monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

hightor wrote:

So when camlok continually raises a subject that no one else wants to discuss, repeatedly filling pages with attempts to get comments or attract attention, and there's already an active thread to discuss that very topic , suggesting that the discussion be moved is authoritarian??? Do I have that right?

Actually between JTT blabbering about 9/11 and Blatham posting links to commentators and shouting "Look everyone! I think what the smart people think!" I find JTT to be the less tedious one.

At least JTT is honestly expressing his own views.

hightor wrote:

And, good god, please — enough of the armchair psychoanalysis and the authoritarian(!) attempts to restrict the re-posting of articles from well-known media sources and journals of opinion. I like to see how the press covers the events of the day — I only wish conservatives made more effort to submit erudite pieces from a conservative point of view instead of just posting tiresome memes, forwarding fake news, and bitching about links.

Of course I may be in error in supposing that erudite sources of the conservative point of view actually exist.

The problem is, these articles are not being advanced as part of any political discussion. They are being posted so someone can pretend he's an intellectual. The posting of these articles is not leading to any sort of reasonable back and forth conversation or hashing out of ideas, nor is it meant to.

So I vote more JTT and less Blatham. At least JTT is expressing his own viewpoint and is willing to have a conversation about it.

Debra Law wrote:

This is addressed to layman: How many middle-eastern moms, dads, and kids do you want to bomb, maim, murder, and otherwise cause to suffer grave harm/hardship before your thirst for blood is satiated?

Although not addressed to me, I'd like to answer too.

Let's continue until every single person who expressed satisfaction over the 9/11 attacks has had all of their children killed.

Maybe that huge clodhopper foot is there to stop the bleeding. Now Trump wants to lift it and here are the people you quote saying that the US shouldn't stop it's "moral obligation to spread its goodness and superior wisdoms" because then millions will starve.

Is this one of those false either/or binaries that you were speaking of?

Quote:

Re: McGentrix (Post 6386948)
Quote:
See that's the problem... when any kind of conservative point of view is given it just becomes an argument about the source and never the material.

Well, I was being facetious, as I know there are conservatives who have interesting things to say.

This administration operates under the doctrine of Trumpal infallibility: Nothing the president says is wrong, whether it’s his false claim that he won the popular vote or his assertion that the historically low murder rate is at a record high. No error is ever admitted. And there is never anything to apologize for.

O.K., at this point it’s not news that the commander in chief of the world’s most powerful military is a man you wouldn’t trust to park your car or feed your cat. Thanks, Comey. But Mr. Trump’s pathological inability to accept responsibility is just the culmination of a trend. American politics — at least on one side of the aisle — is suffering from an epidemic of infallibility, of powerful people who never, ever admit to making a mistake.

There are conservatives who do have interesting things to say. Oddly, I quote more of them here than I think any conservative does. There are some people writing at the American Conservative, for example, who are very bright and knowledgeable and who care about getting things right. That is, they don't do propaganda. One can pull good work from the WSJ or from NRO or even the Weekly Standard or from conservatives writing at media entities which try to include quality thinking/writing from left and right.

I had to look at my calendar and make sure it said 2017 and not 1997. The Project for the New American Century ceased to function in 2006.

You mean that you will reprint conservatives that have something negative to say about the current administration. They are bright and knowledgeable but if they have something positive to say, they will never be seen in a positive light through a Blatham posting. That's just a trick of the trade.

There are conservatives who do have interesting things to say.

The political appointee charged with keeping watch over Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt and his aides has offered unsolicited advice so often that after just four weeks on the job, Pruitt has shut him out of many staff meetings, according to two senior administration officials.

At the Pentagon, they’re privately calling the former Marine officer and fighter pilot who’s supposed to keep his eye on Defense Secretary Jim Mattis “the commissar,” according to a high-ranking defense official with knowledge of the situation. It’s a reference to Soviet-era Communist Party officials who were assigned to military units to ensure their commanders remained loyal.

Most members of President Trump’s Cabinet do not yet have leadership teams in place or even nominees for top deputies. But they do have an influential coterie of senior aides installed by the White House who are charged — above all — with monitoring the secretaries’ loyalty, according to eight officials in and outside the administration.

