Do their representatives and senators in Washington deliberately prioritize the stated requirement of the Pentagon and CIA above the most basic need of their constituents? ― Mike Lofgren
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| WHITE HOUSE |
"Cooped up in the White House without any public events on his schedule and cable
news blaring, Trump unleashed a Twitter tirade that differed from past
outbursts in one significant way: He mentioned Mueller directly," wrote POLITICO's Andrew Restuccia, Brent
Griffiths and Darren Samuelsohn. "Before this weekend, Trump had only
referenced Mueller by name once on Twitter, in a retweet. Now, it appears,
Mueller is fair game." [Morning Media, March 19, 2018]
TRUMP MAY BE SOURCE FOR STAFF SHAKE-UP STORIES: White
House chief of staff John Kelly told reporters in an off-the-record session
Friday that Trump "is likely speculating about staff moves to people
outside the White House and that reporters are then talking to those
people," Axios' Jonathan Swan reported. While reporters present couldn't report the chief of
staff's comments, Swan wasn't invited to the meeting and therefore not bound by
the off-the-record ground rules.
KELLY SAYS PRESS OUT TO GET TRUMP: While
the chief of staff spoke off the record to reporters Friday, he spoke on the record with White House staff, according to Swan's colleague,
Mike Allen. "The press's worst day was when I came in," Kelly told
staffers, according to Allen. "The press wants to take down the president.
I stand between the press and the president. They have to take me down
first."
WHITE HOUSE STAFFERS SIGNED NDAS: The
Washington Post's Ruth Marcus obtained a draft of the unusual non-disclosure agreements that
senior Trump White House staffers were asked to sign. In the draft version,
violators could be forced to pay penalties of $10 million to the federal
government for unauthorized disclosures of "confidential information,"
including to the press.
- "It's not just that they are an
unconstitutional restraint in speech," responded former Obama White House ethics czar Norm Eisen.
"He also did not establish a legal basis to do this. At least need an
[executive order]; where is it? Then there is fact that Trump is in effect
appropriating (intellectual) property of employees - also a no-no.
Unenforceable." [Morning Media, March 19,
2018]
TRUMP BROUGHT NDAS TO WHITE HOUSE: Senior
White House staffers were pressured into signing non-disclosure agreements by
former Chief of Staff Reince Priebus and the White House counsel's office early
in President Donald Trump's term, Ruth Marcus writes in her Washington Post
column. "No president, to my knowledge, has attempted to impose such a
pledge," Marcus writes. "And while White House staffers have various
confidentiality obligations - maintaining the secrecy of classified information
or attorney-client privilege, for instance - the notion of imposing a side
agreement, supposedly enforceable even after the president leaves office, is
not only oppressive but constitutionally repugnant."
A draft agreement obtained by
Marcus extends beyond Trump's years in office and could expose violators to a
$10 million penalty. "The $10 million figure, I suspect, was watered down
in the final version," Marcus writes, "because the people to whom I
have spoken do not remember that jaw-dropping sum." POLITICO's Marianne
Levine wondered back in October 2016 whether the non-disclosure agreements that
Trump imposed on campaign workers (and, later, on transition officials) might resurface in the White House. LeVine asked experts: Would that even be possible? Norman Eisen, special
counsel to President Barack Obama in 2009-11, said Trump likely could make
aides sign NDAs, though he found it a "troubling prospect." Adam
Samaha, a constitutional law professor at New York University, expressed doubt
that it would withstand a constitutional challenge. Richard Painter, chief
ethics lawyer to President George W. Bush in 2005-07, said, "He can order
them to do what he wants them to do" but "I just doubt the
president's lawyers would craft the policy this way." More from
Marcus here. Read LeVine's 2016 piece here. [Morning Shift, March
19, 2018]
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| U.S. SUPREME COURT |
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| U.S. MILITARY |
 |
JAMES
MATTIS
Secretary
of Defense
|
 |
| HEALTHCARE |
PHARMA CONSIDERATIONS LOOM IN SPENDING BILL - Multiple
drug-related measures could hitch a ride on the omnibus spending bill that is
expected to be introduced any minute and must speed through Congress by Friday
to avoid another government shutdown. Changing how the "doughnut
hole" gets filled is a big one. PhRMA has been ambushing lawmakers over
the last month to lessen the industry's increased share of Medicare Part D
coverage gap payments. Congress unexpectedly raised it from half to 70 percent
in February's budget agreement (H.R. 1892 (115) ). Drugmakers have been pushing for 60 percent - even halfway would save them billions of dollars.
Pro's Sarah Karlin-Smith and Jen Haberkorn have been tracking
the doughnut hole developments on the Hill (and of course they will continue to
do so). But they've been hearing from lobbyists that the drug makers have a
good chance of getting their contribution pushed back to 64 percent - but not
necessarily 60.
