monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

Quote:

I almost feel sorry for Kelly

I gather the key word for you there is "almost". I'm not anywhere near "almost". The guy either:
1) agrees with Trump's actions and so, supports him
2) doesn't agree but gets a big pay raise and a high-status social position
3) is there to keep an unstable man from blowing up the nation or other nations

And if it is the last of those, he should stop doing what he's doing and speak honestly to the public.

I seldom read fiction but I hope others do. Congratulations

There are many other possibilities and combinations.

FBI investigating whether Russian money went to NRA to help Trump

The FBI is investigating whether a top Russian banker with ties to the Kremlin illegally funneled money to the National Rifle Association to help Donald Trump win the presidency, two sources familiar with the matter have told McClatchy.

FBI counterintelligence investigators have focused on the activities of Alexander Torshin, the deputy governor of Russia’s central bank who is known for his close relationships with both Russian President Vladimir Putin and the NRA, the sources said.

I don't think old georgie likes me anymore. I'm totally bummed.

David Frum, who is an author and conservative editor at the Atlantic magazine, thinks Republicans have backed themselves into a corner.

In Frum’s new book Trumpocracy, he argues that Republicans are wedded to an ideology that cannot succeed democratically. They have virtually abandoned the democratic process, he believes, and have chosen to support a demagogue who can push their unpopular agenda.

...The Republican Party has a platform that can’t prevail in democratic competition. This is one of the big themes of this book, and why I think this situation is so dangerous. When highly committed parties strongly believe [in] things that they cannot achieve democratically, they don’t give up on their beliefs — they give up on democracy.

As the outlook for conservatives and Republicans becomes more bleak, they’re going to face a choice: Either they accommodate some of the changes that are happening to American society, like universal heath coverage, or else they’re going to have to face up to the fact that what they believe can’t be achieved if everybody votes.

The new book “Trumpocracy” catalogs the damage that top never-Trumper David Frum says the president is doing to American institutions and the presidency.

That damage will last for a long time after Donald Trump, Frum, a writer for The Atlantic and a former speechwriter for George W. Bush, said in an appearance Tuesday on the NPR show On Point.

“It will be the work of a generation to get them to back to normal,” Frum told guest host John Harwood of CNBC. "Because one of the things Donald Trump has done is, he's discovered a lot of the things were never written down. They're not laws, they're just habits. Those habits are broken and once broken they're hard to put together.”

“It is not illegal for the president's family to use access to the president to make mega-million-dollar business deals. It just didn't used to happen. It's not illegal for the president to continue to operate a business while in office, it just didn't used to happen. It's not illegal for the president to spend a third of his time vacationing on his own properties and charge the taxpayer via the Secret Service.”

Have to break our laws to get in? Don't worry about it! We'll do all we can to make your criminal status temporary. We've already forced just about everyone in the country to stop describing you as what, by definition, you are: Criminals who have broken our laws and even the folks who insist on referring to you as illegal immigrants will never use the word "criminal" when referring to your criminal act of violating our immigration laws . You wouldn't believe how many of them we've forced to replace "illegal" with "undocumented" in their lexicons.

What’s more, amigo, while we work on amnesty, permanent citizenship and voting rights (let's not forget that!) we'll set up Sanctuary Cities to provide you with a safe harbor from the cruel storms of ICE deportation sweeps.

Don't have a job waiting for you when you get here? Not to worry niños y niñas, these cities of refuge that we've created will happily provide you with financial assistance, free healthcare, and even drivers licenses! What's more, we've expanded the program to Sanctuary States!

Your compassionate compadre Gov. Jerry Moonbeam in California may have be the first to go all out to welcome you, but he won't be the last. Why just recently we took over the governorship in the great state of New Jersey and our guy, Phil Murphy, is now calling the shots!

(Hey don’t worry, we know his name sounds Irish, and it’s true that he doesn’t have a drop of Latin blood in his veins but he’s the grandson of Irish immigrants and knows better than most that you immigrants are what have made America great! Never mind our Constitution and that we are a nation of laws, without people like Phil’s Grand Da and, Boss Tweed and Whitey Bolger, our Constitution would just be so much papel higiencio)

Now the first thing out of the box Tio Phil did was to announce that he was creating a government agency called the Office of Immigration Defensive Protection to help you folks settle into the Garden State.

Dios Mio! He's even planning on having the new agency get you help in defending yourself against the Feds at ICE engaged in the oppressive act of enforcing our immigration law. Bendita Virgen, who are the real criminals? You or the agents who try to drag you out of your house in the middle of the night while your kids cry and plead with them not to deport Papi?

And we're good at this stuff too! Not only have we made “undocumented immigrants” the only acceptable term to use when referring to criminals who have violated our immigration laws, we have everyone referring to about 800,000 undocumented immigrants eligible for protection under DACCA as “Dreamers” and talking about them as if they are 800,000 angels sent by God to save not only America but the human race as a whole!

We’ve taken great pain to talk like these Dreamers are all little kids or at least young people on the cusp of entering college but really that’s not the case at all. The group ranges from high school sophomores to 35-year-old parents and divorces and 21% of DACCA recipients have dropped out of High School (The national rate is 5.9%)

We’ve also lined up a bunch of like-minded economists to pronounce that deporting the Dreamers will be ruinous to our economy. Pretty neat huh? Considering that the Dreamers represent about 0.2% of the country’s total population you can get a good idea of how personally amazing all these economists assume these folks to be. Our pals at the American Action Forum group came out with a study that claimed deporting 790,000 would reduce the labor force by 740,000 and cut aggregate GDP by $72 billion! Sound ominous right? However in relative terms the labor force would shrink by only 0.5% and reduce the aggregate GDP by 0.4% (That’s not 40% or even 4%, it’s 4 tenths of one percent) Not one of our economist can seriously make the claim that the lives of the average American family will be impacted in the slightest by deporting these folks, but hey, it it’s not the number of the Dreamers it’s their quality. You could deport 800,000 rednecks from the Deep South and the economy wouldn’t miss a beat, hell it would probably improve, but when you’re casting away hundreds of thousands of Los Dorados, well that’s a very big deal!

And what do we expect from you in return for all of this compassion and support? Nada! Nothing that is other than you working your inherent Immigrant Magic on our economy, our culture and our overall way of life. Of course, when you do get the right to vote in American elections we would hope you remember which party fought so hard for you to obtain that right, and who’s made it possible for you to remain in this country even after you violated our laws to get here. Oh, and if you should happen to be talking to friends and family who are legal citizens, we sure wouldn’t mind if you put in a good word for us!

Gracias!

A debate that is driven more by politics than humanitarian imperatives is, never-the-less, chock full of pious platitudes...