Sun Jan 08 2017 18:29:13 GMT-0800 (Pacific Standard Time)

Donald Trump's insane conflicts of interest.

A report this afternoon from the Wall Street Journal, however, revealed that Trump’s disclosure was the tip of the iceberg. The FEC required Trump only to report debt from entities he fully controls. The disclosure left out “more than $1.5 billion lent to partnerships that are 30%-owned by him.” That debt has been securitized and is owed to at least 150 financial entities.

These financial institutions include many firms that are under the scrutiny of the federal agencies that Trump will soon control. Wells Fargo, for example, which services over $900 million in loans connected to Trump, “is currently facing scrutiny from federal regulators surrounding its fraudulent sales practices and other issues.”

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A (very long) summary of Trump's ties to Russia, his pro-Putin comments, his Putin-friendly staff members, and his pro-Putin supporters.

On the thinking of Trump supporters, particularly in Louisiana. Similar to what I've read elsewhere, they tend to view wealth as a virtue. Those who still belong to the vanishing middle class look down on "big-government handouts". But those in the struggling working class are willing to accept needed assistance -- as long as it is only going to "real Americans".

From 15 Nov 2016, an insightful and entertaining rant about the 2016 election campaign and its outcome.

"Hillary Clinton didn't fail us, we failed Hillary Clinton."

• Putin's hackers stole emails. Wikileaks published them.
• News media covered the emails like a breaking scandal, while giving little attention to how and why the emails were stolen.
• Before that, Republicans made as much noise as they could about Benghazi, and Clinton using a private email server. News media could hardly have been more helpful to them if they were all owned outright by the Republican party.
• News media treated Trump like a serious candidate, rather than the lying, idiot lowlife that he is.
• Days before election day, James Comey announces, maybe possibly kind of, more emails from Clinton's private server discovered on Anthony Weiner's laptop. News media covers it enthusiastically. In a few days, Comey announces there was nothing new. How about that.

Dave Pell's main point here is that news media wouldn't produce crap if people didn't eat it up.

But we aren't all eating the crap. I don't think there's much we can do about the people who do. Many of them aren't being fooled by the lies and sensationalism. They're just choosing to "believe" what they want to "believe". (Though the number actually fooled was probably far more than enough to win the election for Trump.)

We need to give as much support as we can to responsible journalism and commentary. And maybe we can collectively discourage media from producing crap by making sure they know that millions of us are angered by it. Maybe there should be independent journalists as a branch of government, tasked with choosing what the people should know, and granted privileges similar to those that members of Congress have.

A personal appeal from Michael Moore to the Republican members of the Electoral College.

Yes, and Alexander Hamilton was in favor of property requirements for voting, which prevented a large majority of people from voting. Here we have the Democrats saying we should make our selection of the U.S. President less democratic, less responsive to voters -- not more democratic.

I have fears Trump will be a bad President. But I don't like the incredible hypocrisy of those who slandered Trump for not agreeing to accept the results of the election, not only refusing to accept the result, but try to do so by -- not only overturning a tradition that is over a hundred years old -- but doing so in a manner that would make our selection of a president much less responsive to voters.

For most of my friends on the Left, the argument against Trump is about fitness: Trump, they say, is not fit to be President. I agree with this claim.

But that claim has been rendered democratically irrelevant. 62 million Americans heard that argument, and disagreed with it. That doesn’t make the claim “Donald Trump is unfit” false. But it does render it unusable by an elector as a reason not to vote for Trump. Whatever they were meant to be originally, we cannot now see electors as democratic guardians of our Republic. They cannot be entitled to second guess the judgment of the people with respect to an issue the people can reasonably be said to have considered.

I disagree with this. The very purpose of the Electoral College is to judge the candidate. That can mean telling the majority that their choice was stupid. (And depending on how many Electors think so, the House is still likely to consider the issue yet again.)

