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

Hendrik Hertzberg has been proselytizing for several plans since 2001.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2006/03/06/count-em-2

it's time the electoral college

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went on spring break

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CR8eagnU8AAuYFm.jpg

"several plans?" imho Hertzberg is a NPVIC convert like yours truly

in unimportant correction news I meant iirc not imho

I'm thinking the scenarios he used to which he used to devote early '00s New Yorker columns before settling on the NPVIC.

if the EC continues to benefit republicans and republican states is there any reason to believe something like the NPVIC will succeed?

Fuck these stupid electors.

Sometimes i feel like I must be hallucinating. The Trump I am seeing cannot be the same guy who was elected president.

i keep seeing 'npvic' and thinking it means 'new posts very much in character'

damn ilx

https://thinkprogress.org/under-political-pressure-kuwait-cancels-major-event-at-four-seasons-switches-to-trumps-d-c-1f204315d513#.th4grt63c

geez it's almost as if there oughta be something in the Constitution saying you aren't allowed to do that

"look, i don't know what kind of midwesterns you guys have met. on the whole they seem like nice people with a reputation for being overly polite.

― AdamVania (Adam Bruneau)"

lol

i may possibly have met one or two midwesterners in my life :)

"rushomancy puts it best but got there too soon, should have sat on that post imho

― a Warren Beatty film about Earth (El Tomboto)"

oh, god, i can't time my zings, i have no life and even i can't keep up with this fucking thread :)

"i don't have any "ideas", and neither does anyone itt. i'm pretty pessimistic about the future and i just find the straw-grasping ("trump will be impeached, just watch", "the electoral college will be gone in 10 years", etc) laughable. finding humor in our shared doom is merely an ego defense

― k3vin k."

great, thanks for sharing, it's not like any of us are dealing with deep existential depression/dread ourselves, so it's really good to have somebody like you here to stan for nihilism.

"I want someone to run for Congress in one of these midwestern Trump districts with "kill all rich people" as their campaign slogan as a kind of test balloon.If anti elitism is what the people crave the Left shouldn't have a problem leveraging that. They invented it.

― Treeship"

'eat the rich' is catchier

"I've often thought of making a thread 'does your ilx posting history ensure that you can never run for public office'

― iatee"

i destroyed my prospects for public office way back in the usenet days. and also by not being born rich.

I think the extent to which people become fundamentally unserious about acting in a way that at least trends toward the common good is a fairly good barometer for the extent to which 'civilization' becomes a word with no meaningful referent. So, y'now, thanks, electors, for doing your part in nudging us just that little bit closer to the precipice.

(None of this is really unexpected by me, btw. I maintain a stupid flicker of hope even though I'm pretty sure I can see where the maniacal minority is steering this bus.)

eephus, i recommend developing respect for gallows humor as a survival mechanism, now more than ever as Hollywood usta say.

HK makin' the rounds

https://twitter.com/DougHenwood/status/810961622072197120

http://www.al.com/news/mobile/index.ssf/2016/12/mobile_chief_of_staff_apologiz.html

The chief of staff to Mobile Mayor Sandy Stimpson issued a public apology Sunday for his responsibility in having a cedar tree cut down at Public Safety Memorial Park Friday and transported to Ladd-Peebles Stadium as a prop during President-elect Donald Trump's rally on Saturday.

Colby Cooper, who has been Stimpson's chief of staff since 2013, said he became "overzealous" in making sure "every detail was covered and the expectations" of Trump's team were exceeded ahead of Saturday's televised rally.

"I now know that there are citizens who are upset and offended that a tree from a city park was used as part of the decorations for the event," Cooper said in a statement sent out to the local media. "I accept full responsibility for having this done. For this, I sincerely apologize. Going forward, I will be more sensitive to the spectrum of concerns regarding trees."

Cooper had been charged with working with Trump's advance team last week in preparation for the rally, which was the final one during Trump's post-election "Thank You" tour. The president-elect spoke more than an hour before a large crowd at Ladd-Peebles Stadium and the large tree decorated with Christmas ornaments served as a back drop, blocking the stadium's scoreboard.

Meanwhile, Matt Yglesias trips over his own dick: https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/810945081943457792

https://thinkprogress.org/under-political-pressure-kuwait-cancels-major-event-at-four-seasons-switches-to-trumps-d-c-1f204315d513#.th4grt63c

― 龜, Monday, December 19, 2016 10:23 PM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

A source tells ThinkProgress that the Kuwaiti embassy, which has regularly held the event at the Four Seasons in Georgetown, abruptly canceled its reservation after members of the Trump Organization pressured the ambassador to hold the event at the hotel owned by the president-elect.

isn't this finally illegal? please?

Yglesias is an asshole, wow.

"isn't this finally illegal? please?

