Trumper Bunker Busters

Things are not going well for the Trump regime, as The Donald does not tolerate failure among his minions, and this week has been nothing but across-the-board disaster with Jeff Sessions and Obamacare repeal.

“We should have had a good week. We should have had a good weekend. But once again, back to Russia," a senior White House official said, expressing the frustration simmering in the West Wing following the news earlier in the week that Sessions failed to disclose during his confirmation process that he had met with the Russian ambassador twice during the election campaign. Sessions at the time was a senator on the Armed Services Committee and was also helping the Trump campaign.

Among those gathered in the Oval Office on Friday: Chief of staff Reince Priebus, chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon, White House Counsel Don McGahn, press secretary Sean Spicer, newly-hired Communications Director Mike Dubke, along with Trump son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner and his wife Ivanka Trump, the sources said.

With Marine One waiting on the South Lawn, Trump and his team engaged in an animated exchange -- captured by press pool cameras peering in through the windows from the White House South Lawn. Trump then left the office for the helicopter, taking the hands of his young grandchildren and joined by his daughter Ivanka and Kushner.

Priebus and Bannon were planning to join the trip, but suddenly after the president's eruption those plans changed. One source said both men volunteered to stay behind in Washington, with another source saying the president seemed to concur that they should. Sidelining key staffers with whom he was angry was an occasional Trump tactic during the campaign.

As President Trump was in the air aboard Marine One headed for Air Force One on the tarmac at Joint Base Andrews, a last-minute phone call was made from the West Wing to the team on board the president’s plane with a directive to remove Priebus and Bannon from the manifest, sources said. They would not be coming to the Sunshine State. 

Both Priebus and Bannon have been grounded, and now Sessions is on the outs as well. It seems Jared Kushner is now the new favorite lieutenant in the ranks.  The larger issue is that Trump now knows his team can't stop the leaks coming from the White House, and with Sessions, he now knows that his team has not been straight with him, either.

If you thought Trump was in full paranoia Nixon bunker mentality before, well, I think we haven't seen anything yet.  Stay tuned.

The Bar Was Set Six Inches Into The Ground

Donald Trump somehow failed to set himself on fire last night while vomiting on anyone during his first joint address to Congress, meaning that in the eyes of many pundits, "it's the most presidential he's been so far".  That's not a high bar, but they couldn't help themselves.  But Ed Kilgore cautions that while the speech's tone was not horrible, the actual content was a vague garbage dump when it came to policy.

Republicans are practically at each other’s throats over how to repeal and replace Obamacare — the party’s top policy priority. Trump has in the past complicated this effort by endorsing a quick replacement plan — on which Republicans are far from agreement — and by insisting the new plan cover as many people as the system being demolished. He did almost nothing tonight address the quandaries his fellow Republicans face on health care policy, other than a brief statement of support for the idea of tax credits to help pay for insurance, presumably a rebuke to conservatives who openly worried such credits would represent a new entitlement. What did Trump want Congress to do about Medicaid, which Obamacare optionally expanded, splitting Republican governors over that key safety net program’s function and future? “[W]e should give our great State Governors the resources and flexibility they need with Medicaid to make sure no one is left out.” That’s about as vague as you can get. And there was nothing at all about how to pay for whatever comes next after Obamacare.

Speaking of taxes: Tax cuts are right behind Obamacare on the congressional GOPs urgent action list. There are big differences of opinion among Republicans about the size and structure of tax cuts, and in particular how to deal with the new administration’s demands that the tax code discriminate against companies that import goods and export jobs. In tonight’s speech Trump devoted more time to the feelings of Harley-Davidson’s executives about other countries’ tax codes than to any exposition on what the U.S. tax code should look like. And indeed, his only real mention of taxes was as an intro to an equally vague disquisition on the need for fair as well as free trade—a theme that has provided leaden ballast to thousands of political speeches for many decades.

The third big topic on which Republicans needed his guidance was the budget, and if they expected any specificity on that crucial priority, they were bitterly disappointed. Trump repeated his commitment to a big defense spending increase, and did display an understanding that providing that would mean getting rid of the spending cap agreement under which defense spending would be “sequestered” if budget targets were missed. As to how those caps would be cast aside—something that in the normal course of events would require 60 Senate votes and a lot of Democratic support—we heard nada. And there was also nothing about the rest of the budget, including the fraught subject of which entitlement programs would be on and off the table.

So, no specifics.  And why should he have them?  The Trump regime has shown multiple times through its botched slate of executive orders that when it comes to specifics, they're not very good at getting even the basic stuff done without running into the Constitution and the courts.

Keep in mind though that while Trump's tone was different, the theme still remains that immigrants are an existential threat to the US, and they they will be "dealt with".  He still seeks to divide the country. Never forget that.

Still The Same Old Trump Rallies

Author Jeb Lund went to Trump's rally in Melbourne, Florida over the weekend and found that Trump supporters are still happily riding the Trump Train, not seeming to mind the occasional missing hunk of track or BRIDGE OUT signs ahead.

If people told you that MAGA hats come 25 percent off when you look peevish and 50 percent off when you're already wearing a sneer, the line snaking out of the airport hangar and a quarter mile down S. Apollo Blvd. in Melbourne, Florida, and awaiting President Trump's first rally since his inauguration would have made you believe them. 

These are the wages of a campaign and an ideology of apocalyptic civilizational struggle: a pep rally that feels undergirded with dread, voters who dismiss leftists as "special snowflakes living in a bubble," gathering in an 83 percent white county that went for Trump by nearly 20 points, and pointing across the road at a few hundred protesters behind a net barrier, wondering whether an international Jewish financier has underwritten a special attack for Saturday afternoon.

Whitey Taylor—"it's not Blackie, it's Whitey," he clarified—hawked MAGA hats and Hillary For Prison shirts at 50 Trump rallies in 33 states during the campaign and was unconcerned about the stakes. A customer asked if he was worried about protester violence; as Taylor turned his face to look at the man, a little smirk embedded in the off-white beard and deep lines framing his nose and mouth. "I've got a 9mm. I don't worry about any of these people." 

The worry grew stronger down the road, where the line looked interminable and threatened to disappear into the gray that seems to swallow the horizon under the lowering sky of a Florida afternoon. Two retired women sat in folding canvas camping chairs, watching the line, waiting for the rest of their party to gather, certain the protesters across the road were paid by George Soros. 

"I think there's a good share of them," said Francis Gilmore, who'd moved down to Florida in the last decade. They were here to advance the Soros agenda. "You can go anywhere you want, do anything you want, live the way you want, say anything you want. No sort of control. They will control us." Soros was the bad kind of billionaire, not like the ones in Trump's cabinet, who "don't have to rob the money from us because they've got enough of their own." 

