monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

Catherine Deneuve and Others Denounce the #MeToo Movement

Quote:

What the **** does Trump have to do with this?

Very little. That's the point.

Netanyahu’s son brags about prostitutes, $20 billion deal for friend’s dad in strip club rant

The conversation between the young men, lubricated with alcohol, meandered past several ribald topics: disparaging, misogynistic comments about women; money borrowed to pay a stripper, a late-night search for a prostitute.

Three years later, recordings of their exchange have shaken Israel's political establishment and rippled around the world because of one of the men involved is Yair Netanyahu, the 26-year-old son of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

The recording was aired Tuesday on Channel 2, Israel's top-rated news broadcast, according to the Associated Press, and comes at a politically difficult time for the elder Netanyahu, who is at the center of criminal investigations and whose government is passing unpopular legislation to curb business on the sabbath.

Judge blocks Trump decision to end young immigrant program (Reuters)

It is decisions such as this we should be the loudest about...

I was speaking of Session's decision to end the DOCA program in the first place.

Instead of ending it, disrupting countless lives, congress should get their stinking act together and come up real decisions which don't involve deporting all the dreamers who have positively contributed to our society.

Responding in October 2010 to demands that he implement immigration reforms unilaterally, Obama declared, "I am not king. I can't do these things just by myself." In March 2011, he said that with "respect to the notion that I can just suspend deportations through executive order, that's just not the case." In May 2011, he acknowledged that he couldn't "just bypass Congress and change the (immigration) law myself. ... That's not how a democracy works

“Romney opens up the discussion, illustrating the fight for the soul of a fractured party,” said Peter Wehner, a veteran of three Republican administrations and a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.

Wehner, who advised Romney’s 2012 campaign, added: “Trump’s failures have left him without an iron grip on the party, leaving an opening for different faces and people like Romney, an alternative approach.”

On the right, however, activists who have a deep affinity for Trump’s upheaval of the GOP said a Romney revival would represent if anything the gasp of an old order in a party captured by the president — calling the bloc of establishment Republicans united mostly by a loathing of Trump.

'What's sauce for the goose...'
This is very wrong

Trump administration does abrupt about-face, says no oil drilling off Florida coast
After pressure from Republican Gov. Rick Scott to reverse course, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke declared offshore drilling “off the table” in politically important Florida.

The unconstitutionality of Obama's actions were confirmed when Obama tried to implement a second, similar program in 2014 called the Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents program, or DAPA. Like DACA, DAPA provided an administrative amnesty for illegal aliens who came to the U.S. as adults and gave them work authorizations and access to government benefits.

The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a nationwide injunction against DAPA, which the Supreme Court allowed to stand. As the Fifth Circuit said, the fact that the president declined to enforce the law and remove illegal aliens "does not transform presence deemed unlawful by Congress into lawful presence and confer eligibility for otherwise unavailable benefits based on that change. "Under our Constitution, Congress has plenary authority over immigration. The president only has the authority delegated to him by Congress – and Congress has never given the president the power to provide a pseudo-amnesty and government benefits to illegal aliens."

... I think it’s very much up in the air for me, you know, how fundamental the effect of Trump is.

Could it be ultimately a kind of unfortunate parenthesis in the history of the Republican Party and of conservatism, modern American conservatism? Or is it an inflection point where the party has to fundamentally rethink itself, or you need to have a new party, or conservatism has to be almost fundamentally redefined, or you have to say, “that was a good 60-year run for American conservatism, but time for something else”?

That, I think, is really, for me, an open question, and more of an open question at the end of this year [2017] than it was at the beginning. I think if we had had this conversation 10 months ago, I would have said, “You know, I think we can get beyond Trump.”

But now the degree of rationalization by Republicans, among Republicans, the degree of excuse-making for Trump, the degree to which Trump has changed, apparently, Republican voters’ views.

..You’d be foolish not to rethink your judgment of some aspects of conservatism, insofar as it’s enabled Trump, insofar as so many conservatives are enabling Trump. It has made me rethink certain aspects of conservative doctrine and dogma...