Who Says Progressive Values Defy Definition.? Oh Yeah, that Guy.

For a guy who doesn't hesitate to self-identify as a progressive, a certain outspoken Liberal doesn't seem to have a clue what that means. That much came through when, in a recent post, he wrote: 

"I was listening to a cabinet minister on the radio this morning. He was invoking the penultimate progressive political totemic, the vaunted “middle class.” (The ultimate progressive divinity being “progressive values,” which no progressive can define, and which therefore makes it the very problem it seeks to address.)"

Apparently this fellow finds progressivism undefinable which begs the question how he so boastfully wears the progressive mantle. What's clear is that he's made no effort to understand what the term means. Perhaps he's not familiar with "the Google" although, given his political posturing, I suspect he'd ditch the label if he understood its meaning.

Progressivism traces back to the heady days of America's Progressive movement in the early years of the 20th century. Progressive values go back even further, as far back as Abraham Lincoln.

So what are these progressive values that our Liberal friend finds so elusive? They are perhaps best restated in Theodore Roosevelt's "Square Deal" speech of 1910. It's not a difficult read and I'm sure our friend can manage it.

Progressive values are rooted in the notion of advancement of the individual and the public interest over special or private interests. It includes regulation of the struggle of labour and capital and the expulsion of corporate power from the realm of politics. It doesn't shy away from concepts such as income and wealth distribution to reflect the contribution of labour to the creation of that wealth. It's largely the opposite of the neoliberal order that prevails today.

Progressivism ought to be non-partisan, capable of being embraced across the political spectrum. That it has become associated with the left and centre-left is largely due to its rejection by the right,  a political choice that is manifest today in America's "bought and paid for" Congress and the suppression, if not outright abandonment of democracy. Left unchecked it results in what has befallen America today - first political capture, then regulatory capture and, now, the capture by special interests of the executive branch.

Progressivism sometimes overlaps with social democracy. Just today Ed Broadbent released a call to renew social democracy which had been largely driven out of his New Democratic Party by first Layton and then Mulcair (both of whom Broadbent supported).  That said, I wish Broadbent well in his quest.

Our friend's own Liberal Party jettisoned any progressive pretensions when it marched to the right under Ignatieff. Trudeau teased Canadians with his supposed progressive street cred only to reveal himself a devout neoliberal in his first few months in office.

So our Liberal friend need fear no longer that progressive values are too elusive that they defy definition. They're not elusive, not at all. They are as clear as they are compelling. You just gotta look.

Holy, Holy Shit.

You might find this a bit unsettling. The latest thing in nuclear war is cyber warfare, hacking an enemy's control systems to either disable his nuclear deterrent or, worse, launching his missiles.  From The New York Times:


In 2010, 50 nuclear-armed Minuteman missiles sitting in underground silos in Wyoming mysteriously disappeared from their launching crews’ monitors for nearly an hour. The crews could not have fired the missiles on presidential orders or discerned whether an enemy was trying to launch them. Was this a technical malfunction or was it something sinister? Had a hacker discovered an electronic back door to cut the links? For all the crews knew, someone had put all 50 missiles into countdown to launch. The missiles were designed to fire instantly as soon as they received a short stream of computer code, and they are indifferent about the code’s source.

It was a harrowing scene, and apprehension rippled all the way to the White House. Hackers were constantly bombarding our nuclear networks, and it was considered possible that they had breached the firewalls. The Air Force quickly determined that an improperly installed circuit card in an underground computer was responsible for the lockout, and the problem was fixed.

But President Obama was not satisfied and ordered investigators to continue to look for similar vulnerabilities. Sure enough, they turned up deficiencies, according to officials involved in the investigation.

...

Cyberwarfare raises a host of other fears. Could a foreign agent launch another country’s missiles against a third country? We don’t know. Could a launch be set off by false early warning data that had been corrupted by hackers? This is an especially grave concern because the president has only three to six minutes to decide how to respond to an apparent nuclear attack.

This is the stuff of nightmares, and there will always be some doubt about our vulnerability. We lack adequate control over the supply chain for nuclear components — from design to manufacture to maintenance. We get much of our hardware and software off-the-shelf from commercial sources that could be infected by malware. We nevertheless routinely use them in critical networks. This loose security invites an attempt at an attack with catastrophic consequences. The risk would grow exponentially if an insider, wittingly or not, shares passwords, inserts infected thumb drives or otherwise facilitates illicit access to critical computers.

Why Fareed Sees Putin, Not Trump, as the World's Most Powerful Man.

America's economy dwarfs Russia's. America's military might eclipses the Russians' except, perhaps, in nuclear warheads. Overall Russia can't hold a candle to the United States of America.

So why does Fareed Zakaria believe Putin, not Trump, is the world's most powerful man?

The power of a head of state is determined both by the country's strength and the capacity he or she has to exercise that power, unilaterally, unconstrained by other institutions, parties and political forces. And combining those two metrics, it's easy to see why Vladimir Putin rises to the top of list.

Putin has created what he calls a "vertical of power," something unlike any we see in other great nations. As the Russian chess grandmaster Gary Kasparov -- himself a harsh critic of Putin -- has noted, the entire structure of Russian political power rests on one man. When the czar died, you knew the structure that would endure and the process by which his successor, his son, would be elevated. When the general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party died, the Standing Committee and the Politburo would select his successor. But when Putin dies -- I almost wrote if -- what will happen? No one knows.

...

Putin understands Russia. But he also understands the world. He is not foolish enough to make a frontal assault on America or Europe. Instead, he knows how to use power asymmetrically, with cyber tools and disinformation.

He also understands the vulnerabilities of free societies -- their internal divisions and discord, and their gaping openness. He understands the fragility of institutions like the European Union and ideas like integration and diversity.
In other words, Vladimir Putin understands us very well. But all that begs an important question: Do we -- and does Donald Trump -- really understand him?

The Great Arctic Raincoast, Coming Soon.

All my life I came to think of the Arctic as a place of ice and snow. It appears that's about to change.

The Arctic is set to get drenched in the next century.

Globally, precipitation is projected to increase by 2 per cent for every degree the planet warms, but in the Arctic that figure is double. By 2091, the Arctic will see a dramatic increase in overall precipitation and most of it won’t come in the form of snow – instead it will be rain.

“It’s quite a bit, a 50 to 60 per cent increase Arctic-wide. We found that most of this increase is due to the retreat of sea ice because of the Arctic warming,” says Richard Bintanja, a climate researcher at the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute who combined data from 37 climate models to predict precipitation in the Arctic between 2091 and 2100.

When You Put It That Way

She's a legend, Tracey Ullman.

It's a Dam Shame

Get this. More than 4,000 dams in the United States are now rated unsafe because of structural and other problems. It's a safe bet we're in the same boat in Canada.

The more urgent problem is that, old and weary as many of these dams have become, they were never designed to deal with our rapidly changing climate. The recent debacle at California's Oroville dam is a good example. The reservoir behind the dam was nearly dry last year but atmospheric rivers of torrential rain brought it to overflowing this year and, when that extra water was diverted to the dam's concrete spillway, the concrete failed. This triggered the evacuation of several towns downstream of the dam.

The cost of rehabilitating dams has led to some 700 of them simply being removed. This should restore fish habitats but a new study shows it's not that simple.

Now, however, a new study in Biological Conservation takes the science of dam removal in an unexpected direction. Although acknowledging that reopening rivers usually leads to “increased species richness, abundance and biomass,” a team of South African and Australian authors argues that in some cases threatened species may actually benefit from keeping existing dams intact.

