Jon Stewart On Fox News Food Stamp Fraud Frenzy, 2014

Fox News is on the rampage again in their never-ending battle against the poor (they do this all the time, but they do seem to regularly target food-stamp recipients around Christmas). Jon Stewart nailed it in 2014:



We miss you, Jon. (H/T to Sarah P at Crooks & Liars)

сделать Россию великой еще раз!!! (Make Russia Great Again!)

Click here for an article at Crooks & Liars by Sarah P entitled "Trump Tweets Love For Putin 24 Hours After Obama Announces Sanctions." (H/T to Sarah for the title of my post.)

That headline pretty much says it all. Obama placed some pretty significant sanctions on Russia; no response from Trump. Putin announces that he will forgo retaliatory measures for now and wait for the Trump administration (which he presumably will find much more pliant and cooperative). And then, within 24 hours of the announcement of the sanctions, Trump strikes with his itchy Twitter finger:

Great move on delay (by V. Putin) - I always knew he was very smart!

And he pinned the tweet. I didn't know what that meant, so I looked it up and found that when you pin a tweet, you're pinning it to your Twitter profile page. It's kind of like adding it to a "greatest hits" list. So Trump is particularly proud of his borderline treasonous relationship with Vlad.



The tweet got a lot of negative response from the public -- but the Russian Embassy must have liked it, because they retweeted it.

Carl Paladino - Alas! - Is Not An Aberration

Click here for my updated post, entitled "Carl Paladino - A Complete Disgrace (Updated)." The scumball was given 24 hours to resign his position on the Buffalo school board. (The vote was 6-2 against him; I hope the two people who cast votes in his favor lose re-election to that prestigious organization, the Buffalo School Board, bigly. I hope their loss is yuge.)

Here's the thing: Carl Paladino, loathsome though he is, is a solidly mainstream Republican political figure in the state of New York. He didn't quietly slither in out of some dank, fetid swamp; he was the Republican candidate for governor of New York in the last election, in 2010. In the primary, he defeated Rick Lazio, a former congressman who had been defeated by Hillary Clinton in a 2000 senatorial race, by a 2-to-1 margin, and he won 29% of the votes in the general election; Andrew Cuomo, the Democrat, got 57%.

Paladino said outrageous, ugly, despicable things about President Obama and the First Lady, Michelle. Beyond the pale -- unacceptable! Condemned by one and all.

But the thing is, those ugly, despicable things were basically mainstream Republican thought; it's just that Paladino pushed things too far. If he were given the power of hindsight and could see the widespread disapproval his statements generated, and if he could just dial his rhetoric back one notch and see the result -- and if he still couldn't take the heat, and if he could dial it back another notch -- and that was still pretty messy, and he could dial it back one notch more -- he would find himself within the protective umbrella of Republican support. If he had just been a little less extreme, Fox News and Hannity and Breitbart would have leapt to his support, and he'd have been okay -- well, not just okay, but a Republican cause, a symbol of left-wing hatred and political correctness run amok, smothering conservative free speech.

Labor Secretary Nominee: Those Dang Worker Breaks!

Click here for an article at Mother Jones, by Tom Philpott, entitled "Trump's Pick for Labor Secretary Doesn't Think Workers Should Get Breaks."

Here's an excerpt from a 2009 interview with Andrew Pudzer, Trump's nomination for Labor Secretary, on the subject of breaks for workers:

"Have you ever been to a fast food restaurant and the employees are sitting and you're wondering, 'Why are they sitting?'" Puzder asked. "They are on what is called a mandatory break [emphasis his]." He shared a laugh with the interviewer, saying the so-called nanny state is why Carl's Jr. doesn't open up any new restaurants in California anymore.

Pudzer is CEO of CKE Restaurants, parent company of fast-food chains Hardee's and Carl's Jr.

Philpott found the transcript of the interview in the archives of Cal State Fullerton's Center for Oral and Public History; it's not available online.

Terrific Gerrymandering!

Here it is, folks: Florida's 5th Congressional District.



Isn't that a beauty? Click here for an article by Stephen Wolf at Daily Kos entitled "Join our tour of the worst Republican gerrymanders, with Florida's 5th District!"

The word "gerrymander" means "manipulate the boundaries of (an electoral constituency) so as to favor one party or class." According to its Wikipedia entry:

The word gerrymander (originally written Gerry-mander) was used for the first time in the Boston Gazette on 26 March 1812. The word was created in reaction to a redrawing of Massachusetts state senate election districts under Governor Elbridge Gerry ... In 1812, Governor Gerry signed a bill that redistricted Massachusetts to benefit his Democratic-Republican Party. When mapped, one of the contorted districts in the Boston area was said to resemble the shape of a salamander.

"Gerrymander" is a portmanteau of the governor's last name and the word "salamander."

According to Stephen Wolf's article:

Florida’s 5th Congressional District snaked down the peninsula from Jacksonville to Gainesville to Orlando, scooping up as many black voters as it could to contain them in one heavily Democratic district so that every surrounding district would lean Republican. The end result was a seat that voted 71-28 for Obama while Romney won all six of its neighbors.

Carl Paladino - A Complete Disgrace (Updated)

Artvoice (a weekly Buffalo magazine): What would you most like to happen in 2017?

Carl Paladino: Obama catches mad cow disease after being caught having relations with a Hereford. He dies before his trial and is buried in a cow pasture next to Valerie Jarrett, who died weeks prior, after being convicted of sedition and treason, when a jihadi cellmate mistook her for being a nice person and decapitated her.

Artvoice: What would you most like to see go in 2017?

Carl Paladino: Michelle Obama. I’d like her to return to being a male and let loose in the outback of Zimbabwe where she lives comfortably in a cave with Maxie, the gorilla.

Keep it classy, Carl.



Paladino, Donald Trump's New York campaign co-chair, is a Buffalo property developer. His run for governor of New York in 2010 was supported by Trump confidant Roger Stone (he lost to Andrew Cuomo, 61% to 34%). During the campaign, some of his ugly, racist emails were made public. He is presently a member of the Buffalo School Board. He campaigned for Newt Gingrich in the 2012 presidential primaries. In August 2016, he claimed that President Obama is a secret Muslim. Earlier this year, Paladino said that Trump supporters were people frustrated with government and who “want the raccoons out of the basement”. He defended that comment amidst claims it was racist.

UPDATE:

Paladino has been given 24 hours to quit the Buffalo School Board or be fired. Strangely, the vote was 6-2. I wonder how the 2 dissenters justify their vote?

Click here for an article by Sarah P at Crooks & Liars entitled "Carl Paladino Told To Resign Within 24 Hours By Buffalo School Board."

The resolution was presented by Hope Jay, a board member, who described Paladino's comments as: “unambiguously racist, morally repugnant, flagrantly disrespectful, inflammatory and inexcusable" and stated that they reflected negatively on “the Buffalo Board of Education, the City of Buffalo and its leadership and its citizens, the State of New York, and every decent human being in America and abroad who has been shocked and offended by his words.”

Ms. Jay got a standing ovation.

Paladino tried to issue an apology, but it fell flat. He said he 'never intended to hurt the minority community' and is definitely not a racist. He tried to justify his comments by saying he was just trying to be funny with his friends and never though his interview with a newspaper would actually be published.

Yeah, right.

Thousands of Buffalo residents had protested Paladino's disgusting remarks.

Judge A Man By The Company He Keeps

Why on earth would any politician consent to being photographed with Don King?



Don King is, to put it mildly, a lowlife. Click here for his Wikipedia entry.

Mike Tyson said of his former manager: "(King is) a wretched, slimy, reptilian motherfucker. This is supposed to be my 'black brother,' right? He's just a bad man, a real bad man. He would kill his own mother for a dollar. He's ruthless, he's deplorable, he's greedy ... and he doesn't know how to love anybody." King settled a Tyson lawsuit out of court for $14 million.

Muhammad Ali sued King in 1982 for underpayment of $1.1 million for a fight with Larry Holmes. Holmes claimed King cheated him out of $10 million over the course of his career. King sued ESPN for $2.5 billion "... after a documentary alleged that King had 'killed, not once, but twice,' threatened to break Larry Holmes' legs, cheated Meldrick Taylor out of $1 million, and then threatened to have Taylor killed. The case was dismissed on summary judgment with a finding that King could not show 'actual malice' from the defendants."

A threat of murder from Don King is not something to be casually dismissed; he has killed two men, and he was convicted of second-degree murder for one of those killings.

