Comments

  1. says

    Hi, regular readers. Our previous chapter of the Moments of Political Madness thread expired at comment 361 because the thread was three months old.

    This chapter will probably fill up quickly thanks to all of the election news.

    Here is a link to the last comment in the previous chapter.

  6. says

    Pope burn:

    “No tyranny can be sustained without exploiting our fears. This is clear,” the pope said in Spanish. “All tyranny is terrorist. And when that terror ignited in the peripheries with massacres, looting, oppression, and injustice explodes in the centers in the form of violence, including with hateful and cowardly intent, the citizens who still have some rights are tempted by the false security of walls, physical or social—walls that close some in and banish others.”

    “Is this the life that our father God wants for us?” he asked. Later in the speech, Francis also criticized “false prophets that exploit fear and hopelessness to sell magical formulas of hate and cruelty.”

  9. Rob Grigjanis says

    Naïve question: Is there an American legal reason why Trump shouldn’t be worried about having his arse sued for slander for the blatant lies he tells about Clinton? Yeah, politicians distort the truth all the time, but I’ve never seen (or been aware of) this level of bullshit.

  10. gijoel says

    On a tangential note Columbia pictures is rebooting Starship Troopers. Dudebros are already debating if it will stay true to Heinlein vision, or whether it will cater to hypersensitive, thin-skinned PC types, without a hint of irony.

  11. Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls says

    Rob #9, the bar to show defamation for a public official is high.

    The defamatory statement must also have been made with fault. The extent of the fault depends primarily on the status of the plaintiff. Public figures, such as government officials, celebrities, well-known individuals, and people involved in specific public controversies, are required to prove actual malice, a legal term which means the defendant knew his statement was false or recklessly disregarded the truth or falsity of his statement. In most jurisdictions, private individuals must show only that the defendant was negligent: that he failed to act with due care in the situation.

    In other words, given Trump’s delusional behavior, he could probably convince a jury he thought his slanderous accusations were true.

  12. raven says

    Trending: LA Times Poll: Donald Trump Leads Hillary Clinton by 5.4 Points Breitbart News

    and

    Latino early voting numbers in swing states are way up
    AOL News – ‎1 hour ago‎
    As early voting numbers continue to trickle in, Latino voter turnout is way up so far, which could bode well for Hillary Clinton in several swing states.

    I’m seeing a lot of this lately.
    To some extent it is agit-prop.
    At this time in the election process, they always declare imminent victory with manufactured polls. The first one is a lunatic fringe white racist site, Breitbart, using a poll that has known problems in sampling.

    Does anyone have any reality based idea on how the voting is and will go? I realize this is probably a hopeless question but it is worth a try.
    As far as I can see, we are now in Crazyland USA. And I have no way to know what will happen in…Crazyland.

  13. says

    Does anyone have any reality based idea on how the voting is and will go?

    Just talking about the Latin@ vote, your cite appears to be supported by the evidence. I linked earlier to Jon Ralston’s reports and final conclusions from early voting in Nevada. Everything I’ve seen and read about Florida today tells the same story there. (Similar reports are coming out of Texas, although there it’s obviously far less likely to swing things.) On the one hand, in some cases this surge could be counteracted by a surge in other groups. On the other, I still don’t think that white voters in traditionally Republican areas or even registered Republican voters – especially women – can be put too easily in Trump’s column. That could be wishful thinking, and I wouldn’t count on it, but it’s my suspicion.

  15. Rob Grigjanis says

    raven @12:

    Does anyone have any reality based idea on how the voting is and will go?

    Yes. The media looks for stories, whether they correspond to reality or not.

  16. says

    In response to raven’s question in comment 12, Josh Marshall, Editor of Talking Points Memo posted an overview of the mix of early vote and demographic data that give us a picture of the current state of the race. Excerpts below:

    […] What seems pretty clear is that the partisan and demographic profile of the early vote is better for the Democrats than it was a week ago. And it seems to point to a narrow Clinton victory. […]

    We’ve seen and discussed this pattern again and again. But we’re closing the race on it. Clinton is seeing surprising strength in former Democratic ‘reach’ states, largely driven by minority and especially Hispanic voters. At the same time she’s seeing relative softness in much whiter states in the northern tier of the country which have seemed pretty solidly blue for a generation. My best guess, looking at all the numbers and number crunchers at my disposal, is that she wins the Northern states anyway, with perhaps slightly lower margins and picks up states in the South and West. […]

    Even more than it seemed yesterday, Democrats seem to have built up a close to insurmountable lead in Nevada.

  17. says

    This is a followup to SC’s comment #3.

    Josh Marshall took a closer look at that closing ad for the Trump campaign, the one with the veiled and not-so-veiled anti-semitic themes.

    […] The four readily identifiable American bad guys in the ad are Hillary Clinton, George Soros (Jewish financier), Janet Yellin (Jewish Fed Chair) and Lloyd Blankfein (Jewish Goldman Sachs CEO).

    The Trump narration immediately preceding Soros and Yellin: “The establishment has trillions of dollars at stake in this election. For those who control the levers of power in Washington [start Soros] and for the global [start Yellin] special interests [stop Yellin]. They partner with these people [start Clinton] who don’t have your good in mind.”

    For Blankfein: “It’s a global power structure that is responsible for the economic decisions that have robbed our working class, stripped our country of its wealth and put that money into the [start Blankein] pockets of a handful of large corporations [stop Blankfein] and political entities.”

    These are standard anti-Semitic themes and storylines, using established anti-Semitic vocabulary […]

    This is an anti-Semitic ad every bit as much as the infamous Jesse Helms ‘white hands’ ad or the Willie Horton ad were racist ads. […] This is an ad intended to appeal to anti-Semites and spread anti-Semitic ideas.

    This is intentional and by design. It is no accident.

    […] Steven Bannon, is an anti-Semite. The Breitbart News site he ran and will continue running after the campaign has become increasingly open in the last year with anti-Semitic attacks and politics. […]

    There’s been a lot of discussion of anti-Semitism and the Trump campaign but a fierce resistance to coming to grips with the fact that anti-Semitism is a key driving force of the Trump campaign, that the campaign itself is an anti-Semitic one even though the great majority of his supporters are not anti-Semites. When he closes out his campaign with a blatantly anti-Semitic ads, it’s time to rethink that resistance.

  18. says

    Sopan Deb is reporting that Trump was just rushed offstage at his rally due to some sort of fights in the crowd.

    There’s also a report that Ted Nugent will appear at Trump’s rally tomorrow in Sterling Heights, Michigan. I hope that’s true.

  19. raven says

    Thanks everyone who replied.
    I did some reading and followed a few links.

    AFAICT, Hillary is ahead in a close race. Not all that reassuring considering the stakes but better than being behind.

    1. With early voting, 40% of people will have voted by election day. I’ve already voted.
    2. Polls are inherently somewhat uncertain, margin of error and so on. They might also have gotten less accurate.
    These days people are less willing to talk to pollsters. I know I won’t.
    And they have a hard time reaching cell phone users. There is a federal law that robots can’t call cell phones.

    Going to be a long three more days until we know for sure.

  20. says

    Followup to 18: The Secret Service hustled Trump off the stage, but he came back and finished his speech after a few minutes.

    One protestor was escorted out of the room.

    The audience took the scary moment as a chance to excoriate the press, and to snatch a camera from a CNN reporter who was just trying to get a shot of the disturbance.

  21. says

    Followup to raven @19: one pollster also made the point that some polling organizations do not have the money and/or expertise needed to poll Latino voters. She made the point that the Latino vote has probably under-sampled.

  22. raven says

    Man near White House with firearm prompts lockdown A few minutes ago.

    While we are posting breaking stories.

    One of the astonishing things lately is how the FBI has gotten so politicized. This is what you expect in a banana republic.
    They are also seemingly ignoring their boss, the Attorney General. And her boss, the…President.
    And their own rules.

    It’s not a good sign. And the FBI does have an important job to do what with all the terrorists running around the last 16 years.

  23. says

    Here is The Guardian’s coverage of Trump being rushed off stage:
    https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/nov/06/donald-trump-rushed-off-stage–secret-service-agents-rally-in-nevada

    […] The Republican nominee shielded his eyes and looked into the crowd and was then suddenly rushed off the stage as an incident unfolded at the front of the crowd.

    Several minutes later, a balding white male wearing a hoodie was escorted out in handcuffs by number of police officers.

    Eventually, Trump returned to the stage and said: “Nobody said it was going to be easy but we will never be stopped. We will never be stopped.”

    He added “I want to thank the Secret Service, those guys are fantastic.”

    The Republican nominee then returned to his stump speech and finished reading it from a teleprompter.

  26. says

    Followup to raven @19: one pollster also made the point that some polling organizations do not have the money and/or expertise needed to poll Latino voters. She made the point that the Latino vote has probably under-sampled.

    Also, other categories that are relatively harder to reach – like cell-phone users (as raven mentions) and people with mobile living arrangements – tend to be younger and therefore more progressive. Again, not hanging my hat on it, but…

  28. cubist says

    Factors favoring a Trump victory: The Angry Cheeto has an iron grip on the Racist White Xenophobe demographic, and he’s got what amounts to an army of willing brownshirts to do dirty work for him.

    Factors opposing a Trump victory: Racist White Xenophobe is pretty much the only demographic in which he has majority support. Every other demographic—white woman, non-white women, non-whites in general, non-xenophobes, etc etc—is not going to give the Angry Cheeto a majority of its votes.

    Also, there’s the American Dream, the glorious notion that the US is a Land of Opportunity, that bigotry has no place here, and so on and so forth. Yes, the American Dream is a cruel sham to a depressingly large percentage of the USA populace… the Dream is surely honored more in the breach than the observance… but for all that, lots of USAns do take the Dream seriously, do think the Dream is an admirable ideal. What this says to me, is that the Dream is a very attractive, very seductive memeplex, and it would be a mistake to discount it’s potential influence. As for the Angry Cheeto, he isn’t about ideals at all; he’s about Fear and Hatred and Greed, and anybody who does take the Dream seriously, will surely have noticed that. On this point, the only question in my mind is how much of an effect ‘belief in the American Dream’ will have on the electorate, whether or not the Cheeto’s naked appeal to FearHateGreed will be more influential than the Dream.

  29. says

    My thoughts going into the final days of the U.S. election:
    *Do Americans understand how the president is elected (Electoral College)?
    *Don’t understand why so much hate for Clinton regarding the e-mails and what happened in Benghazi
    *The first swing state that Clinton wins (Ohio, Pennsylvania, Florida) will seal her presidency.
    *If Trump loses, will he complain about the vote being rigged and will the Republican Party abandon him after his loss?

  31. Menyambal says

    Here’s one thing I imagine might happen. The evangelicals are so very tribal and conformist, that none of them will speak out against Trump. But in the privacy of a voting booth, they can do the right thing and vote against Trump. There may be a chunk going to Clinton that isn’t showing in the polls.

  32. says

    The Republican nominee then returned to his stump speech and finished reading it from a teleprompter.

    Heh.

    The audience took the scary moment as a chance to excoriate the press, and to snatch a camera from a CNN reporter who was just trying to get a shot of the disturbance.

    Here’s the footage. Evidently, it was Noah Gray from CNN, doing his job. People are actually holding up signs in front of his camera while he’s being mobbed.

  33. says

    Here’s one thing I imagine might happen. The evangelicals are so very tribal and conformist, that none of them will speak out against Trump. But in the privacy of a voting booth, they can do the right thing and vote against Trump. There may be a chunk going to Clinton that isn’t showing in the polls.

    Definitely – I think this last is the case. Two things: Black evangelicals have long been speaking out. Among white evangelicals, women and young people have been speaking out, though very likely not nearly as much as they are/will when voting. The response of so many Liberty students is encouraging.

  34. Jake Harban says

    I suspect that, like in 2014, a clear majority of Congressional and Senate votes will go to Democrats but thanks to gerrymandering the Republicans will take a majority of the seats.

    I’d call that electoral fraud.

  36. taraskan says

    @9 Rob Grigjanis

    It is slander, and there isn’t any denying it, but the US has a tradition of protecting presidential candidates from such charges. Virtually every president in its history has uttered an impossibly untrue statement against their opponent during the campaign. Jefferson never called John Adams a secret hermaphrodite, but he did imply it and used the word hermaprodite because of the obvious picture it would spawn in people’s minds. Adams responded with something like “but his mother is a squaw and his father is a mulatto”. And it’s really just escalated from there. Hoover said Al Smith was going to connect the Holland Tunnel to a Vatican aquaduct (a slander only useful when less than 10% of classrooms have a map of the world). JQ Adams and Jackson went after each others’ wives, calling one a slut and the other chattel white-slaved to Tsar Nicholas I.

    What makes Trump insults so insulting are their one-sidedness. Clinton had every opportunity to lie right back and hasn’t even managed it (I know, she lies about other things, that’s not the point). It’s pretty obvious she’d be further ahead if she did. Virtually everything anyone has said about Trump has been true or reflected through hyperbole something almost as bad. Virtually nothing out of Trump’s mouth has been true. This lack of slander on the part of the Clinton campaign is disrespecting one of our most time-honored traditions.

  37. says

    Some Republican guy with a sign or poster or something. He’s been released. Trump campaign tried to paint it as an assassination attempt.

    Re the quote @ #14 above: “You feel free right now?” Yes! Yes, I do!

    I suspect that, like in 2014, a clear majority of Congressional and Senate votes will go to Democrats but thanks to gerrymandering the Republicans will take a majority of the seats.

    I’d call that electoral fraud.

    It’s Obama’s priority post-presidency.

  40. Jake Harban says

    It’s Obama’s priority post-presidency.

    There’s some good news. It’s a pity Obama wasn’t President back in 2010— he’d have made more of a difference in the White House than out of it.

  42. ck, the Irate Lump says

    taraskan wrote:

    This lack of slander on the part of the Clinton campaign is disrespecting one of our most time-honored traditions.

    She couldn’t. If she had, she would’ve been written off as bitchy and angry. Hell, she was called “shrill” constantly, despite her voice not having that property at all. It’s an unfair double standard, but it still is the standard.

  43. fernando says

    Hey… maybe Trump is only trolling everyone, and he will be the most progressive president in the last 100 years… no, in the last 200 years!
    That, or he is the Adolph Trump of Weimar America, manipulating the ignorance, fears and desires of a lot of people.

  44. jrkrideau says

    @22 raven
    One of the astonishing things lately is how the FBI has gotten so politicized.

    Hunh? Check out J. Edgar Hoover. Not a political bone in his body!

    Not to mention that other police forces have reported that the FBI will truncate investigations for brownie points in Washington.

  46. jrkrideau says

    @ 9 Rob Grigjanis

    I have been wondering that too.

    # 36 taraskan

    So a US election always consists of candidates telling mad lies about their opponents? Interesting.

    For our last election, the terrible insult was that the P.M Steven Harper was a “nasty man”. H was/is a sociopathic, racist, misogynistic person but one does not say this. OTH “nasty man” is pretty damning in a Canadian political context.

  47. numerobis says

    the FBI does have an important job to do what with all the terrorists running around the last 16 years

    Most of the major FBI victories on that front have been to groom angry young men prone to radicalization, radicalize them fully, then arrest them. That’s not what I’d call an important job — quite the opposite.

  50. says

    SDF announces Operation Wrath of Euphrates to liberate Raqqa:

    To our brave and patient people of Raqqa:

    We in the General Command of Democratic Forces of Syria (SDF), bring our people in Raqqa the good news of launching this massive military campaign to liberate the city and its countryside from the Daesh (ISIS) terrorists, as the obscurantists have taken this city as capital for their so-called state, the campaign is launched on Saturday November 5, 2016, where Wrath of Euphrates Operations Room was formed for the liberation of the city, and in order to bring about the best collaboration among the participating groups in the battlefields facing Daesh.

    On this occasion, we assure the democratic forces in the world, our great Syrian people and peoples of the region that this operation will be proceeded strictly till its goal is met in isolating the capital of world terror, then bringing it down, we will be victorious in this decisive battle like we overcame in Kobani, Til Abyad, al-Hasakah, al-Holl, al-Shadadi and Manbij.

    Raqqa city will be liberated with the aid of its people be it Kurds, Arabs, or Turkmen, the heroes comprised under the flag of SDF and with the active participation of YPG and YPJ, and also with the cooperation of the International Coalition.

    We call the world and regional sides suffering from Daesh terror to take part in the honor of eliminating the center of international terror embodied in Daesh, and to provide all kinds support and required equipment for the forces of the campaign, we also call the humanitarian organizations to undertake their humanitarian duty towards Raqqa people.

    In the end, we appeal to our resistant and brave people to keep away from the enemy’s gatherings which will be directly a target of our forces and the International Coalition, and head to the areas which will be liberated, and finally we ask them to join the ranks of the liberating forces.

    For people unfamiliar with what’s happening in Rojava, here’s a recent article. You can also read the posts at my blog.

  51. raven says

    Most of the major FBI victories on that front have been to groom angry young men prone to radicalization, radicalize them fully, then arrest them.

    You are equating terrorist with Moslem. It’s a lot bigger than that.
    Most terrorists attacks in the USA since 9/11 have been right wingnuts. And they are getting angrier and angrier. Like the Bundy gang. There are now 1,000 so called militias in the USA with more being formed every day.
    There is one near me and I’ve seen them around. They have an unimaginative uniform and carry guns.

    We are going to need a functioning FBI more than ever, starting right now.

    An FBI that isn’t obeying our laws and rules is another sign that the USA is breaking down. They could make it even worse by joining the other side.

  52. says

    From TPM:

    …Donald Trump’s son and a top campaign aide were falsely spreading the rumor that an incident at a Nevada rally was an “assassination attempt” against the candidate even though no weapon was found.

    Trump’s son, Don Jr., and Dan Scavino, who runs Trump’s social media operation, re-tweeted a message that read, “Hillary ran away from rain today. Trump is back on stage minutes after assassination attempt.”

    At Trump’s next rally in Denver, a pastor, introduced as Father Andre Y-Sebastian Mahanna, also falsely called the Reno incident “an attempt of murder against Mr. Trump.” Mahanna blamed the incident on the media for inciting hate against the Republican nominee.

    I linked to this at #41 above.

    Posobiec’s tweet and Jr’s retweet are still up. Posobiec also has one consisting of a graphic that says “STOP DEMOCRAT VIOLENCE” and including #Reno, which Jr also retweeted.

  54. Ogvorbis: I have proven my humanity and can now comment! says

    I really wonder. Is the Trump campaign playing this disgruntled Republican as an assassination attempt so that when someone does take a shot at Clinton, the Trumpists can whine, “They started it!”?

  55. says

    “As Trump Inches Closer, Anxiety Sets In Among Undocumented Immigrants”:

    …The closing of any campaign can be a trying experience for many voters, especially in an election as divisive and bitter and long as the current one. But for many immigrants, specifically those whose legal status is in limbo or who have family members in such circumstances, it has become absolutely draining. More than any other group, their futures are directly impacted by Tuesday’s outcome; they sense every movement of the race on a visceral level.

    …

    Hillary Clinton has promised to continue and expand deportation relief started under Obama and begin her push for immigration reform within the first 100 days in office. Trump, by contrast, says he will immediately embark on aggressive deportation efforts and dismantle Obama’s programs.

    For undocumented immigrants, the contest has become, quite literally, a life-altering event ― one that’s increasingly difficult to watch. It’s compelled them to participate in the only way they can: not by voting, but urging others to cast their ballots.

    …

    “It’s on these last final days where people that have avoided like the plague following this election are forced to do so, and have to come up with concrete plans for what to do with their families if the worst were to happen,” she said….

  56. raven says

    Is the Trump campaign playing this disgruntled Republican as an assassination attempt so that when someone does take a shot at Clinton, the Trumpists can whine, “They started it!”?

    Probably not.

    They just automatically lie.
    Trump has a veracity quotient of 9%.

    Although if someone does try to assassinate Hillary, that is exactly what they would say. Blaming the victim is a GOP core value.
    I’m surprised it hasn’t happened yet. Those people are armed and violent.

  60. says

    SC @58, If the people participating in the Electoral College don’t want to follow the rules, why are they participating?

    Rightwing media has a lot to answer for. They have painted a false picture of Clinton as a criminal, and now electors are refusing to vote for her even if their state obviously is in the Clinton column.

    Regarding the Trump campaign’s false claim that an assassination attempt took place in Reno, Kellyanne Conway, Trump’s campaign manager, just went off the rails (again):

    […]”Should they be spreading this misinformation?” CNN anchor Jake Tapper asked Conway […]

    “[…] It’s scary. I mean, all of the coverage is usually about our protesters wreaking havoc and making people feel afraid,” Conway replied before praising the Secret Service. “But it does remind you that in these closing days, especially as the polls tighten, many of us are getting more death threats, getting more angry messages on social media and elsewhere. And it’s a pretty fraught environment there. I think that’s the real focus here.”

    Conway then claimed that a protester involved in the incident was “a Democratic plant or operative [Oh, FFS. Really?] trying to disrupt our rally.” The protester, Austyn Crites, is a Clinton supporter but a Republican. He said he was beaten up by rally attendees during the incident that prompted Trump to be rushed off of the stage. […]

    Tapper noted that the protester was a Republican, and displayed the tweet promoted by members of the campaign. The tweet said, “Hillary ran away from rain today. Trump is back on stage minutes after assassination attempt.” Tapper again pressed Conway on why members of the campaign were spreading the false narrative that there was an assassination attempt. […]

    “First of all, that’s really remarkable, I have to say, that that’s what the story line is here. Thank you for reminding everybody that the rain chased her away. There weren’t a lot of people there at her rally to begin with,” Conway said. “And, you know, Jake, I want to say, is CNN going to retract all the story lines, all the headlines, all the breathless predictions of the last two weeks that have turned out not to be true? The race is over. The path is closed. It’s going to be a blowout. You guys retract that and I’ll give a call to Dan Scavino about the retweet.” [Scavino had retweeted the false “assassination attempt” tweet.]

    […] Tapper again said that he has not seen such reporting.[…]

    Link

    The takeaway here is that Conway cannot defend the assassination-attempt lie.

  61. says

    Jorge Ramos’ film “Hate Rising” is a remarkable documentary.

    From the Ku Klux Klan to the so called alt-right movement, white supremacist groups are growing in numbers and influence. In “Hate Rising,” Jorge Ramos shows us how their ideas, usually confined to private and secretive gatherings, are becoming mainstream thanks in part to the rhetoric on the campaign trail this election cycle.

    YouTube link

    The video is 50:29 minutes long. Particularly disturbing is the interview with some KKK leaders. “White people so much higher than any other race. […] Based on God. That’s not racism, that’s a fact.” “[…] the scumbag Jews.[…]

  62. says

    Followup to SC’s comment 57.

    Nugent said in 2007:

    I was in Chicago and I said hey Obama, you might want to suck on one of these you punk; Obama, he’s a piece of shit, and I told him to suck on my machine gun. Then I was in New York and I said, “Hey Hillary you might want to ride one of these into the sunset you worthless [B-word]”…. Then I was out in California and I thought, Barbara Boxer, she might want to suck on my machine gun, hey Dianne Feinstein ride one of these you worthless whore.

    Nugent is the guy that Trump chose to join him at a Michigan rally tonight. Nugent has also posted videos in which he fantasizes about Hillary Clinton being shot. He also routinely calls Clinton the B-word. This (and the anti-semitic ad rollout mentioned in comment 17), this is how Trump wants to cap his presidential campaign.

  63. says

    Comments from the peaceful protestor who was beaten during the false “assassination attempt” fracas at a Trump rally:

    […] Secret Service agents rushed Donald Trump off the stage at a rally in Reno, Nevada on Saturday night. Shortly thereafter, rumors started going around that someone was holding a gun, that the Secret Service had prevented an assassination attempt on Trump. The truth was much less interesting. Turns out someone pulled out an anti-Trump sign, someone yelled “gun,” and in swept law enforcement. No gun was found and the “suspect” was allowed to go on his way.

    Austyn Crites is the man whose apparent protest sparked the commotion and he insists all he was doing was holding up a sign that read “Republicans against Trump” when people around him got very angry. “I just went with sign that said ‘Republicans Against Trump,’ ” Crites tells the Reno Gazette-Journal. “It’s a sign that you can find online. I held up the sign and initially people around me were just booing me telling me to get out of there. Then a couple of these guys tried grabbing the sign out of my hands.”

    Crites says that’s when the crowd around him started punching, kicking, and even choking him. At one point he feared for his life. “Multiple people just tackled me down, kicking me choking me and just beating me up,” he said. “That’s when things even got crazier. I was on the ground and people were holding my arms, legs and I kept saying I can barely breathe. I was turning my neck just to get a little bit of air to keep from passing out.” The 33-year-old registered Republican tells the Guardian it was actually a relief when the police arrived and handcuffed him because it meant they suddenly were the ones fending off the Trump supporters. Crites, and witnesses, all agree that someone yelled out that he had a gun when he was already on the ground.

    “All of a sudden, because they couldn’t grab the sign, or whatever happened, bam, I get tackled by all these people who were just, like, kicking me and grabbing me in the crotch and just, just beating the crap out of me,” Crites said, according to KTNV. “And somebody yells something about a gun, and so that’s when things really got out of hand.” […]

    Slate link

  64. tomh says

    @ #59

    There is no Constitutional requirement nor any federal law that electors must vote for the candidate with the most votes. However many states have laws that do. In Washington, the state law on electors includes, “Each presidential elector shall execute and file with the secretary of state a pledge that, as an elector, he or she will vote for the candidates nominated by that party,” and imposes a $1000 fine for breaking that pledge.

    Since electors are almost always party loyalists and/or leaders, it’s very rare to withhold an electoral vote from the winner of that state. The last time was in 1972, when a Republican elector from Virginia cast a vote for the Libertarian candidate. (As an aside, this allowed the VP candidate, Tonie Nathan, to become the first woman in US history to receive an electoral vote.)

  66. says

    More on that Trump ad:

    Donald Trump’s advertising campaign is ending as it started, with footage of migrants in Europe, lifted from the internet and passed off as video of immigrants streaming across the border from Mexico into the United States.

    Near the start of the new ad, as the candidate complains of “massive illegal immigration,” thousands of people are shown walking along a highway.

    That video, however, was not shot along the southern border of the U.S. — where Trump has promised to build a great wall — but in Hungary, at the height of the migrant crisis last year, as Syrian refugees, desperate for safe passage to Germany, marched out of Budapest.

    The video was shot by Nabih Bulos, a foreign correspondent working for the New York Times last year. He confirmed to The Intercept that that the footage was not licensed from him, and he would not have approved its use if asked….

    …

    It seems possible…that the ad is intentionally misleading, and hopes to conflate the situation in the U.S. with the huge number of migrants seeking refuge in Europe from wars in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan….

    Breitbart, the website of Trump’s campaign chairman, Steve Bannon, obsessively covers the migrant crisis in Europe, using it to boost extreme nationalist parties across the continent whose rhetoric echoes that of Islamophobic and white supremacist groups in the U.S….

  67. says

    Very well done – “Inside Donald Trump’s Last Stand: An Anxious Nominee Seeks Assurance”:

    Donald J. Trump is not sleeping much these days.

    Aboard his gold-plated jumbo jet, the Republican nominee does not like to rest or be alone with his thoughts, insisting that aides stay up and keep talking to him. He prefers the soothing, whispery voice of his son-in-law.

    He requires constant assurance that his candidacy is on track….

    And he is struggling to suppress his bottomless need for attention….

    …

    In the final days of the presidential campaign, Mr. Trump’s candidacy is a jarring split screen: the choreographed show of calm and confidence orchestrated by his staff, and the neediness and vulnerability of a once-boastful candidate now uncertain of victory….

    …

    The contrasts pervade his campaign. Aides to Mr. Trump have finally wrested away the Twitter account that he used to colorfully — and often counterproductively — savage his rivals. But offline, Mr. Trump still privately muses about all of the ways he will punish his enemies after Election Day, including a threat to fund a “super PAC” with vengeance as its core mission.

  70. consciousness razor says

    Lynna:

    SC @58, If the people participating in the Electoral College don’t want to follow the rules, why are they participating?

    Because they get to vote and you don’t, sadly. Talk about political madness.

    Look at it from their point of view, but imagine there’s no electoral college. If there were people telling you “rules” (according to your state or party or anything) about who may get your vote for president, should you listen to them? Why should anyone or anything be able to force you to vote one way or another? What would be the sense in talking about “you voting,” if your vote is not a decision that you can make yourself?

    They have painted a false picture of Clinton as a criminal, and now electors are refusing to vote for her even if their state obviously is in the Clinton column.

    It isn’t formally in any column because of the popular vote, not at any rate in a lot of states. It is legally the electors’ decision about which column it will or won’t be in, according to the Constitution and the state law in question. In some states, when you get a ballot, there are no rules or penalties or anything about an elector voting contrary to the “popular vote.” So your “vote” in such places is a non-binding recommendation, basically an elaborate poll made to look like an election, not a vote in the sense of you having any legally-meaningful impact on the outcome.

    If there’s a $1000 fine in WA, as tomh says, it may be worth it to you as an elector to pay that bill, so that you get to vote as you want. As unlikely as it may be, since parties get to pick the people who actually decide what happens in this country, and since such people are often beholden to their parties, there is nothing to stop that from happening, or if it did happen to certify a substitute elector who would follow the popular vote.

    What’s a $1000 anyway, to a person who is probably not hurting for cash (or could find people who’d bribe them for a lot more), given that they were the sort of person who was chosen to be an elector?

  71. Ogvorbis: I have proven my humanity and can now comment! says

    Trump’s candidacy hasn’t just brought out a baskets of deplorables. He’s also energized a bushel of impassioned survivors.

    From CNN

    As part of a Facebook series called “The Messy Truth,” political commentator and former White House staffer Van Jones sat down for a fascinating back and forth with Donald Trump voters to discuss why they are backing the GOP nominee and why they can’t vote for Hillary Clinton.

    According to Jones, “I feel like we’ve gotten this thing in America now, where we talk about each other, we never talk to each other.”

    Jones’ mission led him to Gettysburg where he sat down with a group, only to be told right from the start, “If Hillary gets in, there could very well be a civil war.”

    Again, from CNN.

  72. taraskan says

    @10 gijoel

    Dudebros are already debating if it will stay true to Heinlein vision, or whether it will cater to hypersensitive, thin-skinned PC types, without a hint of irony.

    But the Heinlein story was thin and fascistic, like Heinlein. IIRC the irony/satire introduced into it was all Verhoeven, and it was brilliant. If they remake it, I fear it’ll be as insipid as the Robocop reboot. Robocop was a comedy-satire on money, power, corporate kick-backs and the modern ruin of Detroit – and what do they do when they reboot it? They played it straight as shitty super-serious action nonsense, or put another way, they turned it into a corporate cash grab. Now that’s irony. I wouldn’t buy that for a dollar. These movies were supposed to be fun.

  73. tomh says

    @ #69

    There are 29 states with “faithless elector” laws, with punishments ranging from fines, like Washington, to New Mexico, which makes it a fourth degree felony, punishable by 18 months in prison. Now that’s a deterrent! Then there are states, (Michigan, North Carolina, and South Carolina, at the least), which take a more practical approach. They cancel the faithless vote and replace them in the Electoral College.

  74. says

    It is legally the electors’ decision about which column it will or won’t be in, according to the Constitution and the state law in question.

    Seems like it isn’t legally their decision under state law if there’s a fine for not signing/fulfilling the pledge.

  75. consciousness razor says

    Seems like it isn’t legally their decision under state law if there’s a fine for not signing/fulfilling the pledge.

    I disagree. You pay some money (or go to prison or whatever) and it still legally and Constitutionally applies as the actual vote which is cast.

    If the state actually nullifies their vote and finds a substitute, then I would agree that the legal right to vote transfers to the substitute. But if there were some rule that said I had to pay a poll tax, for example, or that I must go straight to prison after casting my vote, it would still be true that I got to cast a vote which was considered legally valid and actually determined the outcome.

    In any event, the Constitution doesn’t say, although it should, that it is your right as an “eligible voter” to decide who will be president. I assume there’s no problem with state laws saying their “electors” will all be allocated proportionally according to the popular vote within that state (that is, with boringly mathematical and non-partisan methods of simply counting popular votes and multiplying them by a factor to get a whole number of electors). That would be an improvement.