The idea for the study arose because both South Africa and Australia are now experiencing “an incredibly dry period,” says co-author Olaf Lawrence Weyl, a specialist in endangered fish with the South African Institute for Aquatic Biodiversity. Many native fish species have been “pushed right back into headwater streams” by competition with alien fishes, typically introduced for sportfishing and by “dewatering of entire rivers” to supply irrigation water for crops, Weyl adds. In some cases, the streams and reservoirs backed up behind dams are the only remaining aquatic refuges for endangered species.

It's "Put Up or Shut Up" Time on Climate Change - and "Shut Up" Has a Big Lead Going Into the G20 Summit

Is the G-20 about to kick climate change to the curb? Apparently so, at least according to Bloomberg.

Finance ministers for the U.S., China, Germany and other members of the Group of 20 economies may scale back a robust pledge for their governments to combat climate change, ceding efforts to the private sector.

Citing “scarce public resources,” the ministers said they would encourage multilateral development banks to raise private funds to accomplish goals set under the 2015 Paris climate accord, according to a preliminary statement drafted for a meeting that will be held in Germany next week.

The statement, obtained by Bloomberg News, is a significant departure from a communique issued in July, when finance ministers urged governments to quickly implement the Paris Agreement, including a call for wealthy nations to make good on commitments to mobilize $100 billion annually to cut greenhouse gases around the globe.

“It basically says governments are irrelevant. It’s complete faith in the magic of the marketplace,” John Kirton, director of the University of Toronto’s G-20 Research Group, said in an interview. “That is very different from the existing commitments they have repeatedly made.”

 The shift in tone comes as U.S. President Donald Trump’s Treasury Secretary, Steven Mnuchin, prepares for his first G-20 meeting, scheduled for March 17 to 18 in the spa town of Baden-Baden. While European nations including Germany have been at the forefront of combating global warming, Trump has called climate change a hoax.

So that $100 billion a year promise? Yeah, sorry. Don't worry, the private sector wants to gift you that money. Honestly. They do, really.

Oh Dear, About Those Pipelines.

The history of the Athabasca Tar Sands reveals an on-again/off-again project. In the postwar years there was massive support for development of the bitumen basin. The Canadian government even signed off on an idea to use underground nuclear explosions to liquify the sludge that it might be more easily pumped out of the depths.

Then the whole business came to a crashing halt with the discovery of a massive, conventional oil field in Prudhoe Bay, Alaska. Eventually, however, world oil prices climbed high enough to return to bitumen extraction although profits and lasting prosperity remained elusive. Still the uncertainty and prospects of a carbon bubble haven't deterred the Alberta or the federal government's enthusiasm for pipelines and getting bitumen to tidewater.

Remember Prudhoe Bay (see above)? We may be seeing a replay of the Prudhoe Bay/Athabasca tug of war soon. The Spanish energy company, Repsol, has announced the discovery of a big new field, 1.2-billion barrels of conventional crude oil, beneath Alaska's North Slope. The company expects to bring production to 120,000 barrels a day as soon as 2021. It's America's biggest onshore find in 30 years.

About Televisions That May Be Spying on You. John Oliver's Perspective

In domestic spying, perspective is everything. No, you don't have to ditch your Samsung flatscreen.

The Biggest of Big-Tent Moments

Chances are you've read at least a couple of them: Sinclair Lewis' "It Can't Happen Here," George Orwell's "1984," Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World," Hannah Arendt's "The Origin of Totalitarianism," or Margaret Atwood's "The Handmaid's Tale." John Pfeffer, author of "Splinterlands" and director of Foreign Policy in Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies writes that dystopian novels won't pull America out of the Trump crash dive. It's time to win back Trump voters awash in buyer's remorse.


I took a course in college on the rise of Nazism in Germany. At one point, the professor showed us Triumph of the Will, Leni Riefenstahl’s famous 1935 documentary that covered the Nazi Party Congress of the previous year and featured extensive footage of Adolf Hitler addressing the faithful. Triumph of the Will was a blockbuster film, our professor assured us. It spread the name of Hitler worldwide and established Riefenstahl’s reputation as a filmmaker. It was so popular inside Germany that it ran for months on end at movie theaters, and people returned again and again to watch it. Our teacher promised us that we would find it fascinating.

Triumph of the Will was not fascinating. Even for students engrossed in the details of the Nazi surge to power, the nearly two-hour documentary was a tremendous bore. After it was over, we bombarded the teacher with questions and complaints. How could he have imagined that we would find it fascinating?

He smiled. That’s the fascinating part, he said. Here was this extraordinarily popular film, and it’s now nearly impossible for Americans to sit through the whole thing. He wanted us to understand that people in Nazi Germany had an entirely different mindset, that they were participating in a kind of mass frenzy. They didn’t find Nazism abhorrent. They didn’t think they were living in a dystopia. They were true believers.

Many Americans are now having their Triumph of the Will moment. They watch Donald Trump repeatedly without getting bored or disgusted. They believe that history has anointed a new leader to revive the country and restore it to its rightful place in the world. They’ve been convinced that the last eight years were a liberal dystopia and what is happening now is, if not utopian, then the first steps in that direction.

A hard core of those enthralled by Trump cannot be convinced otherwise. They hold liberal elites in contempt. They don’t believe CNN or The New York Times. Many subscribe to outlandish theories about Islam and immigrants and the continuing covert machinations of that most famous “Islamic immigrant” of them all, Barack Obama. For this hard core of Trump supporters, the United States could begin to break down, the economy take a nosedive, the international community hold the leadership in Washington in contempt, and they will continue to believe in Trump and Trumpism. The president could even gun down a few people and his most fervent supporters would say nothing except, “Good shot, Mr. President!” Remember: even after Nazi Germany went down in fiery defeat in 1945, significant numbers of Germans remained in thrall to National Socialism. In 1947, more than half of those surveyed still believed that Nazism was a good idea carried out badly.

But plenty of Trump supporters -- whether they’re disaffected Democrats, Hillary-hating independents, or rock-ribbed Republican conservatives -- don’t fit such a definition. Some have already become deeply disillusioned by the antics of Donald J. and the demolition derby that his advisers are planning to unleash inside the U.S. government, which may, in the end, batter their lives badly. They can be brought over. This is potentially the biggest of big-tent moments for launching the broadest possible resistance under the banner of a patriotism that portrays Trump and Bannon as guilty of un-American activities.

And it’s here in particular that so many dystopian novels provide the wrong kind of guidance. Trump’s end will not come at the hands of a Katniss Everdeen. A belief in an individual savior who successfully challenges a “totalitarian” system got us into this crisis in the first place when Donald Trump sold himself as the crusading outsider against a “deep state” controlled by devious liberals, craven conservatives, and a complicit mainstream media. Nor will it help for Americans to dream about leading their states out of the Union (are you listening, California?) or for individuals to retreat into political purism. Given that the administration’s dystopian vision is based on chaos and fragmentation, the oppositional response should be to unite everyone opposed, or even potentially opposed, to what Washington is now doing.

As readers, we are free to interpret dystopian fiction the way we please. As citizens, we can do something far more subversive. We can rewrite our own dystopian reality. We can change that bleak future ourselves. To do so, however, we would need to put together a better plot, introduce some more interesting and colorful characters, and, before it’s too late, write a much better ending that doesn’t just leave us with explosions, screams, and fade to black.

And So, I Told My American Friends Who Used to Mock Obama. Oh, Here, Just Read the Email.

Hi guys:

Just days away from two months of Trumpland. How’s that going anyway?

It doesn’t seem to be going too well for el presidente himself. The guy’s already looking worn out, like a bag of hammers, and those pre-dawn tweets suggest a mind that’s not firing on all cylinders. People are beginning to suggest that the boss may be a limo ride away from the Laughing Academy. Sad, very sad. Nixon at least was “scare the living shit out of Hanoi” crazy.

