StupidiNews!

• The Trump regime is expected to issue executive orders concerning construction of a border wall with Mexico by ordering the redirecting of Mexican foreign aid to pay for it.
• The regime is also expected to issue orders today reviving a post-9/11 Bush program to stop immigration from several Muslim countries.
• The Dutch government says it will launch a global fund to help women access abortion services to counter NGO aid cuts announced by the Trump regime yesterday.
• Greek PM Alexis Tsipras is vowing "not one euro more" of austerity cuts as EU finance ministers meet this week to review the conditions of Greece's 2015 bailout.
• A 4-4 split by the 2nd Circuit means that that battle between the the Feds and Microsoft over data stored on the company's Irish servers could now be headed for the Supreme Court.

Last Call For Take A Gander At This Propaganda

BuzzFeed News reporter Charlie Warzel takes a look at the propaganda machine that Trump regime advisor (and white nationalist) Steve Bannon is building to bypass the free press in the age of internet disinformation.

At last Thursday’s DeploraBall, Gateway Pundit editor Jim Hoft stepped on to the event podium, smiling wide in a maroon blazer and ’70s-style wide-collared party shirt. He had an exciting announcement. “We’ve been in contact with the new administration and they’re doing something different,” Hoft said, referring to a Trump administration decision that would award real legitimacy to his popular, ultra-conservative political site. The Gateway Pundit made a name for itself during the election with headlines like “BREAKING: 71% of Doctors Say Hillary Health Concerns Serious, Possibly Disqualifying!” (she had pneumonia), and served as an engine for rumors of Hillary Clinton’s poor health during her presidential campaign. And now that coverage, and its set of alternative facts, was being rewarded. 

“We got word that Gateway Pundit is going to have a White House correspondent position,” Hoft said, whipping up the crowd. “We had 1 million readers a day coming in. And the reason was because I was telling the truth and the mainstream media was telling the fake fucking news!” 

The crowd — a loose collection pro-Trumpers gathered to “celebrate memeing a president into existence” — went nuts with a deafening chant of “Real news! Real news! Real news!” 

If you’ve been paying attention during the long run-up to Trump’s unexpected victory, you may have noticed a new dynamic in the already fractured and chaotic political media ecosystem. There is a new new media. Its branding (“news you can trust,” “we report the truth”), design (sleek, media-rich webpages), and distribution (heavy social and video presences across Facebook, Twitter, Periscope, YouTube, podcasts) all feel familiar. But its message is very different. It is unedited and unabashedly pro-Trump, and it often posits an interpretation of reality dramatically different from that of the mainstream media. 

Welcome to the New Media Upside Down: a parallel universe (think the Upside Down from the Netflix series Stranger Things) that operates as a mirror image of its mainstream counterpart with its own “alternative facts,” audience, and interpretation of truth. The New Media Upside Down looks a lot like the media it’s trying to undermine and replace, but it’s darker in vision — and raw. If you live in the mainstream media world, the New Media Upside Down can be hard to find — the only real crossover between the two worlds is on Twitter, where its leaders lambaste mainstream news reports often with the aim of discrediting them. It’s (reasonably) young and hungry, and has risen with Trump all the way to the White House — where Steve Bannon, who helped construct this upside-down media world while running Breitbart News, now holds sway as senior counselor to the president himself.

Warzel may be getting a bit romantic here with his description of Bannon's "parallel universe news" outlets here, but the threat is very real.  Bannon would love nothing more than to exterminate the free press in America and replace it with his evil, goatee-wearing version, where the only source of news on Trump is what Bannon says it is.  And make no mistake, these guys have the money and production values to do it.

The New Media Upside Down and the traditional media sphere may differ in philosophy, but they share plenty in terms of presentation. Noted alt-right troll Chuck Johnson’s new website WeSearcher — a crowdfunded reporting site aimed at raising bounties to expose mainstream journalists and political opponents — is so slickly designed it feels a bit like Kickstarter’s evil twin. Mitchell’s radio show, Your Voice Radio — which is distributed mainly via YouTube and the DIY podcast platform Spreaker — is basically indistinguishable from terrestrial political talk radio. And video-centric outlets like InfoWars, Right Side Broadcasting, and OANN sport high TV production values with chyrons, swooping jib shots, and flashy sets similar to those of cable news offerings. Other figures are more deeply rooted in new media, like Cernovich’s frequent live Periscopes and the constant, frenetic live-tweeting of the day’s news. 

