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Mornings on the Mall

Thursday July 11, 2017

Hosts: Mary Walter and Vince Coglianese

5am – A/B/C Best tippers Think you tip better than the next guy at a restaurant? If you’re a baby boomer, live in the Northeast or vote Republican, you probably do. http://www.creditcards.com/credit-card-news/best-tippers-survey.php

5am – D Trump: Congress wouldn’t ‘dare’ leave without health care bill; Mike Pence urges Senate Republicans to pursue full Obamacare repeal if consensus can’t be reached (Washington Examiner) Vice President Mike Pence said Monday that Republicans should move forward with a bill that only repeals Obamacare if they can’t generate consensus around a plan that repeals and replaces the healthcare law. “If they can’t pass this carefully crafted repeal-and-replace bill, we ought to repeal only,” Pence said in an interview on Rush Limbaugh’s show. Senate GOP plan Obamacare repeal vote for next week. Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) said on Monday that Senate Republicans want to roll out a new draft of their bill to repeal and replace Obamacare as soon as this week, with a vote next week.  “We’re just trying to get a good picture of what the alternatives are, and hopefully next week we’ll be prepared to take the bill up and vote on it,” the No. 2 Senate Republican told reporters.  He added that Republicans are still waiting to hear back from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) but could release an updated draft of their bill by the end of the week. A Senate GOP aide said senators are expected to get briefed on revisions that have been made to the bill at Tuesday’s lunch, and revised text of the bill could be released later this week.  Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.) earlier on Monday told CNBC he believed that a bill might be floated as early as Monday. US Capitol Police say 80 demonstrators were arrested Monday amid protests over Senate GOP health care bill.

5am- E Chelsea Clinton fires back at Trump over Ivanka G-20 seat-holding controversy (Fox Business) Ivanka Trump, first daughter and adviser to her father President Donald Trump, caught international attention Saturday when she sat in for the president during a meeting at the G-20 summit in Hamburg, Germany. The eldest Trump daughter took over her father’s seat during a working session on the “Partnership with Africa, Migration and Health.” Some of the members at the table included world leaders such as Russian President Vladimir Putin, British Prime Minister Theresa May and Chinese President Xi Jinping. A White House official told CBS News that Ivanka was sitting in the back and only briefly joined the main table when the President had to step out.

6am – A/B Piercings for children Tattoos & piercings for kids. How young is too young? At what age do you allow your kids to get piercings?

6am – C Drinking more coffee leads to a longer life, two studies say (CNN) The new study shows that there is a stronger biological possibility for the relationship between coffee and longevity and found that mortality was inversely related to coffee consumption for heart disease, cancer, respiratory disease, stroke, diabetes and kidney disease.

6am – D Comey friend: no memos given to me were marked classified (CNN) The Columbia University Law School professor and confidant of former FBI Director James Comey refuted a charge by President Donald Trump and his advocates in the media Monday: that Comey shared classified information with journalists. Daniel Richman, with whom Comey shared at least one memo — the contents of which Richman shared with New York Times reporter Michael Schmidt — said President Trump was simply wrong. “No memo was given to me that was marked ‘classified,'” Daniel Richman told CNN. “No memo was passed on to the Times.” Richman did share the contents of one memo, he said, but “the substance of the memo passed on to the Times was not marked classified and to my knowledge remains unclassified.” During Senate testimony in June, in which he said he gave memos to someone he described as a Columbia University professor, Comey said he specifically wrote the memos to avoid including classified information. “My thinking was, if I write it in such a way that I don’t include anything that would trigger a classification, that’ll make it easier for us to discuss, within the FBI and the government, and to — to hold on to it in a way that makes it accessible to us,” Comey told senators. On Sunday, writing in The Hill, John Solomon reported that, “More than half of the memos former FBI Director James Comey wrote as personal recollections of his conversations with President Trump about the Russia investigation have been determined to contain classified information, according to interviews with officials familiar with the documents.”

6am – E Free stuff: Bananas, Slurpees, and Chick-fil-A A team of “banistas” will be passing out some potassium to morning commuters outside Union Station on July 11. There won’t be money in this banana stand, though, because the fruit will be free, courtesy of Amazon. The company mans two permanent community banana stands in Seattle, where employees hand out thousands of bananas a day (they’ve distributed more than 1.7 million since starting in 2015). Whenever July 11 rolls around, it means a sweltering heat wave, a long time until the next holiday off work, and free Slurpees. And every year on this day, 7-Eleven stores celebrate 7/11 by giving you free frozen drinks. This year is also a milestone for the brand, so expect some serious fanfare. On Tuesday, the convenience chain officially turns 90 years old and it expects to dole out a million Slurpees on the house. On Free Slurpee Day, you can go into any 7-Eleven between 11 a.m. and 7 p.m. and get a free small Slurpee. This year the brand is flaunting a cotton candy flavor that tastes just like the carnival treat — in addition to the usual Wild Cherry and Coca-Cola flavors, and that strange cinnamon-flavored Pepsi Fire. In honor of “Cow Appreciation Day,” participating Chick-fil-A restaurants will give out free entrées to anyone wearing “cowlike” attire. Guests in cow clothes may select any breakfast, lunch or dinner entrée. Kids dressed like a cow may select a Kid’s Meal. The freebie runs from opening until 7 p.m. Tuesday.

