monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

Quote:

The best solution in my view would be for liberals (progressives) to take over the Democratic Party...

Why not the Republican Party?

House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell are at pains to maintain a façade of unity. But behind these conspicuous morale-boosting exercises, Republicans are doing a poor job concealing their awareness of how terribly this fledgling government is going. What they haven’t done is anything meaningful to change the trajectory. They have signed up for a suicide mission with Trump, without a complete understanding of what the purpose of the mission is, whether it will succeed, or how severe the collateral damage will be.

...At a glance, Trump is an odd star to hitch a wagon to. He’s extremely unpopular at a time when he should be about as popular as he’ll ever be. The latest national poll, from Quinnipiac University on Thursday, found that only 36 percent approve of the way Trump is handling his new job, while 44 percent disapprove (compared to 59 percent approval and 25 percent disapproval for Barack Obama).

Had Trump spent the first days of his presidency calming nerves and behaving graciously, he might be on the upswing, but instead, he did the opposite. Everywhere you look below the surface, Republicans show signs of discomfiture with Trump’s temperament and the rickety state of his government...

There is nothing subtle about Trump’s behavior. He lies, he repeats the lie, and his listeners either cower in fear, stammer in disbelief, or try to see how they can turn the lie to their own benefit. Every continental wiseguy, from Žižek to Baudrillard, insisted that when they pulled the full totalitarian wool over our eyes next time, we wouldn’t even know it was happening. Not a bit of it. Trump’s lies, and his urge to tell them, are pure Big Brother crude, however oafish their articulation. They are not postmodern traps and temptations; they are primitive schoolyard taunts and threats.

The blind, blatant disregard for truth is offered without even the sugar-façade of sweetness of temper or equableness or entertainment—offered not with a sheen of condescending consensus but in an ancient tone of rage, vanity, and vengeance. Trump is pure raging authoritarian id.

And so, rereading Orwell, one is reminded of what Orwell got right about this kind of brute authoritarianism—and that was essentially that it rests on lies told so often, and so repeatedly, that fighting the lie becomes not simply more dangerous but more exhausting than repeating it. Orwell saw, to his credit, that the act of falsifying reality is only secondarily a way of changing perceptions. It is, above all, a way of asserting power.

From Politico:
Again, if you don't support this wall, you are complicit in the drug trade and the opposite of a patriot. Also, the Mexican government is so evil, they want drugs to flow into the US. Sad.

President Donald Trump's pick for labor secretary outsourced his fast-food company's technology department to the Philippines, a move that contradicts Trump's vow to keep American jobs in the U.S.

Trump has blasted, threatened and tried to charm American companies that have so much as contemplated moving jobs overseas, saying he's sticking up for American workers who aren't feeling the economic recovery and form his political base.

But a filing with the Labor Department on CEO Andrew Puzder's company — and a spokesman's acknowledgment that CKE continues to use the IT operation in the Philippines — provides a window into a key contradiction raised by the nomination.

Democrats and their allies are rushing to exploit Puzder's record on a big increase in the minimum wage, overtime rules and more as they question how well he would advocate for American workers.

President Donald Trump's pick for labor secretary outsourced his fast-food company's technology department to the Philippines, a move that contradicts Trump's vow to keep American jobs in the U.S.

The best solution in my view would be for liberals (progressives) to take over the Democratic Party, which the Young Turks and others are attempting to orchestrate.

This is the problem. We have now had, in the first week of the presidency, a series of untruths, falsehoods, as so many anchorpeople, as so many real reporters, have said, and the enemy here is not the opposition media, as Steve Bannon would have it, the enemy here is the truth. That the opposition is not the media; the opposition is becoming the truth. That is a very dangerous culture fact.

Once again the easy to understand 'drug issue' can be used to gage the rationality of the source.

Just to point out the obvious: Do you think they are doing all that work to grow, process, package and distribute drugs (not to mention the risks involved) just to get us high? Obviously they do it for the money. And obviously it is we who want that drug flow across the border because we are paying for them.

If people can't figure this out - THAT'S what's Sad.

More at the source, but hey, soon we won't have to worry about overseas workers taking over jobs, robots will but as long as the economy doesn't suffer I guess CI is happy.

...but Al Jazeera America consistently expressed faith in the existence of a large unmet demand for straight news without opinion and sensationalism. That way it could be critical, consistent with its Al Jazeera identity and at the same time relevant to American news consumers.

This was a remarkably optimistic view of the American citizenry. It showed trust in the discerning intelligence of US TV audiences, a presumption other cable news channels appeared to abandon long ago.

There is a difference between the types of walls. Germany's wall was meant to keep people in, not out. It works a little differently, but we wouldn't expect you to know the difference.

the majority are not for the hard drugs that get consumed.

I think the local Buddhists are getting more aggressive. There was just a big march past here and they were all holding up signs that read, "Past Lives Matter"