In the era of fake news, a defining characteristic of the New Media Upside Down is how it presents its arguments and biases. Borrowing language from its legacy counterparts, it frames the information it broadcasts as sourced reports, using a collection of like-minded writers and video personalities out in the field to tell its version of the truth. Unlike the patently false news coming out of political content farms in places like Macedonia, the New Media Upside Down’s work is based, to some extent, on actual reporting, despite its shaky sourcing and questionable, often misleading framing. 

Last week, for example, InfoWars — the unabashedly conspiracy-touting radio and video empire dedicated to fighting the globalist New World Order — reported that BuzzFeed News was planning to release a damning tape of Trump just 48 hours before the inauguration. The piece was reported out by InfoWars’ editor-at-large, Paul Joseph Watson. Yet the tip was discovered to be a hoax by a 27-year old marketer who wanted to see how fake news was generated. 

Rarely are such false reports so clear cut; most stories percolating inside the New Media Upside Down exist in a gray area, deftly walking the line between salacious framing/innuendo and falsehoods, but rarely stepping into the dangerous territory of fake news. All signs suggest the ecosystem will only grow murkier. Breitbart News — arguably the largest and most visible publication of the New Media Upside Down — is staffing up across its politics and entertainment desks and is poised to attract mainstream voices to its masthead; just this month, it poached a respected Wall Street Journal reporter to head its business and finance coverage.

The New Media Upside Down’s mirror-image embrace of mainstream language, presentation, and tactics has also helped undermine the traditional media’s credibility. Earlier this month, when BuzzFeed News published a salacious, unverified intelligence dossier on Donald Trump, the New Media Upside Down — often accused of being purveyors of fake news — repurposed the term to denounce reporting by outlets including BuzzFeed News and CNN.

When Bannon's pro-regime propaganda is no longer distinguishable from actual journalism by news consumers, then the game is over.  The Constitution may protect free speech, but it doesn't guarantee your local newspaper can stay in business.  Much of the damage inflicted on the state of the news has been self-inflicted over the last quarter-century,  but Bannon and friends are now in the position to deliver the killing blow to news.

And now they are backed up by the full power of the Trump regime.  You don't have to outlaw the media, you can just flood the zone with crap and people won't bother to look anymore.  All that's left at this point is "exclusives" going to Breitbart and InfoWars and OANN from the Trump regime, and they can drive their competitors out of business.  News is a product, and Republicans want to make sure any government alternatives are tightly controlled if not eliminated.

In other words, we're in real trouble here, and the problem was of our own making.  Sort of glad I never got into the business myself.  New tag: Propaganda Stupidity.

An Air Of Danger At The EPA

The Trump regime is beginning the dismantling of America's basic infrastructure in order to pave the way for total privatization of everything. The plan seems to be to issue an executive branch freeze on everything regulatory, and then let it fall apart through neglect as a best case scenario.  The worst-case is an abrupt elimination of regulatory agencies by Congress.  That may take another election or two depending on when the filibuster gets nuked (or the GOP gets 60 seats), but there's plenty of damage the Trump regime can cause in the meantime without Congress lifting a finger.

The Environmental Protection Agency has frozen its grant programs, according to sources there.

EPA staff has been instructed to freeze all its grants ― an extensive program that includes funding for research, redevelopment of former industrial sites, air quality monitoring and education, among other things ― and told not to discuss this order with anyone outside the agency, according to a Hill source with knowledge of the situation.

An EPA staffer provided the information to the congressional office anonymously, fearing retaliation.

It’s unclear whether the freeze is indefinite or temporary as the agency transitions fully to the Trump administration; the Senate has not yet confirmed Trump’s pick for EPA administrator, Scott Pruitt. It’s also not clear the immediate impact the grant freeze would have on programs across the country, since EPA grants are distributed at varying intervals and frequency.

“I will say it’s pretty unusual for us to get these kinds of anonymous contacts from people at the agency, which makes me think it’s unusual,” said the Hill source.

Neither the Trump transition office nor the central press office at the EPA responded to a request for comment Monday.

