The tabloid press.
My grandparents died at Auschwitz: parents told me how Hitler's publicity machine slowly made it possible. This is how. Constant repetition. pic.twitter.com/AHbs9HFidi
— ☕Carol Hedges (also at @riotgrandma72) (@carolJhedges) November 15, 2016
https://twitter.com/jonnysun/status/797198272079298568
https://twitter.com/tragecies/status/797145251223900161
https://twitter.com/pieceofjay/status/797187300723752960… Read the rest
Dahlia Lithwick says we should all throw a huge tantrum about the Supreme Court, and scream and scream and scream until we’re sick, because the Republicans stole that god damn vacancy.
… Read the restThe current Supreme Court vacancy is not Trump’s to fill. This was President Obama’s vacancy and President Obama’s nomination. Please don’t tacitly give up on it because it was stolen by unprecedented obstruction and contempt. Instead, do to them what they have done to us. Sometimes, when they go low, we need to go lower, to protect a thing of great value.
The seat that became vacant when Antonin Scalia died earlier this year was blocked by the Republican party for 9 months for reasons that were transparently false
More Clown Show. Ben Carson declines a cabinet job because he doesn’t have the relevant experience. And yet…he ran for president.
… Read the restRetired neurosurgeon Ben Carson, a top ally of President-elect Donald Trump, is not interested in serving as the secretary of health and human services, The Hill reported Tuesday.
Armstrong Williams, Carson’s business manager and confidant, told The Hill that Carson won’t join the administration and will instead be an unofficial adviser.
It was reported earlier Tuesday that Carson had been offered the position of HHS secretary.
“Dr. Carson was never offered a specific position, but everything was open to him,” Williams told The Hill. “Dr. Carson feels he has no government experience; he’s never run a federal agency.
Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown gently suggests that hiring a hate-everybody troll for a top policy job in the White House might be seen as unfriendly to non-troll Americans.
… Read the restOhio U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown (D.) today urged President-elect Donald Trump to reverse his appointment of Steve Bannon, executive chairman of Breitbart News, as chief White House strategist and senior counsel because of his association with the Alt-right.
“We cannot bring the country together by inviting into the White House the same bigotry and hate speech that divided us on the campaign trail,” Mr. Brown said in a statement released today.
“This is not about a difference in policy or politics — Steve Bannon has promoted anti-Semitic, racist, misogynistic and dangerous views
Guest post by G Felis.
New York Times headline: “Critics See Stephen Bannon, Trump’s Pick for Strategist, as Voice of Racism”
Oh FFS! Steve Bannon’s history of waving the banner of both implicit and explicit racism is not a judgment call or matter of perspective. That’s like saying “Critics See Animal in this Picture as Duck-like.” If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck and calls for the separation of the races like a duck and publishes racist rhetoric like a duck, it’s a racist duck.
(The duck pictured is just a metaphor, of course. I apologize for any implication that the duck in this picture is racist. He isn’t a racist, he just thinks ducks … Read the rest
The Times provides some highlights of Steve Bannon and Breitbart.
… Read the restHere, in his own words, are a selection of Mr. Bannon’s public statements about the country, the Republican Party and his own political philosophy.
• “Fear is a good thing. Fear is going to lead you to take action,” he said in a 2010 interview.
• Referring to Ann Coulter, Michele Bachmann and Sarah Palin in a 2011 radio interview on Political Vindication Radio, he said: “These women cut to the heart of the progressive narrative. That’s why there are some unintended consequences of the women’s liberation movement. That, in fact, the women that would lead this country would be pro-family, they would have husbands, they would love
Abi Wilkinson keeps an eye on the region that Stephen Bannon comes from:
That loose network of blogs, forums, subreddits and alternative media publications colloquially known as the “manosphere”. An online subculture centred around hatred, anger and resentment of feminism specifically, and women more broadly. It’s grimly fascinating and now troublingly relevant.
I’m well familiar with it, and have been since 2011. It’s a sewer.
… Read the restIn modern parlance, this is part of the phenomenon known as the “alt-right”. More sympathetic commentators portray it as “a backlash to PC culture” and critics call it out as neofascism. Over the past year, it has been strange to see the disturbing internet subculture I’ve followed for so long
And so their incompetence has caused a breakdown already. Surprise surprise.
President-elect Donald J. Trump’s transition operation plunged into disarray on Tuesday with the abrupt resignation of Mike Rogers, who had handled national security matters, the second shake-up in a week on a team that has not yet begun to execute the daunting task of taking over the government.
Imagine how the fur will fly when they actually have to do things!
… Read the restMr. Pence took the helm of the effort on Friday after Mr. Trump unceremoniously removed Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, who had been preparing with Obama administration officials for months to put the complex transition process into motion. Now the effort is frozen, senior White
We can’t define our way out of this. Magical thinking isn’t going to work. Judicious ignoring might work on the personal level for things like being able to sleep, but on the public level – we can neither pretend nor ignore our way out of this catastrophe. Just defining Trump as normal and equivalent to all the other candidates ever cannot possibly work because it’s a gross denial of reality.
This bit of political punditry from an Irish observer defines Trump as normal and equivalent to Clinton and Obama, with ludicrous results.
… Read the restI hope that Donald Trump’s gracious acceptance speech, and his positive meeting with President Barack Obama, can begin to reverse the descent into the political gutter by both
Suzanne Moore at the Guardian:
… Read the restThe appointment of Steve Bannon as “chief strategist and senior counselor” means that those who have been attacking the progressive narrative from the far right are now horrifyingly in positions of power. Those on the left who argued during the election that there was not fundamentally much difference between Trump and Clinton clearly saw women’s bodily autonomy as some sort of elite liberal issue.