    But it would still be an issue that the number of electors each state gets isn’t proportional to (or identifiable with) the voters at the national level. If every state did that, some voters would count more than others, due to the arbitrary and unequal way in which electors are distributed. So it’s better to just get rid of the electoral college altogether.

  76. says

    Thanks to everyone upthread who added information about the electors who vote in the Electoral College. I understand. I still don’t like it.

    In other news, the FBI just said that, basically, there is no there there when it comes to emails from Anthony Weiner’s laptop. Too late, doofuses. You already affected the early vote … probably.

    Since my letter, the FBI investigative team has been working around the clock to process and review a large volume of emails from a device obtained in connection with an unrelated criminal investigation. During that process, we reviewed all of the communications that were to or from Hillary Clinton while she was Secretary of State.

    Based on our review, we have not changed our conclusions that we expressed in July with respect to Secretary Clinton.

    I am very grateful to the professionals at the FBI for doing an extraordinary amount of high-quality work in a short period of time.

    https://twitter.com/kylegriffin1/status/795360926438453248

  77. consciousness razor says

    then I would agree that the legal right to vote transfers to the substitute.

    But that’s really a fiction too. It was always in the state’s hands, and the state could keep substituting one faithless elector after another (a la Dr. Strange), until the state’s decision is made, by an individual representative who will do the state’s bidding.

  78. Hj Hornbeck says

    Anyone remember that letter from Comey announcing they may have found new emails? The one that came out barely a week before voting day, energizing the Trump campaign and the right-wing noise machine?

    Federal Bureau of Investigation Director James Comey said Sunday that no new evidence has been found to warrant charges against Hillary Clinton in the investigation stemming from her use of a private email server while in government.

    Mr. Comey said the bureau stands by its July decision not to recommend charges against Mrs. Clinton or her aides for potential loss or mishandling of classified material.

    Whoops, turns out it amounted to nothing! False alarm, everyone. Hopefully this last-second announcement will erase the damage done by Comey’s misleading last-minute announcement.

  79. Ogvorbis: I have proven my humanity and can now comment! says

    Well, Comey et al. has now thoroughly pissed off the entire political spectrum. The right is pissed off because he didn’t indict Clinton back in July (never mind that the decision to indict would have been via a US attorney, not the FBI). The left is pissed off because, in that press conference in July, Comey alluded to serious criminal acts which Clinton had committed (while also saying that she didn’t do anything that was criminal). The left is pissed off that Comey sent a vaguely worded, thoroughly weaselly letter to congress critters, knowing that it would be made public, and knowing that he made it sound as if indictment were back on the table, about the Wiener emails. Now, the FBI (and I have to assume Comey was part of this decision trail) has said that no, never mind, there is nothing new in the emails (after Trump has trumpeted the “fact” that there were thousands of classified emails from Clinton to Wiener and led chants of “lock her up.”)

    So who does Comey have left? The center? There is no centre in American politics. The ‘centrists’ are either libertarians or anarchists/greens — which puts even further right and left than the GOP or the Democrats. No matter who wins, Comey is in for a rough time. If Clinton wins, he gets it from the President (why did you politicize the FBI) and from GOP ‘investigative’ committees (why did you follow the law and not indict her). If Clinton wins and the Democrats gain control of congress, there will be actual investigations into what in the name of ever loving hell happened to the FBI?

    Short version: Comey is fucked. And not in a good and/or pleasurable way.

  80. says

    Josh Marshall on the latest news from FBI Director Comey:

    It is certainly welcome news for the Clinton campaign that James Comey has now stated publicly that nothing in Huma Abedin’s emails has changed the FBI’s and his original judgment from July. This is not an interim report; it’s final. The Clinton campaign will undoubtedly use it for everything it’s worth in the remaining 48 hours-plus before voting ends Tuesday night. But while welcome, this new development doesn’t remotely undo the original error or its consequences. […]

    The point is that this letter, this entire imbroglio never should have happened. It defies tradition, explicit DOJ guidelines and respect for elementary democratic traditions. It was not a close call. This is why most legal experts and former DOJ officials on both sides of the aisle said so. The second letter is nice. It doesn’t change the gravity of the original error or the damage already done.

    Third, if you looked closely at the apparent nature of what was discovered, the reasoning of the July decision and the nature of the relevant law, it was always extremely unlikely that these emails would change anything, extremely unlikely. As I’m writing, news is emerging that virtually all the emails were simply duplicates of the emails already reviewed by the FBI or personal emails of no public consequence. In other words, not only was nothing found to change the original judgment, at a basic level there actually was not even any new evidence to review.

    This should never have happened. It was inexcusable. It was driven by politics. It never should have happened.

  81. tomh says

    @ #77
    ” Hopefully this last-second announcement will erase the damage done by Comey’s misleading last-minute announcement.”

    Not a chance. You can’t unring a bell.

  82. Ogvorbis: I have proven my humanity and can now comment! says

    tomh:

    It would be more like unblowing a dog whistle. Or, in this case, more of a dog vuvuzela.

  83. says

    Everything … Every. Fucking. Thing that Trump said about the emails on Weiner’s laptop was wrong.

    He was wrong. And now I suppose the Republicans and Trump’s surrogates will conveniently forget that.

  84. Hj Hornbeck says

    Ack, should have refreshed. Ah well, at least the news media are picking up on the story.

  85. says

    I disagree. You pay some money (or go to prison or whatever) and it still legally and Constitutionally applies as the actual vote which is cast.

    OK, then I was confused by your wording. It’s legally their decision (in Washington) in the sense that it’s legally my decision to speed and pay a fine if I’m caught. The state applies a penalty because it’s against the law. But it’s still entered as the actual vote, true.

    But if there were some rule that said I had to pay a poll tax, for example,

    If you had to pay a poll tax in order to vote, and voted without paying it, you would be acting illegally.

    or that I must go straight to prison after casting my vote,

    For voting? Then your voting would be illegal in the sense I meant.

    (Just to be clear, I’m not arguing with you about the electoral college. I’m not making a normative argument. I’m just saying that what these two people are planning is, if tomh is correct, against the law in their state.)

  86. says

    After the Comey news broke, here’s how Trump changed his talking points at a rally:

    […] Just after the news broke Sunday, Trump took the stage at a rally in Minnesota and did not mention the FBI probe specifically, as he has done at most of his recent appearances. However, the GOP nominee accused Clinton of committing “many crimes” that have spurred investigations “likely concluding in a criminal trial.”

    That’s right, that cowardly, lying slime bucket still can’t let go of the “likely concluding in a criminal trial” canard.

    Trump also returned to his familiar accusations that the system is rigged in Clinton’s favor.

    “You have to understand it’s a rigged system and she’s protected,” he said.

    “We were always confident nothing would cause the July decision to be revisited. Now Director Comey has confirmed it,” Clinton campaign press secretary Brian Fallon wrote. […]

    “Then why did you, your colleagues, and your candidate attack Comey and his credibility?” Conway [Kellyanne Conway, Trump’s campaign manager] asked.

    Way to change the subject Kellyanne. Anything to evade discussing the lies your candidate told.

    Conway went on to say:

    “He’s mishandled this investigation from the very beginning,” Conway insisted on MSNBC.

    Uh, wait. Was that a verbal about face at double-time by Conway?
    Politico link

  87. says

    Best workout. I got to the gym, stepped onto the treadmill, put the TV in front of me, and saw “BREAKING NEWS:…” It was even better because someone else was watching Fox.

  88. raven says

    Rick Wilson is still hinting about big Trump oppo dropping.

    They’ve already called her a demon and an Illuminati witch.

    What’s left? Calling her a Shapeshifting Reptilian would be a compliment.

    They will probably think of something. After all, given their habit of lying, all they have to do is lie some more.

    PS: I’m following the Washington Electors story above. A fine of a thousand dollars is basically no deterrent at all. They could crowd fund that in 10 seconds.
    It would be nice if the Washington Democratic party could simply replace them. It’s the height of arrogance to ignore the will of the citizen voters for your own personal reasons.

  89. says

    Here is what Republican Speaker of the House Paul Ryan had to say about the letter issued by FBI Director Comey today:

    Regardless of this decision, the undisputed finding of the FBI’s investigation is that Secretary Clinton put our nation’s secrets at risk and in doing so compromised our national security. She simply believes she’s above the law and always plays by her own rules. This is a pattern with the Clintons, and the American people should not have to endure four more years of their scandal and baggage.

    Fortunately, the American people have the opportunity to ensure Secretary Clinton never gets her hands on classified information again. Let’s bring the Clinton era to an end by voting for Donald Trump on Tuesday.

    Dear Paul Ryan, the American people wish you would just shut up.

  90. says

    Given what was revealed in the article I linked to @ #66, the new Comey letter, and the fact that Trump will be appearing with Ted Nugent tonight, this might get…interesting.

  91. says

    They’ve already called her a demon and an Illuminati witch….

    No, not about Clinton. Wilson’s a never-Trumper, longtime Republican operative, who’s been on MSNBC for months railing against Trump. After the Access Hollywood tape came out, he said he knew there was even worse out there about Trump, and has been hinting for a while that it will come out. It’s pretty late.

  93. Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls says

    Jebus, I’ve had the time this election to actually keep up with some of the news show. I think the deplorable Trump surrogates should be banned for being simply loud, obnoxious, unable to answer simple questions without a redirect, and for being interruptive and microphone hogging. They claim support but provide nothing concrete to back up their assertions, whereas the moderator has hard polling data and other evidence showing their assertions are wrong.
    Other panelists may be and often are republicans, but they are polite, in context, and acknowledge the facts without showing attitude.

    Great to see nothing new in the latest e-mails.

  94. KG says

    Hopefully this last-second announcement will erase the damage done by Comey’s misleading last-minute announcement. – Hj Hornbeck@77

    Of course it won’t. Indeed, it may compound it, and that may be the intention – while providing plausible deniability with regard to charges of bias. People rarely change their opinion on an issue during a campaign. What changes is salience: which issues are in people’s minds when they vote. This gets yet more headlines out with “Hillary” and “emails” in them.

  95. consciousness razor says

    If you had to pay a poll tax in order to vote, and voted without paying it, you would be acting illegally.

    I’d start this whole line of thought by pointing out that the 24th amendment makes poll taxes unconstitutional. The fact that it might be labeled a “fine” or a “fee,” not a “tax,” is just some empty verbiage which makes no substantial difference, as it could just as well be called an “election birthday party” that costs you $1000 (and doesn’t give you any cake) when you don’t vote as others want you to vote.

    According to the state law, yes, you would be acting illegally. But the state’s law is (I’d argue) unconstitutional. So the feds should agree with you that you’re not acting illegally, and they should (and are legally obliged to) correct the state on its fucked up election laws which fail to protect democratic rights.

    When voting for president, the constitution only gives those rights to electors, who is a human being or in other words a natural person (not an entity like a state or a corporation or a party). That elector was chosen in accordance with state law to be one of them (since this kind of state law didn’t provide for choosing a substitute elector). The state is unconstitutionally penalizing its designated elector for voting as he or she wished, as they have been given the constitutional (not statutory) right to do without the threat of a poll tax issued by the state.

    (Just to be clear, I’m not arguing with you about the electoral college. I’m not making a normative argument.

    Yes, I was already sure of that.

    I’m just saying that what these two people are planning is, if tomh is correct, against the law in their state.)

    But I get what you think that means. Why should the federal government consider that sort of law legitimate? If it isn’t, then it’s just some unconstitutional garbage written on some documents somewhere, and enforcing it presumably isn’t something the state should be allowed to do.

  97. says

    I’d start this whole line of thought by pointing out that the 24th amendment makes poll taxes unconstitutional.

    …Why should the federal government consider that sort of law legitimate? If it isn’t, then it’s just some unconstitutional garbage written on some documents somewhere, and enforcing it presumably isn’t something the state should be allowed to do.

    But I wasn’t talking about constitutionality any more than I was talking about normative justification. Many state laws have been or are illegitimate and unconstitutional. They’re still laws. You said “It is legally the electors’ decision about which column it will or won’t be in, according to the Constitution and the state law in question,” and I thought you meant that in the sense I later clarified. My argument was that under Washington state law choosing not to sign or abide by the pledge is not legal and carries a penalty.

    I think we probably agree on the larger issue, and this is getting a bit picayune at this point.

  98. says

    Conway also said to Steve Kornacki that she didn’t understand how the FBI could have gone through the emails in a week, adding “I couldn’t do that.” You’re not the FBI, Kellyanne.

  100. says

    SC @91, in reference to the new FBI letter, Kellyanne Conway claimed that it didn’t really make much difference to Donald Trump because, “he hasn’t been making that a centerpiece of his campaign anyway.”

    Say, what now!? How many times did Trump make the emails on Weiner’s laptop the centerpiece of his rally speech? Over and over again is the answer. What drew the loudest “lock her up!” howls from Trump’s audience? The emails on Weiner’s laptop and Trump’s blatant building of a huge smoking fire out of that news.

  101. Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls says

    I recall a couple of pundits talking about Kellyanne Conway. One said if they were the CEO of some company, and had an Exxon Valdez type of disaster, he would hire her to deflect the bad PR. But under no other circumstances, Which explains why she is working for Trump the disaster.

  102. says

    SC @ 98, The FBI only had to go through the emails that the sort revealed to be to Hillary Clinton or to her private server. Computers do that sort, not people. Not some former Defense Intelligence honcho, and not Kellyanne Conway.

    Trump’s supporters are just doing everything they can to throw some doubt into the discussion of Comey’s most recent decision/letter.

    This is more of the “don’t trust anybody but Trump” bullshit.

  103. says

    This is good. I like this message from Hillary Clinton, “rebuild confidence” in government and in democracy:

    […] “I want us to have a vision that is hopeful, optimistic and unified about what we can do together to make sure America’s best years are ahead of us,” Clinton said. “I love our country and I believe in our people. And I will never, ever quit on you no matter what.” […]

    She addressed congressional obstruction and the importance of down-ballot races, slamming lawmakers who “don’t want to help” their constituents.

    “People say to me all the time, well, how are you going to get anything done? Won’t there be gridlock?” Clinton said. “There will only be gridlock if people that are elected to represent you don’t want to help you.”

    She went on to tout her plans for paid family leave, a higher national minimum wage, equal pay for women, and affordable college tuition.

    “It shouldn’t just be an election about words, it should be about plans and policy,” Clinton said. […]

    “I want to rebuild confidence in what we can do together,” Clinton said. “It’s not good for anybody that our democracy and our country are viewed so suspiciously, without confidence. That is how we govern ourselves. So we have to work together.”

    http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/clinton-closing-argument

  104. Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls says

    Interesting article who two points about Trump made by President Obama in Florida today. The first involves Trump’s Twitter account:

    At a Sunday campaign stop for Hillary Clinton in Kissemmee, Florida, President Obama got in a few jabs at Donald Trump over the report in The New York Times that the Republican nominee’s Twitter account was taken over by his staff. Obama made the basic point that if someone can’t be trusted to handle tweets, they definitely shouldn’t be trusted with the football.
    “If somebody can’t handle a Twitter account, they can’t handle the nuclear codes,” Obama says as the crowd laughs and applauds. “If somebody starts tweeting at three in the morning because ‘SNL’ made fun of you, then you can’t handle the nuclear codes.”

    The other was about Trump’s lies about Obama defending a Trump heckler.

    Obama also hit Trump for his blatant lies about the protester that briefly disrupted a speech the president gave on Friday. Trump claimed that Obama yelled at the protester and that his behavior was “a disgrace.” The thing is, Obama had actually been extremely polite and told the crowd to leave the protester alone and respect his right to free speech.
    “He just made it up!” Obama said of Trump’s account. “Didn’t just make it up, but said the exact opposite of what had happened. With impunity! There was tape. There was a video. And some of the press called him out on it, but the point is that he thought it was OK just to lie. In front of all his supporters. On television. Wasn’t even trying to be sneaky about it.”…
    The larger point still stands, of course. Trump just goes out there and says blatantly false things that are easily proven incorrect. It’s been his main tactic for over a year now, and, no matter how many times he’s fact-checked or is called out it just doesn’t stop.

    Essentially, Trump is a short tempered liar and bullshitter. Said very politely.

  106. says

    I have decided that Ms Conway is to be known henceforth in our house as Ms Such-a-nasty Conway. She is currently spewing lies and bile all over Hardball. Time to plug my ears and hide.

  107. says

    Nerd @104, add Katy Perry and Pharrell in the list of musicians. LeBron James is not a musician, but he certainly counts as a star on Hillary Clinton’s side. Add Adele to the list of musicians. She said on October 25 that her fans should not vote for Donald Trump: “Don’t vote for him,” the Grammy Award winner said on stage, according to a Clinton aide. “I can’t vote but I am 100% for Hillary Clinton, I love her, she’s amazing.”

    Update regarding how Trump is handling the news from FBI Director Comey: Trump is still talking tonight, and at his last rally he made a point of telling his audience that it is not possible to go through 650,000 emails in nine days. So, that’s his way of dismissing the letter that FBI Director Comey issued today.

    When will these people figure out that the FBI had to go through a much smaller number of emails in nine days. They only had to go through the emails that had been sent to Hillary Clinton and/or to her private server to find out that most of them were duplicates of emails they had already examined, and that the rest were what I call “household” or “personal friendship” emails.

  108. says

    Wonkette’s coverage of FBI Director Comey’s letter is amusing.

    In news that will surprise exactly no one who does not suffer from early onset Clinton Derangement Syndrome, and which will SHOCK AND AWE! moron Trump supporters who just know deep down in their little idiot hearts that Hillary Clinton is the long foretold Devil Email Benghazi Demon who needs to GO TO JAIL, FBI Director James Comey has sent another little letter to Congress! It turns out the FBI has sifted through whatever new emails it found on Anthony Weiner’s Sex Computer that pertained to Hillary Clinton, and found a whole bunch of fuckin’ nothing […]

    Dear Stupids,

    Sorry, I fucked up and am bad and stupid and probably violated the Hatch Act too, but anyway, whatever, all the new Hillary emails are about recipes and what time “The Good Wife” comes on the TV. Oopsie poopsie!

    Love, Jim

    OOH that rogue Hillary-hatin’ sleeper cell in the FBI’s New York Office is probably shitting itself in RAGE right now! Poor dears, somebody should go check on them, and also laugh at them and poke them and do name-calling at them. […]

  109. says

    Here is Newt Gingrich’s response to Comey’s letter, he thinks Comey “caved.”

    Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, a Donald Trump supporter and adviser, said on Sunday that FBI Director James Comey “caved” when he announced to lawmakers that the agency is not changing its conclusion on whether to indict Hillary Clinton over her private email server

    “Comey must be under enormous political pressure to cave like this and announce something he can’t possibly know,” Gingrich tweeted Sunday afternoon immediately after the announcement.

    Wow. That’s a lot of overt stupidity and stubborn ignorance on display.

    This how Republicans are spinning this: Comey caved to pressure from the Clintons and from everyone the Clintons supposedly control. Add this to the idea that Trump and his surrogates are hawking, the idea that it is not possible for the FBI to have gone through the emails they needed to examine in only nine days.

    Hopeless. What is one to do with this kind of willful delusion?

  111. taraskan says

    Alright, alright. To everyone still aghast Trump can lie about things there is an undisputed public record of, please understand it’s just about the only way he can win, and it may indeed net him a victory. You throw everything you can and hope some of it sticks; you lie, cheat, steal whatever you can, because nobody will cry recall after an election based on words and not actions.

    Nobody, not one person, who has not made up their mind in this election months and months ago, is going to fact check something they hear from a candidate. If you’re dumb enough not to know their positions by now, they are dumb enough to be swayed by incredible bullshit. Papers haven’t been printing exaggerated pictures of candidates they dislike, showing them as the spawn of Mothra eating a schoolbus full of disabled children, since the nineteenth century, for nothing. It’s effective.

    And as I mentioned before, it isn’t a new strategy for politics in this country. Even the whisper of scandal is enough to necessitate damage control from the other side, and when you’ve got them busy defending themselves, they have less time to attack you.

    What should have been going all this week and still hasn’t and never will, is to invent equally bald-faced lies about Trump. It isn’t hard. We’ve heard how he doesn’t respect women – that’s done as much as it’ll do. Now talk about how he hates gingers. We’ve heard him make inappropriate remarks about his daughter. “WWTD?” He’d try to insinuate a physical relationship there. Why has nobody played the toupee card? What is he hiding under there? Perhaps a swastika tattoo? Are you willing to take that chance?

    Remember the only people left to bother with are the ones who will vote for you just because of your opponent, or who are actually undecided, and dumb people can be taken in by ridiculous libel.

    It’s dirty and disgusting, but there is no high ground in a democracy, and Trump understands this is a viable move in the great game. Everybody needs a rumor mill working overtime, and you neglect it at your own risk.

  114. militantagnostic says

    Lynna @82

    Everything … Every. Fucking. Thing that Trump said about the emails on Weiner’s laptop was wrong.

    Since when has Trump being fractally wrong made a difference to his support.

  115. birgerjohansson says

    Larry Pratt (of Gun Owners of America) has stated “Obama is a subtler version of Hitler”.

    I think I have worked it out. The joos have let Obama borrow enough money to purchase alien technology from the Romulans. This way,he can hide the FEMA camps under cloaking devices, clandestinely gassing and cremating millions of Republican voters… neatly explining why Donald Trump is trailing Hilary Clinton.
    You can’t get subtler than a proper Romulan cloaking devic, I have always said

  122. What a Maroon, living up to the 'nym says

    Re SC @119,

    The left out Chris Christie, Secretary of Transportation

  123. says

    As was noted up-thread, even after the FBI cleared Clinton … again, Donald Trump continues to claim that the FBI could not have read 650,000 emails in eight days.

    Steve Benen explained the silliness of Trump’s claim (and the claim of all of the Trump surrogates) better than I did:

    […] Trump and his allies were handed an unjust gift 10 days ago, and yesterday, it was unexpectedly taken away from them. Naturally, the Republican ticket responded by pulling its attack ads about Clinton facing a “criminal investigation.”

    No, I’m just kidding. Team Trump actually responded by accusing the FBI of a new round of corruption, insisting that the bureau couldn’t possibly have read 650,000 emails so quickly – which in Trump’s mind, necessarily means Clinton was cleared without a thorough review of the materials.

    This talking point doesn’t make sense. For one thing, it’s not as if Comey sat alone in his office, reading individual emails one at a time: the FBI had teams of officials with access to a newfangled tool known as a “computer.” For another, the FBI didn’t have to review all 650,000 emails on Anthony Weiner’s laptop; it only had to review the emails related to Clinton.

    As NBC News’ report noted, the FBI used “a program that targeted only the emails to and from Clinton’s closest aide, Huma Abedin, within the time when Clinton was secretary of state.” […]

  124. says

    This is a followup to comment 122.

    Trump is not only casting doubt on the latest letter of explanation from FBI Director Comey, he is also asking rank-and-file agents to revolt against Comey:

    […] You can’t review 650,000 emails in eight days. You can’t do it folks. Hillary Clinton is guilty.

    The investigations into her crimes will go on for a long, long time.

    The rank-and-file special agents at the FBI won’t let her get away with her terrible crimes, including the deletion of her 33,000 emails after receiving a congressional subpoena.

    http://www.politico.com/story/2016/11/trump-clinton-emails-230854

    This is another uh-oh moment. Trump is asking for the cell of rightwing doofuses in the FBI that support him to ignore the chain of command, an to ignore orders in the FBI, and in the Justice Department in general.

  125. says

    Trump supporters kicked the wheelchair of a disabled protestor today, and the young boy with cerebral palsy was kicked out of the rally:

    This is truly disturbing to me … What I witnessed while covering a Trump rally today.

    Wheelchair-bound JJ Holmes, 12, who has cerebral palsy, and his family were ordered out of Saturday’s Trump rally by Trump after they chanted for Hillary Clinton.

    JJ begged his mom, Alison, to travel over two hours so he could attend. JJ begged his mom, Alison, to travel over two hours so he could attend. Unable to speak, JJ communicates through a special device similar to Stephen Hawkings. JJ is passionate about politics and concerned about the future of all humans but especially those with disabilities.

    Alison said the family was kicked by Trump supporters and had to shield JJ’s wheelchair as Trump supporters gathered to push JJ’s wheelchair out of their space. Alison was called a child abuser and a murderer. This is just so, so sad! Tears are burning my eyeballs but then I look at JJ smiling afterwards when he asked his mom if she is proud of him. […]

    https://www.facebook.com/kimberly.defalco.1/posts/955061457933647

    Some Republicans are calling the incident a setup, saying Democrats did this on purpose.

  126. says

    Followup to comment 124.

    Trump himself, Trump personally ordered the kid and his mother to be thrown out.

    The Clinton Campaign responded:

    Yesterday, a reporter called me in tears after witnessing a 12-year old living with an extreme case of cerebral palsy get kicked out of a Donald Trump rally.

    […] Once there, JJ did a simple, quiet, but defiant act: he held up a Hillary Clinton placard.

    Immediately, the crowd started chanting “USA, USA, USA” (as if this had anything to do with it… or perhaps he was unAmerican for being disabled?), and Trump pointed to security and ordered them to “get them out!”.

    As Secret Service escorted JJ, his mother and two sisters, Trump supporters shouted obscenities and even kicked his wheelchair. […]

    I tell the reporter to share my number with JJ’s mother and that the only thing I can do is escort them into President Obama’s rally the following day. No chance for VIP treatment and much less to meet the President. […]

    As I arrive at the venue hours before the start of the show, I pace around the stadium examining routes to wheel JJ into the VIP area. The ADA zone was too far from the stage, and I wanted JJ to be as close as possible. I conspire with my colleague Angela Johnson and we start devising a plan. […]

    All political staffer knows the attitude one needs to put on to escort a “principal”…. so I turned my mode on. I walked in front of the wheel chair and began asking folks to please break away. Overly assertive and resolute to get JJ to his spot, we were able to hike across the field and settle into the target zone. […]

    I messaged a friend that I knew could help and told him the story. […] I point to him where in the VIP area JJ is sitting with the hope that when POTUS would work the ropeline, he’d somehow remember JJ’s story and spend two extra seconds with him. […]

    Once again, I enlist Angela and together we swim into a sea of people to wheel JJ out, through the turf, and finally reach my friend who escorts us to the other side of the barricades. […]

    At that moment, JJ’s mom tells him he’s going to meet the President. The rest is indescribable…. JJ jumps out of his seat and erupts into cheer… his smile almost bursting out of his face. His body overcome by light, when just the day before it almost succumbed to hate. […]

    There are photos of the boy meeting with President Obama.

    http://www.dailykos.com/story/2016/11/7/1592591/-Trump-hits-new-low-and-kicks-out-a-disabled-protester-Clinton-staffers-rally-to-raise-him-high

  127. says

    Betsy Woodruff describes Trump’s rally in VA last night/this morning:

    …Then State Sen. Dick Black, a legislator known in part for his eager willingness to defend Bashar al-Assad (he traveled to Syria this past April to visit the despot and shake his hand), came out on stage to speak.

    “Where’s Hillary Clinton? What’s she doing?” Black said. “She’s probably sobering up right now.”

    The crowd cheered.

    Then Black launched into a baffling soliloquy blaming the Clinton Global Initiative for America’s military intervention in Libya.

    “Why did we go into Libya? Because of Hillary Clinton,” he said. “We went into Syria. Why did we go into Syria? Because of the Clinton Foundation.”

    The Clinton Foundation also bore at least partial responsibility for the violence in Yemen, he continued, and explains Clinton’s hawkish tendencies.

    …

    Oliver North, who helped sell weapons to Iran to illegally funnel money to rebels fighting to overturn Nicaragua’s government, said Hillary Clinton was a criminal.

    “Who is it that’s going to hold Hillary Clinton accountable for all the crimes she committed?” North cried. “We the people!”…

    Her article and this one about a year covering the Trump campaign describe the callous, almost abusive way the devoted rally attendees are treated as a group. No wonder the environment is so hostile – they can’t turn their anger and resentment on Trump, so they unleash it on substitutes. (Of course, there’s plenty of underlying hate and rage, but being treated like this can’t help their disposition any.)

  128. Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls says

    Thanks Lynna #125 for the striking difference in treatment of person with disabilities between the campaigns. The president again showed his basic decency.

  130. Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls says

    SC#128, my favorite Trump quote will never be uttered: “I’m sorry, I was wrong. I’ll make amends.”

  134. says

    Trump’s opening act in Michigan, Ted Nugent:

    …“I’m here because I was born and raised to be a productive American in the asset column, by that spirit of real Michigan,” he said. “We must not let it get lumped in with California and Illinois and New York and New Jersey and Maryland and Massachusetts.”

    “I’ve got your blue state right here baby!” Nugent cried, grabbing his crotch. “Black and blue!”…

  135. says

    Hm. Some people are saying that’s a Giuliani parody account, and other tweets look like it, but another one that’s allegedly real also looks like a parody. I’m not joking. Does he even have a Twitter account?

  138. says

    John Oliver made his last pitch for people to NOT vote for Donald Trump. Scroll down for the video. I liked his takedown of Kellyanne Conway for claiming that the Trump campaign did not make Clinton’s emails “a centerpiece of our messaging.”

    The Daily Beast link.

  139. says

    SC @133, OMG. That traumatized me. I think I’m going to indulge in stress eating for two days.

    SC @126, That reminds me of my neighbors telling me that Hillary Clinton sold plutonium to the Russians in exchange for their support of the Clinton Foundation. I just raised my eyebrows and walked away, but that moment still affects me. If Trump supporters are that deep into the conspiracy theory swamp, they can’t be saved.

    In other news, Republicans in North Carolina are proud of the fact that black voter turnout is down in their state. It’s like they are saying, “Yes! [Republican equivalent of high five.] We accomplished our goal, disenfranchising voters of color!” Vox link.

  140. says

    SC @136, you can tell that Jay-Z and Beyoncé supporting Hillary Clinton really hurt his feelings.

    In other news, here is an excerpt from Wonkette’s coverage of Donald Trump’s latest, pandering meeting with anti-vaxxers:

    […] as a final pre-election hoorah, Trump decided to throw YET ANOTHER bone to his conspiratorial alt-right base by meeting with former doctor Andrew Goddamn Wakefield, the lying liar who has been lying about vaccines for a generation now. When last we smelled the rancid stench of our intrepid not-a-doctor-no-more, Wakefield was being horribly discriminated against just because he made a teensy little movie that could lead to the infections and possible deaths of millions of babies. […]

    That’s right, Donald Trump met with Andrew Wakefield.

    […] the makers of Vaxxed revealed that he personally met with the Great Orange Charlatan. […]

    After touting his own magnificence like any great huckster, Wakefield implored his audience to vote for the orange molester bear as unhyperbolically as possible:

    This is a one-issue election. That is the future of this country: investing in its children. And if we have mandatory vaccination in this country, in this state — as they have in California — then it’s all over. And we will achieve that objective in 2032 of 1 in 2 children with autism. So you use your vote extremely carefully.

    There is one person, whatever else you may think about him, who has expressed the fact that he knows vaccines cause autism, that vaccine damage is real, […] and I had the privilege of meeting him the other day to discuss this precise issue, and he is on our side. Whatever else you may think, I want you to bear that in mind. […] Within two years, I would say, of Hillary Clinton getting in — if she gets in — there will be mandatory adult and childhood vaccination across the entire country.

    Andrew Wakefield is endorsing Donald Trump. If his endorsements by the KKK, Kim Jong-Un, Vladimir Putin, and Ted Cruz didn’t leave an awful taste in your mouth, know that con artist baby infecters LOOOOOVE Donald Trump just to bits. And why not? Trump has legitimized their heinous brand of bullshit like no other presidential candidate in history. Even the most quacking of third party candidates have not so openly and flagrantly pushed the vaccine-autism myth […]

  141. says

    Here is an excerpt from Wonkette’s coverage of the “Trump idiots” claiming that they can’t read 650,000 emails in eight days, so neither can the FBI:

    If you have two brain cells to rub together, you heard Sunday’s news that the FBI had gone through whatever new Hillary Clinton and Huma Abedin emails it found on Anthony Weiner’s Hard Dick Drive and found that there was no “there” there, […] However, if you are Donald Trump or his poorly behaved, Russia-loving adviser, former Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, you automatically said NUH UH NOT EITHER, because your tiny little bird brain cannot comprehend how the agency could have gone through 650,000 emails in just eight days. […]

    Quote from General Flynn’s Twitter feed: “IMPOSSIBLE: There R 691,200 seconds in 8 day. DIR Comey has thoroughly reviewed 650,000 emails in 8 days? An email/second? IMPOSSIBLE RT”

    This is the man being rumored as Donald Trump’s possible secretary of defense. […] Now, if you are S-M-R-T, you are probably banging your head against your keyboard because you don’t understand how people this D-U-M even exist.

