Trump's Big CON: Is He Lying or Delusional?

UPDATE VII:  "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. . .

[W]hat’s going on with Mr. Trump and his inner circle seems to have less to do with ideology than with fragile egos. To admit having been wrong about anything, they seem to imagine, would brand them as losers and make them look small.

In reality, of course, inability to engage in reflection and self-criticism is the mark of a tiny, shriveled soul — but they’re not big enough to see that.

But why did so many Americans vote for Mr. Trump, whose character flaws should have been obvious long before the election?

Catastrophic media failure and F.B.I. malfeasance played crucial roles. But my sense is that there’s also something going on in our society: Many Americans no longer seem to understand what a leader is supposed to sound like, mistaking bombast and belligerence for real toughness.

Why? Is it celebrity culture? Is it working-class despair, channeled into a desire for people who spout easy slogans?

Read The New York Times, America’s Epidemic of Infallibility.

UPDATE VI:  "America is now governed by a president and party that fundamentally don’t accept the idea that there are objective facts. Instead, they want everyone to accept that reality is whatever they say it is. . .

Mr. Trump has declared [the media] 'enemies of the people' — not, whatever he may say, because they get things wrong, but because they dare to challenge him on anything.

'Enemy of the people' is, of course, a phrase historically associated with Stalin and other tyrants. This is no accident. Mr. Trump isn’t a dictator — not yet, anyway — but he clearly has totalitarian instincts.

And much, perhaps most, of his party is happy to go along, accepting even the most bizarre conspiracy theories. . .

It’s part of a much bigger struggle, in which what’s really at stake is whether ignorance is strength, whether the man in the White House is the sole arbiter of truth."

Read The New York Times, Facts Are Enemies of the People.

UPDATE V:  "We’re seeing a broad White House effort to corrode the very ideal of reality-based governing, something that includes not just a discrediting of institutions such as the CBO but also the weakening of the influence of science and data over agency decision-making and the deliberate misuse of our democracy’s institutional processes to prop up Trump’s lies about his popular support and political opponents."

Read the Washington Post, Donald Trump’s deliberate corruption of reality-based governing.

UPDATE IV:  "Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John McCain (R-Ariz.) called Sunday for President Trump to either prove his claim that President Barack Obama tapped the phones in Trump Tower during last year’s election campaign or drop the accusation.

'The president has one of two choices, either retract or provide the information that the American people deserve,' McCain said in an interview on CNN’s 'State of the Union.' 'I have no reason to believe that the charge is true, but I also believe that the president of the United States could clear this up in a minute.'

Read the Washington Post, McCain to Trump: Retract wiretapping claim or prove it.

UPDATE III:  "Rep. Schiff (D-CA) was asked on MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell Reports if there was any proof to back up Trump’s claim [regarding wiretaps].

He answered, 'No, and I think it’s a preposterous claim. As other people have pointed out, if it were true it would mean that a federal judge had found probable cause to believe that Trump or his associates were engaged in a crime, or that a FISA court judge had found that they were acting as agents of a foreign power. This is what the president is suggesting when he says that he was wiretapped. But it’s a preposterous claim, and I think it’s certainly one explanation that he’s merely trying to distract, but a more troubling conclusion might be that this is simply a president that can not separate fact from fantasy, and as a Commander In Chief doesn’t know right from wrong.'

Schiff was suggesting that the President Of The United States is potentially not of sound mind."

Read Politicususa, Top Member Of House Intel Committee Questions Trump’s Mental State On National TV.

As stated before, Trump is a psycho-narcissistic con man.

UPDATE II:  For a 'tally of the lies and distortions', read the Washington Post, Trump just gave a remarkable new interview. Here’s a tally of all his lies.

UPDATE: Actually, Trump is a psycho-narcissistic con man.

A "lengthy interview, which aired late Wednesday night, provided a glimpse of the president and his state-of-mind on his fifth full day in office. It revealed a man who is obsessed with his own popularity and eager to provide evidence of his likability, even if that information doesn't match reality."

Read the Washington Post, In his first major TV interview as president, Trump is endlessly obsessed with his popularity.

As noted before, this can't end well for the country.

Trump is clearly a con man. So that begs the question: why?

"Is he lying or is he unable to separate what he wants to believe and what exists, literally, in front of his eyes? The first makes him morally unfit, and was the basis upon which many #NeverTrumpers refused to vote for him. If the latter, they — and we all — have a constitutional crisis the likes of which we have never seen. With Trump, however, we have learned the past provides no guarantees."

Read the Washington Post, Maybe Trump isn’t ‘lying’.

Trump's Big CON: 24 Million People Will Lose Health Insurance to Fund Tax Cuts and Credits For the Wealthy

UPDATE:  Need more proof, remember the proposed border adjustment tax on imported consumers goods to give more tax breaks to rich people?

Nothing better proves the true Republi-CON purpose.

And it is now clear why the Republi-CONs didn't want to wait for the Congressional Budget Office report.

Read:

The New York Times, Trumpcare vs. Obamacare: Apocalypse Foretold, which stated:

"The Congressional Budget Office report on Trumpcare is out, and it’s devastating: 14 million people losing insurance in the first year, 24 million over time, with premiums soaring for older, lower-income Americans — in many cases, the very people who went strongly for President Trump. The C.B.O. thinks it would reduce the deficit, but only marginally, around $30 billion a year in a $19 trillion economy.

Let me offer one assertion and ask two questions.

The assertion is that something like this was to be expected. The C.B.O. came in even worse on coverage than most predicted, but it was obvious that the news would be terrible because that’s what the logic of the situation told us. Obamacare imposes a mandate to induce healthy people to sign up, offers means-tested subsidies to make insurance affordable and expands Medicaid to take care of people with really low incomes. Trumpcare eliminates the mandate, slashes subsidies overall and redirects them to those who don’t need them and sharply cuts Medicaid. Of course that leads to a huge drop in coverage.

Or to put it differently, Obamacare is actually an intelligently designed system, and Republican claims that they could do much better even while slashing funding so they could cut taxes on the rich were always obvious nonsense. Trumpcare is a slapdash, incompetent piece of legislation; but even a much more competent set of people couldn’t have done better given the constraints of Republican Party ideology."

Read also:

Politico, 5 takeaways from the CBO's report on Obamacare repeal, which notes that "[m]any Trump voters and states would lose big under the GOP health plan",

Vox, The GOP health plan is an act of class warfare by the rich against the poor, and

The Washington Post, The CBO wallops Paul Ryan, which notes that no matter what you believe or think about the proposal,, "[o]ne thing is for sure: A bill that transfers wealth from poor to rich is going to blow up the notion that Trump is a populist."

And see TrumpCareCon (© NoBullU.com) (AKA TrumpConCare or TrumpCon (© NoBullU.com)) Is All About Future Tax Cut.

Trump's Big CON: SURPRISE, He and His Staff Routinely Lie to the Public

UPDATE IV:  "If you woke up Monday from a coma that caused you to miss the presidential campaign and the first two months of Donald Trump's presidency, then you may have never experienced a Kellyanne Conway interview. But you could catch up on the phenomenon by watching just one TV appearance by the counselor to the president — her latest on CNN.

You missed the whole 'alternative facts' thing? No prob. 'I'm not in the job of having evidence' — a line Conway delivered to Chris Cuomo on Monday morning — should cover the concept.

Never seen Conway take an unsubstantiated claim and state it as fact? . . .

Haven't witnessed Conway's unparalleled ability to twist a journalist's words in a way that frames the media as an enemy? Get ready for a clinic."

Read the Washington Post, Kellyanne Conway gave the most Kellyane Conway interview ever.

UPDATE III:  Anticipating  the obstruction of justice and coverup, steps were taken to preserve the evidence.

Read The New York Times, Obama Administration Rushed to Preserve Intelligence of Russian Election Hacking. 

UPDATE II:  Now it is Trump's leading lawman lying.

Read the Washington Post, Sessions met with Russian envoy twice last year, encounters he later did not disclose and Jeff Sessions’s denials of contact with Russians are falling apart quickly.

And don't forget the obstruction of justice and coverup, all to hide that The Donald is Putin's Puppet. 

