Great Vampire Squid

Let's never forget Matt Taibi's marvelous characterization of Goldman Sachs:

The world's most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.

I've been watching The Rachel Maddow Show on MSNBC, and I've learned the following:

So far, Trump has appointed or nominated the following fat cats who have connections to Goldman Sachs: Special advisor Steve Bannon; multimillionaire Secretary of the Treasury Steven Mnuchin (second-generation Goldman Sachs -- his father was a partner); plus not-yet-named-to-anything billionaire member of his transition team, Anthony Scaramucci. Trump met today with Gary Cohn, president of Goldman Sachs; Cohn is said to be in the running himself for a top position in the administration. For some reason, Goldman stock has done extremely well recently. On election day, the share price was $182; today it's $220, an 8-year high.

Other billionaires nominated, appointed, or on Trump's transition team -- so far -- include Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos; Rothschild investment banker Wilbur Ross; his son-in-law, Jared Kushner; hedge-fund manager Rebekah Mercer; and PayPal founder Peter Thiel.



Rachel said: "It's turning into quite a full employment program for the nation's billionaires." She played a video clip of Trump on the stump:

My contract with the American voter begins with a plan to end government corruption and to take back our country, and to take it back swiftly, from the special interests who [sic] I know so well.

Yes, he knows them well, all right. And far from taking anything back from them, he's gathering them around him. And now he has named another billionaire, Todd Ricketts, co-owner of the Chicago Cubs and the son of one of his top donors during the campaign, to serve as deputy secretary of commerce. (The Ricetts family strongly supported Scott Walker; when his campaign cratered, they briefly considered going "Never Trump," prompting a hostile tweet from The Donald:

I hear the Rickets [sic] family, who own the Chicago Cubs, are secretly spending $'s against me. They better be careful, they have a lot to hide!

The Ricketts family then decided to support Trump, and apparently all is now forgiven with this appointment.

Onward and upward, as we move into The New Gilded Age!

The Blue-Collar Billionaire's Inaugural Ball

Click here for an article at Crooks & Liars, by LeftOfCenter, entitled "Trump Invites The Swamp Monsters To His Inaugural -- For A Price."

It seems that our man of the people, whose spending on Inaugural Balls and other celebrations is expected to top $65 million, far more than has ever been spent before, will be selling access to all the events -- for a cool million dollars.

For seven-figure contributions, Trump's richest supporters will get a slew of special perks during the inauguration weekend, including eight tickets to a “candlelight dinner” that will feature “special appearances” by Trump, his wife, Melania, Vice President-elect Mike Pence and his wife, Karen, according to a sheet detailing “underwriter package benefits” obtained by The Washington Post. The 58th Presidential Inaugural Committee confirmed the authenticity of the donor brochure, which was first reported by the Center for Public Integrity.

Other million-donor benefits include an exclusive lunch “with select Cabinet appointees and House and Senate leadership,” four tickets to “an intimate dinner” with the Pences, eight tickets to a lunch with “the ladies of the first families,” eight tickets and premier access to the inaugural ball and priority booking at “Premier Inaugural Hotel(s).”

Fox News: Islamophobic Fearmongering

Click here for my recent post, entitled " What Group Is The #1 Terror Threat In The U.S.?" I answered that question: "White Americans: radical anti-government groups or white supremacists."

But Fox, as usual, is fearmongering against the American Muslim community. Click here for an article by John Amato at Crooks & Liars, entitled "Fox News Worries About Islamic Groups Arming Themselves Against Trump."

Stuart Varney of Fox Business Network hosted a segment entitled, "Legal? Islamist Group in U.S. Reportedly Arming for Confrontation with Trump Admin." Huh?

Varney got his info from an anti-Muslim hate group called The Clarion Project. According to its Wikipedia entry, "The Clarion Project states its mission as 'exposing the dangers of Islamic extremism while providing a platform for the voices of moderation and promoting grassroots activism.'" The Wikipedia entry concludes: "The Southern Poverty Law Center described the organization as an anti-Muslim group,[17] and the Muslim advocacy group Council on American–Islamic Relations said the group promotes Islamophobia in America." Las Vegas casino magnate Sheldon Adelson is a major donor, and its advisory board includes prominent Islamophobe Frank Gaffney.

I mentioned Frank Gaffney in an earlier post, entitled "Trump Transition: Words From Torture Impresario John Yoo, Positions For Jared Kushner And Wingnut Extraordinaire Frank Gaffney." In that post, I quote a Charlie Pierce article in Esquire as saying "Frank Gaffney is notable for the fact that he is so bullgoose loony that he was refused a gig at CPAC, the annual extremist hootenanny"; I commented that "If you're too over-the-top for CPAC (Conservative Political Action Conference), that's saying something."

Click here for another of my earlier posts, entitled "Look Out! It's Sharia!" in which I talk about Sharia fearmongering, and quote an article at ThinkProgress, by Scott Keyes, as saying:

The godfather of the anti-Sharia movement, Frank Gaffney, told ThinkProgress in January that the Muslim Brotherhood has “infiltrated” the United States government. Last month, Gaffney accused Gen. David Petraeus of “submission” to Sharia law.

I explain the Petraeus reference in yet another of my earlier posts, "Well, That Goofy-Looking Redneck Finally Did It." The "goofy-looking redneck" is pastor Terry Jones, who got international exposure for his tiny church in Gainesville, Florida, threatened to burn a copy of the Quran. I say in my article:

Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, said the burning “could endanger troops and it could endanger the overall effort.” President Obama called it a “destructive act.” Defense Secretary Robert Gates personally called Jones and asked him not to go through with his plan.

Anyway, according to Varney at Fox, confidential sources within "secret" Islamist groups say the groups are arming themselves in preparation for jihad against Trump. Says Amato: "How do they know? They got the low down from Martin Mawyer of the Christian Action Network [Click here for the CAN Wikipedia entry]."

Both the the Clarion Project and the Christian Action Network are considered hate organizations by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Click here for the SPLC's Wikipedia entry; you might want to read the section entitled "Controversy over hate group and extremist listings" to see if you think it detracts from the reputation of the SPLC. The entry also says:

It is noted for its legal victories against white supremacist groups, its classification of hate groups and other extremist organizations, its legal representation for victims of hate groups, and its educational programs that promote tolerance.

The CAN was the group that fomented violence against a peaceful Muslim community in the Catskills in 2015, when according to an article at Huffington Post, Robert Doggart, "a Christian minister and onetime [Republican] candidate for Congress, “was recorded on a wiretapped phone call planning to burn down a mosque and Muslim school, while shooting anyone who tried to stop the attackers.”

Kris Kobach's Support For Trump's "Illegal Voters" Lie

Click here for one of my previous posts, entitled "Kris Kobach Backs Trump's Spurious Claims About Fraudulent Votes."

Commenting on the story that Kobach had backed up Trump's lie, "In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally," Norm Ornstein, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, tweeted about Kobach:

He is not just an evil, evil man. He is a thoroughly dishonest one!

The Iniquity Of "Both-Siderism"

Driftglass must be ecstatic. Jonathan Chait at New York Magazine has written an article entitled "David Brooks and the Intellectual Collapse of the Center," which says exactly what Driftglass has been saying for years about "both-siderism" being the main failing of the press in the Obama years, and specifically about David Brooks of The New York Times. Chait says:

Of all the failures that have led to the historical disaster of the Trump presidency, perhaps the least-remarked-upon is the abdication of responsibility of the American center. Those of us with moderate inclinations need an effective center as a brake against extremism. When one party veers too far from the center, the center joins the opposing party, until the extreme one can be coaxed back into the mainstream. David Brooks calls for a rejuvenation of the center under the Trump presidency. But Brooks himself is the perfect encapsulation of why the center has proven so hapless, allowing itself to enable extremism rather than prevent it.

He proceeds to dissect Brooks's article. Then he says:

Brooks spent the last eight years defining the center as something Obama was not. It didn’t matter that Obama supported a health-care plan first devised by Mitt Romney, or a cap-and-trade plan endorsed by John McCain. Brooks nestled himself into the territory between Obama and the angry, no-compromise Republicans who were shutting down government and boycotting all negotiations with the president. If Obama endorsed the policies Brooks preferred, he would simply pretend that Obama had not proposed them. Indeed, one of the most common genres of David Brooks column was a sad lament that neither party would endorse policies that in fact Obama had explicitly and publicly called for.

