The community standard that shields Nazis

Nov 23rd, 2016 2:51 pm | By

Our Facebook overlords are helping the Nazis win.

Jim Wright tells us he’s been locked out of his Facebook account, while Nazis frolic happily all over the place.

I’ve been banned from Facebook.

My account has been suspended supposedly for violation of community standards.

My profile is still active, you can still access the page and comment on posts that haven’t been deleted by Facebook. But I myself am locked out.  I can’t post, comment, or access the Facebook messenger system.

The community standard I violated is apparently the one where you’re not allowed to criticize actual, no fooling, Nazis.

Yes, actual Nazis.

That’s right, I was banned for criticizing an actual Nazi.

The Nazis who got him banned did it by flagging his post as spam.

So Facebook removed the post and then banned me from the platform for the next 24 hours.

The people who do this sort of thing, do so specifically in order to silence people they don’t like, not because they are actually offended. This is targeted harassment specifically designed to suppress people like me.

In my case, I’ve been targeted by certain rabidly obnoxious members of the Science Fiction community and more recently by actual neo-Nazis and Trump supporters. These people spend an inordinate amount of time obsessing over my Facebook page and scheming to find ways to have me shut down.

It’s Trump’s world and we’re just unwelcome immigrants.

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Haggling over the quid pro quo

Nov 23rd, 2016 2:13 pm | By

On NPR, a conversation about the conflict of interest issue. Richard Painter advised Bush Junior and Norman Eisen advised Obama.

STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:

President-elect Donald Trump shifted positions on several issues yesterday. But in a talk with The New York Times, he avoided placing many limits on his opportunity to profit while in office.

DAVID GREENE, HOST:

The president-elect, who has worldwide business interests, admits that he, quote, “might have requested a business favor from visiting British politicians.” His staff had previously denied that.

INSKEEP: His staff also denied that Trump sought a business favor when talking with Argentina’s president, but his daughter Ivanka – a vice president of his company – joined that call.

His daughter was on that call? Why? Why is no one putting a stop to all this?

GREENE: Ivanka Trump also joined Trump’s meeting with Japan’s prime minister.

INSKEEP: Two ethics lawyers – one Democrat, one Republican – now want Trump to do as other presidents have done. He can put his assets in a blind trust, where they will be sold. Richard Painter was President Bush’s top ethics lawyer, Norman Eisen was President Obama’s. They say federal ethics laws do not apply to the president but other laws do.

It’s unfortunate that federal ethics laws don’t apply to the president. I guess nobody believed we’d ever have one like Trump.

[pauses to have another moment of disbelief that this has happened]

Inskeep asks what’s the danger. Painter says well it gets too close to bribery.

INSKEEP: Is it – is the danger that someone in the Philippines or in Argentina or in Britain or name your country will do a business favor for the new president hoping that it might influence U.S. policy?

PAINTER: Here is where you get into the danger zone, when the government official starts talking about U.S. government business and then also talking about what personal business favors they might want. And when the conversation goes down that road, it does risk crossing the line into solicitation of a bribe. And people need to be very careful about these types of conversations, whether it’s I don’t like those windmills close to my golf courses or whatever it is. Those conversations should never take place at the same time as we’re discussing United States government business and what the – someone else might want from the U.S. government.

But Trump, astoundingly, doesn’t grasp that.

Eisen says there’s also the emoluments clause.

INSKEEP: What’s it say?

EISEN: Well, it says that presidents and other federal officials are not allowed to accept presents from foreign sovereigns. There’s already reports, for example, that the Trump Hotel here in Washington, D.C. is inviting representatives of foreign embassies to come and do deals with them to the extent they include presents, which is customary as part of these deals. That is a violation of the Constitution. And now we’re not only on criminal territory, we’re actually moving towards impeachment territory if a president violates the Constitution.

Why would we even want to be talking about this? Mr. Trump ought to do the right thing and set up a true blind trust and build a big beautiful ethics wall where Mr. Trump and his managers agree not to talk business in meetings with foreign leaders.

He absolutely ought to, but he has no intention of it, and when asked about it he babbles about never seeing his daughter again.

INSKEEP: Well, let me understand this because the Trump campaign has said, don’t worry about it, Trump’s kids are going to run his businesses. Isn’t that good enough?

EISEN: It is far from good enough. Every president has utilized the blind trust or its equivalent to reassure the American people that those presidents’ actions are motivated by the public interest, not their own personal special interests. So it’s not good enough.

PAINTER: And imagine where we’d be today if President Franklin Roosevelt had owned apartment buildings in Frankfurt and Berlin. You know, some of us might be speaking German. I mean, it is very important.

INSKEEP: Oh, you’re saying (laughter) – you’re saying what if the American president during World War II had had a financial stake in the future of Germany? Wouldn’t be good.

PAINTER: Well, yes, as many prominent American businessmen did. And those people who did often supported the America First movement and didn’t want us to stand up to Hitler. Are we going to be in a situation where we swap out the security of Israel so we can get a casino or a hotel in Abu Dhabi? I mean, this – the scenarios go on and on.

