monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

Donald Trump has selected retired Marine Gen. John Kelly to lead the Department of Homeland Security

For someone who knows more than the generals, he's sure cramming a lot of them into his administration. Why he's doing this isn't clear.

This is an aggressively bad choice, a poke in the eye to a long history of bipartisan cooperation on environmental issues, to a nation that has come to depend on the agency for healthy air and drinkable water, and to 195 countries that agreed in Paris last year to reduce their emissions of climate-changing greenhouse gases in the belief that the United States would show the way. A meeting Monday between Mr. Trump and Al Gore had raised hope among some that the president-elect might reverse his campaign pledge to withdraw the United States from the Paris accord. The Pruitt appointment says otherwise.

Since becoming Oklahoma’s top legal officer in 2011, Mr. Pruitt has been a bitter opponent of the E.P.A., joining in one lawsuit after another to kill off federal environmental regulations. He has challenged standards for reducing soot and smog pollution that cross state lines. He has fought protections against mercury, arsenic and other toxic pollutants from power plants. He has sued to overturn an E.P.A. rule modestly enlarging the scope of the Clean Water Act to protect streams and wetlands vital to the nation’s water supply.

ltrated the German Parliament’s computer network in May 2015, it took nearly a year before the country’s intelligence agency concluded that the attack was most likely the work of their Russian counterparts.

Last week, when 900,000 Germans lost access to internet and telephone services, it took a matter of hours before politicians began pointing fingers at Moscow.

Berlin is now concerned that Germany will become the next focus of Moscow’s campaign to destabilize Western democracies as national elections approach next year.

...The increasing dissemination of false news, disinformation and propaganda during the American campaign and before Italy’s referendum last weekend has added a related layer of worry about the potential to corrupt public debate and democratic processes.

Obama has wielded the EPA as a club and trump isn't going to have that.

As to "Obama wielded the EPA like a club", that's a talking point metaphor without any informational value.

DONALD TRUMP: When do we beat Mexico at the border? They’re laughing at us, at our stupidity. And now they are beating us economically. They are not our friend, believe me. But they’re killing us economically.

The U.S. has become a dumping ground for everybody else’s problems.

Thank you. It’s true, and these are the best and the finest. When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.

But I speak to border guards and they tell us what we’re getting. And it only makes common sense. It only makes common sense. They’re sending us not the right people.

It’s coming from more than Mexico. It’s coming from all over South and Latin America, and it’s coming probably— probably— from the Middle East. But we don’t know. Because we have no protection and we have no competence, we don’t know what’s happening. And it’s got to stop and it’s got to stop fast.

Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.), who has emerged as a dark-horse pick for Donald Trump's secretary of state, tangled with a Yahoo News host Wednesday over whether Russia is a major human rights abuser. Rohrabacher's verdict: It's "baloney."


The exchange is pretty remarkable — in part because he was debating a Yahoo host who just happens to be from the former Soviet Union, but mostly because Rohrabacher seemed to dismiss long-standing and documented evidence of abuses in Russia. Rohrabacher seemed to take exception to Russia being mentioned in the same breath as China when it comes to human rights abuses.

here's an exchange between Fox News's Tucker Carlson and Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), who is joining fellow Democrats in pressing for a House review of Russia's alleged meddling. Carlson presses Schiff hard, arguing that nothing has been proven and dismissing the intelligence community's allegations as its opinion.

Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it whether it exists or not, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedy. (Ernest Benn)

=> The Clean Air Act has been administratively interpreted as regulating natural CO2 (and recently Methane, CH4) resulting from animal respiration and flatulence, among other things) as toxic gases.

georgeob1 wrote:

=> The Clean Air Act has been administratively interpreted as regulating natural CO2 (and recently Methane, CH4) resulting from animal respiration and flatulence, among other things) as toxic gases.

As greenhouse gases you mean, and they indisputably ARE greenhouse gases.

NY Times editorial on the Pruitt appointment to EPA

=>Under Obama the EPA has administratively stretched the Clean Water Act by interpreting a phrase in the law, "The waters of the United States " , which under long-stasnding legal precedent included only the navigable rivers of the country, to include all streams and creeks feeding them and, a few years ago, even puddles appearing in a fearmers field after heavy rains or goound surface reconturing after someconstruction.

=> The Clean Air Act has been administratively interpreted as regulating natural CO2 (and recently Methane, CH4) resulting from animal respiration and flatulence, among other things) as toxic gases.

All of ths was done by administrative fiat, without any authorizing action by our legislature.

As greenhouse gases you mean, and they indisputably ARE greenhouse gases.