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Measure the headlines

Nov 20th, 2016 11:16 am | By

A drawback to getting news online is that one doesn’t necessarily see how the news is presented and ordered – what is above the fold in huge headlines and what is below it in ordinary headlines. Jamison Foser has shown me what I’ve been missing.

Big headlines right at the top of the page, the whole entire above the fold occupied by Clinton email news.

On the other hand…

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Other issues

Nov 20th, 2016 9:55 am | By

The Times suggests Trump’s imbecilic tweeting may be an intentional diversionary tactic.

But even as Mr. Trump’s transition team appeared eager to embrace a more disciplined approach to the process of building out his administration, the president-elect’s Twitter complaints about “Hamilton” and “Saturday Night Live” provided a distraction.

That may have been the intention. Mr. Trump’s Twitter posts diverted attention from other issues, including a $25 million settlement in a lawsuit against Trump University, concerns about conflicts of interest involving the president-elect’s business dealings, and questions about the propriety of potentially appointing his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, to a White House post.

Not around here they didn’t. I posted about both.

That’s the thing about Trump, as I keep … Read the rest

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Trump v Saturday Night Live

Nov 20th, 2016 9:46 am | By

Our petulant imbecile of a president-elect is still whining and complaining on Twitter, along with trying to tell us all what to do. He is so confused. He seems to think the president (and even the pres-elect) can just bark out orders and have them obeyed. That’s not how this works.

God he’s stupid. He really is like a child, a very young and very spoiled child. That interpolated “which I hear is highly overrated” – that’s so transparent and so goofy. No he doesn’t hear that, except … Read the rest

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Donnie’s pal “Honest Abe”

Nov 20th, 2016 8:41 am | By

… Read the rest

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Tee hee

Nov 19th, 2016 5:58 pm | By

Oh look, Milo Yiannopoulos being oh so amusingly “provocative” at Breitbart a few weeks ago – women should have stayed home hawhaw, they were better off there hawhawhaw, having babies is all they’re good for hahahaha.

Feminist propaganda shoved in the faces of previously-content housewives told ladies they would be less happy if they weren’t working a gruelling job like their husbands were. This sort of thinking was designed to make women feel strong and empowered. But the fact is, women have become far more unhappy in the last 35 years.

…

The role of the housewife has been thoroughly and ritually humiliated by successive waves of feminism — as if raising well-adjusted children, keeping a beautiful home and marrying

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Step right up, rent a bed in Trump’s new hotel, Ambassador

Nov 19th, 2016 5:21 pm | By

This is completely astounding.

Friday evening, the Washington Post reported that about 100 foreign diplomats gathered at President-elect Donald Trump’s hotel in Washington, DC to “to sip Trump-branded champagne, dine on sliders and hear a sales pitch about the U.S. president-elect’s newest hotel.” The tour included a look at the hotel’s $20,000 a night “town house” suite. The Post also quoted some of the diplomats saying they intended to stay at the hotel in order to ingratiate themselves to the incoming president.

ARE YOU SERIOUS???

He is marketing his new hotel to foreign diplomats?

I’m out of swears, out of facial expressions, out of anything that can express my disgust.

“Why wouldn’t I stay at his hotel blocks

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Read, my child

Nov 19th, 2016 4:52 pm | By

John Lewis won a National Book Award on Wednesday.

Watch him accept it.

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He’s trying to project strength

Nov 19th, 2016 4:22 pm | By

The Times does a story on Trump’s temper tantrum about the “Hamilton” rebellion.

The clash between the “Hamilton” actors and Mr. Trump captured the sharply divergent feelings of many American voters 11 days after the election: a showdown between the values of multiculturalism on the left, including the racially diverse “Hamilton” cast and the world of entertainment, and the conservative principles of the incoming Trump administration, which was backed strongly by working-class white voters and traditional Republicans.

Actually no. It’s not “the conservative principles” that have so many of us fighting back. It’s the noisy racism, the venom, the bullying, the sneering, the insults. It’s the calling a senator “Pocahontas” and the many years as a birther and the … Read the rest

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The Voting Rights Act

Nov 19th, 2016 12:44 pm | By

Ari Berman points out in a Times op-ed that the Trump Supreme Court appointments will very likely kill the Voting Rights Act.