If Obama offered a deal to raise taxes through tax reform while reducing entitlements, Brooks would write a sad column about how nobody was willing to raise taxes through tax reform while reducing entitlements. If Obama favored education reform, an infrastructure bank, and more high-skill immigration, Brooks would write a sad column about how nobody favored those things. When Obama supported market-oriented health-care reform, Brooks opposed it as an extravagant government takeover. Then later he wrote a sad column about how “we’d have had a very different debate if we knew the law was going to be a discrete government effort to subsidize health care for more poor people” rather than “an extravagant government grab to take over the nation’s health-care system.”

Chait concludes:

The centrists could have played a role in braking the growing extremism of the Republican Party. It would have meant telling the country that there was now one moderate, governing party and one extremist faction, and parking themselves with the moderate party until such time as the dynamic changed. They could not do it. If there’s not much of a center left to stop Trump from trampling democratic norms, it is because the centrists abdicated their responsibility and destroyed themselves.

In response to Chait's article, Norm Ornstein (according to Wikipedia, "resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington D.C. conservative think tank) tweeted:

I asked David Brooks more than once to take on an insurgent outlier force in his party. He did not. @jonathanchait is right https://twitter.com/jbouie/status/803700395419676673 …

What Group Is The #1 Terror Threat In The U.S.?

White Americans: radical anti-government groups or white supremacists.

Click here for an article at PRI (Public Radio International), by Peter Gelling, entitled "White Americans are the biggest terror threat in the United States." Despite widespread belief otherwise, the article says:

The Washington-based research organization [the New America Foundation] did a review of “terror” attacks on US soil since Sept. 11, 2001 and found that most of them were carried out by radical anti-government groups or white supremacists. Almost twice as many people have died in attacks by right-wing groups in America than have died in attacks by Muslim extremists. Of the 26 attacks since 9/11 that the group defined as terror, 19 were carried out by non-Muslims.

So what's a "terror" attack? The article says:

Terrorism is hard to define. But here is its basic meaning: ideological violence. In its study, the New America Foundation took a narrow view of what could be considered a terror attack. Most mass shootings, for instance, like Sandy Hook or the Aurora, Colorado movie theater shooting — both in 2012 — weren't included. Also not included was the killing of three Muslim students in North Carolina earlier this year. The shooter was a neighbor and had strong opinions about religion. But he also had strong opinions about parking spaces and a history of anger issues. So that shooting was left off the list.

The killing of nine people at a church in Charleston, South Carolina last week was included. The shooter made it clear that his motivation was an ideological belief that white people are superior to black people. The shooting has cast new light on the issue of right-wing terrorism in the United States. But since it can't really use Special Forces or Predator drones on US soil, it remains unclear how the government will respond.

The article links to another, also at PRI, entitled "Turns out people get angry when you say white Americans are terrorists, too," by Timothy McGrath.

More after the jump.

Drain The Swamp? Charlie Pierce Comments.

Click here for my earlier post, "Trump's Appointments So Far."

Now here's one of my favorite commenters, Charlie Pierce, at Esquire. I've reproduced his article -- "Donald Trump. Goldman Sachs. What Could Go Wrong?" -- subtitled, "Drain the swamp with the people who drained the economy":

Remember back in 2008, when Democratic candidate Barack Obama won a convincing victory over John McCain, who was representing a fairly well discredited Republican Party? The first thing all the sharp people decided that the new president immediately should "reach out" and hire some Republicans out of the many who could be found in David Brooks' contact list—like Bob Gates, for example, or that nice Mr. Comey over at FBI. Just to bring the country together, like the new president said he wanted to do, right?

OK. So now there's a new president-elect and nobody is telling him to keep, say, Tom Vilsack at Agriculture, not that he'd listen anyway. Instead, he seems to be trolling for underlings in two places—the executive washrooms of Goldman Sachs, and the comment sections of Fox Nation. Let's take a look at some of the folks whose names are currently under consideration, instead of waiting for El Caudillo del Mar-A-Lago to hire them and make the electric Twitter machine cry mercy again.

More after the jump.

Handwringing By Chuck Todd

Here's Chuck Todd at CNN:

CHUCK TODD: Tonight, I'm way more obsessed than usual. In fact, there's an issue that quite literally is keeping me up at night. I don't usually like navel-gazing about the press. I don't feel sorry for us, ever. But we in the media are facing a challenge unlike any before. It used to be we believed presidents when they talked, or we believed they had facts to back up their statements. Lying got them in trouble. It got one president impeached. It forced another to resign.

So what do you do when the president-elect is willing to spread outright falsehoods, like the charge that voter fraud cost him the popular vote, and claims somehow the media is covering this up? What do you do when he thinks any unflattering coverage is, by definition, unfair? What do you do when he tells top national reporters that half of them are blatantly dishonest at the job that they do, and he does it to them in their face? What do you do when millions choose to believe fake news stories simply because they like what they hear, and the candidate they like retweets those stories? What do you do when half the country believes one set of facts and the other half believes another set of something?

In short, what do you do when millions simply don't want to believe the media anymore, and now have a candidate or a president that will encourage them not to do that?

Well, here's one answer: We're going to keep working at what we do. We're going to try to distinguish real from fake, fact from fiction, news from propaganda. And we're always going to be fair. We've always been fair. Here's something we won't do, is somehow "balance" facts.

You and your network had nothing to do with it, right, Chuck? You weren't taking part as this circus developed; you were just silent observers?

Kris Kobach Backs Trump's Spurious Claims About Fraudulent Votes

Click here for an article at McClatchy by Bryan Lowry entitled "Trump adviser Kobach backs disputed Trump claim of millions illegally voting."

Kris Kobach, who is expected to soon be given a position in Trump's team (Secretary of Homeland Security?), is Secretary of State in Kansas. He is possibly the nation's most prominent proponent of anti-immigrant policies. Click here for his Wikipedia entry. He is probably best known as the author of Arizona's notorious "show your papers" law, signed by Arizona Governor Jan Brewer in 2008:

Kobach played a significant role in the drafting of Arizona SB 1070, a state law that attracted national attention as the country's broadest and strictest—at the state level—illegal immigration measure in a long time, and has assisted in defending the state during the ongoing legal battle over SB 1070's legality.

The law was contested in federal courts, and finally struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2012. Kobach has helped to draft similar anti-immigrant laws in several other states.

Here's a little gem from Kobach's Wikipedia entry:

In response to a caller on his March 1, 2015 radio show, Kobach agreed that it would not be “a huge jump” for the Obama administration to call for an end to the prosecution of all African-American suspects.

The comment stirred up considerable controversy: "...the Kansas Senate Minority Leader, Anthony Hensley, called Kobach "...the most racist politician in America today" and called upon him to resign from office." Of course, Kobach is a strong Trump supporter. Here are his views on Trump's famous wall:

In February 2016, Kobach endorsed Donald Trump in his campaign for the U.S. Presidency, citing his stance on immigration. Kobach has proposed a halt to what he claims to be $23 billion in annual remittances by Mexican nationals illegally living in the U.S. unless Mexico makes a one-time $5–10 billion payment for Trump's proposed wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.

But I digress; the subject of the post is Trump's tweet:

In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.

This ridiculous claim is completely unsupported; the only person to have been caught voting illegally in the recent election was a Trump supporter who voted twice: Terri Lynn Rote, from Des Moines, Iowa, who is facing a charge of election misconduct.

Kobach, as Kansas Secretary of State, certified the state's election results on Wednesday; moments later, he said: “I think the president-elect is absolutely correct when he says the number of illegal votes cast exceeds the popular vote margin between him and Hillary Clinton at this point."

At least Koback pointed to some "evidence" to support his claim -- debunked, spurious, but at least it's something:

Kobach pointed to a widely disputed study released by two Old Dominion University political scientists in 2014 that found that noncitizens voted at a rate of 11.3 percent in the 2008 election. The study has been rebutted repeatedly by by other election scholars.

Click here for an article at FactCheck.Org which thoroughly debunks Trump's -- and now Kobach's -- claim.

So, what can we expect from the Trump team on immigration "reform"? McClatchy says:

Kobach, who advised Trump on immigration throughout the campaign, would not say Wednesday whether he was advising the president-elect to pursue a nationwide proof of citizenship requirement.

Papers, please! But some Latinos can be quite fair-skinned; should we force them to wear some sort of identifying mark? A yellow star, perhaps?

The Seven Sisters vs Steve Bannon

Click here for an article at The New York Times, entitled "A List of Priorities From Trump, and Kris Kobach Tips His Hand," by Michael D. Shear, Carl Hulse, and Michael E. Schmidt. In a subheading titled "The ‘Seven Sisters’ strike back against Bannon, the article claims that in a radio interview in 2011, Bannon said leadership from Sarah Palin and Ann Coulter “would be pro-family, they would have husbands, they would love their children. They wouldn’t be a bunch of dykes that came from the Seven Sisters schools up in New England."

