The November 18, 2016 Thread

Filed in National by on November 18, 2016

This will be Trump’s undoing: the mixing of his business, family, and government. Eventually laws will be broken, if they haven’t all ready. And imagine the screams if Chelsea Clinton, who was going to lead the Clinton Foundation, had sat in on her mother’s first meeting with a head of a foreign government? There would have been new Lock Her Up chants for another female Clinton. The double standard is outrageous.

NBC News on the rumor of Joe Biden for DNC Chair: “There’s no word on whether the vice president is interested in running for the job — his office declined to comment — and those behind the effort know that it’s a long shot. But they’re making a concerted effort to line up support in the hope that it will convince the vice president to take the helm of a party in crisis.”

Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) blasted FBI Director James Comey, accusing him of being a “Republican operative” who caused Hillary Clinton to lose the election to Donald Trump, The Hill reports. Said Reid: “It’s easy to second-guess what Hillary did. I love Hillary Clinton, I am sorry she lost. I did everything I could to help … but there is no question in my mind she would have won this election without any problem if Comey had not been the Republican operative that he is.”

He added: “He can be fat and happy in his office there for seven more years after having thrown the election to Donald Trump. If he feels good about that — that’s nice.”

Reid is right. Yes, the polls were still wrong and it was a much closer election than any poll indicated, but Hillary would have squeaked by with wins in PA, MI and WI. Comey tipped the late deciders away from her.

President-elect Donald Trump and General Michael Flynn “both see themselves as brash outsiders who hustled their way to the big time. They both post on Twitter often about their own successes, and they have both at times crossed the line into outright Islamophobia,” the New York Times reports.

“They also both exhibit a loose relationship with facts: General Flynn, for instance, has said that Shariah, or Islamic law, is spreading in the United States (it is not). His dubious assertions are so common that when he ran the Defense Intelligence Agency, subordinates came up with a name for the phenomenon: They called them ‘Flynn facts.’”

Many people will die because of Michael Flynn.

He has my support. It is time for Pelosi to go. She has been Democratic Leader since 2002. She did good in winning control of Congress in 2006, and was a great Speaker, but three four consecutive legislative losses (10, 12, 14, 16) means that good will is gone. Retire Nancy.

Michael Isikoff takes a close look at the man who will become national security advisor:

Retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, who has reportedly been offered the role of national security adviser in Donald Trump’s White House, began receiving classified national security briefings last summer while he was also running a private consulting firm that offered “all-source intelligence support” to international clients.

Flynn’s relationship with his overseas clients is coming in for new scrutiny amid recent disclosures that two months ago, during the height of the presidential campaign, his consulting firm, the Flynn Intel Group, registered to lobby for a Dutch company owned by a wealthy Turkish businessman close to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey.

President-elect Donald Trump has settled on Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) for attorney general, Bloomberg reports.

“It wasn’t immediately clear if Trump has formally offered the job to Sessions… A Trump aide on Thursday night called Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), a one-time Trump rival who was under serious consideration for the role, to tell him the job was instead going to Sessions.”

New York Times: “While Mr. Sessions is well liked in the Senate, his record as United States attorney in Alabama in the 1980s is very likely to become an issue for Democrats and civil rights groups expected to give it close scrutiny.”

Binyamin Appelbaum explains how Trump is already lying about saving American jobs:

President-elect Donald J. Trump claimed credit on Thursday night for persuading Ford to keep an automaking plant in Kentucky rather than moving it to Mexico. The only wrinkle: Ford was not actually planning to move the plant. […]But Ford had not planned to close the Louisville factory. Instead, it had planned to expand production of another vehicle made in Louisville, the Ford Escape. And the change had not been expected to result in any job losses.

Eugene Robsinon on the future of the Democratic Party:

The Democratic Party cannot just wait for the next Barack Obama to come along. The president is a unique political talent of the kind that appears only once in a great while, when the stars magically align. Instead, Democrats need to do what Republicans did, which is to build from the ground up and start winning state and local elections.

A Democratic rebound has to begin with the basics: getting people who agree with you to vote. Less than 60 percent of those eligible to cast ballots in last week’s election bothered to do so. Conservatives who say this is “a center-right nation” may be right in terms of who votes, but they’re wrong in terms of who could vote. Polls show that the country favors Democratic over Republican positions on most issues.

