monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

The best speech George Bush ever did.

Instances of the United States overthrowing, or attempting to overthrow, a foreign government since the Second World War. (* indicates successful ouster of a government)

Trump gives his team a '10' for its Puerto Rico hurricane response

CIA Director Mike Pompeo drew sharp criticism Thursday after wrongly stating that the U.S. intelligence community had found that Russian meddling did not tilt the 2016 presidential election.

Pompeo made the inaccurate claim at an event hosted by the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, a conservative think tank close to the Trump administration. His comments come amid growing evidence of Russian interference in last year’s campaign, the scale of which remains unclear.

“The intelligence community's assessment is that the Russian meddling that took place did not affect the outcome of the election,” Pompeo said.

The intelligence community has made no such assessment. A report by the CIA and the National Security Agency released in January found that the Kremlin hacked emails and disseminated propaganda in order “to help [then-candidate Donald Trump’s] election chances.”

But the report’s authors explained that they “did not make an assessment of the impact that Russian activities had on the outcome of the 2016 election.”

I see Sofia Lash Goth is back to her distraction attempt to change the topic from "her" president (as she said it) and to focus on her personal bête noire whom she began attacking at this site at least as long ago as 2003.

Don't feed the troll, sports fans--the topic of this thread is the fat boy in the White House.

He and his nutty band of true believers demand that we all believe that Russia is to blame for the election of Donald Trump.

Frank Rich‏Verified account @frankrichny 10h10 hours ago
So we've now reached the point where George W. Bush can pass for Churchill

A US museum says an Impressionist painting which President Donald Trump reportedly claims to own is a fake.
In a recent interview, Trump biographer Tim O'Brien said he was once told by the future president that his artwork was an original.
But the Chicago Institute of Art says the real painting, Two Sisters (On The Terrace) by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, has hung in its gallery for 80 years.
A museum spokesperson said it is "satisfied that our version is real".
The painting was gifted to the institute in 1933, spokeswoman Amanda Hicks told the Chicago Tribune.
The donor acquired it for $100,000 (£76,000) from an art dealer who bought it directly from the French Impressionist painter in 1881, she added.
But O'Brien said during a recent interview with Vanity Fair's Hive podcast that Mr Trump has repeatedly claimed to him that his version of the painting was authentic.
During a flight on Mr Trump's private jet while he was writing his 2005 book, TrumpNation: The Art of Being The Donald, O'Brien said he spotted the painting and asked about it.
"You know, that's an original Renoir," the author said Mr Trump had told him, adding that the property tycoon repeated the claim the following day.
"Donald, it's not," he recalled telling Trump. "I grew up in Chicago, that Renoir is called Two Sisters on the Terrace, and it's hanging on a wall at the Art Institute of Chicago.
"That's not an original."
The artwork was later apparently moved to Trump Tower, the author said, saying it was visible in the background of a CBS 60 Minutes interview that Mr Trump gave shortly after his election.
"I'm sure he's still telling people who come into the apartment, 'It's an original, it's an original,'" O'Brien said on the podcast.
Mr Trump sued O'Brien for $5bn because the author wrote in TrumpNation that rather than being a billionaire, his net worth was actually as low as $150m.
The defamation lawsuit was dismissed.

I heard he wrote it himself? Go figure.......

Quote:

I think Russia’s dabbling is no more than usual, and no more than ours.

Good girl! You've got Hannity and Limbaugh and Bannon and Trump for company with that one.

But let's take you at your word, shall we?

I guess it must be the case that you've isolated American troll farms in Kentucky and Alaska or somewhere pushing out memes designed to sew discord in the Russian electoral system? Or designed to forward one candidate while damaging another?

And you've got scads of evidence of Americans running covert missions for the same goals using thousands of bots that inundate social media and you have seen Facebook and Twitter executives describe these operations?

Name-calling. Sad footnote.

She just knows.

"Keep America safe" - the deadliest mass shooting committed by an individual on US soil happened a short time ago.

But it is not just the people of Northampton who are perplexed by crime trends. Surveys have shown that while most people in England and Wales believe lawlessness to be falling in the area where they live, the overwhelming majority believe it to be rising nationally, when it has actually fallen to its lowest level in decades. The Office for National Statistics (ONS) believes this may be explained by the way some crimes are reported in the media.

The experts are just as baffled as the public: like the economists who failed to foresee the global financial crisis, criminologists were taken by surprise by what happened during the years of recession that followed the crash. Public spending was cut, unemployment rose, incomes were squeezed, families resorted to food banks. And yet, against all expectations, the number of recorded offences fell.

The number of homicides in England and Wales rose by 71 to 574 in the 12 months to September 2015 - an increase of 14% fuelled by rises in knife and gun crime, official statistics show.

The rise in the number of homicides brings to an end a decade in which the murder rate in England and Wales has been falling despite the continued growth in the population.

The quarterly crime figures published by the Office for National Statistics show a 6% increase in overall crime to 4.3 million offences as recorded by the police in the 12 months to September alongside an apparent 6% fall as measured by the separate crime survey of England and Wales. The ONS said the 6% fall was not statistically significant compared with the previous year’s estimate.
The police-recorded crime figures include a 9% rise in knife crime and a 4% rise in gun crime, which are thought to reflect a rise in gang violence largely in London and Manchester. The rise in gun crime is the first recorded for eight years and includes a 10% rise in London.

The official statisticians say that a 36% rise in sexual offences, including the highest number of rapes since 2003 – at 33,341 – reflect a greater willingness of victims to come forward to report such crimes rather than a real surge in attacks.

The police-recorded figures also include a 27% rise in violence against the person offences, which the ONS said was largely driven by a 37% increase in incidents involving violence without injury as a result of increased recording by the police. The detailed figures also show falls in the number of robberies and snatch thefts.

Most knife crime in London is no longer gang-related, as young people increasingly carry knives for protection, status and safeguarding “criminal interests”, the Metropolitan police commissioner has said.

Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe told the capital’s first knife crime conference, which was convened by the mayor, Sadiq Khan, that the trend was changing.

He said: “By and large, it used to be gang members, but that’s not the case now. We’ve seen an increase in the number of other young people carrying knives, young people with no links to gangs. So at the moment, some 75% – three quarters – of all knife injuries among the under-25s are not gang-related. The 25% that are – this is around 450 offences in the last year, so about one a day – tend to be more serious, and gang members remain the most dangerous knife carriers, but the changing trend is clearly a concern.

Congressional Republicans voted on Thursday to make it more difficult for refugees from Syria and Iraq to come to the US as the fallout from last Friday’s Isis terrorist attacks in Paris continues.

In addition, more than half of the US’s governors have said they will no longer provide placement for Syrian refugees, arguing that they pose too great a risk to national security.

New Jersey governor and Republican presidential candidate Chris Christie has said his state will not take in any refugees – “not even orphans under the age of five”.

Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal has said he has directed state police to “track” the Syrian refugees in his state, something his state police have played down.

GOP presidential hopefuls Ted Cruz and Jeb Bush have suggested the US government prioritize Christian refugees.

Barack Obama has pledged to veto the legislation, and has condemned the anti-refugee comments as “un-American”, but experts worry the backlash could have dangerous consequences if these claims go unchecked.

“Sowing fear of refugees is exactly the kind of response groups like Isis are seeking,” said Iain Levine, deputy executive director for program at Human Rights Watch, on Thursday. “Yes, governments need to bring order to refugee processing and weed out militant extremists, but now more than ever they also need to stand with people uprooted from their homes by ideologies of hatred and help them find real protection.”