    But remember that Donald Trump does not use email. Literally the only thing he knows how to do on his Obamaphone is hunt and peck out mean, poorly worded tweets about everybody who makes fun of him. Michael Flynn is just a fucking moron. […]

    If you want to get into the actual science of how, for real, it’s not that hard to sift through 650,000 emails, filter out the irrelevant business, and so on and so forth, Wired has a great ‘splainer:

    One former FBI forensics expert … tells WIRED he’s personally assessed far larger collections of data, far faster. “You can triage a dataset like this in a much shorter amount of time,” says the former agent, who asked to remain anonymous to avoid any political backlash. “We’d routinely collect terabytes of data in a search. I’d know what was important before I left the guy’s house.” […]

    Next, the agents could filter out duplicate emails from those they’d already analyzed in their months-long investigation earlier this year. According to multiple media reports, the vast majority of emails the FBI examined over the last week were, in fact, duplicates. Those copies could be spotted by their message ID, points out [forensic expert Jonathan] Zdziarski, a unique alphanumeric identifier …

    ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ WE ARE SLEEPING NOW BECAUSE OF ALL THOSE DETAILS. But for real, though, for people who are actual experts in the field, it’s not complicated stuff. […]

    [Snipped response from Edward Snowden about how even old laptops could do the sorting job.]

    In fact, Wired points to a cybersecurity consultant named Rob Johnson asking why it took so damn long for the FBI to go through these emails, or why James Comey couldn’t have gotten his damn warrant and taken care of this little problem before sticking his damn nose into the presidential election. […]

    Anyway, the point is that computers are magic and Donald Trump and his supporters should be required to wear helmets for their own protection.

    WIRED link

  143. a_ray_in_dilbert_space says

    ““I’ve got your blue state right here baby!” Nugent cried, grabbing his crotch.”

    Must have been Rhode Island.

  144. Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls says

    Astronaut “votes as he floats” from the ISS.

    NASA said Monday that astronaut Shane Kimbrough filed his ballot in Tuesday’s presidential election from the International Space Station sometime over the past few days. He arrived at the orbiting lab in mid-October.
    Before launching on a four-month mission, Kimbrough said it was going to be special, being able to say “I voted from space.”

  145. raven says

    Lynna: That reminds me of my neighbors telling me that Hillary Clinton sold plutonium to the Russians in exchange for their support of the Clinton Foundation.

    So where did Hillary get the plutonium? I’ve never seen it for sale on Amazon. com.

    The Inquisitr
    Idaho Mom Used Marijuana Butter To Treat Daughter’s Seizures, Had Kids Taken Away And May Be Going To Jail
    The Inquisitr – ‎1 hour ago‎
    An Idaho mother who used marijuana butter to treat her daughter’s seizures has had her children removed from her custody and may be facing a long prison sentence for child abuse, KTVB (Boise) is reporting.

    and

    Cannabidiol for treating seizures Show Promise — ScienceDaily
    https:// www . sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/03/160303204007.htm
    Mar 3, 2016 – UAB launched the studies of CBD oil as a treatment for severe, … The studies, an adult study at UAB and a pediatric study at Children’s of Alabama, were …. was effective in reducing seizure frequency and well-tolerated and …

    Idaho just seems to get weirder and weirder.
    A lot of parents use cannabis or cannabis derived drugs for uncontrolled seizures.
    1. It seems to work when nothing else does as shown by a recent clinical trial.
    Oddly enough, it is CBD, a non-psychoactive fraction.
    2. Uncontrolled siezures can and often are eventually fatal.
    3. And marijuana is no big deal any more. It’s legal in two states next to Idaho, Washington and Oregon and guess what? The world hasn’t ended and demons haven’t climbed out of the earth.

  146. says

    raven @144, as near as I can tell, my neighbors are confusing an old conspiracy theory about Clinton selling uranium with other sources about Plutonium being sold on the black market.

    As is usual for my neighbors, they cannot keep their conspiracy theories straight. The sell of uranium was touted by Trump:

    Hillary Clinton’s State Department approved the transfer of 20% of America’s uranium holdings to Russia, while 9 investors in the deal funneled $145 million to the Clinton Foundation.

    For these “facts,” Trump relied on the book “Clinton Cash,” which we have discussed before. Trump’s claims, and the claims in the book have been debunked multiple times.

    […] Despite the claims made by Trump, Hillary Clinton could not exert undue influence on approval of the sale because the State Department was just one of nine agencies represented on the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (C.F.I.U.S.), which reviews such sales.

    The deal needed approval from multiple U.S. agencies and the Canadian government. Moreover, the State Department representative to C.F.I.U.S. said Hillary Clinton was not involved on the State Department’s review and did not discuss the uranium sale and called claims to the contrary “absurd conspiracy theories.”

    Clinton Cash author, Peter Schweizer, was forced to admit on ABC, “We don’t have direct evidence” that Hillary Clinton intervened in the deal, and FactCheck.org made clear that Clinton could not have “stopped the deal” through a veto.

    The former chairman of Uranium One also made clear that he became a donor to the Clinton Giustra Sustainable Growth Initiative well before the sale was being considered and rejected any claims that donations could be implied as an effort to influence the U.S. government’s review of the sale.

    Another supposed benefactor from the sale and Clinton Foundation donor, Frank Giustra, actually sold his stake in the company before the sale and more than 18 months before Hillary Clinton became Secretary of State, another truth Schweizer was forced to confront on ABC. […]

  147. says

    In one of his last rallies on election eve Trump claimed that “the world hates us.” I think he is confused. A lot of “the world” dislikes him. It’s personal, Mr. Trump.

    SC, thanks for the news up-thread about the transit strike in Philly being over. That will help get souls to the polls.

    Not sure what they’ll spend it on at this stage of the game, but Super-PACs supporting Donald Trump are still raising money. In November alone, Super-PACs supporting Trump spent $46.2 million. Super-PACs supporting Hillary Clinton spent $27.7 million in November.

    […] Of the $35 million in attack ads hitting Clinton in the last week, a full $28 million of it has come from either Future 45, a super-PAC that has raised $10 million from Las Vegas casino owner Sheldon Adelson and his wife, or from the 45 Committee, a dark-money group that is closely affiliated with Future 45 but which does not disclose it’s donors. […]

    Mother Jones link

  150. says

    SC @147, yeah, Jewish people “eating away at the flesh” of the USA. I do wonder how much of the anti-semitism comes from Steve Bannon and how much comes from Trump.

    Nerd @148, Hillary Clinton has more stamina than I have, that’s for sure. Plus, she seems to be able to maintain maximum coherence throughout he waking hours. My ability to be coherent wanes and waxes.

    Love seeing all the big names in the music business lining up behind her.

    Trump says he’ll “never, ever forgive” voters if he loses the election. I guess we can count on his enmity until the day he dies. I guess he’ll hate all of those musicians mentioned above as well. He already hates Jay-Z and Beyoncé.

  151. says

    I disagree with Ana Navarro on many, many things (including some of what she says here), but this is still good:

    …I voted against Donald Trump because I am an immigrant. Trump has spent this campaign focusing on the very bad things done by a very small group of very bad immigrants. He has portrayed immigrants as criminals, rapists, and murderers. He does not talk about the contributions immigrants have made to America. He does not talk about immigrants who have made this a better and stronger country. He does not talk about the thousands and thousands of immigrant names that fill the Vietnam Wall in Washington or that are carved on so many headstones in every US military cemetery around the world.

    I voted against Donald Trump because I am Hispanic. On June 16, 2015, the first day of his campaign, Trump called Mexicans “rapists.” I was not born in Mexico. I am not of Mexican descent. But I knew he was also talking about me.

    I voted against Donald Trump for every American who looks and sounds like me. Because we love this country. We are proud of this country. We stand as equals in the United States of America.

    …

    I voted against Donald Trump because of all women in my life who have been sexually harassed or assaulted and remained silent, bearing the embarrassment, even shame, for years….

    I remember hearing her say more than once that she planned to write in her mother – now she can’t in good conscience do that in Florida.

  154. says

    “DNC staff helped Sanders during primary”:

    Bernie Sanders’ supporters have been livid with the Democratic National Committee since hacked emails this summer revealed apparent coordination with Hillary Clinton’s campaign, but a new set of hacked emails published by Wikileaks reveals the DNC helped Sanders’ primary bid as well.

    On multiple occasions in March and May, DNC staff aggregated Republican attacks against Sanders and flagged them for Spiros Consulting, a research firm working for Sanders’ campaign.

    It was part of a service the DNC performed for both campaigns, as another email from then-DNC research associate Lauren Hendricks reveals the campaign was also sending updates on GOP attacks to the Clinton team as well.

    …

    “The DNC provided several important services to the Sanders campaign, including monitoring the GOP’s misleading attacks on Sen Sanders. While I can’t confirm the contents of the emails I can confirm that the DNC did partner to assist campaign’s research operation,” Chapman said in an email to POLITICO….

  155. numerobis says

    raven@50: I am most definitely *not* equating terrorism with Islam. I’m casting doubt on the FBI’s ability to deal with terrorism.

    Speaking of which, far-right Quebecers are seriously talking of going to the US to join militias and take up arms in the coming race war that Trump will spark. Anti-terrorism up here takes the threat seriously.

  156. Hj Hornbeck says

    I’ve been keeping a sharp eye on Kurt Eichenwald’s work recently. His last two major pieces give details on how foreign intelligence agencies have reacted to a potential Trump-Putin connection (linked last thread) and what was in those emails the FBI recently announced.

    From the information obtained that first day by Newsweek, it was already clear that, because of the accounts involved, almost all of the documents were going to be duplicates or personal emails. In other words, from the opening moments of this inquiry, there were people in government who already knew what the outcome of this new FBI effort would be, yet it took the bureau another nine days to confirm those details.

    More recently, Eichenwald’s been on a Twitter rampage, sharing a summary of what he’s uncovered about Trump. You can get an idea of what Eichenwald was tweeting about from this Storify…

    11. When Trump built Taj Mahal, testified under oath to NJ he’d only use bank loans, not junk bonds. No bank would lend. Used junk bonds.

    19. Trump was $3.5 bill in debt. Later, when banks bailed him out, he claimed in books he was $9.5bill in debt to make recovery look better.
    21. Trump admitted under oath that, when he claimed he was $9.5 bill in debt in his books, it was a lie and he knew it.
    22. No banks will lend to Trump except Deutsche Bank. In 2008, he defaulted on a $640 mill construction loan to them.

    45. When testifying under oath, Trump refused to answer questions 97 times about infidelities and suspected mistresses.

    68.To hide the ultimate source of his Chinese steel, Trump purchased it through a shell company based in the British Virgin Islands.
    69. Money paid to the Chinese steel manufacturers went to repay loans from Chinese banks, which are arms of the state.

    75. After promising to salvage precious artworks on a building for the Met, Trump had them jackhammered instead to save $32,000.

    83. Trump reneged on a family-wide commitment to pay medical bills for his nephew’s severely sick baby because he was mad.

    84. Trump engaged in a civil conspiracy to defraud union pension funds by hiring undocumented Polish workers, a court found.

    95. CFO of Trump casino passed out from exhaustion and dehydration caused by overwork. In response, Trump fired him.

    105. After 6 mos. of refusing to turn over documents in discrimination case, Trump testified company had been destroying them whole time.
    108. After Trump confronted some employees in discrimination case, they changed their sworn testimony. Others told govt they feared 4 lives
    109. After finally settling housing discrimination case, Trump immediately returned to refusing to rent to African Americans.

    113. Trump execs filed sworn statement that no email server existed before 2001. It was a lie, which they admitted after emails destroyed.
    114. Not only did Trump company destroy emails sought in litigation under court order, they erased the backup tapes.

    117. Trump sued an author for correctly writing that Trump was worth far less than he said; Trump said he did it just to hurt the guy.

    125. In August, a Trump associate met secretly at a school in Eastern Europe with a member of the pro-Putin faction in parliament.

    129. NATO allies have begun assembling intel files, including from Russian informants, about Trump out of fear he is compromised.

    Unfortunately, it isn’t complete and Eichenwald didn’t reply to his own Tweets, so you’ll have to root around on his Twitter page for the remainder.

  157. Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls says

    Donald Trump complains about the size of Clinton’s rallies. Her Philadelphia rally, which will start shortly, will take place at the Liberty Bell mall across the street from Independence Hall (a surprising small building for what happened there). It is swarming with people by the MSNBC background shots (Hardball is on), with Chris Matthews saying 20,000+. That isn’t a lack of enthusiasm for the candidate.

  160. Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls says

    I’ve got some chores to do, like dinner for the Redhead and myself, but somebody please link to the speeches by both Obamas. Masterful and powerful oratory.

  162. says

    They go low.

    (I must be losing it – Clinton’s awkward, stilted delivery in public speaking is starting to seem almost endearing. She’s actually gotten worse at it over the years. I mean, she pronounces “a” with a long a.)

  164. says

    The full event on YouTube.

    Hillary Clinton, President Obama, Michelle Obama Rally in Philadelphia, PA, etc.

    Full Event on Time magazine site.

    Rolling Stone’s final argument against Trump. Excerpt:

    […] What you cannot do is vote for Donald Trump and pretend that this is just another election, and he is just another candidate. It is your minimum duty as a citizen not to support a racist, sexist, unqualified, dishonest, corrupt manchild who celebrates everything that’s ugly about America and not a single thing that’s great about it.

    No matter how left out or left behind you feel, voting for Trump is nothing short of a moral failure. It’s a vicious act against the human beings, mostly women and people of color, who would suffer miserably under his presidency.

  165. Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls says

    Madonna held a surprise concert in NYC for Clinton.

    Hillary Clinton’s last-minute celebrity-push continued Monday night, with an announcement from Madonna that she would play a concert for the Democratic candidate in New York City’s Washington Square Park.
    “B-tches Are You In My Gang???” Madonna said in an Instagram post announcing the event. She described the concert as a “surprise intimate very small acoustic” show in support of Clinton.
    Madonna is one of a growing list of stars to show their Democratic love on the campaign trail. Beyoncé and Jay Z joined Clinton in Cleveland on Saturday, while Bruce Springsteen opened up for President Barack Obama, first lady Michelle Obama and others for a pro-Clinton event in Philadelphia on Monday — the same city where Katy Perry appeared during a Clinton rally on Saturday.

  166. consciousness razor says

    I was discussing some propositions/amendments with some coworkers the other day, and it’s really striking how much they can get away with, when those are worded in such a misleading way on ballots (sample and real). We had very different impressions on what something would do, because the sample ballot language gave completely the wrong impression. We had to do some googling to fact-check the ballot, which is simply ridiculous and should never have to occur. If you just show up on election day and don’t do any extra research or discuss it with anyone who did, you could very easily be confused into voting for stuff that wouldn’t work as advertised.

    We really ought to have (in every state, not sure how some work, but I know this is the case to a certain extent) laws requiring that polling places will publish the complete and literal text of everything offered as a ballot measure. Not a shorthand outline or abstract of it, but the whole and exact and actual thing. That’s at a minimum, but I get that saying what all of the effects are (interactions with other laws in the books, budgetary increases/decreases, which groups lobbied for it and what they get out of it, etc.) can be a trickier matter, although it wouldn’t hurt to at least quote obvious and relevant laws which would be affected. There would still be a lot that’s left to interpretation, but in any case, actually saying what the written law will literally be seems like the most critical part.

    I get that it could be a lot of extra paper/money for millions of ballots, with a lot of possibly confusing technical stuff that not everybody needs to read if they’ve done their homework, if every ballot contained all of that. There might after all be dozens of propositions, and many walls of dense legal text could be really discouraging and counter-productive. But if that kind of information were available at every polling place one way or another for everyone to see, in a supplemental handout or printed on large posters or whatever, maybe people would vote for less bullshit that won’t do what the ballot seems to say it will do.

    Everybody, except I guess for certain lobbyists and corrupt congresscritters and their bullshitting ilk, should agree on this much: whether you would be for or against any proposal whatsoever, you have a right in the first place to know what that proposal is. Voters should be informed. It’s absurd that so little is done about it, and it should’ve been addressed a very long time ago.

  167. Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls says

    We really ought to have (in every state, not sure how some work, but I know this is the case to a certain extent) laws requiring that polling places will publish the complete and literal text of everything offered as a ballot measure.

    In Illinois, the Secretary of State mails out an explanation of each ballot proposal, with pros and cons listed.
    It is very difficult to get a voter referendum in Illinois, except for another constitutional convention, on the ballot, so they usually come from the State Legislature. This year it had to do with spending road/transportation monies solely on roads and transportation. Some localities were spending state monies on local services unrelated to roads/transportation.

  168. KG says

    marijuana is no big deal any more. It’s legal in two states next to Idaho, Washington and Oregon and guess what? The world hasn’t ended and demons haven’t climbed out of the earth. – raven@144

    The demons are… like… prolly too wasted, man.

  173. says

    “This Election Was About the Issues”:

    …A candidacy launched with the promise of committing violence against the less powerful was now coming undone over allegations that the candidate himself had committed actual violence against the less powerful. That so much of this has been dismissed as tabloid folderol is a measure, as surely as the Trump phenomenon is, of the alienation of our political class from the America it means to lead. In one survey of teenage girls, per the New York Times, 42 percent said Trump “had affected the way they thought about their bodies.” This campaign has not been an abstraction unfolding on some theoretical level. It’s a political fight being waged along intimate psychic terrain, every outrage circling the same theme: power. Not just the power of the presidency, but the distributions and arrangements and perquisites of power in everyday American life, about who has the stuff and who doesn’t, and about how the people who have it are permitted to treat the people who don’t.

    The one favor Trump did us was to be monstrous about the things in America that matter the most, to force a confrontation with all the stuff our politics typically is at pains to suppress. This campaign was about power, and it was about impunity. It was about “Grab them by the [redacted],” and it was about the sentence Donald Trump spoke just before that, the issue at the heart of the election: “You can do anything.”

  175. says

    The last polls show Clinton up by five points. This is Trump’s take on that:

    I do think a lot of polls are purposefully wrong. I think I can almost tell you by the people that do it. The media is very dishonest, extremely dishonest, and I think a lot of polls are phony. I don’t think they interview people. I think they just put out phony numbers.

  177. What a Maroon, living up to the 'nym says

    SC @171,

    In fact, as Josh Marshall points out, under Coulter’s rule Trump couldn’t vote.

    Nor could any of his kids.

    And I’m assuming that if they couldn’t vote, they also couldn’t hold office.

  179. says

    This is a followup to comment 122.

    The Clinton campaign did try to get attack ads claiming she was under investigation pulled from the airways:

    The Hillary Clinton campaign Sunday sent cease-and-desist letters to broadcasters telling the stations not to air ads from super PACs supporting Donald Trump that claim that Clinton is under FBI investigation, CNN reported on Monday.

    “These ads falsely claim Secretary Clinton is under investigation by the FBI,” the letter from the campaign general counsel Marc Elias reads, according to CNN.

    The letter was dated on the same day that FBI Director James Comey wrote in a letter to Congress that a review of newly discovered emails did not change the bureau’s conclusion. […]

    the “claim in these ads is provably false,” […] The Clinton campaign listed super PACs and their ads, including Rebuilding America Now and Future 45 […].

  181. says

    SC @177, New Yorkers booing Trump, how appropriate.

    In good news/bad news, some voters are being disenfranchised and some voters have expert help at the polling stations to overcome obstacles:

    Another would-be Philadelphia voter, Jimi Alade, was pretty calm for someone who was just told he couldn’t cast a ballot in a historically close presidential election. The 28-year-old graduate student had time to wait for it all to get sorted out by volunteers. For today, at least, he had nowhere better to be than standing in the parking lot next to a suburban Philadelphia playground while other people argued about his fate.

    Turned out the law is on Alade’s side. Though he’d been told he was “inactive” on the voter registry by poll workers, a legal monitor volunteering with the Hillary Clinton campaign got back from a coffee run 15 minutes later. After consulting the voting law manual he’d been given and double-checking through the “Lawyers Bound for Justice” app the campaign’s voter protection staffers are using, the volunteer realized Alade should be able to vote.

    He did vote, just like he did in 2012. And on a regular ballot rather than a provisional one, after signing an affirmation that he had recently moved from the address listed on the rolls. It was the outdated address that triggered the “inactive” tag, as far as anyone could tell.

    A few moments after signing the required affirmation, Alade emerged from the small brown shed that serves as a polling place inside the Penn Pines Playground, beaming.

    “I voted!” he said.

    Think Progress link

    The impact of the Wisconsin voter ID law may be widespread.
    Think Progress link

  183. says

    Another schadenfreude moment for today: infighting within the Trump campaign seems to be accelerating, mainly because they all know they are losing and they are looking to blame each other.

    Roger Stone got in on the act today:

    […] Frankly Trump has run one of the worst campaigns in modern political history in the state [Nevada] and the crew there is really left over from the primary, these old Americans for Prosperity folks. Nice people just don’t argue about politics and actual getting elected. So I’m disappointed with the campaign there. […]

    Trump himself is still complaining about Beyoncé and Jay-Z. This morning her called in to Fox News’ Fox and Friends to complain:

    BRIAN KILMEADE (CO-HOST): […] There’s Bon Jovi, there’s a president, there’s a first lady, there’s the former president Bill Clinton, there’s Lady Gaga, all coming out to fill up the square in Philadelphia. Does that get intimidating to you?

    DONALD TRUMP: No, because she can’t fill up the rooms. She was getting very poor crowds and then all of the sudden she got these people. In the case of Jay Z, the language he used was terrible. She talks about me and the language was unbelievable that Jay Z and Beyoncé used and frankly, a lot of people left and they left because of the language, and then they left when the performance was done, and there weren’t too many people in the room. She would have been better off not having them, but she uses that. I could do that too but I’m filling up rooms Just on the basis of what I’m saying. I don’t need anybody to fill up the room. We fill up — last night, we had 28,000 people at 1:30, 1:00, practically 1:00 in the morning. 28,000 people in Michigan —

    KILMEADE: That’s amazing.

    TRUMP: And by the way, we had 22,000 people in New Hampshire. The big arena. It was incredible last night. And I will say, I have the best surrogates. I have my kids, I have my family. Don, Ivanka, Eric, Tiffany, all of them, they go around and they make speeches. They are better than the people that you just said.

    Media Matters link

  184. says

    Anderson Cooper took a Trump surrogate to task for complaining about Jay-Z’s language:

    KAYLEIGH MCENANY: The difference is for Jay-Z to shout these — to shout these expletives on a stage at a political rally while the Democrats are trying to stand on a moral high ground saying we’re better than that and Hillary Clinton is putting out commercials with little girls looking in the mirror —

    ANDERSON COOPER (HOST): Ted Nugent -Ted Nugent grabbed his package at his concert, didn’t he? Said “I got your blue states right here?”

    MCENANY: But my point is, if Democrats want to put out commercials of little girls looking in the mirror, making themselves as the moral paragon of virtue, then you cannot have Jay-Z on a stage shouting expletives —

    DAVID AXELROD: Kayleigh, I agree with you, and when Jay-Z runs for president, he’s going to have to answer for that. But he’s not the candidate for president. Donald Trump is, and that’s the problem.

  185. says

    SC @181, yeah, I’m still seeing them too. I think it is partly a timing thing. There was not enough time for the slow wheels of the legal system to turn — they were too slow to get the ads off the air before the election.

    In other news, Breitbart is featuring the image of a Trump supporter who wore the T-shirt printed with this text: “Rope. Tree. Journalist. Some assembly required.” Breitbart thinks it’s funny to promote the lynching of journalists.

  186. says

    Oh, FFS. CNN, please shut up.

    CAROL COSTELLO (HOST) I think that if Hillary Clinton does win though that that historic moment for her will be diminished because of the nastiness of this campaign and her unlikeability factor, right?

    RYAN LIZZA: […] And you’re right, that does take away a little bit from the historic nature of her election if she wins today. She’s been around a long time.

  187. says

    Donald Trump has filed his first lawsuit of the day. His campaign is claiming that people in Clark County, Nevada were allowed to vote after the official closing time of the polling place. Petty and a nuisance. This lawsuit is likely to mean that many Latino votes cast in Clark County will be questioned.

  188. says

    What the fuck? How do polling locations *close before the end of the workday*

    like. it’s 1:23 PM EST right now. Why are polls closing this early? How is that legal? How is that fair or democratic? Fuck this shitty voter suppression bullshit.

  190. raven says

    His campaign is claiming that people in Clark County, Nevada were allowed to vote after the official closing time of the polling place.

    Yeah, I don’t get how that works.
    It’s 10:45 in the morning on the coast.
    Unless Nevada has voting spread over several days and it was yesterday.

  191. Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls says

    Donald Trump has filed his first lawsuit of the day. His campaign is claiming that people in Clark County, Nevada were allowed to vote after the official closing time of the polling place.

    Evidently Nevada law says that you can’t get in line after the polls close for the day, but those in line at the time can cast their valid ballots. Same in many states. Sounds like a lawyer wanted to say he was stiffed by Trump after the lawsuit was tossed.

  192. says

    The suit concerns I think the last day of early voting – it was filed yesterday. They’re claiming one or more voting places (there are four involved total) decided earlier in the day to stay open until 10 regardless,* and that they let people vote who weren’t in line before the official closing time.

    * Not sure how that would even make sense. If there weren’t people in line at 8 and they stayed open, that would be a blatant (blatent/Batant) violation, so why would they plan to do it?

  193. says

    Sorry for the confusing wording in comment 186. Yes, Trump’s team is complaining about a situation that occurred on the last day of early voting.

    I still think this is just a desperate ploy by the Trump campaign to throw voting results in Nevada into doubt.

  194. says

    Coverage from Vox:

    […] Trump’s campaign sued the Clark County, Nevada registrar on Tuesday for allowing the polls to stay open on the last day of early voting (November 4) so that everyone in line could vote. The suit comes after Trump and the Nevada GOP chair both pointed to reports of a Mexican supermarket, where polls stayed open until 10 to accommodate 2-hour-long lines, as evidence that Democrats were deliberately keeping polls open to accommodate “a certain group.”

    You’d think that seeing long lines of people exercising their right to vote would be inspiring to a presidential candidate. But apparently, Donald Trump sees them as a threat. […]

    Yes, the suit was filed today, and, yes, it is related to early voting.

  202. says

    SC @198. Ha! Yet another moment of delicious schadenfreude. Let’s hope all of the lawsuits Trump decides to file from here on out are subjected to the same fate. It was a mean spirited lawsuit to begin with, let alone the failure to have a clue when it came to the legal process.

    Nerd @199, That’s a great moment. It’s hard for some of us to appreciate her perspective.

  204. says

    David Bossie, one of the head honchos in the Trump campaign said that he would not rule out the possibility of other lawsuits being filed.

  205. says

    Josh Marshall’s amusing take on the lawsuit in Nevada was titled “The Best People,” in a reference to Trump’s claim that he always hires the best people. In fact, I heard Trump on Fox News saying that he had great people representing him out in Nevada. Yeah, right.

    The Judge who held a hearing this morning about Trump’s Nevada lawsuit did not seem very impressed. And it turns out that the lawyers who brought the suit on Trump’s behalf are a construction and commercial insurance lawyer and construction and family law attorney. In other words, not election lawyers.

  206. says

    “In darkness and without fanfare, Gov. Christie votes for Trump”:

    Some things are best done under cover of darkness, and for Gov. Chris Christie that includes voting for Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump.

    With the sky navy blue and sunrise still a half hour away, the governor who serves as Trump’s transition planning chief sped into the parking lot of Mendham Township’s Brookside Engine Company to vote for his controversial friend of 14 years….

  210. Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls says

    Watching MSNBC, and the first exit poll results will be announced shortly.

  212. militantagnostic says

    SC @195

    Look on the bright side – every driver and vehicle tailing someone driving black voters to the polls is one that is unavailable for driving potential Trump voters to the polls. It is very telling how they choose to spend their (probably meager) “ground game” resources.

  214. a_ray_in_dilbert_space says

    SC: “W. and Laura Bush left president line on ballot blank.”

    Given his record in that position, a void seems appropriate.

  216. says

    From Steve Benen:

    That an elected public official did this is ridiculous: “As voters across Georgia went to the polls, Jefferson Riley posted this on his personal Facebook page, which identifies him as the mayor of the Newton County city of Mansfield: ‘Remember the voting days: Republicans vote on Tuesday, 11/8 and Democrats vote on Wednesday, 11/9.’ He said it was a joke. Others thought it was out of line.”

    Nope, not funny.

  217. says

    Projected wins so far:

    Trump wins Kentucky, and Indiana
    Clinton wins Vermont

    Down Ballot:
    Senator Rob Portman projected to win in Ohio.

    In popular vote tallies, Clinton so far has 48.8% and Trump has 43.5%

    Florida looks good for Clinton, though still iffy.

  218. says

    Projected win for Clinton: Illinois, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Maryland, Delaware, Rhode Island, District of Columbia

    Projected win for Trump: Tennessee, Alabama, Oklahoma, Mississippi

  220. says

    Looks like Marco Rubio will win/keep his Senate seat for Florida.

    Add West Virginia to Trump’s projected wins.

    Electoral votes so far:
    Clinton 44
    Trump 31

  222. says

    There is already an overflow crowd at the Javits Center in Manhattan, where Hillary Clinton will hold her (hopefully) victory party.

  224. says

    SC @222, Trump convinced every Republican voter in the U.S. that Hillary Clinton is a criminal. Trump is winning votes by having lied. With only a 9% truthful rating, Trump bamboozled every voter who didn’t take the time to suss out all of his lies.

    Repetition works. Trump repeatedly lied. He lied, but he did it over and over. He created his own fake “truth.” FBI Director Comey seemed to have backed up Trump’s repeated lies for nine days. For the most part, no one made a big deal of it when Comey took that backup away. No real correction was made repeatedly, except that some Republicans took the time to say that Comey was probably pressured to lie when he took the threat away.

    That’s all it took.

    A blustering idiot who lies all the time is winning huge numbers of rural votes. The “we’ll show you!”, “give them the middle finger” people are voting for Trump as revenge for anything they think is wrong.

    This is getting too depressing to watch. I may have to give up.

    Clinton now has 104 electoral votes to Trump’s 137.

    Here are Trump’s projected wins:
    Alabama
    Arkansas
    Indiana
    Kansas
    Kentucky
    Louisiana
    Mississippi
    Nebraska
    North Dakota
    Oklahoma
    South Carolina
    South Dakota
    Tennessee
    Texas
    West Virginia
    Wyoming

  225. says

    Here are Clinton’s projected wins:
    Connecticut
    Delaware
    District of Columbia
    Illinois
    Maryland
    Massachusetts
    New Jersey
    New York
    Rhode Island
    Vermont

  227. Saad says

    Lynna, #225

    Florida, Michigan, North Carolina, Virginia and Ohio are leaning toward Trump.

    That’s devastating. If they go Trump, that will probably be it.

    I’m in shock. I shouldn’t be but I didn’t think America was this bad.

  228. Vivec says

    If Trump wins and fucking brings back that pre-existing conditions nonsense, I hope these “endure 4 years of trump and then get a shifted overton window” fucks don’t forget people like me and my family who are literally in the position of either dying of preventable diseases or going bankrupt pre-obamacare.

  230. What a Maroon, living up to the 'nym says

    Clinton’s pulled ahead in Virginia.

    But at this point, best case scenario is that Clinton wins but the gop holds on to the Senate and House. More ugly times ahead.

  232. says

    Some rural counties in these states that are too close to call went for Romney by 12%, etc. Now they are going for Trump by 40 to 60%. It’s all those small vote amounts coming in from rural counties that is eating into any leads we thought Clinton had.

    It’s not over. Let’s wait and see how this all shakes out. Colorado is leaning toward Clinton. Minnesota is leaning toward Clinton. Some sources have put New Mexico in Clinton’s win column, while others habit leaning her way. Pennsylvania is leaning toward Clinton.

    It is really depressing to see that Trump, with the backing of the KKK, Fox News, Breitbart, The Drudge Report, etc. lied his way this close to a victory. Republicans made this monster, and they made the rightwing media that backs hims up. They can’t put the monster back in a cage.

