It will be a while before even the discussions begin:
House Speaker Paul Ryan said Thursday that Republican lawmakers will try to push through tax reform and infrastructure bills — two key policies for investors — in the spring after focusing on health care.
“It’s just the way the budget works that we won’t be able to get the ability to write our tax reform bill until our spring budget passes, and then we write that through the summer,” Ryan said on “Fox and Friends.”
He added that an infrastructure package “comes out of our spring budget, as well.”
Black history month remarks: http://theconcourse.deadspin.com/a-full-transcript-of-donald-trumps-black-history-month-1791871370
Prayer breakfast remarks:
Like every president since Dwight D. Eisenhower, President Donald Trump attended the annual National Prayer Breakfast. But the 45th president was the only one to ask the bipartisan gathering to pray for Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Trump did address faith in his speech Thursday, but he also took jabs at “Celebrity Apprentice” after the show’s producer Mark Burnett introduced him.
“When I ran for president, I had to leave the show. That’s when I knew for sure I was doing it,” Trump said. “And they hired a big, big movie star, Arnold Schwarzenegger, to take my place. And we know how that turned out. The ratings went right down the tubes, it’s been a total disaster, and Mark will never, ever bet against Trump again. And I want to just pray for Arnold if we can for those ratings, OK?”
And then there’s this type of thing:
In a report released at 4:56 a.m. Thursday from Reuters:
“U.S. military officials told Reuters that Trump approved his first covert counterterrorism operation without sufficient intelligence, ground support or adequate backup preparations.
“As a result, three officials said, the attacking SEAL team found itself dropping onto a reinforced Al Qaeda base defended by landmines, snipers, and a larger than expected contingent of heavily armed Islamist extremists.”
Early reports on the troubling raid have also repeatedly stated that the Obama administration knew full well about the target, but did not execute the raid for “operational reasons.” What that generally means is that the Obama administration surveyed this situation and did not feel that they had the intelligence needed to run the operation.
One of the three military officials who spoke to Reuters confirmed this very thing. They said, “The decision was made … to leave it to the incoming administration, partly in the hope that more and better intelligence could be collected.”
And this:
Renewed fighting in east Ukraine has become the first major international test of the Trump administration and could embolden Russia without a strong U.S. response, the chairman of the powerful Senate Armed Services Committee told the president on Thursday, urging him to follow through on permission Congress has already granted to send weapons to Ukraine.
Sen. John McCain pointed out in a letter to President Donald Trump that forces backed by Moscow began testing the shaky cease-fire lines around the Ukrainian town of Avdiivka almost immediately after Trump spoke by telephone with the Russian president on Saturday.
“Vladimir Putin is moving quickly to test you as commander-in-chief,” the Arizona Republican wrote. “America’s response will have lasting consequences.”