West Palm Beach, Florida (CNN)President Donald Trump, once a critic of his predecessor's golfing, has visited one of his golf courses in Florida -- seemingly to play the sport -- five of the last seven weekends.

A president's golf play is far from controversial: In fact, it's the most common pastime of the country's leaders. But before he ran for office, Trump was the most fervent critic of the fact that President Barack Obama regularly hit the links with friends, aides and advisers, arguing that it showed the president was unserious about fixing America's problems.

Now that Trump is President, the comments are coming back to complicate his golf habit.

Trump has visited the two courses near his Mar-a-Lago estate -- Trump International Golf Course in West Palm Beach and Trump National Golf Course in Jupiter -- 10 times in the first two months of his presidency.
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Cera-Q is a protein hydrolysate, a unique mixture of amino acids extracted from the major protein in silkworm cocoons called fibroin. Cera-Q as a nutraceutical ingredient came out of the longtime consumption of the fibroin as part of traditional Korean medicine.

In the early 2000’s a team of PhD researchers in South Korea set about to identify the specific nutrients within the fibroin which would be most beneficial if consumed orally. Their work led to the discovery of the patented Cera-Q ingredient, which has been demonstrated in published human clinical trials to help improve memory, learning and overall cognitive performance.

To put it simply, Cera-Q is very special because it has a unique amino acid profile comprised mainly of glycine and alanine with a highly differentiated beta pleated sheet molecular structure. This structure and composition are important because they allow Cera-Q to bind very effectively to amyloid plaque, which tends to cluster around human neurons, impacting neuron and cognitive performance increasingly as we age. This binding has been shown to reduce the formation of amyloid plaque around neurons – think of it as a Velcro®-like effect.

Cera-Q has also been shown to increase glucose uptake to the brain, providing the brain with critical energy. Thus the evidence suggests that Cera-Q uniquely works via a dual path to support cognitive function, without stimulants or strange or artificial compounds.

FBI Director James Comey met separately with members of the Senate and House for highly classified briefings. Members went into the briefings looking for a firm answer from the FBI to the question of whether or not their was an ongoing investigation into possible ties between Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and Russia but emerged silent on that question and appearing visibly disturbed.

On the Senate side, Comey met with the Chair, Senator Chuck Grassley, and Ranking Member, Senator Dianne Feinstein, of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

After the meeting, Feinstein spoke very briefly with reporters who had been waiting for the pair to emerge from the briefing:

https://twitter.com/NBCPolitics/status/842118566358921216

Long-time observers of events on the Hill noted the unusually somber appearances of the Senators:

[blockquote style="border:solid 1px #000000;padding:10px;"] Phil Elliott ✔ @Philip_Elliott

I've seen Feinstein have the worried look on her face. This is more than that. She just met with FBI chief Comey.

4:56 PM - 15 Mar 2017

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The Trump administration’s budget outline released today has some shocking numbers when it comes to scientific research. “Make no mistake: These numbers would be crippling to much of the federal science apparatus,” says Matt Hourihan, the director of budget and policy programs at the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

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This “skinny” version of the budget contains at least $7 billion in cuts to science research programs, plus a 30 percent cut to the Environmental Protection Agency. Also painful: The budget seeks to cut 18 percent of the National Institutes of Health’s budget. The NIH provides the largest share of federally funded research dollars to universities across the country.

Other cuts include:

A $102 million cut to NASA’s earth science programs, eliminating four NASA Earth science missions completely.

A $900 million reduction in the Energy Department’s basic science research budget. The Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy — a $300 million program that provides grants for energy research — is wholly eliminated because “the private sector is better positioned to finance disruptive energy research.”
[font color="blue"]{for profit companies, for the most part, fund "product development" not what you would call "disruptive research". _B_USA}[/font]
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Most analysis of the American Health Care Act, the new House Republican plan for repealing and replacing Obamacare, has focused on the fact that it will take away health insurance from millions of Americans, including, eventually, millions of poor, elderly, and disabled Americans currently on Medicaid. It’s reasonable in light of that to ask what there is to like about the proposal.

The main answer, for Republicans is Congress, is that it also contains $600 billion in tax cuts — tax cuts that would save the wealthiest 0.1 percent of Americans nearly $200,000 each in a single year, according to a batch of analyses released by the Joint Committee on Taxation on Tuesday.

