Thursday, January 26, 2017
An Unbelievable White House:
We have never before had a White House that pronounces demonstrable falsehoods as 'facts.' CNN has decided to cease live broadcasts of White House press conferences, since they don't want to be an Administration megaphone for statements that are unlikely to pass a fact check. Stop, take a breath, and ponder that for a moment. A news organization just decided it needed to actually behave like it should in rejecting bullshit as facts to be passed on as truth. Good for them, but will the rest of the broadcasters follow suit?
The Denver Post: Editorial: Lying Donald Trump can’t be trusted, and that needs to stop now
"The United States of America deserves to have a president who tells the truth. The fact that we feel compelled to make this observation, so early in the new presidency of Donald Trump, suggests that the country is in for a long and miserable four years. Trump and his spokesman, Sean Spicer, need to start telling the truth. Trump’s gut reliance on making claims that were demonstrably untrue worked fabulously for him on the campaign trail. He eviscerated opponents and knocked back investigative news stories with disturbing frequency and success. His doing so was one of the many reasons we could not and did not support his campaign. But if he is to lead the country with an ambitious agenda to reverse the course of the Obama presidency, and the resulting congressional gridlock so hated across the land, then the new president needs to have the trustworthiness and transparency that will allow him to develop some level of bipartisan support. Any rational person would expect that if you succeeded in your presidential campaign in part by calling your opponent Lying Hillary, you would seek, as president, to avoid such a moniker. But here we are. Lying Trump can’t seem to get his mind around the fact that his inauguration wasn’t as big a hit, in terms of participation and viewership, as his predecessor’s. What struck us as the routine kind of spat one might expect between the local paper and a small-town mayor somehow became a presidential crisis in the opening week of his occupancy of the White House. We sought to avoid getting pulled into commenting on that controversy, choosing instead to look the other way and give the newcomer a bit of room. But now Trump, as president, has doubled down on his insistence that he lost the popular vote because as many as 5 million people living in the country illegally cast votes. All 50 states have certified their elections without reporting such fraud. To be the president of all people, and to give what must have been lip service to the idea that patriotism has no room for prejudice, as he did in his inaugural promise, means putting aside these divisive myths. Perhaps worse, Spicer justified the federal hiring freeze Trump ordered with the false assertion that it was to curb “dramatic expansion of the federal workforce in recent years.” We could have praised the freeze as a smart first step for Trump to get a handle on the vast bureaucracy he now oversees; instead we find ourselves informing Spicer that the federal workforce has wavered around 2 million since the 1950s. The president of the United States needs to demand of himself and of his staff that comments presented to the American people can be trusted and supported by legitimate — and not “alternative” — facts. Without that basic level of trust, the very functioning of our federal government and our nation will be at risk. We hoped that we saw some sincerity in his inaugural promise that he would strive to serve and empower all Americans. But his actions betray a terrible failing, a deep character flaw within the new president that cannot be excused as campaign bluster. Americans won’t be led by a man who works through manipulation and falsehood."
We have never before had a White House that pronounces demonstrable falsehoods as 'facts.' CNN has decided to cease live broadcasts of White House press conferences, since they don't want to be an Administration megaphone for statements that are unlikely to pass a fact check. Stop, take a breath, and ponder that for a moment. A news organization just decided it needed to actually behave like it should in rejecting bullshit as facts to be passed on as truth. Good for them, but will the rest of the broadcasters follow suit?
