All entries by this author

The aching boredom

Nov 12th, 2016 6:13 pm | By

Ashley Feinberg has all the sympathy for Trump’s plight.

Donald Trump does not want to be the president.

Donald Trump likes going to rallies. He likes hearing people scream his name in ecstasy while calling for the imprisonment and death of his enemies. He likes going on TV. He likes hearing about how high the ratings were after he goes on TV. He likes grabbing women by the pussy and moving on them “like a bitch.”

What Donald Trump does not like, however, is keeping his promises, sitting still for more than five minutes at a time, or doing any kind of work whatsoever, tedious or otherwise. It’s probably why so many of his business ventures were spectacular, blistering

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The curate’s egg

Nov 12th, 2016 3:53 pm | By

The Post patiently explains to Trump why he can’t keep “the good parts” of Obamacare while throwing out the icky parts. It’s obvious, plus it was discussed endlessly, but the Post knows that Trump didn’t pay attention and is not quick on the uptake.

After reiterating his promise to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, President-elect Donald Trump has indicated that he may keep two of the law’s most popular provisions. One is straightforward enough — children up to the age of 26 being allowed to stay on their parents’ plan. The other — preventing insurance companies from denying coverage because of preexisting conditions — offers a perfect illustration of why Trump and most of the other Republicans critics

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Question authority

Nov 12th, 2016 3:10 pm | By

Who is Myron Ebell? He’s a climate change denialist who directs environmental and energy policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

(What’s the Competitive Enterprise Institute? Let’s ask SourceWatch:

The Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) is a advocacy group based in Washington DC with long ties to tobacco disinformation campaigns and more recently to climate change denial. It calls itself “a non-profit, non-partisan research and advocacy institute dedicated to the principles of free enterprise and limited government. We believe that individuals are best helped not by government intervention, but by making their own choices in a free marketplace.”[1] The Competitive Enterprise Institute is an “associate” member of the State Policy Network, a web of right-wing “think tanks”

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Guest post: The same 60 million-ish white middle-class Americans

Nov 12th, 2016 2:56 pm | By

Originally a comment by G Felis on Trump’s lobbyists.

Trump was elected by the same 60 million-ish white middle-class Americans who voted for McCain and Romney. (He actually received fewer total votes than either of the preceding candidates.) While some of those Trump voters were surely enthusiastic first-time voters from the deplorable categories (white supremacists and such), they appear to have been balanced by the more traditional Republicans who couldn’t bring themselves to vote for Trump (but also refused to support Clinton), leaving the total number of votes for Trump roughly on a par with Romney and McCain. That is to say, most of the 60 million Trump voters were the same individual citizens — not the same demographic … Read the rest



Reward

Nov 12th, 2016 12:07 pm | By

Good god. He’s managed to surprise me.

Remember that Florida AG who dropped a possible investigation into Trump “University”?

Yes?

Well guess who is on the transition team!

Orlando Weekly:

Dropping that investigation into Trump University is apparently really paying off for Florida’s Attorney General Pam Bondi because she was just named onto President-elect Donald Trump’s transition team.

The Tampa Bay Times reports Bondi joins Vice President-elect Mike Pence, Ben Carson, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, New Gingrich, Gen. Michael Flynn, Rudy Giuliani, Sen. Jeff Sessions, Trump campaign CEO Stephen K. Bannon and several of Trump’s children in the transition team.

Such fun! And when that’s over maybe she’ll be appointed Secretary of Integrity.

Earlier this year, Bondi was

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Trump’s lobbyists

Nov 12th, 2016 11:30 am | By

Trump the populist, elected, we’re told, by people who want to overturn the DC Establishment and speak up for the workers.

President-elect Donald J. Trump, who campaigned against the corrupt power of special interests, is filling his transition team with some of the very sort of people who he has complained have too much clout in Washington: corporate consultants and lobbyists.

Jeffrey Eisenach, a consultant who has worked for years on behalf of Verizon and other telecommunications clients, is the head of the team that is helping to pick staff members at the Federal Communications Commission.

