 2016 election – the most direct attack on American democracy ever attempted by a foreign power — Republicans in Congress want to give Russia a pass.
They don’t even want to take steps to prevent further Russian meddling. They’ve played down a January report by Democrats on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee warning that the Kremlin will likely move to influence upcoming U.S. elections, including those this year and in 2020.
The reason, of course, is the GOP doesn’t want to do anything that might hurt Trump or rile his followers.
The GOP under Trump isn’t the first political party to bend its principles to suit political expediency. But it may be the first to jettison its principles entirely, and over so short a time.
If Republicans no longer care about the federal debt, or state’s rights, or Russian aggression — what exactly do they care about? What are the core principles of today’s Republican Party?
By Michael S. Schmidt, Maggie Haberman January 25, 2018
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Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel overseeing the Russia investigation. CreditDoug Mills/The New York Times
WASHINGTON — President Trump ordered the firing last June of Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel overseeing the Russia investigation, according to four people told of the matter, but ultimately backed down after the White House counsel threatened to resign rather than carry out the directive.
The West Wing confrontation marks the first time Mr. Trump is known to have tried to fire the special counsel. Mr. Mueller learned about the episode in recent months as his investigators interviewed current and former senior White House officials in his inquiry into whether the president obstructed justice.
Amid the first wave of news media reports that Mr. Mueller was examining a possible obstruction case, the president began to argue that Mr. Mueller had three conflicts of interest that disqualified him from overseeing the investigation, two of the people said.
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Donald F. McGahn II, the White House counsel, believed that firing Mr. Mueller would have a catastrophic impact on the presidency and would raise more questions about whether the White House was trying to obstruct the Russia investigation. CreditTom Williams/CQ Roll Call, via Associated Press
First, he claimed that a dispute years ago over fees at Trump National Golf Club in Sterling, Va., had prompted Mr. Mueller, the F.B.I. director at the time, to resign his membership. The president also said Mr. Mueller could not be impartial because he had most recently worked for the law firm that previously represented the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner. Finally, the president said, Mr. Mueller had been interviewed to return as the F.B.I. director the day before he was appointed special counsel in May.
After receiving the president’s order to fire Mr. Mueller, the White House counsel, Donald F. McGahn II, refused to ask the Justice Department to dismiss the special counsel, saying he would quit instead, the people said. They spoke on the condition of anonymity because they did not want to be identified discussing a continuing investigation.
Mr. McGahn disagreed with the president’s case and told senior White House officials that firing Mr. Mueller would have a catastrophic effect on Mr. Trump’s presidency. Mr. McGahn also told White House officials that Mr. Trump would not follow through on the dismissal on his own. The president then backed off.
Ty Cobb, who manages the White House’s relationship with Mr. Mueller’s office, said in a statement, “We decline to comment out of respect for the Office of the Special Counsel and its process.”
Mr. McGahn, a longtime Republican campaign finance lawyer in Washington who served on the Federal Election Commission, was the top lawyer on Mr. Trump’s campaign. He has been involved in nearly every key decision Mr. Trump has made — like the firing of the former F.B.I. director — that is being scrutinized by Mr. Mueller.
Mr. McGahn was also concerned that firing the special counsel would incite more questions about whether the White House was trying to obstruct the Russia investigation.
Around the time Mr. Trump wanted to fire Mr. Mueller, the president’s legal team, led then by his longtime personal lawyer in New York, Marc E. Kasowitz, was taking an adversarial approach to the Russia investigation. The president’s lawyers were digging into potential conflict-of-interest issues for Mr. Mueller and his team, according to current and former White House officials, and news media reports revealed that several of Mr. Mueller’s prosecutors had donated to Democrats.
Mr. Mueller could not legally have considered political affiliations when making hiring decisions. But for Mr. Trump’s supporters, it reinforced the idea that, although Mr. Mueller is a Republican, he had assembled a team of Democrats to take down the president.