The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget helpfully combined them into a single table:




The single biggest tax cut included in the bill is the repeal of the 3.8 percent tax the Affordable Care Act applied to capital gains, dividend, and interest income for families with $250,000 or more in income ($125,000 for singles).
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While some in the Arizona Legislature move to shut down public protests, they might want to add an amendment to the bill with special sanctions for little old ladies who yell at police officers.

Body camera footage of a Feb. 16 immigration protest in Tucson shows a woman, reported to be 86 years old, approaching several police officers, pointing and yelling at them.

In response, a police officer pushes the woman to the pavement. As another protester — this one a 65-year-old woman — moves to older lady's side, the officer rushes forward and pepper sprays her.

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Senate Bill 1142 would expand the state’s RICO laws – the ones set up to combat organized crime – to target protesters. Should it become law, police will be able to seize the assets of anyone involved in a protest that turns violent -- regardless of whether they were the ones rioting.

Fortunately, the bill appears to be dead after it making national news last week, proving that not all of our leaders are totally insane. Still nothing is dead until the Legislature leaves town.
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To pay for an increase in defense spending, a down payment on the border wall and school voucher programs, among other things, funding was cut from the discretionary budgets of other executive departments and agencies. The Environmental Protection Agency, the State Department and the Agriculture Department took the hardest hits. The proposal also eliminates funding for these 19 agencies.

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In total, the budget proposes to eliminate funding for these 19 agencies:

African Development Foundation
Appalachian Regional Commission
Chemical Safety Board
Corporation for National and Community Service
Corporation for Public Broadcasting
Delta Regional Authority
Denali Commission
Institute of Museum and Library Services
Inter-American Foundation
U.S. Trade and Development Agency
Legal Services Corporation
National Endowment for the Arts
National Endowment for the Humanities
Neighborhood Reinvestment Corporation
Northern Border Regional Commission
Overseas Private Investment Corporation
U.S. Institute of Peace
U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness
Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars

Donald Trump earned 59 Four-Pinocchio ratings as a presidential candidate. Now that he’s president, he has continued his proclivity for making dubious, misleading or false statements. He also often repeats the same debunked claims even though they have been fact-checked. It’s hard to keep up with all of Trump’s rhetoric, so the Fact Checker is assembling in one place all of his suspect statements from his first 100 days as president. You can sort them by various categories and see how many times he has repeated the same false statement.
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President Clown-in-Chief, Donald Trump’s first official budget document includes massive changes to the one-third of federal spending going to “discretionary” programs. Programs to mitigate climate change are cut or eliminated across the government. Programs to assist the poor are slashed. And while almost every department would face large cuts, three would see sizable increases in spending: Defense, Homeland Security, and Veterans Affairs.

The impact of the cuts and hikes laid out in the document would be massive. Trump wants to fund a border wall, deportation raids, a hiring spree for Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and purchases of new F-35 fighter jets and a variety of Navy vessels. And it would dramatically hamper enforcement of environmental and labor regulations, end grant and loan programs for clean energy and disadvantaged regions, and significantly reduce funding for biomedical research.

The document is a “skinny” budget that ignores taxes and entitlements like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and food stamps. It only specifies changes to “discretionary” spending by agencies. In total, this is about a third of the overall federal budget; non-defense discretionary is about 16 percent.

The budget will not pass in full, and provisions are already provoking political backlash on Capitol Hill. It will be up to Congress to actually implement spending policy; Trump can only offer suggestions. But the document is revealing and important nonetheless. It gives a clear signal of the administration’s priorities on agency spending, and signals that it will support any efforts by Congress to crack down on international programs, environmental protection, and anti-poverty programs.
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[font size="3"]President Donald Trump’s debut budget proposal is a stark declaration of war on the future of the American economy that substitutes a curious mix of ideology and blind nostalgia for any effort to think critically about the actual needs of a 21st-century nation.[/font]

The war starts with reducing spending — even though an aging population, plus the government’s role in inherently labor-intensive activities like education and long-term care, militates overwhelmingly in favor of a somewhat larger role for the state. But it continues with the priorities Trump set for where the remaining cash gets spent.

The picture that emerges is overwhelmingly one of nostalgia — more money for men with guns, less money for education, caring, and pointy-headed science. But nostalgia is not memory. The midcentury economy Trump yearns for was, almost by definition, less technologically advanced and educationally intensive than today’s.

But it was an extraordinarily forward-looking time. Propelled by the imperatives of Cold War competition, the United States made investments on an unprecedented scale in institutions dedicated to education and research, while engaging in massive public-private partnerships to disseminate then-new technological marvels like cars, phones, and televisions.
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