Nov 23rd, 2016 7:53 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Originally a comment by Bjarte Foshaug on This is who he is.
Also, he will have the nukes. He’ll use them. I don’t think there’s any way he won’t. He has no inhibitions, no understanding, no impulse control, no ability to reason or check himself – why would he not use them?
He could be game over. It’s looking likely.
And of course the slow nuke of climate change is already detonating at a rate of 4 Hiroshima bombs a second. Even if we cut carbon emissions to zero at this very moment, this accumulation of energy would continue for many decades due to the enormous inertia of the climate system. That’s just how long it would take for … Read the rest
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6 comments
Tags: Trump
Nov 22nd, 2016 6:02 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
Robert Reich on Facebook:
Historically, despots have used 7 techniques to destroy the independence of the media:
1. Berate the media. Yesterday Trump called two-dozen TV news anchors and executives to the Trump Tower – including Lester Holt, Charlie Rose, George Stephanopoulos, and Wolf Blitzer — to chew them out about their reporting during the election.
2. Blacklist media that criticize them. Trump has maintained a blacklist of news outlets to which he has refused to grant event credentials. This morning he cancelled a meeting with the New York Times.
3. Turn the public against the media. Trump refers to journalists as “dishonest,” “disgusting” and “scum.” He tweets that the New York Times has lost “thousands of subscribers because
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Tags: President Dictator
Nov 22nd, 2016 5:35 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
Journalists and journalistic outlets must never again agree to meet with Trump off the record.
Margaret Sullivan at the Washington Post says what the tv people did wrong yesterday and the Times people did right today.
The disaster yesterday:
Brandon Friedman, a Virginia-based public relations executive, offered his theory on Twitter: “They walked into an ambush, agreed not to talk about it, then Trump went straight to the Post with his version.”
Then it was just a hop, skip and jump to a big headline on the Drudge Report, with its huge worldwide traffic: “Trump Slams Media Elite, Face to Face.” As Business Insider politics editor Oliver Darcy aptly put it, that is “how a lot of America will
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Posted in Notes and Comment Blog
Tags: President Plutocrat
Nov 22nd, 2016 4:37 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
As we’ve seen, in one of the least surprising “surprises” of the week Trump said hahaha I was just kidding, I’m not going to throw Crooked Hillary in jail.
The Washington Post reported this morning that Trump “has decided that his administration will not pursue criminal investigations related to former rival Hillary Clinton’s private email server or her family foundation.” We learned of the decision by way of Kellyanne Conway, who appeared on MSNBC earlier today.
…Conway said Trump now sees things differently. “I think when the president-elect, who’s also the head of your party, tells you before he’s even inaugurated that he doesn’t wish to pursue these charges, it sends a very strong message, tone and content” to
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6 comments
Tags: President Oops
Nov 22nd, 2016 1:11 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
Trump’s other BFF, the Washington Post, reports on an admission by the Trump Foundation.
President-elect Donald Trump’s charitable foundation has admitted to the IRS that it violated a legal prohibition against “self-dealing,” which bars nonprofit leaders from using their charity’s money to help themselves, their businesses or their families.
That admission was contained in the Donald J. Trump Foundation’s IRS tax filings for 2015, which were recently posted online at the nonprofit-tracking site GuideStar. A GuideStar spokesman said the forms were uploaded by the Trump Foundation’s law firm, Morgan, Lewis and Bockius.
The Post doesn’t know if the IRS got the same forms.
In one section of the form, the IRS asked if the Trump Foundation had transferred
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3 comments
Tags: President Corrupt
Nov 22nd, 2016 12:24 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
Hoo-boy. Trump changed his mind about having a tantrum at the NY Times, and they had their meeting after all.
(What can it be like having a meeting with him? A giant petulant baby with way too much power? It must be such a bizarre experience.)
The Times shares:
The strained relationship between Donald J. Trump and The New York Times took an odd path on Tuesday when a planned meeting between the president-elect and the newspaper was abruptly canceled by Mr. Trump and then quickly rescheduled.
After a morning of back-and-forth statements and Twitter posts, Mr. Trump arrived at midday for a meeting with Times representatives at the paper’s Midtown headquarters. Seated next to the publisher, Arthur Sulzberger
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8 comments
Tags: President Oops
Nov 22nd, 2016 8:11 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Trump also doesn’t understand the limits on his power. He thinks he gets to decide which cases the Attorney General will investigate.
President-elect Donald Trump has decided that his administration will not pursue criminal investigations related to former rival Hillary Clinton’s private email server or her family foundation, his campaign manager said Tuesday.
Trump’s apparent decison, conveyed by campaign manager Kellyanne Conway in an interview on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,’’ would be an extraordinary break with political and legal protocol, which holds that the attorney general and FBI make decisions on whether to conduct investigations and file charges, free of pressure from the president.
I guess protocol is for losers.
Trump’s conciliatory gesture stood in contrast to his continued fights
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4 comments
Tags: President Bully
Nov 22nd, 2016 7:59 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Yesterday Trump held a “summit” with some people from the news media – and pitched a Hitler-style fit at them for covering him in such a meany unfair way.
I wish I were joking.
David Remnick heard from people who were there.
He points out the obvious: that any idea that the job would make Trump a wiser and better human is dead as a stone.
