monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

Absolutely. The authoritarian information control regime was obviously not with trump about a month ago....

"President Obama announced that the Obamacare marketplace saw 670,000 people sign up for coverage Thursday, its biggest open enrollment day ever."

* Trump this week thanked the Financial Times for naming him “Person of the Year,” which he described as “a great honor.” I don’t think he actually read the editorial, however, because the Financial Times also said Trump risks doing “incalculable” damage to American democracy.

As a presidential candidate, Donald Trump’s standard stump speech included a very specific claim about crime in the United States.
Oct. 28, 2016: “You won’t hear this from the media: We have the highest murder rate in this country in 45 years. You don’t hear that from these people. They don’t want to talk about it. The highest murder rate in the United States in 45 years.”

Oct. 29, 2016: “The murder rate in the United States, it’s the worst, the highest it’s been in 45 years. Nobody talks about that — nobody talks about that.”

Oct. 30, 2016: “Murder is – in 45 years, right now, the rates are the highest they’ve been … and they don’t want to talk about it.”
The reason “they” – he never said who “they” are – didn’t want to talk about the murder rate reaching a 45-year high is that the claim is ridiculously untrue. In fact, as the Washington Post explained before the election, Trump actually has the entire story backwards: “Both the rate of homicides and violent crimes are back down to the levels they were 45 years ago.”

In other words, in reality, the murder rate is roughly at a 50-year low, even though Trump claimed every day for months that it’s at a 45-year high.

...And that got me thinking: why is Trump so fond of this specific falsehood? As a pre-election tactic, the deceptive rhetoric at least made strategic sense, but now that he’s already won the election, why bother?

I can think of a few possible explanations:

1. Maybe Trump intends to impose some exceedingly harsh criminal-justice “reforms,” so he needs the public to remain scared of murder rates that don’t exist in order to help justify his regressive and reactionary policy agenda.

2. Perhaps Trump is quietly trying to undermine public confidence in data and statistics. Sure, law-enforcement agencies keep providing us with facts about crime rates, but Trump probably prefers a political environment in which the public trusts his word alone, not the reality-based community.

3. Maybe Trump intends to switch after he takes office and start using the real data once he’s president. “Remember how I said the murder rate is at a 45-year low?” Trump may ask. “Well, now look how low it is! I must be doing a great job!”

4. Perhaps Trump actually believes his own nonsense, and lacks the ability to understand why he’s mistaken.

Which of these explains his bizarre mendacity? Your guess is as good as mine.

digby ‏@digby56 6h6 hours ago
The NYT's David Sanger reported on Chuck Todd's MSNBC that the FBI didn't tell the WH about the DNC hack for months. WTF?

In appointing David Friedman as the next ambassador to Israel, Donald Trump voiced a desire to “strive for peace in the Middle East.” Unfortunately, his chosen representative would be far more likely to provoke conflict in Israel and the occupied territories, heighten regional tensions and undermine American leadership.

President-elect Donald Trump has named Rep. Mick Mulvaney (R-S.C.) as his director of the Office of Management and Budget, signaling his intent to slash spending and address the deficit as president.

Mulvaney, 49, was elected to Congress in 2010 in the wave that brought in a cohort of younger, staunchly conservative members into the House. Mulvaney quickly staked out ground as one of Congress’s most outspoken fiscal hawks — playing a key role in the 2011 showdown between President Obama and House Republicans that ended in the passage of strict budget caps.

...A founding member of the House Freedom Caucus, a group of about three dozen conservative hard-liners that has used its leverage to push Republican leaders to the right, Mulvaney was among the group of lawmakers widely credited with pushing House Speaker John A. Boehner out of power in 2015.

...One analysis by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimated Trump’s tax plan would cost more than $5.3 trillion over the next decade. Even after factoring in faster economic growth, Trump’s proposals are expected to add at least $2.6 trillion to the debt over the next decade, according to the nonpartisan Tax Foundation.

BETSY DEVOS AND THE PLAN TO BREAK PUBLIC SCHOOLS