"After dropping out of Kent State University, he ran an illegal bookmaking operation ... and was charged with killing two men in incidents 13 years apart. The first was determined to be justifiable homicide after it was found that King shot Hillary Brown in the back and killed him while he was attempting to rob one of King's gambling houses. King was convicted of second degree murder for the second killing in 1966 after he was found guilty of stomping to death an employee, Sam Garrett, who owed him $600. The judge reduced King's conviction to non-negligent manslaughter, for which King served just under four years in prison. King was later pardoned for the crime in 1983 ... with letters from Jesse Jackson, Coretta Scott King, George Voinovich, Art Modell, and Gabe Paul, among others, being written in support of King."

A cabinet post, perhaps?

Republicans Can Believe Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast

According to Chris Hayes on All In With Chris Hayes, Economist/YouGov poll results showed that 49% of self-identified Republicans still (December 28, 2016) think it is "definitely true" or "positively true" that leaked emails from John Podesta (Hillary's campaign manager) and other Hillary staffers contained code words for pedophilia, human trafficking and Satanic ritual abuse (the basis of the Pizzagate conspiracy).

25% of Republicans believe that Obamacare has decreased the number of people with health insurance.

35% of Republicans believe the number of people insured has remained the same.

Actually, the number has increased by something like 10 million (different surveys, with different methodologies, get different results; 10 million is a conservative estimate and approximate average).

So 60% of Republicans think the number of insured people has either decreased or stayed the same, when it has increased by 10 million.

The poll also showed that 52% of Republicans believe that millions of illegal votes were cast in the recent presidential election.

It also showed that 52% of Republicans (the same 52%??!!) believe it is definitely or probably true that President Obama was born in Kenya.

What alternate universe do these people live in?

Girls Girls Girls! (All-Girl Motley Crue Tribute Band)

My friend Patricia, who lives in Nashville, Tennessee, is manager of Girls Girls Girls! She's also one of the best court reporters in the world (first place in the Intersteno world speed championships in Vienna in 2005). Paste the following into your address bar -- Patricia is the redhead playing bass guitar:

 http://www.onenightstandbandpresents.com/video-reel

Merry Christmas.

H/T Karoli Kuns, Crooks & Liars.

Estimated Global Nuclear Warhead Inventories, 2015

Carl Paladino - A Complete Disgrace

Artvoice (a weekly Buffalo magazine): What would you most like to happen in 2017?

Carl Paladino: Obama catches mad cow disease after being caught having relations with a Hereford. He dies before his trial and is buried in a cow pasture next to Valerie Jarrett, who died weeks prior, after being convicted of sedition and treason, when a jihadi cellmate mistook her for being a nice person and decapitated her.

Artvoice: What would you most like to see go in 2017?

Carl Paladino: Michelle Obama. I’d like her to return to being a male and let loose in the outback of Zimbabwe where she lives comfortably in a cave with Maxie, the gorilla.

Keep it classy, Carl.



Paladino, Donald Trump's New York campaign co-chair, is a Buffalo property developer. His run for governor of New York in 2010 was supported by Trump confidant Roger Stone (he lost to Andrew Cuomo, 61% to 34%). During the campaign, some of his ugly, racist emails were made public. He is presently a member of the Buffalo School Board. He campaigned for Newt Gingrich in the 2012 presidential primaries. In August 2016, he claimed that President Obama is a secret Muslim. Earlier this year, Paladino said that Trump supporters were people frustrated with government and who “want the raccoons out of the basement”. He defended that comment amidst claims it was racist.

Trump Surrounds Himself With Conspiracy Theorists

Click here for an article at The Washington Post, by Elise Viebeck, entitled "Schooled on Benghazi and Pizzagate, Trump team is heavy on conspiracy theorists."

And here's a little video clip (1:58) explaining the link between Donald Trump and conspiracy theorist extraordinaire (e.g. lunatic), Alex Jones. Trump was a guest on Jones's wingnut site, Infowars, for a 30-minute segment in December 2015, six or seven months into his campaign. Click here for Infowars; everyone should at least have a look at it, to see what kind of madness we're dealing with.



Alex Jones, Monica Crowley, Gen. Michael Flynn, Mick Mulvaney, Roger Stone, bull-goose loony Steve Bannon, K.T. McFarland, Ryan (Hillary Clinton is the anti-Christ) Zinke, Rick Perry, Ben Carson -- and I'm sure there are more -- surround the shallow, ignorant president-elect, who is frequently influenced by the last person to speak to him.

Hang on to your hats; it should be quite a ride.

Team Trump! (Second Update)

Only Agriculture and Veterans Affairs to go! Here's the Rogues' Gallery so far -- or, as Rachel Maddow put it, the Star Wars bar scene meets The Gong Show -- in no particular order; I'll try to keep it updated. 

• White House Press Secretary - Sean Spicer: Aaaargh! The prospect of seeing this guy on TV every day for the next four years fills me with fear and loathing. Click here for my recent post, "The Latest Lie From Sean Spencer"; click here for another recent post, "Trump Lickspittle Sean Spicer On Conflicts Of Interest." His latest gig was director of communications for the Republican National Committee.
  
  
  • The rest of Trump's White House media staff: Hope Hicks, assistant the the president and director of strategic communications; Jason Miller, assistant to the president; director of communications; Dan Scavino, director of social media. (Director of social media: will he have any control over Trump's itchy Twitter finger?)

    According to a post at CNN, Scavino was “a lucky 16-year-old who happened to be in the right place at the right time” when in 1990 he was selected to caddie for Trump. He would later become general manager of Trump National Golf Club, then would “travel the world with Trump visiting courses” before becoming the social media director of the Trump campaign in February 2015.
    
    Scavino has repeatedly promoted stories from Trump ally Alex Jones’ conspiracy theory website InfoWars. Scavino has shared stories from outlets including Western Journalism, The Conservative Tribune, The Angry Patriot, and Gateway Pundit on Twitter. All four of these outlets have produced fabricated news stories labeled by fact-checking websites as “false” or completely “unproven.”
    
    The Guardian reported, “Journalist Megyn Kelly, who is under armed guard after receiving death threats, has accused Donald Trump’s social media director of stirring hatred on the internet.” Kelly said during a December talk in Washington, D.C., “It’s that far corner of the internet that really enjoys nastiness and threats and unfortunately there is a man who works for Donald Trump whose job it is to stir these people up and that man needs to stop doing that. His name is Dan Scavino.” [The Guardian, 12/6/16]

• Specialist adviser - Carl Icahn, billionaire corporate raider-turned activist shareholder
  
  

• Special adviser to the president - Kellyanne Conway (Trump whisperer)

• Secretary of the Army - Vincent Viola, billionaire owner of the Florida Panthers (military background, apparently not a bad pick, so far uncontroversial)

• Office of Management and Budget - Mick Mulvaney, a founder of the Freedom Caucus, the House tea party group. Has embraced the term "Shutdown Caucus" because of his willingness to shut down the government over the debt ceiling. No relevant experience. Admitted he didn't know what the debt ceiling was during the debt ceiling crisis in 2011. Regularly demands cuts for benefit programs. Will be in charge of steering budget proposals. NY Times calls him "a fierce advocate of deep spending cuts." Has a degree in international economics from Georgetown and a law degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
  
  In July, Mulvaney gave a speech to the John Birch Society. According to Mother Jones:

  After South Carolina Democrats criticized Mulvaney for appearing before the group, he defended the decision, saying, "I regularly speak to groups across the political spectrum because my constituents deserve access to their congressman. I can't remember ever turning down an opportunity to speak to a group based on the group's political ideology."

  Would he address the KKK if invited? At one point, he said: "You all put out some really good stuff and it's always interesting."
  
  An article by Matthew Rozsa at Salon says:

  Mulvaney has introduced numerous bills that have attempted to cut government spending, particularly on Medicare and Social Security. His argument has been that the programs need to be reformed in order to avoid bankruptcy.

  Said "I don't like the fact that CFPB exists"; proposed raising Social Security retirement age to 70; pushed to shut down the government over Planned Parenthood; claimed the devastating budget cuts Ryan proposed did not cut Medicare and Social Security "rapidly enough"; called the debt ceiling emergency in 2011 -- when the country's financial rating was cut just because they came so close to the cliff -- a "fabricated crisis"; and said "We have to end Medicare as we know it." Just the guy you want in charge of the budget.

Ambassador to Israel - David Friedman. Described as being on the far right fringe of the far right. "... the announcement sparked anger from liberal Jewish groups. Jeremy Ben-Ami, the president of J Street [a liberal Zionist lobbying group], called nominating Friedman "reckless," citing his support for settlements and his questioning of a two-state solution with the Palestinians." He supports the idea of the West Bank settleents, although the State Department has long regarded them as an obstacle to peace in the region. He's been described as being to the right of Netanyahu. Not only does he have no diplomatic experience, his writings show him to be bellicose and profoundly undiplomatic. He advocates moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, a move guaranteed to provoke a violent backlash. And he likes Putin! According to an article in The Guardian, by Peter Beaumont and Julian Borger, entitled "Donald Trump's Israel ambassador is hardline pro-settler lawyer":

Like Trump, Friedman is an admirer of Vladimir Putin, and has portrayed the Russian president as fighting Islamic State in Syria despite little of the Russian war effort being focused on Isis.

