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

that's very specific

but maybe it will happen

FBI already pissed Dems off, so the CIA/NSA has a lot to gain by currying favor with Dems w/an eye towards midterms or 2020

it is unwise to presume that these institutions give two shits about which party anybody belongs to, or who is "in charge"
they sure don't like being fucked with, though

also "infighting" between the FBI and other three-letter agencies is really more like that kid on the playground who was always trying to start shit and would have gotten pummelled if anybody ever lowered themselves to the occasion, but isn't worth getting in trouble for and besides we all know nothing will ever shut them up

I appreciate your perspective here, thanks

gallows lols at this meme making the rounds

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

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eUe4sFKvJUY

http://www.nola.com/elections/index.ssf/2016/12/john_kennedy_louisianas_next_u.html

foster campbell just got beat handily in lousiana guess we shouldn't have expected anything different

no, we should not have

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dn8-4tjPxD8

It was a super longshot. Early polls actually had a lot of Clinton voters likely to switch to Kennedy -- guessing maybe that means moderate republicans or conservative democrats who weren't keen on trump. Kennedy is apparently relatively moderate.

not sure why stevie is there but i'll take it

Lot of people right now claiming the russia hack thing somehow "invalidates" the election. I really don't get how a foreign power leaking some emails invalidates an election. Not saying it isn't a concern, shouldn't be investigated etc., but think people are grasping at straws with this. No evidence that they actually tampered with the vote so far afaik.

yup

Eh, it further invalidates Trump's suitability for the office. It corroborates and emphasizes the accusations that he's a Kremlin water carrier who takes policy advice from a foreign adversary, and all the useful idiots he's suggesting for cabinet slots will do the same, as some of them have already made clear in public appearances.

The election seems valid to me, the better candidate won by 2.83M votes and counting,

thing that has struck out the most to me about the russian thing- and it probably shouldn't - is mcconnell's brazen partisanship and opportunism

but yeah talk of the vote being hacked somehow is like if your stereo cassette walkman craps out and eats your mixtape halfway through and you go googling for "walkman malfunction" and read about some dudes at MIT wiping out recordings wirelessly with magnetrons and EMP and so you whip out your Galaxy S7 Edge and Tweet MY WALKMAN: HACKED?!?!?

xp cf. my arresting metaphor for Mitch McConnell upthread.

omg we need fucking revolution in the streets. we're not gonna survive 4 years of this.

Time should cave to his whingeing and take back his Person of the Year, give him Man of the Year ... in the back pages of the same issue that they give Person of the Year to a deserving woman.

sorry for the flip and irrelevant post, I'm days behind and in total denial that any of this is real.

I like your idea though

ultimate troll move: give POTY to hillary throwing two middle fingers up on the cover

this week i showed my government students the ava duvernay doc "13TH" and we read a chapter from the new jim crow. they're doing self-directed projects next year. the cool thing about teaching government is that its not a state-tested subject and also my school more or less lets me do whatever i want bc they have bigger fish to fry.

liberals becoming huge CIA fans... takin' my yuks where i can get em

it's certainly weird

strange bedfellows

foster campbell just got beat handily in lousiana guess we shouldn't have expected anything different

― 龜, Sunday, December 11, 2016 3:36 AM (two hours ago)

it's depressing that literally every single straw we've grasped at over the last month has turned out to be a bust. we lost almost every important election, the recounts won't change anything, the cabinet appointments are terrifying, trump hasn't toned down his message and if anything seems more insane and unqualified than he did before the election. now ppl are clinging to the shred of hope that an electoral college largely composed of people who are fanatically loyal to a party that values its own power over everything will somehow do the right thing and throw the election to the person most hated by the party base. and i'm still hoping for that too! when you're in a situation this dangerous you try every strategem you can think of, no matter how ridiculous it is. maybe they'll impeach him, i keep thinking. but if republicans don't give a shit that a hostile foreign power intervened to help elect their guy, they're not going to care about anything he does in office enough to impeach him. maybe they'd impeach him if he raised taxes.

Should we blame Nelly The Elephant for hyping up the Trump, Trump, Trump?

& now i guess it's all one great big circus.
So run away.

Innit?

good mourning!

strange bedfellows

Is it really so strange? Given the Dem element that was actually gung ho for The Most Qualified Hawk Ever?

I'll take the Most Qualified Hawk Ever over the Least Qualified Anything Ever any election.

Given we still have several weeks to go, I don't see how this daily drip/deluge of agitation can sustain itself, honestly. He's done absolutely nothing to mend wounds and no doubt will be even more inflammatory during his interview today, further embolden by his bubble of supporters/enablers. Meanwhile, the same rage and frustration that helped him get barely elected is out there and real, and I think generally hopeful but hardly reassured by his election. Meanwhile, the rest of those invested in American politics seem at the least pretty unsettled, from career politicians to plebes like us, and the best the most optimistic have to offer is, hey, maybe it won't be as terrible as we all expect.

