Trump provided his action plan for the first 100-days. I'll start by mocking his preamble that say [his plan] "begins with restoring honesty, accountability and change to Washington."
Trump was dishonest about so many things on the campaign trial -- simple shit that was easy to expose --, so that one is out the window. He hasn't held himself accountable for his treatment of women, employees, or contractors. If his plans benefit the oligarchy, then it is hardly a change to Washington.
Of his six measures to "clean up the corruption and special interest collusion in Washington, DC":
The greatest trick Donald Trump pulled was convincing voters he’d be “anti-establishment.”
Well, maybe not the greatest trick. But in a campaign full of cons, it has to rank close to the top. This was near the heart of Trump’s appeal to the disaffected and disempowered: Send me to Washington, and that “establishment” you’ve been hearing so much about? We’ll blow it up, send it packing, punch it right in the face, and when it’s over the government will finally be working for you again. And the people who voted for Trump bought it. After all, he’s no politician, right? He’s an outsider, a glass-breaker, a guy who can cut out the bull and get things done. Right?
But the idea that he would do this was based on a profound misunderstanding of what the establishment actually is, and who Donald Trump is.
On the morning of January 20, 2017, the President-elect is to visit Barack Obama at the White House for coffee, before they share a limousine—Obama seated on the right, his successor on the left—for the ride to the Capitol, where the Inauguration will take place, on the west front terrace, at noon.
Donald Trump will be five months short of seventy-one. If he wins the election, he will be America’s oldest first-term President, seven months older than Ronald Reagan was at his swearing-in. Reagan used humor to deflect attention from his age—in 1984, he promised not to “exploit, for political purposes, my opponent’s youth and inexperience.” Trump favors a different strategy: for months, his advisers promoted a theory that his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, who is sixty-eight, has a secret brain illness and is unable to climb stairs or sit upright without help, and, in speeches, Trump asked whether she had the “mental and physical stamina” for the Presidency.
The full spectacle of Trump’s campaign—the compulsive feuds and slurs, the detachment from established facts—has demanded so much attention that it is easy to overlook a process with more enduring consequences: his bureaucratic march toward actually assuming power. On August 1st, members of his transition team moved into 1717 Pennsylvania Avenue, a thirteen-story office building a block from the White House. The team is led by Governor Chris Christie, of New Jersey, and includes several of his political confidants, such as his former law partner William Palatucci. As of August, under a new federal program designed to accelerate Presidential transitions, Trump’s staff was eligible to apply for security clearances, so that they could receive classified briefings immediately after Election Day. They began the process of selecting Cabinet officials, charting policy moves, and meeting with current White House officials to plan the handover of the Departments of Defense, State, Homeland Security, and other agencies.
With the polls virtually tied, the possibility of a Trump victory is no longer the stuff of dark comedy or fan fiction. It is fair to ask: What would he actually be like as President?Credit Photo Illustration by Ji Lee; Source: Pete Souza / White House (Office); Tom Williams / CQ Roll Call / AP (Trump); Yvonne Hemsey / Getty; Orjan F. Ellingvag / Dagbladet / Getty; Andy Buchanan / AFP / Getty; D. Dipasupil / FilmMagic / Getty; Desiree Navarro / FilmMagic / Getty; Jemal Countess / WireImage / Getty; Joe Raedle / Getty; Myrna Suarez / Getty (framed photos)
By: Anthony D. Romero, ACLU Executive Director
Date: 2016-11-09
This morning, Donald J. Trump was elected the 45th president of the United States, and the ACLU has a message for him.
President-elect Trump, as you assume the nation’s highest office, we urge you to reconsider and change course on certain campaign promises you have made. These include your plan to amass a deportation force to remove 11 million undocumented immigrants; ban the entry of Muslims into our country and aggressively surveil them; punish women for accessing abortion; reauthorize waterboarding and other forms of torture; and change our nation’s libel laws and restrict freedom of expression.
These proposals are not simply un-American and wrong-headed, they are unlawful and unconstitutional. They violate the First, Fourth, Fifth, Eighth, and 14th Amendments. If you do not reverse course and instead endeavor to make these campaign promises a reality, you will have to contend with the full firepower of the ACLU at every step. Our staff of litigators and activists in every state, thousands of volunteers and millions of card-carrying members and supporters are ready to fight against any encroachment on our cherished freedoms and rights.