“Vladimir Putin gets it,” Friedman wrote in November last year. “He may be a ‘thug,’ as he was recently described by Senator [Marco] Rubio, but he knows how to identify a national objective, execute a military plan, and ultimately prevail.”

• Deputy National Security Adviser - Monica Crowley. Ouch -- another terrible pick. Click here for a number of complaints about Crowley, conspiracy theory nut, in an article at Crooks & Liars by News Hound Ellen, entitled "Monica Crowley, Conspiracy Theorist Extraordinaire, To Be Trump’s Deputy National Security Adviser." Trump apparently saw Crowley on TV -- something Trump sees as always a good recommendation. Here she is in younger days, standing before the Berlin Wall. She tweeted the picture with the caption "Walls work!"
  
  
  
  Yeah, they're great at keeping people in -- especially if you're willing to shoot anyone who tries to get out. 

More after the jump.

I Am Not Your Negro

Coming to theaters February 3:



Click here for Jonathan Capehart's article in The Washington Post entitled "What the lynching memorial will force us all to face." Says Capehart:

In the acclaimed documentary “I Am Not Your Negro,” director Raoul Peck takes the words from an unfinished book by legendary author James Baldwin and gives them life in the voice of actor Samuel L. Jackson. And there is a jarring moment in this stunning 93-minute examination of race in the United States that has stayed with me since I saw it at a screening last month.

A rosy-cheeked, perfectly coiffed Doris Day frets in her kitchen with champagne glasses and a bottle of bubbly in the 1961 movie “Lover Come Back” while a sentimental song about love plays in the background. But as the lush music continues, the scene fades to a succession of harrowing black-and-white photos of lynched black men and a black woman. What made these gruesome murders all the more grotesque were the white onlookers posing for pictures under trees festooned with “strange fruit.” Those faces peer back at you as Jackson speaks Baldwin’s powerful words.

You cannot lynch me and keep me in ghettos without becoming something monstrous yourselves. And, furthermore, you give me a terrifying advantage. You never had to look at me. I had to look at you. I know more about you than you know about me. Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.

Giant Panda vs. Snowman, Toronto Zoo

It seems to end in a stalemate -- but the snowman puts up quite a fight! 2 minutes, 50 seconds.



H/T Bill in Portland Maine, Cheers and Jeers, Daily Kos.

Bush/Cheney Plan For World War II

Click here for today's edition of Cheers and Jeers, by Bill in Portland Maine, at Daily Kos. He describes "the Meeting of the Titans" -- Roosevelt and Churchill, at the Arcadia Conference, in Washington, D.C., two weeks after Pearl Harbor, when the two leaders met to discuss strategy in the war on Germany and Japan. "They came up with the following nine-point plan:"

1. Declare war on Canada.
2. Send too few troops to the field of battle.
3. Let lawless private mercenaries do much of the heavy lifting.
4. Allow companies formerly run by the vice president to win no-bid contracts and rake in obscene profits while providing shitty services.
5. Ask for no sacrifice from the people and tell them to go shopping instead.
6. Don't give the troops the equipment they need to win battles and protect themselves.
7. Botch the reconstruction.
8. Cut taxes at the same time---twice!
9. Leave office in disgrace six years later having failed to finish the job, and leave it to your successor to clean up the mess.

He left out the plans to hire a bunch of right-wing zealots, inexperienced kids from the Heritage Foundation who could speak neither German nor Japanese, to run the reconstruction, while blackballing dedicated, knowledgeable people from the State Department; to disband the German and Japanese military, guaranteeing armed insurgency; to round up large numbers of innocent civilians, along with the bad actors, and torture them, squandering all the worldwide goodwill generated by Pearl Harbor -- et cetera. There's a long list.

I wonder how Trump would have handled it?

Merry Christmas, Digby!

Or Happy Holidays; I'm fine with either.



Click here for my recent post entitled "Digby's Prescience." The first sentence of that post is: "I consider Digby, who blogs at her site, Hullabaloo, to be one of the best and most insightful political writers on the Web." Here's an added endorsement from Bill in Portland Maine, who writes Cheers and Jeers at Daily Kos:

CHEERS to the Great Pale Yellow Goddess. I typically don't promote fundraisers for bloggers outside of Daily Kos. There are enough outstretched hands (my own included) right here in Orange Satanland. But I always make one exception: Hillman Prize winner Digby aka Heather Parton, creator of the Hullabaloo blog. She is one of the sharpest, most observant bloggers you'll find on the lefty tubes (one of her posts is currently being discussed on the rec list here at Daily Kos), and when you combine that with her Molly Ivins-like wit it's easy to see why "What Digby said..." has become an often-used blogosphere catchphrase. She's in the middle of her annual fundraiser now so she can keep chasing after the bad guys. If you feel so inclined to send a little holiday cheer in her direction, here's the linky dinky. If you prefer snail mail, her address is on the upper left corner of her page. You won’t get much in return, though...just the equivalent of a Ph.D. in political truth telling and the anguished sound of right-wingers wishing she'd go into another line of work.

An Imperial Presidency - For Real

Shades of Richard M. Nixon: "When the president does it, that means it is not illegal."

On All In With Chris Hayes tonight on MSNBC, Chris quoted Trump as saying, in an interview with The New York Times not long after the election: "The law is totally on my side, meaning the president can't have a conflict of interest ... The president of the United States is allowed to have whatever conflicts he wants."



Although the president is limited by the "emoluments clause" of the Constitution, which, according to Wikipedia, "... prohibits the Federal government from granting titles of nobility, and restricts members of the government from receiving gifts, emoluments, offices or titles from foreign states without the consent of the United States Congress," he is indeed not subject to any conflict-of-interest laws that bind literally everyone else in government (except, apparently, Supreme Court justices); he is indeed "allowed to have whatever conflicts he wants."

However, Chris pointed out, the conflict-of-interest exemption does not apply to his relatives or anyone else on his team, and depending on the nature of any violation, those people could actually be subject to criminal charges under conflict-of-interest laws.

However, the odious Newt Gingrich appears to have found a loophole. In an article by Ken Meyer at Mediaite, in an article entitled "Gingrich: Trump Can Pardon Advisers Who Break Ethics Laws, Present Conflicts of Interest," Gingrich appeared on The Diane Rehm Show and said:

“In the case of the president, [Trump] has a broad ability to organize the White House the way he wants to. He also has, frankly, the power of the pardon. I mean, it is a totally open power, and he could simply say, ‘Look, I want them to be my advisers, I pardon them if anybody finds them to have behaved against the rules, period.’ And technically, under the Constitution, he has that level of authority.”

And we thought George W. -- and some have said Obama too -- were running "an imperial presidency." You ain't seen nothin' yet.

Digby's Prescience

I consider Digby, who blogs at her site, Hullabaloo, to be one of the best and most insightful political writers on the Web. Her entry at Wikipedia begins:

Digby is the pseudonym of political blogger Heather Digby Parton[1] from Santa Monica who founded the blog Hullabaloo. She has been called one of the "leading and most admired commentators" of the progressive blogosphere.

The image at her site is the character Howard Beale in the movie Network, screaming. She describes herself as follows:

I'm not part of the Village and I don't pretend to be a journalist. I'm just a political observer, blogger and essayist who tries to sort out what's going on in the world around me.

Further at her Wikipedia site:

She won the 2005 Koufax award for blog writing and accepted the Paul Wellstone Award on behalf of the progressive blogosphere from the Campaign for America's Future at their "Take Back America" conference.[5] Digby had initially kept her identity secret and it was widely assumed that Digby was male until she made an appearance at the 2007 CAF conference to accept the award.[5] Digby has since written regularly at Salon as Heather Digby Parton.[1] She also won the 2014 Hillman Prize for Opinion and Analysis Journalism.

Anyway, click here for one of her latest articles at Hullabaloo, entitled "The Power of Trump's celebrity." Here is the text she posted on the day after Trump announced:

The GOP race for the presidency has been upgraded from a clown car to a three-ring circus with the official entry of Donald Trump into the race. After daughter Ivanka delivered a stirring introduction worthy of Abraham Lincoln or Winston Churchill, the audience waited expectantly for the great man to appear. And it waited. And waited. Finally after several long moments, the great man finally emerged above the crowd on the mezzanine level of the glittering Trump Tower building waving as if he were Juan Peron (or the Queen of England). As Neil Young’s “Keep on Rockin’ in the Free World” continued to play over and over again, he then descended to the stage on an excruciatingly slow-motion escalator and began his speech by insulting his fellow Republican candidates for failing to know how to put on a competent political event.

