What does a TRUMP presidency look like?

[crazy canuck]

Canadians have historically based troops in Europe because it has always been wise to assist our closest neighour, ally and trading partner with that task.  I don't think we have done it out of the goodness of our hearts either.

People have a tendency to forget that NATO isn't just about protecting economic and political allies from external threats, but also from having to go back and fucking kill them again.
Don't know about the rest of you, but there were a couple generations in my family that got a little tired of that shit, dropping everything to go fucking kill Krauts.

Euroweenism is annoying as fuck all, but I'd rather have a continent full of peacenik bankers and manufacturers locked up in a collective security treaty than watching them kill each other and Jews.  That shit gets old.

   

I agree, but we live in a world where that sort of thought is too sophisticated for a tweet and we are the last generation to know the fear of a what would happen if NATO was not strong. 

[jimmy olsen]

Nation slowly returning to its sense five months too late.

Gallup
37% Approve
58% Disapprove
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/trump-approval-ratings/

Josh Jordan
✔  ‎@NumbersMuncher 

Gallup- Job approval upon hitting 60 days in office:

Carter 75
Reagan 60
HW Bush 56
Clinton 53
W Bush 58
Obama 63

Trump... 37

Josh Jordan
✔  ‎@NumbersMuncher 

Gallup- Job *disapproval* upon hitting 60 days in office:

Carter 9
Reagan 24
HW Bush 16
Clinton 34
W Bush 29
Obama 26

Trump... 58

[jimmy olsen]

Some good stuff from electoral-vote.com

Goodbye RyanCare, Hello TrumpCare

President Donald Trump's personal intervention in getting House conservatives to drop their opposition to the AHCA bill means he owns it now, for better or worse. If it passes Congress and he signs it, he can (and will) rightly take much of the credit for getting it passed. However, to voters who lose their healthcare as a result, he is one who will get the blame. And that group includes a fair number of people who voted for him.

After making a few changes to the healthcare bill that will reduce the number of people who will qualify for Medicaid (and also reduce the amount of medical care each one will get), the Republicans have decided to hold a vote on the bill Thursday, without waiting for the CBO to score the new bill. It's not hard to understand why they are in such a hurry. The Medicaid changes are going to increase the number of people who will lose their insurance. If the Republicans thought that "24 Million will lose insurance" was a bad headline, "30 Million will lose insurance" doesn't sound any better.

The tweaks to the bill make it more palatable to the House Freedom Caucus but less palatable to House moderates, whose votes are also needed. If Trump works the phones until Thursday, as he has promised, he could try to buy off the moderates one by one with minor tweaks here and there. If a member of Congress thinks that a tax credit of $4,000 isn't enough for a senior, Trump could offer $4,500, but maybe only for a narrower group of people. If the whip counts are accurate, Trump will give up as little ground as possible and we may see the bill pass with exactly the 216 votes needed (due to House vacancies, 216 is enough). (V)

Muslim Ban Will Have Unintended Consequences
Here's a story that brings together two of the current priorities of the Trump Administration, and not in a good way. As the New York Times' Miriam Jordan reports, rural America is coping with a severe shortage of physicians. For most American-born doctors, there is much more appeal in staying in the big town as a GP, or in becoming a specialist. Neither of those choices leads to a career practicing medicine in small-town America. As a workaround, many smaller towns and cities have taken to recruiting doctors from other countries, including those of the Middle East.

Now, those small towns are faced with a double-whammy. Doctors from many countries, even those not included in the list of six majority-Muslim countries, are having trouble getting visas, or else have to be nervous about committing to a career in the United States, where the rules could literally change at a moment's notice. Further, a possible reduction of government funding may deprive poorer, more rural states of the resources they need to attract these physicians in the first place. The Times story, for example, relates the tale of nine counties in Montana that do not count a single doctor among their residents. For nine months, the state's Benefis Health System has been investing time and money in recruiting a single doctor from Romania (hardly a hotbed of terrorist activity). That doctor has yet to set up shop, and now neither she nor Benefis is entirely confident that she ever will.