"The Seven Sisters" are a group of historically women's colleges, liberal arts schools in the Northease: Barnard College, Bryn Mawr College, Mount Holyoke College, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, Smith College, Vassar College and Wellesley College.

The heads of The Seven Sisters have published an open letter to Steve Bannon, saying: "Our alumnae are accomplished leaders in all spheres of public and professional life; they are committed to their work, their families and their countries. Now more than ever, we look to those who would lead the United States of America for a message of inclusion, respect and unity."

Trump Victory Tour! Hail Trump!

Great! Now the U.S. can have its very own Nuremberg rallies: thousands of adoring fans screaming their love of The Dear Leader!



He's kicking things off in Cincinnati -- thank you, Ohio! -- on Thursday, December 1. I'm going from memory here, and I can't provide backup, but I believe I've read that Trump enjoys his rallies and his "connection with the people" so much that he's going to be holding them throughout his presidency.

Hail Trump!

Trump's Appointments So Far

- Vice President: Indiana Governor Mike Pence
- Chief of Staff: RNC Chairman Reince Priebus
- Chief White House Strategist: Steve Bannon
- Attorney General: Senator Jeff Sessions
- Housing and Urban Development Secretary: Dr. Ben Carson
- Health and Human Services Secretary: Congressman Tom Price
- Transportation Secretary: Former Labor Secretary (for George W. Bush) Elaine Chao
- Education Secretary: Betsy DeVos
- CIA Director: Mike Pompeo
- National Security Advisor: Michael Flynn
- U.N. Ambassador: South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley
- Secretary of the Treasury: Goldman Sachs executive Steven Mnuchin
- White House Counsel: Don McGahn

Pence, Price, Chao, Pompeo, and McGahn (and maybe Sessions), extreme right-wingers all, could be considered mainstream Republican choices, people who could have been appointed by Cruz or Kasich or Rubio or Bush.

Bannon, Carson, and Flynn are weird, off-the-wall wingnut picks.

Priebus, Bannon, Carson, Mnuchin, and DeVos have no government experience whatsoever.

Bannon, Carson, DeVos, and Haley are absolutely inexperienced and unqualified for the positions to which they've been appointed.

Carson is a token African-American (perhaps soon to be joined by Sheriff David Clarke); Haley and Chao add ethnic diversity.

DeVos and Mnuchin are the opposite of "draining the swamp"; it's just adding more alligators.



Screwballs waiting in the wings: Rudy Giuliani (UPDATE: removed his own name from the running for a cabinet position on November 29), Newt Gingrich, Mike Huckabee, John Bolton, Laura Ingraham, Rick Perry, Sarah Palin, Scott Brown, Kris Kobach, Jerry Falwell, Jr., Ann Coulter, and Sheriff David Clarke. They likely all will receive something, being hardcore loyalist Trump supporters; all of them will be disastrous wherever they end up. They're mostly washed up politically, with no hope of ever being elected again; I'm expecting Bobby Jindal to come mooching around any minute. And how about the Duck Dynasty guy? Alex Jones, maybe?

Meet Don McGahn, White House Counsel

Click here for an article by Digby at Hullabaloo, entitled "Trump hired Tom Delay's lawyer to give him ethics advice."

Okay, the name "Tom Delay" sets off some alarm bells. Digby says the following:

President Obama tried to warn Trump that he needed to find a White House counsel who would give him strong, unbiased advice and help him navigate these treacherous ethical waters. Trump clearly didn’t listen. In fact he went out of his way to name as his chief counsel one of the most notorious lawyers in Washington, Don McGahn, the man best known as the ethics lawyer to corrupt former House whip Tom “The Hammer” DeLay, a man who pretty much filled the swamp Trump promised to drain. As one of the architects of the “K Street Project,” which strong-armed lobbyists into only hiring Republicans if they wanted to do business with the government, DeLay and McGahn were instrumental in institutionalizing GOP self-dealing and corruption during the Bush years.

McGahn helped DeLay with a Russian pay-to-play scheme and subsequent RICO lawsuit. As the in-house counsel for the National Republican Campaign Committee, McGahn oversaw the raising of more than $625 million between 2000 and 2008 with almost no oversight and no rules. The scheme finally ended when a Republican congressman insisted on an audit and the FBI indicted the treasurer on embezzlement charges.

Naturally, George W. Bush then made McGahn a member of the Federal Election Commission, where he did everything in his power to undermine the campaign finance laws — and succeeded — after which he went to work for the Koch brothers. Of course. In 2016 he joined the Trump campaign, and he will now be White House counsel.

The idea that this man is going to give Trump guidance on how to deal with conflicts of interest in an ethical manner is laughable. His career has been spent counseling his clients on how to do the opposite. Like Steve Bannon, Michael Flynn and Jeff Sessions, it’s yet another example of Trump hiring the worst person in America for the job. It’s almost as if he’s trolling America, just messing with our heads for the fun of it. And like nearly all forms of trolling it’s not funny at all.

Trump Landslide?

Tweet by Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway:

306. Landslide. Blowout. Historic.

Nate Silver's reply:

Actually way below average for a winner's total:
1984—525
1980—489
1988—426
1996—379
1992—370
2008—365
2012—332
*2016—306*
2004—286
2000—271

W's 271 electoral college votes in 2000, of course, were during the election that took a couple of months for Poppy's Supreme Court to throw it to W; he won by a sliver, 286, when re-elected in 2004. 306 a Trump blowout? I don't think so.

Let's not forget that Hillary won the popular vote by perhaps 2.5 million (they're still counting). Al Gore won the popular vote in 2000 by a much smaller margin. Before 2000, the last time the winner of the popular vote lost the election in the Electoral College was -- drum roll -- Benjamin Harrison, 1888. It hadn't happened in 112 years.

So those two anomalies gave us W. and Trump. Something had better be done about that.

A "Must Read" Article: Trump/Infowars

Click here for an article in The New Yorker, by William Finnegan, entitled "Donald Trump and the 'Amazing' Alex Jones." It was published on June 23, 2016, so it was before many of the events on the campaign -- Trump's appointment of Breitbart's Steve Bannon as his chief advisor, for instance. Not realizing the important role Breitbart.com would play in the Trump campaign, he refers to Breitbart News dismissively as merely "a hapless dispenser of right-wing agitprop."

This post relates to three of my earlier publications: Stupid Trump Tweet; Stupid Trump Tweet, Updated; and Trump Gets His Information From Infowars.

Click here for another earlier post, "Alex Jones, Presidential Sidekick."



In "Trump Gets His Information From Infowars,: I said "There's enough information on the Trump/Infowars connection to justify a separate post." Here it is.

Finnegan's article details elements of the close connection between Donald Trump and Infowars' Alex Jones. There's a lot of meat to the article, so I'm going to quote extensively. Finnegan opens with discussion of the coverage of the events of the San Bernadino shootings on December 2, 2015. He says he noticed that some of the Internet coverage seemed a bit off -- and he mentioned Infowars.

Jones’s guest on his show the morning of the shooting had been, as chance would have it, Donald Trump. Jones had praised Trump, claiming that ninety per cent of his listeners were Trump supporters, and Trump had returned the favor, saying, “Your reputation is amazing. I will not let you down.”

Jones’s amazing reputation arises mainly from his high-volume insistence that national tragedies such as the September 11th terror attacks, the Oklahoma City bombing, the Sandy Hook elementary-school shooting, and the Boston Marathon bombing were all inside jobs, “false flag” ops secretly perpetrated by the government to increase its tyrannical power (and, in some cases, seize guns).

Finnegan goes on to list a number of Jones's other farfetched conspiracy theories.

Does Donald Trump actually believe any of this? Or is he laughing up his sleeve as apoplectic fact-checkers throw themselves into the thankless work of disproving his absurdities? To cover himself, he prefaces his more outlandish remarks with disclaimers like “I hear” or “A lot of people think.” (To back up his contention that “thousands and thousands” of Muslims publicly celebrated the 9/11 attacks in New Jersey, he tweeted a link to Infowars. His source for the California-drought denial also seemed to be Infowars.)

