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Donald Fires FBI Director who's investigating Russian Election Hacking

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One Brow said:
Let's be clear on this: any attempt to create a totalitarian state will need to rely on internal intelligence and law enforcement to enact it upon the populace. Within our federal government, this can only be accomplished by organizations like the FBI and NSA.

I agree that Trump loves dictators, and i find it easy to believe he would love to have dictatorial powers. Dictators don't just arise by fiat; they actually have to take over and subvert the institutions of power. Even if Trump were actively trying to lay a years-long plan to create a dictatorship (and I'm not sure Trump has the capacity for long-term planning), he would be actively interfering with his ability to accomplish it.

The US has had demagogues before, and will again. It has had period of heightened intolerance before, and will again. It may someday cease to be a democracy, but the people that arrange that change will be much more competent and clever that the clown-car this administration represents.

If you really want to worry about something, worry about how at the lower level appointments (undersecretaries and the like) are governing by destroying the government's regulations. That's where the real scandal and danger, not the White House side-show.
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Regarding your last observation, as you stated: "If you really want to worry about something, worry about how at the lower level appointments (undersecretaries and the like) are governing by destroying the government's regulations. That's where the real scandal and danger, not the White House side-show", in my own case this has been my focus and my worry in the case of the EPA and the Department of the Interior. In the case of the former, the actual policy actions of Scott Pruitt in rolling back regulations. The new EPA administrator, Andrew Wheeler, is a former coal industry lobbyist, and he has now curtailed Obama era regulations regarding coal ash:

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/trump-s-epa-rolls-back-obama-era-coal-ash-regulations-n892586

In the case of the latter, Ryan Zinke has made it clear America's public lands should exist for the interest of fossil fuel extraction, as well as our offshore waters:

https://www.newyorker.com/science/elements/ryan-zinkes-great-american-fire-sale

And drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is to get a fast review:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nati...73c11a-8a98-11e8-85ae-511bc1146b0b_story.html

These are some of my concerns and worries, and reason enough for me to vote out Trump when the opportunity presents itself in 2020.

But, I do also worry about the broader trend toward authoritarianism in the United States. I wonder, for instance, what role the tendency of Trump to label any journalism not favorable to him as "fake news", and the mantra "the media is the true enemy of the people" means to the survival of democracy itself. There is also the truism, which this president seems to understand quite well, that simply repeating something often enough sinks in and has an effect. Thus we see approval of Putin, and seeing Putin as an ally, is actually on the rise.

Trump understands repeating things in a mantra-like manner influences how people think, and therefore one can create greater support for ideas and/or policies that increase authoritarianism. If you also have a situation where a political party, in this case the GOP, cannot really separate itself from Trump, and also a situation where, like fireflies attracted to light, each new "outrage" supplants an earlier "outrage" in the attention focus of the media, you get a situation where, for instance and most recently, the discovery of Cohen tapes describing a Trump affair are now already supplanting the Trump/Putin press conference as what the media, and hence public attention, is focused on.

I'm sure I am rambling here, but I am one who does focus on specific actions by cabinet level officials, while at the same time being alarmed by the manner in which the words and actions of the president seem antithetical to American values yet somehow are tolerated and recede with the arrival of still another scandal.

I see now that it is quite likely that the president betraying the United States during the press conference with Putin will not matter at all. Receding already from the news cycle. It's an example of Trump's own adage that he could shoot someone at random, and not lose the support of his followers. A cult of personality lends itself to authoritarianism in the United States.

I know I'm flailing here, struggling to find a way of describing what I see as the danger to our democracy a cult of personality presents. But it was clear to me from day one we were dealing with a demagogue, and I see Trump as the most dangerous such individual in our history...
 