This story is a small part of a much bigger picture. During the campaign season, it is all good and well to make bugaboos of ObamaCare, or Muslim immigrants, or undocumented Mexicans, or Chinese currency manipulation, or the like. However, voters do not respond to abstractions nearly as much as they respond to impacts on their day-to-day quality of life. If, in four years, Trump is left with a legacy of, "He stopped the Muslims from coming, and slashed government spending, but your mother died for lack of medical care," that is going to be a net negative for him. And given that it's rural areas (aka Trump strongholds) that are going to be most affected by these policies, it will make his re-election bid that much tougher. (Z)

Russian Company that Paid Flynn Was Deemed "Unsuitable" by the Pentagon
Former national security adviser Michael Flynn received over $50,000 from various Russian sources in 2015 and 2016. One of the sources was a Russian air cargo carrier that is on the Pentagon's blacklist. It is not entirely clear what the carrier did to get into trouble with the Pentagon, but it was hit by U.S. sanctions, possibly for spreading missile technology.

An affiliate of the airline, Volga-Dnepr, paid Flynn $11,250 for one speech in August 2015. Flynn was a retired lieutenant general at the time so the speech and payment were legal, if a bit unusual. Four months later, Flynn was seated next to Vladimir Putin at a dinner for Russia Today, which paid Flynn $45,000 for a speech. When asked what is going here, an aide to the House Oversight Committee said: "Every day we are learning new information about General Flynn's ties to Russia, and we will continue to gather as much information as possible." It is probably safe to say that all we see now is the tip of the iceberg. (V)

Russians Have Invested $100 Million in Trump Buildings
In 2008, Donald Trump, Jr., said that money is pouring in from Russia. Thanks to some investgating from Reuters, we may now have a little better idea of what he may have meant. At least 63 people with Russian passports bought $98.4 million worth of property in seven Trump-branded buildings in South Florida alone. Many were politically connected businessmen, but some were one or two notches further down the totem pole. None appear to belong to Vladimir Putin's inner circle.

However this estimate may be far too conservative because fully one-third of the 2,044 units were purchased by limited liability companies, so the true buyer could not be determined. Most of the units cost over $1 million and some were purchased with cash. (V)

Gorsuch Is Not a Slam Dunk

It is unclear, as yet, what the Democrats' plans are regarding Donald Trump's SCOTUS nominee, Neil Gorsuch. If they (and the two independents) withhold support as a bloc, however, then Gorsuch could only afford two GOP defections. And, as it turns out, there may be more than two GOP Senators that are reluctant to vote for him.

What is the problem? Well, on the surface, it is Gorsuch's religion. Though raised a Catholic, he now worships at St. John's Episcopal Church in Boulder, Colorado, which is a very liberal church. Specifically, they have somehow concluded that Jesus preached tolerance, and so St. John's does not approve of anti-Muslim rhetoric or homophobia. They also prefer peace over war, and celebrate the "dignity of every human being." Undoubtedly, the Lamb of God is rolling over in his grave due to these Christians who seem to have actually studied his ministry and have tried to understand the spirit in which he preached. In any case, Gorsuch's choice of congregation has some conservatives up in arms. For example, American Family Radio Network radio host Bryan Fischer has tried to rally his listeners to oppose the nominee, tweeting that, "Gorsuch attends a church that is rabidly pro-gay, pro-Muslim, pro-green, and anti-Trump."

