monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

From the podium, Trump attacked CNN for publishing a report about the existence of an unverified intelligence dossier alleging Russia has “compromising” financial and sexual information on the president-elect. Bristled by the unwarranted attack on his network, Acosta attempted to get in a question, but was promptly shouted down as “fake news” and ignored by the incoming president.

Asked about the exchange during his AMA, Carlson said that Trump was in the right.

“Acosta was rude,” he claimed. “Trump rose to it. I thoroughly enjoyed the exchange.”

He was also asked what the mainstream media should do to “regain the American public’s trust,” and Carlson simply said: “stop lying.”
However, not too long ago, Carlson didn’t seem to have any problem with a reporter being “rude” to a president when that president was a Democrat.
When Daily Caller staffer Neil Munro infamously heckled and interrupted President Obama during his prepared remarks for a 2012 Rose Garden press conference, Carlson firmly defended his reporter’s actions as the noble pursuit of journalism.

“I don’t remember Diane Sawyer scolding her colleague Sam Donaldson for heckling President Reagan. And she shouldn’t have,” he remarked in a statement. “A reporter’s job is to ask questions and get answers. Our job is to find out what the federal government is up to. Politicians often don’t want to tell us. A good reporter gets the story. We’re proud of Neil Munro.”

Bill Kristol ‏@BillKristol 10h10 hours ago
It's telling, I'm afraid, that Donald Trump treats Vladimir Putin with more respect than he does John Lewis.

Trump transition approval rating is lowest ever in Gallup poll
Owen Stevens
January 14, 2017
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Trump is set to begin his presidency with a historically low approval rating
The Business Insider · 1 day ago
President-elect Donald Trump's approval rating is the lowest for any presidential transition Gallup has measured ...

Donald Trump said in an April 2014 interview that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was “so smart.”

“Well, he’s done an amazing job of taking the mantle,” Trump said of Russian president Vladimir Putin in an interview with Fox News’ Eric Bolling. “And he’s taken it away from the president, and you look at what he’s doing. And so smart. When you see the riots in a country because they’re hurting the Russians, okay, ‘We’ll go and take it over.’ And he really goes step by step by step, and you have to give him a lot of credit.”

“Interestingly, I own the Miss Universe pageant,” Trump added. “We just left Moscow. He could not have been nicer. He was so nice and so everything. But you have to give him credit that what he’s doing for that country in terms of their world prestige is very strong.”

"He said one nice thing about me. He said I'm a genius. I said thank you very much to the newspaper and that was the end of it. I never met Putin," Trump said.

"I got to know him very well because we were both on '60 Minutes,' we were stablemates, and we did very well that night," Trump said.
...Trump also said during a National Press Club luncheon in 2014 that he was in Moscow and he spoke "directly and indirectly with President Putin who could not have been nicer."

Quote:

While many U.S. states have mandates and incentives to get more of their electricity from renewable energy, Republican legislators in Wyoming are proposing to cut the state off from its most abundant, clean resource—wind—and ensuring its continued dependence on coal.

A new measure submitted to the Wyoming legislature this week would forbid utilities from providing any electricity to the state that comes from large-scale wind or solar energy projects by 2019. It's an unprecedented attack on clean energy in Wyoming, and possibly the nation. And it comes at a time when such resources are becoming cheaper ,,,,,

The bill's nine sponsors, two state senators and seven representatives, largely come from Wyoming's top coal-producing counties and include some deniers of man-made climate change........

Isn't that just special. Scumbags.

David Cameron has condemned Mr Putin for presiding over the "state sponsored murder" of Mr Litvinenko, who died from radioactive poisoning in 2006, and called it an "absolutely appalling crime".
A 327-page report released last week by retired High Court judge Sir Robert Owen concluded Mr Litvinenko was murdered by former KGB agents Andrey Lugovoy and Dmitri Kovtun.

But Mr Trump told Fox Business: "Have they found him (Mr Putin) guilty? I don't think they've found him guilty. If he did it, fine but I don't know that he did it.
"You know, people are saying they think it was him, it might have been him, it could have been him. But in all fairness to Putin - and I'm not saying this because he says 'Trump is brilliant and leading everybody' - the fact is that he hasn't been convicted of anything. Some people say he absolutely didn't do it.
"First of all, he says he didn't do it. Many people say it wasn't him. So who knows who did it?"

Please understand that not only do we live in a time of fake news, we also live in an increasingly Orwellian era where words often mean the exact opposite of what they say. When Republicans talk about "strengthening" Social Security, what they really mean is cutting Social Security. When they talk about "reforming" Medicare, what they really mean is privatizing it. If Republicans want to decimate programs that are life and death for working families, and then give huge tax breaks to billionaires, we must make them own up to what they are doing.

"Cheap, high quality coal?"

...Assaults on free speech; the imprisoning of critics and dissidents; attempts, on the Russian model, likely to begin soon, to intimidate critics of the regime with fake charges and conjured-up allegations; the intimidation and intolerance of even mild dissidence (that “Apologize!” tweet directed at members of the “Hamilton” cast who dared to politely petition Mike Pence); not to mention mass deportations or attempts at discrimination by religion—all things that the Trump and his cohorts have openly contemplated or even promised—are not part of the normal oscillations of power and policy. They are unprecedented and, history tells us, likely to be almost impossible to reverse.

So we need to stiffen our spines and broaden our embrace, grasp tightly but reach out far. The conservatives who see Trump for what he is and are shocked by it—and there are many, though not as many as there should be—should be welcomed. We can postpone arguing about the true meaning of the Second Amendment while we band together to fight for the Constitution that precedes it.