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KTJ You Vile Self Hating Subhuman White Creature Go Fuck Yourself

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Im2Sexy4MyPants
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« on: January 18, 2017, 03:51:23 pm »

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Are you sick of the bullshit from the sewer stream media spewed out from the usual Ken and Barby dickless talking point look a likes.

If you want to know what's going on in the real world...
And the many things that will personally effect you.
Go to
http://www.infowars.com/

AND WAKE THE F_ _K UP

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Kiwithrottlejockey
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« Reply #1 on: January 18, 2017, 03:53:06 pm »


I'll take that as a “notch on the belt!”
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« Reply #2 on: January 18, 2017, 11:23:29 pm »


from the Los Angeles Times....

Donald Trump's transition has hurt his popularity, not helped

By CATHLEEN DECKER | 3:00AM PST - Wednesday, January 18, 2017

President-elect Donald Trump at a news conference last week in New York. — Photograph: Evan Vucci/Associated Press.
President-elect Donald Trump at a news conference last week in New York. — Photograph: Evan Vucci/Associated Press.

DONALD TRUMP's transition to the presidency has seen his popularity decline, not expand, and he will enter the White House on Friday far weaker in that regard than any president in decades.

Trump is unique among the last seven presidents-elect: He is the only one whose popularity dropped between election day and his swearing-in, according to several new polls.

In surveys released during Tuesday, Trump's popularity was half that of President Obama's as he was sworn in in 2009, and far below even that of George W. Bush, who took office in 2001 after a Supreme Court battle that ended with a partisan split on the high court just weeks before Inauguration Day.

Trump does retain the confidence of a majority of Americans polled when it comes to fiscal issues — improving the economy, creating jobs, and dealing with the budget deficit. But they do not approve of how he has handled accusations that Russia tried to interfere in the election, and that appears to be among the things that have hurt him.

More Americans side with the intelligence community, which agrees that Russia did try to boost Trump's chances, than with Trump, who has spent much of the new year in a dramatic public spat with the nation's spy agencies.

The narrow focus of Trump's transition — appealing to those who already supported him while ignoring those who did not — has cost him. Partisans have hardened their views, denying Trump the chance to make inroads among Democrats.

Independent voters likewise seem skeptical of the president-elect.

Trump on Tuesday continued what has been routine for him: to praise polls when they show him ahead, as they did for much of the primary season, and dismiss them as biased when their results are not kind to him. “The same people who did the phony election polls, and were so wrong, are now doing approval rating polls,” he tweeted early on Tuesday. “They are rigged just like before.”

In fact, national presidential polls done by the same groups measuring Trump now were largely accurate, diverging only slightly from Hillary Clinton's 2.1 percentage-point popular vote victory.

Poll ratings matter for a president. Weak popularity at the beginning of a presidency doesn't necessarily doom it. But the ability to come into office with the backing of a huge swath of Americans can help keep members of Congress and others in the political establishment in line.

Trump can call Republicans to his aid — a not-insignificant power when the party controls both sides of Capitol Hill. In a Washington Post-ABC News poll, 76% of Republican respondents had a favorable view of Trump, and 44% of his party members strongly supported him.

Still, almost 1 in 5 Republicans had an unfavorable view of the man whose victory gave the party unified control of Washington. And he has not appealed to enough other voters to make up for that: Only 10% of Democratic respondents gave him positive marks, as did 43% of independents, the Post/ABC poll found.

Three polls released Tuesday — from the Washington Post/ABC, CNN/ORC and NBC/Wall Street Journal — each found about 4 in 10 Americans surveyed approved of Trump. That compared with 79% approval for Obama, 48% for Bush, 68% for Bill Clinton, 65% for George H.W. Bush, 58% for Ronald Reagan and 78% for Carter in Post/ABC polls taken at equivalent times.

All of the previous presidents except Reagan saw double-digit jumps between the percentage of Americans who voted for them in November and the percentage with a positive view of them just before they were sworn in. In Reagan's case, the increase was 7 points.

Trump, however, has fallen somewhat from the 46% of the electorate that he won two months ago. His standing as he starts his presidency, according to the Post/ABC poll, is slightly lower than the worst ratings ever given to Obama — 42% at two rocky points in his presidency.

The contrast between Trump's decline and the increase the other presidents-elect enjoyed suggests that a more graceful and embracing transition period better fits the desires of Americans when the job turns from winning a campaign to governing a nation.

Yet in crafting the tone of his transition, the president-elect has stuck to the pattern of his campaign — reveling in the embrace of his loyalists and forcefully returning any criticism, even if it comes from a civil rights hero, as demonstrated by his weekend feud with Representative John Lewis, the Georgia Democrat. In the CNN/ORC poll, 53% of Americans surveyed said Trump's statements since the election had given them less confidence in his presidency, compared with 37% who said they now had more confidence in Trump.

In the Post/ABC poll, 40% of respondents said they approved of how Trump had handled his transition, the same percentage as approved of him personally. In the NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, a similar 44% approved of Trump's transition.

The figures were sharply polarized this year — Trump won only 11% of Democrats and 77% of Republicans — in a way they were not in 2009, when Obama's transition was praised by 94% of his own party and 62% of Republicans. Among independents polled, 80% of whom favored Obama's transition, only 42% said the same about Trump's.

A central feature of the final weeks of Trump's transition, and perhaps central to its difficulties, has been his battle with the intelligence community.

In responding to allegations of Russian efforts to influence the election, Trump has never utilized what might have been a middle-ground approach — condemning foreign interference while contending that it did not cost Hillary Clinton the election. Instead, apparently seeing the issue as an insult to his legitimacy, he cast doubt on the intelligence community’s verdict.

His war with them reached an unheard-of level last week when Trump, without proof, blamed the release of salacious allegations against him on the intelligence agencies and equated their behavior to Nazi Germany's. CIA Director John Brennan, in a weekend interview, called Trump's remarks “repugnant.”

Trump's arguments have not swayed Americans, according to the CNN/ORC poll. Almost 2 in 3 respondents said they believed the Russians interfered in the election and called those actions a “crisis” or a “major problem.” More than half polled said they disapproved of how Trump had handled the matter; only 35% backed him.

A more profitable transition path for the president-elect would have been to emphasize the issues that propelled his candidacy. He has received praise for boosting U.S. jobs, even if critics say some of his claims are exaggerated. Jobs, Americans have indicated, is what they want him to focus on.

Six in 10 Americans — and almost 3 in 10 Democrats — in the Post/ABC poll said they expected Trump would be good or excellent at managing the economy. About the same number said they believed he could be good or excellent when it comes to creating jobs. And 56% believed he could properly command the war on terrorism.

Those views derive from the vision that Trump put forward in the campaign: that he was a leader tough enough to stand up for the nation. The Russia matter, and Trump's other Twitter-driven controversies, present an image of Trump fighting with his nation, not for it. The success of his presidency may well rest on whether he plays to his strengths, or indulges his weaknesses.


http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-pol-trump-popularity-slump-20170117-story.html
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« Reply #3 on: January 19, 2017, 12:14:01 am »


from the Los Angeles Times....

Scum of the earth lowlife packs a bag for Trump's inauguration

By STEVE LOPEZ | 4:00AM PST - Wednesday, January 18, 2017

L.A. Times columnist Stevel Lopez is headed to Washington D.C. for Donald Trump's inauguration. — Photograph: Getty Images.
L.A. Times columnist Stevel Lopez is headed to Washington D.C. for Donald Trump's inauguration. — Photograph: Getty Images.

I AND MY BRETHREN have been called scum.

We are terrible people. Horrible. Illegitimate. Liars.

The worst.

Hey, nobody's perfect, and I'm willing to forgive. So today I'm packing my bags and hitching a ride to D.C. for the inauguration of Donald Trump as the 45th president of the United States of America.

“There is no such thing as paranoia,” Hunter S. Thompson said. “Your worst fears can come true at any moment.”

That scumbag had it right, didn't he?

In the passing of the baton from Barack Obama to Donald Trump, we have traded class for crass.

But the people have spoken.

Actually, the people voted for Hillary Clinton, but it's too late to cry about that now.

So stop bawling, California. We are out of step, thank God, because civil rights, human rights and environmental protection are civic virtues in the Golden State, and we're going to build a kale-powered bullet train through almond and walnut orchards, come hell or high water.

We voted overwhelmingly for Clinton, with Meryl Streep a close second. And let's face it — we're going to get kicked in the teeth because of it.

No, we can't just all get along, red states and blue. So rather than pretend, our state legislative leaders have all but declared war on Washington over the Republican takeover of the nation’s capital. Meanwhile, many members of our congressional delegation have decided not to attend Friday's inauguration.

Representative Tony Cardenas (Democrat-Los Angeles) explained that his parents told him to “tell me who you hang out with, and I’ll tell you who you are.” Trump, he said, has disrespected “women, civil rights leaders, Hispanics, people with disabilities, Muslims, Gold Star families, African Americans, POWs and more.”

Not to be picky, but Cardenas left out journalists.

And Ted Lieu (Democrat-Torrance) had this to say:

“I cannot normalize his behavior or the disparaging and un-American statements he has made.”

I understand the sentiment, sure. But I didn't waste 18 months of my life watching soul-sucking cable news coverage of the craziest election in history only to miss the coronation.

I feel as though I must bear witness on behalf of my native state and as a member of the scabrous fraternity of ink-stained wretches.

It is not a coincidence that Ringling Bros. just announced the circus would fold its tent after nearly 150 years in business. Lion tamers, pachyderms and clowns can no longer compete. The Greatest show on Earth will be Donald Trump, tweeter of the free world, completing the leap from reality TV to American royalty when he moves into the former home of Abraham Lincoln.

The former home of Ronald Reagan, who said: “If we love our country, we should also love our countrymen.”

Of George H.W. Bush, who said: “We are a nation of communities … a brilliant diversity spread like stars, like a thousand points of light in a broad and peaceful sky.”

Of Bill Clinton, who said: “Promising too much can be as cruel as caring too little.”

Of Barack Obama, who said: “My fellow Americans, we are and always will be a nation of immigrants. We were strangers once too.”

And now it will be the home of Donald John Trump, who said in the midst of his winning campaign: “My fingers are long and beautiful, as, it has been well documented, are various other parts of my body.”

If I can be selfish — and what else would you expect from an illegitimate scavenging worm of a journalist? — this is a rich time for those of us in the real news business, even if many Americans have come to favor fake news.

We'll have a president who believes in Russia but not in the 1st Amendment.

Who insisted Obama was from Africa, and commemorated Martin Luther King Jr. weekend by attacking a legendary black civil rights leader.

Who refused to release his tax returns, called himself smart for not paying taxes and still became a hero to working-class people unhappy about the rigged economy.

Who ripped Wall Street and Hillary Clinton's ties to Goldman Sachs, then used the firm as a farm system for his inner circle, nominating as Treasury secretary someone who made a fortune when his bank foreclosed on thousands of working folks.

Donald Trump promised to drain the swamp, and already he has started refilling it with champagne, surrounding himself with one-percenters.

Energy tycoons. Climate change deniers. An alt-right mogul. A billionaire chosen for education secretary who doesn't seem to like public schools. A Labor Department nominee who said of his company's Carl's Jr. TV ads, “I like beautiful women eating burgers in bikinis.” And to lead health and human services, Trump picked a congressman who invested in a medical device manufacturing company days before introducing a bill that would have benefited the company, according to the lying press.