First came the obsessive Twitter rants directed at “Hamilton” and “Saturday Night Live.” Then came Monday’s astonishing aria of invective and resentment aimed at the media, delivered in a conference room on the twenty-fifth floor of Trump Tower. In the presence of television executives and anchors, Trump whined about everything from NBC News
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11 comments
Tags: President Monster
Nov 22nd, 2016 7:18 am |
By Ophelia Benson
President Pussygrabber’s latest batch of tweets is astounding.
“Only the crooked media” cares about the massive conflicts of interest that a president who has “interests in properties all over the world” presents. No, Donnie, you’re wrong about that, citizens also care.
This is President Corrupt doing that projection thing again – accusing other people of the very crimes he is trying to hide. Tragically, it’s worked for him so far.
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Tags: President Tweet
Nov 21st, 2016 |
By R. Joseph Hoffmann
As they entered the tomb, they saw a young man dressed in a white robe sitting on the right side, and they were alarmed. ‘Don’t be alarmed,’ he said. ‘You are looking for Jesus the Nazarene, who was crucified. …. He is not here.’ Mark 16.6f.
Whether or not National Geographic has found where they “really” laid the body of Jesus is a hot and controversial topic right now. But right or wrong, it is certain that he keeps popping up.
First the good news for believers: Diggers (let’s not call them archaeologists) working within the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in the Old City of Jerusalem have discovered what they claim is the tomb of Jesus. Again. It seems … Read the rest
Posted in Articles
Nov 21st, 2016 6:02 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
Our new reality:
If you tuned in to CNN earlier today, you might have found yourself greeted by a chyron that could have been ripped straight out of a Newt Gingrich Nazi fanfic: Alt-Right Founder Questions If Jews Are People. The real question, of course, is whether our president-elect should distance himself from an explicit group of neo-Nazis. And according to CNN, the answer is a resounding “WEELLLL …”
That’s from that meeting Saturday.
An anchor whom no one seems to be able to name but who looks suspiciously like Jason Sudeikis in Mitt Romney makeup starts us on our journey:
Richard Spencer, he’s the man who actually coined that term, “alt-right.” He was in Washington this
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11 comments
Nov 21st, 2016 4:07 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
Katy Evans-Bush is also repulsed by the Trump Mausoleum.
The world had 18 months to get used to Donald Trump, before the shock of the election result; it turns out what we weren’t ready for was his apartment. Just days after winning, the president-elect and his would-be British middleman, Nigel Farage, stood beaming together in Trump’s private elevator – a lift so gold, so garish, so glaring, that it could have come with an epilepsy warning. The internet shielded its eyes and began to get the picture.
Oh yes – let me find that.
[shudder]
It’s not just the bling – it goes way beyond that. It begins with Trump Tower itself, the squared-off monolith that’s like a steel
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Nov 21st, 2016 3:44 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
Columbia University Provost John Coatsworth said in a statement today:
First, you should know that the University will neither allow immigration officials on our campuses without a warrant, nor share information on the immigration status of students with those officials unless required by subpoena or court order, or authorized by a student. Moreover, New York City continues to be a sanctuary city, with special protections for undocumented immigrants, and Mayor de Blasio recently affirmed that local law enforcement officials will continue to operate consistent with that commitment.
If the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) policy is terminated or substantially curtailed and students with DACA status lose the right to work, the University pledges to expand the financial aid
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Nov 21st, 2016 2:55 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
Ok the Trump-Macri story may not be true. It’s not completely clear that the reporter wasn’t joking.
On his popular Sunday night program “Periodismo para Todos” (Journalism for All), the muckraking Argentine reporter Jorge Lanata and his guests delivered an explosive claim: U.S. President-elect Donald Trump asked the country’s president for help getting permits for a stalled Trump tower project in Buenos Aires.
The story caught fire, but it may be just more fake news.
Ivan Pavlovsky, a spokesman for Macri who was present in the room during their call, said the claims were false and that “nothing like that ever happened.”
“They didn’t talk about any investments or any tower,” said Pavlovsky, reached by phone in Buenos Aires.
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Tags: President Fraud
Nov 21st, 2016 12:28 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
TPM tells us:
For a number of years, Trump and his Argentine partners have been trying to build a major office building in Buenos Aires. The project has been held up by a series of complications tied to financing, importation of building materials and various permitting requirements.
According to a report out of Argentina, when Argentine President Mauricio Macri called President-Elect Trump to congratulate him on his election, Trump asked Macri to deal with the permitting issues that are currently holding up the project.
Pause to stare at the screen in frozen horror.
This comes from one of Argentina’s most prominent journalists, Jorge Lanata, in a recent TV appearance. Lanata is quoted here in La Nacion, one
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5 comments
Tags: President Corrupt
Nov 21st, 2016 12:22 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
Robin Lustig sees a dangerous world ahead.
What scares me most about Trump is not only that he is a deeply unpleasant man with deeply unpleasant views but also that he is grotesquely, frighteningly incompetent and woefully unprepared for the task ahead. His reputation as a successful businessman is as phony as everything else about him, and he is a man who has no experience whatsoever of politics even at the very lowest level, who apparently had no idea of what was involved in putting together a new White House team.
More than a week after his election, no one from his team had been in touch with either the State Department or the Pentagon, and when the Japanese
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Tags: President Oops