BANNON TAKES CONTROL

JEFFERSON MORLEY, ALTERNET
28 JAN 2017 AT 00:02 ET
 




One key question of the Trump presidency in its first week is: who is actually going to perform the tasks associated with the job?

While the liberal comedians and right-wing pundits agitate themselves about crowd sizes, odd tweets and imaginary voter fraud, Politico and the Hill supply some data points about the all-important paper flow in Washington. Steve Bannon, the former Goldman Sachs executive-turned-Breitbart news chief, is running the government, while the president argues with actresses.


Politico reports that the executive orders Trump has been signing were prepared and coordinated by Bannon. Various Cabinet secretaries and congressional leaders were not consulted, according to the story. Such procedural corner-cutting is not inconsequential when it comes to spending $25 billion of taxpayer funds or running the CIA.

But whatever the eventual costs, the current reality seems to be that Bannon—not his White House rivals, chief of staff Reince Priebus or Vice President Mike Pence—decides what piece of paper gets put in front of Donald Trump’s pen.

The Breitbartization of the White House comes as no surprise to people at the conservative news site.


https://www.rawstory.com/2017/01/bannon-takes-control/


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Dangerous Liaisons: A CIA vets thoughts on Trump, loyalty, and the agency

By “Denise Matthews”
Best Defense guest columnist

"A much-missed friend and colleague from my time at the CIA, let’s call her “Cathy,” would probably have been delighted with President Donald Trump’s election. I can imagine Cathy rushing to get her name on the list to welcome Trump to headquarters last Saturday. Another friend and regular lunch date, “Michelle,” would likely have spent last Saturday downtown, marching in a “pussy hat” for the liberal issues she held dear.

I’ll never know for sure, of course, since Cathy and Michelle shared more than just agency employment. Each has a star on the CIA’s Wall of Honor. Each died in the line of duty supporting the policy of a president she had voted against.

I shudder at the idea of a president — any president, from either party — expecting ideological and personal loyalty. Last Saturday, Trump walked into a room of CIA officers — career civil servants subject to Hatch Act laws against partisan activity — and speculated they all had voted for him. He missed the point. However we voted, our oath was to the Constitution. I served under every president from Ronald Reagan to Barack Obama; my husband dates to Jimmy Carter. That matters. Our country needs the expertise that transcends a single presidency. More importantly, we need the protections that come from an intelligence service obedient to the law, and not a man.

What would a politicized intelligence service give us? Could a president trust assessments from an intelligence service that sought only his approval? Politicized intelligence gave us the “slam dunk” assessment that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction under Saddam Hussein. Ideologically driven leadership gave us Fidel Castro’s exploding cigars and the Bay of Pigs. Intelligence needs skeptics, not yes-men.

What, too, would come of American citizens’ protections from misuse of Intelligence Community capabilities? Today, I have faith in our systems for protecting against invasion of Americans’ privacy. I know how long I was trained to avoid unnecessary snooping, how carefully I was supervised, and the penalties I faced for breaking the rules. This system rests on a personal and organizational commitment to following the rules. When Trump states that we “have not used the real abilities that we have,” I wonder whether these abilities also include expanded domestic surveillance."

..........

"I can make one prediction with utter certainty: Trump will soon be confronted by an international crisis that will threaten U.S. lives and interests. This crisis may indeed come from the Islamic State, but it is equally likely to arise somewhere else on the planet. When that crisis comes, I can only pray that the CIA I remember still has the resources and access it needs to fulfill its mission: speaking truth to power, conducting covert actions abroad, and protecting our nation’s secrets.

“Denise Matthews” is the pseudonym of a recently retired CIA officer."

https://www.google.com/amp/foreignpolicy.com/2017/01/27/dangerous-liaisons-a-cia-vets-thoughts-on-trump-loyalty-and-the-agency/amp/




These are the people Trump insulted.

I am still reeling in shock and disbelief that this excuse for a man is in the White House.

Can We Trust the Russian Bear? Here's Your Answer...

Legendary spy novelist and retired MI6 officer John LeCarre ..

Trump Signs Muslim Ban

WASHINGTON — President Trump on Friday closed the nation’s borders to refugees from around the world, ordering that families fleeing the slaughter in Syria be indefinitely blocked from entering the United States, and temporarily suspending immigration from several predominantly Muslim countries.

Declaring the measure part of an extreme vetting plan to keep out “radical Islamic terrorists,” Mr. Trump also established a religious test for refugees from Muslim nations: He ordered that Christians and others from minority religions be granted priority over Muslims.

“We don’t want them here,” Mr. Trump said of Islamist terrorists during a signing ceremony at the Pentagon. “We want to ensure that we are not admitting into our country the very threats our soldiers are fighting overseas. We only want to admit those into our country who will support our country, and love deeply our people.”

https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/01/27/us/politics/trump-syrian-refugees.html?_r=0&referer=http://www.google.com/

So begins the government of, by, and for Putin.

"Click for Regime Change"

Interesting article by British journalist and Russia expert Luke Harding..

"Even if you’re not forging votes, the internet offers a world of opportunity to debase the democratic process. Candidate not to your liking? Smear him or her. Better still, why not invent a story, say of an ethnic Russian girl raped by migrants in Berlin? (That “story,” spread by Russian state media outlets in January last year and endorsed by a senior Russian minister, was entirely made up.)