Finnegan discusses Trump's penchant for lying repeatedly:

The Huffington Post assigned a team of researchers to document the fabrications in a single hour-long Trump appearance on CNN. They counted seventy-one, or one fib for every hundred and sixty-nine words uttered (including Anderson Cooper’s words). Huff Post readers were presumably appalled, but were any Trump supporters given pause about the character of their man by this brain-fogging list of falsehoods? It seems doubtful. Trump is playing a different game. He gestures toward beliefs, hunches, prejudices, and constituencies on the margins. He is playing to Americans who do not trust the media or traditional information sources, such as the government. He offers alternative narratives, fantasies that shock and satisfy. He entertains. On “Meet the Press,” after Chuck Todd asked him for evidence supporting his claim that a protester at one of his rallies had ties to the Islamic State, Trump said, “All I know is what’s on the Internet.” He said that.

We know that Trump regularly watches cable TV news, since he sometimes responds to TV stories in real time. This article talks about Trump's consumption of "print" media; not being a computer guy, he gets a daily printout of 30 to 50 Google News results for "Donald J. Trump." Finnegan says: "His appetite for facts appears to be tiny."

Even after Trump (and Sean Hannity, of Fox News) fell victim to a joke—a parody news story “reporting” that two hundred and fifty thousand Syrian refugees would be settled on U.S. Indian reservations—he continued to repeat the bogus figure for months. (He knew better than to touch, from the same Web site, “Trump: I Would Have Prevented the Asteroid from Killing the Dinosaurs.”) His appetite for facts appears to be tiny. In a GQ profile of Hope Hicks, his spokeswoman, by Olivia Nuzzi, Trump’s daily news briefing is described as printouts of “30 to 50 Google News results for ‘Donald J. Trump.’

More after the jump.

Trump Gets His Information From Infowars

No wonder he's got things so messed up. Folks, that's where the president-elect gets his information about the world: from the darkest, seamiest corners of the Internet. God help us all.

As I've said earlier, in posts entitled Stupid Trump Tweet and Stupid Trump Tweet Updated, this is a Trump tweet, apparently in reaction to the Jill Stein recount in Wisconsin and the fact that Hillary's campaign will be helping:

In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally

The "Updated" post goes into the apparent source of Trump's mistaken belief (to give him the benefit of the doubt). Trump is a fan of Alex Jones, his radio talk show -- in liberal Austin, Texas, of all places -- and his fearmongering website, Infowars, hotbed of conspiracy theories. (Swastikas painted on a door? Black church burned down? False flag operations, every one of them, done by liberals financed and organized by George Soros! The Sandy Hook massacre of elementary school children? A total fake, with the roles of grieving parents being played by actors!) There's enough information on the Trump/Infowars connection to justify a separate post.

Here's a video clip from Infowars of Jones ranting on his radio program. It's a long one; 22:50. I highly recommend that you don't bother watching it all. I did, and believe me, I wish I had 22 of those minutes back; I could have used them to clean my bathroom. Below the clip, I've transcribed a few sentences, from 6:54 to 7:40.

JONES: This is all part of the destabilization of this country, ladies and gentlemen. I'm going to go over, though, the evidence that it is uncontrovertible [sic] fact that 3 million illegals voted and that tens of millions of people were on the voter rolls who were dead, and at least 4 million of them voted as well. So what's 3 and 4 million? 7 million people voted that were either not citizens, were illegal, or were dead. Now, that's Associated Press, that's Reuters, that's Fox News, that's Pew Research. That is not debatable. We're going to put some of those articles up on screens. Some numbers had 20 million dead people potentially voting. But conservatively, we know of 4 million.

He claims he's "going to go over, though, the evidence ..." Watch the video if you must, to satisfy yourself that no, he doesn't produce one shred of evidence; there is nothing whatever to support his straight-faced lies.

"Now, that's Associated Press, that's Reuters, that's Fox News, that's Pew Research." No, it isn't. None of those organizations have said anything resembling Jones's claims. Fox can be pretty shady, but they're not on the same despicable level as Alex Jones. As I said, Jones produces no evidence whatsoever to back up his ludicrous claims.

Another Frequent, Outrageous Campaign Lie By Donald Trump

Trump declared passionately at many of his campaign rallies that Hillary's offenses with regard to her emails were criminal, and that David Petraeus had been forced to resign his position as CIA director in disgrace for offenses that were "one-tenth" of what Hillary had done.

Not true, of course. FBI Director Comey explicitly stated that no reasonable prosecutor would bring a criminal case against Clinton; he explicitly stated that she had not lied to the FBI. On the other hand, the FBI and Justice Department recommended felony charges be brought against Petraeus for providing classified information. They intended to charge him with two criminal offenses: lying to the FBI and violating a section of the Espionage Act. A conviction on either charge could result in a lengthy prison sentence. Ultimately, Petraeus pleaded to lesser offenses, misdemeanors; he was sentenced to two years of probation and a $100,000 fine.

The following is a videotape clip (57 seconds) of Comey giving evidence at a congressional inquiry, answering a question from ranking Democratic member Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD):



Here's my transcription of Comey's evidence:

The Petraeus case, to my mind, illustrates perfectly the kind of cases the Department of Justice is willing to prosecute. Even there, they prosecuted him for a misdemeanor. In that case, you had [sound recording cuts out for about a second] of higly classified information, including special sensitive compartmented information -- that's the reference to "code words" -- vast quantity of it, not only shared with someone who had no authority to have it, but we found it in a search warrant hidden under the insulation in his attic*, and then he lied to us about it during the investigation. So you have obstruction, you have intentional misconduct and a vast quantity of information. He admitted he knew that was the wrong thing to do. That is a perfect illustration of the kind of cases that get prosecuted. In my mind, it illustrates importantly the distinction to this case.

* Sidebar: I'd heard that "attic" story before, but Comey got it wrong: The FBI searched Petraeus’s house in April 2013 and found the books in an unlocked drawer in his study. The books contained top-secret information that the Justice Department said could cause “exceptionally grave damage” to national security if disclosed.

So Trump had it exactly backwards: The Clinton FBI investigation found no reason to proceed with criminal charges; the Petraeus investigation determined that Petraeus had indeed committed serious crimes (though he pled down).

January 20, 2017: Deficit Spending Suddenly Acceptable

Click here for an article in The Washington Post, by , entitled "How Obama’s unaffordable socialism could become Trump’s smart conservatism."

Obama's stimulus plan in 2009 would have done more to dig the country out of the economic hole that Bush dug if it had been twice as big. According to the Republican congress, of course, the deficit and the national debt were the biggest emergencies facing the country. And Obama has been pushing for five years for a big infrastructure program; Republicans have blocked it at every turn.

Suddenly, though, on Inauguration Day, the Republicans will come to the conclusion that the country's infrastructure is in terrible shape and needs a lot of work; a big construction program will put a lot of people to work, people who will then be paying taxes and spending their money on local goods and services; and it makes a lot of sense to borrow now for such a program, while interest rates are at historical lows. (Actually they're rising somewhat just recently; they were better during the years Obama was trying to make that point.) But Inauguration Day will arrive, and with it a new attitude by the Republicans:

For the last 35 years, Republicans haven't worried about deficits when they've been in power—in fact, former vice president Dick Cheney said that “Reagan proved” they “don't matter"—and treated them like the greatest threat to the republic when they've been out of it. So the fact that this would add a lot of red ink wouldn't be a dealbreaker. Republicans are going to resume not caring about the deficit the moment the calendar flips to Jan. 20, 2017.

And like that, rebuilding our roads, bridges, schools, airports, water systems, and electrical grids will go from being Obama’s unaffordable socialism to Trump's prudent conservatism.

So will the Democrats step up and cooperate with the Republicans on a trillion-dollar infrastructure program? You might think so, but maybe not:

Trump, you see, doesn’t want the government to spend $1 trillion on infrastructure. Instead, he wants the government to give corporations $187 billion worth of tax breaks to try to get them to spend $1 trillion on infrastructure. The problem with that, as former Obama and Clinton official Ronald Klain points out, is that there’s no guarantee these tax breaks would get companies to build infrastructure they weren’t already going to build, and no way to get them to build infrastructure where it’s needed the most but isn’t the most profitable. Places like Flint, Mich., where lead-free water pipes are a necessity people might not be able to afford if a utility boosted their rates even more.

In other words, Trump's plan might mostly help rich investors make money off infrastructure, and rich communities get infrastructure they were already going to.