Her friend, who refused to give her name, agreed. "There are many others besides George Soros but George Soros is the biggie," she said. "All the braindeads suck in the false news, because they don't have the ability to read and get the proper information." The friend had gotten a lot of the hidden details from The Creature from Jekyll Island, a Federal Reserve conspiracy book written by an HIV/AIDS denialist who believes he knows the location of Noah's ark and can cure cancer with a poisonous plant extract. When asked where else she gets her news, she replied, "Mostly radio." 

Gilmore and The Nameless Friend agreed that the protesters represented an unprecedented rejection of the office of the president and an ahistorical breach of civility. 

A man with dusty clothes, gap teeth, and a tan darker than his sandy blonde hair walked by with a four-year-old girl on his shoulders. 

"Hey, who wants to kill an unborn baby?" he said, gesturing across the street. "All them are retards. That's some shit."

So yeah, this is Trump's America, endless fear and demonization of those people, hollow chest beating, and a shared sense of camaraderie through perceived victimization.  We're all in control of the country and those stupid libtard snowflakes, but they're coming for us and  at any point we may have to start shooting.

These folks are uninformed, but they vote.  They vote GOP.  And there's nothing Trump can do that would make them not vote for him, short of being nice to liberals.  This is what I mean by impeachment or removal of Trump through the 25th Amendment being a dangerous fantasy.

Democrats need to stop relying on it, they need to stop considering it, they need to find a way to deal with the damage Trump and the GOP are causing people in real time rather than wasting breath on something that will never happen.  And the reason it will never happen is that Republicans fear Whitey Taylor and Francis Gilmore infinitely more than they fear the rest of the country.  Until they turn on Trump, he's president.

And they will never, ever turn on him.  Dems need to stop chasing these folks and worry about the millions of Dem voters who are going to be wrecked by Trump policies.

Russian To Judgment, Con't

Josh Marshall points out the Sater-day Night Massacre over the weekend in the Trump regime/Russia story (emphasis mine:)

I don't know how much attention it's received. But the appearance of the name of Felix Sater in this new article in the Times is one of the biggest shoes I've seen drop on the Trump story in some time.

The new story explains that a group of Trump operatives, including top lawyer Michael Cohen and fired former campaign manager Paul Manafort, along with a pro-Putin Ukrainian parliamentarian named Andrii V. Artemenko and Mr. Sater are pushing President Trump on a 'peace plan' for Russia and Ukraine.

Cohen recently met with Sater and Artemenko; and Cohen agreed to personally deliver the peace plan (actually a sealed envelope with documents detailing it) to the President when he met with him at the White House. Cohen says he left it with General Flynn days before Flynn was forced to resign.

The backstory to all this is amazingly byzantine and murky. Let me try to cover the key points as simply as I can.

Having spent some time studying the matter, the biggest red flags about Donald Trump's ties to Russia and businessmen around Vladimir Putin have always been tied to the Trump SoHo building project in Lower Manhattan, from the first decade of this century. I base my knowledge of this on this rather cursory but still quite good April 2016 article from the Times and my own limited snooping around the Outer Boroughs Russian and Ukrainian emigre press. (I summarized the most salient details of the earlier Times article in Item #3 of this post.) This was a key project, perhaps the key project in the post-bankruptcy era in which Trump appeared heavily reliant on Russian funds to finance his projects. Sater was at the center of that project. The details only came to light after the project got bogged down in a complicated series of lawsuits.
After the lawyers got involved, Trump said he barely knew who Sater was. But there is voluminous evidence that Sater, a Russian emigrant, was key to channeling Russian capital to Trump for years. Sater is also a multiple felon and at least a one-time FBI informant. Bayrock Capital, where he worked was located in Trump Tower and he himself worked as a special advisor to Trump. Again, read the Times article to get a flavor of his ties to Trump, the Trump SoHo project and Russia. For my money there's no better place to start to understand the Trump/Russia issue.

On its own, Trump's relationship with Sater might be written off (albeit not terribly plausibly) as simply a sleazy relationship Trump entered into to get access to capital he needed to finance his projects. Whatever shadowy ties Sater might have and whatever his criminal background, Trump has long since washed his hands of him. (Again, we're talking about most generous reads here.)

But now we learn that Sater is still very much in the Trump orbit and acting as a go-between linking Trump and a pro-Putin Ukrainian parliamentarian pitching 'peace plans' for settling the dispute between Russia and Ukraine. (Artemenko is part of the political faction which Manafort helped build up in the aftermath of the ouster of his Ukrainian benefactor, deposed President Viktor Yanukovych.) Indeed, far, far more important, Cohen - who is very close to Trump and known for dealing with delicate matters - is in contact with Sater and hand delivering political and policy plans from him to the President.

Were Cohen not involved, one might speculate that Sater is just up to yet another hustle, looking to parlay his one-time association with Trump into influence with the new President. Cohen hand delivering his messages to the President changes the picture considerably. How or why Cohen would do this, if for no other reason than the current massive scrutiny of Trump's ties to Russia and Sater's scandals, almost defies belief. But here we are.

So yet another player in the Trump regime, definitely sleazy, definitely a felon, definitely still working for The Donald, definitely still making deals with foreign nationals.  Doug J at Balloon Juice says it's all just too much for our broken media to handle.

I hate to keep beating this horse, but I’m wondering if maybe the Trump-Russia story is one of those things that establishment media just isn’t set up to cover. I don’t mean that they can’t cover individual pieces of the story but that they aren’t able to put it all together. I had the same feeling when Josh Marshall was breaking the Bush US Attorney story, which was also ignored by establishment media. I guess some stories have too many moving parts and say things that are too negative about powerful people for establishment media to handle.

We have an “All The President’s Men” press corps but we’re living in a “Chinatown” world.

Like people keep saying, your FOX-watching racist uncle knows nothing about Carter Page, Paul Manafort, Michael Cohen, Felix Sater, or Steve Bannon.  He knows that Hillary Clinton is a bitch though, and he knows the reason why he lost his job at the plant ten years ago is the fault of those goddamn liberals, because that's what he's been told daily for ten years. He doesn't give a damn about what Trump does as long as he brings the jobs back and gets rid of Muslims and Mexicans and Black Lives Matter.

The rest, well who cares, right?

Last Call For Obama Makes The Grade

Now out of office, Barack Obama can officially be ranked by C-SPAN's tabulation by presidential historians, and the man from Hawaii ends up in the 12 spot, maybe not Mount Rushmore territory, but certainly one of the better chief executives we've had.

Former President Barack Obama was ranked 12th best among 43 former presidents in in C-SPAN’s third-ever survey of dozens of presidential historians.

The network asked 91 presidential historians to rank every former president on 10 leadership attributes. C-SPAN also performed the survey in 2000 and 2009. 

Obama ranked favorably compared to his immediate predecessors: George W. Bush ranked at No. 33 (up from 36 in 2009), George H.W. Bush was No. 20 (down from 18), and Bill Clinton held steady at No. 15. 