UPDATE:  Read the Washington Post, 5 times Donald Trump’s team denied contact with Russia.

Is it REALLY a surprise, or have you just been lying to yourself?

Read the Washington Post, In a remarkable interview, Kellyanne Conway’s spin about Mike Flynn crashes and burns.

Trump's Big CON: TrumpCareCon (© NoBullU.com) (AKA TrumpConCare or TrumpCon (© NoBullU.com)) Is All About Future Tax Cuts

UPDATE:  "Given the sick joke of a health plan, you might ask what happened to all those proclamations that Obamacare was a terrible, no good system that Republicans would immediately replace with something far better — not to mention Donald Trump’s promises of “insurance for everybody” and “great health care.”

But the answer, of course, is that they were all lying, all along — and they still are. On this, at least, Republican unity remains impressively intact."

Read The New York Times, A Bill So Bad It’s Awesome.

"Let’s abandon the pretense.

Republicans’ 'health care' bill is not really about health care. It’s not about improving access to health insurance, or reducing premiums, or making sure you get to keep your doctor if you like your doctor. And it’s certainly not about preventing people from dying in the streets.

Instead, it’s about hundreds of billions of dollars in tax cuts — tax cuts that will quietly pave the way for more, and far larger, tax cuts. . .

For those keeping score, [the plan] means fewer people would have insurance, those who get insurance on the exchanges would pay a higher price for it and Medicare’s solvency would be jeopardized as a bonus.

Hard to see how this achieves any of President Trump’s stated goals to “lower costs, expand choices, increase competition and ensure health-care access for all Americans.”

On the other hand, it’s quite easy to see how another well-established Republican goal would be achieved: tax cuts. . .

Under normal circumstances, Democrats would almost certainly filibuster the coming tax overhaul, preventing it from ever getting to a vote. But Republicans can take the filibuster option away by using the 'reconciliation' process, which is an option if, and only if, the tax bill doesn’t increase government deficits in the long term, relative to existing law.

How do you keep tax cuts from increasing deficits relative to existing law? One useful tool is to change existing law — that is, to move the goalposts. Cutting taxes in the Obamacare repeal bill today lowers the revenue baseline against which a tax overhaul plan will be judged tomorrow."

Read the Washington Post, The Republican health-care plan isn’t about health care at all.

Trump's Big CON: I'll Get Tough With Iran

"Since former national security adviser Michael T. Flynn warned Iran that it was “on notice” for an illegal missile test and the administration issued exceptionally narrow sanctions, we have heard little — if anything — from the administration about the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), Iranian aggression in the region, Iran’s human rights atrocities or much of anything else concerning the world’s largest state sponsor of terrorism. (The White House spokesman did issue one of the sort of empty platitudes — that it is “unwavering” in its determination to bring home American Robert Levinson, believed to be held in Iran for 10 years — that conservatives ridiculed during the Obama administration.)

Obviously unconcerned about being on 'notice,' Iran this week yet again conducted a ballistic missile test."

Read the Washington Post, Trump misses an opportunity to defang Iran.

Trump's Big CON: Our Racist, White Nationalist President

"Leading conservatives have taken to pretending that the alt-right is a fringe movement that they and President Trump have disavowed. In recent interviews and at a high-profile conservative conference last month, conservatives have taken great pains to distance conservatism — and the Trump administration — from any alt-right influence.

But here’s the reality: The alt-right’s deep influence over this White House is on display daily — in Trump’s rhetoric and his administration’s policies. The alt-right influence on Trump matters: it means the most powerful man in the world is under the influence of a racist and white nationalist movement. . .

Bannon — who is now Trump’s most influential adviser — told me last summer, when he was chairman of Breitbart, that his site was 'the platform for the alt-right.'

The reality is that it is under Bannon’s influence that the administration has taken its actions that most thrill the alt-right, most notably his moves to step up deportation of undocumented immigrants, and ban refugees and migrants from Muslim-majority countries.

[And] after Trump tapped him to head up his campaign, Bannon nonetheless praised the deeply Islamophobic ethno-nationalism on the rise in Europe, like the National Front in France, led by far-right presidential candidate Marine Le Pen.

And then there’s Trump’s choice of Jeff Sessions as Attorney General. During the transition, alt-right leaders were delighted with the Sessions pick, pointing to his opposition to immigration as well as their hope that he would stop enforcing civil rights laws and might even prosecute Black Lives Matter protesters.

As Emily Bazelon writes, Sessions has long been a devoted Breitbart reader, and met regularly with the site’s writers. Trump’s dark vision of America as besieged by inner city crime, immigrants, and refugees, Bazelon notes, 'provides clear justification for policies that will advance Sessions, Bannon and Miller’s divisive nationalism.' Justice Department policy, under Sessions, she adds, aims 'to strengthen the grip of law enforcement, raise barriers to voting and significantly reduce all forms of immigration, promoting what seems to be a longstanding desire to reassert the country’s European and Christian heritage.'

Despite the determined spin, the reality is that Trumpism would not exist without the alt-right. Conservatives can pretend it’s fringe and has little to no influence on the Trump administration — but the proof is in the policy."

Read the Washington Post, Conservatives insist Trump is not influenced by the alt-right. Here’s why they’re wrong.

Trump's Big CON: ObamaCare vs. TrumpCareCon (© NoBullU.com) (AKA TrumpConCare or TrumpCon (© NoBullU.com))

UPDATE VII:  "[H]ealth-care experts across the political spectrum agree that the new House GOP health-care plan, which Trump has now endorsed, falls short of his promises:

    The bill, experts said, falls far short of the goals President Donald Trump laid out: Affordable coverage for everyone; lower deductibles and health care costs; better care; and zero cuts to Medicaid. Instead, the bill is almost certain to reduce overall coverage, result in deductibles increasing, and will phase out Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion.

The American Medical Association came out against the GOP bill on Wednesday morning, arguing that its subsidy scheme and rollback of Medicaid expansion would produce a “decline in health insurance coverage,” instead calling on Republicans to “ensure that those who are currently covered do not become uninsured.” The GOP bill would likely result in millions losing insurance, even though Trump himself recently promised that the GOP replacement would mean “insurance for everybody.”

It’s plausible that the GOP bill would hit a lot of Trump voters. A new Kaiser Family Foundation analysis concludes that older, lower-income people will likely see a loss of financial support for insurance — many of whom are probably Trump voters. Non-college whites in the Rust Belt states that flipped to Trump saw a big drop in the uninsured rate under the ACA. Meanwhile, the GOP bill would mean cuts to Medicaid over time and potentially a phasing-out of the expansion, something that might also hit many Trump voters. . .

[T]here is an irreconcilable split among Republicans over the specific outcome they envision for a post-Obamacare health-care system.

The split was obscured for years, because Republicans could call for repeal, secure in the knowledge that it wouldn’t happen. It is between two camps. There are conservatives (mostly in the House) who actually want repeal, because they don’t think the government should be spending and regulating to expand coverage to poor and sick people, and instead want free markets to fulfill this goal. And there are other Republicans (mostly senators and governors) who want to say they’re repealing Obamacare (since they’ve railed against it for years in the abstract) while actually minimizing just how much of the coverage expansion gets rolled back in their states. Trump is more or less in the second camp, since he doesn’t want to be the guy who kicks millions off insurance or shatter Trumpism’s aura of ideological heterodoxy.

The result is a kind of kludge solution, which tries to give both camps a way to argue that they are getting their way. But the practical result is that it doesn’t actually give either what they want. And there is simply no way of pretending it comes anywhere near what Trump explicitly promised or vaguely signaled in ideological terms. This has left Trump spewing outright gibberish as he tries to sell the plan".

Read the Washington Post, Trumpism is now getting exposed as a monumental fraud.

UPDATE VI:  Congratulation Trump supporters, you've been conned.

TrumpCareCon (© NoBullU.com)  is "especially harmful to Trump’s lower-income, older Rust Belt supporters.