The Founding Fathers would have been horrified by the notion of a religious test for SCOTUS justices, but that's the world we live in today. And the real issue is not Gorsuch's religion, per se, it's that his religious beliefs may be a hint that he's not a "true" conservative. Certainly, there have been a number of instances in the past half century or so where a Republican appointee became part of the "liberal" wing of the court: John Paul Stevens, Harry Blackmun, Earl Warren and—on some occasions—Anthony Kennedy and Sandra Day O'Connor. That may say something more about the merits of the cases being considered, rather than anything else, since there really hasn't been a case of a Democratic-appointed justice who turned out to be a closet conservative. By all indications, Gorsuch can be expected to rule from a center-right perspective, not too far removed from Chief Justice John Roberts. If Senate Republicans insist on someone who is more orthodox, they could open themselves up to a nasty fight with the President, while at the same time giving Democrats carte blanche to filibuster the replacement nominee. (Z)

West Virginia Newspaper Slams Trump

Donald Trump squashed Hillary Clinton like a bug in West Virginia, 69% to 26%. The only state where his margin was bigger was Wyoming. That was then, this is now:



As we noted yesterday, much in Trump's budget hits poor rural voters very hard. West Virginia is a poor rural state and the Charleston Gazette-Mail, the largest newspaper in the state, noticed. The article cites many of the things the Appalachian Regional Commission has done for the state, including strengthening the infrastructure (transportation, broadband, water, and sewer projects), training people in entrepreneurship, building community health centers, and more. Trump's budget defunds the Commission and the paper is not pleased. What he sees as waste, it sees as vital services. This is a simple reminder of why it is so hard to change the federal budget: every single item that is in there is present because some senators and representatives want it in there. If other newspapers and media outlets in the heart of Trump country also start attacking him, at the very least it will put pressure on senators and representatives to fight him. (V)

[jimmy olsen]

Political officers, lovely...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/powerpost/white-house-installs-political-aides-at-cabinet-agencies-to-be-trumps-eyes-and-ears/2017/03/19/68419f0e-08da-11e7-93dc-00f9bdd74ed1_story.html?tid=sm_tw&utm_term=.2bfb594dab0a

White House installs political aides at Cabinet agencies to be Trump's eyes and ears

By Lisa Rein and Juliet Eilperin March 19 at 8:15 PM
The political appointee charged with keeping watch over Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt and his aides has offered unsolicited advice so often that after just four weeks on the job, Pruitt has shut him out of many staff meetings, according to two senior administration officials.

At the Pentagon, they're privately calling the former Marine officer and fighter pilot who's supposed to keep his eye on Defense Secretary Jim Mattis "the commissar," according to a high-ranking defense official with knowledge of the situation. It's a reference to Soviet-era Communist Party officials who were assigned to military units to ensure their commanders remained loyal.

Most members of President Trump's Cabinet do not yet have leadership teams in place or even nominees for top deputies. But they do have an influential coterie of senior aides installed by the White House who are charged — above all — with monitoring the secretaries' loyalty, according to eight officials in and outside the administration.

This shadow government of political appointees with the title of senior White House adviser is embedded at every Cabinet agency, with offices in or just outside the secretary's suite. The White House has installed at least 16 of the advisers at departments including Energy and Health and Human Services and at some smaller agencies such as NASA, according to records first obtained by ProPublica through a Freedom of Information Act request.

These aides report not to the secretary, but to the Office of Cabinet Affairs, which is overseen by Rick Dearborn, a White House deputy chief of staff, according to administration officials. A top Dearborn aide, John Mashburn, leads a weekly conference call with the advisers, who are in constant contact with the White House.

The aides act as a go-between on policy matters for the agencies and the White House. Behind the scenes, though, they're on another mission: to monitor Cabinet leaders and their top staffs to make sure they carry out the president's agenda and don't stray too far from the White House's talking points, said several officials with knowledge of the arrangement.


"Especially when you're starting a government and you have a changeover of parties when policies are going to be dramatically different, I think it's something that's smart," said Barry Bennett, a former Trump campaign adviser. "Somebody needs to be there as the White House's man on the scene. Because there's no senior staff yet, they're functioning as the White House's voice and ears in these departments."

