monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

A post-Brexit trade deal between the U.K. and U.S. could be in danger if Donald Trump doesn’t get invited to the wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, according to the author of a controversial new book about the U.S. president.

Michael Wolff told the Mail on Sunday that Trump would resent any snub and the so-called special relationship could be damaged unless he “gets what he wants.”

Trump “doesn’t like being snubbed and wants to be the center of attention all the time,” Wolff said.

Everything I’ve done is 100 percent proper. That is what I do, is I do things proper.

In one of his first calls with a foreign leader after being elected, Mr. Trump spoke with the Pakistani prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, and gushed that he was a “terrific guy.”

“Mr. Trump said that he would love to come to a fantastic country, fantastic place of fantastic people,” Mr. Sharif’s office said in a statement describing the call. “Please convey to the Pakistani people that they are amazing and all Pakistanis I have known are exceptional people.”

More recently, Mr. Trump switched to threatening them, saying on Twitter that Pakistan had “given us nothing but lies & deceit” and accusing it of providing “safe haven to the terrorists we hunt in Afghanistan.”

The public humiliation outraged Islamabad, giving an opening to China, which moved within 24 hours to praise Pakistan’s fight against terrorism. Pakistan then agreed to adopt the Chinese currency for transactions, to improve bilateral trade.

François Heisbourg, a French defense and security analyst, commented tersely about Mr. Trump’s anger this way: “Pushing Pakistan into an exclusive relationship with China.”

Steele talked – and talked a lot – to the FBI. Steele told the left-leaning magazine Mother Jones that he first took the material to the FBI "near the start of July." As a result of their talks, Steele and the FBI reached a tentative agreement whereby the FBI would pay Steele to continue the anti-Trump work. All the while, Steele was also working for the opposition research firm Fusion GPS – his dossier was the result of a Fusion anti-Trump project funded by the Clinton campaign.

Steele briefed reporters on what he had found. In a London court case, Steele's lawyers said that in September 2016, Fusion GPS directed Steele to brief reporters from the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, the New Yorker, Yahoo News, and, later, Mother Jones. Steele did each briefing individually.

As an EPA intern, I was barred from mentioning climate change

...Combing through the old tweets, I noticed that some had links to the EPA’s information on climate change, but the links were now dead. I had to leave the links out of my draft tweets, erasing paths that citizens had once been able to follow to learn about the science. I understood that policies change from administration to administration, but could science, based on years of research, really become outdated, too?

I was also asked to look at the EPA’s Instagram account to get a sense of what the agency wanted to focus on in its social media. Under the Obama administration, many images on the account featured EPA employees from across the country, as well as Superfund sites turned into parks — and even scientist Bill Nye . Under the new administration, EPA chief Scott Pruitt appeared in every picture or video through the first months — often with one of his quotes, such as “We as a nation can be both pro energy and jobs and pro environment. . . . We don’t have to choose between the two.” (Since then, the images have been more varied, though many still show Pruitt.)

Russia has played Americans bigtime, quite successfully. But not by compromising Trump. They played the chump-ass MSM and managed to tear the USA almost in half by doing it.

Taking Soviet propaganda at face value this way was completely misleading, as talking with ordinary Russians might have revealed even at the time. Duranty’s prize-winning articles quoted not a single one – only Stalin, who forced farmers all over the Soviet Union into collective farms and sent those who resisted to concentration camps. Collectivization was the main cause of a famine that killed millions of people in Ukraine, the Soviet breadbasket, in 1932 and 1933 – two years after Duranty won his prize.

Some of Duranty’s editors criticized his reporting as tendentious, but The Times kept him as a correspondent until 1941. Since the 1980’s, the paper has been publicly acknowledging his failures. Ukrainian-American and other organizations have repeatedly called on the Pulitzer Prize Board to cancel Duranty’s prize and The Times to return it.

This is obviously the work of a very stable genius.

Trump’s emotional and mental limitations should debunk a number of rationalizations from his devoted cultists, who insisted he was the best choice in 2016, cheered his first year in office and continue to pretend he’s fit for office. He’s sounding presidential. No, he’s reading off a teleprompter, likely with very little comprehension. He’s playing four-dimensional chess with Kim Jong Un. No, he’s impulsively lashing out, with the risk of provoking a deadly clash. He’s a master manipulator when he shifts from position to position, sometimes in the same sentence. No, he likely doesn’t realize what contradicts what or remember what he originally said. His use of alternative facts is a brilliant scheme to control the press narrative. No, he’s incapable of processing real information and driven by an insatiable need for praise and reaffirmation.

Russia has played Americans bigtime, quite successfully. But not by compromising Trump. They played the chump-ass MSM and managed to tear the USA almost in half by doing it.

blatham wrote:

Stable genius gives America a lesson in proper grammar

Who was it that said that a genius would always be opposed by a confederacy of stupid people? Mark Twain?

"When a true genius appears in this world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him."

Even after the dissolution of Trump’s voter commission, critics worry that its mission will live on

Quote:

Even after the dissolution of Trump’s voter commission, critics worry that its mission will live on

WP

The central organizing principle of the Republican Party, at this point, is helping Trump cover up his crimes

Stable genius gives America a lesson in proper grammar

Quote:

Everything I’ve done is 100 percent proper. That is what I do, is I do things proper.

This is a country I don’t want looking foolish, and it’s not going to look foolish as long as I’m here

This is a country I don’t want looking foolish, and it’s not going to look foolish as long as I’m here