Then you see what happened in the united kingdom. i was glad to see nikki haley, our ambassador to the united nations, take such a strong stand, together with our allies in the united kingdom, against that sort of activity. but they re out of control, russia is, and that needs to be dealt with one way or the other. this is one way for us to discourage that. the president just met with the irish prime minister, and we are told that the president did respond to a question about russia from our colleagues here. there s a lot of activity here in the briefing room. as customary, the tv pool will be playing that out shortly. i m giving you a preview to wait for new comments from the president on the russia issue, as part of the st. patrick s day festivities that are beginning at white house. the president did respond to a question at the end of, what is the typical oval office ceremonial greeting of another official, the irish prime
Everything that we ve seen across the country this year. and before we get that tape rolled by the tv pool, just want to recap something reported by the associated press on the details of the rates that have been set. michael steele, follow me here. the corporate rate, 21%, not the 20% the president asked for, not the 22% some suggested to bring that deficit down. the personal rate, the top rate going from 39.6% to 37%. this is good for the wealthiest americans. and among the tax breaks, they agreed that homeowners can deduct interest on the first $750,000 of a new mortgage. that s down from the current rate of $1 million. but still it looks like no benefit at all on the state and local taxes. so, that is sort of a summary. we re about 15 seconds away from seeing this video from the president. michael steele, some final thoughts there? real quick on that, i still think the state and local tax issue is going to be a big one for those big states that also
thank you for your service, appreciate it. keep up the great work. tomorrow. [inaudible conversations] we had heard the president talk about a national prayer day tomorrow, he talked about that yesterday as well from the oval office. you can see him there talking to texas governor greg abbott, we are going we are having a little bit of problems with the microphones, the tv pool is kept pretty far back, sometimes they don t want us to hear, that s just what the secret service does but we have our poll incomes the control room listening and at any point that we can hear what the president is saying, we will go ahead and go back to that audio.
Releasing crude oil, that helps crude oil prices, that helps bring on refineries to help them ramp back up but doesn t help the gasoline prices because the storage reserves are holding crude oil not gasoline and the crude oil has to go to refinery first before it becomes jet fuel. yeah, we ve also watched jet fuel, update our viewers right now that the president is arriving at stadium, that s where the houston texan play. that being one of the places that they are turning into the shelter for folks not only sheer size but also what s inside, live pictures coming in from our pool camera, this is the tv pool into part of nrg, what part of complex it is, i m not quite sure, with us michael webber,
And walked through the center where there was kids playing and set up play areas. people were asking, when are you going to release fema funds and that was folks in the crowd who were shouting, not folks with the tv pool, so it s clear that folks on the ground are very concerned about when they re going to get money and when fema is going to be able to begin doing that. also noteworthy that just now the ap putting out an alert, many houston ultra polluted super fund sites are flooded, concerns about toxins and began to have issues with chemicals there. it s amazing how widespread the damage is going to be and we saw so much from the air and the flood, once those flood waters recede they ll be all sorts of problems that we know about and a whole lot of unknown unknowns.