    As SC pointed out up-thread, Trump and his Super-PACs (and the NRA) are still running ads that say Clinton is under investigation by the FBI. She is not. That’s outright slander.

  234. Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls says

    Boy, are some voters brainwashed. A woman in Michigan who voted for Trump said he would bring back integrity.,
    I don’t think so Tim.

  235. taraskan says

    Don’t you dare make the mistake of blaming Greens, people. Johnson (libertarian) has gotten triple the green vote in most states. If he weren’t running, Clinton would’ve lost it three hours ago. Third parties are interfering with the Trump vote by a much greater margin than Clinton’s.

  236. Vivec says

    I’m blaming everyone who lives in a swing state and voted for not-Hillary. What flavor of not-Hillary they voted for is irrelevant.

  237. Saad says

    This is depressing and infuriating.

    White people have failed. It was their moment and they’re failing miserably.

  238. says

    Update of the list of States Clinton has won:
    California
    Colorado
    Connecticut
    Delaware
    District of Columbia
    Hawaii
    Illinois
    Maryland
    Massachusetts
    New Jersey
    New Mexico
    New York
    Oregon
    Rhode Island
    Vermont
    Virginia

  239. taraskan says

    It isn’t irrelevant. There are many logical problems with that reasoning, but let’s assume you can bound over most of them, which relate to the idea that a green would have otherwise voted Clinton and a libertarian would have otherwise voted Trump – let’s assume those are their locked-in second choices.

    It still misses the point that if you tally votes for Greens for Clinton instead you must logically tally all of Johnson’s votes for Trump. And if you do that, you end up with a greater Trump margin than currently exists every time you run the numbers. If you do not do this, you are erroneously assuming a universe existed where all Green votes were instead cast for Clinton and all Libertarian votes were still cast for Johnson, and what is the point of such a fantasy?

  240. says

    Update of the list of states Trump has won:
    Alabama
    Arkansas
    Florida
    Idaho
    Indiana
    Kansas
    Kentucky
    Louisiana
    Mississippi
    Missouri
    Montana
    Nebraska
    North Carolina
    North Dakota
    Ohio
    Oklahoma
    South Carolina
    South Dakota
    Tennessee
    Texas
    West Virginia
    Wyoming

  242. says

    Current Electoral vote:
    Clinton 209
    Trump 216

    States still too close to call:
    Arizona, leaning Trump
    Georgia, leaning Trump
    Iowa, leaning Trump
    Maine, leaning Clinton
    Michigan, leaning Trump
    Minnesota, leaning Clinton
    Nevada, leaning Clinton
    New Hampshire, leaning Trump
    Pennsylvania, leaning Clinton
    Utah, leaning Trump
    Washington, leaning Trump
    Wisconsin, leaning Trump

    Note that “leaning” indicates who is ahead right now, right at this moment. It does not really count as a prediction.

  245. Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls says

    The difference in Florida, North Carolina, and Georgia is that it appears the rural counties, who were normally apathetic voters who voted slightly more republican that democrat, seemed to have been energized by Trump, turned out to vote, and voted heavily for Trump. That seems to be a consistent theme from the evening.

  247. ck, the Irate Lump says

    So, um, is the U.S. news media and political analysts just figuring out now that white, rural voters tend to vote extremely conservative since the last several decades? I saw people on NBC talking about it like it was a new revelation…

  249. says

    Gee, an enthusiasm gap? People coming out to vote who are usually apathetic, because they hate Hillary Clinton so much? What a surprise! If only someone could have predicted this back during the primaries… you know, maybe they could have run a candidate who had enthusiastic supporters. And avoided the candidate who was publicly perceived as untrustworthy by choosing someone who was admitted to be honest even by their opponents. Of course, that would never happen, and if it did and that candidate lost, it would obviously be their supporters who were to blame for Clinton’s loss. But of course, Clinton can’t lose! She’s the most vetted candidate in history! I read it right here on this site, Diane and Applehead both said so, and Nerd of Redhead backed them up, so it must be true!

  252. Vivec says

    Hooray, we handed the keys to the country over to a fucking fascist that is going to lead to deaths of thousands if any of his policies get put in place, but hey gotta make sure we get in one little jab against those hillary supporters.

  253. says

    The Vicar@248, the Republican strategy would have been pretty simple if Sanders had been chosen. They would have just shown ads with his picture superimposed over a hammer and sickle, with an announcer screaming “Socialist!” over and over for 30 seconds. After all we’re talking about a country where the Democratic Party are considered very left wing, where Hillary Clinton is considered some sort of radical. Or would your choice have been Joe Biden, as much of a party establishment candidate as Clinton is?

  254. Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls says

    Vicar, you never had a viable alternative for your paranoia. Which is why you were dismissed. Without a viable solution, all you are is an overly pendantic crank. Fuck off.

  255. chigau (ever-elliptical) says

    The Vicar (via Freethoughtblogs) #248
    Yay!
    You win!
    Will you now go away and never come back?
    Please?

  256. says

    Given the size of the dark cloud, I’ll take any silver lining I can get. So far, presuming that Trump really does win (as of this moment it appears to not be confirmed) I’ve found four:

    1. Joe Arpaio (sp? I can’t be bothered to look up that jerk’s name) got kicked out, finally. The one really bright spot in the electoral news.

    2. There’s a good chance the Clintons will at long last be gone and we won’t have to deal with Hillary’s endless running for the presidency ever again, and maybe we’ll be spared Chelsea “I never worry about money” Clinton’s inevitable attempt to run as well.

    3. If we’re lucky, this and Brexit will make 2016 be known as “the final year that the Baby Boomers were able to screw everybody over in elections”.

    4. I get to say “I told you so” to all the idiots who thought lining up to support Clinton would work. It’s cold comfort, like discovering that you only have double pneumonia instead of lung cancer, but I saw it coming and as stated I’ll take what I can get.

    Hey, folks, you sold out your consciences to vote for a corporatist warmonger, and you still lost. Next time the Democrats try to get you to support some imbecilic right-of-center person who has no actual ethical standards and determines their views based on the latest polls, remember this. The Democratic party is useless and broken. They had a palpable lead in 2008 with popular support, and they spent two years throwing it away with both hands by pushing the ACA instead of attacking the banks, and then the next six years blaming the Republicans for everything, and kicked the better candidate in the teeth in the 2016 primaries in every way, including not one but two DNC chairs who broke the election rules to try and throw things to Clinton. You would be far better off taking over the Greens, who actually agree with you on most issues, and bending them to your will on the rest, than you will ever be by letting the Democrats, who covertly disagree with you on any issue which involves spending money, bend you to theirs.

  257. Vivec says

    I’m really glad that we get to play “try to survive the next four years so we can have slightly more liberal democrats” game. Just don’t pretend you were doing people like me any favors.

  258. says

    If people in rural counties hate Hillary Clinton, it is in part because Donald Trump and his enablers lied about her every day, every minute of every day.

    She is not under investigation by the FBI.

    She did not sell plutonium to the Russians.

    She did not murder anyone.

    She is not a criminal.

    She is, in short, not the evil demon they made her out to be. If Trump wins, it will be on the back of a pack of lies.

  260. militantagnostic says

    i am now a Christian
    I believe there is a god
    I believe this god can effect events here on earth.
    This god is a complete asshole

  262. says

    @#252, timgueguen

    The Republican strategy would have been pretty simple if Sanders had been chosen. They would have just shown ads with his picture superimposed over a hammer and sickle, with an announcer screaming “Socialist!” over and over for 30 seconds.

    They’ve done the equivalent of that to every Democrat since 1980, at the very least. News flash: people born after about 1975 are not scared of commies. Only the Baby Boomers — who went for Trump anyway — care about it these days. Pandering to that fear is a losing strategy for the Democrats.

    What sank Clinton was her baggage from the 1990s — which Sanders supporters pointed out again and again and were ignored — and the perception that she is dishonest. Whether you agree with that perception or not, and whether you think Trump is any better or not, it hurt her terribly. When Debbie Wasserman Schultz got caught doing everything possible to sabotage the primaries in favor of Clinton, it hurt Clinton, but nowhere near as much as the fact that Clinton put Schultz into the Clinton campaign, endorsed her against her primary challenger, and gave her a big donation after that, and then, when the next DNC chair turned out to have been trying to throw the debates as well? You might as well have made Clinton wear a sign saying “I am an untrustworthy liar” in public at all times. Someone who was too stupid to throw DWS to the wolves and refuse all further attempt to throw the primaries was inevitably going to lose anyway.

  263. militantagnostic says

    Lynna @257

    And if Sanders had won the nomination, they would have lied about him plus “HE’S A SOCIALIST!!!!” at every opportunity.

  264. says

    @#256, Vivec

    I’m really glad that we get to play “try to survive the next four years so we can have slightly more liberal democrats” game. Just don’t pretend you were doing people like me any favors.

    Do you seriously think we were ever going to get more liberal Democrats by supporting right-of-center ones? Whether we’ll get more liberal Democrats or not remains to be seen — personally, I believe the party is so thoroughly captured by Wall Street that they would rather lose every election than move left — but the game you seem to favor definitely can’t be won.

    Every 4 years since 1996, the Democrats march out and say “the Republicans are monsters, we know we’re running an economically and militarily right-of-center candidate, but think of the Supreme Court! If you’ll support us this time, we promise we’ll give you a better candidate next time! This isn’t the year to take a stand!” And then they either lose, and blame us for not having enough faith, or win and the next candidate is another economically and militarily right-of-center twit. It’s exactly like faith healers: if your disease gets better, it’s because of God, but if it gets worse, it’s because of you. Time to break the cycle and get away from the hucksters, folks.

    (Besides, if the TPP passes — and the Democrats, absolutely unforgivably, have been the ones pushing it — then the Supreme Court will be an essentially moot question.)

  265. Ichthyic says

    4. I get to say “I told you so”

    do you enjoy both being full of shit AND an asshole that nobody here wants around?

    why do you persist?

    oh wait… I get it… you suffer from serious NPD, just like Trump! that explains everything.

    wait, I recall telling people this about you months and months ago.

    do I get to add that to my list?

  267. Ichthyic says

    the Democrats, absolutely unforgivably, have been the ones pushing it

    democrats, like Hillary Clinton.

    oh, wait, no, she changed her mind, and even explained why she no longer supports it

    go get hit by a bus, you utter fuckwit.

  268. Vivec says

    Do you seriously think we were ever going to get more liberal Democrats by supporting right-of-center ones?

    No, because that was never a fucking goal of mine to begin with. My goal was to vote for the president who won’t lead the fucking effort to repeal a policy that is keeping my family from dying or having to sell our house to pay for medicine. Your stupid overton window bullshit doesn’t even fucking register on the scale of things I give a shit about.

  269. chigau (ever-elliptical) says

    Ichthyic
    it is possible that
    *The Vicar (via Freethoughtblogs)*
    has you [hushed]
    .
    we could talk about
    *The Vicar (via Freethoughtblogs)*
    behind his back

  270. militantagnostic says

    The Vicar @261

    the perception that she is dishonest.

    Because the people who voted for Trump value honesty so much.

    Although, I will admit that perhaps had Bernie won the nomination, he might have shifted the Overton Window.

  271. ck, the Irate Lump says

    The Vicar (via Freethoughtblogs) wrote:

    Do you seriously think we were ever going to get more liberal Democrats by supporting right-of-center ones?

    Would you care to explain why having a right-of-center candidate lose to a far right candidate will cause the party to move leftward rather than rightward? I can’t see that ever doing anything but push the party rightward as they chase “moderate” voters who voted for the other party.

    (Besides, if the TPP passes — and the Democrats, absolutely unforgivably, have been the ones pushing it — then the Supreme Court will be an essentially moot question.)

    That conspiracy theory again? All your free trade agreements have clauses like that, and the U.S. federal government routinely just ignores judgements that it doesn’t like. Those provisions exists so that your corporations can bully smaller nations around by threatening that the U.S. gov’t will impose consequences on them if they don’t comply. It is extremely unlikely that it will ever be able to supersede U.S. domestic law.

  272. says

    @#266, Ichthyic

    the Democrats, absolutely unforgivably, have been the ones pushing it

    democrats, like Hillary Clinton.
    oh, wait, no, she changed her mind, and even explained why she no longer supports it

    She helped write the thing, and she hasn’t explained why she supported it all the way up until the terms were made public; we have a record via WikiLeaks showing that nothing serious changed between her last statement of support and her announcement (prompted by Sanders’ public attacks on it) that she didn’t like it any more. IIRC, there’s also a leaked e-mail in which somebody in the campaign admits that she only changed her public stance to try to shut up the unions, and had already prepared to switch back after the election… which would put her in alignment with Obama, who is still pushing it.

    But hey, economics don’t matter any more — to twist Cheney’s famous line, Obama proved trade doesn’t matter.

    go get hit by a bus, you utter fuckwit.

    Charming.

  274. Vivec says

    Yeah, to be fair, you getting hit by a car would probably put an undue burden on the person that had the misfortune of hitting you. Kindly pull an Anton Yelchin and hit yourself with a car.

  275. tomh says

    “What the fuck is wrong with this country?”

    The same thing that’s always been wrong with it. This is the country that elected Nixon and Reagan and Bush and Bush. They all promise to fix everything, whether it’s a secret plan to end the war in Vietnam, or a plan to cut taxes, people swallow all the promises. Now we’ve got someone who makes the biggest promises of all, he’s going to fix immigration, fix terrorism, fix the Middle East, fix everything. All by himself. That seems to be what half the people want. And now we all have him.

  276. says

    @#269, militantagnostic

    the perception that she is dishonest.

    Because the people who voted for Trump value honesty so much.

    Yeah, I know. Trump is absolutely terrible; I think he’s not just a liar but has some kind of cognitive disfunction going on which prevents him from even thinking clearly enough to avoid contradicting himself. But we’re talking about the hard cold reality of electoral politics, and the major thing which was hurting Hillary Clinton all along was the perception that she was dishonest. There were exit polls conducted at early voting sites, and there were literally people coming out admitting they had voted for Trump because Clinton seemed so dishonest. She and her handlers and her fellows in the party decided that that was not terribly important, and kept making major, boneheaded mistakes: not abolishing DWS immediately, letting Brazile leak debate questions to her, deleting those e-mails from her server before turning it over to the FBI… Whether it makes sense to non-Trump voters or not, those things hurt her, and they hurt her predictably, and she was always a bad choice because she suffers from a kind of hubris that makes her believe she’s just somehow above commonsense basics like that.

    (Heck, she could even have avoided the whole e-mail server thing if she had been willing to listen to “little people” — one of the e-mails which was released from the FBI’s investigation was from the guy who set the server up, specifically saying that he didn’t think the server was secure enough for State Department business and should he get in touch with their IT people about it? She replied “don’t bother about it.”)

  277. ck, the Irate Lump says

    Vivec wrote:

    Kindly pull an Anton Yelchin and hit yourself with a car.

    Hey, that’s unfair to Anton Yelchin. He didn’t deserve to be crushed by his own car due to a manufacturer transmission defect.

  278. taraskan says

    @Vicar

    There are two problems with your reasoning I’d like you to understand. Full disclosure – I did favor Sanders over Clinton in the primaries and share the exact same resentments about Clinton you do – she is right-of-center, Clinton mistrust did start in the 90s, the two Clinton terms there were a disaster, etc. I also voted for Clinton today. But the nature of the Trump victory suggests very strongly that Sanders would not have won and here is why.

    First, although undeniably more liberals would have turned out to vote for Sanders in a general election than for Clinton, those voters do not count, because that missing constituency were young college-age Sanders supporters, all in blue states and urban districts that did swing toward Clinton regardless. We would see higher voter turnout but not necessarily increased number of districts won in battleground states. Despite being a socialist, rural and factory democrats of the American South and Midwest did not favor Sanders in the primary – Clinton received nearly 100% of union support.

    Second, where Clinton lost because of votes against her does not mean that the same constituency wouldn’t have done the same against Sanders, unless perhaps Sanders was prepared to run a much dirtier campaign than Clinton was (and should have). People disgruntled with Clinton that would not be as disgruntled with Sanders are all liberal, whereas the shape of the conservative Clinton-hater, and the shape of a conservative Sanders-hater, look pretty much the same.

    Had Clinton lost any college towns or coastal cities, it would be a good argument they should have picked Sanders in the primary, but as that isn’t the case, it is dodgy at best to suggest it as a viable alternative.

    You also have to keep in mind the one solid boost in polls Clinton did receive, was far and away from Trump’s misogynist remarks a few short weeks ago, which would not have had the effect they did with a male candidate like Sanders (sad-but-true).

    The last, and perhaps most important thing, is that the extra people Trump brought to the polls also did-in the senate battles, as people who would not ordinarily have cared about a senate race, found themselves already at the polls and ticked everything along his column before they left. It is not clear a replacement of Clinton with Sanders would have changed that, and that is perhaps the worse outcome from all this. After all, a president’s power is pretty limited when they don’t also have house support.

    Finally, even though Vicar’s thesis is wrong, other commenters do not have to prove even more vindictive than Vicar is being. Everyone is upset and tensions are high, but get a grip and stop acting like if we don’t show unflinching solidarity in defeat it’s as if we’re speaking ill of the dead. The comparisons of Vicar to Trump, accusations of mental instability, and death threats – and there are all of these in the comments above me, are not just uncalled for, they are against the TOS of posting here.

  279. microraptor says

    The same thing that’s always been wrong with it. This is the country that elected Nixon and Reagan and Bush and Bush.

    Here’s the thing: Trump makes all of those candidates look good by comparison.

  280. Beatrice, an amateur cynic looking for a happy thought says

    Wow, let’s try and come up with imaginative ways to tell someone to go kill himself.
    Hahaha
    That was sarcastic, btw.

    Vicar is an asshole, don’t try to out-asshole him.

    In other news, what else has happened in this election besides a hate mongering fascist becoming the next “leader of the free world”? Or “the world that’s becoming less free by the minute”.
    Besides Joe Arpaio getting kicked out, what else? Any good news?

  281. EveryZig says

    Agreeing with taraskan and Beatrice. The news is miserable, but seeing multiple commenters suddenly being fine with telling someone to kill themself is in itself disturbing.

    @Beatrice, an amateur cynic looking for a happy thought
    There is some good news here in NC: It looks like we at least be getting rid of Governor “Bathroom Bill” McCrory

  282. taraskan says

    Beatrice wrote

    Besides Joe Arpaio getting kicked out, what else? Any good news?

    The market tanked, so we might get another safety measure out of it. Also Trump has such a childlike rage against banks since nobody will loan him money anymore, that he’s weirdly in favor of a revamped Glass-Steagall (only thing I agree with), so he’ll fuck the economy in the short term but perhaps not the long term. I wouldn’t start buying bonds, though.

  283. KG says

    Agreeing with taraskan, Beatrice and EveryZig – anger at smug gits like The Vicar is a completely understandable response, but keep it within decent bounds.

    As for whether there’s any good news – well, we escape the downsides of a Clinton presidency – her hawkishness and economic neoliberalism. Which are admittedly hardly visible in comparison with the best case of a Trump Presidency: social regression, attacks on the rights of anyone who is not a healthy white male cishet Christian, an upsurge of racist attacks, huge tax cuts for the rich, accelerating increases in economic inequality, measures at all levels to tilt the results of future elections, the destruction of Obamacare, abandonment of any attempt to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, dangerous unpredictability abroad. The worst case: outright fascism andor nuclear war.

    A period of depression, fear, rage, feelings of helplessness is inevitable. I feel all these things, and as a reasonbly well off non-American with multiple layers of privilege, I’m not directly affected – yet. My heartfelt sympathies, for what that’s worth, to those of you who are.

    But we must get through that, and fight back.
    “Don’t waste any time mourning, organize!” – Joe Hill, shortly before his execution, in a telegram to Bill Haywood

  284. Akira MacKenzie says

    Do you seriously think we were ever going to get more liberal Democrats by supporting right-of-center ones?

    Do you seriously think there are going to be any liberals left after Trump and the Republican are finished with this country? Thanks to assholes like you, we’re getting a front row seat to our own demise.

    Fuck you very, very much, Vicar. I just hope to live long enough to see you dragged in front of the firing squad before it’s my turn.

  285. A. Noyd says

    For fuck’s sake. Even my delinquent sixth grade students here in Japan know Trump is terrible.

  286. taraskan says

    Well, let’s not sound armageddon just yet. Trump was willing to say anything to get elected, but with a conservative senate he has no need to keep any of his latter campaign promises.

    Trump’s original position on national health care was ‘everybody needs it’. Obamacare has actually made money for insurance companies, since people who weren’t paying anything toward health insurance before now are paying $1-3K a year on it. Trump is a terrible businessman, but he knows what a profit looks like and his throw-away lines about actually removing Obamacare seem to me to be just that.

    Huge tax cuts – the senate does not need a president in their pocket to achieve this, so it’s not really productive to lay it at his feet. He’ll welcome it, of course.

    Nuclear war – hardly. He’s in Putin’s pocket and we owe China too much money.

    Social regression – for the most part yep, but again the senate doesn’t need Trump to do it. So long as the SC is intact, we shouldn’t see a single reversed social right, only the lack of forward-thinking social policies. The distinction between policies and rights is important here. Until they claim the SC, they cannot even try to repeal protections for abortion or gay marriage. Also, historically the SC is quite reticent to repeal earlier decisions unless there is overwhelming popular support for it, or a majority of the states have already done so where applicable.

    I see Trump and the Senate butting heads the most when it comes to the budget. There are limits to what can be cut and the country still run properly, and (Wall Street) republicans by and large do not trust him as a businessman to make those decisions. They are not going to build a wall around Mexico.

    Climate change, equality, fundamentalism – Trump does not care about these things; he’ll happily let them slide as gimmes to court favor with house repubs, should he need it, but I don’t see him actively getting the ball rolling. Whatever he says, Trump is not religious, but nor does he care about religion’s abuses.

    Remember why Trump wanted to run in the first place. He has no particular driving force to accomplish anything other than fortune and power. He is a bully who likes being in as secure a position as possible, and so long as he gets to live and act like a regent, he’ll be controllable so long as there are some things he has to compromise on. I don’t think he even wants a legacy, he just wants to ride the fame train as far as it takes him.

  288. Saad says

    The 45th President of the United States:

    I moved on her, actually. You know, she was down on Palm Beach. I moved on her, and I failed. I’ll admit it.

    I did try and fuck her. She was married.

    I moved on her like a bitch. But I couldn’t get there. And she was married. Then all of a sudden I see her, she’s now got the big phony tits and everything. She’s totally changed her look.

    Yeah, that’s her. With the gold. I better use some Tic Tacs just in case I start kissing her. You know, I’m automatically attracted to beautiful — I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.

    Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.

    Even more mortifying now.

  289. Saad says

    The 45th President of the United States:

    I moved on her, actually. You know, she was down on Palm Beach. I moved on her, and I failed. I’ll admit it.

    I did try and fuck her. She was married.

    I moved on her like a b***h. But I couldn’t get there. And she was married. Then all of a sudden I see her, she’s now got the big phony tits and everything. She’s totally changed her look.

    Yeah, that’s her. With the gold. I better use some Tic Tacs just in case I start kissing her. You know, I’m automatically attracted to beautiful — I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.

    Grab ’em by the p***y. You can do anything.

    Even more mortifying now.

    But there’s no rape culture in America, guys!!!

  291. Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls says

    Did my part down ballot. Helped to flip the US Senate seat from republican to democrat, and the same for the US House seat in my district. Helped to retain the democrat state rep seat.
    Vicar the deplorable…

    Do you seriously think we were ever going to get more liberal Democrats by supporting right-of-center ones?

    Support doesn’t matter. Electing does. And election to office requires getting the middle to vote for you. Candidates too far to the left who don’t seem innocuous will not be elected. Remember, Sanders lost the primary because he had 3 million less votes than Clinton. Stein got only 1% of the vote as she was seen as a flake.

  293. KG says

    taraskan@285,

    You don’t seem to have noticed that Trump has promised to renege on the Paris agreement, shred environmental protection, expand fossil fuel use, expel millions of people, forbid Muslims from entering the USA. He’s promised to nominate a forced-birther to the Supreme Court, and will not doubt do the same for other judicial vacancies – of which there are many. As for the other things you mention – if Congress don’t need the President to do them, why haven’t they been done under Obama?

  295. says

    I am wondering how the election of Trump is going to affect President Obama’s work to change the processes that brought us gerrymandered voting districts. That’s his chosen focus after he leaves the White House.

  296. Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls says

    I am wondering how the election of Trump is going to affect President Obama’s work to change the processes that brought us gerrymandered voting districts. That’s his chosen focus after he leaves the White House.

    Shouldn’t effect his plans. In fact, it may help in 2018, when tradition says the party not in the White House tends to gain overall in that election.

  297. taraskan says

    @KG

    They won’t need the president to do them next term, not now.

    Nothing out of Trump’s mouth has been true, why should he care about far-right promises he never uttered before in his life? He’s an east-coast republican and always has been. He can’t nominate anyone to the SC if they don’t retire, and he has no control over that. Before he began campaigning – in fact even a little bit into it, he was in favor of national health care and abortion. I think we have every reason to believe he’ll revert to what he really believes now that he doesn’t have to kiss any babies.

    You aren’t an American, so you may not know this, but the presidency is the weakest of our branches of government. Every potential abuse may seem major but is really checked by the legislative branch. Presidents have gone off the rails before, but in each case they had the complicity of both houses to do it. They can veto bills, but their veto can be overturned. They can take military action if they cite it as an emergency, but only for a maximum period of 60 days unless congress formally declares a state of war. A president can issue clemency in individual criminal cases. The president declares a budget at the start of the year, but congress has to approve it. The president appoints SC judges but the Senate confirms them. Lastly the president is a figurehead for foreign affairs and gets to take part in treaty formation.

    If horrible stuff happens, it’s ultimately Congress’ fault for going along with it, is my point. For some things to be approved they need a simple majority, but for a lot of it they need a two-thirds majority, and that is really hard to achieve.

    I’m tired of these ‘Trump’s awful, but…’ posts. I hope people get that none of this is a defense of the man, but general information that by all rights should be adequate to calm unrealistic fears of deportations and wars and other campaign rhetoric. Trump made a lot of enemies to get here, will be even before taking office one of the least popular presidents ever, and therefore has to tread more carefully than you may think. Stephen Fry said it best, “I think Trump will be bored as president.”

  298. Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls says

    I recall a MSNBC panel being asked about the possibility that the ACA would be revoked.
    The consensus seemed to be that the more practical politicians, understanding the wrath of 20 million+ Americans without healthcare coverage, the insurance companies losing the revenue, and the hospitals/doctors now having to bill patients unlikely/unable to pay, that some type of way to vent opposition to the plan without revoking it would occur. Like Ryan and house voting to repeal, but McConnell and the senate holding up action so it never gets sent to the president.

  299. says

    From a Talking Points Memo reader:

    Now we get to test if the press is really free and if American institutions are truly robust. I’m starting to organize today to put in my bit to help retake the House or the Senate in two years. I am going to finally get my US citizenship as an act of defiance and resistance. I have refused to get it so far – I have lived here 20 years. I have even entertained leaving. But no. I do not have the luxury of bailing out, or of despairing. My kid is growing up here. This is where I live. These are my friends. I care about my community. So I will become a US citizen.

    We will have to manage the damage. It will be very high to incalculable. But don’t forget economist Robert Fogel’s lesson. The immovable force of demographic change points to brighter days ahead. It will take longer than hoped for. We are not alone. Fired up. Ready to go.

    Talking Points Memo link

    I, for one, am really disappointed about the taco trucks. Now we won’t have one on every corner. (Resorting to lame jokes because, really, I’m too worried to do anything else. Having Mike Pence run the day-to-day business of the Executive Branch doesn’t reassure me.)

  300. says

    Here’s one thing we will see in the near future, Trump (or his lawyers) in court:

    […] As president, Trump will bring unprecedented conflicts of interest into office. He is embroiled a number of ongoing legal battles, some of which have court dates set for right after the election. […]

    https://thinkprogress.org/hate-wins-2c48768814b2

    Yes, Clinton is winning the popular vote.

    Yesterday, after I voted, I teared up. I thought I had, finally, voted for the first female president of the USA.

  301. says

    Analyzing the many failures that led to this election result, Jan Millhiser, made some cogent points. Excerpts below:

    American failed because our media turned this race into an election about trivialities. Donald Trump is a racist authoritarian who knows little about policy and doesn’t appear inclined to learn. Hillary Clinton is a former senator and secretary of state who had sub-optimal IT practices in one of her most recent jobs. If you want the full account of why Clinton’s emails should have never been a major story — much less a candidate-defining incident — read Matt Yglesias’ piece on this subject. But the short of it is this: “In total, network newscasts have, remarkably, dedicated more airtime to coverage of Clinton’s emails than to all policy issues combined.”

    I don’t like the “blame the media” trope, but I do acknowledge the major part played by Fox News, Breitbart, and other rightwing media in giving Trump a pass on … well, on almost everything. I also blame them for exponentially multiplying and exaggerating any bad news related to Hillary Clinton.

    And they had help from the FBI.

    […] America failed because the FBI Director manipulated the election. Maybe FBI Director James Comey did not intend to swing the election. Indeed, it is overwhelmingly likely that Comey did not intend to swing the election. But the fact of the matter is that the Justice Department’s tradition of not injecting itself into elections exists for a reason. It exists because voters are especially likely to be prejudiced by negative information indicating that a candidate is caught up in the criminal justice system, even if the charges are bogus or baseless.

    Yet Comey didn’t just violate this norm, he held a July press conference where he editorialized about Clinton’s carelessness. And then, just when the story seemed dead, he reinvigorated it eleven days before the election with a vague letter about new evidence that turned out to be nothing at all.

    America failed because FBI agents intentionally manipulated the election. What is it called when elements within a nation’s internal security agency intentionally try to swing an election? Because that’s what happened here. It’s been widely reported that anti-Clinton elements within the FBI leaked selective and, at times, misleading, information to the press in an effort to discredit Clinton. It worked. […]

    The Republican Party sold its soul a long time ago.

    [The Republican Party] made opposition to Democrats its highest value. It sold its faithful on fantasies about invading immigrants, rampant voter fraud, rigged elections, magical tax cuts, and the creeping threat of socialism. It became the kind of party that could nominate Donald Trump.

    America failed because half of Americans are racist. Some black journalists are calling the election a “white-lash.”

    We don’t know the full impact of voter suppression tactics backed by Republican legislators in many states.

    At least half of Americans are sexist. That half is congratulating itself not just for defeating Hillary Clinton, but for bringing down a woman.

    America failed because the institutions that maintain liberal democracy are fragile, and we allowed them to collectively fall into decay.

    This is not a complete list, nor a complete analysis, but it is a way to talk about this loss.

  302. KG says

    taraskan@295,

    They won’t need the president to do them next term, not now.

    That doesn’t make any sort of sense. Either they need at least the President’s aquiescence, or they don’t. If they do, why would Trump block them? If they don’t, why haven’t they done them?

    He can’t nominate anyone to the SC if they don’t retire, and he has no control over that.

    He can already replace Scalia. And several on the court are in their late 70s or older, and could die or become ill. That’s assuming Trump doesn’t find ways to make their tenure so uncomfortable they feel they have to go. This is a man without conscience, or any respect for the rule of law. He will also be appointing scores of judges in lower courts – and for that he won’t even need to get the filibuster removed.

    Presidents have gone off the rails before, but in each case they had the complicity of both houses to do it.

    And what makes you think Trump won’t have it? He is the one who won the Republican Party the Presidency. Those in the party who went against him as candidate Trump have been humiliated. How many are going to stand up to President Trump?

    They can veto bills, but their veto can be overturned.

    With a 2/3 majority in both houses. Which of course meant Obama could veto any Bill to destroy Obamacare, or attack the rights of LGBTQ people or the right to abortion, or social security… You really think Trump’s going to do that? He doesn’t give a shit if millions suffer as a result. Oh, I expect there’ll be some pretence at a replacement for Obamacare, but that’s all it will be.

    They can take military action if they cite it as an emergency, but only for a maximum period of 60 days unless congress formally declares a state of war.

    The President can order a nuclear launch and legally, no-one has a veto.

    Lastly the president is a figurehead for foreign affairs and gets to take part in treaty formation.

    And repudiation – as Reagan withdrew from the International Court of Justice. The New York Times thinks this “figurehead’s” election “Promises to Upend the International Order”. But I guess their journalists are non-Americans, ignorant of how powerless the President really is.