For all of that he’s certainly generating plenty of work for Nikki Haley, Mike Pence, Rex Tillerson and James Mattis as they travel far and wide from Asia to Europe telling folks to ignore Trump’s deranged babbling. They – all of ‘em – call the boss a bullshitter AND they keep their jobs. Donald is the best bullshitter you’ve ever known. Nobody is a better bullshitter than the Donald. He’s got all the best bullshit. Do you get the faint whiff of Charlie Sheen on crystal meth?

Apparently ISIS is still around. Maybe they didn’t get the message that Trump was going to rid the world of these murderous swine within 30 days of assuming office. The Iraqis are slowly pushing them back but, like al Qaeda, they’re popping up elsewhere. Let’s hope Trumpy gets on with their extermination pretty soon.

Then there’s that wall on the Mexican border. How’s that going? Do you know that Erwin Rommel built the Atlantic Wall, Festung Europa, in just two years and it stretched all the way from the southern coastline of Norway to the border between France and Spain and it included beach obstacles, minefields, wire, machine gun nests,  trenches  and massive concrete bunkers for coastal artillery emplacements? Two years. The best part is that a lot of it was built by forced labour from the occupied countries so, in effect, Rommel got those territories to pay for it. Festung Amerika doesn’t seem to be getting off the ground.  Sad, very sad.

At this point Hillary was supposed to be in an orange jump suit with a tray in hand lining up for lunch in some prison cafeteria. Remember when Mike Flynn led the “lock her up, lock her up” chant at Trump rallies? Now it’s Flynn, the undisclosed “foreign agent” who’s looking at felony time. 23-days and out as NSA. A record. I never watched Trump’s reality show but I assume most of the contestants must have lasted longer than Flynn held onto his office. Sad, so sad.

Then there’s the failing Jeff Sessions. What’s with that guy?

With this crushing workload it’s a good thing Trumpy was able to hand over the businesses to the kids, ‘Tardo Junior and Ambergris. I’m sure they’ll do fine.

If all that wasn’t enough, now it’s on to scrapping Obamacare and replacing it with Trumpcare. He’s already got the slack-jawed, mouth-breathing Gullibillies who handed Trump the presidency and the Repubs both houses of Congress up in arms now that they figured out that the Affordable Care Act and Obamacare were just two names for the same thing. They’re howling like cut cats now they realize their healthcare is heading straight down Paul Ryan’s shitter. Well at least that’ll free up room for more tax cuts for the rich.

It’s not all bad. Vlad Putin is happy. He’s loving the chaos that’s spreading across the U.S. and Europe. Making Russkie hay while the sun shines. Along with the Chinese, they’re moving in to the Middle East – big time or, as Trumpy would put it, "bigly." Nervous Euros are also looking a bit more kindly on Moscow, not that they’ve got a lot of choice.

Meanwhile the Chinese are beginning to consolidate their sphere of influence across Asia Pacific. The big, unmentioned issue is the dismemberment of the Monroe Doctrine. China’s biggest banks are now the number one and number two lenders to Latin America. America’s influence across the western hemisphere is oh so gradually evaporating. Latin America and, for that matter, the rest of the world – failing, so overrated.

This is like so awesome. All of this in less than two measly months. Just imagine what Trump can do to America in four years? Wowser.

Check Please! America Wants Cambodia to Pay Up.

In the course of America's ill-fated war in Viet Nam, U.S. forces lavished half a million tonnes of high explosives on the territory of Cambodia.  By one count, America's carpet bombing claimed the lives of 500,000 Cambodians.

Now the United States of Trump wants bygones to be bygones, just as soon as
Cambodia repays a 550-million dollar war debt, the current value of what began as a $274 million loan for food supplies.

William Heidt, the US's ambassador in Phnom Penh, said Cambodia's failure to pay back the debt puts it in league with Sudan, Somalia and Zimbabwe.

"To me, Cambodia does not look like a country that should be in arrears…buildings coming up all over the city, foreign investment coming in, government revenue is rapidly rising," Mr Heidt was quoted as saying by the Cambodia Daily.

Apparently Ambassador Heidt isn't interested in talking reparations for the death and destruction the U.S. lavished on Cambodia and its people during the Viet Nam war.

"I'm saying it is in Cambodia's interest not to look to the past, but to look at how to solve this because it's important to Cambodia's future," he said, adding that the US has never seriously considered cancelling the debt.

Of course the United States doesn't want to look to the past but, then again, it doesn't want to look to the future either. Why, if it started negotiations with Cambodia for its years of relentless carpet bombing in that country, next thing you know the Vietnamese would be at the door looking for a mega cheque for the ongoing deaths, birth deformities and mutilations caused by spraying Agent Orange in that country. If you can stomach it, here's the Americans' handiwork that is expected to persist for up to 600 years. Coincidentally, here's a story from today's Daily Mail about Vietnam's endless agony.

Elections B.C. Calls In the Mounties

The Trump administration isn't the only regime under investigation. Now you can add Christy Clark's B.C. Liberal cabal.

Elections BC says it has referred the investigation into alleged violations of political donation laws to the RCMP.

“This investigation has been referred to ensure that it will in no way impede Elections BC’s administration of the provincial general election scheduled for May 9,” said a statement from Chief Electoral Officer Keith Archer.

“This referral will also ensure that there is no perception that Elections BC’s ability to administer the general election in a fair, neutral and impartial manner is in any way compromised,” it said. “The potential scope and timing of this matter make the RCMP the most appropriate agency to continue this investigation.”

The investigation follows reports in the Globe and Mail that lobbyists have been making political donations to the BC Liberals under their own names and then being reimbursed by clients, thus obscuring the real source of the contributions. The report also raised the question of whether some lobbyists may have claimed tax credits for those donations.

B.C. is among a minority of Canadian provinces that have no limits on how much donors can give. Corporate and union donations and political contributions from outside the province — or country — are allowed.

So outrageous has it become that, in January, the New York Times published a piece headlined, "British Columbia, the Wild West of Canadian Political Cash."

Even the Malaysian family behind Vancouver's new Trump Tower made sure to kick in a tidy quarter million to the B.C. Liberals.

That Big Blue Marble, She's Getting Hotter

One of the lesser known aspects of climate change is the role played by oceans as a "heat sink." Oceans absorb a lot of heat from the atmosphere with currents and prevailing surface winds sometimes driving that captured heat deep into the ocean depths.

We might think that oceanic heat goes down into the cold depths and just disappears only it doesn't. The first law of thermodynamics, the law of conservation of energy, holds that energy can not be created or destroyed. It can merely be converted from one form to another. In other words oceans absorb that surface energy, heat from direct sunlight and from the warming atmosphere, and, in the right circumstances, store it in very deep water until, again in the right circumstances, it may be returned to the surface. This stored ocean heat is believed to be a driving force behind the Pacific Decadal Oscillation.

Climate scientists have been keeping a close eye on ocean temperatures, especially the rapid pace of ocean warming. Their concern is that a powerful positive phase could see much of that heat energy released back into the atmosphere creating a big spike in global warming.

The science types now have even more cause for concern.  A new study finds that the oceans are warming 13% faster than previously estimated and that the rate of increase is accelerating.


Since about 2005 a new type of sensing device has been deployed (the Argo float system). These floats (approximately 3500 in total at any time) are spread out across oceans where they autonomously rise and fall in the ocean waters, collecting temperature data to depths of 2000 meters.

