monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

But as I have you on ignore, I doubt you'd find any compelling reason to speak to me.

Ever since taking office, President Trump has been condemning leaks, leakers and the journalists they leak to.

“I’ve actually called the Justice Department to look into the leaks,” Trump said in February. “Those are criminal leaks.”

Only days after he took office — as we know from a leak — Trump asked then FBI-director James B. Comey to consider jailing journalists who publish government secrets.

And just a few days ago, Trump again ranted about leakers who “should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”

So, I think we understand the president’s position — except that he’s in favor of leaks that damage his political opponents. Recall his campaign cry: “I love WikiLeaks!”

Paul Steiger stakes out the opposite position. The revered former managing editor of the Wall Street Journal (and founder of ProPublica, the investigative nonprofit) put it this way:

“It is not the publishing of these secrets that threatens national security. Publishing these secrets threatens the secret-keepers. It protects the public interest by letting us know what powerful people are doing when they think no one is looking.”

Accepting a journalism award, Steiger summed it up: “We need more journalists revealing more secrets, not fewer.”

He’s right...

Meanwhile -- and it pains me to write this -- our president acted like a clod, a heartless and dull-witted thug in sending out a series of tweets. He -- commander in chief and leader of the Free World -- first retweeted an unverified, unofficial Drudge headline about the unfolding terrorist attack.

Then he aimed to bolster his Muslim travel ban (which is not supposed to be a Muslim travel ban). "We need to be smart, vigilant and tough," he tweeted. "We need the courts to give us back our rights. We need the Travel Ban as an extra level of safety!" (Aside from the inappropriateness of President Trump's tweet, he fails to grasp that the courts in these cases are reaffirming our rights against an overreaching, discriminatory edict.)

The gnawingly persistent question in the Trump years so far is a relatively simple one: Is this reparable? By which I mean: Can Trump’s admixture of malevolence, corruption, and incompetence be survived without permanent damage? Is this a minor heart attack from which this democracy and the world can soon recover … or is it a major one whose consequences are, in some respects, permanent?

The truth is: We don’t yet know (although Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris climate accord is beyond depressing). Can we at some point reconstruct a common set of facts after such a shameless torrent of lies and fantasies from the very top? Can some minimal level of decency and dignity be returned to the White House and to our public discourse? Is there any viable synthesis to be struck between the two Americas divided by a widening gyre of mutual incomprehension? The long run suggests all of this is possible, if currently hard to envision. Time heals. America survived the 1860s and the 1960s. But there’s one thing about today’s political darkness that will be close to impossible to undo.

And that’s the very concept of a united, democratic West...

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And a consequence of the progressive ideological extremism will be the chokehold of government directed bureaucratic oversight and control of every aspect of our lives.

This could be a quote from a John Birch tract.

"control of every aspect of our lives". Like whether your daughter or granddaughter unable to marry another woman? Or have access to abortion or to have her birth control needs covered in her medical plan? Or you grandson being tossed into the clink for choosing a joint over a bottle of scotch? Or your community, in majoritarian consensus, being unable to pass local firearms ordinances they deem necessary? Etc.

Once again, you simply ignore that real world fact that the most free and prosperous nations in the world operate with governmental structures which you insist must axiomatically be described as without liberty and destined to failure. That is nutty. It's John Birch nutty (which is high on the nutty scale).

And as I've pointed out before, your ideological dream (not much different from Norquist's) has no exemplar nation which can offer evidence of workability, either in prosperity, actual liberty, enviable health and welfare of citizens, and relative citizen contentment.

BuzzFeed, which published some pictures from the rally, wrote that “dozens of Trump supporters” gathered for the event. The Washington Post similarly reported that “dozens” showed up to applaud the president’s decision to withdraw from the international agreement.

Postscript: The Washington Post’s report added, “More than a thousand people gathered near the Washington Monument Saturday to rally at the March for Truth, calling for an independent investigation into alleged collusion between Russia and President Trump’s 2016 campaign.”

You outlined your own imagined conservative ideal end state implying that it would soon result from the supposedly conspiratorial expansion of Sinclair's local TV & radio system

Theresa May has said Donald Trump was “wrong” to criticise Sadiq Khan over his handling of the London Bridge attacks, and praised the London Mayor who, she said, had been "doing a good job."

At a speech in London, The Prime Minister was asked several times whether President Trump had been right to criticise the Mayor, avoiding the question on each occasion. Eventually, asked if there was “anything Donald Trump could say” which she would be prepared to criticise, Mr May replied: “I have been critical of Donald Trump before. I don’t think he should have pulled out of the climate agreement.

"I think Sadiq Khan is doing a good job and it’s wrong to say anything else - he’s doing a good job."

I touched on this before but it needs a spotlight.

After the attack in London, Trump's first communication via Twitter was to retweet an item from the Drudge Report.

This guy has the biggest and surely one of the most capable intelligence networks on the planet and he gets his initial data from Drudge and then repeats it. Then he went to play golf.

A phrase like "amateur hour" here is insufficient. This is like a drunk plumber picking up a scalpel to do brain surgery.

Trump is like a child with a gun. Dangerous and ignorant. And scary.

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First of all it appears the tweet is fraudulent.

Why do people post this crap then? How does it serve their argument? It's one thing to make a stupid comment that backfires or is shown to be false but why post a piece of blatantly fake news? And why, on this site, are these stories nearly always submitted by the right?

Donald Trump is repeating his criticism of Sadiq Khan, after London underwent a terror attack.

“At least 7 dead and 48 wounded in terror attack,” the president wrote on his Twitter account soon after the attack, “and Mayor of London says there is ‘no reason to be alarmed!’”

He then repeated that criticism in even stronger terms.

"Pathetic excuse by London Mayor Sadiq Khan who had to think fast on his "no reason to be alarmed" statement," he wrote. "MSM is working hard to sell it!"

But Mr Trump's criticism is based on a quotation entirely removed from its context. He appears to be confused about what happened in part because Fox News repeated the same short quote but without the full remarks from the mayor of London.

What Mr Khan actually said was that there is no reason to be alarmed about the increased police presence on the streets after the attack.

“My message to Londoners and visitors to our great city is to be calm and vigilant today," Mr Khan said. "You will see an increased police presence today, including armed officers and uniformed officers.

"There is no reason to be alarmed by this. We are the safest global city in the world. You saw last night as a consequence of our planning, our preparation, the rehearsals that take place, the swift response from the emergency services tackling the terrorists and also helping the injured.”

You really do need to do this discussion thing with more care for honesty/accuracy, george.