monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

Inside the coming war between the United States and the United Nations

Unfortunately, the incarceration rates includes possession of drugs, which in some states are now legal.

It’s been less than a week since Syrian Prime Minister Bashar al-Assad thanked Russian President Vladimir Putin for helping “liberate Aleppo.” But that isn’t stopping Russian propagandists—and their allies on the American fringe—from denying that civilians were bombed there at all.

Both Kremlin-backed networks and American far right websites have adopted and deployed the Western buzzword “fake news” for the very real bombings in Aleppo. Worse, they’re dubbing private American citizens “professional propagandists” for starting fundraisers in support of afflicted Syrian civilians.

Aleppo has been the home of a forced evacuation over the past several weeks—leaving traditional Western media reporters unable to gain firsthand access to the atrocities. But reports from nonpartisan, international human rights groups and videos from the scene show bombed-out buildings and dead civilians in the streets.

People wondering why Republicans are so hell-bent on repealing Obamacare even though that would cost 20 million Americans their health insurance haven’t been heeding the old investigator’s maxim to “follow the money.”

The path leads to the Affordable Care Act’s tax provisions, and the discovery that repeal would provide the wealthiest taxpayers with an immediate tax cut totaling $346 billion over 10 years. Every cent of that would go to taxpayers earning more than $200,000 a year ($250,000 for couples). As Nicholas Bagley of the University of Michigan observed a few days after the election, the imperative of handing their wealthy patrons a gift of this magnitude may well outweigh their solicitude for the mostly middle- and low-income constituents whose individual insurance plans would be at risk from repeal.

“However ambivalent Republicans may be about health reform,” he wrote, “they are not at all ambivalent about big tax cuts to the wealthy.”

"It will relegitimize middle-class dependence for 'security' on government spending and regulation. It will revive the reputation of the party that spends and regulates, the Democrats, as the generous protector of middle-class interests. And it will at the same time strike a punishing blow against Republican claims to defend the middle class by restraining government."

Sorry roger. Not sure what you mean there.

My reply was supposed to be a big "So What?"

While Mr. Tillerson’s Exxon has stopped funding several groups that loudly denied climate science, it still funds organizations that pursue a broader agenda of fighting measures to address climate change, including carbon taxes.

Naomi Oreskes, a Harvard historian, said the positions held by the company and Mr. Tillerson still constitute climate denial, but in a “clever and sophisticated” form. “It is, in my view, what makes it more concerning,” she said, “because many people don’t scratch the surface to see what lies beneath.

Trump, appearing at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Fla., was asked what he thought about the Obama administration’s plans to sanction Russia for what U.S. intelligence officials say was state-sanctioned hacking of Democratic organizations, the targeting of state election systems and meddling in the U.S. presidential election.

“I think we ought to get on with our lives,” Trump said. “I think that computers have complicated lives very greatly. The whole age of the computer has made it where nobody knows exactly what’s going on. We have speed, we have a lot of other things, but I'm not sure we have the kind of security we
need.”

Supporters of Mr. Netanyahu argue that Mr. Obama has now only inflamed the Israeli right and encouraged more settlement-building, as if this Israeli government would otherwise show restraint. This is the cynical logic of the settlement movement: When the world is silent, Israel can build settlements; when the world objects, Israel must build settlements. Under any scenario, settlements will grow, and the possibility of a two-state solution will recede.

You gotta admit, the man has a talent for Omnibabble

Trump also fired back against questions about potential conflicts of interest over his sprawling business empire, faulting the media for turning it into an issue.

“It is not a big deal,” he said. “You people are making that a big deal, the business.”

Quote:

I take it that worse even than epistemological stupidity in your pretentious lexicon.

george
Increasingly, you're having trouble responding to a post of mine without insulting me personally. I'm not going to play that game with you. Where you write something here that avoids this, I'll continue reading it.