More draining the swamp, by spurning people who know anything about climate or the environment for head of the EPA:

President-elect Donald J. Trump has selected Scott Pruitt, the Oklahoma attorney general and a close ally of the fossil fuel industry, to run the Environmental Protection Agency, signaling Mr. Trump’s determination to dismantle President Obama’s efforts to counter climate change — and much of the E.P.A. itself.

Mr. Pruitt, a Republican, has been a key architect of the legal battle against Mr. Obama’s climate change policies, actions that fit with the president-elect’s comments during the campaign. Mr. Trump has criticized the established science of human-caused global warming as a hoax, vowed to “cancel” the Paris accord committing nearly every

Time’s choice of photo to illustrate its Person of the Year cover of Trump is interesting.

He…erm…usually doesn’t let it show.

But more seriously, what a surly bruiser he does look. He may be trying to look serious and grown up, but all he looks is hostile and belligerent. He’s making not duck-face but fascist-face.

Also notice the dig under his name.

Updating to add:

There are many valuable replies to Helen Rosner’s tweet, for instance pointing out the fiendish positioning of Trump’s head right under the M so that it makes horns. Rosner says the whole photo uses a very 1940s aesthetic.

… Read the rest

Trump held another fascist rally yesterday.

President-elect Donald Trump continued his “Thank You” victory tour on Tuesday, making a stop in North Carolina to tout his national security agenda and formally introduce his pick for Defense Secretary, retired Marine Corps Gen. James Mattis.

Speaking in Fayetteville, N.C., Trump called Mattis the “living embodiment of the Marine Corps motto” — Semper Fidelis.

“Mad Dog plays no games, right?” Trump asked, invoking the general’s nickname, and added that the country was fortunate “that a man of this character and integrity will now be the civilian leader atop the Department of Defense.”

The “civilian” leader whose career was in the military, which is not really what is normally meant by civilian … Read the rest

Again a major newspaper calls Trump a liar in the headline as well as the body.

Headline:

Carrier union boss: Donald Trump ‘lied his ass off’ about saving 1,100 jobs from moving to Mexico

They used asterisks in “ass” but not in “lied.”

Donald Trump lied about saving more than 1,100 Indianapolis manufacturing jobs from moving to Mexico, according to the boss of the company’s union.

Chuck Jones, leader of the United Steelworkers 1999 union who watched the president-elect give a speech at the air conditioning plant on 1 December, told the Washington Post that Mr Trump had inflated his victory.

He claimed to have “saved” over 1100, but it was really 800; the company confirmed that number.

In gratitude

Oh, so that’s why Ivanka Trump was in the room when Trump met with Shinzo Abe, while state department officials and reporters were excluded.

When Donald J. Trump hosted a foreign leader for the first time as president-elect, the guest list included a curious entry: Mr. Trump’s daughter Ivanka, who looked on last month while he and Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan chatted on a white couch high above Manhattan.

Some 6,700 miles from Trump Tower, in Tokyo, another exclusive gathering was already underway: a two-day private viewing of Ivanka Trump products, teeming with Trump-branded treasures like a sample of the pale pink dress Ms. Trump wore to introduce her father at the Republican National Convention.

Ms. Trump

So it’s now clear that Trump was lying when he said the phone call with Taiwan was just a friendly “congrats!” call from one president to another. It was carefully arranged, and one of the arrangers was a paid lobbyist and former Senator.

Former Senator Bob Dole, acting as a foreign agent for the government of Taiwan, worked behind the scenes over the past six months to establish high-level contact between Taiwanese officials and President-elect Donald J. Trump’s staff, an outreach effort that culminated last week in an unorthodox telephone call between Mr. Trump and Taiwan’s president.

Mr. Dole, a lobbyist with the Washington law firm Alston & Bird, coordinated with Mr. Trump’s campaign and the transition

Did Trump cause Boeing’s stock to plummet in a fit of temper? Philip Bump at the Washington Post wonders.

The tweet was this morning.

Boeing is building a brand new 747 Air Force One for future presidents, but costs are out of control, more than $4 billion. Cancel order!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 6, 2016

What inspired him this time?

CNN’s Jake Tapper noted on Twitter that shortly before the tweet (which was posted at 8:52 a.m. Eastern) the Chicago Tribune posted an article quoting the company’s CEO, Dennis Muilenberg. (The comments were made at a speech on Friday, not in an interview with the Tribune, as this article originally indicated.)

“Anyone who paid attention to the

Dana Milbank has more on the pizzeria shootup and Trump’s fomenting of hatred and thus violence.

He got an email from a reader on Sunday.

“Rope, Tree, Journalist,” the man wrote. “Some assembly required.” To this slogan, made popular by T-shirts Donald Trump supporters wore at his rallies, my would-be hangman added his offer: “I will assemble for you.”

This bit of, er, gallows humor was the latest, though far from the worst, of the sort of correspondence my colleagues and I have been receiving lately.

There was a time when threats against journalists, like threats of any sort of political violence, were exceedingly rare. But in Trump’s America, such threats are neither rare nor idle.

The pizzeria shootup … Read the rest

The Times on Trump’s choice of Ben Carson:

With no experience in government or running a large bureaucracy, Mr. Carson, 65, publicly waffled over whether to join the administration. He will oversee an agency with a $47 billion budget, bringing to the job a philosophical opposition to government programs that encourage what he calls “dependency” and engage in “social engineering.”

He has no expertise in housing policy, but he did spend part of his childhood in public housing, said a close friend, Armstrong Williams, and he was raised by a dauntless mother with a grammar-school education. In his autobiography he stressed that individual effort, not government programs, were the key to overcoming poverty.

Yeah that’s great. I’ve been to … Read the rest