;)
The Commentariat -- Nov. 12, 2016
Afternoon Update:
Amy Chozick of the New York Times: "Hillary Clinton on Saturday cast blame for her surprise election loss on the announcement by the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, days before the election that he had revived the inquiry into her use of a private email server. In her most extensive remarks since she conceded the race to Donald J. Trump early Wednesday, Mrs. Clinton told donors on a 30-minute conference call that Mr. Comey's decision to send a letter to Congress about the inquiry 11 days before Election Day had thrust the controversy back into the news and had prevented her from ending the campaign with an optimistic closing argument.... Mrs. Clinton said a second letter from Mr. Comey, clearing her once again, which came two days before Election Day, had been even more damaging." -- CW
Some things I missed:
Gail Collins: "Sometime soon, there'll be another woman presidential nominee. Maybe she'll be in the Clinton tradition, the grand and glorious American worker bees. Maybe she'll just leap out, like Barack Obama did, a fresh face with a new message. All we can know now is that when we talk about how she got there, we'll be telling Hillary Clinton's story." -- CW
NYT reporter Sydney Ember publishes, in a tweet, a "letter to NYT readers from Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. & Dean Baquet," the publisher & managing editor of the paper, respectively. Weirdly, the letter to readers does not seem to have appeared in the actual newspaper where, um, readers, might see it. And of course the comments are priceless: "The New York Times is a piece of crap. I will never read it because it will always be biased." CW: Not sure how the writer knows the paper is a piece of crap if he's never read it; some people are just intuitive, I guess.
Bernie Sanders, in a New York Times op-ed: "When my presidential campaign came to an end, I pledged to my supporters that the political revolution would continue. And now, more than ever, that must happen." -- CW
Paul Waldman: "The greatest trick Donald Trump pulled was convincing voters he'd be 'anti-establishment.'... An organizational chart of Trump's transition team shows it to be crawling with corporate lobbyists, representing such clients as Altria, Visa, Coca-Cola, General Electric, Verizon, HSBC, Pfizer, Dow Chemical, and Duke Energy.... Who could possibly have predicted such a thing? The answer is, anyone who was paying attention.... Trump's tax plan would give 47 percent of its benefits to the richest one percent of taxpayers. Paul Ryan's tax plan is even purer -- it gives 76 percent of its cuts to the richest one percent in its first year, and by 2025 would feed 99.6 percent of its benefits to the top 1 percent. Once that's accomplished, Trump and the Republicans plan to either gut or completely repeal the Dodd-Frank financial regulations, the greatest wish of Wall Street bankers.... the voters thinking that Trump would vanquish the establishment were just marks for a con, like those who lost their life savings at Trump University." -- CW
Steve M.: "Clinton was so busy portraying Trump as a monster that she forgot to say he'd be a lousy president.... Clinton's campaign echoed the media's message that what was important about Trump was his character and personal behavior. Ad after Clinton ad showed Trump insulting women and mocking a disabled reporter. No Clinton ad, as far as I know, ever went after Trump's economic plan the way this Barack Obama ad, for instance, went after Mitt Romney's:
AND Andy Borowitz expresses my thoughts when I read that Trump had said he learned something from the President about ObamaCare: "Speaking to reporters late Friday night..., Donald Trump revealed that he had Googled Obamacare for the first time earlier in the day. 'I Googled it, and, I must say, I was surprised,' he said. 'There was a lot in it that really made sense, to be honest.' He said that he regretted that the frenetic pace of the presidential campaign had prevented him from Googling Obamacare earlier." -- CW
*****
This needs to be a time of redemption, not a time of recrimination. -- Speaker Paul Ryan, Wednesday ...
... ** Adam Serwer of the Atlantic: After the American Civil War, the so-called "Southern Redemption" annihilated "the optimism of emancipation leading to racial equality in the South.... The election of Donald Trump, and the complete dominance of the Republican Party both in the federal government and in the states, may usher in a new era of Redemption, one which could see the seemingly astounding racial progress of having a black president relegated to little more than symbolism.... The erasure of the legacy of the first black president of the United States will be executed by a man who rose to power on the basis of his embrace of the slander that Obama was not born in America.... The Democrats will resist.... But history suggests they will fail.... The uncomfortable truth is that, whether you're Donald Trump or Bill Clinton, economic populism is most effective in American politics when it is paired with appeals to racism." Read it all. -- CW ...