Nine Lessons of Russian Propaganda<br> Roman Skaskiw (an American who moved to Ukraine in 2012)<br> [I liked this article enough to google the author. First, I looked at Twitter -- and thought it was either an imposter, or his account had been hacked. But then I went looking at other sites, which are registered to someone using the same name. They shift between reasonable and crackpot.]

From 27 March 2016.<br> But gosh... This shit is strangely familiar.

• Use and abuse all factions.
• Destroy and ridicule the idea of truth.
• Headlines are more important than reality. They stick.
• Demoralize, and terrorize.
• Distract and misdirect.
• Pollute the information space.
• Accuse the enemy of doing what you're doing.

Lawrence Lessig on the legal constraints and ethical obligations of the Electors. (First published in The Daily Beast, 13 Dec 2016.)

In my opinion, if the Electors don't reject Donald Trump, they have failed to do the only duty for which the Electoral College was created. (Putting aside the fact that the actual majority voted for Hillary Clinton...) The majority can make a stupid decision. It should be the sworn duty of the Electors to judge the candidate.

Trump claims nobody brought up Russian hacking before the election. It was already made public on October 7. And he had been personally briefed about it before denying Russian involvement during the debates.

http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/trump-was-told-russia-was-blame-hacks-long-debate-n663686

(On Google Chrome, hypothesis fails to open for me on that nbcnews page.)

A report on Putin's tactics in France, Germany, and the UK.

From 26 July 2016, Lawrence Lessig says it isn't the time to refuse to vote for "the lesser of two evils". Then he agrees with Robert Reich that people are angry about corrupt government, and Trump is likely to win unless Hillary Clinton makes it a central issue.

Now Trump is already working on using the presidency to line his pockets. His cabinet is basically ExxonMobil and Goldman Sachs -- and a few lesser Nazis.

I wonder how many Trump voters are paying attention to this. How many notice they've been scammed? How many are busy rationalizing it? How many notice that they just voted to destroy democracy?

Video messages to members of the Electoral College asking them to vote for someone qualified to be President of the United States of America.

A volunteer observer for the Michigan recount describes his experience -- an army of Republican lawyers doing whatever they could to keep votes from being counted.

Twitter may be a platform that mostly lives in the public, but it isn't a public platform. It's also one of the reasons I have my own site.

Donald Trump's conflicts of interest are already a source of ongoing corruption.

Nine Democratic Senators call for a National Intelligence Estimate on the extent of Russian intervention in the 2016 presidential election, and ask the DOJ to confirm that a criminal investigation is ongoing, or to begin one.

Oh, look. The Benghazi investigation is officially done.

I guess Republicans are probably really tired of investigating stuff right now.

In the last couple of days, I'm seeing more people using the appropriate words: coup, and treason.

Trump's character and America's recent political climate are familiar to people who have lived in or studied authoritarian states. Russia is using the same tactics on us that they've used, and continue to use, in Europe.

Karoli Kuns lists things we need to do:

• forensic investigation of voting machines
• full accounting for any breaches of voter databases
• investigation of RNC hacks
• investigation of Paul Manafort
• testimony from Roger Stone
• testimony from James Comey
• testimony from Mitch McConnell

Trump is trying to prohibit protest.

That’s because the National Park Service, on behalf of the Presidential Inauguration Committee, filed documents securing large swaths of the national mall and Pennsylvania Avenue, the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial for the inauguration festivities. None of these spots will be open for protesters.

The NPS filed a “massive omnibus blocking permit” for many of Washington DC’s most famous political locations for days and weeks before and after the inauguration on 20 January,

Ironically, dismissal of Trump's ties to Putin strikes me as an instance of gaslighting -- while demonstrating that it's not always intentional. ("Oh, that's just a conspiracy theory." "There's no evidence of that at all." "What do you think this is, a James Bond novel?")

There are very close ties between Trump and Putin.<br> They need to be thoroughly investigated.

Another instance of gaslighting is the suggestion that those who want the election audited are merely sore losers, or paranoid. Never mind the probing of voter registration databases. Never mind the vulnerable voting machines. Never mind the mismatch between exit polls and counts. Never mind that Republicans brazenly conspire to disenfranchise minorities.

