If Assange is tried and cyber warriors attack, will the nation respond cohesively, or will all hell break loose?

No one knows, so my advice is this: Tread lightly, you who seeing Julian Assange in shackles, or chained to a wall in a country no one can spell. No one, including myself, wants to live in the world your hubris may provoke.

Julian Assange sues over 'inhuman' conditions, 'denigrating' cat obligations in Ecuadorean embassy

Paul Manafort Is Getting Transferred out of His 'VIP' Prison

Hoisted on his own petard - his lawyers complained that his prison was too far from them to prepare for the trial 

"he’s found a way to work around the jail’s ban on email"

In February, after Donald Trump tweeted that the U.S. media were the “enemy of the people,” the targets of his insult exploded with indignation, devoting wall-to-wall media coverage to what they depicted as a grave assault on press freedoms more befitting of a tyranny. By stark and disturbing contrast, the media reaction yesterday was far more muted, even welcoming, when Trump’s CIA Director, Michael Pompeo, actually and explicitly vowed to target freedoms of speech and press in a blistering, threatening speech he delivered to the D.C. think tank Center for Strategic and International Studies.

What made Pompeo’s overt threats of repression so palatable to many was that they were not directed at CNN, the New York Times or other beloved-in-D.C. outlets, but rather at WikiLeaks, more marginalized publishers of information, and various leakers and whistleblowers, including Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden.

Trump’s CIA Director stood up in public and explicitly threatened to target free speech rights and press freedoms, and it was almost impossible to find even a single U.S. mainstream journalist expressing objections or alarm, because the targets Pompeo chose in this instance are ones they dislike – much the way that many are willing to overlook or even sanction free speech repression if the targeted ideas or speakers are sufficiently unpopular.

Decreeing (with no evidence) that WikiLeaks is “a non-state hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors like Russia”  a belief that has become gospel in establishment Democratic Party circles – Pompeo proclaimed that “we have to recognize that we can no longer allow Assange and his colleagues the latitude to use free speech values against us.” He also argued that while WikiLeaks “pretended that America’s First Amendment freedoms shield them from justice,” but: “they may have believed that, but they are wrong.”

He then issued this remarkable threat: “To give them the space to crush us with misappropriated secrets is a perversion of what our great Constitution stands for. It ends now.” At no point did Pompeo specify what steps the CIA intended to take to ensure that the “space” to publish secrets “ends now.” (...)

 LowPhreak wrote:

For example, since Vietnam was largely over by the time he was installed in the White House, did Gerry Ford ever cut the defense budget as he should have advocated for? Not that I'm aware of.

"..the President has submitted a defense budget for 1977 which provides a real increase of $7.4 billion in total obligational authority in defense spending..."

Let's remember too that he had uber-hawks (and career ne'er-do-wells) like Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney shoved so far up his ass he couldn't see straight. So, Ford should be the last one to rattle on about "big government taking everything you have."

Vietnam war spending peaked in 1967 and declined for the following 10 years. US involvement in the war (other than evacuating embassies and such) ended in 1973. The 1977 budget represented a rearmament that began in the final year of Ford's term, continued under Carter, and peaked on Reagan's watch.

"The initial goodwill toward Ford steadily eroded as the numbers turned sour. Unemployment went from 4.8% in 1972 to 8.0% when he took office; consumer price inflation jumped from 3.4% to 11.0%. Unexpectedly high inflation, fueled by soaring oil prices, made it difficult to plan for the future; cheap imports from Germany and Japan for the first time became a threat to autos and electronics; high unemployment troubled industrial areas. By early 1975 the jobless rate was the worst since the Great Depression. Ford insisted that inflation was the greater problem. He sought to slow it, as Nixon had, by severe restraints on government spending for social programs. He also tried to curb private spending by asking Congress to raise the taxes on personal incomes. But the Democratic majority refused, and in congressional elections in November 1974 Democrats increased their majorities to three-fifths in the Senate and two-thirds in the House. In January 1975 Ford finally yielded to liberals' demands for a program to stop the economic slump and promote hiring. He proposed personal income tax rebates, especially to higher-income people, who might spend extra money on durable goods such as automobiles. Liberals criticized Ford's proposal for offering little relief for the poor, so they pushed through Congress a modified, though modest, tax rebate bill favoring lower-income people. Ford signed it reluctantly. He continued to resist liberal demands for massive public works spending to employ the jobless, and vetoed many bills.

Ford also wanted to make the domestic energy industry more profitable, even at the cost of inflation, in order to encourage more private investment in it and thereby reduce the dependence on oil from abroad. He proposed huge public subsidies for developing new energy sources.

Deregulation - that is, the removal of the old New Deal controls on transportation, communications, finance and other businesses - began under Ford (Nixon was more of a New Dealer who liked federal regulations), ..."

http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Gerald_Ford

So we had the typical Republican playbook - Ford's "subsidies" (corporate welfare) to energy companies, corporate deregulation, along with austerity for the working class or lower incomes, advocating raising taxes on personal incomes but income tax rebates for higher incomes, and at the end of his term an increased defense budget.

 
Indeed.

Often references are made to guard against the military-industrial complex, but many of those who cite to that admonition from Ike are conspicuously silent when the Trump administration proposes big increases in defense spending while proposing massive cuts for other programs.