Foxes vs. Henhouses

Predictably, a cabinet of deplorables.

But that's just to mention some of those more recent named to cabinet positons, omitting earlier doozies in sensitive positions. Like Michael Flynn... truly a General Jack D. Ripper for the twenty-first century.

The Good Old, Bad Old Days

The days when popular art and class consciousness briefly flourished. Erik Loomis, This Day in Labor History: November 27, 1937—

On November 27, 1937, the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) debuted its play "Pins and Needles," which would become the longest running musical of the 1930s. This cultural form of labor feminism at a time when organized labor was dominated by male workers is a vital and important moment both in the cultural history of work but also in the history of women and work.

And so, from the tuneful stroll down memory lane to the present... And ">the near future, thanks to so much of white organized labor deciding to vote for suicide.

90 Miles...

Erik Loomis—

Fidel Castro was a tremendously complex person who attempted to rebuild a society around ideas of justice while also refusing to allow democratic institutions to form. He sought to resist U.S. imperialism while openly hoping his island would be devastated by a nuclear attack. He brought outstanding medical care and education to his own people and the poor around the world while limiting the ability of educated people to use their skills at home. He was on the front lines of fighting the oppression of people of color by U.S. allies around the world while also supporting some pretty awful people around the world himself.

As always, the Noise Machine went into gear: reanimating the Cold War and attacking Obama for normalizing relations. The usual drill, but with something else in the noise.

How long before Havana get its Trump Hotel?

War On Christmas, Open For Business

First salvo fired Thanksgiving week, by the Trump campaign. The grift that keeps giving is now selling a tree ornament, at $149.

Sold on Amazon, which has thousands of reviews.

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By Shaenon K. Garrity on November 23, 2016
Came with an entire crate of white hood ornaments. Great bargain! Downside: My tree is now on fire.

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By Emily on November 23, 2016
It tried to put my nativity figures into an internment camp. Would not buy again.

R.I.P., Sharon Jones

At 60, following years of fighting pancreatic cancer, and continuing to perform while the illness was in remission.

Suffered a stroke watching election night results, a second stroke the following day, and passed away the 18th.

Audience At The Gilded Northern Palace

Michael Shaw: "photos of the Trump – Abe meeting, his first with a foreign head of state, were taken by an Abe photographer and later distributed as handouts to western media." American press apparently barred from said meeting with a foreign head of state.

Shaw continues—

In a drastic departure from protocol, there is only one non-family member in attendance for Team Trump, the erratic General Michael Flynn (who reportedly was offered the National Security Advisor role earlier in the day). Even then, he is only fully visible in two pictures. In both cases, he's on the periphery like hired help. He receives no recognition from Abe, and, in contrast to the kids, he looks like Trump's appendage.

Among the pictures released—

Open for business; see Ivanka.

Rewrite Redux

Trump surrogate says it will be no sweat to register Muslims, because Japanese-American internment went so smoothly.

Interviewed by Megyn Kelly, as she cues him to use his inside voice—

KELLY: Come on. You're not — you're not proposing we go back to the days of internment camps, I hope.

HIGBIE: No, no, no. I'm not proposing that at all, Megyn, but what I am saying is we need to protect America from —

KELLY: You know better than to suggest that. I mean, that's the kind of stuff that gets people scared, Carl.

HIGBIE: Right, but it's — I'm just saying there is precedent for it, and I'm not saying I agree with it, but in this case I absolutely believe that a regional based —

She tops it off with this—

KELLY: You can't be citing Japanese internment camps as precedent for anything the president-elect is gonna do.

The language is completely calculated, always. Here, it's Japanese internment, to imply that America's concentration camps were filled with war-time enemies. To obscure the truth: they they were families of ordinary citizens, deprived of homes, businesses, and freedom.

Certainly, they floated this after 9-11. And camp survivors were quick to oppose post-9/11 discrimination against Muslims, recognizing as they did that those who would exploit the situation were directing fearful citizens to find scapegoats in other, vulnerable citizens.

