monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

Republicans should realize they have a problem, President Barack Obama said over and over on Friday, when they’re agreeing with the Kremlin so much.

That they don’t, shows him just how broken American politics has become, and how vulnerable the country has become after Republicans spent years demonizing him and fellow Democrats and gumming up the government.

It’s not only a vulnerability to foreign powers, according to Obama. There’s now a real risk of America abandoning the ideals and values that have bound the country together for 240 years.

Everyone should be scared about what that means and where it leads, he said.

Quote:

How about a list of 36?

I think there's no better nor more objective sourcing than the Trump campaign.

Donald Trump's campaign struck a deal with Sinclair Broadcast Group during the campaign to try and secure better media coverage, his son-in-law Jared Kushner told business executives Friday in Manhattan.

Kushner said the agreement with Sinclair, which owns television stations across the country in many swing states and often packages news for their affiliates to run, gave them more access to Trump and the campaign, according to six people who heard his remarks.

In exchange, Sinclair would broadcast their Trump interviews across the country without commentary

Kushner, dressed in a suit and sneakers, told the business executives that the campaign was upset with CNN because they considered its on-air panels stacked against Trump. He added that he personally talked with Jeff Zucker about changing the composition of the panels but Zucker refused. He repeatedly said in the panel that CNN wasn't "moving the needle" and wasn't important as it once was, according to three of the people present.

Remember that time when I said "then the source gets discussed instead of the material"? That's what you are doing. Each one is discussed in detail with attributed facts.

Poo-poo the source when you can't deny the facts... tsk.

North Carolina governor signs laws restricting successor's power

The North Carolina GOP’s legislative coup takes partisan politics to a whole other level.As the transition from incumbent Republican Governor Pat McCrory to his successor Democrat Roy Cooper reached its final stages, GOP state legislators, who hold a massive majority in both chambers, voted on Friday to curb the authority of the executive office and cut more than 1,000 of his employees. The incoming governor will no longer have control over election boards, appointments to his own cabinet (at least not without approval from the state Senate), or the board of trustees of the University of North Carolina.

This is not simply a rebuke of Cooper, who promised to upend some of the socially conservative policies McCrory has pursued, but also of the 2.3 million North Carolinians who voted for him. Republicans have ignored the will of those voters, launching an unprecedented assault on democratic institutions and de-legitimizing the electoral process, all in the name of protecting McCrory’s legacy and their power.

In an act that falls somewhere between ruthlessness and hubris, North Carolina Republicans are in the process of executing what critics are calling a “power grab” by exploiting a special legislative session supposedly called to work on disaster relief to pass legislation significantly diminishing the powers of incoming Democratic governor Roy Cooper. Outgoing governor Pat McCrory, whom Cooper defeated on November 8 (an outcome bitterly contested by McCrory for nearly a month), is signing bills as quickly as the legislators can pass them.

The package, if fully, enacted would reduce the power of the governor’s party over state and county election boards (in a state where election laws and their administration have been used as a sharp party weapon by Republicans); require state senate confirmation of the governor’s cabinet appointments; make certain nonpartisan judicial positions partisan; and greatly reduce the number of state agency employees who serve at the pleasure of the governor. This last provision is more than a bit ironic given the GOP’s usual hostility to rules protecting “career bureaucrats.”

The Scariest Thing About Trump’s Presidency So Far Is Michael Flynn and His Team of Nutters

The most frightening aspect of the looming Donald Trump presidency is not so much the likely outcomes, many of which are horrifying, as the unlikely ones. Running the federal government of the world’s most powerful country is hard, and many things can go wrong. Full control of government is about to pass into the hands of a party that, when it last had it, left the economy and the world in a shambles. These disasters occurred because the party’s ideological extremism made it unequipped to make pragmatic choices, and because its chief executive was a mental lightweight. Sixteen years after it last came to power, the party has grown far more ideologically extreme, and its head of state is much less competent. Many of the tail risks of an extremist party led by an unqualified president are difficult to foresee in advance. But one is especially glaring: the appointment of Michael Flynn to be national security adviser.

Every morning since November 9th, you wake up and read the news and think, This has got to be an issue of The Onion. Because, while so much of the media, in ways subtle and broad, attempts to normalize the Trump ascendancy, while we are told that patriotism demands that we accept Trump and “give him a chance,” the President-elect acts in ways that leave even dystopian satire behind. His behavior has little to do with conservatism or libertarianism or populism; his mode is recklessness, a self-admiring belief that unpredictability is the path to national salvation.

And so every day brings at least one fresh outrage: the appointment of a national-security adviser whose temperament resembles those of the unhinged generals in “Dr. Strangelove”; a keeper of the environment who denies the science of climate change; a chief strategist and senior counselor who ran a Web site laced with racist poison and bogus “news”; an Attorney General who regards the Voting Rights Act as “intrusive” and once referred to a subordinate as “boy.”

It seems almost sadistic to go on. It’s the holiday season, after all. Suffice it to say that the appointments, contrary to Trump’s vow to “drain the swamp,” comprise a reinvention of the swamp, a new, improved version of the swamp, in which the super-wealthy and the oil and gas industries are vested with singular authority. All of this is set against a background of brewing scandals, myriad conflicts of interest, the gleeful humiliation of longstanding foes, and a President-elect who refuses to show even a measure of curiosity about the possibility that Russian intelligence agencies meddled in a national election.