Category: Uncategorized

I went on three network Sunday shows. I spoke for 35 minutes on three network Sunday shows. You know what got picked? The fact that I said alternative facts, not the fact that I ripped a new one to some of those hosts for never covering the facts that matter to America’s women, 16.1 million women in poverty as we sit there, the 12.4 million who have no health insurance. Everybody should feel outraged. The billions of dollars we have spent as a nation on public education, only to have millions of kids trapped in schools that fail them and never really promote and protect their intelligence and prepare them for the world that they all deserve. They shouldn’t be restricted by the zip code where they live. They should be lifted up.

This has all been a colossus failure, and nobody wants to talk about that. They want to talk about it’s always zing. It’s always playing gotcha. There’s no question that when you look at the contributions made by the media, money contributions, they went to Hillary Clinton. We have all the headlines, people should be embarrassed. Not one network person has been let go. Not one silly political analyst and pundit who talked smack all day long about Donald Trump has been let go. They are on panels every Sunday. They’re on cable news every day. Who’s the first editorial—the first blogger that will be left out that embarrassed his or her outlet? We know all their names.

I’m too polite to call them by name. But they know who they are, and they’re all wondering, will I be the first to go? The election was three months ago. None of them have been let go. If this were a real business, if the mainstream media were a thriving private sector business that actually turn a profit, which is not true of many of our newspapers, Chris, 20 percent of the people would be gone. They embarrassed, they failed to protect their shareholders and their board members and their colleagues.

And yet we deal with him every single day. We turn the other cheek. If you are part of team Trump, you walk around with these gaping, seeping wounds every single day, and that’s fine. I believe in a full and fair press. I’m here every Sunday morning. I haven’t slept in a month. I believe in a full and fair press. But with the free press comes responsibility. And responsibility is to get the story right. Biased coverage is easy to detect. Incomplete coverage impossible to detect. That’s my major grievance, is the media are not—they’re not giving us complete coverage. President Trump has signed all these executive orders this week. He’s met with these heads of states. He’s done so many things to stimulate the economy, to boost wages, to create jobs. Where’s the coverage?

Special Snowflake to the President, Kellyanne Conway, bringing it, uh, bigly to FOXnews’ Chris Wallace (who rather wisely just let her ramble on, it would seem). She’s right about one thing, people should be embarassed and people should be outraged. Just different people in different slots than you would have it.

The President can sign whatever executive orders he likes. But the law is the law. We are not bringing back torture in the United States of America.

“On June 16, 2015, the United States Senate voted 78-21 to adopt an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2016 that reaffirmed the prohibition on torture by limiting interrogation techniques to those in the Army Field Manual. The Army Field Manual does not include waterboarding or other forms of enhanced interrogation. The law requires the field manual to be updated to ensure it ‘complies with the legal obligations of the United States and reflects current, evidence-based, best practices for interrogation that are designed to elicit reliable and voluntary statements and do not involve the use or threat of force.’ Furthermore, the law requires any revisions to the field manual be made available to the public 30 days prior to the date the revisions take effect.

Senator John McCain (R), Arizona and chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, doubles down on his "I'll see Trump in court" language. This is definitely where the rubber meets the road. Will McCain actually hold the line, or will he fall into line when they either a) resume torturing without regard to the law or b) just revise the Field Manual to include whatever forms of torture they prefer? I'm guessing there will be a thirty day public comment period for which the announcement of said comment period and the contents of the text to be commented on is classified or otherwise disallowed from release to the public. Later, when the practice of torture inevitably leaks in a politically damaging way, various members of Congress and media sources will reveal that, oh, yeah, we knew about and sat on that for months. Didn't seem important what with all those Hillary emails and the Twitter. And so the republic burns.

[Donald Trump is] a grown man, and secondly he’s someone who has been involved with beauty contests for many years and has met the most beautiful women in the world. I find it hard to believe that he rushed to some hotel to meet girls of loose morals, although ours are undoubtedly the best in the world.

Preisdent in absentia of these United States Vladimir Putin, also noted leader of Russia. Undoubtedly the best in the world. Also very little evidence for “is a grown man.”

What Atrios Said

Press conferences don’t really matter that much anyway. Just one of those ritualistic things we’re all used to. Just get rid of it, spend your time doing something else. Stop whining about it.