Great rewrite job now, when direct survivors of America's camps will not be with us for many more years.

Twilight Zone

We entered the Twilight Zone; yes, I had been thinking of our new era as an episode we cannot turn off.

Rely on driftglass to identify just which episode: "The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street"...

And the pity of it is, these things cannot be confined to the Twilight Zone...

R.I.P., Mose Allison

Sad to learn of his passing yesterday, at 89.

A lot of brilliance has gone out of the world. The work that captured so much only becomes more relevant.


Impossible to pick a favorite, but I've always loved the lyrical twists in this social commentary.


From his last recording: "Let's give God a vacation/He must be tired of it all ..."

And, The Winner Is...

The last, best flatterer to get his ear!

"Finalist", as on Reality TV... Who wasn't thinking that? Although Charles Pierce went for another Trump venue—

Finalists? The swimsuit competition between Giuliani, Carson, and Bolton must have been a sight to see.

That from a long post on "Camp Runamuck in Manhattan," lede of which is, "You have to wonder just how far from its best self the United States has wandered when one of the nation's leading war criminals is nervous about the incoming administration."

John Yoo is the war criminal being referenced. From Yoo quotes ("I don't think he has a very good sense of how our law enforcement system works"), Pierce segues to Camp Runamuck, where

...Jared Kushner, the son-in-law of the president-elect, is now the straw boss of the larval regime. It has been reported by various people that Kushner has purged from the inner circle anyone who was in any way friendly to Chris Christie who, as U.S. Attorney in New Jersey, sent Kushner's pappy to the federal sneezer for a spell, partly because Kushner's pere had gotten back at his brother-in-law by setting the poor sap up with a pricey woman of the town.

In short, the transition team of a president-elect who already has demonstrated a jones for reckless revenge is now being run by a guy who has made a life's work of reckless revenge against anyone who helped send his father up the river for an act of reckless revenge. This is no longer a political operation. It's a Sergio Leone film.

Current chaotic jockeying aside, winners will be selected; in Pierce's words, "The actual parade of horribles will come in due time."

Sticking To A Media Diet

More than ever, it's a cinch to avoid consuming anything from the usual suspects. What I do take in comes via those bloggers with strong stomachs, and with the talent for evisceration that the major outlets offerings deserve.

Shakezula, for instance; all her stuff is must-read, in full.

This, on Nick Kristof's post-election column—

Abusers are horrible people, but their enablers are almost as bad, and with the I like to watch vibe thrown in as a nightmare bonus.

And on that topic, here's the NYT's human rights, women's rights, health, global affairs concern troll to explain why we'll feel so much better if we give our lunch money to the class bully.

Yet, like it or not, we Americans have a new president-elect, and it's time to buck up. I've seen past elections that were regarded as the end of the world — including, in many Democratic circles, the Reagan triumph of 1980 — and the republic survived. This time as well, our institutions are stronger than any one man. We are not Weimar Germany.

We are not Weimar is an awesome rallying cry. If you're a moron. And it is not a comfort to be reminded various concepts survived Reagan. Unlike the NYT's human rights columnist, I'd don't think that makes up for the many living, breathing human beings who didn't survive Reagan, in part because Smilin' Ron was one of the many malicious homophobes who convinced themselves that there could be such a thing as a virus that only killed gay men.

As an aside – when talking about actual human beings, the verb survive is a very chilly one. Thanks in part to people like Trump, we know human beings can survive – that is still have vital functions – all sorts of horrible things. Torturers rely on the durability of the human body. In America, people have developed bizarre, psuedo-evolutionary theories about the mental and physical durability of African-Americans that combines with a number of other biases to lower the quality of health care they receive, even when they can afford it. That people will survive should be so basic an assumption that it doesn't warrant mentioning. When it does warrant mentioning, it should be a cause for alarm.

Or to put it in terms Mr. Attitude of Platitude might understand, at least explain why the standard dropped from Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness to You'll live.

Here, she's only getting warmed up in delivering the "Buck you, Nick Kristof" the column deserves.