When they rise to the ocean surface, they send their data wirelessly to satellites for later analysis. Hence we can now map the ocean heat content quite well. But what about the past, when we mainly had measurements from expendable bathythermographs deployed mainly along major shipping routes and largely confined to the northern hemisphere? Putting data from these various sensors together has been a struggle and has been a major impediment to an accurate quantification of the ocean’s temperature history.
...

Lead author, Lijing Cheng says:

"We know that ocean observations were very sparse until the Argo era. There were major gaps in data, particularly in the Southern Hemisphere. Our challenge was to assess the changes to global ocean heat and fill data gaps. A major issue is to ensure gap-filling is reliable. It is this issue that motivated the study. We proposed an advance gap-filling strategy and used it to attain near global coverage. We rigorously evaluated the reliability of our approach and as a result, we have much higher confidence that the ocean and the Earth are warming at a faster rate than previously thought."

One of the co-authors, John Fasullo added:

"This study shows that more heat is likely to have been absorbed by the oceans over the past 50 years than had previously been reported. With upward revisions in our estimates of the climate’s sensitivity to greenhouse gases and the associated resultant sea level rise."

Our team’s press release noted:

"we know the oceans are much warmer now and they contain the memory of climate change. Higher sea surface temperatures are continually reinforced by the extra heat beneath the ocean surface. The oceans are affecting weather and climate through more intense rains. This process is a major reason why 2016 was the hottest year ever recorded at the Earth’s surface, beating out 2015 which was the previous record. Additionally 2015 was a year with record hurricanes, heat waves, droughts, and wild-fires around the world."

The knowledge about how the ocean has warmed, and how the warmth has spread in depth and over the different oceans is consistent with theory and models, and grounds the theories of human-induced climate change. The memory of past warming is in the oceans, and even though there are weather events that alter the details daily, the atmosphere above the oceans is warmer and moister than it used to be.

It is these changes that affect storms, such as the deluges that have recently affected California, or which have led storms to produce “thousand year floods” as has been seen in the Carolinas with Hurricane Matthew, or the Louisiana floods in August last year, or the Houston floods in April, and so forth. This kind of knowledge and understanding has profound consequences.

Of course this new data on the degree and rate of ocean warming means a lot of other temperature based projections, notably sea level rise, will have to be recalculated - and not in a good way.

EPA Woes. Scott Pruitt is a Believer.

Trump's administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency is a believer.

The attorney and Republican hack from Oklahoma "believes" that carbon dioxide emissions are not a major cause of global warming.

“I think that measuring with precision human activity on the climate is something very challenging to do and there’s tremendous disagreement about the degree of impact, so no, I would not agree that it’s a primary contributor to the global warming that we see,” he told CNBC.

This stance puts Pruitt at odds with his own agency, which states on its website that carbon dioxide is the “primary greenhouse gas that is contributing to recent climate change”. This finding is backed by Nasa, which calls CO2 “the most important long-lived ‘forcing’ of climate change”.

Pruitt’s comments were quickly condemned by scientists, environmental activists and even his immediate predecessor as EPA chief, Gina McCarthy.

“The world of science is about empirical evidence, not beliefs,” said McCarthy, an appointee of Barack Obama. “When it comes to climate change, the evidence is robust and overwhelmingly clear that the cost of inaction is unacceptably high.

Pruitt sued the EPA 14 times while attorney general of Oklahoma and has worked in concert with fossil fuel interests in many of these cases. The recent release of thousands of Pruitt’s emails during his tenure showed an extremely close relationship between Pruitt’s office and oil and gas companies.

It Does Seem Like They're Closing In on Donald J. Trump

Some pretty top notch journalists and columnists see the writing on the wall for Donald Trump and his presidency.

The Sydney Morning Herald's chief foreign correspondent, Paul McGeough, has produced a good body of reports on Trump's looming downfall.

Foreign Policy's right-of-centre columnist and Council on Foreign Relations Fellow, Max Boot,  has produced his own body of analysis. Most recently he's written that Trump knows the feds are closing in and that WikiLeaks has become Trump's preferred source of intelligence.  Boot writes that Assange has joined the Trump administration. Of course, he jests.

On Saturday, recall, Trump was making wild-eyed accusations that Obama had ordered the U.S. intelligence community to wiretap him. “How low has President Obama gone to tapp (sic) my phones during the very sacred election process. This is Nixon/Watergate. Bad (or sick) guy!” The White House could not come up with one iota of evidence to support this irresponsible allegation, which was denied by FBI Director James Comey and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. But Trump would not be dissuaded from pursuing this charge, which serves as a convenient distraction from the far more serious accusations of possible collusion between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin while Russia was interfering with the presidential campaign.

Is it just a coincidence that WikiLeaks dumped a massive database pertaining to CIA hacking and wiretapping just three days after Trump made wiretapping a major political issue? Perhaps so. But there is cause for suspicion.

In the first place, WikiLeaks has often timed its leaks for maximum political impact. It released 20,000 stolen DNC emails just three days before the Democratic National Convention on July 25, 2016. As expected, WikiLeaks generated headlines about DNC staffers disparaging Sen. Bernie Sanders, buttressing a Trump campaign effort to prevent Clinton from consolidating Sanders supporters. DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz resigned as a result, and the Clinton campaign suffered significant public relations damage.

But what about Assange, the guy who said he'd turn himself in to American authorities if only then president Obama would free Chelsea Manning only to change his mind once Obama did just that? 

It's said you can tell a man by the company he keeps and none other than Trump's British water boy, Nigel Farage, just happened to swing by the Ecuadorean embassy in London today where Assange is holed up for a 40-minute visit only to emerge saying he couldn't remember what he'd been doing there. Right, Nige, of course you can't remember.

And then there's Trump's longstanding pal, confidante and career dirty trickster, Roger Stone.

Over the weekend when Trump went through his Twitter meltdown, accusing Obama of having illegally wire tapped his campaign, Stone had a Twitter meltdown of his own in which he admitted that, on behalf of the Trump campaign, he colluded with Assange on the release of the hacked Clinton emails.

But wait, there's more. Now The Smoking Gun reports that Roger Stone was also in contact with Guccifer 2.0, the group that hacked the DNC computers.

Though “Guccifer 2.0” maintained that he was a lone “hacktivist” committed to “fight all those illuminati,” a U.S. intelligence assessment concluded with "high confidence" that the G.R.U., Russia’s military intelligence service, was operating the “Guccifer 2.0” persona, which communicated through Twitter, a WordPress blog, and a series of burner e-mail accounts.

...

Like Trump, Stone is vain, vindictive, and prone to declarations untethered to the truth. Both men are protégés of Roy Cohn, the reptilian attorney whose career initially blossomed at the elbow of Senator Joseph McCarthy and ended in disbarment weeks before his death from AIDS in 1986.

Stone began working for Trump’s presidential campaign months before the Republican candidate famously descended Trump Tower’s escalator in June 2015. Two months after Trump’s announcement, Stone--who had clashed with campaign manager Corey Lewandowski--was gone. Stone told reporters he quit, while Trump said he fired the veteran consultant, who was paid a total of $50,000 for his campaign work, Federal Election Commission records show.

Meanwhile, remember that Trump "dossier" prepared by former MI6 spy, Chris Steele, and almost instantly dismissed? Well, Rachel Maddow, has been showing how facts coming out are corroborating Steele's allegations that Trump is beholden to Vlad Putin.

At Foreign Policy in Focus, editor John Feffer writes that Trump has already given Putin everything he wanted - and more.

Even Fox News' Shep Smith can't take the endless, constant lying any more.

WikiLeaks Under a Cloud. First Things First.

WikiLeaks is in the news for dumping thousands of documents allegedly detailing CIA techniques for hacking and surveillance. The documents are bound to embarrass the intelligence agency.

