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Comments
Putin's pal Trump won't have an easy road to destroy us, but he shouldn't have a road at all.
Stay strong in the struggle, my Constitution loving friends.
And now let's work to get rid of the Electoral College; they've shown that for the greater part, they are useless in our system.
Again, it's twitter so it's brief, not a long read.
includes:
To win one election, the GOP erased its own horizon. Destroyed its own future. I truly believe this. The arc does bend toward justice.
That the present is fully theirs just ensures the future will be ours. Just by being on the side of basic decency we inherit the future.
*******
I have Republican friends who are genuinely appalled at what is happening. I don't lump all Republicans, but they do hold more power now. As a party they need to step up. I actually think they will, once things start rolling and they can see consequences. But we need to let all of our govt representatives know how we feel, and do not stay silent. Local, state, and federal. Don't wait for things to get better on their own, or wish things away. This is not going away without consistent, vocal, strong action by American citizens.
http://time.com/4606071/american-global-leadership-is-over/?xid=tcoshare
Says in part:
Trump’s “America first” approach fundamentally changes the U.S. role in the world. Trump agrees with leaders of both political parties that the U.S. is an exceptional nation, but he insists that the country can’t remain exceptional if it keeps stumbling down the path that former Presidents, including Republicans and Democrats, have followed since the end of World War II. Washington’s ambition to play the role of indispensable power allows both allies and rivals to treat U.S. taxpayers like chumps, he argues. Better to build a “What’s in it for us?” approach to the rest of the world. This is a complete break with a foreign policy establishment that Trump has worked hard to delegitimize–and which he continues to ostracize by waving off charges of Russian interference in the election and by refusing the daily intelligence briefings offered to all Presidents-elect. American power, once a trump card, is now a wild card. Instead of a superpower that wants to impose stability and values on a fractious and valueless global order, the U.S. has become the single biggest source of international uncertainty.
And don’t expect lawmakers to provide the traditional set of checks and balances. It’s not just that the Constitution gives the President great power to conduct foreign policy. It’s also that Trump has succeeded politically where his party’s establishment has continually failed, and as long as he remains popular with the party’s voters, many junior Republican lawmakers will answer to their President rather than to their leaders on Capitol Hill. Expect Trump to use the bully pulpit with a vengeance, often at 140 characters or less, to try to set new rules and rally the faithful to follow his lead.
and
Pence trying to throw some dignity into tweets, on top of Trump's usual
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/19/opinion/will-trump-play-spy-vs-spy.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=opinion-c-col-right-region®ion=opinion-c-col-right-region&WT.nav=opinion-c-col-right-region
Here is most of the article:
In recent days, President-elect Donald J. Trump has rejected the C.I.A.’s conclusions that Russian hackers attempted to sway the American elections, and has accused unnamed officials within the agency of trying to undermine him. And he has rejected the tradition of receiving the intelligence community’s daily briefing, implying that he would rather rely on information and analysis from his inner circle of advisers.
It’s a disturbing set of developments, if only because we’ve been here before. Presidents face a great temptation to go “in-house” for intelligence that fits with their plans; some have even set up formal or informal operations to circumvent the C.I.A. and other agencies. In almost every case, the result has been a disaster — for the president and for the country.
The most obvious example is Richard M. Nixon. When, as president-elect, he interviewed Henry A. Kissinger to be his national security adviser, Nixon told Kissinger that he didn’t trust the State Department or the “Ivy League liberals” at the C.I.A. Once in office, Nixon tried to use the agency to shut down the F.B.I.’s investigation of the Watergate burglary, but he was rejected by its director, Richard Helms.
But even long before Watergate, Nixon had decided to bypass the normal foreign-policy and intelligence chains. Nixon and Kissinger kept the secretary of state, William P. Rogers, in the dark on secret diplomacy and schemed to outfox the top brass at the Pentagon to conduct the bombing of Laos and Cambodia.
And when the generals and the intelligence officials refused to do his bidding, Nixon looked for someone who would. While he hated the C.I.A., he counted on J. Edgar Hoover of the F.B.I. Lyndon B. Johnson had told Nixon that Hoover would be the only one in Washington he could trust — meaning, trust to do his dirty work, just as he had for presidents going back to Franklin D. Roosevelt.
