monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

My argument is more "China and North Korea and ISIS are not going to be nice right now, Russia is saying they want to work with us".

Just about I guess. I guess if we re define words we can make just about anyone believe anything. I would like to live in a representative dictatorship where all the citizens vote on both the laws and how they are interpreted.

Donald Trump was forced to take a time-out Thursday from his frenzied planning for the White House, sitting for a sworn, videotaped deposition in Trump Tower.

It’s an extraordinary circumstance for any president or president-elect. The last president to be deposed was Bill Clinton in 1998, in the Paula Jones sexual harassment suit. Ulysses Grant, Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter are the only other sitting presidents to face a deposition.

And it’s hardly Trump’s only legal headache.

With Trump’s swearing-in just days away, many of the high-profile lawsuits that entangled him during the campaign are all but certain to carry on through his inauguration and into his tenure at the White House — and he will even inherit some new ones.

Trump and his companies face scores of pending lawsuits, including cases claiming skimming of tips at his New York SoHo hotel, seeking refunds of millions in membership fees charged by his country club in Jupiter, Florida, and alleging that his security personnel assaulted protesters outside Trump Tower.

"b : a government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised by them directly or indirectly through a system of representation usually involving periodically held free elections"

That's the problem! The people DO NOT have the power! The Electoral College could have said Jeb Bush is the next president. Supreme Court says gay marriage is not ok. Than they say it is ok. We indirectly pick the person who directly appoints the people making decisions without any election at all. People have virtually no power, except to elect SOME of the people who get power.

“The media lies to make it look like I am against ‘Intelligence’ when in fact I am a big fan!”

Keep an eye on the doctors. When the American Medical Association endorsed the Affordable Care Act during the legislative phase seven years ago, it gave the proposal an enormous boost. It was nearly as important yesterday when the AMA urged congressional Republicans not to pursue any policy that would undo the gains achieved in recent years.

The group also insisted that Congress not repeal the ACA unless it has a sound alternative in place, which is the exact opposite of the course most Republicans intend to pursue.

Keep an eye on the hospitals. Other than American families, no institution has benefited more from the ACA than American hospitals. It therefore mattered a great deal when the nation’s hospital industry warned Republicans a month ago that their current plans risk triggering “an unprecedented public health crisis.”

Keep an eye on the insurers. Insurance companies keep trying to warn Congress not to be irresponsible, or lawmakers risk insurers abandoning exchange marketplaces altogether. For all of the industry’s complaints in recent years, private insurers have made clear they want a system that looks an awful lot like the status quo.

I've passed by the tabloid countless times at grocery stores, and as best as I can tell, it's always focused largely on celebrity gossip: Celebrity A is having an affair with Celebrity B; Celebrity C is dying; Celebrity D is in rehab; etc. It's oddly fascinating, though, to see the National Enquirer take steps to add pro-Trump propaganda to its mission.

Its current cover, for example, tells readers President Obama has "ignited" a national security crisis, but Americans shouldn't worry -- because Donald Trump will "fix" the problem.

Last week's cover said in all-caps, "Lying Obamas Destroyed!" There's "proof," the National Enquirer added, that the president "was not" born in the United States.

The cover before that featured a big cover photo of Trump and his family. The cover before that assured readers that Trump is "taking charge" and has achieved "success in just 36 days!"

The cover before that insisted Trump will "save 25 million jobs!" The cover before that told readers that "Trump was right" about "Muslim spies in Obama's CIA!"

You are such a cynic.

I often hear people argue that the United States is a republic, not a democracy. But that’s a false dichotomy. A common definition of “republic” is, to quote the American Heritage Dictionary, “A political order in which the supreme power lies in a body of citizens who are entitled to vote for officers and representatives responsible to them” — we are that. A common definition of “democracy” is, “Government by the people, exercised either directly or through elected representatives” — we are that, too.

The United States is not a direct democracy, in the sense of a country in which laws (and other government decisions) are made predominantly by majority vote. Some lawmaking is done this way, on the state and local levels, but it’s only a tiny fraction of all lawmaking. But we are a representative democracy, which is a form of democracy.

And indeed the American form of government has been called a “democracy” by leading American statesmen and legal commentators from the Framing on. It’s true that some Framing-era commentators made arguments that distinguished “democracy” and “republic”; see, for instance, The Federalist (No. 10), though even that first draws the distinction between “pure democracy” and a “republic,” only later just saying “democracy.” But even in that era, “representative democracy” was understood as a form of democracy, alongside “pure democracy”: John Adams used the term “representative democracy” in 1794; so did Noah Webster in 1785; so did St. George Tucker in his 1803 edition of Blackstone; so did Thomas Jefferson in 1815. Tucker’s Blackstone likewise uses “democracy” to describe a representative democracy, even when the qualifier “representative” is omitted...

The place I am trying to lead you is we are not democracy. We are republic at best. I like democracy, I want us to push towards democracy, but I refuse to accept being given one slice of bread cut in two called two slices of bread.

Why not?