All entries by this author

Buffoons who end up ruling their worlds

Nov 23rd, 2016 11:31 am | By

A bit later Trevor Noah said more about Trump’s skills as a crowd-pleaser.

You know, funny enough, one of the biggest moments of realization was when Donald Trump won the election because when I came into the show, I said, I think this guy can win. This was when he first came down that escalator. He gave his first speech. And then I was like, wow, this guy’s going to do well. And I remember man – people laughed at me. People were like, oh, you silly ignorant person who’s just come to this world. You clearly shouldn’t be at “The Daily Show” because you don’t know what you’re talking about.

And I was like, but I don’t know. He

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You have to be able to switch up as well as down

Nov 23rd, 2016 11:16 am | By

Speaking of Trump’s incredibly stunted vocabulary, and the horrifyingly stunted thinking and knowledge that reflects – Trevor Noah said some interesting things about all that on Fresh Air yesterday.

If you look at this election, I feel like Donald Trump was speaking a different language to Hillary Clinton. You know, it’s not dissimilar to what we saw in South Africa with our president Jacob Zuma. I remember sitting with people laughing when they would watch the debates, and they’d go this guy’s a buffoon. Oh, man, he has such a low word count. He’s got the grammar of a 5-year-old. He has the – you know, vocabulary of a toddler. And I said, yeah, but do know how many

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Special tremendous

Nov 23rd, 2016 8:42 am | By

The Times published a transcript of its meeting with Trump yesterday. Le tout Facebook is talking about it, so I hastened to find it. It will probably take me all day to read it though, because I’ll have to take frequent breaks, because reading unscripted Trump is so abrading to the nerves.

I just can’t get over how thick he is. I feel as if I should take that as read and focus on the substance, but I find it difficult. The thickness has a lot to do with why the substance is what it is. The first extended passage reveals it in all its chattering nakedness:

TRUMP: O.K. Well, I just appreciate the meeting and I have great

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Turkish police continue rounding up academics

Nov 23rd, 2016 8:29 am | By

Mahir Zeynalov on Twitter:

https://twitter.com/MahirZeynalov/status/799514778716794881

https://twitter.com/MahirZeynalov/status/800823333159890945

https://twitter.com/MahirZeynalov/status/798185888408707076… Read the rest



Guest post: The slow nuke of climate change is already detonating

Nov 23rd, 2016 7:53 am | By

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



Trump is out to destroy the free and independent media

Nov 22nd, 2016 6:02 pm | By

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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The Queens boy

Nov 22nd, 2016 5:35 pm | By

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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Just call them Nazis

Nov 22nd, 2016 5:10 pm | By

Dear Media:

Please stop calling them the “alt-right.” Just call them Nazis. They won’t be offended. Nazis are super hard to offend, unless you call them Jews.

-Andy Borowitz

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Trump now sees things differently

Nov 22nd, 2016 4:37 pm | By

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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Trump provides free storage

Nov 22nd, 2016 1:11 pm | By

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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Very rough

Nov 22nd, 2016 12:24 pm | By

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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All the power, none of the criticism

Nov 22nd, 2016 8:11 am | By

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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This is who he is

Nov 22nd, 2016 7:59 am | By

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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The day in Trumptweets

Nov 22nd, 2016 7:18 am | By

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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Headlines

Nov 22nd, 2016 6:05 am | By

The BBC seven hours ago:

Turkish MPs to vote on controversial underage sex bill

The BBC one hour ago:

Turkey withdraws child rape bill after street protests

One wonders why it was “underage sex” seven hours ago and “child rape” six hours later.

From the second article:

This bill sparked a rare thing here: cross-party opposition. The AKP MPs who proposed it insisted it would not pardon rapists or sexual abusers and was simply intended to exonerate men who marry underage girls apparently with consent.

Miss the point much? Consent is not meaningful in underage girls. Men exploit underage girls; their underageness makes that easier to do. Saying “Jeez they only want to marry them” makes it worse, not better. … Read the rest



Tomb Raiders Ride Again: National Geographic’s Breaking News

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



“One wonders if these people are people at all”

Nov 21st, 2016 6:02 pm | By

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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A golden tomb

Nov 21st, 2016 4:07 pm | By

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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New York City continues to be a sanctuary city

Nov 21st, 2016 3:44 pm | By

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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See the Nazi salutes

Nov 21st, 2016 3:21 pm | By

The Atlantic has video of that talk Richard B. Spencer gave at the neo-Nazi meeting Saturday evening after most of the journalists had left.

I hit the stop button after he said “It’s not just that they are leftists and cucks. It’s not just that they are stupid.” That’s 50 seconds in.

It’s only a few men in a room. But…they’re connected to the next president.… Read the rest