Sitting alongside Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, with whom he'd spent most of the day golfing, Trump took the call on a mobile phone at his table, which was set squarely in the middle of the private club's dining area. As Mar-a-Lago's wealthy members looked on from their tables, and with a keyboard player crooning in the background, Trump and Abe's evening meal quickly morphed into a strategy session, the decision-making on full view to fellow diners, who described it in detail to CNN.

There may be hope for us yet ...

According to two sources with direct knowledge of the situation, Lasswell was in effect phased out over a period of months from the paper. He took a book leave during the election following conflict with his boss Paul Gigot, the editorial page director, about the extent to which the page should run material sympathetic to Trump.

I'm shocked, I tell ya, shocked!

Michael Flynn reportedly misled the vice president about conversations with Russia. Sean Spicer has never found his stride. Kellyanne Conway is in Congress’s sights. Welcome to Survivor: West Wing.

According to the campaign’s Federal Election Commission filing, it paid $200,000 to Locke Lord on Dec. 27. Then, on Jan. 11, the plaintiffs dropped the case. They did not submit a settlement for the judge to approve or say why they were withdrawing their claims.

But as Democrats across the country consider how to respond to President Donald Trump, some progressive leaders, from grassroots organizers to the head of the pro-Hillary Clinton super PAC Priorities USA, are looking to North Carolina, of all states, as a model.

This is a wonderful piece on the Smothers Brothers; their show, their politics and the mold they broke.  It's also a good reminder that "something's happening here" lives on.

So welcome to Week Two of the Did-It-Matter-Meter. If the main theme of Trump’s wild first week was that it’s important to separate knee-jerk media freakouts from true signs of dramatic change, the main theme of his even wilder second week was that it’s hard to keep track of all the true signs of dramatic change when they’re all getting jumbled together.

When Hunter S. Thompson wrote about Nixon, he was responding to a man he saw as symbolic of his time, a kind of monster of his age. Nixon's personality represented this darkness that was at the heart of everything wrong with America at the time. And Trump is an equivalent figure in that way. But he's not the same kind of person as Nixon. Nixon had many levels to his personality; he was a thinker, well-educated, a schemer. Trump is just a bundle of disorganized urges.

Another very good reason to keep an eye on Trump and anything he does regarding the EPA.

A horrifying, yet somehow hopeful piece ... more than worth a read.

So before the progressive movement declares that it has a fully assembled Tea Party of its own, poised to neutralize Trump and take back Congress in 2018, it should pause and think hard about how best to build on this weekend’s success and how to avoid potential pitfalls. Here are six lessons learned: [...]

U.S. President Donald Trump's administration has moved in the past week to curb the flow of information from several government agencies involved in environmental issues in actions that may have been designed to discourage dissenting views.

Employees at the Environmental Protection Agency, the Interior Department, the Department of Agriculture and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) have seen directives from the newly minted leadership seeking to limit how they communicate to the public, according to multiple sources.

The role of major progressive donors, and of Brock himself, was scrambled by Clinton’s surprise defeat. Trump’s victory upended more than a decade of infrastructure-building on the left, funded in part by the Democracy Alliance, another group of donors. As the Florida gathering unfolded, the Women’s March on Washington was drawing historic crowds there and in other cities; a point of pride among organizers was how little big money had to do with it.