The ruling in Shelby was bad enough. What was the result of Shelby?

Fourteen states had new voting restrictions in effect in 2016, including strict voter ID laws, fewer opportunities for early voting and reductions in the number of polling places. These restrictions depressed turnout in key states like Wisconsin, particularly among black voters.

Now it will get much worse.

A grave danger comes from the Supreme Court. If Donald J. Trump appoints a justice in the mold of Antonin Scalia to fill the current vacancy, as he has pledged to do, there could be five votes

… Read the rest

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People who know Trump say he’s a lifelong jerk so why stop now?

Nov 19th, 2016 11:45 am | By

The Times reports on how President Pussygrabber is adjusting to his new job. The first sentence is not a confidence-builder.

Donald J. Trump sits high in Trump Tower in New York, spending hours on the phone with friends, television personalities and donors to ask if they know people to recommend for his cabinet.

Very deadpan. ARE YOU SERIOUS? The man is asking tv personalities to recommend people for the cabinet???

Jesus h fucking christ.

He does a transition meeting early but then he goes back to his morning routine of reading the NY Times and Post and watching “Morning Joe” on the television machine.

He gets angry when members of his inner circle get too much of the spotlight,

… Read the rest

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A surprisingly sharp rebuke from Mr. Trump

Nov 19th, 2016 10:50 am | By

What happened at last night’s performance of “Hamilton.”

With Vice President-elect Mike Pence attending the show, the cast used the opportunity to make a statement emphasizing the need for the new administration of President-elect Donald J. Trump, a Republican, to work on behalf of all Americans.

It was a deeply felt and altogether rare appeal from the stage of a Broadway show — and it drew a surprisingly sharp rebuke from Mr. Trump on Saturday morning. The president-elect tweeted that the “Hamilton” cast had “harassed” Mr. Pence by making the statement and had been “very rude.”

“Apologize!” Mr. Trump wrote at the end of one of two tweets on the matter.

“Surprisingly” sharp? Hardly. “Surprisingly” compared to what one would … Read the rest

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Trump objects to all this outrageous rudeness

Nov 19th, 2016 10:04 am | By

Twitter Trump tweets again.

He thinks it’s noteworthy that he will be working all weekend. Dude. That’s the job. It’s the job he signed up for, it’s the job he trampled all over people to get, yet he’s bragging/complaining about working over the weekend.

Then he tells us how happy he is that he succeeded in cheating people out of as much as $35k with his laughable fake “university” with only a token payout to settle the lawsuit.

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Milo agrees he does like offending people

Nov 18th, 2016 5:52 pm | By

Channel 4 News (the UK one):

This is the moment Milo Yiannopoulos is challenged on Breitbart’s headlines and so-called “post-fact era.”

The news outlet’s former chairman Steve Bannon has been appointed as Donald Trump’s chief strategist – and there’s speculation that Yiannopoulos himself could find his own way into the White House.

Go there to see their excerpt, or here is the full interview:

He says himself he’s a troll:

You know perfectly well that it is a provocation designed to make people think and perhaps to make them laugh.

In other words, trolling.

At about 4:40 he’s even more explicit:

I do like offending people. I think that the grievance brigade, victimhood, you know the idea that hurt

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Troll seizes White House

Nov 18th, 2016 5:07 pm | By

Fresh Air yesterday talked to Joshua Green, a Bloomberg reporter who knows a lot about Steve Bannon.

DAVIES: In 2012, when Steve Bannon was the executive editor of Breitbart, he established a research arm – the Government Accountability Institute. What does it do?

GREEN: Well, Bannon – what attracted me to Bannon originally was that, you know, if you look at kind of the infrastructure, the organizational chart of the Republican right-wing, what Hillary Clinton once referred to as the vast right-wing conspiracy, what you see is that a lot of the tendrils lead back to Steve Bannon. So not only was Bannon executive chairman of Breitbart News, but then with some of the same financial backers, he started

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Trump agrees he cheated those students

Nov 18th, 2016 4:39 pm | By

In more bad news, Trump has settled the lawsuits against Trump “University.”