The Kaiser Foundation has a user-friendly map and calculator which shows which states (most of them) and which counties specifically would pay more under the GOP American Health Care Act and which pay more under the Affordable Care Act. In almost every single county in Iowa, Michigan and Ohio, a 60-year-old with $30,000 in income would pay more for coverage. In some counties that would amount to more than $1,000. As Kaiser puts it, 'Generally, people who are older, lower-income, or live in high-premium areas (like Alaska and Arizona) receive larger tax credits under the ACA than they would under the American Health Care Act replacement. Conversely, some people who are younger, higher-income, or live in low-premium areas (like Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Washington) may receive larger assistance under the replacement plan.' Congratulations, House Republicans and Trump, you’re on the side of rich New England millennials. Seriously, this would be a tragedy for the 'forgotten' Americans and hence a political disaster for Trump. . . 

[It appears Trump's health care] plan all along was to reward the rich, cover fewer people, enact painful cuts at the expense of the poor and repeal taxes for the upper-income taxpayers who’ve footed a large share of the cost of Obamacare."

Read the Washington Post, How Trump blew it on health care.

UPDATE V:  For a specific comparison of ObamaCare vs. TrumpCareCon (© NoBullU.com), read the Washington Post, How the House Republicans’ proposed Obamacare replacement compares.

UPDATE IV:  "It only took seven years, but Republicans have finally decided how they want to replace Obamacare: with a much, much less generous version of it that almost seems designed to push individual insurance markets into death spirals.

I guess that's freedom?

Before we get to that, though, let's recap what it is that Obamacare actually does. At the most general level, it just taxes the rich to subsidize health insurance for the poor and sick. . .

It's no surprise, then, that Republicans have acted like this is the gravest threat to the republic since the 16th Amendment. (That's the one that made the income tax legal). After all, the GOP has made reversing redistribution its raison d'être the past 40 years, and in the past 40 years there hasn't been a bigger piece of redistribution than Obamacare. Still, they've run into a problem when they've tried to come up with a plan of their own. There isn't a conservative alternative to Obamacare, you see, because Obamacare is the conservative alternative. It's pretty close to what conservatives proposed in 1993, and what Mitt Romney did in Massachusetts. If you buy into the idea of universal coverage (or at least not yanking it away from too many people), then you either need the government to do it directly or use the same kind of three-legged stool Obamacare has. So it's even less of a surprise that the Republican replacement plan is more or less a stingier version of Obamacare that cuts taxes on the rich, cuts Medicaid, and cuts subsidies for lower earners while introducing them for some higher ones. . .

If this sounds like a plan that's designed to please no one and infuriate everyone, that's because it is. House conservatives don't like that it enshrines what they think is a “new entitlement” in tax-credit subsidies; Republican governors won't like the way it cuts Medicaid; and Senate Republicans are leery of anything that could make anywhere from 6 to 10 million people lose their health insurance, as S&P estimates this could. Indeed, conservative groups such as FreedomWorks, Heritage Action, and Americans for Prosperity are already rallying against it.

The only question is whether it will take seven years for Republicans to replace their Obamacare replacement."

Read the Washington Post, Republicans’ ready-to-fail Obamacare replacement.

Emphasis added above. This is key to understanding that Obama tried to compromise with Republi-CONs, and give them the health care plan they wanted. Which is why their proposal will fail and Democrats will eventually get single-payer health care, their preferred option.

UPDATE III:  "Republicans' new health-care bill is a mass transfer of income that cuts taxes for the wealthiest Americans while cutting federal benefits for the middle and working class.

Just two provisions in the Republican plan would allow the richest households to pay an average of nearly $200,000 less under the GOP plan, according to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center."

Read the Washington Post, The massive tax cuts for the rich inside the GOP health-care plan.

UPDATE II:  "Conservative health-care guru and Obamacare critic Avik Roy bluntly criticizes 'the bill’s stubborn desire to make health insurance unaffordable for millions of Americans, and trap millions more in poverty.' He notes the 'critical' flaw in the bill, namely 'its insistence on flat, non-means-tested tax credits. The flat credit will price many poor and vulnerable people out of the health insurance market.' The bill is far more generous to upper-income people than the ACA is . .

Another conservative commentator agrees that the House bill will look horrible upon closer inspection, including: 'significant erosion of up to 10-20 million individuals with employer-provided health coverage; a new entitlement — the refundable tax credits — that by and large wouldn’t expand coverage, but instead cause individuals currently in employer plans to switch to the credits; more federal spending via the refundable tax credits; a tax increase — a cap on the current exclusion for employer-provided health coverage — to pay for the new spending on the credits; and an increase in the uninsured (compared to Obamacare) of at least 15 million — nearly as much as repealing the law outright.' He speculates that 10 million to 20 million could lose coverage."

Read the Washington Post, ACA repeal: House Republicans’ breathtaking recklessness.

UPDATE:  "There are so many awful things about this bill that it’s hard to fit them all into one post, so I’ll try to be as brief as I can. Let’s review the carnage:

The Republican bill undoes the ACA’s expansion of Medicaid. An estimated 14 million more Americans are insured due to the ACA’s expansion of Medicaid. . .

It replaces the ACA’s insurance subsidies with a tax credit. This is a far less efficient and effective way to help people afford insurance . .

It does away with the individual mandate, in a way that could lead the individual market to collapse. . .

If you’re healthy, and especially if you’re young and healthy, this system actually incentivizes you to wait until you get sick before getting insurance. . .

The Medicare trust fund will be drained sooner. . .

It allows insurance companies to charge older people a lot more. . .

It gives a huge tax cut to the wealthy. . .

Planned Parenthood is barred from receiving Medicaid reimbursements for a year. . .

So in sum, the Republican bill makes coverage more expensive and less comprehensive, will inevitably lead to fewer people with insurance, is particularly cruel to those with low incomes, and destabilizes the insurance market, all to give a tax break to the wealthy. That’s why Avik Roy, perhaps the leading conservative health care wonk and a fierce critic of the ACA, wrote that the Republican bill reflects a 'stubborn desire to make health insurance unaffordable for millions of Americans, and trap millions more in poverty.'"

Read the Washington Post, The new Republican health care plan is awe-inspiringly awful.

Kids love sugar, so imagine a parent who fed his kids only sugar and you have TrumpCareCon (© NoBullU.com) (AKA  TrumpConCare or TrumpCon (© NoBullU.com)).

Read the Washington Post, The most popular (and unpopular) parts of House Republicans’ health-care plan. The article included this table which highlighted the provisions kept, changed/scaled back, and repealed, as well as the percent of adults who favor each provision:

Republican health care plan retains some of the most popular parts of Obamacare
   
    Provisions kept in GOP plan                Adults who favor each provision
   
    Eliminate costs for preventative services                77%
    Allow kids to stay on parent's plan until 26            73
    Coverage for pre-existing conditions                     69
    Require insurance to cover birth ctrl costs             60
   
    Provisions changed/scaled back           
   
    Financial help for low/middle income ppl*             72
    Expand Medicaid to cover more people               66
   
    Provisions repealed                   
   
    Employers w/50+ ppl must offer insurance            62
    Increase taxes for wealthy to fund Medicaid         53
    Mandate to buy insurance                                    33

Trump is a Psycho-Narcissistic Con Man

UPDATE II:  "With a lot of pretentious talk about the “deconstruction of the administrative state” and political fantasies (tariffs that don’t provoke retaliation, for example), Stephen K. Bannon and President Trump hoped to transform the GOP into an ethno-nationalist, pro-Russia party akin to the Alternative for Germany (AfD), the National Front in France and the Netherlands’ Party for Freedom (headed by Geert Wilders). We will see how the European counterparts do in elections throughout the year, but so far the Trumpist GOP and its hodgepodge of ill-conceived ideas gleaned from Fox News (with its obsession over illegal immigration for which it provides oodles of incorrect data) have fallen flat. . .

Trump’s emotion-laden campaign promises turn to dust when he actually tries to implement them. In the real world, populism has few concrete, viable solutions to offer the United States. Not surprisingly, when Americans see how it works in practice, they recoil against the mean-spirited anti-immigrant measures, an alliance with anti-democratic kleptocrats and the reverse Robin Hood schemes that widen the inequality gap. Bannon’s mumbo-jumbo about 'deconstruction of the administrative state' apparently means a healthcare scheme which keeps much of Obamacare’s architecture (but favors rich people), enhanced police powers to go after hard-working immigrants and refusal to touch Medicare and Social Security. Populism hence becomes Robber Baron-ism.