The Denver Post: Editorial: Lying Donald Trump can’t be trusted, and that needs to stop now
"The United States of America deserves to have a president who tells the truth. The fact that we feel compelled to make this observation, so early in the new presidency of Donald Trump, suggests that the country is in for a long and miserable four years. Trump and his spokesman, Sean Spicer, need to start telling the truth. Trump’s gut reliance on making claims that were demonstrably untrue worked fabulously for him on the campaign trail. He eviscerated opponents and knocked back investigative news stories with disturbing frequency and success. His doing so was one of the many reasons we could not and did not support his campaign. But if he is to lead the country with an ambitious agenda to reverse the course of the Obama presidency, and the resulting congressional gridlock so hated across the land, then the new president needs to have the trustworthiness and transparency that will allow him to develop some level of bipartisan support. Any rational person would expect that if you succeeded in your presidential campaign in part by calling your opponent Lying Hillary, you would seek, as president, to avoid such a moniker. But here we are. Lying Trump can’t seem to get his mind around the fact that his inauguration wasn’t as big a hit, in terms of participation and viewership, as his predecessor’s. What struck us as the routine kind of spat one might expect between the local paper and a small-town mayor somehow became a presidential crisis in the opening week of his occupancy of the White House. We sought to avoid getting pulled into commenting on that controversy, choosing instead to look the other way and give the newcomer a bit of room. But now Trump, as president, has doubled down on his insistence that he lost the popular vote because as many as 5 million people living in the country illegally cast votes. All 50 states have certified their elections without reporting such fraud. To be the president of all people, and to give what must have been lip service to the idea that patriotism has no room for prejudice, as he did in his inaugural promise, means putting aside these divisive myths. Perhaps worse, Spicer justified the federal hiring freeze Trump ordered with the false assertion that it was to curb “dramatic expansion of the federal workforce in recent years.” We could have praised the freeze as a smart first step for Trump to get a handle on the vast bureaucracy he now oversees; instead we find ourselves informing Spicer that the federal workforce has wavered around 2 million since the 1950s. The president of the United States needs to demand of himself and of his staff that comments presented to the American people can be trusted and supported by legitimate — and not “alternative” — facts. Without that basic level of trust, the very functioning of our federal government and our nation will be at risk. We hoped that we saw some sincerity in his inaugural promise that he would strive to serve and empower all Americans. But his actions betray a terrible failing, a deep character flaw within the new president that cannot be excused as campaign bluster. Americans won’t be led by a man who works through manipulation and falsehood."
Sunday, January 15, 2017
This Is How Environmental Policy Gets Trumped:
Expect this man to do what his patrons want, rather than what's good for the People's air & water quality...
Eric Lipton & Coral Davenport: Scott Pruitt, Trump’s E.P.A. Pick, Backed Industry Donors Over Regulators
"A legal fight to clean up tons of chicken manure fouling the waters of Oklahoma’s bucolic northeastern corner — much of it from neighboring Arkansas — was in full swing six years ago when the conservative lawyer Scott Pruitt took office as Oklahoma’s attorney general. His response: Put on the brakes. Rather than push for a federal judge to punish the companies by extracting perhaps tens of millions of dollars in damages, Oklahoma’s new chief law enforcement officer quietly negotiated a deal to simply study the problem further. The move came after he had taken tens of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from executives and lawyers for the poultry industry. It was one of a series of instances in which Mr. Pruitt put cooperation with industry before confrontation as he sought to blunt the impact of federal environmental policies in his state — against oil, gas, agriculture and other interests. His antipathy to federal regulation — he sued the Environmental Protection Agency 14 times — in many ways defined his tenure as Oklahoma’s attorney general. Trump Picks Scott Pruitt, Climate Change Denialist, to Lead E.P.A. DEC. 7, 2016 Now, Mr. Pruitt, tapped to head Donald J. Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency, will have the opportunity to engineer a radical shift in Washington. If confirmed by the Senate, he is expected to shelve the Obama administration’s aggressive environmental enforcement and embrace a more collaborative approach with the industries that the agency is charged with policing, many of which have helped him advance his political career. The impact would stretch from the nation’s waterways to the planet’s climate, since the E.P.A. carries out and enforces rules to combat global warming..."
Expect this man to do what his patrons want, rather than what's good for the People's air & water quality...
Eric Lipton & Coral Davenport: Scott Pruitt, Trump’s E.P.A. Pick, Backed Industry Donors Over Regulators
"A legal fight to clean up tons of chicken manure fouling the waters of Oklahoma’s bucolic northeastern corner — much of it from neighboring Arkansas — was in full swing six years ago when the conservative lawyer Scott Pruitt took office as Oklahoma’s attorney general. His response: Put on the brakes. Rather than push for a federal judge to punish the companies by extracting perhaps tens of millions of dollars in damages, Oklahoma’s new chief law enforcement officer quietly negotiated a deal to simply study the problem further. The move came after he had taken tens of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from executives and lawyers for the poultry industry. It was one of a series of instances in which Mr. Pruitt put cooperation with industry before confrontation as he sought to blunt the impact of federal environmental policies in his state — against oil, gas, agriculture and other interests. His antipathy to federal regulation — he sued the Environmental Protection Agency 14 times — in many ways defined his tenure as Oklahoma’s attorney general. Trump Picks Scott Pruitt, Climate Change Denialist, to Lead E.P.A. DEC. 7, 2016 Now, Mr. Pruitt, tapped to head Donald J. Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency, will have the opportunity to engineer a radical shift in Washington. If confirmed by the Senate, he is expected to shelve the Obama administration’s aggressive environmental enforcement and embrace a more collaborative approach with the industries that the agency is charged with policing, many of which have helped him advance his political career. The impact would stretch from the nation’s waterways to the planet’s climate, since the E.P.A. carries out and enforces rules to combat global warming..."