In this case the timing is suspect. The revelations come just as America's worst ever president is at war with America's intelligence community, including the CIA and the FBI. Trump is alleging that his predecessor even tapped Trump's phones during the election campaign and afterward. Presumably these documents will be manna from heaven to the Great Orange Bloat.

The timing is suspect, coming just days after Trump confidante. dirty trickster and some time advisor, Roger Stone, tweeted that WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, collaborated with the Trump campaign.

Trump loyalist and former top adviser Roger Stone claimed on Twitter that he had a back channel to work with Julian Assange at Wikileaks to spread damaging leaked Clinton emails.

US intelligence has unanimously said that Russia interfered in the US election in what it called a "multifaceted campaign" of "cyber espionage", and that Clinton's emails were obtained by Russian hackers.

Stone's claim that he worked with Assange to spread Clinton's emails comes amid growing reports of Trump staffers meeting with Russian officials, then lying about it.

Stone later deleted the tweet.

Neither Assange nor WikiLeaks has responded to Stone's allegation that they worked with, aided and abetted, the Trump campaign to damage Hillary Clinton's run for the presidency. That brings into question the timing of today's revelations.

Assange has a vested interest in currying favour in Washington. If he can get a deal from the sitting administration, amnesty perhaps, he can get out of his self-imposed house arrest in the Ecuadorean embassy in London.

Trump is looking for something, anything to support his bare allegations that, during the campaign and after, he was subject to wiretapping.

Roger Stone's twitter rants are enough to put a cloud over WikiLeaks, one that both it and Assange need to address before it can again be deemed credible. If it's disseminating information, selectively, to advance its own or its founder's interests, everything it releases is suspect at best.

Meanwhile, the British paper, The Express, comes right out and asks if Trump will grant Assange immunity for WikiLeaks election help?

What Dave Said...

My parents generation had Jack Paar, Steve Allen and Johnny Carson. My generation had Letterman and Leno. Today it's Kimmel, Corbin, Fallon and Meyers.

The new crop are pretty good but I still think Letterman is a notch above. Which is why I devoured the New York Magazine interview with Dave in which he lays into Trump and Company.  A few excerpts:

Donald Trump can be Donald Trump, but if he doesn’t help the people that need help, then he’s just a jerk. That press conference that he held berating the news media? I mean, how do you build a dictatorship? First, you undermine the press: “The only truth you’re going to hear is from me.” And he hires the Hunchback of Notre Dame, Steve Bannon, to be his little buddy. Bannon looks like a guy who goes to lunch, gets drunk, and comes back to the office: “Steve, could you have just one drink?” “Fuck you.” How is a white supremacist the chief adviser to our president? Did anybody look that up? I don’t know.

...

Kellyanne Conway was my favorite for a long time. This thing about her telling everyone, “Go buy Ivanka’s shoes; I’m going to go buy Ivanka’s shoes. Hell, I’ll buy you a pair of Ivanka’s shoes.” Then they had to counsel her. Boy, if this administration decides you need counseling — whoa. And poor Sean Spicer is a boob who just got out of a cab and now here he is. Then the other kid, is it Miller?

Wow, that guy [Miller] is creepy. He fell out of a truck. And the guy from Exxon, Rex Tillerson. Don would say, “Rex, if you’re talking to your friends, ask them” — I’m sure the Russians groomed Trump. They gave him tips: “You want to be an authoritarian dictator? Sure, that’s not a problem. We’ll tell you how to do it, for God’s sake.” I think it was just all like that, because that’s the way Trump does business: “See if they’ll give us the tar coating? They’ll throw that in? Great, great. And by the way, we’re not paying the last 10 percent of the bill.” I think it’s the same shit.

...

If he could do just one more show, it'd be all Trump.

I would just start with a list. “You did this. You did that. Don’t you feel stupid for having done that, Don? And who’s this goon Steve Bannon, and why do you want a white supremacist as one of your advisers? Come on, Don, we both know you’re lying. Now, stop it.” I think I would be in the position to give him a bit of a scolding and he would have to sit there and take it. Yeah, I would like an hour with Donald Trump; an hour and a half.

Murmurs From the Asylum.

This must be just a horrible dream. Listen as Trump's housing secretary, Dr. Ben Carson, explains how his own ancestors, who arrived in America in the holds of slave ships, were actually hard-working immigrants who came to America with a dream of a wondrous future for their children and grandchildren.



This man, much like the president he serves, is unhinged, utterly delusional.

Maybe Trump is Telling the Truth

Donald Trump may be wrong about Obama wiretapping his lines in Trump Tower and elsewhere. However he has made it astonishingly easy for others, especially those who might not have America's best interests at heart, to delve into his innermost secrets.

Blame the Samsung Galaxy S3, the smartphone that Trump uses for his late night/pre-dawn tweets.

In the middle of February, Congressional Democrats sent the president a letter urging him to ditch the Samsung in favour of a secure phone but Trump ignored their pleas. It turns out that there exists no power in the US government or anywhere else that can force Trump to give up his trusty S3 Galaxy.

Last week, the New York Times reported that Trump “traded in his Android phone for a secure, encrypted device approved by the Secret Service.” Previously identified as a Samsung Galaxy—likely an S3 which came out in 2012—the Android phone was widely believed to be his primary tweeting device. In defiance of all security standards, the president is reportedly still using it.
...

“That’s how you do it—you strip out all the functionality so it becomes a brick that does the one thing he needs it to do,” a former senior NSA official told NBC News. “There are things an adversary can to do a cellphone—turn on the mic, for example—that make it really dangerous for a guy in his position to carry an unmodified device.”

And those dangers have only increased. As last year’s Russian hacking debacle illustrated, America’s cyber security is more important than ever. But when your boss is President Donald Trump, it’s hard to imagine anyone telling him no. “No one is taking away his Twitter,” senior Trump adviser Boris Epshteyn told USA Today in November. “He’s his own man.”

To make America's enemies' job even easier, Trump also sacked the guy on staff whose job was to make sure Trump wouldn't get hacked.

It’s unclear if Cory Louie, an Obama appointee with extensive experience working on security teams at places like Google and the Secret Service, got fired or simply quit. ZDNet reports that Louie “was either fired or asked to resign last Thursday evening, and was escorted out from his office in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building.” The news was first reported by The Atlantic’s Steve Clemons. Neither the White House nor Louie has commented publicly on what exactly went down.

...

No, Donald, There Is No Santa Claus or Wiretaps For That Matter.

Donald Trump loves his Android smartphone, his late night portal to the Twittersphere. Then that orange moron worries about being wiretapped. He's been warned about the security risk that poses but he's still using his Samsung Galaxy.

Besides, as this Guardian article reveals, nobody wiretaps any more. That's so 1960s - just like Donald J. Trump.

The past two decades have been a golden age for the security services, courtesy of the digital revolution. There would have been no need to break into Trump Tower. The security agencies can access electronic devices across the planet with ease. They can listen in to a target’s mobile, even if it is switched off. If the target is paranoid and stuffs the mobile into a microwave or fridge freezer to render it inert, the security services can pick up the target’s conversations by switching to the mobiles of others in the vicinity.

When it comes to intercepting Trump's or his aides' communications, America's intelligence agencies would need FISA warrants. Putin's intelligence operatives can operate unhindered.

Chris Hedges Sees Liberals as Trump's Essential Enablers

He's got a point. Our liberal elite went along to get along as our political centre was inexorably shifted to the right.

In the States they've evolved a politics in which Ronald Reagan would today be considered much too left to ever win the Republican leadership. Democrats have trailed behind, abandoning the final vestiges of liberalism to become conservative-lite. Their righteous indignation over Trump has become too much for Chris Hedges.