This. If it is still publishing David Farenthold, the WaPo is nevertheless poised for its most natural role: shamelessly floating along in the whirl of a pussy-grabbing new Gilded Age.

All; In The Family

Mr. I Know How To Do Things tries getting top security clearance for the kids—then denies seeking it.

They need access now, to explain stuff to him. And for later on—to find out, Where's the key to the treasury?

Also this, from Yastreblansky—

Trump presidency is going to be all about jobs:

Rudolph W. Giuliani, a close adviser to Mr. Trump, said on CNN's "State of the Union" on Sunday that excluding Mr. Trump's family from a role in his businesses "would basically put his children out of work." The public, Mr. Giuliani said, needs to trust Mr. Trump.

Ivanka's, Donny's, and Eric's jobs.

To Each His Own Grift

Ben Carson's failed "book tour posing as a candidacy" is capped off by this announcement--

According to Dr. Ben Carson's business manager Armstrong Williams, Dr. Ben Carson will not serve in President-elect Donald Trump’s administration.

Williams told Circa, that "the President-elect offered him anything he wanted to do. But in the end he didn't want anything." Adding that "his background didn't prepare him to run a federal agency."

Impresario

Shakezula, on media reaction to Steve Bannon's being named Trump's Karl Rove—

In the Trumpnited States of MAGAmerica, a president who makes a white supremacist one of his top advisers is not divisive. Noting that the white supremacist advising the president is in fact a white supremacist is divisive and irresponsible. So everyone should shut up.

Trump spoke not only to a dying demographic of elderly whites. Through his social media enabled bullying and vulgarity, Trump also spoke the language of young enraged white men. Like neo-Nazis and Klansmen, they may have not have voted in the past, but they turned out last week.

That there were no longer norms of behavior was obvious throughout this, the first Twitter election. But I hadn't made the connection between likely Trump voters and the last few years of reports about the behavior of young male gamers. Some have immersed themselves in social media campaigns to terrorize women; others joined a chorus that cheered on threats of rape and death.

I wonder if anything will ever come out about Bannon's previous gaming business ventures, immediately prior to his taking over Breitbart. If he wasn't directly involved in encouraging online terror, he was positioned to see marketing opportunity. Mother Jones noted this in September—

... he took over at Breitbart News in 2012. Bannon may have applied his web knowledge gained from his time at IGE and Affinity to Breitbart News, which he transformed into the preeminent destination for the internet-savvy, meme-centric alt-right—in part by stoking the anger behind Gamergate, which saw harassment of female gamers by their male peers.

How could they not have been thrilled to turn out for President Sexual Predator.

White Riot

Since the 9th Shaun King has posted sickening reports from around the country. His twitter feed is now filling up with trolls, but this is a sampling from the last three days.

Wild About Harry

When he's right, he's right. And in explicit detail—

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.
...

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.

Heartland Values

Via tengrain: a Midwesterner makes some points to the insularity of his Trump-voting hometown, with its fear of people they've never encountered. Patrick Thornton says of his hometown, and the like—

I'm from the rural midwest. All of this talk about coastal elites needing to understand more of America has it backwards.

My home county is 97% white. It like a lot of other very unrepresentative counties went heavily to Donald Trump.

My high school had about 1,200 students. Two were Asian. One was Hispanic. Zero were Muslim. All the teachers were white.
...
Many rural Americans have isolated themselves from the rest of the country. They live in very unrepresentative areas.
...
Here it is in sharp relief: My HS had more sexual predator teachers (convicted!) than minority teachers. That's a rural American story.

They-a Culpa

Mea culpa is indeed appropriate, but not the kind instinctive for the NYT. That is, "How did we get this so wrong?" hand-wringing, along lines of, Perhaps we really are a liberal, elitist media who were uncomprehending of The Heartland.

It could so easily be dispensed with—if the editors bothered to look at their own goddamn reporting, of four months ago.

11-9; 9-11

If his voters deserve to get it (good and hard), the rest of us do not. Nor does the rest of the world.

