Mourning in America - Trump Year One: November '16 to

Sorry for the shorthand reply (in a rush)

Penzey's Spices guy is angry

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Cxfw5NYVQAAEhK7.jpg

the us ambassador from israel is a fucking gop humping scumbag

good on him tbh xp

David Remnick talks to Obama.

The official line at the White House was that the hour-and-a-half meeting with Trump went well and that Trump was solicitous. Later, when I asked Obama how things had really gone, he smiled thinly and said, “I think I can’t characterize it without . . . ” Then he stopped himself and said that he would tell me, “at some point over a beer—off the record.”

I wasn’t counting on that beer anytime soon. But after the sitdown with Trump, Obama told staff members that he had talked Trump through the rudiments of forming a cabinet and policies, including the Iran nuclear deal, counter-terrorism policy, health care—and that the President-elect’s grasp of such matters was, as the debates had made plain, modest at best. Trump, despite his habitual bluster, seemed awed by what he was being told and about to encounter.

Denis McDonough strolled by with some friends and family. The day before, the person Trump sent to debrief him about how to staff and run a White House was his son-in-law, Jared Kushner. They had taken a walk on the South Lawn.

I asked McDonough how it was going, and he gave me a death-skull grin. “Everything’s great!” he said. He clenched his teeth and grinned harder in self-mockery. McDonough is the picture of rectitude: the ramrod posture, the trimmed white hair, the ashen mien of a bishop who has missed two meals in a row. “I guess if you keep repeating it, it’s like a mantra, and it will be O.K. ‘Everything will be O.K., everything will be O.K.’ ”

n the Oval Office, the President was quick to comfort the young members of his staff, but he was, an aide told me, even more concerned about the wounding effect the election would have on the categories of Americans who had been routinely insulted and humiliated by the President-elect. At a social occasion earlier this year, someone asked Michelle Obama how it was possible for her husband to maintain his equipoise amid so much hatred. “You have no idea how bad it is,” she said. His practiced calm is beyond reckoning.

If they both take faculty positions at a law school somewhere I might have to apply to law school

Meanwhile, for those curious, here's a breakdown of what happened in Florida, specifically the famous I-4 corridor:

http://steveschale.squarespace.com/blog/2016/11/14/florida-2016-in-the-rearview-mirror.html

https://scontent-lga3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/15085475_10210931517514233_7017732641750945736_n.jpg?oh=4dabdc894a504fcc4f37e25f42f1747e&oe=588A9569

https://scontent-lga3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/15134529_10211195870957766_6173996564034086870_n.jpg?oh=5d922e3bc28b599a7bef6b5ca6458486&oe=58BBE662

man, must be heartbreaking for Obama to pass the baton to this doofus

https://twitter.com/surlyurbanist/status/799414446959435776 (via jamelle bouie)

this seems like the sort of nuanced take on the intersection of race and class (and possibly the implications on electoral politics, though i like that the tweeter didn't force himself into a definitive conclusion) that i'd like to read more of, rather than the binary-minded, blame-laying type of thinking that is much more prevalent all over the net

definitely have that remnick article tabbed for later tonight

it's a great article. you're touched, again, by Obama's depth and resolve. And I'm dying to know what he really thought, which he says is 'off the record'

Remnick article is heartbreaking

Maybe the only president in 40 years I'd have a martini with and ask wtf drones

yeah i think many of us had issues with the president early in his tenure, and still do, but he's a fundamentally decent man and i think all the abuse he's taken and obnoxious opposition he's had to face has softened me toward him a considerable deal

probably the only president since Truman to emerge from the presidency with his humanity intact too

It may not survive the next two months.

yeahhhhh, i'm not gonna take another ban this soon.

Good morning!

you use that whenever you're "in the mood," eh

Good mourning!

On The Pulse Of Mourning

maya angelou humor never really a crowd pleaser...

that poem was a cowl, yeah

The Associated PressVerified account
‏@AP
BREAKING: Senior official: Trump has offered retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn job as national security adviser.

...better than secretary of defense... i suppose... ?

he can have an incompetence-off with condi

One of the articles about how really Trumps win was about the economy told the story that he went to Michigan and said that he would demand the Ford factory kept it's carmaking in Michigan, otherwise he'd levy a 35% tariff on imported Ford cars. How the fuck would he keep that promise? Well, he just tweeted that Ford won't move it's carmaking to Mexico. From Kentucky.