The euphemistic talk around unplanned pregnancies hides the fact that it is those women at the bottom who suffer most without basic healthcare. The idea that reproductive rights are human rights or that human rights even matter is an anathema to Trump’s entourage.
Do not forget that the wesbite Breitbart
From Obama’s press conference today:
… Read the restFirst of all, let me mention three brief topics. First of all, as I discussed with the president-elect on Thursday, my team stands ready to accelerate in the next steps that are required to ensure a smooth transition and we are going to be staying in touch as we travel. I remember what it was like when I came in eight years ago. It is a big challenge. This office is bigger than any one person and that’s why ensuring a smooth transition is so important. It’s not something that the constitution explicitly requires but it is one of those norms that are vital to a functioning democracy, similar to norms of civility and
Trump contentedly told 60 Minutes that women will have to “go to another state” if Roe v Wade is thrown out.
… Read the restAffirming his campaign pledge to appoint Supreme Court justices who oppose abortion, President-elect Donald Trump on Sunday said that women would “have to go to another state” to get an abortion if the court were to overturn Roe v. Wade.
“Having to do with abortion, if it ever were overturned, it would go back to the states,” he said in his first post-election interview, on CBS’ “60 Minutes.”
“Yeah, but then some women won’t be able to get an abortion?” Lesley Stahl asked.
Trump responded: “Yeah, well, they’ll perhaps have to go, they’ll have to go to another state.”
Priya Jain says the “White Working Class” can kiss her brown ass.
… Read the restI have read dozens of longform pieces this election season about the plight of the white working class. I’ve skipped over many more because I’m fucking done with it. The white working class was not under-covered. The problem is not that we don’t understand the white working class. The problem is that they’re not the only people here.
I am sick of being told, as I have my whole life, that middle America is the “real” America, and we “urban” elites just don’t get it because we don’t live there. As if that were our choice. As if we could just live our brown lives, our black
That threat from Kellyanne Conway to Harry Reid.
… Read the restFormer Trump campaign manager and current transition-team advisor Kellyanne Conway said on Sunday that Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid “should be very careful” regarding his post-election comments criticizing President-Elect Donald Trump, and seemed to at least partially imply that Reid might face legal consequences as a result. Her comment came during an interview with Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday, following a discussion about the protests across the country in response to Trump’s election, and how she hoped that Americans would come together to support their new president. Wallace then asked Conway to respond to Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid’s scathing statement last week that “If this is going to
“All politics is local. Greatness isn’t.”
It doesn’t matter how it happened now. It happened. And now Donald Trump, the least qualified man ever to be nominated for or elected to high office in America, an untested and completely unworthy president-elect, elected by ¼ of the eligible electorate in a year when nearly 50% of Americans preferred to stay home and watch it unfold as a reality TV extravaganza, this same Donald Trump will be President of the United States. Why? Because Americans, we are assured, love change. It doesn’t matter what kind of change. Change with bacon and cheese crumbles is best. But any change will do.
This is an essay about change. I live in China where change … Read the rest
I was thinking President Plutocrat has to obey rules against conflicts of interest…but he doesn’t. The Times spelled it out a couple of days ago:
… Read the restA theme of Mr. Trump’s presidency is likely to be the clash of his duties running the country with the remnants of his decades as a hard-charging businessman. But federal rules and precedent make a couple of things clear.
Mr. Trump will have no immunity from lawsuits involving his corporate ventures, thanks to a Supreme Court ruling involving Paula Jones, one of President Bill Clinton’s accusers. And nothing will stop Mr. Trump’s family from continuing to run its vast international web of businesses. Federal ethics laws and conflict-of-interest statutes that apply to other federal
The Post reports reactions to Bannon’s appointment:
The announcement has produced intense hand-wringing in Washington and sharp denunciations from political observers and strategists critical of Breitbart News’s close association with the alt-right, a fringe conservative movement saturated with racially insensitive rhetoric and elements of outright white nationalism.
That puts it a good deal too tactfully. Breitbart News is a scurrilous racist hate-mongering rag of a website.
https://twitter.com/jonlovett/status/797923795088482304
Nation exhales because white nationalist only gets second most influential job in White House
— Dan Pfeiffer (@danpfeiffer) November 13, 2016
… Read the restBen Shapiro, a former Breitbart editor who worked closely with Bannon, called him a “legitimately sinister figure” in an article he published on the Daily Wire after Bannon joined the Trump
When President Pussygrabber met with Obama last week he was surprised to learn that the job is an actual job, with a large amount of hard work involved. His surprise was apparently not of the pleased and delighted variety. Talking Points Memo quotes the WSJ:
… Read the restDuring their private White House meeting on Thursday, Mr. Obama walked his successor through the duties of running the country, and Mr. Trump seemed surprised by the scope, said people familiar with the meeting. Trump aides were described by those people as unaware that the entire presidential staff working in the West Wing had to be replaced at the end of Mr. Obama’s term.
After meeting with Mr. Trump, the only person to be
Bloomberg on Steve Bannon a year ago:
… Read the restBannon is the executive chairman of Breitbart News, the crusading right-wing populist website that’s a lineal descendant of the Drudge Report (its late founder, Andrew Breitbart, spent years apprenticing with Matt Drudge) and a haven for people who think Fox News is too polite and restrained. He’d spent the day at CPAC among the conservative faithful, zipping back and forth between his SiriusXM booth and an unlikely pair of guests he was squiring around: Nigel Farage, the leader of Britain’s right-wing UKIP party, and Phil Robertson, the bandanna’d, ayatollah-bearded Duck Dynasty patriarch who was accepting a free-speech award. CPAC is a beauty contest for Republican presidential hopefuls. But Robertson, a novelty