Americans have been promised plentiful, good-paying jobs. Coal mines will prosper once more and auto manufacturing will thrive anew despite decades of automation. Inner-city decay will be reversed. Tariffs on imports will rise but the cost of goods will not. Roads, bridges and airports will be rebuilt. Terrorists will be exterminated. People and corporations will get huge tax breaks. The wall will get built, and we're still not paying for it.

That's the Trump plan in this new era of magical thinking, details to come.

You're damn right I'm going to Washington.

I'll report back soon on whether I think we should give more thought to secession.


• Steve Lopez is a California native who has been a Los Angeles Times columnist since 2001. He has won more than a dozen national journalism awards for his reporting and column writing at seven newspapers and four news magazines, and was a 2011 Pulitzer finalist for his columns on elder care. He is the author of three novels, two collections of columns and a non-fiction work called “The Soloist” which was a Los Angeles Times and New York Times best-seller, winner of the PEN USA Literary Award for Non-Fiction, and the subject of a Dream Works movie by the same name. Lopez's television reporting for public station KCET has won three local news Emmys, three Golden Mike awards and a share of the Columbia University DuPont Award.

__________________________________________________________________________

Related stories:

 • He loves them, he loves them not: A look at Donald Trump's volatile celebrity friendships

 • More than 1 in 4 California members of Congress are skipping Trump's inauguration


http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-lopez-inauguration-20170117-story.html

« Last Edit: January 19, 2017, 12:41:32 am by Kiwithrottlejockey » Report Spam   Logged

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« Reply #4 on: January 19, 2017, 12:28:35 am »


from the Los Angeles Times....

Top performers shun inauguration to avoid normalizing Trump

By DAVID HORSEY | 5:00AM PST - Wednesday, January 18, 2017



A FEW DAYS before Bill Clinton's inauguration in 1993, I got clipped from behind while playing recreational league soccer. I was sidelined with a sprained ankle, but the injury did not stop me from flying to Washington two days later. There was a big story to cover.

Hobbling on crutches, I made my way to the pre-inauguration concert at the Lincoln Memorial. I was trying to reach the press area, but ushers kept taking pity on me and steering me toward the front of the crowd instead. I ended up sitting in the second row with folks in wheelchairs — something about which I should have been embarrassed, but the view was just too good.

The concert featured a spectacular series of stellar performers, including Michael Jackson and Diana Ross. At the end of the show, with the sun setting in the West, the new president and vice president descended the marble steps of the memorial like two Roman demigods. It was a superbly orchestrated event.

On the eve of Donald Trump's inauguration, expectations for it being an entertaining event center on the nature of the man taking the oath of office. Trump is bound to do something dramatic, comedic or both (why should Inauguration Day be different than any other?). Beyond Trump himself, though, the list of celebrity performers will be thin; certainly no one on par with Michael Jackson at the pinnacle of his career.

Not surprisingly, the best-known artists who have agreed to take part in Trump's party are conservative-leaning country music singers Toby Keith (“Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue”) and Lee Greenwood (“God Bless the USA”). Also on the bill are the Frontmen of Country. Add in the Piano Guys, DJ Ravidrums, 3 Doors Down and a 16-year-old finalist from “America's Got Talent”, Jackie Evancho, and that's about it.

Politically active rockers Bruce Springsteen and Jon Bon Jovi will not be there. Both campaigned for Hillary Clinton. A previously booked Springsteen cover band, the B Street Band, decided to cancel their longstanding gig with New Jersey's inauguration event out of respect for The Boss.

Elton John declined an invitation. That is no surprise, given that he is on record saying Trump's ascendance makes him “fear for the world.” Several other invited artists also made it quite clear why they did not want to come. Moby passed on an invitation, although he said he might show up if Trump released his tax returns as part of the deal. Rebecca Ferguson said she would sing only if allowed to perform the anti-lynching protest number “Strange Fruit”. Welsh songstress Charlotte Church refused the offer to perform, saying Trump is “a tyrant.”

Quite a few singers claimed to have scheduling conflicts that made it impossible for them to accept offers to perform, including Garth Brooks, KISS and Paul Anka. Maybe they really are that busy. Or maybe they were looking for a way to finesse the issue and avoid getting in trouble with their fans with an unambiguous yes or no.

Celine Dion simply said she was not interested after Trump's fellow casino owner, Steve Wynn, reportedly tried to get her to sing for the controversial new president.

Even a few marching bands pulled out of the post-inauguration parade.

Just as there are lots of Republicans among bankers and hedge-fund managers, a big proportion of free-thinking artistic types are liberals. Still, Republican presidents have never had much trouble finding talent to entertain at their inaugural events. Trump is simply different from anyone who came before him, Republican, Democrat, Whig or Federalist. He was an abnormal candidate who offended and frightened wide swaths of the electorate with his arrogance, boorishness, serial mendacity and authoritarian tendencies. Given that he is taking those same attitudes with him into the White House, his presidency seems destined to be abnormal as well.

It is no surprise that so many performing artists want no part of the attempt to normalize Trump.


http://www.latimes.com/opinion/topoftheticket/la-na-tt-inauguration-singers-20170117-story.html
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« Reply #5 on: January 21, 2017, 05:48:28 pm »


from the Los Angeles Times....

Surviving four years of Trump's huge ego and incurious mind

By DAVID HORSEY | 5:00AM PST - Friday, January 20, 2017



READY OR NOT, here he comes. Despite the magical thinking of some shell-shocked liberal folk who kept imagining something — something! — would happen to prevent Donald Trump from being sworn in as president of the United States, today it happens.

How bad will it be? If we are lucky, Trump will merely be an uncomfortable embarrassment, like a drunk uncle who grabs the microphone during toasts at a wedding and won't let go. That version of Trump was on display the day before the inauguration at a big soiree at Washington's Union Station. There, House and Senate Republicans, party operatives, Cabinet choices and fat-cat donors listened to Trump ramble on and free-associate.

Still talking as if he is a candidate, not a president, Trump, once again, reveled in his election victory. He claimed that he worked harder than any candidate in any election — ever. He said his win was so huge that electoral maps showing the voting results by county displayed a sea of Republican red with just a few tiny dots of Democratic blue. (He chose to ignore the reality that those blue dots are America's cities with tens of millions of people, while the swaths of red are the country's wide-open spaces where there are more cows than people.)

Pointing out his Cabinet picks in the crowd, he insisted they were the greatest of all-time, with a higher collective IQ than any other group of Cabinet officers in history. (Really? Energy Secretary-designate Rick Perry, who wanted to eliminate the department he will run until he found out what it actually does, surely is a big drag on that IQ number.) Then he talked about the concert he had just attended at the Lincoln Memorial and speculated that both the venue and the crowd size were unprecedented. (Actually, that was wrong. In 2009, a similar inaugural show was held for Barack Obama at the Lincoln shrine. It drew an audience of 400,000 and featured megastars Bruce Springsteen, Beyonce and U2.)

Between his typically preposterous boasts, Trump introduced nearly everyone in the room, including his personal party planner. He also chided donors in the hall, without naming them, who had waited until after the election to make contributions to his campaign. Oh, and he talked about how his hair might get wet and turn into a mess if rain fell on his inaugural shindig.

If Trump would merely spend the next four years bloviating, pumping up his ego and tweeting out little lies, it would be sometimes entertaining, generally tiresome and occasionally blush-inducing, but the republic would survive. Unfortunately, that is not the only Trump we will get. We will also be saddled with a president whose business interests will entangle him in a web of ethical conflicts, a president whose campaign staff is being investigated by the FBI for its possible communications with Russian officials, a president who has assembled a Cabinet — brilliant or not — that is stocked with Goldman Sachs billionaires, servants of the oil industry and at least a couple of buffoons.

Scariest of all is the Trump who is incurious about intelligence briefings, who, in fact, has indicated he believes he already knows more about our complex world than the nation's intelligence agencies (which he has compared to Nazis). This is the Trump who has made loose talk about using nuclear weapons, who has disparaged American allies and has a boy crush on Vladimir Putin. This is the Trump whose ignorance, arrogance, vindictiveness and impulsiveness could lead to calamity.

Time for more magical thinking — or a good, stiff drink.


http://www.latimes.com/opinion/topoftheticket/la-na-tt-surviving-trump-20170119-story.html
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« Reply #6 on: January 21, 2017, 05:49:03 pm »


Mark Morford

The day democracy died: An epitaph

By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist | 7:16AM PST - Friday, January 20, 2017



THIS MUCH This much we know: He is not going to step up. He is not going to pivot, or suddenly turn classy and shrewd, or reveal a surprisingly warm intelligence or thoughtful demeanor, one which makes us proud to have him representing our hobbled nation on the global stage. Just the opposite.

He will gain no kind of sure footing, inspire not a single iota of grace, compassion or dignity in those around him. He will relinquish no shred of the bloviated, terrifying reality-TV egomania that got him here, a place he very much does not at all belong, or deserve. Would that we could be so lucky.

No, on the day the pussy-grabbing, climate-denying, NATO-sneering, China-taunting, nuke-happy, Putin-fellating, woman-hating, neo-Nazi con-artist gameshow-host troll king officially ascends to the highest office in the land, we find a mad scramble across all media worldwide to locate a single bright spot, a silver lining, any kind of upside to this thuggish, deeply unstable man-child who is our 45th president, a brutishly vain, vindictive human chased by countless almost-certainly-true insinuations of vast corruption, crooked deals, massive debt, Russian hookers and flagrant tax evasion, sexual assault and ideological venality, all covered by a pocked orange skin as thin as tissue paper and twice as scaly.


A concierge desk, a golf course, a Sharpie, and a sexually abusive, pussy-grabbing creep. It's the president!The real America.
LEFT: A concierge desk, a golf course, a Sharpie, and a sexually abusive, pussy-grabbing creep. It's the president! | RIGHT: The real America.

And there is nothing, of course, to be found. There is no good news. No upside, no benefit either nationally or globally to a Trump presidency, AKA the end of common democracy as we know it, the convulsive death of the American experiment.

I have scoured the media, the analysts, the historians and the Trump biographers, and the best anyone can do is offer a meek possibility that the hatestorm that's coming just might not be as destructive as everyone knows it will be.

As many others have pointed out, liberals have no idea how bad it's about to get, what serious disfigurements Trump's policies are about to wreak. Then again, neither do most Republicans, and certainly not Trump voters themselves, a stunningly naïve, mal-educated voting bloc that's about to get smashed the hardest with the reality that their new king despises them most of all.




Did you note Joe Biden's final speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos? The unprecedented alarm he sounded of just how volatile it's about to get, the degree to which Trump's degenerate egomania and venal soul could very well destabilize the fundamental world order, destroy economies, set us all on a tailspin toward antagonism and war?

Rest assured, it's not because the new president has a sharp but divisive agenda, well planned but just a little bit… evil. Just the opposite: He has no clue whatsoever. He opines on topics he knows nothing about. He is guided by nothing but desperate vanity and lust for power at the lowest, most tawdry levels. He will never be a statesman, will never separate the interests of the nation from his own gross self-aggrandizement. And he knows, just like the rest of the world, that his presidency has as much legitimacy as a pedophile suddenly handed the keys to Toys R' Us.

