People who know Trump say he’s a lifelong jerk so why stop now?

Nov 19th, 2016 11:45 am | By

The Times reports on how President Pussygrabber is adjusting to his new job. The first sentence is not a confidence-builder.

Donald J. Trump sits high in Trump Tower in New York, spending hours on the phone with friends, television personalities and donors to ask if they know people to recommend for his cabinet.

Very deadpan. ARE YOU SERIOUS? The man is asking tv personalities to recommend people for the cabinet???

Jesus h fucking christ.

He does a transition meeting early but then he goes back to his morning routine of reading the NY Times and Post and watching “Morning Joe” on the television machine.

He gets angry when members of his inner circle get too much of the spotlight, as Rudolph W. Giuliani did when headlines about his millions of dollars in speaking fees appeared as the former New York mayor was publicly promoting himself to be Mr. Trump’s secretary of state.

And Mr. Trump has happily resumed control of his Twitter feed, using it to bash targets in the news media and criticize the cast of the Broadway musical “Hamilton” for imploring Vice President-elect Mike Pence, who was in the audience Friday night, to govern on behalf of all Americans.

Because that’s what presidents do – they ask random people if they know anyone to appoint to the cabinet, and tweet their fury when anyone dares to talk back.

As a parade of job seekers, TV talking heads and statesmen like Henry Kissinger paraded through the lobby of Trump Tower this past week, Mr. Trump ran his presidential transition from his triplex on the 58th floor much the way he ran his campaign and his business before that — schmoozing, rewarding loyalty, fomenting infighting among advisers and moving confidently forward through a series of fits and starts.

Great last item – so Trump – confidently jerking back and forth like a wind-up toy.

President Obama, who met with Mr. Trump two days after the election, has held out hope that the gravity of the presidency will change the former reality show star. But people close to the 70-year-old president-elect say that he has such long-held habits formed by fame, wealth and the freedom to have done whatever he wanted that they remain skeptical, at least for now, that he will transform to fit the constraints of the White House.

Well quite. Also, add to “fame, wealth and the freedom to have done whatever he wanted” stupidity and obstinacy and shallowness. His lacks are not only contingent, not only the product of money and tv stardom – they’re also part of his character. He’s a bad human being who has never been forced or persuaded or inspired to learn to be a better one.

People close to Mr. Trump nonetheless say he is more focused now than he was in the first few days after his surprise victory. He was nervous and jolted, they said, by the 90-minute Oval Office meeting with Mr. Obama, and for the first time appeared to take in the enormousness of the job.

That’s a perfect example of how shallow and stupid he is. What kind of lox runs for the presidency without ever bothering to find out what it entails??

He is proud, they say, that he has so rapidly named people for his cabinet and senior staff…

Jesus. Is he proud when he pees in the toilet? Is he proud when he eats all his din-din?

There were initial reports from senior officials within Mr. Trump’s orbit that Mr. Giuliani, Mr. Trump’s most fervent supporter in the campaign’s final weeks, was the leading candidate for secretary of state. But the headlines about Mr. Giuliani’s business interests bothered Mr. Trump, who was urged by several business leaders and some media hosts to reconsider the option. Suddenly, he arranged a Saturday meeting with one of his fiercest critics, Mitt Romney, at Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, N.J.

And you know why he’s interested in Romney? It’s because he looks the part. He looks like an actor who could play a Secretary of State on the television machine.

Transition officials say the meeting with Mr. Romney, a moderate Republican who was the party’s nominee for president in 2012, may not have been simply for show. They say that Mr. Trump believes that Mr. Romney, with his patrician bearing, looks the part of a top diplomat right out of “central casting” — the same phrase Mr. Trump used to describe Mike Pence before choosing him as his running mate.

(So does Trump ever worry about his own explosion-in-a-pimp-factory appearance?)

Yet Mr. Trump loves the tension and drama of a selection process, and has sought to stoke it. A senior adviser described the meeting, in part, as Mr. Romney simply coming to pay his respects to the president-elect and “kiss his ring.”

Yeah. This is why we have to refuse the normalization. We have to refuse to kiss his ring. We have to refuse his Twitter orders to apologize and shut up. We have to keep pointing out, as with the underdressed emperor, how fucking naked he really is.

He doesn’t like it when people do that, or even edge too close to doing it.

Mr. Trump was angered when Mr. Christie did not defend him after 11-year-old audio emerged of the candidate boasting about committing sexual assaults.

Yeah. Christie should have been out there saying how admirable and presidential it is to go around bragging about grabbing women by the pussy.

Showmanship remains central to Mr. Trump, who on Thursday held his first meeting as president-elect with a foreign leader, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan. The setting was Mr. Trump’s marble and gold, Louis XIV-style residence on the 58th floor, with sweeping views of New York and Central Park. Mr. Trump, with General Flynn at his side, sat next to Mr. Abe under an enormous crystal chandelier as Mr. Trump’s daughter Ivanka, looked on.

The vulgarity of the setting was striking. I have no doubt it all cost billions, but that doesn’t make it not vulgar.

He is worried, his aides say, that he will not be able to keep his Android phone once he gets to the White House and wonders aloud how isolated he will become — and whether he will be able to keep in touch with his friends — without it as president. He continues to discuss with the Secret Service how much he can return on weekends to Trump Tower, and still expects to use the Bedminister golf club and his private Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Fla., as vacation retreats.

Again – he should have taken all this on board before deciding to campaign for the presidency.

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog | 7 comments
Tags:


A surprisingly sharp rebuke from Mr. Trump

Nov 19th, 2016 10:50 am | By

What happened at last night’s performance of “Hamilton.”

With Vice President-elect Mike Pence attending the show, the cast used the opportunity to make a statement emphasizing the need for the new administration of President-elect Donald J. Trump, a Republican, to work on behalf of all Americans.

It was a deeply felt and altogether rare appeal from the stage of a Broadway show — and it drew a surprisingly sharp rebuke from Mr. Trump on Saturday morning. The president-elect tweeted that the “Hamilton” cast had “harassed” Mr. Pence by making the statement and had been “very rude.”