Where was this moral outrage when our privacy was taken from us by the security and surveillance state, the criminals on Wall Street were bailed out, we were stripped of our civil liberties and 2.3 million men and women were packed into our prisons, most of them poor people of color? Why did they not thunder with indignation as money replaced the vote and elected officials and corporate lobbyists instituted our system of legalized bribery? Where were the impassioned critiques of the absurd idea of allowing a nation to be governed by the dictates of corporations, banks and hedge fund managers? Why did they cater to the foibles and utterings of fellow elites, all the while blacklisting critics of the corporate state and ignoring the misery of the poor and the working class? Where was their moral righteousness when the United States committed war crimes in the Middle East and our militarized police carried out murderous rampages? What the liberal elites do now is not moral. It is self-exaltation disguised as piety. It is part of the carnival act.

...

[Rolling Stone columnist Matt] Taibbi, when I interviewed him in New York, said political power in our corporate state is controlled by “a tripartite system.” “You have to have the assent of the press, the donor class, and one of the two [major] political parties to get in,” said Taibbi, author of “Insane Clown President: Dispatches From the 2016 Circus.” “It’s an exclusive club. It’s like a membership system. They all have to agree and confer their blessing on the candidate. Trump somehow managed to get past all three of those obstacles. And he did it essentially by putting all of them on trial. He put the press on trial and villainized them with the public. I think it was a brilliant masterstroke that nobody saw coming. But it wouldn’t have been possible if their unpopularity hadn’t been building for years and years and years.”

...

The press, like the Democratic Party, is an appendage of the consumer society. These institutions are not about politics or news. They are about imparting an experience. They create political personalities, marketed as celebrities, to make us feel good about candidates. These manufactured emotions, the product of the dark arts of the public relations industry, determine how we vote. Issues and policies are irrelevant. It is marketing and entertainment. Trump is a skillful marketer of his fictitious self.

“When you work in that environment long enough you unconsciously become an agent for whatever that commercial strategy is,” Taibbi said of the press in our corporate-run political theater.

“What we call right-wing and liberal media in this country are really just two different strategies of the same kind of nihilistic lizard-brain sensationalism,” Taibbi wrote in “Insane Clown President.” “The ideal CNN story is a baby down a well, while the ideal Fox story is probably a baby thrown down a well by a Muslim terrorist or an ACORN activist. Both companies offer the same service, it’s just that the Fox version is a little kinkier.”

“People have this idea that Trump has no connection with the ‘common man,’ but he does,” Taibbi said. “He has exactly the same media habits that ordinary people have. He believes the stuff that he reads on the internet and watches on television implicitly and unquestioningly. That is what gives him that connection with people. He thinks like they do. He has the same habits they have. A classic example is the thing with the so-called 3 million illegal … voters. He reads that, probably in an Infowars story, it’s policy like two minutes later. He doesn’t go through the process of asking himself if it’s untrue. He’s a perfect consumer in that respect. That’s what makes him so dangerous.”

...

The liberal class, by embracing neoliberalism and refusing to challenge the imperial wars, empowered the economic and political structures that destroyed our democracy and gave rise to Trump. Multiculturalism, when it means, to use the words of Cornel West, nothing more than having a president who is a “black mascot for Wall Street,” betrays the disenfranchised and endows the ruling elites with a false progressivism, a false humanism and a false inclusiveness.

...

Fyodor Dostoevsky excoriated Russia’s bankrupt liberal class at the end of the 19th century. Russian liberals mouthed values they did not defend. Their stated ideals bore no relationship to their actions. They were filled with a suffocating narcissism.

In “Notes From Underground,” Dostoevsky lampooned the defeated dreamers of the liberal class, those who preached goodness but lived in moral squalor. These defeated dreamers denounced the social and cultural depravity they had largely created. They had an open disdain for the uneducated, the poor, the working class, the lesser breeds beneath them. And in the end they ushered in a moral nihilism to empower a dangerous class of demagogues, killers and fools.

Trump Bestie's Meltdown - Implicates Assange in Hillary Email Leaks

Did Julian Assange collaborate with the Trump campaign to leak hacked emails damaging to Hillary Clinton?

According to long time Trump pal, advisor and dirty trickster, Roger Stone, that's exactly what happened. Surprise, surprise.

Stone got into a furious twitter war with JK Rowling and Republican strategist Ana Novarro. He called a female journalist a "stupid, ignorant, ugly bitch" and called Novarro "fat and stupid." It was fascinating to watch Stone lose his mind as his vitriol erupted.

Trump was not the only one to have a Twitter meltdown this weekend.

Trump loyalist and former top adviser Roger Stone claimed on Twitter that he had a back channel to work with Julian Assange at Wikileaks to spread damaging leaked Clinton emails.

US intelligence has unanimously said that Russia interfered in the US election in what it called a "multifaceted campaign" of "cyber espionage", and that Clinton's emails were obtained by Russian hackers.

Stone's claim that he worked with Assangee to spread Clinton's emails comes amid growing reports of Trump staffers meeting with Russian officials, then lying about it.

This madness is spiralling out of control. Trump's tweets, accusing Obama of having ordered illegal wire taps of Trump's suite in his New York apartment building has backfired. Now the FBI director, Comey, has come out to ask the Department of Justice to refute Trump's claims because, boiled down, they would implicate the FBI of serious crimes.

Tillerson Gives Secretary-General the Brushoff.

A newly minted U.S. secretary of state and a new U.N. Secretary-General. You might have thought they would sit down for a chin wag in no time. No, we're talking about Donald Trump's secretary of state,  Rex Tillerson.

Last month, State Department staffers recommended the two diplomats take a break during G-20 ministerial meetings in Bonn, Germany, to talk, according to two diplomatic sources briefed on the matter. Tillerson passed on the meeting, deferring to President Donald Trump’s U.N. ambassador, Nikki Haley, to take the lead in handling the administration’s dealings with the U.N. chief. He also missed a high-level meeting that Guterres attended. The U.N.’s own efforts to secure a face-to-face meeting or a phone conversation through the U.S. mission to the U.N. also haven’t borne fruit.

Generations of previous U.S. secretaries of state have sought to cultivate close ties with U.N. leaders to help rally international backing for U.S. foreign-policy goals. U.N. special envoys are at the center of peace efforts in trouble spots from Libya to Syria and Yemen, places where the United States has vital interests in ensuring stability.

“The U.N. is everywhere,” said Bathsheba Crocker, who served as assistant secretary of state during former President Barack Obama’s administration. “Having a relationship and learning how you are going to mutually help each other and support each other seems like something that every administration would want to try to do.”

Welcome to Trump World.

The Scariest Part Is If You Take Him at His Word

Donald Trump, eager to pump up his defence cred, recently described himself as the "most militaristic" person in the world.

Sure that's the now standard bombast from a pathologically narcissistic degenerate but what if that was true or if it was something Trump aspired to be, the most militaristic person in the world.

History is full of people who were the "most militaristic" of their time. They range from Alexander the Great to Adolph Hitler. Some of those, like Alexander, soared to greatness. Yet there were plenty of hyper-militarists who left nothing but ashes in their wake. When it comes to character and intellect, it'd be hard to put Trump in the Alexander category. Probably a lot more like the other option.

So now we have a new game. When Trump describes himself as the greatest, or the most, or the biggest anything what he's saying is that he's the most extreme of whatever it is he's boasting about. Then think of all the other extremists in that category and see if you're not scared shitless.

The Night of the Generals

The headline in Politico is kind of jarring - "The Generals Guarding American Democracy: It has fallen to military men to keep our institutions safe."