It was a perfect beginning to what is going to be an astonishing political spectacle.

Right out of the gate he began to free-associate like a drunken Tea Partyer on 2 Shots For A Buck night, insulting Mexican immigrants by calling them rapists and drug dealers, asking when we’ve ever beaten China or Japan (!) at anything, declaring himself to be potentially the greatest jobs president God has ever created and more. Oh, and he also told us that he’s worth $8,737,540,000 — more or less. It was the best presidential campaign announcement ever, even better than Lindsey Graham’s.

The media seemed a little bit shell-shocked in the early going — perhaps they’ve never actually heard what the average right-winger believes. They seemed to find it noteworthy that he was incoherent and contradictory, with promises of totally free trade even as he said he would make Mexico pay a tariff to construct the Great Wall he envisions building on the border.

And they didn’t seem to know what to think about his endless gobbledygook about “making” the world do what he wants it to do. They are clearly unaware that members of the far right don’t follow the philosophy of Edmund Burke. They follow the philosophy of Glenn Beck, Joe McCarthy and P.T. Barnum. Not even Roger Ailes can control the way their minds work.

More after the jump.

Fireworks Explosion In Mexico City

Subversion Of Democracy In North Carolina

Click here for an article by Ari Berman at The Nation, entitled "North Carolina’s Legislative Coup Shows What Voter Suppression Will Look Like Under Trump," subtitled "Republicans have turned North Carolina into a laboratory for subverting democracy."

Republicans have turned North Carolina, previously one of the most progressive states in the South, into a laboratory for voter suppression and offered a disturbing preview of what’s to come under Trump. The legislative coup is merely the latest in a series of outrageous and illegal actions by the North Carolina GOP to undermine democracy in the state.

Berman makes four points. First, that the N.C. legislature resegregated the state politically in violation of the Voting Rights Act; second, that they then passed the country's worst voter-suppression law; third, that they limited early-voting hours and polling locations "... that included opposing polling sites on college campuses and prohibiting early voting on Sundays, when black churches held 'Souls to the Polls' voter mobilization drives":

The North Carolina GOP bragged before Election Day that “African American Early Voting is down 8.5% from this time in 2012. Caucasian voters early voting is up 22.5% from this time in 2012.” After aggressively using their majorities on state and local election boards to suppress votes, Republicans then took those majorities away from the new Democratic governor.

Fourth, that "... despite all of these suppression efforts, Cooper managed to defeat McCrory—the only race in 2016 where Democrats picked up a governor’s seat in a state Trump carried. But McCrory refused to concede for nearly a month, spreading bogus allegations of voter fraud that included wrongly accusing a 101-year-old World War II veteran of voting twice."

He sees the travesty in North Carolina as a preview of Trump's America:

The pattern in North Carolina is clear: When Republicans win, they suppress the Democratic vote to solidify power in future elections. And when they lose, they rig the rules to prevent their opponents from being able to fairly exercise and maintain power. This is what happens in a dictatorship, not a democracy. And it’s a preview of what’s to come in Trump’s America.

I’ve written that Trump is the greatest threat to American democracy in our lifetime because, unlike his Democratic or Republican predecessors, he has little respect for basic democratic institutions like a free press or a fair election. But Trump is also such a threat because his party, as we’re seeing in North Carolina, has displayed the same brazen disregard for the will of the people. And now it will control the White House, the Congress, the courts, and two-thirds of state legislatures.

Electoral College: "Living Symbol Of America's Original Sin"

Click here for Abbreviated pundit roundup at Daily Kos, today by Georgia Logothetis. It includes this excerpt from an article behind The New York Times' paywall:

The Electoral College, which is written into the Constitution, is more than just a vestige of the founding era; it is a living symbol of America’s original sin. When slavery was the law of the land, a direct popular vote would have disadvantaged the Southern states, with their large disenfranchised populations. Counting those men and women as three-fifths of a white person, as the Constitution originally did, gave the slave states more electoral votes.

Today the college, which allocates electors based on each state’s representation in Congress, tips the scales in favor of smaller states; a Wyoming resident’s vote counts 3.6 times as much as a Californian’s. And because almost all states use a winner-take-all system, the election ends up being fought in just a dozen or so “battleground” states, leaving tens of millions of Americans on the sidelines.

There is an elegant solution: The Constitution establishes the existence of electors, but leaves it up to states to tell them how to vote. Eleven states and the District of Columbia, representing 165 electoral votes, have already passed legislation to have their electors vote for the winner of the national popular vote. The agreement, known as the National Popular Vote interstate compact, would take effect once states representing a majority of electoral votes, currently 270, signed on. This would ensure that the national popular-vote winner would become president.

Trump "Endorsements" By Fellow Republicans

Click here for the Tuesday, December 20, edition of Cheers and Jeers, at Daily Kos, by Bill in Portland Maine.

"He has spent a career of sticking it to working people." (Sen. Marco Rubio)

"This man is a pathological liar. He doesn't know the difference between truth and lies. He lies practically every word that comes out of his mouth. … He describes his battle with venereal disease as his own personal Vietnam." (Sen. Ted Cruz)

"Donald Trump reminds me of the Kim Kardashian of politics." (Carly Fiorina)

"He's a race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot. He doesn't represent my party. He doesn't represent the values that the men and women who wear the uniform are fighting for. ... He's the ISIL man of the year." (Sen. Lindsey Graham)

"Not the Commander-in-Chief we would need to keep our country safe" (Gov. Jeb Bush)

“He is a cancer on conservatism … His comments should completely and immediately disqualify him from seeking our nation’s highest office.” (Gov. Rick Perry)

Republican Playbook: Seven Easy Steps

By Jen Sorenson:

Aux armes, citoyens!

"Play La Marseillaise! Play it!"



Allons enfants de la Patrie
Le jour de gloire est arrivé!
Contre nous de la tyrannie
L'étendard sanglant est levé
L'étendard sanglant est levé
Entendez-vous dans les campagnes
Mugir ces féroces soldats?
Ils viennent jusque dans vos bras
Égorger vos fils, vos compagnes!
Aux armes, citoyens
Formez vos bataillons
Marchons, marchons!
Qu'un sang impur
Abreuve nos sillons!


Vive la France! (H/T Driftglass @ Crooks & Liars)

Wayback Machine

If you type "wayback machine" into a Google search box and click on the first entry, "Internet Archive: Wayback Machine," you will end up at https://archive.org/web/. At the top there is a search box, with a suggested search prefix, "http://". That invites you to enter the URL (Universal Resource Locator) of a web site you wish to search.

For example, the URL of the Republican National Committee is https://www.gop.com/. If you type that entry and click on "BROWSE HISTORY," it indicates "Saved 4,672 times between January 14, 1997 and December 18, 2016 [today's date]." You can see all the dates which are archived for the GOP site. Clicking on any date will show you what the web page looked like on that day.

Picking a date at random -- February 11, 2016 -- it shows you that five snapshots of the site were taken on that day. Clicking on any one of those snapshots shows you what the site looked like at that particular time. Clicking on each of them, one after another, shows you the changes that were made to the site on that date.

The site only indicates snapshots that were taken. For example, you'll notice that no snapshots were taken of the site between February 12 and February 21. Perhaps there were no changes to the site in that time; or perhaps there were changes, but no contributor to the Wayback Machine posted a snapshot.

Very useful for keeping people honest when they try to scrub web posts that later prove embarrassing! For example, Alex Jones at Infowars (a blog and radio show frequented and endorsed by one Donald J. Trump) posted vicious, disgusting lies claiming that Hillary Clinton personally raped children and cut them up into chunks. Long after Pizzagate became a sickening, disgusting topic on the news and drew a lot of public attention, he scrubbed those entries -- but a diligent search of the Wayback Machine shows snapshots of the Infowars site when those posts were made.

A small victory for truth. (Loved Rocky & Bullwinkle!)

Tweets And Rallies Make It Easy For Trump To Lie

Or rather, tweets and rallies make it easy for Trump's lies to get out there and circulate as common wisdom among his followers.

In tweets and rallies, Trump can lie to his heart's content without fear of contradiction. If he tweets, for example, or says at a rally that he won the election "in a landslide," there's nothing anyone can do to counteract the lie -- it's out there among the Trumpistas, and millions of them believe it, despite the fact it's a blatant lie.

If Trump were to make that statement in an interview with an actual journalist -- and I'm not talking Fox News or Breitbart here -- the response would be: "WTF? That's just not true."



