British speaker tells Trump he is not welcome in parliament

The informal invitation for a formal State Visit to the UK that was given by the British prime minister to Donald Trump has roiled that country. A petition to not have the visit be a State Visit with a meeting with the Queen has already garnered nearly 1.9 million signatures and parliament will debate the petition on February 20. The petition states:
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What White House press briefings look like now

Melissa McCarthy channels White House spokesperson Sean Spicer to demonstrate the nature of current press briefings. I for one am hoping that the relations between the government and the press get as hostile as possible because an adversarial press is more likely to produce actual news than one that had such good relations with high government officials that reporters could be easily manipulated and used as puppets.
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Trump backs off on black sites

Donald Trump has made no secret of the fact that he thinks torture is a great idea and that it works in getting information from people, even though it is a war crime and the evidence suggests that any information generated by it is largely useless. He initially suggested that he wanted to reopen the so-called ‘black sites’, prions that were located overseas where prisoners could be tortured under the direction of the CIA, thus creating a slight distance from direct involvement in war crimes and providing a possible legal loophole.
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Trump calls world leaders

Alec Baldwin seems to be having a blast portraying Trump on Saturday Night Live. There have been increasing suggestions that Trump’s advisor Stephen Bannon is the person actually running the White House with Trump as his puppet and a figurehead. Given Trump’s ego, narcissism, and intense dislike of being upstaged, it will be interesting to see if this will get under Trump’s skin at some point and what he will do about it if it does.
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The emerging bureaucratic guerilla warfare

I was going out for a dinner engagement last week when I read the news that the acting attorney general Sally Yates had sent a memo to the staff that they should not defend Donald Trump’s Executive Orders on visitors and refugees that targeted Muslim nations because she felt that they were not legally defensible nor right nor just. During the dinner, I discussed this with friends and we predicted that she would be fired by Trump and sure enough, by the time I got home that had already happened, accompanied by a statement that had all the trademarked pettiness of Trump.
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When loyalty to the Dear Leader takes precedence over everything else

We are living in a remarkable time when the government seems to be deliberately scorning the constitutional system of checks and balances that has been so carefully created. Subverting the principles of the constitution for venal and partisan reasons and political expediency has been going on for a long time but what is new is how brazen the current efforts are. The Customs and Border Protection officers ignoring the rulings of several federal judges that they stay the implementation of Donald Trump’s executive orders on immigration and refuges pending full evaluation was one step. The fact that Trump did not ask the CBP to follow the judicial orders means that they will see him as giving tacit approval of their defiance.
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