Russia? What Russia? Trump is polling BETTER than Obama at the same point in his presidency despite scandals, staff turnover and a special counsel

Despite a never-ending drumbeat of criticism and suspicion related to a trio of Russia investigations, President Donald Trump's approval rating is in better shape than Barack Obama's was at the same point in his presidency.

Trump's job approval number stood at 48 per cent on Wednesday in a Rasmussen Reports tracking poll. Fifty-one per cent disapprove.

On February 21, 2010, Obama's was 45 per cent, with 54 per cent opposed to his work in the Oval Office.

Trump's current level of support is also above his performance level in the 2016 election, when 46.1 per cent of voters chose him over Hillary Clinton and a handful of minor candidates.

Obama began his presidency at 67 per cent approval in the Rasmussen tracking poll, compared with 56 per cent for Trump.

Yet 13 months later, the two men have switched places on Rasmussen's Oval Office leaderboard.

The February during Obama's first full year in office was a mishmash of trouble spots that drove his numbers down by 6 points – back to where they were before his first State of the Union address.

Trump has his own collection of political headaches, including a special counsel probe into whether his campaign colluded with Russians who aimed to meddle in the 2016 election.

Nearly 20 women have accused him of some level of sexual harassment or abuse, depressing his support among female voters.

The president has also been plagued by far greater turnover of senior staff than his predecessors, most recently losing his staff secretary following domestic violence accusations from two ex-wives.

The instability of Trump's inner circle hasn't projected strength: Departures of his initial chief of staff, chief strategist, press secretary, health secretary, national security adviser, FBI director and a pair of communications directors have all been public-relations train wrecks.

Yet the president's popularity has been buoyed by December's tax cut package, especially as Americans begin to see results in their paychecks.

The Rasmussen Reports national poll was among the few that came closest to accurately predicting the results of the election that vaulted Trump to power.

Unlike other polls that ask questions in live telephone interviews, it relies on push-button phone calls – meaning voters who like Trump's performance in office aren't required to say so out loud to another person.

Some political scientists have called the result 'The Trump Effect,' a phenomenon that explained how social distaste for the president might depress his numbers in polls that use live operators.

SOURCE

*******************************

Columbine attack survivor and Colorado House Minority Leader Patrick Neville (R-45) is a strong proponent of arming teachers for self-defense

Neville was first elected to office in 2014 and has introduced his bill each year since that time without success. He hopes this year will be different because of the increased attention paid to the defenseless posture of unarmed teachers and staff.

The Washington Times reports Neville’s contention that more Columbine students would have survived the April 20, 1999, Columbine attack if faculty and/or staff had been armed to take out the attackers. And he believes arming teachers now will protect future students from evil men who are planning attacks.

He described his legislation: “This act would allow every law-abiding citizens who holds a concealed carry permit, issued from their chief law-enforcement officer, the right to carry concealed in order to defend themselves and most importantly our children from the worst-case scenarios.”

SOURCE

******************************

Dept. of Labor:  Still enforcing Obama policies

As described below, Department of Labor policy and practice supports illegal immigrants in at least three ways. This shouldn’t be surprising. Illegal immigrants had no better friend in the Obama administration, and few anywhere in American, than Tom Perez, Obama’s Secretary of Labor.

Here is how Perez used the DOL to promote the interests of illegal immigrants. First, an Obama administration-era memorandum of understanding between the DOL, the EEOC, the NLRB and DHS/ICE prohibits ICE from conducting enforcement activities against illegals when a DOL, EEOC, or NLRB investigation is pending.

This seems indefensible. Why should illegal immigrants and their employers be exempt from ICE enforcement activity merely because a DOL investigation is pending? It’s almost as if the Obama administration has carved out its own “sanctuary city.”

Second, the Wage and Hour Division (WHD) of the DOL invests a significant amount of its budget conducting investigations and collecting back wages for illegal immigrants. This wouldn’t bother me if the budget for investigating and litigating wage and hour violations were unlimited, but it is not. By devoting resources to seeking back wages for illegal immigrants, the DOL is short-changing victims of pay act violations who are in this country legally, including American citizens.

A 2015 Report from DOL’s Office of Inspector General on WHD’s back wage distributions found that from 2010 to 2015, WHD transferred $72 million in back wages to the Treasury Department for employees it could not locate. It’s likely that a large portion of these funds were collected for illegal immigrants no longer in the country or not willing to contact DOL to claim the money. Thus, even from a purely pragmatic standpoint, the DOL’s resources would be better spent pursuing back pay on behalf of citizens and lawful residents.

Third, the DOL has entered a number of partnerships with Central American, South American, and Asian Pacific Government to facilitate complaints against employers by their citizens, regardless of immigration status. I don’t think our government should be devoting resources to encouraging complaints by illegal immigrants that apparently may immunize them from visits by ICE to their workplaces.

One year into the Trump administration, these pro-illegal immigrant policies remain intact. It’s my understanding that Secretary of Labor Alex Acosta has shown no interest in undoing any of them. The issues have been raised with Acosta, but he seems bent on ignoring them. From all that appears, he’s fine with the status quo, including the government’s own “sanctuary city” program.

As was the case during the Obama administration, illegal immigrants have no better friend in high office than the Secretary of Labor.

