Pardon Me, Newt?

Whoever thought Republicans ever cared about rule of law once they came to power is in for quite the shock when it comes to "crony capitalism" Trump-style.  And Newt Gingrich is right there cheering them along, saying the GOP should simply change the laws to allow Trump and his kids to do whatever they want. 

Newt Gingrich said Monday that President-elect Donald Trump could simply pardon members of his administration who may break anti-nepotism laws, adding that Trump's business ties require "a whole new approach" to addressing potential conflicts of interest in the presidency.

“In the case of the president, he has a broad ability to organize the White House the way he wants to. He also has, frankly, the power of the pardon,” Gingrich told WAMU’s Diane Rehm on Monday morning. “It is a totally open power, and he could simply say, ‘Look, I want them to be my advisers. I pardon them if anyone finds them to have behaved against the rules. Period.' Technically, under the Constitution, he has that level of authority.”

Gingrich was referring to a federal anti-nepotism law that could prevent Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, Trump’s daughter and son-in-law, respectively, from serving in his administration. Previously, Gingrich suggested Trump may need a waiver from Congress to have Kushner work in his administration.

On Monday, however, Gingrich said the law was the result of “Lyndon Johnson’s reaction to Bobby Kennedy, and the fact that Johnson hated Kennedy.”

“It was a very narrowly focused bill really in reaction to a particular personality thing,” he said. “I think that we have to look at it in the context of what they were trying to accomplish.”

Although Gingrich acknowledged that Trump’s potential conflicts of interest were “a very real problem,” he argued that the President-elect's massive wealth was “virtually impossible to isolate” and that “traditional rules don’t work."

"We’re going to have to think up a whole new approach,” he said.

We have to change to rules for Trump, because Trump doesn't follow the rules.

Republicans have spent more than two decades screaming about "lawless Democrat thugs" and as soon as they get into power, they simply say "If we change the laws so we can do what we want, we're not lawless, are we?"

Trump just pardons anyone who might break the law ahead of time.  Problem solved, citizen!

Of course the administration that can change the laws to do what they want can also change the laws to make anything their opponents do illegal.  History tells us that part is coming pretty soon as well.

Lemme Hear Ya Go Hotel, Motel, Trump-iday Inn

And if Kuwait starts acting up, then they're not Trump's friend.

The Embassy of Kuwait allegedly cancelled a contract with a Washington, D.C. hotel days after the presidential election, citing political pressure to hold its National Day celebration at the Trump International Hotel instead.

A source tells ThinkProgress that the Kuwaiti embassy, which has regularly held the event at the Four Seasons in Georgetown, abruptly canceled its reservation after members of the Trump Organization pressured the ambassador to hold the event at the hotel owned by the president-elect. The source, who has direct knowledge of the arrangements between the hotels and the embassy, spoke to ThinkProgress on the condition of anonymity because the individual was not authorized to speak publicly. ThinkProgress was also able to review documentary evidence confirming the source’s account.

In the early fall, the Kuwaiti Embassy signed a contract with the Four Seasons. But after the election, members of the Trump Organization contacted the Ambassador of Kuwait, Salem Al-Sabah, and encouraged him to move his event to Trump’s D.C. hotel, the source said.

Kuwait has now signed a contract with the Trump International Hotel, the source said, adding that a representative with the embassy described the decision as political. Invitations to the event are typically sent out in January.

Abdulaziz Alqadfan, First Secretary of the Embassy of Kuwait, told ThinkProgress last week that he couldn’t “confirm or deny” that the National Day event would be held at the Trump Hotel. Reached again Monday afternoon, Alqadfan did not offer any comment. An email sent directly to Ambassador Al-Sabah was not immediately returned.

If you're a foreign national or lobbyist wanting access and want to stay in good graces with the Trump administration, you'd better stay at his hotels. They're now the only game in town in DC, Chicago, New York, SoHo, Miami and Vegas, but especially the DC digs.  President Trump would be disappointed if you didn't accept his offer of hospitality in our nation's capital. You wouldn't want to disappoint President Trump, would you?

This is how things work in America now.  Trump is the President's Brand™.

