monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

Boz-o-bama is just about to leave Washington, and America is relived.

This is most encouraging. The free press, after all, is our first line of defense against oppressive government.

It is astonishing to me, however, to find the vast numbers of incurious people in this country who consume and unwittingly share memes, i.e., "shitpostings", found on social media sites and the like. I think that is a sign that the last couple of generations have failed to teach and learn critical thinking skills.

With Donald Trump’s presidency at hand, the news-media landscape is unlike anything we’ve seen before.

...What can we expect in the months ahead? As Marty Baron, The Post’s executive editor, aptly noted in a commencement speech last week, predictions are not journalists’ strong suit.

Nevertheless, with the help of some expert observers, here are a few.
1. Unprecedented conflict between the administration and the media.

Jay Rosen, a leading media thinker, sees big trouble ahead. Describing himself as “very gloomy,” he said he believes that not only will media rights be under siege but the end of our democracy is possible.

“Trump converts press coverage of his falsehoods into fuel in the culture war,” he said in an interview. “This casts the press in the role of Trump’s antagonist and encourages his supporters to shout down honest reporting.”

He forecast in a 20-part Twitter thread what might happen when a major journalistic investigation infuriates the new president: A leak investigation will follow and, in turn, journalists could find themselves prosecuted for the crime of reporting the news

Given how little content the 2016 presidential debates contained, how rarely specific policies or programs were outlined or even mentioned, it often seemed that the only thing left for journalists – and ordinary citizens – to do was tally the number of lies each candidate told.

By some counts, Donald Trump told a lie every few minutes; Hillary Clinton’s distortions appear to have been fewer and less blatant. And when the bigger liar won the election, one conclusion to be drawn was that, for millions of Americans, honesty was not nearly so important as we might have wished or assumed. If we factor in the popular assumption that all politicians lie, perhaps all that mattered was what they lied about.

Who cared if Trump denied sexually harassing women when he was so boldly telling the truth about the fear, rage, racism, xenophobia and misogyny that many of his supporters felt but had hesitated to voice?

More recently, Newt Gingrich, among others, has been informing us that facts and statistics no longer count so much as feelings, suspicions, prejudices and anecdotal evidence. The fact that violent crime is down, Gingrich explained on CNN, is of less import than the fact that “people feel more threatened. Liberals have a whole set of statistics which theoretically may be right but are not how human beings are. As a political candidate, I’ll go with how people feel, and I’ll let you go with theoreticians.”

Inner Sanctuary city or state? They have no fear of being stopped or questioned for being an illegal alien why would they fear using the ID that was issued to them by the state... They're ******* driver's license. They don't need to have a fake ID; the government gave them one.

President-elect Donald Trump has continued employing a private security and intelligence team at his victory rallies, and he is expected to keep at least some members of the team after he becomes president, according to people familiar with the plans.

The arrangement represents a major break from tradition. All modern presidents and presidents-elect have entrusted their personal security entirely to the Secret Service, and their event security mostly to local law enforcement, according to presidential security experts and Secret Service sources.

The available facts in response to the various political claims of voter fraud are interesting. The Stein Clinto recount effort in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania ended ignominiously in a gain of ~ 170 votes for Trump in Wisconsin,

47 counties: Recount by hand
13 counties: Combination of hand count and optical scanners
12 counties: Optical scanners

Reince Priebus, incoming chief of staff for Donald Trump, on Sunday morning said that Trump will not yet accept the CIA's conclusion that Russian hacks into Democratic groups were an attempt to boost Trump to victory.

"I think he would accept the conclusion if these intelligence professionals would get together, put out a report, show the American people they’re actually on the same page, as opposed to third parties through The Washington Post," Priebus said on "Fox News Sunday" when asked if Trump accepts the consensus of the intelligence community on the Russian hacks and their intent.

two slimey jerks

Trump adds another billionaire to his team
President-elect Donald Trump announced Monday that he would nominate billionaire Vincent Viola to be Secretary of the Army.

Viola, the owner of the Florida Panthers hockey team, made his fortune as an investor and founder of the high-speed electronic trading firm Virtu Financial, where he is still executive chairman. He is the former chairman of the New York Mercantile Exchange, where he got his start as a commodities trader.

“Viola’s business experience makes him well positioned to help guide a Fortune 10-sized company, the U.S. Army,” a statement from Trump’s transition team announcing Viola’s nomination reads.

President Barack Obama said in an interview aired Monday that many voters who rallied around President-elect Donald Trump’s criticisms of political correctness have their very own version of PC culture.

Speaking to NPR’s Steve Inskeep, Obama acknowledged said there was one “narrow” definition of political correctness, which he characterized as “as a hypersensitivity that ends up resulting in people not being able to express their opinions.”

Still, he said, that kind of political sensitivity isn't the exclusive territory of liberals.

“[T]he irony in this debate is often-times you'll hear somebody like a Rush Limbaugh, or other conservative commentators, or you know, radio shock jocks, or some conservative politicians, who are very quick to jump on any evidence of progressives being 'politically correct,' but who are constantly aggrieved and hypersensitive about the things they care about and are continually feeding this sense of victimization, and that they are being subject to reverse discrimination,” he said.

The available facts in response to the various political claims of voter fraud are interesting. The Stein Clinto recount effort in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania ended ignominiously in a gain of ~ 170 votes for Trump in Wisconsin, an impasse in Michigan (though it was discovered that in Detroit (the source of most Democrat votes in the state) about 650 more votes were cast than the total number of registered voters ( typical of our excellent Democrat urban political ground games)

In 248 precincts, there were a total of 782 more votes tabulated by voting machines than the number of voters listed as picking up ballots in the precincts’ poll books. That makes up just three-tenths of 1% of the total 248,211 votes that were logged in Detroit for the presidential election. That number was far too small to swing the statewide election results, even in this year’s especially tight race that saw a Republican win Michigan for the first time since George Bush in 1988.