[Bannon vows daily fight for 'deconstruction of the administrative state']

The arrangement is unusual. It wasn't used by presidents Barack Obama, George W. Bush or Bill Clinton. And it's also different from the traditional liaisons who shepherd the White House's political appointees to the various agencies. Critics say the competing chains of command eventually will breed mistrust, chaos and inefficiency — especially as new department heads build their staffs.

"It's healthy when there is some daylight between the president's Cabinet and the White House, with room for some disagreement," said Kevin Knobloch, who was chief of staff under Obama to then-Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz.

"That can only happen when agency secretaries have their own team, who report directly to them," he said. "Otherwise it comes off as not a ringing vote of confidence in the Cabinet."

The White House declined to comment about the appointees on the record, citing the confidentiality of personnel matters and internal operations. But a White House official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said that instead of holding agencies accountable, the appointees technically report to each department's chief of staff or to the secretaries themselves.

"The advisers were a main point of contact in the early transition process as the agencies were being set up," the official said in an email. "Like every White House, this one is in frequent contact with agencies and departments."

The advisers' power may be heightened by the lack of complete leadership teams at many departments.

The long delay in getting Trump's nominee for agriculture secretary, former Georgia governor Sonny Perdue (R), confirmed means that Sam Clovis, who was a Trump campaign adviser, and transition team leader Brian Klippenstein continue to serve as the agency's top political appointees.


"He and Brian Klippenstein are just a handful of appointees on the ground and they're doing a big part of the day-to-day work," said Dale Moore, the American Farm Bureau Federation's public policy executive director.

Every president tries to assert authority over the executive branch, with varying degrees of success.

The Obama White House kept tight control over agencies, telling senior officials what they could publicly disclose about their own department's operations. Foreign policy became so centralized that State Department and Defense Department officials complained privately that they felt micromanaged on key decisions.

After then-Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. made some political gaffes, Obama aides wanted to install a political aide at the Justice Department to monitor him. But Holder was furious about the intrusion and blocked the plan. During his tenure as defense secretary, Robert M. Gates pushed back against a top official the White House wanted at the Pentagon to guide Asia policy, wary of having someone so close to the president in his orbit.

Former House speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.), a Trump adviser, said the president needs to dispatch political allies to the agencies to monitor a bureaucracy that's being targeted for reduction.

"If you drain the swamp, you better have someone who watches over the alligators," Gingrich said. "These people are actively trying to undermine the new government. And they think it's their moral obligation to do so."

At the Transportation Department, former Pennsylvania lobbyist Anthony Pugliese shuttles back and forth between the White House and DOT headquarters on New Jersey Avenue SE, according to an agency official. His office is just 20 paces from Secretary Elaine Chao's, the official said.

Day to day, Pugliese and his counterparts inform Cabinet officials of priorities the White House wants them to keep on their radar. They oversee the arrival of new political appointees and coordinate with the West Wing on the agency's direction.


The arrangement is collegial in some offices, including at Transportation and Interior, where aides to Chao and Secretary Ryan Zinke insisted that the White House advisers work as part of the team, attending meetings, helping form an infrastructure task force and designing policy on public lands.

Tensions between the White House and the Cabinet already have spilled into public view. Mattis, the defense secretary, and Homeland Security Secretary John F. Kelly were caught unaware in January by the scope of the administration's first travel ban. The president has been furious about leaks on national security matters.

Trump does not have long-standing relationships or close personal ties with most leaders in his Cabinet. That's why gauging their loyalty is so important, said officials who described the structure.

"A lot of these [Cabinet heads] have come from roles where they're the executive," said a senior administration official not authorized to publicly discuss the White House advisers. "But when you become head of an agency, you're no longer your own person. It's a hard change for a lot of these people: They're not completely autonomous anymore."

Many of the senior advisers lack expertise in their agency's mission and came from the business or political world. They include Trump campaign aides, former Republican National Committee staffers, conservative activists, lobbyists and entrepreneurs.