From 27 July 2016, Masha Gessen recognizes Donald Trump as a dangerous fascist. She also recognizes that Trump is "a thoroughly American creation that poses an existential threat to American democracy."

But the top point of the article is to dismiss the idea of connections between Trump and Putin. Bullshit.

Putin assisted the Trump campaign with hacking and propaganda. The only questions are exactly how much the Russians did, and whether they actually hacked the election itself. We need to investigate ties between Trump, his associates, and Putin, and we need a thorough audit of the election.

Chris Sautter and Jake Schlachter say we need a federal lawsuit to require a hand recount of all paper ballots.

http://www.electorstrust.com/<br> Electors Trust is providing free, confidential legal support to Electors who are considering voting their conscience.

How a moderate Republican could stop Trump in the Electoral College, most likely followed by votes in Congress.

Leading up to Ms. Tolokonnikova’s trial, Russian news reports carried suggestions that she and her bandmates were pawns of Hillary Clinton’s State Department or witches working with a global satanic conspiracy — perhaps linked to the one that was behind the Sept. 11 attacks, as lawyers for one of their offended accusers put it. This is what we now call “fake news.”

Pussy Riot became an international symbol of Mr. Putin’s crackdown on free speech; of how his regime uses falsehood and deflection to sow confusion and undermine critics.

Now that the political-media environment that we smugly thought to be “over there” seems to be arriving over here, Ms. Tolokonnikova has a message: “It’s important not to say to yourself, ‘Oh, it’s O.K.,’” she told me. “It’s important to remember that, for example, in Russia, for the first year of when Vladimir Putin came to power, everybody was thinking that it will be O.K.”

A legal argument that winner-take-all allocation of Electors is a violation of the rights of the voters in the minority.

1. In summary, a winner-take-all system of allocating Electors by the states denies the minority of voters within each state any representation whatsoever within the Electoral College and ultimately in the case of the 2000 and 2016 elections, denies the plurality of voters nationwide their choice for President under circumstances in which the constitutionally established small state advantage made part of the Electoral College wouldnot. This is neither a reasonable nor a rational result in a representative democracy. This result was dictated by the winner-take-all method of allocating Electors used by the states. It is this state law method of allocating Electors that is an unconstitutional violation of the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment and its bedrock principle of one man one vote.

...

It’s perfectly clear that the Attorney General of New York or California could walk into the Supreme Court tomorrow, and ask the Court to hear the case. Delaware tried to do this exactly fifty years ago, but the Court ducked the question. But based on that complaint, were I a citizen of California, I’d ask my current AG (and future Senator) why hasn’t CA done the same thing? And were I a citizen of New York, I’d ask my AG the same. Why are these big states standing by quietly as their voters are essentially silenced by the unconstitutional inequality?

Trump has already had more "chances" than anyone deserves.

It is not only the right, but the duty of the Electoral College to reject Donald Trump. But we've never had a candidate as unfit for office as Trump, so that duty has been ignored and subverted. We need to do all we can to let the Electors know that we expect and support that they will exercise personal judgment to do what is best for the nation and the world.

Donald Trump is a vile liar. So are the people who associate with him. So are the Republicans who supported his presidential campaign, or stood by as though it was fine to say nothing. Don't regard them as anything other than vile liars.

journalists need to understand what Trump is doing and refuse to play by his rules. He is going to use the respect and deference typically accorded to the presidency as an instrument for spreading more lies. Reporters must refuse to treat him like a normal president and refuse to bestow any unearned legitimacy on his administration. They must also give up their posture of high-minded objectivity — and, along with it, any hope of privileged access to the Trump White House. The incoming president has made clear that he expects unquestioning obedience from the press, and will regard anyone who doesn’t give it to him as an enemy. That is the choice every news outlet faces for the next four years: Subservience and complicity, or open hostility. There is no middle ground.

So, PropOrNot's report declares so many websites to be "Russian propaganda" that it is practically Russian disinformation. I guess they should add their own site to the list.