Gosh, that would make a pretty good tag, huh.

StupidiNews!

• German officials say they are treating a truck driven through a crowded Berlin Christmas market square, killing 12 and injuring dozens, as a terrorist incident.
• A shooter was detained outside the US Embassy in Ankara, Turkey hours after the Russian envoy to Ankara was killed in an art gallery by an off-duty police officer.
• China has returned a US Navy underwater drone after seizing it in international waters last week, speculation is that Beijing is now taking a far tougher line in the South China Sea.
• Despite being worth nearly $70 billion on paper, ride-sharing giant Uber may take as much as $3 billion in losses over being drubbed out of China's ride-share market in 2016.
• A South Carolina lawmaker wants to install anti-pornography filters on all new computers and tablets sold in the state to prevent viewing of obscene content without paying the state a fee.

Last Call For The Opioid Option

So, turns out that in the midst of the miserable red state opioid epidemic that has cost thousands of lives and ruined tens of thousands more in states like West Virginia that there's no better drug pushers than the legal, corporate ones.

Follow the pills and you'll find the overdose deaths. 

The trail of painkillers leads to West Virginia's southern coalfields, to places like Kermit, population 392. There, out-of-state drug companies shipped nearly 9 million highly addictive — and potentially lethal — hydrocodone pills over two years to a single pharmacy in the Mingo County town. 

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

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

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

Yep, it seems that nearly 20% of all OxyContin, hyrdrocodone, and other painkillers shipped by the nation's three largest drug distribution companies ended up in West Virginia.

Nearly twenty percent. Just to West Virginia.

Let that sink in.

While the death toll climbed, drug wholesalers continued to ship massive quantities of pain pills. 

Mingo, Logan and Boone counties received the most doses of hydrocodone — sold under brand names such as Lortab, Vicodin and Norco — on a per-person basis in West Virginia. Wyoming and Raleigh counties scooped up OxyContin pills by the tens of millions. 

The nation's three largest prescription drug wholesalers — McKesson Corp., Cardinal Health and AmerisourceBergen Drug Co. — supplied more than half of all pain pills statewide.

For more than a decade, the same distributors disregarded rules to report suspicious orders for controlled substances in West Virginia to the state Board of Pharmacy, the Gazette-Mail found. And the board failed to enforce the same regulations that were on the books since 2001, while giving spotless inspection reviews to small-town pharmacies in the southern counties that ordered more pills than could possibly be taken by people who really needed medicine for pain. 

As the fatalities mounted — hydrocodone and oxycodone overdose deaths increased 67 percent in West Virginia between 2007 and 2012 — the drug shippers' CEOs collected salaries and bonuses in the tens of millions of dollars. Their companies made billions. McKesson has grown into the fifth-largest corporation in America. The drug distributor's CEO was the nation's highest-paid executive in 2012, according to Forbes. 

In court cases, the companies have repeatedly denied they played any role in the nation's pain-pill epidemic.

The laws were there.  They were never enforced.  The drug distributors got rich.  Thousands died. This is a massive scandal, period.

Now imagine how bad this will be under the Trump FDA, which wants to eliminate "job-killing regulations" on Big Pharma, and would remain in charge of enforcing what regulations would be left on the books.

And please note, this was a local city newspaper that broke this story wide open, not a national paper, not a online outlet, not a non-profit, but a local hometown paper.

But the problem is still economic anxiety, right?

Invasion Of The Orangemen

Nothing to be alarmed about folks, President Hair Furor is only going to have his own private security force on top of any Secret Service protection, even after he takes office in January, in order to "deal with protesters" at the rallies and events he continues to want to have.

President-elect Donald Trump has continued employing a private security and intelligence team at his victory rallies, and he is expected to keep at least some members of the team after he becomes president, according to people familiar with the plans. 

The arrangement represents a major break from tradition. All modern presidents and presidents-elect have entrusted their personal security entirely to the Secret Service, and their event security mostly to local law enforcement, according to presidential security experts and Secret Service sources.