At Homeland Security, for example, is Frank Wuc o, a former security consultant whose blog Red Wire describes the terrorist threat as rooted in Islam. To explain the threat, he appears on YouTube as a fictional jihadist.

Matt Mowers, a former aide to New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) who was Trump's national field coordinator before landing at the State Department as senior adviser, said through a spokesman that he "leads interagency coordination" among the White House, agencies and the National Security Council and "coordinates on policy and personnel."

Mowers sits at the edge of Secretary of State Rex Tillerson's seventh-floor suite, dubbed Mahogany Row. But neither Tillerson nor his chief of staff are his direct boss.


Many of the advisers arrived from the White House with the small groups known as "beachhead teams" that started work on Jan. 20. One of the mandates at the top of their to-do list now, Bennett said, is making sure the agencies are identifying regulations the administration wants to roll back and vetting any new ones.

[Trump establishes task forces to eliminate 'job killing regulations']

At the Pentagon, Brett Byers acts as a go-between between Mattis's team and the White House, largely on "bureaucratic" matters, said an official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss personnel issues.

Career officials who work near the "E" ring offices occupied by senior Pentagon staff, suspicious that Byers is not directly on Mattis's team, came up with the Soviet-era moniker "commissar" to describe him, someone familiar with their thinking said.

Elsewhere, resentment has built up. Pruitt is bristling at the presence of former Washington state senator Don Benton, who ran the president's Washington state campaign and is now the EPA's senior White House adviser, said two senior administration officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss personnel matters.

These officials said Benton piped up so frequently during policy discussions that he had been disinvited from many of them. One of the officials described the situation as akin to an episode of the HBO comedy series "Veep."

Trump's approach may not be so different from Abraham Lincoln's. Coming into the White House after more than a ­half-century of Democrats in power, Lincoln worked swiftly to oust hostile bureaucrats and appoint allies. But he still had to deal with an Army led by many senior officers who sympathized with the South, as well as a government beset by internal divisions.

Gettysburg College professor Allen C. Guelzo described Lincoln as "surrounded by smiling enemies," which prompted him to embed his friends into army camps as well as some federal departments.

"I think that presidents actually do this more than it appears," said Guelzo, adding that Lincoln dispatched Quartermaster General of the U.S. Army Montgomery Meigs to circulate among the Army of the Potomac to pick up any negative "doggerel" or insults officers made about him.

Ashley Halsey III and Missy Ryan contributed to this report.

Read more at PowerPost

[CountDeMoney]

West Virginia Newspaper Slams Trump

Donald Trump squashed Hillary Clinton like a bug in West Virginia, 69% to 26%. The only state where his margin was bigger was Wyoming. That was then, this is now:

Thing is, there's a substantial number of his supporters who would cut their own throats than benefit from something That Nigger passed or allow That Cunt to have continued his policies.  I suspect there won't be much of a drop-off of support in WV at all in the long run.

Appalachian Regional Commission?

[Syt]

Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump  1h

What about all of the contact with the Clinton campaign and the Russians? Also, is it true that the DNC would not let the FBI in to look?


Donald J. Trump‏ @realDonaldTrump  2h

Just heard Fake News CNN is doing polls again despite the fact that their election polls were a WAY OFF disaster. Much higher ratings at Fox

[alfred russel]

Do you think the Americans base their troops on foreign territory out of the goodness of their own hearts or do you think there is some self interest involved?

Silly question, I know, but it is something that the analysis that people should pay for the privilege of Americans "protecting" them misses completely.  If the Americans did not benefit from projecting military strength would they do it?  I don't think so.

Canadians have historically based troops in Europe because it has always been wise to assist our closest neighour, ally and trading partner with that task.  I don't think we have done it out of the goodness of our hearts either.

