When you are an asshole and the President, maybe you should be more selective with your friends and associates....

Josh Marshall's (Talking Points Memo) political commentary is consistently prescient and accurate. This article focuses on the Porter situation.

All of it starts to feed on itself. The President is defined by his predation. He attracts these people to him or they are the only options available and he in turn protects them. He’s staffed by the inexperienced, the incompetent and the reprobate. They are unable to hide his nature even when it would be in his interest to allow them to do so. The rush of crises and incapacity yields desperation and lying, in part because of the nature of the situation but even more because these behaviors are validated from the top. Did John Kelly start out as a liar? We don’t know. He seems to be one and a not terribly good one now. Porter’s exposure is like a brief but sustained flash of light amidst the moral darkness and squalor of Trump White House, briefly illuminating all the dreck and rot of the rough beast of Trumpism.

JUAN PABLO VILLALOBOS VOLUNTEERS THE NATION OF MEXICO TO BUILD TRUMP’S WALL: IT'S GOING TO BE REALLY TERRIFIC

Let's build the wall...read it all...Exceptional piece...

Let’s build the wall. And okay, we’ll pay for it, us Mexicans. But we’ll build it ourselves, and we’ll put an aid station every twenty kilometers, a proper shelter with doctors, food, water, beds where people can rest and gather their strength, and English classes. And most importantly, we’ll have lots of doors all up and down the wall, thousands of them. Doors that can only be opened from one side: ours...

The only policy they understand is Revelations...

Richard Land of the Southern Evangelical Seminary, appeared on the “Point of View” radio program, where he told host Kerby Anderson that he has been shocked by how much influence he and other Religious Right activists have had over the make-up of Trump’s administration.

“Some of my conservative friends and I, we have been pinching ourselves, are we hallucinating or is this actually happening?” Land said. “I know a good number of people on the transition team and I can tell you right now, about half of them, Kerby, think I’m liberal. I mean, these are very conservative people.”

http://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/even-richard-land-is-shocked-by-how-much-influence-the-religious-right-is-having-in-shaping-trumps-administration/

This Tain't Zoning Regulations, Cheetoini...

Ethics Schmethics...Get ready for the great fleecing...

Shaub pleaded with Trump to change his mind. “It’s important to understand that the President is now entering the world of public service,” he said. “He’s going to be asking his own appointees to make sacrifices. He’s going to be asking our men and women in uniform to risk their lives in conflicts around the world. So, no, I don’t think divestiture is too high a price to pay to be the President of the United States of America.”

Trump’s impulse is to cavalierly disregard ethical and democratic norms that he views as inconvenient.  

It's the same old developer's hustle

Drain the swamp without addressing the hydrology, build low-rent, sub-code houses and sell them before they sink and fall apart.

Aspiring to the Lowest Calling...

Sheldon Goldman, a professor at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and the leading academic expert on federal judicial appointments, calls the Senate's record over the past two years "the worst in American history in terms of obstruction and delay."

Yes, Children, there were dinosaurs in the Mesozoic and humans in the Anthropocene...

Have we entered the Anthropocene Era?

There is growing evidence that human activity has changed the Earth’s system to such an extent that we are now in a new geological age. 

This is according to members of the Anthropocene Working Group who will present their findings to the 35th International Geological Congress...