In his State of the Union speech this week Donald Trump asked Congress to give him the power to purge cabinet agencies. He said:

I got this email a couple of days ago from Trump headquarters after I got off the air, it was 4:10 p.m. Pacific time: "Fred," (because I'm registered as Fred Flintstone with the Trump campaign)...

Chuck Butler does a daily newsletter called the Daily Pfennig - the German word for penny - and he talked about a Minsky moment in bonds in yesterday's newsletter.

So Donald Trump goes to Davos and the whole media in America is like, "whoa, he's hanging out with the globalists, how can he do that?"

I don't think that you can argue that a two-year-old decided to take a risk to come to this country with their parents, any more than you can argue that the African Americans decided to come over to the United States.

The international order is changing as a result of populism, and I would argue that the populism is a response to the disintegration all around the world in developed countries of the middle class, as the predatory class, the over class, the top 1% keeps taking more and more and more.

The New York Times has a piece by Max Fisher and Amanda Taub and it's a little video where they point out that over the last 200 years we've gone from basically no democracies in the world - or a couple, ours being one of the very first.

The Republicans have the power to out-message Democrats almost every time.

You find a majority of the people who show up on television are Republicans, the majority of the pundits who are on television are Republican-leaning or conservative, even on MSNBC.

The airwaves of this country are almost exclusively right-wing. You've got Fox so-called News.

The Southern Poverty Law Center is reminding us - and there was a great thread by SunLei over at Democratic Underground pointing this out, and thanks for the for the tip on that - that we're not paying atte

This is from Occupy Democrats: "Dear Trump: this is why Norwegians don't immigrate to America."

The World Happiness Rank for the United States, we're number 19 - Norway, number one.

The question that is constantly being asked, particularly on the talking heads on television, is "what do the Democrats have to do to regain political power?" What does it take?

There's one particular cancer that has attacked our body politic, and that cancer is money in politics. We tried to get that out of politics in 1973 after the Nixon scandals.

We passed some really strong laws. You can't give more than $1700 to any presidential candidate. You can't give more than $4,000 to a political party, all that stuff.

Is it time to bring a monarchy to the United States? Or is it time to end one?

The thing that you are not going to hear so much about in the corporate media is how we got to here. How is it that we have this man as our president?

The sales pitch that David Koch was running on in 1980 on the Libertarian ticket was that government is bad, corporations are good. You can trust corporations.

But the reality is that the government that we have, which perhaps millions of Americans have literally fought and died to create and protect - George Washington had three horses shot out from underneath him trying to create this government - should be of, by, and for we the people, to paraphrase Abraham Lincoln.