Such active measures, it turns out, aren’t expensive. Moscow’s US cyber-operation was a textbook example of how to get big results with minimum outlay. According to the FBI, Russian hackers directed over 1,000 spear-phishing emails containing a malicious link to US officials. The hackers worked their way down a list of US institutions. They began with the White House and State Department, without success. Next, in the summer of 2015, they tried the e-mail accounts of the Democratic National Committee. US intelligence officials believe the Russians penetrated the Republican National Committee, but didn’t release anything. (The RNC disputes this.) The technology involved was kid-like in its simplicity. Once someone clicked on a malicious email, the hackers could “exfiltrate and analyse information,” as the FBI put it. With the DNC they got lucky. Several senior Democrats fell for the bogus emails before Podesta, one—a New York Times investigation found—while half-asleep in Hawaii.

At times, the events of 2016 resemble the plot of a spy novel: cyber-warriors working for Moscow; an autocrat with a personal grudge against Clinton; and another improbable figure, stuck in the Ecuadorian embassy next to Harrods, Julian Assange. The US believes Moscow passed the hacked emails to the WikiLeaks website. Assange denies this, insisting they didn’t come from “a state party.”

http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/click-regime-change-russia-putin-election-hacking-democracy-donald-trump

British Journalist Expelled from Russia Warns America

"Harding understands how Russia's reach extends far beyond its borders, and he takes very seriously the issue of Russia's interference in the U.S. election. "I don't want to sound too hyperbolic, but it's really an assault on the Western liberal order," he says.

Harding adds that Putin's aim is to disrupt the politics that have dominated America and Europe for the last 70 years. "[Putin] wants to turn the clock back to an age of great powers, to almost an imperial era of the 19th century, where strong sovereign nations didn't talk about values or human rights or anything like that," he says. "They cut deals, they had summits, they made grand bargains ... and they divvied up, they divided the world into spheres of influence."

<snip>

On Putin's tactics for creating false stories

"This is one of Putin's tactics that he first learnt as a junior spy in Leningrad when he joined the KGB — essentially lying, if you're in the KGB. There's nothing wrong about it. It's simply a kind of tactic. It's a kind of operational strategy. And what we've seen, essentially, is that the Kremlin has kind of perfected these postmodern techniques, first of all, by squashing domestic criticism and taking over TV inside Russia, but really, over the last seven or eight years, willing this out to an English language audience through things like Russia Today, the English-language propaganda channel of the Kremlin.

The goal is essentially to persuade some people that the Kremlin's view of events is true, but also to kind of confuse and bamboozle everybody else by floating conspiracy theories, so there are 10 different explanations for an event, by doing fake news, by hiring armies of trolls. ... And so it's clever, it's clever because it allows, actually, the Russian regime to get away with all sorts of things, and increasingly, I guess, exploiting the openness of Western societies and America in particular."

(About the author - "Journalist Luke Harding has an insider's understanding of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Harding served as Moscow bureau chief for the British newspaper The Guardian from 2007 until 2011. During his tenure, Russian agents followed him, tapped his phone and repeatedly broke into his home.&quot



http://www.npr.org/2017/01/26/511786803/journalist-russias-interference-is-an-assault-on-the-western-liberal-order


Heard this interview on the way home yesterday, and it chilled me to the bone.

Harding's opinion is that the Trump administration is operating straight out of the FSB playbook, though NPR did not put those comments in its summary. (NPR also issued a statement earlier the same day on why it would not call out Trump’s false statements as lies.)

My conclusion - Putin has successfully executed a coup on the United States government.

What the Republicans ""Wall" really means

It is the same thing Albert Speer did for Hitler.

They are taking the money that would have paid for our health care, climate change research, our schools, and basically the future of ths American people, and they are turning it into an absolutely worthless symbol of right wing hatred.

It's what they do.

All You Fascists BOUND TO LOSE!

RESIST!

RESIST!

RESIST!

Section 4, 25th Amendment - Relieving Queeg of Command

"...Trump too has a psychopathic personality: a paranoid with obsessive-compulsive syndrome. The best term that describes Trump is “malignant narcissist.” Trump’s erratic behavior at his first press conference reinforces the fear that all his negative campaign rhetoric was not mere bluster. In that press conference, and in his midnight tweets, Trump has attacked the free press, our American intelligence community, supported Russia, conflated the truth and violated his campaign promises not to use the office of the presidency to make a buck for himself and his family."

>>>>>>>>>




What is the remedy for America’s Trump dilemma? This brings us back to Haughness’s point about preparing in advance, now, to deal with the true threat posed by President Trump.

Unfortunately, there is no provision for popular recall of a disabled president, but the 25th Amendment, section 4, provides for a succession of presidential power where it has been determined that the president is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office. This Amendment represents a parallel to Article 184 of Navy Regulations.

Vice President-elect Mike Pence and our elected congressmen, including McCarthy, need to prepare immediately to deal with Trump’s projected and virtually assured inability to serve our country as a rational, ethical and safe president.Keying on Barack Obama’s Farewell Address, all American citizens and true patriots need to support ways and means to make America safe again. We can’t afford to await the passage of four years. We can’t waste any time."
http://www.bakersfield.com/opinion/community-voices-must-we-invoke-navy-regulations-against-trump/article_a86b5cb4-44d3-577d-8fcb-52082113757f.html

When the weather breaks

I heard that tens of millions of people are going to show up in Washinton to help Trump pack, and to remind the rest of the fucking democrats we elected to do do their fucking jobs.