monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

Do you know the regulations that Trump is doing away with which will result in people being injured or dying?

I think people just don't expect much of Mrs. #45. They think HRC is a responsible adult woman. Though why she should be responsible for the actions of other people is a mystery.

Obama and the FBI colluded to cover up his complicity with Clinton's crimes

Published October 03, 2016:

Cheryl Mills, Hillary Clinton's former chief of staff, received an immunity deal from the Justice Department during the year-long FBI investigation of Clinton's server.

Two other State Department staffers, John Bentel and Heather Samuelson, were also given immunity agreements, bringing the total number of witnesses who were protected by deals to five.

Immunity deals for two top Hillary Clinton aides included a side arrangement obliging the FBI to destroy their laptops after reviewing the devices, House Judiciary Committee sources revealed on Monday.

Just how much damage his wife and son have done to Mr. Netanyahu’s political standing is difficult to assess, since he faces scandals of his own.

Tim Phillips, president of Americans for Prosperity, the network’s main advocacy arm, praised Trump’s staff for involving the network in talks “from day one” about what a tax code overhaul might look like.

Phillips said 2017 was “the most productive year . . . in the existence of this network” at the federal level. “A lot of the policies they’ve put forward in the first year have been good ones,” he said.

He added, “We really don’t get caught up in all the other extraneous stuff out there.”

Something amazing will happen with the moon on Jan. 31
There will be a full moon, a blue moon, a supermoon and a total lunar eclipse — all in one day.

On Fox News Sunday, host Chris Wallace displayed a shocking lack of self-awareness when he asked his guest, Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC), if “Republicans hurt their credibility on real issues of bias when they make such a big deal about secret societies and palace coups?” referring to the GOP hyping a text message between two FBI employees referencing a "secret society." Wallace ignored Fox News’ role in hyping the texts, airing the term "secret society" over 100 times on Fox News over the course of two days, before stopping abruptly after it was reported the “secret society” reference was likely a joke.

it is only fair

President Trump has a long history of mind-bogglingly foolish statements about climate change, the most notorious of which is probably his 2012 Twitter declaration that the phenomenon is merely a Chinese hoax.

On Sunday, he added another whopper to his least-greatest hits collection.

Speaking to kindred spirit Piers Morgan on the British network ITV, Trump said that, despite what you may have heard, the polar ice caps are actually thriving.

“The ice caps were going to melt, they were going to be gone by now, but now they’re setting records,” he said.

American socialists have been celebrating a comeback at the same time as approval ratings for Republican president Donald Trump and the opposition Democratic Party have hit all-time lows.

At the end of his first year in office, only 39 percent of Americans approved of the job President Donald Trump was doing in office – lower than any US president at that point in his term in at least 40 years. His opponents the Democrats, however, are not doing much better. According to a poll late last year, only 37 percent of Americans had a favorable view of Democratic politicians in general.

To find a political tendency that hasn't suffered from the last year, you would have to look further to the left in American politics. Socialist organizations, long relegated to the sidelines of influence or even persecuted for their views, have seen their numbers grow considerably since Trump entered the White House.

One organization in particular has experienced a surge in membership. The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), founded in 1982, had roughly 6,000 dues-paying members for the duration of its history. Then, in the two days following Trump's election, 1,000 people joined DSA. Today the organization claims to have around 25,000 card-carrying members, having tripled its size in just over one year. This would make it the largest socialist membership organization in the US since the Second World War.

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Jane Mayer
‏@JaneMayerNYer
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WashPost puff piece on Kochs neglects to note their interest in criminal justice reform began when their company was charged with crimes.

Normalizing Trump: An incredibly brief explainer
A conflict in the journalist's code was created by a president wholly unfit for the job.
17 SEP 2017 1:12 AM
Most every journalist who covers Trump knows of these things:

1. He isn’t good at anything a president has to do. From the simplest, like pretending to help out in flood relief, to the hardest: making the call when all alternatives are bad. (We’re told he can be charming one-on-one. So maybe that’s his one skill.)

2. He doesn’t know anything about the issues with which he must cope. Nor does this seem to bother him.

3. He doesn’t care to learn. It’s not like he’s getting better at the job, or scrambling to fill gaps in his knowledge.

4. He has no views about public policy. Just a few brute prejudices, like if Obama did it, it was dumb. I do not say he lacks beliefs — and white supremacy may be one — but he has no positions. His political sky is blank. No stars to steer by.

5. Nothing he says can be trusted.

6. His “model” of leadership is the humiliation of others— and threat of same. No analyst unfamiliar with narcissistic personality types can hope to make sense of his actions in office.

It’s not like items 1-6 have been kept secret. Journalists tell us about them all the time. Their code requires that. Simultaneously, however, they are called by their code to respect the voters’ choice, as well as the American presidency, of which they see themselves a vital part, as well as the beat, the job of White House reporting. The two parts of the code are in conflict.

If nothing the president says can be trusted, reporting what the president says becomes absurd. You can still do it, but it’s hard to respect what you are doing. If the president doesn’t know anything, the solemnity of the presidency becomes a joke. That’s painful. If they can, people flee that kind of pain. In political journalism there is enough room for interpretive maneuver to do just that.

This is “normalization.” This is what “tonight he became president” is about. This is why he’s called “transactional,” why a turn to bipartisanship is right now being test-marketed by headline writers. This is why “deal-making” is said to be afoot when there is barely any evidence of a deal.

What they have to report brings ruin to what they have to respect. So they occasionally revise it into something they can respect: at least a little.

It's by now even noticed in Germany:
Under Donald Trump, socialism seeps into US mainstream

Quote:

One organization in particular has experienced a surge in membership. The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), founded in 1982.... Today the organization claims to have around 25,000 card-carrying members... This would make it the largest socialist membership organization in the US since the Second World Wa

WOW!! 25,000, ya say!