monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

I had to google that ["I could shoot someone on Firth Avenue] quote for I didn't think it possible.

Who is this an indictment of, Mr Trump or his followers?

"Now is our Time. And ALEC is Ready"

Recently, ALEC Executive Director Lisa Nelson told ALEC funders and members that she was thrilled to report that the Trump administration "does have the potential to be an ALEC administration. It is full of the people and ideas we've advanced since 1973…Now is our time. And ALEC is ready."

ALEC allies are burrowed deep into the Trump administration. Trump VP, former Indiana Governor Mike Pence, is an ALEC booster and the Trump team has picked many with Koch and ALEC ties to fill key positions. Koch Congressman Mike Pompeo was picked for CIA chief, school voucher advocate and ALEC funder Betsy DeVos for Department of Education, and South Carolina Governor and ALEC stalwart Nikki Halley for U.N. representative.

Scott Pruitt, Trump's controversial EPA nominee has also aided ALEC, for example by co-chairing ALEC's Civil Justice Task Force as it cranked out anti-consumer bills. Koch operative Marc Short, who previously led the Koch Brothers' Freedom Partners, is Trump's Legislative Director.

Peter DaouVerified account
‏@peterdaou
QUESTION: How can you call yourself a patriot and support 33 Benghazi hearings but NOT ONE on whether Russia infiltrated the White House?

cicerone imposter wrote:

I'm prone not to trust Trump.

FOX NEWS ALERT!!!!

CI NOT PRONE TO TRUST TRUMP.

Fox sources tell us that the usually apolitical CI who has been steadfastly giving the new president the benefit of the doubt, may have moved to the other side of the dial and now is not prone to trust Trump.

This has to be a major setback for the Trump Administration because when you lose CI...

Trump was informed weeks ago that Flynn lied about his conversations with the Russians and was fine with that lie until it became public.

Quote:

Trump says he's unaware of reports Flynn discussed sanctions with Russian ambassador

President Donald Trump said Friday afternoon he was unaware of reports that his national security adviser, Michael Flynn, may have spoken about sanctions with the Russian ambassador before the inauguration.

Trump, speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One, said he will "look into that."

[...]

Earlier Friday, a senior White House adviser told CNN that Vice President Mike Pence did not know that Flynn may have discussed sanctions in the December conversation and believes "it's a problem."

Three administration officials said Pence only knew what Flynn told him -- that he had not talked about sanctions -- before Pence stood before cameras last month and vouched for Flynn. One official said Pence was trying to "get to the bottom of it," and two senior administration officials said Pence was "very intentional" in asking Flynn about his communication with the Russians before speaking to the media.

Greg Mitchell ‏@GregMitch 43m43 minutes ago
David Gergen just now: very unlikely Flynn would call Russian that day FIVE times without direction from Trump or another higher up.

Phone records and intercepted calls show that members of Donald J. Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and other Trump associates had repeated contacts with senior Russian intelligence officials in the year before the election, according to four current and former American officials.

Russia carried out a comprehensive cyber campaign to sabotage the U.S. presidential election, an operation that was ordered by Russian President Vladi­mir Putin and ultimately sought to help elect Donald Trump, U.S. intelligence agencies concluded in a remarkably blunt assessment released Friday.

The report depicts Russian interference as unprecedented in scale, saying that Moscow’s role represented “a significant escalation in directness, level of activity, and scope of effort” beyond previous election-related espionage.

The campaign initially sought to undermine public faith in the U.S. democratic process, “denigrate” Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and damage her expected presidency. But in time, Russia “developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump” and repeatedly sought to artificially boost his election chances.

The report released to the public is an abbreviated version of a highly classified multiagency assessment requested by President Obama. Even so, it amounts to an extraordinary postmortem of a Russian assault on a pillar of American democracy.

New York Times Feb 14, 2017
To the Editor:

Fevered media speculation about Donald Trump’s psychological motivations and psychiatric diagnosis has recently encouraged mental health professionals to disregard the usual ethical constraints against diagnosing public figures at a distance. They have sponsored several petitions and a Feb. 14 letter to The New York Times suggesting that Mr. Trump is incapable, on psychiatric grounds, of serving as president.

Most amateur diagnosticians have mislabeled President Trump with the diagnosis of narcissistic personality disorder. I wrote the criteria that define this disorder, and Mr. Trump doesn’t meet them. He may be a world-class narcissist, but this doesn’t make him mentally ill, because he does not suffer from the distress and impairment required to diagnose mental disorder.

Mr. Trump causes severe distress rather than experiencing it and has been richly rewarded, rather than punished, for his grandiosity, self-absorption and lack of empathy. It is a stigmatizing insult to the mentally ill (who are mostly well behaved and well meaning) to be lumped with Mr. Trump (who is neither).

Bad behavior is rarely a sign of mental illness, and the mentally ill behave badly only rarely. Psychiatric name-calling is a misguided way of countering Mr. Trump’s attack on democracy. He can, and should, be appropriately denounced for his ignorance, incompetence, impulsivity and pursuit of dictatorial powers.

His psychological motivations are too obvious to be interesting, and analyzing them will not halt his headlong power grab. The antidote to a dystopic Trumpean dark age is political, not psychological.

ALLEN FRANCES

Coronado, Calif.

The writer, professor emeritus of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Duke University Medical College, was chairman of the task force that wrote the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders IV (D.S.M.-IV).