As in any democratic society, there are multiple motivations. I think probably the four biggest, in no particular order:

-self interest
-inertia after the cold war
-altruism (defending / promoting democracy)
-policy capture by the military industrial complex to justify their existence

[OttoVonBismarck]

Do you think the Americans base their troops on foreign territory out of the goodness of their own hearts or do you think there is some self interest involved?

Silly question, I know, but it is something that the analysis that people should pay for the privilege of Americans "protecting" them misses completely.  If the Americans did not benefit from projecting military strength would they do it?  I don't think so.

Canadians have historically based troops in Europe because it has always been wise to assist our closest neighour, ally and trading partner with that task.  I don't think we have done it out of the goodness of our hearts either.

I think it's a mixed bag, and I do think that Trump's idiocy is at least based on a "close misunderstanding" of reality. It obviously was beneficial to both the United States and Europe for the U.S. to have significant troop presences in Europe. I notice many Europeans act like it solely benefited the U.S. for some reason, which is silly--all of Germany at the very least would likely have been in the Soviet sphere if we hadn't decided to keep a significant European presence, I think that would've had obvious bad outcomes for Europe as a whole that we'd still be seeing today.

But at the same time, when we created NATO we used terms like "mutual defense", and I do think there are questions about whether Europe has traditionally actually maintained military capacity to defend themselves let alone other member states of the alliance. For pretty much all of its history NATO has basically been either the promise that America would fall on its sword (i.e. use its nuclear arsenal) in a battle with the Soviet Union or as a vehicle for military interventionism (which is fine I guess, but obviously not the original intent of NATO.)

I would argue in the modern era, with no Cold War, no serious military threat to NATO member states from Russia--and to be frank, no I don't think the threat to the Baltics is significant, and the threat to non-NATO members like Georgia/Ukraine/Moldova is outside NATO's mandate--NATO's primary function is operating as a tool for Western military intervention. That's how it was used in Afghanistan and how it's been used in interventions in North Africa and the Levant in recent years. I'll note that after the attacks in Paris, Francois Hollande publicly called on the United States to increase its efforts against ISIS in Syria and Iraq. That was a concerning moment for me, because you had a NATO member who hasn't hit the agreed upon 2% GDP defense spending in some time whining to the United States to commit itself more to a military intervention against a country not attacking another NATO member, when the U.S. was already significantly more involved than France itself was.

That suggests to me, that to a degree, NATO is sometimes functioning as a vehicle for Europe to utilize the U.S. military might for overseas interventions. At the end of the day I don't mind, and in fact support, the West working together on things like Libya and Syria, but I also think given this more interventionist mandate for NATO, other NATO countries need to develop force projection of their own because I certainly don't want NATO to just be a vehicle for a country that spends 1% of GDP on its military to pressure my country into bombing a third country that hasn't attacked one of our allies. Basically if the West is going to do military interventions, I think we all need roughly the same skin in the game, the Cold War realities are gone now, and if anything Europe has significantly greater interest in issues like the Syrian conflict than the United States, but is devoting fewer resources to resolving it. This is a bit different from the Soviet Union problem, where the U.S. was quite aggressively locked in a global conflict with the USSR and several European states were closer to neutrality (albeit slightly on the side of hostile neutrality.)

I think looking at it just in terms of money isn't really ideal though, I see the necessity for the % of GDP goal, but like I said, it's really more important that NATO members other than the United States develop a capacity to project force. If they don't, or won't, I think the U.S. is right to be skeptical of projecting force on behalf of NATO.

[CountDeMoney]

That suggests to me, that to a degree, NATO is sometimes functioning as a vehicle for Europe to utilize the U.S. military might for overseas interventions.

And to what degree, exactly, is that, Mr. International Cabal?

[garbon]

I don't think they could force us to project force on behalf of NATO if we don't want to and France whining is hardly a compelling reason to start castigating our allies. Particularly not from a president who wants to increase US defense spending.