“Apologize!” Mr. Trump wrote at the end of one of two tweets on the matter.

“Surprisingly” sharp? Hardly. “Surprisingly” compared to what one would expect of an adult, reasonable, civic-minded president-elect, but not “surprisingly” at all from the belligerent sadistic narcissistic bully that is Trump. Trump considers his own rudeness the very best rudeness, and rudeness directed at him or his an offense against the universe.

As the play ended, the actor who played Aaron Burr, Brandon Victor Dixon, acknowledged that Mr. Pence was in the audience, thanked him for attending and added, “We hope you will hear us out.”

“We, sir — we — are the diverse America who are alarmed and anxious that your new administration will not protect us, our planet, our children, our parents, or defend us and uphold our inalienable rights,” he said. “We truly hope that this show has inspired you to uphold our American values and to work on behalf of all of us.”

The audience applauded and cheered. Pence was already in the hall but stopped to listen.

The statement that Mr. Dixon read was written by the show’s creator, Lin-Manuel Miranda, its director, Thomas Kail, and the lead producer, Jeffrey Seller, with input from cast members, Mr. Seller said.

“We had to ask ourselves, how do we cope with this?” Mr. Seller said. “Our cast could barely go on stage the day after the election. The election was painful and crushing to all of us here. We all struggled with what was the appropriate and respectful and proper response. We are honored that Mr. Pence attended the show, and we had to use this opportunity to express our feelings.”

Mr. Seller said that there was some discussion about whether it was appropriate to inject a political statement into the night, and that those involved decided to wait until the end of the performance. He said no cast members had skipped the performance to protest Mr. Pence’s appearance.

In normal circumstances I think I would probably consider it inappropriate, if only because we don’t want political speeches from all sides at the end of every play…but probably more because it would look like self-righteous preening, as things like that so often do. But these circumstances? Not normal.

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog | 2 comments
Tags:


Trump objects to all this outrageous rudeness

Nov 19th, 2016 10:04 am | By

Twitter Trump tweets again.

He thinks it’s noteworthy that he will be working all weekend. Dude. That’s the job. It’s the job he signed up for, it’s the job he trampled all over people to get, yet he’s bragging/complaining about working over the weekend.

Then he tells us how happy he is that he succeeded in cheating people out of as much as $35k with his laughable fake “university” with only a token payout to settle the lawsuit.

The cheating fraud gets away with it again – and he’s president! Is this a great country or what?

Trump complaining about people being rude. Trump complaining about people being rude. The mind reels.

Also, of course, Trump demanding a safe place…the jokes write themselves.

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog | 3 comments
Tags:


Milo agrees he does like offending people

Nov 18th, 2016 5:52 pm | By

Channel 4 News (the UK one):

This is the moment Milo Yiannopoulos is challenged on Breitbart’s headlines and so-called “post-fact era.”

The news outlet’s former chairman Steve Bannon has been appointed as Donald Trump’s chief strategist – and there’s speculation that Yiannopoulos himself could find his own way into the White House.

Go there to see their excerpt, or here is the full interview:

He says himself he’s a troll:

You know perfectly well that it is a provocation designed to make people think and perhaps to make them laugh.

In other words, trolling.

At about 4:40 he’s even more explicit:

I do like offending people. I think that the grievance brigade, victimhood, you know the idea that hurt feelings are some kind of special currency, I think that’s come to an end, and America agrees.

It’s classic bully-speak, that. People are hurt by insults, therefore it’s important to insult them incessantly so that they will stop objecting to being insulted. People are hurt by insults, therefore it’s important to insult them incessantly to make them shut up and go away and let you run the show.

It’s wrong. It’s evil, and wrong. Sure, ideally, it’s useful for people to be tough and resilient – but those aren’t actual virtues or good qualities. They’re just useful. Yes people who melt down over every tiny thing are maddening, and should learn to do better. But people not liking to be insulted? There’s nothing unreasonable about that, and it’s revolting to watch smug Yiannopoulos boasting of doing it on purpose because he likes offending people.

But no doubt Trump will make him Labor Secretary or something.

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog | 9 comments


Troll seizes White House

Nov 18th, 2016 5:07 pm | By

Fresh Air yesterday talked to Joshua Green, a Bloomberg reporter who knows a lot about Steve Bannon.

DAVIES: In 2012, when Steve Bannon was the executive editor of Breitbart, he established a research arm – the Government Accountability Institute. What does it do?

GREEN: Well, Bannon – what attracted me to Bannon originally was that, you know, if you look at kind of the infrastructure, the organizational chart of the Republican right-wing, what Hillary Clinton once referred to as the vast right-wing conspiracy, what you see is that a lot of the tendrils lead back to Steve Bannon. So not only was Bannon executive chairman of Breitbart News, but then with some of the same financial backers, he started the Government Accountability Institute which is a nonprofit research organization based in Tallahassee. And whereas Breitbart is gleefully provocative and hard right, the conceit at GAI is that this is a research organization that is going to do digging and stick to the realm of facts, and they’re going to investigate corruption in cronyism in government, be it Republican or Democrat. GAI was a pretty sleepy shop.

But what really brought GAI into the forefront was that GAI’s president, Peter Schweizer, wrote the book “Clinton Cash” that became an unexpected best-seller back in the spring of 2015, just as Hillary Clinton was getting ready to launch her presidential campaign. It drove up her unfavorability ratings, and it raised all sorts of pernicious questions about who Clinton – in the Clinton Foundation had financial relationships with and whether or not this was going to be a problem in her presidential campaign.

It was clear, I think, from the scope and tenor of the coverage that there was really something there. And that is the other way, I think, in which Bannon has been able to hack mainstream media news coverage because these “Clinton Cash” stories and the various relationships that the book documented were intentionally not published on right-wing sites like Breitbart News. What GAI did instead was to reach out to investigative reporters and mainstream media outlets like The New York Times, The Washington Post and others and try and encourage their reporters to take this research that they’d done and to go off and do some digging on their own. And they did, and that wound up resulting in front-page stories in a lot of major newspapers that got this negative information about Clinton in front of a whole different audience than reads Breitbart News or listens to talk radio.