    Dream on.

  303. says

    Some traders on the floor on the stock market on Wall Street booed and chanted “lock her up” during Hillary Clinton’s very gracious concession speech.

  304. says

    From Steve Benen:

    In Florida, Hillary Clinton lost by about 1.4% of the vote – but if Jill Stein’s supporters and half of Gary Johnson’s backers had voted Democratic, Trump would have lost the state.

    Similarly, in Pennsylvania, Clinton lost by about 1.1% of the vote – but if Jill Stein’s supporters and half of Gary Johnson’s backers had voted Democratic, Trump would have lost the state.

    In Wisconsin, Clinton lost by about 1% of the vote – but if Stein’s supporters had voted Democratic, Trump would have lost the state.

    In Michigan, Clinton appears to be on track to lose by about 0.3% of the vote – but if half of Stein’s supporters had voted Democratic, Trump would have lost the state.

  307. says

    SC, good quote to post in comment 304.

    Here’s another take on a similar sentiment:

    […] The next four years are going to fucking suck. All the progress we made the last eight years will be lost, and we’ll be starting from zero.

    I ask one thing for now: please stop the talk about leaving the country. […] We don’t have to resort to hate and voter suppression to win. Our core voters aren’t dying off; they are growing. Arizona, Georgia, Texas are the future. The Rust Belt is … waning. […]

    No one is leaving this country. We love it, and we love our people. So we’re going to fight for it.

    But for now, let’s take a moment to grieve, because America isn’t what we thought it was. […]

    Link

  308. says

    Followup to comment 305: and let’s keep a close eye on Paul Ryan. That guy’s economic plans are regressive and dangerous. He is, perhaps, a more dangerous man than Trump.

  309. raven says

    I refused to make any predictions in North American Crazyland.
    But I did relax a bit going into the election.

    All the polls and subpolls seemed to show Hillary with a small but comfortable lead.
    So much for the polls.
    As I wrote way above, they seem to be getting less accurate, not more. Bot 538 and Sam Wang at Princeton were simply wrong.

    And good luck to everyone. I/we are going to need it and a lot more.

  310. Hj Hornbeck says

    raven @307:

    As I wrote way above, they seem to be getting less accurate, not more. Bot 538 and Sam Wang at Princeton were simply wrong.

    Oddly enough, they were also the most right. I’ve been tracking the accuracy of six different poll aggregators, and Sam Wang’s model sits in first place. I suspect that’s because only a dozen or so of the 50 states were competitive, and his model gave really high probabilities to the rest. It essentially gamed the system; if you use a weighted Brier metric, so that states with more electoral votes count more, Five Thirty Eight’s model beats Princeton’s.

    As for Silver’s model, it gave an 11% chance of this kind of result, more than any other model. He caught a lot of flack for being as pessimistic as he was, but the warning signs that model was emitting turned out to be bang-on.

    There was actually less polling error this time around than in 2012, in fact; pollsters underestimated Obama’s support by 3 points, yet it looks like the national polls were off by about 2 in 2016. Brexit’s error was 4 points, the 2015 UK general election’s polls were off by 7. That error of 2 just happened to break in the worst possible way for Clinton, threading through the electoral college system to break her “firewall.”

  311. says

    Jihadist responses to Trump’s win:

    […] Al-Qaida linked Jordanian cleric Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi tweeted Wednesday morning that “#Trump’s term may be the beginning of America’s fragmentation and the era of its breakup” and that “#Trump reveals the true mentality of the Americans, and their racism toward Muslims and Arabs and everything.”

    A media official for Jabhat Fateh al-Sham (which recently formally broke ties with al-Qaida but is still considered a terrorist group by the United States) tweeted that “Trump’s victory is a powerful slap to those promoting the benefits of democratic mechanisms.” […]

    There’s good reason to suspect that, despite Trump’s promises to “bomb the shit out of them,” ISIS is pretty happy about this news as well. An analysis of pro-ISIS online chatter by Mara Revkin and Ahmad Mhidi in Foreign Affairs in August found that its followers strongly preferred Trump, mostly because his “anti-Muslim rhetoric plays into ISIS’ narrative of a bipolar world in which the West is at war with Islam” and because of “hopes that Trump will radicalize Muslims in the United States and Europe and inspire them to commit lone-wolf attacks in their home countries.”

    As one pro-ISIS post on the group’s favorite encrypted messaging app Telegram put it:

    The “facilitation” of Trump’s arrival in the White House must be a priority for jihadists at any cost!!!

    ISIS has been facing a pretty bleak outlook over the past few weeks, so this may be a rare bit of promising news for them.

    Slate link

  312. Hj Hornbeck says

    Meanwhile,

    At Trump’s election night party at the Midtown Hilton Hotel in New York, [Omarosa Manigault, a surrogate of Donald Trump] told Independent Journal Review that “it’s so great our enemies are making themselves clear so that when we get in to the White House, we know where we stand,” adding: “If [Senator Lindsey Graham] felt his interests was with that candidate, God bless him. I would never judge anybody for exercising their right to and the freedom to choose who they want. But let me just tell you, Mr. Trump has a long memory and we’re keeping a list.”

    That does not sound ominous in the slightest.

  313. says

    This is a followup to comment 223, “Repetition works.” Repeated lies from the rightwing did become the “truth” about Hillary Clinton.

    Here are some quotes from Trump voters who are not economically stressed, and not under-educated:

    […] “It’s not a vote for him; it’s a vote against Hillary,” Ken Stulik, a real-estate agent, told me, after casting his ballot. Stulik is genial and articulate, a persuasive spokesman for the charms of downtown Clifton (“A five-star restaurant right here, a four-star restaurant right there”), but on politics he harbors deep worries. “I’m convinced that she is corrupt and a criminal, and I fear for our country if she’s elected.” […]

    “It’s almost certain to me that the Clinton Global Initiative has taken hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign investments. She may be indebted to these people in some way. So we may have certainly been sold out by her. I worry about that. I mean, what if someone’s, you know, Qatar or Saudi Arabia, says, ‘Hey, remember that five hundred million dollars I gave you? I’m calling it a favor now.’ “ He added, “I’m concerned that she’s a globalist and she doesn’t have the sovereignty of the United States in her best interests. I think she’ll be so mired in scandal and controversy that she’s not going to have a lot of time to get stuff done. So it might be a sort of lame-duck Presidency right from the get-go.” […]

    I encountered Jaclyn Miller, a genial tax accountant in her mid-thirties. I asked how she voted. She winced and laughed. “I voted for Trump, begrudgingly,” she said.

    “It was the lesser of two evils, in my mind. I’m definitely a fiscal conservative, and the corruption and everything from Hillary, just, I couldn’t do it,” she said. “She’s not trustworthy.” […]

    I met Sandra Bittner, […] Her late husband of fifty-six years had worked at Apple Computer, which provided financial security; beginning in the seventies, Bittner herself ran a building-and-construction firm. “And I ran it successfully,” she said. “So I understand what it takes.”

    She was unmoved by the prospect of Clinton becoming the first woman President. “This woman has lied her way her entire life,” she said. “She and Bill Clinton are the most corrupt couple in politics today.”

    New Yorker link

  314. says

    […] The Russian leadership appeared mostly heartened by Clinton’s defeat. The State Duma, the lower house of the Russian parliament, greeted the news of Trump’s victory with an ovation. […]

    NBC News link

  319. ck, the Irate Lump says

    I’m sure this surprises no one, but neo-nazis are certainly feeling emboldened by Trump’s win.
    Police investigating two swastikas painted on South Philly building:

    Philadelphia police have responded to a South Philly property where two swastikas were spray-painted on the empty building’s windows sometime Wednesday morning.

    The symbols were scrawled in black paint on the former Meglio Furs building at 1300 S. Broad St. In one instance, the swastika appears to replace the letter T in the word “Trump.” In the second, it was accompanied by the German phrase “Sieg Heil 2016.”

    Amazing how many of these groups got the message that his campaign was about racism despite the weak assertions to the contrary by so many.

  320. says

    We should look at the fine print behind Trump’s plan to “[…] rebuild our infrastructure, which will become, by the way, second to none. And we will put millions of our people to work as we rebuild it.”

    […] Under Trump’s plan … the federal government would offer tax credits to private investors interested in funding large infrastructure projects, who would put down some of their own money up front, then borrow the rest on the private bond markets. They would eventually earn their profits on the back end from usage fees, such as highway and bridge tolls (if they built a highway or bridge) or higher water rates (if they fixed up some water mains). So instead of paying for their new roads at tax time, Americans would pay for them during their daily commute. And of course, all these private developers would earn a nice return at the end of the day.

    The federal government already offers credit programs designed to help states and cities team up with private-sector investors to finance new infrastructure. Trump’s plan is unusual because, as written, it seems to be targeted at fully private projects, which are less common.

    Slate Link

    Steve Benen notes some of the drawbacks of such a plan:

    […] The first is that’s probably a more expensive route, because it costs more for private businesses, which pay higher interest rates and need to make a profit, to borrow than for governments to do the same. As a Washington Post report added last week, the plan “would likely impose substantial costs in the form of tolls and fees on the people using the new infrastructure.”

    Which leads us to the second and related problem: “new construction would only occur in communities where it is urgently needed if private investors were convinced users could afford to pay,” the Post explained.

    In other words, areas with lower-income residents would be the least likely to see the benefits, because private investors would seek bigger returns elsewhere.

    So, sure, it was nice to hear Trump talk about infrastructure in his victory speech, but as Americans will notice over the next four years, it’s best not to take his rhetoric at face value.

    Private construction companies will get richer, poorer neighborhoods needing infrastructure will likely be ignored, and working people traveling to and from work will pay a daily fee they can ill afford.

    I’m not convinced that privatizing our roads, bridges, schools, airports, etc. is a good thing.

  321. says

    Now that the election is over, and the Russian connection can no longer hurt Trump’s chances of winning, the Russians are admitting that they had a relationship with Trump’s team:

    Russia said it was in contact with President-elect Donald Trump’s team during the U.S. election campaign, despite repeated denials by the Republican candidate’s advisers that any links existed.

    “There were contacts” before the election, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said Thursday, according to the Interfax news service. “We continue this work of course,” he said, without giving details of what the contacts were.

    [quoted from Bloomberg Politics]

    From Steve Benen:

    […] The same report added that Russia’s Foreign Ministry requested meetings with Hillary Clinton’s campaign, which refused to have pre-election discussions, but members of Trump’s campaign accepted meetings with Russian officials.

    As the Washington Post added, Ryabkov also told Russia’s state-run news agency that “quite a few” members of Trump’s team “have been staying in touch with Russian representatives” ahead of the American election.

    Mr. Comey, if you’re reading this, it seems like the kind of detail U.S. voters probably should’ve known before casting their ballots.

    Keep in mind, there are at least two angles to a controversy like this one. The first is that Trump, who has a nasty habit of dishonesty, denied during the campaign that his team was in contact with Russian officials. According to Russia’s Deputy Foreign Minister, the president-elect’s denials weren’t true. […]

    Postscript: While I suspect Republicans will try to downplay the significance of developments like these, consider a hypothetical. Imagine it’s 2008, and Putin’s government, worried about John McCain’s saber-rattling, takes steps to steal McCain campaign documents to boost Barack Obama. Then we learn that members of Obama’s team were having back-channel discussions with Russian officials, even while the Democrat denied the existence of these meetings. Do you suppose a story like that would be a big deal?

    Link

  322. Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls says

    It appears the US House is not interested in building a wall if they have to pay for it.

    Republicans in the House of Representatives hope to offer President-elect Donald Trump an alternate plan to his proposed U.S.-Mexico border wall, a first test by lawmakers from his own party of one of his key campaign promises.
    Just a day after Trump’s stunning election victory over Democrat Hillary Clinton, congressional aides told Reuters the lawmakers wanted to meet with Trump’s advisers to discuss a less costly option to his “big, beautiful, powerful wall.”
    The plan would involve more border fencing and additional border staffing with federal agents, many of whom belong to labor unions that supported Trump’s candidacy, the aides said.
    Double layers of fencing would be extended along parts of the roughly 2,000-mile (3,200-km) border, rather than constructing a brick-and-mortar wall, according to the proposal.
    A House Republican aide and a Department of Homeland Security official said a wall was not realistic because it would block visibility for border agents and cut through rugged terrain, as well as bodies of water and private land.

    Even manpower to patrol the lesser wall is a problem

    The National Border Patrol Council, a union representing border agents, said the agency had already had a difficult time meeting hiring goals mandated by Congress.

  323. Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls says

    Not so easy to repeal the ACA as Trump believes.

    Republican President-elect Donald Trump vowed on the campaign trail to repeal Obamacare, but making good on that promise may be easier said than done.
    President Barack Obama’s 2010 national healthcare reform law extended medical insurance to 25 million more people by expanding the Medicaid plan for the poor and creating subsidized coverage for individuals.
    Republican lawmakers, who have voted more than 50 times to repeal all or part of the law, have begun pressing Trump to deliver. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said on Wednesday repealing Obamacare is a “pretty high item on our agenda” for the new Congress.[nL1N1DA2ZE]
    But a complete repeal of Obama’s Affordable Care Act may not be immediately in the cards, as Republican lawmakers now hold 51 seats in the Senate at latest count, well short of the 60 seats required to overturn it.
    Instead, health policy experts said, Trump could try to dismantle key elements through a process called budget reconciliation. That would allow him to eliminate funding for the income-based subsidies that make the new insurance plans affordable, or cut the money providing expanded Medicaid benefits in 31 states.
    “Some of the policy experts on the Republican side would say tearing it up and starting over would be very disruptive,” said Paul Howard, director of health policy at the conservative Manhattan Institute.
    Parts of the law have been weakened through legal challenges. Several of the largest U.S. health insurers have pulled out of the exchanges for individual coverage after losing money on a sicker-than-expected group of patients. Consumers not eligible for government subsidies have seen premiums rise sharply, including a projected average increase of 25 percent for 2017.
    Scrapping the law altogether without a clear plan for providing replacement coverage for so many people would be politically risky, experts said.

  324. says

    Hillary Clinton is on track to win the popular vote by about 1.5 million votes or more. That makes me dream about what might have been.

    And now for some “Oh, FFS!” news. Kris Kobach has been named to Trump’s transition team.

    Those that have been reading this thread for some time are well aware of Kris Kobach, the racist Kansas Secretary of State. For those of you who may not remember him, Kobach is the man who wrote the Arizona SB1070 law that was known as the “driving while brown law” or “papers please law.” If you had brown skin, or even an accent that was not Kobach’s or Arpaio’s version of “speaking American,” you could be stopped by the police for no other reason. The police would then demand that you prove your citizenship.

    Kobach regular speaks at white nationalist conferences. He has worked for organizations flagged at hate groups by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Kobach has been called the Republican politician who is most dedicated to disenfranchising minorities. He lost several cases in court as he tried to defend his disenfranchisement efforts.

    This man, that Kris Kobach (often pictured, smiling broadly, with Ted Nugent), is now on Trump’s team.

    Wichita Eagle link

  325. microraptor says

    Nerd of Redhead @320:

    What, you mean private companies aren’t going to borrow money to build the wall, then charge fees to use it?

  326. says

    Jason Chaffetz still plans to continue investigating Hillary Clinton:

    […] “It would be totally remiss of us to dismiss [the email investigation] because she’s not going to be president,” Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT), the chair of the House Oversight Committee, told the Washington Post on Wednesday.

    “I still have a duty and obligation to get to the truth about one of the largest breaches of security at the State Department,” he added. “Tens of thousands of documents still have not been turned over to Congress.”

    Chaffetz told the Washington Post that he does not anticipate calling Clinton herself before the committee, but he said he would like to conduct transcribed interviews with State Department staffers.

    […] he thinks “a Trump administration would be cooperative in getting these floodgates to open as they should.”

    Link

    Democrats plan to fight this continuing investigation, but will probably be unsuccessful.

    […] Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD), the highest ranking Democrat on the Oversight Committee, said that Republicans should end their nonstop investigations into Clinton as the nation attempts to heal following the election.

    “It is extremely disappointing that Chairman Chaffetz plans to continue investigating Secretary Clinton for years to come,” he said in a statement to the Post. “After everything our country has just been through—and particularly given that Donald Trump and Paul Ryan have both called for healing our nation’s divisions—I think the American people deserve more from Congress than to continue squandering taxpayer dollars on these baseless Republican accusations and partisan attacks.”

  327. says

    Two Samantha Bee videos cover the damaged-dream part of the election results, and the “nasty women” who have some work to do before 2018.
    Link

    Both videos are presented on the Daily Kos page.

  328. says

    Irony? Hope? Desperation? What does this mean?

    The day after Donald Trump’s presidential election victory marked the strongest day of ObamaCare signups in this year’s open enrollment period so far.

    More than 100,000 people selected plans through HealthCare.gov on Wednesday, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced. […]

    Even though the GOP’s wave victory on Election Day likely dooms ObamaCare, the White House has made clear that it plans to forge on with this year’s enrollment period. […]

    Enroll America, a top advocacy group for the healthcare law, also released a statement trying to calm fears about the fate of the marketplaces. The group called it “critically important” to remain focused on signups and reassured people who have insurance through the exchanges. […]

    http://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/305419-obamacare-signups-surge-post-election

  330. says

    Sheriff David Clark is being talked about as Trump’s choice for head of Homeland Security.

    Here is Clark’s tweet about yesterday’s protests:

    These temper tantrums from these radical anarchists must be quelled. There is no legitimate reason to protest the will of the people.

    He is talking about quelling peaceful protests! It doesn’t matter what Clark thinks is a good or a bad reason to protest, those people have a right to protest publicly, and peacefully. It’s one of our freedoms as Americans. The freedom to peacefully assemble.

    Clarke posted that tweet with a picture of himself holding a copy of the Constitution. The man has no shame.

  331. says

    The Ku Klux Klan in North Carolina is organizing a Trump Victory Parade for December 3, 2016. That should be a jolly affair. /sarcasm

    Greetings , I would like to take this opportunity to tell you a little about the Loyal White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, and hopefully dispel some of the lies told about us by the liberal news media. Let me start by addressing the repeated falsehood that we are a “HATE GROUP”. Let me assure you that nothing could be further from the truth. We do not hate any group of people! […]

    We hate drugs, homosexuality, abortion and race-mixing, because these things go against God’s law and they are destroying all white nations. But rather than focus on hate, we try to focus on the love of our race. We Love for our Lord and Savior and our Country.

    Our goal is to help restore America to a White Christian nation, founded on God’s word. This does not mean that we want to see anything bad happen to the darker races … we simply want to live separate from them … As GOD intended. (Lev.20:24-25) […]

    Most of our youth are on DRUGS or pregnant with a mongrel child. If our forefathers could see America today they would have our Government Leaders put to DEATH. For Treason against the American people. […]

    We as a people can change this course in which America has taken. We need to come together as WHITE CHRISTIAN AMERICANS and spread the word to others. Grab the blind Liberals by their heads and shake them until they wake up. From their JEW TUBE naps and tell them to look around because the ship is sinking. And through the Ku Klux Klan we will wake America up to the evils which are in our Government. We will unite proud white Americans to our cause because we have the LORD on our side. And with CHRIST we can’t lose.

    The excerpt above is from KKK website. The text is presented in blood red on a black background on the website. An image of Trump looking like a communist propaganda poster for Master of the Universe accompanies the text.

  332. says

    More white supremacists and neo-Nazis celebrating Trump’s victory … and asking for even more draconian policies than we’ve already seen from Trump:

    […] Once the globalist-progressive coalition of Jews, minorities, and anti-white whites stops reeling in confusion from the results of yesterday’s election, we can expect them to start striking back with trickery and violence. Thus, we as Southern nationalists face both danger and opportunity.

    Now, more than ever, we need tight organization and numbers to help drive a stake through Dracula’s heart and keep him from rising once again to menace our people and civilization. No mercy should be shown to the enemies of our God, our Folk, and our civilization. None would be afforded us.

    That’s Michael Hill, President of League of the South speaking.

    In addition to that racist drivel, Hill said today that if “you don’t finish the job by routing your enemies and driving them into the sea while you have the chance, they will re-group and be back at your throats in no time! You have been given a reprieve by God (probably undeservedly so); do not give your enemies and His a reprieve.”

  333. says

    Anti-abortion activists are celebrating Trump’s win, and they have legislation ready to go in order to “shut down the abortion industry.”

    Janet Porter joined fellow Religious Right activist Gordon Klingenschmitt on his “Pray In Jesus Name” program today to rejoice in Donald Trump’s victory on Tuesday.

    […] “This is a great day to be alive in America and I just thank God.”

    Porter again revealed that Republican members of Congress will soon introduce a federal version of her “Heartbeat Bill” that would make it illegal to perform an abortion if a fetal heartbeat can be detected, which can often occur before the woman even knows that she is pregnant.

    […] Christians must now “take this opportunity and end abortion,” she said, starting by passing her “Heartbeat Bill,” which will “probably shut down the abortion industry.”

    “What we’ve been given is a green light,” Porter boasted, “and, man, I want to hit the gas pedal and floor it and go to fulfill what we have gotten a mandate from the evangelical voters and the voters of America to do.

    And I believe that with all of us joined together now, that we can make America righteous again.”

    Link

  334. says

    “With Trump’s Election, a Bonanza for Washington Lobbyists”:

    …With Republicans poised to control both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue, Mr. Lott said he had not seen such a chance to help clients since he left the Senate in 2007 — whether by making changes to the federal tax code for Amazon or increasing military spending on new ships for Huntington Ingalls Industries.

    “Trump has pledged to change things in Washington — about draining the swamp,” said Mr. Lott, who now works at Squire Patton Boggs, a law and lobbying firm. “He is going to need some people to help guide him through the swamp — how do you get in and how you get out? We are prepared to help do that.”

    Across Washington, lobbyists and trade association executives were busy reviewing their priorities, which include repealing financial regulations instituted during the Obama administration, pushing for cuts in corporate taxes, overhauling Mr. Obama’s signature health care plan and spending billions on roads, bridges and other infrastructure….

    Outsider populism!

  335. says

    SC @332, That sounds like Trump is in bed with the very “special interests” to which he promised that he would not be beholden.

    Lobbyist were supposed to be part of the swamp he drained.

  337. says

    The future president of U.S. is back on Twitter. He is, of course, lying his ass off immediately. His tweet claims that the anti-Trump protestors in Manhattan are “professional protesters” and that they have been egged on by the media. FFS.

    Here’s the entire tweet:

    Just had a very open and successful presidential election. Now professional protesters, incited by the media, are protesting. Very unfair!

  338. consciousness razor says

    Now professional protesters, incited by the media, are protesting.

    But they weren’t doing it before, these professional protesters, who had to be incited by the media despite it being their profession, apparently the media which shows/describes all of the shit Trump is actually about. Right.

    He wouldn’t be qualified to run a fucking clown college in D.C.

    Very unfair!

    Not that this means anything…. But what are the odds that somebody had to tell Trump how to spell “unfair”? I don’t recall him ever giving a shit about fairness.

  339. says

    “Paul Ryan Says Medicare Privatization Is On”:

    During the campaign, coverage of the issues was blotted out by coverage of Hillary Clinton’s emails and Donald Trump’s broad suite of sociopathic tendencies. And of the issues that did receive any attention, a conspicuously missing one was Paul Ryan’s plan to push Medicare beneficiaries into private health insurance. Reporters just assumed that, since Trump never talked about it, it won’t happen. But Paul Ryan still wants it to happen. And in a Fox News interview with Bret Baier, Ryan said Medicare privatization is on….

    This is what the next four years look like. Every day, a new horror that Trump voters and abstainers have brought upon themselves, the rest of the country, and the world.

  342. says

    “Trump Campaigned Against Lobbyists. Now They’re on His Transition Team”:

    President-elect Donald J. Trump,* who campaigned against the corrupt power of special interests, is filling his transition team with some of the very sort of people who he has complained have too much clout in Washington: corporate consultants and lobbyists.

    Jeffrey Eisenach, a consultant who has worked for years on behalf of Verizon and other telecommunications clients, is the head of the team that is helping to pick staff members at the Federal Communications Commission.

    Michael Catanzaro, a lobbyist whose clients include Devon Energy and Encana Oil and Gas, holds the “energy independence” portfolio.

    Michael Torrey, a lobbyist who runs a firm that has earned millions of dollars helping food industry players such as the American Beverage Association and the dairy giant Dean Foods, is helping set up the new team at the Department of Agriculture.

    Mr. Trump was swept to power in large part by white working-class voters who responded to his vow to restore the voices of forgotten people, ones drowned out by big business and Wall Street. But in his transition to power, some of the most prominent voices will be those of advisers who come from the same industries for which they are being asked to help set the regulatory groundwork.

    The president-elect’s spokeswoman, Hope Hicks, declined a request for comment, as did nearly a dozen corporate executives, consultants and lobbyists serving on his transition team, which was outlined in a list distributed widely in Washington on Thursday….

    * *spit*

  343. says

    “Trump team looks to scrap retirement advisory rule: Fiduciary standard could be one of several financial regulations to be reversed”:

    Donald Trump’s advisers are eyeing plans to scrap a landmark piece of the Obama administration’s financial reforms, giving relief to the industry that lobbied hard against the wide-ranging proposals but raising fresh concerns about consumer protection.

    Speaking after Mr Trump’s election victory, Anthony Scaramucci, a manager of a fund of hedge funds who is a member of Mr Trump’s economic advisory council, said the incoming administration should put the brakes on looming changes to the way retirement products are sold.

    “We’ve got to get rid of this,” he said.

    The move would be one of several to reverse policies pursued by President Barack Obama — part of a package of business-friendly measures that Mr Trump’s allies say will stimulate economic growth.

    …

    The sweeping changes, from the Department of Labor, are designed to curb conflicts of interest in the US pensions industry. Professionals who give retirement advice would be required to put clients’ interests above their own under a new “fiduciary” standard. At present, they are only required to recommend “suitable” products.

    …

    Mr Scaramucci had previously compared the labour department’s rule to a 1857 Supreme Court ruling that African-Americans were not citizens. “It’s about like the Dred Scott decision,” Mr Scaramucci said at the Securities Enforcement Forum in Washington last month, according to Investment News. It is discriminatory against “a class of people who they deem to be adding no value”.

  344. says

    Trump policy plans:

    …The Dodd-Frank economy does not work for working people. Bureaucratic red tape and Washington mandates are not the answer. The Financial Services Policy Implementation team will be working to dismantle the Dodd-Frank Act and replace it with new policies to encourage economic growth and job creation.

  345. says

    Nevada Senator Harry Reid released the following statement about the election of Donald Trump as the 45th president of the United States:

    “I have personally been on the ballot in Nevada for 26 elections and I have never seen anything like the reaction to the election completed last Tuesday. The election of Donald Trump has emboldened the forces of hate and bigotry in America.

    “White nationalists, Vladimir Putin and ISIS are celebrating Donald Trump’s victory, while innocent, law-abiding Americans are wracked with fear – especially African Americans, Hispanic Americans, Muslim Americans, LGBT Americans and Asian Americans. Watching white nationalists celebrate while innocent Americans cry tears of fear does not feel like America.

    “I have heard more stories in the past 48 hours of Americans living in fear of their own government and their fellow Americans than I can remember hearing in five decades in politics. Hispanic Americans who fear their families will be torn apart, African Americans being heckled on the street, Muslim Americans afraid to wear a headscarf, gay and lesbian couples having slurs hurled at them and feeling afraid to walk down the street holding hands. American children waking up in the middle of the night crying, terrified that Trump will take their parents away. Young girls unable to understand why a man who brags about sexually assaulting women has been elected president.

    “I have a large family. I have one daughter and twelve granddaughters. The texts, emails and phone calls I have received from them have been filled with fear – fear for themselves, fear for their Hispanic and African American friends, for their Muslim and Jewish friends, for their LBGT friends, for their Asian friends. I’ve felt their tears and I’ve felt their fear.

    “We as a nation must find a way to move forward without consigning those who Trump has threatened to the shadows. Their fear is entirely rational, because Donald Trump has talked openly about doing terrible things to them. Every news piece that breathlessly obsesses over inauguration preparations compounds their fear by normalizing a man who has threatened to tear families apart, who has bragged about sexually assaulting women and who has directed crowds of thousands to intimidate reporters and assault African Americans. Their fear is legitimate and we must refuse to let it fall through the cracks between the fluff pieces.

    “If this is going to be a time of healing, we must first put the responsibility for healing where it belongs: at the feet of Donald Trump, a sexual predator who lost the popular vote and fueled his campaign with bigotry and hate. Winning the electoral college does not absolve Trump of the grave sins he committed against millions of Americans. Donald Trump may not possess the capacity to assuage those fears, but he owes it to this nation to try.

    “If Trump wants to roll back the tide of hate he unleashed, he has a tremendous amount of work to do and he must begin immediately.”

  346. says

    “Trump’s victory sparks bankers’ hopes for new deal”:

    In the wake of Donald Trump’s stunning presidential win, banks are working on a game plan to confront an entirely new reality: They might actually get their way.

    While Trump bashed Wall Street throughout the campaign, the financial services industry is hoping his victory, coupled with a GOP-led Congress, could open a path forward to easing regulations.

    “To say the world has changed is an understatement,” one bank lobbyist said. “The defensive issues we were concerned about we can be less concerned about. And we can start thinking about, to some degree, an affirmative agenda. … We didn’t have a plan B, so now everyone’s got to come up with a plan B.”

    Financial institutions have faced a stream of regulations since the 2008 financial crisis, from increased capital and liquidity standards, to proposed crackdowns on incentive pay for bank executives. Now, any rules that aren’t finalized before the Obama administration leaves office could land in the lap of Trump-appointed regulators with very different ideas about supervision….

  347. says

    SC @337, Paul Ryan is lying in order to push his Medicare privatization scheme.

    Ryan said, “[…] Medicare has got some serious issues because of Obamacare. So those things are part of our plan to replace Obamacare.”

    That’s not true. The financial health of Medicare was improved by Obamacare. Medicare’s solvency was extended by a decade or more when the Affordable Care Act was passed.
    http://www.cbpp.org/research/health/medicare-is-not-bankrupt

    The myth within the Republican Party that Paul Ryan is super-intelligent and great with numbers is just that, a myth. If you look at Ryan’s proposals you will see that he consistently lies and/or gets the numbers wrong.

    Other Republican legislators look up to Ryan because he is doing something most of them do not do, he does enough original work to put his bonkers ideas down on paper. He gives semi-coherent speeches about those bonkers ideas. The bar is really low.

  349. microraptor says

    Technically, Kate Brown has already been the governor for several years: she got the position when John Kitzhaber was forced to resign due to a criminal investigation over abuses of authority in 2015. She’s been the first openly LGTB governor for two years, now she’s the first openly LGTB individual who was elected governor.

  351. raven says

    SC
    But Paul Ryan still wants it to happen. And in a Fox News interview with Bret Baier, Ryan said Medicare privatization is on….

    Won’t happen.
    1. Unless the GOP wants to lose the next election.
    Medicare and Social Security are wildly popular with their base of old white people. These are also effective programs that work. And old people vote more than any other group.

    2. Which is still possible. They can be that stupid.

  352. says

    Thanks microraptor @347 for the additional information.

    In other news, here is an excerpt from Wonkette’s essay discussing “Supposedly Pro-Choice, Pro-Same Sex Marriage, Non-Racist Trump Supporters”:

    […] You all, on the other hand, want to say you are SO NOT racist, you totally support same-sex marriage, and you are pro-choice. You just like him for his other policies. Whatever those are. You just wanted to vote “against the establishment” by voting for a rich white man instead of a woman. You had “economic anxiety” and thought no health care was better than Obamacare […] or you thought that if Trump brought back manufacturing jobs that they would magically pay well without anyone fighting for it. Because you apparently have no idea how the labor movement happened. […]

    Because of you, those of us that voted against him now need to do more work — for things you say you want too. And think about this for a moment — the largest demographic of people who voted for Clinton, percentage-wise, were black women. Black women — who have both sexism and racism to deal with, who have “economic anxiety” of their own that will certainly be exacerbated by a Trump presidency, and who — let’s be honest — do the most work when it comes to fighting both sexism and racism. What the hell is more racist than shitting in the middle of the living room, casually walking away and expecting a black woman to come and clean it up for you. That’s what you did.