But Trump — who puts a premium on loyalty and has demonstrated great interest in having forceful security at his events — has opted to maintain an aggressive and unprecedented private security force, led by Keith Schiller, a retired New York City cop and Navy veteran who started working for Trump in 1999 as a part-time bodyguard, eventually rising to become his head of security. 

Security officials warn that employing private security personnel heightens risks for the president-elect and his team, as well as for protesters, dozens of whom have alleged racial profiling, undue force or aggression at the hands Trump’s security, with at least 10 joining a trio of lawsuits now pending against Trump, his campaign or its security. 

“It’s playing with fire,” said Jonathan Wackrow, a former Secret Service agent who worked on President Barack Obama’s protective detail during his 2012 reelection campaign. Having a private security team working events with Secret Service “increases the Service’s liability, it creates greater confusion and it creates greater risk,” Wackrow said. 

“You never want to comingle a police function with a private security function,” he said, adding, “If you talk to the guys on the detail and the guys who are running the rallies, that’s been a little bit difficult because it’s so abnormal.”

The word you need to be using isn't "abnormal" it's "authoritarian".  Private security details without public oversight and answerable only to Trump, "controlling" protesters?  That's what dictators do, guys.  This is the Orange Brigades here, Trump's private army. These are the actions of a man who knows just how much the people hate him and he doesn't care.

If Obama had done this in 2008 or especially 2012, he'd have been impeached the moment one of these guys tried to cash a paycheck.

This is a serious, serious problem and nobody seems to care to try to do anything about it.

Those Nice Klansmen Down The Road

Seems that in the era of Trump "economic anxiety" that cable television seeks to remain relevant by giving us the fuzzy, warm, homey view of your average KKK Imperial Wizard and his family.

The setup is warm and fuzzy. “Girls, I got y’all some gifts,” says Steven Howard, presenting his two young daughters with prettily wrapped packages, which they eagerly rip into. The cameras then reveal what’s inside: the distinctive pointed hoods of the Ku Klux Klan.

“Giving my girls my legacy,” Mr. Howard says as he helps place them on their heads.

It’s a chilling introduction to “Generation KKK,” an eight-part documentary series, beginning Jan. 10 on A&E, that burrows in with high-ranking Klan members and their families. The series also takes A&E, best known for long-running favorites like “Hoarders” and “Intervention,” into programming waters more complicated — and politically charged — than anything it has shown before.

That meant finding a delicate balance between winning the trust of the Klan members and ensuring the show didn’t propagate views the network’s executives abhor. “We certainly didn’t want the show to be seen as a platform for the views of the KKK,” said Rob Sharenow, general manager of A&E. “The only political agenda is that we really do stand against hate.”

I see.  But we really need to hear why they harbor that hate in their own words in order to understand them, I guess. At least, that's what the pundits tell me.

The series follows Mr. Howard, the Imperial Wizard of the North Mississippi White Knights; Chris Buckley, a Grand Knighthawk with the North Georgia White Knights; and Richard Nichols, the Grand Dragon in the Tennessee Knights of the Invisible Empire.

According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the number of independent Klan chapters in the United States (there is no national organization) grew from 72 to 190 between 2014 and 2015. The Anti-Defamation League estimates membership at 3,000, while the law center places the figure at between 5,000 and 8,000. And the indoctrination of young people, members say, is crucial to the Klan’s survival.

“We all here for the same reason: we’re here for the preservation of our race and the preservation of our people,” Mr. Howard says on the show, voicing his dream of becoming the next David Duke. “If we don’t fight this battle, our children ain’t gonna have a future.”

The series follows the adventures of these happy warriors as they learn and grow!

As they sought to capture this relatively unseen world, the filmmakers also incorporated the anti-hate activists Daryle Lamont Jenkins, Arno Michaelis and Bryon Widner as they tried to persuade members to leave the Klan — or at least to leave their children out of it.

That meant introducing Mr. Buckley’s wife, Melissa, to Mr. Michaelis, a former white supremacist now with Serve 2 Unite, which works with young people to prevent violent extremism. Mr. Buckley’s Klan involvement had led his wife into a dangerous confrontation with three African-American women at a Walmart, and she wanted to squelch her now-5-year-old son’s mimicry of his father’s racial slurs and “white power” salutes before he started school.

