monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

John Nichols
‏@NicholsUprising
California Gov. Jerry Brown took office in 2011 with a $27 billion deficit. He won voter support for huge tax hikes on the rich in 2012, and voters reauthorized them in 2016. Brown leaves office w/a $6.1 billion surplus.
Take a note: Taxing the rich works.

Never handle firearms carelessly. The sorrow and suffering that have been caused through the innocent but heedless handling of firearms by the young! Only four days ago, right in the next farm house to the one where I am spending the summer, a grandmother, old and gray and sweet, one of the loveliest spirits in the land, was sitting at her work, when her young grandson crept in and got down an old, battered, rusty gun which had not been touched for many years and was supposed not to be loaded, and pointed it at her, laughing and threatening to shoot. In her fright she ran screaming and pleading toward the door on the other side of the room; but as she passed him he placed the gun almost against her very breast and pulled the trigger! He had supposed it was not loaded. And he was right -- it wasn’t. So there wasn’t any harm done. It is the only case of that kind I ever heard of. Therefore, just the same, don’t you meddle with old unloaded firearms; they are the most deadly and unerring hings that have ever been created by man. You don’t have to take any pains at all with them; you don’t have to have a rest, you don’t have to have any sights on the gun, you don’t have to take aim, even. No, you just pick out a relative and bang away, and you are sure to get him. A youth who can’t hit a cathedral at thirty yards with a Gatling gun in three quarters of an hour, can take up an old empty musket and bag his grandmother every time, at a hundred. Think what Waterloo would have been if one of the armies had been boys armed with old muskets supposed not to be loaded, and the other army had been composed of their female relations. The very thought of it make one shudder.

Reddit has become the latest social network to admit that it was infiltrated by Russian misinformation actors in the run-up to the 2016 US election.

In a post on the social news site, Reddit’s chief executive Steve Huffman said that the company has “found and removed a few hundred accounts” which it suspects are of Russian origin, or which were linking directly to “known propaganda domains”.

“The vast majority of suspicious accounts we have found in the past months were banned back in 2015–2016 through our enhanced efforts to prevent abuse of the site generally,” Huffman added.

Reddit has been silent on Russian misinformation efforts on its site for months, despite being viewed as a likely target as far back as September 2017, when the US senator Mark Warner suggested that an investigation into Russian misinformation should expand beyond the initial focus on Twitter and Facebook.

The company appears to have been prompted to speak by a leak from the Internet Research Agency, a notorious “troll farm” which was behind many of the misinformation efforts to date. The documents, seen by the Daily Beast, showed that the agency was sharing “American proxies” for accessing Reddit, and that content from websites it created were receiving “hundreds – and sometimes thousands – [of] upvotes on” Trump-supporting subreddits.

The Daily Beast also reported that at least 21 accounts on Tumblr, the hybrid social network/blogging service owned by Oath (formerly Yahoo), were run directly by the Internet Research Agency.

In his post on Reddit, Huffman acknowledged Reddit’s previous silence on the issue. “While I know it’s frustrating that we don’t share everything we know publicly, I want to reiterate that we take these matters very seriously, and we are co-operating with congressional inquiries. We are growing more sophisticated by the day, and we remain open to suggestions and feedback for how we can improve.”
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We are sorry for ever calling Carter Page the dumbest one in the Trump-Russia investigation

I argue that my idea is vastly easier, cheaper, and carries fewer consequences.

The grinding pressure of special counsel Robert Mueller's Russia investigation is starting to do strange things to peoples' heads.

How else to explain a staggering, reality TV-style meltdown of short-lived Trump campaign adviser Sam Nunberg on Monday, played out in a batch of cable news interviews, marking the oddest twist of the Russia saga yet?

In a stunning blast of accusations, insults and non-sequiturs, Nunberg vowed to defy a grand jury subpoena, dared Mueller to arrest him and claimed the relentless prosecutor believed that Donald Trump was a Manchurian candidate.

It all unfolded in hour upon hour of car-crash television, in a compelling self-immolation that it was impossible to look away from and provided a reminder of the cast of erratic, oddball characters who drift in and out of the President's employ -- some of whom staffed his campaign and his White House.

At times, Nunberg appeared close to the end of his rope, saying he had already spoken to Mueller's team and did not wish to spend another "80 hours" digging through his communications with Trump aides that had been subpoenaed by the special counsel.

"Screw that," Nunberg told CNN's Gloria Borger when asked if he would testify to the grand jury on Friday. "Why do I have to go? Why? For what?"

His defiance risked landing him in jail on contempt charges and threatened to create a sideshow for the straight-laced special counsel while his outbursts were sure to trigger days of news coverage and will therefore likely infuriate Trump.

But though Nunberg's emotional outpouring might be seen as the ramblings of someone under intense duress, it had enough hints of where the Russia investigation may be heading to worry the President.

"This guy is all over the map," former FBI special agent Josh Campbell said, dubbing the Nunberg show "the Great Unravelling."

"Up until this point Mueller's team has been so tight, we haven't seen the leaks so it has been very difficult to see what he's looking for," Campbell said. "I think it's incredible, seeing today this episode unfold before our eyes because it gives us that insight into where the investigation is ultimately headed."

What he said

Nunberg, apparently interpreting questions already put to him by Mueller's investigators, said for instance that he believes that the special counsel has something on Trump related to the Russian meddling effort on the 2016 election: "I suspect they suspect something about him," he told Borger.

He also claimed the special counsel is trying to prove that Trump associate Roger Stone colluded with Julian Assange, founder of the WikiLeaks site which is reputed to have links with Russian intelligence.

In another claim that would be highly significant if it turns out to be true, Nunberg claimed Trump knew about a meeting between his son Donald Trump Jr., campaign officials and a Russia delegation offering dirt on Hillary Clinton.

"He talked about it a week before and I don't know why he did this," said Nunberg, in his second CNN interview, this time with Jake Tapper.

"I don't know why he went around trying to hide. He shouldn't have," Nunberg said.

The President has denied he knew anything about the meeting.

Nunberg also said he suspected that former Trump foreign policy adviser Carter Page had colluded with the Russians, and said he was a "moron" -- though argued that he was too low-level to have much influence with Trump.

While much of what Nunberg said was insulting toward Trump and his staff, he also insisted that the President did not conspire with the Russians during the election, offering a rather backhanded defense of his former boss.

"Vladimir Putin is too smart to collude with Donald Trump," Nunberg told CNN. "Donald Trump couldn't keep his mouth shut if Putin colluded with him."

I work in a corporation and sometimes, often we have to find the best choice out of many choices. Often there are no good choices only less bad ones.

Here is an example where we could either change 300MM people’s views on mental health, bullying, medication, etc....or we could limit the killing-spree-potential of semi-automatic rifles.

One of these choices is vastly easier, cheaper, and with the fewest un-intended consequences.

my idea is vastly easier, cheaper, and carries fewer consequences.