And if you look at how Donald Trump chose to run against Clinton in the general election, Trump was essentially channeling the same attacks that Bannon had conceived and pushed in the “Clinton Cash” book. And so – and, you know, so ultimately, you know, he succeeded in this year’s-long plan to plot and carry off the downfall of Hillary Clinton.

They planned it, and it worked. We’re all living in Breitbart world now.

DAVIES: You know, there’s a lot of consternation, criticism, alarm about the appointment of Bannon to a senior-level position in the Trump White House. The concern is that it suggests a tolerance, if not embrace, of racism and anti-Semitism. What about the idea that Breitbart News itself propagates, you know, white supremacist views? I mean, The New York Times editorial on this said to scroll through Breitbart’s headlines is to come upon a parallel universe where black people do nothing but commit crimes, immigrants rape native-born daughters and feminists want to castrate men. The Southern Poverty Law Center says he made Breitbart News a white ethno-nationalist propaganda mill.

What’s your sense of the content of Breitbart News?

GREEN: Well, it is certainly inflammatory and fixated on race, on religion, on all the sorts of things that have upset people. I think the thing to understand about Breitbart – and this is not to excuse anything they write or publish – is that they are deliberately provocative. They’re aiming to offend and upset people in order to stoke the grassroots anger at government and the broader culture.

In internet language, it’s an elaborate and effective trolling operation because that is what martials this group of disaffected Republicans, you know, and other people sometimes referred to as the alt-right, but essentially this splinter faction of conservatives who have attacked and now taken over the Republican Party over the last four or five years.

We’re all living in Breitbart world, where we’re governed by trolls.

DAVIES: You know, it’s one thing if white supremacists read Breitbart News and if they write shocking comments in response to the stories. But as you look at the content, I mean, does the website seem to, you know, embrace and propagate these views of white nationalism and white supremacists? What’s your sense?

GREEN: I think it certainly fuels those views. And, you know, I had a discussion with Bannon about this back in 2015 about – you know, I said, you know, you’re a former Harvard guy, you’re a Goldman Sachs banker. I’m sort of shocked at some of the things you write because you come out of a culture that isn’t, you know, openly racist or anti-Semitic.

And what he said essentially was that they are trying to reach an audience that doesn’t have an outlet anywhere else in mainstream media. I pulled up some of the quotes. He said, you know, we focus on things like immigration, ISIS, race riots, what he calls the persecution of Christians. He says, we give a perspective that other outlets are not going to give. There are not a lot of outlets that are covering that, at least not from the perspective that we should be running a victory lap every time some sort of traditional value gets undercut.

The question I was always interested in getting at with Bannon was do you really believe this stuff – because a lot of it is offensive and inflammatory. And he said, you know, personally I’m mixed on a lot of this stuff. But we’re airing a lot of things that traditional people are thinking that don’t get mainstream media representation anymore. So they were making a market for these kinds of views and these kinds of stories and attracting an audience, what’s turned out to be an extremely large and powerful audience by tapping these sentiments.

That’s an incredibly callous thing to say, if that really is his reason for doing it. We don’t need a “market for these kinds of views and these kinds of stories.” That’s not a gap that needs to be filled. We don’t need to create a market for sadistic torture porn, for instance, and we don’t need to create a market for racist misogynist trolling and bullying. That’s not something humanity needs.

DAVIES: There are petitions circulating urging Trump to reverse the hiring of Steve Bannon. Why is he so loyal to Steve Bannon?

GREEN: There’s been so much kind of shock and consternation about how a guy like Bannon who is so far outside the bounds of anybody who’d typically be considered for, you know, a West Wing position gets elevated to one, I think it’s important to remember what we’ve just witnessed and what Trump himself has just seen that Bannon – and this is what originally attracted me to him as a profile subject – is a smart guy and a clever strategist who orchestrated this elaborate plan to deny Hillary Clinton the presidency that we’ve just watched work. It succeeded.

And so I think that Trump has a degree of faith in Bannon that he doesn’t have in another people. And I think that’s why Trump has been willing to withstand all the intense criticism over the Bannon appointment that we’ve seen in the last few days. To me it’s sort of like the least shocking aspect of what Trump has done in appointing Bannon to the West Wing. I mean, the guy hatched this elaborate plan to stop Clinton, and it worked.

Of course. Plus, Trump is a very bad man, so the fact that Bannon is also a very bad man isn’t going to trouble him.

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog
Tags:


Trump agrees he cheated those students

Nov 18th, 2016 4:39 pm | By

In more bad news, Trump has settled the lawsuits against Trump “University.”

Donald J. Trump has reversed course and agreed to pay $25 million to settle a series of lawsuits stemming from his defunct for-profit education venture, Trump University, finally putting to rest fraud allegations by former students, which have dogged him for years and hampered his presidential campaign.

The settlement was announced by the New York attorney general on Friday, just 10 days before one of the cases, a federal class-action lawsuit in San Diego, was set to be heard by a jury. The deal, if approved, averts a potentially embarrassing and highly unusual predicament: a president-elect on trial, and possibly even taking the stand in his own defense, while scrambling to build his incoming administration.

It was a remarkable concession from a real estate mogul who derides legal settlements and has mocked fellow businessmen who agree to them.

But the allegations in the case were highly unpleasant for Mr. Trump: Students paid up to $35,000 in tuition for programs that, according to the testimony of former Trump University employees, used high-pressure sales tactics and employed unqualified instructors.

Also, teaching some tricks of the real estate trade does not constitute a university. A trade school, maybe; a university, no.

the position of Mr. Trump and his legal team appeared to soften soon after his election on Nov. 8. At a hearing last week, Daniel Petrocelli, a lawyer for Mr. Trump, expressed interest in moving toward a settlement. Mr. Trump’s lawyers were seeking to delay the trial in one of the California cases until after his inauguration on Jan. 20, while also requesting that he be allowed to testify on video.

“The time and attention to prepare and testify will take him away from imperative transition work at a critical time,” Mr. Petrocelli wrote in the request to the judge, Gonzalo Curiel, last week, noting the “thousands” of appointments that President-elect Trump needed to make in the weeks ahead.