Friday, January 13, 2017
PEOTUS:
The Guardian (UK) - Donald Trump dossier: intelligence sources vouch for author's credibility
"His denials – at least some of them – were emphatic, even by the standards that Donald Trump has come to be judged by. The dossier, he said, was a confection of lies; he compared it to Nazi propaganda; it was fake news spread by sick people. At his press briefing on Wednesday, the president-elect dared the world’s media to scrutinise the 35 pages of claims, before throwing down a challenge – where’s the proof? Nobody had any. Case closed. But in the rush to trample all over the dossier and its contents, one key question remained. Why had America’s intelligence agencies felt it necessary to provide a compendium of the claims to Barack Obama and Trump himself? And the answer to that lies in the credibility of its apparent author, the ex-MI6 officer Christopher Steele, the quality of the sources he has, and the quality of the people who were prepared to vouch for him. In all these respects, the 53-year-old is in credit...
...A Cambridge graduate, Steele was one of the more eminent Russia specialists for the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6). The Guardian understands that he focused on Soviet affairs after joining the agency, and spent two years living in Moscow in the early 1990s. This was a period when Russia and the breakup of the eastern bloc were still the prime focus for Britain’s intelligence agencies, and a successful spell in the region was a good way to get on. By all accounts, that’s exactly what Steele did. And his interest in Russia did not diminish as he continued to rise up the ranks, a friend and contemporary of Alex Younger – now head of MI6...
..The Foreign Office official who spoke to the Guardian on Thursday acknowledged that the Steele dossier was not perfect. But he pointed out that intelligence reports always came with “gradations of veracity” and included phrases such as “a high degree of probability”. “You aren’t dealing with a binary world where you can say this is true and this isn’t,” the official said. He added: “The strongest reason for giving this report credence is that intelligence professionals in the US take it seriously. They were sufficiently persuaded by the author’s track record to find the contents worth passing to the president and president-elect,”..."
The Guardian (UK) - Donald Trump dossier: intelligence sources vouch for author's credibility
"His denials – at least some of them – were emphatic, even by the standards that Donald Trump has come to be judged by. The dossier, he said, was a confection of lies; he compared it to Nazi propaganda; it was fake news spread by sick people. At his press briefing on Wednesday, the president-elect dared the world’s media to scrutinise the 35 pages of claims, before throwing down a challenge – where’s the proof? Nobody had any. Case closed. But in the rush to trample all over the dossier and its contents, one key question remained. Why had America’s intelligence agencies felt it necessary to provide a compendium of the claims to Barack Obama and Trump himself? And the answer to that lies in the credibility of its apparent author, the ex-MI6 officer Christopher Steele, the quality of the sources he has, and the quality of the people who were prepared to vouch for him. In all these respects, the 53-year-old is in credit...
...A Cambridge graduate, Steele was one of the more eminent Russia specialists for the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6). The Guardian understands that he focused on Soviet affairs after joining the agency, and spent two years living in Moscow in the early 1990s. This was a period when Russia and the breakup of the eastern bloc were still the prime focus for Britain’s intelligence agencies, and a successful spell in the region was a good way to get on. By all accounts, that’s exactly what Steele did. And his interest in Russia did not diminish as he continued to rise up the ranks, a friend and contemporary of Alex Younger – now head of MI6...
..The Foreign Office official who spoke to the Guardian on Thursday acknowledged that the Steele dossier was not perfect. But he pointed out that intelligence reports always came with “gradations of veracity” and included phrases such as “a high degree of probability”. “You aren’t dealing with a binary world where you can say this is true and this isn’t,” the official said. He added: “The strongest reason for giving this report credence is that intelligence professionals in the US take it seriously. They were sufficiently persuaded by the author’s track record to find the contents worth passing to the president and president-elect,”..."
