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Breitbart seizes power

Nov 13th, 2016 5:31 pm | By

So it’s official. Steve Bannon of Breitbart is to be “chief strategist and senior counselor” to the president. Also Priebus is chief of staff. A nod to the “traditional” party, along with elevation for the white supremacist piece of shit.

[T]he inclusion of Bannon, the former head of the far-right outlet Breitbart News, suggests another direction entirely. Rumored to be have been considered for chief of staff himself, Bannon “would have been the insurgent choice” for the top aide job, Eyder says. He is “known for his no-holds-barred approach to politics and his popularity among the alt-right,” as NPR’s Sarah McCammon reported last week.

We must accept the legitimacy of President Birther and his Birther staffing decisions.… Read the rest

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Shut up, Brendan

Nov 13th, 2016 4:55 pm | By

Brendan O’Neill defends poor persecuted President Pussygrabber from the sneers of people who think he’s not a good human being.

If you want to know why Trump won, just look at the response to his winning. The lofty contempt for ‘low information’ Americans. The barely concealed disgust for the rednecks and cretins of ‘flyover’ America who are apparently racist and misogynistic and homophobic. The haughty sneering at the vulgar, moneyed American political system and how it has allowed a wealthy candidate to poison the little people’s mushy, malleable minds. The suggestion that American women, more than 40 per cent of whom are thought to have voted for Trump, suffer from internalised misogyny: that is, they don’t know their own minds,

… Read the rest

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His embarrassment is embarrassing

Nov 13th, 2016 4:07 pm | By

Ugh, this is why people hate the left. It’s why much of the left hates the left.

Dear White People, Your Safety Pins Are Embarrassing

I already hate it, and that’s just the title.

And of course the author is white.

Seriously? This is a thing now? Wear a safety pin to show “you’re an ally?” So immigrants, people of color, LGBTQ people, and others who were targeted and persecuted and (further) marginalized by the Trump Campaign will know they’re “safe” with you?

No. Just no. Please, take it off.

Let me explain something, white people: We just fucked up. Bad. We elected a racist demagogue who has promised to do serious harm to almost every person who isn’t a

… Read the rest

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog | 23 comments


Trump’s children must keep their jobs

Nov 13th, 2016 12:36 pm | By

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

… Read the rest

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For certain areas a wall is more appropriate

Nov 13th, 2016 12:09 pm | By

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

… Read the rest

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The aching boredom

Nov 12th, 2016 6:13 pm | By

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

… Read the rest

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The curate’s egg

Nov 12th, 2016 3:53 pm | By

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

… Read the rest

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Question authority

Nov 12th, 2016 3:10 pm | By

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”

… Read the rest

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Guest post: The same 60 million-ish white middle-class Americans

Nov 12th, 2016 2:56 pm | By

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


Reward

Nov 12th, 2016 12:07 pm | By

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

… Read the rest

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Trump’s lobbyists

Nov 12th, 2016 11:30 am | By

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,

… Read the rest

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On the to-do list

Nov 12th, 2016 10:53 am | By

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

… Read the rest

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Not in any way a blind trust

Nov 12th, 2016 9:52 am | By

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

… Read the rest

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He longs to stay with the unit

Nov 12th, 2016 7:55 am | By

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

… Read the rest

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The KKK celebrates

Nov 11th, 2016 5:29 pm | By

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

… Read the rest

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog | 14 comments
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Somewhere between disastrous and cataclysmic

Nov 11th, 2016 5:17 pm | By

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

… Read the rest

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The deranged distillation of the angry white male id

Nov 11th, 2016 4:35 pm | By

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

… Read the rest

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He has a long memory

Nov 11th, 2016 3:58 pm | By

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


Extended to protect Planned Parenthood

Nov 11th, 2016 3:05 pm | By

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

… Read the rest

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog | 9 comments


And all the good people will do nothing

Nov 11th, 2016 2:48 pm | By

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

… Read the rest

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