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

he was my district rep growing up, have hated him literally all my life

I joked about it before but my ability to laugh about the idea of a President Luthor assembling his Legion of Doom has diminished as that comparison has become more scarily accurate (minus the superpowers, thankfully).

for those of you unfamiliar w/ Dana

https://twitter.com/jeremyscahill/status/805806949644333056

https://twitter.com/cool_as_heck/status/803343911364149248

btw Gore did get face time w/ the Yam himself, said it was "an extremely interesting conversation"

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-38211695

not sure what to make of that

"It was like speaking to a nascent form of artificial intelligence that's in the process of understanding sentence structure and what words mean. Fascinating."

bizarre

maybe heartening because i've read that the people closest to his ears are his kids and he basically just seems to think whatever the last person told him to think

if I was in his cabinet my immediate strategy would be to make sure I was always the last one to talk to Chump

that was the strategy observed by Reagan-Bush II advisors

I love the anecdotal tale of his advisers influencing him by appearing on TV and introducing their ideas via that conduit.

There are going to be a lot of oval office meetings that involve someone accidentally dropping their pen on the way out the door, searching for it until everyone else has left, and then getting the last word in with trump

http://www.xe.com/en/currencycharts/?from=USD&to=CNY

looks like Trump just took out the Chinese economy with a couple of tweets

if you want a vision of the future, imagine a room full of people on their hands and knees scouring the carpet for their 'lost' pens / phones / contact lenses which none of them ever find, while an oblivious president trump tweets the nuclear codes xp

That is the opposite of the direction he wanted their currency to go in, tbf.

xp

that BBC image of gore on the elevator makes it look like he's about to be encased in carbonite

well, it *would* be a carbon sink

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/05/opinion/why-i-will-not-cast-my-electoral-vote-for-donald-trump.html?smid=tw-share

He is going to vote for kasich or something dumb like that. We need these traitors to be traitors for us. They need to vote for Clinton.

this is not going to matter

Yeah that too

I want Trump's transition to be resisted at all turns though. This way when he does something egregious no one can say they are surprised. He shouldn't be treated like a normal president.

i guess trump can now cross 'diversity?' off the to-do list he scrawled on the back of an envelope on nov 9

― the criss angel's death song (bizarro gazzara), Monday, December 5, 2016

see, this is where contemporary identity politics falls apart. there is nothing diverse about a cabinet of 100% assholes.

imagine if a bunch of electors don't vote for trump, somehow he doesn't get the office, but he still knows all these huge secrets he's been briefed on (at least the ones he's bothered to listen to). his twitter feed would be pretty funny next year

Then he could go into exile as Snowden's roommate!

Apparently Bob Dole helped arrange the phone call to Taiwan. That rascally scamp!

http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/308915-report-bob-dole-organized-trumps-call-with-taiwan-president

Donald Trump's call with Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen was organized by Bob Dole, a former Republican senator and one-time presidential nominee, the Wall Street Journal reports.

Dole told the Journal that the law firm he is affiliated with does work with the Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office in the U.S.
“It’s fair to say that we may have had some influence,” he said.

People in DC are going to stop wearing pants when it gets warm again. Just let it breathe. Discretion is for nerds.

Weird.

Well.

Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) has "reservations" about privatizing Medicare, she told the Portland Press Herald.

“Suffice it to say I have a number of reservations,” Collins told the newspaper. “A complete upending of a program (Medicare) that by and large serves seniors well is not something that appeals to me.”

Collins' comments signals an early and significant departure from GOP unity on the issue, which will be needed to overhaul something like Medicare and will be essential to repealing and replacing Obamacare. If Republicans lose too many lawmakers on these topics, they won't be able to follow through with promises to gut Obamacare.

Collins said she had voted against similar proposals to voucherize Medicare in the past.

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/susan-collins-has-reservations-about-privatizing-medicare

Would be amusing if after all this handwringing at the imminent horrors of the Trump administration, what bogs them down and ties them up is reimagining US health care. Talk about a quagmire ...

afaict they have literally no idea what to replace the current system with, right? seems like they'll basically be in the same nightmare as the uk government over brexit, where a promise no-one ever expected to have to deliver on is now an urgent priority and no-one has the faintest fucking clue about what to do

the main problem (well, one of a few) is that there are too many loopholes where people still have to buy plans they can't afford

the right approach would be to track down those groups, legislate a subsidy or determine why they're missing the current ones

the wrong approach would be to reintroduce cheaper plans that are completely worthless in reality and allow people to buy them again

afaict they have literally no idea what to replace the current system with, right? seems like they'll basically be in the same nightmare as the uk government over brexit, where a promise no-one ever expected to have to deliver on is now an urgent priority and no-one has the faintest fucking clue about what to do

― Rush Limbaugh and Lou Reed doing sex with your parents (bizarro gazzara), Tuesday, December 6, 2016 10:26 AM (seven minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

CVS coupon book

no-one has the faintest fucking clue about what to do

Oh, I disagree, there are some people like Paul Ryan who know exactly what to do. Catch-22.

Given that a few states went Trump by only a few thousand votes, it's increasingly bonkers that Clinton's popular vote lead has crept up over 2.6 million. And it's still climbing.

"increasingly bonkers" to replace "in god we trust" on all US currency

Did this Evan McMullin piece get linked above?

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/05/opinion/trumps-threat-to-the-constitution.html?_r=0

Countdown to McMullin being seen in the lobby of Trump Tower...

Given that a few states went Trump by only a few thousand votes, it's increasingly bonkers that Clinton's popular vote lead has crept up over 2.6 million. And it's still climbing.

― Josh in Chicago, Tuesday, December 6, 2016 10:42 AM (eleven minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

So what are we gonna do about that in 2020? Guessing electoral college is still gonna be in place by then and mostly blue states are going to go NPV, so we have to keep playing the game as it exists, not a different game we wish we were playing.

Per that other thread, focus on getting governors to go blue.

xp Well, that split is incredibly unlikely, right? Even Nate Silver only had it at 10-15% iirc, though obviously no-one's clowning him on why he 'called it' wrong.

"increasingly bonkers" to replace "in god we trust" on all US currency

― El Tomboto

or at least to replace "xiphoid beetlebum" in my display name

this is one of those days where everything feels like it's spinning too fast and i'm gonna be sick

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/trump-sold-all-shares-in-companies-in-june-spokesman-says/2016/12/06/55419d44-bbcf-11e6-94ac-3d324840106c_story.html

Norm Eisen, who served as ethics counselor to President Obama and has criticized Trump over his conflicts, said it would be “absolutely a step in the right direction” if Trump had sold his stock holdings in June, divesting himself of ownership in companies whose fates could be tied to his policies. But he added that it is now important to know how Trump spent the money he earned from the sale.

“We need to know, has he put them in conflict free assets ... or has he bought other stocks or assets that would create new conflicts?” he asked. “It’s all the more reason that we need a prompt and full disclosure financial disclosure. If he did liquidate all his stocks, what did he do with the money? What bank is the money in? What did he buy? It’s a lot of money.”

He called this the latest example of the tension between Trump’s promise to drain the swamp and how he has managed his own business conflicts. “The swamp draining should begin with Trump’s own wetlands,” Eisen said.

Trump's own wetlands ...

the wettest lands, really

Very odd. If he really did cash out i imagine he would have disclosed this earlier because it addresses some of these conflict of interest concerns.

trump not a big fan of financial disclosure iirc

Probably how he paid for his campaign contributions and hats.