Mencken, of course, believed that immigrant masses in cities would make the worst political choices. Yet the most under-populated and backward parts of the country are the ones favored by our antique and intentionally undemocratic system. The Electoral College supposedly existing to prevent an incompetent demagogue from being placed in the presidency, and all that...

Roy Edroso, on the voters who really mattered—

I'm still seeing some people talking about this election as if Trump voters were a bunch of poor oppressed hillbillies desperate to be freed from the meth and misery to which Tyrant Obama had condemned them. But as has been shown, Trump voters aren't poor -- though they obviously do feel as if they've been deprived of something, and that voting for Trump would give it to them....
...
Sure, Trump stirred up the Nazis, but look on the bright side, he made the liberal elites sad! I think this was a big part of the winning formula. I doubt Trump voters seriously believe their man will make international trade more advantageous to the U.S., or settle race relations, or bring global peace. But they don't like the people who are actually working on these things; they are delivering unsatisfactory results and, in the Trumpkin mind, that isn't because these things are difficult and complicated, but because they spend too much time thinking about their friends the blacks, the women, the foreigners, and the gays. Never mind your so-called rights, widget sales are fluctuating, now how'm I going to afford that second home? It's gotta be the fault of liberal elites!

You don't have to be a yokel to think like that -- hell, you don't even have to be a Republican. You just have to be a certain kind of American who's always wondering where's his.

In the end, a vote for "Spite."

First time voters seem to have crawled out of the woodwork, when I had wanted to believe they wouldn't manage to register or show up. Certainly, it was not a good sign when PBS decided to run its new voter human interest story featuring this woman—and her white power-heil Hitler tattoos...

Thus did the media blandly present this horror as checking in with Heartland Real America. Month after month after month of a media Trump-Trump-Trump drumbeat, drowning out anything real... It all ends in this feeling of having entered a Twilight Zone episode. The shock now is to know this will be immeasurably longer than a half hour, and an episode which can not be turned off.

New Voters

So, members of this family finally figured out how to register. Is it uncertain whether the wives know how to make marks?

It really should be asked: why is privacy so non-existent in these polling places? This opens the door wide open to intimidation, and—as Trump's ugly mug (and uglier history) suggest—to potential domestic abuse.

Wisdom

Interesting account of going door-to-door in West Dayton, OH—

Mostly talked to older African-Americans. When I launched into the boilerplate about how this is likely to be a very close, very important election, etc etc etc, they’d often give me a raised-eyebrow look that said, very clearly, "do you really think I don't understand what's at stake with this election?" and we'd quickly move on to logistics–polling locations, early voting hours, etc.
...

Only a few people want to take advantage of the captive audience to talk politics, but one woman, just getting home from a double shift as I arrived to her house, was pure gold. I'm going to reconstruct my favorite part of her rant as faithfully as possible, but I'm not doing is justice–it was just a marvelous, angry, hilarious rant. The gist of it:

Look, I get it, you white people* had a hard time with Obama being president so you need a racist president. I get it. I don't like it but I get it. But what I don't get is why you needed a racist who is so goddamn crazy and stupid! Couldn't you find a racist who could actually know how to run the damn government? I mean, I wouldn't vote for him–he'd still be bad for people like me–but at least he'd know what he's doing? What good does it do the damn white people when Trump shits the bed? It's not like there's some other special country they move to when he takes this country down. We get a black president and he does a pretty good job, and your response is murder-suicide? You white people need to get smarter about how you do this racism thing.

*she interjected caveats about how her use of "you white people" should not be construed to include people such as myself and Obama/Clinton supporters generally, so this didn't come off as hostile or accusatory as the words on the page might make it appear....

Really no need to interject the caveats, when the crazy and stupid is in everyone's face. But, how could this racism be anything other than suicidally crazy and stupid?

Implausible Deniability

Someone in Drumpf's campaign thought decided to have the wife read words about... bullying.

