The November 17, 2016 Thread

Filed in National by on November 17, 2016

Hillary Clinton made her first public remarks Wednesday night, just a week after gracefully conceding the election to collective waking nightmare Donald Trump. Clinton appeared Wednesday night at the Children’s Defense Fund’s Beat The Odds Gala at Newseum in Washington, D.C. and delivered an eloquent and subdued speech reminding us all that “America is worth it.” She began by acknowledging that appearing at the gala was difficult for her, given the events of the past week and her surprising and devastating loss.

Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) told the Huffington Post that he doesn’t support ending the filibuster.

Said Hatch: “Are you kidding? I’m one of the biggest advocates for the filibuster. It’s the only way to protect the minority, and we’ve been in the minority a lot more than we’ve been in the majority. It’s just a great, great protection for the minority.” Lindsay Graham agrees.

The Senate is going to be a bulwark for America during these fascist times. For one thing, the GOP only has a 2 seat majority (51 seats, but Vice President Pence gets to break ties if vote is tied at 50). So if 2 Senators don’t go along with Trump’s plans, they are blocked. There are your two votes, with others like John McCain, Susan Collins, and Jeff Flake possibly joining in.

Ryan Lizza: “Seven days may not be enough time to fully assess any new leader, especially in the case of Trump, whose first week was marked by seeming chaos in his efforts to put together an Administration. But what we’ve learned so far about the least-experienced President-elect in history is as troubling and ominous as his critics have feared.”

“The Greeks have a word for the emerging Trump Administration: kakistocracy. The American Heritage Dictionary defines it as a ‘government by the least qualified or most unprincipled citizens.’ Webster’s is simpler: ‘government by the worst people.’”

Jonathan Chait at the New Yorker:

How and where to cooperate with Trump presents many dilemmas for the opposition, pitting the Democrats’ self-interest against the need to safeguard the welfare of the country’s political institutions. There are certainly venues where Americans alarmed by the incoming president ought to consider working with him for the sake of preserving the welfare of the country. But infrastructure is not one of those dilemmas. Supporting a Trumpian infrastructure bill would be to cooperate with the subversion of American government and an act of political self-sabotage. It is an idea so insanely bad it disturbingly suggests the party utterly fails to grasp the challenge before it, or the way out.

It would make sense that Trump’s election would enable the passage of a large infrastructure plan if he were replacing a president who opposed such a plan. This is not the case. Obama spent years pleading publicly and privately with the Republicans to support a national infrastructure bank. They blocked it on the purported grounds of affordability. To the extent they are willing to support infrastructure spending under Trump, or at least stand aside, it is a continuation of a pattern dating back to Reagan, in which Republicans toggle between wild expansionary fiscal policy under Republican presidents and brutal contractionary policy under Democratic ones.

Amy Walter of the Cook Political Report:

The media has paid a lot of attention throughout the campaign and afterward on rural and working-class white America. Not nearly as much attention has been spent on suburban America, whose college-educated white voters (especially white women) were supposed to provide Hillary Clinton a bulwark to big losses among the white working class. Instead, these voters abandoned Clinton too. Mitt Romney carried the suburbs by 2 points — Trump carried them by 5 points.

The theory held by the Clinton campaign was that Clinton would make up for losses in rural, white America with gains in suburban America among white voters who were turned off by Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric, lack of presidential timbre and temperament and sexist behavior brought to light by the Access Hollywood tape.

Yet, in looking at the results of highly-educated suburban counties, it’s clear that those voters didn’t turn out for Clinton with the fervor that the rural white voters did for Trump.

That is the affect of the Comey letter. They were going for her prior to the letter.

Team Trump is citing to the Japanese Internment as a positive precedent for its future Muslim Registry and Crescent Moon Armbands and Latino Concentration Camps.