Russia’s increasingly sophisticated propaganda machinery — including thousands of botnets, teams of paid human “trolls,” and networks of Web sites and social-media accounts — echoed and amplified right-wing sites across the Internet as they portrayed Clinton as a criminal hiding potentially fatal health problems and preparing to hand control of the nation to a shadowy cabal of global financiers.

http://warontherocks.com/2016/11/trolling-for-trump-how-russia-is-trying-to-destroy-our-democracy

Another group, PropOrNot, is supposed to be releasing their study on Russian propaganda tomorrow, 25 November. [Update: PropOrNot apparently labelled so many sites as "Russian propaganda" that it is practically a piece of disinformation all by itself. Maybe they're Russian. :) http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-propaganda-about-russian-propaganda

Quick summary of Donald Trump's conflicts of interest.

The significance of the "Billie Jean" when it came out was do to the fact that the song was about a person being told that they are some kids father.

The users of a subreddit devoted to Donald Trump have been a big hassle for Reddit moderators

“At this point, I think reddit is a lost cause because of the admins inability to take action on the group while simultaneously being overwhelmed with dealing with the individual,” a moderator told us. “No other subreddit has been able to be used [as] a platform for harassment for this long in Reddit’s history. And it’s likely going to be what kills it.” Said another: “The social experiment has run its course.”

The names and pseudonyms of multiple sources in this story have been omitted to protect their anonymity due to credible threats.

Concerns about election integrity. Quite a few links.

Despite the limited airplay of punk overseas, Dookie sold 50,000 copies in Europe in 1994 and built a following for Green Day internationally.

about 1/2 to 3/4 inch of rain last night. It did help

At least three people died, others are still missing

This is an interesting look at Trump's personality, but it shrugs off the danger we're in.

Donald Trump is a liar, a cheat, a narcissist, and a petty bully with no principles. And Trump himself is only part of the danger. I have no doubt that some members of the 1% are actively looking for opportunities to flush democracy down the toilet for the sake of making an extra billion. And they may be colluding with wealthy Russians.

That’s how you move Trump. You don’t talk about ethics. You play the toughness card. You appeal to the art of the deal. You make him feel smart, powerful, and loved. You don’t forget how unmoored and volatile he is, but you set aside your fear and your anger. You thank God that you’re dealing with a narcissist, not a cold-blooded killer. And until you can get him safely out of the White House, you work with what you have. People in other countries have dealt with presidents like Trump for a long time. Can we handle it? Yes, we can.

I have watched as tobacco, coal, oil, chemicals and biotech companies have poured billions of dollars into an international misinformation machine composed of thinktanks, bloggers and fake citizens’ groups. Its purpose is to portray the interests of billionaires as the interests of the common people, to wage war against trade unions and beat down attempts to regulate business and tax the very rich. Now the people who helped run this machine are shaping the government.

Donald Trump has filled his staff with these liars.

Republican Rep. Jason Chaffetz of Utah, chair of the House Oversight Committee, has shown great enthusiasm for persecuting Hillary Clinton. But for some reason, he doesn't seem to have any interest in investigating Donald Trump's glaring conflicts of interest.

From 11 Oct 2016, Donald Trump and his followers fit all 14 of Umberto Eco's criteria for Ur-Fascism.

Also note that many of the videos of Trump doing and saying horrible things come from pro-Trump YouTube channels. His fans love that he’s a fascist. It’s what they want — a strong man who will take care of them, scare off the bad people and tell them what to do.

Donald Trump is using the methods of tyrants to control the media. He was already doing this during his campaign, and he has only gotten worse since becoming President-Elect.

• Berate them directly.
• Refuse access to those he disapproves.
• Turn the public against them.
• Condemn criticism and satire aimed at him.
• Threaten them with lawsuits and potential new laws.
• Limit media access.
• Speak directly to the public. (There has been mention of Trump continuing to hold rallies. He likes the instant gratification and adulation of a cheering crowd.)

http://robertreich.org/post/153748549760

Donald Trump's "lies about voter fraud are a prelude to massive voter suppression." This has become typical of the Republican party. But Trump and his staff are sure to make it worse, and they're already showing it.