Perhaps it took Trump to discredit the whole grab bag of ideas and remind us that putting 'America first' means maintaining leadership in the world, keeping markets open and staying true to our values."

Read the Washington Post, A populist agenda based on Fox News hooey fizzles.

Just remember, don't interrupt him, Trump is doing a great job of destroying  the Republi-CON party.

UPDATE:  "We shouldn’t blithely move on to other matters until we deal with the institutional carnage inflicted upon us by President Trump.

The current president of the United States has accused former president Barack Obama of committing a felony by having him wiretapped. But Trump refuses to offer a shred of evidence for perhaps the most incendiary charge one president has ever leveled against another. Trump recklessly set off a mighty explosion and his spokespeople duck and dodge, hoping we’ll pretend nothing happened.

If our republic had a responsible Congress, its leaders would accept their duty to demand that a president who shakes his country and the world with such an outlandish allegation either put up proof or apologize. . .

No one should act as if Trump didn’t warn us about his negotiable relationship with the truth. He laid it out in his 1987 bestseller, 'The Art of the Deal.' Trump wrote: 'I play to people’s fantasies. . . . People want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular.' . .

It is sad, to paraphrase the tweeter in chief himself, that Washington is now a city of avoidance, denial and deception. Whether he’s talking about policy or his political adversaries, Trump is simply not believable. And his friends in Congress are proving themselves no more trustworthy. Welcome to Fantasyland."

Read the Washington Post, Welcome to Trump’s Fantasyland.

As stated before, Trump is a psycho-narcissistic con man.

If you have any doubt, watch his press conference on February 16, 2017, where he "aired his grievances against the news media, the intelligence community and his detractors generally in a sprawling, stream-of-consciousness news conference that alternated between claims that he had 'inherited a mess' and the assertion that his fledgling administration 'is running like a fine-tuned machine.'"

Read the Washington Post, Trump says ‘I inherited a mess,’ blasts media and detractors at combative news conference.

Trump's Big CON: He's a Different Man Now (Ha Ha Ha, the Jokes on You)

UPDATE V:  That didn't last long.

Read the Washington Post, Trump’s charge that he was wiretapped takes presidency into new territory, which quoted conservative commentator Peter Wehner, who was the top policy strategist in George W. Bush’s White House:

'We have as president a man who is erratic, vindictive, volatile, obsessive, a chronic liar, and prone to believe in conspiracy theories. And you can count on the fact that there will be more to come, since when people like Donald Trump gain power they become less, not more, restrained.'"

Read also the Washington Post, Inside Trump’s fury: The president rages at leaks, setbacks and accusations.

UPDATE IV:  "Like the proverbial canaries in the coal mine, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and national security adviser H.R. McMaster are expected to be early alarms in the event that life in the Trump administration becomes untenable. If the White House fails to build an atmosphere in which they can work, Mattis and McMaster — both of whom are keenly aware that the world is watching their every move — could take their leave. The shock waves caused by their departure would be felt throughout the White House, Congress, and foreign capitals around the globe. The stakes couldn’t be higher — everyone knows that if they aren’t able to make it work, something must be seriously broken. "

Read the Washington Post, Mattis and McMaster are canaries in Trump’s coal mine.

UPDATE III:  "The president’s conciliatory address was a recognition that a softer sales tactic was needed to sell the hard-edge populism on which he campaigned."

Read The New York Times, Speech Wasn’t as Much a Pivot as a Skillful Political Act.

UPDATE II:  "The problem isn’t that Trump honored Carryn Owens at a moment of terrible grief, or that he spoke movingly of her husband’s death. All that was altogether appropriate. Rather, the problem is that he did this after trying to evade any responsibility for what happened, and after the White House cast any criticism of his handling of it as an insult to Ryan’s legacy. In this sense, the entire story raises serious doubts about Trump’s decision-making on matters of national security, and it may be a grim preview of what’s to come."

Read the Washington Post, The pundits are wrong. Trump’s handling of the Ryan Owens affair was contemptibly cynical.

UPDATE:  "The obsession with President Trump’s ability to spend one hour in a disciplined relationship with a teleprompter obscured one of his central goals on Tuesday night: He continued to try to scare the country to death."

Read the Washington Post, Trump still wants you to be very, very afraid.

Wow, after 40 days in office, Trump can maintain some self-control for an hour and read a speech from a teleprompter (which BTW, he frequently criticized Obama for using).

"He delivered a wonderful speech that used the words 'torches' and 'freedom' — not just once, but three times! He did not make lip-farts into the microphone, use the word 'pussy' (It is amazing to think that there was a time when I would have worried about typing that word at a family newspaper. But that was weeks ago, in another country) or mock a reporter, disabled or otherwise. He did not halt mid-speech to level a withering aside at Rosie O’Donnell. In short, it was just like the kind of speech Jack Kennedy would have given.

It was 'the most speech-like speech,' said Brian Williams.

High praise, indeed! I give it a Trump A.

This isn’t grading on a curve so much as it is grading in a deep cave many miles below the curve, but — that is all that America wanted, apparently. . .

Yup, Donald Trump spoke to Congress, and he did not bite a live bat in half.

Trump is finally presidential. That is to say, 'capable of delivering a boring speech full of meaningless platitudes.' . .

What does he want to do with the country, exactly?

Well, don’t worry. He is speaking in fluid sentences and has not paused yet to mock a former Miss USA or complain about the Fake Media. Do we need to trouble ourselves with these niggling details? They will only upset us and turn Vice President Pence’s smile upside down. . .

He listed an exciting agenda, something that these speeches always demand.

He has created many jobs and has started to drain the swamp. (The swamp is almost entirely drained because everyone in it has been offered a job in the Trump administration.)

He has cleared a path for pipelines and made them out of American steel, and he is making the Justice Department form a Task Force on Reducing Violent Crime. (Its first step to reduce all this violent crime will be to hand Trump an accurate set of crime statistics.) . .

It was the Gettysburg Address, by Trump standards. . .

Yup, Trump said words. Words about dreams! Just like the Rev. Martin Luther King, practically.

The facts were not exactly right, and the plans were no less alarming than usual — but they came packaged in such beautiful, coherent sentences. Bravery and freedom, my fellow Americans.

If George Washington were watching, I bet he was shedding proud tears. It was just wonderful. Truly.

Everything but the content."

Read the Washington Post, Great news: President Trump did not bite any bats in half during his address to Congress!

It was what the stock market wanted, today it is giddy.

Trump's Big CON: I Hate Leaks (AND False News)

"[T]he Trump media strategy is looking more and more like a hall of mirrors, where real leaks provide what the president blasts as 'fake news' — but that same news, vociferously denied, can get a top official fired, as with the former national security adviser Michael Flynn.

In this fun house, a president who, during the campaign, proclaimed 'I love WikiLeaks!' because that organization’s leaks were causing political damage to his opponent, now bemoans the dangers of leaks that cause political damage to him. . .

It’s hardly new that American presidents both decry leaks and use them.

But in the extremes of behavior on one side and rhetoric on the other, Trump may be setting a new standard for trying to have it both ways."

Read the Washington Post, Trump’s tough talk on leaks is one thing. His actions tell another tale.

He only hates leaks (and news) that doesn't flatter him

Trump's Big CON: Make America Hate Again

UPDATE III:  "There are a few voices of sanity in the administration, people who actually have the experience and knowledge to do their jobs well and aren’t pursuing some maniacal vision of a global clash of civilizations — particularly McMaster and Defense Secretary Jim Mattis. But they’re likely to be overcome by a trio of forces working against reason, caution and thoughtfulness.

[They are Bannon's apocalyptic world view. . . ]

[T]he Republican Party; not just Republicans on Capitol Hill, but the party more broadly. . . For the past two years, Trump has promoted and then fed off the fears and hatreds of the GOP base in a feedback loop of anger. With his daily diet of Fox News shows, Trump is intensely attuned to what the base is saying and is always eager to give them what they want — which is not even to mention that he is in regular communication with people like lunatic conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. That puts those advocating restraint and appreciating nuance at a disadvantage. . .