The Democratic Party should put its energy and money into connecting with potential voters at the grass-roots level. Trump made a bunch of pie-in-the-sky promises he can never keep. Democrats need a hopeful but realistic message recognizing that while most big cities prosper in today’s globalized economy, much of the rest of the country suffers.

Rep. Mike Pompeo (R-KS) has been selected as the next CIA Director by President-elect Donald Trump, Reuters reports.

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  1. El Somnambulo says:
    November 18, 2016 at 8:22 am

    Let’s see. We’ve got an Islamaphobe with all kinds of conflicts-of-interest for National Security Advisor (Flynn) and a racist for AG (Jeff Beauregard Sessions). All going according to plan…

  2. Jason330 says:
    November 18, 2016 at 8:27 am

    “They (Dem Senators including Carper no doubt) apparently believe that cooperating with Trump will provide them with a political advantage, and are seeking out potential issues — infrastructure, child care, trade — to do so. This is a disastrous misreading of all the evidence of how politics works.”

    The idiocy of the Democratic Party (Paltry?) knows no bounds.

  3. puck says:
    November 18, 2016 at 8:51 am

    re Schumer: This is the worst possible time for the most senior Democratic official to be beholden to Wall Street. Schumer is not the man you want to have for a goal-line stand against the financial elite.

  4. Steve Newton says:
    November 18, 2016 at 9:11 am

    Note about that post-election Gallup Poll. If it’s right, Trump still has high unfavorables, but for him to be in the mid-50s, when he was in the low 60s throughout most of the fall, is disturbing.

  5. anonymous says:
    November 18, 2016 at 9:31 am

    @puck: As if you couldn’t tell this from the pre-election positions of a lot of liberals, the cult of personality surrounding the Clintons is going to get in the way of rebuilding the party. A lot of false Democrats have been elected in the last 25 years, including probably the majority of office-holders.

    When Barack Obama was elected, the Republicans wasted not a single tear for unity or comity. They came out fighting. Democrats, by contrast, want to work with Trump, because they’re such cowards they’re afraid they’ll lose their jobs if they fight him.

    This was the Democratic Party crack-up I expected to come in 2020, when Clinton was bound to be defeated.

  6. El Somnambulo says:
    November 18, 2016 at 9:32 am

    Will Tom Carper vote to enable a racist to head the Department of Justice?

    This, ladies and gentlemen, is what’s known as a rhetorical question.

  7. liberalgeek says:
    November 18, 2016 at 11:10 am

    Kavips is calling it quits.

    I’m going to imagine that he and Celia Cohen have bought a sailboat that they will float away into their shared retirement.

  8. jason330 says:
    November 18, 2016 at 11:15 am

    When I read that I got sad about what a crappy blogger I’ve been (it’s always about you Jason330, isn’t it? Yes).

  9. anonymous says:
    November 18, 2016 at 11:22 am

    Trump’s cabinet picks remind me of a DC comics episode where the Joker or somebody frees all the inmates of the Arkham Asylum for the Criminally Insane. If I recall correctly, that didn’t end well.

  10. cassandra_m says:
    November 18, 2016 at 6:11 pm

    Arizona Rep. Ruben Gallego has the right idea:

    Given everything we know about Donald Trump — and everything we don’t know — I was alarmed by the words of senior leaders from both the progressive and centrist wings of the party regarding their openness to working with Donald Trump on infrastructure.

    Under ordinary circumstances, we would welcome a plan to invest in infrastructure — even if that plan came from the other side of the aisle. Especially if it came from the other side of the aisle!

    But Donald Trump is not an ordinary politician. He is a con artist. He has refused to give the American people reason to believe that he is not in this to enrich himself. In fact, he has bucked tradition by maintaining his family’s interest in a private corporation.

    And, unfortunately, his infrastructure plan is really a privatization scheme, rife with graft and corruption, whose real purpose is to enrich the Trump family and his supporters. He is not reaching out. He is reaching his hand into America’s pockets, just as he has his whole career. And we must not let him do it.

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