Senate panel OKs tax bill, drawing Trump, GOP closer to major legislative win

The Senate Finance Committee voted late Thursday in favor of the House GOP tax bill, paving the way for the first major legislative victory for the Trump administration.

The panel's 14-12 vote means the bill will likely reach the Senate floor sometime after Thanksgiving.

Earlier Thursday, the House passed its bill in a 227-205 vote.
"For the millions of hard-working Americans who need more money in their pockets and the chance of a better future, help is on the way," Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said in a statement.

"For the millions of hard-working Americans who need more money in their pockets and the chance of a better future, help is on the way."

“When the Senate returns after Thanksgiving, I will bring this must-pass legislation to the floor for further debate and open consideration," he added.
The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA), slightly altered by Finance Committee Chairman and U.S. Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, during the four-day markup, would temporarily cut taxes for individuals and ax the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 20 percent.
It would also include a repeal of the Affordable Care Act's individual mandate, adding an estimated $338 billion in revenue over 10 years. Earlier this year, Republicans failed to repeal the ACA, the 2010 health care measure commonly called ObamaCare.
“This is a good bill that delivers on our promise to provide middle-class tax relief and grow our economy,” Hatch told reporters before the Senate panel's vote, according to the Hill.
The earlier House vote drew praise on Twitter from President Donald Trump. “Big win today in the House for GOP Tax Cuts and Reform, 227-205. Zero Dems, they want to raise taxes much higher, but not for our military!” Trump tweeted.
Republicans celebrated the potential tax overhaul, claiming it would support the middle class in America, and denied Democratic Party lawmakers' accusations that the bill favors the wealthy and big corporations and will potentially leave millions of Americans without health insurance.
“I come from the poor people," said Hatch, 83, who was the first member of his family to attend college. "And I’ve been working my whole stinking career for people who don’t have a chance. And I really resent anybody saying I’m just doing this for the rich. Give me a break.”
U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., meanwhile, called the bill “indefensible, partisan legislation," the Hill reported. Sen. Tom Carper, D-Del., said the bill was “flawed.”
"It’s not surprising that a flawed process has produced a flawed product, but we can change course," Carper said in a statement, according to Business Insider. "I implore Chairman Hatch and our colleagues on the other side of the aisle: Let’s go back to the drawing board and start anew on a real bipartisan basis."

Hillary Clinton 2017 Cartoons

Senate Confirms Mark Esper as Army Secretary

OAN Newsroom

The Senate confirms President Trump’s pick for the Army’s top civilian post.
In an 89-to-six vote, senators approved the nomination of Mark Esper as army secretary.
Esper is a West Point graduate who retired as a lieutenant colonel after serving more than 20 years in the Army.
He also worked under the George W. Bush administration as deputy assistant defense secretary for Negotiations Policy.
Esper mostly recently worked at Raytheon, and was a top lobbyist for the defense contractor.
He has promised to recuse himself from all Raytheon matters as he fills the key Pentagon post.

Judge Andrew Napolitano: The incredible new chapter in the Hillary Clinton chronicles

The Department of Justice will soon commence an investigation to determine whether there should be an investigation (you read that nonsense correctly) of a scandal involving the Clinton Foundation and a company called Uranium One. It appears that FBI decisions made during the time that Hillary Clinton was being investigated for espionage will also be investigated to see whether there should be an investigation to determine whether she was properly investigated. (Again, you read that nonsense correctly.)

Only the government can relate nonsense with a straight face. Here is the back story.

