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The Trump presidency

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On Politico Trump’s Enemies Within
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Though Trump’s style seems wildly improvisational, the public official in recent times who thought more methodically about how to control and dominate the executive branch was former Vice President Dick Cheney. Unlike Trump or his coterie, Cheney was intimately familiar with the hidden byways of the federal government due to his service as chief of staff under Gerald Ford, a member of Congress in the Reagan years and defense secretary in the George H.W. Bush administration.

He believed that the presidency had been weakened by an overreaction to Watergate and was determined to restore presidential prerogatives to what he considered their rightful place. Along the way, he often faced a permanent bureaucracy hostile to his conservative ideology and hawkish military views. And he made it his mission to ensure that these forces did not thwart administration policies.

“Cheney focused less on the Cabinet than subcabinet and assistant and deputy assistant secretaries because he knew the policy pivot points were there,” said Bart Gellman, senior fellow at the Century Foundation and author of “Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency.”

“He bypassed normal interagency and White House review, sending documents for Bush’s signature before even the staff secretary reviewed them,” Gellman noted.

Cheney often got his way until Bush lost confidence in his hard-line ideas, and only then, said Gellman—pointing to the White House’s showdown with the Justice Department over warrantless wiretapping--when they became “a threat to his reelection and his presidency itself.”

That’s a lesson that Trump, who is already revving up the 2020 machinery only 14 days into his term, can understand.
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All Presidents clash to some extent with the vast machine of US government bureaucracy. What Trump lacks, a man with a Fine Florentine Hand who really knows how to ruthlessly work The Hill. Bannon ain't that sort of critter at all. At best a spin doctor like Rove.

Article points out how unprecedentedly leaky the Good Ship Trump is with factions in government boring into its hull like naval parasites. They are reminded of Nixon's fall. That was after a second term landslide. We are just in the honeymoon period.
 
90

Linky.
 
On TSG Intel Brief Rebranding Countering Violent Extremism
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Approaching Muslim community groups—which have already expressed concerns that CVE efforts disproportionately focus on Muslims—with a program dubbed ‘Countering Islamic Extremism’ is destined to fail. This inevitable outcome was evidenced within hours of the Reuters report surfacing, when a Minneapolis-based community group turned down a federal grant worth $500,000 for CVE due to the Trump administration’s rhetoric and actions regarding Muslims.

Putting aside the self-inflicted wounds that a high-profile federal program targeting ‘radical Islamic extremism’ would bring—with little benefit in the stated purpose of preventing violence—the suggested changes also ignore the fact that there are a substantial number of domestic terror threats that have nothing to do with Islamist extremism. Right-wing hate groups, white supremacists, and anti-government groups all pose an equal or greater threat to the domestic security of the United States than groups such as the so-called Islamic State. Shifting focus away from these domestic groups at a time when they appear to actually be growing in menace demonstrates a true misunderstanding of the nature of the threat facing the homeland.
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The interesting thing with Trump is he's a fear monger who often does not seem to take genuine security threats at all seriously. Russia, North Korea and even domestic terror threats. It's all just a scripted reality TV show for him to star in as the stunts play out. Banon's American Carnage is just the necessary stage scenery.
 
Pickman's model said:
surprised and disappointed at the low level of gun ownership in texas
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That's just the controlled weapons.

Doesn't include your normal collection of semi-auto 5.56mm 30 round "squirrel rifles" or the family's Glocks. Mention even registering those in some states and it'd all go a bit Turner Diaries.

Texas isn't actually that gunny in terms of this:
gun-ownership-study-state-map.png
 
CrabbedOne said:
That's just the controlled weapons.

Doesn't include your normal collection of semi-auto 5.56mm 30 round "squirrel rifles" or the family's Glocks. Mention even registering those in some states and it'd all go a bit Turner Diaries.

Texas isn't actually that gunny in terms of this:
gun-ownership-study-state-map.png
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Geez, we Nebraskans need to pick up the pace. I'm a little ashamed, tbh.
 
Johnny Canuck3 said:
A judgement from Gorsuch, J.

Judge Gorsuch’s dissent in the case of a 13-year-old arrested for making fake burps in class
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A belch of common sense fromthe apointee:


If a seventh grader starts trading fake burps for laughs in gym class, what’s a teacher to do? Order extra laps? Detention? A trip to the principal’s office? Maybe. But then again, maybe that’s too old school. Maybe today you call a police officer. And maybe today the officer decides that, instead of just escorting the now compliant thirteen year old to the principal’s office, an arrest would be a better idea. So out come the handcuffs and off goes the child to juvenile detention. My colleagues suggest the law permits exactly this option and they offer ninety-four pages explaining why they think that’s so. Respectfully, I remain unpersuaded.
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CrabbedOne said:
Bannon ain't that sort of critter at all.
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No, he's not. And he doesn't want to be. He really does seem to want to bring everything - domestically and internationally (and with the noted exception of the European-descended folks of the United of States) - crashing down from what I've read.

He hates the media. He hates the current Republican Party. He hates politicians. He hates "coastal elites". And I think that hate really is hate. In the wider world there seem to be plenty of other people he hates too - China seems to be a favourite, Islam another. And he won, and it seems that - like Trump and many of the rest of his team - he sees that as perfect and total validation of that set of views, the views of "real America".

So, I think he's quite capable of telling them to go fuck themselves and of threatening to bring down quite apocalyptic consequences on them if they don't. He seems to have a pretty chaotic/apocalyptic view of the world and he seems to like war. A lot.
 
MightyTibberton said:
And so far, I think there are still a huge number of unfilled jobs in that "vast machine", possibly deliberately while Bannon opens his shock and awe campaign.
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Not really, it's the posts at the upper levels that aren't filled, a few hundred jobs tops, it's not even the tip of the iceberg. There's over a million or so folk working for the vast US Intelligence Community alone for instance. DoD is about four million and so on. A lot of Presidents come in all Hopey Changey. Few make much of a dent in it.

Bannon is no Dick Cheney used to this level of complexity. He is a propagandist thinking grand ideas in a billionaire backed La La Land. Just what you want to run a bullshit propelled campaign. It's apparent he does not even know how to draft a Presidential order competently. As an enforcer he's rubbish. Trump's team looks like an utter shambles of contending factions and un-vetted, barely briefed appointees. The strongest of them Tillerson from Exxon and Mattis from the USMC are about the only people there with a clue how to operate something this big. Trump has no idea and is floundering around fulfilling daft campaign pledges while still badgering fellow celebs about their ratings.
 
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