Retired Adm. William McRaven, the man who oversaw the 2011 Navy SEAL raid that killed Osama bin Laden, issued a stunning rebuke of President Donald Trump's decision to revoke the security clearance of former CIA Director John Brennan on Thursday, defending the former spy chief as "one of the finest public servants I have ever known."

I would consider it an honor if you would revoke my security clearance as well, so I can add my name to the list of men and women who have spoken up against your presidency

"Through your actions, you have embarrassed us in the eyes of our children, humiliated us on the world stage and, worst of all, divided us as a nation," McRaven said of Trump.
"If you think for a moment that your McCarthy-era tactics will suppress the voices of criticism, you are sadly mistaken. The criticism will continue until you become the leader we prayed you would be"

Donald J. Trump@realDonaldTrump

The Queen of Soul, Aretha Franklin, is dead. She was a great woman, with a wonderful gift from God, her voice. She will be missed!

Omarosa Manigault Newman's publisher has responded to President Donald Trump's campaign's "legal threats" over her tell-all book, saying Trump is fully able to use his "bully pulpit" to refute anything they take issue with -- but that the book will be published.

Responding to a letter from Charles Harder, who is litigation counsel for the Trump campaign, book publisher Simon and Schuster's outside counsel Elizabeth McNamara wrote: "While your letter generally claims that excerpts from the book contain 'disparaging statements,' it is quite telling that at no point do you claim that any specific statement in the book is false.
Your client does not have a viable legal claim merely because unspecified truthful statements in the Book may embarrass the president or his associates. At base, your letter is nothing more than an obvious attempt to silence legitimate criticism of the president."

A bomb threat was reported at The Boston Globe on Thursday, the same day the newspaper spearheaded a campaign to publish coordinated editorials at multiple papers condemning President Trump's attacks against the press.

A building manager at the Globe's headquarters said the paper received "several threats via phone call" on Thursday, according to an email obtained by Axios.

"The pen is mightier than the sword"

$90 million budget for Trump's latest vanity project which, they argue, could be spent on homeless and disadvantaged vets.

Trump's touching tribute to Aretha Franklin:

"I knew her well - she worked for me on numerous occasions."

Because it's all about you, Donald.

Republicans now control both Congress and the White House. Paul Ryan is now the top Republican in the House. Mitch McConnell is now the top Republican in the Senate. Donald Trump is the president.

So you might be forgiven for assuming that under unified Republican control, the federal government's fiscal outlook would have improved—or at the very least, that it would not have become markedly worse.

Yet since winning control of the House, the Senate, and the White House, Republicans have done nothing to shore up the budget. On the contrary, the GOP's two most prominent achievements—an overhaul of the tax code and a spending deal made with congressional Democrats—have combined to make the nation's fiscal future far worse.

The annual deficit is now racing toward $1 trillion. According to a new report from the Congressional Budget Office, over the next decade, deficits will total about $1.8 trillion more than if the tax law had not been passed. If anything, that undercounts the damage. The tax law's individual rate reductions all expire within the decade. Republicans, including Paul Ryan, have said they would like those cuts to be made permanent, and it is hard to imagine that a future Congress will really let them expire. If that were to happen, the deficit increase would balloon by a further $722 billion.

By 2028, the CBO now projects that the national debt will nearly equal the country's entire gross domestic product. The report contextualizes this figure by noting that it is an amount "far greater than the debt in any year since just after World War II." Republicans have set the debt on a trajectory that has little historical precedent.

The $1.3 trillion spending bill that congressional Republicans passed earlier, meanwhile, added $400 billion in new spending over the next two years, breaking the spending caps that were put in place under the previous administration. Its increases were roughly split between domestic and defense, and it ended up funding many Obama-era priorities. As with the temporary tax reductions, the two year increase is likely to have permanent ripple effects, as it's unlikely that Congress will suddenly return to lower spending levels.

This is the opposite of fiscal responsibility. It is, if anything, an active disdain for the sort of fiscal restraint that Republicans so often claimed to support under Obama. And it strongly suggests that the GOP's criticisms were merely opportunistic. Under Trump, Republicans have demonstrated that they are the party of fiscal ruin.

To be more precise: They have demonstrated it once again. The behavior we have witnessed under Trump is not a twist or a reversal or an unpredictable turn. It is simply how Republicans have behaved whenever they have been given the opportunity since at least the turn of the century.

Under President George W. Bush, Republicans turned a budget surplus into a bulging deficit, cutting taxes while radically increasing spending. Bush spent more than any of the six presidents before him, and nearly doubled the total spending of his predecessor, Bill Clinton. Between the 2002 and 2009 fiscal years, the federal government's discretionary spending rose 96 percent.

Democrats, to be sure, have not exactly been icons of limited government. But under Clinton, the deficit turned into a technical surplus. During his first term, discretionary spending actually dropped; it wasn't until the second term, with Republicans in control of Congress, that it began to increase again.

Deficits ballooned during President Obama's first term, and from day one of his presidency, Republicans were swift to blame Democrats for a lack of fiscal discipline. But the rapid increase actually started under Bush. Depending on how you run the numbers, it is possible to make the argument that most of the Obama-era deficits were caused by Bush-era policies. Obama's second term was marked by still large but shrinking deficits that Republicans, since taking over, have grown again. When Paul Ryan noted that Obama ignored the recommendations of the bipartisan committee on fiscal responsibility, he was right. But what Ryan didn't say was that Ryan himself was on that committee—and he voted against its recommendations.

Donald J. Trump@realDonaldTrump

.@TuckerCarlson speaking of John Brennan: “How did somebody so obviously limited intellectually get to be CIA Director in the first place?” Now that is a really good question! Then followed by “Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut is a FAKE War Hero...” So true, a total Fake!