monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

George W. Bush: ‘Pretty Clear Evidence’ Of Russian Meddling In 2016 Election

Former President George W. Bush said on Thursday that “there’s pretty clear evidence that the Russians meddled” in the 2016 American presidential election, forcefully rebutting fellow Republican Donald Trump’s denials of Moscow trying to affect the vote.

While never mentioning President Trump by name, Bush appeared to be pushing back on Trump’s attempts to have warmer relations with Russia, as well as his comments on immigration.

The White House did not immediately comment on Bush’s remarks.

Headed to the Olympics to cheer on #TeamUSA. One reporter trying to distort 18 yr old nonstory to sow seeds of division. We won’t let that happen! #FAKENEWS. Our athletes are the best in the world and we are for ALL of them! #TEAMUSA
9:04 PM - Feb 7, 2018

The US-led coalition fighting ISIS in Syria conducted air and artillery strikes against pro-regime forces in Syria on Wednesday, killing an estimated 100 pro-regime fighters, according to a coalition statement.

The coalition described its action -- which if confirmed could represent the largest number of pro-regime casualties inflicted by the US-led coalition -- as carried out in "self defense."

Syrian state news agency SANA described the action as an "aggression" by the coalition against "popular forces" who were fighting ISIS and the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces. The attack had left "scores of persons dead and others injured" and caused "huge damage" to the area, SANA added.

In 2012, the political scientists Norm Ornstein and Thomas Mann threw in the towel. Their book, It’s Even Worse Than It Looks, laid the blame for the increasing dysfunction of America’s political system at the feet of the Republican Party, which, they admitted, had become “an insurgent outlier—ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.” They rejected, at great professional risk, the Washington catechism that defines centrism as a wandering midpoint between wherever Democrats and Republicans happen to stand at any given moment.

Six years later, the self-styled anti-partisans Jonathan Rauch and Benjamin Wittes, have reluctantly reached the same conclusion.

“The Republican Party, as an institution, has become a danger to the rule of law and the integrity of our democracy,” they argue in The Atlantic. “We’re thus driven to believe that the best hope of defending the country from [Donald] Trump’s Republican enablers, and of saving the Republican Party from itself, is to…vote mindlessly and mechanically against Republicans at every opportunity, until the party either rights itself or implodes (very preferably the former).”

Like Mann and Ornstein before them, Rauch and Wittes have put a finger on the cardinal fact of American politics. Unfortunately their prescription for a voting-booth boycott of Republican politicians is inadequate. There is more to politics than elections and nobody understands this better than the leaders of the Republican Party Rauch and Wittes would like to oust. Defeating Republicans at the polls is, of course, a precondition for ending the country’s slide into right-wing authoritarianism. But Republicans have been defeated before without being chastened. To reverse this alarming antidemocratic trend, the modern-Republican Party’s style of politics must be made anathema. That won’t happen without a large-scale civic censure of political actors and institutions, like the GOP, that reject empiricism and equality, attack mediating arbiters of authority, and embrace propaganda and bad-faith argument as ordinary brickbats of political war.

A senior White House aide with a history of domestic violence. Another who was discovered to have an open arrest warrant for a gun crime. At least two others very obviously dealing with substance abuse problems.

The most flagrantly & routinely dishonest White House press operation in history. A chief of staff who publicly repudiated the principle of civilian control of the military.

An undisclosed foreign agent as National Security Adviser - that adviser credibly implicated in a plot to kidnap a US resident on US soil. Lies, lies, lies on the financial disclosures and security clearance applications of the president’s nepotism appointments to WH staff

A White House drug czar who previously worked as the opioid industry’s top apologist in the House of Representatives. A CoS to the drug office who falsified his resume and was fired from his previous job for not showing up

The New Yorker
‏Verified account
@NewYorker
In this July, 2017, photo:

Corey Lewandowski: Fired, June, 2016
Omarosa Manigault: Fired, December, 2017
Anthony Scaramucci: Fired, July, 2017
Sebastian Gorka: "No longer with the White House," August, 2017
Rob Porter: Resigned, today.

Jennifer Rubin
‏Verified account
@JRubinBlogger
If Kelly knew about protective order and let Porter stay, he's got to go. WH indulgence for abusive men has gone far enough

Dan Pfeiffer
‏verified account
@danpfeiffer
The difference in how the media is treating the relationship between Weinstein and Democrats and Wynn and the Republicans should cause everyone to take a real look in the mirror.