And another thing. What’s this crap about how Trump has “continually set the standards of business and entrepreneurial excellence, especially with his interests in real estate, sports, and entertainment”? Nonsense.

We don’t think of “entrepreneurial excellence” that way (assuming we think of it at all, but that’s another subject). We think of it in connection with some kind of innovation or improvement, of a kind that benefits a lot of people (or the planet or the environment and the like). Fast food, for instance – however crappy the food is, it’s still been a benefit in convenience and cheapness for a lot of people.

We don’t think of building luxury apartment buildings as “entrepreneurial excellence,” nor do we think of … Read the rest

Adam Raymond at New York mag on what’s gone from the White House website.

We know about the climate change section already.

Also gone from the site are the LGBT, civil rights, and health-care sections. Separately, the Labor Department’s report on LGBT workplace rights is no longer online.

If you click on the links you get bounced to a transitional page, with Trump and Pence leering into the distance.

Here is the archived LGBT page. I couldn’t find the other two by adding “obama” and “archive” the same way.

Added is a bio of The Great Man himself.

… Read the rest

Andrew Rosenthal at the Times on Trump’s inaugural address.

There was no soaring rhetoric in his inaugural speech, no real effort to heal the wounds of the 2016 campaign, and really only one real, coherent defining theme for his coming administration – the only thing that counts is America.

On this day, he said, there will be “a new decree to be heard in every city, in every foreign capital and in every hall of power.”

“From this day forward a new vision will govern our land,” he said. “From this day forward, it’s only going to be America first, America first.”

It’s a hideous slogan, even without the pro-Nazi background. He might as well have shouted, “We need … Read the rest

We (we in the US) now live in a country whose head of state is a very bad man.

It’s a dirty feeling.

It feels dirty having a mean vengeful angry belligerent bully as head of state.

It feels dirty having a corrupt lying cheating fraud as head of state.

It feels dirty having a misogynist racist pussygrabbing monster as head of state.

It feels dirty having an ignorant incurious stupid illiterate as head of state.

It’s a bad day.… Read the rest

PBS wondered how the crowds for Trump’s inauguration compared to those for Obama’s, so they compared photos:

… Read the rest

So now it’s reality.

First stop: the erasure of climate change:

All References to Climate Change Have Been Deleted From the White House Website

Cool. That means there no longer is such a thing, and Trump’s children and grandchildren won’t have to deal with it in the next several decades.

At 11:59 am eastern, the official White House website had a lengthy information page about the threat of climate change and the steps the federal government had taken to fight it. At noon, at the instant Donald Trump took office, the page was gone, as well as any mention of climate change or global warming.

It’s customary for www.whitehouse.gov to flip over to the new administration exactly at noon,

The Times addresses the question of why Putin wanted Trump; what’s in it for him?

Brendan Nyhan, a professor of government at Dartmouth and a contributor to The Upshot, made the case succinctly:

Trump has flouted the norms of American elections and governance at every turn, including calling for the jailing of an opposing candidate, encouraging violence against protesters, endorsing the torture of prisoners, suggesting he might not respect the results of the election, falsely claiming that millions of illegal votes were cast, failing to resolve unprecedented conflicts of interest or to even disclose his tax returns, and attacking a federal judge based on his ethnicity (and that’s of course a highly incomplete list). I can’t directly assess

Jonathan Bernstein at Bloomberg:

Politico’s Michael Crowley has a nice piece explaining the missing National Security Council staffers, and the dangers that could cause if there’s an early crisis. Hundreds of briefing papers have been created by Obama’s NSC and sent to Team Trump, but the New York Times reports that no one knows if they’ve been reviewed.

Yet the NSC is ahead of the curve for this administration. Look at the big four departments. There’s no Trump appointee for any of the top State Department jobs below secretary nominee Rex Tillerson. No Trump appointee for any of the top Department of Defense jobs below retired general James Mattis. Treasury? Same story. Justice? It is one of two

Bahahahahahahaha Donnie from Queens tweets a candid shot of himself “writing” his inaugural address. Suuuuuuure he is. He’s totally writing it. You can tell by the casual expertise with which he tries to fold the pad in half while he’s writing on it.

Writing my inaugural address at the Winter White House, Mar-a-Lago, three weeks ago. Looking forward to Friday. #Inauguration pic.twitter.com/S701FdTCQu

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 18, 2017

 … Read the rest