And nothing happens. Apparently no one will stop him.

INSKEEP: Why wouldn’t the president-elect respond to your concerns the same way that he responded to demands for his tax returns, just by declining to comply?

EISEN: Well, he’ll have an interval of goodwill. He’ll have a honeymoon period. And he may very well choose to decline. But just wait for that first scandal, that first impropriety to hit. The political pressure will become so intense that he’s going to be forced to do something.

Wait for the first scandal to hit if we know about it. He does it in secret as much as he can.

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Eavesdropping on a toddler

Nov 23rd, 2016 12:30 pm | By

Ploughing through the interview.

Jaw nearly dislocated.

As far as the, you know, potential conflict of interests, though, I mean I know that from the standpoint, the law is totally on my side, meaning, the president can’t have a conflict of interest. That’s been reported very widely. Despite that, I don’t want there to be a conflict of interest anyway. And the laws, the president can’t. And I understand why the president can’t have a conflict of interest now because everything a president does in some ways is like a conflict of interest, but I have, I’ve built a very great company and it’s a big company and it’s all over the world. People are starting to see, when they look at all these different jobs, like in India and other things, number one, a job like that builds great relationships with the people of India, so it’s all good. But I have to say, the partners come in, they’re very, very successful people. They come in, they’d say, they said, ‘Would it be possible to have a picture?’ Actually, my children are working on that job. So I can say to them, Arthur, ‘I don’t want to have a picture,’ or, I can take a picture. I mean, I think it’s wonderful to take a picture. I’m fine with a picture. But if it were up to some people, I would never, ever see my daughter Ivanka again. That would be like you never seeing your son again. That wouldn’t be good. That wouldn’t be good. But I’d never, ever see my daughter Ivanka.

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A disaster for humanity

Nov 23rd, 2016 12:01 pm | By

Phil Plait tells us Trump is apparently going to cut off the funding for NASA’s climate research.

In an interview with the Guardian, Bob Walker, a senior Trump adviser, said that Trump will eliminate NASA’s Earth science research. This is the mission directorate of NASA that, among other important issues, studies climate change.

In other words, Trump and his team want to stop NASA from studying climate change. From the article:

Nasa’s Earth science division is set to be stripped of funding in favor of exploration of deep space, with the president-elect having set a goal during the campaign to explore the entire solar system by the end of the century.

This confirms essentially the same comments made by Walker in late October at a Federal Aviation Administration committee meeting.

So that’s horrifying.

If this slashing of NASA Earth science comes to pass, it will be a disaster for humanity. This is no exaggeration: NASA is the leading agency in studying the effects of global warming on the planet, in measuring the changes in our atmosphere, our oceans, the weather, and yes, the climate as temperatures increase. They have a fleet of spacecraft observing the Earth, and plans for more to better understand our environment. That’s all on the chopping block now.

Especially irritating are the details of what Walker said. Calling climate change research  “politicized science” is so ironic you could build a battle fleet out of it, because it was the GOP who politicized it. They are the ones who attacked it as a party plank, they are the ones who have been taking millions in fossil fuel money to fund an organized disinformation campaign about it, they are the ones who harass climate scientists.

“Politicized” – honest to christ. It’s not politicizing to think it’s probably not ok to continue destroying the climate for the sake of our short-term gain while leaving the catastrophe for future generations to deal with.

Walker said the research should be done by NOAA, which Plait points out is outrageous since the Republicans have been relentlessly attacking NOAA for the past two years.

There’s one other exasperating thing Walker said, and it’s a pants-on-fire doozy:

Walker, however, claimed that doubt over the role of human activity in climate change “is a view shared by half the climatologists in the world. We need good science to tell us what the reality is and science could do that if politicians didn’t interfere with it.”

That is complete garbage. “Half the climatologists”? In reality, at least 97 percent of climatologists agree that humans cause global warming, and the data show you can’t explain the current rising temperatures without human influence.

climate consensus

And need I remind you, this is all happening while the planet has seen a string of record breaking heat, month after month, where the Arctic sea ice is melting in unprecedented ways, where President Obama has said climate change and its denial is a threat to national security, and a top military advisory board has said the same thing.

I find it outrageous that Trump won this presidency in large part by stoking fear in people, yet he denies the single biggest thing we actually should be scared of.

We’re screwed.

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Buffoons who end up ruling their worlds

Nov 23rd, 2016 11:31 am | By

A bit later Trevor Noah said more about Trump’s skills as a crowd-pleaser.

You know, funny enough, one of the biggest moments of realization was when Donald Trump won the election because when I came into the show, I said, I think this guy can win. This was when he first came down that escalator. He gave his first speech. And then I was like, wow, this guy’s going to do well. And I remember man – people laughed at me. People were like, oh, you silly ignorant person who’s just come to this world. You clearly shouldn’t be at “The Daily Show” because you don’t know what you’re talking about.