One thing is certain: We will be eternally vigilant every single day of your presidency. And when you leave the Oval Office, we will do the same with your successor as we have done throughout our nearly 100 years of existence. The Constitution and the rule of law are stronger than any one person, and we will see to that. We will never waver.
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There’s more than one way for the establishment to yield power from this election.
The first path is obvious, direct and potentially deadly. A Hillary presidency will be surrounded by bitter people, and overt uses of power, along with war, increased taxes and thinly-veiled pay-for-play politics benefiting the billionaires who’ve bankrolled her rise to power.
The other path is less predictable, but possible just the perfect “magic formula” they need to get things flowing again.
In an on-the-ground report from the battleground state of Ohio, investigative reporter Greg Palast has uncovered the latest in vote suppression tactics led by Republicans that could threaten the integrity of the vote in Ohio and North Carolina. On some polling machines, audit protection functions have been shut off, and African Americans and Hispanics are being scrubbed from the voter rolls through a system called Crosscheck. "It’s a brand-new Jim Crow," Palast says. "Today, on Election Day, they’re not going to use white sheets to keep way black voters. Today, they’re using spreadsheets."
When Donald Trump claimed, "the election's going to be rigged," he wasn't entirely wrong. But the threat was not, as Trump warned, from Americans committing the crime of "voting many, many times." What's far more likely to undermine democracy in November is the culmination of a decade-long Republican effort to disenfranchise voters under the guise of battling voter fraud. The latest tool: Election officials in more than two dozen states have compiled lists of citizens whom they allege could be registered in more than one state – thus potentially able to cast multiple ballots – and eligible to be purged from the voter rolls.
The data is processed through a system called the Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck Program, which is being promoted by a powerful Republican operative, and its lists of potential duplicate voters are kept confidential. But Rolling Stone obtained a portion of the list and the names of 1 million targeted voters. According to our analysis, the Crosscheck list disproportionately threatens solid Democratic constituencies: young, black, Hispanic and Asian-American voters – with some of the biggest possible purges underway in Ohio and North Carolina, two crucial swing states with tight Senate races.
New Proof The Election Was Rigged Against Democrats!
http://leecamp.net/8138-2/
By: Lee Camp
Date: 2016-09-09
I just talked with two election experts – Greg Palast and Mark Crispin Miller – both incredibly accomplished in their fields. They agreed that this election was indeed rigged, and even though it has been Donald Trump spouting off about election rigging, perhaps he didn’t realize that the machinery was in place to rig it in HIS FAVOR. Greg Palast estimates that 1.1 MILLION people, mainly minorities, were knocked off the voting rolls in swing states using a system called “Cross Check.” That system accuses people of being “double voters” even though there is absolutely no proof. Cross Check is used in 30 Republican-led states. On top of that, Palast discovered that ballot protection software on the new Ohio voting machines was TURNED OFF. Election law expert Bob Fitrakis actually took Ohio to court last week to make sure the ballot protection software be turned ON. However, the judge sided with the state and said to leave it OFF on election day!
Professor Mark Crispin Miller agrees with Palast, saying that this election was stolen from the Democrats in a similar fashion to 2000 and 2004. And this is not coming from a fan of Hillary Clinton. Miller pointed out that Hillary Clinton is a neo-liberal who was intent on continuing to gut the social safety net and allowing the big banks to run wild. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have a fair election. Furthermore, this is not just about the Presidency. This election theft impacts congressional and gubernatorial races as well.
I strongly believe that if Hillary Clinton – and the corporate Democrats in general – had ACTUALLY stood for something, then people would’ve had a reason to stand with them. This is why Bernie Sanders would’ve won this election easily. (He would’ve beat the margin that was stolen.) People believed what Bernie Sanders said, and that’s why he attracted an enthusiastic following. Even most Hillary voters didn’t take her at her word. Her actions proved that she supports trade deals, supports war, supports weapons contractors, supports oil and gas, and supports the big banks. If the left ever wants to win again, they need to start TRULY standing for something, rather than just feeding people lies while enriching themselves.