... Ryan Lizza of the New Yorker is a bit more sanguine: "When all the votes are counted in California ... Trump will likely have lost the national vote by more than a million votes and have received a smaller percentage of votes than Mitt Romney's 47.2 per cent, in 2012.... As Harry Enten noted at fivethirtyeight.com, Trump received a smaller share of the votes than the G.O.P. Senate candidate in ten out of the thirteen states where there was a closely contested Senate race.... It may even be possible that white nationalism cost Trump more votes than it gained him. Trump and Republicans in Congress will almost certainly overinterpret their mandate, as victors often do.... The bigger unknown is how Trump will leverage his slim victory in areas that are more fundamental to democracy and civil liberties. The early signs are ominous." -- CW
Michael Shear, et al., of the New York Times: "... Mike Pence will take over as the leader of
... CW: What? The kids? It wasn't two weeks ago that one of them was assuring the public that the family would keep an arm's length distance from governance so they could run Trump's businesses. I'm so surprised Trump went back on his word on this. I thought it might take a whole week.
... Shocking News -- It Was All BS. "Lock Her Up?" Maybe Not. Jose DelReal of the Washington Post: "... Donald Trump and key advisers in recent days have backed away from some of the most sweeping pledges that the Republican candidate made on the campaign trail, suggesting that his administration may not deliver on promises that were important to his most fervent supporters. Trump built his campaign message around bold vows to, among other things, force Mexico to pay for a massive border wall, fully repeal the Affordable Care Act and ban Muslims from entering the United States. But in the days since his upset election victory, he or his advisers have suggested that those proposals and others may be subject to revision. On President Obama's health-care law, for example, Trump said in an interview with the Wall Street Journal on Friday that he would like to keep some parts of the law intact and may seek to amend the statute rather than repeal it. In the same interview, Trump also avoided answering whether he would follow through on a campaign vow to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server while secretary of state.... His lack of clarity on these and other issues has added more uncertainty to a tumultuous presidential transition...." -- CW ...
... Reed Abelson of the New York Times: "Just days after a national campaign in which he vowed repeatedly to repeal President Obama's signature health care law, Donald J. Trump is sending signals that his approach to health care is a work in progress. Mr. Trump even indicated that he would like to keep two of the most popular benefits of the Affordable Care Act, one that forces insurers to cover people with pre-existing health conditions and another that allows parents to cover children under their plan into their mid-20s. He told The Wall Street Journal that he was reconsidering his stance after meeting with Mr. Obama on Thursday. The comments added to a sense of whiplash about the law and its future. More than 100,000 Americans rushed to buy health insurance under the Affordable Care Act on Wednesday, the biggest turnout yet during this year's sign-up period, underscoring that millions of people now depend on the law for coverage. Beyond Mr. Trump's comments, new plans laid out on his presidential transition website this week deviate from what he had proposed during the campaign, and he added ideas that appeared to more closely align with the mainstream Republican agenda." -- CW ...
... Sarah Kliff of Vox: "... Donald Trump told the Wall Street Journal Friday that there are two parts of the Affordable Care Act he'd like to keep: the ban on preexisting conditions and the provision that allows young adults to stay on their parents' coverage through age 26.... That second policy is easy enough to keep running. It's a pretty simple regulation that the insurance industry has already become accustomed to. Continuing the ban on preexisting conditions is ... not so easy. Because as it stands now, the guaranteed issue of insurance is intertwined with two other major reforms of the individual market: a requirement that everybody purchase insurance or pay a fine (the mandate) and subsidies to make coverage affordable for those with low and middle incomes." -- CW ...