“I hate to say that I was even at the point of leaving him, because he’s my best friend, he’s my kids’ father, he’s everything to me,” she said in a phone interview. “But it got to the point where, if I’m not safe with him, why be with him?”

For Mr. Buckley, an Army veteran of Afghanistan and Iraq, the Klan offered a band of brothers not unlike the military and an outlet for the rage he felt toward those he blamed for his emotional and financial precariousness.

“People involved in hate groups do so because they’re suffering,” Mr. Michaelis said. “I really draw upon that truth to respond to their aggression with compassion, and doing so makes a very powerful first impression.”

While I'm glad to hear that somebody's trying to deprogram these folks and absolutely support their efforts to do so, I have to admit my personal biases of you know, being black in America in 2016 makes me quite leery of how long it's going to take to try to reform the tens of millions of other Trump voters who may be suffering from this particular strain of "economic anxiety" and that I'm not super stoked to watch a series about humanizing the reasons for their hatred towards me.

I don't need to watch the series.  Thanks to November's election I get to live it instead.

That's more than enough for me.  Thanks.

I'll pass.

StupidiNews!

• Senior US senators from both parties are asking for a select committee investigation of Russian hacking, but so far GOP leaders in Congress are expressing zero interest.
• The Trump cabinet pick with the thorniest conflicts of interest may be Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, whose steel empire would be directly enriched by government decisions.
• Thousands of California protestors marched to demonstrate against Donald Trump and his impending election in the Electoral College on Monday, marking International Migrants' Day.
• Senate Democrats admit they can make a hard road for Trump cabinet selections, but also admit they will need Republican help to block any nominees.
• The Washington Post is offering a free Google Chrome plug-in that offers the paper's fact-checking analysis on the subject of any Donald Trump tweet.

Last Call For Trump Cards, Con't

You approve of Glorious Leader Donald Trump, don't you citizen? Four out of five of us do!

On Sunday, Priebus told Fox News host Chris Wallace that Trump’s tweet — and everything else he has done — is supported by 80 percent of the American people.

“I don’t think it’s all that provocative,” Priebus opined.

“You mean the One China policy is up for grabs?” Wallace wondered.

“We’re not suggesting we’re revisiting One China policy right now,” Priebus insisted. “And he’s not president right now and he’s respectful to the current president.”

“The Chinese ripped a drone out of the water,” the Trump aide continued. “President-elect said this is an unprecedented act, totally inappropriate. He didn’t quite use those words, but that’s essentially what he said in a tweet.”

According to Priebus, the U.S. military should not “want that drone back” after it had been handled by the Chinese government.

“I think every single thing he’s done has been factual and has been in line with where 80 percent of the American people are,” Priebus declared.

The reality is much less than 80%, but that no longer matters.


 

Four out of five real citizens approve of Trump. The fifth one will be dealt with shortly.

Don't be the fifth one, citizen.

The Village Discovers The Cult Of Trump

John Sides over at the Monkey Cage is astonished to discover that the majority of Republican voters are disregarding the facts about the 2016 election.

Amid the speculation on whether the electoral college will refuse to make Donald Trump president, many Trump opponents are pinning their hopes on one glaring fact: Hillary Clinton’s sizable win in the popular vote.

Clinton’s lead now exceeds 2.8 million votes (more than 2.1 percent of the total vote) and continues to grow. Many Democrats hope this fact alone might persuade Republican electors to reject Trump in favor of some alternative.

But this hope faces a serious challenge: Half of all Republicans actually think Trump won the popular vote.

In a nationally representative online survey of 1,011 Americans conducted by Qualtrics between Dec. 6 and 12, we asked respondents, “In last month’s election, Donald Trump won the majority of votes in the electoral college. Who do you think won the most popular votes?”

Twenty-nine percent said Donald Trump won the popular vote. This is a slightly larger proportion than in a recent Pew survey in which 19 percent said Trump won the popular vote.