I was out to dinner with friends last night, and my banker pal, who is prone to devil's advocating, kept coming back to Trump as a distraction, and the GOP as possible solvers of a few real fiscal problems America is facing at a federal and state level. But I kept pushing back that Trump is more than a distraction, he is a fulcrum, and that nothing good, from GOP piggy bank shaking to dem services, will come of the US government as long as he is in office and emboldened. The more I think about it, the more I think there's something endemically sour about the state of things, from the audacious stonewalling over Scalia's replacement on the federal level, to the fact that Illinois' GOP governor has refused to sign a state budget into law for about a year. Both those tactics preceded Trump, and I have a feeling things like that will only get worse and worse while he dicks around with our country's very fundamentals and foundations. So yeah, he is a distraction, but the worse kind of destructive distraction who has to be faced or dealt with on several levels before we can even get around to addressing all the other ways the country is broken and fucked up.

I'm not talking about "taking," Josh, but the cheerleading Isn't She Great crowd.

The inflation of Russian chicanery to "PUTIN INSTALLED TRUMP" strikes me as the kind of whingeing that indicates the Dems will run 33 shitty Senate candidates in two years, and likely nominate someone as vile as Andy Cuomo in four (if there's an election).

Also, Trump describes Sec of State-designate Exxon Tillerson as "a player" in his fuxNews interview. Just think, if Yam was a man of the left, we could be looking at Warren Beatty in the Cabinet.

The inflation of Russian chicanery to "PUTIN INSTALLED TRUMP" strikes me as the kind of whingeing that indicates the Dems will run 33 shitty Senate candidates in two years, and likely nominate someone as vile as Andy Cuomo in four (if there's an election).

"The straw men shrieking in my head confirmed my biases, again!"

xps

GOP as possible solvers of a few real fiscal problems America is facing at a federal and state level.

the gop is really adept at convincing people they're the party of fiscal responsibility without ever having earned that title with actions when in power. in theory it'd be great if this widely held belief were confronted more strenuously but it's so much harder to engage in a substantive discussion of the nuances of fiscal issues than it is to say "party of small government" and "shrink the deficit" even when neither of these things are true on any level

http://i.imgur.com/8rEEYrW.jpg

lol

I think my friend's argument - and he votes dem -is that at least the GOP talks about it, even if for myriad reasons they don't deliver. Like, he's sees much of the world on the precipice of systemic financial failure, and the US in particular vulnerable to collapse, due to borrowing, pensions, that sort of thing. That's the problem in Illinois, but internationally he thinks Europe (he's Croatian) is a mess, and that no one is offering real solutions, just delaying and dithering. We were arguing about Carrier, and how Trump really accomplished nothing, so he asked, well, what would you do to keep Carrier from moving jobs to Mexico? What can you do? It's not like Dems have offered solutions, however unlikely, which helped them lose.

I took a call.
I heard the call.
This was a call.
I didn't make the call.
And it was a call.
Very short call.
It was a very nice call.
I can't take a call.

Tax the rich, universal basic income, single payer. Dems could run on that imo.

I'm so glad i'm the only one with biases

christ, apparatchiks, huh?

http://i.imgur.com/0rxLi2Q.jpg

who can ask for anything more?

It might be fun to have a fresh nullification crisis, maybe someone can viciously beat Mitch McConnel on the senate floor

Tillerson at State brings some clarity/madness to my mind.

the US and Russia together go to war with Iran in order to split Iran's oil reserves amongst themselves. There are pretexts, including Iran's nuclear program and its alleged threat to Israel. Europe howls and is left out of the spoils. I don't know what China does, probably nothing directly. Brazil and India sit this one out, there's too much trouble at home to be worth the bother.

I'm not a betting man but if I were, I'd put money on it.

yeah, i'll be protesting that one when it's appropriate

Russia and Iran have very good relations - economically, politically and militarily. Russia is building Iran's nuclear reactors, for a start. xp

There's no reason Russia can't continue to build those reactors after "regime change".

but I am happy to be talked out of this nutty idea.

It would make the ongoing collaboration of Russian and Iranian troops in Syria pretty awkward and it would potentially destabilise Russian allies including Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan and Armenia. John Bolton is definitely up for it but i think it's practically unimaginable Russia would be.

^^ Let alone all those legitimate reasons, Putin nationally has far more to gain by being a hardman towards the US instead of making up and being friends.

now seems like an appropriate time to know the difference between hamas and hezbollah

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eUe4sFKvJUY