monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

I'm guessing these are the only type people he can attract for the positions they hold.

Scott Morrison has declared Australia is a partner the United States “can rely on” in an era of geopolitical complexity and strategic competition as he departs for a week long visit to America, beginning with a meeting with Donald Trump at the White House.

Morrison will depart Australia on Thursday for a visit that will include a state dinner with Trump in Washington and meetings with senior members of the administration, including the vice-president, Mike Pence, the secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, and the secretary of defence, Mark Esper.

The state dinner on Friday night, Washington time, is the first offered to an Australian prime minister since the Howard era, and Trump will also accompany Morrison on a side visit to a new Australian-owned paper recycling mill in Ohio owned by the billionaire box maker Anthony Pratt.
Australia to join US military effort to protect shipping in the Strait of Hormuz


The key speech of the trip will be delivered by Morrison at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs after the Washington program, and the visit will wind up with a contribution at the 74th regular session of the general assembly at the United Nations.

Apparently he could have listened to Bolton and who knows where we would be with respect to Iran and NK?

An American Airlines mechanic charged with sabotaging an aircraft in July has possible links to the Islamic State (IS) group, US prosecutors say.

Abdul-Majeed Marouf Ahmed Alani, 60, has a brother in IS and had IS propaganda on his phone, they said.

The plane, with 150 people on board, did not take off after the pilots received an error message.

Mr Alani previously told police he had wanted to cause a delay or have the flight cancelled to get overtime work.

He did not intend to cause any harm to either the plane or the passengers, he is quoted as saying in court papers.

The 60-year-old, originally from Iraq, is being held without bail after prosecutors argued he presented a flight risk. He has not been charged with a terrorism-related crime.

Assistant US Attorney Maria Medetis said a video showing people being shot had been sent from his phone and Mr Alani had allegedly told the recipient that God wanted harm to come to non-Muslims.

She said it raised the possibility that his actions to damage the plane had had a deadly purpose.

Two witnesses gave differing accounts about Mr Alani's brother - one colleague said Mr Alani had travelled to Iraq to meet his brother, who was an IS member, but his roommate said Mr Alani had travelled there because his brother had been kidnapped.

Prosecutors did not provide evidence that Mr Alani had a brother in IS, media reports said.


The plane was scheduled to fly from Miami to Nassau in the Bahamas on 17 July - but pilots aborted take-off after receiving an error message about the flight computer.

Upon inspection, a piece of foam was found glued inside a navigation system part which stopped it from functioning. It was reportedly inside the tube leading from the outside of the plane to its air data module, a system that reports aircraft speed, pitch and other critical flight data

Mr Alani told authorities that he was upset at a stalled contract dispute between the union and American Airlines, which he said had affected him financially.

The naturalised US citizen, who has worked as an airline mechanic for 30 years, did eventually work overtime to help fix the plane.

Trump does not want to fight a new war...

The whistleblower complaint that has triggered a tense showdown between the U.S. intelligence community and Congress involves President Trump’s communications with a foreign leader, according to two former U.S. officials familiar with the matter.

Trump’s interaction with the foreign leader included a “promise” that was regarded as so troubling that it prompted an official in the U.S. intelligence community to file a formal whistleblower complaint with the inspector general for the intelligence community, said the former officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.

It was not immediately clear which foreign leader Trump was speaking with or what he pledged to deliver, but his direct involvement in the matter has not been previously disclosed. It raises new questions about the president’s handling of sensitive information and may further strain his relationship with U.S. spy agencies. One former official said the communication was a phone call...

President Trump appeared to distance himself from embattled Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Wednesday, declining to offer either encouragement or praise to his most enthusiastically loyal foreign ally now that he faces potential electoral defeat.

Speaking a day after Israeli elections that at best leave Netanyahu weakened, Trump
seemed cool to the Israeli conservative who has touted his ideological lockstep with Trump as a chief reelection credential.

Trump said he had not spoken to Netanyahu, a man he has described as a close friend. He then noted that the election is close while playing down Netanyahu’s importance to the alliance between the United States and Israel.
“Our relations are with Israel, so we’ll see what happens,” Trump told reporters traveling with him in California.

Netanyahu failed to win a clear majority in national elections Tuesday that the long-serving conservative leader had hoped would give him a strong mandate for another term and armor against a looming corruption case.

During his presidency, Trump has tightly embraced Netanyahu and his hawkish views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, frequently winning praise from the prime minister for such things as moving the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem and announcing that the United States would recognize Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights. But his comments Wednesday underscored Trump’s penchant for separating himself from political allies once they become weakened or could serve as a liability to him.

“Ice cold,” Brookings Institution Middle East specialist Tamara Cofman Wittes observed on Twitter...

Quote:

Trump does not want to fight a new war...

God bless him, he's so sweet.

Your acid replies grow tiresome.

Jeezus...I imagine there'll be all sorts of mockery and complaints about "triggers" but it's pretty damn chilling, isn't it.

Guess who:

Quote:

“We’ve been fighting against an imperial presidency for five and a half years,” he said in June 2016, after Trump had captured the nomination. “Every time we go to the floor and push back against an overreaching president, we get accused of being partisan at best and racist at worst. When we do it against a Republican president, maybe people will see that it was a principled objection in the first place. So we actually welcome that opportunity. It might actually be fun, being a strict-constitutionalist congressman doing battle with a non-strict-constitutionalist Republican president.”

Bill Kristol? David Frum? George Will, maybe?

Nope. That's Mick Mulvaney, White House chief of staff and top sycophantic bootlicker to Donald J. Trump.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump filed a lawsuit on Thursday against Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance and Trump’s longtime accounting firm Mazars, according to records in Manhattan federal court.

A copy of the complaint was not immediately available in online court records.

It is. Because as frightening as it is, we all know that actual truths portrayed are unimaginably worse. I hope it gains the broadest possible dissemination.

The whistleblower complaint that has triggered a tense showdown between the U.S. intelligence community and Congress involves President Trump’s communications with a foreign leader, according to two former U.S. officials familiar with the matter.

Trump’s interaction with the foreign leader included a “promise” that was regarded as so troubling that it prompted an official in the U.S. intelligence community to file a formal whistleblower complaint with the inspector general for the intelligence community, said the former officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.

It was not immediately clear which foreign leader Trump was speaking with or what he pledged to deliver, but his direct involvement in the matter has not been previously disclosed. It raises new questions about the president’s handling of sensitive information and may further strain his relationship with U.S. spy agencies. One former official said the communication was a phone call...
WP