The Huffington Post also received a message that was reportedly sent to staff Monday that seems to cover the current agency guidance on talking to the press in general, not just about the directive on grants. The memo states that the agency is imposing tight controls on external communication, including press releases, blog posts, social media and content on the agency website.

Expect that most other executive agencies will be given similar directives to no longer communicate, especially to the press.  Vague leaks like this will be all you can expect from the Trump regime.  This is how you maintain an authoritarian regime, all information will come from Trump's propaganda machine.  Even the Bushies weren't this obviously fascist.  But the Trump regime is locking down agencies -- particularly agencies with focus on science -- within the first week.

I recall conservatives scoffing at the "lack of transparency" in the Obama administration.  These same pundits and critics are strangely silent about the Trump regime.  It's okay however, I don't expect the EPA to last much longer anyway considering the only budgetary issue now is how many trillions in draconian cuts the Republicans make starting this spring.

The more immediate picture is this means Flint, Michigan and several other American communities will be receiving zero federal money from the EPA to help fix water pipe problems and toxic drinking water.  People will continue to be poisoned.  But hey, you'll be able to keep buying bottled water at ten times the cost, and it'll probably be safe.

Probably.

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.

StupidiNews!

• Minnesota Democratic Gov. Mark Dayton will give a planned budget speech this morning after fainting last night during the State of the State address.
• The Trump regime says it will make a decision on a Supreme Court nominee by early February, Senate Democrats are expected to fight the pick as much as possible.
• The UK Supreme Court has ruled that PM Theresa May must get parliamentary approval before going ahead with Brexit.
• Automation on offshore oil rigs means the Trump regime's policy to allow more offshore drilling will mean only a fraction of the new jobs the White House is promising to create.
• As expected, the Trump regime has named Ajit Pal as chairman of the FCC, Pal is a former Verizon legal counsel who has vowed to end "net neutrality" consumer protection policies.

Team Never Trump Folds Immediately

Once again, if you thought Senate Republicans were going to ever really oppose the Trump Regime, you're too stupid to be allowed to vote.

After weeks of agonizing over Rex Tillerson’s ties to Russia, Sens. John McCain and Lindsey Graham said Sunday that they will vote for President Donald Trump’s secretary of state nominee, essentially clinching approval for Tillerson. 

Though Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) is still holding out on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Graham and McCain’s support will allow Trump to breathe easier, knowing that Tillerson will likely be confirmed later on the Senate floor. Tillerson needs just a bare majority of votes to win approval, and it appears highly unlikely now that Tillerson will lose the three or more Republican votes that could have scuttled his nomination.

McCain said he was “very cautious” about voting for Tillerson, the former ExxonMobil CEO who once received an Order of Friendship award from Russian President Vladimir Putin. But the Arizona senator said that his deference to a new president combined with several private conversations with Tillerson sealed the deal. 

“He talked to me a lot about his views with Russia, a lot about the events that have taken place, about … what his duties were as a head of one of the world’s largest corporations,” McCain said on ABC’s “This Week.” “Listen, this wasn’t an easy call, but I also believe that when there’s doubt, the incoming president gets the benefit of doubt, and that’s the way I’ve treated every president.” 

The Foreign Relations panel will vote on Tillerson’s nomination Monday, and Rubio still hasn’t decided whether to vote for Tillerson. The Florida senator said Friday that Tillerson has addressed “some” of his concerns that were brought to light at a brutal inquisition during Tillerson’s confirmation hearing, where Rubio criticized Tillerson for not coming down harder on Putin, Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte and Saudi Arabia.

Oh, and Marco Rubio?  He folded this morning.  Tillerson will easily be confirmed by the Senate.

BREAKING: Republican Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida says he'll support Rex Tillerson's nomination for secretary of state.

— The Associated Press (@AP) January 23, 2017

So many suckers, so little time.

Graham, McCain and Rubio folded within days of Trump assuming power.  Don't expect anything other than capitulation from them in the future.  Tillerson, Sessions, Perry, all will be slam dunks.

There's a reason for that.

The Trump Austerity Plan Starts With Medicaid

If you were somehow expecting the Trump regime to save you from House Speaker Paul Ryan's trillions in draconian austerity cuts, you're exactly the fools that Trump and the GOP were counting on to hand over the power to destroy the safety net to them.  They were laughing at you then. They're coming for you now with the long knives.