On Chris Hayes tonight, All In With Chris Hayes, on MSNBC, the Trump team said:

Today marks a historic electoral landslide victory in our nation's democracy ... The official votes cast by the Electoral College exceeded the 270 required to secure the presidency by a very large margin, far greater than ever anticipated by the media.

Okay, there's a humungous lie there: "Today marks a historic electoral landslide victory in our nation's democracy." NO, NO, NO! 306 votes in the Electoral College is, historically speaking, barely squeaking through; and he lost the popular vote by almost 3 million.

But truthtellers, unfortunately, have to hedge their statements; they feel compelled to tell the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Their scream of LIAR! to the first bit has to be tempered by a grudging acceptance that the rest of the statement can be interpreted as true. The rest of the Trump statement can be defended. The EC votes exceeded the 270 needed by quite a bit -- not by "a very large margin," by 36 votes -- although almost every other president in modern history exceeded that number by a far greater margin. And yes, it's true that 306 votes was far greater -- far, far greater -- than ever anticipated by the media, because general wisdom and the media were so far off the mark; they anticipated he would lose by jaw-dropping numbers. So yes, it's true; 306 votes, while far from a landslide, was a hell of a lot more than the media anticipated.

By lying grossly and repeatedly in tweets and at rallies, Trump is able to shout through a bullhorn unimpeded by those pesky fact-checkers -- and his adoring fans believe him. Sad, but true.

Kleptocracy, Extortion: Inside Trumpworld

Kleptocracy: government by those who seek chiefly status and personal gain at the expense of the governed.



Click here for an article by Karoli Kuns at Crooks & Liars, entitled "Kleptocracy: Kuwait Changes Event From Four Seasons To Trump DC Hotel." Ms. Kuns reports that the Kuwaiti embassy had a signed contract with the Four Seasons Hotel in Washington, D.C., where it had for years been holding an annual event; according to an anonymous source at ThinkProgress, the embassy abruptly changed the venue to the Trump Hotel after the Kuwaiti ambassador was pressured by someone in the Trump organization.

Despicable Drug Dealers In West Virginia

Click here for an article at Esquire by Charlie Pierce, entitled "Drug Companies Have Been Pumping Opiates into West Virginia."

Kermit, West Virginia, has a population of 392. It's a typical small town in the poor, rural county of Mingo. According to its Wikipedia entry, per capita income for the town is $14,695. About 4.0% of families and 10.1% of the population were below the poverty line. The unemployment rate is 12.8%.

Over two years, out-of-state drug companies shipped nearly 9 million hydrocodone (OxyContin) pills to a single pharmacy in the Mingo County town. OxyContin and similar opioids are highly addictive and potentially deadly, and are prescribed for pain relief.

Click here for an article with this information in the Charleston Gazette-Mail, by Eric Eyre, entitled "Drug firms poured 780M painkillers into WV amid rise of overdoses." The article says:

Rural and poor, Mingo County has the fourth-highest prescription opioid death rate of any county in the United States.

The trail also weaves through Wyoming County, where shipments of OxyContin have doubled, and the county's overdose death rate leads the nation. One mom-and-pop pharmacy in Oceana received 600 times as many oxycodone pills as the Rite Aid drugstore just eight blocks away.

In six years, drug wholesalers showered the state with 780 million hydrocodone and oxycodone pills, while 1,728 West Virginians fatally overdosed on those two painkillers, a Sunday Gazette-Mail investigation found.

The article presents figures saying that 780 million doses of oxycodone or hydrocodone -- opioids -- were shipped to West Virginia in the period from 2007 to 2012 -- "433 pain pills for every man, woman and child in West Virginia." Deaths from opioid overdoses over that period increased by 67%.



According to the article, "The wholesalers and their lawyers fought to keep the sales numbers secret in previous court actions brought by the newspaper."

The drug companies, of course, are making billions; their CEOs and other executives are making tens of millions in salaries and bonuses. The largest distributor, McKesson, "has grown into the fifth-largest corporation in America. The drug distributor's CEO was the nation's highest-paid executive in 2012, according to Forbes."

Under the heading "Drug wholesalers made billions," the article says:

In the drug distribution industry, they're called the “Big Three” — McKesson, Cardinal Health, AmerisourceBergen — and they bear no resemblance to the mom-and-pop pharmacies that ordered massive quantities of the drugs the wholesalers delivered in West Virginia.

The Big Three wholesalers together are nearly as large as Wal-Mart, with total revenues of more than $400 billion. Their revenues account for about 85 percent of the drug distribution market in the U.S.

Between 2007 and 2012 — when McKesson, Cardinal Health and AmerisourceBergen collectively shipped 423 million pain pills to West Virginia, according to DEA data analyzed by the Gazette-Mail — the companies earned a combined $17 billion in net income.

Over the past four years, the CEOs of McKesson, Cardinal Health and AmerisourceBergen collectively received salaries and other compensation of more than $450 million.

In 2015, McKesson's CEO collected compensation worth $89 million — more money than what 2,000 West Virginia families combined earned on average.

There's much more in the article about the unholy alliance between the drug companies, the pharmacies, and the physicians. It's well worth the read -- click here. And the article is only the first of two parts; the second is called "'Suspicious' drug order rules never enforced by state."

Team Trump! (Updated)

Only Agriculture and Veterans Affairs to go! Here's the Rogues' Gallery so far -- or, as Rachel Maddow put it, the Star Wars bar scene meets The Gong Show -- in no particular order; I'll try to keep it updated. 

• Secretary of the Army - Vincent Viola, billionaire owner of the Florida Panthers (military background, apparently not a bad pick, so far uncontroversial)

• Office of Management and Budget - Mick Mulvaney, a founder of the Freedom Caucus, the House tea party group. Has embraced the term "Shutdown Caucus" because of his willingness to shut down the government over the debt ceiling. No relevant experience. Admitted he didn't know what the debt ceiling was during the debt ceiling crisis in 2011. Regularly demands cuts for benefit programs. Will be in charge of steering budget proposals. NY Times calls him "a fierce advocate of deep spending cuts." Has a degree in international economics from Georgetown and a law degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
  
  In July, Mulvaney gave a speech to the John Birch Society. According to Mother Jones:

  After South Carolina Democrats criticized Mulvaney for appearing before the group, he defended the decision, saying, "I regularly speak to groups across the political spectrum because my constituents deserve access to their congressman. I can't remember ever turning down an opportunity to speak to a group based on the group's political ideology."

  Would he address the KKK if invited? At one point, he said: "You all put out some really good stuff and it's always interesting."
  
  An article by Matthew Rozsa at Salon says:

  Mulvaney has introduced numerous bills that have attempted to cut government spending, particularly on Medicare and Social Security. His argument has been that the programs need to be reformed in order to avoid bankruptcy.

Ambassador to Israel - David Friedman. Described as being on the far right fringe of the far right. "... the announcement sparked anger from liberal Jewish groups. Jeremy Ben-Ami, the president of J Street [a liberal Zionist lobbying group], called nominating Friedman "reckless," citing his support for settlements and his questioning of a two-state solution with the Palestinians." He supports the idea of the West Bank settleents, although the State Department has long regarded them as an obstacle to peace in the region. He's been described as being to the right of Netanyahu. Not only does he have no diplomatic experience, his writings show him to be bellicose and profoundly undiplomatic. He advocates moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, a move guaranteed to provoke a violent backlash. And he likes Putin! According to an article in The Guardian, by Peter Beaumont and Julian Borger, entitled "Donald Trump's Israel ambassador is hardline pro-settler lawyer":

Like Trump, Friedman is an admirer of Vladimir Putin, and has portrayed the Russian president as fighting Islamic State in Syria despite little of the Russian war effort being focused on Isis.

“Vladimir Putin gets it,” Friedman wrote in November last year. “He may be a ‘thug,’ as he was recently described by Senator [Marco] Rubio, but he knows how to identify a national objective, execute a military plan, and ultimately prevail.”

• Deputy National Security Adviser - Monica Crowley. Ouch -- another terrible pick. Click here for a number of complaints about Crowley, conspiracy theory nut, in an article at Crooks & Liars by News Hound Ellen, entitled "Monica Crowley, Conspiracy Theorist Extraordinaire, To Be Trump’s Deputy National Security Adviser." Trump apparently saw Crowley on TV -- something Trump sees as always a good recommendation. Here she is in younger days, standing before the Berlin Wall. She tweeted the picture with the caption "Walls work!"
  
  
  
  Yeah, they're great at keeping people in -- especially if you're willing to shoot anyone who tries to get out. 

More after the jump.

PDB: Trump Determined To Strike In U.S.!