The final force working against the sane members of the administration is, of course, the president himself. We know that Trump is impulsive and ill-informed, which dramatically increases the risk of terrible decision-making in a crisis. We also know that his natural inclinations move him in the direction of simplistic thinking, bellicosity and overreaction."

Read the Washington Post, There are a few voices of sanity around Trump. They’re likely to be overwhelmed.

UPDATE II:  "To most Americans, a shooting in Kansas last Wednesday will be remembered as just another incident of gun violence in a country where homicides are tragically commonplace and where far too many disturbed loners have ready access to firearms.

To many Indians, though, the murder of Srinivas Kuchibhotla was the harshest warning yet about the reality of President Trump’s America.

Kuchibhotla, an engineer at satellite navigation company Garmin, was having an after-work drink with his friend and colleague Alok Madasani at their regular bar in Olathe, a town 20 miles southwest of Kansas City. The duo, both Indian nationals who received master's degrees in the United States, were confronted by 51-year-old Adam Purinton, who hectored them with ethnic slurs.

'He asked us what visa are we currently on and whether we are staying here illegally,' said Madasani to the New York Times. 'We didn’t react. People do stupid things all the time.'

But an enraged Purinton returned with a shotgun and opened fire, killing Kuchibhotla, 32, and injuring Madasani and Ian Grillot, an onlooker who intervened in defense of the Indian men. Eyewitness accounts suggest Purinton yelled at the pair to 'get out of my country.'"

Read the Washington Post, An act of American terror in Trump’s heartland. 

UPDATE:  "Bannon and Trump are living out a cultural revenge fantasy. Bannon-Trump remain bonded to their base not because of ideology or agenda, but because they desire the downfall of coastal and urban elites (personified by the media), detest the ethnic and racial demographic trends that continue to make the country more diverse and hold fast to various myths and an exaggerated sense of victimhood (e.g. climate change is a hoax, minorities all live in violent and poverty-stricken cities, Christians are 'persecuted'). No wonder the Trump team finds a role model in the anti-Western, authoritarian Russian President Vladimir Putin, who runs a kleptocracy that impoverishes his people, whom he then tries to pacify with grandiose nationalistic ambitions. (They may not have a high-tech industry, but by gosh, the Empire is back!)"

Read the Washington Post, Bannon and Trump are out for revenge.

Trump wants you to hate this 5-year.

Read the story and tell me if you do.

Read the Washington Post, My 7-year-old daughter Henry is transgender. She’d change Trump’s mind.

BTW, it's not just this child Trump wants you to hate.

Trump's Big CON: "Enormous Tax Cuts for the Wealthy Will Boost the Economy"

UPDATE III:  "Trump’s irresponsible, non-reality-based budget likely makes it more difficult to pass a budget — any budget — and increases the chances we will drift along from continuing resolution to continuing resolution. The president apparently wants to force Congress to make all the hard choices, but it doesn’t work that way. Without presidential leadership Congress usually becomes paralyzed. Lawmakers who want to make hard choices get undercut by the White House (Well, President Trump says we don’t need entitlement cuts!) and those who want to grandstand are encouraged to do so.

In sum, Trump never thought he’d be president. Right now he’s not acting like one, and unless he screws up some courage and faces reality, he and Republicans won’t get much of anything done. On second thought, that might be the good news."

Read the Washington Post, Why Trump’s nonsensical budget matters.

UPDATE II:  "The Trump budget — which is so far only the barest outlines of a budget — is the GOP stereotype on steroids. Take from the poor to give to the military. Trump will be defending a budget, as far as I can tell, [that] is unrealistic, cruel and obscene. . .

He seems to be proposing massive cuts in the one area of the budget that can't afford it, which would exact a terrible human cost. That is impractical, immoral -- and typical."

Read the Washington Post, George W. Bush’s speechwriter on Trump budget: ‘Unrealistic, cruel and obscene.’

UPDATE:  Trump's "budget numbers come nowhere close to adding up. I don’t mean there’s some discrepancy at the margins, nor am I being the Washington budget scold who bugs you for not paying for your proposals. I’m saying that his budget won’t work.

The problem is that he can’t cut taxes by trillions, increase defense spending, invest in infrastructure, hold Social Security and Medicare harmless, and balance the budget in 10 years without almost getting rid of the rest of the government. And that’s not going to happen."

Read the Washington Post, Trump’s budget plan depends on wholly unrealistic cuts to the rest of government., which includes this graph:

"What if I told you that I could save you thousands and thousands of dollars a year, and you don’t even have to cut back on anything important in your life? What if I promised you that, just by saving a penny a day, your whole life could change for the better? What if I said you could improve your overall finances by working less and spending more?

You’d probably think that sounded too good to be true. You’d probably suspect that I was trying to scam you. You’d be right on both counts.

If early reports are accurate, President Trump’s budget blueprint will be trying to run that same scam on the American people. His budget will pretend that he can achieve huge savings without any pain. . .

Of course, Trump will argue — as good snake-oil salesmen do — that picking your pockets is good for you. You can be sure he will try to sell you on the idea that enormous tax cuts for the wealthy will boost the economy for everyone. Never mind that we’ve tried that before . . .

To be fair to Trump, this is the same scam that Republicans in Congress have been running for six years. Their budgets always contained the same basic tricks and sleights of hand, and they did seem to get away with it.

Read the Washington Post, Trump says his budget will make government ‘lean.’ It’s really a scam.

Trump's Big CON: Historically Black Colleges Are 'Pioneers of School Choice’

Talk about whitewashing history to help white people forget the nation's racist past and reconcile that past with its ideals!

Read the Washington Post, DeVos called HBCUs ‘pioneers’ of ‘school choice.’ It didn’t go over well.

Trump's Big CON: 'Nobody Knew Health Care Was So Unbelievably Complex and Complicated'

Only a simpleton would believe that.

Of course Trump says it so that the right-wing media complex will repeat it ad nauseam for the many Republi-CON simpletons.

"Many policy makers had anticipated the intricacies of changing the health care law".

Read The New York Times, Trump Concedes Health Law Overhaul Is ‘Unbelievably Complex’.

Trump's Big CON: He Fancies Himself the Unquestionable Supreme Leader

"The phrase was too toxic even for Nikita Khrushchev, a war-hardened veteran communist not known for squeamishness. As leader of the Soviet Union, he demanded an end to the use of the term 'enemy of the people' because 'it eliminated the possibility of any kind of ideological fight.'

'The formula 'enemy of the people,'' Mr. Khrushchev told the Soviet Communist Party in a 1956 speech denouncing Stalin’s cult of personality, 'was specifically introduced for the purpose of physically annihilating such individuals' who disagreed with the supreme leader. . .

Why would the elected leader of a democratic nation embrace a label that, after the death of Stalin, even the Soviet Union found to be too freighted with sinister connotations? . .

He has used the phrase more than once, including Friday during an attack on the news media at a conservative gathering in which he said that some reporters were making up unnamed sources to attack him. . .

By using the phrase and placing himself in such infamous company, at least in his choice of vocabulary to attack his critics, Mr. Trump has demonstrated, Ms. Khrushcheva said, that the language of 'autocracy, of state nationalism is always the same regardless of the country, and no nation is exempt.' She added that, in all likelihood, Mr. Trump had not read Lenin, Stalin or Mao Zedong, but the 'formulas of insult, humiliation, domination, branding, enemy-forming and name calling are always the same.'"

Read The New York Times, Trump Embraces ‘Enemy of the People,’ a Phrase With a Fraught History.

As I've said before, Trump is a psycho-narcissistic con man. And he is afraid that eventually the people, through the media, will awaken to that realization.

Trump's Big CON: It's All About the Theatre/Show

UPDATE VIII:  It looks more and more liker that shortly after taking office Trump ordered a risky special operation's raid in Yemen as part of the show -- to advance his 'tough guy' image.

Read The New York Times, Father of Commando Killed in Yemen Refused to Meet Trump.

Where is the outrage by the right-wing media?

