monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

Which since he is president elect will happen about as much as Bush 43 was contradicted. Trump lies 80% of the time but the media wont point it out.

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.

Donald Trump understood at least one thing better than almost everybody watching the 2016 election: The breakdown of a shared public reality built upon widely accepted facts represented not a hazard, but an opportunity.

The institutions that once generated and reaffirmed that shared reality — including the church, the government, the news media, the universities and labor unions — are in various stages of turmoil or even collapse. Because Mr. Trump himself has little regard for facts, it was easy for him to capitalize on this situation...

...But it also turns out that when everyone can customize his or her own information bubble, it’s easier for demagogues to deploy made-up facts to suit the story they want to tell.

That’s what Mr. Trump has done. For him, facts aren’t the point; trust is. Like any autocrat, he wins his followers’ trust — let’s call it a blind trust — by lying so often and so brazenly that millions of people give up on trying to distinguish truth from falsehood. Whether the lie is about millions of noncitizens voting illegally, or the crime rate, or President Obama’s citizenship, it doesn’t matter: In a confusing world of competing, shouted “truths,” the simplest solution is to trust in your leader. As Mr. Trump is fond of saying, “I alone can fix it.”

“We’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers.”

“Given [Trump's] proclivity for revenge combined with his notorious thin skin, this threatens to result in a lasting relationship of distrust and ill will between the president and the intelligence community,” said Paul Pillar, former deputy director of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center.

U.S. intelligence officials described mounting concern and confusion about how to proceed in an administration so openly hostile to their function and role. “I don’t know what the end game is here,” a senior U.S. intelligence official said. “After Jan. 20,” the official said, referring to Inauguration Day, “we’re in uncharted territory.”

Pillar added: “Everything Trump has indicated with regard to his character and tendencies for vindictiveness might be worse” than former president Richard Nixon, who also had a dysfunctional relationship with the intelligence community.

In the past, Bannon has repeatedly expressed his affinity for the technique of Nazi propaganda filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl, whose work in the 1930s glamorized the rise of Adolf Hitler. “One time we were in the office, and he said, ‘I want to be the Leni Riefenstahl of George Bush,’ and I was horrified,’” Jones said. (Jones said Bannon later amended his remark to say he wanted to be the Riefenstahl of the GOP.)

..The Reagan documentary drew the attention of conservative provocateur Andrew Breitbart, who later called Bannon the Riefenstahl of the tea party movement. The pair fell into each other’s orbits.

Education Ministry Set to Bar Breaking the Silence From Israeli Schools
Directive seeks to stop groups whose activity 'undermines the very legitimacy of state entities' from addressing students, but it's unclear whether state can legally sanction principals who invite leftist veterans' group into their schools.

Another climate-denying nominee will be named Friday for a key environmental position in the Trump administration, multiple sources are reporting.
Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA) will likely be tapped to lead the Department of the Interior, which oversees all of the U.S. public lands, including forest management, the Parks Service, and fossil fuel extraction.
McMorris Rodgers is strongly in favor of developing the United States’ fossil fuel resources. She has also opposed federal ownership of public lands and voted to make it more difficult for the president to create national monuments. McMorris Rodgers is the author of a bill that would have directed the Department of the Interior to sell off federal lands in Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, and Wyoming.

Makes Sense
Trump's administration ends up being made up of plutocrats, right wing extremists and generals. Basically, exactly what you should have expected, unless you were stupid.

Trump, McConnel, Putin, and the Triumph of the Will to Power

...It is true that the CIA, like intelligence agencies in several other allied countries, fell for Saddam Hussein’s bluff that he still had weapons of mass destruction. But the overheated claims of imminent danger, and the ticking bomb of a nuclear program, came not from the CIA’s own analysts but from political pressure exerted by Dick Cheney and the Bush administration, which insisted the CIA’s hesitant conclusions should be discounted because the agency was allegedly filled with doves blind to the real danger only Cheney’s true believers could detect. Trump’s statement is a replication of that same debacle, substituting his own politicized judgments for the analysis of career staff. Cheneyism helped discredit the agency, and Trump is exploiting that discredit in order to impose more Cheneyism.

He had always had a major nasty side. We all know that. But this Rudy, this convention-speech Rudy, this Trump-is-a-great-man Rudy, this throw-the-Clintons-in-jail-and-by-the-way-Hillary-is-dying Rudy; there was something about this Rudy that was different. “How Rudy got here is a mystery that has rocked his alumni network,” says one member thereof. But I have watched Giuliani since I covered his mayoralty, and I think it’s not such a mystery at all — if you understand it the right way. And that way is in basic New York City geographic-resentment terms. Giuliani and Trump versus Hillary was white-ethnic Brooklyn and Queens versus the Manhattan snoots. It’s an old conflict that doesn’t have much resonance in today’s New York — Clinton won more than 80 percent of the vote in the Queens
assembly district that includes Astoria, where (on TV) that Ur-Trump-voter Archie Bunker used to live. But it’s deep in the bones of both men, and watching Trump unfurl those particular ancient grudges on the national stage seems to have energized Giuliani.

Which culminated naturally in this year’s speech. It wasn’t so much that Giuliani took a long walk off a short Alex Jones-Infowars pier, though there was some of that, with respect to Hillary and Benghazi. It was that every quality that once made Rudy a compelling speaker was gone. I’ve seen him give lots of speeches — as a candidate in 1993, especially, when I followed him around all over the city; and then, budget presentations and State of the City addresses. He could cajole, he could persuade, he could inform; as noted, he could be funny.

But in Cleveland, all was buried under an avalanche of bluster and bile. Reprinting the mere words here can’t begin to convey the shocking impact of the way Giuliani shrieked them. At one point he name-checked the four Americans who’d died in the Benghazi consular attack; and he said, reasonably enough, “May they rest in peace.” But the scowl on his face as he spit out the words was chilling. At another point he called Trump, this fraudster against his “university” students and stiffer of small businesspeople and scam artist against his own “charitable” foundation, a man with a “big heart” (twice!). He “loves people. All people!” He’s just screaming now: “From the top! To the bottom! From the middle! To the side!” He was so swept up, so discombobulated, that as he said the word “top,” he bent over and pointed down below his knees, and as he said the word “bottom,” he pointed above his head.

Remember that Mario Cuomo line, about how politicians campaign in poetry and govern in prose? This was cave painting.