monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

But let's also note at this critical juncture where the US of A speeds over the edge of the cliff...

What damage can Trump cause our country?

The contradiction between Trump’s populist rhetoric and Puzder’s anti-worker agenda is rooted in the coalition that Trump built during the election. He won the electoral vote by appealing to working class whites who previously had not voted or voted for Democrats, but he also had the support of many conventional business-friendly Republicans. To hold this coalition together, it looks like Trump is going to square the circle via political theater—using the spotlight he enjoys as president-elect to single out individual businesses for populist ire, while handing the levers of power to corporate leaders like Puzder.

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What damage can Trump cause our country?

The question is too large, ci. Or the answers too numerous. But my concerns and the concerns of many others can be found in the many posts starting on page one.

But one way which is presently emerging is this one:

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The contradiction between Trump’s populist rhetoric and Puzder’s anti-worker agenda is rooted in the coalition that Trump built during the election. He won the electoral vote by appealing to working class whites who previously had not voted or voted for Democrats, but he also had the support of many conventional business-friendly Republicans. To hold this coalition together, it looks like Trump is going to square the circle via political theater—using the spotlight he enjoys as president-elect to single out individual businesses for populist ire, while handing the levers of power to corporate leaders like Puzder.

kleptocracy behind a populist facade

WASHINGTON — An extraordinary breach has emerged between President-elect Donald J. Trump and the national security establishment, with Mr. Trump mocking American intelligence assessments that Russia interfered in the election on his behalf, and top Republicans vowing investigations into Kremlin activities.

Mr. Trump, in a statement issued by his transition team on Friday evening, expressed complete disbelief in the intelliegence agencies’ assessments. “These are the same people that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction,” Mr. Trump’s team said, adding that the election was over and that it was time to “move on.”

Though Mr. Trump has wasted no time in antagonizing the agencies, to carry out priorities like combating terrorism and deterring cyberattacks he will have to rely on them for the sort of espionage activities and analysis that they spend more than $70 billion a year to perform.

At this point in a transition, a president-elect is usually delving into intelligence he has never before seen and learning about C.I.A. and National Security Agency abilities. But Mr. Trump, who has taken intelligence briefings only sporadically, is questioning not only analytic conclusions, but also their underlying facts.

“To have the president-elect of the United States simply reject the fact-based narrative that the intelligence community puts together because it conflicts with his a priori assumptions — wow,” said Michael V. Hayden, who was the director of the N.S.A. and later the C.I.A. under President George W. Bush.

With the partisan emotions on both sides — Mr. Trump’s supporters see a plot to undermine his presidency, and Hillary Clinton’s supporters see a conspiracy to keep her from the presidency — the result is an environment in which even those basic facts become the basis for dispute.

Mr. Trump’s team lashed out at the agencies after The Washington Post reported that the C.I.A. believed that Russia had intervened to undercut Mrs. Clinton and lift Mr. Trump, and The New York Times reported that Russia had broken into Republican National Committee computer networks just as they had broken into Democratic ones, but had released documents only on the Democrats.

The president-elect finds himself in a bind after strenuously rejecting for months all assertions that Russia was working to help him. While there is no evidence that the Russian efforts affected the outcome of the election or the legitimacy of the vote, Mr. Trump and his aides want to shut the door on any such notion, including the idea that President Vladimir V. Putin schemed to put him in office.

Instead, Mr. Trump casts the issue as an unknowable mystery. “It could be Russia,” he recently told Time magazine. “And it could be China. And it could be some guy in his home in New Jersey.”

The Republicans who lead the congressional committees overseeing intelligence, the Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security take the opposite view. They say that Russia was behind the election meddling, but that the scope and intent of the operation need deep investigation, hearings and public reports.

Minimum wage IS too high. It causes inflation and companies to move to other countries.

Here it is. Let's celebrate today's 5 Star rated "Making Americans Stupider Every Day" winner.

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House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes is chiding President Barack Obama for ordering a "full review" of Russia's election-year cyberattacks, saying the administration "has suddenly awoken to the threat" posed by Moscow.

"Russia's cyberattacks are no surprise to the House Intelligence Committee, which has been closely monitoring Russia's belligerence for years," the California Republican said Friday in a statement. "As I've said many times, the Intelligence Community has repeatedly failed to anticipate Putin's hostile actions."

But Trump was going to get on this like right away

Blatham sees the news only through lens of his largely silly prefabricated political agenda, and regularly ignores rather clear contextual detail pointing in s very different direction. There are words for that as well.

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What damage can Trump cause our country?

The question is too large, ci. Or the answers too numerous. But my concerns and the concerns of many others can be found in the many posts starting on page one.

But one way which is presently emerging is this one:

Quote:

The contradiction between Trump’s populist rhetoric and Puzder’s anti-worker agenda is rooted in the coalition that Trump built during the election. He won the electoral vote by appealing to working class whites who previously had not voted or voted for Democrats, but he also had the support of many conventional business-friendly Republicans. blah, blah, ......

Yeah, words like cheese-eater, eh?

In 1980, for example, Exxon paid $400 million for the rights to the Natuna natural gas field in the South China Sea. But company scientists soon realized that the field contained unusually high concentrations of carbon dioxide, and concluded in 1984 that extracting its gas would make it “the world’s largest point source emitter of CO2 [, which] raises concern for the possible incremental impact of Natuna on the CO2 greenhouse problem.” The company left Natuna undeveloped. Exxon’s John Woodward, who wrote an internal report on the field in 1981, told InsideClimate News, “They were being farsighted. They weren’t sure when CO2 controls would be required and how it would affect the economics of the project.”3

This, of course, was a responsible decision. But it indicates the distance between Exxon’s decades of public deception about climate change and its internal findings. So do investments that Exxon and its Canadian subsidiary Imperial Oil made in the Arctic. As Ken Croasdale, a senior ice researcher at Imperial, told an engineering conference in 1991, concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere were increasing “due to the burning of fossil fuels. Nobody disputes this fact.” Accordingly,

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any major development with a life span of say 30–40 years will need to assess the impacts of potential global warming. This is particularly true of Arctic and offshore projects in Canada, where warming will clearly affect sea ice, icebergs, permafrost and sea levels.

Croasdale based these projections on the same climate models that Exxon’s leaders spent the next fifteen years publicly disparaging. But following his warnings that rising seas would threaten buildings on the coast, bigger waves would threaten offshore drilling platforms, and thawing permafrost would threaten pipelines, Exxon began reinforcing its Arctic infrastructure.4