UPDATE VII:  "What Washington has been trained to perceive as disorder — a blizzard of contradictions, a president saying one thing while his top appointees say the opposite — is actually a long-running theatrical event, The Trump Show, a time-tested method by which the star builds excitement, demands attention and creates soap-operatic story lines that at least superficially seem like success. The most important thing about this presidency, to the man in the Oval Office, is how it looks. . .

The Trump Show is new to the White House but old hat to anyone who has watched its star as casino magnate, hotel builder, pitchman for all manner of products or reality TV host."

Read the Washington Post, President Trump wants to put on a show. Governing matters less.

And the reason he hates the media now is that the media just won't clap. 

UPDATE VI:  The "conservative movement in the age of Trump . . [is] strangely stuck in opposition mode. . .

[No need to be] particularly conservative . . . [or offer] a cogent political point of view or new ideas . . . [Yiannopoulos] earned his speaking slot at CPAC because he pisses people off — liberal people. And that was apparently good enough. . .

It's an outgrowth of the 'enemy of my enemy is my friend' approach to politics that has become so popular with Trump. Trump's GOP has come to be defined as much by what it's not — politically correct, playing nice, a friend of the mainstream media, adhering to political norms and facts — as what it actually is. It's a long-standing middle finger to the political establishment, and in that way, Yiannopoulos very much fit the mold."

Read the Washington Post, Milo Yiannopoulos’s Trumpian rise shows how the GOP is stuck in opposition mode.

UPDATE V: More proof that it's not conservative principles that unite Republi-CONs, it's the show of outrageous statements and nastiness designed to pander to fear, anger and hatred.

Read the Washington Post, If college liberals are so naive, why did the campus right fall for Yiannopoulos.

Read also The Hollywood Reporter, Milo Yiannopoulos Documentary in the Works as Outrageous Tour Demands Revealed.

UPDATE IV: Nothing evidences the theatre better than this.

As part of an 'Apprentice' style contrived/fabricated drama leading up to the announcement, the Supreme Court "runner-up" Judge Hardiman, was asked by Trump aides to "hit the road to Washington to help them maintain the illusion that the selection process was still competitive" .

Read The New York Times, Runner-Up Didn’t Make It to Supreme Court, but He Did Get to Altoona.

UPDATE III:   "U.S. military officials also said that [a weekend raid on al Qaeda in Yemen in which one Navy Seal died and three others were wounded] was approved by President Trump without sufficient intelligence or ground support."

Read The Hill, Trump-ordered raid in Yemen approved without sufficient intelligence: military officials.

Makes me wonder if Trump approved this risky raid to advance his 'tough guy' image?

UPDATE II:  Trump's theatrics pander to fear, anger and hatred.

Read the Washington Post, Donald Trump often tweets about terror and violence, but said nothing about an attack on Muslims in Quebec City.

UPDATE: "Donald Trump's management style is clear to anyone who has watched his TV show "The Apprentice."

Line up a bunch of contenders in front of you; set their hair on fire; let them squabble; run around and create mayhem.

Once things have reached the point at which the viewer is watching from between their fingers -- and only then -- step in as the arbiter in chief, the man with the answers, the all-powerful figure who brings the whole pitiful thing to a conclusion.

This is how Trump ran his businesses, his TV show and his campaign. But this week he has begun to find out what happens when the myth comes to Washington, with its competing power centers, lawyers and vested interests.

Trump's determination to win Big League is blinding him to what a victory in government looks like. Quick fire stunts that alienate allies and dent your chances will probably limit opportunities down the road. . .

Maintaining the image of getting down to business fast is coming at the expense of the other part of the deal -- that he can deliver.

The story taking hold is chaos over order, weakness over strength, division over unity.

That would be a problem for any politician. But when you have no political experience and when you have built your entire platform on a messianic appeal -- a savior myth built around the politician as strongman -- then it could very easily end in disaster."

Read CNN, Donald Trump is learning the hard way he's not the Messiah.

"The Big Four broadcasters will interrupt regularly scheduled programming Tuesday with specials from their news divisions covering President Donald Trump’s announcement of his pick to fill the open seat on the U.S. Supreme Court. The announcement, set for 8 p.m., will be the first live-news event of the Trump administration to prompt broadcasters to break into primetime programming.

In scheduling the announcement for 8 p.m., Trump is diverging from the approach of his predecessors, who introduced Supreme Court nominees in daytime press events. And in a move reminiscent of Trump’s experience as host of NBC reality show 'The Apprentice,' CNN reported Tuesday that the top two candidates for the Supreme Court seat — Neil Gorsuch and Thomas Hardiman — have traveled to Washington, D.C. ahead of the announcement. . .

Citing unnamed sources, CNN reported Tuesday morning that the White House had gone to extraordinary efforts to build suspense for Tuesday evening’s announcement. Such a focus would be in keeping with President Trump’s recent track record of treating television coverage of his administration as event programming."

Read Variety, Donald Trump’s SCOTUS Announcement to Take Over Primetime.

This had to be more boring than Dances With the Stars.

Read also New York Magazine, Trump Plans Apprentice-Style SCOTUS Announcement, which notes that "Trump is providing a powerful validation to those who have argued he approaches politics and government as nothing more than a big reality-TV show."

And read also The Atlantic, Trump Ups the Drama for His Supreme Court Pick, which stated that "[a]ll that’s missing is a rose ceremony right out of The Bachelor—a disappointing oversight for a president who was a reality-TV star and has a Rose Garden at his disposal."

Lastly, read The New York Times, It’s ‘The Apprentice, Supreme Court Edition,’ as Trump Summons Finalists to White House.

Trump's Big CON: Hate Doesn't Unite

UPDATE II:  Here is Trump's achilles heel.

Read the Washington Post, Donald Trump’s CPAC speech proves it: He’s totally obsessed with the media.

UPDATE:  "Trump’s theory of politics is that it’s okay to offend five voters if seven voters approve. Dividing the country is the name of the game. The object is to create a coalition of the resentful. Polarization is not only the consequence. It also is the underlying purpose and philosophy.

In this strategy, the news media are tempting targets. . .

He likes denouncing journalists as dishonest scum of the Earth. It’s invigorating. Trump can’t be a unifying figure when he’s having so much fun being divider in chief."

Read the Washington Post, Why Trump loves to hate the media.

"Fifteen years ago, shoeless, President George W. Bush] walked through the sanctuary of the Islamic Center of Washington.

It was six days after Islamist terrorists flew planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, killing thousands. War plans awaited Bush back at the White House. But for six minutes that afternoon, he stood between an Islamic altar and a bank of TV cameras and admonished a country in fear. . .

He quoted from the Koran — “The English translation is not as eloquent as the original Arabic,” he said — and then addressed a wave of Islamophobia that had followed the terrorist strikes.

Dozens of attacks on Arab Americans were reported that week, The Washington Post noted at the time. 'Among them is the case of a Pakistani Muslim store owner who was shot and killed in Dallas Saturday evening.'

'I've been told that some fear to leave. Some don't want to go shopping for their families,' Bush said at the mosque, and shook his head. . .

'That's not the America I know.' . .

When President Barack Obama visited a mosque near the end of his presidency, The Post's Aaron Blake reported, he took heat for it.

'Donald Trump said perhaps Obama 'feels comfortable there' — a comment thick with innuendo from a man who championed conspiracy theories about Obama's birthplace,' Blake wrote.

Trump, of course, would go on to win the presidency after calling in a speech to ban all Muslims from the United States. . .

A spokesman for Bush declined to comment on the family's reaction to Trump's rhetoric about Muslims and his executive order last week, which barred visitors and immigrants from seven Muslim-majority countries. . .

On Twitter, [President Bush's daughter Jenna ] Bush Hager explained why she quoted her father: 'Just reinforcing his words that still, sadly pertain to today.'

She's not the only one to think so."

Read the Washington Post, ‘Not the America I know’: George W. Bush’s daughter wants you to remember his speech on Islam. 

The Donald is Putin's Puppet

UPDATE XVII:  Now obstruction of justice and coverup.

Read the Washington Post, White House adviser asked FBI to dispute Russia reports.

It's déjà vu Nixon all over again!

And like Nixon, Trump doesn't like it.

Read the Washington Post, The big news is not the FBI leaks. It’s what’s in the leaks.

