Jeff Sharlet on Facebook:

Since Trump’s been made an honorary Cossack — by the St. Petersburg-area Irbis group — I thought I’d re-share my own encounter with a St. Petersburg Cossack — and his whip, and his gun.

This was in November 2013, at a secret meeting of Russian fascists to organize anti-LGBT violence to which I’d been invited by accident. I was reporting for GQ.

The Cossack will begin, he says, with history. “God sends Cossack souls through our blood,” he says. A voice that seems cultivated for menace. A barrel of dread. God sends Cossacks, yes, he says. They are his warriors.

Do not be frightened, he says. Cossacks are just. For instance: We will not rape

More of Trump demonstrating that there’s no conflict of interest at all at all between his new job as President of the US and his longstanding job as Grifter who slaps his name on other people’s buildings for a large fee: he used a phone call with Erdoğan to puff his Turkish business partner.

When President-elect Donald Trump spoke to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Nov. 9, he mentioned one of his Turkish business partners as a “close friend” and passed on his remarks that he is “your great admirer.”

The twinned Trump Towers bear the president-elect’s name in Istanbul. Dogan Holding, a massive media and real estate conglomerate in Turkey, owns the conjoined buildings and pays the

Trump’s tax plan – massive tax cuts for the 1%, tax raises for single parents. Populist uprising!

“The Trump tax plan is heavily, heavily, skewed to the most wealthy, who will receive huge savings,” said Lily Batchelder, a law professor and tax expert at New York University. “At the same time, millions of low-income families – particularly single-parent households – will face an increase.”

Batchelder, who wrote an academic paper on Trump’s tax plan published by the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, said that the president-elect’s plan “significantly raises taxes” for at least 8.5 million families, with “especially large tax increases for working single parents”. More than 26m individuals live in those families.

According to Batchelder’s research Trump’s tax changes –

Charles Blow isn’t having the Times “let’s meet and discuss this” thing. He’s not impressed that Trump dialed down some of his claims and demands. (Neither am I. You don’t get to use evil attacks and incitement to win an election and then take them back once you’ve won.)

You don’t get a pat on the back for ratcheting down from rabid after exploiting that very radicalism to your advantage. Unrepentant opportunism belies a staggering lack of character and caring that can’t simply be vanquished from memory. You did real harm to this country and many of its citizens, and I will never — never — forget that.

Likewise.

As I read the transcript and then listened to the audio,

Originally a comment by Bjarte Foshaug on This is who he is.

Also, he will have the nukes. He’ll use them. I don’t think there’s any way he won’t. He has no inhibitions, no understanding, no impulse control, no ability to reason or check himself – why would he not use them?

He could be game over. It’s looking likely.

And of course the slow nuke of climate change is already detonating at a rate of 4 Hiroshima bombs a second. Even if we cut carbon emissions to zero at this very moment, this accumulation of energy would continue for many decades due to the enormous inertia of the climate system. That’s just how long it would take for … Read the rest

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.

I 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

Sarah Ditum in the Independent:

America has chosen, and it chose the pussy-grabber. The guy who said his daughter was a “piece of ass”. The guy who has been accused – in multiple, mutually corroborating accounts – of sexual assault. The guy whose ex-wife accused him of rape in a divorce deposition. So tell me again how a rape accusation ruins a man’s life. Please, I am all ears for your sympathetic descriptions of the terrible injustice done to men when they’re named as the suspected perpetrator of a violent crime in exactly the same way that suspected perpetrators of violent crimes are always named.

We just elected a known (though not convicted) rapist president. We elected him even … Read the rest

David Remnick in the New Yorker:

The election of Donald Trump to the Presidency is nothing less than a tragedy for the American republic, a tragedy for the Constitution, and a triumph for the forces, at home and abroad, of nativism, authoritarianism, misogyny, and racism. Trump’s shocking victory, his ascension to the Presidency, is a sickening event in the history of the United States and liberal democracy. On January 20, 2017, we will bid farewell to the first African-American President—a man of integrity, dignity, and generous spirit—and witness the inauguration of a con who did little to spurn endorsement by forces of xenophobia and white supremacy. It is impossible to react to this moment with anything less than revulsion