I'm thinking that maybe one effect of a Post Truth era is that citizens will simply stop judging whether the president is lying or telling the truth. The truth of the matter will become irrelevant. And maybe a president will be able to behave in a more authoritarian manner in an age where the only truth is the truth one chooses to believe. Again, I know I'm floundering here, it's a struggle for me to understand how a Post Truth era will change our democratic institutions. On the other hand, Orwell illustrated the power of the Big Lie. As long as a sufficient percentage of the electorate believe the Big Lie, it's far easier for them to believe the media is "the enemy of the people". Even the most exhaustively researched investigative journalism can be dismissed. It seems to me this has to make authoritarian rule a greater possibility....

https://www.wired.com/story/facebook-snapchat-and-the-dawn-of-the-post-truth-era/

"What we politely call “fake news”—a formulation that presupposes some antecedent credible truth called “news” that we're now abandoning—is just the tribal folklore of a certain (and usually opposing) tribe. Our exhausting and constant absorption in a transitory but completely overwhelming media cycle is our own preliterate eternal present. Who thinks now of Cecil the Lion and the villainous dentist who shot him, whose practice was promptly ruined by an online mob? We’re too busy dealing with the third huge Trump scandal this week, which we’ll forget in due course thanks to next week’s school shooting. Could any of us, if pressed, even construct a chronological ordering of Trump media cycles, or would we have only episodic memories of highlights, as we do when trying to reconstruct some long-ago period of life from memory? Twitter’s Moments product is a constant stream of just such transitory and disordered reactions to context-free events. A history-less forgetfulness is the overarching product vision for Snapchat, whose posts—atomized and textless morsels of personal experience—are designed to disappear and never be consulted or searched.


Future historians will be no help in making sense of our era. There’ll be no authoritative history that more than one faction will trust; a dozen factions will each have their own history. Given the persistence and ubiquity of digital media, it will be the best-documented period in American history, but nobody will agree on what happened.

As always, some prophetic academics have seen this coming, titling this new media medievalism “the Gutenberg Parenthesis” (or in Marshall McLuhan’s coinage “the Gutenberg Galaxy”). The idea here is that Gutenberg opened a parenthesis of textual, literate society, and Zuckerberg (and others) effectively closed it by promoting atomized experiences online. How then does the open debate of democratic societies work in such a post-textual “oral” culture (where the “orality” is not the in-person oral tradition of storytellers and shamans, but an intermediated one of Snapchat stories and viral Facebook videos)?

By and large, it doesn’t."
 
The Carter Page FISA warrent documents, heavily redacted, have been released by the Dept. of Justice, and contain some interesting statements pertinent to Page, Russians, and interference in the 2016 election. First time ever that FISA warrants have been released to the public....

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/21/us/politics/carter-page-fisa.html

"On Saturday evening, those materials — an October 2016 application to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to wiretap Mr. Page, along with several renewal applications — were released to The New York Times and other news organizations that had filed Freedom of Information Act lawsuits to obtain them. Mr. Trump had declassified their existence earlier this year.

This application targets Carter Page,” the document said. “The F.B.I. believes Page has been the subject of targeted recruitment by the Russian government.” A line was then redacted, and then it picked up with “undermine and influence the outcome of the 2016 U.S. presidential election in violation of U.S. criminal law. Mr. Page is a former foreign policy adviser to a candidate for U.S. president.”.....

.....Visible portions showed that the F.B.I. in stark terms had told the intelligence court that Mr. Page “has established relationships with Russian government officials, including Russian intelligence officers”; that the bureau believed “the Russian government’s efforts are being coordinated with Page and perhaps other individuals associated with” Mr. Trump’s campaign; and that Mr. Page “has been collaborating and conspiring with the Russian government.”

The fight over the surveillance of Mr. Page centered on the fact that the F.B.I., in making the case to judges that he might be a Russian agent, had used some claims drawn from a notorious Democratic-funded dossier compiled by Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence agent.

The application cited claims from the dossier that Mr. Page, while on a trip to Moscow in July 2016, had met with two senior Russian representatives and discussed matters like lifting sanctions imposed on Russia for its intervention in Ukraine and a purported file of compromising information about Mr. Trump that the Russian government had. (Mr. Page has denied those allegations, although he later contradicted his claims that he had not met any Russian government officials on that trip.)"

The documents:

https://int.nyt.com/data/documenthe...isa-documents-foia-release/full/optimized.pdf
 
Red said:
The Carter Page FISA warrent documents, heavily redacted, have been released by the Dept. of Justice, and contain some interesting statements pertinent to Page, Russians, and interference in the 2016 election. First time ever that FISA warrants have been released to the public....