Judge Curiel, of Federal District Court, who is hearing the two California cases, was thrust into the limelight of the campaign in May when Mr. Trump spent several minutes at a rally denouncing the judge’s decisions in the case, calling him a “hater” and questioning his impartiality because of his Mexican heritage.

That’s our shiny new president – a guy who cheats people out of as much as 35 thousand dollars for teaching them some marketing tricks they could learn from a pamphlet, and who incites xenophobia against a judge hearing the case against him. Don’t we feel proud!!

Trump University, which operated from 2004 to 2010, included free introductory seminars across the country, focusing largely on real estate investing and on learning Mr. Trump’s secrets. Students could then purchase more expensive packages costing up to $35,000.

Documents made public through the litigation revealed that some former Trump University managers had given testimony about its unscrupulous and exploitative business practices. One sales executive testified that the operation was “a facade, a total lie.” Another manager called it a “fraudulent scheme.”

Other records showed how Mr. Trump had overstated the depth of his involvement in the programs. Despite claims that Mr. Trump had handpicked instructors, he acknowledged in testimony that he had not.

That’s our shiny new president – a cheat and fraud who could take his place alongside the Duke and the Dauphin. If only he could share their fate.

Anyway. The settlement is bad news, because the trial would have made him look even worse.

So our shiny new president has admitted to cheating a lot of people out of a lot of money. Good start.

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog | 1 Comment »
Tags:


The kids sat in on the meeting with that guy from Japan

Nov 18th, 2016 4:16 pm | By

Again the mind reels. Ivanka Trump sat in on the meeting with the Japanese Prime Minister yesterday. Fortune says this is tinpot oligarchy behavior.

President-elect Donald Trump has repeatedly said that there would be no conflicts of interest during his administration because his vast business empire would be in a “blind trust.” But White House ethics lawyers in both parties have criticized that, noting that having his children run the company means it would be neither blind nor a trust.

The very first meeting that the President-elect held with a world leader, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, is prompting further criticism—even alarm. According to photographs taken at Trump Tower in New York City and published this week, the session was attended by Ivanka Trump, who has no government security clearance and is an executive at the Trump Organization.

“This is not the way we behave in the world’s leading constitutional democracy,” says Norman Eisen, special counsel and ethics adviser to President Barack Obama between 2009 and 2011. “It’s like something out of a tin-pot oligarchy.”

Members of the press were also barred from the meeting, adding to building criticism that a President Trump will not honor White House traditions of transparency. Ivanka Trump’s presence apparently only became public because the Japanese government released photos; it is not clear whether she was present for the entire meeting.

Jared Kushner was also there.

In an interview with Fortune, Eisen says Ivanka Trump and Kushner’s apparent presence at Trump’s first face-to-face meeting with the leader of one of our key allies was “shocking” and unprecedented. “If you’ve got one member of the power couple—Jared Kushner, whispering in the President[-elect]’s ear—and if you’ve got the other, the wife and daughter, who is running businesses, it merges the Trump Organization and the United States into one huge conglomerate managed by the Trumps for their own interests,” he says.

He adds that the fear is that their involvement will turn “our intelligence community into a management consulting firm for the Trump family business. That can’t be right. Ivanka must go, and Kushner can’t stay.”

Eisen and Richard Painter, White House ethics adviser to President George W. Bush between 2005 and 2007, on Tuesday wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post urging Trump to put his “conflict-generating assets in a true blind trust run by an independent trustee.”

Unlike most other federal employees, the President of the United States isn’t bound by the federal conflict of interest law. But Eisen tells Fortune that several lawyers, including those who are part of the Republican party, are “worried about this unprecedented blurring of lines” and President-elect Trump should “expect massive litigation if he proceeds on this collision course.”

Most racist ever, most incompetent ever, most rapey ever, most conflict of interested ever. Shaping up well.

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog | 3 comments
Tags:


Operation #TrumpCup

Nov 18th, 2016 3:51 pm | By

Jim Wright:

Apparently the latest trend is for conservatives to go to Starbucks and order a drink and when the barista asks for the name on the order they say “Trump.”

This means the liberal company run by famously liberal CEO Howard Schultz is now shouting “Trump!” from behind the counter several thousand times a day all across the country.

Conservatives who’ve never shopped at Starbucks are now dropping in to pull this stunt. They’re right now busy organizing trips to their local franchise via social media and posting pictures of their orders on Twitter and Facebook.

#TrumpCup is currently trending on Twitter.

Which conservatives find hilarious.

And it IS hilarious.

Especially when you realize Trump is getting his revenge on those who opposed his candidacy by having tens of thousands of his supporters buy $12 coffee drinks from his enemies.

A very cunning plan.

 

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog | 8 comments
Tags:


Get out of jail free card

Nov 18th, 2016 3:24 pm | By

Turkish Minute reports:

Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) has brought a motion to Parliament that proposes rapists in Turkish jails be released if they marry their victims, a way out of prison for more than 4,000 inmates convicted of rape.

The motion was brought to the floor of the General Assembly and was approved by AKP deputies despite the nay votes of both the Republican People’s Party (CHP) and the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP).

So the raped women get to spend the rest of their lives being raped by the guys who raped them in the first place, so that those guys can get out of prison where they were placed because they raped women. It’s as if someone breaks into your house to grab all your books and coffee mugs, and then when they’re in jail for doing that they get to leave jail if they consent to take all your stuff. It’s a win-win for the taker, but not so much for the taker’s victim.

A majority of votes was lacking during the general assembly vote on the motion on Thursday, thus making it impossible to convert the motion to the status of a bill. At least 184 votes are needed in Parliament to pass a bill.

A second round of voting will take place on Friday.

I guess the women of Turkey will just have to stay home now.

Updating to add: Seth pointed out a BBC story which gives vital details.

A bill which would allow men accused of raping underage girls to be cleared if they marry the girl has been preliminarily backed by Turkish MPs.

The bill would pardon men only if they had sex without “force or threat” and if they married the victim.

Critics say it legitimises rape and child marriage, and lets off men who are aware of their crime.