A Peek Inside the Cabinet of Horribles. Paul Waldman: "... wait until you get a load of the people Trump wants to populate the executive branch with. It won't help.... Let's run some of the early contenders down, shall we? These are obtained from leaked documents and news reports quoting people around Trump." -- CW
Suffer the Hapless Elites. Francis Wilkinson of Bloomberg: Dear Trumpians, your hero is about to give us dastardly elites "our cosmopolitan comeuppance.... The precise nature of the penalty elites will pay is unclear.... By extrapolating from Trump's campaign, and from the 'Better Way' agenda of Trump's soon-to-be-loyal-lieutenant Paul Ryan, it looks as if the first thing that elites will be targeted with is a huge tax cut.... Trump, who lives in blue Manhattan and perhaps fears that he might yet pay taxes one day, has a plan that goes easier on residents of Trump Tower than Ryan's plan. But either way, the elite are set to end up with a whole lot more money.... Trump is promising to punish the elite in other ways. He's "draining the swamp" in Washington by empowering lobbyists on his transition team, where they oversee the issues they are paid to influence." -- CW
Give Trump a Chance? No Way. James Downie of the Washington Post: "Politicians govern as they campaign.... We know who [Trump] is. On Thursday evening, after being informed of protests around the country against him, did Trump give these citizens a chance? No, he sought to delegitimize them, calling them 'professional protesters, incited by the media.' Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke, a possible candidate to run Trump's Department of Homeland Security, said the protesters 'must be quelled.'... (Of course, Trump supporters such as Clarke saw nothing wrong with promising to pick up 'pitchforks' and 'muskets' if Clinton won.)... We can hope for the best for a Trump presidency, though that hope looks increasingly foolish by the hour. We must plan for the worst.... Now is the time to fight back." -- CW ...
... Mark Berman & Wesley Lowery of the Washington Post: "... in the wake of Donald Trump's election, many civil rights, environmental, immigration, labor rights and LGBT activists -- all of whom have frequently deployed street marches and disruptive protests during the Obama years -- saw taking to the streets as the clear first step in collectively registering their opposition of what they fear is to come.... MoveOn.org, a liberal group, [called] on people to gather in cities nationwide Wednesday. Ben Wikler, MoveOn's Washington director, said different people organized events in 275 cities and communities across the country, noting that many were candlelight vigils and group discussions rather than the sprawling marches." -- CW ...
Just had a very open and successful presidential election. Now professional protesters, incited by the media, are protesting. Very unfair! -- Donald Trump, in a tweet Nov. 10, 9:19 pm ET
Love the fact that the small groups of protesters last night have passion for our great country. We will all come together and be proud! -- Donald Trump, in a tweet, Nov. 11, 6:14 am ET
... Washington Post Editors: "With a single tweet, [Donald Trump] ... rekindled every legitimate fear of the damage he might do from the White House. And nine hours after that, the president-elect reversed course again -- with a contradictory, and statesmanlike, message on Twitter." -- CW ...
Abigail Hauslohner, et al., of the Washington Post: "Three days since businessman Donald Trump won the presidency, it is clear that the animosity wrought by a historically divisive election did not simply die in its wake, but may have intensified. U.S. cities have been convulsed by anti-Trump protests. Swastikas, racial slurs and personal threats have appeared on public buildings and dorm room doors.... Across the country, women and minorities reported incidents of intimidation perpetrated by Trump supporters or those claiming to be, who under the cloak of anonymity seemed to see in the results a validation of their extremist views.... And online, the vicious word-slinging between supporters of the two candidates has escalated to include videotaped accounts of personal confrontation and retribution.... At a Veterans Day ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery on Friday, President Obama again called for reconciliation.... The protests continued for a third night on Friday in Atlanta, Miami and other cities, but remained largely peaceful. Trump, too, departed briefly from his calls for reconciliation Thursday night to blast the protesters on Twitter, but tweeted Friday that the protesters were exercising their constitutional rights." -- CW ...
... Southern Poverty Law Center: "Pulling from news reports, social media, and direct submissions at the Southern Poverty Law Center's website, the SPLC had counted 201 incidents of election-related harassment and intimidation across the country as of Friday, November 11 at 5pm. These range from anti-Black to anti-woman to anti-LGBT incidents. There were many examples of vandalism and epithets directed at individuals. Often times, types of harassment overlapped and many incidents, though not all, involved direct references to the Trump campaign. Every incident could not be immediately independently verified." -- CW ...
** Increasingly, it wasn't what I wrote that angered these readers; it was that I wrote it while being me. -- Michelle Lee ...