Respondents’ correct understanding of the popular vote depended a great deal on partisanship. A large fraction of Republicans — 52 percent — said Trump won the popular vote, compared with only 7 percent of Democrats and 24 percent of independents. Among Republicans without any college education, the share was even larger: 60 percent, compared with 37 percent of Republicans with a college degree.

Please remember this the next time you feel like saying "If only Hillary Clinton had talked more about jobs and economy!" or "I can't believe Trump voters voted against their own self-interest!"  The facts simply didn't matter in 2016.  It was a cult of personality, pure and simple.  And the cult won.

It was never about jobs, or the economy, or the facts.  It was about assembling like-minded individuals into an army to destroy those unlike them.  It's the definition of a cult.

The Cult now in fact rules the entire federal government, and most states.  When the reality of the damage that they cause settles in, the Cult will simply convince America that the Others are the problem.  The Others have to go. The rest of you? Join the Cult or else.

That ultimatum will be backed up by the power of the state.  History tells us what happens next in these situations, and the results are usually catastrophically bloody.

This is why I think that what the Electoral College may or may not do on Monday is ultimately 100% meaningless.  The Cult already has the results. They will validate the Cult or else.

“The Trump campaign is calling. The Republican Party of Texas is calling. They’re trying to lock down the votes,” said Texas GOP elector Alexander Kim, who estimated he has received at least 30 such calls. One RNC insider, he said, called him three times in one hour to get a response.

There’s a reason electors like Kim make Republicans nervous. While he insists he’s voting for Trump when the body meets on Monday and that nothing can shake him from that position, there is a caveat: “unless Trump does something to violate the compact that he created with American citizens.”

Just that eyelash of doubt, Kim suspects, has led to his barrage of calls from the party.

 Deviation will be dealt with swiftly and with brutal finality.  Those who deviate will be destroyed.

Chris Suprun of Texas, the only GOP elector to publicly oppose Trump, has been especially battered by criticism — mainly from fellow Republicans, including party leaders who have questioned his integrity.

Suprun announced his intention to vote for someone other than Trump in a New York Times op-ed, recalling his service on Sept. 11, 2001, as a first responder to the attack on the Pentagon. On Friday, a Texas television station ran a story accusing Suprun of inventing his 9/11 role, the story that Suprun built his career around. The charge, based on a discrepancy with Suprun’s LinkedIn page, featured an anonymous former colleague accusing Suprun of “stolen valor.”

Suprun has vehemently denied the story.

The Others will be dealt with.  But first the Cult will be purged of those who believe the Others have rights or are even human.

All hail Trump.

Sunday Long Read: Back In Black

This week's Sunday Long Read is the indispensable Ta-Nehisi Coates and his exit interview with President Obama, but most of all it's a story of faith: President Obama's faith in the American people, and how badly that faith was misplaced.

Last spring, I went to the White House to meet the president for lunch. I arrived slightly early and sat in the waiting area. I was introduced to a deaf woman who worked as the president’s receptionist, a black woman who worked in the press office, a Muslim woman in a head scarf who worked on the National Security Council, and an Iranian American woman who worked as a personal aide to the president. This receiving party represented a healthy cross section of the people Donald Trump had been mocking, and would continue to spend his campaign mocking. At the time, the president seemed untroubled by Trump. When I told Obama that I thought Trump’s candidacy was an explicit reaction to the fact of a black president, he said he could see that, but then enumerated other explanations. When assessing Trump’s chances, he was direct: He couldn’t win.

This assessment was born out of the president’s innate optimism and unwavering faith in the ultimate wisdom of the American people—the same traits that had propelled his unlikely five-year ascent from Illinois state senator to U.S. senator to leader of the free world.* The speech that launched his rise, the keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, emerged right from this logic. He addressed himself to his “fellow Americans, Democrats, Republicans, independents,” all of whom, he insisted, were more united than they had been led to believe. America was home to devout worshippers and Little League coaches in blue states, civil libertarians and “gay friends” in red states. The presumably white “counties around Chicago” did not want their taxes burned on welfare, but they didn’t want them wasted on a bloated Pentagon budget either. Inner-city black families, no matter their perils, understood “that government alone can’t teach our kids to learn … that children can’t achieve unless we raise their expectations and turn off the television sets and eradicate the slander that says a black youth with a book is acting white.” 