The two interviews mentioned above will air tomorrow night on Redacted Tonight: VIP. At 6pm ET tomorrow they’ll also be posted to YouTube.com/RedactedTonight.
Keep Fighting,
Lee
The article is reproduced in accordance with Section 107 of title 17 of the Copyright Law of the United States relating to fair-use and is for the purposes of criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research.
In his first speech as president-elect, Donald Trump pledged to “be president for all Americans” and to work with supporters and critics alike to “unify our great country.” Now that it is apparent that?—?likely without a plurality of the votes?—?the nation has selected him to lead the country, it will now be up to him to deliver on his promises to “make America great again.”
With GOP majorities in both houses of Congress for at least the next two years and what will likely be a friendly Supreme Court, Americans will now see what happens trying things his way.
Here is what the Trump administration must now deliver to keep his promises:
The $66 billion sale of Monsanto is yet another reminder of how corporations have colonized the world and subverted democracy. To regain our future, we must claim our right to popular sovereignty.
Last week, Bayer, a transnational drug and pesticide company, secured funding for its $66 billion offer to acquire Monsanto, the world’s largest producer of agricultural seeds. This follows the announced $130 billion merger of chemical giants Dow and DuPont, and ChemChina’s proposed $43 billion purchase of the seed and pesticide firm Syngenta.
Bayer, DuPont, Dow, Monsanto, and Syngenta are five of the world’s six biggest pesticide and seed corporations. There are claims, which I find credible, that the “Big 6” and their products bear major responsibility for pesticide-resistant weeds and insects, and are implicated in impoverishment of small farmers, collapse of honeybee colonies, water pollution, and loss of biodiversity and soil fertility—all serious attacks on the common good. And similar consolidation continues in most every sector of the economy.
I think you believe this is all just sour grapes; the crocodile tears of the losing locker room with the scoreboard going against us at the buzzer.
I can only tell you that you’re wrong. This is not about losing an election. This isn’t about not winning a contest. This is about two very different ways of seeing the world.
Read the Letter Aaron Sorkin Wrote His Daughter After Donald Trump Was Elected President
The Oscar-winning screenwriter of The Social Network and mastermind behind The West Wing reacts to Donald Trump being elected the 45th president of the United States in a moving letter written to his 15-year-old daughter Roxy and her mother Julia Sorkin.
Well the world changed late last night in a way I couldn’t protect us from. That’s a terrible feeling for a father. I won’t sugarcoat it—this is truly horrible. It’s hardly the first time my candidate didn’t win (in fact it’s the sixth time) but it is the first time that a thoroughly incompetent pig with dangerous ideas, a serious psychiatric disorder, no knowledge of the world and no curiosity to learn has.
And it wasn’t just Donald Trump who won last night—it was his supporters too. The Klan won last night. White nationalists. Sexists, racists and buffoons. Angry young white men who think rap music and Cinco de Mayo are a threat to their way of life (or are the reason for their way of life) have been given cause to celebrate. Men who have no right to call themselves that and who think that women who aspire to more than looking hot are shrill, ugly, and otherwise worthy of our scorn rather than our admiration struck a blow for misogynistic shitheads everywhere. Hate was given hope. Abject dumbness was glamorized as being “the fresh voice of an outsider” who’s going to “shake things up.” (Did anyone bother to ask how? Is he going to re-arrange the chairs in the Roosevelt Room?) For the next four years, the President of the United States, the same office held by Washington and Jefferson, Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt, F.D.R., J.F.K. and Barack Obama, will be held by a man-boy who’ll spend his hours exacting Twitter vengeance against all who criticize him (and those numbers will be legion). We’ve embarrassed ourselves in front of our children and the world.
And the world took no time to react. The Dow futures dropped 700 points overnight. Economists are predicting a deep and prolonged recession. Our NATO allies are in a state of legitimate fear. And speaking of fear, Muslim-Americans, Mexican-Americans and African-Americans are shaking in their shoes. And we’d be right to note that many of Donald Trump’s fans are not fans of Jews. On the other hand, there is a party going on at ISIS headquarters. What wouldn’t we give to trade this small fraction of a man for Richard Nixon right now?
Clerk Note: This was put in the publication queue before the election results were known.