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/21/us/politics/carter-page-fisa.html

"On Saturday evening, those materials — an October 2016 application to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to wiretap Mr. Page, along with several renewal applications — were released to The New York Times and other news organizations that had filed Freedom of Information Act lawsuits to obtain them. Mr. Trump had declassified their existence earlier this year.

This application targets Carter Page,” the document said. “The F.B.I. believes Page has been the subject of targeted recruitment by the Russian government.” A line was then redacted, and then it picked up with “undermine and influence the outcome of the 2016 U.S. presidential election in violation of U.S. criminal law. Mr. Page is a former foreign policy adviser to a candidate for U.S. president.”.....

.....Visible portions showed that the F.B.I. in stark terms had told the intelligence court that Mr. Page “has established relationships with Russian government officials, including Russian intelligence officers”; that the bureau believed “the Russian government’s efforts are being coordinated with Page and perhaps other individuals associated with” Mr. Trump’s campaign; and that Mr. Page “has been collaborating and conspiring with the Russian government.”

The fight over the surveillance of Mr. Page centered on the fact that the F.B.I., in making the case to judges that he might be a Russian agent, had used some claims drawn from a notorious Democratic-funded dossier compiled by Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence agent.

The application cited claims from the dossier that Mr. Page, while on a trip to Moscow in July 2016, had met with two senior Russian representatives and discussed matters like lifting sanctions imposed on Russia for its intervention in Ukraine and a purported file of compromising information about Mr. Trump that the Russian government had. (Mr. Page has denied those allegations, although he later contradicted his claims that he had not met any Russian government officials on that trip.)"

The documents:

https://int.nyt.com/data/documenthe...isa-documents-foia-release/full/optimized.pdf
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Yep. More evidence of collusion. I love how Donald and his minions are desperately trying to discredit Page and the FISA warrants (approved by 4 republican judges). It makes you wonder just how damaging to Donald is the evidence that the FBI obtained via Page?

Furthermore, when was the last time we found evidence that helped Donald? Seems like it’s been pretty much a landslide of evidence showing dirty Russian money laundered through the NRA (who then “donated” to republicans). These donations were then reciprocated with gun deregulation. Which added more money to NRA coffers and more election wins for republicans. We’ve seen a landslide of shady meetings between Russians and trump surrogates. And the recent Putin summit only served as more evidence that trump appears compromised by Putin.

When will republicans wake up? Or is winning elections with dirty Russian money more important than our country?
 
Do you hear that?

It’s the sound of the human trash can flip flopping and throwing the intelligence community under the bus (again).

So tired of this guy’s crap.

 
Obama knew about Russia before the election...

Trump just found out Montenegro was a country a week or two ago.
 
Increasingly, the American president is beginning to sound like a character out of Orwell's 1984.

Quotes by the character Winston Smith in 1984:

"The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command. His heart sank as he thought of the enormous power arrayed against him, the ease with which any Party intellectual would overthrow him in debate, the subtle arguments which he would not be able to understand, much less answer. And yet he was in the right! They were wrong and he was right. The obvious, the silly, and the true had got to be defended. Truisms are true, hold on to that! The solid world exists, its laws do not change. Stones are hard, water is wet, objects unsupported fall towards the earth's centre."......
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"Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past," repeated Winston obediently.

"Who controls the present controls the past," said O'Brien, nodding his head with slow approval. "Is it your opinion, Winston, that the past has real existence?" (3.2.39-40)
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Trump's latest pronouncements are right out of 1984:
https://thinkprogress.org/trump-vfw...-reading-is-not-whats-happening-b1a8f318d1d9/

"In George Orwell’s classic dystopian novel 1984, the “final, most essential command” of the ruling totalitarian regime is “to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears.”
On Tuesday, President Trump made that same request of his supporters.

Speaking to a Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) gathering in Kansas City, Trump implored his audience to forget about what they see and read — and instead just listen to him.

“Don’t believe the crap you see from these people, the fake news,” Trump said, pointing at reporters as the crowd broke out in boos. “Just remember, what you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening"
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Don't like CNN? too bad, since they are pointing out the truth here. Of course, in a Post Truth landscape, if there is no truth, there are no lies, and the media loses the ability to rebut the lies of the president...

 
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