(PDB: Presidential Daily Briefing.)

Is Donald Trump a clear and present danger to the existence of the United States as we know it? The following is a tongue-in-cheek assessment of the situation by Jon Perr, in an article at Daily Kos entitled "Presidential Daily Brief: Trump determined to strike in U.S.":

OVERVIEW: TRUMP DETERMINED TO STRIKE IN U.S.

Clandestine, foreign government, and media reports indicate Donald Trump since at least 2011 has wanted to conduct attacks in the U.S. Trump implied in media interviews between 2011 and 2016 that the current president was not born in the United States, and that his adherents would follow his example to “bring the fight to America.”

After a U.S. humor strike on his media base in America on April 30, 2011, Trump told followers he wanted to retaliate in Washington, according to a [REDACTED] service.

We have not been able to corroborate some of the more sensational threat reporting, such as that from opposition leaders such as [REDACTED] saying that Trump knew in advance of Russian plans for cyberattacks on the Democratic Party intended to gain the release of Clinton campaign emails.

Nevertheless, FBI information since that time indicates patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings of the public good and the public Treasury. These include plans to undermine core U.S. democratic institutions including voting rights, press freedom, and religious liberty, as well as the privatization of fundamental government services in ways likely to jeopardize Americans’ standard of living. The Trump jihad against the pillars of Americans foreign policy—summarized as “appease Russia, provoke China, and attack Iran”—poses a double threat to U.S. national security and its allies in both Europe and the Pacific.

GLOBAL THREAT ASSESSMENTS

NATO Alliance, Russian Sanctions Being Put at Risk. In the wake of Russia’s occupation of Crimea and incursion into Ukraine, the Obama administration responded with the deployment of U.S. forces in frontline NATO states and economic sanctions targeting Moscow’s energy sector. But the president-elect’s selection of pro-Putin figures Flynn and former Exxon Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson to his national security team reflect Trump’s likely desire to unwind the sanctions regime. Combined with Russian/OPEC production cuts pushing global oil prices higher, the failure of U.S. sanctions will only serve to refill Putin’s coffers even as he applies greater pressure on former Soviet territories and Warsaw Pact members. With U.S. troops now engaged in exercises with NATO partners in Estonia, Lithuania, and Poland, President Trump will be putting the lives of American servicemen and women at risk if he follows through on his past threats to the alliance.

More after the jump.

Gen. McCaffrey On Trump National Security Adviser Michael Flynn

That's Gen. Barry McCaffrey, National Security Adviser to President Clinton and commander of the First Gulf War.

Click here for an article by David Ferguson at Raw Story entitled "General: Trump appointee Mike Flynn’s ‘demented’ tweets raise serious questions about his judgment."

On December 16, McCaffrey announced that upon consideration, he was withdrawing his endorsement of Gen. Michael Flynn as Trump's national security adviser. He said that he had been strong in his initial endorsement:

“But I must admit that now I am extremely uneasy about some of these tweets, which don’t sound so much as if they’re politically skullduggery, but instead border on being demented,” McCaffrey said.

“So I think we need to look into this and sort out what’s going on here,” he concluded. “I think we need to aggressively examine what was going on with Gen. Flynn and his son dealing with these transparent, nearly demented tweets that were going out.”

“I think it needs closer scrutiny,” he said.

Yes, I guess a penchant for insane conspiracy theories and reliance on fake news stories might give one pause.

Perception vs. Reality: The Popular Vote, Putin, And The Russian Hack

Click here for an article at Daily Kos, by Hunter, entitled "Half of Republicans believe Trump won popular vote; less than a third bothered by Russian hacking."

• Did Trump win the popular vote? No, he did not; Hillary's lead is upwards of 2.8 million votes and counting, as absentee and mail-in ballots continue to be counted.

Do people think Trump won the popular vote? Well, quite a lot of people do, according to a survey cited in the article: 52% of Republicans surveyed, 24% of independents, and 7% of Democrats.

60% of Republicans without college degrees believe Trump won the popular vote, as opposed to 37% of those with a college degree.

The survey asked, Are you bothered a great deal/quite a bit by Russian interference in the election? 86% of Democrats said yes, as opposed to 29% of Republicans.

In an article by Politico staff entitled "Morell calls Russia's meddling in U.S. elections 'political equivalent of 9/11,'" former CIA acting director Michael Morell said about the Russian hacks:

“A foreign government messing around in our elections is, I think, an existential threat to our way of life. To me, and this is to me not an overstatement, this is the political equivalent of 9/11,” Morell said in an interview posted Sunday on The Cipher Brief. “It is huge and the fact that it hasn’t gotten more attention from the Obama Administration, Congress, and the mainstream media, is just shocking to me.”

But only 29% of Republicans are concerned. Are they not aware that U.S. intelligence agencies have agreed that the Russians hacked the election (that is, various servers connected with the Democratic party)? Or do they not believe the intelligence community's assessment? Or do they believe the assessment and they just don't care, or don't think it's significant?

• Is Trump too friendly with Putin? 61% of Democrats say yes, as opposed to 8% of Republicans.

• Do Americans have a favorable opinion of Vladimir Putin? 37% of Republicans do, while 47% view him at least somewhat negatively. 12% of Democrats and 20% of independents view him favorably.

Draw your own conclusions.

Congressman: Russian Hacks Were A Good Thing!

That's the opinion of California congressman Dana Rohrabacher, who was considered to be "in the mix" of people Trump was considering for Secretary of State; he is chairman of the House subcommittee on Europe and Eurasia.

And he's a big Putin fan. The article recounts the story of how he lost an arm-wrestling contest with Putin years ago, and states:

In an interview earlier this month with Yahoo News anchor Bianna Golodryga, Rohrabacher said that the anchor's claim that Russia was a human rights abuser was "baloney," then accused her of bias because she was a political refugee from the former Soviet republic of Moldova.

The claim that Russia was a human rights abuser was "baloney"? Does this guy know anything at all?

Click here for an article at CNN by Chris Massie, entitled "GOP congressman on Russian hacking: 'Terrific' that voters got more truthful information."

"The hackers, whether or not they're Russian hackers, I don't know," the California congressman said. "I know the CIA and the FBI disagree as to who the hackers are. But whether they're Russian hackers or any other hackers, the only information that we were getting from hackers was accurate information, was truthful. And that's not gonna turn the tide. If the American people have been given more truthful information, that's terrific."

Right. Thanks, Russia! He claims he doesn't know "they're Russian hackers," but that's a lie. It's common knowledge by now that the FBI and the CIA have come to an agreement that it was Russian hackers, at the behest of one Vladimir Putin, and FBI Director Comey announced today that not only are they sure it was the Russians, but the purpose of the hacks was in part to try to see that Trump was elected president.

The article reports that Rohrabacher, in a California radio interview, said:

"It was truthful and in fact, whoever the hackers were, who could've been our hackers or Russian hackers or whoever, they were doing more investigative journalism into the corruption and arrogance of the liberal Democratic campaign for president than any of the national media, who were just hellbent to try to destroy Don Trump. That's all they focused on."

Again, he's lying about "could've been our hackers or Russian hackers or whoever." And the national media "were hellbent to try to destroy Don Trump"? That's news to me. I seem to remember a constant deafening drumbeat of emails, emails, emails.

Trump's Cabinet Picks

By Brian McFadden (H/T Daily Kos):

The Latest Lie From Sean Spencer

Spicer, Republican National Committee communications director, was speaking to a roomful of journalists when a question was asked about Obama's statement regarding the Russian hacks:

"He said that the CIA and the FBI and the Director of National Intelligence are now in unison believing that Russia interfered in the election. Do you think that is true?"

After claiming he's "not an intel person," Spencer came up with the following gem:

"Number one, this would not have happened had Hillary Clinton not had an improper, a secret server. She did not follow protocol."

What on earth? There is no evidence that Clinton's server was hacked; there is acknowledged to be incontrovertible evidence that Russia hacked the emails of at least the Democratic National Committee and John Podesta. Is Spicer of the opinion that the DNC and Podesta's emails were hosted on Hillary's server? I don't think so. It's simply a flat-out lie.

Spicer is apparently under consideration to be Trump's press secretary.

David Friedman, Hard-Line Ambassador To Israel

Click here for a scathing article by David Remnick in The New Yorker, entitled "Trump’s Daily Bankruptcy and the Ambassador to Israel." He's using the word "bankruptcy" figuratively, not literally; he says reading the news these days feels like you're reading The Onion:

Because, while so much of the media, in ways subtle and broad, attempts to normalize the Trump ascendancy, while we are told that patriotism demands that we accept Trump and “give him a chance,” the President-elect acts in ways that leave even dystopian satire behind. His behavior has little to do with conservatism or libertarianism or populism; his mode is recklessness, a self-admiring belief that unpredictability is the path to national salvation.

