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Six Fireflies Beeping Randomly In A Jar

When a conservative columnist compares the current president’s thinking to “six fireflies beeping randomly in a jar.”

From David Brooks for The New York Times:

His inability to focus his attention makes it hard for him to learn and master facts. He is ill informed about his own policies and tramples his own talking points. It makes it hard to control his mouth. On an impulse, he will promise a tax reform when his staff has done little of the actual work.

“In a short period of time I understood everything there was to know about health care,” he told Time. “A lot of the people have said that, some people said it was the single best speech ever made in that chamber,” he told The Associated Press, referring to his joint session speech.

By Trump’s own account, he knows more about aircraft carrier technology than the Navy. According to his interview with The Economist, he invented the phrase “priming the pump” (even though it was famous by 1933). Trump is not only trying to deceive others. His falsehoods are attempts to build a world in which he can feel good for an instant and comfortably deceive himself.

He is thus the all-time record-holder of the Dunning-Kruger effect, the phenomenon in which the incompetent person is too incompetent to understand his own incompetence. Trump thought he’d be celebrated for firing James Comey. He thought his press coverage would grow wildly positive once he won the nomination. He is perpetually surprised because reality does not comport with his fantasies.

[snip]

We’ve got this perverse situation in which the vast analytic powers of the entire world are being spent trying to understand a guy whose thoughts are often just six fireflies beeping randomly in a jar.

I encourage you to read the full essay.

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Washington Post: President Trump Revealed Highly Classified Information To Russian Officials

From The Washington Post:

President Trump revealed highly classified information to the Russian foreign minister and ambassador in a White House meeting last week, according to current and former U.S. officials, who said Trump’s disclosures jeopardized a critical source of intelligence on the Islamic State.

The information the president relayed had been provided by a U.S. partner through an intelligence-sharing arrangement considered so sensitive that details have been withheld from allies and tightly restricted even within the U.S. government, officials said.

The partner had not given the United States permission to share the material with Russia, and officials said Trump’s decision to do so endangers cooperation from an ally that has access to the inner workings of the Islamic State. After Trump’s meeting, senior White House officials took steps to contain the damage, placing calls to the CIA and the National Security Agency.

“This is code-word information,” said a U.S. official familiar with the matter, using terminology that refers to one of the highest classification levels used by American spy agencies. Trump “revealed more information to the Russian ambassador than we have shared with our own allies.”

[snip]

In their statements, White House officials emphasized that Trump had not discussed specific intelligence sources and methods, rather than addressing whether he had disclosed information drawn from sensitive sources.

Just to underline that last point: The Washington Post reported Trump revealed intelligence from a secret source, not that Trump revealed the source itself.

Remember, this was the meeting that Trump allowed a Russian state news organization to be present and take photos, but no U.S. media outlet.

You may recall Trump turned the entire presidential election into a referendum on Hillary Clinton’s handling of “unmarked,” low-level classified info.

Now this.

Let’s take a trip on the way-back machine:

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White House Refuses To Deny Oval Office Recordings

What kind of game is the White House playing in hinting that President Trump may have recorded Oval Office meetings with unwitting colleagues?

At today’s press briefing, White House Press Secretary repeatedly refused to confirm OR deny the existence of such recordings.

One reporter asked, “Is the White House intending to cooperate with those requests and furnish that information as requested in writing?”

“I think I made it clear last week that the president has nothing further on that,” replied Spicer.

That same reporter attempted for some kind of clarity on the issue: “Does that mean the president will deny –” but Spicer stopped her.

“I think I said – I was very clear – the President would have nothing further,” Spicer said.

Two more reporters tried to get past the stonewalling stance, but Spicer refused again repeating some version of the same statement.

Very odd.

Watch below.

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MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” Hosts: Kellyanne Conway Secretly Loathes President Trump

Remember when MSNBC Morning Joe hosts Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough were BFFs with the Trumpster and company?