    Social justice is work. Ending systemic racism is work. Keeping abortion legal is work. Making sure LGBTQ people have rights is work. And just because you never bothered doing any of that work yourself doesn’t mean that you should just take it for granted. […]

    Not only did you make more work for other people that you claim to agree with, you made that work a hell of a lot harder, by joining forces with and legitimizing hate groups, men’s rights groups, the alt-right, and, indeed, Donald Fucking Trump. […]

  353. raven says

    Thanks to Lynna, SC, and the others for keeping this thread going. It’s one of the best parts of Pharyngula.
    The 5 stages of grief. Denial, bargaining, anger, depression, acceptance.

    I skipped denial and bargaining. Depression last two days. And am now easing into anger. I probably won’t get to acceptance.
    The next step is drawing up survival plans. One doesn’t live under fascism, one merely hopes to survive it.

    PS: Re Medicare attack. Bush tried to privatize Social Security. It went nowhere and died immediately. The few adults left in the GOP just pointed out that they would never win another election.

  354. Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls says

    Medicare and Social Security are wildly popular with their base of old white people. These are also effective programs that work. And old people vote more than any other group.

    Of course, but they show government can work effectively and cheaper than private enterprises. That can’t be allowed to happen.

  355. says

    Thanks, raven. We appreciate your participation too.

    In more “don’t accept this” news, Trump lied as soon as the meeting with President Obama ended:

    […] “This was a meeting that was going to last for maybe 10 or 15 minutes, and we were just going to get to know each other,” Trump said. “We had never met each other. I have great respect. The meeting lasted for almost an hour and a half. And… as far as I’m concerned, it could have gone on for a lot longer.”

    The point was that he and Obama had gotten along so well that they just couldn’t stop chatting—that for all their differences, they were two guys who shared a mutual respect and had so much to learn from each other that they wanted to keep talking even after their time was up.

    Just one problem: the meeting was scheduled to last one hour, not “10 or 15 minutes.” In fact, as Politico points out, reporters at the White House were told not to assemble for the scrum until 30 minutes into the meeting. […]

    Slate link

  356. says

    Some Mayors are preemptively standing up to Trump when it comes to Trump’s stated plan to do away with “sanctuary cities.” Here is the mayor of New York, De Blasio:

    “We are not going to sacrifice a half million people who live among us, who are part of our community,” de Blasio said, referring to an estimate of the number of unauthorized immigrants living in New York. “We are not going to tear families apart.”

    De Blasio said Trump’s threat to withhold funds from sanctuary cities was “dangerous,” but it was too soon to tell whether the president-elect intended to follow through on all his proposals.

    Reuters link

    And here is the mayor of Los Angeles, Garcetti:

    “We comply with federal immigration agencies, but insist that detainer requests be handled constitutionally,” Connie Llanos, the [mayor’s] spokeswoman, said in an email.

    “It is Mayor Garcetti’s sincere hope that no president would violate those principles, the very foundation of our nation, by taking punitive action on cities that are simply protecting the well being of residents.”

  358. says

    On Chris Hayes’ “All In” show he interviewed Max Read and Heather McGhee about the social media divides that affect what news stories people see, and what news people believe is true. Regarding fake or misleading news stories, Max Read said, “If Fox News is like a Super Soaker, Facebook is a fire hose. You know, so you’ve got a cable network and they’re spraying disinformation everywhere, and then Facebook comes along and they dump a reservoir on top of people.”

    Excerpt from transcript of the video segment:

    CHRIS HAYES (HOST): People aren’t living around each other with different views and across these sort of divides. Social media becomes the place they sort of experience it, and then social media, as you’ve written, I mean — It is crazy to think about the most powerful platform for the dissemination of information in the history of the planet has no editorial standards. Like, you could get a — 10 million views on an article that says Barack Obama was born in Kenya.

    MAX READ: Yeah, absolutely. And because of the way Facebook works, because it has these sort of difficult to navigate privacy controls, and stuff sort of spirals off and you can’t really chase misinformation and find ways to debunk it the way you might be able to do on other social media platforms […]. And you know, I think it speaks to this idea social media is a bad place to have these conversations, in part because they’re being had underneath articles that are lies.

    HAYES: Right, exactly, the comment thread of the article saying that, for instance, here’s one from the — there is a Macedonian town that just churns out fake Trump information because it gets them U.S. ad dollars and there are 17-year-olds who want to buy electric guitars, this is “How teens in the Balkans are duping Trump supporters with fake news,” I’m like, there’s an article there that in the lede, is like “Hillary Clinton is about to be indicted.”

    HEATHER MCGHEE: Yeah, well, but But Donald Trump said that from the stump.

    HAYES: Right, which is why that was a viral story.

    MCGHEE: Right. Well, and I do think that there is some responsibility here. I know it’s kind of like interesting to think about it in Facebook, but it also really started in Fox News and right wing radio.

    HAYES: Yeah.

    MCGHEE: And the general narratives that are picked up by someone, a Macedonian teenager who doesn’t even live here can pick up and sort of understand what the clickbait things will be —

    HAYES: Yeah, he just knows what will get read. […]

    MCGHEE: And I want to lay a little more blame on slightly bigger platforms. […]

    READ: If Fox News is like a Super Soaker, Facebook is a fire hose. You know, so you’ve got a cable network and they’re spraying disinformation everywhere, and then Facebook comes along and they dump a reservoir on top of people.

    Media Matters link

    Video is also available at the link. The video is 6:33 minutes long.

  359. says

    It’s about damned time. It took a court ruling to get it done, but after a federal judge in Michigan ordered bottled water delivered to residents of Flint, those people will finally be getting water delivery. It only took two years. Sheesh.

    NY Times link

  360. says

    The Trump team has been caught plagiarizing copyrighted text … again.

    President-elect Donald Trump’s official government website, GreatAgain.gov, lifts the work of a nonprofit organization that provides research on presidential transitions, with some passages being duplicated whole-cloth. […]

    The Trump website was launched late Wednesday and replicates material on the copyrighted site of the Center for Presidential Transition, which is a project of the Washington-based nonpartisan Partnership for Public Service.

    Trump’s site contains a small note at the bottom: “First Posted on Center for Presidential Transition.” But by not making clear where the content comes from, including a link back to the source site, the Trump transition faces charges of sloppiness at best, and even potential legal challenges […]

    Much of the transition site’s news feed matches information from the nonprofit’s site word-for-word and was clearly written before Election Day. One page has a header dated last Sunday and contains a misplaced pronoun that is supposed to refer to the partnership rather than the Trump transition. […]

    Even if the transition used the passages without permission from the nonprofit, it’s still in a gray area of copyright law, said a law professor who has studied copyright issues involving Google Books.

    “Copyright gives authors exclusive rights to the things they write. I can’t go out and publish a copy of ‘Harry Potter’ without J.K. Rowling’s permission, ” says James Grimmelmann, a law professor at Cornell University. But Grimmelmann said the context in which the copied content is used affects whether it can be considered as fair use under the law. “When someone is using something in service to the nation, we give them a bit more leeway.”

    Politico link

    After plagiarizing a lot of text, we see instances of the Trump team having done so sloppily. They left notes like “see chart below” in the copied text, but didn’t copy the chart, etc.

  361. ck, the Irate Lump says

    One nice thing about this election is that it laid bare the “values voter” lie for all to see. Evangelicals voted for a man who gets remarried whenever the current wife gets too old instead of a woman who went to some effort to keep her family together after the infidelity of her husband. They voted for a man who doesn’t seem to even know what Christians are supposed to believe, instead of a woman who is at least nominally Christian. They voted for a publicly foul mouthed man instead of a woman who always keeps a respectful tone in public. They voted for every personality trait they claim to oppose, just to keep Clinton out.
    http://nyti.ms/2eplgzh

  362. raven says

    I’m doing an autopsy on the election. Using data.
    The question is, who voted for Trump;
    Pew research:
    White non-Hispanic voters preferred Trump over Clinton by 21 percentage points (58% to 37%),

    Trump’s margin among whites without a college degree Two-thirds (67%) of non-college whites backed Trump, compared with just 28% who supported Clinton,

    Trump won whites with a college degree 49% to 45%.
    (There are a lot more non-college educated whites so this vote is important.)
    ******************************************************
    Young adults preferred Clinton over Trump by a wide 55%-37% margin;
    Older voters (ages 65 and older) preferred Trump over Clinton 53%-45%.
    ****************************************************
    The gender gap. Clinton +12 female. Trump +12 male canceling out exactly.
    White females voted mostly for Trump.

    Conclusion: Trump voters were white, old, and low education.

  364. says

    Rachel Maddow “reports on Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s frantic round-up of tens of thousands of people he accuses of being political opponents, and his demand that the U.S. turn over a dissident living in Pennsylvania – a demand that Donald Trump adviser General Mike Flynn advocates meeting.” The video is 7:42 minutes long.

    General Mike Flynn has said a lot of questionable things while backing Trump. He is now suggesting that we turn over the Turkish cleric, Fethullah Gulen.

    The Turkish president has gone nuts. He put 30,000 people in jail. He arrested judges, professors, librarians, teachers, etc. He shut down some newspapers and some government offices. He is building 174 new prisons. General Mike Flynn wants to comply with a request to extradite Gulen without going through the judicial system and complying with U.S. law. Gulen is a legal resident of the USA.

    Pro-Erdogan press in Turkey is now comparing Trump to Islamist President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. That’s weird. Supposedly, Erdogan had conversations with Trump during which he [Erdogan] repeatedly mentioned Gulen. Erdogan thinks Gulen played a major role in the recent coup attempt (an attempt that many think Erdogan himself orchestrated in order to increase his strong-man powers once he put the fake coup down).

    Turkey has not provided evidence of Gulen’s participation, but Trump’s pet general thinks we should ignore our judicial processes and turn him over anyway.

  365. says

    Rachel Maddow presented a great segment last night on Mike Pence’s extreme anti-gay efforts in Indiana. The video is 10:06 minutes long.

    It could be said that Mike Pence is one of America’s most extreme anti-gay governors.

    In other news, Daily Kos and Bloomberg Businessweek took the time to put together the story that shows that FBI Director Comey really did play a major role in electing Donald Trump. The Bloomberg link provides the most information. The Daily Kos link provides the most reasonable analysis.

  366. raven says

    I’ve been seeing the usual blame games for the loss.
    It’s Bernie’s fault, it’s Hillary’s fault, Benghazi, Comey, emails, third party candidates, misogyny, Obama, and so on. Opinion, usually someone’s hobby horse, without any data.
    This is right wingnut thinking in reverse. For them it is always the Illuminati, demons, satan, Space reptiles, Jews, atheists, Moslems, the antichrist, and as always Obama.

    There are deeper forces at work than this.

    Income inequality boosted Trump vote
    Bruegel. org BY: ZSOLT DARVAS AND KONSTANTINOS EFSTATHIOU DATE: NOVEMBER 9, 2016
    …our findings are not against the interpretation that the ‘losers’ of globalisation cast protest votes against the status quo.

    Short quote only for copyright reasons.

    It’s harder to find data for Trump voters by income levels, so I haven’t found much.
    What there is indicates that lower income whites voted mostly for Trump. No surprise since income correlates with college degree status.

    1. The conventional wisdom is true.
    The Trump vote was white, old, low education.
    Lower income whites shifted more towards Trump as well.

  368. raven says

    The tl,dr version.

    The Trump voters.
    1. The ongoing demographic transition where whites are a minority in 2043.
    2. The 46 years of rising economic inequality resulting in the disappearing middle class.

    Next question. Can Trump fix any of that?
    Without mega-mass murder, he isn’t going to stop that demographic transition.

    The disappearing middle class? We will have to wait 4 years to see if he does.
    Nothing he has ever said indicates that he has the slightest idea of what to do.
    And if getting-poorer-whites think a billionaire living in a tower with his name on it, really cares about their bank accounts, well, good luck and they will need it.

  369. says

    Thoughts from Sir Richard Branson:

    “[…] I think if people’s rights are going to be taken away in America we’ll need to see demonstrations of the size that took place when the Vietnam War was going on. The government is going to need to know that there’s a line that they can’t cross.” […]

    “We’re going to need to have business leaders speaking out telling the government that you cannot ignore 99 percent of scientists who say global warming is a threat, and risk the world being put in peril by reopening coal mines instead of creating hundreds of thousands of jobs in the clean energy sector, which would be good for our nation and good for the world.”

    “You can’t destroy a universal healthcare system that is in its infancy, and was obviously by no means perfect, but was essential to so many people’s lives!” he said. “You need to do what the Democrats would have done, which is improve it and make it as near perfect as possible.”

    Branson weighed in on the Brexit vote in his own country, a decision he’d warned would be “the worst decision the British public ever made”—and one that sent his business shares nosediving. “The people of Britain were misled by both politicians and by the popular right-wing press, The Daily Mail and The Sun, with facts that just weren’t true,” Branson offered. “Sadly, the British people will suffer. If it becomes a hard Brexit it’s going to be devastating for Great Britain, and it’s going to be very bad news for Europe. The real pain is still to come.” […]

    “Trump has said that he’s not going to tax the wealthy, not going to tax the one-percent,” he added. “I’m just not quite sure what he’s going to be able to do for the working-class man. Stopping trade agreements is likely to result in more expensive goods here in America, which will cost the working-class man a lot more money. Sending people out of America when you’ve got full employment at the moment in America is going to damage the economy, and obviously damage the individual and break up families, and not really achieve anything.” […]

    Daily Beast link

  370. says

    This is pretty much what we expected. It is as bad as we expected it to be. Putin is suggesting that Trump pressure NATO to withdraw:

    A spokesman for Russian President Vladimir Putin is suggesting President-elect Donald Trump begin rebuilding the U.S.-Kremlin relationship by urging NATO to withdraw forces from the Russian border. […]

    NATO forces have recently increased their presence in Eastern Europe to counter Russian’s increased presence in the region. […]

    In a separate interview with the Associated Press on Thursday, Peskov [Dmitry Peskov] insisted that Crimea, the region of Ukraine annexed by the Kremlin in 2014, is part of Russia.

    “No one in Russia — never — will be ready to start any kind of discussion about Crimea,” he said, refusing to call it “annexation.”

    Putin has expressed optimism about a Trump presidency in the days since the billionaire defeated Hillary Clinton. […]

    The Hill link

  371. tomh says

    @ 367
    Branson is saying all the right things, but I’m not sure he’s in touch with the current reality of America. Counting on business leaders to fight climate change is a fantasy, for one thing. Thinking a Trump administration will care about the people who will lose health care is another.

  372. raven says

    @Lynna 361
    I read Masha Gessen’s Survival manual for fascism.
    Linked by SC upthread. It’s well worth it.

    After the election autopsy, my next step is to draw up survival plans. We will be the new Doomsday Preppers.
    And no, it doesn’t involve bunkers and years of freeze dried food.
    It’s more economic survival and mental health survival.
    And of course, staying out of the Gulag.

    PS Masha Gessen makes a good point. Believe the Fuehrer.
    These people aren’t hiding anything. What you see and what they say they will do, they will do.
    A lot of people thought Hitler was just being hyperbolic about the Jews. 6 million dead proved them wrong.

  373. says

    tomh @369, good points. Branson, like many people, simply can’t believe that Trump is as bad as he is. Trump will say he cares about people who may lose their health care insurance, and then he will act to strip people of health care insurance. I expect him to team up with Paul Ryan in order to create some kind of bandage that works for some people, but not for most people. They will put a pretty, false gold front on an inadequate plan.

    raven @370, I am concerned about my own mental health. For one thing, good mental health is hard to maintain when I see Muslim and gay friends so upset and so frightened. Hate crimes and/or hate speech against people of color has a long and sordid history where I live. We have active John Birch Society chapters here. I am also worried about my health care options. Nevertheless, I am taking some steps in the right direction, including doing something I love every day (even if it is only for fifteen minutes).

    “Believe the Fuehrer.” Yes, I noticed that Gessen hit that point again during her interview with Maddow. Trump has told us what he intends to do, and he has shown us what kind of person he is. He is busily surrounding himself with like-minded doofuses all the time, including now as he puts his transition team together. I do not get it when people assume that Trump may not have meant all the awful things he said, all the awful things he proposed.

    The size of the protests in NYC give me some hope. One thing that does seem to get through Trump’s filter is public opinion when it is loudly expressed.

  374. says

    Speaking of surviving the Fuehrer, here is an excerpt from an article in which artists make the point that art is more critical now — critical to the surviving/healing process:

    […] Toni Morrison: This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.
    —————-
    Junot Díaz on why we need the humanities: […] You can take all the engineering and computer classes you want, but I can tell you that what consistently helps us understand what it means to be human, and offers us spaces where we can contemplate the improvement of that condition, has always been the humanities and the arts. And so therefore it’s absolutely essential.
    —————–
    Dan Piepenbring at the Paris Review on why now is the time to write: The creative impulse is such a fragile thing, but we have to create now. We owe it to ourselves to do the work. I want to encourage you. If you aspire to write, put aside all the niceties and sureties about what art should be and write something that makes the scales fall from our eyes. Forget the tired axioms about showing and telling, about sense of place—any possible obstruction—and write to destroy complacency, to rattle people, to help people, first and foremost yourself. Lodge your ideas like glass shards in the minds of everyone who would have you believe there’s no hope. And read, as often and as violently as you can. If you have friends, as I do, who tacitly believe that it’s too much of a chore to read a book, just one fucking book, from start to finish, smash every LCD they own. This is an opportunity. There’s too much at stake now to pretend that everything is okay.
    ——————-
    Chinua Achebe on why art must be on the side of humanity:
    […] Poetry and slave trading cannot be bedfellows. That’s where I stand. […]

    Vox link

  375. says

    Something to do tonight: spend some time outside looking at the “supermoon.”

    This Monday, November 14, the full moon will appear larger than it has since the 1940s. The moon will appear around 14 percent bigger and 30 percent brighter compared with the smallest full moons. It will be worth taking a step outside to see this super superman. […]

  377. says

    Joy Reid has a message for Trump voters:

    […] To the sixty million two hundred and sixty-five thousand eight hundred and fifty-eight people who voted for Donald Trump and the nearly one hundred million who didn’t bother to vote at all, even though you were eligible, we here at AM Joy are going to tell you what you have won.

    Donald Trump now heads the Republican Party which controls all three branches of government. which controls the House, the Senate, and the White House. And the Supreme Court is poised to be filled by the new Republican President.

    Now you have given Trump, a man alternately described as vengeful, erratic, narcissistic, and dangerous, and temperamentally unfit to be president — and that’s just what Conservative Republicans said about him. You’ve given him control of the FBI, the CIA, the NSA, the IRS, — pretty ironic since he probably hasn’t paid taxes in eighteen years — not to mention drones and nuclear weapons. […]

    You have also lost the notion of an exceptional America. Because as it turns out, we are just another Western nation falling to the Ethno-nationalist forces sweeping across Europe, from Brexit in the U.K. to France’s Marie Le Pen fueled and egged on by the Russians and feeding on the fear of non-white and non-Christian immigrants. We as it turns out are not that different after all.

    You’ve also lost the right to moralize to Blue America about family values. Now we sincerely hope and pray that your daughters or sisters or your wives and all women and girls are never disrespected, never abused the way the next President of the United States has boasted about disrespecting or even sexually assaulting women including walking in on teenage pageant contestants when they are naked. When your sons and daughters ask you if little girls are as valuable as little boys or if they should emulate the President of the United States, we will leave that to you to explain. […]

    Link to video. The segment is 8:27 minutes long.

  382. says

    SC @377, well, that is not reassuring at all.

    SC @378, too late for the Republicans to separate themselves from the KKK. They are stuck with both the KKK and Trump.

    In other news, here’s another bright spot in the 2016 election picture. Voters in Georgia said NO to allowing state takeovers of “failing” public schools. Good thing they said no. I’m remembering how poorly that sort of thing turned out in Michigan.

  383. says

    Trump talking about his use of social media:

    It’s a great form of communication. Now do I say I’ll give it up entirely? I’m not saying I love it, but it does get the word out. When you give me a bad story or when you give me an inaccurate story or when somebody other than you and another — a network, or whatever, ‘cause of course, CBS would never do a thing like that right? I have a method of fighting back.

    The excerpt is from Trump talking to CBS’s Lesley Stahl on “60 Minutes.” The program airs tomorrow.

    Here’s what Trump said about using social media after he becomes president:

    I’m going to do very restrained, if I use it at all, I’m going to be very restrained.

    It’s a modern form of communication. There should be nothing you should be ashamed of. It’s where it’s at. I do believe this, I really believe that the fact that I have such power in terms of numbers with Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, et cetera — I think it helped me win all of these races where they’re spending much more money than I spent. I think that social media has more power than the money they spent, and I think maybe to a certain extent, I proved that.

    Trump spread his lies on social media with very little pushback against his lies.

  384. says

    What s Maroon @379, I have a hard time imagining Steve Bannon getting along with anyone. It seems like he would want everything his way entirely.

    For one thing, Bannon and his Breitbart News site have been throwing knives at Paul Ryan for about two years now. Surely Bannon sees Trump’s win as a way to take Ryan down once and for all. It’s unlikely that the rest of Trump’s team is that obsessed with Ryan’s dethroning.

  385. says

    “Clinton’s Popular-Vote Lead Will Grow, and Grow, and Grow”:

    …The numbers that came out on Election Night were enough to secure Trump the presidency, but they weren’t complete. State officials are still counting millions of provisional and absentee ballots, and within two weeks, Clinton will likely have another few million votes in the bank.

    Most were cast in the Clinton-leaning states of California, Washington, and New York—not swing states—so they won’t change the Electoral College. But there’s a sufficient amount to put her within striking distance of Obama’s 2012 turnout, and help put an end to the argument that she simply didn’t work hard enough.

    “We probably have about 7 million votes left to count,” said David Wasserman, an editor at Cook Political Report who is tracking turnout. “A majority of them are on the coasts, in New York, California, and Washington. She should be able to win those votes, probably 2-1.” By mid-December, when the Electoral College officially casts its ballots, Wasserman estimates that Clinton could be ahead by 2 percentage points in the popular vote….

  387. says

    Some background on just one of Trump’s possible picks for Attorney General, or for a position of leadership in the Defense Department:

    In 1986, he was nominated by President Ronald Reagan to serve as a federal-district court judge, but a bipartisan panel of Judiciary Committee senators declined to send his nomination to the Senate floor amid allegations that he had said the NAACP was “un-American” and “Communist-inspired” and that a white civil rights lawyer was a “disgrace to his race.” Sessions vigorously denied the allegations.

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/checkpoint/wp/2016/11/09/sen-jeff-sessions-is-known-for-fighting-immigration-now-he-could-lead-trumps-pentagon/

  388. microraptor says

    Lynna @ 381: You don’t get it, Trump with be the most reserved president evers!!1! It will be yuge!

  390. cubist says

    Is it just me, or did anybody else see an ad for an MMORPG called Tyrrany, one of whose taglines is “Sometimes evil wins” ?

  392. KG says

    You have also lost the notion of an exceptional America. Because as it turns out, we are just another Western nation falling to the Ethno-nationalist forces sweeping across Europe, from Brexit in the U.K. to France’s Marie Le Pen fueled and egged on by the Russians and feeding on the fear of non-white and non-Christian immigrants. We as it turns out are not that different after all. – Joy Reid, quoted by Lynna, OM@375

    The “Ethno-nationalist forces sweeping across Europe” can be seen as part of a near-global tide of reaction – see what’s happening in Latin America, Turkey, India, Egypt, Japan… This tide can probably be regarded as a response to the financial crash of 2008, the neoliberal “remedy” of attacks on the living standards of the majority, the weakness and obvious fragility of the recovery, and consequent widespread economic anxiety and despair. This sequence of events has revealed the practical failure and intellectual bankruptcy of neoliberalism – the idea that cutting taxes and removing constraints on international trade and finance would produce general prosperity and economic stability – but so far, the left has failed to craft a program or even a set of ideas that can successfully compete with the proto-fascist right’s appeal to bigotry. This is partly because the latter is just easier to put together, appealing to fear and resentment of “the other” while having to obey no ethical or rational constraints, partly because a large part of the left (or perhaps, “left”) bought into the neoliberal delusion. Alongside organized resistance, and practical solidarity with the most vulnerable, creating such an intellectual alternative is vital. The urgent need for international cooperation to mitigate global warming and other environmental dangers must be part of this – because that need is not only absolutely real, but has the potential to appeal to the more rational sections of the global elite (systemic change very rarely occurs without an elite split). But the potential of technology to provide a better life for all, if employed under democratic control to that end rather than to maximise the profits of the few, is just as necessary: people must see a hope for themselves and their children that does not depend on trampling or excluding “the other”.

  393. says

    Change.org petition, currently with almost 4 million signatures: “Electoral College: Make Hillary Clinton President on December 19”:

    On December 19, the Electors of the Electoral College will cast their ballots. If they all vote the way their states voted, Donald Trump will win. However, they can vote for Hillary Clinton if they choose. Even in states where that is not allowed, their vote would still be counted, they would simply pay a small fine – which we can be sure Clinton supporters will be glad to pay!

    We are calling on the Electors to ignore their states’ votes and cast their ballots for Secretary Clinton. Why?

    Mr. Trump is unfit to serve. His scapegoating of so many Americans, and his impulsivity, bullying, lying, admitted history of sexual assault, and utter lack of experience make him a danger to the Republic.

    Secretary Clinton WON THE POPULAR VOTE and should be President.

    Hillary won the popular vote. The only reason Trump “won” is because of the Electoral College.

    But the Electoral College can actually give the White House to either candidate. So why not use this most undemocratic of our institutions to ensure a democratic result?

    SHE WON THE POPULAR VOTE.

    There is no reason Trump should be President.

    “It’s the ‘People’s Will'”

    No. She won the popular vote.

    “Our system of government under our Constitution says he wins”

    No. Our Constitution says the Electors choose.

    “Too many states prohibit ‘Faithless Electors'”

    24 states bind electors. If electors vote against their party, they usually pay a fine. And people get mad. But they can vote however they want and there is no legal means to stop them in most states.

  395. says

    This sequence of events has revealed the practical failure and intellectual bankruptcy of neoliberalism – the idea that cutting taxes and removing constraints on international trade and finance would produce general prosperity and economic stability – but so far, the left has failed to craft a program or even a set of ideas that can successfully compete with the proto-fascist right’s appeal to bigotry. This is partly because the latter is just easier to put together, appealing to fear and resentment of “the other” while having to obey no ethical or rational constraints, partly because a large part of the left (or perhaps, “left”) bought into the neoliberal delusion. Alongside organized resistance, and practical solidarity with the most vulnerable, creating such an intellectual alternative is vital.

    Preach.

  396. says

    Barack Obama openly called on illegal aliens to vote in Tuesday’s election. This whole administration is lawless!

    They lie at every turn. They lied to get Obamacare passed. They lied about Benghazi. They lied about Hillary’s private server and emails.

    And now they are calling on illegal aliens to vote.

    That’s the lie that was driven by rightwing media, mainly Fox News, on November 5.

    Now I see why my neighbors believe that undocumented immigrants are voting for Democratic candidates.

    Daily Kos link

    Snopes link

  398. says

    Unreal:

    “Statement on Paris climate agreement entering into force”

    Today marks the entering into force of the Paris climate agreement. The agreement is an important step forward by world governments in addressing the serious risks of climate change.

    ExxonMobil supports the work of the Paris signatories, acknowledges the ambitious goals of this agreement and believes the company has a constructive role to play in developing solutions….

  399. says

    Donald Trump back on Twitter, attacking the media:

    Wow, the @nytimes is losing thousands of subscribers because of their very poor and highly inaccurate coverage of the ‘Trump phenomena.

    This does not make me feel like giving him a chance to govern.

  400. says

    SC @389, Trump said he didn’t regret anything he said during the campaign because, “I won.” Nigel Farage would agree with that approach. Farage blatantly lied about the effects of Brexit during that campaign in the UK.

    Both guys think it is okay to lie if it helps you win. How can government and policy be decided that way? Aaaarrrggghh.

  401. says

    After all the votes are counted, it looks like Hillary Clinton will win the popular vote by as much as two million. I wish that final count would come in sooner. We need to put wind in the sails of petitions like the one SC noted in comment 391.

    No, I do not think that petition will be successful, but I think it helps to try anyway. Anything that clearly shows that the Republicans do not have a mandate will help.

  402. says

    100,000 people showed up to protest against Trump in LA today. Protests are continuing all across the country.

    In other news, Josh Marshall, took a look at what we can expect in the way of corruption from the Trump administration:

    […] Trump himself is instinctively corrupt. […]

    He took a substantial amount of the campaign money he raised and ran it through his own companies. He practiced textbook self-dealing with his family foundation. Many of his private businesses were no better than glitzy cons and he developed a reputation for cheating partners, even if in many cases doing so in ways that didn’t explicitly violate the law.

    He is placing his own children into prominent positions organizing his administration. His version of a “blind trust” is one in which his children and heirs administer his companies on his behalf while he is President. His companies are not ‘public companies’ in the corporate governance sense. But the vast majority of his companies’ activities are carried out in public – hotels, golf resorts, licensing businesses, consumer businesses. None of this can really be blind even if there were any attempt to make it so.

    Trump and his children are in the process of building a real life version of the cartoonishly caricatured fantasy of the Clinton Foundation he created for his followers on the campaign trail.

    Trump is so thoroughly corrupt in his dealings that it is probably fair to say that he doesn’t even recognize the concept of self-dealing as being a problem in itself. They say hypocrisy is the tribute which vice pays to virtue. In Trump’s case there isn’t even much hypocrisy. In every case we’ve seen him discuss it, he sees self-dealing and self-enrichment as a normal, meritorious way of doing things.

    His followers almost all tend to be grifters, in many or most cases people who bet all on Trump when he seemed like a longshot because both professionally and metaphorically they had nothing to lose. Those people will want a bonanza and I suspect they’ll get it. […]

    […] we’re heading into an era of unparalleled public corruption. Get ready.

    “Instinctively corrupt,” yes, that’s the right phrase. The tendency to be corrupt whenever possible is ingrained in Trump’s character.

  403. tomh says

    @ #399

    In the last seven presidential elections, Democrats have won the popular vote six times. That doesn’t stop the Republicans from claiming a “mandate” every time they slither into the White House.

  404. says

    Kellyanne Conway thinks that Hillary Clinton and President Obama should shut down the protests against Trump. Is she kidding? (Rhetorical question. Of course she is not kidding.)

    It’s time really for President Obama and Secretary Clinton to say to these protesters, “This man is our president.”

    Um, they already said that.

    Conway made the comments on NBC’s “Meet the Press” show today. Conway also accused Harry Reid of “egging people on” to protest Trump.

    Yeah! Carry on Harry Reid.

    BTW, and this is really stupid, so prepare yourself, Conway also continued to repeat the lie that paid, professional protesters are behind the anti-Trump demonstrations.

  405. says

    tomh @401, yeah, that’s a thing with Republicans. Only they can have a “mandate” to govern. Even after President Obama was elected for a second term, they assumed he did not have a mandate. In fact, they denied his mandate to govern so strongly that they would not hold hearings on and confirm his appointment to the Supreme Court.

    In their dictionary the definition of “mandate” includes “only applicable to rightwing political candidates.”

  406. says

    Someone in the comments at WaPo argued that the EC petition is pointless because congress can overturn electoral votes, citing this. But my inexpert reading seems to indicate that objections can only be made on the basis of EC votes not being “regularly given,” which I interpret as a legal-technical term. I don’t think it says that they can reject votes for any other reason, but the language is archaic.

    The WaPo article’s argument that people shouldn’t try it because in the unlikely event it succeeded it would provoke a “constitutional crisis” and Republicans would be furious and “justifiably” (!) feel the election had been stolen been isn’t convincing to me. We’re in a crisis now, Trump lost the vote, this appears to be within the rules (even if it’s not likely to succeed).

  407. says

    The WaPo article’s argument that people shouldn’t try it because in the unlikely event it succeeded it would provoke a “constitutional crisis” and Republicans would be furious and “justifiably” (!) feel the election had been stolen been isn’t convincing to me. We’re in a crisis now, Trump lost the vote, this appears to be within the rules (even if it’s not likely to succeed).

    I agree.

    Besides, the “constitutional crisis” argument is one that Trump made against Hillary Clinton, arguing that people like Jason Chaffetz would continue to investigate her … as if that was a good argument.

    We are in the Trumplandia version of a crisis now. All hands on deck.