I'm sorry, were you looking for a semblance of compassion for the alternative view, a calm call for unity among all positions and political opinions, a gratifying hint that we might just be OK through all of this?

You might have to look elsewhere. We will most certainly not be OK through all of this. We will not, as the world's foremost democracy, survive this intact or in any way healthy. We might survive it fractured and bleeding, hanging on by our moral fingernails as Trump's army of billionaires, conspiracy theorists, white supremacists, racists, torture fanatics and Wall Street robber barons rape the Constitution and the Treasury, and mock your beating heart.


I want YOU to suffer the gross indignities I'm about to inflict on the world!
I want YOU to suffer the gross indignities I'm about to inflict on the world!

The nightmare begins.
The nightmare begins.

Lincoln has never looked more ashamed or humiliated.
Lincoln has never looked more ashamed or humiliated.

Would that I were exaggerating. On this, everyone agrees: The Trumpocalypse is very real, and globally disturbing, representing vast and vulgar reversal of just about every noble and advantageous thing America had going for it. We had our problems, sure, but at least we worked to champion fundamental civil rights, women’s health, the immigrant narrative, healthy foreign relations, minority inclusion, individual autonomy, et al.

No longer. Trump's official policy is simple enough: a tiny, raging middle finger to everyone, and everything. No more do we as a country give a damn about immigrants. No more caring about the public health, the poor, improving public schools or roads or small businesses. To hell with reproductive choice and protection of women from rape culture. Climate science, vaccination for children, energy policy, China relations, respectful land use? Get serious. You think ISIS is bad? Trump's GOP is, at scale, by far the most dangerous organization in the world.

But don't take it from me. Take it from a senior envoy to one of our major allies, as told to New Yorker reporter Robin Wright, after Trump gave a particularly nasty interview to the foreign press:

What he's saying is so serious, so grave, that if you take it all seriously it's a world crisis. And he's saying it all in such a reckless and ignorant way that I suspect everyone is praying that this is not serious.

Does this qualify as an “upside?” That Trump is too ignorant of world affairs, too game-show bombastic to know if he's being serious? Did you note the creepy, entirely staged photo he took of himself “writing” his inauguration speech, sitting at the concierge desk at his tacky Florida golf resort, holding a Sharpie over a blank piece of paper, looking like a wax caricature of himself? There's your clue.


Keep saying it, a million more times.
Keep saying it, a million more times.

Let's hope so.
Let's hope so.

Aren't we all.
Aren't we all.

Bosom bedfellows.
Bosom bedfellows.

Perhaps there is one thing, a singular positive note amidst the gloom on this, the most nauseating inauguration day in modern American history — though it's less a silver lining and more an encouraging sign of life after you’ve just been told you have four weeks to live, and they will all be at gunpoint in the basement of a Hobby Lobby in rural Kansas.

It's this: The anti-Trump resistance is, very quickly, gaining real power.

The historic Woman's March is just the beginning, but it's a telling one. As Rolling Stone reported, all the most important progressive groups, from the ACLU to the Sierra Club to Planned Parenthood, are seeing huge surges in participation and donations. But more importantly, the progressive world is, in the words of PP CEO Cecile Richards, experiencing a moment of “enormous solidarity — our issues and, frankly, our activists are all connected.”

In short, progressives are quickly putting aside their differences and realizing, if we are to save our ideals, our loved ones and a sliver of our national pride, we must unify, clarify our goals and tactics, and yank the chain of flatulent oppression until the orange beast chokes to death on his own mangled tyranny.


This, times 100 million.
This, times 100 million.

The vacuous and the vain.
The vacuous and the vain.

Let's be clear. This is not, technically, a silver lining. After you've been mauled nearly to bloody, quivering death by an scowling orange demon with very tiny hands, the fact your big toe is still twitching is not an “upside.”

But on this, a day when democracy itself just took a serious bullet, it could be a sign that the shot might, just might, miss our most vital organs.


WORD!!
WORD!!

Remember this? Kindness and history and a remembrance of the advancement of civil rights? Hope so. You won't see anything remotely like it during the Trumpocalypse. Just the opposite, in fact.
Remember this? Kindness and history and a remembrance of the advancement of civil rights? Hope so.
You won't see anything remotely like it during the Trumpocalypse. Just the opposite, in fact.


Email: Mark Morford

Mark Morford on Twitter and Facebook.

http://blog.sfgate.com/morford/2017/01/20/the-day-democracy-died-an-epitaph
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« Reply #7 on: January 21, 2017, 05:49:32 pm »


from the Los Angeles Times....

Trump's ‘America first’ policy has a big fan in the Kremlin

By DAVID HORSEY | 3:45PM PST - Friday, January 20, 2017



THE central theme of President Donald Trump's inaugural address was “America first,” and, perversely, that may be very good news for Vladimir Putin and bad news for allies of the United States.

A new decree is going out across the world, Trump declared. “From this day forward, a new vision will govern our land,” he said. “From this day forward it is going to be America first, America first.”

Trump's vision, as detailed in his speech, is a dark one in which the country he now leads is besieged by drugs and gangs and crippled by bad schools and rusted factories. The United States has “defended other nations' borders while refusing to defend our own,” he said, and “spent trillions and trillions of dollars overseas while our infrastructure slipped into decay.” American factories have been shuttered and manufacturing sent overseas, Trump said, while “the wealth of our middle class has been ripped from their homes and redistributed across the world.”

The new president characterized it as an “American carnage.” The remedy he offered consisted of two rules: “Buy American and hire American.”

If it were just about economics, then the worst result of Trump's approach would be a trade war, not that such a thing would be pleasant or wise. But it carries deeper implications than that. The “America first” slogan is worrisome because it was first employed by fascist-sympathizing isolationists in the 1930s who thought Americans could tolerate the depredations and anti-democratic regimes of Hitler, Mussolini and Tojo and simply get on with business, protected by the moats of two oceans.

Trump justified his “decree” by saying, “All countries should be free to pursue their self interest.” To many, that makes perfect sense. Why shouldn't Americans put their interests ahead of the interests of others? What needs to be taken into account in answering that question is the fact that, since the end of the World War II, all the money spent abroad defending allies and aiding struggling countries in the developing world has served American interests very well. Yes, there were massive miscalculations — Vietnam and Iraq spring to mind — but, on balance, nearly eight decades of U.S. engagement, investment and leadership in international affairs has paid huge dividends, economically and politically.

So, there are a disturbing implications to Trump's words. Do they mean American resolve to defend the democracies of Europe and Asia will wither as we narrow our definition of national interest? And what would it mean if all countries are left free to pursue their narrow self interest?

It is easy to imagine what that means in the Kremlin: a return to a world where great powers divided up the globe and allowed each other a sphere of interest in which they could plunder smaller nations and abuse the rights of minority populations. This is precisely why Putin has been such a fan of Trump. He takes the new president's words as a signal, a green light to expand Russia's hegemony into the Baltic countries, Ukraine and beyond.

Is that what Trump means? The corollary to “America first” is, logically, “Russia first” in their sphere and “China first” in Asia. Will Poland and Germany and Japan and Korea be cut loose to defend themselves in a Trumpian world where it is every man for himself?

As the fledgling president's staffers redecorated the Oval Office for their boss, it is reported they brought a bust of Winston Churchill out of storage. If Trump's foreign policy turns out to be what Putin hopes it to be, it might be more fitting to put Churchill back in the the closet and install a likeness of Neville Chamberlain instead.


http://www.latimes.com/opinion/topoftheticket/la-na-tt-america-first-20170120-story.html
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« Reply #8 on: January 21, 2017, 05:50:14 pm »



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« Reply #9 on: January 22, 2017, 05:27:20 pm »


from The Washington Post....

On Day 2 of his presidency, Trump wages war with
the media over the size of his inauguration crowd


Trump insists that the crowd was six times the size reported
and lashes out at the media for ‘dishonest’ reporting.


By PHILIP BUMP | 6:04PM EST - Saturday, January 21, 2017

President Trump addresses intelligence officers at the Central Intelligence Agency headquarters on Saturday in Langley, Virginia. — Photograph: Olivier Douliery/European Pressphoto Agency.
President Trump addresses intelligence officers at the Central Intelligence Agency headquarters on Saturday in Langley, Virginia.
 — Photograph: Olivier Douliery/European Pressphoto Agency.


PRESIDENT TRUMP took advantage of a visit to the American intelligence community to insult the intelligence of the American people.

Speaking at CIA headquarters in Virginia on Saturday, Trump challenged media characterizations of the crowd size at his inauguration a day earlier. In doing so, he presented preposterous arguments about the actual attendance.

“We had a massive field of people, you saw that. Packed,” Trump said to the audience. “I get up this morning, I turn on one of the networks and they show … an empty field. I said, wait a minute, I made a speech! I looked out, the field was … it looked like a million, a million-and-a-half people. They showed a field where there were practically nobody standing there. And they said, ‘Donald Trump did not draw well!’”

Trump blamed the “almost raining” weather, saying that God kept it from raining during his speech. “It looked, honestly, it looked like a million-and-a-half people,” he continued. “Whatever it was it was, but it went all the way back to the Washington Monument. And I turned on — by mistake, I get this network, and it showed an empty field and it said we drew 250,000 people. Now that's not bad, but it's a lie. We had 250,000 literally around, you know, in the little bowl that we constructed. That was 250,000. The rest of the, you know, 20-block area all the way back to the Washington Monument was packed.”

“So, we caught them,” he said, apparently referring to the media. “And we caught them in a beauty and I think they're going to pay a big price.”

This is simply nonsense.

It is very hard to judge crowd size from within a crowd, as we pointed out on Friday. Looking out over a sea of people makes it hard to gauge where there are gaps in the audience; Trump's vantage point during the inauguration was one of the worst possible places from which to make such a determination. Aerial photos show very clearly that there huge empty areas in the crowd moving back from the Capitol Building.

Here's a comparison that The Washington Post's graphics team made with the 2009 inauguration.




Those white areas are the “empty fields” Trump likely says the network showed. And they showed those empty areas because they existed. Our Ben Terris was a bit to the east of the Washington Monument about an hour before the speech began. You can see that, from his vantage point, there was a gigantic swath of empty space. An empty field, if you will.



Trump, speaking from the barely visible Capitol, would not have been able to see the empty white space as readily. To him, it may well have looked like the crowd stretched all the way back.

The inaugural committee did print nearly 250,000 tickets to attend the event, covering the areas in color on the map below. It's not clear if all of those tickets were used or if they corresponded one-to-one to seating, since the numbered regions on that map were filled with chairs, limiting capacity. Notice, too, that the colored regions include areas that stretch back past the reflecting pool.




The 250,000-person estimate to which Trump referred probably comes from Dan Gross, who helped coordinate crowds for former president Barack Obama's 2012 inauguration. He tweeted the figure on Friday.



Kenneth Still, an expert in crowd sizes, told The New York Times that he estimated the turnout at about a third of the count for Obama in 2009. (The Times also has clear comparisons of the crowds that year with those on Friday.) The total audience eight years ago was estimated at 1.8 million — putting Trump's number somewhere closer to 600,000.

