We have a hypothesis of seriously earth-shaking proportions: the Trump presidential campaign actually colluded with the Russian government (in some form) to hack into the Democratic party files and steal information that could be used as propaganda against not only Hillary Clinton, but all Dem candidates running in the election, all in order to steal the election for Trump and the GOP.

Here's the important part of this-- we have a LOT of data/evidence that supports this hypothesis, and we actually have NO data/evidence that goes against this hypothesis. At least I'm unaware of any evidence that contradict this hypothesis.

Thus, we have a working hypothesis that the Trump campaign committed treason at the highest levels, and the Republican party has helped cover this up.



The Trump team and the GOP has a lot to lose in this, but ultimately we have to hope that patriotic duty will hold sway. This level of treason cannot be allowed to stand.

Source: Washington Post

The Trump administration, searching for money to build the president’s planned multibillion-dollar border wall and crack down on illegal immigration, is weighing significant cuts to the Coast Guard, the Transportation Security Administration and other agencies focused on national security threats, according to a draft plan.

The proposal, drawn up by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), also would slash the budget of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which provides disaster relief after hurricanes, tornadoes and other natural disasters. The Coast Guard’s $9.1 billion budget in 2017 would be cut 14 percent to about $7.8 billion, while the TSA and FEMA budgets would be reduced about 11 percent each to $4.5 billion and $3.6 billion, respectively.

The cuts are proposed even as the planned budget for the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees all of them, grows 6.4 percent to $43.8 billion, according to the plan, which was obtained by The Washington Post. Some $2.9 billion of that would go to building the wall on the U.S.-Mexico border, with $1.9 billion funding “immigration detention beds” and other Immigration and Customs Enforcement expenses and $285 million set aside to hire 500 more Border Patrol agents and 1,000 more ICE agents and support staffers.

Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/to-fund-border-wall-trump-administration-weighs-cuts-to-coast-guard-airport-security/2017/03/07/ba4a8e5c-036f-11e7-ad5b-d22680e18d10_story.html?tid=ss_tw&utm_term=.66fe4830babd

---

fucking insanity... I can't freaking believe this

Source: Think Progress

Donald Trump has claimed repeatedly that he has had no contact with Russian officials as a presidential candidate.

He was lying.

Trump personally met with the Russian ambassador on April 27, 2016, prior to a major foreign policy speech. The Wall Street Journal, in a report that was little-noticed at the time but was recently picked up by AMERICABlog News, reported the meeting last year.

A few minutes before he made those remarks, Mr. Trump met at a VIP reception with Russia’s ambassador to the U.S., Sergey Ivanovich Kislyak. Mr. Trump warmly greeted Mr. Kislyak and three other foreign ambassadors who came to the reception.

Read more: https://thinkprogress.org/trump-personally-met-with-russian-ambassador-during-campaign-cc59ae305032#.dnsvszn21

---

this pisses me off no end-- this bullshit cannot stand.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/06/opinion/pause-this-presidency.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=opinion-c-col-left-region®ion=opinion-c-col-left-region&WT.nav=opinion-c-col-left-region

The American people must immediately demand a cessation of all consequential actions by this “president” until we can be assured that Russian efforts to hack our election, in a way that was clearly meant to help him and damage his opponent, did not also include collusion with or coverup by anyone involved in the Trump campaign and now administration.

This may sound extreme, but if the gathering fog of suspicion should yield an actual connection, it would be one of the most egregious assaults on our democracy ever. It would not only be unprecedented, it would be a profound wound to faith in our sovereignty. Viewed through the serious lens of those epic implications, no action to put this presidency on pause is extreme. Rather, it is exceedingly prudent.

Some things must be done and some positions filled simply to keep the government operational. Absolute abrogation of administrative authority is infeasible and ill advised. But a bare minimum standard must be applied until we know more about what the current raft of investigations yield. Indeed, it may be that the current investigative apparatuses are insufficient and a special commission or special counsel is in order.

In any event, we can’t keep cruising along as if the unanswered question isn’t existential. Americans must demand at least a momentary respite from — my preference would be a permanent termination of — Trump’s aggressive agenda to dramatically alter the social, economic and political contours of this country.

https://twitter.com/yottapoint/status/837150152687116288
see linked tweets for links

Rex Tillerson

Jeff Sessions

Scott Pruitt

Tom Price

Steve Mnuchin

Betsy DeVos

What a freaking disgrace, to put it mildly. This administration needs to be torn from power, the sooner the better.

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/03/donald-trump-salesman-214845

President Donald Trump basically told Americans last night that he’s going to make sure we can have our cake and eat it, too—and by the way it will be a spectacular cake, it won’t cost much, and it’s going to help us lose a lot of weight.

Trump used his first speech to Congress last night to lay out a heroic vision of an America where “every problem can be solved.” He promised to ensure clean air and water while getting rid of environmental regulations. He vowed to ratchet down taxes on corporations and the middle class while jacking up spending on the military, immigration enforcement, infrastructure and veterans—and at the same time somehow rescuing America from its crushing national debt. He suggests that he'll increase tariffs on foreign goods, and that foreign countries would respond by lowering tariffs on U.S. goods. And he pledged to replace Obamacare with terrific reforms that “expand choice, increase access, lower costs, and provide better health care.” He didn’t explain in much detail how those reforms would work, or whether they would also do something about those embarrassingly skimpy gowns patients have to wear in the hospital.