[CountDeMoney]

I don't think they could force us to project force on behalf of NATO if we don't want to and France whining is hardly a compelling reason to start castigating our allies. Particularly not from a president who wants to increase US defense spending.

France goes off and does its own thing when it wants anyway, e.g., Africa.  It's never used NATO to pursue its interests in its former colonial sphere.  And, quite frankly, they weren't the only ones "whining" about U.S. inaction over Syria;  most of the western world was, too.  That's what happens when the Indispensable Nation refuses to lead.

[Syt]

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/live/2017/mar/20/donald-trump-campaign-russia-fbi-nsa-live?page=with:block-58cff231e4b0a411e9ab6ad7#block-58cff231e4b0a411e9ab6ad7

Guardian national security editor Spencer Ackerman on "an extraordinary development" at the hearing:

The leaks that Republicans are citing as damaging to the Trump administration are having an effect that for years was unthinkable: threatening the reauthorization of a key NSA authority for mass surveillance.

That authority is known as Section 702. Created in 2008, it is the wellspring of legal authorization for NSA's Prism program and its "Upstream" vacuuming of data transiting over the internet. All this occurs without warrants, and, though ostensibly targeting foreign activity oversees, necessarily involves the "incidental" collection of Americans' communications.

Section 702 is up for reauthorization in December. Civil libertarians want it to die on 31 December. Ron Wyden, a Democrat on the Senate intelligence committee, has fought unsuccessfully for years for the NSA to disclose how many Americans' communications have been swept up under 702.

Republicans on the intelligence committees are typically the champions of 702. That was before leaks that Trump has attributed to the intelligence agencies concerning his team's ties to Russia undermined Trump's lines that all this is malicious politicized claims.

Trey Gowdy, formerly of the Benghazi inquiry, said the leaks "jeopardize Americans' trust in the surveillance programs." Florida Republican Tom Rooney, who said he supports 702, said "it is very difficult to keep that sacred trust" should the NSA discover that it leaked Michael Flynn or anyone else's name and didn't hold anyone accountable. Chairman Devin Nunes has already speculatedthat 702 may not be reauthorized.

This is an extraordinary development. The Snowden revelations, of mass surveillance that implicated the privacy of ordinary Americans, did not budge anyone on the committees, Democrat or Republican, off support for 702. Causing the resignation of Trump's national security adviser, it turns out, might.

A supreme irony in all of this is that should NSA have collected Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak's conversation with Flynn, it wouldn't have done it under 702, but under a different component of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. NSA director Mike Rogers gingerly clarified that collection within the United States falls under a different authority (title 1 of FISA, to specify).

[celedhring]

Once we entered NATO we really didn't gain much from having US bases on our soil, besides the stimulus to their local economies. We previously got some hefty foreign aid during the 1960s and 70s in exchange for them. The funny thing about Spain's NATO membership is that Ceuta and Melilla are excluded from article 5, and those are the only bits of Spain that will ever need defending. So if Morocco wanted to pull another Green March, those US soldiers would sit on their arses.

That said, I don't object to Spain's NATO membership, and I don't think it has to specifically benefit us in order to justify us being there. Better together and all that thing.

[OttoVonBismarck]

I don't think they could force us to project force on behalf of NATO if we don't want to and France whining is hardly a compelling reason to start castigating our allies. Particularly not from a president who wants to increase US defense spending.

Maybe, I think it's at least fair to say Obama was dragged kicking and screaming by NATO allies in to the Libyan intervention, just as a more clear cut example. I think it's a little naive to just assume our European allies lack levers to try and compel action, certainly they can't force us to do anything, but nor can we force them. But we likewise have levers, I mean several Euro countries have been ramping up defense spending at least in part because of urging from the US.

[derspiess]

Maybe, I think it's at least fair to say Obama was dragged kicking and screaming by NATO allies in to the Libyan intervention,

IIRC they had help from Hillary Clinton, Samantha Powers, and Susan Rice.