monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

It's like trying to talk to the recently converted.........waste of breath.

Mike Bloomberg: Those Uneducated Midwest Rubes Are Just Too Stupid for Trans Bathrooms

Speaking to an audience at Oxford University and addressing the Brexit vote, Bloomberg said, "We, the intelligentsia, the people who could make it into this room, we believe a lot of things in terms of equality and protecting individual rights that make no sense to the vast bulk of people."

"They are not opposed to you having some rights, but there's a fundamental disconnect between us believing the rights of the individual come first and the general belief around the world, I think it's fair to say, that the rights of society comes first," Bloomberg continued.

Well stated and essential observations on yet another potential progressive tyrant

Biden Lashes Out At Female Voter: ‘You’re A Lying Dog-Faced Pony Soldier’

Well stated and essential observations on yet another potential progressive tyrant. It isn't far from the banning of large bottles of sweetened soft drinks to many other and more serious restrictions to the individual freedoms on which our nation has been built and which sustain it in a world so demonstrably prone to the suppression of human freedom.

Bloomberg didn't ssy anything like that.

Iran has started the countdown to the launch a scientific observation satellite that is part of a programme the United States had previously described as a "provocation".

"Beginning countdown to launch #Zafar_Satellite in the next few hours... In the Name of God," Iran's telecommunications minister, Mohammad Javad Azari Jahromi, wrote on Twitter on Sunday.

According to state news agency IRNA, the minister said less than 2 million euros ($2.2m) had been spent on making the satellite and that it would have cost five times more if Iran had wanted to buy it.

On February 1, the head of Iran's space agency said the 113-kilogramme (249-pound) Zafar (Victory in Farsi) would be launched into orbit 530km (329 miles) above Earth by a Simorgh rocket.

Its "primary mission" would be collecting imagery, Morteza Berari told AFP news agency, adding that Iran needed such data to study earthquakes, deal with natural disasters and develop its agriculture.

The Zafar was designed to remain operational for "more than 18 months", he added.

While the Islamic republic's satellite programme has concerned some Western countries, Berari said Iran supported the "peaceful use of outer space" and that its activities were "transparent".

Iran launched its first satellite Omid (Hope) in 2009 and the Rasad (Observation) satellite was sent into orbit in June 2011.

Tehran said in 2012 that it had successfully put its third domestically-made satellite Navid (Promise) into orbit.

The Zafar's scheduled launch comes days before the 41st anniversary of the Islamic Revolution and crucial parliamentary elections in Iran.

It also comes at a time of heightened tensions between Tehran and Washington, after a January 3 US drone attack killed top Iranian general Qassem Soleimani in Baghdad.

Iran retaliated days later by firing a wave of missiles at US troops stationed in Iraq.

The US has raised concerns in the past about Tehran's satellite programme, saying the launch of a carrier rocket in January 2019 amounted to a violation of curbs on its development of ballistic missiles.

Iranian authorities said the Payam (Message) satellite, which authorities said they launched it to collect data on the environment in Iran, had failed to reach orbit.

Long-standing acrimony between Tehran and Washington was exacerbated in 2018 when US President Donald Trump unilaterally withdrew from a deal that froze Iran's nuclear programme, before issuing new demands for its development of ballistic missiles to be curtailed.

Iran maintains it has no intention of acquiring nuclear weapons, and says its aerospace activities are peaceful and comply with a UN Security Council resolution that placed restrictions on its programme.

Replying to a tweet that asked what happens if Zafar fails like its predecessor, Jahromi said: "We will try again".

Iran's internet services have faced cyber-attacks for the past two days, according to the ministry. Officials have not elaborated on the source of the attack or its likely motives.

Iran launched its first satellite Omid (Hope) in 2009 and the Rasad (Observation) satellite was sent into orbit in June 2011.

Tehran said in 2012 that it had successfully put its third domestically-made satellite Navid (Promise) into orbit.

Trump weaponizes the Presidency after impeachment victory

CNN)Donald Trump is moving fast in the wake of his impeachment trial to use the government to punish his enemies and pursue his political ends, underlining how his acquittal has helped make him one of history's most powerful modern Presidents.

Trump has meted out retribution to officials who testified against him in the impeachment inquiry, is making a push to defy Congress in funding his border wall and appears to be seeking new ways to hector former Vice President Joe Biden after facing down a mortal threat to his presidency.

He is completing his project of fashioning the office around his own personality. It's unrestrained, unaccountable, often profane, impervious to outside influence and factual constraints of normal governance. The President has established dominance over his party, his Cabinet and his own media complex. He loosened Congress's constraints by refusing to cooperate with the impeachment probe.

The result is that there are very few political constraints on his behavior left.

Trump sent a strong signal of Washington's new power realities Friday by ignoring pleas from the Republican senators who acquitted him and who had hoped to protect those who testified against him.

Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, a national security council Ukraine specialist and his brother Yevgeny, a national security lawyer who was not involved in the Ukraine controversy, were sent back to the Pentagon. US ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland, who effectively implicated Trump in a quid pro quo in colorful House testimony, was also sent packing. The two had been quietly planning exits of their own, three sources told CNN's Kaitlan Collins, but according to a person familiar with Trump's thinking, although he had been advised to simply let them leave to avoid the criticism of firing impeachment witnesses, he didn't want them to go quietly.

Republican senators have correctly pointed out that the President has the power to fire anyone in the executive branch and has the right to a team in which he has confidence.

"He's a political appointee. He serves at the pleasure of the President," South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham said on CBS' "Face the Nation" on Sunday, referring to Vindman.

Yet Trump's moves, conducted so quickly after the ending of the impeachment showdown were a clear sign that those who cross him will pay a price -- in a way that could send a chill through the government and stifle dissent and accountability. And they undermine the comments of GOP senators who in voting to acquit the President suggested that the shame of impeachment could temper his behavior.

Similarly, Trump's vocal attacks on Mitt Romney, the sole senator in history to vote to convict a President of his own party, send an unmistakable warning to the GOP: the President demands otal loyalty. Those who refuse are ostracized.

Trump is also set to ignore another constitutional norm -- that Congress has the power of the purse -- by diverting billions more in already appropriated funding to pay for his border wall. The administration argues it does not require the approval of lawmakers for such steps. But lawmakers from both parties have complained about losing funding for projects within their own states and have argued the practice is symptomatic of a wider transfer of power from Capitol Hill to the White House.

Taking aim at the NSC

This week, the President is expected to take another scythe to the restraining bureaucracy by gutting the National Security Council itself, a rare remaining source of non-Trumpian thought in the government.

Now that impeachment is over, there are also signs that Trump's government and allies are using their power to perpetuate the behavior — targeting Democratic presidential candidate Biden — that caused him to be impeached in the first place.

Graham said Sunday that the Justice Department was now evaluating information about the role of Biden's son Hunter in a Ukrainian energy company provided by Trump's personal lawyer.

"The Department of Justice is receiving information coming out of the Ukraine from Rudy (Giuliani)," Graham said on CBS, citing a conversation with Attorney General William Barr.

"He told me that they have created a process that Rudy could give information and they would see if it's verified," Graham, who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee, said. Graham also warned that any information Giuliani collected in Ukraine needed to be evaluated by Justice to ensure that it did not contain Russian propaganda. But given previous evidence that Barr is acting not as the independent arbiter of the US justice system but as a political facilitator for the President, there will be extreme skepticism among Democrats about Justice handling Giuliani's material at all.

Trump's attempts to pressure Ukraine to investigate Hunter Biden and Joe Biden, his potential 2020 general election rival, were at the center of the President's impeachment trial. Trump and his allies have repeatedly made unfounded and false claims to allege that the Bidens acted corruptly in Ukraine.

Trump shows how he will use his new power

In a post-impeachment appearance at the White House last week, the President lashed out at his political enemies, even questioning the faith of some critics, hinting that he would use his power to exact vengeance.

He branded his opponents "evil," compared those who investigated his presidency to "dirty cops," blasted the Russia probe as "bullsh*t" and condemned his critics as "liars and leakers."

This is all music to the ears of Republican voters -- more than 90% of whom are gravitating to a strongman President sitting atop a purring economy. And Democrats are suddenly beginning to realize the formidable task they face in November. Trump last week had the highest approval rating of his presidency -- 49% in a Gallup tracking poll -- and is building a formidable election machine in swing states while Democrats struggle to identify their best potential candidate to take him on. His State of the Union address last week underlined how Trump will use the strength of the economy -- on which his ratings outpace his presidential job approval numbers, to make a case for a second term.

From a historic perspective, the President's consolidation of his own position is a political achievement that is not to be discounted. It is even more notable than his dominance of the Republican nomination chase in 2016 and remarkable for the fact that he had no prior political experience.

But it also raises profound questions about the balance between the branches of government and puts American democracy under the most strain that it has faced in decades.

And it raises the possibility that the President's instincts could steer him on to more murky legal and constitutional ground. After all, his notorious "do us a favor" phone call with Ukraine's President came just two days after ex-special counsel Robert Mueller testified on the Russian probe in Congress.

The President's new-found political liberation is the culmination of three years of tearing at the norms of his office and of defanging competing centers of power. He has comprehensively answered the question posed at the beginning of his term: would he change to accommodate the presidency or bend the office in deference to his wild, unrestrained personality?

Trump has removed cabinet titans like former Defense Secretary James Mattis and former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson who worked to contain his more impulsive instincts. He has replaced them with more compliant loyalists, and also favors pliable and dispensable acting cabinet secretaries.

And he has discovered, especially during the impeachment drama, that a President who is willing to ignore the institutional restraints around his office and the normal codes of moral behavior that have attached themselves to his role can access a well of power that his predecessors were unable to tap.

That's part of a reason why his presidency seems likely to set many new precedents for the behavior of the executive in the US political system before it ends -- and why the current period up until the next election could be a particularly intense ride for Trump and the nation.