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He specialized in cowardice, retreat, and surrender.

layman wrote:

He specialized in cowardice, retreat, and surrender.

America has this addiction to cowardice. GW deniers for instance are scared little cowards, afraid of the truth, and no country has more of them than the US... Why is that? And all the cyber spying and all this Muslim banning, that's born out of visceral, primal fear of the "other". Even Trump's election is a symptom of fear: the fear of falling backward, of not being "great" (aka white) anymore. You guys have become a permanently scared nation.

...Senator Mitch McConnell, the majority leader, has boasted that keeping the seat open — and thus keeping the future of the Supreme Court alive in conservative voters’ minds as a concrete issue because of an actual vacancy — played a decisive role in Donald Trump’s election. “The single biggest issue in bringing the Republicans home in the end was the Supreme Court,” Senator McConnell gloated to The Washington Post in February.

...Making an existing Supreme Court vacancy a highly visible part of an electoral strategy stamps the court as an electoral prize, pure and simple. In doing so, it places the court in a position of real institutional peril.

...Going forward, it will be next to impossible for people to look at decisions that may appear on the Republican Party’s agenda — on voting rights, as a prime example — without seeing the Supreme Court as a partisan tool.

Suburban G.O.P. Voters Sour on Party, Raising Republican Fears for 2018
A gray mood has settled over conservative-leaning voters in some of the country’s most reliably Republican congressional districts, as the party’s stumbles in Washington demoralize them and leave lawmakers scrambling to energize would-be supporters in a series of off-year elections.

While the next nationwide elections are not until 2018, Republicans have grown fearful that these voters are recoiling from what they see as lamentable conditions in Washington: a government entirely in Republican hands that has failed to deliver on fundamental goals like overhauling the health care system.

President Trump made three startling economic policy reversals on Wednesday, stepping away from pledges he made as a candidate and even policies he supported only days ago.

The shifts confounded many of Mr. Trump’s supporters and suggested that the moderate financiers he brought from Wall Street are eclipsing the White House populist wing led by Stephen K. Bannon, the political strategist who is increasingly being sidelined by the president.

In a series of interviews, Mr. Trump said he no longer wanted to label China a currency manipulator — a week after telling The Financial Times that the Chinese were the “world champions” of currency manipulation.

In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, the president said he no longer wanted to eliminate the Export-Import Bank. And he said that he might consider reappointing Janet Yellen as chairwoman of the Federal Reserve when her term ends next year.

Yet before the election, he regularly denounced China and said that Ms. Yellen should be “ashamed” of herself because of what he said was her political bias.

President Trump rose to power on a combination of meanness, incoherence and falsehoods. His strategy depended almost entirely on playing off the unpopularity and weaknesses of others.

Every aspect of his approach has blown up on him since he took office, but as is always the case with Trump, he will not take any personal responsibility for what’s going wrong. He must find a scapegoat. The latest object of his opprobrium would seem to be Stephen K. Bannon, the chief White House strategist.

But dumping Bannon would only underscore the extent to which Trump is a political weather vane, gyrating wildly with the political winds. He’s “populist” one day, conventionally conservative the next and centrist the day after that. His implicit response is: Who cares? Let’s just get through another week.

“I like Steve, but you have to remember he was not involved in my campaign until very late,” Trump said. “I had already beaten all the senators and all the governors, and I didn’t know Steve. I’m my own strategist and it wasn’t like I was going to change strategies because I was facing crooked Hillary.”

Hmm. Contrary to Trump’s claim, he has known Bannon since 2011 and appeared nine times on Bannon’s radio show.

In a way, Spicer is the perfect figure to transmit — indeed channel — the president and his administration. Spicer’s condescension (“Stop shaking your head,” he instructed April Ryan) is nothing new, nor is Spicer’s historical ignorance. Remember, this crowd claimed that leaving “Jews” out of the Holocaust Remembrance Day statement was appropriate. Likewise, Spicer’s lack of mastery over basic policy issues, his fake conspiracy theories, preference for bullying and bluster, and abject dishonesty mirror those of his boss, to an almost uncanny degree.