And I was like, but I don’t know. He seems like he connects with people. I can relate to him as a performer. I can see what tools he’s using. He’s good at riffing. He’s good at taking the crowd on a journey. I can see what he’s doing. And people would say – and all throughout the race – and there were times when on the show I would mention it. You know, I mean, that’s why I said Trump reminds me of an African dictator. And that’s where that came from because everyone said to me this guy is – he’s just a fool. He’s just – he’s a buffoon.

I said, yeah, you can say that, but I’ve seen this before. I have seen this before. I’ve seen clowns that go on to take over their countries. I’ve seen buffoons who end up ruling their worlds. And it came to pass. And I’ve just come to realize I’m going to share my point of view. Some people won’t like me for it, some people will. I will work every day to be as honest as I can because I do believe that we’re all trying to get to the same place. But various people have tricked us into believing that we are not.

And I see America going into that space. And I know that in South Africa, we were in that space and we’re still suffering from that space. And that was where a government very successfully convinced the majority of a population that every single person there was blocking the other people from achieving greatness in the country only to realize that we were all being oppressed at the same time.

It’s true and it’s infinitely depressing. Trump is a buffoon. He is empty. And he’s going to ruin everything.

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You have to be able to switch up as well as down

Nov 23rd, 2016 11:16 am | By

Speaking of Trump’s incredibly stunted vocabulary, and the horrifyingly stunted thinking and knowledge that reflects – Trevor Noah said some interesting things about all that on Fresh Air yesterday.

If you look at this election, I feel like Donald Trump was speaking a different language to Hillary Clinton. You know, it’s not dissimilar to what we saw in South Africa with our president Jacob Zuma. I remember sitting with people laughing when they would watch the debates, and they’d go this guy’s a buffoon. Oh, man, he has such a low word count. He’s got the grammar of a 5-year-old. He has the – you know, vocabulary of a toddler. And I said, yeah, but do know how many people find that appealing right now? He’s up there and everybody understands what he’s saying. And they were like, oh, can you imagine this guy as a president? And I said, yeah, but think of how many people who for the first time are listening to a presidential candidate understanding every single, quote, unquote, “policy” that he puts forward.

And sometimes that’s a thing that I will call them, you know, like elites, not even liberal elites, just people who are educated. They forget sometimes that communication is more important than your grasp of language. You know, can you communicate effectively with a person? That’s what I learned as a comedian. I remember one time I went on a little bender I tried to learn as many words as I could from the dictionary. And I thought I’m going to increase my vocabulary on stage. I’m going to expand my word count. My word cloud will be immense.

And I got onstage, and I lost half of the audience because half of the people in the audience were going we don’t know what perambulate means. Why do we have to think about this? And I realized you’ve got to be careful in deciding what your intention is. Are you using language, you know, as a flourish or are you trying to communicate as effectively as possible with another human being? And that’s what Donald Trump, in my opinion, did very, very well.

In other words you have to be good at code switching. That’s how Terry Gross responds to what he said:

GROSS: Do you find yourself code switching in the U.S.?

NOAH: I do. I do definitely, depending on where I am. And code switching is fun for me. You know, I don’t even do it intentionally. I just find, speaking to one person, I change a few words; I change my tone; I change my accent slightly. It’s a seamless transition that I do without even thinking, like a chameleon. I don’t think that I’m doing it. I just do it.

Sure. We all do. Adults code switch when they talk to toddlers, for instance. But I disagree with his last two sentences about Trump –

Are you using language, you know, as a flourish or are you trying to communicate as effectively as possible with another human being? And that’s what Donald Trump, in my opinion, did very, very well.

He did it well in the sense of getting a lot of people on his side. He did not do it well in many other senses that are relevant. He did not for instance do it well in the sense of getting people on his side without inciting them to misogynist and racist hatred. He did not do it well in the sense of telling the truth. He did not do it well in the sense of modeling reasoned political discourse. I could go on.

Also, Trump can’t actually code switch. He can’t code switch in the way he needed to in that meeting with the Times people for instance. He can’t switch up, he can only switch down. That’s no good in a president.

You know who can code switch, of course. The current president is brilliant at it. Remember him at the funeral in Charleston? And his campaign speeches over the past few weeks, too. But Trump has only the one register, and it’s desperately inadequate.

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Special tremendous

Nov 23rd, 2016 8:42 am | By

The Times published a transcript of its meeting with Trump yesterday. Le tout Facebook is talking about it, so I hastened to find it. It will probably take me all day to read it though, because I’ll have to take frequent breaks, because reading unscripted Trump is so abrading to the nerves.

I just can’t get over how thick he is. I feel as if I should take that as read and focus on the substance, but I find it difficult. The thickness has a lot to do with why the substance is what it is. The first extended passage reveals it in all its chattering nakedness:

TRUMP: O.K. Well, I just appreciate the meeting and I have great respect for The New York Times. Tremendous respect. It’s very special. Always has been very special. I think I’ve been treated very rough. It’s well out there that I’ve been treated extremely unfairly in a sense, in a true sense. I wouldn’t only complain about The Times. I would say The Times was about the roughest of all. You could make the case The Washington Post was bad, but every once in a while I’d actually get a good article. Not often, Dean, but every once in awhile.