What else to look for: Sources off Capitol
Hill also tell Sarah that some drug companies are pushing for other tweaks such
as removing biosimilars from pass-through payments. These extra Medicare
payments to doctors for the first years that a treatment is on the market can
help spur uptake of new products. Because recent 340B payment changes for
Medicare Part B drugs don't apply to medicines on pass-through status, industry
is concerned that biosimilars may have an advantage. But generic drugmakers say
taking excluding biosimilars from pass-through payments would kill biosimilars
manufacturers just as they are getting off the ground.
Also being looked at, according to lobbyists: extending
pass-through payments from three years to five years. [POLITICO's Prescription Pulse, March 19, 2018]
LINGERING QUESTIONS ABOUT 340B - The
much-debated drug discount program will continue to be a hot topic after last
week's Senate HELP Committee hearing. Here are some outstanding questions:
Are hospitals trying to run out the clock in an election
year? It's already mid-March with midterm elections looming and no
shortage of health care issues to work on - opioids and stabilization of
Obamacare to name two (though that stabilization bid was losing, not gaining
steam as of late last week). So hospitals' biggest ally might be the
abbreviated calendar. Hospitals, especially those serving low-income
populations, like 340B just fine. But if debate rolls into next year, lawmakers
could lose interest or control of Congress could shift to Democrats. The HELP
Committee wants to hold at least one more hearing on 340B, which discounted
drugs by $8 billion in 2016. The House Energy and Commerce Committee also wants
another hearing before marking up legislation that hasn't even been made
public.
How hard will Alexander press transparency...? HELP
Chairman Lamar Alexander said he wanted more specific numbers about how much
of 340B's savings went to patients. Bruce Siegel, president of the America's
Essential Hospitals, which represents the public and safety net institutions
that treat a high proportion of those patients and benefit the most from the
program's discounts, said he had no idea. When pressed by Alexander at
Thursday's hearing, Siegel said transparency should apply to drug companies
too. "That's called passing the buck," the Tennessee Republican told
him.
...And how far will hospitals bend? When
pressed by Alexander, Siegel finally admitted: "I support transparency. We
think we embrace it." That sounds a lot like what the American Hospital
Association's top lobbyist Tom Nickels told Rep. Larry Bucshon at an Energy and Commerce Committee hearing in December: "I do agree that further transparency in terms of
where the dollars go is something we're certainly willing to discuss with the
committee."
Are Senate Democrats willing to participate? Most
HELP Committee Democrats were vocal in their support of 340B and likely don't
want to be associated with changes that help pharma. Their voices signaled that
they won't help GOP colleagues on the issue, said Rodney Whitlock, vice
president of health policy at ML Strategies. "It's less clear if Chairman
Alexander can get bipartisan interest to pursue more modest reporting
requirements," Whitlock, a former longtime aide to Sen. Chuck Grassley, added. [POLITICO's
Prescription Pulse, March 19, 2018]
FDA LOOKING AT OFF-LABEL PROMOTION AND THE FIRST AMENDMENT -
The agency has a First Amendment working group that is "taking a hard
look" at how its advertising and promotion regulations square with the
Bill of Rights' free speech protections, FDA chief counsel Rebecca Wood told a
recent industry conference. "We know that there can at times be tension
between the important public health mandates that Congress has entrusted to FDA
and the imperatives of the First Amendment," she said.
The working group is examining whether FDA should refresh its
stance after recent court rulings emphasized the constitutional right to
communicate truthful and non-misleading information about drugs. Medicines
approved by the FDA can be prescribed for any ailment but the agency generally
prevents companies from marketing their products for purposes not on the label
- and limits what companies can say pre-approval. The agency expects to issue
new guidance about the free speech space harbors.
Commissioner Scott Gottlieb is likely to move toward the drug
industry's position - more freedom to communicate off-label information. That
would be a change in direction from the Obama administration, which in its
final days released a memo on First Amendment considerations for drug and
device promotion, pushing back against an appeals court decision that said the
agency cannot prohibit or criminalize truthful off-label promotion [POLITICO's Prescription Pulse, March 19, 2018]
A body that drafts guidelines for doctors on
cancer drugs too often makes recommendations that are off-label and based on
weak evidence, according to a new study in The BMJ. [POLITICO's Prescription
Pulse, March 19, 2018]
 |
| EDUCATION |
The revolution may not be televised,
but it is happening in public schools. This is evident in
the growth of student and teacher actions across the country, from walkouts to
strikes.
Public school communities – students,
teachers, parents, and citizens – have seen their institutions targeted with deeper
budget cuts, greater inequities in the system, harsher penalties for
“underperforming” on arbitrary standards, and deadlier gun violence.
Is it any wonder that people are
starting to stand up and say they’ve had it with inaction on school safety? Trump
and the GOP Congress have failed America’s students, teachers and families.
It’s time for them to get out of the way of student-led change.
One week from today more than a
million people are expected to join the March for Our Lives, with students
leading the way. With the 2018 primaries in full swing, and Illinois coming up
on Tuesday, we can both march for our lives and vote for our lives. Imagine a
Congress that listened to students, teachers and families rather than doing
less than nothing about school safety.
This week, mass walkouts of students
in middle schools and high schools spanned the nation to protest school
shootings and lack of sensible gun control.
Even as students were out in the
streets calling for sensible gun control, President Donald Trump was reversing
himself once again, backing off meaningful steps for gun control and increasing
funds for arming teachers instead.
The students demand the right to
attend school in an environment where they don’t have to worry about being
gunned down. “Protect lives, not guns” was an oft-observed sign held aloft in
the demonstrations.
The mass student walkouts came close
after another headline-grabbing story born from the public school community:
the successful teacher strike in West Virginia.
In defiance of state laws making
public employee strikes illegal, nearly 20,000 teachers and about 13,000 school
service personnel in all 55 counties of the Mountain State shut down schools
for nine days. School boards and administrators across the state expressed strong
support for the teachers and took no actions to end the walkouts.
West Virginia lawmakers buckled to
all five of the teachers’ demands including a five-percent pay raise for all
public employees, a realistic commitment from the state to address a broken
public employee health insurance program, limits on charter school expansions,
a continuation of seniority privileges for teachers and the ability of unions
to deduct dues through payroll collection.
The successful action of the West
Virginia teachers is inspiring similar actions in other states.
Teachers in Oklahoma have set an
April 2 date for a statewide strike, if their demands for better pay and
working conditions aren’t met by state lawmakers. In Arizona, two public school
advocacy groups are planning a march on the state capitol for March 28. Their
chief complaints are lousy teacher pay, college student-loan burdens, a
shortage of qualified teachers, and cuts to classroom resources. In Kentucky,
hundreds of teachers are protesting cuts to their benefit programs. Local media
are reporting the actions are a “precursor to a statewide strike.”
It’s not surprising that school
communities have become a breeding ground for dissent.
People who rely on public schools
have a lot to complain about. Government officials at all levels have been
underpaying teachers and making their lives miserable, wielding budget cuts
that close learning opportunities for students, and pushing schools toward more
prison like conditions instead of doing something meaningful about gun
violence. This is opposite of what public-school students and teachers say they
want: meaningful gun control.
Schools are America’s most
collaborative endeavor, by far. They’re the places we’ve entrusted to teach the
values of democracy. They’re working. [People’s Action, March 18, 2018]
Congress: The Republican-controlled U.S. House has approved a bill
to reauthorize the Department of Homeland Security, and one provision in the
bill is
raising alarms for voting rights.
This measure would let the Trump administration dispatch Secret Service agents
to patrol polling places, which would do little more than serve to intimidate
voters. With more than 100,000 polling places across the country and fewer
than 5,000 agents and uniformed officers in the entire Secret Service, there
should be no illusion that this provision is about improving security against
some nonexistent threat. All it would do is equip Trump with the power to send
armed federal agents to precincts with large populations of voters of color,
where voters lean strongly Democratic.
Fortunately, a Senate committee didn't
include this provision when
it approved its version of the bill. However, both chambers will have to
reconcile any differences, meaning there's still a chance the House's version
could make it into the final bill. [Daily Kos. Voting Rights Roundup, March
17, 2018]
Calling all Lees, Kims, Nguyens, and
Patels: if you have the same first and last name as another registered voter in
another state -- your vote might be purged.
Kris Kobach, the King of Voter
Suppression, is once again using the “Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck”
program to disenroll registered voters of color under the guise of preventing
voter fraud. The program allegedly identifies people registered in multiple
states. But, Crosscheck’s flawed methods erroneously flag
millions of eligible voters, putting them at risk from being purged from the
voter rolls.
States know that Crosscheck isn’t
working and over 20 states have already pulled out of the program. [1] With the
2018 elections only 7 months away, tell your state to leave the racist,
unreliable Interstate Crosscheck program.
For many Asian Americans it is
extremely common to have the same first and last name. Many Chinese Americans,
for example, may have a first name that is also a family name, and a middle
name that is their “first” name. Therefore, a brother and sister who live in
different states may be regarded as having the “same” name under Crosscheck.
The use of Crosscheck in Virginia
right before the 2016 election also purged tens of thousands of eligible voters
-- a disproportionate number being people of color. With the numbers
of Asian American eligible voters soaring in Virginia and other states across
the country, our communities are being purposefully disenfranchised.
In solidarity,
Laura and the 18MR Team
P.S. Over seven
million voters may have been wrongly tagged and listed as registered or voting
in multiple states since 2005. Help us protect our right to vote by signing and sharing our
petition!
