monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

You've been misinformed here. The Aegis missile system in Poland is meant to protect Paris and London against Iranian nukes, much like the longer-range system that it replaced.

Per a PPP poll that will be released today...

Only 45% of Trump voters believe Donald Trump Jr. had a meeting with Russians.

Just consider the disinformation mechanisms in place to produce this result.

Textual mapping is a popular function; a recent project, in Denmark, used artificial intelligence to comb through thirty thousand witchy folktales and geographically plot their elements. (It revealed, among other things, that witchcraft allegations in Protestant Denmark tended to arise in the vicinity of Catholic monasteries.)

“We’re going to win. We’re going to win so much. We’re going to win at trade, we’re going to win at the border. We’re going to win so much, you’re going to be so sick and tired of winning, you’re going to come to me and go ‘Please, please, we can’t win anymore.’ You’ve heard this one. You’ll say ‘Please, Mr. President, we beg you sir, we don’t want to win anymore. It’s too much. It’s not fair to everybody else.’” Trump said. “And I’m going to say ‘I’m sorry, but we’re going to keep winning, winning, winning, We’re going to make America great again.”

GOP Relearns Hard Lesson: Benefits Are Hard to Take Back

WASHINGTON — In the end, Republicans relearned a lesson that has bedeviled them since the New Deal: An American entitlement, once established, can almost never be retracted.

Since the day the Affordable Care Act passed Congress, Republicans have vowed to overturn it. In the beginning, many voters were with them, handing the Republican Party some of the tools: a sweeping rejection of House Democrats in 2010 — a rejection of government reach — followed by the Senate in 2014.

But in the intervening years, as millions of Americans have become insured under the law that was derisively tagged with President Barack Obama’s name, the health care program has become more and more popular, even with Republican governors.

In red states where Mr. Obama and Democrats remain highly unpopular, the law’s reach into American lives could not be denied. This was true for communities ravaged by the opioid crisis, which health care money helped treat; for rural states where hospitals had become all but dependent on increased Medicaid payments that covered the bulk of their patients; and for poor constituents with chronic medical conditions who had come to take it as an article of faith that their insurance companies could not deny them coverage for pre-existing conditions.

Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, said she was besieged by constituents who urged her to oppose the Republican plan: a conservative Republican who was worried about the impact on her grandson, who has cystic fibrosis; a small-business owner in a town where the hospital depends on Medicaid for more than 60 percent of its revenues and is the second-largest employer; a working single mother and her 9-year-old daughter who, for the first time in the girl’s life, were both able to get affordable insurance.

Congressional Republicans, emboldened by their narrow majority, pushed their luck from Day 1. Not content simply to pull apart the health care law, they took the repeal efforts as a license to make broad-based changes to Medicaid, with provisions that would have capped spending annually and ended the open-ended entitlement for the poor after 50 years, without so much as a public hearing. This was a bridge too far for moderate Republicans and those from states where the party commands fierce loyalty but where poor residents benefit in some form from the law.

Republicans had a math problem on both ends.

On the right, senators like Rand Paul of Kentucky and Mike Lee of Utah were going to be satisfied only with a bill that repealed the Affordable Care Act in its entirety.

But senators from states that had expanded their Medicaid programs — like Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia, Rob Portman of Ohio and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska — had to contend with alarmed governors and other state officials who faced the choice of leaving constituents uncovered or raising taxes to extend their insurance. Attempts to mollify them were largely unsuccessful: Ms. Murkowski, for example, was awarded a special provision to compensate for the expected explosion of premiums in her state. But this concession also exposed her to potential criticisms of legislative kickbacks.

The process itself was not helpful. Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, tried to work with a select group of senators who largely represented a conservative view. But without hearings, committee work or a public drafting of the bill — all marks of the original health care law — members on both sides of the divide felt bruised and left out.

Congressional Republicans got little help from the White House, which was at turns disengaged and counterproductive. White House officials and many Republicans seemed to be more dedicated to their true love, changes to the tax system, than to their flirtation with health care.

There was no attempt to work with Democrats, who had no intention of repealing the law. Yet this left Republicans unable to alternately woo or terrify red-state Democrats into lending a helping hand.

Now, it is likely they have no choice. Republicans will probably have to do what Mr. McConnell predicted earlier this month: offer an olive branch and work quickly with Democrats to shore up ailing online health care marketplaces. From there, members of both parties have said they want to tweak the existing law to help small businesses and reduce premiums.

But until then, the health program known as Obamacare remains the law of the land.

McConnell practically challenged conservative critics of the bill to vote against moving the process ahead. How? By publicly dangling in front of them what they have said they wanted if the current effort falls apart: a so-called clean repeal of the law known as Obamacare, with a two-year delay to come up with a replacement.

But there is a catch: to get that vote, they will now have vote to proceed to consideration of the House-passed repeal and replace bill, which Senate GOP leaders have been trying to reconcile with their own version (through an arcane procedural tactic known appropriately as budget reconciliation).

In the end, Republicans relearned a lesson that has bedeviled them since the New Deal: An American entitlement, once established, can almost never be retracted.

Hillary Clinton sided with Russia on sanctions as Bill made $500G on Moscow speech

"If you want to talk about having relationships with Russia, I'd look no further than the Clintons,” Deputy Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said at a briefing last week. “Bill Clinton was paid half a million dollars to give a speech to a Russian bank, personally thanked by President Putin.”

Shortly before Bill Clinton’s speech in 2010, members of Congress pushing the sanctions bill had asked Hillary Clinton to refuse visas to Russian officials implicated under the policy.

The State Department denied the request.

Bill Clinton was paid $500,000 by the Russia-based finance company Renaissance Capital for his June 29, 2010 speech in Moscow to its employees and guests attending the company's annual conference. Renaissance’s Russian investment bank executives would have been banned from the U.S. under the law.

According to a memo from Clinton’s presidential campaign team later published by WikiLeaks, however, the Clinton campaign was able to stop the presses.

"We killed a Bloomberg story trying to link HRC’s opposition to the Magnitsky bill a $500,000 speech that WJC gave in Moscow,” Jesse Lehrich, on the Rapid Response Communications team for Hillary For America, boasted on May 21, 2015.

A royally fucked up "country", the US of A, layman!