6am – F Trump administration cancels plan to build new FBI headquarters to replace agency’s crumbling building downtown D.C. (The Washington Post) The federal government is canceling the search for a new FBI headquarters, according to officials familiar with the decision, putting a more than decade-long effort by the bureau to move out of the crumbling J. Edgar Hoover Building back at square one. The decision follows years of failed attempts by federal officials to persuade Congress to fully back a plan for a campus in the Washington suburbs paid for by trading away the Hoover Building to a real estate developer and putting up nearly $2 billion in taxpayer funds to cover the remaining cost. Officials from the General Services Administration, which manages federal real estate, said they plan to announce the cancellation in a phone call with bidders and in meetings on Capitol Hill on Tuesday morning. They spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to disclose the decision before it was announced.

7am – A INTERVIEW – REP. LOUIE GOHMERT (R-TX) – Texas Congressman

Topic: What we can reasonably expect from Congress prior to the August recess

• We should not be taking any kind of recess until we repeal Obamacare, make progress on tax reform
• Selling across state lines equalizes healthcare costs, will make it cheaper
• Need to end exemption from antitrust/monopoly laws that healthcare companies have

7am – B Metro to explore selling station naming rights (WMAL) Board documents released ahead of Thursday’s meeting indicate staff thinks naming rights are a possibility at four stations – Navy Yard-Ballpark, Metro Center, Gallery Place, and L’Enfant Plaza. That would come on top of other aggressive advertising efforts already available, like “Station Dominations,” in which one advertiser plasters the entirety of a station, and train wraps. Metro admits the idea was tossed around in 2012, and it did not get a favorable response. Riders were mainly looking for concise station names that easily tell them where they are. There was also concern about having brand names associated with historic landmarks.

7am – C Ax throwing restaurant coming to D.C. (NBC4 Washington) Alcohol and axes. A combination that’s coming to D.C. in September. News4’s Jim Handly reports. It’s just like darts – except it involves a 6-pound, sharpened and precisely thrown ax. To play, participants hurl axes at a target positioned 10 to 15 feet away. After each player has thrown five axes, the points are tallied up, and a winner is declared. Kraken Axe founder Steuart Martens already had his foot in the door of the D.C. entertainment scene, having helped create other events including Drink the District and Taste of D.C. But when he and his friends were looking for a new way to hang out, his mind wandered to axe throwing.

7am – D INTERVIEW – DAN CALDWELL – Director of Policy for Concerned Veterans for America

Topic: Serve Veterans First Act (VA accountability)

• Likely there are between 350-500 employees at the VA that are doing union work full-time
• VA is a massive government bureaucracy
• Trump administration has started to right the ship, begun to make the VA more transparent, increasing accountability
• Senators being pressured to oppose bill by American Federation of Government Employees

7am – E College law professor (Howard University) is found guilty of sexual harassment because he gave students a question about a bikini wax (Daily Mail) A college law professor has been found guilty of sexual harassment because he gave students a test question about a bikini wax. Reginald Robinson included the question in a test for students at Howard University in Washington, D.C. in September 2015. It described a hypothetical situation in which a person sued a beauty salon claiming to have been touched inappropriately by a therapist after falling asleep while undergoing a bikini wax. The question asked whether a court would support the person’s claim against the salon owner as opposed to the therapist and if it would even be upheld given that the person had consented to the somewhat invasive wax on their genitals. Two students complained to the university, claiming that the question made them feel as though they had to reveal if they had ever undergone bikini waxes themselves. They said they did not like the use of the word ‘genitals’, according to The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE).

8am – A/B/C Donald Trump, Jr. under fire for Russia meeting; If you were him, would you have taken the meeting? (Politico) The White House is rallying around the president’s oldest son after Donald Trump Jr. acknowledged meeting last June with a Kremlin-linked lawyer promising information about Hillary Clinton, deepening the Russia-related scandal for those closest to the president.

8am – D INTERVIEW – LARRY KUDLOW – Host, CNBC’s The Kudlow Report

Topic: Healthcare bill

• Repealing Obamacare on its own will open the door to barrage of Democrat criticism; is a cop-out and not politically astute at all
• Needs to be a clear Republican bill
• 14 days until August recess of 34 days; Republican leaders should vote immediately to stop August recess not just to tackle healthcare, but also taxes

8am – E Eleanor Holmes Norton: ‘Insult’ to say some residents may want to concealed carry (The Daily Caller) When asked by TheDC Monday following the press conference if law abiding residents in high crime neighborhoods may want to defend themselves with firearms, Holmes Norton responded, “The city has taken the position that the best way to defend yourself is not to be armed. So, your notion…is an insult– quite an insult to the wards that have greater crime. They have not come forward to me and say, ‘Congresswoman we want to conceal and carry.’ So, I suggest that you approach the people you’re talking about.”