The article claims that Friedman is to the right of Benjamin Netanyahu. It mentions the hard-right orientation of Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner and his family, and the fact that although the State Department has long considered the West Bank settlements an obstacle to peace in the region, Friedman and the Kushner family are ardent supporters of the settlements. He claims that Obama is guilty of "blatant anti-Semitism," which is ridiculous on its face.

Friedman has described J Street, the liberal Zionist lobbying group, as comparable to the “Kapos during the Nazi regime.” The reference is to the prisoners forced to work as functionaries in the concentration camps.

“Finally, are J Street supporters really as bad as kapos? The answer, actually, is no,” Friedman wrote in Arutz Sheva. “They are far worse than kapos—Jews who turned in their fellow Jews in the Nazi death camps. The kapos faced extraordinary cruelty and who knows what any of us would have done under those circumstances to save a loved one? But J Street? They are just smug advocates of Israel’s destruction delivered from the comfort of their secure American sofas—it’s hard to imagine anyone worse.”

He says: "When one read this morning in the paper that Friedman 'has no experience in diplomacy,' one could only mutter, 'No kidding.'”

Remnick concludes his article with bitter remarks about Trump and the expected outcome of a Trump/Friedman hard-line policy with regard to Israel:

“What can you say about Trump?” Avishai Margalit, an Israeli philosopher and co-founder of Peace Now, told me. “Everything is an outlier. No one can predict anything. It’s not as if there is a deviation and you try to explain it. Everything is a deviation. You cannot rationalize it. It’s a family business, and they treat the White House as a family business, like Don Corleone. He doesn’t feel that he has to please anybody. You bully everyone and see what happens. The only thing you can say about Friedman’s appointment is that it’s not as if some other Ambassador would make a big difference. It doesn’t matter. There is no peace process, though Friedman may escalate things. The Palestinians have given up in any case. They have lost hope in any solution, and this is another nail in the coffin.”

Prof. Krugman: Gloom And Doom, Trump Style

I've wiggled into a crevice through The New York Times' paywall, and entered a treasure trove of Paul Krugman articles; that's why I'm publishing all these Krugman posts. The hole in the paywall will close shortly.

Anyway, Prof. Krugman is not pleased with the election. Here are some of his thoughts, expressed in an article entitled "The Sorrow and the Pity":

A lot of people in politics and the media are scrambling to normalize what just happened to us, saying that it will all be OK and we can work with Trump. No, it won’t, and no, we can’t. The next occupant of the White House will be a pathological liar with a loose grip on reality; he is already surrounding himself with racists, anti-Semites, and conspiracy theorists; his administration will be the most corrupt in America history.

How did this happen? There were multiple causes, but you just can’t ignore the reality that key institutions and their leaders utterly failed. Every news organization that decided, for the sake of ratings, to ignore policy and barely cover Trump scandals while obsessing over Clinton emails, every reporter who, for whatever reason — often sheer pettiness — played up Wikileaks nonsense and talked about how various Clinton stuff “raised questions” and “cast shadows” is complicit in this disaster. And then there’s the FBI: it’s quite reasonable to argue that James Comey, whether it was careerism, cowardice, or something worse, tipped the scales and may have doomed the world.

No, I’m not giving up hope. Maybe, just maybe, the sheer awfulness of what’s happening will sink in. Maybe the backlash will be big enough to constrain Trump from destroying democracy in the next few months, and/or sweep his gang from power in the next few years. But if that’s going to happen, enough people will have to be true patriots, which means taking a stand.

And anyone who doesn’t — who plays along and plays it safe — is betraying America, and mankind.

Here's a second, related article by Prof. Krugman, entitled "The Long Haul." I've already posted this article in full, a post I entitled "Dr. Krugman: Be Stalwart." But I think it's worth reposting here:

As I said in today’s column, nobody who thought Trump would be a disaster should change his or her mind because he won the election. He will, in fact, be a disaster on every front. And I think he will eventually drag the Republican Party into the abyss along with his own reputation; the question is whether he drags the rest of the country, and the world, down with him.

But it’s important not to expect this to happen right away. There’s a temptation to predict immediate economic or foreign-policy collapse; I gave in to that temptation Tuesday night, but quickly realized that I was making the same mistake as the opponents of Brexit (which I got right). So I am retracting that call, right now. It’s at least possible that bigger budget deficits will, if anything, strengthen the economy briefly. More detail in Monday’s column, I suspect.

On other fronts, too, don’t expect immediate vindication. America has a vast stock of reputational capital, built up over generations; even Trump will take some time to squander it.

The true awfulness of Trump will become apparent over time. Bad things will happen, and he will be clueless about how to respond; if you want a parallel, think about how Katrina revealed the hollowness of the Bush administration, and multiply by a hundred. And his promises to bring back the good old days will eventually be revealed as the lies they are.

But it probably won’t happen in a year. So the effort to reclaim American decency is going to have to have staying power; we need to build the case, organize, create the framework. And, of course, never forget who is right.

It’s going to be a long time in the wilderness, and it’s going to be awful. If I sound calm and philosophical, I’m not — like everyone who cares, I’m frazzled, sleepless, depressed. But we need to be stalwart.

Paul Krugman On The Republican Infrastructure Proposal

Obama and the Democrats have been trying for years to get an infrastructure spending bill through Congress: Interest rates have been at historical lows, and spending $1 trillion would fix decaying roads, bridges, airport runways, water and sewer pipelines -- and put millions to work at well-paying construction jobs. The Republican plan is somewhat different; in fact, it looks like a boondoggle. Here's Prof. Krugman's take on it, in an article entitled "Infrastructure Build or Privatization Scam?"

Trumpists are touting the idea of a big infrastructure build, and some Democrats are making conciliatory noises about working with the new regime on that front. But remember who you’re dealing with: if you invest anything with this guy, be it money or reputation, you are at great risk of being scammed. So, what do we know about the Trump infrastructure plan, such as it is?

Crucially, it’s not a plan to borrow $1 trillion and spend it on much-needed projects — which would be the straightforward, obvious thing to do. It is, instead, supposed to involve having private investors do the work both of raising money and building the projects — with the aid of a huge tax credit that gives them back 82 percent of the equity they put in. To compensate for the small sliver of additional equity and the interest on their borrowing, the private investors then have to somehow make profits on the assets they end up owning.

You should immediately ask three questions about all of this.

First, why involve private investors at all? It’s not as if the federal government is having any trouble raising money — in fact, a large part of the justification for infrastructure investment is precisely that the government can borrow so cheaply. Why do we need private equity at all?

One answer might be that this way you avoid incurring additional public debt. But that’s just accounting confusion. Imagine that you’re building a toll road. If the government builds it, it ends up paying interest but gets the future revenue from the tolls. If it turns the project over to private investors, it avoids the interest cost — but also loses the future toll revenue. The government’s future cash flow is no better than it would have been if it borrowed directly, and worse if it strikes a bad deal, say because the investors have political connections.

Second, how is this kind of scheme supposed to finance investment that doesn’t produce a revenue stream? Toll roads are not the main thing we need right now; what about sewage systems, making up for deferred maintenance, and so on? You could bring in private investors by guaranteeing them future government money — say, paying rent in perpetuity for the use of a water system built by a private consortium. But this, even more than having someone else collect tolls, would simply be government borrowing through the back door — with much less transparency, and hence greater opportunities for giveaways to favored interests.

Paul Krugman And Greg Sargent On Appointment Of Price, Obamacare

Trump has appointed Obamacare's arch-enemy, House member for Georgia Tom Price, Secretary of Health and Human Services. Here's Prof. Krugman's comment:

As Greg Sargent points out, the choice of Tom Price for HHS probably means the death of Obamacare. Never mind the supposed replacement; it will be a bust. So here’s the question: how many people just shot themselves in the face?

My first pass answer is, between 3.5 and 4 million.

He links to Greg Sargent's article in The Washington Post, entitled "Obamacare is probably toast. And a lot of poor, white Trump voters will get hurt by it."

Sargent says that Price's appointment "... likely means that, at best, the health law will be repealed and replaced by something that covers far fewer people, or that, at worst, it will get repealed outright, leaving even more people without coverage." Further, he says:

... conservatives want far less in government spending and regulations designed to cover poor and sick people, protect consumers and enforce a minimum standard for coverage. As a result, they are willing to tolerate far lower standards in those areas, though some also want conservative reforms to strive to make very cheap bare-bones catastrophic coverage widely available. Liberals think we should spend and regulate to the degree necessary to move toward universal care and see expanded and improved coverage as part of a broader effort to progress toward a higher societally guaranteed minimum standard of living. Conservatives won the election, and apparently, we are now going to do it their way. Elections have consequences.