Ronald Reagan was judged the ninth best president of all time, up from No. 10 in 2009.
In a press release accompanying the results, historian Richard Norton Smith, an academic adviser for the project, noted that five of the top 10 judged presidents in the American pantheon served between 1933 and 1969. 

“It reinforces Franklin Roosevelt's claim to be not only the first modern president but the man who, in reinventing the office, also established the criteria by which we judge our leaders,” he said.

The full list:

So yeah, for those of you playing at home, Dubya moved up a few notches into "C-plus Augustus" territory, and James "Oops I accidentally The Civil War" Buchanan still sets the nadir for the office. Reagan, still silly overrated, and Big Dog's still hanging at 15. Jimmy Carter is in the middle of the pack at 26, and Poppy Bush rounds out the top 20.

One has to wonder where The Donald will end up on this list.  I'm betting south of Hoover.

Orange You Glad It's Over

Trump just gave the most insane press conference the world has ever seen a US President give, and it was outright bonkers.

I ran for president to present the citizens of our country. I am here to change the broken system so it serves their families and their communities well. I am talking -- and really talking on this very entrenched power structure, and what we're doing is we're talking about the power structure; we're talking about its entrenchment. As a result, the media is going through what they have to go through too often times distort - not all the time - and some of the media is fantastic, I have to say - they're honest and fantastic. 

But much of it is not a - the distortion -- and we'll talk about it, you'll be able to ask me questions about it. But we're not going to let it happen, because I'm here again, to take my message straight to the people. As you know, our administration inherited many problems across government and across the economy. To be honest, I inherited a mess. It's a mess. At home and abroad, a mess. Jobs are pouring out of the country; you see what's going on with all of the companies leaving our country, going to Mexico and other places, low pay, low wages, mass instability overseas, no matter where you look. The middle east is a disaster. North Korea - we'll take care of it folks; we're going to take care of it all. I just want to let you know, I inherited a mess. 

Beginning on day one, our administration went to work to tackle these challenges. On foreign affairs, we've already begun enormously productive talks with many foreign leaders, much of it you've covered, to move forward towards stability, security and peace in the most troubled regions of the world, which there are many. We have had great conversations with the United Kingdom, and meetings. Israel, Mexico, Japan, China and Canada, really, really productive conversations. I would say far more productive than you would understand. 

We've even developed a new council with Canada to promote women's business leaders and entrepreneurs. It's very important to me, very important to my daughter Ivanka. I have directed our defense community headed by our great general, now Secretary Mattis. He's over there now working very hard to submit a plan for the defeat of ISIS, a group that celebrates the murder and torture of innocent people in large sections of the world. It used to be a small group, now it's in large sections of the world. 

They've spread like cancer. ISIS has spread like cancer - another mess I inherited. And we have imposed new sanctions on the nation of Iran, whose totally taken advantage of our previous administration, and they're the world's top sponsor of terrorism, and we're not going to stop until that problem is properly solved. And it's not properly solved now, it's one of the worst agreements I've ever seen drawn by anybody. I've ordered plan to begin building for the massive rebuilding of the United States military. Had great support from the Senate, I've had great from Congress, generally. 

We've pursued this rebuilding in the hopes that we will never have to use this military, and I will tell you that is my - I would be so happy if we never had to use it. But our country will never have had a military like the military we're about to build and rebuild. We have the greatest people on earth in our military, but they don't have the right equipment and their equipment is old. I used it; I talked about it at every stop. Depleted, it's depleted - it won't be depleted for long. And I think one of the reason I'm standing here instead of other people is that frankly, I talked about we have to have a strong military. 

We have to have a strong law enforcement also. So we do not go abroad in the search of war, we really are searching for peace, but its peace through strength. At home, we have begun the monumental task of returning the government back to the people on a scale not seen in many, many years. In each of these actions, I'm keeping my promises to the American people. These are campaign promises. Some people are so surprised that we're having strong borders. 

Well, that's what I've been talking about for a year and a half, strong borders. They're so surprised, oh, he having strong borders, well that's what I've been talking about to the press and to everybody else. One promise after another after years of politicians lying to you to get elected. They lied to the American people in order to get elected. Some of the things I'm doing probably aren't popular but they're necessary for security and for other reasons.

Now, he went on for over an hour like this.  Just rambling on and on to the press.  He finally did take some questions about half-an-hour in, but it was a disaster.

Mike Flynn is a fine person, and I asked for his resignation. He respectfully gave it. He is a man who there was a certain amount of information given to Vice President Pence, who is with us today. And I was not happy with the way that information was given. 

He didn't have to do that, because what he did wasn't wrong -- what he did in terms of the information he saw. What was wrong was the way that other people, including yourselves in this room, were given that information, because that was classified information that was given illegally. That's the real problem. 

And, you know, you can talk all you want about Russia, which was all a, you know, fake news, fabricated deal, to try and make up for the loss of the Democrats and the press plays right into it. In fact, I saw a couple of the people that were supposedly involved with all of this -- that they know nothing about it; they weren't in Russia; they never made a phone call to Russia; they never received a phone call. 

It's all fake news. It's all fake news. The nice thing is, I see it starting to turn, where people are now looking at the illegal -- I think it's very important -- the illegal, giving out classified information. It was -- and let me just tell you, it was given out like so much.
I'll give you an example. I called, as you know, Mexico. It was a very, very confidential, classified call. But I called Mexico. And in calling Mexico, I figured, oh, well that's -- I spoke to the president of Mexico; I had a good call. All of a sudden, it's out there for the world to see. It's supposed to be secret. It's supposed to be either confidential or classified, in that case. 

Same thing with Australia. All of a sudden, people are finding out exactly what took place. The same thing happened with respect to General Flynn. Everybody saw this. And I'm saying -- the first thing I thought of when I heard about it is: How does the press get this information that's classified? How do they do it? 

You know why? Because it's an illegal process and the press should be ashamed of themselves. But more importantly, the people that gave out the information to the press should be ashamed of themselves, really ashamed.

It just got worse from there, but the point is that Trump is well beyond Nixon's "bunker mentality" and "enemies list" phase in 1974.

And it's been less than a month.

Last Call For Last Bus To Beattyville

Another month, another story of poor white folks in eastern Kentucky who are desperately waiting for Trump to save them.  This time it's Beattyville in Lee County, where residents are hoping Trump will bring back oil and coal jobs from 40 years ago...and barring that, at least if they'll cut off those people who didn't vote for him so the people of this tiny town can continue getting SNAP, welfare, and Obamacare.

"If you got a job here in Beattyville, you're lucky," says Amber Hayes, a bubbly 25-year-old mom of two, who also voted for Trump. She works at the county courthouse, but is paid by the Kentucky Transitional Assistance Program (K-TAP), a form of welfare. 

Coal, oil and tobacco made Beattyville a boom town in the 1800s and much of the 1900s. Locals like to bring up the fact that Lee County -- where Beattyville is located -- was the No. 1 oil-producing county east of the Mississippi at one time. 

