monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

The Nato Secretary General, Jens Stoltenberg, has marked the alliance's 70th anniversary with a rare address to the US Congress.

"Nato has been good for Europe but Nato has also been good for the United States," the former Norwegian prime minister said to applause.

He said that Nato did not want a new Cold War but it "must not be naive" about relations with Russia.

Jens Stoltenberg only mentioned the American president once but his speech was clearly a ringing defence of Nato in the face of Donald Trump's scathing attacks on the alliance.

Mr Trump's views are shaped by his trademark transactional approach to foreign policy. He believes the US has been taken for a ride by "freeloading" Europeans benefiting from the American security umbrella without investing enough in their own defence.

He has taken credit for a recent "rocket launch" of increased military spending amongst members, and Mr Stoltenberg has given it to him, making the best of a tense situation. Officials and lawmakers on both sides of the Atlantic agree that the payment gap is a valid concern, but they are alarmed by the ambivalence Mr Trump has shown towards the value of the alliance, and the mutual defence commitment at its core - the first time in 70 years an American president has raised such doubts.

Mr Trump is even reported to have mulled over withdrawing from Nato, which is structured around the defence of Europe. Notably Mr Stoltenberg emphasised how the alliance benefited America, not only Europe, a view shared by members of Congress and of Mr Trump's administration.

Lawmakers gave Mr Stoltenberg repeated standing ovations, their way of reaffirming America's commitment to Nato.

In order to be a trumpie one has to obligingly stupid.

In order to be a trumpie one has to obligingly stupid.

James [Rupert's youngest of two sons] was becoming increasingly troubled by Fox News. He didn’t object to the idea of a conservative news network, but he did object to what he felt it had evolved into at certain hours: a political weapon with no editorial standards or concern for the value of truth and a knee-jerk defender of the president’s rhetoric and policies.

On another thread, I alerted folks to an incredibly thorough piece at the NY times on the Murdoch family

@blatham,
The NY times has no credibility.

Do you want your sons to become mini Trumps or your daughters to marry men like old Trump???

“If Sean Hannity is claiming fraud on television and Rush Limbaugh is claiming fraud and Mitch McConnell is not willing to stand up and say, ‘No, there was no fraud,’ then we could have a real crisis ….”
“I think you could have a long, drawn-out crisis in which our institutions lose credibility,” Levitsky said. Even if Trump were eventually forced out, “we’ll be left with a situation where maybe 30, 35 percent of our population believes the election was rigged ….”

“I could imagine some rioting, some civil violence,” said John Carey, a political scientist at Dartmouth who studies comparative democracy and who cofounded Bright Line Watch, which monitors the health of American democracy. “We just can’t imagine all the possibilities.”