Not so much these days.

This morning the newly engaged duo informed their viewers that White House counselor Kellyanne Conway actually hated having to defend Donald Trump during the 2016 election.

Here’s Brzezinski’s take on how Conway’s appearances would go once the cameras and microphones were off:

“This is a woman, by the way, who came on our show during the campaign and would shill for Trump in extensive fashion. And then she would get off the air, the camera would be turned off, the microphone would be taken off, and she would say ‘Bleeech, I need to take a shower’ because she disliked her candidate so much.”

(h/t JoeMyGod)

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Randy Rainbow: “The Russian Connection”

Randy Rainbow starts out your week with his parody of the Muppets classic, “The Rainbow Connection,” rewritten with more Trumpian lyrics – “The Russian Connection”

“And since you’re fixin’ to trump Richard Nixon
Your days are numbered and few.
Someday they’ll find it, the Russian connection,
The covers, the schemers, and you.”

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Gallup: Support For Marriage Equality Continues To Rise

From Gallup:

Americans’ support for same-sex marriage has more than doubled since Gallup first polled on the issue in 1996, when 27% said it should be recognized as valid by the law.

In 2004 — weeks before gay weddings took place in Massachusetts after it became the first state to legalize same-sex marriage — less than half of Americans (42%) felt such unions should be legally valid.

Majority support for gay marriage would not come until May 2011, about a month before New York became the sixth state to legalize it.

Since then, support for legal same-sex marriage has steadily climbed, with consistent majorities in favor of it since late 2012.

Gallup also reports that support for same-sex relations has also reached an all-time high of 72%.

When Gallup first began polling on the issue in 1977, only 43% said same-sex relations should be legal.

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Short Film: “Unchechen”

Writer and director Stephen M. Hornby has created the short film Unchechen, based on actual quotes from accounts of the current torture and genocide of gay men in Chechnya.

The short film, created by digitalSTAGE and Inkbrew Productions, began life as a stage play commissioned by theatre collective Take Back, performed in Manchester earlier this month.

Hornby issued this statement with the short film:

“The State organised extermination of gay men in Chechnya is a horrific ghost from World War Two. But it’s real. The men fleeing from it are too terrified to go on camera, and so I wanted to try to fill the silence with something that attempts to make this crisis real and human. This is an emotional story to connect people to what’s happening and hopefully stimulate a response.”

The filmmakers encourage people to donate to Rainbow Railroad to help more gay men escape these horrific conditions.

(tipped by TRR reader Larry)

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Politico: How Trump Gets His Fake News


 Politico’s Shane Goldmacher has an engrossing account of how information and misinformation makes it’s way into the hands of the president.

Goldmacher explains how aides get articles into the Trumpster’s hands to gain an advantage in promoting a certain policy, or just to step up in the ongoing Game of Thrones happening daily in the West Wing.

White House chief of staff Reince Priebus issued a stern warning at a recent senior staff meeting: Quit trying to secretly slip stuff to President Trump.

Just days earlier, K.T. McFarland, the deputy national security adviser, had given Trump a printout of two Time magazine covers. One, supposedly from the 1970s, warned of a coming ice age; the other, from 2008, about surviving global warming, according to four White House officials familiar with the matter.

Trump quickly got lathered up about the media’s hypocrisy. But there was a problem. The 1970s cover was fake, part of an Internet hoax that’s circulated for years. Staff chased down the truth and intervened before Trump tweeted or talked publicly about it.

The episode illustrates the impossible mission of managing a White House led by an impetuous president who has resisted structure and strictures his entire adult life.

The consequences can be tremendous, according to a half-dozen White House officials and others with direct interactions with the president. A news story tucked into Trump’s hands at the right moment can torpedo an appointment or redirect the president’s entire agenda. Current and former Trump officials say Trump can react volcanically to negative press clips, especially those with damaging leaks, becoming engrossed in finding out where they originated.

Make sure you read the full article.