monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

Trump, speaking exclusively to Fox News, accused “Obama people” of giving news organizations embarrassing details of his recent tense phone conversations with his Australian and Mexican counterparts, and said that the holdovers from the Obama administration still serving on his White House and National Security Council staff were being replaced.

“It’s a disgrace that they leaked because it’s very much against our country,” Trump said, without stating why he believed that career civil servants who work in Democratic and Republican administrations were the source of the leaks. “It’s a very dangerous thing for this country,” he said.

Sobieski’s two accounts, for example, tweet more than 1,000 times a day using “schedulers” that work through stacks of his own pre-written posts in repetitive loops. With retweets and other forms of sharing, these posts reach the feeds of millions of other accounts, including those of such conservative luminaries as Fox News’s Sean Hannity, GOP strategist Karl Rove and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), according to researcher Jonathan Albright.

“It’s like a giant megaphone,” said Albright, an assistant professor of media analytics at Elon University, in North Carolina, whose research singled out Sobieski’s accounts as having unusual reach.

When Albright studied the most prolific Twitter accounts during the final two weeks of the election, he found that all of the top 20 appeared to support the eventual winner, Donald Trump. Among accounts using major pro-Trump hashtags such as “#MAGA,” for “Make America Great Again,” two of the top three belonged to Sobieski.

While there is no way to know how often Sobieski’s tweets are read as they flit through busy feeds — nor is it clear how they are influencing political debates — researchers have found that automation allows users to exert an oversize influence on conversations on Twitter and beyond.

Former CIA chief: Trump’s travel ban hurts American spies — and America

President Trump’s executive order on immigration was ill-conceived, poorly implemented and ill-explained. To be fair, it would have been hard to explain since it was not the product of intelligence and security professionals demanding change, but rather policy, political and ideological personalities close to the president fulfilling a campaign promise to deal with a threat they had overhyped.

I’ve heard from a lot of intelligence professionals who are going to have to live with the consequences. They noted that six of the seven countries involved in the ban (Iran being somewhat an exception) are troubled, fragmented states where human sources are essential to defeating threats to the United States.

Paradoxically, they pointed out how the executive order breached faith with those very sources, many of whom they had promised to always protect with the full might of our government and our people. Sources who had risked much, if not all, to keep Americans safe.

Finally, we must resist a bad habit infecting political commentary that sees Trump’s irresponsibility, bigotry and casual cruelty as a heroic form of “disruption” aimed at bringing down “the establishment.”

No. The people in the streets rallying against Trump are not the establishment. Those political and business leaders who are, for now, playing along with and enabling Trump very much are the establishment.

Americans who tell pollsters they oppose Trump — including outsiders from Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) on the left to independent presidential candidate Evan McMullin on the right — are not defending some status quo. They are standing up for humane principles that Trump is threatening: democracy over authoritarian nationalism; religious pluralism over bigotry; clarity of thought, speech and action over a self-involved indiscipline; civil rights and civil liberties over their unchecked abuse; and a basic decency toward each other over a political approach devoted to disparaging and bullying adversaries.

Trump administration looks to divide Russia's relations with Iran

The Trump administration is exploring ways to break Russia’s military and diplomatic alliance with Iran in a bid to both end the Syrian conflict and bolster the fight against Islamic State, said senior administration, European and Arab officials involved in the policy discussions.

The emerging strategy seeks to reconcile President Donald Trump’s seemingly contradictory vows to improve relations with Russian President Vladimir Putin and to aggressively challenge the military presence of Iran—one of Moscow’s most critical allies—in the Middle East, these officials say.

A senior administration official said the White House doesn’t have any illusions about Russia or see Mr. Putin as a “choir boy,” despite further conciliatory statements from Mr. Trump about the Russian leader over the weekend. But the official said that the administration doesn’t view Russia as the same existential threat that the Soviet Union posed to the U.S. during the Cold War and that Mr. Trump was committed to constraining Iran.

Trump is threatening: democracy over authoritarian nationalism; religious pluralism over bigotry; clarity of thought, speech and action over a self-involved indiscipline; civil rights and civil liberties over their unchecked abuse; and a basic decency toward each other over a political approach devoted to disparaging and bullying adversaries.

Quite early in the Trump presidency, people asked me, Is this like Watergate? The question came mainly from people who weren’t around at the time. My answer was either, No or Not yet.

Well, the situation just changed, and moved significantly toward what was at the heart of Watergate. Donald Trump’s immediate reaction to the ruling Friday night by a federal judge in Washington state ordering a hold on his immigration plan might have been the prelude to a constitutional collision between the president and the judiciary. It was just such a showdown that led to the end of Richard Nixon’s presidency.

In his first defiant tweet dismissing the court’s decision—which put a temporary halt to the implementation of his executive order imposing a travel ban on citizens of seven Muslim-dominated countries—as “ridiculous” and referring to “the opinion of this so-called judge, which essentially takes law-enforcement away from our country,” Trump displayed the same contempt for the federal judiciary in our constitutional system that brought down Nixon...

Bill to Pre-Emptively Attack Iran Introduced in Congress

Rep. Alcee Hastings (D-FL) recently introduced a bill that would enable to US to invade Iran for the stated purpose of preventing it from obtaining nuclear weapon...it authorizes the president to launch a “pre-emptive” war with the Middle Eastern nation without requiring Congressional approval and without the necessity of Iran having actually committed any action that would warrant a full-scale invasion.

President Donald Trump on Monday said the American people “want border security and extreme vetting,” decrying “negative polls” that suggest otherwise as “fake news.”

A majority of Americans, however, opposed the president’s controversial executive order restricting travel by citizens of seven majority-Muslim countries, according to a CNN/ORC poll released Friday.

Fifty-three percent opposed the order, with 46 percent arguing that it makes the U.S. less safe from terrorism and 49 percent saying it harms American values by preventing those seeking asylum from entering the U.S.

“Any negative polls are fake news, just like the CNN, ABC, NBC polls in the election,” Trump tweeted Monday morning. “Sorry, people want border security and extreme vetting.”

He followed up minutes later with a post casting himself as a data-driven decision maker while accusing the media of lying “to marginalize” his supporters.

“I call my own shots, largely based on an accumulation of data, and everyone knows it,” Trump said. “Some FAKE NEWS media, in order to marginalize, lies!”

Matthew Yglesias ‏@mattyglesias 11h11 hours ago
New 24 season is the president tweeting complaints about judges as he tries to keep the country safe from five year-old refugees.

I hear-tell some muslim with a machette done paid a little visit to one of your museums over there in Frogville, eh, Ollie?

Where's he, now?

He one of your homeboys, Ollie?