"Growing up in the '70s? Yeah, this was the place to be," says Chuck Caudhill, the general manager of the local paper, The Beattyville Enterprise. He calls the town the "gem of eastern Kentucky." 

Today, the town is a ghost of its former self. The vast majority of Beattyville residents get some form of government aid -- 57% of households receive food stamps and 58% get disability payments from Social Security. 

"I hope [Trump] don't take the benefits away, but at the same time, I think that once more jobs come in a lot of people won't need the benefits," says Hayes, who currently receives about $500 a month from government assistance. She's also on Obamacare.

I understand that Beattyville is poor as hell, and that Lee County has fallen into dark times.  I understand that the efforts made to help the people there haven't been enough.  I understand that oil and tobacco have left them high and dry. I understand being from a town where the companies left and folks are praying for jobs.  Lee County is maybe fifty miles southeast of Lexington, I could get there in about 2 hours and change from here.  It's the same kind of small town I left behind more than a decade ago.

But when 80% of the county votes for Trump, knowing his message full well of bigotry and racism and that his message is acceptable as long as he maybe spares them the rod by yanking a few assistance programs in Louisville or Lexington where they didn't vote for him, well that's not okay.

The people who voted for Clinton in Lee County?  Yeah, I feel for them.  But the Trump voters? You're getting exactly what you wanted.

The End Of Nerd Prom

If these early indicators are true of the media as a whole, then the yearly White House Correspondents' Dinner may not survive the Trump regime at all.

The White House Correspondents Dinner has gone from a hoary ritual to the apex of Washington’s social calendar, replete with Hollywood A-listers, tuxedoed television stars and live coverage on the major news networks. 

But like many Washington traditions, things are changing now that President Trump is in town. 

The New Yorker is canceling the kickoff party that it usually holds at the W Hotel, according to a spokeswoman for the magazine, Natalie Raabe. Vanity Fair is pulling out of co-sponsoring the dinner’s most exclusive after-party, a celebrity-studded affair most recently hosted at the French ambassador’s residence that is considered the capital’s hottest ticket of the year. 

Vanity Fair’s co-sponsor, Bloomberg L.P., is proceeding with its plans for the party, but no final decision has been made on the event, a spokesman said on Thursday. (Bloomberg has previously sponsored the after-party on its own.) 

“We’ve taken a break from the dinner in the past,” Graydon Carter, the editor of Vanity Fair, wrote in an email, adding that he planned to spend the weekend fishing in Connecticut instead. 

Mr. Carter, who has feuded with Mr. Trump for decades, was asked whether he had a particular reason for canceling this year’s festivities. “Trump,” Mr. Carter replied, “and the fish.”

Considering the Trump regime sees the Washington media as a enemy that needs to be completely exterminated off the face of the planet, I can't imagine the dinner will happen at all.

Compare that to any of Obama's WHCD proceedings, or even that of his predecessor.  (The Bush ones were tasteless, but they weren't "Off with his head!" affairs either.)  Who would want to perform at that as the host, other than dull, unfunny right wing comics who'll spend the entire night trashing Obama, black people, Latinx folks and anybody darker than a paper bag?

Even if the dinner happens, I sure as hell won't watch.

I don't think many other folks will either.

At least until Trump makes it mandatory next year.

Sunday Long Read: The Dark Side Of Data

Two reporters for Zurich's Das Magazin take a look at British data analysis company Cambridge Analytica in this week's Sunday Long Read at Vice and find there's a method to the madness of "fake news" and social manipulation in the 2016 elections.

On November 9 at around 8.30 AM., Michal Kosinski woke up in the Hotel Sunnehus in Zurich. The 34-year-old researcher had come to give a lecture at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) about the dangers of Big Data and the digital revolution. Kosinski gives regular lectures on this topic all over the world. He is a leading expert in psychometrics, a data-driven sub-branch of psychology. When he turned on the TV that morning, he saw that the bombshell had exploded: contrary to forecasts by all leading statisticians, Donald J. Trump had been elected president of the United States.

For a long time, Kosinski watched the Trump victory celebrations and the results coming in from each state. He had a hunch that the outcome of the election might have something to do with his research. Finally, he took a deep breath and turned off the TV.

On the same day, a then little-known British company based in London sent out a press release: “We are thrilled that our revolutionary approach to data-driven communication has played such an integral part in President-elect Trump’s extraordinary win,” Alexander James Ashburner Nix was quoted as saying. Nix is British, 41 years old, and CEO of Cambridge Analytica. He is always immaculately turned out in tailor-made suits and designer glasses, with his wavy blonde hair combed back from his forehead. His company wasn't just integral to Trump’s online campaign, but to the UK's Brexit campaign as well.

Of these three players—reflective Kosinski, carefully groomed Nix and grinning Trump—one of them enabled the digital revolution, one of them executed it and one of them benefited from it.

Anyone who has not spent the last five years living on another planet will be familiar with the term Big Data. Big Data means, in essence, that everything we do, both on and offline, leaves digital traces. Every purchase we make with our cards, every search we type into Google, every movement we make when our mobile phone is in our pocket, every “like” is stored. Especially every “like.” For a long time, it was not entirely clear what use this data could have—except, perhaps, that we might find ads for high blood pressure remedies just after we’ve Googled “reduce blood pressure.”

On November 9, it became clear that maybe much more is possible. The company behind Trump’s online campaign—the same company that had worked for Leave.EU in the very early stages of its "Brexit" campaign—was a Big Data company: Cambridge Analytica.

To understand the outcome of the election—and how political communication might work in the future—we need to begin with a strange incident at Cambridge University in 2014, at Kosinski’s Psychometrics Center.

The reality is Facebook is an open book, and that building a database of profiles based on likes and activity online was far easier than anyone has ever imagined.  One company discovered that you could use Facebook to target people you wanted to target with messages tailored to them from a political standpoint.  It can be used to get Trump voters to go vote, and could be used to get Clinton voters to throw their votes away.

For the Trump campaign, it worked far better than anyone could have guessed.  The money you didn't see Trump spending on traditional political advertising was being spent on Cambridge Analytica, as much as $15 million in order to individually target people through the internet and directing canvassers with specific messages to specific houses.

The Clinton camp had no clue what was going on, either.  They had no way of knowing.  The Trump campaign unleashed this weapon in 17 states, and it was this data model that put Trump in the Rust Belt in the last month of the campaign.

It won him the White House.

Death Of The DREAM

Leaked copies of Trump regime draft orders have been circulating among the media and have panned out so far on things like The Wall™ and sanctuary cities, so Vox is making the choice to publish additional draft orders.  These orders detail a massive and abrupt about face in Obama policy in what amounts to a brutal Trump regime crackdown on immigration, both legal and undocumented.