Johnathan Chait once chided Ta-Nehisi Coates for his hopelessness. If there is a more persistent demand of the marginalized and oppressed than that they perform hope for their benefactors, it is difficult to find it. We have, of course, a nomenclature problem. When white allies want us to be hopeful what they really mean is that they require absolution in exchange for their sympathies. And, when black people say that they are plenty hopeful we tend to mean that our hope is tempered by a deep awareness of how thin is the veneer of white civility.

...

My hopelessness isn’t nihilism just like my blind spot has always seen clearly the limits of American progress.

My hopelessness is faith in things yet seen and works yet done. It is a necessary requirement for the hard work of resisting tyranny and fascism. It is the precondition for sustained social movements because history isn’t a straight line. It is a spinning top that eventually moves forward but also always goes round and round as it does.

Widespread voter suppression targeting minorities, and suspicious "errors" in Wisconsin vote counts.

Donald Trump's conflicts of interest are global.

What you can do to fight tyranny, by historian Timothy Snyder. Originally a Facebook post: https://www.facebook.com/timothy.david.snyder/posts/1206636702716110

7 Oct 2016 joint statement from DHS and DNI.

The U.S. Intelligence Community (USIC) is confident that the Russian Government directed the recent compromises of e-mails from US persons and institutions, including from US political organizations.

A statement from Marc Elias, general counsel to Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign. They've been watching the vote counts closely, and will continue to do so. They "had not uncovered any actionable evidence of hacking or outside attempts to alter voting technology."

Members of the Electoral College should not make Donald Trump the next president unless he sells his companies and puts the proceeds in a blind trust, according to the top ethics lawyers for the last two presidents.

Richard Painter, Chief Ethics Counsel for George W. Bush, and Norman Eisen, Chief Ethics Counsel for Barack Obama, believe that if Trump continues to retain ownership over his sprawling business interests by the time the electors meet on December 19, they should reject Trump.

I grew up in rural, Christian, white America. ... The problem isn’t that I don’t understand these people. The problem is they don’t understand themselves, the reasons for their anger/frustrations, and don’t seem to care to know why.

...

Since facts and reality don’t matter, nothing you say to them will alter their beliefs. “President Obama was born in Kenya, is a secret member of the Muslim Brotherhood who hates white Americans and is going to take away their guns.” I feel ridiculous even writing this, it is so absurd, but it is gospel across large swaths of rural America. Are rural, Christian, white Americans scared? You’re damn right they are. Are their fears rational and justified? Hell no. The problem isn’t understanding their fears. The problem is how to assuage fears based on lies in closed-off fundamentalist belief systems that don’t have the necessary tools for properly evaluating the fears.

What CAN change their minds?

• Someone they consider "one of them" and respect as an authority, who preaches tolerance and critical thinking. We need more of those. (Unfortunately, there are now many public figures who reinforce their worst beliefs.)
• Personal experience: knowing people from the groups they are prejudiced against.

J. Alex Halderman, Professor of Computer Science at U. Michigan, says yes, it's possible that the election was hacked. We should audit the results. And paper ballots should always be used in future elections.

Jill Stein filing for vote recounts in MI, PA, and WI. Needs to raise $2.5 million by Friday afternoon.

"Farewell, America", Neal Gabler

If there is a single sentence that characterizes the election, it is this: “He says the things I’m thinking.” That may be what is so terrifying. Who knew that so many tens of millions of white Americans were thinking unconscionable things about their fellow Americans?

...

The virus that kills democracy is extremism because extremism disables those codes. Republicans have disrespected the process for decades. They have regarded any Democratic president as illegitimate. They have proudly boasted of preventing popularly elected Democrats from effecting policy and have asserted that only Republicans have the right to determine the nation’s course.

...