The media takeaway was that Trump’s speech sounded optimistic, which was true compared to his dyspeptic inaugural address, and also true in the sense that infomercials promising baldness cures or eight-minute abs are optimistic. But there’s a fine line between optimism and magical realism. Politicians routinely deploy sunny rhetoric about “cures to illnesses that have always plagued us” and “American footprints on distant worlds,” but Trump was playing a high-risk game by promising just about everything to just about everyone—especially when he also declared that “above all else, we will keep our promises to the American people.”

In the real world, policy choices have tradeoffs. For example, Trump vowed to kill Obamacare’s individual mandate, but he also complained that insurers are abandoning the Obamacare exchanges—a problem that would only intensify if the mandate went away, and young and healthy consumers weren’t required to buy insurance. He suggested he could fix the problem by lowering the overall cost of health care, but in fact Obamacare has already helped bring health care inflation down to its lowest level in half a century. As for the big goal of "repeal and replace"? He handed that ball to Congress, where some Republicans want to eliminate many of the subsidies that have helped Obamacare cover 20 million additional Americans as well as the new taxes on the wealthy that helped pay for it, and other Republicans hope to preserve some of Obamacare’s benefits for the working poor. It’s not clear how they’ll pass anything, much less how they could pass - or even think up - a cost-cutting, tax-cutting, coverage-expanding, care-improving plan that squared Trump’s various circles.

Though I think con-artist-in-chief would be more appropriate...

We watched the American Crime Story: People vs OJ Simpson over the weekend (now streaming on Netflix).

We hadn't seen it before, but wow, what a powerful production. Great acting, amazing script. Everything about it resonated so much still.

The biggest thing that hit me though were the parallels of that crazy media environment of the trial to a presidential campaign, where every little thing gets blown up and there's endless intrigue, undercutting, infighting and skullduggery.

More specifically though, if you think of Marcia Clark as Hillary Clinton and OJ as Trump, there were just unbelievable parallels. Poor Marcia Clark works her butt off and can't catch a break, gets criticized endlessly for her style, not smiling enough and so forth. OJ is an obvious sleaze ball, a massive liar, an abuser and narcissist and has a weak, needy personality.

In the end OJ totally gets away with it because of a couple key mistakes by the prosecution and a lot of heavy work by his lawyers and serious demagoguery by Johnny Cochran. The prosecution was also totally over-confident (sound familiar?).

But mainly OJ got a away with it because people lost sight of the key facts in the case and the big picture.

I hope the lessons are are learned!

I've been subscribing to it off and on over the years. I stopped for a bit during the Bush years because their coverage was far too favorable for that horrible president. I started getting it again about 6 years ago, to get some more local news flavor and also because I feel it's important to support local journalism.

But their news coverage of Trump has been horrible. They've totally normalized him. From reading the news section, you'd never know he called the media the enemy of the American people or that he tweets delusional things or that anything bizarre has happened with him at all. It's weird, they've made him dull. Their coverage of his talk to CPAC just presented him as giving red meat to his base, and nothing about his lies and delusion. These articles are largely derived from other sources such as USA Today.

They do have opinion columnists, and there have been a decent number of columns on the editorial page criticizing Trump from the expected columnists. The problem is I think it's too easy for their conservative readers to just ignore the columns or write them off as silly liberals.

There have been no columns from the editors of the paper truly critical of Trump. There was one mildly critical of Pence recently, for supporting some Trump nonsense, but it totally gave Pence the benefit of the doubt.

They've published a couple rare letters to the editor against Trump, but nothing that properly captured just how crazy and abnormal Trump is. I sent in my own letter but they have not published it (yet). And there have been several totally clueless letters in support of Trump.

Of course this is Indiana, which overall went big for Trump, but the city was still quite blue. So I guess they need to make their paper palatable for their audience, but I feel like Trump is so extreme and abnormal that he needs special attention.

ANYWAY, my question is-- it is worth continuing my subscription for the sake of supporting the local news (and getting the comics pages )? Or should I cancel and tell them why?

versus a normal, decent human being?

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/25/us/ice-immigrant-deportations-trump.html

"Agents Discover Freedom on Deportations Under Trump"

The Trump administration’s plan to deport vast numbers of undocumented immigrants was introduced in dramatic fashion over the past month.

Much of the front-line work has fallen to thousands of ICE officers who are newly emboldened and empowered.

(snip)
Two officials in Washington said that the shift — and the new enthusiasm that has come with it — seems to have encouraged pro-Trump political comments and banter that struck the officials as brazen or gung-ho, like remarks about their jobs becoming “fun.” Those who take less of a hard line on unauthorized immigrants feel silenced, the officials said.

ICE of course was one of the few if only (?) unions that endorsed Trump for president.

Source: Reuters

The Kuwaiti government could pay up to $60,000 to President Donald Trump's hotel in Washington for a party on Saturday that will be an early test of Trump's promise to turn over profits from such events to the U.S. Treasury.

The Kuwait Embassy is hosting an event to mark their National Day. Similar National Day celebrations at the Trump International Hotel for a crowd of several hundred can run from $40,000 to $60,000, according to cost estimates from the hotel seen by Reuters. The hotel declined to comment on the figures.

One of Trump's lawyers, Sheri Dillon, pledged at a Jan. 11 press conference to donate any Trump Hotel profits from foreign governments to the U.S. Treasury.

The White House and Alan Garten, the general counsel for the Trump Organization, did not return calls for comment on whether any profits from foreign government payments to the hotel have been donated. Dillon's firm declined to comment.

Read more: http://mobile.reuters.com/article/amp/idUSKBN1640LE

---

Clearly a violation of the constitution if this happens. IMPEACH!