#Pizzagate: Vile, Disgusting, Preposterous

I first became aware of this fake "scandal" a few days before the election: In the deepest, filthiest sewers of the Internet this story bubbled up about Comet Ping Pong Pizza, a prosperous Washington, D.C., pizzeria whose owner, James Alefantis, was a Clinton supporter, though he'd never met her (D.C. voted 93% for Clinton). The "story" goes that Hillary Clinton and her campaign manager, John Podesta, were running a child sex ring out of the back rooms (which have ping-pong tables, a craft room, and a play area for kids) and basement of the pizzeria. (First clue: It doesn't have a basement.)

How did such an insane story get started? Well, Clinton's and Podesta's emails seemed to mention "pizza" quite a lot, so there must be something nefarious there; and Podesta and Alefantis actually did have cursory email discussions about the possibility of Alefantis holding a Clinton fundraiser. And Alefantis was once in a relationship with Clinton backer David Brock (they broke up five years ago).

That's it.

I'm only posting about this piece of garbage because it's been gathering steam among the trolls on the far right, to the point where it's drawn the attention of The New York Times and The Washington Post. (Click here for the WaPo story, by the Editorial Board, entitled "‘Pizzagate’ shows how fake news hurts real people"; click here for the NYT story, by Cecelia Kang, entitled "Fake News Onslaught Targets Pizzeria as Nest of Child-Trafficking."

According to the WaPo story:

The allegations against Comet Ping Pong, reported by the New York Times, are absurd on their face and detached from any gossamer thread of fact. They took root in the dark crevices of the Web and took flight thanks to social media platforms, whose witless “who, us?” posture in the face of misinformation and outright lunacy is a civic embarrassment.

More than that, the use of social media as a platform for outright lies about public figures and, in this case, malevolent rumors about a pleasant neighborhood restaurant popular with families is a menace to private lives, peace and prosperity. In response to the firestorm of anonymous death threats and warnings directed at Comet’s owner, James Alefantis, and some of his employees, D.C. police have had to deploy officers to keep an eye on the restaurant.

Here's a video clip (2:37) from WUSA-9 entitled "Online Bullies Attack DC Restaurant":




Alefantis has received hundreds of death threats. His manager has been urged by his wife to quit his job because of threats. The staff have been threatened and harassed.

With any luck, legal action can be taken against the disseminators of these vicious lies:

The First Amendment is a bulwark of democracy but provides no protection for defamatory allegations published in knowing disregard for the truth. Mr. Alefantis is more than entitled to sue for defamation and libel, if he can find the purveyors of the garbage heaved his way.

A separate question is whether criminal charges may arise from some of the threats that have been leveled at the restaurant and its owner, online and by phone. Mischief may stray into the province of criminality if it incites violence.

According to another WaPo article, by Abby Ohlheiser, entitled "Fearing yet another witch hunt, Reddit bans ‘Pizzagate’":

“Pizzagate” has yet to produce any actual evidence for its extremely weighty and life-ruining accusations, but every debunking of its claims — including the one in the Times — has only convinced its believers that they must be right, and that the circle of pedophiles and sympathizers trying to cover up their findings must be even bigger and more powerful than they imagined.

The article says:

Most troubling for Mr. Alefantis and staff has been the use of children’s images, pilfered from the restaurant’s social media pages and the personal accounts of friends who had “liked” Comet Ping Pong online. Those photos have been used across dozens of websites. Parents, who declined to talk publicly for fear of retribution, have hired lawyers to get the photos removed.

Nearly a million tweets were sent in November using the term "Pizzagate."

What a noble, inspiring, uplifting political campaign this has been.

Meet Betsy DeVos, Education Secretary

Click here for an article in The New Yorker, by Jane Mayer, entitled "Betsy DeVos, Trump’s Big-Donor Education Secretary."



The DeVos family, from Wisconsin, is headed by Richard DeVos Sr., co-founder of Amway. Forbes estimates his wealth at $5.1 billion. Betsy is married to Richard DeVos Jr. Her brother, Erik Prince, founded the Blackwater group of mercenaries, infamous for their murders of innocent civilians in Iraq. The family are long-time allies of the Koch brothers.

The family has long been instrumental in bankrolling the inexorable slide to the right of the Republican party, having donated millions over the years to conservative groups and election campaigns, at the state and national level.

The family supported conservative think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation; academic organizations such as the Collegiate Studies Institute, which funded conservative publications on college campuses; and the secretive Council on National Policy, which the Times called “a little-known club of a few hundred of the most powerful conservatives in the country.” The Council’s membership list, which was kept secret, included leaders of the Christian right, such as Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and Phyllis Schlafly, and anti-tax and pro-gun groups. Richard DeVos, Sr., liked to say that it brought together “the doers and the donors.”

Betsy DeVos is a religious conservative who has donated millions in attempts to close the gap between church and state, and to various anti-abortion and anti-homosexual causes across the country:

Members of the family, including Betsy and Dick DeVos, have spent heavily in opposition to same-sex-marriage laws in several states. According to the Michigan L.G.B.T. publication PrideSource.com, Devos and her husband led the successful campaign to pass an anti-gay-marriage ballot referendum in the state in 2004, contributing more than two hundred thousand dollars to the effort. Dick Devos reportedly gave a hundred thousand dollars, in 2008, to an amendment that banned same-sex marriage in Florida. That year, Elsa Prince Broekhuizen, Betsy Devos's mother, was a major contributor to the effort to pass Proposition 8, which made same-sex marriage illegal in California.

She has spent a lot of money on legal efforts to impede campaign finance reform measures -- and she expects to get a return on her investment:

In 1997, she brashly explained her opposition to campaign-finance-reform measures that were aimed at cleaning up so-called “soft money,” a predecessor to today’s unlimited “dark money” election spending. “My family is the biggest contributor of soft money to the Republican National Committee,” she wrote in the Capitol Hill newspaper Roll Call. “I have decided to stop taking offense,” she wrote, “at the suggestion that we are buying influence. Now I simply concede the point. They are right. We do expect something in return. We expect to foster a conservative governing philosophy consisting of limited government and respect for traditional American virtues. We expect a return on our investment.”

Her involvement with the education system has been to champion and financially support the proliferation of charter schools:

"Betsy ... spent more than two million dollars of the family’s money on a failed school-vouchers referendum in 2000, which would have allowed Michigan residents to use public funds to pay for tuition at religious schools."

Her only connection with public education has been to try to starve it to the benefit of charter schools.

Interestingly, she did not support Trump, saying he “does not represent the Republican Party.”

Words For Our Times? Slouching Towards Bethlehem ...

The Second Coming - W.B. Yeats



Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert.

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

A Basket Of Deplorables

Bannon's Breitbart: Extreme Right-Wing And Racist Stories? Surprise, Surprise

Click here for an article at Raw Story by Tom Boggioni, entitled "Second largest internet ad placement company drops Breitbart.com over hate speech."

Apparently a huge ad network named AppNexus has canceled its contract with Trump advisor Steve Bannon's Breitbart.com:

According to Bloomberg Technology, AppNexus — which handles about $2.5 billion in ad spending — is pulling the plug on the website that has promoted itself as the home of the so-called “alt-right” by promoting extreme rightwing and racist stories.

“We did a human audit of Breitbart and determined there were enough articles and headlines that cross that line, using either coded or overt language,” AppNexus spokesperson Joshua Zeitz explained.

The Breitbart website came under increased scrutiny after CEO Steve Bannon joined the campaign of President-elect Donald Trump, before being tabbed as senior White House advisor.

Bannon's site? Extreme rightwing and racist stories? My goodness; does Donald Trump know about this?

Of course he does.

Stupid Trump Tweet, Updated

The "short-fingered vulgarian" (h/t Spy Magazine) soon to occupy the White House has added to the "Stupid Trump Tweet" of my recent original post (click here) of that name. Here's the original one again:

In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally

Again: It's a lie.



Carl Bernstein tweeted in response:

This factless madness shows @realDonaldTrump to be unhinged. If PresNixon had a Twitter account it would not reflect this much paranoia.

And Matt Taibi weighs in:

Congratulations, America, you've turned the presidency into a four-year Alex Jones broadcast. https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/802972944532209664 …

But click here for an article at Heavy.com by Brendan Morrow, entitled "Why Is Donald Trump Claiming Voter Fraud Took Place in the 2016 Election?"

Here's Trump's additional tweet on the subject:

Serious voter fraud in Virginia, New Hampshire and California - so why isn't the media reporting on this? Serious bias - big problem!

The article says:

This comes four hours after Trump posted several tweets in a row claiming that the only reason Hillary Clinton won the popular vote was because millions of people cast fraudulent ballots. Trump once again did not provide any evidence to support this or specify what exactly he was referring to, but his statement implies that over two million people voted illegally during the 2016 election, an astonishing assertion for an incoming president to make.

