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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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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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 Trump administration appealed for an emergency stay of the judge’s order halting the implementation of his Executive Orders on immigration and refugees but the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has rejected it.
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New information is emerging about what happened during the recent raid in Yemen by US military forces including the US Navy Seals that resulted in many civilians being killed, including women and children. These new reports were provided by survivors of the attacks.
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The State Department and the Department of Homeland Security have backed down and said that they will follow the order of a federal judge that the Executive Orders on visitors and refugees that Donald Trump signed and caused great confusion will no longer be implemented, returning the country to the status quo ante.
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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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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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Reader Jason sent me a link to this article that has more on the raid by the US forces, authorized by Donald Trump, that killed innocent people in Yemen that I wrote about a few days ago. Among the dead was an 8-year old girl whose father and 16-year old brother, both US citizens, had been murdered in separate attacks authorized by then president Obama.
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Some of you may be aware of COINTELPRO (acronym for COunter INTELligence PROgram), the secret operation run by the FBI during the days of J. Edgar Hoover where they engaged in all manner of covert activities such as infiltrating religious, civil rights, and anti-war movements and having their agents try to get those groups to engage in illegal actions that would discredit them and land the leaders in jail. While the groups strongly suspected the presence of FBI informants and provocateurs in their midst, they could not prove it and the FBI denied it.
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