Sargent predicts "... that we’ll see a substantial rollback of the progress toward universal health coverage we’ve seen in the past few years."

Trump has repeatedly said he will repeal Obamacare, but promises to replace it with "something terrific." Republicans have been howling "Repeal and replace" for six years now, and have so far been unable to come up with the "replace" part of that chant. Can Trump do better? Are you surprised that my guess is no, he can't?

Paul Krugman On The Carrier Deal

I'm reproducing Prof. Krugman's piece, "When the Ridiculous is Ominous," in full:

I’m still mulling over the Carrier deal, which I suspect will be a template for the Trump years in general — again and again, we’ll see actions that are ridiculous in themselves, but add up to a very scary picture.

Start with the ridiculous nature of the whole thing: we’re talking, it now turns out, about 800 jobs in a nation with 145 million workers. Around 75,000 workers lose their jobs every working day. How does something that isn’t even rounding error in the overall jobs picture come to dominate a couple of news cycles?

Yet it did — with overwhelmingly positive coverage, at least on TV news. And that’s ominous in itself. It says that large parts of the news media, whose credulous Trump coverage and sniping at HRC helped bring us to where we are, will be even worse, even more poodle-like, now that this guy is in office.

Meanwhile, as Larry Summers says, the precedent — although tiny — is not good: it’s not just crony capitalism, it’s government as protection racket, where companies shape their strategies to appease politicians who will reward or punish based on how it affects their PR efforts and/or personal fortunes. That is, we’re looking at what may well be the beginning of a descent into banana republic governance.

This is, as Larry says, bad both for the economic and for freedom. And there’s every reason to expect many stories like this in the days ahead.

Temperature Rising In The South China Sea

Click here for an article at AP News, by Christopher Bodeen, entitled "Report: Beijing adds weapons to South China Sea islands." The article says:

China appears to have installed anti-aircraft and anti-missile weapons on its man-made islands in the strategically vital South China Sea, a U.S. security think tank says, upping the stakes in what many see as a potential Asian powder keg.

The Center for Strategic and International Studies, or CSIS, said in a report late Wednesday that the anti-aircraft guns and close-in weapons systems designed to guard against missile attack have been placed on all seven of China's newly created islands.

Lovely. Just what we need -- things heating up in the South China Sea as the clueless president-elect blunders around tweeting random nonsense affecting relations with China.

Trump Lickspittle Sean Spicer On Conflicts Of Interest

Spicer is communications director and chief strategist of the Republican National Committee -- and, God help us, touted for the position of Trump's press secretary. I don't know if I can handle seeing that guy on TV every day for years -- the sight of Ari Fleischer still makes me want to vomit.

“Conflicts of interest arise when you’re sneaky about it, when you’re shady about it. If you tell everyone, here’s what’s going on, here’s the process, here’s the people who are playing a role, that’s being transparent.”

–Sean Spicer, CNN, Dec. 14, 2016.

Or as Charlie Pierce stated it on All In With Chris Hayes:

If we want to sell Yellowstone to Gazprom, as long as it's an open auction, we're okay with it.

Hayes responded:

So much of this is behind the cloak of the corporate structure that they have that it is -- from the outside, can be very hard to penetrate and know exactly what's happening, which is precisely why Spicer's own standard is -- there's no way they're going to meet even the standard that Spicer is laying out.

Trump can't meet the lowest of bars. He's a walking tangle of conflicts of interest -- but it seems as though Trump supporters just don't care.

Here's another analogy, proposed by Hunter at Daily Kos:

Bank robberies work the same way: Sneak in after dark and you've got a problem, but as long as you boldly enter during business hours and say "Hello, I am currently robbing this bank" there's not a thing they can do to stop you. It makes it all legal and transparent!

Presidential press secretary? The mind boggles.

Girls Girls Girls! Encore At Chilkoot Charlie's, Anchorage, 2008

Girls Girls Girls! are a Motley Crue tribute band. My friend Patricia Orsini Nilsen is the manager and plays bass guitar. She posted this clip on Facebook with the following comment:

Came across this vid on youtube and hadn't watched it in years. It's so old it was before HD video. As a musician, it's a little hard to watch because we were still a very new band and nowhere near as tight as we eventually became. We're not even a year old here. I think we only had 15 songs at this point in our catalog. The only reason I'm posting it now is because it was a really great indication of the kind of excitement from the crowds that we drew. This video really captured how amazing it all was. I'll be forever grateful that I got to experience what that felt like, and to get paid to travel to places like Alaska that I may never have visited on my own. What a ride it all was.

That's Patricia in the foreground.

Music is not Patricia's only talent: She was Intersteno Speed Champion at the court reporting world speed contest in Vienna in 2005 (click here for a report on the contest). My friend Lori Oxley came third. Patricia, Lori, and I worked together at Doyle Court Reporting in Dublin, Ireland, for a couple of years. Lori moved on to Singapore and then the Canadian Senate; Patricia spent 14 years in Manhattan federal court and is now freelancing in Nashville -- and I've been doing some scoping for her, which is a pretty nice gig!

Trump's National Security Adviser, Michael Flynn, Illegally Shared Confidential Information

I've read several places that Flynn installed a secret Internet connection in his office at the Pentagon, and that he had been investigated for improperly sharing confidential documents with NATO allies at Afghanistan HQ (it was determined that he had indeed shared such documents, but without malicious intent). Click here for an article at The Hill, by Jessie Hellmann, entitled "New Yorker profile: Flynn broke 'stupid' rules during Army career." Hellmann says:

Flynn, Donald Trump's newly named national security adviser, told The New Yorker's Dana Priest that he would sneak out of the CIA station in Iraq when he was assigned there without the "insane" required approval from headquarters.

He also said he had technicians install an Internet connection in his Pentagon office, even though it was forbidden.

Another time, Flynn said he gave classified information to NATO allies without approval, which resulted in an investigation and a warning from superiors. Another time, Flynn said he gave classified information to NATO allies without approval, which resulted in an investigation and a warning from superiors.

About Flynn's management style, Hellmann says:

He would often say things that weren't true, one subordinate told The New Yorker, such as stating that Iran had killed more Americans than al Qaeda.

Flynn was also known to have a temper, former associate said, and berated people of front of colleagues.

Flynn was fired as head of the Defense Intelligence Agency by his boss James Clapper, Director of National Intelligence.

In an article at Esquire entitled "There Are Going to Be Some Awkward Run-Ins at the Water Cooler in Trump's White House," subtitled "General Michael Flynn has priors with David Petraeus and 'Mad Dog' Mattis," Lieutenant Colonel Robert Bateman puts things in more personal terms, describing his experiences in confidential meetings at Afghanistan's NATO HQ, where he arrived in January 2011, two months after Flynn's departure. He describes the commonly-understood protocol for intelligence sharing in meetings, and concludes his article:

But the real kicker in all of this, one that should make for an interesting time at the White House water cooler, is this tidbit: The investigation into Flynn's behavior was ordered in 2010 by the commander of the U.S. Central Command in Tampa, Florida. The exact date hasn't been released, but if it took place in the first half of the year, then the CENTCOM commander who ordered the investigation was General David Petraeus—another rumored Trump appointee.

If it occurred sometime between July 2010 and Flynn's departure from Afghanistan in October, Flynn's boss in Afghanistan was Petraeus, and the commander at CENTCOM was none other than General James "Mad Dog" Mattis, the nominee for Secretary of Defense. Awkward.

Petraeus and Mattis are 4-star generals, while Flynn is a 3-star. Nowhere is rank and hierarchy more pronounced and important than in the military. There will be no question as to whose authority is greater, and who is subordinate.

So Long, Net Neutrality

The Internet will be for sale to the highest bidder. That's the message in an article at Daily Kos by Joan McCarter, entitled "Republican FCC member can't wait to end net neutrality, sell the internet to highest bidders."

McCarter says that Republican FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai "has consistently opposed consumer protection rules that the FCC's current Democratic majority imposed on ISPs, including the net neutrality order that forbids blocking, throttling, and paid prioritization."

Under the Trump regime, big corporations will pay for high-speed Internet; your web browsing, or your email to Aunt Martha -- or my blog! -- will be slowed to a crawl if we don't pay a premium.

How are things likely to unfold? McCarter says:

The Trump administration could basically just ignore the open internet rules and refuse to enforce them; the FCC could actually overturn them; or a Republican Congress could overturn them or replace them with something much more friendly to big telecom. Given the massive public support for the open internet, however, the first scenario seems likeliest—it won't have to be a big fight. They can do away with net neutrality on the sly.