This is another reminder to watch what he is doing and try and block out the crazy coming out of his mouth.

"The director of national intelligence and the joint chiefs will attend when discussions pertain to their areas."

This is not only dangerous and crazy, I think it is illegal.

here is a pretty good list of what he has done this week. Most of this is worthless bullshit that has no authority things that require congressional action. Some it has consequences.

Here’s Every Action Trump Took In His First Week As POTUS
Not what he said. Not what he lied about. What he actually did

Here's another thing I'm wondering: Brietbart is a massive conspiracy site, so unless Bannon is playing a con on its readers, he bought into a lot of that shit (i.e. Jade Helm). Assuming that's so, how long can he sit on classified information before leaking, blabbing, or otherwise publishing it in the name of "wake up sheeple?" Further, how many times can he do it before even the GOP has to prosecute?

Bannon is largely backed by the billionaire Robert Mercer. Another one of the Dark Money players. He invests heavily into conspiracy theory type projects which have a tendency to poison the well of civil and intelligent discourse. He was one of the major bankrollers of the "Ground Zero mosque" bullshit. Bannon's passion is probably less the conspiracy theories and more the white supremacy and anti-government agenda his conspiracy theories give him the platform to push.

On the plus side, I'm seeing more and more media outlets taking on the importance of facts and more concrete language. We're not quite to the point of calling Trump/Bannon statements "lies," but I'm hearing "not supported by facts," "untrue," etc. a lot more than I did before.

In the same way that even China realized it needed to start paying attention to the environment, I'm seeing plenty of news outlets discovering these "fact" things and stating them as such with greater emphasis. I'll be interested to see if it's only coming from journalists or if the suits are perhaps wondering if that's something they should "invest" in (either for ratings or to not make things worse).

I don't have any illusions that there will ever be 100% non-bias in the media, but I admired it when, say, a pre-Murdoch Wall Street Journal could be conservative in its editorials, but it rarely let that bleed over into the actual news.

It helps that they're going about this with all the subtlety of a hand grenade in a box of Corn Flakes; if they were actually clever about this, they'd probably be able to easily co-opt the media. By jumping straight to crazytown, even those who would've been "useful idiots" along the way are given pause. It's like a comedy sketch where someone gets promoted to CEO and their first orders are to kill all the mail room staff and implement a nude dress code for those matching a "sexy-hot" metric. Had they done that gradually, it might have worked, but damn if that one person in cube 13 wouldn't look good nekkid right now.

It seems like the highest ranking military officer in the country and the most informed intelligence officer in the country should probably be in on every National Security Council meeting. But maybe that's just me.

Sorry for the accidental -1 HP Lovekraftwerk. It's a + in my heart. <3

The people pulling Trump's strings have one goal: the destruction of our democracy.

Were I writing this as a novel, I'd have to ask, "to what end?"

"Revenge" seems to be the only thing I can think of. These men are all fairly-to-obscenely successful, so I can only think that their primary motivator is to somehow hurt people they think have wronged them. What's worse, they appear to want to hurt whole segments of the population based on myths they've constructed about "the other" and how "they" have been trying to do bad things to them all their lives or some story like that.

I say that because there's no way the U.S. would stay prosperous and a great place to live, even for the rich, if these guys start wrecking everything. They would've lived in nice houses and everything no matter what, but this way they get to see the skies lit by constant fires, I guess?

It's pathological. If there's some other endgame apart from maybe a little more short-term monetary gain, I'm not sure what it is. The only other option is real mental illness, and we've got the Joker in the White House.

Seems totally reasonable, since Bannon's far more likely to tell Trump exactly what he wants to hear.

You said "what he wants to hear" when I think you meant "what he wants Trump to do."

More like both.

So - its like they are inviting another 9-11 type disaster to happen or something? It's getting so weird that I'm watching Chris Wallace on Fox News and agreeing with Karl Rove and Dick Cheney.

"What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could not understand it, it could not be released because of national security

An excerpt from
They Thought They Were Free