It certainly does. It would be just a way for a guy to force an underage girl to marry him, thus ruining her entire life.

What are those MPs thinking? Is this that same old “Wull it was good enough for Mohammed so it’s blasphemy to say it’s not ok for our handsome young men”? Because that’s a terrible argument.

 

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog | 4 comments


Of course it is crystal clear that assault is unacceptable

Nov 18th, 2016 3:04 pm | By

Back in October Jeff Sessions – former prosecutor Jeff Sessions – was very cautious about what you could call sexual assault.

Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), a top Donald Trump surrogate, said on Sunday that even if the GOP nominee actually grabbed a woman “by the pussy,” as he bragged about in a leaked tape from 2005, that behavior would not amount to sexual assault.

“I don’t characterize that as sexual assault,” Sessions told The Weekly Standard in the spin room after Sunday night’s presidential debate. “I think that’s a stretch. I don’t know what he meant.”

“So if you grab a woman by the genitals, that’s not sexual assault?” the reporter asked Sessions.

“I don’t know,” the senator replied. “It’s not clear that he — how that would occur.”

Oh really? I know how that would occur. I bet it’s pretty hard to find a woman who doesn’t know how that would occur. There are many ways, actually. Public transport is an outstanding convenience for men who like to grab women by the pussy. How that would occur is just that a man would stick out his hand and thrust it between a woman’s legs and then grip. If he had enough time he could do more than grab and grip. It’s not terribly difficult to extrapolate from that description to other settings – walking down the street; in the supermarket; at a party; in an elevator; at a movie…you get the idea.

Is that sexual assault? Yes, of course it is. It’s not a “stretch” to say that it is. It’s not rape, it’s not penetration (unless it is, and sometimes it is), but it is assault.

Sexual assault is defined as any kind of unwanted sexual contact, which is exactly what Trump described in the recording. In a conversation with Billy Bush, then host of “Access Hollywood,” Trump boasted about how he could kiss and grope women without their consent because he was a celebrity.

“I just start kissing them,” Trump said on the tape. “It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. … Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything.”

Women reacted strongly to Trump’s comments, sharing thousands of their own stories of sexual assault on Twitter to underscore that what he said epitomizes rape culture in America.

And he won anyway. Would you believe it? He won anyway.

But then, a surprise ending – Sessions took it back.

UPDATE: Oct. 11 ― Sessions said on Tuesday that “assault is unacceptable,” and argued that his remarks had been mischaracterized.

“The Weekly Standard’s characterization of comments I made following Sunday’s Presidential debate is completely inaccurate,” the senator said in a statement provided to HuffPost. “My hesitation was based solely on confusion of the contents of the 2005 tape and the hypothetical posed by the reporter, which was asked in a chaotic post-debate environment.”

“I regret that it resulted in an inaccurate article that misrepresented my views,” Sessions’ statement continued. “Of course it is crystal clear that assault is unacceptable. I would never intentionally suggest otherwise‎.”

So he’s happily joining the administration of a man who brags about committing sexual assault.

What a shit hole this country has suddenly become.

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog | 6 comments
Tags:


Meet the white supremacist Attorney General

Nov 18th, 2016 11:48 am | By

Ari Berman tells us more about Jefferson Beauregard Sessions, Trump’s pick for Attorney General.

Donald Trump has chosen a white nationalist as his chief strategist and a white nationalist sympathizer as his pick for Attorney General. Like the Confederate general he is named after, Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III has long been a leading voice for the Old South and the conservative white backlash vote Trump courted throughout his campaign. Sessions, as a US senator from Alabama, has been the fiercest opponent in the Senate of immigration reform, a centerpiece of Trump’s agenda, and has a long history of opposition to civil rights, dating back to his days as a US Attorney in Alabama in the 1980s.

The Senate rejected Sessions for a federal judgeship during the Reagan administration because of racist statements he made and for falsely prosecuting black political activists in Alabama. He opposed the Voting Rights Act, the country’s most important civil rights law.

Then he tells a hideous story. Albert Turner was a civil rights activist, who was beaten alongside John Lewis on the Bloody Sunday march in Selma. After the Voting Rights Act passed he became Alabama field secretary for the SCLC, signing up voters.

Because of Turner’s work, African-Americans gained political control of many counties in the Alabama Black Belt, where you could practically count the number of black voters on one hand in 1965. But the flourishing of black political power in the Black Belt didn’t sit well with the old white power structure.

In the Democratic primary of September 1984, FBI agents hid behind the bushes of the Perry County post office, waiting for Turner and fellow activist Spencer Hogue to mail 500 absentee ballots on behalf of elderly black voters. When Turner and Hogue left, the feds seized the envelopes from the mail slots. Twenty elderly black voters from Perry County were bused three hours to Mobile, where they were interrogated by law enforcement officials and forced to testify before a grand jury. Ninety-two-year-old Willie Bright was so frightened of “the law” that he wouldn’t even admit he’d voted.

In January 1985, Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, the 39-year-old US Attorney for the Southern District of Alabama, charged Turner, his wife Evelyn and Hogue with 29 counts of mail fraud, altering absentee ballots and conspiracy to vote more than once. They faced over one hundred years in jail on criminal charges and felony statutes under the VRA – provisions of the law that had scarcely been used to prosecute the white officials who had disenfranchised blacks for so many years. The Turners and Hogue became known as the Marion Three. (This story is best told in Lani Guinier’s book Lift Every Voice.)

The trial was held in Selma, of all places. The jury of seven blacks and five whites deliberated for less than three hours before returning a not guilty verdict on all counts.

That will be the Attorney General. I want to vomit.

Four months after that verdict, Reagan nominated Sessions for a federal judgeship. The Senate rejected the nomination.

Now Sessions will be in charge of enforcing the civil rights laws he once opposed, like the Voting Rights Act. He’s almost certain to further weaken what’s left of the law and to encourage the kind of bogus prosecutions for voter fraud that led him to be rejected for a federal judgeship.