“Special.”

Look, I have great respect for The Times, and I’d like to turn it around. I think it would make the job I am doing much easier. We’re working very hard. We have great people coming in. I think you’ll be very impressed with the names. We’ll be announcing some very shortly.

The desperately stunted vocabulary is one index, but the complete incomprehension of “the job he is doing” and its relationship to the press is another. He thinks it’s legitimate for him to ask the Times to make his job easier!

Everybody wanted to do this. People are giving up tremendous careers in order to be subject to you folks and subject to a lot of other folks. But they’re giving up a lot. I mean some are giving up tremendous businesses in order to sit for four or maybe eight or whatever the period of time is. But I think we’re going to see some tremendous talent, tremendous talent coming in. We have many people for every job. I mean no matter what the job is, we have many incredible people. I think, Reince, you can sort of just confirm that. The quality of the people is very good.

That’s the next president. That’s why I have to take a break at that point, in order to recover.

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Turkish police continue rounding up academics

Nov 23rd, 2016 8:29 am | By

Mahir Zeynalov on Twitter:

https://twitter.com/MahirZeynalov/status/799514778716794881

https://twitter.com/MahirZeynalov/status/800823333159890945

https://twitter.com/MahirZeynalov/status/798185888408707076

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Guest post: The slow nuke of climate change is already detonating

Nov 23rd, 2016 7:53 am | By

Originally a comment by Bjarte Foshaug on This is who he is.

Also, he will have the nukes. He’ll use them. I don’t think there’s any way he won’t. He has no inhibitions, no understanding, no impulse control, no ability to reason or check himself – why would he not use them?

He could be game over. It’s looking likely.

And of course the slow nuke of climate change is already detonating at a rate of 4 Hiroshima bombs a second. Even if we cut carbon emissions to zero at this very moment, this accumulation of energy would continue for many decades due to the enormous inertia of the climate system. That’s just how long it would take for the global temperature to stop rising. Getting back to “normal” temperatures is going to take millennia.

Of course this all assumes that there are no unpleasant surprises in store, which seems unlikely. Despite all this talk of “alarmism” and “hysteria”, climate scientists are actually far more guilty of understatment than overstatment (Naomi Oreskes has called it “erring on the side of least drama”). If the edge of the cliff is 100 ft ahead, then aiming to stop after 180 ft is not “half as good” as aiming to stop after 90 ft. And there are many such “cliffs”:

– Ice reflects lots of energy-carrying sunlight back into space. When you release carbon into the atmosphere, the planet heats up, which means less ice, which means less reflection of sunlight, which means even more global warming.

– Water vapor is also a greenhouse gas. When you release carbon into the atmosphere, the planet heats up, which means more water vapor, which means more greenhouse effect, which means even more global warming.

– Permafrost stores vast amounts of Methane, which is yet another greenhouse gas. When you release carbon into the atmosphere, the planet heats up, which means melting permafrost, which means more methane in the atmosphere, which means more greenhouse effect, which means even more global warming.

– The oceans absorb vast quantities of carbon (which is a serious problem in itself, since it leads to ocean acidification). But warm water holds less carbon than cold water. When you release carbon into the atmosphere, the planet heats up, which means warmer oceans, which means less absorption of carbon by the oceans, which means more carbon in the atmosphere, which means even more global warming.

– Etc… etc…

At some point these positive feedback-loops may become self-perpetuating, such that the planet will keep warming even if we cut our carbon emissions to zero…

…which, of course, we are not doing. We already have 5 times more fossil fuels in store than we can possibly burn while having a reasonable chance of limiting global warming to 2 degrees (which is already way too high, maybe fatally). And we are still looking for more. It’s the most urgent existential threat our species has ever faced, and it’s hardly even on the cultural radar. As I have previously written elsewhere, it’s as if we’re in a car heading for the cliff mentioned above, and the only discussion going on inside mainstream culture is whether we should aim to stop after 1000 ft or 1500 ft (or never).

But at least with the Paris accord – for all its shortcomings – we finally had in place a strong international consensus that the problem was real and that something (just not something in particular) needed to be done about it.

Enter Trump.

THE END

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Trump is out to destroy the free and independent media

Nov 22nd, 2016 6:02 pm | By

Robert Reich on Facebook:

Historically, despots have used 7 techniques to destroy the independence of the media:

1. Berate the media. Yesterday Trump called two-dozen TV news anchors and executives to the Trump Tower – including Lester Holt, Charlie Rose, George Stephanopoulos, and Wolf Blitzer — to chew them out about their reporting during the election.

2. Blacklist media that criticize them. Trump has maintained a blacklist of news outlets to which he has refused to grant event credentials. This morning he cancelled a meeting with the New York Times.

3. Turn the public against the media. Trump refers to journalists as “dishonest,” “disgusting” and “scum.” He tweets that the New York Times has lost “thousands of subscribers because of their very poor and highly inaccurate coverage of the ‘Trump phenomena.’” (The Times says it added 41,000 net paid subscriptions in the week after the election.)