Unfortunately, this comes as no surprise. At both the Justice Department and the DOL, Acosta has been unwilling to take action that would alienate leftists. He has raised inaction to an art form.

At DOL, far from making regulatory roll back a priority, he has taken what can euphemistically be called “a cautious approach” to controversial policy matters. For example, although he withdrew the Obama Administration’s interpretation of “independent contractors” under the Fair Labor Standards Act with respect to home health registries, he has done nothing to prevent DOL employees from continuing to use it, which they do aggressively. Senator Rubio complained about this in a letter to Acosta.

Acosta is so unwilling to offend the left that he has not removed any of the Obama/Perez holdovers on the DOL’s Administrative Review Board (ARB), the influential body that issues final agency decisions for the Secretary of Labor in cases arising under a wide range of worker protection laws — more than three dozen of them. The members of this Board serve entirely at the pleasure of the Secretary. Acosta had the right to dismiss them the day he took office. Yet, four of the five remain in place (the other left a month or two ago on his own accord).

Given his track record, including his unwillingness even to cut the low-hanging fruit at the ARB, it was predictable that Acosta wouldn’t alter DOL policy favoring illegal immigrants. But what were the odds that President Trump would not disturb the aggressive pro-illegal immigrant, anti enforcement policies put in place by Barack Obama and Tom Perez? Until he appointed Acosta, they were slim indeed.

SOURCE

*****************************

Bad science and government are a destructive combination

In modern America, there is a little-known government entity, the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), which is an arm of the Center for Disease Control. NIOSH has launched more than 1,000 lawsuits costing companies hundreds of millions of dollars over the past fifteen years due to their determination that a naturally occurring as well as synthetically produced chemical, diacetyl, is linked to injuries and deaths involving microwave popcorn workers among others. 

There is only one problem – their science may not be right.

So what is diacetyl?  It is a naturally occurring chemical that is found in low concentrations of fermented foods like butter, beer and yogurt. It is also made synthetically to add buttery flavor to popcorn, chips and even coffee. Safe to eat in trace amounts, according to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the question is what quantity of the chemical is safe to inhale.

Bronchiolitis obliterans also known as popcorn lung is no joke, despite its almost comic book descriptor, but it is reasonable to ask whether NIOSH jumped the gun when they created the wave of lawsuits based upon their findings.

Years after the initial NIOSH finding, the Toxicology Excellence for Risk Assessment (TERA) produced a 2008 report, which casts strong doubt on whether diacetyl is actually the villain that NIOSH and trial lawyers have made it out to be.  TERA states, “The causal link between diacetyl and the onset of bronchiolitis obliterans is not certain.”

NIOSH itself is listed among the recent sponsors of TERA at the outset of its report, so while the funding came from the food industry, it is safe to conclude that the contrary conclusion to NIOSH’s earlier findings should be taken seriously.

Additionally, the highly respected chemical toxicology firm, Cardno ChemRisk, has studied the impacts of diacetyl extensively over the past decade.  In a study published in Critical Reviews on Toxicology, they wrote, “We found that diacetyl and 2,3-pentanedione exposures from cigarette smoking far exceed occupational exposures for most food/flavoring workers who smoke.” One line down they continue, “Further, because smoking has not been shown to be a risk factor for bronchiolitis obliterans, our findings are inconsistent with claims that diacetyl and/or 2,3-pentanedione exposure are risk factors for this disease.”

The argument against NIOSH’s findings can even be found within the Obama administration’s Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), where after eight years of controversy over regulating diacetyl, they chose not to regulate the chemical in the workplace. When Obama’s radical OSHA decides not to act, it should serve as a touch point for trying to get to the real truth of the matter.

Meanwhile, like the Trojan War of old, the trial lawyer bar is besieging the walls of business on many fronts, looking for weaknesses that might allow them to hit a massive payday.  When it comes to diacetyl lawsuits, NIOSH is the Trojan horse that has been wheeled behind those walls, unleashing a horde of trial lawyers looking for industries to sue.  It doesn’t matter to them whether diacetyl is the agent of illness, only that they can convince a jury, using NIOSH as their lead witness, that it does. 

Given the fact that there is serious and reasonable doubt about the causal factors of bronchiolitis obliterans, combined with the Obama Administration’s determination to not impose  workplace standards, it is time for a common sense approach to diacetyl.

Bruce Fein, a former senior ranking Reagan Administration official recommends that the federal government set up a process similar to the one undertaken in 1977 in examining saccharin.  He wrote in the West Virginia Record, “In 1977, the FDA proposed a ban on saccharin as a human carcinogen required by the Delany Amendment.  Congress balked.  It passed the Saccharin Study and Labelling Act which placed a moratorium on the ban but required labels warning that saccharin could cause cancer.  After two decades of further study, the National Toxicology Program delisted saccharin as a carcinogen in 2000.

“Congress should consider comparable oversight of NIOSH’s recommended worker exposure limits for diacetyl.”

This seems like a reasonable approach to what heretofore has been an intractable problem that NIOSH and the credibility of the federal government have been used as the cudgel in legal cases, when their determinations are disputed by multiple respected alternative studies.

It’s time to get to the right answer on diacetyl, rather than having the trial bar use one agency’s claims, that another agency of government has chosen not to act upon, to drive businesses engaged in innocuous activity like grinding coffee beans into legal hell. 

SOURCE

******************************

For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated),  a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

***************************