monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

glitterbag wrote:

It would appear so. Ive got to stop looking, its always so unfulfilling.

Yeah, probably best to get back to your "safe space," pronto, eh, Glitta?

Fox News Settled Sexual Harassment Allegations Against Bill O’Reilly, Documents Show

Republicans want to fight climate change, but fossil-fuel bullies won’t let them

...Climate change became partisan in 2010, shortly after the five Republican-appointed justices of the Supreme Court upended a century of law and precedent to issue the Citizens United decision, which rejected limits on corporate spending on political campaigns. The timing is not a coincidence.

Big-business interests, particularly the fossil-fuel industry, led the charge. That industry’s annual U.S. subsidy is $700 billion, according to the International Monetary Fund. With stakes that high, the incentive to protect the subsidy and the amount that the fossil-fuel industry can afford to spend on political influence are enormous, so the restraints of campaign finance and disclosure rules were particularly galling.

The justices allowed the fossil-fuel industry to roll heavy artillery out onto the political field, not just its previous musketry. Industry operatives brag about putting hundreds of millions of dollars into each federal election cycle, though undisclosed “dark money” and identity-laundering pass-throughs make this increasingly hard to track. Most recklessly, the five justices missed the point — or didn’t care — that anyone who is allowed to spend unlimited political money necessarily can threaten to spend unlimited political money. This atmosphere has quashed any Republican effort on climate change, silenced serious climate debate in Congress and ended progress, as desired and directed by the fossil-fuel industry...

This new poll has all kinds of bad news for Donald Trump

As honeymoons go, Donald Trump’s wasn’t much to write home about. He was voted in as the most unpopular president-elect in modern history and got slightly less unpopular in the weeks that followed, as the goodwill flowed. Even then, though, he clearly remained the most unpopular president-elect in modern history. Again, that was the honeymoon.

And now it’s over.

A new poll from Quinnipiac University suggests that Trump has reverted to his pre-election standing, with Americans having major concerns about his temperament and the direction in which his presidency will lead the country. Trump’s continued controversies seem to have put him right back where he was before he won the election.

On Nov. 10, just two days after the American Election Day, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said "there were contacts" between the Russian government and Trump's campaign team before the U.S. presidential election. In fact, Ryabkov said "quite a few" members of Trump's team had been "staying in touch with Russian representatives" before Americans cast their ballots.

The Republican's transition team has insisted that these conversations never happened. Kellyanne Conway was especially emphatic when asked about possible, pre-election communications between the campaign and Moscow. "Absolutely not," she told CBS News' John Dickerson in December. She added the conversations "never happened" and any suggestions to the contrary "undermine our democracy."

This angle to the broader controversy quietly faded -- replaced with other revelations -- but the new reporting should return the question to the fore. Did the pre-election communications happen or not?

Donald J. Trump ✔ @realDonaldTrump
Intelligence agencies should never have allowed this fake news to "leak" into the public. One last shot at me.Are we living in Nazi Germany?
4:48 AM - 11 Jan 2017

Quote:

Couldn't you just die to be in their little cliche?

Pretty sure it's a pre-requisite.

Builder wrote:

Quote:

Couldn't you just die to be in their little cliche?

Pretty sure it's a pre-requisite.

It's not, but proper spelling of fancy French words is. (clique)

Republicans, and other Americans with common sense are fully aware that man caused climate change is a HOAX.

We all have much more important issues to deal with than the man caused fake news story known as climate change.

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey finds that 51% of Likely U.S. Voters have a favorable opinion of Trump, while 47% view him unfavorably.

...We don’t know who CNN’s sources are or if those people’s information is accurate. We don’t know which Trump aides were allegedly dealing with the Russians or whether those Russians worked for Vladimir Putin’s government. And we don’t know the answer to the biggest question of them all: Just what does Russia have on Trump?

“So while people are being delicate about discussing wholly unproven allegations, the document is at the front of everyone’s minds as they ponder the question: Why is Trump so insistent about vindicating Russia from the hacking charges that everyone else seems to accept?” Benjamin Wittes, Susan Hennessey, and Quinta Jurecic wrote in a post for the Lawfare blog.

There is one thing, though, that we can say with absolute certainty. If the allegations are true, they will spark criminal investigations and the types of congressional probes that could end Trump’s presidency before it fully begins. If the allegations are false, Trump will accurately be able to say that he’d been slandered by a politicized intelligence community looking for ways to undermine his legitimacy.

Trump’s weeks-long war with the CIA means this kind of moment may have been inevitable: After weeks of quiet sniping, sources inside the agency or familiar with its work have responded by leaking something truly and genuinely explosive...

Trump and the Intelligence Agencies: On the Slow Collapse of Imperial Republics
I want to step back—way back—from yesterday’s release of a declassified intelligence report on Russian interference in the election in order to point out the larger political significance of this moment.

Regardless of the truth value of the report, the nation’s intelligence agencies (the report is based on assessments by the NSA, the CIA, and the FBI) are strongly suggesting that the person who is about to walk into the White House got there with the help of a foreign power. The significance of this move by the nation’s security establishment against an incoming president, as I’ve been suggesting for some time, has not been quite appreciated. That the nation’s security agencies could go public with this kind of accusation, or allow their accusation to go public, is unprecedented. The United States used to do this kind of thing, covertly, to other countries: that is the prerogative of an imperial power. Now it claims, overtly, that this kind of thing was done to it. It’s extraordinary, when you think about it: not simply that it happened (if it did) but that an imperial power would admit that it happened. That’s the real shocker.

But we need to read the story against a larger backdrop of the slow delegitimation of American national institutions since the end of the Cold War.

It began, I would argue, with the appointment of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court, even though it seemed clear to most people he committed perjury before the Senate. It continued with the gratuitous impeachment of Bill Clinton, the elevation of George W. Bush to the White House by a Supreme Court deploying the most specious reasoning, a war in Iraq built on flagrant lies, the normalization of the filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, and now the ascension of Trump, despite not winning the popular vote—and supposedly with the help of the Russians.

What ties these events together is either that they cast serious doubt on the democratic legitimacy of American institutions or that they drag those institutions into the delegitimating mud of the most sordid scandals.

The simple truth is that the United States could barely have weathered one of these events during the Cold War, let alone a long succession of them. That is why civil rights activists were able, finally, to bring an end to Jim Crow when they did—the international embarrassment was too great—and why the failures in Vietnam provoked such a national crisis.

What we’re now seeing is not a cataclysmic crisis—I suspect one day we’ll look back on the language of “legitimation crisis” as itself the product of the Cold War—but a more familiar phenomenon from the annals of history: the slow but steady collapse—the real norm erosion—that you tend to see in the later stages of imperial republics. A collapse that can take decades, if not longer, to unfold.

Update (11 am)

If people could step outside their partisan selves for one minute, I’d ask you to consider the following fact as yet another sign of late imperial disjunction: For the last eight years, we’ve had a president who half the country thinks is Muslim, Kenyan-born. For the next four, maybe eight, years, we will have a president who half the country thinks is the Manchurian Candidate, Russian-born. I can’t think of a greater symptom of the weird fever dream that is the American empire, whereby the most powerful state on earth imagines, over a 12- to 16-year period, that its elected leaders hail from the far reaches of its various antagonisms.

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