4. Threaten the media. Trump says he’ll “open up our libel laws, so when they write purposely negative and horrible and false articles, we can sue them and win lots of money.”

5. Block media access. Trump hasn’t had a news conference since July. He has blocked the media from traveling with him, or knowing whom he’s meeting with. (His phone call last week with Putin was first reported by the Kremlin.)

One evening last week he told the media he wasn’t going out again and they left, and then he went out to dinner.

6. Establish their own alternative controlled media. Trump sends messages through Alt-Right Breitbart News and Fox News.

7. Bypass the media and communicate with the public directly. Trump uses tweets and videos. The word “media” comes from “intermediate” between newsmakers and the public. Trump wants to eliminate the media.

A free and independent media is essential to a democracy. Even before he’s sworn in, Trump is out to destroy that freedom and independence.

He added a bizarro 8th item today: being inappropriately matey and needy with the New York Times, suggesting editors should call him when they think he’s doing something wrong.

At any rate, yes, what Reich said. He’s acting every inch the dictator with regard to the media, and it’s appalling. We mustn’t let him normalize this behavior.

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The Queens boy

Nov 22nd, 2016 5:35 pm | By

Journalists and journalistic outlets must never again agree to meet with Trump off the record.

Margaret Sullivan at the Washington Post says what the tv people did wrong yesterday and the Times people did right today.

The disaster yesterday:

Brandon Friedman, a Virginia-based public relations executive, offered his theory on Twitter: “They walked into an ambush, agreed not to talk about it, then Trump went straight to the Post with his version.”

Then it was just a hop, skip and jump to a big headline on the Drudge Report, with its huge worldwide traffic: “Trump Slams Media Elite, Face to Face.” As Business Insider politics editor Oliver Darcy aptly put it, that is “how a lot of America will see this.”

The result for the president-elect: He once again was able to use the media as his favorite foil. Having a whipping boy is more important than ever now that the election is over and there is no Democratic opponent to malign at every turn.

And yet at the same time he wants to be besties with the New York Times. It’s as if his mind goes blank every few minutes and he reboots and starts all over from scratch.

On Tuesday, shockingly, a new melodrama arose: Trump’s planned meeting at the New York Times was canceled, then restored.

The Times played it right. Despite a tweet attack from the president-elect, editors refused to go the off-the-record route with Trump, which was his preference, for obvious reasons — because he wanted again to control the story.

With the exception of a brief off-the-record conversation between Times Publisher Arthur Sulzberger and the president-elect, the meeting was fair game for news stories — as it should be.

Off-the-record was a mistake for the TV people, and it would have been a mistake for the Times. The paper successfully called Trump’s bluff. As much as he professes to despise the Times, he remains in some ways the Queens boy who lusted after Manhattan success and acceptance.

Doesn’t he though. That’s why I call him Donnie from Queens.

 

Always on the record with Donnie from Queens. Never trust him.

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Just call them Nazis

Nov 22nd, 2016 5:10 pm | By

Dear Media:

Please stop calling them the “alt-right.” Just call them Nazis. They won’t be offended. Nazis are super hard to offend, unless you call them Jews.

-Andy Borowitz

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Trump now sees things differently

Nov 22nd, 2016 4:37 pm | By

As we’ve seen, in one of the least surprising “surprises” of the week Trump said hahaha I was just kidding, I’m not going to throw Crooked Hillary in jail.

The Washington Post reported this morning that Trump “has decided that his administration will not pursue criminal investigations related to former rival Hillary Clinton’s private email server or her family foundation.” We learned of the decision by way of Kellyanne Conway, who appeared on MSNBC earlier today.

…Conway said Trump now sees things differently. “I think when the president-elect, who’s also the head of your party, tells you before he’s even inaugurated that he doesn’t wish to pursue these charges, it sends a very strong message, tone and content” to fellow Republicans, she said. “Look, I think he’s thinking of many different things as he prepares to become the President of the United States, and things that sound like the campaign are not among them,” she added.

Notice how casual she is about admitting that he’s not going to do what he repeatedly said he was going to do. Notice how casual she is about admitting he lied to the voters, as if they should have known that all along.

I suspect much of the political world will perceive this as a conciliatory, and perhaps even magnanimous, decision…

Oh surely not. It was just his typical scuzzy lying bullshit and projection, seeing as how he’s the actually corrupt one of the two. His fans will be pissed off that he lied to them, and his non-fans can’t possibly think it’s magnanimous to say he’s not going to do something he had no business doing in the first place.

It was a scandal of sorts during the campaign that Trump saw himself as some kind of unhinged strongman, threatening to lock up those who stood in the way of his pursuit of power, in large part because he was claiming a legal authority that did not exist. Today’s news may seem reassuring – Trump won’t keep a ridiculous campaign promise – but look just below the surface and you’ll see that it’s actually a continuation of the scandal because Trump is still acting as if he has a power that remains imaginary.

Certainly. I wouldn’t dream of looking at it any other way.

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Trump provides free storage

Nov 22nd, 2016 1:11 pm | By

Trump’s other BFF, the Washington Post, reports on an admission by the Trump Foundation.

