Tom Gjelten at NPR notes that Trump’s choice of god-botherers for his inauguration shows what his values are.

Bishop Wayne T. Jackson, who leads Great Faith Ministries in Detroit, played a key role during the presidential campaign by inviting candidate Trump to visit his church. For Trump, it was a rare appearance before a black congregation.

Jackson is rich.

Jackson lives in a multimillion-dollar mansion in Detroit and drives luxury cars. He preaches that being rich is not bad and that Trump’s wealth shows he is “blessed by God.”

Such teachings exemplify the “prosperity gospel,” which holds that God rewards faithful Christians with financial success. It is a faith tradition with which Trump long has been

A classicist, Andrew James Sillett, explains on Twitter a possible (indeed highly likely) Trump’s shamelessness.

Seeing a few tweets in which folk are debating whether Trump “has no shame” or whether he acts as he does because he feels shame intensely.

Worth noting, I think, that the Romans had 2 words that we translate as ‘shame’; the difference between them somewhat resolves the paradox.

The two words are Pudor and Verecundia. They both describe that combination of regret and sorrow one feels when doing something shameful.

The difference between them is simple: pudor is inward-facing, and verecundia is outward-facing.

And there you go. Trump has none of the inward-facing kind, but a heightened version of the outward-facing.

There are extra … Read the rest

Elizabeth Warren asks Ben Carson if he can assure us that no money spent on HUD projects will go into Trump’s pockets…and after he tap dances for awhile, explains why he can’t: it’s because no one can, and that’s because no one knows what Trump’s holdings are except Trump, so we simply have no way to tell whether or not Project X has any connection to President Monster.

… Read the rest

Guest post by Stewart of Gnu Atheism.

It would be foolish to attempt to lay down the law about what is true regarding the Trump dossier attributed to Christopher Steele, who is reported to be in hiding. Nonetheless, one ought to exercise one’s critical faculties (and that is intended to mean one’s own critical faculties, not those belonging to any third party) in examining the evidence either jostling or not jostling for our attention.

Firstly, it seems that the media so disdained by Trump is racing, at breakneck speed, to normalise him and the story of Steele and the dossier is already being pushed down almost out of sight among other headlines regarding Trump and his incoming administration. It … Read the rest

Richard Wolffe has a few observations on Trump’s appalling press conference.

Donald Trump is not what he seems. The supposed master of media manipulation stumbled so often at his first press conference, it is hard to recall why anyone thought the TV star was good at this stuff in the first place.

That one doesn’t make me wince with embarrassment, because I never did think Trump was good at this stuff. I didn’t think about him at all until a few months ago, and when I started I certainly never thought he was good at anything.

Judging from Wednesday’s trainwreck press conference – the first since July – Trump and his handlers have no self-discipline and no strategy

Trump provided his own cheering crowd for the press conference.

When Donald Trump gathered the press at Trump Tower 20 months ago to announce his unlikely candidacy for president, he reportedly paid actors to fill the marble lobby and cheer.

I wonder if he has a recording of people cheering him that plays while he sleeps. Poor guy – he’s so needy.

On Wednesday morning, when the president-elect once again faced hundreds of reporters from around the globe gathered in his lobby — this time for his first press conference in seven months — Trump filled the room with paid staffers who clapped and cheered as he blasted members of the media as purveyors of “fake news.”

…

The Greek

From the Washington Post yesterday:

Coretta Scott King, the widow of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., urged Congress in a letter to block the 1986 nomination of Jeff Sessions for federal judge, saying that allowing him to join the federal bench would “irreparably damage the work of my husband.” The letter, previously unavailable publicly, was obtained on Tuesday by The Washington Post.

“Anyone who has used the power of his office as United States Attorney to intimidate and chill the free exercise of the ballot by citizens should not be elevated to our courts,” King wrote in the cover page of her nine-page letter opposing Sessions’s nomination, which failed. “Mr. Sessions has used the awesome powers of

Trump the birther called CNN “fake news” and refused to take a question from the CNN reporter but then took one from Breitbart – yes Breitbart, that haven of non-fake genyoowine news. (What was Breitbart even doing there?)

One of the stranger moments in Wednesday’s deeply strange Donald Trump press conference came when the president-elect got into a shouting match with CNN’s Jim Acosta, who was trying to ask him a question.

Earlier in the presser — his first one since July — Trump had attacked CNN for disseminating “fake news” because it broke the story that both the sitting president and the president-elect had been briefed on allegations that Russia has “compromising personal and financial information” regarding Trump.

“Since

The Atlantic has the best summary of the press conference I’ve seen.

Trump insisted, despite copious reporting to the contrary as well as his own son’s statements, that he did not and never had business dealings in Russia. When a reporter asked him if he would release his taxes to prove that, he once again demurred, claiming they are under audit. (He has not proven that claim, the IRS says there’s nothing to prevent him from releasing taxes that are under audit.) Yet he also seemed to suggest that having won the election, he no longer had any incentive to release the returns. “The only ones that care about my tax returns are the reporters,” he said. “I mean, I

Trump has issued a public statement disputing the claims in yesterday’s news with his usual dignity and taste, as well as his usual epistemic caution. He chose Twitter as the best venue for this well-reasoned official statement.

Russia just said the unverified report paid for by political opponents is "A COMPLETE AND TOTAL FABRICATION, UTTER NONSENSE." Very unfair!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 11, 2017

Russia just said it’s not true, Donnie tells us. Ah well then – case closed. There is no possible way Russia could be lying about it, so we have no choice but to take their word for it and move on.

Russia has never tried to use leverage over me. I HAVE NOTHING TO

Er. This seems explosive. CNN:

Classified documents presented last week to President Obama and President-elect Trump included allegations that Russian operatives claim to have compromising personal and financial information about Mr. Trump, multiple US officials with direct knowledge of the briefings tell CNN.

The allegations were presented in a two-page synopsis that was appended to a report on Russian interference in the 2016 election. The allegations came, in part, from memos compiled by a former British intelligence operative, whose past work US intelligence officials consider credible. The FBI is investigating the credibility and accuracy of these allegations, which are based primarily on information from Russian sources, but has not confirmed many essential details in the memos about Mr. Trump.