monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

. . . I doubt seriously that at any time until the final days of the campaign that many Democrat leaders expected or wanted Hillary to lose. Indeed their behavior as and after the results came in very strongly suggests the opposite.

but almost everyone else can see the swamp is becoming swampier.

http://nypost.com/2016/12/04/nancy-pelosi-i-dont-think-democrats-want-a-new-direction/

WASHINGTON — Nancy Pelosi just gave Republicans another reason for celebration.

The newly elected House minority leader insisted Sunday that Dems aren’t looking for a “new direction” even after the bruising Election Day defeats and a GOP monopoly in Washington.

A defiant — and possibly delusional — Pelosi stood firm about her party’s future when pressed on what she’ll do differently to deal with Democratic discontent.

Challenger Ohio Rep. Tim Ryan, argued Dems must do more to speak to working-class voters in the Rust Belt and not just coastal liberal elites. Pelosi batted back the threat to her reign with a 134-63 win, and has since downplayed the dire straits for the Democratic Party...

“I don’t think people want a new direction,” Pelosi told CBS’s “Face the Nation.”

Justice Department opinion backs Trump on hiring of son-in-law

President Trump’s decision to appoint his son-in-law as a senior adviser did not violate a federal anti-nepotism law, the Justice Department found in a formal legal opinion issued Saturday....

Trump’s team said, “Kushner has chosen to forego his salary while serving in the administration.”

The 14-page opinion, written by a more-than-20-year veteran of the department who had been honored by former attorney general Eric H. Holder Jr., concluded that....no law could prohibit the president from taking informal advice from his relatives.

Bill Clinton appointed wife Hillary to lead his administration’s health care reform.

It's going to be a very long four years if he keeps obsessing about the sizes of his crowds and how many times he's been on the cover of Time Magazine every time he gets on a podium.

But as the CT piece clarifies and as the victim himself says, it wasn't a politically motivated incident. That makes it a much different phenomenon with different consequences. Right?

Four people have been charged after a man was punched and kicked as a crowd yelled, “Don’t vote Trump," a day after the presidential election, police said.

I mean, [Biden's] a Democrat, a politician, and all that stuff, but I always had the feeling he was interested in what was best for our country.

Just kidding, blatham.

Republicans say the Affordable Care Act provides health insurance that manages to be both lousy and expensive. Whatever the flaws of these policies, the new Trump administration is trying to pull off a con by offering Americans coverage that is likely to be so much worse that it would barely deserve the name insurance. It would also leave many millions without the medical care they need.

This reality became increasingly clear when President Trump’s choice to run the Department of Health and Human Services, Tom Price, testified before a Senate committee last week. He looked pained as he described the terrible predicament of people who earned around $30,000 to $50,000 a year and had to deny “themselves the kind of care that they need” because they had Obamacare policies with deductibles of $6,000 to $12,000. Yet, earlier in the same hearing, Mr. Price extolled the virtues of policies that would be woefully inadequate — policies that cover medical treatment only in catastrophic cases. Such policies often have deductibles of around $14,000 for family coverage. This is simple hypocrisy. Condemn the policy you don’t like, propose something far worse as a replacement and claim that it is much better.

President Trump used his first full day in office on Saturday to unleash a remarkably bitter attack on the news media, falsely accusing journalists of both inventing a rift between him and intelligence agencies and deliberately understating the size of his inauguration crowd.

In a visit to the Central Intelligence Agency intended to showcase his support for the intelligence community, Mr. Trump ignored his own repeated public statements criticizing the intelligence community, a group he compared to Nazis just over a week ago.

He also called journalists “among the most dishonest human beings on earth,” and he said that up to 1.5 million people had attended his inauguration, a claim that photographs disproved.

Later, at the White House, he dispatched Sean Spicer, the press secretary, to the briefing room in the West Wing, where Mr. Spicer scolded reporters and made a series of false statements.

He said news organizations had deliberately misstated the size of the crowd at Mr. Trump’s inauguration on Friday in an attempt to sow divisions at a time when Mr. Trump was trying to unify the country, warning that the new administration would hold them to account.

The statements from the new president and his spokesman came as hundreds of thousands of people protested against Mr. Trump, a crowd that appeared to dwarf the one that gathered the day before when he was sworn in. It was a striking display of invective and grievance at the dawn of a presidency, usually a time when the White House works to set a tone of national unity and to build confidence in a new leader.

What you mean, 'lurking'?