The ethos of arrogance — they are so important that they need not be held accountable for their statements — has been the one constant since Trump announced his campaign for the presidency. Trump’s victory, however, does not mean underlings like Spicer can get away with egregious lies and bizarre gaffes. For one thing, Spicer has to face the press (not just a single friendly interviewer) en masse and on an almost daily basis. For another, Spicer lacks the confidence to pull off the lies, not to mention the stature to deflect inquiry. He’s a sitting duck for fact-checkers, cable TV news vilification and, most important, “Saturday Night Live” mockery.

And so it doesn’t seem equitable to fire Spicer for gross and perpetual dishonesty, ignorance and rudeness. If that were the standard, most of the Trump staff would need to go.

The single biggest issue in bringing the Republicans home in the end was the Supreme Court,” Senator McConnell gloated to The Washington Post in February

Abraham Lincoln’s name is frequently invoked as one the greatest — if not the greatest — leaders ever produced on American soil.

Adolf Hitler’s name is frequently invoked as one of the worst — if not the worst — human beings ever produced on Planet Earth, a man worthy of enough scorn that his name is a colloquial benchmark for what constitutes evil (i.e., “That guy sucks, but he’s no Adolf Hitler”).

Aside from being born in the same century, these two men would seem to have very little in common, unless you’re asking North Carolina lawmaker Larry Pittman.

The Republican General Assembly member from Cabarrus County this week called the 16th president “the same sort (of) tyrant” as Adolf Hitler,” according to the Charlotte Observer.

Britain’s spy agencies played a crucial role in alerting their counterparts in Washington to contacts between members of Donald Trump’s campaign team and Russian intelligence operatives, the Guardian has been told.

GCHQ first became aware in late 2015 of suspicious “interactions” between figures connected to Trump and known or suspected Russian agents, a source close to UK intelligence said. This intelligence was passed to the US as part of a routine exchange of information, they added.

Over the next six months, until summer 2016, a number of western agencies shared further information on contacts between Trump’s inner circle and Russians, sources said.


Donald Trump's first 100 days as president – daily updates
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The European countries that passed on electronic intelligence – known as sigint – included Germany, Estonia and Poland. Australia, a member of the “Five Eyes” spying alliance that also includes the US, UK, Canada and New Zealand, also relayed material, one source said.

Another source suggested the Dutch and the French spy agency, the General Directorate for External Security or DGSE, were contributors.

It is understood that GCHQ was at no point carrying out a targeted operation against Trump or his team or proactively seeking information. The alleged conversations were picked up by chance as part of routine surveillance of Russian intelligence assets.

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And that axiomatic formulation is used by both types (1) and (2) above.

Which explains why the U S of A is very close to a becoming another Nazi state.

Of course you love Obama, Ollie. All Frogs do. He specialized in cowardice, retreat, and surrender.

Less then a week into the job, Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch will have his first chance, behind closed doors at least, to weigh in on voting rights.

When the justices meet Friday for their private conference, the first since Gorsuch’s confirmation, among the cases that they will be considering whether to take up is an appeal of a landmark ruling striking down North Carolina’s mammoth restrictive voting law.

The moment is an anxious one for voting rights advocates, who had seen a number of lower court victories on key cases in the months since the death of Justice Antonin Scalia and were cautiously optimistic that the Supreme Court was about to flip their way in time for them to cement that progress at the highest court.

While it is unclear how Gorsuch is likely to rule on the major questions bubbling up in voting rights litigation, if he does represent the second coming of Scalia, as he has been billed by his supporters, then some of those intermediary wins are now at risk.

President Jackass

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/keith-olbermann-trump-jackass_us_58ef060de4b0bb9638e15211?

Carter Page, a former foreign policy adviser on the Trump campaign, on Thursday conceded he “may” have discussed lifting U.S. sanctions against Russia during a July 2016 trip to Moscow—just one day after claiming he “never” spoke about them on that visit.