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

how is it possible they can eat a meal without a glass of wine?

Mitt's caption: how can I excuse myself before becoming the 3rd course.

Blink twice if you're there against your will, Mitt.

Mitt, I'm sure we can find 19 electors.

NYT at least pretending to wrestle with the advisability of treating Trump's diarrhea drops like news and considering reader opinion on the matter

https://theintercept.com/2016/11/26/laura-ingraham-lifezette/

did u guys talk about this article yet?

But a closer look reveals that some of the biggest fake news providers were run by experienced political operators well within the orbit of Donald Trump’s political advisers and consultants.

Laura Ingraham, a close Trump ally currently under consideration to be Trump’s White House press secretary, owns an online publisher called Ingraham Media Group that runs a number of sites, including LifeZette, a news site that frequently posts articles of dubious veracity. One video produced by LifeZette this summer, ominously titled “Clinton Body Count,” promoted a conspiracy theory that the Clinton family had some role in the plane crash death of John F. Kennedy, Jr., as well as the deaths of various friends and Democrats.

...

But LifeZette, for all its influence, pales in comparison to the sites run by Floyd Brown, a Republican consultant close to Trump’s inner circle of advisers. Brown gained notoriety nearly three decades ago for his role in helping to produce the “Willie Horton” campaign advertisement, a spot criticized for its use of racial messaging to derail Michael Dukakis’s presidential bid. Brown is also the political mentor of David Bossie, an operative who went to work for Trump’s presidential campaign this year after founding the Citizens United group. In an interview this year, Brown called Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway a “longtime friend.”

Brown now produces a flow of reliably pro-Trump Internet content through a company he co-owns with his family called Liftable Media Inc., which operates a number of high-impact, tabloid-style news outlets that exploded in size over the course of the election. One of Brown’s sites, Western Journalism, is the 81st largest site in the U.S. with 13 million monthly unique monthly visitors, according to rankings maintained by the site Alexa. Another, called Conservative Tribune, is the 50th largest site with over 19 million monthly unique visitors. Liftable Media is run on a day to day basis by Brown’s son, Patrick, who is the president of Liftable Media.

But LifeZette, for all its influence, pales in comparison to the sites run by Floyd Brown, a Republican consultant close to Trump’s inner circle of advisers. Brown gained notoriety nearly three decades ago for his role in helping to produce the “Willie Horton” campaign advertisement, a spot criticized for its use of racial messaging to derail Michael Dukakis’s presidential bid. Brown is also the political mentor of David Bossie, an operative who went to work for Trump’s presidential campaign this year after founding the Citizens United group. In an interview this year, Brown called Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway a “longtime friend.”

Brown now produces a flow of reliably pro-Trump Internet content through a company he co-owns with his family called Liftable Media Inc., which operates a number of high-impact, tabloid-style news outlets that exploded in size over the course of the election. One of Brown’s sites, Western Journalism, is the 81st largest site in the U.S. with 13 million monthly unique monthly visitors, according to rankings maintained by the site Alexa. Another, called Conservative Tribune, is the 50th largest site with over 19 million monthly unique visitors. Liftable Media is run on a day to day basis by Brown’s son, Patrick, who is the president of Liftable Media.

this sort of willful spreading of misinformation, fear and confusion is a kind of terrorism.

hey all you have to do is google James Conway, Kellyanne's husband, whom I first learned about in the late '90s.

well Mitt totally caved, because of course he did

republicans are cowards, degenerates, and perverts

why are we using the term "fake news" to describe propaganda?

Was talking to a friend about this today -- facebook has no need to "play censor" or fact-check every article, it should just ban egregious websites.

hey all you have to do is google James Conway, Kellyanne's husband, whom I first learned about in the late '90s.

