monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

Frugal1 wrote:

YEA!... all right now let's see if we can get him a Nobel Prize.

This is encouraging. Maybe Schumer and Pelosi et al can carry through with Dems whose seats will be vulnerable and do this right.

Hillary came in second place, well behind Trump.
She has asked Jill Stein to request a recount.

Only weeks ago they were decrying the myths of Republican intransigence and gridlock in the Congress, when in fact much of was their work all along. Obamacare was passed with zero input from or coordination with Republicans, and it will die a similar death.

A partial list of things Jones believes include: The US government is secretly controlled by a shadowy international cabal called the New World Order. The Federal Emergency Management Agency is going to put Americans in concentration camps. The “Jewish mafia” controls Uber and American health care. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are literal demons — like, the kind that come from hell and smell like sulfur.

A lot of other people — including many supporters of Donald Trump — seem to believe these things too. One of Jones’s websites, Infowars, got 10 million unique visitors in the past month, according to Quantcast. That’s more than National Review, America’s premier conservative journal, and nearly four times as much as Rush Limbaugh’s site. It’s also more than mainstream sites like the Economist and Newsweek.

Just a few weeks ago, Donald J. Trump and Republicans in Congress were talking about how Obamacare’s insurance markets were floundering, and how insurance companies were fleeing while prices were spiraling out of control.

The failure of those markets, they argued, was the reason Obamacare should be repealed.

Now, Republican leaders are considering a legislative effort to roll back major provisions of the health law, but the plan they’re considering would keep the current system in place for at least two and possibly three more years.

The nickname for the plan is repeal and delay, and the assumption underlying it is that the current system will be sustainable for as long as it takes Congress to pass and the White House to install a new health plan.

The plan might be better described as “zombification.” It is not at all clear that Republicans can easily time the expiration date of the Obamacare markets. Insurance experts say the resulting zombie market — not dead, but not alive either — would suffer from many of the maladies of the existing system, and quite a few more. The result on the books might look like the status quo, but millions of Americans could lose their insurance and others could pay much higher prices to keep their coverage.

In 2000 Donald Trump told Fortune magazine, “It’s very possible that I could be the first presidential candidate to run and make money on it.”

Nothing mentioned about the book Flynn co-authored with conspiracy theorist Michael Ledeen, which spread the insane far-right conviction that Islam is not a religion but a conspiracy aimed at destroying Judeo-Christian civilization. (Priest: “I’ve asked Flynn directly about this claim; he has told me that he doesn’t have proof—it’s just something he feels as true.”) Nor his business ties to Turkey, on whose behalf, without disclosure, he has written op-eds advising extradition of an enemy of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s regime. Nor that he not merely “appeared” on Russia’s state-sponsored English-language station RT but was a paid speaker at their anniversary gala in Moscow. Nor that he has stated, “I’ve been at war with Islam”—he corrected himself, for political correctness’s sake: “or a component of Islam”—“for the last decade.”

President-elect Donald Trump has reportedly chosen Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt as his nominee to lead the Environmental Protection Agency.

News of the intended nomination broke Wednesday afternoon, as unnamed sources confirmed Pruitt’s selection to the New York Times, Reuters and others.

Pruitt has been a leading voice of Republican attorneys general nationwide who have banded together against environmental regulations put forward by the Obama administration.

He also has close ties to the energy industry: A 2014 New York Times investigation uncovered a letter from Pruitt to the EPA in 2011 which claimed the agency was overestimating the air pollution caused by energy companies drilling natural gas wells in his state. The letter had been written by lawyers for one of Oklahoma’s largest energy companies. Pruitt’s staff simply copied it onto official stationery "with only a few word changes," The Times reported, and sent it to Washington.

Now, Republican leaders are considering a legislative effort to roll back major provisions of the health law, but the plan they’re considering would keep the current system in place for at least two and possibly three more years.

Oh goody gumdrops. Like I said, the Koch boys are driving this administration as much as Trump is.

It’s a wonderful satire right out of Twain or Thurber. A minority of the electorate goes for the loosest and least knowledgeable candidate, certain that he will lose and their votes will be only harmless protest, a middle finger to Washington, and then — whoa. The joke comes true. You put a whoopee cushion on your father’s chair and he sits down and it barks and he has a massive coronary. You wanted to get a rise out of him and instead he falls down dead. Very funny.

Thank you, Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania for this wonderful joke. Voters in high dudgeon against Wall Street manipulators and the Washington aristocracy vote for the billionaire populist who puts tycoons in power and the Republican hierarchy who owned the logjam that the voters voted against. If Billy the Kid had been smart, he’d’ve run for sheriff.

And now we sit and watch in disbelief as the victor drops one piece of china after another, spits in the soup, sticks his fist through a painting and gobbles up the chocolates. Not satisfied with the usual election night victory speech, he stages a post-election victory tour and gloatfest, a series of rallies in arenas where he can waggle his thumbs and smirk and holler and point out the journalists in their pen for the mob to boo and shake their fists at. He puts the Secret Service through their paces, highways are closed, planes diverted, cities disrupted, just so the man can say how much fun it was to defeat Hillary Clinton and confound the experts.