And here's a good point:

The president-elect’s tweetstorm was particularly strange considering that it came hours after he mocked Hillary Clinton for participating in a recount effort. Trump is now simultaneously stating that millions of votes were fraudulently cast and that taking another look at those votes is a waste of time. Also, one would think that if there were to be a large-scale effort to rig the election in favor of Hillary Clinton, those millions of votes would be cast in states that could actually change the result rather than in solidly-blue states like California.

Speculation is that Trump is doing this because he's angered at Jill Stein's initiation of a Wisconsin recount, and Hillary's announcement that she'll participate in the recount. How is a man so petty, who lashes out at any minor slight, going to conduct himself when he's president and perceives himself insulted by a political opponent or some foreign leader?

Trump's Conflicts Of Interest ...

... are far too extensive and wide-ranging for me to try to chronicle; it'd be a full-time job. So, since I'm too lazy to do it, click here for a pretty extensive coverage of the subject by Digby at Hullabaloo, in an article entitled "Trump Targets."



Charlie Pierce at Esquire says: "Some conflicts of interest are mere schoolyard punch-ups. Trump's are the last days at Passchendaele."

Any possibility Trump's administration might conduct foreign policy by showing favoritism to countries that treat Trump's projects favorably? Nah ...

Trump's Sources Of Information - Foreign Leaders?

Click here for an article by Hunter at Daily Kos entitled "Conway: Trump gets his information from 'world leaders', is 'magnanimous' for not jailing Clinton."

CNN's Dana Bash was interviewing Conway about the fact that although Trump is being offered daily presidential intelligence briefings (most of which his VP-elect, Mike Pence, is taking), Trump has taken only two so far. (Who needs it? He knows better than the generals and the people that have gotten the U.S. into its current mess.) There was the following exchange:

BASH: [...] Is this true? Has he turned down the opportunity to get classified intelligence briefings?

CONWAY: So he is receiving classified intelligence briefings and the president-elect is also receiving information through his personal and on the phone meetings with over what's now 41 world leaders. In addition to meeting with 60 men and women who could serve in his government but certainly without the promise of any formal position or certainly — [...]

Now, the fact that Trump is skipping the intelligence briefings is bad enough. But since he is also not communicating with the State Department before taking off-the-cuff calls from foreign leaders, the fact that he is receiving information through his meetings and phone conversations with world leaders is astonishing. He is getting his information on the situation in Egypt, for example, from his discussions with military strongman Abdel Fattah al-Sisi? Is he getting his information on the situation in Russia from Vladimir Putin? Frankly, I find that terrifying.

Stupid Trump Tweet

It looks like the title of this post will get a lot of repetition in the future. Here's the latest:

In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally

This is, quite simply, a lie. Trump is apparently going with the assertion by talk show host and right-wing nutball Bryan Fischer that 3 million illegal aliens had voted for Clinton (when of course illegal aliens cannot vote). On his program, Fischer said: “

You look at the margin in the popular vote that Hillary Clinton has,” he said, “it’s somewhere north of a million—they’re still counting—but let’s say she wins the popular vote by a million votes. It very well could be that what tipped the balance to Hillary Clinton were three million illegal aliens that simply had no right to vote, let alone even to be in this country.”

His supporting information for this ridiculous claim? Two tweets by a right-wing fanatic, a former Texas Health and Human Services Commission deputy commissioner named Gregg Phillips. Here's the first:

Completed analysis of database of 180 million voter registrations.

Number of non-citizen votes exceeds 3 million.

Consulting legal team.

And here's the second:

We have verified more than three million votes cast by non-citizens.

We are joining .@TrueTheVote to initiate legal action.

Despite the lack of evidence, the lie found traction in the far-right blogosphere, and the story spread, to the extent that it was debunked at Snopes.com. Click here for an article by David Emery at Snopes entitled "Knock the Vote." It says: "Zero evidence has been put forth to support the widely parroted claim that 3 million "illegal aliens" voted in the 2016 presidential election." The article continues:

Origin: On 14 November 2016 — not even a week after the results of the 2016 presidential election were announced — our inbox exploded with messages requesting that we investigate the claim that more than three million votes were cast by "illegal immigrants" or "illegal aliens" (non-citizens). In some cases it was also claimed that these three million voters are "under investigation" for fraud, or that three million votes for Hillary Clinton will be "voided" because they were illegal. Under federal law, non-citizens cannot vote in a presidential election.

The first thing we found was that while no such claim has been reported in the mainstream media, it has been repeated on scores of partisan, right-leaning web sites since the 8 November election under the guise of "news." Here are a few examples:

The article then lists sites spreading this preposterous story, including such "dubious" (I'm being generous) sites as Allen West Republic, Alex Jones at Infowars, and alt-right darling Milo Yiannopoulos, Breitbart contributor and self-described "Dangerous Faggot." It goes on:

We scoured at least a dozen such articles for evidence to support the claim, but found none. All of them pointed back to the same source: a pair of tweets by someone named Gregg Phillips, whose Twitter profile identifies him as the founder of VoteStand ("America's first online fraud reporting app).

Snopes asked Phillips to provide backup for his assertions:

Phillips offers no evidence whatsoever to back up the claim that he "verified" more than three million non-citizen votes. Nor does he divulge his data sources or methodology, much less explain how it was possible to "verify" three million fraudulent votes within five days of a national election. In point of fact, Phillips bluntly refuses to share this information with journalists, claiming it will be released "in open form to the American people."

The article goes on to say that Phillips was known to Snopes from lies he had promulgated in the past.

America's tweeter-in-chief continues to develop his worldview by reading content in the far-right sewers of the Internet. Asked during the campaign to justify his retweet of a highly dubious claim, we got this response:

"Now, I don't know. What do I know about it? All I know is what's on the Internet," Trump said on NBC's "Meet the Press" on Sunday.

Charlie Pierce at Esquire says: "In short, the president-elect of the United States is trafficking in nonsense dredged up from the deepest and most feverish mudholes of the fever swamp."

Trump Admires Tyrants

Click here for an article in The Washington Post by Erin Cunningham, entitled "Middle East rights activists, dismayed by Obama, fear Trump will be much worse."

Trump's admiration for Kremlin strongman Vladimir Putin is well known. He has praised the "strength" of Kim Jong Un in North Korea. He has expressed his approval of the "strength" demonstrated by the Deng Xiaoping regime in crushing the pro-democracy student-led demonstrations in Tiananmen Square in 1989. But his support for the oppressive Middle East regimes of Abdel Fatah al-Sissi in Europe and Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey is causing consternation in the region.

The Obama administration — which sold arms to despots in the region even as they cracked down on opponents — has disappointed many rights advocates. But President Obama has also pressed Middle East governments to curb abuses and enact democratic change.

Trump, by contrast, has not only lauded some of the region’s strongmen but also called for torturing terrorism suspects and killing the families of Islamic State fighters as a way to defeat the extremist group. His rhetoric has alarmed local human rights defenders who say their situation is tenuous enough already.

Gamal Eid, executive director of the Arabic Network for Human Rights Information in Cairo, is unhappy with the way things have developed in the Middle East under Obama, but says: "But now that Trump has been elected, Eid said, 'what is coming is worse.'" He says al-Sissi's regime in Egypt, "... which came to power in a military coup in 2013, has jailed political opponents, launched a campaign of mass arrests and stifled protests." He says: "But Trump, after meeting Sissi in September, hailed the Egyptian leader as a “fantastic guy” in an interview with the Fox Business Network." Others, too, have been critical of Obama's handling of the Middle East situation, "But activists say that while the administration’s support for human rights ebbed, they could still engage with U.S. diplomats and raise their concerns."

With Trump, they worry there will not even be a dialogue.

His comments on the Middle East have included pledging to destroy the Islamic State and rip up the nuclear deal with Iran. There is no indication he recognizes the work of local rights activists.

The article says:

In a poll conducted in nine Arab countries, just 14 percent of respondents said they thought Trump would have a positive impact on U.S. policy in the region. The survey was published by the Arab Center Washington D.C., a nonprofit group, on Nov. 1.

And further:

With Trump in the White House, the United States “will be less concerned about human rights, less concerned about democracy, less concerned about ­civil society and other things,” said Orhan Kemal Cengiz, a Turkish human rights lawyer. “And this is a huge loss.”

I think it's fair to say that Trump's election has caused consternation and dismay in countries around the world.

