monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

President Trump plans to order a rollback Friday of regulations governing the financial services industry and Wall Street under the Dodd-Frank law and beyond, a White House source confirmed.

Gary Cohn, White House Economic Council director, told the Wall Street Journal in an interview published last night that the administration would also move against a regulation designed to force retirement advisers to work in the best interest of their clients, the “fiduciary rule,” set to take effect in April and designed to eliminate conflicts-of-interests among professionals dealing with those enrolled in qualified retirement plans and IRAs.

In an interview with the Journal, Cohn, a former president of Goldman Sachs, said the order was a “table setter for a bunch of stuff that is coming.”

They use the word troll here for someone who beats them logically with an argument they don't have the skills or facts to answer. It's easier to call names and throw hands over ears than to stand up confidently with a good reason to disagree.

Because they have no good reason.

This season of establishment liberals has no argument. They've been trained to call names and hide from an opposing opinion.

Much-dreaded “sharia law,” or something resembling it, may well be coming to the United States.

Just not in the form many Americans expected.

That is, the religiously motivated laws creeping into public policymaking aren’t based on the Koran, and they aren’t coming from mythical hard-line Islamists in, say, Dearborn, Mich. They’re coming from the White House, which wants to make it easier for hard-line Christians to impose their beliefs and practices on the rest of us.

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what we’re hearing sounds like a man who is out of his depth and out of control, who can’t even pretend to master his feelings of personal insecurity.

Translation: The Democrats disagree with Mr. Trump's positions.

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His first two weeks in office have been utter chaos, and things just keep getting worse — perhaps because he responds to each debacle with a desperate attempt to change the subject that only leads to a fresh debacle.

Translation: Mr. Trump keeps doing things that Democrats don't like.

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America and the world can’t take much more of this.

Translation: The Democrats are sad and they feel like crying.

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Think about it: If you had an employee behaving this way, you’d immediately remove him from any position of responsibility and strongly suggest that he seek counseling.

Translation: The Democrats wish they had the power to fire people who they disagree with.

I was thinking this morning

Makes me want to puke.

“Yes, Arnold Schwarzenegger did a really bad job as Governor of California and even worse on the Apprentice...but at least he tried hard!”

In the thirteen days since President Donald Trump was sworn in, headlines have screamed about mass dismissals at federal agencies, tense phone calls with world leaders, and a commander-in-chief who stewed for days over coverage of his inauguration crowd size.

Many of these unflattering details about the turmoil at the White House and inner psychology of the President have come from a steady stream of anonymous leaks. Presidential historians and veteran political journalists agree they’re unlike anything they’ve seen before.

“I can’t recall having seen a situation where there appears to be so much leaking of such an intimate nature in such a short period of time,” Russell Riley, expert on presidential history at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center, told TPM.

“I think typically there is an enormous amount of care on the part of the White House staff not to do anything to undermine the President,” he added.

Bill Keller, the longtime former editor of The New York Times and current editor-in-chief of the Marshall Project, said he’d seen “nothing remotely like” the leaks coming out of the Trump White House over the course of his career...

GOP Rebrands Obamacare Strategy From ‘Repeal’ to ‘Repair’

Some Republicans in Congress are starting to talk more about trying to “repair” Obamacare, rather than simply calling for “repeal and replace.”

There’s good reason for that.

The repair language was discussed by Republicans during their closed-door policy retreat in Philadelphia last week as a better way to brand their strategy. Some of that discussion flowed from views that Republicans may not be headed toward a total replacement, said one conservative House lawmaker who didn’t want to be identified.

Using the word repair “captures exactly what the large majority of the American people want,” said Frank Luntz, a prominent Republican consultant and pollster who addressed GOP lawmakers at their retreat.

Trump Promised White Supremacy. Now He’s Delivering It.
He's implementing his campaign platform—and he's only getting started.

The bigoted undertones of Trump’s Mexico policy and the overtones of the [Muslim] ban are self-evident. But they are not incidental to the Fortress America that Trump envisions by keeping immigrants, refugees, and imports out of the country. If anything, the economic and security justifications for these policies are incidental, while the racial antagonism and scapegoating runs through the entirety of the agenda. Trump essentially promised us during the campaign that he would attempt to turn America into a white ethno-state, and now he’s making good on his promises.