monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

Didn't someone say to ignore everything someone says before the word but?

It is because Bannon was more or less a big producer and director to the Trump show, without Trump, the whole 'Trumpism' just fades away.

Will Democrats run on impeachment in 2018 midterms?

Liberal billionaire Tom Steyer, who has spent $20 million to promote impeachment, sent a copy of the Wolff book to all 535 members of Congress. Steyer’s NeedToImpeach.com petition collected 4.1 million signatures. He told a California radio station KQED Friday: “It is an open-and-shut case, that he has met the criteria for impeachment. We're supportive of the Mueller investigation, he is investigating two out of the nine criteria that this president has met.”

“Steyer’s assumption is that Trump committed espionage with Putin. If proven, he would be quite right, but it hasn’t been proven,” conservative legal commentator and author Andrew McCarthy told Fox News. “The country will not broadly find it attractive if there is a lack of evidence. Fair-minded people will not want to impeach. Smart Democrats know it’s a dumb idea.”

McCarthy nevertheless believes Democrats will feel pressure from a rabid base to run on impeachment, and some members could fear a primary if they aren’t on board.

“The base can make Democrats do politically stupid things,” said McCarthy, former chief assistant U.S. attorney in New York. “If the Democrats’ front and center issue is impeachment, they will not win in the midterms. It would be a bad strategy to run on.”

“Many Democrats will want to impeach Trump even if they don’t have anywhere near the numbers in the Senate,” McCarthy said. “That’s in part because they hate Trump and in part because they’re still sore about the Clinton impeachment 20 years ago.”

Only Presidents Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton were impeached in the House, where it takes just a majority, and both were acquitted in the Senate, where it takes a two-thirds supermajority to remove.

Sroka, spokesman for Democracy for America, a liberal activist group that endorses and raises money for Democratic candidates, claimed the impeachment push has public support.

A Wall Street Journal-NBC poll last month found 41 percent of Americans want Congress to hold impeachment hearings. Of that, 70 percent of Democrats, 40 percent of independents and 7 percent of Republicans back a House inquiry. Sroka is taking a just-you-wait approach on the Senate numbers. “We’ll see what two-thirds looks like,” Sroka said.

Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III has raised the likelihood with President Trump’s legal team that his office will seek an interview with the president, triggering a discussion among his attorneys about how to avoid a sit-down encounter or set limits on such a session, according to two people familiar with the talks.

Mueller brought up the issue of interviewing Trump during a late December meeting with the president’s lawyers, John Dowd and Jay Sekulow. Mueller deputy James Quarles, who oversees the White House portion of the special counsel investigation, also attended.

The special counsel’s team could interview Trump very soon on some limited portion of questions — possibly within the next several weeks, according to a person close to the president who was granted anonymity to describe internal conversations.

“This is moving faster than anyone really realizes,” the person said, who said Trump is comfortable participating in an interview and believes it would put to rest questions about whether his campaign coordinated with Russia in the 2016 election.

However, the president’s attorneys are reluctant to allow him to sit down for open-ended, face-to-face questioning without clear parameters, according to two people familiar with the discussions. Since the December meeting, they have discussed whether the president could provide written answers to some portion of the questions from Mueller’s investigators, as then-President Ronald Reagan did during the Iran-contra investigation. They have also discussed the obligation of Mueller’s team to demonstrate they could not obtain the information they are seeking without interviewing the President.

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Oil and gas companies are holding online lease sales that exclude the public

With the BLM’s move to online, privatized lease sales, a company will be able to navigate nearly the entire leasing process in full anonymity. First, the process through which parcels of land are nominated for auction is anonymous. Following a successful lawsuit for conservation groups who forced the BLM to disclose the names of companies that nominated leases,12 these companies argued that anonymity was necessary to protect their competitive interests. The BLM complied by issuing a memorandum in 2013 allowing anonymous bids.13 Second, the use of lease brokers—discussed in more detail below—enables companies to shield themselves from public view in the bidding process and after the sale results are posted. Finally, the use of an industry-owned privatized system for conducting the auctions limits the opportunity for public protest of parcels and makes it impossible to see who is bidding on publicly owned resources. This further exposes the system to collusion and other abuses.

Of particular concern is the fact that the Western Energy Alliance (WEA)—a trade organization that lobbies for its oil and gas industry members—specifically called for online lease sales to cut public protests, and hence the public, out of the process.14 In response to protests at a Colorado lease sale in 2016, WEA’s then-vice president revealed that she had requested that the BLM “get rid of this circus by just holding online auctions.”15 The fact that these internet-based auctions will silence public protest is significant in the wake of the Trump administration’s action to eliminate protections for more than 2 million acres of Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante. The announcement slashing protections for these monuments was met with swift and overwhelming public opposition, and the online, privatized system of leasing these lands will considerably stifle opportunity for public protest.

If Mueller tries to interview Trump it will be over after two words: "You're fired."

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This focus on the left obscures the same PC tendencies on the right.

This near total failure of the right (in America, at least) to recognize "political correctness" as a feature of its own worldview is quite interesting. One day, I'll try to write that up with the attention it deserves.

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It's going to take a long while, if ever, for the US to recover the prestige it has lost with this sociopath at the helm.

Forget "prestige", that's probably gone forever. What the US may possibly recover post-Trump is a modicum of respect and trust from other nations.

He may as well shoot himself in the foot if he tries to get Mueller fired.

I am not sure how they will claim the Trump presidency hasn't been "conservative" in order to rebrand themselves. In my opinion, it's been ultra conservative with all deregulations and the relaxing of environmental rules, the tax bill favoring the richest in the US, the efforts to take away health insurance...I mean, it has been a huge conservative feast from the WH. None of which helps the very the people who elected him. If only we had (democrats, left leaning independents..)had another flamboyant spokesperson to get the message across for the mid term elections.

The President from September, 1901 to March, 1909, was Theodore Roosevelt, Jr. Far from being a conservative, he was considered by the Republican party, of which he was a life-long member, to be a dangerous radical. Fascism, per se, did not exist then, nor was there a "proto-fascist" equivalent. When you slander Theodore Roosevelt in such a cavalier manner, you demonstrate a profound ignorance.