Michael Catanzaro, a lobbyist whose clients include Devon Energy and Encana Oil and Gas, holds the “energy independence” portfolio.

Michael Torrey,

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On the to-do list

Nov 12th, 2016 10:53 am | By

There is of course the schedule of court cases.

US president-elect Donald Trump heads to court later this month to face charges that he ran a scheme that “preyed upon the elderly and uneducated to separate them from their money”. It’s the first of an unprecedented slew of legal issues to face an incoming president.

On Thursday, Judge Gonzalo Curiel will hold a hearing on jury instruction and what evidence can be admitted in the class action lawsuit brought by students of the president-elect’s now defunct Trump University.

Another first. How well it reflects on us, that our new president-elect ran a fraudulent not-university named after himself.

The first day of the trial, at which he has been called

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Not in any way a blind trust

Nov 12th, 2016 9:52 am | By

And then there’s that whole thing about the conflicts of interest. Sam Thielman in the Guardian:

When President-elect Donald Trump enters the White House next year he will bring with him potential conflicts of interest across all areas of government that are unprecedented in American history.

Trump, who manages a sprawling, international network of businesses, has thus far refused to put his businesses into a blind trust the way his predecessors in the nation’s highest office have traditionally done. Instead he has said his businesses will be run by his own adult children.

As someone on NPR said yesterday, that’s not a blind trust, that’s a 20/20 vision trust.

Donald Jr, Eric and Ivanka Trump are all on the

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He longs to stay with the unit

Nov 12th, 2016 7:55 am | By

Uh oh, poor President Pussygrabber, he’s realized that he’s taken on an actual job, one with a lot of work attached, and he doesn’t want to. He wanted to win the prize, he didn’t want no stinkin’ job.

Plus he wants to go on living in the tower. He’s got it just the way he likes it.

Mr. Trump, a homebody who often flew several hours late at night during the campaign so he could wake up in his own bed in Trump Tower, is talking with his advisers about how many nights a week he will spend in the White House. He has told them he would like to do what he is used to, which is

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The KKK celebrates

Nov 11th, 2016 5:29 pm | By

A chapter of the KKK says it’s holding a victory march for Trump next month.

Yeah. The president-elect is being celebrated by the Ku Klux Klan.

This is no dream. This is really happening.

A North Carolina chapter of the Ku Klux Klan announced it will hold a rally in December to celebrate Donald Trump’s presidential victory, in what a national hate-tracking group called the latest evidence that white supremacist groups are feeling emboldened since the election.

The Loyal White Knights of Pelham, North Carolina, one of the largest Ku Klux Klan groups in the U.S., said on its website it will hold the event on Dec. 3. The time and location of the event were not listed. The group

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Somewhere between disastrous and cataclysmic

Nov 11th, 2016 5:17 pm | By

Paul Waldman at the Washington Post underlines the obvious: if you think Trump is going to do away with “the establishment,” you’re smoking something.

This was near the heart of Trump’s appeal to the disaffected and disempowered: Send me to Washington, and that “establishment” you’ve been hearing so much about? We’ll blow it up, send it packing, punch it right in the face, and when it’s over the government will finally be working for you again. And the people who voted for Trump bought it. After all, he’s no politician, right? He’s an outsider, a glass-breaker, a guy who can cut out the bull and get things done. Right?

But the idea that he would do this was based on

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The deranged distillation of the angry white male id

Nov 11th, 2016 4:35 pm | By

Michelle Goldberg considers the role of misogyny in the recent disaster.

Forty-six years ago, Germaine Greer wrote in The Female Eunuch, “Women have very little idea of how much men hate them.” Well, now we do.

On Tuesday, faced with a choice between a highly competent if uncharismatic female candidate and the deranged distillation of the angry white male id, America chose the latter. (Or, at least, the Americans whose votes count most in the Electoral College chose the latter: Hillary Clinton won the popular vote.) We don’t yet have a full picture of the electorate, but according to exit polls published by the New York Times, 54 percent of women voted for Clinton while 53 percent of men chose

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He has a long memory

Nov 11th, 2016 3:58 pm | By

How charming.