President-elect Donald Trump’s charitable foundation has admitted to the IRS that it violated a legal prohibition against “self-dealing,” which bars nonprofit leaders from using their charity’s money to help themselves, their businesses or their families.

That admission was contained in the Donald J. Trump Foundation’s IRS tax filings for 2015, which were recently posted online at the nonprofit-tracking site GuideStar. A GuideStar spokesman said the forms were uploaded by the Trump Foundation’s law firm, Morgan, Lewis and Bockius.

The Post doesn’t know if the IRS got the same forms.

In one section of the form, the IRS asked if the Trump Foundation had transferred “income or assets to a disqualified person.” A disqualified person, in this context, might be Trump — the foundation’s president — or a member of his family, or a Trump-owned business.

The Foundation said yes.

Another line on the form asked if the Trump Foundation had engaged in any acts of self-dealing in prior years. The Trump Foundation checked “yes” again.

There are no more details.

Philip Hackney, who formerly worked in the IRS chief counsel’s office and now teaches at Louisiana State University, said he wanted to know why the Trump Foundation was now admitting to self-dealing in prior years — when, in all prior years, it had told the IRS it had done nothing of the kind.

I’ll admit to being curious about that.

During the presidential campaign, The Post revealed several instances — worth about $300,000 — where Trump seemed to have used the Trump Foundation to help himself.

In two cases, The Post reported, the Trump Foundation appeared to pay legal settlements to end lawsuits that involved his for-profit businesses.

In one case, Trump settled a dispute with the town of Palm Beach, Fla., over a large flagpole he erected at his Mar-a-Lago Club. The town agreed to waive $120,000 in unpaid fines if Trump’s club donated $100,000 to Fisher House, a charity helping wounded veterans and military personnel. The Trump Foundation paid that donation instead — effectively saving his business $100,000.

They describe more items like that. The last one is paying 10k for a portrait of Trump, which now hangs in the bar of one of his golf resorts.

In September, a Trump campaign spokesman rejected the idea that Trump had done anything wrong, by using his charity’s money to buy art for his bar. Instead, spokesman Boris Epshteyn said, the sports bar was doing the charity a favor by “storing” its art free of charge.

Tax experts said that this argument was unlikely to hold water.

“It’s hard to make an IRS auditor laugh,” Brett Kappel, a lawyer who advises nonprofit groups at the Akerman firm, told The Post then. “But this would do it.”

It certainly made me laugh!

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Very rough

Nov 22nd, 2016 12:24 pm | By

Hoo-boy. Trump changed his mind about having a tantrum at the NY Times, and they had their meeting after all.

(What can it be like having a meeting with him? A giant petulant baby with way too much power? It must be such a bizarre experience.)

The Times shares:

The strained relationship between Donald J. Trump and The New York Times took an odd path on Tuesday when a planned meeting between the president-elect and the newspaper was abruptly canceled by Mr. Trump and then quickly rescheduled.

After a morning of back-and-forth statements and Twitter posts, Mr. Trump arrived at midday for a meeting with Times representatives at the paper’s Midtown headquarters. Seated next to the publisher, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., in the paper’s Churchill Room, he said he had great respect for the paper but thought its treatment of him had been “very rough.”

God he’s stupid. The Times is not there to write daily panegyrics to unqualified ignorant billionaire candidates for president. That’s not their job.

He added that he hoped he and the paper could improve their relationship.

No, that’s not how that works. You don’t have a “relationship.” You can’t make the Times be your besty.

Three people with knowledge of Mr. Trump’s initial decision to cancel the meeting said that Reince Priebus, the incoming White House chief of staff, had been among those urging the president-elect to cancel it, because he would face questions he might not be prepared to answer. It was Mr. Priebus who relayed to Mr. Trump, erroneously, that The Times had changed the conditions of the meeting, believing it would result in a cancellation, these people said.

Ah look at that. because he would face questions he might not be prepared to answer. Of course he fucking would! He will always face questions he certainly won’t be prepared to answer, because he’s ignorant and incurious and thick as a brick. He can’t refuse to talk to us because he’s too ignorant and thick to answer questions relevant to the job he campaigned to get. It doesn’t work like that.

They collected tweets from the meeting.

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All the power, none of the criticism

Nov 22nd, 2016 8:11 am | By

Trump also doesn’t understand the limits on his power. He thinks he gets to decide which cases the Attorney General will investigate.

President-elect Donald Trump has decided that his administration will not pursue criminal investigations related to former rival Hillary Clinton’s private email server or her family foundation, his campaign manager said Tuesday.

Trump’s apparent decison, conveyed by campaign manager Kellyanne Conway in an interview on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,’’ would be an extraordinary break with political and legal protocol, which holds that the attorney general and FBI make decisions on whether to conduct investigations and file charges, free of pressure from the president.

I guess protocol is for losers.

Trump’s conciliatory gesture stood in contrast to his continued fights on Twitter. The president-elect escalated his longstanding battle with the media on Tuesday, cancelling a meeting at The New York Times and blasting the publication on Twitter hours after he criticized TV journalists at another contentious sit-down.