  408. says

    Trump does not want to live in the White House full time. He also wants to hand most domestic and foreign policy issues over to Mike Pence.

    What does he want to do? He wants to stand in front of adoring crowds and get instant gratification of his need for approval. His staff is trying to make plans to accommodate this wish, and his supporters are trying to spin it as a good thing.

    […] His aides say he has also expressed interest in continuing to hold the large rallies that were a staple of his candidacy. He likes the instant gratification and adulation that the cheering crowds provide, and his aides are discussing how they might accommodate his demand.

    “I think Trump has discovered that these rallies are tremendous opportunities for him to get his message out,” said Christopher Ruddy, chief executive of Newsmax Media, a conservative website. “It’s actually sort of old-fashioned, that you want to actually meet people and press the flesh with him.”

    http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/12/us/politics/trump-president.html

    I wonder what the secret service will think about Trump going back to his “King of the hill at rallies” schtick. And I wonder what the protesters against Trump will think of all these new opportunities to make their rejection of Trump known?

  409. ck, the Irate Lump says

    It looks like Trump’s “blind trust” is getting less blind by the second: Washington Post: Donald Trump’s questionable ‘blind trust’ setup just got more questionable

    A day after Trump’s lawyer, Michael Cohen, announced that Trump’s three oldest children — Donald Jr., Ivanka and Eric — would control what he labeled a “blind trust” for the president-elect, the Trump campaign announced Friday afternoon that all three would also serve on Trump’s presidential transition team executive committee.

    In that role, the trio will have input when it comes to the people Trump picks for key administration posts.

    And it’s also come out that he intends to spend little time in the White House and instead spend a lot of time in Trump Tower and Mar-a-Lago: NY Times: Donald Trump Prepares for White House Move, but His Tower May Still Beckon. I’m sure he won’t be tempted to manage his corporate empire while in Trump tower, and that these decisions have nothing to do with making the U.S. government spend money to upgrade his building’s facilities to comply with the Secret Service’s security requirements.

  410. says

    This is a followup to comment 397.

    The NY Times responded to Trump’s tweet:

    Fact: surge in new subscriptions, print & digital, with trends, stops & starts, 4 X better than normal.

    Take that, Trump. You have been caught lying again. Let’s not give a pass to any of Trump’s lies.

  411. ck, the Irate Lump says

    Oops. I didn’t refresh and notice that Lynna already posted one of those links.

  413. says

    “Donald Trump Says He’ll Deport 2-3 Million People Once In Office”:

    He’ll build a border wall and he’ll deport millions of people who are in the U.S. illegally, President-elect Donald Trump says, promising to keep his campaign pledges on immigration in his first prolonged interview since winning the White House.

    Saying that his administration will deport “probably 2 million” — and possibly 3 million — people who are in the country illegally, Trump told 60 Minutes‘ Lesley Stahl that he wants to secure the border. Trump also seemed willing to consider the plan some of his fellow Republicans have aired, of securing some parts of the border with a fence….

  414. says

    So I just read Alexander Zaitchik’s The Gilded Rage: A Wild Ride through Donald Trump’s America. During the primaries, Zaitchik (a Sanders supporter) went to Trump rallies across the country and did long interviews with Trump followers. There’s no prototypical Trump voter, and these people aren’t among the most deplorable – I don’t know how representative they are. Far from all of them are in a dire or desperate economic situation, though some have been downwardly mobile. A few immediate thoughts/generalizations (the first two aren’t surprising revelations, but worth emphasizing):

    1) Soldiers and veterans and their families are often treated terribly, especially when it comes to mental health care.

    2) Miners and mining communities are treated terribly.

    3) It’s anecdotal, but it looks like very, very few Trump voters would have voted for Sanders. They think he’s a Communist, and the constant refrain and punchline is that he’s about “free stuff,” which they believe involves taking from middle class and other poor people to give to others rather than redistributing wealth from the top. They’re pro-capitalist. They’re hierarchical thinkers, and dislike comprehensive social programs that they think would benefit undeserving people equally.

    4) They see their problems as caused by the elites in power, particularly the Democrats, rather than the result of capitalism and neoliberal policies driven primarily by Republicans and the superrich. I’m reasonably convinced that if someone distributed the Communist Manifesto to many of them, but changed the name and replaced “bourgeois” and “capital” with “elites,” “establishment,” and “globalism” and so forth, it would resonate.

    5) Some of them talk somewhat sympathetically about some of the people Trump bashes, but there doesn’t seem to be even the tiniest spark of solidarity with them. When they talk about what the past was like, there’s an assumption that what worked for them worked for everyone; there seems to be no question of joining together with these other groups in a common struggle.

    6) There’s explicit racism, especially toward Muslims, but more frequent is the longing to return to a past age when things were good for them and others “knew their place.” Many comments in the southwest could basically be translated as “Mexicans have gotten too uppity.” Even if they’re not openly racist or sexist, they’re not bothered by Trump’s racism and sexism.

    7) There’s a lot of authoritarianism, especially when it comes to the police and protesters.

    8) They don’t believe everything Trump says, but they do believe he’s a savvy and successful businessman who will bring back good jobs with benefits and restore past “greatness.” They also believe he’s against the elite.

    9) Many of them rely on some sort of government program, but they don’t realize that the Republicans have been gutting these programs for decades while the Democrats have fought to defend and expand them. In some cases, they praise their state health care program without understanding that it’s Obamacare. They don’t seem at all aware of or concerned about the future of these programs with Trump and the Republicans in charge.

  418. says

    California Senate Leader to Trump: Abandon this dangerous path on immigration:

    Sunday, November 13, 2016

    LOS ANGELES – California Senate President pro Tempore Kevin de León (D-Los Angeles) issued the following statement in response to President-elect Donald Trump’s statement that he will deport as many as 3 million undocumented immigrants immediately upon taking office:

    Since Tuesday’s election, California’s leaders have hoped and prayed for the best but prepared for the worst – and, today, President-elect Trump confirmed some of our worst fears.

    It is erroneous and profoundly irresponsible to suggest that up to three million undocumented immigrants living in America are dangerous criminals – and threatening to immediately deport them only exacerbates the unprecedented angst and anger currently dividing our American community. It also appears to be a thinly-veiled pretense for a catastrophic policy of mass deportation that will tear apart families and weaken our economy. I implore President-elect Trump to reconsider and retract his preposterous statement.

    I also want to assure the millions of people who are here pursuing and contributing to the California Dream, but lack documentation, that the State of California stands squarely behind you. State leaders will defend your due process rights and aggressively avail ourselves of any and all tools to prevent an unconscionable over-reach by a Trump administration in California. We will protect our people and prosperity.

    ###

    En Español:El Presidente del Senado de California Kevin de León (D-Los Ángeles) emitió la siguiente declaración en respuesta a la declaración del Presidente-electo Donald Trump que deportara a hasta 3 millones de inmigrantes indocumentados inmediatamente al tomar posesión de la presidencia:

    Desde las elecciones del martes, los líderes californianos habían tenido esperanza y habían orado para que sucediera lo mejor, y al mismo tiempo preparase para lo peor – y, hoy, el presidente electo Trump confirmo nuestros peores temores.

    Es erróneo y profundamente irresponsable sugerir que hasta tres millones de indocumentados viviendo en los Estados Unidos sean criminales peligrosos viviendo en el país—y amenazando con deportarlos inmediatamente solo puede exacerbar la angustia y la ira sin precedentes que divide actualmente a nuestra comunidad estadounidense. También parece ser una pretensión ligeramente escondida para una política pública catastrófica de deportación en masa que separara a las familias y debilitara nuestra economía.

    Yo imploro al Presidente-electo Trump, a reconsiderar y retractar su absurda declaración. También quiero asegurar a las millones de personas aquí buscando y contribuyendo al Sueño Californiano, pero que no tienen documentación, que el Estado de California los apoya completamente. Los líderes estatales defenderán sus derechos de proceso debido y agresivamente nos apoyaremos de cualquier y toda herramienta para prevenir una extralimitación irresponsable por una administración Trump en California. Defenderemos nuestra gente y nuestra prosperidad.

    These statements have to start coming from more than government and politicians. Universities, churches, unions, professional organizations, NGOs,… – all of these need immediately to make clear that they will not collaborate with measures or policies that violate human rights, constitutional principles, or democratic institutions. They also need to put in place plans of action for defending imperiled people, groups, and institutions. There is precisely zero time to dither.

  420. consciousness razor says

    SC:

    Someone in the comments at WaPo argued that the EC petition is pointless because congress can overturn electoral votes, citing this.

    Well, I would say it’s not so much pointless as it is ineffectual, because electors have no obligation to care about the petition or do anything any differently because of it. There is some value in getting more attention, if lots of people support it. Even so, every eligible voter in the country could sign it, and it would only be a suggestion that they should vote as we want them to vote. Although they wouldn’t even have to bother, they could say, if they feel like it, “Duly noted, all eligible voters: we hear all of you loud and clear; but we (not you) get to decide who we will elect, so now we will do that, because the Constitution clearly states that we are pompous assholes who have rights that you don’t.” If they don’t want to make lots of people even more upset, perhaps they just won’t bother.

    If you could get certain state legislatures to change their systems, effectively immediately (i.e., before the December electoral vote), then I suppose that would still make a difference for 2016. But that’s obviously a huge “if.” Even in the extremely unlikely case that it did happen, Congress may still want to overturn that, flipping it “back” to Trump, if they think it’s an unconstitutional/illegal way for those states to run their elections…. It’s not clear if that could be considered “irregular” in any of the ways that matter, but it wouldn’t be the first time politicians (especially Republicans) came up with creative ways to make the law seem to say whatever they want. I wouldn’t put it past them, and there doesn’t seem to be any way to rule that out. Anyway, my hopes of fixing it for 2016 were gone a long time ago. Governments work slowly, and major changes like this just won’t happen in a few weeks.

    A week ago, some people comforted themselves with the thought that the winner losing the electoral college is supposedly “rare.” I don’t think we should call it that when our elections fail 5/58 times. Try getting hit by a bus 5 times out of every 58 that you leave the house (or 4 out of 57 if you like). You probably wouldn’t shrug it off, and you probably wouldn’t want to leave the house again. It’s not rare enough, so maybe we ought to think about possibly doing something to change it.

    Let’s do it right. All US eligible voters should have the right to vote for president (including citizens in US territories, not just the 50 states and D.C., and we happily welcome them as new states if they like). You just count people. As a bonus, as if democracy weren’t enough, there won’t be lots of pandering and media drivel dedicated to a handful of “swing states,” since that particular sort of idiocy would simply become meaningless, as Gawd intended. We could all equally enjoy some new and exciting forms of pandering and drivel, as people who can actually vote. Wouldn’t that be nice?

    Maybe we could eventually get the Senate to represent us fairly too, so it isn’t two from every state no matter the population…. But if has to be one little step at a time, so be it. I don’t think we should be politely asking our betters, who have the vote, to please give us a reason, if they would be so kind, not to take this shit seriously for a few more years. This sort of thing isn’t usually handed to you, just because you asked nicely and had impeccable reasons for asking. So let’s try another strategy. We’ll have to recognize that this really is a problem with our whole system, not just with this one outcome. Then we’ll have to do some real work, which make take a while, to make it democratic. It’ll be worth it.

  421. raven says

    Americans crowdsource tips for a Trump survival guide
    By Emanuella Grinberg, CNN
    Updated 10:53 PM ET, Sun November 13, 2016

    Survival guides for making it through the Trump disaster are appearing.
    They will be somewhat different depending on who you are and where you are.

    I’m working on mine. It won’t be too complicated.
    1. Believe the dictator. They aren’t hiding who they are or what they will do.
    2. The USA will likely be wrecked.
    But it won’t happen immediately. it will take many years.
    The USA is a big place with 324 million people. It takes time to destroy it. It took Bush 7 years.

    3. Most likely they will rev up the economy with easy money. Like Bush and Greenspan did. And then one day far away, the bubble will burst. Again. Wall Street and the banks are very good at siphoning off huge amounts of money and leaving someone else holding the bag.

    4. Toss your TV. I did that during Reagan and never got another one. It changes nothing but is good for mental health.
    This time, I’m not tossing my internet. I need it for lots of stuff like most everyone. But paying attention is going to go down. It can’t go too low because it is like a slow motion train wreck. I need to know what happens and when to get out of the way.

  422. raven says

    California Senate leader:
    State leaders will defend your due process rights and aggressively avail ourselves of any and all tools to prevent an unconscionable over-reach by a Trump administration in California. We will protect our people and prosperity.

    If the states don’t want to be pushed around by the federal government, they don’t have to.

    The state and local governments more or less have to obey the laws. But they don’t have to do it willingly or enthusiastically. There are a lot of ways to stall and beat around the bush.
    The southern states have been doing it since 1865.

    You are going to see a lot of passive aggressive resistance to the fuhrer from blue states.

  423. KG says

    There’s a lot of media and commenter noise about how Trump’s voters were “those left behind by globalization”, or “anti-establishment”. Ed Brayton, on Dispatches from the Culture Wars said:

    Most of the people who voted for Trump did so largely because they believed he was truly anti-establishment

    I responded:

    Nonsense: . Trump won majorities among men, whites, those over 40, and those making over $50,000 a year. Clinton won majorities among women, all other racial groups, those under 40, and those making less than $50,000 a year (and of course among voters as a whole). Do Trump’s supporters look like an anti-establishment coalition? Most of his voters more likely voted for him because they believed he would protect their privileges. Some will have voted for him because they believe – or at least, hope – that he will bring back decently-paid working-class jobs; and at the least, didn’t find his bigotry sufficient reason not to vote for him. Those are the ones who are going to be most swiftly disappointed, but the majority of his voters are likely to be right, at least in the short term: he, and the Republicans, will protect the interests of privileged groups.

    That by no means implies that the Democrats don’t need to craft a program that will appeal more to those at the bottom of the economic heap, or “left behind” by globalization. But overwhelmingly, that means 2016 non-voters. It’s not going to be easy: contrary to many claims, Sanders didn’t bring in a lot of new voters to the primaries – whether he could have done so in the general, we don’t know. And it shouldn’t be attempted under the delusion that most of Trump’s voters supported him despite the bigotry: at best, they didn’t care enough about its targets to stop them voting for him; for many, it was not a bug, but a feature. Understanding how deep and widespread the social pathologies Trump and his European counterparts exploit are, is absolutely necessary in fighting them.

  424. snuffcurry says

    @ consciousness razor 418

    Let’s do it right. All US eligible voters should have the right to vote for president (including citizens in US territories, not just the 50 states and D.C., and we happily welcome them as new states if they like). You just count people.

    That’s actually the point of the petition, to highlight for states that haven’t yet been able to pass the National Popular Vote Interstate Act (clumsy name, I feel) that there’s a will, among the electorate, to do so. I don’t think, pace your other remarks, that anyone actually thinks the petition is going to salvage this election, but spreading news about it might hasten the dissolution of the electoral college some day, and its existence proves to those who may not have realized before now that the possibility of doing so is real.

    Even in the extremely unlikely case that it did happen, Congress may still want to overturn that, flipping it “back” to Trump, if they think it’s an unconstitutional/illegal way for those states to run their elections….

    It’s the other way ’round. Congress can’t overturn anything to prevent this from happening. They’d have to actually amend the Constitution to wrest away from individual states the power to decide how they will select electors and how those electors’s votes are determined and then cast (or sue so that the SCOTUS may determine whether congress has a right or obligation to do so). As it stands, not all states require that their electors pool their votes together for the candidate who won the majority of intra-state popular votes.

  426. Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls says

    Also, I’m not sure, but has the option ever been put to voters?

    Not that I’ve heard. Not all referendums make the national news.
    Direct election of the president will require another amendment to the constitution, as was required for direct election of senators (17th amendment).

  427. says

    Well, I would say it’s not so much pointless as it is ineffectual, because electors have no obligation to care about the petition or do anything any differently because of it. There is some value in getting more attention, if lots of people support it. Even so, every eligible voter in the country could sign it, and it would only be a suggestion that they should vote as we want them to vote. Although they wouldn’t even have to bother, they could say, if they feel like it, “Duly noted, all eligible voters: we hear all of you loud and clear; but we (not you) get to decide who we will elect, so now we will do that, because the Constitution clearly states that we are pompous assholes who have rights that you don’t.” If they don’t want to make lots of people even more upset, perhaps they just won’t bother.

    It’s such a strange thing. It’s true that they have no obligation to heed the petition, but that’s true of most petitions. Additionally, as you note, they’re not accountable to the public in any way that those petitioned typically are. On the other hand, the concrete legal consequences of voting for Clinton where it’s possible to do so seem to be minimal or nonexistent. So to the extent that it’s more than a symbolic appeal, it’s a question of whether some electors could conceivably be prevailed upon to represent the popular will and defend against autocracy. It would depend on how they see their role and responsibilities and the kind of people they are. The consensus seems to be that they’re extremely unlikely to do what the petition asks because they’re “very carefully chosen” by the parties (I admit that I’m totally ignorant of this process) and would be afraid, if they even considered taking that step, of backlash and chaos.

    I really know very little about who these people are. Am I missing something fundamental?

  428. says

    During Trump’s extended interview with Leslie Stahl on “60 Minutes,” he said that marriage equality was “settled law” because it had gone through the Supreme Court; then he indicated that Roe v. Wade was not settled law and that conservative Justices on the Supreme Court could overturn Roe v. Wade and send the issue of abortion back to the states.

    On the issue of different abortion laws in different states, he had no empathy for women who would “have to go to a different state” to get an abortion. I think he is incapable of understanding the plight of poor and low-income women.

    Trump also demonstrated ignorance about health insurance in general, and about Obamacare in particular. He spouted platitudes about better and cheaper health insurance, but he does not understand that it is not economically feasible to forbid insurance companies to refuse coverage for pre-existing or long-term conditions while simultaneously throwing the individual mandate out the window along with subsidies. He does not know how things work. And I think he is incapable of learning.

    Trump also indicated that he might not appoint a special prosecutor to investigate Hillary Clinton. Apparently, threatening to jail his political opponent was just a campaign ploy.

    http://www.cbsnews.com/news/60-minutes-donald-trump-family-melania-ivanka-lesley-stahl/

  429. says

    Regarding Trump’s appointment of Steve Bannon to the position of chief strategist and senior counselor, let’s look at just one of Bannon’s lies posted on Breitbart News:

    Notwithstanding his war-hero son’s genuinely patriotic example, Khizr M. Khan has published papers supporting the supremacy of Islamic law over ‘man-made’ Western law — including the very Constitution he championed in his Democratic National Convention speech attacking GOP presidential nod Donald Trump.

    https://www.justsecurity.org/32508/trumps-ceos-smear-campaign-gold-star-father-khizr-khan-headlines-excerpts/

  430. a_ray_in_dilbert_space says

    It is unlikely that the protests and the petitions and reiterating that Drumpf did NOT win the popular vore and all the reasons why Drumpf is an unacceptable occupant for 1600 Penn. Ave. will change the outcome of the election, but…

    It does show he does not have a mandate. It does weaken his claim to legitimacy.

    I mean, let’s face it, Donald Drumpf certainly knew he wasn’t really going to discover from his birth certificate that Obama was a Kenyan Muslim. The goal was to delegitimize Obama and make it easier to oppose his agenda. What Drumpf may not have known is that paybacks are hell.

  431. says

    Oh, the ignorance, the depth of the ignorance!

    […] During their private White House meeting on Thursday, Mr. Obama walked his successor through the duties of running the country, and Mr. Trump seemed surprised by the scope, said people familiar with the meeting. Trump aides were described by those people as unaware that the entire presidential staff working in the West Wing had to be replaced at the end of Mr. Obama’s term. […]

    http://www.wsj.com/articles/leading-contender-for-donald-trump-s-chief-of-staff-is-rnc-chairman-reince-priebus-1479069597

    Meanwhile, Sean Hannity of Fox News has suggested that Trump should ban the NY Times and the Washington Post from the White House.

  432. says

    Another moment from Leslie Stahl’s interview with Trump struck me as ominous: Stahl said that Trump was unaware of all the hate crimes and harassment of “others” that had escalated since his election.

    How can he be that unaware? WTF?

    Trump did say to the camera, “Stop it,” claiming that he does not want people to behave that way, that it saddens him. He also followed up by saying that the media takes a few isolated incidents and blows them out of proportion.

  433. says

    This is a followup to comment 430.

    “Trump Nation, whites only.” That’s what the sign read in Silver Spring, Maryland. The message was painted over a sign advertising Spanish-language Mass.

    Yes, Mr. Trump, fake deportation letters have been sent to high school students, university dormitories have been vandalized with swastikas, etc. And that’s only a drop in the bucket when it comes to the uptick in hate crimes.

  434. says

    This is a followup to comment 427.

    A few details that describe the rancid ideology of Steve Bannon:

    […] Bannon may deny that Breibart traffics in racism, misogyny, anti-Semitism, and anti-Muslim extremism, but a look at some of the site’s headlines shows that these are the ideologies on which the site built its popularity since Bannon took it over in 2012. It used a picture of Harambe the gorilla for a story about President Barack Obama and birtherism. It ran headlines that include: “Gabby Giffords: The Gun Control Movement’s Human Shield,” “There’s No Hiring Bias Against Women in Tech, They Just Suck at Interviews,” “Birth Control Makes Women Crazy and Unattractive,” “The Solution to Online Harassment Is Simple: Women Should Just Log Off,” and “Bill Kristol: Republican Spoiler, Renegade Jew.” […]

    Mother Jones link

  435. says

    This is a followup to the health care portion of comment 426.

    Jonathan Gruber explained why “You can’t have it both ways” by only keeping parts of the Affordable Care Act that poll well.

    […] JONATHAN GRUBER: It sounds to me like Trump is trying to say he’s going to protect some of the parts of Obamacare that are most popular without actually laying out a plan for doing so. So, for example, one of the fundamental gains of Obamacare is ending discrimination in insurance markets.

    No longer allowing insurers to deny insurance coverage to people just because they’re sick or charge them higher prices. […]

    COSTELLO: So, if he keeps — like I guess this still would have to go through Congress, right? So, let’s say he keeps the parts of the law that people really like. What would that do to all of our premiums? If he could keep all of the elements that you say that Congress might reject.

    GRUBER: The point is about Obamacare, it’s complicated for a reason. The part people like is ending insurance discrimination. Not allowing insurers to deny my wife coverage because she’s a breast cancer survivor.

    However, you can’t have that unless you also make sure that people can afford insurance so that the healthy buy it, and you get healthy people into the risk pool. To just say we’re going to keep the parts people like and get rid of the parts people don’t, we’ve tried that. Seven states tried that in the 1990s. They tried to tell insurers you can’t discriminate against the sick. In every single case it destroyed the insurance market, premiums went through the roof and the insurance market shrunk to a fraction of its previous size. You can’t have it both ways. If you want to tell insurers they can’t discriminate you need an individual mandate and subsidies to make sure that healthy people come into the pool.

    COSTELLO: Why couldn’t the government put price controls on insurance companies?

    GRUBER: The government could try to put price controls on insurance companies but then insurance companies could: A)exit the market. And say, “I’m just not going to offer insurance in this market.” There’s nothing the government can do about that. Or B) deny sick people coverage and say, “At that price I’m not going to offer coverage to sick people.” […]

    GRUBER: […] you can’t have it both ways. If you want insurance companies to cover everyone fairly, you have to bring healthy people into the pool. And the only way to do that is with a combination of carrots, which is tax credits to make health insurance affordable, and a stick, which is a mandate to bring the healthy people in to buy insurance.

    COSTELLO: I’ve heard a lot of people say, you know what, there’s 22 million people on Obamacare right now, a large majority of them are poor people who can’t afford insurance, but if they’re ticked off with Obamacare they’ll just go to Medicaid. Is it as simple as that?

    GRUBER: No, it’s not. The 22 million people who are on Obamacare right now are on parts of Medicaid that didn’t exist before. So for example, before on Medicaid, if you were a, say, 25-year-old, or say a 30-year-old single woman with no children, and an income of $5,000 a year, you had no access to health insurance. That simply didn’t exist. Obamacare, in expanding Medicaid, said we are going to guarantee our poorest citizens, very poorest citizens, a right to health insurance coverage in those states that chose to expand Medicaid. If you take that away, then a woman like that simply has no coverage options.

    This is a long comment, but I think it is a short as it can be and still explain the facts, the reality.

  436. raven says

    …then he indicated that Roe v. Wade was not settled law and that conservative Justices on the Supreme Court could overturn Roe v. Wade and send the issue of abortion back to the states.

    1. It is possible that Roe v. Wade gets overturned somewhere down the line. Five years ago, I wouldn’t have written that.
    It’s very rare for people to give up their rights.
    The majority of the voters are…women. Quite a few voted for Trump. A majority of white women did.

    2. It’s not the end of the story though. It could be reinstated even further down the line by another Supreme court.

    3. Everything has gotten political. The FBI, the courts, etc.. A Supreme Court decision is as good as the judges that ruled on it. Another group of judges can and sometimes will overrule.

  437. says

    I’ve completed my post about Hans Miklas, a fictional character in Klaus Mann’s 1936 novel Mephisto. He’s an avid Nazi supporter who believes they’ll bring down the elites; in the end, he’s bitterly disappointed and crushed by his own movement. (The post includes a compilation of several articles about Trump’s and the Republicans’ economic plans.)

  438. says

    raven @434, right. You’re right. One of my points was that Trump is inconsistent, accepting one thing as settled law and not another. He is unpredictable. He contradicts himself within the same paragraph. I should have made that clearer.

    In other news, as we expected, white nationalists love Trump’s appointment of Steve Bannon to his administration’s leadership team:

    […] Neo-Nazi Website Infostormer: “Pure Awesomeness.” Infostormer is a neo-Nazi website that idolizes Adolf Hitler and Donald Trump. It is virulently anti-Semitic and features the prominent tag line, “Destroying Jewish Tyranny.” Writer “Marcus Cicero” celebrated Bannon’s hiring by writing that it’s “Pure awesomeness” and Bannon “is far closer to our views than the average Republican you will see on the tubes.”

    Neo-Nazi Website Daily Stormer: Trump Has Surrounded Himself With “The Right People.” The Daily Stormer is a neo-Nazi website that idolizes Hitler and Donald Trump. The website leads online attacks and troll campaigns against Jewish journalists. Editor Andrew Anglin praised Trump’s hiring of Bannon and said Trump has “surrounded himself with the right people this entire election, so there’s no reason to believe he’ll stop doing that now.” Anglin also attacked the “kike media” for “portraying Trump as a cuck who is going back on everything.”

    White Nationalist Leader Richard Spencer: “’Strategist’ Is The Best Possible Position For Steve Bannon.” Richard Spencer is a white nationalist who leads the “think tank” National Policy Institute. The Associated Press reported that Spencer has “matter-of-factly called for removing African-Americans, Hispanics and Jews from the United States.” Spencer praised Trump’s Bannon appointment on his Twitter account: 1/ “Strategist” is the best possible position for Steve Bannon in the Trump White House. […]

    Link

  439. says

    Democrats in the House of Representatives are asking the House Oversight Committee to review Trump’s financial arrangements.

    Elijah Cummings on Monday filed a letter asking for the House Oversight Committee to swiftly review Donald Trump’s “financial arrangements” for potential conflicts of interest before he’s sworn in as president.

    […] “immediately begin conducting a review of President-elect Donald Trump’s financial arrangements to ensure that he does not have any actual or perceived conflicts of interest and that he and his advisors comply with all legal and regulatory ethical requirements when he assumes the presidency.”

    “We have never had a president like Mr. Trump in terms of his vast financial entanglements and his widespread business interests around the globe,” Cummings wrote, noting Trump’s refusal to disclose his tax returns. “Mr. Trump’s unprecedented secrecy and his extensive business dealings in foreign countries raise serious questions about how he intends to avoid conflicts of interest as president.”

    Cummings dismissed the notion that Trump will set up a blind trust for his business empire, considering the president-elect has said his children — who were active in his campaign and named to his transition team’s executive committee — will take over, not an independent person.

    “This is certainly not a ‘blind trust,’” he said. […]

    Link

  443. consciousness razor says

    SC:

    On the other hand, the concrete legal consequences of voting for Clinton where it’s possible to do so seem to be minimal or nonexistent.

    Right. Ultimately, the goal ought to be making the popular vote legally binding. (You could take electors and their “college” out of the process altogether instead of making them an irrelevant sideshow, but that would require an amendment, which is harder than repairing a bunch of state laws.)

    So to the extent that it’s more than a symbolic appeal, it’s a question of whether some electors could conceivably be prevailed upon to represent the popular will and defend against autocracy. It would depend on how they see their role and responsibilities and the kind of people they are. The consensus seems to be that they’re extremely unlikely to do what the petition asks because they’re “very carefully chosen” by the parties (I admit that I’m totally ignorant of this process) and would be afraid, if they even considered taking that step, of backlash and chaos.

    I’m also mostly ignorant on the process of selecting them — it probably varies a lot from one state and one state-level party to the next. One thing to keep in mind is that both Clinton and Trump get 538 of them, who are picked in advance of the election. (If there’s a death or whatever, then the same process will certify a replacement.) Basically and generally (although each state’s election laws make this more complicated in reality), if Clinton is the popular winner in your state, all of those Clinton electors will meet in that state to claim that the state’s election goes to her, the state has told itself that it must legally adhere to whatever they say, and the country has told itself via the Constitution to listen states using this process. Your state’s Trump electors stay home that day, presumably to spend it hating on one demographic group or another. But those Trump electors have otherwise done nothing: in a state like California where everyone knows the Democrat will certainly win, it’s only a symbolic gesture from the California Republican party to honor 55 of their most fucked up people.

    Imagine it’s 38 electors from Texas, just to make it concrete. Those are 38 actual votes for Trump, and that by itself would suffice to shift the electoral college over to Clinton. Texas’ state legislature could decide that it isn’t the popular vote in Texas which determines whether its Trump electors or its Clinton electors do the electing, because the legislature has made it law that the national popular vote determines which set of electors it will be. (Or they could make it the law that they will be allocated any number of other ways, through any sort of convoluted process the legislature invents, for any arbitrary reason they like.)

    But if the legislature doesn’t change that, then it will be Trump’s 38 electors and none of Clinton’s, who are legally and constitutionally the only ones in Texas who can vote for president. Texas may be a state which imposes fines or other punishments on “faithless electors” (I don’t know), but the Texans who are in a position to be considering a petition like this are all loyal Republicans, hand-picked by the Texas Republican party to guarantee (as well as the party can) that they will vote for Trump.

    They probably won’t be very moved by the popular will of the country, because (1) they’ve signed on to play this role, knowing how it works, with the aim to represent the will of Texas voters, who did mostly vote for Trump in contrast the country as a whole, and (2) they will not typically see Trump, their own party’s candidate, as an autocrat who poses any danger to anybody or anything they care about.

    You’d have to convince them that #1 is the wrong goal to have, that electors have no real legitimacy and should have no special rights not granted to any others, so they should simply do the motions to satisfy the letter (but not the spirit) of the Constitution, since for now we’re stuck with this absurd system which granted them these rights and this is the game they have to play. That’s going to be a pretty tough sell, but it’s certainly conceivable.

    Or you may convince them that they are wrong about #2, which is to say that they should use their rights wisely (whether or not they should have such rights), to vote against their party and against the popular vote of their state (but with the popular vote of the country). That also wouldn’t be easy: Trump voters are the worst, and these people are some of the worst of the worst, because unlike the average Trump voter on the street they have a whole lot of reasons to stay loyal and not budge an inch. You might convince a few, but you’d need to convince enough of them, scattered around the country in any way you can, to get up to 270 votes for Clinton.

  444. consciousness razor says

    Gwen Ifill has died.

    This year just keeps getting worse. She was only 61. So sad right now.

  445. raven says

    @Lynna, 436.
    I understood completely what you said. Just adding my 7 cents worth.
    1. A lot of older people, mostly but not all women, are really bitter and feeling betrayed about how Roe vs. Wade has been put in harm’s way.
    We/they put a lot of effort into making abortion legal.
    And the voters, many of them female are letting those rights get taken away.
    If you don’t defend your rights, you won’t have them.

    2. Ironically, the large majority of the US population favors legal abortion.
    As studies have shown, what the majority wants in our democracy isn’t often what they actually get.

    3. While Roe vs Wade can be overturned and then reinstated depending on how the future votes turn out, it is a slow process.
    One whole cycle of this would be a lot longer than my projected lifespan.