... Michelle Lee, a Washington Post fact-checker, who is of Asian descent: "The first email calling me a 'b[itch]' for my Pinocchio rating came early in the election season.... Over the next 18 months or so, 'b[itch]' became one of the more pedestrian names I was called for doing my job.... I expected the volume of criticism to swell throughout the campaign, and it did. But what surprised me was just how fiercely racist and sexist the comments became.... (Many of the comments were in response to my fact checks of Donald Trump, but not all.)" -- CW
Plagiarist-in-Chief. Nancy Scola of Politico: "... Donald Trump's official government website, GreatAgain.gov, lifts the work of a nonprofit organization that provides research on presidential transitions, with some passages being duplicated whole-cloth.... The Trump website was launched late Wednesday and replicates material on the copyrighted site of the Center for Presidential Transition, which is a project of the Washington-based nonpartisan Partnership for Public Service.... Much of the transition site's news feed matches information from the nonprofit's site word-for-word and was clearly written before Election Day.... Trump's site contains a small note at the bottom: 'First Posted on Center for Presidential Transition.' But by not making clear where the content comes from, including a link back to the source site, the Trump transition faces charges of sloppiness at best, and even potential legal challenges...." -- CW
Annals of "Journalism," Ctd. Adam Serwer: "During the 2016 presidential campaign, reporters marveled at the ability of Donald Trump and his surrogates to create an alternate reality in which statements made by the candidate had not been made at all.... Now they will have the entire apparatus of the federal government to bolster their lies, and the mainstream press is woefully unprepared to cover them. The first reason is that political journalism is highly dependent on official sources, which are chased with abandon.... Another obstacle is that media objectivity is not a fixed point. It is carefully calibrated to the perception of public opinion, because media organizations do not want to alienate their intended audience." -- CW
Annals of "Journalism," Ctd. Brian Stelter of CNN: "Corey Lewandowski, the controversial Donald Trump campaign manager turned CNN commentator, resigned from CNN on Friday afternoon. The resignation is effective immediately. A CNN spokeswoman confirmed that Lewandowski is no longer serving as a contributor to the network. Lewandowski has stayed in close touch with Trump and some top Trump aides since being fired from the campaign in June. This week there has been media discussion about Lewandowski possibly taking a role in the Trump administration." -- CW
Peter Stevenson of the Washington Post: While most of the media were predicting that Clinton would win the presidency, "Allan Lichtman..., a Washington, D.C.-based professor insisted that Trump was lined up for a win — based on the idea that elections are 'primarily a reflection on the performance of the party in power.'... [In September,] Lichtman made another call: that if elected, Trump would eventually be impeached by a Republican Congress that would prefer a President Mike Pence -- someone whom establishment Republicans know and trust." -- CW
Thanks, Jim Comey! Anna Palmer of Politico: "Navin Nayak, the head of Clinton's opinion research division, sent an email to senior campaign staff Thursday night.... 'We believe that we lost this election in the last week. Comey's letter in the last 11 days of the election both helped depress our turnout and also drove away some of our critical support among college-educated white voters -- particularly in the suburbs,' Nayak wrote. 'We also think Comey's 2nd letter, which was intended to absolve Sec. Clinton, actually helped to bolster Trump's turnout.'... Additionally, Nayak pointed to anger at institutions, a desire for change of power at the White House after two terms under President Barack Obama, the difficulty of recreating the Obama coalition and the reluctance of some Americans to vote for a female president as underlying challenges the Clinton camp faced throughout the campaign. Despite those challenges, Nayak wrote, Clinton's campaign was poised to win until the last week, when 'everything changed.'" -- CW
Way Beyond the Beltway
Nick Cumming-Bruce of the New York Times: "Islamic State militants have summarily killed scores of civilians in the Iraqi city of Mosul in recent days, sometimes using children as executioners, and have used chemical agents against Iraqi and Kurdish troops, United Nations officials said on Friday.Video posted by the militants on Wednesday showed four children, who appear to be 10 to 14 years old, shooting four civilians accused of disloyalty at a location near the Tigris River, said Ravina Shamdasani, a spokeswoman for the United Nations human rights office in Geneva. The video release identified one of the children as Russian, another as coming from Uzbekistan and two as Iraqis." -- CW
Fahim Abed & Rod Nordland of the New York Times: "A suicide bomber managed to sneak onto the main American military base in Afghanistan on Saturday and kill four people, according to U.S. and Afghan officials.... The American military confirmed in a statement that four people had been killed. About 14 were wounded, the statement said. A Taliban spokesman, Zabihullah Mujahid, claimed responsibility for the attack on the militants' behalf and said that it had killed a large number of American soldiers." -- CW
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Reader Comments (9)
So now the discussion is about transition and policy of the new administration. I feel sorry for the media because you can't discuss the plan when there is no plan. Welcome to the land of the free and the home of chaos.