Sessions hardly reformed his views after he was elected to the Senate in 1996. He frequently earned an “F” rating from civil rights groups like the NAACP and “consistently opposed the bread-and-butter civil rights agenda,” Hillary Shelton, director of the NAACP’s Washington office, told The New Republic. He voted to reauthorize the VRA in 2006 but praised the Supreme Court’s decision gutting the law in 2013, cluelessly saying, “if you go to Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina, people aren’t being denied the vote because of the color of their skin.” (As but one example of ongoing voting discrimination, his home state of Alabama tried to close 31 DMV offices, many in majority-black counties, after requiring strict photo ID to vote.)

Thanks Putin, thanks Assange, thanks Comey, thanks Bannon. You shits.

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog | 6 comments
Tags:


The Borgias hit a bump in the road

Nov 18th, 2016 11:23 am | By

I didn’t know this: there’s an actual law against presidents hiring family members.

Mr. Kushner has consulted with at least one lawyer and believes that by forgoing a salary and putting his investment fund, his real estate holdings and The New York Observer into a blind trust, he would not be bound by federal nepotism rules, according to one of the people briefed.

Ethics lawyers in both parties said that such an arrangement would violate a federal statute designed to prevent family ties from influencing the functioning of the United States government. Under a 1967 law enacted after John F. Kennedy installed his brother, Robert F. Kennedy, as attorney general, no public official can hire a family member — including one related by marriage — to an agency or office over which he has authority. A separate statute also makes it a crime, punishable by a fine and up to two years of prison time, for government employees to accept voluntary services that are not authorized by law, except in emergency situations.

The anti-nepotism law “would seem to block out Kushner flatly,” said Norman L. Eisen, who served as Mr. Obama’s ethics counsel during his transition and at the White House. If Mr. Trump were to try to skirt it by having Mr. Kushner advise him in a volunteer capacity, he added, he “would be treading upon very serious statutory and constitutional grounds.”

Aka breaking the law, which is a no-no.

Richard W. Painter, an ethics counsel to George W. Bush, said he remembered having to inform a senior official serving Mr. Bush that he was legally barred from granting a White House internship to his son. Mr. Painter based his decision on a reading of the anti-nepotism law by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel during Jimmy Carter’s administration, which barred the president from doing so for his own child.

“I told him: ‘Jimmy Carter couldn’t do it. If the president of the United States couldn’t do it, I can’t do it for your kid,’” Mr. Painter recalled. “I got cussed out.”

Of course Trump thinks he’s above the laws, so maybe he’ll just do it anyway.

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog | 3 comments
Tags:


A racist and a Tea Party hire

Nov 18th, 2016 10:58 am | By

Today in Trump-horror news:

President-elect Donald Trump announced Friday that he plans to nominate Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) as attorney general and Rep. Mike Pompeo (R-Kan.) as CIA director, a pair of hard-line conservatives who offer early signs of the shape of Trump’s Cabinet.

Trump also confirmed the news reported a day earlier that he has selected retired Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn as his national security adviser, a position that, unlike the other two, does not need to be confirmed by the Senate.

…

Sessions, 69, was Trump’s first endorser in the Senate and quickly became the then-candidate’s chief resource on policy, but the fourth-term senator has been dogged by accusations of racism throughout his career.

In 1986, he was denied a federal judgeship after former colleagues testified before a Senate committee that he joked about the Ku Klux Klan, saying he thought they were “okay, until he learned that they smoked marijuana.”

“If you have nostalgia for the days when blacks kept quiet, gays were in the closet, immigrants were invisible and women stayed in the kitchen, Senator Jefferson Beauregard Sessions is your man,” Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-Ill.) said in a statement. “No senator has fought harder against the hopes and aspirations of Latinos, immigrants, and people of color than Sen. Sessions.”

…

Pompeo is a vocal critic of President Obama’s nuclear accord with Iran. “I look forward to rolling back this disastrous deal with the world’s largest state sponsor of terrorism,” he tweeted Thursday, before his offer to become CIA director was public.

Say goodbye to everything.

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog | 1 Comment »
Tags:


Racists and anti-Semites are rejoicing

Nov 18th, 2016 10:44 am | By

David Duke is in bliss.

Duke: Bannon, Flynn, Sessions: the 1st Steps in Taking America Back!

Now it’s time for – LAW & ORDER!

Mr. Trump’s appointment of Bannon, Flynn and Sessions are the first steps in the project of taking America back.

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog | 3 comments
Tags:


These obscene harpies

Nov 18th, 2016 6:38 am | By

Have a passage from Edmund Burke to liven up your reading. It’s from A Letter to a Noble Lord, 1796.

It cannot at this time be too often repeated, line upon line, precept upon precept, until it comes into the currency of a proverb — to innovate is not to reform. The French revolutionists complained of everything; they refused to reform anything; and they left nothing, no, nothing at all, unchanged. The consequences are before us—not in remote history, not in future prognostication: they are about us; they are upon us. They shake the public security; they menace private enjoyment. They dwarf the growth of the young; they break the quiet of the old. If we travel, they stop our way. They infest us in town; they pursue us to the country. Our business is interrupted, our repose is troubled, our pleasures are saddened, our very studies are poisoned and perverted, and knowledge is rendered worse than ignorance, by the enormous evils of this dreadful innovation. The Revolution harpies of France, sprung from Night and Hell, or from that chaotic Anarchy which generates equivocally ‘all monstrous, all prodigious things,’cuckoo-like, adulterously lay their eggs, and brood over, and hatch them in the nest of every neighbouring state. These obscene harpies, who deck themselves in I know not what divine attributes, but who in reality are foul and ravenous birds of prey (both mothers and daughters), flutter over our heads, and souse down upon our tables, and leave nothing unrent, unrifled, unravaged, or unpolluted with the slime of their filthy offal.

You’re welcome.

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog | 1 Comment »


Filthy Trump

Nov 17th, 2016 5:37 pm | By

Have nausea medications handy. Welcome to the Trump kleptocracy.

Anti-nepotism laws prevent Trump from giving his family members jobs in the administration. But don’t think that’s going to stop them from being active participants in U.S. government decision-making, or using the fact that Trump is president to keep money flowing in. In fact, we could see the president enriching himself and his family on a scale that we normally associate with post-Soviet kleptocrats and Third World dictators.

