monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

If it's obvious that one country is getting fucked in a deal, it aint gunna be us, eh?

all sides win.

"International law" is an oxymoron.

America First, Baby!

There is a wealth of historical evidence that says you are dead wrong with respect to each of these countries - one can readily cite wars initiated by Russia for occupation of their territory and very bloody mass exterminations and forced transportations to Siberia to suppress nationalist movemernts in each one of them in just the last century.

So no Geneva Conventions, agreements and treaties with nations, no diplomats etc etc?

Georgebob willingly took part in this. So much for being a nice guy.

It's all getting a bit much, the poor bastard wants out. It can't be a lot of fun, day in day out, being made to spout a load of nonsensical horseshit that nobody in their right mind would believe.

Some days, his briefings have drawn over four million viewers. But he’s tap dancing for one viewer in particular: the fuming, demanding cable-news addict in the Oval Office, who has very specific opinions on what message he wants given to the media and how hard to give it to them.

During the briefings, it helps to imagine Mr. Spicer being watched by a cruel flaming eye just off-camera. Mr. Trump, reportedly, has criticized Mr. Spicer’s suits, his speaking style, his insufficient fire in the belly.

Mr. Spicer doesn’t just have a boss; he has a minder. In the middle of one briefing, David Corn of Mother Jones tweeted, “he was passed long notes: big letters written w/ red Sharpie. Journos speculate they’re from a watching Trump.”

In that latter case - when school libraries are pressured by the religious right to remove/refuse certain books for ideological reasons - many liberal critics do (IMHO rightly) often decry it as censorship, though. So that's maybe not the best example.

19 times Trump called jobs numbers ‘fake’ before they made him look good

A conservative doctor-turned-pundit with deep ties to Wall Street and the pharmaceutical industry is President Donald Trump's pick to lead the Food and Drug Administration.

...Gottlieb is a resident fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute and a partner in the venture capital firm New Enterprise Associates. He has spent more than a decade in Washington rotating between the worlds of government, health policy consulting and political think tanks.

AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — Federal judges found more problems in Texas' voting rights laws, ruling that Republicans racially gerrymandered some congressional districts to weaken the growing electoral power of minorities, who former President Barack Obama set out to protect at the ballot box before leaving office.

The ruling late Friday by a three-judge panel in San Antonio gave Democrats hope of new, more favorably drawn maps that could turn over more seats in Congress in 2018. But the judges in their 2-1 decision didn't propose an immediate fix, and Texas could appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Republicans hold two of three congressional districts ruled newly invalid and were found to have been partly drawn with discriminatory intent. The GOP-controlled Texas Legislature approved the maps in 2011, the same year then-Gov. Rick Perry signed a voter ID law that ranks among the toughest in the U.S. Courts have since weakened that law, too.

A recently retired FBI agent, Brian McCauley, was the fact witness at the center of yet another Clinton email 'scandal' which broke about three weeks before the November 2016 election. This was the 'quid pro quo' story about email classification which broke in mid-October. It turns out that about two weeks before that story came out, McCauley had been placed on retainer by Trump advisor Michael Flynn, a retainer/consultancy agreement which eventually totaled $28,000.

The fees were for research tied to Flynn's foreign agent advocacy on behalf of the Republic of Turkey.

There's a difference between a GI conscript and a pilot who reenlisted over and over again.

According to The Intercept, “The small group of lawyers and PR strategists orchestrating the secret science effort are closely tied to those attacking the EPA from within. All have connections to either big tobacco, oil, or both.” And those industries would, of course, benefit financially by killing or delaying regulation. “I’m sure you’ve heard of the ‘Delay Game,’ where clearly it’s in the best interests of certain major stakeholders to delay science so they can in effect delay regulations that may have an impact on their business or industry,” said Thomas Burke, who served as the EPA’s chief science advisor under President Obama. “So one has to be a little skeptical of an intent to a bill like this that might lead to an endless loop of reanalysis of data.”

Burke and others said the HONEST Act would delay or stymie the approval of scientific data at EPA because it requires that the disclosure of private data and that study results be “reproducible,” meaning an outside source must be able to replicate the entire study on their own and get the same results. Scientists say that’s just not possible for many public health studies. Consider a 10-year study of lead exposure in pregnant women and children: How would scientists swiftly replicate the results? Or a study on the BP oil spill’s impact on public health in coastal Gulf communities: How can one reproduce that event?

The US institution which retains the most popularity or acceptance is the military and that is to a high degree, just nuts.