― The burrito of ennui (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Tuesday, November 29, 2016 10:32 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i assume you mean George T. Conway III unless she's a serial conway-marrier

friends just call him jimmy or sometimes jim bam bojangles

slimy jim aka george

Just had a heated phone conversation with my dad (I made a friends-only Facebook post advocating burning the flag and tweeting it at Trump; he freaked the absolute fuck out and is convinced I will never have a job), tried talking him down by mentioning the importance of not normalizing THE PRESIDENT-ELECT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, who will appoint 2-3 Supreme Court justices, talking about stripping citizenship from people for exercising their most basic First Amendment rights, talked about local actions like delivering recount affidavits to city hall yesterday and volunteering for Planned Parenthood, when some fucking south Philly lowlife came up behind me and starting smacking me in the mouth and chest. Knocked my glasses off, I have a little bit of a fat lip, otherwise fine, but THIS IS NOT FUCKING OKAY. I don't know if this is because I was talking loudly about PP or if it was just because south Philly is full of shitheads, but I'm not taking any chances.

ugh I'm sorry that happened to you.

Bradd Jaffy ‏@BraddJaffy 1h1 hour ago
Romney on Trump in March vs. Romney on Trump tonight. Breathtaking.

http://i.imgur.com/DA7wNM6.png
http://i.imgur.com/tvXTVMh.png

buncha cucks amirite

I like the Trumpian "By the way" - nice touch Mitt

i feel like his anti-poetry is going to infect us all in the end

that ship had sailed man. people can't help imitating him

it's a compulsion

"He's just been out of the race for about six months...It's still good...it's still good"

jesus, telephone thing that's awful!

baldwin as trump telling himself 2 weeks ago "don't worry, hillary's still ahead in the polls."

I sort of want to see the_donald's reaction to Mitt (laughing at victory over the cuck, presumably - but not so much swamp-draining) but I'd rather have my IP logged spying on Stormfront at this point.

How does one create an ongoing culture of active engagement and resistance? how does one create any sort of culture? Should I start a new thread for this?

If we give a damn about the constitution, Donald Trump has to sell off his empire and place his assets in a blind trust, just like every other president has done for the last half century. If he chooses not to do this, then Trump is constitutionally unable to be president, just as if he was born in Kenya. It's that simple.

http://cepr.net/blogs/beat-the-press/andrew-ross-sorkin-s-joke-letter-to-trump-he-has-to-sell-the-stuff

hey all you have to do is google James Conway, Kellyanne's husband, whom I first learned about in the late '90s.

― The burrito of ennui (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Tuesday, November 29, 2016 10:32 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i assume you mean George T. Conway III unless she's a serial conway-marrier

― the klosterman weekend (s.clover), Tuesday, November 29, 2016 11:22 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

friends just call him jimmy or sometimes jim bam bojangles

― Treeship, Tuesday, November 29, 2016 11:50 PM

eh call him ishmael

it feels useless/pointless but it is kind of weird that we now live in a world where you can directly, personally insult the president via the internet

― Οὖτις, Tuesday, 29 November 2016 16:48 (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

If you were a racist you would have learned this 8 years ago tbf

How does one create an ongoing culture of active engagement and resistance? how does one create any sort of culture? Should I start a new thread for this?

― (rocketcat) (kingfish)

on the one hand i can see people not wanting this entire board to be all trump, all the time, but on the other hand this stuff is important, and it's too big for one thread, which we can't all keep up with anyway.

the most effective forms of resistance, i feel, will be off-internet, but at the same time i don't think we can or should just say "ok we'll abandon the internet entirely", it's not practical.

I know this was commented on even before the election, but I was just jarred by the realization that, regardless of what he actually does or even if he drops dead before his inauguration, the office of POTUS may have been fundamentally altered and tainted by the simple fact that Trump won. How many presidential election cycles are going to be (even more) fucked up circuses of nakedly sociopathic adult babies unleashing their ids first upon one another and then subsequently upon the nation that voted them into office? How do we come back from a president who doesn't care at all about the foundations of the country he's been appointed to run?

All rhetorical questions. Just needed to vent my fresh horror.