UPDATE XVI:  "The Trump-Russia file, which concerns fundamental questions of national security, is far more deserving of close scrutiny by Congress, the media, law enforcement, and the public than any of the White House’s many other alleged misdeeds. And the Flynn phone calls are only the beginning, not the end, of the scandal in question."

Read Foreign Policy, Donald Trump’s Russia Scandal Is Just Getting Started.

UPDATE XV: Read the Washington Post, Why Flynn was undone by a phone call, which notes:

"The call may not necessarily be the smoking gun, the ultimate 'proof' that there was a quid pro quo: 'You help us with the election, we help you by lifting sanctions.' But it sure looks like it could be.

That explains why Flynn lied about the call to the vice president, and to the press. That explains why — although he has known about this issue for many weeks — the president did not fire Flynn earlier. That also explains why the president has expressed regret about the leak of the transcript of the call but not about the fact that Flynn made the call in the first place. That also explains why Flynn resigned."

UPDATE XIV:  "President Trump's national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn . . . had discussed U.S. sanctions against Russia with Moscow's ambassador in Washington prior to Trump's inauguration. Flynn, according to intelligence sources, likely signaled that the question of sanctions would be revisited by a more friendly Trump administration.

The discussions suggest a worrying level of collusion between a key figure in the new administration and the Kremlin. . .

Flynn's dealings with Russia aside, there are even deeper ties that connect the current administration to the Kremlin.

First, there surely is more to come on the extent of Russian involvement in last year's election, with law enforcement agencies in the United States increasingly certain that Moscow actively worked to help Trump win. The Russian establishment, including close Putin allies, publicly basked in Trump's victory. Now, some Pentagon officials say they have 'assumed that the Kremlin has ears' inside the White House ever since Trump's inauguration, according to controversial former counterintelligence official John Schindler.

Beyond the intrigues of spies, though, there's also a clear ideological affinity."

Read the Washington Post, Beyond Flynn, other ties bind the White House to the Kremlin. 

UPDATE XIII: Read CNN, Intel chiefs presented Trump with claims of Russian efforts to compromise him.

Read also The New York Times, Trump Briefed on Claim That Russia Had Secrets on Him.

BTW, this story has more corroboration than Republi-CON pizzagate or the birther scam.

UPDATE XII:  The Donald is ever the consummate con man.

Read the Washington Post, Trump alleges delay in his briefing on ‘so-called’ Russian hacking; U.S. official says there wasn’t one.

UPDATE XI:  The Donald's ode to Putin:



Listen to the lyrics, or read them here. This song foretells The Donald's relationship with Putin.

UPDATE X: In Europe in the 1930s "there was throughout [the land] a generalized crisis of legitimacy. Large numbers of people felt dispossessed, disenfranchised, disconnected from dominant social institutions. The political party system, and . . . government more generally, were regarded as corrupt and oligarchic. Such an environment was fertile ground for a ‘mob mentality,’ in which outsiders . . . could be scapegoated and a savior could be craved: 'The mob always will shout for 'the strong man,' the 'great leader.' For the mob hates the society from which it is excluded, as well as [government] where it is not represented.'

And a society suffused with resentment, according to Arendt, is ripe for manipulation by the propaganda of sensationalist demagogues: 'What convinces masses are not facts, and not even invented facts, but only the consistency of the system of which they are presumably part . . . Totalitarian propaganda thrives on this escape from reality into fiction . . . [and] can outrageously insult common sense only where common sense has lost its validity.' Cynicism. Contempt for truth. Appeal to the craving of the masses for simple stories of malevolent conspiracy."

Read the Washington Post, How Hannah Arendt’s classic work on totalitarianism illuminates today’s America.

Sounds a lot like America today.

UPDATE IX:  "Put his campaign rhetoric, tweets and appointments all together, and we’re getting a sense of U.S. foreign policy under Donald Trump. The president-elect has consistently signaled that he wants to be accommodating toward Russia and get tough on China. But that sees the world almost backward. China is, for the most part, comfortable with the U.S.-led international system. Russia is trying to upend it. . .

Keep in mind that China’s view of the world over the past two decades has been fundamentally benign, having grown to wealth and power in that period. Putin, by contrast, believes that the end of Soviet communism in 1989 was the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century” and that Russia has been humiliated ever since. His goal appears to be to overturn the U.S.-created international order, even if this means chaos.

The question is, why would an American president-elect help Moscow achieve that goal?"

Read the Washington Post, Vladimir Putin wants a new world order. Why would Donald Trump help him?

The answer: simply to get elected. Winning elections is the only thing  Republi-CONs care about, principle no longer matters.

Read also The New York Times, Is Donald Trump a Threat to Democracy?, which argues convincingly that The Donald show classic dictatorial tendencies. 

The more that this is analyzed, the scarier it get.

UPDATE VIII:  "Russia’s secret hacking against Democratic Party officials threatened the integrity of the U.S. political system. And President-elect Donald Trump shouldn’t have criticized the CIA after its analysts told Congress about the Kremlin’s efforts. Trump, unbelievably, seemed to be taking a potential adversary’s side against his own nation’s intelligence professionals. . .

[N]o doubt the Russians wanted to hurt Clinton and help Trump. In Russia’s eyes, he said, Clinton had sought to undermine President Vladimir Putin after the 2011 parliamentary elections and to foment 'color revolutions' in areas of Russian influence. Trump, by contrast, had lauded Putin, suggested lifting sanctions and belittled NATO."

Read the Washington Post, Trump is playing a risky spy game.

UPDATE VII: "Trump has repeatedly expressed a soft spot for an oppressive dictator, Vladimir Putin, who is challenging American interests at every turn. As a candidate, Trump publicly invited Russia to hack his opponent’s emails. Trump’s campaign manager, Paul Manafort, resigned amid reports that he had represented pro-Russian interests as a lobbyist. Trump’s choice for national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn, seems to be a Russophile and has appeared on Russia’s propaganda network.

In 2008, Donald Trump Jr. admitted that “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets.” President-elect Trump has consistently refused to be fully transparent about his finances.

Before the presidential vote, the American intelligence community determined that the Russian government directed the illegal hacking of the Democratic National Committee and other political figures. Now the CIA, according to reporting in The Post, has shared with Congress its finding that Russia intervened with the intent of swinging the election toward Trump. And Trump — instead of expressing concern about an act of cyberwar — has essentially come to Russia’s defense and launched an ad hominem attack on the U.S. intelligence community. . .

[I]f the CIA interpretation is correct, this is not just one provocation among many. If Putin actually helped elect an American president more favorable to Russian interests, it is surely the largest intelligence coup since the cracking of the Enigma code during World War II. And it is arguably a bigger deal — more on par with, say, German intelligence helping elect Charles Lindbergh president."

Read the Washington Post, Trump’s dangerous diss of the CIA.

UPDATE VI: "Good Lord. We are about to inaugurate as president a man whose election, according to the CIA, was aided by a Russian intelligence operation. Try as we might, we cannot pretend this didn’t happen.

We can’t ignore outrageous interference by an adversarial foreign power because President-elect Donald Trump’s actions question his own legitimacy, or at least his fitness to hold the nation’s highest office, virtually every day. . .

Our president is supposed to be chosen in polling places across the United States — not behind the imposing walls of the Kremlin."

Read the Washington Post, Trump is assembling an anti-government. Did Russia help get him here?

UPDATE V:  "You would think the stunning news that the CIA had concluded Russia hacked the Democrats to help President-elect Donald Trump win the election, followed by Trump’s insulting dismissal of 17 intelligence agencies finding that Russia was responsible — which in turn was followed by news he intended to nominate as secretary of state an unqualified chief executive with exceptionally close ties to Vladimir Putin (and who opposed sanctions) — would have stirred outrage and deep concern among Republicans, who used to pride themselves on their national security chops. You would be wrong. . .

[W]hy are these Republicans so silent? I mean, this is a really big deal.

Read the Washington Post, Republicans need to get out from under their desks.

I can only image the outcry if Russia had hacked the Republi-CONs to get HRC elected. Is there any doubt there would be impeachment proceedings.