This shadow government of political appointees with the title of senior White House adviser is embedded at every Cabinet agency, with offices in or just outside the secretary’s suite.

FBI Director James B. Comey and National Security Agency head Michael S. Rogers are set to testify Monday on the intelligence community’s conclusion that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election, and they will also face questions about possible collusion between associates of President Trump and the Kremlin.

Just hours before the start of the hearing, Trump posted a series of tweets claiming Democrats “made up” the allegations of Russian contacts in an attempt to discredit the GOP during the presidential campaign. Trump also urged federal investigators to shift their focus to probe disclosures of classified material.

“The real story that Congress, the FBI and all others should be looking into is the leaking of Classified information,” Trump wrote early Monday. “Must find leaker now!”

The US has also the second most charitable country in the world..

Mrs Sybil Birling

Mrs Birling is about fifty, rather cold and snobbish.
Enlarge image

She is described at the start as "about fifty, a rather cold woman and her husband's social superior."
She is a snob, very aware of the differences between social classes. She is irritated when Mr Birling makes the social gaffe of praising the cook in front of Gerald and later is very dismissive of Eva, saying "Girls of that class."
She has the least respect for the Inspector of all the characters. She tries - unsuccessfully - to intimidate him and force him to leave, then lies to him when she claims that she does not recognise the photograph that he shows her.
She sees Sheila and Eric still as "children" and speaks patronisingly to them.
She tries to deny things that she doesn't want to believe: Eric's drinking, Gerald's affair with Eva, and the fact that a working class girl would refuse money even if it was stolen, claiming "She was giving herself ridiculous airs."
She admits she was "prejudiced" against the girl who applied to her committee for help and saw it as her "duty" to refuse to help her. Her narrow sense of morality dictates that the father of a child should be responsible for its welfare, regardless of circumstances.
At the end of the play, she has had to come to terms that her son is a heavy drinker who got a girl pregnant and stole money to support her, her daughter will not marry a good social 'catch' and that her own reputation within the town will be sullied. Yet, like her husband, she refuses to believe that she did anything wrong and doesn't accept responsibility for her part in Eva's death.

Because this thread is far too popular and polarizing. The 5 other conservatives on A2K already use this thread and so I will continue to post my PoV here. I do not think many of your liberal brethren would participate in such a thread.

It is high season in South Florida: blue skies, low humidity, warm temperatures and increasingly regular visits from the president of the United States.

Trump’s visits to Mar-a-Lago are stretching Palm Beach’s budget and locals’ patience

With those visits, the busiest time of year for longtime residents of Palm Beach has taken on a new unpleasantness. Airplane noise, traffic and a rash of angry confrontations between pro and anti-Trump demonstrators are beginning to seem like the new normal.

“He’s baaaack!” warned one resident on a neighborhood blog. “Get out your earplugs it is going to be another noisy weekend!”

President Trump’s trips here — which have added up to more than half of the weekends since his inauguration — are also forcing a brewing budgetary crisis for Palm Beach County, which faces the prospect of millions of dollars in unexpected costs associated with aiding in securing the president’s luxury estate.

...With this uplifting example, I inaugurate an occasional feature: Access Watch, tracking the special treatment — phone calls, interviews, perhaps the lone press seat on the secretary of state’s plane — that can result when media people play nice.

True, it is not the proper job of journalists to provide favorable coverage but rather to hold powerful figures accountable.

But that doesn’t get you far these days, at least in terms of access.

So we’ll be taking note of what does.

Consider Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s recent trip to North Asia — his first such foray. Tillerson broke with long-standing tradition by not including State Department reporters on this foreign trip. The norm is to have a solid group of reporters who provide “pool reports” to others not on the trip, so that American citizens might have a sense of what their government is doing abroad.

Tillerson had only one press representative with him: Erin McPike of the Independent Journal Review, a conservative website founded by Alex Skatell, a former Republican operative.

Because this thread is far too popular and polarizing. The 5 other conservatives on A2K already use this thread and so I will continue to post my PoV here. I do not think many of your liberal brethren would participate in such a thread.

McGentrix wrote:

The US has also the second most charitable country in the world..

That's not necessarily a good thing. When essential social services are seen as charity instead of rights you get people making value judgements.