For all those pundits out there who were concerned that Trump wasn't "Presidential" enough to actually be President, I have some great news for you! This past week Trump wiped out any such fear by doing the most presidential thing that can possibly be imagined: Continuing the never-ending war in Afghanistan!

That's right, the longest war in the history of the United States is not coming to an end any time soon. And just in case you were still operating under the delusion that the current puppet figurehead was any different at all from any of the stuffed shirts who previously occupied the Oval Office, Trump is even copying Obama's failed 2009 "surge" strategy to keep the whole charade going for another 4 (or 8 or 12 or 200) years.

As Mark Perry notes in his article on the subject, quoting an unnamed Pentagon official who was privy to the deliberations on the plan:

"This Trump plan, at least so far as I understand it, sounds a lot like the kind of plan we've come up with again and again since the end of World War Two," a senior Pentagon officer says. "We're going to surge troops, reform the government we support and put pressure on our allies. In this building [the Pentagon] there's a hell of a lot of skepticism. And that's because we all know what this new strategy really means - and what it means is that the only way we can get out of Afghanistan is to get further in. You know, it seems to me that if there's one thing we've learned, it's that that doesn't work."

Bah! Work shmirk. The point is that copying Obama's failed "surge" strategy will look aggressive and manly and will pump even more of that Fed-issued fiat debt paper into the pockets of the Pentagon and their contractor buddies, so now Trump is officially "Presidential" according to all the neocons on the right and the warmongers on the left.

Professor Thorsten Polleit said the EU project had once been a "very wise concept" for fostering peace and cooperation but became far too politicised and is now heading in the "wrong direction" of pursuing ever greater centralisation.

In an interview with express.co.uk the eminent German academic and financier urged European leaders to "start decentralising" if they want to save the bloc from oblivion and warned their efforts to prop up the single currency are doomed to fail.

Professor Polleit also predicted that Britain will emerge from Brexit in better shape than the EU, because it will be able to liberalise its economy to attract greater investment and pursue genuinely free trade across the globe.

In contrast, he painted the EU's single market as an unnecessarily burdensome beast, saying it was stifling European innovation with red tape and driving up prices by putting up protectionist barriers to the rest of the world.

He said: "The first signs are that the euro currency has failed and it's only in place because the ECB has dropped interest rates to zero. Under normal conditions it would've collapsed already. It can't compete - it's a dead end policy.

Gary Cohn, President Donald Trump's top economic adviser, has criticized the White House's response to Charlottesville, Virginia, in his first public remarks about the deadly violence earlier this month.

"This administration can and must do better in consistently and unequivocally condemning these groups and do everything we can to heal the deep divisions that exist in our communities," Cohn told the Financial Times.

Cohn said he felt compelled "to voice my distress over the events of the last two weeks."

Cohn, who is Jewish, was reportedly "disgusted" and "appalled" with Trump's response to white nationalists' role in the violence in Charlottesville. The president blamed "both sides" for the violence, which left one counterprotester dead.

"Citizens standing up for equality and freedom can never be equated with white supremacists, neo-Nazis, and the KKK," Cohn told the FT.

The United States and South Korea are currently engaged in large-scale, joint-military war games that simulate an invasion of the North, the destruction of the DPRK's nuclear weapons sites, and a "decapitation operation" to take out the supreme leader, Kim Jong-un. The objective of the operation is to intensify tensions between North and South thereby justifying the continued US occupation of the peninsula and the permanent division of the country.

Imagine if North Korea decided to conduct massive "live fire" military drills, accompanied by a Chinese naval flotilla, just three miles off the coast of California. And, let's say, they decided to send formations of strategic high-altitude aircraft loaded with nuclear bombs to fly along the Canada and Mexico borders while tens of thousands of combat troops accompanied by hundreds of tanks and armored vehicles rehearsed a "shock and awe" type blitz onto US territory where they would immediately crush the defending army, level cities and critical civilian infrastructure, and topple the regime in Washington.

Do you think the Trump administration would dismiss the North's provocative war games as merely "defensive maneuvers" or would they see them as a clear and present danger to US national security warranting a prompt and muscular response from the military?

The "West Wing Democrats" in the White House are eager to sacrifice President Donald Trump's top campaign promise in exchange for Democratic approval of the tax cuts sought by wealthy donors and business interests, according to an article in Politico.