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The Billionaire Pedophile Who Could Bring Down Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton
Trump’s supporters have long wondered whether he’d use billionaire sicko Jeffrey Epstein as ammo against the Clintons—until a lurid new lawsuit accused The Donald of raping one of Epstein’s girls himself.
For Jeffrey Epstein and his famous friends, the Aughts were a simpler time, when the businessmen, academics, and celebrities who counted themselves among the playboy philanthropist’s inner circle could freely enjoy the fruits of his extreme wealth and connections.
Epstein’s little black book and flight logs read like a virtual Who’s Who: Bill Clinton, Donald Trump, Larry Summers, Kevin Spacey, Prince Andrew, and Naomi Campbell all hitched rides on Epstein’s private planes. Socialites and distinguished scientists went to visit Epstein’s island in St. Thomas, and cavorted at epic dinner parties at his palatial townhouse—then the largest privately owned residence in New York, as he liked to brag. There, they picked at elaborate meals catered by celebrity chefs like Rocco DiSpirito, marvelled at Epstein’s opulent decor, and noted the pack of very, very young model-types with whom Epstein always seemed to surround himself.
But a darker story was going on underneath the glamour. In 2008, Epstein was convicted of soliciting sex from an underage girl and quietly paid settlements to scores of alleged victims who said he serially molested them. But the girls kept coming out of the woodwork—in 2014, another young woman filed a lawsuit claiming that Epstein used her as a sex slave for his powerful friends—and that she’d been at parties on his private island with former President Clinton.
And just last week, yet another “Jane Doe” filed a suit in New York accusing Epstein and Donald Trump of raping her at a series of sex parties when she was only 13.
Did you know that your Facebook mobile app has complete access to your phone’s microphone?
Recently, an expert has come out to claim that Facebook may be listening in on your conversations. Kelli Burns, a mass communication professor at the University of South Florida, believes the app might be using people’s microphones to gather data on the content of people’s conversations.
Facebook admits that the app is capable of listening to what’s happening around it — but claims the feature simply identifies what people are listening to or watching as means of conveniently posting about it.
When Donald Trump claimed, "the election's going to be rigged," he wasn't entirely wrong. But the threat was not, as Trump warned, from Americans committing the crime of "voting many, many times." What's far more likely to undermine democracy in November is the culmination of a decade-long Republican effort to disenfranchise voters under the guise of battling voter fraud. The latest tool: Election officials in more than two dozen states have compiled lists of citizens whom they allege could be registered in more than one state – thus potentially able to cast multiple ballots – and eligible to be purged from the voter rolls.
The data is processed through a system called the Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck Program, which is being promoted by a powerful Republican operative, and its lists of potential duplicate voters are kept confidential. But Rolling Stone obtained a portion of the list and the names of 1 million targeted voters. According to our analysis, the Crosscheck list disproportionately threatens solid Democratic constituencies: young, black, Hispanic and Asian-American voters – with some of the biggest possible purges underway in Ohio and North Carolina, two crucial swing states with tight Senate races.
In the wake of 9/11, the U.S. government began creating what has now become an "unprecedented buildup" of secret laws, and even the recent public backlash against them has not stopped widespread use of covert rules that impact Americans' everyday lives without their knowledge, according to a new report from the Brennan Center for Justice.
The Department of Justice has kept classified at least 74 legal memos, opinions, and letters issued by the department's Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) from 2002 to 2009 on national security issues—from torture to mass surveillance—according to the report, The New Era of Secret Law (pdf), written by Elizabeth Gotein, co-director of the center's Liberty and National Security Program.
And the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Court, which rules on intelligence collecting activities, is also hiding 25 to 30 opinions issued between 2003 and 2013 "that were deemed significant by the Attorney General." In fact, most of the significant case law written before National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower Edward Snowden's 2013 revelations remains undisclosed.
Government surveillance of civilians has declined in large part due to National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower Edward Snowden's 2013 revelations, according to the latest inspector general audit of the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ).
The report (pdf), released Thursday, which covers the department's activities from 2012 to 2014, finds that technology companies grew increasingly resistant to sharing information with the FBI after Snowden exposed the government's mass surveillance programs—and that the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court approved far fewer FBI requests for civilians' "business records" than it did before the revelations. The records were requested under the controversial Section 215 of the Patriot Act, which the government relied on at the time to collect bulk communications data.
