monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

This is a column directed at high school and college students. I’m going to try to convey to you how astoundingly different the Republican Party felt when I was your age.

...The mood of the party is so different today. Donald Trump expressed the party’s new mood to David Muir of ABC, when asked about his decision to suspend immigration from some Muslim countries: “The world is a mess. The world is as angry as it gets. What, you think this is going to cause a little more anger? The world is an angry place.”

Consider the tenor of Trump’s first week in office. It’s all about threat perception. He has made moves to build a wall against the Mexican threat, to build barriers against the Muslim threat, to end a trade deal with Asia to fight the foreign economic threat, to build black site torture chambers against the terrorist threat.

Trump is on his political honeymoon, which should be a moment of joy and promise. But he seems to suffer from an angry form of anhedonia, the inability to experience happiness. Instead of savoring the moment, he’s spent the week in a series of nasty squabbles about his ratings and crowd sizes.

This time a year ago, leaders of the old guard religious right were determined to stop Donald J. Trump from winning the Iowa caucuses.

...When, last October, a recording emerged of Mr. Trump’s boasting to a TV host about grabbing women “by the pussy,” many secular conservatives urged him to step aside, but most of the religious right stayed true. Ralph Reed, the founder and chairman of the Faith and Freedom Coalition and head of Mr. Trump’s religious advisory board, argued that for people of faith, “a 10-year-old tape of a private conversation with a TV talk show host ranks pretty low on their hierarchy of their concerns.”

...In November, exit polls showed that Mr. Trump won 81 percent of white evangelicals, more than the born-again George W. Bush garnered in either of his races.

...Consider Vice President Pence, a man who regularly tries to make policy obey the dictates of faith. In 2002, he gave a speech on the House floor criticizing public schools for teaching evolution but not creationism

...The religious right has been elevated to power without having to contest its ideas in an election. Sometimes, a deal with the devil pays off, big league.

I don't know how, and don't care to take the time to try to learn, otherwise I would re-post the "one-trick donkey" JPG (or whatever it is), at this point.

Sez it all, ya know?

One of the most disturbing things about the Trump administration is its antipathy toward public schools.

Perhaps you remember the president’s mini-rant in his inaugural speech about an “education system flush with cash but which leaves our young and beautiful students deprived of all knowledge.”

Well, Trump’s choice for secretary of education, Betsy DeVos, is responsible for Michigan’s charter school boom, which currently costs the state about $1.1 billion a year. A 2014 investigation by The Detroit Free Press found myriad examples of “wasteful spending and double-dipping.” Thanks in large part to DeVos’s lobbying in the Legislature, there’s virtually no oversight. So much for the young and beautiful students.

She was appointed to public office by Presidents George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton. She served as Assistant Secretary of Education under Secretary of Education Lamar Alexander from 1991 to 1993 and his successor Richard Riley appointed her to serve as a member of the National Assessment Governing Board - wikipedia

When Public Goes Private, as Trump Wants: What Happens?

In a way it doesn't matter as much as it used to.

Liberalism is done as a political force in America. The Republicans are going to control the government for the next 20 years, and even after that the voters will not return the Democrats to power until they purge themselves of liberalism.

Congressional Republicans, meeting behind closed doors this week in Philadelphia, expressed grave concerns about dismantling the Affordable Care Act on the urgent timetable demanded by President Trump, fretting that, among other things, they could wreck insurance markets and be saddled with a politically disastrous “Trumpcare.”

An audio recording of a session at their annual retreat, obtained by The New York Times, shows Republicans in disarray, far from agreement on health policy, and still searching for something to replace former President Barack Obama’s health care law. While their leaders called for swift action to rescue consumers from the Affordable Care Act, some backbench Republicans worried about potential pitfalls.

Russians Charged With Treason Worked in Office Linked to Election Hacking
Ever since American intelligence agencies accused Russia of trying to influence the American election, there have been questions about the proof they had to support the accusation.

But the news from Moscow may explain how the agencies could be so certain that it was the Russians who hacked the email of Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee. Two Russian intelligence officers who worked on cyberoperations and a Russian computer security expert have been arrested and charged with treason for providing information to the United States, according to multiple Russian news reports.

Canada is considering contributing to a Dutch-led international fund to support abortion services in developing countries, set up in response to Donald Trump’s order to halt financing of NGOs that support the practice.

A spokesman for Canada’s international development minister, Marie-Claude Bibeau, told AFP the minister had spoken with her Dutch counterpart about the fund, and was considering donating an unspecified sum to it or a similar measure that would support “sexual reproductive rights, including abortion” abroad.

Legislation has defined the fetus as a person under fetal homicide or "feticide" laws. Such legislation is hotly debated under names such as the Fetal Protection Act, the Preborn Victims of Violence Act and the Unborn Victim of Violence Act.

Currently, at least 38 states have fetal homicide laws. At least 23 states have fetal homicide laws that apply to the earliest stages of pregnancy ("any state of gestation," "conception," "fertilization" or "post-fertilization").

Pro-choice advocates are concerned that the laws could be interpreted to apply to a woman's behavior during her pregnancy (such as smoking, drinking or using drugs).

“We’d better be sure that we’re prepared to live with the market we’ve created” with repeal, said Rep. Tom McClintock (R-Calif.). “That’s going to be called Trumpcare. Republicans will own that lock, stock and barrel, and we’ll be judged in the election less than two years away.”

Quote:

In an exclusive interview with The Brody File, President Donald Trump says persecuted Christians will be given priority when it comes to applying for refugee status in the United States. “We are going to help them,” President Trump tells CBN News. “They’ve been horribly treated. Do you know if you were a Christian in Syria it was impossible, at least very tough to get into the United States? If you were a Muslim you could come in, but if you were a Christian, it was almost impossible

This is, of course, complete baloney. There’s no religious preference against Christians in American refugee policy. Trump is lying. And if you say, “Well, maybe he’s not really intentionally lying, he’s just repeating what he heard on some right-wing radio show or something”? Not good enough. He’s the president of the United States, and when he says he’s going to change an existing policy, he doesn’t get to just lie about what the existing policy is.

Matt Damon and Ben Affleck joined forces once again, this time to create a dystopian drama about inequality, climate change, and corporations. The aptly named Incorporated premiered on Syfy...

Politically-motivated science fiction has not done well in recent years. You don’t need to look any farther than Matt Damon’s recent movie Elysium....There are a few explanations but it seems the most problematic factor for the movie was its objective. It was clearly intended to convey a politically controversial message. Americans just aren’t interested in paying good money to watch propaganda.

At a cocktail party in November, 2013, he described himself as “Leninist” to the writer and historian Ronald Radosh. In a piece at the Daily Beast, Radosh recalled that Bannon had said to him, “Lenin wanted to destroy the state, and that’s my goal, too. I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s establishment.” (Bannon subsequently told Radosh that he didn’t recall the conversation.)

monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events...