Octopus Overlords

Isgrimnur wrote:No one better to help drain the swamp than the new Chief of Staff: Reince Priebus.

Captain Caveman wrote:

RunningMn9 wrote:There are times when I wonder whether I'm living in an Onion article. Ann Coulter helpfully pointed out on Twitter that the Republican Party has control of the White House, House of Reps and Senate for the first time....since 1928.

Is that something you want to advertise? "Hey, the last time you turned over total control to us, it was immediately followed by the worst economic meltdown in our country's history!"

Of course, you might remember that Ann appears to have forgotten that the Republican Party was given total control more recently - from 2003-2006. Right before the second worst economic downturn in our history!

I could totally see Hillary pointing that out. Why is Ann pointing that out?

She's also horribly wrong. Republicans held control of the White House, the House, and the Senate as recently as 2002-2006.

Defiant wrote:Nine times Donald Trump has already betrayed the US voters who put their faith in him
Within days the President-elect has rowed back or ditched a string of his bizarre promises

It includes:
Scrapping Obamacare
Jailing Clinton
The Wall
Banning Muslims
Taxing China
Iran nuclear deal
Other countries paying for their own defences
Bringing back waterboarding.

Who else feels dizzy?

malchior wrote:Woke up to find out Bannon is to be named Chief Strategist. The bridge to White Nationalism is going to be Chief Strategist. That seems to take a lot of air out of the healing the divide balloon.

LordMortis wrote:

Defiant wrote:Nine times Donald Trump has already betrayed the US voters who put their faith in him
Within days the President-elect has rowed back or ditched a string of his bizarre promises

It includes:
Scrapping Obamacare
Jailing Clinton
The Wall
Banning Muslims
Taxing China
Iran nuclear deal
Other countries paying for their own defences
Bringing back waterboarding.

Who else feels dizzy?

I'll play wait and see. But (most of) this is a good thing, isn't it? In theory, it's all a good thing. It's demonstration of being reasonable, isn't it?

LordMortis wrote:

Defiant wrote:Nine times Donald Trump has already betrayed the US voters who put their faith in him
Within days the President-elect has rowed back or ditched a string of his bizarre promises

It includes:
Scrapping Obamacare
Jailing Clinton
The Wall
Banning Muslims
Taxing China
Iran nuclear deal
Other countries paying for their own defences
Bringing back waterboarding.

Who else feels dizzy?

I'll play wait and see. But (most of) this is a good thing, isn't it? In theory, it's all a good thing. It's demonstration of being reasonable, isn't it?

tgb wrote:Riddle me this:

If gay marriage has already been "decided by the courts", how is it that Roe v. Wade hasn't?

Rip wrote:That has to be about the weakest leak in history.

President-elect Donald J. Drumpf’s transition was in disarray on Tuesday, marked by firings, infighting and revelations that American allies were blindly dialing in to Drumpf Tower to try to reach the soon-to-be-leader of the free world.

One week after Mr. Drumpf scored an upset victory that took him by surprise, his team was improvising the most basic traditions of assuming power. That included working without official State Department briefing materials in his first conversations with foreign leaders.

Two officials who had been handling national security for the transition, former Representative Mike Rogers of Michigan and Matthew Freedman, a lobbyist who consults with corporations and foreign governments, were fired. Both were part of what officials described as a purge orchestrated by Jared Kushner, Mr. Drumpf’s son-in-law and close adviser.

The dismissals followed the abrupt firing on Friday of Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, who was replaced as chief of the transition by Vice President-elect Mike Pence. Mr. Kushner, a transition official said, was systematically dismissing people like Mr. Rogers who had ties with Mr. Christie. As a federal prosecutor, Mr. Christie had sent Mr. Kushner’s father to jail.

Prominent American allies were in the meantime scrambling to figure out how and when to contact Mr. Drumpf. At times, they have been patched through to him in his luxury office tower with little warning, according to a Western diplomat who spoke on the condition of anonymity to detail private conversations.

President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt was the first to reach Mr. Drumpf for such a call last Wednesday, followed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel not long afterward. But that was about 24 hours before Prime Minister Theresa May of Britain got through — a striking break from diplomatic practice given the close alliance between the United States and Britain.

On Sunday, the publisher and the executive editor of the New York Times published a letter to the paper’s readers, promising to “rededicate” the paper to its “fundamental mission”. That mission, they said, is to “report America and the world honestly, without fear or favor, striving always to understand and reflect all political perspectives and life experiences in the stories that we bring to you.”

This is as close as the Times is likely to come to apologizing to its readers for a year and a half of unbalanced--and often unhinged--coverage of the presidential race.

I grew up in an era when the New York Times was the greatest newspaper in the world. Throughout my political career, there were plenty of moments when I thought the paper’s coverage had an unfair slant. But I knew it remained America’s most revered newspaper, and that generally its reporters held themselves to the highest standards.

Thus I watched with some regret as all of that went out the window this election cycle. It was sad to see a 165-year-old paper destroy its credibility over one election season. But the Times’s complete abandonment of its old standards was obvious to anyone who read its coverage.

The paper wrote stories that were unrelentingly hostile to Trump and his supporters.

It allowed reporters to include their personal opinions and political analysis in news coverage.

It allowed political reporters to spew their animosity to Trump on social media. (I am old enough to remember when reporters maintained the conceit that they did not have political opinions.)

It published stories about Trump in which it distorted the accounts of interviewees, according to the subjects’ own testimony.

It published front page stories and editorials with headlines that accused Trump of “lying”--but never so characterized any of Hillary Clinton’s well-documented lies.