For starters, Ivanka, Eric and Donald Trump Jr. are on the executive committee of Trump’s transition team, helping decide who gets hired for key positions and what the administration’s initial focus will be. We learned that someone on the transition team inquired about obtaining security clearances for the three so that they could see classified information (though the Trump team protested that the request did not come from Trump himself). Then there’s the matter of Ivanka Trump’s husband:

Donald Trump has taken the unprecedented step of requesting his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, receive top-secret clearance to join him for his Presidential Daily Briefings, which began Tuesday.

Multiple sources tell NBC News Trump received his first briefing on Tuesday and designated both Kushner and Ret. Gen. Michael Flynn as his staff-level companions for the briefings going forward.

Kushner — whose knowledge of government is so minimal that he was apparently surprised to learn that the Obama staffers in the White House wouldn’t be staying on to serve President Trump — is shaping up as perhaps his father-in-law’s closest adviser. He won’t have an official position, yet he’ll be privy to some of the most sensitive intelligence secrets the government possesses.

Then he’ll go home at night to Ivanka Trump, who is already monetizing her father’s election; Ivanka Trump Fine Jewelry is promoting the bracelet she wore on last Sunday’s “60 Minutes” interview, which can be yours for $10,800.

In other words she’s parlaying the media exposure she got because her father is President Pussygrabber into a marketing opportunity for herself. She’s using this catastrophe to make herself richer.

And then there’s the Trump corporation, which the rugrats will be managing while Donny from Queens is busy playing prezeedent.

We don’t know exactly how the profits are divided, because it’s a private company and Trump won’t tell us. But it’s important to understand that Trump’s primary business is not building things; he actually does very little building anymore. His main business is brand licensing, and it’s a business that is particularly amenable to enriching himself while he’s president.

How would that work? Well, imagine this scenario. Ivanka and Donny Jr. go to some country — let’s say Russia, for no particular reason — and arrange a meeting with a developer. They suggest a deal that the Trump corporation has carried out in places all over the world, in which the local developer builds a hotel or resort, then slaps the Trump name on it and pays the Trumps millions of dollars in licensing fees for the privilege. And let’s say that developer just happens to have ties, publicly known or otherwise, to the Kremlin and Vladimir Putin. And let’s say he offers the Trump corporation very favorable terms — which, being savvy businesspeople, Ivanka and Donny accept. You’d then have a situation in which the Russian dictator has, through a proxy, deposited millions or even tens of millions of dollars into the bank account of the president of the United States.

And it’s not a remote contingency. It’s likely, unless this filthy arrangement can be stopped.

Trump is an intersectional disaster. It’s not just that he’s a mean vindictive bully, it’s also that he’s a sexual assaulter, and incompetent, and corrupt, and racist…and I could go on. He’s a disaster on all possible fronts.

This could be repeated in countries all over the world. And since the Trump corporation is privately held, we might never know all the details. We might be able to figure them out if Trump released his tax returns, but he refused to do so, despite almost certainly having more potential financial conflicts of interest than any president in history. And forget about seeing them after his IRS audit is done, the lame excuse Trump gave for not releasing them during the campaign. I promise you this: Donald Trump is never going to make his tax returns public. Never.

So we have to rely on their personal integrity.

I know, I know.

The problem is that absolutely nothing we have learned about Trump suggests that he will operate in a remotely ethical way when it comes to opportunities to enrich himself once he becomes president. We’re talking about a man who allegedly ran multiple grifts on gullible customers (Trump University, the Trump Institute, the Trump Network); who used the bankruptcy laws to escape the collapse of his casinos, leaving investors holding the bag while he made out like a bandit in a kind of Atlantic City version of “The Producers”; who ran a foundation that was essentially a scamfrom top to bottom; who regularly stiffed contractors when he knew they were too small to fight him; who used undocumented workersand reportedly had foreign models lie to customs officials so that they could work illegally in the United States, who once paid$750,000 to the Federal Trade Commission to settle an antitrust suit, and who was generally revealed to be, if not the most spectacularly corrupt businessman in the United States, then certainly a strong contender for that title.

Hog heaven.

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog | 4 comments
Tags:


Joe makes a poem

Nov 17th, 2016 5:21 pm | By

This is a good one.

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog | 1 Comment »


Three victims

Nov 17th, 2016 1:11 pm | By

In Oakland California…

A San Jose woman who once sued a school district for firing her after sex-reassignment surgery has been charged in the stabbing and shooting deaths of three people in Oakland, authorities said.

Dana Rivers, 61, a former Sacramento teacher, faces three counts of of murder, one count of arson and one count of possessing metal knuckles, according to a criminal complaint filed in Alameda County Superior Court. The complaint alleged the victims, who were identified as 57-year-old Patricia Wright and 56-year-old Charlotte Reed, were stabbed and shot. The third victim, 19-year-old Toto Diambu, was shot.

A lesbian couple and the son of one of them.

Someone called police at 12:21 a.m. after hearing multiple gunshots and saw Diambu lying in the street. He had been shot.

As the arriving officers tried to help Diambu, one of them heard a loud banging coming from the garage, Jimenez said.

Moments later, Rivers walked out of the home, he said.

She was covered in blood, so officers quickly detained her. As officers searched her, they found ammunition and knives in her pocket, Jimenez said.

As they detained Rivers, “she began to make spontaneous statements about her involvement in the murders,” Jimenez wrote.

Then officers searched the home and found Wright and Reed dead inside. A fire was also burning in the garage.

This goes into the crime stats as a woman murdering three people. MRAs are throwing a party.

Wright, a part-time teacher in Oakland, and Reed were married for more than a year, the San Jose Mercury News reported. Diambu was Wright’s son.

Maybe they were all TERFs.

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog | 36 comments


Bad company

Nov 17th, 2016 12:36 pm | By

Russia has withdrawn its signature from the Rome statute that founded the International Criminal Court.

Russia has said it is formally withdrawing its signature from the founding statute of the international criminal court, a day after the court published a report classifying the Russian annexation of Crimea as an occupation.