When President Donald Trump fired FBI Director Jim Comey last spring, the attorney general’s stated purpose for recommending the firing was Comey’s dropping the ball in the investigation of Clinton's email when she was secretary of state. After a year of investigating her use of her own computer servers to transmit and store classified materials instead of using a government server to do so -- and notwithstanding a mountain of evidence of her grossly negligent exposure of secret and top-secret materials, which constitutes the crime of espionage -- the FBI director decided that because no reasonable prosecutor would take the case, it should be dropped. Weeks later, the DOJ ratified Comey’s decision.
At the same time that Clinton was failing to safeguard state secrets, she was granting official State Department favors to donors to her family’s charitable foundation. There are dozens of examples of this so-called “pay to play,” the most egregious of which is the Uranium One case. This involved a Canadian businessman and friend of former President Bill Clinton's, Frank Giustra, who bundled donations from various sources that totaled $148 million, all of which Giustra gave to the Clinton Foundation.
At the same time that Giustra made this extraordinary donation, he was representing a client that needed federal permission to purchase a 51 percent stake in Uranium One, which then controlled about 20 percent of America's licensed uranium mining capacity. Secretary Clinton freely gave Giustra’s client the State Department’s approval, and it soon acquired the remaining approvals to make the purchase. Giustra’s client is a Russian corporation controlled by the Kremlin.
When the FBI got wind of the Giustra donation and Secretary Clinton’s approval and the Kremlin involvement, it commenced an investigation of whether Clinton had been bribed. At some point during former President Barack Obama’s second term, that investigation was terminated. We do not know whether the investigating FBI agents learned that the Clinton Foundation was not even registered as a charity by the states in which it was doing business or authorized by them to receive tax-free donations.
At the same time that the FBI was looking into Uranium One, American and British intelligence agents were surveilling Donald Trump. The belated stated purpose of that surveillance was to ascertain whether the future president or his colleagues were engaged in any unlawful activity by accepting campaign favors from foreign nationals or were improperly assisting foreign intelligence agents to interfere with the presidential election.
One of the foreign nationals whose communications were captured during that surveillance was Sergey Kislyak, then the Russian ambassador to the United States. He spoke with Michael Flynn, then the national security adviser to President-elect Trump. Mysteriously, portions of a transcript of those intercepted communications were published in The Washington Post.
Another foreign national who caught the FBI’s attention is a former British intelligence agent named Christopher Steele. Steele had compiled a dossier about, among other things, alleged inappropriate behavior by Trump in a Moscow hotel room years earlier. After offering Steele $50,000 to corroborate his dossier, the FBI backed down.
After being confronted by irate Republican members of the House and Senate judiciary committees, who demanded to know why the investigations of these matters had been terminated, Attorney General Jeff Sessions revealed that he has asked career DOJ lawyers to commence an investigation of all of the above to determine whether an independent counsel should be appointed to investigate all of the above.
This is the investigation to determine whether there should be an investigation. This is also the DOJ's reluctance to do its job.
Can the government investigate itself? The short answer is yes, and it has done so in the past. But it hardly needs an investigation to determine whether there should be an investigation. The job of the DOJ is to investigate probable violations of federal law. Sessions should not shy away from this and should not push it off to another independent counsel.
We have one independent counsel already because his target -- let’s be candid -- is the president of the United States. That is a potato too hot for the DOJ. But Hillary and Bill Clinton, the FBI's tampering with the political process, and the use of intelligence-captured communications for political purposes are not. It is profoundly the duty of the DOJ -- using its investigatory arm, the FBI -- to investigate all this.
Whatever Comey’s motive for not prosecuting Hillary Clinton and the DOJ’s ratification of it, the current DOJ is not bound by these erroneous decisions.
The evidence in the public domain of Clinton’s espionage and bribery is more than enough to be presented to a grand jury. The same cannot be said about FBI involvements with the Steele dossier or the use of intelligence data for political purposes, because we don’t yet know who did it, so we need aggressive investigation.
But none of this presents the type of conflict that exists when the president is a target, and none of this requires an independent counsel. All of this simply requires the DOJ to get to work.
That is, unless the lawyers in the leadership of this DOJ are fearful of investigating their predecessors for fear that their successors might investigate them. Whoever harbors those fears has no place in government.
Andrew P. Napolitano, a former judge of the Superior Court of New Jersey, is the senior judicial analyst at Fox News Channel.

Tipping point? Conservative media outlets bailing on Roy Moore

'MediaBuzz' host Howard Kurtz explains how and why journalists and reporters in recent stories like the Roy Moore and Harvey Weinstein sexual harassment scandals get sources to go on the record.

The media tide is turning against Roy Moore as even some prominent voices on the right are urging him to drop out of the U.S. Senate race in Alabama.

The mounting allegations against the former judge have already undermined his attempts to paint himself as the victim of runaway reporting by the Washington Post. And whoever set up a robocall in Alabama from fictional Post scribe named "Bernie Bernstein," offering money for dirt on Moore, is a moron.

The real Post, meanwhile, reports on two more accusers describing unwanted overtures by Moore when they worked at the local mall. One, a high school senior, said Moore pursued her at Sears, called her while she was in trig class, and eventually got "a date that ended with Moore driving her to her car in a dark parking lot behind Sears and giving her what she called an unwanted, 'forceful' kiss that left her scared."
Alabama Media Group quotes another woman as saying that in 1991, when Moore was a married attorney, he grabbed her buttocks when she went there with her mother as part of a custody case. "He didn’t pinch it; he grabbed it," the woman said.
Ivanka Trump, meanwhile, told the AP: "There's a special place in hell for people who prey on children. I've yet to see a valid explanation and I have no reason to doubt the victims' accounts."
All this is unfolding as there is a pronounced shift on the right. The Wall Street Journal’s conservative editorial page, no fan of the Republican establishment, says Moore should drop out:
"Mr. Moore's credibility has fallen below the level of survivability ... The sensible move would be for Mr. Moore to step away from the campaign and allow Alabama’s Republicans to put forth a more credible candidate to run as a write-in against Democrat Doug Jones."
And if he doesn't, and President Trump doesn't try to force him out, says the Journal, "then the GOP will be better off if Mr. Moore loses ... Democrats and the media will make Mr. Moore the running mate of every Republican in 2018."
Sean Hannity, who had withheld judgment on Moore—and conducted the only interview with him on his radio show—sounds ready to jump ship.
"For me, the judge has 24 hours," Hannity told Fox viewers Tuesday night. "He must immediately and fully come up with a satisfactory explanation for your inconsistency ... You must remove any doubt. If you can’t do this, then Judge Moore needs to get out of this race."
Hannity noted that when he asked Moore whether he had dated teenage girls, he said "not generally."
But the tipping point may have been the presser held by Beverly Young Nelson, who said Moore locked her in a car and sexually assaulted her when she was 16. For one thing, we saw a woman on television choking back tears as she recounted what happened. But perhaps more important, Moore said he had never met Young—and yet he had signed her yearbook, at a time when he was 30: "To a sweeter more beautiful girl I could not say Merry Christmas. Christmas 1977. Love, Roy Moore, D.A."
For Alabama Media Group, publisher of the Birmingham News and two other papers in the state, this is a tipping point.
"Roy Moore simply cannot be a U.S. senator," an editorial declares. "Even if his party and many of its adherents still think it possible, it is unthinkable--for his state, and his country.
"Proof beyond a reasonable doubt is a consideration for the courtroom, not the ballot box. When choosing our representative before the rest of the world, character matters."
So what does it mean that Moore has lost most of the media, the RNC, and Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan?
No one can force Moore out of the race. He's on the ballot for the Dec. 12 special election. He owes nothing to Beltway Republicans who opposed him in the primary in favor of the appointed senator, Luther Strange. He's still popular in Alabama and the latest poll has him a few points ahead of Democrat Doug Jones.
But does there come a point where so much of the media and political universe is aligned against you that it makes no sense to soldier on? Especially when McConnell is saying the Senate might refuse to seat him?
At a public appearance the other day, Moore asked: "Why do you think I'm being harassed from media and by people pushing forward allegations of the last 28 days of this election?"
The answer is that there are inconsistencies in his account. And Moore is losing even media figures who ordinarily would be staunchly behind him.
Howard Kurtz is a Fox News analyst and the host of "MediaBuzz" (Sundays 11 a.m.). He is the author of five books and is based in Washington. Follow him at @HowardKurtz. Click here for more information on Howard Kurtz.

Trump to lift ban on importing elephant trophies from Africa

Foreign tourists in safari riverboats observe elephants along the Chobe river bank near Zimbabwe.

The Trump administration on Wednesday announced that it will issue permits for elephant trophies from Zambia and Zimbabwe, reversing a 2014 ban under President Obama.

A U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service official told ABC News that the agency received new information from the countries that the move would benefit conservation in the area.

“Legal, well-regulated sport hunting as part of a sound management program can benefit the conservation of certain species by providing incentives to local communities to conserve the species and by putting much-needed revenue back into conservation,” the FWS statement said.
The same department, under Obama, determined in 2015 that importing the trophies would not benefit the species in the area.
The National Rifle Association praised the FWS decision Wednesday, the New York Post reported. The paper reported that elephants — valued for their tusks — have been on the “threatened” species list since 1978.
“By lifting the import ban on lion trophies in Zimbabwe and Zambia, the Trump administration underscored the importance of sound scientific wildlife management and regulated hunting to the survival and enhancement of game species in this country and worldwide,” said Chris Cox, executive director of the National Rifle Association’s Institute for Legislative Action.
Wayne Pacelle, president of the Human Society of the United States, called the Trump administration’s decision jarring, the Post reported.
“Remember, it was Zimbabwe where Walter Palmer shot Cecil, one of the most beloved and well-studied African lions, who was lured out of a national park for the killing. Palmer paid a big fee even though it did irreparable damage to the nation’s reputation.”
Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump have been known to hunt for big game. Several years ago, Trump Jr. was criticized for posting a photo of himself with a dead elephant’s severed tail.
“Reprehensible behavior by the Trump Admin,” tweeted the Elephant Project.
“100 elephants a day are already killed,” the group said. “This will lead to more poaching.”

Papa John's NFL Cartoons

Papa John's issues Twitter apology for 'divisive' NFL, anthem remarks

Papa John's Pizza is the fourth largest take-out and pizza delivery restaurant chain in the United States.

 Taking Supporting NFL Kneeling?

The Papa John’s pizza chain apologized Tuesday for comments made by CEO John Schnatter, who had blamed the NFL and protesting players for its sales struggles during football season.
In a three-tweet mea culpa, the Louisville-based company did a reversal and said it now supports players’ right to protest.
During an earnings call two weeks ago, Schnatter lashed out at kneeling players and league officials for not solving the controversy.
“The statements made on our earnings call were describing the factors that impact our business and we sincerely apologize to anyone that thought they were divisive. That was definitely not our intention,” Papa John’s tweeted.
“We believe in the right to protest inequality and support the players’ movement to create a platform for change. We also believe, as Americans, we should honor our anthem. There should be a way to do both.”
The pizza powerhouse ended with, “We will work with the players and league to find a positive way forward. Open to ideas from all. Except neo-nazis.”
The chain then used an emoji for the middle finger, “those guys.”
Some on Twitter weren’t buying Papa John’s apology.
“You don’t need to `work with’ them. They want to protest. They don’t need your permission or to compromise to benefit you,” according to Hollywood writer Rachel Kiley.
One Twitter user wanted to know if Schnatter had any role in flipping off Nazis.
Papa John’s responded: “He helped write this post – yes.”
In a conference call with investors, Schnatter – who appears in many TV ads for his company – blamed NFL leadership for not taking decisive action.
“Leadership starts at the top, and this is an example of poor leadership,” Schnatter said. “The NFL has hurt Papa John’s shareholders.”
He said NFL brass has had plenty of time to get ahead of the protests.
“This should have been nipped in the bud a year and a half ago,” Schnatter said. “The controversy is polarizing the customer, polarizing the country.”