Category: Uncategorized

How the Department of Education Fails to Properly Monitor College Accreditation Agencies

Overview

The Department of Education must strengthen its oversight over accrediting agencies to ensure that they are keeping low-quality educational providers from accessing federal financial aid.

Introduction and summary

In February 2018, a U.S. Department of Education advisory committee gathered in a dimly lit Washington, D.C., hotel ballroom to consider the fate of the four organizations that oversee the majority of America’s colleges and grant access to nearly 60 percent of the roughly $120 billion in federal financial aid awarded each year.¹ These four private nonprofits under review were accreditation agencies that determine which colleges are of sufficient quality to participate in the federal aid programs.²

View the complete September 19 article by Antionette Flores on the Center for American Progress website here.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi said on Wednesday that Corey Lewandowski deserved to be held in contempt of Congress for his combative performance before the House Judiciary Committee, where the former Trump campaign manager repeatedly refused to answer questions about his testimony to special counsel Robert Mueller.

Pelosi told Democrats during a private meeting on Wednesday that Democrats should have held Lewandowski in contempt “then and there,” according to multiple sources in the room.

View the complete September 18 article by Heather Caygle on the Politico website here.

LOS ANGELES — President Trump on Wednesday announced he intends to name the administration’s envoy for hostage negotiations, Robert O’Brien, as his next national security adviser.

“I have worked long & hard with Robert. He will do a great job!” Trump tweeted.

O’Brien will replace John Bolton, whom Trump fired last week and later criticized for failing to align with the administration’s agenda on North Korea and Venezuela.

View the complete September 18 article by Brett Samuels on The Hill website here.

Office is investigating role the president and his family business played in hush-money payments before the election.

State prosecutors in Manhattan have subpoenaed President Donald Trump’s accounting firm to demand eight years of his personal and corporate tax returns, according to several people with knowledge of the matter.

The subpoena opens a new front in a wide-ranging effort to obtain copies of the president’s tax returns, which Trump initially said he would make public during the 2016 campaign but has since refused to disclose.

The subpoena was issued by the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office late last month, soon after it opened a criminal investigation into the role that the president and his family business played in hush-money payments made in the run-up to the election.

Both Trump and his company reimbursed Michael D. Cohen, the president’s former lawyer and fixer, for money Cohen paid to buy the silence of Stormy Daniels, a pornographic film actress who said she had an affair with Trump. The president has denied the affair.

View the complete September 16 article by Ben PRotess and William K. Rashbaum on The Star Tribune website here.

The progressive push to raise taxes on the rich is gaining new momentum.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), who has already proposed a wealth tax to raise funds for a variety of new government programs, on Thursday unveiled a plan to expand Social Security by creating two taxes on wage and investment income for wealthy Americans.

The proposal comes as Warren enjoys a long stretch of momentum in the Democratic presidential primary race that has lifted her in polls and put her side-by-side with former Vice President Joe Biden during last week’s debate.

View the complete September 16 article by Naomi Jagoda on The Hill website here.

The fight over the fundraising platform WinRed highlights worries among Republicans that they won’t win back the House.

BALTIMORE — House Republicans sparred behind closed doors with Trump-aligned political operatives at a GOP retreat over the new online fundraising platform backed by party leaders and the White House.

The fight Thursday over WinRed’s data and competitiveness highlights long simmering tensions between GOP lawmakers and operatives allied with the president, and underscores the growing frustrations in the party as they try to hash out a strategy to win back the House next year.

The creation of WinRed was a top priority for the GOP that has been plagued with implementation problems over the last year. If the initiative isn’t a success, Republicans fear their chances of taking back the House and holding on to the White House in 2020 will be imperiled.

View the complete September 13 article by Melanie Zanona on the Politico website here.

President Donald Trump appears to be concerned about his poll numbers. While that’s nothing new – his approval numbers are definitely the worst in U.S. history, having never broken 50%. His numbers are also on the decline, dropping six points in two months.

So he’s doing what he always does: lies.

Here’s Trump lying just yesterday about his approval rating – among Republicans:

View the complete September 10 article by David Badash from The New Civil Rights Movement on the AlterNet website here.

View the complete September 9 article by Robert Barnes on The Washington Post website here.

TROUBLED Prestwick Airport, owned by the Scottish Government, has been involved in negotiations with Donald Trump in an effort to return it to profit – at the same time as senior SNP figures have been calling for the US presidential candidate to be banned from the UK, Scotland on Sunday can reveal.

The Scottish Government was last night accused of hypocrisy and urged to disclose the precise nature of its relationship with the controversial Republican frontrunner after a tranche of correspondence detailed Prestwick Airport’s extensive dealings with Trump.

Officials at the loss-making Glasgow Prestwick Airport and Trump’s executives have explored working together to “win” business and the “integration” of their operations.

View the complete February 21, 2016 article (yes, that old, the Scottish press has been pursuing this issue that long) here.

House Democrats are launching a broad investigation into whether President Trump, his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani and others sought to exert pressure on the Ukrainian government to help Trump get reelected in 2020 by targeting a possible political opponent, former Vice President Joe Biden.

Three House committees sent joint letters to White House and State Department demanding documents related to whether Trump and Giuliani sought to pressure Ukraine to target Biden, a 2020 Democratic White House hopeful.

A growing public record indicates that, for nearly two years, the President and his personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, appear to have acted outside legitimate law enforcement and diplomatic channels to coerce the Ukrainian government into pursuing two politically-motivated investigations under the guise of anti-corruption activity,” the chairmen of the House Intelligence, Oversight and Reform, and Foreign Affairs panels wrote in a joint statement.

View the complete September 9 article by Olivia Beavers on The Hill website here.