President Trump’s plan to replace the Affordable Care Act will propose giving each state a fixed amount of federal money in the form of a block grant to provide health care to low-income people on Medicaid, a top adviser to Mr. Trump said in an interview broadcast on Sunday. 

The adviser, Kellyanne Conway, who is Mr. Trump’s White House counselor, said that converting Medicaid to a block grant would ensure that “those who are closest to the people in need will be administering” the program. 

A block grant would be a radical change. Since its creation in 1965, Medicaid has been an open-ended entitlement. If more people become eligible because of a recession, or if costs go up because of the use of expensive new medicines, states receive more federal money. 

If Congress decides to create block grants for Medicaid, lawmakers will face thorny questions with huge political and financial implications: How much money will each state receive? How will the initial allotments be adjusted — for population changes, for general inflation, for increases in medical prices, for the discovery of new drugs and treatments? Will the federal government require states to cover certain populations and services? Will states receive extra money if they have not expanded Medicaid eligibility under the Affordable Care Act, but decide to do so in the future? 

Ms. Conway, speaking on the NBC program “Sunday Today,” said that with a block grant, “you really cut out the fraud, waste and abuse, and you get the help directly” to intended beneficiaries. 

Medicaid covers more than 70 million people at a combined cost of more than $500 billion a year to the federal government and the states. More than 20 million people have gained coverage under the Affordable Care Act, more than half of them through Medicaid.

So the Trump plan would not only eliminate Medicaid coverage for ten million by rolling back Medicaid expansion, but converting Medicaid to a block grant would eliminate coverage for tens of millions more, particularly in red states.  States wouldn't have to spend the money on coverage, and in fact red states would almost certainly use the money to give tax cuts to corporations and the wealthy (since states actually have to balance their budgets.)

In other words, this will end up being hundreds of billions in austerity cuts yearly, and tens of millions of Americans without basic health coverage.

That's just the start.  I don't think people have realized yet just how bad these cuts are going to be, and I don't know if Senate Democrats will be able to stop it.

These Disunited Nations

As I keep saying, while everyone's pointing at Trump's obvious lies and authoritarian overtures, please keep an eye on the GOP in Congress as they use him for cover to distract America from their efforts to undo the last eight decades of progress and turn America into a dangerous rogue nation.

A bill co-sponsored by about half a dozen Republicans would force the United States to quit its membership in the United Nations.

Earlier this month, Rep. Michael Rogers (R-AL) filed legislation called The American Sovereignty Restoration Act of 2017 on behalf of himself and at least four other GOP co-sponsors.

The measure aims to repeal the United Nations Participation Act on 1945, which authorized U.S. membership in the intergovernmental organization.

The bill states that the president “shall terminate all membership by the United States in the United Nations, and in any organ, specialized agency, commission, or other formally affiliated body of the United Nations.”

Additionally, the measure prohibits “diplomatic immunity for U.N. officers or employees.” Without immunity protection for diplomats, the organization would be forced to re-locate its headquarters outside of the United States.

Again, I don't see how this measure would get through the House, let alone Democrats in the Senate, but the larger point is the fringe Bircher idiocy that always powered the GOP is now firmly in charge of the party.

With the diplomatic damage of wanting to leave the UN and wanting to relocate the US Embassy in Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, ripping up the TPP and NAFTA and starting a trade war with China, and all but dismantling the decades of intelligence community cooperation with the UK, Canada, Australia and other partners by embracing Moscow, the US is heading for a diplomatic nightmare scenario under the Trump regime.

The cost for all that will be massive and lasting.  We're heading for rogue nation status pretty quickly here, and it won't take long for the nations of the world to unite against us.

StupidiNews!

• At least 18 are dead in Georgia and Florida as a series of tornadoes ripped through the Southeast on Sunday, two are dead from flooding in Los Angeles as California is deluged.
• The Trump regime says it is in the early stages of talks to move the American Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.
• Legal watchdog group CREW will bring a lawsuit against Trump on Monday over the Constitution's Emoluments clause and Trump businesses taking foreign government money.
• Canada is considering bilateral trade measures with the US as the future of planned renewal of the NAFTA free trade agreement next month is now in doubt.
• Electronics giant Samsung has completed its investigation of the Galaxy Note 7, the smartphone could catch on fire due to defective batteries from two different manufacturers.