It comes down to a simple fact. The sane people in Donald Trump's administration are his generals (at least now that Flynn is gone). He's got three - Mattis (defense department), Kelly (homeland security) and McMaster (national security).  All three are highly regarded by Republicans and Democrats alike.

A little more than a month into his presidency, a fundamental shift in civil-military relations is taking hold. Rather than civilian leaders checking military power, it is now military leaders, who represent one of the strongest checks against the overreach of a civilian executive.

Take President Trump’s comments on Thursday, in which he said the deportations of undocumented immigrations would be a “military operation.” Several hours later, the retired Marine general who serves as his secretary of homeland Security, John Kelly, spoke to the press. There would be, “No, I repeat no, use of military forces in immigration operations,” Secretary Kelly said. The White House later said, rather unconvincingly, that the president was merely using the word “military” as an “adjective.”

The Generals Speak Out

Comments from Gen. Tony Thomas, commander of U.S. Special Forces, concerning recent upheaval in the White House, as well as the decision of Robert S. Harward, a retired-three star admiral, to forgo serving as the president’s national security adviser, represent an important development.

General Thomas, when asked last week at a conference in Maryland about the state of affairs in the White House, used the words “unbelievable turmoil.” Turmoil is something General Thomas knows plenty about, having served as an elite Special Operations officer in Iraq and Afghanistan for much of the last 15 years. “As a commander,” he said “I’m concerned our government be as stable possible.”

His responsibilities commanding U.S. Special Forces also mean General Thomas knows something about how the decision-making process in the White House affects combat operations. The SEAL team leading the raid on al Qaeda operatives in Yemen late last month, which resulted in the death of Chief Petty Officer William Ryan, fell under General Thomas’s command.

Defending Democracy

One of General Thomas’s predecessors leading U.S. Special Forces, retired Adm. William McRaven, leveled his own critique of Donald Trump’s leadership this week. McRaven, speaking at the University of Texas, where he now serves as chancellor, commented on the president’s recent vilification of the media. “We must challenge this statement and this sentiment that the news media is the enemy of the American people,” McRaven said, according to the Daily Texan. “This sentiment may be the greatest threat to democracy in my lifetime.”

Old Comrades - They're the Type Trump Needs to Worry About

As a business leader and reality TV celebrity, [Trump] earned a reputation for encouraging divisions and rivalries on his teams, but in choosing Kelly and Mattis he has not two but three Marines occupying critical national security roles. Their friend and fellow Marine, Gen. Joseph Dunford, currently serves as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Mattis, Kelly and Dunford share more than a pedigree. Kelly and Dunford served under Mattis in Iraq as part of the 1st Marine Division. It was where Kelly earned his first star as a general and where Dunford, then a colonel with a reputation for toughness, famously refused to wear his armor inserts until each of his Marines had received their own.

It Has Come to This. Trump, Bannon, Beware

Chairman Dunford has said little so far, but his role was brought to the fore by the president’s executive order reorganizing the National Security Council. The order left him, the nation’s highest-ranking military officer, without a permanent seat on the NSC’s most senior body, while giving one to Bannon. According to reporting from the Associated Press, it was on account of concern with these sorts of half-baked executive orders coming out of the White House that Mattis and Kelly arranged to have one of them in the country at all times during Trump’s initial weeks in office. While the detail is buried deep in the AP’s story, it’s a significant revelation. Essentially, it shows that it is military leaders, albeit retired, who feel the need to guard against the overreach of a civilian executive. It’s a phenomenon familiar to countries like Turkey or Egypt, but not the United States. Until now.

As the president takes to Twitter to attack the judiciary on one day and declares the press the enemy of the American people on another, one of Samuel P. Huntington’s predictions appears to be coming to pass. “As the mass society looms on the horizon,” he wrote, “he [the soldier] becomes the conservative guardian of the existing order.”

If the president and his close civilian advisers continue to argue that historic norms and constitutional constraints do not apply to executive power, they should remember that those who protect this country swear an oath not to a person but to the Constitution and will be some of the most faithful guardians of American democracy.

It's Not Just Three Marines Who are Standing Up to Trump

From CNN:

More than 120 retired generals and admirals signed a letter Monday pushing back on the White House's proposal to make major cuts to diplomacy and development.

Retired Gen. David Petraeus, a former CIA director, and retired Adm. James Stavridis, the former NATO supreme allied commander, are among the former three- and four-star generals who wrote that State Department funding is "critical to keeping America safe." They sent the letter to congressional leaders, two Cabinet officials and the White House national security adviser.

"The State Department, USAID, Millennium Challenge Corporation, Peace Corps and other development agencies are critical to preventing conflict and reducing the need to put our men and women in uniform in harm's way," the generals wrote.

They went on to quote a 2013 remark by Defense Secretary James Mattis while commander of US Central Command: "If you don't fully fund the State Department, then I need to buy more ammunition."

Oh, Now They Want the Commonwealth Back

They dropped us like a bag of laundry to join the EU, but now the Brits want us back.

This week, the UK government has requested officials from Canada, Australia and New Zealand to assist with Brexit negotiations, promoting cooperation between the four countries for upcoming trade and immigration deals.

UK Trade Minister, Greg Hands, emphasised eagerness to work with Canadian, Australian and New Zealander officials, who have already declared their intentions to establish quick trade deals once the United Kingdom begins proceedings to leave the European Union.

Sort of like Brad Pitt inviting Jennifer Aniston over for a candlelight dinner. The Brits always thought they called the shots before and it would come as no surprise if they figure on doing that again. Oh, Chaps. Mother England here. We're Back. Now, where were we?

I sure hope we wait until we see just how well Brexit goes for the Brits. There may be hard bargains to be driven.

Drip, Drip, Drip

Donald Trump regularly boasts that he's the product of an Ivy League education. Very, very smart. He knows all the best words. There's a story about how DJT was allowed to transfer into Wharton but that's for another day.

Whether he was Ivy League material or not, you might have thought that Trump would have learned a bit about his own government and its history, especially the stuff about perhaps its greatest president, Abraham Lincoln.

Abe actually had a priceless bit of advice for Donald when he said, "You can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time."

Trump is demonstrably good at fooling people. Ask his creditors, especially the tradesmen he stiffed on his development projects. The American voters, they were pushovers to a guy like the Great Orange Bloat.

Trump's problem is time. He operates on quick, in and out deals. Only not this time, not the Russia business. He's going to have to carry that millstone around his neck for a good long time and it's just going to keep getting heavier and heavier.

Think of it as the Obama administration's inauguration gift to Donald Trump. Not Obama personally but "senior officials" in the former administration. Joe, what in hell have you been up to?

In the closing months of the Obama administration, a wave of intelligence and analyses poured in detailing the close involvement of the Trump campaign with top Russian officials. There was also intelligence about extensive business dealings of Trump senior officials, Paul Manafort, Rex Tillerson, Wilbur Ross, with Vlad Putin and various oligarchs, suggestions of dirty money, rubles, laundered into US dollars and buried in curious real estate deals in America. There was intelligence from American agencies, intelligence from Britain, intelligence from Germany.

They didn't trust Donald Trump to investigate himself and his closest aides and the Obama team didn't have time to do it before they left office. They faced the prospect that the Trump team might bury the intelligence, make it disappear. They weren't about to let that happen.

And so they gave the stuff the lowest security classification they could which meant the greatest possible number of government officials could be given copies of the intelligence. They "seeded" the federal bureaucracy with the information.

Trump doesn't know, even his top officials don't know just who has the intelligence. The genie is out of the bottle. It's no wonder Trump has been raging about government leaks, especially from the intelligence/security agencies including the FBI. He's under investigation and he knows it. Now if Trump and his besties were clean they would probably want this all out in the open so they could get out from under this cloud just as fast as possible. Only that's the last thing they seem to want. Where there's smoke, there's fire.