Perceived differences were the work of “spinmasters and negative-ad peddlers who embrace the politics of ‘anything goes.’ ” Real America had no use for such categorizations. By Obama’s lights, there was no liberal America, no conservative America, no black America, no white America, no Latino America, no Asian America, only “the United States of America.” All these disparate strands of the American experience were bound together by a common hope: 

It’s the hope of slaves sitting around a fire singing freedom songs; the hope of immigrants setting out for distant shores; the hope of a young naval lieutenant bravely patrolling the Mekong Delta; the hope of a mill worker’s son who dares to defy the odds; the hope of a skinny kid with a funny name who believes that America has a place for him, too. 

This speech ran counter to the history of the people it sought to address. Some of those same immigrants had firebombed the homes of the children of those same slaves. That young naval lieutenant was an imperial agent for a failed, immoral war. American division was real. In 2004, John Kerry did not win a single southern state. But Obama appealed to a belief in innocence—in particular a white innocence—that ascribed the country’s historical errors more to misunderstanding and the work of a small cabal than to any deliberate malevolence or widespread racism. America was good. America was great.

Over the next 12 years, I came to regard Obama as a skilled politician, a deeply moral human being, and one of the greatest presidents in American history. He was phenomenal—the most agile interpreter and navigator of the color line I had ever seen. He had an ability to emote a deep and sincere connection to the hearts of black people, while never doubting the hearts of white people. This was the core of his 2004 keynote, and it marked his historic race speech during the 2008 campaign at Philadelphia’s National Constitution Center—and blinded him to the appeal of Trump. (“As a general proposition, it’s hard to run for president by telling people how terrible things are,” Obama once said to me.) 

But if the president’s inability to cement his legacy in the form of Hillary Clinton proved the limits of his optimism, it also revealed the exceptional nature of his presidential victories. For eight years Barack Obama walked on ice and never fell. Nothing in that time suggested that straight talk on the facts of racism in American life would have given him surer footing.

I personally love this piece (and if you haven't already Coates's book Between the World and Me yet, you absolutely need to) but it's also very stark and very clear that President Obama's weakness is his faith in others.  Coates does a good job of explaining why that weakness is not always the worst in a leader to have.  Given the monster this country chose to succeed Obama, I think a man who dared to believe in the best of us sounds much better than a man who works to bring out our worst days, and will, every day, for the next four years.

The Orange Gift That Keeps On Giving

Saturday Night Live went after Trump with a vengeance last night, and it was perfect.

I wonder how long this will last before Trump shuts it down?

Ugly Orange In Black And White

Donald Trump's daughter Ivanka is married to Jared Kushner, who owns and runs the New York Observer. And yes, The Donald's son-in-law is just as odious as he is. No surprise then that it turns out Kushner gave exclusive access to Maryland-based broadcaster Sinclair for favorable interviews with Trump that ran on TV stations Sinclair owned.

Kushner said the agreement with Sinclair, which owns television stations across the country in many swing states and often packages news for their affiliates to run, gave them more access to Trump and the campaign, according to six people who heard his remarks.

In exchange, Sinclair would broadcast their Trump interviews across the country without commentary, Kushner said. Kushner highlighted that Sinclair, in states like Ohio, reaches a much wider audience — around 250,000 listeners — than networks like CNN, which reach somewhere around 30,000.

“It’s math,” Kushner said according to multiple attendees.

Scott Livingston, vice president of news at Sinclair, said the offer for extended interviews with local anchors was made to both candidates. Trump did a handful of interviews, while Sen. Tim Kaine did a few as well, though Hillary Clinton did not.

“Our promise was to give all candidates an opportunity to voice their position share their position with our viewers. Certainly we presented an opportunity so that Mr. Trump could clearly state his position on the key issues,” Livingston said. “Our commitment to our viewers is to go beyond podium, beyond the rhetoric. We’re all about tracking the truth and telling the truth and that’s typically missing in most political coverage.”

