All entries by this author
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Nov 13th, 2016 12:36 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
Again there’s that unprecedented issue that Trump has binders full of business interests that present unmistakable and undeniable conflicts of interest – and the fact that he wants to keep it that way. I guess nobody told him this was an issue during this entire campaign? That was sloppy. Is sloppy the word I mean? Do I mean reckless? Do I mean corrupt? Gosh it’s hard to choose.
The Washington Post reports that Giuliani – lawyer Giuliani, former prosecutor Giuliani – says it’s cool for Trump’s family to run his businesses and also help Daddy run the government.
Appearing on televised interviews on Sunday, Giuliani initially said Trump should set up some kind of “blind trust.” When pressed, Giuliani told
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Posted in Notes and Comment Blog |
4 comments
Tags: President Corrupt
Nov 13th, 2016 12:09 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
The deportations.
In a “60 Minutes” interview scheduled to air Sunday, President-elect Donald Trump said he planned to immediately deport two to three million undocumented immigrants after his inauguration next January.
“What we are going to do is get the people that are criminal and have criminal records, gang members, drug dealers, where a lot of these people, probably 2 million, it could be even 3 million, we are getting them out of our country or we are going to incarcerate,” Trump told 60 Minutes correspondent Lesley Stahl, according to a preview of the interview released by CBS. “But we’re getting them out of our country. They’re here illegally.”
Stahl had pressed Trump about his campaign pledge to
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9 comments
Tags: President Oops
Nov 12th, 2016 6:13 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
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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Posted in Notes and Comment Blog |
18 comments
Tags: President Oops
Nov 12th, 2016 3:53 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
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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3 comments
Tags: President Oops
Nov 12th, 2016 3:10 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
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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4 comments
Tags: President Corrupt
Nov 12th, 2016 2:56 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
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
Posted in Notes and Comment Blog |
5 comments
Nov 12th, 2016 12:07 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
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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6 comments
Tags: President Corrupt
Nov 12th, 2016 11:30 am |
By Ophelia Benson
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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Posted in Notes and Comment Blog |
8 comments
Tags: President Plutocrat
Nov 12th, 2016 10:53 am |
By Ophelia Benson
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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2 comments
Tags: President Pussygrabber
Nov 12th, 2016 9:52 am |
By Ophelia Benson
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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1 Comment »
Tags: President Plutocrat
Nov 12th, 2016 7:55 am |
By Ophelia Benson
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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5 comments
Tags: President Oops
Nov 11th, 2016 5:29 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
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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Posted in Notes and Comment Blog |
14 comments
Tags: President Birther
Nov 11th, 2016 5:17 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
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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2 comments
Tags: President Pussygrabber
Nov 11th, 2016 4:35 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
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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3 comments
Tags: President Pussygrabber
Nov 11th, 2016 3:58 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
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
Posted in Notes and Comment Blog |
4 comments
Nov 11th, 2016 3:05 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
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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9 comments
Nov 11th, 2016 2:48 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
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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Posted in Notes and Comment Blog |
4 comments
Tags: President Pussygrabber
Nov 11th, 2016 11:47 am |
By Ophelia Benson
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
Posted in Notes and Comment Blog |
12 comments
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