Trump had scheduled two meetings with the publisher and journalists from the Times on Tuesday, including one on-the-record session. But the president-elect, who frequently attacked the paper during his campaign, suddenly cancelled the events in a series of tweets.

“I cancelled today’s meeting with the failing @nytimes when the terms and conditions of the meeting were changed at the last moment. Not nice,’’ Trump wrote to his nearly 16 million followers on the micro-blogging site. “Perhaps a new meeting will be set up with the @nytimes,’’ he continued. “In the meantime they continue to cover me inaccurately and with a nasty tone!’’

Times editors and reporters also took to Twitter to deny Trump’s account. Clifford Levy, the paper’s assistant masthead editor, tweeted out an official response saying it was the president-elect who had tried to change the ground rules by seeking only a private meeting. “We did not change the ground rules at all and made no attempt to,’’ Levy wrote. “We were unaware that the meeting was cancelled until we saw the President Elect’s tweet this morning.’’

So he canceled the meeting himself and lied about it on Twitter. That’s a good look.

The extraordinary spectacle of a man about to become president and one of its leading newspapers engaging in a Twitter war underscores how Trump’s always contentious relations with the media have deteriorated even further since his election. The relationship between presidents and those who cover them is often an adversarial one, but media experts say Trump’s blasts against reporters — he called them the “lowest form of humanity” during the campaign — have broken new ground.

His Twitter spat with the Times came one day after Trump did sit down with television news executives and some well-known TV journalists — and repeatedly told them the campaign reporting about him was “unfair” and “dishonest.”

That’s his projecting thing again. He told multiple lies during the campaign, and those lies helped him get elected.

Instead of striking a harmonious tone to build rapport following the election, Trump was combative, participants said. In a calm and deliberate voice, he told the group sitting around a conference table that they had failed to provide their viewers with fair and accurate coverage, and told them they failed to understand him or his appeal to millions of Americans.

But he made no mention of the enormous amount of airtime that the networks, especially on cable, devoted to his campaign. A number of analyses have noted that Trump’s presidential effort was boosted by the news media’s fascination with him.

Welcome to hell.

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This is who he is

Nov 22nd, 2016 7:59 am | By

Yesterday Trump held a “summit” with some people from the news media – and pitched a Hitler-style fit at them for covering him in such a meany unfair way.

I wish I were joking.

David Remnick heard from people who were there.

He points out the obvious: that any idea that the job would make Trump a wiser and better human is dead as a stone.

First came the obsessive Twitter rants directed at “Hamilton” and “Saturday Night Live.” Then came Monday’s astonishing aria of invective and resentment aimed at the media, delivered in a conference room on the twenty-fifth floor of Trump Tower. In the presence of television executives and anchors, Trump whined about everything from NBC News reporter Katy Tur’s coverage of him to a photograph the news network has used that shows him with a double chin. Why didn’t they use “nicer” pictures?

For more than twenty minutes, Trump railed about “outrageous” and “dishonest” coverage. When he was asked about the sort of “fake news” that now clogs social media, Trump replied that it was the networks that were guilty of spreading fake news. The “worst,” he said, were CNN (“liars!”) and NBC.

This is where we are. The President-elect does not care who knows how unforgiving or vain or distracted he is. This is who he is, and this is who will be running the executive branch of the United States government for four years.

That. He doesn’t care who knows what a fucking baby he is. He doesn’t care that he’s revealing himself, hourly, to be too childish and petulant for junior high school. He doesn’t care that we can all see what a vain greedy self-obsessed buffoon he is. He must not even realize that that’s what he’s showing us.

It’s mind-boggling. I’ll never get used to it. The grotesquerie cannot be assimilated.

The over-all impression of the meeting from the attendees I spoke with was that Trump showed no signs of having been sobered or changed by his elevation to the country’s highest office. Rather, said one, “He is the same kind of blustering, bluffing blowhard as he was during the campaign.”

Another participant at the meeting said that Trump’s behavior was “totally inappropriate” and “fucking outrageous.” The television people thought that they were being summoned to ask questions; Trump has not held a press conference since late July. Instead, they were subjected to a stream of insults and complaints…

From the guy who will be president in a few weeks. They’re the fourth estate, and he thinks it’s a good idea to summon them to his GoldVomitorium in order to try to bully them. He thinks he gets to tell them what to do.

Kellyanne Conway, who managed Trump’s campaign and who is now his senior adviser, said that the meeting had been “very cordial, candid, and honest.”

Participants said that Trump did not seem entirely rational about his criticism of the media, nor did he appear any more informed about policy than he had been during the campaign. When one participant pointed out that all Presidents and Presidential candidates believe they get bad press, Trump said, “Not Obama!”

In fact, Trump went on at length about how much he has come to like the current President—how “great” they are getting along and how he “loves” Obama. He said that since the two met at the White House, two weeks ago, they have spoken twice on the phone. When I interviewed Obama for nearly two hours last week, he was obviously doing his best to avoid insulting or provoking a man whom he had previously declared “unfit” and “uniquely unqualified” for the Presidency. During the President’s trip to Europe and Peru, sources said, one foreign leader after another came to Obama in a mood of shock and alarm, including Angela Merkel, of Germany.