The four remaining draft orders obtained by Vox focus on immigration, terrorism, and refugee policy. They wouldn't ban all Muslim immigration to the US, breaking a Trump promise from early in his campaign, but they would temporarily ban entries from seven majority-Muslim countries and bar all refugees from coming to the US for several months. They would make it harder for immigrants to come to the US to work, make it easier to deport them if they use public services, and put an end to the Obama administration program that protected young "DREAMer" immigrants from deportation.
In all, the combined documents would represent one of the harshest crackdowns on immigrants — both those here and those who want to come here — in memory. 

The draft executive order limiting immigration from certain Muslim-majority countries, formally titled, "Protecting the Nation From Terrorist Attacks by Foreign Nationals," suspends entry into the United States from selected countries starting 30 days after the executive order's issuance. 

On the campaign trail, Trump made comments about banning Muslims from the United States. This order is reminiscent of that promise but falls far short of it, as most Muslim-majority countries, including the most populous ones (Indonesia, Bangladesh, and Pakistan), are not included on the list of barred countries. 

The countries in question are those included in the State Department's list of terrorism-sponsoring countries (Iran, Sudan, and Syria), those designated by the Department of Homeland Security as countries of concern (Libya, Somalia, and Yemen), and Iraq, which is specially designated in the Visa Waiver Program Improvement and Terrorist Travel Prevention Act of 2015, the law from which the executive order gets its list of barred countries. (Syria is specially designated too, but it’s already banned due to the terrorism list.) 

That law simply limited travel from countries whose residents normally don't need a visa to visit the US (which tend to be rich countries like the UK, France, and Germany) if they had previously traveled to a country of concern, like Iran or Yemen or Iraq. Trump's executive order uses that list and bars all immigration from those countries outright. 

As this ban is being implemented, the secretary of homeland security, along with the secretary of state and director of national intelligence, is instructed to evaluate which countries do and don't provide enough information about visa applicants for the US to vet them for terrorism risk. Any countries that don't provide enough information, according to the secretary of homeland security, will be given 60 days to start doing so. After those 60 days, the secretary of homeland security will provide to the president a list of any countries still judged to not be providing enough information. The president will then issue a proclamation prohibiting nationals of those countries from entering the United States. This list will replace the one based on the 2015 law.

That's just the first order, widely expected today:  A moratorium on all refugees, a revocation of visas from selected countries (even spouses of US citizens) and a complete ban on entry from these countries starting on or about March 1.  It's madness and the list omits Saudi Arabia, where the 9/11 attackers were based, and this list will only grow.

And that's just the start.

Another apparent order draft, titled “Ending unconstitutional executive amnesties,” would end a major Obama program that has effectively protected more than 740,000 unauthorized immigrants from deportation since 2012. 

This program — Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA — was aimed at people who came to the US when they were younger than 16 years old, who either had pursued or were pursuing education and had no felony convictions, among other conditions. It let them get temporary protection from deportation and permits to work in the US. 

But the order would end the DACA program. Now, it says that work permits already issued under the program will remain valid. However, these permits are all already set to expire at some point in the next two years, and once they expire, they will not be renewed, according to the order. Starting very soon, a trickle of immigrants would start to lose their DACA protections — and by January 2019, barring a policy reversal or an act of Congress, all of them would. 

Even while still protected by DACA, the order says, the government will not grant them “advance parole.” That means that should they leave the country, they would not be allowed to return. 

Finally, this draft order would also put the nail in the coffin of Obama’s 2014 attempt to extend that program to cover a broader group of unauthorized immigrants — DAPA — which had already been blocked in court. All in all, if implemented, the order would roll back President Obama’s most significant legacy on immigration.

In other words, the Trump regime is planning to take information on three-quarters of a million people and almost certainly use it to start rounding them up and deporting them.  Between this and the sanctuary city order yesterday, the path of mass deportations is very painfully clear here.

The other two orders are designed to limit legal immigration into the US, the first by completely changing the way L1 and H1-B visas work, and to crack down on foreign students at US colleges and universities, and the second would deny public government services to undocumented immigrants and to anyone on visas and deport them if they are receiving any government benefits whatsoever.

In other words, the US is closing its doors over the next few days.  This is not the America I grew up in anymore.

Last Call For E-Mailing It In

At this point we've gone so far around the bend on the irony meter that the leading bit has become negative.

Senior Trump administration staffers including Kellyanne Conway, Jared Kushner, Sean Spicer and Steve Bannon have active accounts on a Republican National Committee email system, Newsweek has learned. 

The system (rnchq.org) is the same one the George W. Bush administration was accused of using to evade transparency rules after claiming to have “lost” 22 million emails.
Making use of separate political email accounts at the White House is not illegal. In fact, they serve a purpose by allowing staff to divide political conversations (say, arranging for the president to support a congressional re-election campaign) from actual White House work. Commingling politics and state business violates the Hatch Act, which restricts many executive branch employees from engaging in political activity on government time. 

But after then-candidate Donald Trump and the Republicans repeatedly called for “locking up” Hillary Clinton for handling government work with a private server while secretary of state, the new White House staff risks repeating the same mistake that dogged the Democrat’s presidential campaign. They also face a security challenge: The RNC email system, according to U.S. intelligence, was hacked during the 2016 race. “They better be careful after making such a huge ruckus over the private email over at the State Department,” says former Bush administration lawyer Richard Painter. 

(The White House has not responded to queries about the system. Newsweek will update if and when it does.) 

It’s not clear whether or how Trump staffers are using the RNC email addresses. If they are using them, they are subject to the “Disclosure Requirement For Official Business Conducted Using Electronic Messaging Accounts," a law, 44 U.S.C. 2209, that went into effect in 2014. If White House staffers have already used the RNC emails system for White House work, they must copy or forward those communications into the government system within 20 days.

The Disclosure Requirement was passed to prevent presidents from shielding communications that fall under the Presidential Records Act of 1978. The last time White House staffers used the same RNC email system, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) described it as an attempt to circumvent transparency. CREW Director Melanie Sloan charged in 2007 that the Bush White House was using the RNC email system because “they don’t want anyone ever to be able to come back and see what was going on behind the scenes.”

And the Bush email mess in 2007 was pretty huge, with 22 million emails that, you know, vanished into thin air never to be seen again.  Now the Trump regime is happy to start getting away with doing that all over again.

Oh, and The Donald is still using an unsecured Android phone these days.

I'm sure it's not a problem, I mean Russia already knows 100% of what Trump is doing, so it doesn't really matter if they've got a bead on the thing 24/7 right?

Good thing we didn't elect the lady with the private email system.

Trump Can't Stop Lying

Our new Dear Leader is a pathological liar, and while meeting with congressional leaders yesterday he repeated the nonsense claim that millions of "illegals" voting are the only reason he could have lost the popular vote as he did in November.

In his first meeting with congressional leaders of both parties since taking office, President Donald Trump on Monday reiterated a debunked claim that he lost the national popular vote only because of widespread voter fraud.