Prospects For A Harsher, Bleaker World

Click here for a frightening article in The Washington Post, by James McAuley and Griff Witte, entitled "Clinton’s loss is one more nail in the coffin of center-left politics in the West."

Is the center-left world order, the unquestioned state of affairs since 1945, coming to an end? It's certainly in crisis, and the possible changes don't look pretty.



In the aftermath of 1945, says the article, "... politicians across war-torn Europe banded together to build a new continent that would never repeat the grave mistakes of the recent past. This was the genesis of the European Union: an economic union that was meant to become, at least in theory,committed to the common cause of social justice, largely a leftist ideal."

If the three decades that followed World War II coincided with the longest period of growth in Europe’s history, voters today see neither leftist economic policies nor the E.U. itself as necessarily worth preserving. Britain voted to leave the bloc in June, and separatist movements have spread across the continent to France, the Netherlands and elsewhere.

In Germany and Britain, once-mighty center-left parties have been badly diminished, locked out of their nations’ top jobs for the foreseeable future. In Spain and Greece, they have been usurped by newer, more radical alternatives. And in France and Italy, they’re still governing — but their days in power may be numbered. The rout of the center-left has even extended deep into Scandinavia, perhaps the world’s premier bastion of social democracy.

Overall, the total vote share for the continent’s traditional center-left parties is now at its lowest level since at least World War II. Like the Democrats, these parties have been marginalized, with little influence over policy as the right prepares to place its stamp on the Western world in a way that could endure for decades.

“If the left and the center-left don’t get their act together, then we’re looking at a period of very unstable right-wing hegemony,” said Alex Callinicos, a European studies professor at King’s College London.

The decline of the European center-left is part of a broader unraveling of the continent’s mainstream consensus as electorates fracture and a political kaleidoscope of alternatives emerges.

But unlike the center-left, traditional parties of the center-right have managed to hold their own amid the populist fury, clinging to power in London, Berlin and Madrid — with a strong chance next year to take Paris, as well.

The article goes on to discuss the dimming electoral prospects for the left in France, Germany, Italy, Greece, Spain, and Britain.

“The merger of traditional social democracy with neoliberalism and globalized free-market policies has fallen apart in fairly disastrous fashion,” he [Callinicos] said, suggesting that the turning point was the global financial crash of 2008, when working-class voters saw their jobs disappear or their wages stagnate even as the net worth of the wealthy continued to race ahead.

First Brexit, then Trump:

Trump’s victory in the United States rested at least in part on a similar phenomenon — a billionaire tycoon using appeals to xenophobia and racism to scoop up support from voters who no longer believe the party of the working man has their interests at heart. As in the Brexit vote, Trump won certain key states with the help of working-class voters who had supported Barack Obama, a Democrat, in 2012.

One implication of the growing void on Europe’s left could be profound political instability, both within specific countries and geopolitically. Another could be the emergence of a right-wing stranglehold, based on widespread nostalgia for a world that, in Snyder’s view, never actually existed. “All these continental parties are nostalgic for the interwar nation-state, which was a total disaster,” he said. “There was never any moment when they were happy, independent nation-states. There was never such a time, and their nostalgia is a kind of disguise.

The article concludes:

“If you plunge into that abyss,” he added, “very bad things lie ahead.”

Democratic 2020 Presidential Candidate: Michelle Obama?

Click here for an article in The Washington Post by Chris Cillizza, entitled "The race for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination is now open."



Cillizza floats names of potential Democratic candidates for 2020, including Senator Cory Booker, New Jersey; Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, New York; Senator-elect Kamala Harris, California; Governor John Hickenlooper, Colorado; Senator Amy Klobuchar, Minnesota; and First Lady Michelle Obama. Here's what he says about Ms. Obama:

Let’s say this first: The soon-to-be-former first lady has never run for elected office and, to date, has shown absolutely no interest in doing so. But let’s also say this: She gave the two best political speeches of the past two years — the first at the Democratic National Convention in July, the second in New Hampshire in the fall, an emotional condemnation of Trump’s America. Obama has one thing — with the possible exception of Booker — that the rest of the people on this list lack: true star power. She would start the race not only totally known by base Democrats but also absolutely beloved. The issue for Obama is that being a candidate in your own right is very different from being a surrogate for a candidate.

George Wallace, Reformed Racist

We're seeing the name "George Wallace" in the news quite a bit these days, in connection with the racism demonstrated by Trump and his followers. Wallace was governor of Alabama and ran for nomination as president in four consecutive elections. According to his Wikipedia entry:

Wallace is remembered for his Southern neo-dixiecrat and "Jim Crow" attitudes during the mid-20th century period of the Civil Rights Movement, declaring in his 1963 Inaugural Address that he stood for "segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever," and standing in front of the entrance of the University of Alabama in an attempt to stop the enrollment of black students.

After running for governor of Alabama in 1958, and losing:

... aide Seymore Trammell recalled Wallace saying, "Seymore, you know why I lost that governor's race? ... I was outniggered by John Patterson. And I'll tell you here and now, I will never be outniggered again."

He found that racism worked for him as an electoral strategy. After winning the governorship in 1962, he said:

"You know, I tried to talk about good roads and good schools and all these things that have been part of my career, and nobody listened. And then I began talking about niggers, and they stomped the floor."

Whatever works, I guess.



He was shot in a 1972 assassination attempt, and he spent the rest of his life in a wheelchair. His would-be assassin was released on parole on November 9, 2007.

Reading his Wikipedia entry, I discovered something I didn't know: He flew B-29 bombing missions over Germany under Curtis LeMay; when he ran for president in 1968, he selected Curtis LeMay as his candidate for vice president. More importantly, I learned something I didn't realize, or had forgotten: Wallace changed his attitude and spent the last ten years of his life apologizing for his earlier racist beliefs. Wikipedia again:

In the late 1970s, Wallace announced that he was a born-again Christian and apologized to black civil rights leaders for his past actions as a segregationist. He said that while he had once sought power and glory, he realized he needed to seek love and forgiveness. In 1979, Wallace said of his stand in the schoolhouse door: "I was wrong. Those days are over, and they ought to be over."

A story of redemption, I'd say.

Justin Trudeau On Castro's Death

Canada's prime minister Justin Trudeau has found himself in some hot water over his remarks concerning Castro's death.

Click here for an article at CBC News, by , entitled "Fidal Castro was a dictator, Trudeau says."

Trudeau's original official statement was as follows:

“It is with deep sorrow that I learned today of the death of Cuba’s longest serving President.

“Fidel Castro was a larger than life leader who served his people for almost half a century. A legendary revolutionary and orator, Mr. Castro made significant improvements to the education and healthcare of his island nation.

“While a controversial figure, both Mr. Castro’s supporters and detractors recognized his tremendous dedication and love for the Cuban people who had a deep and lasting affection for “el Comandante”.

“I know my father was very proud to call him a friend and I had the opportunity to meet Fidel when my father passed away. It was also a real honour to meet his three sons and his brother President Raúl Castro during my recent visit to Cuba.

“On behalf of all Canadians, Sophie and I offer our deepest condolences to the family, friends and many, many supporters of Mr. Castro. We join the people of Cuba today in mourning the loss of this remarkable leader.”

Responding to his critics:

"There are people who have many memories and who experienced a great deal of difficulty because of what happened in Cuba, and I am not minimizing any of that," Trudeau said.

He went on to say:

"The fact is Fidel Castro had a deep and lasting impact on the Cuban people. He certainly was a polarizing figure and there certainly were concerns around human rights. That's something that I'm open about and that I've highlighted," he added.

"But on the passing of his death I expressed a statement that highlighted the deep connection between the people of Canada and the people of Cuba."​

Quebec Premier Philippe Couillard:

"Yes, his accomplishments will be in various tones of grey — some white, some black — but historians will have to decide this," Couillard told reporters Sunday. "I see no controversy in describing him as a giant of the 20th century."

There's a history with Castro in the Trudeau family; Justin's father, Prime Minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau, was the first Western leader to visit Castro in Cuba in 1976. Detractors claimed this gave Castro undeserved legitimacy.The article says:

The two leaders developed a close bond that would last for decades after that encounter. Castro was said to be devastated when Justin Trudeau's brother Michel died in an avalanche in 1998, and he made the trip to Montreal for the elder Trudeau's state funeral.

Canada has always maintained diplomatic relations with Cuba throughout the U.S's decades-long economic embargo and political isolation policies towards the country.

Canada recently helped facilitate discussions between the two countries that led to the easing of some of those restrictions.