A critical lesson in this is that crowd estimates are tricky and that our sense of the scale of big numbers is iffy. If Trump made up the number 1.5 million — and it seems likely that he did, given that he wavered between 1 million and 50 percent more as he was talking — he added a huge number of additional people. A noticeably huge number. Compare the visual difference between 250,000, 600,000 and 1.5 million.




Trump's new press secretary, Sean Spicer, spoke briefly to the press several hours after Trump addressed the CIA.

“Photographs of the inaugural proceeding were intentionally framed in a way, in one particular tweet,” he said, “to minimize the enormous support that had gathered on the national Mall.” He's presumably referring to this tweet from The Boston Globe's Matt Viser, which was retweeted more than 20,000 times.




The use of white “floor coverings,” Spicer said, unfairly highlighted areas where people were not standing, as in the comparison photographs at the top of this article. (He claimed this was a first; it was not.) His implication is that the crowd looked more sparse as a result. (You may be the judge of that.) Further, he noted that security measures extended further down the Mall than in years past, meaning that “hundreds of thousands” of people were unable to get into the Mall as quickly.

Spicer claimed that 420,000 people used public transit in Washington on the day of the inauguration, surpassing the 317,000 that used it for the 2013 event. It's not clear where that number comes from. The Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority compared ridership by 11 a.m. from the past four inaugurations on Friday; Trump's was the lowest.




(Ridership for those attending Saturday's anti-Trump rallies, incidentally, was 42 percent higher than by 11 a.m. on Friday.) Over the course of the day, our Luz Lazo reports, there were nearly 571,000 trips taken on January 20th — versus 1.1 million in 2009 and 782,000 in 2013.

Noting that there are no official estimates of crowd size, Spicer also walked through the capacities of various parts of the Mall, totaling 720,000 people. That included space from Fourth Street NW to the “media tent” — the area where Terris was filmed — and from the media tent to the Washington Monument, both of which he said were “full when the president took the oath of office.” (You may be the judge of that, too.) Even if those areas were full, this is still less than half of the figure that Trump presented to the CIA. Spicer noted that more people watched the inauguration online and on television, which is true — but also isn't the claim that his boss was making.


White House press secretary Sean Spicer makes a statement to members of the media at the James Brady Press Briefing Room of the White House on Saturday. — Photograph: Alex Wong/Getty Images.
White House press secretary Sean Spicer makes a statement to members of the media at the James Brady Press Briefing Room
of the White House on Saturday. — Photograph: Alex Wong/Getty Images.


Complaints about the media misrepresenting his audience size are not new for Trump. During the campaign he routinely inflated attendance at his rallies. In one notorious incident that parallels Saturday's complaints neatly, he got angry at CNN for saying that he spoke to a half-empty room, insisting that the crowd had rushed forward to hear him speak. That also wasn't true; the room was demonstrably only half-full.

At that point, though, Trump was just a regular old candidate for office. On Saturday, he was the newly inaugurated president of the United States.


• Philip Bump writes about politics at The Washington Post for The Fix. He is based in New York City.

__________________________________________________________________________

More on this topic:

 • VIDEO: White House press secretary berates media for Inauguration coverage

 • VIDEO: Trump questions media reports of inauguration crowd size

 • VIDEO: Trump's full speech at CIA headquarters

 • Trump wages war against the media as demonstrators protest his presidency — 8:26PM EST - Saturday, January 21, 2017

 • Trump's press secretary lashes out at press, calling crowd coverage ‘shameful and wrong’ — 6:43PM EST - Saturday, January 21, 2017

 • Metro Inauguration Day trips top 500,000, but still lowest since 2005 — 5:37PM EST - Saturday, January 21, 2017

 • Trump, in CIA visit, attacks media for coverage of his inaugural crowds — 4:38PM EST - Saturday, January 21, 2017


https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2017/01/21/on-day-two-of-his-presidency-trump-wages-war-with-the-media-over-the-size-of-his-inauguration-crowd
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« Reply #10 on: January 22, 2017, 08:48:08 pm »


from The Washington Post....

Women's marches: More than one million protesters
vow to resist President Trump


From Washington to Los Angeles to London, the crowds were gigantic and historic.

By PERRY STEIN, STEVE HENDRIX and ABIGAIL HAUSIOHNER | 8:20PM EST - Saturday, January 21, 2017

With U.S. Capitol in the background, a crowd fills the streets on Washington during the Women's March. — Photograph: Oliver Contreras/The Washington Post.
With U.S. Capitol in the background, a crowd fills the streets on Washington during the Women's March.
 — Photograph: Oliver Contreras/The Washington Post.


MORE THAN 1 million people gathered in Washington and in cities around the country and the world Saturday to mount a roaring rejoinder to the inauguration of President Trump. What started as a Facebook post by a Hawaii retiree became an unprecedented international rebuke of a new president that packed cities large and small — from London to Los Angeles, Paris to Park City, Utah, Miami to Melbourne, Australia.

The organizers of the Women's March on Washington, who originally sought a permit for a gathering of 200,000, said Saturday that as many as half a million people participated.

Many in the nation's capital and other cities said they were inspired to join because of Trump's divisive campaign and his disparagement of women, minorities and immigrants. In signs and shouts, they mocked what they characterized as Trump's lewd language and sexist demeanor.

The marches provided a balm for those eager to immerse themselves in a like-minded sea of citizens who shared their anxiety and disappointment after Democrat Hillary Clinton's historic bid for the presidency ended in defeat.

“We just want to make sure that we're heard,” said Mona Osuchukwu, 27, a D.C. native. “I want her to know that she has a voice,” she said of her 3-year-old daughter, Chioma, who was with her at the march. “No matter what anyone tells her, especially as a black woman in America.”

The Washington demonstration was amplified by gatherings around the world, with march organizers listing more than 670 events nationwide and overseas in cities including Tel Aviv, Barcelona, Mexico City, Berlin and Yellowknife in Canada's Northwest Territories, where the temperature was 6 degrees below zero.

In Chicago, the demonstration was overwhelmed by its own size, after 150,000 demonstrators swamped downtown blocks. It forced officials to curtail their planned march, although thousand of protesters still paraded around the Loop. In Boston, police estimated a gathering of 125,000. In Los Angeles, officials temporarily closed some side streets to accommodate the crowds.

“We are doing our best to facilitate, because they are squeezing into every street right now,” said Captain Andrew Neiman of the Los Angeles Police Department.

New York, Miami, Denver and Seattle also had huge gatherings.

In Juneau, Alaska, one man marveled that the crowd was the biggest he had ever seen on the state Capitol's steps. In Philadelphia, marchers filled city bridges. In Lexington, Kentucky, they shut down streets. In New Orleans, participants played brass instruments.

The fear — and anger — about Trump's rise to the most powerful position in the United States reverberated at renowned protest sites around the world, from the Trocadero in Paris to Trafalgar Square in London.

Marina Knight, a 43-year-old executive assistant, and her 9-year-old daughter were two of the tens of thousands marching in London.

“This is her first march,” Knight said, referring to her daughter. “It's the first time we felt it was vital to march. I feel the rights we take for granted could go backward, and we owe it to our daughters and the next generation to fix this somehow.”

In the United States, the crowds marched in weather ranging from balmy to snowy. But common to every gathering was fiery rhetoric, pink knit hats and repeated references to the boast that offended so many women: Trump’s infamous taped comments in 2005 about groping women’s genitals.

Among the thousands of signs that marchers dumped at the end of the day in front of the Trump International Hotel, just blocks from his new home at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue: “Pussy Power” and “This Pussy Bites Back”. Protesters got as close as they could to the presidential mansion, crowding metal barriers less than a block away as police and Secret Service personnel watched closely.

Demonstrators came to Washington from around the country, sometimes sleeping on the couches of people they had never met. As of 4 p.m. Saturday, Metro had recorded more than 597,000 trips, a weekend ridership record. By comparison, as of 4 p.m. on Inauguration Day, there were 368,000 trips. The city issued about 1,800 bus parking permits for the march, and Amtrak added extra trains in and out of Union Station.

The huge crowd delighted iconic feminist Gloria Steinem, 82, who was among the first speakers. “This is the upside of the downside,” she exulted. “This is an outpouring of democracy like I've never seen in my very long life.”

Clinton did not attend the march but tweeted her gratitude: “Thanks for standing, speaking & marching for our values @womensmarch. Important as ever. I truly believe we're always stronger together.”

The size of the gathering proved challenging. The audio from sound system did not reach everyone in the massive crowd, and far more portable toilets were needed.

When the toilets behind the stage broke down, security instructed women to use cups and ushered them into a box truck for privacy.

“I'm afraid to shake anyone's hand,” one woman joked.

Although the marchers were mostly female and white, men and people of color also joined the throngs.

John Fischer, a 34-year-old locksmith from Grand Rapids, Michigan, drove more than nine hours with his wife, Kara Eagle.

I'm here to support my wife,” Fischer said. “I don't care who you are, women impact your life, and there's no reason why they shouldn't have the same rights as men.”

Cynthia English, a 61-year-old Jamaican American who lives in Florida, said she wants the new president to know that women will be fighting during his presidency to ensure that the country and laws treat them equally. She was with her daughter and marching for her two granddaughters in the hope that no future president feels comfortable making lewd comments about women.

“I don't want this to happen to them 20 years from now, so I am making my mark now,” said English, who wondered, “Why are we the ones that bring people into this world, and we are treated the worst? We should be treated with respect.”

The crowd was buoyant, even joyous. Many held up signs — “I Am Very Upset!” and “Love Trumps Hate” and “Bridges Not Walls” — while others took videos of the experience on their cellphones. Every few minutes, a rolling roar swept over them.

D.C. police said they had made no march-related arrests, compared with more than 200 Friday when protesters created chaos in downtown Washington.

March organizers briefly considered suspending the formal march to the Ellipse out of concern that the crowd had grown too large to safely navigate the route to the White House. But speakers soon told the marchers to set out.

Lorraine LaHuta, 66, who came to the march from New York City, said that at times she wasn't sure where to go, but that it never felt chaotic. “It was organized disorganization that worked very well,” she said.

Judith Snyder-Wagner, a 67-year-old former fundraising consultant, came because she sensed a shift in the rural, blue-collar community near Canton, Ohio, where she lives with her wife, Joy. A neighbor mowed a piece of grass along their property line and put up a Trump sign facing their home. Someone recently drove through the neighborhood flying a Confederate flag.

“We've been afraid,” she said, her voice quavering. She was limping up the sidewalk on Independence Avenue. She has had both her knee and hip replaced, and she held a cane in one hand and a poster in the other. “We just feel like we're going to lose our civil rights.”

The couple boarded a bus at 1 a.m. Saturday in Ohio and would head home less than 24 hours later. “We needed to feel inspired,” Joy Snyder-Wagner said, looking around. “And we do.”

Trump's election was the wake-up call that progressives needed, said Erin Edlow, 28, the membership director of the Virginia Beach Young Democrats. She was in town with her sister to demonstrate her support for the rights of immigrants and of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people.

“Democracy is not a spectator sport,” Edlow said.

