monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

Distasteful or even alarming though he may be, Donald Trump has presented a tantalizing possibility of a Republican who would take “a wrecking ball to many of his adopted party’s orthodoxies, proposing a vision of right-wing politics far more mercantilist, nationalist and statist than anything we’ve seen from the post-Reagan, post-Goldwater G.O.P.,” as Ross Douthat, among many others, put it. But the emerging cast in Trump’s administration, from the appointment of Tom Price to run the Department of Health and Human Services to the slew of bankers and other millionaires, suggests something different: On domestic policy, he has not wrecked his party’s domestic platform, but continued and even intensified it. And the single most emblematic development is the report that Lawrence Kudlow is the leading candidate to run his Council of Economic Advisers.

The CEA chair is typically an economist. Kudlow is not, a fact on his résumé that qualifies rather than disqualifies him for his job. Kudlow is a fanatical adherent of supply-side economics. While many conservative economists believe that, all things being equal, lower tax rates can produce faster growth, Kudlow believes it with a religious intensity. No serious body of economic work could substantiate his beliefs. Indeed, even hard-core conservatives in academia — like Greg Mankiw, a Republican economist with a deep moral disdain for progressive taxation — have nonetheless described the arguments used by Kudlow as those of “charlatans and cranks.” And yet his views have come to dominate the Republicans Party despite decades of unremitting failure. What is remarkable about Kudlow is not just how flamboyantly and demonstrably wrong he has been, but that his influence over the Republican agenda has actually increased.

Trump’s Budget Director Choice Is an Ominous Sign of Conservative Extremism to Come

Quote:

For eight years, it has been the most exclusive, and arguably most important, daily meeting in Washington. Each morning, President Obama gathers his inner circle for the Presidential Daily Briefing, a run-through of the most important intelligence from around the world.

The rules under Obama have been strict and unyielding: No substitutes are permitted if one of the six regular attendees is out sick or traveling. No straphangers are allowed to linger in the Oval Office and watch.

Unlike just about every other meeting involving Washington officialdom, this one rarely, if ever, leaks.

Now it looks as if the PDB’s status as Washington’s most indispensable briefing could be coming to an end. “I get it when I need it,” said President-elect Donald Trump, who so far is taking the PDB only a few times a week. “I’m, like, a smart person. I don’t need to be told the same thing and the same words every single day for the next eight years.”

No one with a functioning brain stem ought to be surprised by Trump in this. Everything that comes out of his mouth is evidence of how intellectually lazy he is, how uninformed he is, and how irresponsible he is going to be as President.

Then, knowing what else we know about him (the amoral facility to lie about anything, his unthinking reactive behavior, his complete inability to accept responsibility for everything he does, etc just imagine how he will react given another terror attack in the US. That's just ******* terrifying.

Oh gawd. Talk about a hot mess we are soon to have.

For all his bluster and overstatement, Donald Trump has proved himself to be far more aware of the situation around him and in our country, and far more insightful in understanding it, than has been the hapless, self-absorbed and utterly irresponsible Hamlet occupying the White House. Happily we will soon be rid of him.

Yes we want people to have photo IDs... those who are legal to vote... you know like citizens of the United States of America. That should be a requirement

While it’s not always possible for the president to have a good deal of knowledge about the immediate situation he confronts, whether it’s health-care policy or budget deficits or Iran’s internal politics, it certainly helps. Since Trump has neither worked a day in government nor evinced the barest interest in policy, there will be almost no decisions to which Trump will bring any base of knowledge.

That means that perhaps more than any president in history, he’ll have to rely on the people who know more about that particular area than he does to give him the information he needs to make the best decision. This is something all presidents must do, but Trump will be further hampered by what appears to be a deep distrust of anyone who actually has that kind of knowledge.

I suspect that distrust comes from what is obviously his profound intellectual insecurity — no actual smart person goes around saying things like “I’m, like, a smart person” and “Let me tell you, I’m a really smart guy” and “I have a very good brain” and “Look, if I were a liberal Democrat, people would say I’m the super genius of all time” and “Look, I went to the best school, I was a good student and all of this stuff. I mean, I’m a smart person,” unless they have some serious issues.

But for whatever reason, Trump is positively contemptuous of those with expertise, as we saw over and over during the campaign. Trump would assure us that “I know more about ISIS than the generals do,” or “I know more about renewables than any human being on earth” or “I think nobody knows more about taxes than I do, maybe in the history of the world.” These are things he actually said and seems to believe.

Quote:

Reince Priebus, incoming chief of staff for Donald Trump, on Sunday morning said that Trump will not yet accept the CIA's conclusion that Russian hacks into Democratic groups were an attempt to boost Trump to victory.

"I think he would accept the conclusion if these intelligence professionals would get together, put out a report, show the American people they’re actually on the same page, as opposed to third parties through The Washington Post," Priebus said on "Fox News Sunday" when asked if Trump accepts the consensus of the intelligence community on the Russian hacks and their intent.

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/priebus-cia-russia-hack

Well of course these two slimey jerks will say this. The truth doesn't work for them, particularly given Trump's prior blatant falsehoods on the hacking and on the "mandate". But notice Preibus' tossing in the typical liberal media notion with his reference to the reporting by the WP.