Castro: A Negative View

Fidel Castro died on November 25, 2016. Though unquestionably a giant figure in world affairs for half a century, not everyone agrees what his legacy has been. Click here for the negative side, an article in The Washington Post by Carlos Eire, T.L. Riggs Professor of History and Religious Studies at Yale University, entitled "Farewell to Cuba’s brutal Big Brother." Eire says:

If this were a just world, 13 facts would be etched on Castro’s tombstone and highlighted in every obituary, as bullet points — a fitting metaphor for someone who used firing squads to murder thousands of his own people.

●He turned Cuba into a colony of the Soviet Union and nearly caused a nuclear holocaust.

●He sponsored terrorism wherever he could and allied himself with many of the worst dictators on earth.

●He was responsible for so many thousands of executions and disappearances in Cuba that a precise number is hard to reckon.

●He brooked no dissent and built concentration camps and prisons at an unprecedented rate, filling them to capacity, incarcerating a higher percentage of his own people than most other modern dictators, including Stalin.

●He condoned and encouraged torture and extrajudicial killings.

●He forced nearly 20 percent of his people into exile, and prompted thousands to meet their deaths at sea, unseen and uncounted, while fleeing from him in crude vessels.

●He claimed all property for himself and his henchmen, strangled food production and impoverished the vast majority of his people.

●He outlawed private enterprise and labor unions, wiped out Cuba’s large middle class and turned Cubans into slaves of the state.

●He persecuted gay people and tried to eradicate religion.

●He censored all means of expression and communication.

●He established a fraudulent school system that provided indoctrination rather than education, and created a two-tier health-care system, with inferior medical care for the majority of Cubans and superior care for himself and his oligarchy, and then claimed that all his repressive measures were absolutely necessary to ensure the survival of these two ostensibly “free” social welfare projects.

●He turned Cuba into a labyrinth of ruins and established an apartheid society in which millions of foreign visitors enjoyed rights and privileges forbidden to his people.

●He never apologized for any of his crimes and never stood trial for them.

In sum, Fidel Castro was the spitting image of Big Brother in George Orwell’s novel “1984.” So, adiós, Big Brother, king of all Cuban nightmares. And may your successor, Little Brother, soon slide off the bloody throne bequeathed to him.

Graydon Carter At Vanity Fair Revisited

In October, I posted an article entitled "Must Read: Trump v Graydon Carter (Vanity Fair)." Click here for the article, entitled "Donald Trump: The Ugly American." My previous post merely linked to the article and included a 4.5-minute video clip entitled "Trump v. Political Correctness," and the lyrics to a Woody Guthrie song, "Old Man Trump," which was about Donald's father, Fred Trump (Guthrie was a tenant in one of Fred's apartment buildings, and he wasn't a Fred fan). The title of the Vanity Fair is asterisked with the notation, "(With apologies to William J. Lederer and Eugene Burdick)." Lederer and Burdick are the authors of the 1958 political novel of the same name.

The article is a scathing attack on Trump, and I think it deserves a little more elaboration.

He describes how in 1993, he took Donald Trump to the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner as a "novelty guest":

Novelty guests don’t know they’re novelty guests. They just think they’re guests. That evening in May 1993, Vanity Fair had two tables and we filled them with the likes of Christopher Hitchens, Bob Shrum, Barry Diller and Diane von Furstenberg, Peggy Noonan, Tipper Gore, and Vendela Kirsebom, a Swedish model who professionally went by her first name and who was then at or near the top of the catwalk heap. I sat Trump beside Vendela, thinking that she would get a kick out of him. This was not the case. After 45 minutes she came over to my table, almost in tears, and pleaded with me to move her. It seems that Trump had spent his entire time with her assaying the “tits” and legs of the other female guests and asking how they measured up to those of other women, including his wife. “He is,” she told me, in words that seemed familiar, “the most vulgar man I have ever met.”

Then Carter describes the next time he saw Donald Trump, again at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, in 2011:

Much as Trump loves to be the center of attention, the attention he got that night didn’t go according to plan. First, President Obama ridiculed him mercilessly from the dais. The fact that the president’s birther tormentor was in the room appeared to give him a lift—he was seriously funny and his timing was flawless. Then the evening’s headliner, Seth Meyers, stood up and really went to town on Trump. Weymouth’s table was right beside us, so I got a ringside view of the poor fellow as he just sat there, stony-faced and steaming—and of course unaware, like everyone else, that while Obama was launching his jokes he was also launching the attack that would kill Osama bin Laden. To think that next spring Trump could be attending the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner as the commander in chief renders one almost speechless.

More after the jump.

Only In America

I'm reproducing here in full Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter's article entitled "Graydon Carter on Trump’s 'Only in America' Election Win":

God, I love this country.

Only in America could a serial bankrupt pass himself off as a successful businessman. (And almost none of those he bankrupted were even regular businesses. They were casinos—where people essentially come to lose their money.)

Only in America could a man who offended Hispanics, Muslims, Jews, and African-Americans, as well as women, babies, and the handicapped, become the Republican nominee for president.

Only in America could a man for whom truth is an inconvenient concept feel comfortable referring to his opponent as “lying” and “crooked.”

Only in America, a nation built on a history of immigration, could a man who married two immigrants—one of whom is alleged to have worked illegally when she first arrived—run on an anti-immigration platform.

Only in America could a man with a legendary reputation for stiffing small-business owners and wage laborers be able to pass himself off as a champion of the little guy.

More after the jump.

Trouble For The Dreamers?

Here's Digby at Hullabaloo:

Established in 2012 under an executive action by President Barack Obama administration, the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals [DACA] program has given temporary deportation relief to young people brought to the U.S. illegally as children. Nearly a third of the 742,000 so-called Dreamers live in California.

Click here for my earlier post, "Obama: Pardon The Dreamers?"

And click here for an article by Digby at Hullabaloo entitled "Come home now kids."

According to Digby, Trump's anti-immigrant team is ramping up:

In a letter sent to each of its 23 campuses, the California State University’s Office of the Chancellor has advised administrators to tell DACA recipients currently studying abroad to return to the U.S. before the new president’s inauguration. “It is highly likely that as of Jan. 20, DACA students who are abroad will not be allowed to re-enter the U.S,” the letter said.

Further, Digby says:

It's heartbreaking to think about what's going to happen to these kids if Trump carries out his plans. They took the brave step of registering with the government under the assumption they would be spared deportation and now they are likely going to pay.

Thanksgiving Dinner, Trump Style

Click here for an article at Crooks & Liars by LeftOfCenter, entitled "America Never Deserved The Obamas, Trump's Thanksgiving Proves It."

A peek at the menu, as if we care what the world's most corrupt selfish fame whores are having for dinner.

Turkey, stuffing and pumpkin pie were just the beginning as President-elect Donald Trump dined with his family at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida.

Their festive feast included six choices of main courses and eight different desserts — including "three-layer Trump chocolate cake."

Here's what else was on the soon-to-be first family's menu.

Mar-a-Lago Chilled Seafood Display
Large Florida Stone Crabs
Oysters on the Half Shell
Jumbo Shrimp
Middle Neck Clams

From the Garden
Mr. Trump's Wedge Salad
Farm-Fresh Deviled Eggs
Roasted Vegetable Cous Cous Salad
Ahi Tuna Martinis

House Made Soup Selections
Maine Lobster Bisque
Local Vegetable Minestrone Soup

Savory Sensations
Oven-Roasted Turkey, Traditional Stuffing, Sweet Mashed Potatoes, House Made Gravy
Herb-Marinated Beef Tenderloin, Steamed Vegetables, Whipped Potatoes, Warm Popovers, Horseradish Cream
Chef-Carved Leg of Lamb, Grilled Pita and Tzatziki Sauce
Pan-Seared Chilean Sea Bass, Curried Vegetables, Coconut Shellfish Broth
Red Wine-Braised Short Ribs, Herb Roasted Potatoes, Natural Braising Jus
Grilled Diver Scallops, Roasted Vegetable Ratatouille

Sweet Sensations
Three-Layer Trump Chocolate Cake
Pumpkin Pie
Toasted Coconut Cake
Chocolate Eclairs
Pecan Pie
Warm Chocolate Brownie Pockets
Creamy Key Lime Pie
Hot Apple Crisp

NBC News reported Wednesday that the family's Florida Thanksgiving was guarded by a contingent of at least 150 Secret Service personnel. A Homeland Security official told NBC News that the cost to the taxpayer of that operation alone would reach $7 million.

The Obamas "... spent their Thanksgiving with retired war veterans serving them their holiday dinner with smiles on their faces."