But even Hoover balked. When the Pentagon Papers appeared in June 1971, Nixon ordered Hoover to dig up dirt on the leaker, Daniel Ellsberg. A shrewd self-preservationist, Hoover ducked the order; he could see that the legal system was starting to crack down on government wiretaps and “black bag jobs” — i.e., burglaries.
Thwarted, Nixon went in-house, and created an internal security unit to plug national security leaks. The unit, whose chief operatives were a former F.B.I. agent, G. Gordon Liddy, and an ex-C.I.A. case officer, E. Howard Hunt, became infamous as “the Plumbers.” Liddy and Hunt did catch a leaker or two, but during the 1972 campaign they went on to do political espionage for the Committee to Re-Elect the President.
As Nixon found, one problem with subverting the intelligence and law enforcement apparatus is the risk of incompetence. Liddy and Hunt were stumblebums who got caught. When Ronald Reagan made the mistake of sneaking around the State Department and C.I.A. to free the hostages held by Iranian terrorists in 1986, he sent his national security adviser, Robert C. McFarlane, on a ludicrous mission to Tehran bearing a Bible and a baked cake. McFarlane’s swashbuckling deputy, Marine Col. Oliver North, proceeded to cook up an arms-for-hostages deal that boiled over into the Iran-contra scandal, almost wrecking Reagan’s presidency.
*****
The best model of a national security adviser was Brent Scowcroft, a scrupulous pragmatist and honest broker under George H. W. Bush. Judging from press accounts, Mr. Trump’s pick, Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, is no Scowcroft. While skilled at disrupting terrorist networks in Iraq as an intelligence officer, he was regarded as an erratic and overbearing boss by many of his subordinates at the Defense Intelligence Agency. It is easy to imagine him establishing clandestine intelligence and operational groups to feed him and the president what they want.
The bureaucracy can find ways to fight back. During the Nixon administration, the Joint Chiefs of Staff grew so distrustful of the White House that they planted a spy on the staff of the national security adviser. “Deep Throat,” the famous source behind some of the earliest Watergate revelations from Bob Woodward at The Washington Post, turned out to be the deputy director of the F.B.I., Mark Felt. But those intrigues ultimately doomed a presidency and plunged the nation into crisis.
We need to heed those lessons: Congress, law enforcement, the bureaucracy and the press will need to be vigilant about the Trump White House. We can’t say we weren’t warned. Nixon tried to keep his unruly emotions a secret. President-elect Trump tweets them.
http://www.politico.com/story/2016/12/donald-trump-security-force-232797
Security officials warn that employing private security personnel heightens risks for the president-elect and his team, as well as for protesters, dozens of whom have alleged racial profiling, undue force or aggression at the hands of Trump’s security, with at least 10 joining a trio of lawsuits now pending against Trump, his campaign or its security.
“It’s playing with fire,” said Jonathan Wackrow, a former Secret Service agent who worked on President Barack Obama’s protective detail during his 2012 reelection campaign. Having a private security team working events with Secret Service “increases the Service’s liability, it creates greater confusion and it creates greater risk,” Wackrow said.
“You never want to commingle a police function with a private security function,” he said, adding, “If you talk to the guys on the detail and the guys who are running the rallies, that’s been a little bit difficult because it’s so abnormal.”
*****
Several past presidential nominees have used private security or, in the case of governors running for president, state police details. But the experts could not think of another example of a president-elect continuing with any private security after Election Day, when Secret Service protection expands dramatically for the winner. In fact, most candidates drop any outside security the moment they’re granted Secret Service protection.
Trump’s spending on private security, on the other hand, actually increased after he was granted Secret Service protection in November 2015.
=))
Funny (and unrelated), we were just watching Eureka season 5 and since Will Wheaton is in it I constantly make connections to all things Wesley....
;)
Where's Captain America when we need him?
I thought you reminded me of Dr. Sheldon Cooper... :-\"
Haha thanks but no relation. :))
As opposed to the US imposing instability and anarchy on the world. As long as we're the ones doing the imposing, it's all good.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/donald-trump-nazi-propaganda-coordinate_us_58583b6fe4b08debb78a7d5c