The media can’t be let off the hook for enabling an authoritarian to get to the White House. ... When he ran, the media treated him not as a candidate, but as a celebrity, and so treated him differently from ordinary pols. The media gave him free publicity, trumpeted his shenanigans, blasted out his tweets, allowed him to phone in his interviews, fell into his traps and generally kowtowed until they suddenly discovered that this joke could actually become president.

Armstrong and Dirnt turned to music as an escape and to bring a little excitement into their admittedly staid, suburban lives. Though many of their punk brethren have accused them of selling out, complaining that real punk rock cannot be found on a major corporate label, Green Day's success has not cast a shadow over their drive for fun. Dirnt commented to Rolling Stone, "I told Bill, 'Let's just take it as far as we can. Eventually we'll lose all the money and everything else, anyway. Let's just make sure we have one great big story at the end.'"

Green Day began in San Francisco, California, as an escape for two troubled teens— Michael Dirnt and Billie Joe Armstrong. Dirnt (born Michael Pritchard) was the son of a heroin-addicted mother. A Native American woman and her white husband adopted Dirnt, but they divorced when he was an adolescent. At that time, Dirnt returned to his birth mother, then left home at age fifteen, renting a room from the family of a school friend—Billie Joe Armstrong. (The friendship had solidified around the time of the death of Armstrong's father, when Billie Joe was about ten years old.) Dirnt and Armstrong eventually moved out on their own, inhabiting various basements throughout Berkeley, California, and frequenting a club called the Gilman Street Project.Armstrong and Dirnt hired Jeff Kiftmeyer as the new drummer and began touring. Upon their return to California in 1990, Gilman Street Project regular Tré Cool replaced Kiftmeyer as the drummer. This combination turned into the formula for Green Day's success as the band tried to bring punk rock into the mainstream.This trio of tattooed, pierced, and dyed-hair 22-year-olds emerged in 1994 as one of the hottest commodities in the entertainment business and ushered in punk as the heir apparent to grunge in rock and roll's quirky evolution. For all their efforts, the band has helped make punk mainstream and opened the gates for other punk bands including former Lookout! labelmates, the Offspring and Rancid.

Green Day's first number one album since 1994's multi-platinum Dookie--which is likely due to the fact that while the lyrics may have a deeper meaning, the hooks are still there, and they are played with the same intensity that made the group famous more than a decade ago. Spin said the title track was "Green Day's most epic song yet.

Like their punk predecessors, Green Day showed commitment and passion in their songs while reveling in disorder with their outlandish stage theatrics. Whether drawn to the on-stage antics or the music, listeners have always responded well to Green Day. Audiences have purchased an unprecedented number of the band's albums and continue to attend their concerts in large numbers. Both critics and music industry organizations have handed the band honors and praise for its music and lyrics.

Their lyrics dwell on "hormone-related" issues such as alienation, resentment, disillusionment, hopelessness, and self-destruction. Typically punk, they preach redemption through realism. It is not surprising then that Green Day's material was once classified as "music for people with raging hormones and short attention spans.

Moreover, critics lauded Dookie for its melodies and lyrics as well as for its controlled frenzy. In June 1994, Time reviewer Christopher John Farley even went so far as to declare the work the best rock CD of the year. In 1995, Dookie won the prestigious Grammy Award for Best Alternative Music Performance. Rolling Stone Music Awards also recognized Dookie as the best album of the year and named Green Day the best band of 1995. "Longview" from Dookie also received two honors at Billboard's Music Video Awards. It was MTV's constant playing of "Longview" that made the punk-pop song more than an alternative hit and Green Day a major crossover success with mainstream audiences. Similarly, Green Day's singles earned impressive credits. In 1995, for example, "When I Come Around" spent more than twenty weeks on Billboard's Hot 100 Chart, eighteen weeks on the Modern Rock Tracks Chart, eleven weeks on the Hot 100 Recurrent Air Play List, and nine weeks on the Top 40 Air Play Chart. The next year "Geek Stink Breath" endured for eight weeks on Billboard's Hot 100 Air Play Chart.