Donald J. Trump has reversed course and agreed to pay $25 million to settle a series of lawsuits stemming from his defunct for-profit education venture, Trump University, finally putting to rest fraud allegations by former students, which have dogged him for years and hampered his presidential campaign.

The settlement was announced by the New York attorney general on Friday, just 10 days before one of the cases, a federal class-action lawsuit in San Diego, was set to be heard by a jury. The deal, if approved, averts a potentially embarrassing and highly unusual predicament: a president-elect on trial, and possibly even taking the stand in his own defense,

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The kids sat in on the meeting with that guy from Japan

Nov 18th, 2016 4:16 pm | By

Again the mind reels. Ivanka Trump sat in on the meeting with the Japanese Prime Minister yesterday. Fortune says this is tinpot oligarchy behavior.

President-elect Donald Trump has repeatedly said that there would be no conflicts of interest during his administration because his vast business empire would be in a “blind trust.” But White House ethics lawyers in both parties have criticized that, noting that having his children run the company means it would be neither blind nor a trust.

The very first meeting that the President-elect held with a world leader, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, is prompting further criticism—even alarm. According to photographs taken at Trump Tower in New York City and published this week, the

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Operation #TrumpCup

Nov 18th, 2016 3:51 pm | By

Jim Wright:

Apparently the latest trend is for conservatives to go to Starbucks and order a drink and when the barista asks for the name on the order they say “Trump.”

This means the liberal company run by famously liberal CEO Howard Schultz is now shouting “Trump!” from behind the counter several thousand times a day all across the country.

Conservatives who’ve never shopped at Starbucks are now dropping in to pull this stunt. They’re right now busy organizing trips to their local franchise via social media and posting pictures of their orders on Twitter and Facebook.

#TrumpCup is currently trending on Twitter.

Which conservatives find hilarious.

And it IS hilarious.

Especially when you realize Trump is

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Get out of jail free card

Nov 18th, 2016 3:24 pm | By

Turkish Minute reports:

Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) has brought a motion to Parliament that proposes rapists in Turkish jails be released if they marry their victims, a way out of prison for more than 4,000 inmates convicted of rape.

The motion was brought to the floor of the General Assembly and was approved by AKP deputies despite the nay votes of both the Republican People’s Party (CHP) and the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP).

So the raped women get to spend the rest of their lives being raped by the guys who raped them in the first place, so that those guys can get out of prison where they were placed because they raped women. It’s as … Read the rest

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Of course it is crystal clear that assault is unacceptable

Nov 18th, 2016 3:04 pm | By

Back in October Jeff Sessions – former prosecutor Jeff Sessions – was very cautious about what you could call sexual assault.

Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), a top Donald Trump surrogate, said on Sunday that even if the GOP nominee actually grabbed a woman “by the pussy,” as he bragged about in a leaked tape from 2005, that behavior would not amount to sexual assault.

“I don’t characterize that as sexual assault,” Sessions told The Weekly Standard in the spin room after Sunday night’s presidential debate. “I think that’s a stretch. I don’t know what he meant.”

“So if you grab a woman by the genitals, that’s not sexual assault?” the reporter asked Sessions.

“I don’t know,” the

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Meet the white supremacist Attorney General

Nov 18th, 2016 11:48 am | By

Ari Berman tells us more about Jefferson Beauregard Sessions, Trump’s pick for Attorney General.

Donald Trump has chosen a white nationalist as his chief strategist and a white nationalist sympathizer as his pick for Attorney General. Like the Confederate general he is named after, Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III has long been a leading voice for the Old South and the conservative white backlash vote Trump courted throughout his campaign. Sessions, as a US senator from Alabama, has been the fiercest opponent in the Senate of immigration reform, a centerpiece of Trump’s agenda, and has a long history of opposition to civil rights, dating back to his days as a US Attorney in Alabama in the

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