AND THIS IS PROBABLY WHY ... THE NYT/THE OBSERVER OF LONDON just
popped a big story by MATT
ROSENBERG, NICK CONFESSORE and CAROLE CADWALLADR from London with
the headline: "How Trump
Consultants Exploited the Facebook Data of Millions": "As
the upstart voter-profiling company Cambridge Analytica prepared to wade into
the 2014 American midterm elections, it had a problem.
"The firm had secured a $15 million investment from
Robert Mercer, the wealthy Republican donor, and wooed his
political adviser, Stephen K. Bannon, with the promise of tools that could
identify the personalities of American voters and influence their behavior. But
it did not have the data to make its new products work.
"So the firm harvested private information from the
Facebook profiles of more than 50 million users
without their permission, according to former Cambridge employees, associates
and documents, making it one of the largest data leaks in the social network's
history. The breach allowed the company to exploit the private social media
activity of a huge swath of the American electorate, developing techniques that
underpinned its work on President Trump's campaign in 2016." http://nyti.ms/2Iv3S7P [POLITICO
Playbook, March 17, 2018]
 |
| DONALD TRUMP JR. |
 |
| TRUMP |
TRUMP WELFARE REFORM EFFORT STALLS: President
Donald Trump pledged in his State of the Union address to impose work requirements on welfare programs, but that
effort appears stuck in neutral, Glenn Thrush reports in the New York Times.
"Days before the speech, as part of the plan, several federal departments
took steps to impose the stricter work requirements on able-bodied adults
receiving non-cash aid," Thrush writes. "The move could result in the
loss of subsistence benefits for as many as four million poor, single adults
over the next few years, experts say."
"But Mr. Trump's effort faces an
uncertain future," Thrush reported. "The centerpiece of the plan, a
sweeping executive order mandating that federal agencies review safety net
programs with an eye toward cutting their rolls, has been delayed indefinitely,
according to three senior administration officials." More here.
BEHIND THE WELFARE WORK CLAIMS: Most
adults who receive SNAP benefits are working, have worked recently, or will
work in the future, according to a report from the Center for Budget and Policy
Priorities released Thursday. The report found that many adults use SNAP to
bridge periods of volatility when their hours are cut or they find themselves
out of work. More than half of non-disabled, non-elderly adults worked in a
typical month of receiving SNAP benefits, and nearly 75 percent worked within a
year of receiving benefits (either before or after).
CBPP said in a statement that the findings debunk
the conservative talking point that welfare discourages people from working.
"It's often said that impoverished Americans would rather receive
government assistance than work, but this study shows that they are working
when they can, just in the low-wage labor market, where jobs are often unstable
because of shifting schedules and lack key benefits like paid sick leave,"
the group said. [POLITICO's Morning Shift, March
16, 2018]
 |
| YOU DECIDE |
TOP DOC III - HOUSE DEMS POINT TO ALLEGED AFGHANISTAN
COVER-UP, also via your Morning D correspondent: "Top Democrats
on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee expressed 'grave concerns' [Thursday] that the Trump
administration is classifying information to conceal a failing Afghanistan
policy.
"Committee ranking Democratic Reps. Elijah Cummings of Maryland and Stephen Lynch of Massachusetts said the Defense Department is
classifying information about the performance of Afghan security forces that
had previously been made public." [POLITICO's
Morning Defense, March 16, 2018]
 |
| EXPERIMENTAL MEDICINE |
House GOP aiming to revive 'right-to-try' next week. The
chamber's Republicans are setting up their "right-to-try" drug bill
for another vote next week - and this time they'll only need a simple majority
for passage.
 |
| U.S AGRICULTURE |
TOP DOC III - HOUSE DEMS POINT TO ALLEGED AFGHANISTAN
COVER-UP, also via your Morning D correspondent: "Top Democrats
on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee expressed 'grave concerns' [Thursday] that the Trump
administration is classifying information to conceal a failing Afghanistan
policy.
"Committee ranking Democratic Reps. Elijah Cummings of Maryland and Stephen Lynch of Massachusetts said the Defense Department is
classifying information about the performance of Afghan security forces that
had previously been made public." [POLITICO's
Morning Defense, March 16, 2018]
 |
| UNIONS |
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| SCREEN |
NOTE: The news sources here vary. Not all sources have the same credibility, but in an effort to share some different perspectives, they are included here. This compendium itself cannot claim to be unbiased. Please take into consideration where these different perspectives originate in assessing their value. Thank you
NOTE: I have no official connection to any organization from which information is shared.. Occasionally, I post informational material and/or an opportunity to donate or join as a "community service" announcement. These again are shared for their varying perspectives.
Any books listed are random or topic-related to something else in the post. Think of these as a "library bookshelf" to browse. They are shared for informational or entertainment value only, not as being recommended
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