Multiple sources described the exchange as part of a generally lighthearted meet-and-greet between Trump and the lawmakers at the White House. It’s unclear whether any of the leaders responded to Trump.

Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn (R-Texas) confirmed that Trump made the voter fraud claim, but added, "I didn't pay a lot of attention to it. I was ready to move onto some policy issues. I didn't anticipate that discussion."

It's further evidence of Trump’s fixation with his narrow victory, in which he won the Electoral College handily despite losing the popular vote to Hillary Clinton by nearly 3 million votes. Nearly three weeks after his Election Day victory, as late California returns drove up Clinton’s popular vote margin, Trump tweeted incorrectly about the size of his victory.

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

He’s provided no evidence to back up that claim, and multiple fact checks and investigations have called the assertion false.

Trump's aides did not immediately respond to requests for comment Monday evening.

Let me say this again for the folks in the cheap seats: Donald Trump is a pathological liar.   News outlets need to describe him as such, and they are starting to do a better job of that. 

The NY Times headline on this story is pretty simple, Trump Repeats Lie About Popular Vote in Meeting With Lawmakers. The WaPo headline, not quote as strong but still Without evidence, Trump tells lawmakers 3 million to 5 million illegal ballots cost him the popular vote. CNN's headline is nearly identical to WaPo's, FOX simply says that Trump made the claim about "illegals" and barely bothers to say the claims are unverified in the second paragraph.

But the problem is still the fact that Trump is spouting lies to cover his ego, a bad quality in a business leader, but a potentially disastrous one in a US President.

The Regime's First Speech

Trump's inaugural speech was "one for the ages" in the same way that hurricanes like Katrina and earthquakes like the one during the 89 World Series were: disasters of historic proportions, viewed by tens of millions as it happened.

In it Trump, the least popular president to take office in modern history, addressed his supporters and simply ignored the people who didn't vote for him, repeatedly saying that America now belonged to Trump voters and not himself.  The passages are truly disturbing:

Everyone is listening to you now. You came by the tens of millions to become part of a historic movement, the likes of which the world has never seen before.

At the center of this movement is a crucial conviction -- that a nation exists to serve its citizens. Americans want great schools for their children, safe neighborhoods for their families and good jobs for themselves.

These are just and reasonable demands of righteous people and a righteous public. But for too many of our citizens, a different reality exists. Mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities, rusted out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation, an education system flush with cash but which leaves our young and beautiful students deprived of all knowledge. And the crime, and the gangs, and the drugs that have stolen too many lives and robbed our country of so much unrealized potential. This American carnage stops right here and stops right now.

America is a great country that belongs to Trump voters.  Everyone else? Well, they're the reason America is an awful place.  But that stops now, because I will stop them.  You, my supporters, will stop those people.

We assembled here today are issuing a new decree to be heard in every city, in every foreign capital and in every hall of power. From this day forward, a new vision will govern our land. From this day forward, it's going to be only America first — America first.

Every decision on trade, on taxes, on immigration, on foreign affairs will be made to benefit American workers and American families. We must protect our borders from the ravages of other countries making our products, stealing our companies and destroying our jobs.

Protection will lead to great prosperity and strength. I will fight for you with every breath in my body. And I will never, ever let you down.

We will bring back our jobs. We will bring back our borders. We will bring back our wealth, and we will bring back our dreams. We will build new roads and highways and bridges and airports and tunnels and railways all across our wonderful nation. We will get our people off of welfare and back to work rebuilding our country with American hands and American labor. We will follow two simple rules -- buy American and hire American.

Note he didn't say "All of us" or "America" but "We assembled here today" as having the power, and being the righteous.  Everyone else will be made fearful of America first, a slogan with a very dark history as the country now plunges into an era of ruthless protectionism that will absolutely lead to devastating trade wars and a ravaged economic landscape.  To have a president repeatedly say it should scare the hell out of you.  But here's where we should really be paying attention:

We will reinforce old alliances and form new ones. And unite the civilized world against radical Islamic terrorism, which we will eradicate completely from the face of the earth. 

 We're going to war, folks.  A massively expanded military and mindset to "eradicate" terrorism absolutely means we're going to be in shooting wars all over the globe with hundreds of thousands, if not millions of troops.

That passage above was followed by this one:

At the bedrock of our politics will be a total allegiance to the United States of America and through our loyalty to our country, we will rediscover our loyalty to each other. When you open your heart to patriotism, there is no room for prejudice.

Dissent in the Trump regime will not be tolerated. Only total allegiance will do. And those who bring up race or creed or sexual orientation? There's no room for you, only patriotism.  You are a patriot, right citizen?

Folks, Trump has been saying this for months now.  And now he is backed up by the total control of our government, law enforcement, and military.

You should be very, very frightened.  We now live in a authoritarian regime. This speech was written by a white nationalist warmonger tyrant, and it was given by one too.

Be ready to resist any way that you can.

The Age Of Austerity Is Coming

It's going to be a race to see who can cause more misery with draconian austerity cuts: Paul Ryan and the House (who have been cooking up brutal Medicaid Medicare and Social Security cuts for years and will almost certainly get them) or the Trump regime, who is apparently working on cutting everything else in the budget.

Staffers for the Trump transition team have been meeting with career staff at the White House ahead of Friday’s presidential inauguration to outline their plans for shrinking the federal bureaucracy, The Hill has learned. 

The changes they propose are dramatic. 

The departments of Commerce and Energy would see major reductions in funding, with programs under their jurisdiction either being eliminated or transferred to other agencies. The departments of Transportation, Justice and State would see significant cuts and program eliminations. 

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting would be privatized, while the National Endowment for the Arts and National Endowment for the Humanities would be eliminated entirely. 

Overall, the blueprint being used by Trump’s team would reduce federal spending by $10.5 trillion over 10 years. 

The proposed cuts hew closely to a blueprint published last year by the conservative Heritage Foundation, a think tank that has helped staff the Trump transition. 

Similar proposals have in the past won support from Republicans in the House and Senate, who believe they have an opportunity to truly tackle spending after years of warnings about the rising debt. 

Many of the specific cuts were included in the 2017 budget adopted by the conservative Republican Study Committee (RSC), a caucus that represents a majority of House Republicans. The RSC budget plan would reduce federal spending by $8.6 trillion over the next decade.

Congrats, America.  You're not going to get a "government small enough to drown in a bathtub", you're going to get a government that drowns you in one instead.

So many Americans voted for Trump on the basis that he would hurt those people instead of the people ignorant enough to buy his con.  So many Americans are about to find out they were always going to get screwed by him.  Sure, there are plenty of folks who will be content to suffer just as long as it means anyone darker than a paper bag ends up back in crushing poverty, but as I keep reminding people, the majority of Americans on cash welfare, SNAP food assistance, SS disability checks and housing assistance programs are all white people.  When they start really hurting too, maybe they'll come around.