A Trump spokesman said the deal included the interviews running across every affiliate but that no money was exchanged between the network and the campaign. The spokesman said the campaign also worked with other media outlets that had affiliates, like Hearst, to try and spread their message.

“It was a standard package, but an extended package, extended story where you’d hear more directly from candidate on the issue instead of hearing all the spin and all the rhetoric,” Livingston said.

It's just math, right?  Except for the fact Trump has repeatedly denied access to networks he thinks are unfair to him, and he's producing a TV show on NBC next year while still President.   Oh, and Sinclair hates liberals.

Sinclair, a Maryland-based company, has been labeled in some reports as a conservative-leaning local news network. Local stations in the past have been directed to air “must run” stories produced by Sinclair’s Washington bureau that were generally critical of Obama administration and offered perspectives primarily from conservative think tanks, The Washington Post reported in 2014.

Of course Kushner went to them.  Why do you need the cable networks at all when you can get interviews on the local affiliates that people watch for news anyway?

Kushner, dressed in a suit and sneakers, told the business executives that the campaign was upset with CNN because they considered its on-air panels stacked against Trump. He added that he personally talked with Jeff Zucker about changing the composition of the panels but Zucker refused. He repeatedly said in the panel that CNN wasn't "moving the needle" and wasn't important as it once was, according to three of the people present.

The campaign then decided not to work as closely with CNN, and Trump ramped up his bashing of the cable network.

Two people present said that they were surprised how much Kushner talked about CNN. "He kept going on and on about it," one business executive said.

He also told the crowd that Google and Facebook are now more powerful, and that The New York Times and CNN aren't as powerful.

Get used to that.  Pretty soon the only game in town will be news outlets that are "fair and balanced" to Trump. Critics won't have access at all.

To anything.

How To Steal An Election, Con't

The massively immoral and anti-democratic power grab in North Carolina by Republicans bent on permanent one-party rule despite voters electing a Democratic party governor is just a preview of the GOP in the age of Trump, says Boston Globe columnist Michael Cohen.

Republicans, having barely lost the governor’s mansion, have launched an anti-democratic legislative coup. In a hastily called emergency session — and with little deliberation or public review — GOP state legislators have proposed a series of antidemocratic measures that would fundamentally erode the power of Roy Cooper, the newly elected Democratic governor. The goal is simple: to use the authority of state law to ensure continued Republican political dominance.

The GOP’s power grab is both terrifying and comical in its breadth. Proposed legislation would force Cooper’s cabinet picks to be confirmed in the state Senate. Previously they were appointed without Senate confirmation.

It would reduce the number of political appointees that Cooper can chose, from 1,5000 to 300. This would reverse the Legislature’s earlier decision, when Cooper’s Republican predecessor, Pat McCrory became governor, to expand the number of appointees. It would also allow McCrory’s partisan picks to keep their jobs and become career state employees.

Cooper would be stripped of the right to appoint members to the state university’s boards of trustees — and that right would be transferred to the state Legislature, which, not surprisingly, has a Republican supermajority. That huge GOP advantage was obtained by a discriminatory and unconstitutionally drawn legislative map. A federal court has in recent weeks overturned the map and demanded it be redrawn, while also mandating a new election for the state Legislature to be held next year.

But since, apparently, North Carolina Republicans feel they haven’t done enough to rig the state’s voting system, they are now trying to radically erode Cooper’s control over state and local election boards. In perhaps the GOP’s most creative move, proposed legislation would also mandate that the board of elections be rotated between Democrats and Republicans, with Democrats having the chairmanship in odd-numbered years and the GOP in even-numbered years. Guess which years most elections in North Carolina are held?

Just in case you think that state courts can reverse these decisions, the Legislature is also considering a bill that would make it more difficult to bring cases to the state Supreme Court, which — and you guessed it — is now controlled by Democrats.

The GOP’s actions fit a familiar pattern. This is the same group of legislators that in another emergency legislative session passed HB2, the so-called transgender bathroom law, which also prevented local jurisdictions from putting in place antidiscrimination laws to protect the rights of LGBT North Carolinians.

