-- I'll lightly gloss over the latest media-talking-about-the-media spanking from President Hair Furor yesterday. No More Mister Nice Blog thinks Trump's people are the 'anonymous sources speaking off the record', and as I posted yesterday, you have to be careful about being distracted by Trump while Trump is doing something he doesn't want the media to actually focus on.
Like this. It's one more example of how important it will be to read media outside the US over the next four years in order to get the real news.
-- Nothing like having a Mad Dog running your War Department.
The law?! What conservative ever let a quibble with the law stop him?
Update: This is good news, from the perspective of its potential of convincing Trump that torture does not work, and presumably muzzling CIA-designate Steve Pompeo (although the spooks report to DNI and not SecDef).
-- Keep an eye out for wherever it is that Kris Kobach -- who inadvertently showed his own papers before his meeting with Trump over the weekend -- lands in the new administration. In addition to his extensive propaganda ministry work, he is also the father of Crosscheck, the system used by almost half of the states to disenfranchise millions of their right to vote this year. (As an aside, it remains a mystery to me why Greg Palast's long history of exposing this kind of election fraud goes completely unnoticed by the mainstream media.)
-- And keep an eye peeled for this guy, who keeps an extraordinarily low profile for an American billionaire, but like Trump, lets his daughter do all the hard work. Robert and Rebekah Mercer are, together, one of the true powers behind this throne.
Like this. It's one more example of how important it will be to read media outside the US over the next four years in order to get the real news.
-- Nothing like having a Mad Dog running your War Department.
The saying is “Once a Marine, always a Marine,” and if President-elect Donald Trump picks retired Gen. James Mattis for secretary of defense, he is still too much a Marine in the eyes of the law.
Mattis retired in 2013, leaving him four years short of the requisite seven years after active duty before commissioned officers may serve as secretary of defense.
Experts say the reason for the mandatory break between active service and heading the Defense Department is to ensure that any incoming secretary has had time to adjust to being a civilian leader rather than a military officer.
“That’s an important principle in democratic politics just because sometimes the military itself is not the best judge of American foreign policy,” said David E. Lewis, a professor of political science at Vanderbilt University.
Trump met with Mattis on Saturday at the president-elect's estate in New Jersey and on Sunday tweeted that he was considering the retired Marine Corps general for the top defense post.
The law?! What conservative ever let a quibble with the law stop him?
Update: This is good news, from the perspective of its potential of convincing Trump that torture does not work, and presumably muzzling CIA-designate Steve Pompeo (although the spooks report to DNI and not SecDef).
-- Keep an eye out for wherever it is that Kris Kobach -- who inadvertently showed his own papers before his meeting with Trump over the weekend -- lands in the new administration. In addition to his extensive propaganda ministry work, he is also the father of Crosscheck, the system used by almost half of the states to disenfranchise millions of their right to vote this year. (As an aside, it remains a mystery to me why Greg Palast's long history of exposing this kind of election fraud goes completely unnoticed by the mainstream media.)
-- And keep an eye peeled for this guy, who keeps an extraordinarily low profile for an American billionaire, but like Trump, lets his daughter do all the hard work. Robert and Rebekah Mercer are, together, one of the true powers behind this throne.