Probably not though.  At least they wont be, you know, black.  Long as Trump can keep that scam going, he can end the New Deal and start a new Gilded Age, no problem.  So as the Trump regime takes power (I refuse to call them "administration" because that would assume they 1) care about governance, 2) are capable of competent governance, 3) aren't a bunch of actual thieves and con artists, 4) aren't a white nationalist movement) this afternoon, remember:

It gets darkest just before it all goes pitch black.

Last Call For Climate Of Hostility, Con't

As the Trump regime assumes power this weekend, keep in mind that the earth has now hit three straight years of record global temperatures, and we're in a pattern where new records will be set monthly.

Marking another milestone for a changing planet, scientists reported on Wednesday that the Earth reached its highest temperature on record in 2016 — trouncing a record set only a year earlier, which beat one set in 2014. It is the first time in the modern era of global warming data that temperatures have blown past the previous record three years in a row. 

The findings come two days before the inauguration of an American president who has called global warming a Chinese plot and vowed to roll back his predecessor’s efforts to cut emissions of heat-trapping gases. 

The data show that politicians cannot wish the problem away. The Earth is heating up, a point long beyond serious scientific dispute, but one becoming more evident as the records keep falling. Temperatures are heading toward levels that many experts believe will pose a profound threat to both the natural world and to human civilization. 

In 2015 and 2016, the planetary warming was intensified by the weather pattern known as El Niño, in which the Pacific Ocean released a huge burst of energy and water vapor into the atmosphere. But the bigger factor in setting the records was the long-term trend of rising temperature, which scientists say is being driven by increasing levels of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.

The good news is with El Nino over, 2017 will probably not be a global record-breaker.  But there are still major problems in the Arctic.

Even at current temperatures, billions of tons of land ice are melting or sliding into the ocean. The sea is also absorbing most of the heat trapped by human emissions. Those factors are causing the ocean to rise at what appears to be an accelerating pace, and coastal communities in the United States are spending billions of dollars to fight increased tidal flooding. Their pleas for help from Congress have largely been ignored. 

The finding that a record had been set for the third year in a row was released on Wednesday by three government agencies, two American and one British, that track measurements made by ships, buoys and land-based weather stations. They analyze the figures to correct for known problems, producing an annual average temperature for the surface of the Earth. The national meteorological agency of Japan also confirmed the findings in a preliminary analysis. 

The findings about a record-warm year were also confirmed by the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project, a nonprofit California group set up to provide a temperature analysis independent of governments. That group, however, did not find that three records had been set in a row; in its analysis, 2010 was slightly warmer than 2014.

So the Trump regime will try to legislate all mention of the problem away as Republicans are salivating over cuts to climate science and research.  But it's looking more and more like it's too late to stop the first stages of a positive feedback loop in the polar ice zones.  Science doesn't require your belief, as the truism goes.

The Creamsicle Cabinet

When Trump says "Make America Great Again" judging from his cabinet selections "America" is about 90% white men, a few white women, Ben Carson, Nikki Haley, and Mitch McConnell's wife, Elaine Chao.  With Trump reportedly tapping former Georgia GOP Gov. Sonny Perdue as Agriculture Secretary, that means for the first time since 1988 there will be no Hispanic members in the Cabinet.

Donald Trump's Cabinet is poised to become the first since 1988 without any Hispanic officials — a huge disappointment for members of the nation's second-largest ethnic group — as reports indicate he'll tap former Georgia Gov. Sonny Perdue for agriculture secretary.

Two Hispanic Texans were under consideration for the post: former U.S. Rep. Henry Bonilla, a San Antonio Republican, and Elsa Murano, a former Texas A&M president and former undersecretary for food safety.

"We're extremely worried. This is anti-democratic," Hector Sanchez, chairman of the National Hispanic Leadership Agenda, an umbrella group of 40 advocacy organizations, asserting that Trump is undoing decades of progress toward more inclusion.

Ronald Reagan named the first Latino to the Cabinet in 1988 when he picked Texas Democrat Lauro Cavazos for education secretary. Cavazos, a former Texas Tech president, stayed on under George Bush. Every president since, from both parties, has had at least one Hispanic in the Cabinet at all times.

"Trump has not only been the most anti-Latino, anti-immigrant president in the history of the nation. By not including Latinos in the Cabinet he is just showing how he is planning to govern," Sanchez said, noting that Latinos now account for 17 percent of the U.S. population. 

Carson has zero experience in running an agency like HUD (and has said so), Haley has zero foreign policy experience (and has said so), and ironically the one actual person in the Orange Cabinet who is actually qualified to be there is Chao, as Dubya's former Labor Secretary, as an obvious sop to her husband.

I'm thinking that it's almost an accident that Trump's cabinet has any diversity in it at all.  Hispanic voters should definitely be thinking that.  And Mouth of Sauron Sean Spicer?

Asked Wednesday about the dearth of Hispanics in the Cabinet, Trump spokesman Sean Spicer called it more important to pick people who can do the jobs well.

"He has continued to seek out the best and the brightest to fill out his Cabinet," Spicer said. "We have 5,000 positions and I think you're going to see a very strong presence of the Hispanic community" among senior administration appointments and White House staff.

"I don't have any concern about diversity," he said.

It's pretty apparent you don't, guys.

Last Call For Russian To Judgment

The Trump regime assumes power in less than 48 hours, and we have this bombshell from McClatchy's Peter Stone and Greg Gordon on the Kremlin possibly funding the Trump campaign.

The FBI and five other law enforcement and intelligence agencies have collaborated for months in an investigation into Russian attempts to influence the November election, including whether money from the Kremlin covertly aided President-elect Donald Trump, two people familiar with the matter said. 

The informal, inter-agency working group began to explore possible Russian interference last spring, long before the FBI received information from a former British spy hired to develop politically damaging and unverified research about Trump, according to the sources, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the inquiry. 

The agencies involved in the inquiry are the FBI, the CIA, the National Security Agency, the Justice Department, the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network and representatives of the director of national intelligence, the sources said. 

Investigators are examining how money may have moved from the Kremlin to covertly help Trump win, the two sources said. One of the allegations involves whether a system for routinely paying thousands of Russian-American pensioners may have been used to pay some email hackers in the United States or to supply money to intermediaries who would then pay the hackers, the two sources said.

That the Trump Organization as a front for Russian money laundering has long been a unifying theory in the story of Moscow's involvement with our elections, but this story intimates that multiple intelligence and law enforcement agencies took that possibility seriously for months.  Apparently this is a much, much bigger story than the January 6 report let on, and it definitely looks like FISA warrants were issued in conjunction with the investigation.

So again, we have serious evidence that our next president is a Russian asset.

What will anyone do about it?

Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/politics-government/article127231799.html#storylink=cpy

The Big Orange Basement

It's only now that the prospect of "President Trump" is sinking in with his supporters and that he won't serve as any sort of check on unlimited GOP lunacy, with Americans only growing more and more horrified at him over the last two months.  As such, he'll be entering office Friday with the lowest starting approval rating of any president in recent history.