Well of course they did. What’s not to be terrified about?

Participants said that Trump did not raise his voice, but that he went on steadily at the start of the meeting about how he had been treated poorly. “It was all so Trump,” one said. “He is like this all the time. He’ll freeze you out and then be nice and humble and sort of want you to like him.”

“But he truly doesn’t seem to understand the First Amendment,” the source continued. “He doesn’t. He thinks we are supposed to say what he says and that’s it.”

And he doesn’t know he doesn’t understand it, and he doesn’t know that it matters that he doesn’t understand things like that.

Also, he will have the nukes. He’ll use them. I don’t think there’s any way he won’t. He has no inhibitions, no understanding, no impulse control, no ability to reason or check himself – why would he not use them?

He could be game over. It’s looking likely.

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The day in Trumptweets

Nov 22nd, 2016 7:18 am | By

President Pussygrabber’s latest batch of tweets is astounding.

“Only the crooked media” cares about the massive conflicts of interest that a president who has “interests in properties all over the world” presents. No, Donnie, you’re wrong about that, citizens also care.

This is President Corrupt doing that projection thing again – accusing other people of the very crimes he is trying to hide. Tragically, it’s worked for him so far.

Nigel Farage. Ambassador. To the US. Oh dear god.

Fortunately it’s not President Pussygrabber’s choice to make. He no doubt thinks it is, but he’s wrong.

“Not nice” – as if he would know.

That’s because you’re a bad, stupid, mean, childish, incompetent man who somehow parlayed your money and fame into being elected president.

He really needs to start acting like an adult now.

He thinks he’s become a god.

Oh look, the National Review agrees with him! No shit, Sherlock.

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Headlines

Nov 22nd, 2016 6:05 am | By

The BBC seven hours ago:

Turkish MPs to vote on controversial underage sex bill

The BBC one hour ago:

Turkey withdraws child rape bill after street protests

One wonders why it was “underage sex” seven hours ago and “child rape” six hours later.

From the second article:

This bill sparked a rare thing here: cross-party opposition. The AKP MPs who proposed it insisted it would not pardon rapists or sexual abusers and was simply intended to exonerate men who marry underage girls apparently with consent.

Miss the point much? Consent is not meaningful in underage girls. Men exploit underage girls; their underageness makes that easier to do. Saying “Jeez they only want to marry them” makes it worse, not better. Marriage terminates all other possibilities before the girl is old enough to evaluate the situation.

However, critics said that in patriarchal Turkey, a young girl would feel unable to give consent and so the bill would have legitimised rape and encouraged child brides. When conservative, usually pro-government, women spoke out against it – including the president’s wife – the bill was doomed to failure.

Child marriage is a problem here. Former President Abdullah Gul famously married when he was 30 and his wife 15.

Men like them tight and easy to dominate.

But women’s groups say the solution is not controversial legislation such as this but real opportunities for girls. And they say the Islamist AKP has encouraged female subservience, with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan calling childless women “deficient”.

It’s led to a huge rise in physical abuse of women, with the murder rate said to have increased by 1,400% between 2003 and 2010 – although some believe that number is partly due to more cases being reported than ever before.

It’s not “underage sex,” BBC, it’s child rape made even worse by child marriage.

H/t Joanne

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“One wonders if these people are people at all”

Nov 21st, 2016 6:02 pm | By

Our new reality:

If you tuned in to CNN earlier today, you might have found yourself greeted by a chyron that could have been ripped straight out of a Newt Gingrich Nazi fanfic: Alt-Right Founder Questions If Jews Are People. The real question, of course, is whether our president-elect should distance himself from an explicit group of neo-Nazis. And according to CNN, the answer is a resounding “WEELLLL …”

That’s from that meeting Saturday.

An anchor whom no one seems to be able to name but who looks suspiciously like Jason Sudeikis in Mitt Romney makeup starts us on our journey:

Richard Spencer, he’s the man who actually coined that term, “alt-right.” He was in Washington this weekend. He was spewing, as he often does, what I can only describe as hate-filled garbage. Of Jews, Spencer said … “One wonders if these people are people at all, or instead soulless golem.”

Does President Trump need to formally denounce and disavow these groups as a whole?

It’s too late for that, Trump has welcomed them into his “administration” (the one where he waves at the crowds and someone else does the actual work).

Moving on, though, there are the optics to consider. Does Trump really want to risk alienating Nazis when they’ve been such devout, loyal supporters? According to Berg:

Part of this is also a political calculation. They found that they need these people in their coalition to succeed, so can they disown them and cleanse their coalition of these people?

Can they cleanse the undesirables, indeed. CNN, unfortunately, offers no answers. Instead, all we get is a lively debate of the pros and cons of the president-elect denouncing people who question whether Jews are human, because they have been loyal parts of the coalition that put him in office.

CNN will be airing live executions of staffers within six months.

We’ll be numb to it soon.

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