― Milton Parker,"

yes, but they've already shown that they don't believe the law pertains to Trump so don't expect much to come of it

xp to phil

dude's default mode has been cynical, unfunny sacrasm since the election (before even?). It was a matter of time before he said something stupid.

like, who needs this?

https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/810810830216433664

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C0E1IWxXcAA-HgF.jpg

Good god... Good luck USA/Earth... :'-(

now that trump has finally called them 'radical islamic terrorists' we won right? its over?

ok, so one of my other scary/nightmare scenario predictions is this: Trump, Sessions at all use the "terrorist" label more loosely than ever and start going after organizations like ACLU, using federal civil asset forfeiture to kneecap their operations even when nothing is proven.

sry et al not at all

German officials haven't even released details about this yet, right? So we don't even know for certain that this was ISIS or any other Islamist group?

Has the Trump team said anything about the unknown assailant in Zurich who shot up an Islamic center? (Don't answer, it's rhetorical.)

I feel like W occasionally verged on sounding like that but it felt like someone was behind him whispering to tone it down. Not anymore!

it was a christmas market, why would non christians shop there amirite?

So Ron Paul got a fucking electoral vote

That statement is almost as terrible and dread-inducing as I could've possibly feared. I don't know how we get through four years of this.

A source tells ThinkProgress that the Kuwaiti embassy, which has regularly held the event at the Four Seasons in Georgetown, abruptly canceled its reservation after members of the Trump Organization pressured the ambassador to hold the event at the hotel owned by the president-elect.

isn't this finally illegal? please?

if people call it kuwait-gate then something like this has an outside chance of being noticed, otherwise no

the only possible scandals in this country can reasonably have -gate tacked on the end

Kuwaitigate is viable, push that

So Ron Paul got a fucking electoral vote

I am confused about how Trump learned to manipulate the media so adeptly. There were negative stories about him every day but by maintaining his ground and deflecting he somehow turned each egregious scandal into a he said/she said. Even that grim debate -- that awful night -- when he brought the Bill Clinton rape accusers to the debate, everyone who saw it seemed horrified at Trump, not Bill, but the discourse was suddenly murky. On the sexual assault front, Hillary was now tarnished too.

I think his alt right cyber brownshirts were used to his advantage and some of them might have been on some kind of Trump or Putin payroll. Whenever journalists or Hillary tried to tag him with them, with their racist intimidation tactics, they sounded like conspiracy theorists. Just like Trump. Now Trump wasn't the only conspiracy theorist in the race.

Over and over again he dragged people down to his level. And even when Hillary refused to engage, he would use that to make her seem haughty and superior. Not a straight talker. Hiding something.

The email scandal was perfect for Trump's strategy of confusion. A slow drip of substance-less "scandal" related to Hillary, that the press would dutifully report on. Even when they said there was nothing in the emails, people half-listening still heard "emails." It was like some sort of mass hypnosis.

None of this trickery worked on people who were paying attention but it wasn't aimed at them. Trump knew he could incur tons of awful press and still make it look like an ugly race on "both sides" to the average voter. How? How did he learn to do all of this?

Roy Cohn?

Yeah he was a key influence. I want to know what he taught him specifically, how Trump refined these lessons for the age of the internet and, most importantly, how to break through with a clear oppositional message when he is polluting the airwaves with misdirection.

Some scandal has got to stick. In some way he needs to be made accountable for his actions even though he seems to have a bag of tricks for avoiding accountability:

Short of everything Rick Wilson promised in October, nothing will stick. Nothing. He won after Access Hollywood.

He must have done things to weasel out of it, things that can be identified and confronted. Like he knew how to twist it around on Hillary. At the time the way he did this seemed idiotic and desperate but it worked somehow, whereas no Democratic politician had weathered a similar scandal as successfully.

You have to factor in the Hillary hatred that has been nurtured for decades as the complement to Trump's evasions, distractions, and wildly inflated promises. He was fortunate in his opponent.

Last I checked (right before the election), Putin was blackmailing Trump with a video of him having sex with (possibly underage) prostitutes in Russia. Presumably this tape can be employed at Putin's convenience. Or it's total bullshit.

I'm not hopeful about the tape's existence. And I am not confident that Trump couldn't have beaten another Democrat too. Hillary was a unique candidate, with particular strengths and weaknesses, but the manner in which Trump (and Putin) exploited her baggage was a thing to behold. The insinuations were there before but they became radioactive. I think he could do it again to someone else.

At this point we are all so used to this asshole, he is like a chronic illness we are all living with. But beating this illness will take a new treatment approach. We need to see him with fresh eyes, understand what game exactly it is that he is playing, and then nail him to the fucking wall. This is all going to start on ilx and spread outwards.

xp I'm not sure how being blackmailed makes one more media-savvy and able to evade scandal. But lets all hope Putin shits out his compromising video on Trump asap. C'mon Donnie, take one for the team!

http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/tom-arnold-claims-vulgar-donald-trump-apprentice-tapes-article-1.2916614

if he really has this he should release it, not that it fucking matters at this point, and he should have done it months ago.

Yeah wtf tom arnold

a question we've all been asking for 25+ years

maybe he's just doing this to piss of Rosanne

off. OFF