It has been 10 weeks since Donald Trump was elected president, and more Americans disapprove (48 percent) than approve (37 percent) of the way he has handled his presidential transition. They are split on his cabinet picks. Views divide heavily along party lines.

Just days before his inauguration, Donald Trump’s favorable rating (32 percent) is the lowest of any president-elect in CBS News polling going back to Ronald Reagan in 1981, when CBS News began taking this measure.

However, a majority of Americans are at least somewhat confident in how Mr. Trump will handle the economy, ISIS and U.S. trade policy. Fewer are confident in his decisions on foreign policy and illegal immigration.

President-elect Trump gets more negative than positive marks for the handling of his Presidential transition. Forty-eight percent disapprove of the job he is doing, while 37 percent approve.

Confirmation hearings for some of Donald Trump’s cabinet appointments are underway. Americans are divided over Mr. Trump’s choices for his Cabinet, similar to last month.

On both of these matters, views are highly partisan. More than seven in 10 Republicans approve of how Mr. Trump has handled his presidential transition and his cabinet choices. Most Democrats disapprove.

Evaluations of Mr. Trump’s cabinet appointees are more negative than those of his two immediate predecessors: seven in 10 Americans approved of the cabinet appointments of Barack Obama, and six in 10 approved of those appointed by George W. Bush. 

More broadly, Donald Trump will enter the White House with the lowest favorable rating of any president-elect in CBS News polling going back to Ronald Reagan in 1981. Thirty-two percent have a favorable view of Mr. Trump, while 42 percent view him unfavorably. In 2009, 60 percent held a favorable view of Mr. Obama, and just nine percent had an unfavorable view of him. George W. Bush had a 44 percent favorable rating in Jan. 2001, and Bill Clinton had a 45 percent approval rating. Ronald Reagan came into office with a 47 percent approval rating. Still, unfavorable views of Mr. Trump have declined since he was elected in November.

Trump is already in the low 30's and I think it's going to get worse for him from here.  Unfortunately, it also means things are going to get a lot worse for Americans too.

Still, expect Republicans to shout MANDATE while ripping the last 80 years of classic federal liberalism apart.  It's really too bad that the GOP will do unprecedented damage to the country and the wealthy will loot the treasury completely before voters will be able to do much of anything to stop them.

If we, you know, still have elections.

Last Call For Cryer's Remorse

There seems to be a whole heck of a lot of buyer's remorse for Trump among the demographic of white women who voted for him (by ten points I might add) and they're only now just figuring out what total control of women's rights in the hands of Republicans means: things like the end of Planned Parenthood here which bothers USA Today contributor Melody Forbes.

I voted for Donald Trump because I wanted to see change in our country. One change I didn’t want to see was access to health care at Planned Parenthood blocked. 

But Republican congressional leaders have already promised to do just that, with a provision to stop reimbursements for the health care Planned Parenthood provides. 

Just like one in 5 women across the country, I went to Planned Parenthood here in Arizona in my 20s for health care. I was newly divorced, unemployed and uninsured, and I needed health services I could not otherwise afford. 

These are services every woman needs at some point, and they are at risk. Vice President-elect Mike Pence and anti-women’s health members of Congress are pledging to attack Planned Parenthood and block patients from essential care, as they have threatened to do as many times as they could in last 10 years. The difference this time is that they think President-elect Trump, as a Republican, will sign the bill. 

It doesn’t make any sense for Trump, who said he would defend the American people from politics as usual, to sign a bill like this. Millions of mostly low-income people who rely on Planned Parenthood for essential health care like birth control, cancer screenings, STI testing and treatment, well-woman exams and more, would no longer have access within their communities. And people who already face outsized barriers to getting care, especially people of color and people in rural communities, would face additional hurdles. A bill to defund Planned Parenthood doesn’t cross out a line in the federal budget — it stops people with Medicaid from being able to go to Planned Parenthood for basic reproductive health care.

Well all that is true, but Trump is going to sign the bill anyway because he's promised to do just that.

Yes, because as long as they do the abortion I am not for funding Planned Parenthood but they do cervical cancer work. They do a lot of good things for women but as long as they’re involved with the abortions, as you know they say it’s 3% of their work, some people say it’s 10%, some people say it’s 8%, I hear all different percentages but it doesn’t matter. As long as they’re involved with abortion, as far as I’m concerned forget it, I wouldn’t fund them regardless. But they do do other good work. You look at cervical cancer. I’ve had women tell me they do some excellent work so I think you also have to put that into account but I would defund Planned Parenthood because of their view and the fact of their work on abortion.”

So the question remains ma'am...why the hell did you vote for Trump if Planned Parenthood is that important?

So Long And Thanks For All The Net Neutrality

That the Trump team wants to get rid of net neutrality measures to protect consumers is a given and almost 100% assured at this point.  But remember, Trump is vindictive and destructive, so the real plan is to all but dismantle the FCC completely to make sure the commission never has power to actually do anything ever again.

President-elect Donald Trump's transition team is reportedly pushing a proposal to strip the Federal Communications Commission of its role in overseeing competition and consumer protection.

Multichannel News has what it calls an exclusive report that says the incoming Trump administration has "signed off on an approach to remaking the Federal Communications Commission." The plan, offered by transition team members appointed by Trump, "squares with the deregulatory philosophies of FCC Republicans Ajit Pai and Michael O'Rielly," who will take a 2-1 majority after Trump's inauguration on Friday, the report said.

Besides restructuring FCC bureaus, the majority of the transition team wants to "eventually move functions deemed 'duplicative,' like, say, competition and consumer protection, to other agencies, particularly the Federal Trade Commission," Multichannel news reported. The story cites "sources familiar" with a recent meeting involving Trump officials and FCC transition team members. The Trump team has not made any on-the-record statements about specific plans for the FCC.

Pai and O'Rielly have already promised to take a deregulatory approach to broadband and telecom industries, and it's within their power to do so. But that doesn't mean the Trump administration could unilaterally reduce the FCC's authority in such a way that the changes last beyond Trump's presidency. Congress would have to be involved in a permanent reduction of FCC authority, though that isn't inconceivable as Congressional Republicans have previously said they'd like to overhaul the Communications Act that gives the FCC its authority.

The FCC transition team appointed by Trump has six people including three individuals affiliated with the conservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI), namely Roslyn Layton, Jeffrey Eisenach, and Mark Jamison. The majority plan offered by the transition team "was said to dovetail with comments from Eisenach and Layton to Congress in 2014," which said FCC "functions are largely duplicative of those of other agencies," Multichannel News reported.

In other words, say goodbye to the FCC's power to protect American internet consumers as Trump will almost certainly assure internet near-monopolies, total lack of competition, and Americans paying some of the highest internet prices of any developed country.

But after all, that's what you voted for, right?