And now the same publisher and the same editor that oversaw this partisan assault are promising to “rededicate” themselves to reporting “honestly”. Perhaps even the paper’s liberal readership has tired of reporting that increasingly resembles the state-controlled propaganda of totalitarian regimes.

Before readers take the paper at its word, they should ask its leadership some of the following questions:

1. Does the Times have any reporters, editors, or columnists who will say they voted for Trump, and has it hired any new ones?

2. Has it hired any reporters who are even Republicans?

3. Has it changed its policies that allowed journalists to express their opinions about the events and people they covered in their news stories?

4. Will it ask the Pulitzer Prize board to withdraw, and its reporters to return, any prizes that might be awarded for news stories that contained reporters’ personal opinions?

5. Have its editors retracted misleading news headlines that expressed opinions or pure speculation--such as the paper’s coverage of Trump’s tax returns?

6. Has it fired reporters who admitted to writing politically motivated “news” stories and encouraged interview subjects to talk to them so they could stop Trump?

7. Has it retracted its shameful election-eve front-page story “reporting” on Trump’s innermost thoughts and feelings, virtually every sentence of which is filled with reporters’ opinions and speculations--featuring claims like “he is struggling to suppress his bottomless need for attention”?

If the answer to all of these questions is “no”--why would anyone believe that the paper is now “rededicated” to honesty? And why would anyone trust the New York Times to report on American politics?

Ford Motor Co. CEO Mark Fields said the Trump administration’s potential 35 percent tariff on vehicles imported from Mexico could have a “huge impact” on the U.S. economy, but the automaker has no plans to change its investments in Mexico.

“A tariff like that would be imposed on the entire auto sector, and that could have a huge impact on the U.S. economy,” Fields said today following his keynote address at the Los Angeles auto show. “I continue to be convinced that the right policies will prevail. I think we all share the same objective, which is a healthy and vibrant U.S. economy.

President-elect Donald Trump has attacked Ford repeatedly for moving some production south of the border, vowing to impose a tariff that would force the automaker to bring jobs back to the U.S. Fields said the automaker still plans to move Ford Focus production to a $1.6 billion plant being built in Mexico and replace that with two vehicles at the company’s Michigan Assembly Plant.”

malchior wrote: So Trump is having random conversations with foreign leaders on the phones at Trump Tower. What could go wrong with this scenario?

“Bannon is going to be keeper of the image of Trump as a fighter against the status quo, and Reince is going to utilize his personal connections with the speaker and others, to make the trains run on time,” said Ken Blackwell, a former Ohio state official and a member of the transition team.

Fitzy wrote:

malchior wrote: So Trump is having random conversations with foreign leaders on the phones at Trump Tower. What could go wrong with this scenario?

Oh. So one might say Trump is using a private phone system for official business...

Donald Trump isn’t the president yet, the incumbent president expressed on Monday, telling the press ahead of a foreign trip “there is one president at a time.”

Rip wrote:

Fitzy wrote:

malchior wrote: So Drumpf is having random conversations with foreign leaders on the phones at Drumpf Tower. What could go wrong with this scenario?

Oh. So one might say Drumpf is using a private phone system for official business...

Donald Drumpf isn’t the president yet, the incumbent president expressed on Monday, telling the press ahead of a foreign trip “there is one president at a time.”

Did Obama have some special "potus-elect" phone system to use before he was inaugurated?

Rip wrote:

Fitzy wrote:

malchior wrote: So Trump is having random conversations with foreign leaders on the phones at Trump Tower. What could go wrong with this scenario?

Oh. So one might say Trump is using a private phone system for official business...

Donald Trump isn’t the president yet, the incumbent president expressed on Monday, telling the press ahead of a foreign trip “there is one president at a time.”

Did Obama have some special "potus-elect" phone system to use before he was inaugurated?

Ralph-Wiggum wrote:That John Oliver show convinced me that I need to do more to support the causes I think will be under fire in a Drumpf presidency. So yesterday I donated for the first time to the ACLU and Planned Parenthood (not using Mike Pence's name, unfortunately). I also looked into getting a New York Times subscription, but just the Sunday Times costs $460/year! As an educator(ish), I can actually get a discount to make it "only" $250/year. But still, holy crap.

Ralph-Wiggum wrote:That John Oliver show convinced me that I need to do more to support the causes I think will be under fire in a Trump presidency. So yesterday I donated for the first time to the ACLU and Planned Parenthood (not using Mike Pence's name, unfortunately). I also looked into getting a New York Times subscription, but just the Sunday Times costs $460/year! As an educator(ish), I can actually get a discount to make it "only" $250/year. But still, holy crap.

Ralph-Wiggum wrote:That John Oliver show convinced me that I need to do more to support the causes I think will be under fire in a Trump presidency. So yesterday I donated for the first time to the ACLU and Planned Parenthood (not using Mike Pence's name, unfortunately). I also looked into getting a New York Times subscription, but just the Sunday Times costs $460/year! As an educator(ish), I can actually get a discount to make it "only" $250/year. But still, holy crap.

Zaxxon wrote:You can get the NYT digital edition for much less than that. Something like $1-2/week. If you grab the app and go to sign up in there you'll see it.

Zaxxon wrote:You can get the NYT digital edition for much less than that. Something like $1-2/week. If you grab the app and go to sign up in there you'll see it.

Ralph-Wiggum wrote:If you subscribe to the digital edition only, do you get access to the crossword puzzles? There's an app for it, but it still costs something like $40/year just for the crossword.

malchior wrote:

Ralph-Wiggum wrote:If you subscribe to the digital edition only, do you get access to the crossword puzzles? There's an app for it, but it still costs something like $40/year just for the crossword.

It is separate - even for regular subscriptions. Annoying.

Zaxxon wrote:Ah, so you hate the environment. Got it.