The first aide to spontaneously combust was ex-general and conspiracy theorist, Mike Flynn, toppled from his perch as national security agency chief in less than a month. Drip.

Now, before Flynn's chair is even cold, it's Jeff Sessions' turn. Sessions is an order of magnitude different than Flynn. He's an old hand, a pro. After a stint in the state government in Alabama, Sessions logged twenty years in the Senate. And now he's trapped, having given sworn evidence at his confirmation hearing that he had no involvement with the Russians during the Trump campaign even though he met twice with the Russian ambassador, once in a closed door meeting in his Senate office.

Flynn out, Sessions gored, possibly fatally. Drip, drip.

How did the Washington Post learn of Sessions' dalliances with the Russian ambassador? Best guess is that was a leak and it probably came from the intelligence documents spread wide and far by Obama officials.

Trump was getting out from under the Flynn fiasco but Sessions has really put the millstone around Donald's neck. It's the weight he's going to have to carry and it could get a lot heavier as this investigation continues.

Sessions was the exception to the Trump team. There's not a lot of political depth in the Trump White House, especially not when it comes to federal politics. Mike Pence had a dozen years in the House before he went home to Indiana to serve as governor. As for the rest, Trump included, there's little to no "hands on" government experience.

The Trump junta (there are a curious number of generals) is slowly turning toxic. Recruiting A-list talent is getting ever tougher. When Trump had to fill the Flynn vacancy his first two choices, retired Navy admiral, Harward, and controversial former Army commander, Petraeus, both turned him down. The guy who did take the job (he was still on active duty, pretty hard to say "no"), general H.R. McMaster has moved to sanitize the National Security Council, removing Flynn's operative inside the agency.

This is giving Congressional Republicans a coronary. With their hold on the House and the Senate at stake in the mid-term elections, they're as vulnerable to leaks as the White House. They can't thwart a full investigation into the Russia scandal. They've also got a powerful faction of senior Republicans who are willing to offer Trump no quarter, none.

Drip, drip, drip.

The Sessions leak shows how powerful this information might be and how vulnerable it leaves both the White House and Congress.

Oh My, My - This Is Juicy

Did Obama leave a minefield for the Trump administration/junta, one sown with Trump's own mines?

The New York Times reports that Obama officials in the final days before the new president took over took all the intelligence they had on Trump and Russia and distributed it to several federal agencies.

American allies, including the British and the Dutch, had provided information describing meetings in European cities between Russian officials — and others close to Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin — and associates of President-elect Trump, according to three former American officials who requested anonymity in discussing classified intelligence. Separately, American intelligence agencies had intercepted communications of Russian officials, some of them within the Kremlin, discussing contacts with Mr. Trump’s associates.

Then and now, Mr. Trump has denied that his campaign had any contact with Russian officials, and at one point he openly suggested that American spy agencies had cooked up intelligence suggesting that the Russian government had tried to meddle in the presidential election. Mr. Trump has accused the Obama administration of hyping the Russia story line as a way to discredit his new administration.

At the Obama White House, Mr. Trump’s statements stoked fears among some that intelligence could be covered up or destroyed — or its sources exposed — once power changed hands. What followed was a push to preserve the intelligence that underscored the deep anxiety with which the White House and American intelligence agencies had come to view the threat from Moscow.

White House spokesman, Sean Spicer, apparently imagining that the Great Orange Bloat had defeated Obama instead of Hillary Clinton responded. “The only new piece of information that has come to light is that political appointees in the Obama administration have sought to create a false narrative to make an excuse for their own defeat in the election. There continues to be no there, there.”

Seeding the Minefield

As Inauguration Day approached, Obama White House officials grew convinced that the intelligence was damning and that they needed to ensure that as many people as possible inside government could see it, even if people without security clearances could not. Some officials began asking specific questions at intelligence briefings, knowing the answers would be archived and could be easily unearthed by investigators — including the Senate Intelligence Committee, which in early January announced an inquiry into Russian efforts to influence the election.

At intelligence agencies, there was a push to process as much raw intelligence as possible into analyses, and to keep the reports at a relatively low level of classification to ensure as wide a readership as possible across the government — and, in some cases, among European allies. This allowed the upload of as much intelligence as possible to Intellipedia, a secret wiki used by American intelligence analysts to share information.

No Wonder Trump Has Lost His Mind over Leaks

Trump and, by now, his inner circle know what's in those intelligence reports and analyses and they must know this stuff has been so widely circulated to prevent them from burying it. When they tried to get the FBI and the CIA to announce there was nothing to these reports it was an act of desperation by Trump and his minions. It sent Trump flying off the handle, issuing angry rebukes to his own intelligence community but, even if they wanted to help him, their hands are tied by how broadly the intelligence has been circulated and the fear that, if they did try to suppress it, the information would be leaked.

Sorry, But Those Jobs Aren't Coming Back

Say what he will, and we know by now that Donald Trump will say just about anything,Trump's promise of many hundreds of thousands of new, high paying jobs is nonsense.  It ain't gonna happen. He's the wrong man at the wrong time.

Those outsourced/offshored jobs that he's promising to repatriate? They're not coming back because the place they left no longer exists. We've moved on.

Those jobs are for low-cost labour, not middle class American labour. The high priced help, well, they're already getting squeezed out by computerization and automation.

The Globe and Mail has a thoroughly depressing, 10-page list of nearly 500 job categories and the risk each will succumb to automation over the next 10 to 20 years.

Clerical accounting staff are hooped. They face a 98% loss of jobs. That's light years beyond just "screwed." Admin staff can expect to see 96% of their jobs rendered redundant. No great career future in those areas.

Those wonderful manufacturing jobs, the positions Trump is after? Sorry, 96% downturn.  Overall, labour, skilled and non, is not facing a bright future. And, yes, that includes most trades.

Oh but there is good news. Lawyers are looking at a paltry 3.5% decline. Yeah, lawyers!

Remind me why our federal government still considers industrial-scale immigration to be a good thing if an unemployment tsunami is heading our way.

As for me, I don't believe all this doom and gloom. I don't think Trump will have much luck restoring all those offshored jobs. It's just that these projections don't take contingencies into account - plague and pestilence, famine, bio-error, climate catastrophes, revolution, even major war. Those can all be ways of hitting the "reset" button.

The Black Death is an inspiring example. From 1346 to 1353 it killed off  some 200-million people. Paltry as that number sounds in a world of 7.5 billion today, humankind weighed in at just 370-million in 1350 so it was a pretty decent hit.

Studies have shown that, in the aftermath, the survivors lived pretty well. Everybody seemed to have plenty of everything - and at everyday low prices. Empty houses go cheap. Labour was in short supply, wages went up commensurately.

There's only one way to end this post:

Trump's New Commerce Secretary Focused On One Aspect of Climate Change. Of Course.

America's newly minted commerce secretary, shady billionaire Wilbur Ross, doesn't entirely share Trump's view that climate change is a hoax. No, to Wilbur, sea level rise is real. For the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that's a good thing given that it comes under the Commerce Department.

So, why is secretary Wilbur, a.k.a. the "King of Bankruptcy," so focused on sea level rise? It might have something to do with his $23 million waterfront home in Palm Beach. The house is just over 4 feet above sea level.

Nice shack, Wilbur.

Wilbur made a good chunk of cash as vice chairman of the shady Bank of Cyprus, reputed to have been the laundromat for Russian oligarchs looking to move mountains of rubles out of Russia. The White House has been blocking Democrats' efforts to uncover whether any of those laundered rubles/dollars made their way to Trump or his associates.