In an August 23 article about Trump's push to get funding for an extended border wall, Politico described the lack of support for the wall among his business-affiliated aides:

Few staff members in the West Wing are as concerned about it [as the President], senior administration officials said.

Some in the White House have urged Trump not to focus as much on the wall, try to pass a clean debt-ceiling bill and move to tax reform. "You have barely anyone here saying, 'Wall, wall, we have to get the wall at all costs,'" one White House official said.
...
Two people who have spoken to Trump said he sees not building the wall as a personal embarrassment - and that he has shown more interest in building the wall than in other issues, like the upcoming budget negotiations. "You don't want a government shutdown," the White House official said. "He is told that. He says, 'I want money for the wall.'"
Politico article here.

Last week Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) met with Julian Assange in a three hour meeting private gathering at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London.

Following the meeting Rep. Rohrabacher spoke with The Hill:

"Our three-hour meeting covered a wide array of issues, including the WikiLeaks exposure of the DNC [Democratic National Committee] emails during last year's presidential election," Rohrabacher said, "Julian emphatically stated that the Russians were not involved in the hacking or disclosure of those emails."

Pressed for more detail on the source of the documents, Rohrabacher said he had information to share privately with President Trump.

"Julian also indicated that he is open to further discussions regarding specific information about the DNC email incident that is currently unknown to the public," he said.

On Friday Rep. Rohrabacher joined Tucker Carlson to discuss his meeting with Julian Assange. Rohrbacher told Tucker Assange knows who provided him the information and it was likely a Democrat party insider. Rep. Rohrabacher:

He was adamant that the Russians played no role in the disclosure of the Democratic National Committee their emails that were exposed during the election. They played no role... The liberal left in this country had every reason to lie about it... The whole thing is a fraud, is a con job.

While there is talk about shutting down the federal government in the news again, the fact of the matter is the Democrats in the Senate have been trying to effectively shut down the government since President Trump started in office. They have done so by refusing to confirm or delaying the confirmation of many of President Trump's nominees for Executive Branch positions and judicial vacancies.

How bad is the situation? Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell recently stated: "If this continues it will take us more than 11 years to confirm the remaining presidential appointment[s]." Statistics back this up, with almost four times as many nominees confirmed during President Obama's first six months as President Trump's.

Starting on Thursday, Google will police YouTube like it never has before, adding warnings and disabling advertising on videos that the company determines crosses its new threshold for offensive content.

YouTube isn't removing the selected videos, but is instead setting new restrictions on viewing, sharing and making money on them. A note detailing the changes will go to producers of the affected videos on Thursday, according to a spokeswoman for the Alphabet Inc. company.

Google outlined these moves in June, but the implementation comes as debate about extremism and political speech is front-and-center in the national spotlight -- and when tech giants like Google and Facebook Inc. face deeper scrutiny over how they moderate information distributed through their digital services.


"These videos will have less engagement and be harder to find," Kent Walker, Google's general counsel, wrote about the plans in a June blog post. "This strikes the right balance between free expression and access to information without promoting extremely offensive viewpoints." A Google spokeswoman declined to comment further on the changes.

Trump's Afghanistan plan is neither a game-changer nor a sharp departure from what we've seen since the George W. Bush administration. But it creates avenues for India to play a larger role in Afghanistan and is likely to cement the Pakistan-China alliance.

Sixteen years into the US' longest continuing war, déjà vu and quagmire are the two words that best characterize what Bush had considered a first front in a global "campaign against terrorism" and what Barack Obama had termed a "war of necessity."

Now Trump has jumped on to this bandwagon by arguing that "a hasty withdrawal would create a vacuum for terrorists" and that "our troops will fight to win" and secure "an honorable and enduring outcome." With an estimated 4,000 extra American troops slated to be dispatched to Afghanistan, the US will have about 13,000 boots on the ground for an indefinite time span.

So, CNN's Don Lemon had a meltdown over President Trump's rally in Phoenix. He called it insane, the panel questioned the president's fitness for office and stability, and wondered if Trump was a national security threat. Oh, and Trump is clearly trying to start a civil war or something. Now, we have Barbara McQuade, the former U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan, telling MSNBC's Stephanie Ruhle that Trump going after Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell could constitute obstruction of justice regarding the Russia probe headed by Robert Mueller. Trump said that McConnell didn't do enough to protect him from the investigation.

"He went after the media, he went after Congress, he went after basically anyone else who wronged him - is that going to affect the Mueller investigation in any way, Barbara?" asked Ruhle.