Full Text

Yep. I’d only add that “something else” has to be real, aggressive, confrontational journalism. It is a colossal waste of time and resources to wait around all day for the privelege to sit there and go through the motions of jotting down what the press secretary said and, on a good day, elicit some minor gaffe around imprecise wording that we can all titter about for a few hours before repeating the same pointless nonsense the next day. Seriously, when was the last time news of any kind was broken at a press conference? If you’re thinking of citing Muskie’s suspect tear, then keep looking and leave the Man from Maine alone, my friend.

If Trump eliminates this particular brand of nonsense forever, I say good on him. At least he accomplished something beyond enriching himself and forcing all the august journals to acknowledge that water sports are officially ‘Merica’s Prime Patriotic Pastime.

About those meetings between the Trump campaign and Russian officials

What we are left with from all this is that a high level Russian official confirmed in early November that there had, in fact, been meetings between the Trump campaign and officials from his country. We also know that the Trump campaign lied about the involvement of Carter Page in the organization and that he took a leave of absence when allegations that he had met with high level Russian officials surfaced.

Drip. Drip. Drip.

About those meetings between the Trump campaign and Russian officials

We’re going to get reimbursed, but I don’t want to wait that long. But you start, and then you get reimbursed.

Incoming President Donald Trump. I hope he has the right TPS reports forms for that, because I hear the Mexican government can be sticklers on reciepts, the TPS reports, the cover sheets, and their formatting.

I think we ought to get on with our lives. I think that computers have complicated lives very greatly. The whole, you know, age of computer has made it where nobody knows exactly what’s going on. We have speed, we have a lot of other things, but I’m not sure we have the kind the security that we need.

Donald Trump, President Elect of these United States. This statement provides the clearest possible indication that a transparent, serious, and sustained investigation is needed here. I’m sure McCain and them will get right on it. Blue Ribbons all around the panel.

Kevin Drum: It’s inevitable that more details are going to emerge about all this—about both the hacking itself and Republican complicity in making use of the Russian material. This is not something that can be forgiven quickly or easily. Republicans may or may not care about this, but they’re going to have live with a smoldering, bitter anger from their Democratic colleagues for a very long time.
18 U.S. Code § 2381 – Treason: Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.(June 25, 1948, ch. 645, 62 Stat. 807; Pub. L. 103–322, title XXXIII, § 330016(2)(J), Sept. 13, 1994, 108 Stat. 2148.)
Lemkin: If we ever have a Democrat in power and/or position to do something about investigating and seeking legal redress, that person will say “I think it’s time to let bygones be bygones. Let’s just keep walking.”

I’m a PC

A long piece by Ta-Nehesi Coates on Obama (and, basically, race in America) that is predictably excellent, but this little scene really sticks out to me:

The [systematic and complete GOP] obstruction [throughout Obama’s presidency] grew out of narrow political incentives. “If Republicans didn’t cooperate,” Obama told me, “and there was not a portrait of bipartisan cooperation and a functional federal government, then the party in power would pay the price and they could win back the Senate and/or the House. That wasn’t an inaccurate political calculation.”

Obama is not sure of the degree to which individual racism played into this calculation. “I do remember watching Bill Clinton get impeached and Hillary Clinton being accused of killing Vince Foster,” he said. “And if you ask them, I’m sure they would say, ‘No, actually what you’re experiencing is not because you’re black, it’s because you’re a Democrat.’ ”

This is a genuinely and deeply important perception by Obama. It is undeniable that racism figures into much of the baseline Obama hatred/denial (“not my President!” “not a citizen!” and so forth), but baseline crazy is baked right into the mix for any Democrat that holds high office. Period. And an over-reliance on just characterizing this stuff over the last eight years as racism in blanket fashion is definitively of a piece with the “PC run wild” attacks that Trump used to great effect.

Even more importantly, though, is the fact that it’s all too easy to forget what the ground rules are for Democrats as candidates or office-holders. Expect this kind of shit. Run against it. Point it out in off years any time you are near a live microphone. You can never just “move forward,” unilaterally disarm, and take what you perceive to be the high road. Use your foreknowledge and expectation of these asinine talking points to preemptively mock and aggressively belittle your opponents based on the predictability of their spew as opposed to the far easier shortcut “oh, that’s just racist.” Because once you throw those qualifiers in, people on the convincible peripheries just stop listening. It is far easier to show them the crystal clear pattern of noise and falsehood, especially if you’re the one bringing it up and preemptively bludgeoning your opponent with it, than it is to get them to stare into the maw of decades and centuries of systematic privilege from which they have likely benefited…and but also magically admit to that, accept your point, change their worldview, and march right down to vote “D” for the rest of their natural lives.

But, alas, Serious Democrats are against this sort of thing; my dears that simply isn’t done. And this is why they fail.