The march turned into a star-studded event, with celebrities such as Madonna, Janelle Monáe, Scarlett Johansson and Ashley Judd making appearances. D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (Democrat) introduced herself as a proud “chick mayor” and implored the Republican majority in Congress to stop meddling in the District's local lawmaking.

Activist filmmaker Michael Moore ripped a copy of The Washington Post in half, noting the headline “Trump takes power” and declaring, “I don't think so.” Actress America Ferrera said that “our new president is waging a war” on the values that define the country with “a credo of hate fear and suspicion of one another.”

“It's been a heart-rending time to be both a woman and an immigrant,” said Ferrera, whose parents are from Honduras. “Our dignity, our character, our rights have been under attack.”

“But the president is not America,” she said. “We are America.”

As the march grew in prominence, it highlighted long-existing racial and political rifts in the feminist movement. The initial organizers were white women — a group that narrowly voted for Trump in November — although they quickly handed its leadership over to a diverse group of longtime organizers from New York.

They have embraced an imperiled liberal agenda, in sharp contrast to much of what Trump laid out for his presidency. The march platform focused on issues such as workers' rights, reproductive rights, environmental justice, immigrant rights, ending violence against women and more.

But a group of women who oppose abortion also came, beseeching the larger march to recognize their variety of feminism. Whether to include the conservative viewpoint sparked controversy in the days before the event. Antiabortion activists said they were excluded.

Siobhan Rooney, 32, drove from Philadelphia on Saturday morning to march for women's rights. For her, that includes the rights of fetuses.

“We are in the same page on so many issues. It's just this one issue,” she said.

Teresa Shook, who is in her 60s, was on hand to marvel at what emerged from her original proposal for a march in a November post on Facebook. The grandmother of four from outside Honolulu accepted hug and after hug as the crowd surged around her.

“This is the woman who came up with the idea for today's march,” one woman said. “Thank you!” shouted another.

“I'm so blown away,” Shook said.


• Perry Stein covers D.C., Maryland and Virginia for The Washington Post.

• Steve Hendrix came to The Washington Post more than ten years ago from the world of magazine freelancing and has written for just about every page of the paper: Travel, Style, the Magazine, Book World, Foreign, National and, most recently, the Metro section's Enterprise Team.

• Abigail Hauslohner is a national reporter who covers Islam, Arab affairs and America for The Washington Post. Before coming to Washington in 2015, she spent seven years covering war, politics and religion in the Middle East, and served as The Post's Cairo bureau chief. She has also covered District politics and government.

__________________________________________________________________________

More on this topic:

 • PHOTOGRAPH GALLERY: Photos from the scene of the Women's March on Washington

 • PHOTOGRAPH GALLERY: See activists around the nation and world as they unite for Women's March

 • VIDEO: Massive crowds gather for the women's March on Washington

 • VIDEO: Bird's-eye view shows huge crowds marching towards White House

 • VIDEO: Women's March protests go global

 • VIDEO: Madonna: ‘We are not afraid’

 • On first day in the White House bubble, no mention of protesters outside

 • At the Women's March, it's the men who mattered most. Here's why.

 • She's 54, white, rural and a lifelong Republican. Why is she protesting Donald Trump?

 • Massive Women's March crowd starts trip home; Metro warns against overwhelming stations

 • Is there a place at the Women's March for women who are politically opposed to abortion?

 • CARTOON GALLERY: The Donald Trump transition to the presidency, through the eyes of America's cartoonists


https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/womens-march-on-washington-a-sea-of-pink-hatted-protesters-vow-to-resist-donald-trump/2017/01/21/ae4def62-dfdf-11e6-acdf-14da832ae861_story.html
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« Reply #11 on: January 23, 2017, 05:56:55 pm »


from The Washington Post....

Trump won't release his tax returns because
people don't care, top adviser says


The president's senior aide indicated a marked shift from Trump's pledge
during the campaign to make his returns public once an audit was complete.


By JOHN WAGNER | 11:14AM EST - Sunday, January 22, 2017

Kellyanne Conway talks to reporters at Trump Tower in New York last month. — Photograph: Evan Vucci/Associated Press.
Kellyanne Conway talks to reporters at Trump Tower in New York last month. — Photograph: Evan Vucci/Associated Press.

A SENIOR AIDE to President Trump said on Sunday that he has no plans to release his tax returns, a marked shift from Trump's pledge during the campaign to make them public once an audit was completed.

“The White House response is that he's not going to release his tax returns,” said Kellyanne Conway, counselor to the president, on ABC's “This Week”, “We litigated this all through the election.”

“People didn't care,” Conway added. “They voted for him, and let me make this very clear: Most Americans are — are very focused on what their tax returns will look like while President Trump is in office, not what his look like.”

Presidents are not required to release their tax returns, but presidents dating back to Richard Nixon have routinely done so voluntarily.

A Washington Post-ABC poll last week showed that Trump's continued refusal to release his tax returns continues to be an unpopular decision, with 74 percent of Americans saying he should make the documents public, including 53 percent of Republicans.

Conway was questioned about a petition page on the White House website that allows citizens to ask government officials to take up issues of importance to them. Under former president Barack Obama, the White House would give a response to petitions that garnered more than 100,000 signatures online.

As of Sunday evening, a petition for Trump to immediately release his tax returns had received more than 228,000 signatures.


More than 113,000 people signed a petition in less that 24 hours urging President Trump to release his tax returns. Trump was sworn in as the nation's 45th president on Friday. — Photograph: Mark Wilson/Getty Images.
More than 113,000 people signed a petition in less that 24 hours urging President Trump to release his tax returns.
Trump was sworn in as the nation's 45th president on Friday. — Photograph: Mark Wilson/Getty Images.


During the campaign and since then, Democrats consistently criticized Trump for not releasing his returns, saying that information was needed to evaluate conflicts that might be posed by his vast business holdings.

“You know full well that Trump — President Trump and his family are complying with all the ethical rules, everything they need to do to step away from his businesses and be a full-time president,” said Conway, who previously served as Trump's campaign manager.

As recently as at a press conference this month, Trump pointed to an ongoing audit as the reason he couldn't release his tax returns.

“I'm not releasing the tax returns because as you know they're under audit,” he said.


• John Wagner is a national political reporter covering the White House for The Washington Post.

__________________________________________________________________________

Related story:

 • The White House petitions page is still live. The top one calls for Trump's tax returns.


https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2017/01/22/trump-wont-release-his-tax-returns-because-people-dont-care-top-adviser-says
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« Reply #12 on: January 23, 2017, 05:57:09 pm »


from The Washington Post....

Kellyanne Conway says Donald Trump’s team has
‘alternative facts’. Which pretty much says it all.


After the president’s press secretary made easily disproved claims about
the size of the inauguration crowd, chief counselor Kellyanne Conway
sparred on “Meet the Press” with Chuck Todd, who said,
“Alternative facts are not facts.”


By AARON BLAKE | 11:38AM - Sunday, January 22, 2017

Kellyanne Conway, counselor to President Trump, prepares to appear during Sunday on NBC's “Meet The Press”. — Photograph: Mark Wilson/Getty Images.
Kellyanne Conway, counselor to President Trump, prepares to appear during Sunday on NBC's “Meet The Press”.
 — Photograph: Mark Wilson/Getty Images.


IF there is one video clip that describes the new reality for the political media — and for the truth — during the President Trump era, it is this one:



It's a discussion about White House press secretary Sean Spicer, on his first full day in that job, having taken to the podium and made easily disproved claims about the size of Trump's inauguration crowd.

“Why put him out there for the very first time, in front of that podium, to utter a provable falsehood?” Chuck Todd asked Kellyanne Conway, counselor to the president. “It's a small thing, but the first time he confronts the public, it's a falsehood?”

After some tense back and forth, Conway offered this:

Don't be so overly dramatic about it, Chuck. You're saying it's a falsehood, and they're giving … our press secretary, Sean Spicer, gave alternative facts to that. But the point really is …

At this point, a visibly exasperated Todd cut in. “Wait a minute. Alternative facts? Alternative facts? Four of the five facts he uttered … were just not true. Alternative facts are not facts; they're falsehoods.”

“Fake news” is so yesterday. “Alternative facts” is where it's at now.

This, of course, isn't the first time the Trump team and its supporters have responded to journalists calling out their falsehoods by claiming the truth isn't so black and white or that it's not a big deal.

Former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski offered this after the election, comparing Trump with a guy at the bar and saying, “You're going to say things, and sometimes you don't have all the facts to back it up.”

That same week, pro-Trump CNN pundit Scottie Nell Hughes offered this on Diane Rehm's show:

One thing that's been interesting this campaign season to watch is that people that say facts are facts — they're not really facts. Everybody has a way — it's kind of like looking at ratings or looking at a glass of half-full water. Everybody has a way of interpreting them to be the truth or not true. There's no such thing, unfortunately anymore, of facts.

Hughes is not an official spokesman for the Trump team, but that last comment is basically what Conway is arguing today — that there are so many shades of gray that clear facts just don't really exist.

This, of course, is a hugely cynical worldview. But it's about the only way the Trump team can fight back, given how questionable the new president's purported facts have been throughout his time as a politician. Whether you like Trump or not, it's demonstrably true that he says things that are easily proved false, over and over again. The question the media has regularly confronted is not whether Trump's facts are correct but whether to say he's deliberately lying or not.

A memo is circulating on social media right now that claims to be from someone who worked in a past White House and tries to explain what the Trump team is doing.




It's not clear where this memo came from, but no matter the provenance, it makes some good points. Trump himself has been using his own brand of the truth, which is often false, for months. And there was really no way that his administration wasn't going to have to deal with that same tendency during his presidency.

On Saturday in Spicer's statement and now during Sunday in Conway's interview, the two are attempting to set a precedent that says they don't recognize the concept of facts as the media has come to define them; they have their own “alternative facts” and they'll rely on those.

And as brazen as it is, it's likely to appeal to that one-third of Americans the memo describes as being Trump's base. Polls have regularly shown a large portion of Republicans are more apt to believe Trump's claims even if they are pretty patently false, as Washington Post columnist Catherine Rampell wrote last month. It's a symptom of media distrust.

The New York Times's Glenn Thrush tweeted this Saturday after Spicer's statement:




Both “fake news” and the concept of “alternative facts” are now cudgels in the effort to obfuscate when reporters point out that Trump and his team have their facts wrong. Welcome to our new political reality — or rather, realities.

• Aaron Blake is senior political reporter at The Washington Post for The Fix.

__________________________________________________________________________

More on this topic:

 • VIDEO: Trump's team responds after his controversial first day

 • The perfect meme for the ‘alternative facts’ era: #seanspicersays

 • Kellyanne Conway sports a glittery Trump pin designed by jeweler Ann Hand


https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2017/01/22/kellyanne-conway-says-donald-trumps-team-has-alternate-facts-which-pretty-much-says-it-all
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« Reply #13 on: January 23, 2017, 05:57:26 pm »


from The Washington Post....

The traditional way of reporting on a president
is dead. And Trump's press secretary killed it.


Sean Spicer's remarks about the audience for Trump's inauguration were
full of falsehoods, and they should inspire journalists to dig in and pay far
more attention to actions than sensational tweets or briefing-room lies.