The repudiation of the tribunal, though symbolic, is a fresh blow to efforts to establish a global legal order for pursuing genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity.

In recent months, three African countries who were all full members of the ICC – South Africa, Burundi and Gambia – have signalled their intention to pull out, following complaints that ICC prosecutions focused excessively on the African continent.

I’d love to be very disapproving, but…the US never signed the Rome statute in the first place.

On Tuesday, the court, which is based in The Hague, published a report that recognised the annexation of Crimea as a military conflict between Russia and Ukraine, and classified it as an occupation.

“According to information received, the situation in the Crimea and Sevastopol is equivalent to the international armed conflict between Ukraine and the Russian federation,” a preliminary report from the ICC prosecutor Fatou Bensouda stated.

“The Russian federation employed members of its armed forces to gain control over parts of the territory of Ukraine without the consent of the government of Ukraine.”

Russia has insisted that Crimea voluntarily joined Russia after a referendum, but international observers say the referendum was hastily organised, did not meet international standards, and was conducted as Russian troops swept through the peninsula. Having initially denied vehemently that Russian troops were involved in the takeover, Putin later admitted it.

Russia may also be concerned about ICC jurisdiction in Syria, where its forces have been repeatedly accused of carrying out war crimes in recent months. HRW and other organisations have called for the ICC to investigate events in Syria.

I’d love to be in a position to say that’s terrible, but…

The ICC has struggled to obtain widespread international acceptance. The US, India and China as well as most Middle Eastern states have declined to ratify the Rome statute which established the court.

About 120 countries, mainly smaller states, have ratified the treaty. The UK is a member of the ICC. The resurgence of nationalist politics, apparent in Brexit and Donald Trump’s presidential election victory, suggests the tide may be turning against international legal institutions.

Down. The direction is down.

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog | 2 comments


Still going down the list

Nov 17th, 2016 11:28 am | By

Joshua Foust’s list.

Item six is the only one without a link.

  • Putting one’s children into senior positions of a government is the behavior of a banana republic, not a constitutional democracy with strong institutions. This is not normal.

There was Kennedy making his brother Attorney General. There was plenty of controversy about that at the time. Sticking in three children and the spouse of one of them, all at once – when they are all entangled in the president’s many businesses – that’s a whole new level.

Item seven is his refusal to disclose his taxes.

Item eight:

  • Asking if he can decline the President’s salary, so as to avoid paying taxes, is not normal.

The link is to a Forbes article which quotes him saying on 60 Minutes that he won’t take the salary, and goes on to discuss taxation in general. I don’t see anything that says Trump wants to refuse his salary to avoid paying taxes on it. I think that one’s a bust.

Item nine is the hundreds of millions he owes Deutschebank. Item 10 is one of the very startling ones:

  • Ascending to the White House while your eldest son, who is also on your transition team, and for whom you also seek a top-secret clearance, seeks out seven-digit business deals in Russia, is not normal. When Russia then names the President elect an “honorary Cossack,” it is not normal.

The first link is to a Newsweek piece from September.

If Donald Trump is elected president, will he and his family permanently sever all connections to the Trump Organization, a sprawling business empire that has spread a secretive financial web across the world? Or will Trump instead choose to be the most conflicted president in American history, one whose business interests will constantly jeopardize the security of the United States?

The second, unless someone can and does force him to do the first.

Throughout this campaign, the Trump Organization, which pumps potentially hundreds of millions of dollars into the Trump family’s bank accounts each year, has been largely ignored. As a private enterprise, its businesses, partners and investors are hidden from public view, even though they are the very people who could be enriched by—or will further enrich—Trump and his family if he wins the presidency.

Sigh. All that palaver about Clinton’s emails, and this went under-reported.

A close examination by Newsweek of the Trump Organization, including confidential interviews with business executives and some of its international partners, reveals an enterprise with deep ties to global financiers, foreign politicians and even criminals, although there is no evidence the Trump Organization has engaged in any illegal activities. It also reveals a web of contractual entanglements that could not be just canceled. If Trump moves into the White House and his family continues to receive any benefit from the company, during or even after his presidency, almost every foreign policy decision he makes will raise serious conflicts of interest and ethical quagmires.

It’s inaccurate, Newsweek says, to pretend the Clinton foundation is like this. The Clinton Foundation actually spends the money it raises on “charitable efforts, such as fighting neglected tropical diseases that infect as many as a billion people.” It’s not a piggy bank for the Clintons.

On the other hand, the Trump family rakes in untold millions of dollars from the Trump Organization every year. Much of that comes from deals with international financiers and developers, many of whom have been tied to controversial and even illegal activities. None of Trump’s overseas contractual business relationships examined by Newsweek were revealed in his campaign’s financial filings with the Federal Election Commission, nor was the amount paid to him by his foreign partners. (The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for the names of all foreign entities in partnership or contractually tied to the Trump Organization.) Trump’s financial filings also indicate he is a shareholder or beneficiary of several overseas entities, including Excel Venture LLC in the French West Indies and Caribusiness Investments SRL, based in the Dominican Republic, one of the world’s tax havens.

Trump’s business conflicts with America’s national security interests cannot be resolved so long as he or any member of his family maintains a financial interest in the Trump Organization during a Trump administration, or even if they leave open the possibility of returning to the company later. The Trump Organization cannot be placed into a blind trust, an arrangement used by many politicians to prevent them from knowing their financial interests; the Trump family is already aware of who their overseas partners are and could easily learn about any new ones.

Many foreign governments retain close ties to and even control of companies in their country, including several that already are partnered with the Trump Organization. Any government wanting to seek future influence with President Trump could do so by arranging for a partnership with the Trump Organization, feeding money directly to the family or simply stashing it away inside the company for their use once Trump is out of the White House. This is why, without a permanent departure of the entire Trump family from their company, the prospect of legal bribery by overseas powers seeking to influence American foreign policy, either through existing or future partnerships, will remain a reality throughout a Trump presidency.

Newsweek provides a great deal of detail.

As I said – we can’t even keep up.

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog | 5 comments
Tags: