U.S. delivers patrol boats to Vietnam to deepen security ties

The United States has transferred six patrol boats to the Vietnam coast guard, to help build security cooperation between the two countries, U.S. embassy in Hanoi said in a statement on Tuesday.
U.S. President Donald Trump has expressed his hope for a stronger relationship with Vietnam, after the Obama administration put ties on a stronger footing amid Vietnam’s territorial dispute with China in the South China Sea.
The patrol boats, which were included a defense cooperation memorandum agreed in 2011, will help Vietnam in intercoastal patrols and law enforcement, the statement said.
It also added that delivering these vessels deepens cooperation in the areas maritime law enforcement, search and rescue, and humanitarian assistance operations within Vietnam’s territorial waters and exclusive economic zone.
“Vietnam’s future prosperity depends upon a stable and peaceful maritime environment. The United States and the rest of the international community also benefit from regional stability,” U.S. Ambassador Ted Osius said.
Vietnam is the country most openly at odds with China over the waterway since the Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte took a softer line with Beijing.
China claims 90 percent of the potentially energy-rich South China Sea. Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines, Vietnam and Taiwan lay claim to parts of the sea, through which about $5 trillion of trade passes each year.

Trump administration wants Obamacare subsidy case put on hold, again

The Trump administration asked on Monday that a major federal court case weighing the fate of the Obamacare cost-sharing subsidies be put on hold again, leaving billions of dollars in payments to insurers up in the air for 2017 and 2018.
In a joint filing with the U.S. House of Representatives submitted to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, the administration and Republican lawmakers asked for a second 90-day extension.
The subsidies are available to low-income Americans who buy individual health insurance on the exchanges created under the 2010 Affordable Care Act, former President Barack Obama’s signature healthcare law, popularly known as Obamacare.
President Donald Trump and Republican lawmakers want to repeal and replace the law and are working on legislation to overhaul it that would also secure the subsidy funding during a transition period. But it is not clear if or when they will pass it.
The two sides said they wanted more time because they were discussing measures that would no longer require a judicial decision, including the new healthcare legislation.
Insurers that are trying to set premium rates for insurance plans to be sold in 2018 are running up against deadlines and have repeatedly asked Congress to fund the subsidies during the transition.
One Republican senator said on Monday that he believed the money for the subsidies should be appropriated by Congress. “I think we have to,” Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana told reporters outside the Senate. “We need to stabilize premiums, or we’re not going to have a market.” He said he was speaking for himself and not Republican leaders.
The legal case was filed by the Republican-led House against the Obama administration to cut off the subsidy payments.
A lower court had ruled in favor of the lawmakers, saying that Congress must appropriate the money for the subsidies and that the government could not simply pay for them in the way it does now.
Insurers and medical groups reiterated their view on Monday after the court filing about continuing the payments, which amount to about $7 billion this year and help low-income consumers pay for out-of-pocket medical costs.
“Uncertainty is destabilizing the market and leading health plans to raise their rates for 2018 to account for the political risk brought on by Congress and the administration through a protracted debate over the fate of these reimbursements,” Margaret Murray, chief executive officer of the Association for Community Affiliated Plans, said in a statement.
While the proposed legislation from the House would keep the payments through 2019, Trump has said he could stop paying the subsidies at any time. That has insurers concerned that the monthly government payments could end and leave them exposed financially.
Several insurers, including Aetna Inc and Humana Inc, have already exited the Obamacare marketplace for 2018. Credit Suisse analyst Scott Fidel said insurers such as Centene Corp and Molina Healthcare Inc that focus on the low-income families that qualify for the subsidies have the most at risk. Centene shares closed down 1.4 percent at $74.02 and Molina fell 0.8 percent to $66.84.

Trump seeks to slash government spending in budget plan

The White House on Tuesday will ask Republicans who control the U.S. Congress – and federal purse strings – to slash spending on healthcare and food assistance programs for the poor as they push ahead on plans to cut taxes and trim the deficit.
President Donald Trump is set to propose a raft of politically sensitive cuts in his first full budget, for the fiscal year that starts in October, a proposal that some analysts expected would be put aside by lawmakers as they craft their own budget and spending plans.
Trump, who is traveling overseas and will miss the unveiling of his plan, wants lawmakers to cut $3.6 trillion in government spending over 10 years, balancing the budget by the end of the decade, according to a preview given to reporters on Monday.
More than $800 billion would be cut from the Medicaid program for the poor and more than $192 billion from food stamps.
Republicans are under pressure to deliver on promised tax cuts, the cornerstone of the Trump administration’s pro-business economic agenda, which would cut the business tax rate to 15 percent from 35 percent, and reduce the number of personal tax brackets to three from seven.
But their policy agenda has stalled as the White House grapples with the political fallout from Trump’s firing of former FBI Director James Comey.
Comey had been leading a probe of alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. election.
Trump’s biggest savings would come from cuts to the Medicaid program made as part of a Republican healthcare bill passed by the House of Representatives.
The bill aims to gut the Obama administration’s signature 2010 Affordable Care Act, known as Obamacare, that expanded insurance coverage and the government-run Medicaid program for the poor. But it faces an uncertain future in the Senate, which is writing its own law.
The White House proposed changes that would require more childless people receiving help from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, better known as food stamps, to work.
STEEP CUTS
The plan would slash supports for farmers, impose user fees for meat inspection and sell off half the nation’s emergency oil stockpile. Another politically fraught item is a proposal for cuts to the U.S. Postal Service, a goal that has long eluded lawmakers and administrations from both political parties.
The first look at the plan came in a “skinny budget” released in March – a document that received a tepid response from Congress.
Most departments would see steep cuts, particularly the State Department and the Environmental Protection Agency.
There is some new spending. The Pentagon would get a boost, and there would be a down payment to begin building a wall on the southern border with Mexico, which was a central promise of Trump’s presidential campaign.
The budget includes $25 billion for a plan to give parents six weeks of paid leave after the birth or adoption of a child, and $200 billion to encourage state and local governments to boost spending on roads, bridges, airports and other infrastructure programs.
The plan drew immediate fire from lobby groups, including from the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, which said it relied on “rosy assumptions,” gimmicks and unrealistic cuts.
“While we appreciate the administration’s focus on reducing the debt, when using more realistic assumptions, the president’s budget does not add up,” Maya MacGuineas, the group’s president, said in a statement.
Trump’s plan relies on forecasts for economic growth of 3 percent a year by the end of his first term – well beyond Congressional Budget Office assumptions of 1.9 percent growth.
“That assumes a pessimism about America, about the economy, about its people, about its culture, that we’re simply refusing to accept,” White House budget director Mick Mulvaney told reporters on Monday.

New York Times Cartoons

The disgusting “mainstream media” is helping the Deep State oust Trump and should be considered an enemy of democracy

On a near-daily basis now, the disruptive, discredited, fake news corporate media breathlessly reports every single thing President Donald J. Trump says or does as some sort of new scandal rising to the level of impeachment.
The latest “crisis” is supposedly related to a memo former FBI Director James Comey wrote following a meeting in February with the president in the Oval Office, in which it is claimed that Trump asked him to drop the bureau’s investigation into former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn.
Not that this is odd or anything, but the contents of the memo were read to a New York Times reporter; the memo itself wasn’t provided in full, so there is no context, no way of knowing if it’s even real, and no way of discerning where it actually came from.
And it’s a Comey memo, they say? It shows Trump was attempting to obstruct justice, say Democrats and their media? Well then, why didn’t Comey report any intimidation? He is required by statute to report any interference like that to House and Senate intelligence committees and yet he didn’t do that. And never mind that acting FBI Director Andy McCabe told a congressional committee last week that there has been no interference from the White House on any of the FBI’s investigations.
But hey, it was the latest leak of sensitive information that is part of the rising flood of leaks coming out of the administration these days, so the Left-wing establishment media must dutifully publish as gospel and then repeat it ad nauseam, even when they’re wrong.
What about former President Obama and his administration? Did the same standards apply? Hardly.
One of the media’s hyperventilated charges last week was that Trump provided Russian diplomats with “classified information” during their recent meeting in the Oval Office (a claim Russian President Vladimir Putin is even mocking). The White House vehemently denied it, citing three officials who were in the room at the same time as the president when the interactions took place.
But on at least two occasions in the past few years, the Obama regime actually did compromise classified information – in exposing the CIA station chief in Afghanistan and giving Russia intelligence it later used against us in Syria.
The resulting media outcry? It didn’t happen. Calls for impeachment? Nada.
As to Trump’s alleged “obstruction of justice,” Obama indicated in a public forum more than once he didn’t think Hillary Clinton did anything wrong in using an unsecured private email server to send and receive classified information, a blatant violation of national security statutes. According to former U.S. prosecutor and National Review columnist Andrew McCarthy, because of those very public statements, which clearly telegraphed Obama’s desire not to have the Democrats’ presidential nominee indicted, it set a precedent that cannot now ensnare Trump:
April 10, 2016, President Obama publicly stated that Hillary Clinton had shown “carelessness” in using a private e-mail server to handle classified information, but he insisted that she had not intended to endanger national security (which is not an element of the relevant criminal statute). The president acknowledged that classified information had been transmitted via Secretary Clinton’s server, but he suggested that, in the greater scheme of things, its importance had been vastly overstated.
On July 5, 2016, FBI director James Comey publicly stated that Clinton had been “extremely careless” in using a private email server to handle classified information, but he insisted that she had not intended to endanger national security (which is not an element of the relevant criminal statute). The director acknowledged that classified information had been transmitted via Secretary Clinton’s server, but he suggested that, in the greater scheme of things, it was just a small percentage of the emails involved.
Case dismissed.
He went on to note that “a cynic” could conclude that the president signaled the FBI and Justice Department his desired outcome, and that is the outcome he and Democrats got. Yet no outrage from the same discredited media that is excoriating Trump and calling for his ouster.
It should be crystal clear by now that the Washington establishment media is not just an enemy of Donald J. Trump, it is an enemy of the people – at least, Americans in a majority of electoral districts that voted for him.
But the media is also an enemy of our democracy for so willingly going along with the Democratic Party’s inability to accept defeat at the ballot box whenever it occurs. They had already pre-ordained Clinton as the next queen…er, president – and they expected to be feting her well into the year after being inaugurated Jan. 20.
It didn’t happen. So Alt-Left Democrats and their allies in the establishment media have concocted fake narrative after fake narrative to “explain” why Clinton lost – the Russians stole the election; or – until Trump fired him – Comey’s ‘interference’ did it. Anything other than admitting she was the worst candidate to come along in generations. She was corrupt, she was uninspiring and frankly, her last name is Clinton, which is offputting to many. She got the same consideration from tens of millions of Democrats as Jeb Bush got from Republicans, only her party conspired to ensure she got the nomination.
As Natural News founder/editor Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, noted earlier today, a political coup has been launched against a legitimately elected president. And the “mainstream” media is part of the lynch mob.

