Oh dear god – the Breitbart guy might be chief of staff. Breitbart. Twitter trolls running the country.

Steve Bannon, the conservative provocateur and Mr. Trump’s campaign chief, is now a leading candidate to become White House chief of staff, but he’d have to beat out another campaign veteran in the running, Reince Priebus, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, according to two people with knowledge of the discussions.

Mr. Bannon, the executive chairman of the conservative website Breitbart News, who took a leave to help manage the final weeks of Mr. Trump’s campaign, is well liked among Mr. Trump’s circle of overlapping advisers, who see him as a favorable influence on the president-elect.

What’s a “favorable … Read the rest

A collection of tweets from Day 1.

https://twitter.com/ManikRathee/status/796408766518292480

Someone on the streets of LA just yelled at one of my girl's Latina coworkers to "go back where you came from." #TrumpsAmerica

— Alex/Apex Gale (@AlexGale) November 9, 2016

https://twitter.com/Chris_Weatherd/status/796384091260207104

https://twitter.com/ShaunKing/status/796750646196191233… Read the rest

It’s strange, I’ve just noticed, having a soon-to-be president who has expressed angry, loud, hostile contempt for most of the population.

You’d think someone campaigning for the job would think of that and decide it might not be such a good idea.

I realize he endeared himself to a segment of angry white people, but he did it at the price of wholly alienating massive demographics. That’s not usually how presidential campaigns play out. We get candidates who seem brutally indifferent to our concerns and needs, but not ones who get up at 3 a.m to express furious contempt for us.

I don’t see this working out well. He’s lit a whole bunch of fuses, and he has no plans … Read the rest

Robert Reich points out that the Clintonistas abandoned the working class. I agree with him about that, but I still don’t see how it translates to voting for Trump. He lays out a lot of true claims, but doesn’t explain the ===> Trump part.

Recent economic indicators may be up, but those indicators don’t reflect the insecurity most Americans continue to feel, nor the seeming arbitrariness and unfairness they experience. Nor do the major indicators show the linkages many Americans see between wealth and power, stagnant or declining real wages, soaring CEO pay, and the undermining of democracy by big money.

Median family income is lower now than it was 16 years ago, adjusted for inflation. Workers without college

The Cabinet…

Donald Trump‘s transition team has prepared a preliminary list of potential Cabinet members for his upcoming administration.

The list, obtained by BuzzFeed News, reveals a number of familiar faces including Ben Carson, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, Mike Huckabee, Newt Gingrich and others being weighed for multiple positions.

In total, the list includes 41 names and covers 14 different departments. A source told BuzzFeed that the list is not final and will likely be changed in the future.

Attorney general picks include Chris Christie, Jeff Sessions and Rudy Giuliani.

Newt Gingrich, John Bolton and Bob Corker are listed as potential picks for the secretary of State.

Ben Carson is under consideration for Secretary of Education.… Read the rest

Now it can be told –

Russian government officials had contacts with members of Donald Trump’s campaign team, a senior Russian diplomat said Thursday, in a disclosure that could reopen scrutiny over the Kremlin’s role in the president-elect’s bitter race against Hillary Clinton.

Facing questions about his ties to Moscow because of statements interpreted as lauding Russian President Vladi­mir Putin, Trump repeatedly denied having any contact with the Russian government.

…

Russia’s Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov, in an interview with the state-run Interfax news agency, said that “there were contacts” with the Trump team.

…

Speaking to Bloomberg News, ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said that Russian embassy staff met with members of Trump’s campaign, which she described as

Tasneem Khalil on Facebook:

5 rules: How to write about Trump, his supporters and nationalists

1. Never use words like racists and bigots to describe racists and bigots. When people vote in overwhelming numbers to keep “Polish vermin” out of the United Kingdom or “Mexican rapists” and “Muslim terrorists” out of the United States, you must try to see the wisdom of the crowd. That is the beauty of democracy. If you deviate from this rule, some people will get really offended.

2. Refer to the abandoned white working class. Do not look at exit poll data that would show the working class in the United States actually voted for HRC and most of the Trump voters

One of the first headlines I saw this morning –

Private Prison Stocks Are Surging After Trump’s Win

Oh, of course they are. Obviously our massive prison population should be an opportunity for somebody to make a yuuuge amount of money by giving prisoners bad food and worse medical care. What could possibly go wrong?

Donald Trump’s victory in the presidential elections helped shares of Corrections Corp. rise as much as 60 percent before paring their surge to 34 percent by 10:14 a.m. in New York, while GEO Group Inc. was trading 18 percent higher by the same time.

Those moves mean the stocks have recouped some of the losses they’ve registered since August, when the Department of Justice said

The Times’s editorial summary of what we face:

So who is the man who will be the 45th president?

After a year and a half of erratic tweets and rambling speeches, we can’t be certain. We don’t know how Mr. Trump would carry out basic functions of the executive. We don’t know what financial conflicts he might have, since he never released his tax returns, breaking with 40 years of tradition in both parties. We don’t know if he has the capacity to focus on any issue and arrive at a rational conclusion. We don’t know if he has any idea what it means to control the largest nuclear arsenal in the world.

Here is what we do know:

The BBC tells us about some world media reactions to the election of The Pussygrabber.

Media across the world have reacted to Donald Trump’s victory in the US presidential election with a mixture of shock, disbelief and anxiety. There is also a large measure of uncertainty as to what the future holds.

In the US some heavyweight papers have published leader articles that are unprecedented in their contempt for the future president.

The New York Times says Mr Trump “is the most unprepared president-elect in modern history” and “has shown himself to be temperamentally unfit to lead a diverse nation of 320 million people”.

The Washington Post sees little cause for optimism about the vote, recalling that Trump “has

Profound and empathetic insights on the election of President Pussygrabber from Dana Hunter at The Orbit.

Friends I love are going to die.

The things that were keeping them alive will be gutted.

Bigots who despise them have been emboldened enough to murder them without a twinge of conscience.

And you did that to them.

White folk. You did this. Cis folk. You did this. Bernie-or-busters, third party voters, people who didn’t vote because you couldn’t be arsed, people who thought all candidates were the same, people who voted for Trump because you’re either too white or too sexist or too racist or too selfish or too all-of-the-above to think it through, you did this. It’s all on you.

As … Read the rest

Jeff Sharlet:

I’m reminded of something the late Chuck Colson — a brutal Watergate felon who made himself over as the reigning intellectual of the Christian Right, with help from centrists — told me: “I love ‘compromise.’ I stay right where I am and they come to me.”

It’s worth noting Colson was talking about how he’d come to appreciate the Clintons as inadvertent partners in the rightward lurch of America. He was one of the engines, but let’s remember that too often the Clintons were the caboose of that train. They also did some decent things for everyday people. But they did them on the terms of knee-cappers like Colson. Clintonism ultimately worked out for the Right;