A less rhetorical question: how do we get the citizenry to reinvest in a basic knowledge and understanding of civics? How do we sexy up shit like the social contract? Because it's becoming increasingly clear that, if we don't all choose to actively invest in some common core principles, this shit is in danger of unraveling.

Well, a Trotskyite view might be that the worse things get the better.

On that view, people will see how shitty it is when garbage voters elect a shitty president whose administration is full of garbage and whose policies turn out to be made entirely of shit. Perhaps they will recoil from the shit/garbage sandwich and start caring about electing quality humans again.

Public education is already shrilly lambasted for being a liberal indoctrination process. Schools are largely staffed by well-meaning liberal white female Democrats; I'm not sure you can make them even moreso. Kids go to college and reportedly spend all their time cataloging microaggressions, apologizing for their privilege, and seeking safe spaces ringed about by trigger warnings. I'm not sure you can make it even moreso.

On that view, people will see how shitty it is when garbage voters elect a shitty president whose administration is full of garbage and whose policies turn out to be made entirely of shit. Perhaps they will recoil from the shit/garbage sandwich and start caring about electing quality humans again.

It never works this way and no one anywhere on the left side should assume as much, he only gets unseated by active effort.

At this point, I feel like this stuff needs to happen outside of school. I didn't give a shit about government when it was being described in a dry monotone by a teacher who clearly gave an equal amount of shit. But how do you educate people or convince people to seek out education when it isn't compulsory?

I also have no idea whether it's actually true that public schools in red states are staffed by democrats. Not convinced of that.

xxp: Agreed. There's plenty of active effort out there though. Plenty of resistance in the 60+ million people who voted against him and will presumably do so again.

But to put the current anti-Trump coalition over the edge to victory, you need some of his current support to drain away. I don't personally much care whether that's because he turns out to be a hideous shitmonster and people recoil from that, or - contrariwise - because the torches/pitchforks crowd concludes he's not doing ENOUGH.

Anyway, I think it's a mistake to assume that "education" is all we need here. Plenty of educated people become conservative!

the extent to which this guy has already betrayed 90% of the people who voted for him is incredible, really

anyway so what is this deal he supposedly made with Carrier? when did this happen? All I keep hearing is "he's saving jobs already!" but...how??

It's a pretty clever political move that, according to people in the know, is (duh) not as good as it seems. I'll try to find a link.

we're going to be subject to four years of this, huh. "1000 jobs are staying here!!!!" meanwhile everything else is going to shit

labor-involved guy I am fb friends with:

So state of Indiana takes money from public schools to keep Carrier jobs; undisclosed inflated Defense contract payoffs offered. For progressives thinking this is any kind of a good thing, I refer you to a whole organization Good Jobs First (www.goodjobsfirst.org) which has been debunking these kinds of deals for decades. It is the idiot version of industrial policy that saves a few jobs while undermining them for every other worker.

Also they totally went around the union and didn't notify them, but found some rube to say "GEE THAYUNKS MISTER TRUMP" on fox news.

Anyway, I think it's a mistake to assume that "education" is all we need here. Plenty of educated people become conservative!

― the last famous person you were surprised to discover was actually (man alive), Wednesday, November 30, 2016 8:39 AM (four minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I'd never suggest that our current problems will be solved by education alone. This is going to have to be a steady assault on a number of fronts. But wrt your latter concerned, I'm less concerned with educated people becoming conservative than I am with uneducated people being played, in the same way that I'm less concerned with how people choose to cast their vote than I am with whether their ability to vote is being actively hindered.

'latter concern'

yeah with no specifics it's hard to tell wtf is going on. especially since the president has no executive power whatsoever at this point. from what I can discern they're still shipping 1000 jobs to Mexico and now most likely getting a big tax break so win/win for them I guess.

amazing how different the headlines look today than what they did when Obama "saved" 1.5 million jobs in the auto industry, but hey