New York Times doesn’t appear to require actual documented proof anymore when it comes to reporting on Trump

The Old Gray Lady is sure getting a lot older these days, especially for millions of Americans who are simply turning off the news or tuning it out because the media’s irrational hatred of President Donald J. Trump has completely warped whatever objectivity — and credibility — it had left.
This is especially true of The New York Times, whose editors have obviously decided that reporters no longer need actual documented proof of claims made in their stories about Trump; that the spoken word by “officials,” who shall always be nameless, is good enough.
Twice now in less than a week the Times has run pieces based on information that was read to their reporters from someone who is either serial-leaking highly sensitive information out of Trump’s White House, or who is serving as a tool of the Deep State which continues to try to push Trump out of the Oval Office. Not once in either of those cases did the Times actually see the document purporting to support what was being read to reporters, presumably over the phone.
The first story dealt with allegations that Trump asked then-FBI Director James Comey to drop the bureau’s investigation into the president’s first national security advisor, Michael Flynn. We’re being told that what Trump allegedly asked was detailed in a memo Comey wrote following the meeting; there is no other context, and no one other than Comey and some “associates” of his, has actually seen said memo, if it even exists:
Mr. Comey shared the existence of the memo with senior F.B.I. officials and close associates. The New York Times has not viewed a copy of the memo, which is unclassified, but one of Mr. Comey’s associates read parts of it to a Times reporter.
The second story was published Friday, as Trump left the country on a multi-day tour that takes him to Saudi Arabia, Israel and Europe. It dealt with allegations that he told Russian diplomats he met last week in the Oval Office that Comey was a “nut job” who was “crazy” and putting “great pressure” on him “because of Russia.” That, too was read to Times reporters:
“I just fired the head of the F.B.I. He was crazy, a real nut job,” Mr. Trump said, according to the document, which was read to The New York Times by an American official. “I faced great pressure because of Russia. That’s taken off.”
You know, once upon a time if a reporter had filed a story — even at the Times — without documentation to back up claims when said documentation apparently existed, he or she would likely face a reprimand and/or unemployment. The Times publishing these kinds of allegations based only on what someone was reading to its reporters is just despicable.
And wholly dishonest.
For the second story, to be fair, White House spokesman Sean Spicer did not deny the words that were read to reporters, just the context in which the reporters portrayed what was read to them.
“By grandstanding and politicizing the investigation into Russia’s actions, James Comey created unnecessary pressure on our ability to engage and negotiate with Russia,” Spicer said. “The investigation would have always continued, and obviously, the termination of Comey would not have ended it. Once again, the real story is that our national security has been undermined by the leaking of private and highly classified conversations.” (Related: Wait A Sec… You Mean James Comey Wrote A Memo To HIMSELF, Then “Leaked” It To The NYT?)
Yet another “government official” quoted by the Times said the words Trump chose were part of negotiating with the Russian officials — Foreign Minister Sergey V. Lavrov and Russian Ambassador to the U.S., Sergey Kislyak:
The idea, the official suggested, was to create a sense of obligation with Russian officials and to coax concessions out of Mr. Lavrov — on Syria, Ukraine and other issues — by saying that Russian meddling in last year’s election had created enormous political problems for Mr. Trump.
Indeed, the leaks are the problem. How are Americans supposed to believe such accounts when the outlets reporting them have been so wrong so many times before? And as for reading documents to reporters, anyone can make up the contents of a “memo” or “transcript” and call it valid and real, even when it’s not. Plus, in the case of Trump’s meeting with the Russian officials, there were no American officials present other than National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, and a lower-ranking national security aide.
So where did these accounts come from? Who actually said what? And why are Americans just supposed to blindly believe these accounts when it’s obvious the Establishment press is gunning for Trump?
Welcome to establishment journalism in the Age of Trump, when innuendo and claims phoned in now pass as responsible reporting.