Sunday Long Reads: A Forgotten May Day

As the world is still trying to come to grips with the Trump regime and the wave of nationalism around the world, the lessons of the Nixon era come to mind as to the kind of things America can and should expect to happen under Trump.  The criminalization of protest is moving very quickly in Republican ranks, and after yesterday's Women's Marches across the country will millions participating, those efforts will now be top priority.

That brings us to the now largely forgotten Mayday Tribe shutdown of Washington DC in 1971.

On May 3, 1971, after nearly two weeks of intense antiwar protest in Washington, DC, ranging from a half-million-person march to large-scale sit-ins outside the Selective Service, Justice Department, and other government agencies, some 25,000 young people set out to do something brash and extraordinary: disrupt the basic functioning of the federal government through nonviolent action. They called themselves the Mayday Tribe, and their slogan was as succinct as it was ambitious: “If the government won’t stop the war, we’ll stop the government.” The slogan was of course hyperbolic— even if Washington, DC were completely paralyzed by protest for a day or week or a month, that would not halt the collection of taxes, the delivery of mail, the dropping of bombs, or countless other government functions—but that made it no less electrifying as a rallying cry, and no less alarming to the Nixon administration (Nixon’s White House chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, called it “potentially a real threat”). An elaborate tactical manual distributed in advance detailed twenty-one key bridges and traffic circles for protesters to block nonviolently, with stalled vehicles, improvised barricades, or their bodies. The immediate goal was to snarl traffic so completely that government employees could not get to their jobs. The larger objective was “to create the spectre of social chaos while maintaining the support or at least toleration of the broad masses of American people.”

The protest certainly interfered with business as usual in Washington: traffic was snarled, and many government employees stayed home. Others commuted to their offices before dawn, and three members of Congress even resorted to canoeing across the Potomac to get themselves to Capitol Hill. But most of the planned blockades held only briefly, if at all, because most of the protesters were arrested before they even got into position. Thanks to the detailed tactical manual, the authorities knew exactly where protesters would be deployed. To stop them from paralyzing the city, the Nixon Administration had made the unprecedented decision to sweep them all up, using not just police but actual military forces.

Under direct presidential orders, Attorney General John Mitchell mobilized the National Guard and thousands of troops from the Army and the Marines to join the Washington, DC police in rounding up everyone suspected of participating in the protest. As one protester noted, “Anyone and everyone who looked at all freaky was scooped up off the street.” A staggering number of people— more than 7,000—were locked up before the day was over, in what remain the largest mass arrests in US history.

Many observers, including sympathetic ones, called it a rout for the protesters. “It was universally panned as the worst planned, worst executed, most slovenly, strident and obnoxious peace action ever committed,” wrote esteemed antiwar journalist Mary McGrory in the Boston Globe afterwards. In the New York Times, reporter Richard Halloran flatly declared, “The Tribe members failed to achieve their goal. And they appear to have had no discernible impact on President Nixon’s policy in Vietnam.” Even Rennie Davis, the Chicago 7 defendant and New Left leader who had originally conceived of the Mayday action, announced at a press conference that the protest had failed.

But the government’s victory, if you can call it that, came only as a result of measures that turned the workaday bustle of the district’s streets into what William H. Rehnquist, the assistant attorney general who would later become chief justice of the Supreme Court, called “qualified martial law.” While the government hadn’t been stopped, there was a very real sense that it had been placed under siege by its own citizens, with the nation’s capital city transformed into “a simulated Saigon,” as reporter Nicholas von Hoffman put it in the Washington Post. Nixon felt compelled to announce in a press conference, “The Congress is not intimidated, the President is not intimidated, this government is going to go forward,” statements that only belied his profound unease. White House aide Jeb Magruder later noted that the protest had “shaken” Nixon and his staff, while CIA director Richard Helms called Mayday “a very damaging kind of event,” noting that it was “one of the things that was putting increasing pressure on the administration to try and find some way to get out of the war.”