Notice how Trump is playing with that horrible Obamacare? My guess is we are going to have a new plan: Trumpcare! (which is going to look a lot like the ACA).
If the ACA is going to be called trumpcare, that means us taxpayers
are going to have to pay trump for use of his name. I'm thinking
the ACA is going to be so screwed up in time that the R's will find
a way to blame it on Hillary or Obama.
Nostradamus while mourning:
TrumpCare? Interesting thought.
Might want to rename the EPA, too, while we're at it, now that we have a climate denier in charge of that agency's transition. How 'bout the ED(estruction)A just to make all things (except air and water) clear?
Of course, it's not the job of an action figure or as Marie says, a hero, to make things clear. It's the seeming of doing, the aura of success, that counts. In contemporary America (I cite Boorstin's "The Image" once again) the illusion of doing something, anything, is apparently enough.
Trump's glitzy past prepared him well to get elected in 2016. Casinos, palatial towers, and upscale resorts, not to mention reality TV are all about the creation and maintenance of illusion. That so many of his schemes have come to nothing, have in fact ended in bankruptcy, the closest the economic world comes to a reality check, remained behind the curtain and when it was noticed at all considered to be just another of Our Hero's magic escapes from peril.
But in the White House it won't be so easy. I'm guessing (hoping?) there reality won't be so easy to hold at bay. Medical cost increases won't go away. His plan for Trumpcare will never cost out. Keep all the freebies at no cost? Nor will his promises of massive infrastructure spending fit with even more massive tax relief for corporations and the rich he's proposed. And that Wall won't be cheap in dollars or global consequence either. Even more contradictions between promise and fulfillment lie in wait.
Oz' world collapsed when the curtain was pulled aside. We'll see how long the Trump illusion (which I'd note had enough holes it fooled fewer than half the voters) lasts.
If the world my grandchildren aren't to inhabit weren't at stake, it might be fun to watch.
Picked this up from MSNBC last night and read the article. From my personal experience of spending my 1st 27 years in a suburb of Flint, MI, this is dead-on accurate. Really worth the read. This passage in particular has personal resonance for me;
"And rather than embrace it, rural and white working-class Americans are twisting and turning, fighting it every step of the way. We will never return to the days where a white man could barely graduate high school and walk onto a factory floor at 18 and get a well-paying job for life. That hasn’t set in for much of the Midwest."
My family was working class, my father worked in a car dealership as a "body man." He was paid on commission, 51% of the bill and for the times, he made a good living working very hard. The rest of my extended family worked in the factories (7 GM factories in Flint). I moved to CA in 1981 when the auto industry was dying. My dad never graduated from HS. WWII instead.
http://www.rollcall.com/news/opinion/im-a-coastal-elite-from-the-midwest-the-real-bubble-is-rural-america
Also last night, Maddow mentioned that Trump has posted a list of his businesses on his transition website. I guess he thought it was a way for more advertising.. Apparently, he can't even be truthful about that. Bloomberg:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-11-11/trump-transition-website-said-he-owns-buildings-that-he-doesn-t
Give 'em hell, Harry!
Freud at work? "Aren't" should have been "are" in the last line of what I submitted, or maybe not?
Oops. I sound like a Republican, blaming my own errors on someone else.
According to the Tampa Bay Times there's an interesting addition to the Trump transition team. Pa, Bondi, Floridas attorney general, has parlayed accepting that 25K$ check for not joining the lawsuit against Trumps university scam into a prominent position on the team.
@ Marie: The trump family will withdraw from government to run the trump empire and never speak of business with dad again after the inauguration. After all they need to be out there, at arms length, to accept government grants in order to build the companies which will benefit from dad's infrastructure initiatives. Trump excavation! Trump paving! Trump construction! All the best, most efficient, naturally.
My prediction for trump's first bill will be one to bring government executive remuneration into line with the position's awesome responsibilities.$1/annum is for schmucks! For a genius like sir trump is $10,000,000/annum (tax free of course) beyond the pale?