UPDATE IV:  "The flood of 'fake news' this election season got support from a sophisticated Russian propaganda campaign that created and spread misleading articles online with the goal of punishing Democrat Hillary Clinton, helping Republican Donald Trump and undermining faith in American democracy, say independent researchers who tracked the operation.

Russia’s increasingly sophisticated propaganda machinery — including thousands of botnets, teams of paid human “trolls,” and networks of websites and social-media accounts — echoed and amplified right-wing sites across the Internet as they portrayed Clinton as a criminal hiding potentially fatal health problems and preparing to hand control of the nation to a shadowy cabal of global financiers. The effort also sought to heighten the appearance of international tensions and promote fear of looming hostilities with nuclear-armed Russia. . .

Some players in this online echo chamber were knowingly part of the propaganda campaign, the researchers concluded, while others were 'useful idiots' — a term born of the Cold War to describe people or institutions that unknowingly assisted Soviet Union propaganda efforts.

The Russian campaign during this election season, researchers from both groups say, worked by harnessing the online world’s fascination with 'buzzy' content that is surprising and emotionally potent, and tracks with popular conspiracy theories about how secret forces dictate world events.

Some of these stories originated with RT and Sputnik, state-funded Russian information services that mimic the style and tone of independent news organizations yet sometimes include false and misleading stories in their reports, the researchers say. On other occasions, RT, Sputnik and other Russian sites used social-media accounts to amplify misleading stories already circulating online, causing news algorithms to identify them as 'trending' topics that sometimes prompted coverage from mainstream American news organizations."

Read the Washington Post, Russian propaganda effort helped spread 'fake news' during election, experts say.

Read also the Washington Post, Americans keep looking away from the election’s most alarming story.

UPDATE III:  "Former CIA director Michael Morell endorsed Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton and blasted GOP rival Donald Trump, accusing him of becoming an unwitting agent of Russian President Vladimir Putin in an op-ed on Friday. . .

He noted that Putin is a trained intelligence officer, and he suggested that the Russian leader has been using Trump's personality for his own gain. In the primaries, Morell said, Putin 'played upon Mr. Trump's vulnerabilities' by complimenting him.

Among the traits Morell said would make Trump a 'danger' to national security: 'his obvious need for self-aggrandizement, his overreaction to perceived slights, his tendency to make decisions based on intuition, his refusal to change his views based on new information, his routine carelessness with the facts, his unwillingness to listen to others and his lack of respect for the rule of law.'"

Read the Washington Post, In endorsing Clinton, ex-CIA chief says Putin made Trump his 'unwitting agent'.

UPDATE II:  At the same time, his VP pick said "If it is Russia and they are interfering in our elections, I can assure you both parties and the United States government will ensure there are serious consequences."

Read the Washington Post, Pence: Consequences if Russia is interfering in U.S. election.

So while Pence understands the seriousness of the possibility that a foreign power is directly interfering in the U.S. presidential election, Trump is encouraging the interference.

Pence should withdrawal as Trump's VP.

UPDATE:  "Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump on Wednesday said he hoped that Russia would hack into Hillary Clinton’s email server to find “missing” messages and release them to the public."

Read the Washington Post, Trump urges Russia to hack Clinton's emails and release them publicly.

Donald Trump is dangerously insane!

"Donald Trump never met a conspiracy theory he didn’t like — until now.

He has dabbled in, among other things, the notion that President Obama is a Muslim born in Kenya, that Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia was murdered and that Ted Cruz’s father was involved in the JFK assassination.

But on one topic, Trump is conspicuously incurious: the suggestion that he is complicit in a plan by Vladimir Putin to influence the U.S. election."

Read the Washington Post, A Trump-style speculation on the GOP and Putin, which lists the many troubling connections between Putin and The Donald.

Trump's (and the Republi-CON's) Big CON: "I/They Will Replace Obamacare"

UPDATE IV:  "The Republican effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act is not going well, in large part because it turns out that making sweeping changes to a system that encompasses one-sixth of the American economy turns out to be rather more complicated than they imagined. Their backtracking has an interesting character to it, in particular how they’ve been gobsmacked by the transition from shaking their fists at the system to being responsible for it.

Up until November, they had been pursuing a strategy they got straight from Marx and Lenin, but now that they’re in power, it suddenly looks like a terrible idea. Here’s the latest fascinating pirouette they’re undertaking:

    House Republicans and the Trump administration on Tuesday filed a joint motion seeking to delay lawsuit proceedings that threaten to undo President Barack Obama’s health care law, the Affordable Care Act. . .

    Yet in the absence of an Obamacare replacement plan, the outcome the GOP initially sought threatens to upend the insurance marketplace and jeopardize coverage for millions of people.

Just to be clear, Republicans are asking the court to delay their own lawsuit pretty much indefinitely, because they’ve become terrified of what would happen if they succeed. In this case, it concerns government subsidies to pay out-of-pocket costs for people with low incomes.

 Read the Washington Post, Republicans suddenly realize burning down the health-care system might not be a great idea.

UPDATE III:  "Covering preexisting conditions without an individual mandate guarantees a death spiral."

Read the Washington Post, Trump’s health-care plan has already been tried. It was a disaster.

UPDATE II: This is a must read article, The New York Times, The G.O.P. Health Care Hoax, which notes:

"This week, President-elect Donald Trump and congressional Republicans began to dismantle Obamacare, and here are the details of their replacement plan:

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That captures the nonexistent Republican plan to replace Obamacare. They’re telling Americans who feel trapped by health care problems: 'Jump! Maybe we’ll catch you.'

This G.O.P. fraud is called 'repeal and delay.' That means repealing the Affordable Care Act, effective in a few years without specifying what will replace it.

If the Republicans ran a home renovation business, they would start tearing down your roof this month and promise to return in 2019 with some options for a new one — if you survived.

And survival will be a real issue. The bottom line of the G.O.P. approach is that millions of Americans will lose insurance, and thousands more will die unnecessarily each year because of lack of care. . .

Americans spend two or three times as much on health care as a share of G.D.P. as other industrialized countries but get worse outcomes. American children are 75 percent more likely to die in the first five years of life than British or German children, according to World Bank data, and American women are twice as likely to die in pregnancy as Canadian women. The reasons have to do partly with American poverty, and partly with the high number of uninsured.

Trump would have you believe that he will keep the popular parts of Obamacare, such as the ban on discriminating against pre-existing conditions, while eliminating unpopular parts like the mandate. That’s impossible: The good and bad depend on each other.

The Trump approach would be like trying to amputate a dog’s rear end so you wouldn’t have to clean up its messes. It just doesn’t work that way."

UPDATE II:  Read also the Washington Post, Republicans are about to feel Obama’s pain on Obamacare — and he knows it.

UPDATE: I've discussed and explained Obamacare extensively. Read the posts.

The only feasible alternatives to Obamacare are single payer (AKA medicare) or government run health care (which isn't that bad, ask anyone in the military).

Which is the reason that Republi-CONs developed the plan that we now call Obamacare. Just ask Romney.

Read the Washington Post, How Democrats can defeat the repeal of Obamacare.

The inability to explain this simple fact shows how inept Democrats are.

"[T]he whole idea of 'repealing' the ACA has been something of a scam."

Read the Washington Post, Are Trump and the Republicans really going to repeal Obamacare?

Trump's Big CON: The News Media Lies About 'Honest Trump'

Trump, like Jefferson, doesn't like the news media looking into his 'affairs'.

"When Jefferson wrote to 17-year-old John Norvell, urging him to avoid a career in journalism, he was embittered by reports spread by his political opponents that he had slept with Sally Hemings, one of his slaves. Today, most historians believe she was the mother of six of his children. So this is a case where 'fake news' turned out to be true."

Read the Washington Post, Fact-checking President Trump’s rally in Florida.

Trump's Big CON: He Ignores the 'Forgotten Man'

Corporate tax reform "would do a lot for Wall Street and the well-connected, and do nothing for Main Street and what Trump called the 'forgotten men and women' of the country.

Populism is just another alternative fact of the Trump administration."

Read the Washington Post, Trump talks a lot about the ‘forgotten man,’ but so far he’s just helping Wall Street.