Mayday, the scruffy and forgotten protest that helped speed US withdrawal from Vietnam, changed the course of activist history as well. It came at a time of crisis for the left—indeed, the distress call embedded in the mobilization’s name could apply equally well to the state of American radical movements in 1971 as to the conduct of the war they opposed. The last major national protest against the Vietnam War, Mayday was also a crucial first experiment with a new kind of radicalism, one rooted as much in its practices as in its ideas or demands. This quixotic attempt to “stop the government”—so flawed in its execution, yet so unnerving in its effects—was organized in a different manner than any protest before it, in ways that have influenced most American protest movements since. 

Nixon and Halderman broke out the National Guard and martial law to stop the Mayday protests.  And that was just 25,000 people.  If we had another mass shutdown, something larger, like on the scale of the hundreds of thousands who showed up for the Women's March?

Trump would be terrified.  And the world would know.

Just saying.

Not Foxy Enough For The Trump Regime

Dissent will not be tolerated in the Trump regime, and nobody is a bigger target now than conservative pundits who weren't sufficiently loyal enough during the Trump campaign. There's no use for them in the era of Trump propaganda, and so they are being purged.

Fox News has declined to renew contributor contracts for longtime political commentator George Will, Republican strategist Ed Rollins and actress Stacey Dash, according to a network spokesperson.

Will, 75, is a Pulitzer-winning conservative columnist who was with ABC from 1981-2011 before coming to Fox in 2013.

In June of 2016, he declared he was leaving the Republican party because of Donald Trump, a decision the then-nominee appeared to embrace.

In 2015 and 2016, Will had periodically feuded with the network's highest-rated host, Bill O'Reilly, with Will once stating that O'Reilly's best-selling book, "Killing Reagan" was "nonsensical" and "The Factor" host calling Will "a hack" in a subsequent interview.

Dash was signed by Fox in 2014 and was primarily seen on the afternoon news discussion program, "Outnumbered." The 50-year-old Republican is best known for her co-starring role in the 1995 comedy, "Clueless."

Political strategist Ed Rollins, 73, was a political commentator for CNN before jumping to Fox in 2011. He's primarily known for serving as national campaign director for the successful Reagan-Bush 1984 campaign and currently co-chairs the pro–Trump Great America PAC.

Veteran journalist Marvin Kalb, 86, and syndicated columnist and radio commentator Cal Thomas, 74, also did not have their contracts renewed by the network.

No need for Dash with Obama gone.  No need for older "Never Trump" conservatives like Will, Thomas, Rollins and Kalb with Trump in charge.  They've outlived their usefulness.  Greta Van Susteren and Megyn Kelly were the smart ones and left for greener pastures on networks who need conservative cred with the Trumpies.  This is how the business of political media works.  It's not about fact, it's about "truth".   They're out.  Who's in at the new Trump News Network?

On Friday, Fox announced the signing of former U.K. Independence Party leader Nigel Farage as a contributor.

Farage is a major backer of Brexit and outspoken supporter of President Trump.

Have to make the new regime happy.

Last Call For The New Baghdad Bob

Meet Sean Spicer, Trump regime mouthpiece.  He has the hardest job on Earth, which is pretending the garbage that flows from the lips of Dear Leader is true, and that America believes it.

White House press secretary Sean Spicer on Saturday accused the media of misrepresenting the crowd at Donald Trump's inauguration in order to dampen enthusiasm for the event, getting some numbers wrong himself in the process.

“This was the largest audience ever to witness an inauguration, period,” Spicer said with emphasis. “Both in person and around the globe.”

He accused the media of "deliberately false reporting" both with regard to photos of the crowd that were published as well as crowd estimates.

"No one had numbers. Because the National Park Service, which controls the National Mall, does not put any out," Spicer said.

"These attempts to lessen the enthusiasm of the inauguration are shameful and wrong," he added.

Spicer took no questions after delivering his remarks.

This is his first day on the job, but his job is apparently "screaming at the press about Trump's tiny...attendance figures."

Meet The Sisters Of The Resistance

The planned Women's Marches around the country blew away estimates as hundreds of thousands showed up to protest the Tangerine Tyrant in cities across America.  In Washington DC, crowds dwarfed that of Trump's inauguration the day before.

Activists and politicians rallied huge crowds who descended on the nation's capital today for the Women's March on Washington this morning, the biggest of hundreds of similar marches taking place today.

