Trump is a throwback of the worst kind

It is astonishing sometimes to look back at the kinds of things that were considered acceptable in the past. What is worse is to see some of those attitudes making a comeback now. Mark Frauenfelder points to a post by someone known as Saint Hoax titled MAKING AMERICA MISOGYNISTIC AGAIN who has taken advertisements from the past that are horribly demeaning and abusive towards women and superimposed actual quotations from Donald Trump on them.
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The luxury of being a man on the internet

In maintaining this blog, I have to deal with the occasional commenter who tends to hijack the comments to pursue some pet issue, sometimes using a form of argumentation that I have now learned is called sealioning. Bloggers take different attitudes to this phenomenon. There are those who treat the blog platform as similar to their homes and all commenters as visitors. This results in relatively quick ejections for those who violate the rules of the house. I view this blog as more of an online magazine with me as the editor with the right to moderate comments but where the rules of behavior are less strict than those of a private home. I initially tried to treat the blog as a completely open platform where people were free to say what their liked but I found that my tolerance had its limits and I had to ban one commenter.
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The rise of anti-Semitic acts in the US

Every day brings with it fresh reports of acts of hate aimed at Jews in the US. ProPublica has been monitoring these acts as part of a project called Documenting Hate and has published a lengthy report, listing incidents ranging from swastikas painted on the homes and cars of people that had some kind of indicator that the owner was Jewish, to bomb threats.
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The danger in the way the Russian story is being covered

As a result of the way that the CIA leaks have fueled the coverage of the links between Donald Trump and his associates, partisan opinions about the CIA have shifted dramatically from the way it was perceived when this question was last polled in 2015

CIA favorability

The poll, which measured Republican and Democratic sentiment toward the CIA, showed that Democrats had started to view the CIA with a net favorability of 32%, compared with 4% net favorability for Republicans.

An NBC/WSJ poll from 2015 showed Republicans viewing the CIA with a net favorability of 27%, versus -4% from Democrats.

The divide in the latest poll was even steeper between Trump supporters and those who supported his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton. The CIA had net favorability of 39% among Clinton supporters in December, compared with 2% among Trump supporters.

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More on the WikiLeaks release of CIA files

I was surprised that the leaks from within the CIA of nearly 9,000 documents that WikiLeaks has labeled ‘Vault 7’ that revealed information about its spying methods on Americans and how they lost control of the systems it was using have not received much greater prominence in the news, though it is now receiving more scrutiny as both the FBI and CIA launch criminal investigations into the leaks.
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The phoniness of ‘being presidential’

It was disgusting to see how the media fawned over Donald Trump’s speech to the joint session of Congress. Simply for acting like a normal human being for a brief time, they gushed that he had suddenly become presidential. But as Trevor Noah astutely pointed out, Trump knows exactly how to fake the media into thinking he is presidential and has mocked them in the past about how easy it was to fool them. In the speech, he did exactly what he said he would do and they still fell for it.
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