An instantly obvious sick joke, it seemed. Yet the remarks (near end of this transcript)—

Technology has changed our universe. But like anything that is powerful, it can have a bad side. We have seen these already. As adults, many of us are able to handle mean words, even lies. Children and teenagers can be fragile. They are hurt when they are made fun of or made to feel less in looks or intelligence. This makes their life hard and can force them to hide and retreat. Our culture has gotten too mean and too rough, especially to children and teenagers. It is never OK when a 12 year old girl or boy is mocked, bullied, or attacked. It is terrible when that happens on the playground.

And it is absolutely unacceptable when it is done by someone with no name hiding on the internet.

When the Party of Personal Responsibility speaks, it's a given that what's said is all projection, all the time. But this is particularly stunning, in light of the how "technology" creates a record of its use.

So, about recent "mean words, even lies"...

About who is setting an example for children to bully fellow students who are African-American, Hispanic, Muslim...

And that "our culture has gotten too mean and too violent" is the reason for death threats against Jewish journalists...

Or threats against those perceived as Jewish. A mysteriously "too violent" culture prompting neo-nazi to send potentially lethal epileptogenic video to reporter on the Trump beat.

He's Still Relevant

And bigly, from what Wayne Barrett reports—

Two days before FBI director James Comey rocked the world last week, Rudy Giuliani was on Fox, where he volunteered, un-prodded by any question: "I think he's [Donald Trump] got a surprise or two that you're going to hear about in the next few days. I mean, I'm talking about some pretty big surprises."

Pressed for specifics, he said: "We've got a couple of things up our sleeve that should turn this thing around."

The man who now leads "lock-her-up" chants at Trump rallies spent decades of his life as a federal prosecutor and then mayor working closely with the FBI, and especially its New York office. One of Giuliani's security firms employed a former head of the New York FBI office, and other alumni of it. It was agents of that office, probing Anthony Weiner's alleged sexting of a minor, who pressed Comey to authorize the review of possible Hillary Clinton-related emails on a Weiner device that led to the explosive letter the director wrote Congress.

Barrett runs down numerous other Giuliani-FBI pal connections, including this one—

[Jim] Kallstrom is the former head of the New York FBI office, installed in that post in the '90s by then-FBI director Louis Freeh, one of Giuliani's longtime friends. Kallstrom has, like Giuliani, been on an anti-Comey romp for months, most often on Fox, where he's called the Clintons as a "crime family." He has been invoking unnamed FBI agents who contact him to complain about Comey's exoneration of Clinton in one interview after another, positioning himself as an apolitical champion of FBI values.

Besides apolitically exposing the Clinton crime family on Fox, Kallstrom chairs (though without pay, notes Barrett)

...the Marine Corps Law Enforcement Foundation ... the single biggest beneficiary of Trump's promise to raise millions for veterans when he boycotted the Iowa primary debate. A foundation official said that Trump's million-dollar donation this May, atop $100,000 that he'd given in March, were the biggest individual grants it had ever received. The Trump Foundation had contributed another $230,000 in prior years and Trump won the organization's top honor at its annual Waldorf Astoria gala in 2015.

Much more, in Barrett's piece.

Steve M. takes up Barrett's conclusion, that "Fox is the pipeline for the fifth column inside the bureau"—

... A cabal of current and former law enforcement operatives has made this a live issue again. We think the likes of Giuliani and Kallstrom have been banished to cigar lounges and cable news greenrooms, where they can strut their supposed expertise while recalling the good old days when they had power. But they have power. They're the undead, and they're working with some of the living to undermine American democracy and either install a psychopath as president or hobble the psychopath's opponent if she manages to win.

And they're spreading disinformation via Fox News -- which a lot of smart people told us was on its last legs. Roger Ailes is gone, Bill O'Reilly might retire, Sean Hannity might soon leave for Trump TV, Megyn Kelly might jump ship, and Rupert Murdoch might finally cede full control to his less ideological sons. And yet when this cabal wanted to spread its story, Fox was still the obvious venue...

A Cast Of Thousands

Impeachment 2017, coming very soon. One of the players: chair of Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Richard Burr. Currently campaigning on the "assassinate her" platform.