Carl Higbie, former Navy SEAL and spokesman for the pro-Trump Great American PAC, argued Wednesday night on Fox News that a registry of immigrants from Muslim countries would pass constitutional muster, citing the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. Here’s part of his exchange with Megyn Kelly:

HIGBIE: Yeah, and to be perfectly honest, it is legal. They say it will hold constitutional muster. I know the ACLU is gonna challenge it, but I think it’ll pass, and we’ve done it with Iran back – back a while ago. We did it during World War II with Japanese, which, you know, call it what you will, maybe —

KELLY: Come on. You’re not — you’re not proposing we go back to the days of internment camps, I hope.

HIGBIE: No, no, no. I’m not proposing that at all, Megyn, but what I am saying is we need to protect America from —

KELLY: You know better than to suggest that. I mean, that’s the kind of stuff that gets people scared, Carl.

HIGBIE: Right, but it’s — I’m just saying there is precedent for it, and I’m not saying I agree with it, but in this case I absolutely believe that a regional based —

KELLY: You can’t be citing Japanese internment camps as precedent for anything the president-elect is gonna do.

HIGBIE: Look, the president needs to protect America first, and if that means having people that are not protected under our Constitution have some sort of registry so we can understand, until we can identify the true threat and where it’s coming from, I support it.

Muslims and Latinos are protected under our Constitution, you fuckface. Having brown skin is not a litmus test of whether you get constitutional rights.

“Republican operatives spent four years warning that the party needed to diversify — or risk a blowout at the ballot box. Donald Trump spent the campaign trafficking in divisive racial rhetoric — and he won anyway,” Politico reports.

“Now, those who pushed for a more inclusive GOP fear that their party will absorb the wrong takeaways from Trump’s win, and that the momentum behind efforts to expand the Republican tent to include more minorities and young people has evaporated.”

Politico: “A populist candidate who railed against shady financial interests on the campaign trail is now putting together an administration that looks like an investment banker’s dream.”

“Former Goldman Sachs banker Steven Mnuchin has been seen at Trump Tower amid rumors that he’s the leading candidate for Treasury secretary. Billionaire investor Wilbur Ross appears headed to the Commerce Department. Steve Bannon, another Goldman alum, will work steps from the Oval Office. If Mnuchin drops out, as some rumors suggest he may, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon remains a possibility as Treasury secretary, and will serve as an outside adviser if he doesn’t get the job.”

“It’s a restoration of Wall Street power — and a potential flip in the way the industry is regulated — perhaps unparalleled in American history.”

In a discussion about cyber security at a WSJ forum, National Security Agency Adm. Michael Rogers, head of the NSA and the U.S. Cyber Command issued a warning.

[Deputy Editor-in-Chief Rebecca] Blumenstein also asked Rogers about WikiLeaks, and the slow and steady leak of emails stolen from Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta’s gmail account. “There shouldn’t be any doubts in anybody’s mind: This was not something that was done casually, this was not something that was done by chance, this was not a target that was selected purely arbitrarily,” Rogers said. “This was a conscious effort by a nation state to attempt to achieve a specific effect.”

Joshua Spivak: “Midterm elections usually represent a bad result for the party holding the presidency – Obama’s first midterm saw the Democrats lose the House and his second saw them lose the Senate. Due to the fact that the Democrats are the ones defending Senate seats – 25 of the 33 seats up are Democrats or their independent allies, the Republicans can feel the wind at their back.”

“The GOP may feel that they can defeat the historic trends. It has been done before – George W. Bush managed to have a great mid-term result in 2002 after also winning the White House while losing the popular vote. But it is against the historic norm. Most times, the party in power does poorly in the midterm.”

“But there are two particular midterm elections that should serve as flashing warning signs for any party coming off big victories —1894 and 1994. Both rank among the two most important midterm elections in American history and came two years after one party won a seemingly sweeping mandate for power. Both saw historic reversals. And, perhaps more importantly, both completely reshaped the political landscape for decades to come.”

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  1. puck says:
    November 17, 2016 at 8:45 am

    “HIGBIE: Look, the president needs to protect America first…”

    A common misconception. The presidential oath is to protect and defend the Constitution first.

  2. Rufus Y. Kneedog says:
    November 18, 2016 at 6:07 am

    Congrats to Cassandra for her appointment to the Mayor-elect’s transition team. I saw at least one other Young supporter on the list also which is an encouraging sign.

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