If ever an alternative rock group epitomized modern punk, it would be Green Day. Influenced by groups like British punk rockers The Sex Pistols and The Clash, as well as by the 1960s British Invasion pop group The Kinks, Green Day's Billie Joe Armstrong, Mike Dirnt, and Tré Cool built on the British punk sound of the 1970s to carve their own place in pop music history.

The work challenges listeners to dig deeper than the high-octane guitars and thundering drums that drive the record's jubilant pop sheen. This is a multi-layered, literate narrative that effectively wields anger, wit, and bombast to expose the ugliness that seeps below the surface of this country's patriotism, commercialism, and nationalism.

"A lot of rock music lacks ambition. Rock has become stagnant. There are a lot of bands that aren't doing anything differently than what's currently going on in pop music--like issuing a single, putting out a record, making a video, and hopefully getting on a tour with a bigger band. I think the reason hip-hop has become so much bigger than rock lately is because those artists are much more ambitious, and they are making records that have a concept and characters. They sound like a script." ~Billy Joe Armstrong

"All my songwriting is about creating a statement and taking action. On American Idiot, it's reflecting on what's going on in the world right now." ~Billy Joe Armstrong

2016 election irregularities, including a claim by Richard Hayes Phillips that some small towns in Wisconsin had more cast ballots than registered voters. (!!!)

Elizabeth Warren on the horde of lobbyists Trump has appointed to his transition team.

Donald Trump is a liar. What a surprise.

This is one of the main largest reasons this speech is so memorable. Murrow, not only addressed the issue, but he called out the person responsible live TV.

I love the intro that Murrow uses. He knows that his speech might fall on deaf ears and may indeed be unhelpful, but he will not be daunted in his beliefs and his choice to express his opinion and thoughts on what he feels is not only an important event for him, but for his country. however in today's modern digital news infrastructure, his concerns are somewhat of a moot point now. in order for any web based news source to function online, they need revenue to function and to remain online. The easiest way is to advertise. While this is the easiest way to gain revenue, the payoff is much smaller. The only way for sites like these are able to still function are if they continue to give space to ads. The biggest downside is that with so much space taken over by ads, the real news at the center of the site is harder to see beneath the haze.

Ethnographers often act surprised at how "nice" white supremacists are -- to another white person, that is.

What I realized was how tired I am of hearing how “nice” and “decent” the people are who voted for Trump. I’m so damn tired of this particular excuse because so-called nice and decent white voters put bigotry in office. “Nice” and “decent” don’t necessarily negate racism. Klan members can seem nice and still be racist. And “nice” and “decent” is often only extended by white people to other white people. This is pretty much only a shock to white people.

TV and newspapers avoid using the words "racism" and "racist". This was helpful to Trump's campaign, and it's even more helpful to him now.

Michael Signer says it is the duty of the Electoral College to judge candidates and reject a man like Donald Trump.

Where we're heading under "President" Trump.

Prof. Timothy Frye on the disturbing abnormalities of the 2016 election -- and their similarity to the status quo in weak democracies.

• candidate keeping his finances a secret
• threats to imprison a political opponent
• racism, xenophobia, and misogyny
• interference by a foreign government
• media circus
• politicization of security services (FBI)

Jeff Sessions, Trump's pick for Attorney General, is an opponent of civil rights.

Bill Palmer's opinion:

In order to believe that the official vote tallies are legitimate, you have to accept that all of the above legitimately happened: African-Americans in the south went from turning out in droves for Hillary Clinton in the primary to not caring if she won the general election. Donald Trump got perhaps seventy percent of the same-day voting in Florida. The polling averages were wrong for the first time in modern history. Trump beat his poll numbers despite having spent the primary season tending to fall below them. Clinton fell below her poll numbers despite having spent the primary season tending to beat them. In every state where Trump pulled off a shocking upset victory, he just happened to do it with one percent of the vote. And in an election that everyone cared particularly deeply about, no one really turned out to vote at all.