Between 2012 and 2014, the FISA court issued 561 orders known as National Security Letters (NSL), which subpoena records like email time stamps, senders and recipients, and other metadata without a warrant. In 2012, the court issued a nine-year high of 212 NSLs; by 2014, that had dropped to 170. By 2015, it was 142.
Why Isn't There Wall-to-Wall Coverage of The Kansas Crusaders?
https://youtu.be/lZIRpoGtggE
By: 2016-10-17
Date: Thom Hartmann
Thom compares the media coverage of the arrest of three men in Kansas who were plotting to harm immigrants with coverage of previous events perpetrated by Muslims. Is the difference in coverage a reflection of the media's views on race?
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"Megadroughts" that last for decades are threatening to strike already parched Western U.S. states by the end of the century, a new study finds, with one model predicting that a drought lasting about 35 years may be a "near certainty."
A megadrought would bring back the devastating dustbowl conditions of the 1930s to California, Utah, Nevada, New Mexico, and Colorado, but would last for a much longer period of time, according to the study published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances.
"Using a combination of temperature and precipitation models," the Guardian reports, "the study predicts a 70 percent chance of a megadrought by the end of the century, should rainfall levels remain the same, with a 90 percent chance of an elongated drought should rainfall decrease, as most climate models forecast."
Earth is the warmest it's been in 100,000 years, a new reconstruction of historical temperature data finds, and with today's level of fossil fuel emissions the planet is "locked into" eventually hitting its highest temperature mark in 2 million years.
The new research published Monday in Nature was done by Carolyn Snyder, now a climate policy official at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, as a part of her doctoral dissertation at Stanford University, according to the Associated Press.
Snyder "created a continuous 2 million year temperature record, much longer than a previous 22,000 year record. [Snyder's reconstruction] doesn't estimate temperature for a single year, but averages 5,000-year time periods going back a couple million years," AP writes.
"We do find this close relationship between temperature and greenhouse gases that is remarkably stable, and what the study is developing is the coupling factor between the two," Snyder toldNational Geographic.
AP further reports:
Temperatures averaged out over the most recent 5,000 years—which includes the last 125 years or so of industrial emissions of heat-trapping gases—are generally warmer than they have been since about 120,000 years ago or so, Snyder found. And two interglacial time periods, the one 120,000 years ago and another just about 2 million years ago, were the warmest Snyder tracked. They were about 3.6 degrees (2 degrees Celsius) warmer than the current 5,000-year average.
With the link to carbon dioxide levels and taking into account other factors and past trends, Snyder calculated how much warming can be expected in the future.
In an interview with CBS, a leading physicist named Dr. Michio Kaku has blown the lid on secret experiments into weather modification. He described the experiments in great detail, and many have noted that they sound remarkably similar to the experiments that have been carried out at the HAARP facility in Alaska. In both cases, the weather modification has been achieved by shooting lasers and nanoparticles into the sky.
Dr. Kaku is not the only scientist to have attested to the feasibility of advanced weather modification technology. In a paper published in ‘Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences’, Professor Wolf Kasparian has described the process in some detail. He claims that laser beams can be used to create a strong effect of ice multiplication in thin cirrus ice clouds. This increases the optical thickness of the cloud and causes a corresponding change in the weather in the atmosphere.
According to Dr. Kaku, the government of the United States is not alone in its experimentation with this extraordinary technology, and he claims that weather modification has been attempted all over the world. However, when he specifically started to draw attention to governmental collaboration with this kind of experiment he was quickly interrupted by the CBS anchors who assured the viewers that these experiments were only ‘alleged’. This is a fairly typical response to the topic of weather modification among members of the press, most of whom seem to believe that stories of weather modification are too outlandish to be true.
However, the evidence for weather modification technology keeps piling up. The testaments of these two scientists can be added to the mass of testimony given by whistleblowers and independent researchers over the years. The United States government has tacitly admitted that they have been involved in this kind of project in the past but have always been very coy about admitting the full extent of these secret programs. It is hoped that as more and more people choose to speak out about weather modification technologies the veil of secrecy will finally be lifted.
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