Together with McCrory, North Carolina Republicans cut unemployment benefits and funding for early childhood education. They gave generous tax breaks to the state’s wealthiest citizens while scrapping the earned-income tax credit. Perhaps most famously, the GOP passed the most onerous voting restriction law in the country, one that was overturned by a federal court because of evidence that the legislation “targeted African Americans with almost surgical precision.”

I’ve had my hair on fire for months now about the existential threat to democracy that Donald Trump represents. We’re already seeing evidence of his authoritarian tendencies and lack of respect for democratic norms in the five weeks since he won the presidency. But what’s happening in North Carolina right now is the real deal. This is a frontal assault on democracy.

McCrory signed these measures into law last night and there's nothing Democrats can do right now.  He'll get to re-appoint nearly all of his state board choices for a four-year stint starting December 30, and Cooper will not have the ability to fire a single one of them, meaning that McCrory will get to appoint all of Cooper's picks.

The state's GOP Lieutenant Governor, Dan Forest, is even more rabidly right-wing than McCrory and will get to make a number of appointments himself, without any oversight from Cooper at all.

In short, this is a coup.  This would be like Congress and and outgoing Republican president signing a bill that would allow the outgoing president to pick all the new president's cabinet members, and a bill that would put Republicans in charge of elections in all 50 states during even-numbered years when federal elections were held.  It would be a disaster.

But that's exactly what will happen in NC now.  It's a banana republic, and I hope that voters throw the bums out.

 

Obama Takes The Podium One Last Time

In an epic (well, in length) press conference marking his final days in office, President Obama made it very clear that he wasn't going to magically save the Republic from Donald Trump, and that all the issues still outstanding in both domestic and foreign policy that suffered from constant GOP obstruction are now 100% their problems to try to solve. 

I think overall Barack Obama has done a pretty damned good job, especially given the constant hatred he's gotten from the Republicans since day one of his first term.  Republicans conspired to drive him out of office and while they failed in 2012, they did succeed in badly damaging Democrats in nearly every other state.

I'm not going to lie, the Dems are in dire straits right now, and are barely able to put up any sort of national defense against Trump's coming diplomatic, military and economic disaster.  Obama's not going to be able to save us.  Schumer and Pelosi aren't either.  We're going to have to do the hard work at the local and state level to try to build a foundation strong enough that we can get back in this fight, and that's going to mean lots of time, resources, and people willing to spend them effectively.

More of President Obama's statements after the jump.

Last Call For The No-State Solution

The Trumpian process of putting the worst possible person in charge continues unabated as The Donald continues to destroy decades of foreign policy. Meet David Friedman:

David Friedman is a bankruptcy lawyer who believes the two-state solution is an “illusion,” Barack Obama is anti-Semitic, and that Israel has a legal right to expand settlements in the occupied West Bank — or else to annex the territory in its entirety.

He believes that America’s embassy in Israel should be immediately relocated from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem — even though decades of Republican and Democratic administrations have opposed making such a move before a peace deal is secured, as both the Israelis and Palestinians see the city as their rightful capital.

Friedman has nothing but contempt for Jews that disagree with him. Last June, he wrote the following about members of J Street — an advocacy group for pro-Israel Americans who oppose the occupation of the West Bank and support a two-state solution: 

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

None of this should be newsworthy. There are plenty of smug advocates of indefinite Palestinian subjugation lounging on sofas in New York City or in one of Sheldon Adelson’s well-appointed sitting rooms. Friedman is just some bankruptcy lawyer, who happens to have views that make Bibi Netanyahu look like Peter Beinart.

But Friedman isn’t just any bankruptcy lawyer — he’s Donald Trump’s personal bankruptcy lawyer.

And so, he is now the president-elect’s pick for ambassador to Israel.

Yep, Donald Trump's pick for ambassador to Israel wants to end the two-state solution, wipe out the West Bank, move our embassy to Jerusalem and thinks the liberal Jewry are literally worse than Nazis.

Ambassador. To Israel.  This guy.

I'd say this horror show will never end, except there's a very good chance it will "end" us all.