Another option that Mr. Trump considered in discussions with his advisers was dismissing the deputy attorney general, Rod J. Rosenstein, and elevating the department’s No. 3 official, Rachel Brand, to oversee Mr. Mueller. Mr. Rosenstein has overseen the investigation since March, when Attorney General Jeff Sessions recused himself.
Mr. Trump has significantly ratcheted back his criticisms of Mr. Mueller since he hired Mr. Cobb for his legal team in July. A veteran of several high-profile Washington controversies, Mr. Cobb has known Mr. Mueller for decades, dating to their early careers in the Justice Department.
He advised Mr. Trump that he had nothing to gain from combat with Mr. Mueller, a highly respected former prosecutor and F.B.I. director who has subpoena power as special counsel. Since Mr. Cobb’s arrival, the White House has operated on the premise that the quickest way to clear the cloud of suspicion was to cooperate with Mr. Mueller, not to fight him.
Nonetheless, Mr. Trump has wavered for months about whether he wants to fire Mr. Mueller, whose job security is an omnipresent concern among the president’s legal team and close aides. The president’s lawyers, including Mr. Cobb, have tried to keep Mr. Trump calm by assuring him for months, amid new revelations about the inquiry, that it is close to ending.
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President Trump said that Mr. Mueller, who had been a member of his golf club in Sterling, Va., left it years ago after a disagreement about club fees. CreditAl Drago for The New York Times
Mr. Trump has long demonstrated a preoccupation with those who have overseen the Russia investigation. In March, after Mr. McGahn failed to persuade Attorney General Jeff Sessions not to recuse himself from the inquiry, Mr. Trump complained that he needed someone loyal to oversee the Justice Department.
The former F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, said Mr. Trump asked him for loyalty and encouraged him to drop an investigation into his former national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn. Mr. Comey said he sidestepped those requests. He was soon fired.
In an interview with The New York Times in the Oval Office in July, the president pointedly kept open the option of firing Mr. Mueller, saying that the special counsel would be passing a red line if his investigation expanded to look at Mr. Trump’s finances. Mr. Trump said he never would have made Mr. Sessions the attorney general if he had known he would recuse himself from the investigation.
Last month, as Republicans were increasing their attacks on the special counsel, Mr. Trump said in an interview with The Times that he believed Mr. Mueller was going to treat him fairly.
“No, it doesn’t bother me because I hope that he’s going to be fair,” Mr. Trump said in response to a question about whether it bothered him that Mr. Mueller had not yet ended his investigation. “I think that he’s going to be fair.”
Mr. Trump added: “There’s been no collusion. But I think he’s going to be fair.”
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Reuters January 25, 2018
Cars and people move up and down State Street in smog filled downtown Salt Lake City, Utah, U.S. December 12, 2017. REUTERS/George Frey Reuters
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said on Thursday it was withdrawing a provision of the Clean Air Act that requires a major source of pollution like a power plant to always be treated as a major source, even if it makes changes to reduce emissions.
The decision to withdraw the “once-in always-in” policy is part of President Donald Trump’s effort to roll back federal regulations and was sought by utilities, the petroleum industry and others.
Sources of air pollution previously classified as “major sources” may be reclassified as “area” sources when the facility limits its emissions below “major source” thresholds, the EPA said. Area sources are subject to less strict pollution control standards than major sources.
“It will reduce regulatory burden for industries and the states, while continuing to ensure stringent and effective controls on hazardous air pollutants,” Bill Wehrum, assistant administrator of the EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation, said in a statement.
The “once-in always-in” policy, which was established in 1995, has been a disincentive for power plants, factories and other major sources of pollution to pursue technological innovations that would reduce emissions, the agency said.
The Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group, said the decision “is among the most dangerous actions that the Trump EPA has taken yet against public health.”
“This move drastically weakens protective limits on air pollutants like arsenic, lead, mercury and other toxins that cause cancer, brain damage, infertility, developmental problems and even death,” John Walke, director of a clean air program for the NRDC, said in a statement.
(Reporting by Eric Beech; Editing by Leslie Adler)