  446. says

    SC @438, that was great! In all of its awfulness, it was great. Thanks for the link.

    And just for good measure, here’s one more moment of abrasive stupidity from Steve Bannon:

    […] Bannon is known for his anti-Semitism, white nationalism and conspiracy theories, but he’s also not a fan of educated, progressive women. While defending Sarah Palin and other conservative women, he said he thinks educated, progressive women are nothing more than a bunch of “dykes.” This wasn’t some secret audio recording. He said this in a radio interview. […]

    Twitter link

  447. says

    I linked above to news about the SDF operation to liberate Raqqa. Turkey has now moved in. This is terrible news.

    It gets worse. I’ve been sharing news here about the increasingly dire situation in Turkey, and Lynna did above @ #362. Erdogan now wants a referendum on expanding his autocratic powers (particularly to go after the Kurds), which will be no problem for Trump. Boris Johnson is calling on European governments to go easy on Erdogan’s plan to restore the death penalty. Every victory for authoritarianism over democracy and human rights in any country makes victories in other countries easier.

  448. says

    Senator Jeff Merkley released this statement:

    There should be no sugarcoating the truth here: Donald Trump just invited a white nationalist into the highest reaches of the government. Bannon has boasted that he made Breitbart News ‘the platform for the alt-right,’ which is the politically correct term for the resurrection of white nationalism.

    Under Bannon’s leadership, Breitbart News created news sections such as ‘Black Crime’ and compared the work of Planned Parenthood to the Holocaust. Under his leadership, Breitbart News ran this headline following the massacre of nine church-goers at an African American church in Charleston: ‘Hoist it high and proud: The Confederate flag proclaims a glorious heritage.’ […] Steve Bannon bears substantial responsibility for the open and disgusting acts of hatred that are sweeping across our nation.

    After running a campaign built on inciting divisions and hate, Donald Trump has claimed he wants to unite America. Yet he has done nothing meaningful to stop the wave of hate crimes and hate speech he has unleashed, and now has brought that strategy right into the Oval Office.

    Donald Trump needs to forcefully denounce the hateful actions and efforts to intimidate people that some of his supporters are undertaking and rescind the appointment of Steve Bannon.

    https://www.merkley.senate.gov/news/press-releases/merkley-denounces-appointment-of-white-nationalist-to-top-white-house-post

  449. says

    This is a followup to comments 430 and 431.

    […] According to the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a non-profit organization that tracks hate groups and hate crimes, more than 300 incidents of “hateful harassment and intimidation” have been reported since Election Day. That is reportedly roughly the amount they usually see in a five to six-month period. […]

    Think Progress link

    Those numbers are truly frightening.

  451. says

    Wonkette has had it up to here when it comes to infighting within the Democratic Party:

    […] If you want to explain that John Lewis and Nancy Pelosi need to be purged from the party, do it at Twitter, not on Wonkette. (Except just this once!) If you want to explain that all Democrats are just warmongers and need to be eaten from within, have fucking at it. If you want to put everyone’s head on a pike because for some reason you think Democrats don’t care about the white working class, because they also care about working class people of other colors, [B-Word] away. (You’re wrong, and fuck you, but whatever, let it all hang out!) If you think Bernie could have won, because a poll when he never had a dime spent against him said so, that is your right. If you think who the Congressional Black Caucus got funding from is more important than the work they’re doing trying to stop voter suppression, go right ahead! […]

  452. says

    Rachel Maddow discussed Steven Mnuchin, campaign’s new national finance chair. This episode is from 5/5/2016, but it is newly relevant since Mnuchin has been selected for national finance chair.

    The video is 19:32 minutes long.

    You will not be surprised to learn that of all the criminally-inclined bankers responsible for the recession Steve Mnuchin might get the prize for being the most unethical. Mnuchin was completely impervious to the financial plights of his customers.

  453. says

    Oh, FFS. Mike Pence has an email problem, and a transparency problem:

    […] Mike Pence is working to block public access to the contents of his emails as governor of Indiana.

    His lawyers are now fighting to deny disclosure of records showing how many taxpayer dollars he spent to hire outside attorneys to join an anti-immigration case. […]

    Indy Star link

  455. says

    Did the Koch brothers will after all, even though they did not openly back Trump?

    […] Vice-President-elect Mike Pence, the new transition-team chair, announced that Marc Short, who until recently ran Freedom Partners, the Kochs’ political-donors group, would serve as a “senior adviser.” […]

    For policy and personnel advice regarding the Department of Energy, Trump is relying on Michael McKenna, the president of the lobbying firm MWR Strategies. McKenna’s clients include Koch Companies Public Sector, a division of Koch Industries. […]

    Michael Catanzaro, a partner at the lobbying firm CGCN Group, is the head of Trump’s energy transition team, and has been mentioned as a possible energy czar. Among his clients are Koch Industries and Devon Energy Corporation, a gas-and-oil company that has made a fortune from vertical drilling and hydraulic fracturing. Another widely discussed candidate is Harold Hamm, the billionaire founder of the shale-oil company Continental Resources, who is a major contributor to the Kochs’ fund-raising network. […]

    Myron Ebell, an outspoken climate-change skeptic, heads Trump’s transition team for the E.P.A. Ebell runs the energy-and-environmental program at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, an anti-regulatory Washington think tank that hides its sources of financial support but has been funded by fossil-fuel companies, including Exxon-Mobil and Koch Industries. […]

    New Yorker link

  457. says

    SC @454, I look forward to seeing that. (Meant “win” when I typed “will”.)

    About the Supreme Court:

    […] In Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, the Court rejected the Administration’s view that the A.C.A. required closely held corporations to subsidize forms of birth control that the owners opposed on religious grounds. Over all, the Court has reflected the fierce partisan divisions in the country. Conservatives won many cases (striking down campaign-finance regulations and gutting the core of the Voting Rights Act), while liberals won others (expanding gay rights and reaffirming abortion rights). The Trump Presidency will shape the Justices’ work even before they decide a case. If Trump succeeds in overturning the Affordable Care Act, the Court’s two landmark endorsements of that law, in 2012 and 2015, will become nullities, like rave reviews of a closed restaurant. […]

    [Regarding voters-suppression initiatives] a conservative majority on the Court would likely give the states a free hand, which would allow them to enact even greater restrictions. […]

    New Yorker link

    Quoted text by Jeffrey Toobin.

  458. says

    Advice from Junot Diaz:

    […] I believe that, once the shock settles, faith and energy will return. Because let’s be real: we always knew this shit wasn’t going to be easy. Colonial power, patriarchal power, capitalist power must always and everywhere be battled, because they never, ever quit. We have to keep fighting, because otherwise there will be no future—all will be consumed. Those of us whose ancestors were owned and bred like animals know that future all too well, because it is, in part, our past. And we know that by fighting, against all odds, we who had nothing, not even our real names, transformed the universe. Our ancestors did this with very little, and we who have more must do the same. This is the joyous destiny of our people—to bury the arc of the moral universe so deep in justice that it will never be undone.

    But all the fighting in the world will not help us if we do not also hope. What I’m trying to cultivate is not blind optimism but what the philosopher Jonathan Lear calls radical hope. “What makes this hope radical,” Lear writes, “is that it is directed toward a future goodness that transcends the current ability to understand what it is.” Radical hope is not so much something you have but something you practice; it demands flexibility, openness, and what Lear describes as “imaginative excellence.” Radical hope is our best weapon against despair, even when despair seems justifiable; it makes the survival of the end of your world possible. Only radical hope could have imagined people like us into existence. And I believe that it will help us create a better, more loving future. […]

    Link

  459. says

    Press release – “AJC and ISNA Launch Muslim-Jewish Advisory Council”:

    The Muslim-Jewish Advisory Council, a new national group of leading Muslim and Jewish Americans, was launched this month at a meeting convened by the American Jewish Committee (AJC) and the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA).

    …

    At the group’s inaugural meeting, the Muslim and Jewish participants met for two hours to get to know one another, discuss the Council’s mission, and identify and agree on a domestic policy agenda. Among the Council’s initial action items are:

    The Council will highlight the contributions of Muslims and Jews to American society, and aim to celebrate their contributions in the best traditions of American democracy.
    The Council will develop a coordinated strategy to address anti-Muslim bigotry and anti-Semitism in the U.S.
    The Council will work to protect and expand the rights of religious minorities in the U.S., as enshrined in the Constitution, so they may practice their faiths in full freedom and security.

    “Our two communities share much in common and should find ways, where possible, to work together for the benefit of the entire country,” said Stanley Bergman, Co-Chair of the Council….

  461. says

    “Trump adviser linked to Turkish lobbying”:

    Donald Trump wants to forbid his officials from lobbying for foreign governments, but one of his top national security advisers is being paid by a close ally of Turkey’s president.

    Retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, a vice chair of the Trump transition who is in the running for a top national security post in the new administration, runs a consulting firm that is lobbying for Turkish interests, an associate told POLITICO. Asked if Flynn’s firm was hired because of the general’s closeness to Trump, the associate, Robert Kelley, said, “I hope so.”

    …

    Flynn wrote an op-ed published in The Hill on Election Day arguing that the U.S. should not provide “safe haven” to Fethullah Gülen, the Pennsylvania-based cleric who the Turkish government has accused of masterminding this summer’s failed coup. (Gülen denies the allegation.)…

  462. says

    “Major Outlets Downplay The Fact That Trump’s New Chief Strategist Ran An Anti-Semitic White Nationalist Website”:

    Major newspapers are ignoring or burying Steve Bannon’s ties to white nationalism and anti-Semitism when reporting on his appointment as President-elect Donald Trump’s chief strategist and senior counselor. By burying or dismissing the information, media are failing to provide their audiences with essential background on one of Trump’s most influential advisers….

  463. says

    From 2006 – “Harvard’s admissions of gilt”:

    The most egregious example of pay-for-Crimson – play is that of Jared Kushner , now the youthful owner of The New York Observer. While Jared was applying to colleges, his dad, New Jersey billionaire developer Charles Kushner , pledged $2.5 million to Harvard, to be paid in installments. (Kushner pere pleaded guilty to tax evasion and other counts in 2004 and recently completed a prison sentence.) An official at Kushner’s high school told Golden: “There was no way anybody in . . . the school thought he would on the merits get into Harvard. His GPA did not warrant it, his SAT scores did not warrant it. We thought, for sure, there was no way this was going to happen.” Kushner graduated from Harvard in 2003.

    A spokesman for Kushner said he would not be available for comment. In a prepared statement, Harvard admissions dean William Fitzsimmons affirmed that “all students admitted to Harvard are fully qualified to be here.”…

  464. says

    “Associated Press casts Trump as potentially ‘history-making’ champion of women”:

    …The AP’s coverage is part of the normalization of Donald Trump. The candidate routinely belittled and demeaned women as a candidate — and none have been named to top posts in his transition or administration. During the campaign itself, more than 10 women accused Trump of sexual assault.

    The remaking of Trump as a history-making champion of gender diversity less than a week after his election illustrates just how far, and how fast, the bar has been lowered….

  468. says

    This is a followup to tingueguen’s comment 463.

    Rachel Maddow covered the madness of Trump asking for top security clearances for his children. His kids are advising him on matters of national security and they are simultaneously running the Trump family businesses.

    Maddow said that NBC News confirmed the top level security clearances for Trump’s three eldest children.

    If President Obama does not approve the security clearances, President Trump could approve the security clearances after he is sworn in in January.

    Is Trump afraid to run the presidency without the help of his children? Or does he want his kids to have insider information they can use to run Trump’s businesses for more and better profits?

    Are his kids the only people Trump trusts?

    Do we trust Trump’s kids to be privy to national security secrets that may affect their far-flung business empire?

  469. says

    Rachel Maddow covered Steve Bannon’s past record, his array of right-wing media ventures, his anti-Semitic , and his white nationalist leanings.

    The video is 12:16 minutes long. It begins with Maddow’s hilarious review of a movie in which a “mad scientist” threatens people if they don’t publish his manifesto about global warming. The next movie reviewed by Maddow is the “Torchbearer,” a movie that celebrates the Duck Dynasty patriarch as a living prophet. Steve Bannon was involved in producing both movies. A Sarah Palin documentary is discussed.

    Not to worry, Maddow leaves the movies behind eventually and she does bring us up to date on Steve Bannon’s more recent career moves. All of the career moves in which Bannon was involved were either totally bonkers in terms of their original concept(s), and/or Bannon turned them into something totally bonkers.

    Some of Maddow’s coverage includes details about misogyny and abuse of women (1996 for the abuse charges).

  470. says

    In other global-reverberations news:

    “Saudi regime prostration to Trump is reaching pathetic levels: a Saudi regime paper talks about Obama ‘whose father came from the jungles of Africa'”:

    Look at this columnist from Saudi regime mouthpiece, Al-Jazeera: “Trump has become last Wednesday the president of America, and by presiding over the throne of power in the most powerful state on earth, it means that a new dawn has risen in the world, and on the Middle East in particular; and that that Obamian nighmare and the stale years which were crowned with blood, have ended with the beginning of the Trump era…The Democratic politicians were the worst for us and our region…And the one whose father came from the jungles of Africa were the worst among them by far”. Days ago all those regime mouthpieces were signing the praises of Hillary.

    Note the reference to the “throne of power.”

  471. Hj Hornbeck says

    [This has been cross-posted from En Tequila Es Verdad.]

    The electoral college meet to vote sometime after December 14th. While roughly half the states place legal restrictions on how electors can vote, only a handful have vowed to invalidate a ballot and there’s no instance where that’s actually occurred. On the contrary, something like one hundred “faithless electors” have voted according to their conscience instead of how they were pledged.

    Between now and mid-December, a few key events happened or will occur.

    1. The final vote tally will be published. Clinton’s small margin in the popular vote is expected to grow to around two percentage points. She’ll wind up with more votes cast in her favor than every President except Obama.

    2. “Low v. Trump University” begins November 28th. This lawsuit claims Trump engaged in elder abuse and fraud, and the evidence is looking pretty strong. Trump’s tried to delay this several times, even though he’s already recorded video testimony for it. It’s likely he’ll use every dirty trick he can to get out of it, it’s his M.O.

    3. Both the Clinton and Trump campaigns have mentioned that James Comey’s pre-election letter was a decisive factor. Clinton’s team claims their internal data shows the first letter hurt Democratic turnout, while the second boosted Republican turn out. Trump’s campaign noticed the shift too, and with no other possible means of winning the White House on hand decided to take a shot in the dark.

    While I don’t think Clinton’s popular vote margin will sway many in the electoral college, combining it with evidence of election tampering and Trump’s disrespect for the rule of law might be enough. The problem is getting this message to the electors; there’s already a petition with four million signatures on it calling on the same action, but with a fraction of the evidence. We need some way to refine its message or get the media to cover this expanded argument.

    I figure the best way to accomplish this is to call your representatives, if you live in the USA. Don’t write, email, or fax; phone calls seem to be the most powerful way to get their ear. Don’t pay much attention to party affiliation, there’s still a fair number of Republicans who might be willing to stand up to Trump. Maybe one of your reps will have the clout to hold a press conference and get the word out.

  472. says

    SC @468, all the authoritarians lining up behind Trump. Figures.

    Authoritarian, bigoted women are also pushing Trump’s agenda. What is worse, some of those women now feel free to air racist comments about Michelle Obama:

    “It will be refreshing to have a classy, beautiful, dignified First Lady in the White House. I’m tired of seeing an ape in heels.”

    Beverly Whaling, the Mayor of Clay, responded to the post saying “Just made my day Pam.”

    “Pam” is Pamela Taylor, the Director of Clay County Development Corporation in Clay County, West Virginia. The comments were posted on her Facebook page.

    Pam Taylor was on the receiving end of a lot of blowback, and rightfully so. In her mind, however, she is the victim. She thinks the situation has turned into a “hate crime against me.” She is taking a page out of Trump’s book and threatening to sue everyone.

    http://www.wsaz.com/content/news/Non-profit-director-and-mayor-under-fire-after-Facebook-post-cal-401049855.html

  473. says

    Turning politics and public service into business, (or at least erasing the lines between business and public service), Ivanka Trump’s company is selling copies of the bracelet she wore on “60 Minutes” for $10,000. Expect to see more of this kind of thing. It falls into the same category as Donald Trump promoting his hotels and golf courses during the presidential campaign.

  474. says

    This is a followup, of sorts, to comment 471.

    Other people are commenting on the merger of the Trump administration and the Trump Organization.

    In the six days since Donald Trump became president-elect, he has destroyed any distinction between the Trump administration and the Trump Organization. They have merged.

    One of the basic tenets of being president is that you represent the people, not your own self interest. That’s why presidents typically liquidate any assets that could present even a the perception of conflict.

    If you look at President Obama’s most recent financial disclosure, for instance, you’ll find only cash, government bonds, and very broad index funds. […]

    Trump will be fully aware of the assets controlled by the Trump Organization and could easily make decisions to benefit its interest. […]

    The next time Ivanka seeks to bring “the Trump® Hotel brand to global markets,” for example, she will have the ultimate leverage — the full power of the United States federal government.

    President Trump, meanwhile, retains ownership in all his companies. So every “win” for Ivanka, Eric, and Donald Jr. is money is his pocket.

    Think Progress link

  475. says

    A former Breitbart employee told a CNN host that the “dangerous and divisive” Breitbart News will be the “propaganda arm” of Trump’s administration. Link.

    Sounds about right.

    Rachel Maddow recently made the point that we don’t know if Steve Bannon stopped being directly involved with Breitbart News when he started working for Trump’s campaign. I always thought that Bannon saw Trump as his way to promote all of the goals (and conspiracy theories) of Breitbart News.

  476. says

    “The Election Is Over, But Russia Is Still Hacking”:

    Before most Americans woke up last Wednesday and learned Donald Trump had won the presidential election, hackers linked to Russian intelligence had already launched a sweeping cyberespionage campaign to find out what his victory meant for Vladimir Putin’s government.

    …

    The Nov. 9 attack especially targeted “people who are or will be associated with the incoming administration,” according to Steven Adair, founder of Volexity, the cyber security firm that first disclosed the campaign.

    …

    The attack came from the hacking crew known as Cozy Bear that U.S. officials have linked to earlier attacks on the Democratic National Committee, the White House, State Department and Joint Chiefs of Staff.

    …

    Cozy Bear’s flurry of activity on the morning of Nov. 9 targeted think tanks, non-governmental-organizations and university researchers, said Adair. Most of those targeted had ties to the national security, defense, international affairs, public policy, and European and Asian studies realms, according to Adair and other experts at cybersecurity firms that track the Russian hackers.

    …

    Adair told NBC News that the campaign especially targeted “people who are or will be associated with the incoming administration” or with those in Congress and other places who will be working with them. Also targeted: those with subject matter expertise in public policy matters that have suddenly risen in importance now that a Republican administration is taking over, he said….

  477. says

    “Was Steve Bannon, Donald Trump’s Attack Dog, Paid Illegally?”:

    A campaign watchdog group filed a complaint with federal election officials that alleges Stephen Bannon—recently named one of Donald Trump’s top White House advisers—may have gotten paid illegally during Trump’s campaign by pro-Trump billionaires.

    And now, a new set of Federal Election Commission filings that haven’t yet been reported on may give the group’s case some additional heft.

    At issue are payments of nearly $200,000 that a super PAC called Make America Number 1 made to a company tied to Bannon….

  478. says

    This article about Mike Rogers leaving Trump transition team contains an interesting segment at the end:

    The Donald Trump transition, already off to slow start, bogged down further Tuesday with the abrupt resignation of former Congressman Mike Rogers, who had been coordinating its national security efforts.

    …

    In a separate development, Eliot Cohen, a senior State Department official under George W. Bush who blasted Trump during the campaign, ripped into the president-elect’s transition effort Tuesday.

    Cohen, one of 122 Republican national security figures who signed an open letter last spring opposing Trump’s candidacy, had written an essay last week in which he suggested that military and intelligence officials “continue to do their jobs.”

    But on Tuesday, he tweeted, “After exchange w Trump transition team, changed my recommendation: stay away. They’re angry, arrogant, screaming ‘you LOST!’ Will be ugly.”

  480. says

    “LAPD will not help deport immigrants under Trump, chief says”:

    Los Angeles Police Chief Charlie Beck said Monday that he has no plans to change the LAPD’s stance on immigration enforcement, despite President-elect Donald Trump’s pledge to toughen federal immigration laws and deport millions of people upon taking office.

    For decades, the LAPD has distanced itself from federal immigration policies. The LAPD prohibits officers from initiating contact with someone solely to determine whether he or she is in the country legally, mandated by a special order signed by then-chief Daryl Gates in 1979. During Beck’s tenure as chief, the department stopped turning over people arrested for low-level crimes to federal agents for deportation and moved away from honoring federal requests to detain inmates who might be deportable past their jail terms.

    On Monday, Beck said he planned to maintain the long-standing separation.

    …

    More than 1 million of the estimated 11 million immigrants in the country without legal status live in Los Angeles County, according to the Migration Policy Institute.

    “If the first day, as president, we see something that is hostile to our people, hostile to our city, bad for our economy, bad for our security, we will speak up, speak out, act up and act out,” Garcetti said….

  482. says

    SC @475, Mercer the billionaire again, and his wife as well.

    SC @478, a good move by LAPD. I hope many follow suit.

    More news regarding Paul Ryan’s seriously obsessive approach to ending Medicare:

    What people don’t realize is that Medicare is going broke, that Medicare is going to have price controls. Because of ObamaCare, Medicaid is in fiscal straits. So you have to deal with those issues if you’re going to repeal and replace ObamaCare. Medicare has got some serious problems because of ObamaCare. Those things are part of our plan to replace ObamaCare.

    Quoted text is from a partial transcript of an interview with Paul Ryan on Fox News.

    Paul Ryan is a more skillful liar than Donald Trump, so I am afraid he may get away with this bullshit.

    Facts:

    Medicare already has price controls. A committee called the Specialty Society Relative Value Scale Update Committee (RUC) meets three times per year. The members, a committee of doctors, set costs for procedures such as various heart surgeries, and for tests like MRIs, and so forth. Medicare does not have to accept the RUC recommendations, but it usually does because a more objective price-setting mechanism does not exist. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) should be doing this job, but Congress will not give them the resources (money) they need to do so. So, not a perfect system, but there are price controls.

    Medicare is not going broke thanks to Obamacare. Obamacare extended the financial well-being of Medicare by 12 years. Washington Post link.

    Paul Ryan’s plan is to also expand the privatized part of Medicare, Medicare Advantage. Medicare Advantage is already too expensive for many people. They can’t afford it. Ryan’s voucher plan is tied in with this privatized market. He wants to shuttle federal money to private insurance companies with very few regulations to control costs.

    Ryan thinks he can get away this bait-and-switch maneuver by using the ill-informed bad reputation of Obamacare, and by saying that his efforts will affect only future retirees.

    Ryan was unanimously renominated as Speaker of the House today.

  484. says

    SC @479, Oh, FFS. Let’s hope that an ill-informed minority of that Jewish coalition is defending Bannon.

    Some commentary from Daily Kos:

    Dear Talking Heads and Print Journalists,

    You seem really concerned about offending the feelings of NeoNazis, otherwise know as White Supremacists or White Nationalists. GET OVER IT!

    The Neo Nazis know that their usual tags inspire revulsion amongst many Americans. That’s why Bannon and his ilk have invented the term “Alt Right”. Most people don’t even realize what it means… it just vaguely sounds sort of Conservative. Not as hateful. Almost could be benign.

    “Hey, isn’t the Alt-Right just the Indie version of the Republican party for millennials”?

    They knew they had to rebrand. And they knew using a different term would help obfuscate the truth of what they are.

    So stop using the term “Alt-Right” and just come out and call them what they are:

    Neo Nazis. And if that’s too raw, then at least have the integrity to call them White Supremacists or White Nationalists.

  485. says

    SC @481, it only took Ivanka’s company an hour to get new advertising posted for jewelry worn during the “60 Minutes” interview, so you know that there was a plan prior to the interview.

    Also, Ivanka placed her hands so that the bracelet was conspicuously displayed. Priorities, I guess.

    I wouldn’t pay $500 for that bracelet, let alone $10,000.

  486. Hj Hornbeck says

    Good news, Ben Carson isn’t interested in joining a Trump administration.

    “Dr. Carson was never offered a specific position, but everything was open to him,” Williams told The Hill in a phone call. “Dr. Carson feels he has no government experience, he’s never run a federal agency. The last thing he would want to do was take a position that could cripple the presidency.”

    Bad news, it appears Trump has confused hiring administrative positions with ordering at a buffet. Also, I think irony meters in alternate dimensions are starting to emit smoke.

  488. What a Maroon, living up to the 'nym says

    Wait, he admits he has no experience and would cripple any agency he runs…but he was running for fucking president?

    I’m sure he was confident that the American people would never elect anyone with no relevant experience…..

  489. says

    It’s not clear that Republicans in the Senate would have confirmed Ben Carson, even if Trump had appointed him to a cabinet position. Some Republicans have pushed back against other people that have been floated as possible Trump appointees:

    […] Rand Paul has just announced that he would not vote to confirm either John Bolton or Rudy Giuliani as Secretary of State. Remember, the GOP senate majority is exceedingly small. Three GOP defections can sink any nominee, unless Republicans can bring over a Democrat.

    Next, there’s ex-Rep. Mike Rogers’ (R-MI) sudden departure from the transition team. The key here is that he was apparently tossed because the Benghazi investigation he led in 2014 wasn’t hard enough on Obama and Clinton. If you look at Rogers’ findings and the criticism of the report that essentially means that believing Benghazi conspiracy theories is a litmus test for administration work. That’s Steve Bannon and whatever faction he’s leading talking.

    We’re hearing various blind quotes about a ‘knife fight’ in the transition team. Those quotes can be a dime a dozen. But remember, the Trump campaign is build on men who are driven by aggression as ideology and instinct. It’s hardly surprising that infighting would amount to a “Game of Thrones” type scenario as another source called it. But what does seem clear is that the Bannon/white nationalist wing of the administration is trying to root out mainstream Republicans, except for ones who have fully taken the Trump yoke, like Priebus. […]

    Link

    Carson is a doofus, so, who knows. A lot of Republicans seem to have love in their hearts for doofuses these days.

  491. says

    Hillary Clinton’s lead in the popular vote just topped one million:

    […] As the final vote counts continue to trickle in a week after Election Day, Wasserman’s tally found that Clinton had 61,963,234 votes to Trump’s 60,961,185 as of Tuesday afternoon. […]

    Politico link.

  492. says

    Here is a partial description of the painting that Sean Hannity bought for Donald Trump:

    Against the background of a darkening sky, all of the past Presidents of the United States gather before the White House, as if to commemorate some great event. In the left hand corner of the painting sits a man. That man, with his head bowed appears distraught and hopeless as he contemplates his future. Some of the past Presidents try to console him while looking in the direction of the modern Presidents as if to say, “What have you done?” Many of these modern Presidents, seemingly oblivious to anything other than themselves, appear to be congratulating each other on their great accomplishments. In front of the man, paper trash is blowing in the wind. Crumpled dollar bills, legislative documents, and, like a whisper—the U.S. Constitution beneath the foot of Barack Obama.

    Wonkette link.

    Hannity wanted Trump to have something classy to hang in the White House. /sarcasm

    Those of you who read some of the Moments of Mormon Madness I posted in past years may recognize this as Jon McNaughton’s style of kitsch. (Remember the painting titled “Jesus Gives the Constitution to George Washington” and the unforgettable “Barack Obama Burns The Constitution Because He’s Satan”?

    McNaughton studied art at Brigham Young University in Utah, and his “art” is heavily influenced by mormon themes.

  493. says

    Paul Ryan has chosen his new “leadership team” for the Republican-dominated House of Congress. The team consists of seven white men and one white woman.

    In other news, this is a followup to comment 491. Some right-wingers are claiming that Clinton’s popular vote win can be explained away by accepting the claim that millions of illegal votes were cast.

    […] “You look at the margin in the popular vote that Hillary Clinton has,” he [Bryan Fischer of American Family Radio] 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.”

    The claim that three million illegal votes were cast for Clinton is something that appears to be taken as an established fact by many right-wing media outlets despite the fact that the “evidence” for this claim seems to be nothing more than two tweets from a right-wing activist named Gregg Phillips […]

    Phillips claims that, within two days of the election, he somehow analyzed 180 million voter registration forms and was able to verify that more than three million illegal votes were cast […]

    Right Wing Watch link.

    Oh, FFS. More fake news. More fake stats.

    Phillips has not provided any evidence for the claims he made.

    InfoWars is posting the story as true.

    World Net Daily is posting the story as true.

    The New American is posting the story as true.

  494. says

    Man oh man, this day is certainly full of “oh, FFS” news. Breitbart is going to sue people for saying it is a site that supports white nationalism:

    “Breitbart News Network, a pro-America, conservative website, is preparing a multi-million dollar lawsuit against a major media company for its baseless and defamatory claim that Breitbart News is a ‘white nationalist website,’” the statement reads.

    “Breitbart News cannot allow such vicious racial lies to go unchallenged, especially by cynical, politically-motivated competitors seeking to diminish its 42 million monthly readers and its number one in the world political Facebook page. Breitbart News rejects racism in all its varied and ugly forms. Always has, always will,” the statement continues.

    “The diversity of the company’s news coverage and its staff continue to embody Andrew Breitbart’s colorblind, distinctly American commitment to ‘E pluribus unum’—out of many, one.”

    Wonkette made this appropriate comment in response to this news:

    Wonkette expects NBC to call David Duke, your skinhead nephew, the Grand Wizard of the KKK, and Stephen Bannon as witnesses for the defense.

    Bannon already called Breitbart.com “the platform for the alt-right.” Also, the KKK and the American Nazi Party have praised Trump’s appointment of Steve Bannon to a leadership role.

  495. says

    I just saw Arrival. It was very good – I recommend it. I didn’t know anything about it, but I saw that Jon Lovett recommended it, checked it out, and noticed that it was playing down the street shortly, so it worked out perfectly.

    Anyway, the recommendation came in the midst of a series of tweets about how the infighting on the Left is counterproductive and we don’t have time for it. I think he takes it a bit too far, but he’s largely right. The enemy stands on the Right, to be (hopefully) melodramatic, and there’s no time to waste. We have to come together to keep fighting and defend the people threatened and the progress made. We can’t be distracted from this by rehashing the election, which we won’t get to do over. We can and should keep disputing how to go forward, but we need always to have in the front of our minds the threat we all face in common and to stop bitterly casting blame and burning bridges on the Left. The Right is on the move globally, and we need to be, too. Everything depends on it.

  498. says

    …And there will be newcomers like Richard B. Spencer, who took a break from reveling with other ecstatic supporters in the lobby bar of the Trump International Hotel on election night to declare the party over for the Washington establishment.

    “We are winners and we have displaced them,” said Mr. Spencer, a leader of the “alt-right” movement who champions white identity politics and is currently looking for Beltway headquarters for his movement.

    He added, “We want to become the new establishment.”

    cc: Hans Miklas

  500. Hj Hornbeck says

    Another day, another story of how Trump’s transition team is flailing about.

    On Tuesday morning, for example, the Obama administration alerted the press that it had not yet received a memorandum of understanding signed by Pence, which would legally allow the old and new administrations to begin discussions on how to hand off critical government functions. That document still hadn’t arrived by 4:30 p.m., and only later in the evening did a White House official confirm it had been received. The official noted that the language signed by Pence was identical to a memo signed by Christie, making the holdup all the more peculiar.

    The disarray has left agencies virtually frozen, unable to communicate with the people tasked with replacing them and their staff. Trump transition team officials were a no-show at the Pentagon, the Washington Examiner reported. Same goes for the Department of Energy, responsible for keeping the nation’s nuclear weapons safe, where officials had expected members of the Trump transition team on Monday. Ditto for the Department of Transportation. Over at the Justice Department, officials also are still waiting to hear from the Trump team.

    But my favorite part is this (emphasis mine):

    The transition dysfunction extends beyond failure to promptly execute a memorandum of understanding. According to several sources close to the Trump transition team and inside the Obama administration, the president elect and his staff have had difficulty finding able-minded Republicans willing to take on critical posts. One Democratic source, who like others would only discuss sensitive talks on condition of anonymity, said transition officials had been informally asking Obama political appointees to recommend Republicans to take over their jobs.

    It must sting Trump to be so heavily indebted to Obama…