Donald Trump surrogate Omarosa Manigault said the President-elect’s campaign is keeping a list of people who did not support his run to the White House.

“Let me just tell you, Mr. Trump has a long memory and we’re keeping a list,” Manigault, the campaign’s director of African-American outreach, told the Independent Journal Review, an online news outlet started by two former GOP staffers aimed at a center-right audience.

Manigault made the comment in response to Sen. Lindsey Graham’s tweet that he supported conservative presidential candidate Evan McMullin.

It’s always a good idea to keep a list, and to say you’re keeping a list.

President Pussygrabber is welcome to add me.… Read the rest



Extended to protect Planned Parenthood

Nov 11th, 2016 3:05 pm | By

Obama blocks one move.

Barack Obama is moving to protect funding for abortion providers such as Planned Parenthood from political attack.

The landmark ruling will block individual US states from stopping funds to Planned Parenthood, or any other family planning provider, as was threatened by President-elect Donald Trump.

President Pussygrabber doesn’t care. He’ll never have to deal with an unwanted pregnancy or need contraception to avoid getting pregnant. He can afford to prevent women from having bodily autonomy.

The service has been widely contested in some states, however, who oppose it on the grounds that some clinics provide abortion services – usually paid for by the patient.

Under the new rule, proposed by the US Department of Health

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And all the good people will do nothing

Nov 11th, 2016 2:48 pm | By

Damon Lewis on Facebook:

What do you tell your kids?

You tell them the truth.

You tell them that the majority of Americans are good people. But, you also tell them they can’t rely on the good people of this country to protect them from evils because here, being a “good person” does not require actually being good. Being a “good person” merely means not being actively evil. Here, you can still be a “good person” if you don’t stop an evil. You can still be a good person if you don’t even try. You can still be a good person if you just maintain an unawareness that you’re being evil.

You tell them the truth that the majority

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Is too so a victory for hatefulness

Nov 11th, 2016 11:47 am | By

Another way I don’t agree with Robert Reich’s take. This piece is in AlterNet and it’s either identical to the one in the Guardian or almost identical.

What happened in America Tuesday should not be seen as a victory for hatefulness over decency. It is more accurately understood as a repudiation of the American power structure.

I wish.

For one thing – what sense does it make to claim it’s more accurately understood as a repudiation of the American power structure when Trump exploited that power structure to get rich as fuck?? Just being vulgar doesn’t make you not part of the power structure. Just being “an outsider” in the sense that you’ve always worked for your own profit … Read the rest



Different

Nov 11th, 2016 10:47 am | By

Apposite.

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Backsies

Nov 11th, 2016 10:10 am | By

President Pussygrabber tweets again.

Nine hours between the two. I suppose somewhere in those nine hours one of his handlers reminded him he needed to start acting presidential now.

Good save.… Read the rest



These anarchists

Nov 10th, 2016 5:58 pm | By

Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke has been rejoicing at Trump’s win and denouncing protesters on Twitter. He’s a candidate for head of the Department of “Homeland Security.” Another very bad man.

Wrong. We’re allowed to protest, and Sheriff Clarke doesn’t get to decide whether our reasons are legitimate or not. We’re allowed to protest and that’s all there is to it.… Read the rest



The wages of cruelty

Nov 10th, 2016 5:24 pm | By

Another reason Trump’s win is so distressing – the fact that being relentlessly horrible didn’t cause him to lose. I’ve realize that the reason I was feeling so cheerful in the last few weeks was because I thought his hatefulness was causing him to lose. It looked that way.

But no. His hatefulness was exhaustively documented, and he won anyway. He won because of it.

That makes me feel sick, and profoundly alienated.

Cruelty and bullying should cause people to turn away in disgust. They did many, of course, but to many others they were like catnip to a cat.

He’s demonstrated that cruelty and bullying are rewarded. That’s very bad news.… Read the rest