Mick Mulvaney
Credit: Business Insider

In a meeting with bank executives, Mick Mulvaney, interim director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, told them they should increase their campaign donations to have leverage over lawmakers, reported the New York Times.

“We had a hierarchy in my office in Congress, Mulvaney said at the American Bankers Association conference in Washington. “If you’re a lobbyist who never gave us money, I didn’t talk to you. If you’re a lobbyist who gave us money, I might talk to you.”

Mulvaney’s goal is to stop funding from independent entities such as the Federal Reserve. This action would give lawmakers influence on the bureau’s actions. He said this tactic was, “fundamental underpinnings of our representative democracy. And you have to continue to do it. If you came from back home and sat in my lobby, I talked to you without exception, regardless of the financial contributions.”

A spokesman for Mr. Mulvaney responded to a comment made by John Czwartacki. He said: “He was making the point that hearing from people back home is vital […]

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HENDERSONVILLE, Tenn. — The Music City campus of the Trinity Broadcasting Network is about a half-hour drive from Music City itself, in a placid Nashville suburb on a bend in the Cumberland River where the main road through town is called the Johnny Cash Parkway. TBN, America’s largest Christian television network, acquired the complex in 1994 after the death of country singer Conway Twitty, who had operated it as a sprawling tourist attraction he called Twitty City. Last year, TBN renovated Twitty’s personal auditorium, leveling the floor, adding large neon signs and a faux-brick backdrop under the original Corinthian columns. The resulting TV set looks like an urban streetscape framed by a Greek temple.

On a February night, in his large office just above the auditorium, the network’s biggest star is making last-minute plans for what’s shaping up to be a busy evening. First, Mike Huckabee fields some logistics for dinner at his nearby condo, where he will host three couples who won the privilege in a charity auction. He takes a call from the actor Jon […]

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PHOENIX, ARIZONA — As residents of Arizona’s eighth congressional district cast ballots in a special election to replace former Rep. Trent Franks (R-AZ) in Congress, roughly 140,000 of them may be unaware they are eligible to vote because they did not receive the ID card the county is required to send them after they register.

According to the Arizona Republic, Maricopa County officials have not sent all voters the cards they can use to cast a ballot under Arizona’s voter ID law because of an issue with the company used to print the materials. The paper reports that just 60,000 ID cards have been mailed to people who recently registered or changed their registration, while about 140,000 have not been sent.

“It’s not that big of an impact on voters because we have redundancies in our system,” said Fontes, a Democrat who took office in 2016 after he campaigned on a […]

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Over the last year, the media have published story after story after story about the declining price of solar panels and wind turbines.

People who read these stories are understandably left with the impression that the more solar and wind energy we produce, the lower electricity prices will become.

And yet that’s not what’s happening. In fact, it’s the opposite.

Between 2009 and 2017, the price of solar panels per watt declined by 75 percent while the price of wind turbines per watt declined by 50 percent.

And yet — during the same period — the price of electricity in places that deployed significant quantities of renewables increased dramatically.

Electricity prices increased by:

• 51 percent in Germany during its expansion of solar and wind energy from 2006 to 2016;
• 24 percent in California during its solar energy build-out from 2011 to 2017;
• over 100 percent in Denmark since 1995 when it began deploying renewables (mostly wind) in earnest.

What gives? If solar […]

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American universities are losing out to colleges in other countries in the race to enroll international students, and they’re blaming President Donald Trump.

Foreign competitors are taking advantage of Trump’s anti-immigration rhetoric, aggressively recruiting the types of foreign students and faculty who would have typically come to the United States for their higher education. The data already show that U.S. colleges are falling behind foreign competitors during the Trump era.

New foreign student enrollment in the U.S. dropped by 3 percent during the 2016-17 school year, and that decline is projected to double this school year, data show. At the same time, universities overseas are seeing increases as high as the double digits. The decline in foreign students enrolling in American colleges is just the latest evidence of Trump’s immigration policies shutting doors in America. The U.S. is also granting fewer visitor visas to people from around the world.

Trump is responsible for the decline in student enrollment, U.S. universities argue — especially his travel ban, which goes before the Supreme Court on Wednesday. Dozens of higher education groups […]

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