By MARGARET SULLIVAN | 4:53PM EST - Sunday, January 22, 2017

White House press secretary Sean Spicer held his first official briefing with the media in the White House on Saturday. — Photograph: Andrew Harnik/Associated Press.
White House press secretary Sean Spicer held his first official briefing with the media in the White House on Saturday.
 — Photograph: Andrew Harnik/Associated Press.


THE PRESIDENCY is not a reality show, but President Trump on his first full day in office made clear that he’s still obsessed with being what he once proudly called “a ratings machine.”

He cares enough about it to send his press secretary, Sean Spicer, out to brazenly lie to the media in his first official briefing.

“This was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration — period — both in person and around the globe,” Spicer said. And he added a scolding about widespread reports that differ from his evidence-free assessment: “These attempts to lessen the enthusiasm of the inauguration are shameful and wrong.”

Crowd size experts estimate Trump's audience at far fewer than the million or more that Trump is claiming, and at far less than the size of the following day's women's march, which the new president has said little about. And side-by-side photographs showed the contrast between the comparatively thin gathering for Trump's inauguration and the record-setting one in 2009 for former president Barack Obama's first.

Ari Fleischer, a former George W. Bush press secretary, saw Saturday's bizarre session for what it was.

“This is called a statement you’re told to make by the President. And you know the President is watching,” Fleischer wrote. (MSNBC's Mika Brzezinski pegged it as “Sean Spicer's first hostage video.”)

The mainstream media, including The Washington Post, appropriately made clear note of the falsehoods about crowd size. The New York Times called out “false claims” in a prominent headline, and many broadcast journalists challenged Spicer immediately — although they didn't get a chance to do so to his face, since he took no questions.

CNN wisely chose not to air the briefing in full, but to report on it and to show parts, providing context. Fox News showed it in its full glory, infomercial style.

Some journalists, afterward, sounded stunned at what had transpired.

“Astonishing,” said Jim Acosta of CNN. “Jaw meet floor” was the reaction of Glenn Thrush of The New York Times.

The reaction is understandable. Some semblance of truth from the White House ought to be reasonable enough, especially on Day Two.

But nothing about this should shock.

Anyone — citizen or journalist — who is surprised by false claims from the new inhabitant of the Oval Office hasn't been paying attention. That was reinforced when Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway told “Meet the Press” on Sunday that Spicer had been providing “alternative facts” to what the media had reported, making it clear we've gone full Orwell.

Official words do matter, but they shouldn't be what news organizations pay most attention to, as they try to present the truth about a new administration.

White House press briefings are “access journalism,” in which official statements — achieved by closeness to the source — are taken at face value and breathlessly reported as news. And that is over. Dead.

Spicer's statement should be seen for what it is: Remarks made over the casket at the funeral of access journalism.

As Jessica Huseman of ProPublica put it: “Journalists aren't going to get answers from Spicer. We are going to get answers by digging. By getting our hands dirty. So let's all do that.”

She's right. So was Tim O'Brien, executive editor of Bloomberg View and a Trump biographer, who urged journalists to remember that the White House briefing room is “spoon-feeding and Trump is a habitual fabulist.”

There's a deeper story here, beyond a single briefing, no matter how memorable. Saturday made clearer than ever that President Trump intends to make the American media his foremost enemy.

During his first official visit to the CIA, Trump once again attacked the media, as he did throughout the campaign as he blacklisted news organizations and called reporters “scum.”

Journalists shouldn't rise to the bait and decide to treat Trump as an enemy. Recalling at all times that their mission is truth-telling and holding public officials accountable, they should dig in, paying far more attention to actions than to sensational tweets or briefing-room lies — while still being willing to call out falsehoods clearly when they happen.

They also should quickly acknowledge and correct their own inevitable errors, as Time's Zeke Miller did — multiple times and with an apology — after erroneously reporting that a bust of Martin Luther King Jr. had been removed from the Oval Office.

That didn't keep the president from making Miller's reporting error a major issue as he raged during his CIA visit: “This is how dishonest the media is.”

Trump wants a flat-out war with the nation's media for one well-calculated reason: Because he believes it will continue to serve his political purposes, as it has for months.

Journalists should respond by doing their jobs responsibly, fairly and fearlessly, in service of the public good.

Somebody has to be the grown-up in the room. We've just been reminded of who it won't be.


• Margaret Sullivan is The Washington Post's media columnist. Previously, she was The New York Times' public editor, and the chief editor of The Buffalo News, her hometown paper.

__________________________________________________________________________

More on this topic:

 • VIDEO: White House press secretary's inauguration claims, annotated

 • Fact Checker: 4 Pinocchios for Spicer's claims about the inauguration crowd

 • It's usually difficult for people to agree on a crowd's size. Here's why.


https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/the-traditional-way-of-reporting-on-a-president-is-dead-and-trumps-press-secretary-killed-it/2017/01/22/75403a00-e0bf-11e6-a453-19ec4b3d09ba_story.html
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« Reply #14 on: January 23, 2017, 05:57:50 pm »


from the Los Angeles Times....

Trump's White House sets an unapologetically
aggressive tone in its first days


By MICHAEL A. MEMOLI and BRIAN BENNETT | 5:00PM PST - Sunday, January 22, 2017

Advisors to President Trump swear an oath of service Sunday in the White House. In the front row are Kellyanne Conway, left, Jared Kushner, Stephen Bannon and Chief of Staff Reince Priebus. — Photograph: Andrew Harnik/Associated Press.
Advisors to President Trump swear an oath of service Sunday in the White House. In the front row are Kellyanne Conway, left,
Jared Kushner, Stephen Bannon and Chief of Staff Reince Priebus. — Photograph: Andrew Harnik/Associated Press.


ONE BY ONE, just hours after President Trump's inauguration, some of his most senior aides made the short journey from their new West Wing offices to the press briefing room.

Press Secretary Sean Spicer stood for a moment behind the lectern where he will conduct news briefings. Stephen Bannon, chief strategist, took note of the cramped quarters many correspondents worked in. And Kellyanne Conway exchanged pleasantries with the reporters and photographers who will document the administration.

Within 48 hours, what had seemed to be a goodwill tour instead appeared to have been a reconnaissance mission, the new administration sizing up a prominent adversary.

“As you know, I have a running war with the media,” Trump later said to CIA employees.

The presidential campaign is over, but Trump aides stuck to their election-year tactics in their first weekend in the White House. Over and over, aides laid down markers that they would continue to unapologetically present their version of events and challenge any perceived slights.

On Sunday, the day many were formally installed to their positions as assistants to the president, Trump advisors defended the White House's attacks on the media and its incorrect claims about the size of the crowd at the inauguration, accusing news organizations of trying to undermine the president's legitimacy.

Challenged by “Meet The Press” host Chuck Todd about why Spicer had been dispatched a day earlier to deliver a statement with provably false crowd data, Conway made a startling characterization, that Spicer had offered “alternative facts.”

“You're saying it's a falsehood. And Sean Spicer, our press secretary, gave alternative facts to that,” Conway told the NBC host, who immediately interjected with his disbelief over her description.

Conway eventually backed off Spicer's claims. “I don't think you can prove those numbers one way or the another,” she said. “There's no way to really quantify crowds.”

Police and cities do use statistical methods to estimate crowd sizes to protect public safety during large events. And scientists used available evidence to tally Friday's attendance on the National Mall.

When news outlets presented comparisons of Trump's inauguration crowds with ones for former President Obama's inaugurals, whether by airing broadcast footage or publishing side-by-side photographs, Trump advisors saw, as Chief of Staff Reince Priebus characterized it, an “obsession by the media to delegitimize this president.”

“And we are not going to sit around and let it happen," he told “Fox News Sunday”.

In his Saturday evening press statement, Spicer also accused reporters of seeking to sow division. Priebus and Conway made a supplemental argument on Sunday: that by reporting on and fact-checking the grievances expressed by the president and his aides, journalists were overlooking more substantive matters.

Their point was undermined by Trump tweeting hours earlier about television ratings for his inaugural — “11 million more than the very good ratings from 4 years ago!” His emphasis on Obama's second inaugural ignored that first inaugurations historically draw more viewers.

Every new White House experiments with different approaches for communicating its message. Obama, in an interview with former aides just before the end of his presidency, said that if he could offer advice to himself eight years earlier, it would be to “spend more time thinking about new ways of communicating with the American people.”

“You can't be so intimidated by the way things have been done in the White House because the communications landscape is shifting,” he said on the “Pod Save America” podcast.

But Trump aides risked damaging the administration's credibility with such public admonitions over provably false claims. That could impede their efforts to build support for Trump's agenda beyond his most committed backers.

Indeed, Trump was dismissive of the massive public protests in Washington and around the world on Saturday that grew out of opposition to his election.

“Was under the impression that we just had an election! Why didn't these people vote? Celebs hurt cause badly,” he tweeted.

He acknowledged in a follow-up message the marchers' right to demonstrate, saying, “Peaceful protests are a hallmark of our democracy.”

Later during Sunday, in his first appearance in the White House's grand East Room as president, Trump turned to the more sober governing tasks ahead. He offered condolences to storm victims in the Southeast before highlighting conversations with foreign leaders.

British Prime Minister Theresa May is set to visit on Friday, followed by a summit next week with Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto to discuss, among other issues, the North American Free Trade Agreement. Trump campaigned extensively on renegotiating free-trade deals.

“Anybody ever hear of NAFTA?” he asked in jest. “I ran a campaign somewhat based on NAFTA.”

Trump also spoke of a “very nice” conversation with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu by phone, amid speculation that among his first foreign policy acts would be to move the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, long a goal of many influential Jewish Republicans in the U.S. Both Israel and the Palestinians lay claim to Jerusalem.

Spicer said in a statement that the administration was “at the very beginning stages of even discussing this subject.” The White House later said that the two leaders discussed the threat posed by Iran, and that Trump emphasized that peace between Israel and the Palestinians could only be negotiated directly between the two sides — an affirmation of longstanding U.S. policy.

In the East Room, Trump also made note of a graceful letter from Obama that he had found waiting for him in the Oval Office.

Holding it up, he added: “We won't even tell the press what's in that letter.”


__________________________________________________________________________

Related stories:

 • Massive marches and a cranky new president. We're certainly off to a colorful start

 • Trump boasts and attacks the media in solemn CIA setting

 • Trump is sworn in as president, a divisive, singular figure promising to lift up ‘the forgotten’


http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-pol-trump-20170122-story.html
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« Reply #15 on: January 23, 2017, 05:58:04 pm »


from the Los Angeles Times....

When the presidency and television ratings collide

By LORRAINE ALI | 6:55PM PST - Sunday, January 22, 2017

President Trump waves after taking the oath of office as his wife Melania, left, holds a Bible, and daughter Tiffany Trump looks out to the crowd on Friday in Washington, D.C. — Photograph: Jim Bourg/Associated Press.
President Trump waves after taking the oath of office as his wife Melania, left, holds a Bible, and daughter Tiffany Trump looks out
to the crowd on Friday in Washington, D.C. — Photograph: Jim Bourg/Associated Press.


IN HIS first statement as White House press secretary, Sean Spicer conveyed the top priority of his boss, America's first reality-TV star/executive producer president. For Donald J. Trump, it was all about ratings, ratings, ratings.