The Kentucky production was never getting moved to Mexico to begin with. Trump's known this for weeks. The Michigan cars will still move to Mexico. And none of this matters at all...

read that as "officially retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn's job as national security adviser" at first

So uh flynn's son

http://cnn.it/2g15qZ6

notably that position doesn't require a Senate confirmation

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/18/us/politics/rudolph-giuliani-possible-cabinet-pick-faces-scrutiny-over-finances.html

In 2006, Rudolph W. Giuliani, a former New York City mayor, made $10 million from 108 speeches he delivered around the world, and more money from other projects.

flynn got his ass fired for being a douche

xpost https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ohxbpP45Mzw

couldn't make it through that Remnick Obama piece, too sad

last paragraph is really good

The Richard Rorty excerpt (from 1998) in that Reminick piece is incredible:

"Something will crack," he wrote: "The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for--someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots. . . . One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the past forty years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped out. Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion. . . . All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet."

morelike David Rimlick

So Flynn is a complete shithead:
https://twitter.com/genflynn/status/703387702998278144

Breh

https://twitter.com/genflynn/status/753772080471179264

The more shit like this happens the less I can understand giving people a pass for voting for him on the grounds they didn't realize he was a racist

No no deej, you're crying wolf. If you're calling Flynn an islamophobe now, what will you then call a guy called who won't subsequently lie about having said those things, and then share a picture of himself eating a dürüm? Huh? And what will you do then?

can't believe how badly the liberal lamestream media dropped the ball on these guys prior to 11/9.

http://www.npr.org/2016/11/17/502476139/were-not-going-away-alt-right-leader-on-voice-in-trump-administration?sc=17&f=2

i was all over the Flynn stuff yesterday while the Shakey-Deej Revue was in center ring. Sad!

john r stanton
‏@dcbigjohn

Key Clinton fundraiser Heather Podesta touts connections to Trump transition in email to corporate clients

https://www.buzzfeed.com/johnstanton/lobbyists-have-no-clue-how-theyre-going-to-work-under-a-trum?utm_term=.ivAAgmjD9P#.dqdvnzYZOe

@ggreenwald 2h2 hours ago

Glenn Greenwald Retweeted john r stanton

How can you not love the bipartisan DC lobbyist class?

Sessions for AG (NYT)

Who knew Trump's job plan would mean giving jobs to all these unemployable losers.

Meanwhile, the interview with Mark Warner on the radio this morning about the intelligence community's checks on Trump was chilling. Not that they necessarily couldn't do it, but there was such a dark tone in his voice every time he had to say "let's hope that hypothetic does not come to pass" when asked how to would respond to an order to bring back something illegal, like torture

Nytimes (and other) editorials have been working overtime, but this brings up yet another issue with his inchoate policy:

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/18/opinion/donald-trumps-plan-to-purge-the-nation.html

Observations in the piece:

Start with the fact that the target number is made up. There simply aren’t as many criminal immigrants as he imagines. According to rough estimates by the Migration Policy Institute, of the country’s 11 million unauthorized immigrants, about 820,000 have criminal records. About 300,000 of those have felony convictions and are presumably the bad people Mr. Trump is talking about. If he deports those and only those, it will be a remarkable display of law-enforcement discretion, since he said that there were lots of “terrific people” among the unauthorized who might be allowed to stay, “after the border is secured and after everything gets normalized.”

And yet he also said that two million to three million would go, a population about the size of Chicago’s. He would have to haul away a lot of terrific people, and terrorize many more, to hit that mark. This would require a vast conscription of state and local law enforcement against people who pose no threat. It would mean a surge in home and workplace raids, investigations and traffic stops.

It took the Obama administration eight years to deport 2.5 million immigrants. The threat of Mr. Trump chasing that number right off the bat is the reason immigrant communities are so terrified. But the damage won’t be immediate: He can’t just load two million people onto buses and planes and ship them out. He’ll first have to stuff them into the bottleneck of the immigration courts, where there are too few judges and lawyers for a swollen caseload, and fill detention cells to bursting. Mr. Trump may be unaware of due process, or in denial about it, but it exists.

Scalzi/TPM "Trump's Razor" remains in full effect, that when in doubt, stupid prevails. Which obviously does not mean Trump can't continue to fail forward, but short of changing laws just getting anything done legal takes time once he's in office. It is just inconceivable that a man whose selfish life has been about nothing but paying for shortcuts and finding ways to hide and move money to get his way will be able to tolerate true bureaucracy. I can't even see how Trump will smoothly make the transition from private figure to public servant.

Jeff Sessions is AG.

Times bullet-points:

President-elect Donald J. Trump has offered Jeff Sessions the post of attorney general, according to officials close to the transition.
Mr. Sessions was denied a federal judgeship by the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1986 because of racially charged comments.

He is no doubt a piece of shit.