Left-wing media attempting “a coup against our right to govern ourselves”

The blizzard of lies and distraction blowing through Washington is not just any routine stuffstorm, but a calculated attempt to bring down a president – our president, not the establishment’s president. And more than that, it’s an attempt to ensure that we never again have the ability to disrupt the bipartisan D.C. cabal’s permanent supremacy by inserting a chief executive who refuses to kiss their collective Reid.
This is a coup against us. It’s a coordinated campaign by liberals and their allies in the bureaucracy and media to once and for all ensure their perpetual rule over us. We need to fight it, here and now, so we don’t have to fight it down at the bottom of this slippery slope.
It’s brazen. It’s bold. It’s insulting to our intelligence. They aren’t even trying to hide their lies anymore. Truth is irrelevant; this is a choreographed dance routine and everyone has his moves. Call it Breakin’ 2: Electric Leakaroo, except instead of trying to save the community center they’re trying to save their power and prestige.
To buy the media narrative on this latest Russian nonsense, you must believe:
1. That whatever was revealed was super-secret, though we don’t know exactly what it was. When in doubt, assume it’s on par with the nuclear codes!
2. That there was no good reason to share this info with Russia, like coordinating our fight against our joint enemy or to prevent another Russian airliner massacre. Because why would we want another power fighting ISIS or civilians not to be blown out of the sky?
3. That LTG McMaster, who literally wrote the book on soldiers standing up to misbehaving civilian leaders and displayed immense personal courage in battle, turned chicken and sat there silently as Trump monologued about this unknown mystery info of doomsday-level import.
4. That LTG McMaster lied on camera. Twice. And that Secretary of State Tillerson lied too.
5. That random anonymous sources in an intelligence community that hates Trump with a burning passion must be believed without question, though we don’t know their identities or their motives.
6. That these anonymous randos must be believed, even though they were not actually in the room to, you know, actually hear what happened. The traditional bar on hearsay is apparently now just a bourgeois conceit.
7. That when the Washington Post and the rest of the media publishes classified stuff (including intelligence provided by allies) leaked by anyone not named “Donald Trump,” it’s awesome.
8. That the Washington Post and the rest of the media, which has been wrong over and over again in their reporting, are not wrong again.
9. That the Washington Post and the rest of the media are objective and have no anti-Trump bias, even though they are literally cheering the hits on the president.
10. That there are unicorns.
The latest pseudo-scandal is that Trump doesn’t think Mike Flynn did anything wrong, and told James Comey so back in February. So basically, Trump expressed the same view he had of the whole Flynn nonsense to Comey as he has expressed to every interviewer. Comey did nothing, and said nothing (even when testifying to Congress) for nearly three months, because it was nothing. The Russian snipe hunt continued throughout unabated. That off-hand comment was a pretty poor attempt at obstruction of justice since it didn’t obstruct anything – to the limited extent these Russian witch hunts can be confused with “justice” at all.
Continue reading at TownHall.com

Trump nominates Callista Gingrich as ambassador to Vatican

President Donald Trump plans to nominate Callista Gingrich as ambassador to the Vatican, the White House said in a statement on Friday.
She is the wife of former Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich and produces documentary films on public policy and history.
The announcement came as Trump embarked on Friday on his maiden foreign trip as president, which will include a visit to the Vatican.