“This was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, period, both in person and around the world,” insisted Spicer on Saturday to a pool of reporters, despite Nielsen ratings data and aerial crowd image estimates that showed Trump on the low end of first-term inaugural viewership and attendance. Reporters who stated otherwise, said Spicer, were peddling “false narratives.”

Instead of a message about eradicating Obamacare, defeating ISIS or the immense responsibility of beginning a new term at the helm of the largest democracy in the world, Spicer was fighting a previously unthinkable idea — that Trump had failed to woo a crowd.

Trump has referred to himself as a “ratings machine,” a force whose gift of drawing “YUGE” crowds made him a formidable opponent on the campaign trail. He promised that his inauguration would not only be “huge”, but “unbelievable” — the likes of which we'd “never seen before.” The three-day celebration of the peaceful transfer of power, which began on Thursday with the “Make America Great Again” concert, would upstage everything that came before.

Not exactly. The concert was a dud, lacking A-list talent. On Friday, the inauguration ceremony pulled in 30.6 million viewers, 7 million less than Obama's first swearing in, 12 million less than Reagan, and 3 million less than Jimmy Carter — but slightly above that of Bill Clinton's first- term ceremony of 29.7 million viewers. Trump, who recently Twitter-shamed Arnold Schwarzenegger for pulling in lower ratings than he had as a reality host of NBC's “Celebrity Apprentice”, barely bested George W. Bush, a president whose election was won only after an aborted recount and Supreme Court intervention.

Kellyanne Conway, in defending Spicer for his false numbers about the inauguration crowds and transit ridership on Washington's Metro system, suggested to Chuck Todd on “Meet the Press” that the new press secretary's claims were not lies but “alternative facts”.

It was harder to explain away Trump's inauguration ceremony, which came across on television as the type of surprisingly subdued event one might expect to see on C-SPAN rather than every major news channel.

Even the customary pomp and circumstance of every inaugural since the advent of television — the gathering of D.C. dignitaries on stage, the marching bands, the long black limos cruising slowly down Pennsylvania Avenue — didn't animate the crowd on the National Mall the way the mere appearance of Hillary Clinton on the jumbo screens did. “Lock Her Up!” was one of the only spontaneous outbursts that could be heard from a crowd that otherwise waited for the pauses as cues in Trump's speech to clap.

On the Capitol steps, a grim mood hung in the air, along with rain clouds, as Washington's most powerful players gathered to witness the swearing in of the 45th president and an inaugural speech with the dark promise, “This American carnage stops right here and stops right now.”

At times, the president-elect appeared distracted at his own inauguration. Never known for his patience, he could not seem to sit still. He rocked in his seat minutes before taking the oath, tapped his fingers together and whispered to newly sworn-in Vice President Mike Pence when others were taking up time on the mike.

No matter how you sliced it, the affair lacked the exuberance and adoration we've come to expect from a showman like Trump on the campaign trail. He often cites his own power to amass fans and followers (have you heard he has a Twitter account?) as one of his greatest assets. He's referred to it as his edge above all the other “losers”.

Those losers seemed to be on his mind later that night as he danced with his model-beautiful wife wearing the look of a high school bully who'd just been named Prom King. Two lines from his inauguration speech seemed especially relevant to the moment: “Everyone is listening to you now…. You will never be ignored again.”


Thousands of people on Pennsylvania Avenue participate in the Women's March on Washington, a rally to protest President Donald J. Trump the day after he was sworn in as the 45th president of the United States. — Photograph: Michael Reynolds/European Pressphoto Agency.
Thousands of people on Pennsylvania Avenue participate in the Women's March on Washington, a rally to protest President Donald J. Trump
the day after he was sworn in as the 45th president of the United States. — Photograph: Michael Reynolds/European Pressphoto Agency.


Ignored? No, but upstaged, yes. The next morning the Women's March on Washington flooded the areas around the Capitol Dome that had been noticeably less populated when Trump was waving from and walking near his stretch limo on the parade route.The half-empty parade bleachers and unoccupied ground tarps of Friday were swallowed up by a sea of protesters who'd flown in from across the country to voice concerns about the Trump presidency.

They were thousands among the millions who protested across the nation and the world for women's rights — and their concern about a president whose remarks about sexually assaulting women were as disturbing as some of his conservative Cabinet picks' views of reproductive rights.

Madonna, America Ferrera, Ashley Judd, Scarlett Johansson and Gloria Steinem stoked the crowd's exuberance in way that Trump did not the day before. It was a rousing spectacle. It was exciting. It was everything the show on Friday was not.

And maybe that is why Spicer was sent out on Saturday to belligerently berate the press — “the opposition party,” in the words of one Trump official. Here was the “unbelievable” scene — the likes of which we’d “never seen before.”

The true start of the Trump presidential reality show had begun.


__________________________________________________________________________

Related stories:

 • What the White House said about Trump's inauguration crowd and how it was wrong

 • Fox News downplays Women's March on Washington


http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/tv/la-et-st-inauguration-tv-review-20170122-story.html
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« Reply #16 on: January 23, 2017, 06:00:41 pm »


Yep....America under President Donald J. Trump is turning into a “clown state” alright.

Watching Trump and his professional bullshit artists spout unplausible bullshit is like watching the late Terry Aziz (Saddam's foreign minister) all over again.

It's so hilariously funny that one's guts starts to hurt from laughing so much.

And do you know what is even funnier? There are stupid Trump supporters who actually believe the unplausible lies.

How's that for a real hoot, eh?
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« Reply #17 on: January 23, 2017, 08:34:38 pm »


Death to the Communist cock suckers
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« Reply #18 on: January 24, 2017, 09:55:25 am »


Slow, boring day in Hicksville Woodville? 
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« Reply #19 on: January 24, 2017, 10:38:14 am »


WEIRD INAUGURATION CAKE
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« Reply #20 on: January 24, 2017, 10:38:58 am »


from the Los Angeles Times....

Trump loathing unifies the diverse crowd at the massive L.A. women's march

By DAVID HORSEY | 5:00AM PDT - Monday, January 23, 2017



GIVEN THAT it was Los Angeles, there was no surprise that a solid list of actors and musicians spoke and performed at the women's march on Saturday. The real surprise was how many people showed up. Organizers had hoped for 80,000 and got as many as 750,000. Though some estimates were significantly lower, it appears that, even by conservative counts, more opponents of the new Trump administration turned out in LA than in any of the 650 other cities and towns that held similar gatherings over the weekend, including the key protest march on the Mall in Washington that drew half a million.

Unless one is gullible enough to believe the fantastical claims of Donald Trump and his communications team, the very diverse Los Angeles crowd was at least double the size of the mostly white pro-Trump cohort that came to the capital for the president's inauguration. Added together, all the marches around the country and in other cities across the globe drew at least 2 million and as high as 3 million people, based on official estimates (which, coincidentally, is not far off Hillary Clinton's edge in the popular vote on November 8th.)

The Los Angeles march was planned to flow from Pershing Square to City Hall via Broadway. However, there were so many more attendees than expected, the stream of people spilled over into three parallel streets. Most of the drivers brought to a standstill in the resulting traffic snarl appeared to tolerate their predicament stoically and many enthusiastically honked their horns and gave thumbs up to the protesters. Trump supporters were scarce or silent.

Those who doubled back to the third and final stage of the march in the Jewelry District were entertained and cajoled for several hours by singers and celebrities, including Kerry Washington, Jackson Browne, Alfre Woodard, U2's the Edge, Keegan-Michael Key, Debbie Allen, Jamie Lee Curtis, Rob Reiner, Christine Lahti, Helen Reddy, Melissa Manchester and many more.

Julia Louis-Dreyfus, who has won multiple Emmys for her portrayal of a hilariously incompetent fictional president, Selina Meyer, on the HBO series “Veep”, took the stage to marvel at how reality has outstripped even the wildest imagination of screenwriters. Calling Trump “a fool, a dolt, a clown,” Louis-Dreyfus said, “President Selina Meyer has got nothing on the current president.” Speaking directly to Trump, she raised a point that was probably echoed in all the marches: “We have not forgotten that you lost the popular vote and you have no mandate and no majority.”

Of course Trump does have the power, so the question has to be asked whether public outpourings of the president's critics, no matter how enormous and unprecedented, will have lasting political effect. Certainly, the weekend marches will not have accomplished much if they were merely frustrated bursts of anger and disappointment that quickly fade away. Over and over again, speakers at the Los Angeles event emphasized the importance of staying involved in the political process, from the grass roots up.

One thing that could keep the energy alive is the full frontal assault from the Trump administration and the Republican Congress against pretty much every issue of concern to those who adored Barack Obama and voted for both Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders — from voting rights, Planned Parenthood and climate change to Obamacare, environmental protection and immigration. There is nothing that will forge unity among the very disparate millions of people who are alarmed by Trump's unfolding presidency like the feeling that everyone is under attack. Trump has become a great unifier — for his opponents.

In the closing words of an impassioned speech late on Saturday afternoon, actress Natalie Portman alluded to the growing baby in her womb. “Now from the two hearts beating in my body, I want to thank our new president,” Portman said. “You just started the revolution.”


http://www.latimes.com/opinion/topoftheticket/la-na-tt-marchers-loathing-20170122-story.html
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« Reply #21 on: January 24, 2017, 10:39:13 am »


MY TRUTH
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« Reply #22 on: January 24, 2017, 12:45:55 pm »

a mohammadian women who calls for sharia law with its pussy mutilation organised the women's march

trump will fuck your stupid weak minded leftist cult members
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« Reply #23 on: January 24, 2017, 06:13:37 pm »


from The Dominion Post....

Trump will push New Zealand closer to China

If Trump starts a trade war with China, New Zealand
will have little choice but to side with Beijing.


By ROBERT AYSON | 5:00AM - Tuesday, 24 January 2017

Against Donald Trump's protectionism, Chinese president Xi Jinping is casting his country as a bastion of free trade. — Photograph: Ruben Sprich/Reuters.
Against Donald Trump's protectionism, Chinese president Xi Jinping is casting his country
as a bastion of free trade. — Photograph: Ruben Sprich/Reuters.


EVEN BEFORE Donald Trump's inauguration, China was challenging the new administration's capacity to lead the world. Speaking at the Davos Forum in Switzerland, President Xi Jinping has been presenting China as the new champion of free trade and globalisation.

There are few challengers to that crown. Certainly not the United States whose new president treats free trade arrangements as a threat to American interests.

Probably not the EU, whose rich trade zone will be diminished by Britain's coming withdrawal.

Not a growing India, whose ambivalence on free trade continues. And not Japan, for whom the TPP would have been a promising building block to greater regional connectivity.

At one level, New Zealanders might be relaxed about China's claim to international economic leadership. After all, the FTA with China is a central element in our trade-focused foreign policy. And many New Zealanders are aware of how important China's continuing economic growth is to our prosperity.

Unlike Australia, we don't have a strong public debate about China where concerns about China's military rise sometimes match stories of economic benefits.

But New Zealand's comfort about China's rise has been helped by a consistent and steady American presence in Asia. The resulting regional equilibrium has offered space to manage the effects of China's growth.

And because of our trade focus, the most important thing Washington could do for New Zealand was to advance the TPP. That era is finished. By jettisoning the TPP, the Trump Administration will relinquish the Asian economic integration initiative to China.