The rally featured speeches from women's rights activist Gloria Steinem, Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards, Madonna, actresses Ashley Judd and Scarlett Johansson and director Michael Moore among others.

A group of largely women senators and other politicians took the stage together at one point, including Kirsten Gillibrand, D-NY, Claire McCaskill, D-MO, and newly elected senators Kamala Harris, D-CA, and Tammy Duckworth, D-IL, who addressed the group as did Rep. Maxine Waters, D-CA. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-FL, and Sen. Cory Booker, D-NJ, were also on stage.

With the timing and sheer number of people involved, it comes as little surprise that there are various causes attached to the march, which was largely billed as a demonstration in support of women's rights and civil rights but for many has clear political undertones connected to the inauguration of Donald Trump.

In Boston, LA, Chicago and NYC huge crowds marched and chanted.

They were joined by crowds in cities across the country: In Chicago, the size of a rally so quickly outgrew early estimates that the march that was to follow was canceled for safety. In Manhattan, Fifth Avenue became a river of pink hats, while in downtown Los Angeles, even before the gathering crowd stretched itself out to march, it was more than a quarter mile deep on several streets.

Portland, St. Paul, Denver, even Austin, Texas had major demonstrations.

The Austin Police Department told CBS Austin that it estimates more than 40,000 people descended on the state capitol Saturday afternoon to participate in the Women's March on Austin. They said the participants filled more than 20 downtown city blocks.

People are pissed off, guys.  Trump is the most unpopular president since Dubya crashed and burned, and he's starting at this level and will only get worse for him.

The Regime Plays In Kentucky

In 95% white Elliott County, Kentucky, in what used to be deep blue union territory, they voted for the Republican for the first time in over a century.  Now the people who voted for the regime are wondering if they got taken to the cleaners by a con man.

As the lunch crowd began trickling into the Frosty Freeze restaurant Friday, owner Judy Pennington stood in front of a television and eagerly awaited the inauguration of President Donald J. Trump.

“Even though he’s a billionaire — and that don’t cut no ice with me — he’s for the little people,” she said. “The veterans. The coal miners. The forgotten people.”

Trump’s connection with those “forgotten” working-class white voters put him in the White House and shocked the political establishment. Nowhere was it more shocking than in Elliott County, a place Barack Obama carried twice and one of the last Democratic strongholds in rural Kentucky. No Republican presidential candidate had ever carried this 148-year-old county until Trump got 70 percent of the vote.

With that sort of victory margin, you might have expected a lot of excitement here about Trump’s inauguration. But, aside from Pennington, none of the customers in her restaurant seemed enthusiastic.

It was the same down the road at the Penny Mart, where several people were enjoying the taco salad special and ignoring Trump’s inaugural speech on television.

“It’s just what’s on TV,” said Matt Farley, who was working the cash register and said he wasn’t a Trump fan. “I just try to stay out of it.”

Several people at both restaurants who said they voted for Trump didn’t want to talk about it — or didn’t want to give their name if they did. Most said it wasn’t so much that they voted for Trump as against Hillary Clinton.

“A lot of people didn’t like her because she was a woman,” Pennington said. More than that, though, she just didn’t connect with people here.

“I honestly believe that if (Trump) and Hillary Clinton were out there in the parking lot, he would be the one to come in and talk to people,” Pennington said.

“You never saw any Hillary signs,” said Travis Jones, 28, a construction worker who voted for Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primary but couldn’t vote for Clinton in November because of “all of her lies and scams and schemes.” Her pro-choice stand on abortion and her comments critical of the coal industry hurt her, too, he and several others said.

“Honestly, I thought Hillary beat herself,” Jones said.

Although he didn’t vote for Trump, Jones said he is hopeful the new president will turn out to be a champion for working people. But he is suspicious of all the rich business executives Trump has named to his cabinet.

“I’m not sure what to expect,” Jones said. “I think he’s going to fight for some of his promises, but he’s going to have some trouble because there are a lot of people who want him to fail.”

Democrats won overwhelmingly in the county in other races, Jim Gray beat Rand Paul here and Rocky Adkins remains the state's most powerful Democrat in the General Assembly, winning by nearly 60 points.  But Clinton was destroyed.  The union boys voted Trump.

They're going to wonder why the jobs don't come back too.

Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/news/state/article127801844.html#storylink=cpy

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.