Trump will make things even worse if he fosters a trade war with China. That sort of economic conflict would cut against New Zealand's free trade principles and its interests in an open and integrated Asia-Pacific economic system.

Xi Jinping will play this for all it is worth, casting China as a strong defender of the economic status quo. And, at least on this question, Wellington will have little choice but to side with Beijing and oppose Washington.

Trump's advisers may feel that this still leaves America with plenty of options to counter China's growing influence. On the diplomatic side, Trump has already hinted that he sees America's long-standing one China policy as a bargaining chip to pressure Beijing.

But if this turns Washington into an advocate for Taiwan's independence, another New Zealand policy line will have been crossed. And in the competition between the two great powers, New Zealand will again end up closer to China.

Of course it is the military sphere where the United States continues to have the greatest advantages over China. Here Trump has indicated that he intends to be tougher.

That may please some in the region who were worried that a Trump Administration would abandon America's regional allies. But it could involve a very risky attempt to prevent China from advancing its South China Sea claims. Or it could mean a harsh response to a missile launch by North Korea which remains an ally of China.

Few expect the new commander-in-chief to take a nuanced approach to these complex security problems. The result may not be a stronger American presence and a less confident China. It could be the increasing chance of an Asian war.

Against these obvious risks, it will be in China's interests to present itself as the responsible security stakeholder. Xi Jinping might well reduce China's assertiveness, at least for a while. That will make it even easier for New Zealand to draw a little closer to Beijing and to distance itself from Washington.

We won't go as far as some have already done. Under President Duterte, the Philippines is defecting from its US alliance relationship in favour of closer links with China. And much of mainland Southeast Asia is firmly part of China's sphere of influence.

Instead New Zealand will be looking to what our traditional allies and partners such as Australia and Singapore are doing. We'll have more incentives to work with emerging partners such as Indonesia and Vietnam. And we know that Japan, South Korea and India don't want a dominant China either.

The appeal of China has its limits. It may be able to brand itself as the new leader of the economic parts of the international liberal order. But Xi Jinping's increasingly authoritarian ways are a turn-off for societies who are attached to the political aspects.

The rule of law, the protection of civil liberties, and democratically accountable government all remain important to New Zealand. And China simply can't lead in those domains.

But here Western leadership is in short supply. Apart from Angela Merkel's brave efforts in Germany, much of Europe is softening its commitment to these ideas. London has other priorities. And especially if he embraces Vladimir Putin as a trusted strategic partner, Trump will signal that US leadership on liberal values is in recess.

This all portends a bleak international outlook. That makes it even easier for China, no friend of the open society, to make its claim for leadership. And if Trump delivers on what he has been promising, his administration could well push New Zealand closer to China's orbit.


Robert Ayson is a professor of strategic studies at Victoria University of Wellington.

__________________________________________________________________________

Related stories:

 • US President Donald Trump has signed order to pull out of Trans-Pacific Partnership

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« Reply #24 on: January 24, 2017, 07:27:43 pm »


from The Washington Post....

Withdrawal from Trans-Pacific Partnership shifts U.S. role in world economy

Trump's executive order formally ending the United States’ participation in a sweeping
trade deal with Asia comes as China and other emerging economies are seeking
to increase their leverage in global affairs, seizing on America’s turn inward.


By YLAN Q. MUI | 8:02PM EST - Monday, January 23, 2017

Vice President Mike Pence, left, and White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus, right, watch as President Donald Trump shows off an executive order to withdraw the U.S. from the 12-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership trade pact agreed to under the Obama administration in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington on Monday, January 23rd, 2017. Several countries expressed hope on Tuesday, January 24th, that the Trans-Pacific Partnership could be salvaged, after President Donald Trump’s decision on a U.S. withdrawal from the trade pact left its future in serious jeopardy. — Photograph: Evan Vucci/Associated Press.
Vice President Mike Pence, left, and White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus, right, watch as President Donald Trump shows off
an executive order to withdraw the U.S. from the 12-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership trade pact agreed to under the Obama
administration in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington on Monday, January 23rd, 2017. Several countries expressed
hope on Tuesday, January 24th, that the Trans-Pacific Partnership could be salvaged, after President Donald Trump’s decision
on a U.S. withdrawal from the trade pact left its future in serious jeopardy. — Photograph: Evan Vucci/Associated Press.


PRESIDENT TRUMP's cancellation on Monday of an agreement for a sweeping trade deal with Asia began recasting America's role in the global economy, leaving an opening for other countries to flex their muscles.

Trump's executive order formally ending the United States' participation in the Trans-Pacific Partnership was a largely symbolic move intended to signal that his tough talk on trade during the campaign will carry over to his new administration. The action came as China and other emerging economies are seeking to increase their leverage in global affairs, seizing on America’s turn inward.

Mexico's President Enrique Peña Nieto declared on Monday that his country hopes to bolster trade with other nations and limit its reliance on the United States. Chinese state media derided Western democracy as having “reached its limits”; President Xi Jinping had touted Beijing's commitment to globalization during his first appearance at the annual gathering of the world's economic elite last week in Davos, Switzerland.

“This abrupt action so early in the Trump administration puts the world on notice that all of America's traditional economic and political alliances are now open to reassessment and renegotiation,” said Eswar Prasad, a professor of trade policy at Cornell University. “This could have an adverse long-run impact on the ability of the U.S. to maintain its influence and leadership in world economic and political affairs.”

The TPP was one of President Barack Obama's signature efforts, part of a broader strategy to increase American clout in Asia and provide a check on China's economic and military ambitions. The deal with 11 other nations along the Pacific Rim covered a wide swath of goods, granting U.S. cattle ranchers better access to Japan and lowering tariffs on apparel imported from Vietnam. Congress granted Obama “fast-track” authority to negotiate the agreement in 2015, but political sentiment quickly shifted, and the deal fell apart without making it to Capitol Hill for approval.

Trump's election effectively guaranteed its demise. Monday's executive order made it official.

Pulling out of the deal “raises fundamental questions about American reliability,” said Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations. “It leaves our allies and trading partners in the lurch. It does create strategic opportunities for China.”

Those include Beijing's own regional trade agreement, which it is pursuing with 15 other Asian countries, including Japan. An analysis by White House economists under Obama found that a deal between just China and Japan could jeopardize $5 billion in U.S. exports and millions of American jobs. Proponents of the TPP have also pointed to recent reports of Beijing's weapons buildup on islands in the South China Sea as evidence of the country’s emboldened posture.

Senator John McCain (Republican-Arizona) echoed those concerns on Monday, calling Trump's withdrawal from the TPP a “serious mistake” that will give China greater authority to dictate the terms of international trade.

In his speech in Davos, even Xi warned that America's protectionist turn could backfire and wind up damaging the world economy.

“No one will emerge as a winner in a trade war,” Xi said.


China is beating Trump already!
(click on the image to open another story about this topic)

But canceling the TPP was one of the clarion calls of Trump's campaign, part of a global backlash against the drive toward greater internationalization that has defined the world economy since the end of World War II. British Prime Minister Theresa May, who is in the midst of navigating her country's own break from established trading partners, is slated to visit with Trump this week. A White House spokesman said meetings with Peña Nieto and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau are in the works.

“What we want is fair trade,” Trump said during a meeting with business executives on Monday. “And we're going to treat countries fairly, but they have to treat us fairly.”

Ending America's involvement in the TPP was also a top priority for Democrats. On Monday, five Democratic senators introduced legislation that would require the president to notify each of the 11 other countries involved in the deal of the United States' withdrawal. It would also block any “fast track” approval of the agreement in the future.

AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka hailed the president's executive order and called for additional action.

“They are just the first in a series of necessary policy changes required to build a fair and just global economy,” he said in a statement.

John Veroneau, a partner at the law firm Covington who served as deputy U.S. trade representative under President George W. Bush, said the Trump administration could still pursue bilateral deals with individual countries, particularly Japan and Vietnam, that mirror the deals negotiated under the TPP. But he pointed out that China is aggressively seeking to lock in trade agreements with many of the same countries that had signed on to the TPP.

“If the U.S. decides to pause, we should assume that some of our trading partners will move ahead,” Veroneau said.

In addition to backing out of the TPP, Trump has also vowed to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement, the cornerstone of the U.S. economic relationship with Mexico and Canada for more than two decades. Trump's nominee for commerce secretary, billionaire investor Wilbur Ross, has said he considers reopening the deal the first order of business for his agency. On Monday, White House spokesman Sean Spicer said the administration would tackle NAFTA “very shortly.”

In Mexico, Peña Nieto said in a speech on Monday that he plans to begin trade talks with other countries that had signed on to the TPP. And he stressed that in the Trump era, one of Mexico's top priorities will be to diversify its trading and political partners so it won't have to rely so heavily on the United States.

Mexico is a nation “open to the world,” Peña Nieto said.

Meanwhile, Trudeau and other top Canadian officials met with Trump adviser Stephen Schwarz­man, chief executive of the Blackstone Group, according to The Globe and Mail. Schwarzman called trade between the United States and Canada “in balance.”

“Things should go well for Canada in terms of any discussions with the United States,” he said, according to The Globe and Mail.

In meetings with business leaders and union workers on Monday, Trump highlighted his proposal for a border tax as a centerpiece of his administration's trade policy.

Dow Chemical chief executive Andrew Liveris, who attended the meeting, said the border tax was discussed extensively. He said the executives were asked to return in 30 days with a plan to shore up the manufacturing industry.

“I would take the president at his word here,” Liveris said. “He's not going to do anything to harm competitiveness. He's going to actually make us all more competitive.”

Still, it is unclear exactly how a border tax would be implemented. Testifying before the Senate Finance Committee last week, Trump's nominee to lead the Treasury Department said any border tax would be targeted at specific businesses. However, the president does not have the power to levy taxes, and experts on international trade have warned that focusing on particular companies could violate treaties.

House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (Republican-Wisconsin) has proposed allowing businesses that export goods to deduct many of their expenses, while those that import would not receive the same benefit. But in a recent interview with The Wall Street Journal, Trump dismissed the plan, known as “border adjustment,” as “too complicated”.

Some industry groups argue that Trump's approach would better leverage America's status as the world's largest economy.

Scott Paul, president of the Alliance for American Manufacturing, said his group is hoping that opening up NAFTA could provide more leeway to combat currency manipulation in countries outside the agreement. His group, which represents both industry and unions, is also seeking more stringent rules of origin, which dictate how much production must occur within member countries to qualify for free-trade status.

“The details are going to matter a lot,” Paul said. “Renegotiating NAFTA obviously entails some risks and some rewards.”


Joshua Partlow contributed to this report.

• Ylan Q. Mui is a financial reporter at The Washington Post covering the Federal Reserve and the economy.

__________________________________________________________________________

Read more on this topic:

 • Push to save Pacific Rim trade deal after US exits TPP pact

 • Analysis: Trump's trade plans to test his deal-making skills

 • VIDEO: Trump signs orders on TPP, Federal hiring freeze, “Mexico City policy”

 • VIDEO: Mexico wants to keep free trade with U.S., Canada, president says


https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/withdrawal-from-trans-pacific-partnership-shifts-us-role-in-world-economy/2017/01/23/05720df6-e1a6-11e6-a453-19ec4b3d09ba_story.html
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