Delaware Liberal

The December 5, 2016 Thread

Delaware Dem

“Donald Trump’s protocol-breaking telephone call with Taiwan’s leader was an intentionally provocative move that establishes the incoming president as a break with the past, according to interviews with people involved in the planning,” the Washington Post reports.

“The historic communication — the first between leaders of the United States and Taiwan since 1979 — was the product of months of quiet preparations and deliberations among Trump’s advisers about a new strategy for engagement with Taiwan that began even before he became the Republican presidential nominee, according to people involved in or briefed on the talks.”

“The call also reflects the views of hard-line advisers urging Trump to take a tough opening line with China, said others familiar with the months of discussion about Taiwan and China.”

CNN’s Brian Stelter:

Let’s tell some truths about lying, because the way Donald Trump lies has people rethinking some of the basic premises of journalism, like the assumption that everything a president says is automatically news. When President-elect Trump lies so casually, so cynically, the news isn’t so much the false thing he said, it’s that he felt like he could just go ahead and say it, go ahead and lie to you. That’s the story. […]

Court cases involving Trump have shown that he lies even when the truth is really easy to discern. And that’s what we’re seeing all again now. That’s why I think fact-checking is important, but the framing of these stories is even more important.

Take Trump’s promotion of this voter fraud conspiracy idea. He said on Twitter “I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.” The journalistic impulse was to say something like “Trump claims he won the popular vote.” I would suggest to you that better framing is “Trump lies again, embracing a far-right-wing conspiracy theory.”

See, focusing on the falsehood createsmore confusion and gives the lie even more life. And that’s the wrong way to go. Focusing on Trump’s tendency to buy into BS gets to what’s really going on here. This calls for more reporting and for reporters to show our work, to show that we actually know the truth.

Finally and exact. If what Trump is saying is a lie, the word lie should be in the headline. Trump lies again. Exactly.

The leader of a Ku Klux Klan branch in North Carolina missed his own Donald Trump victory parade because he was in a jail cell, arrested for stabbing a fellow Klan member the night before, according to the Daily Mail.

Finally also! Follow her lead, spineless Carperite Dems! Our response is repeal the repeal or pass Medicare for all.

Playbook: “Republicans on Capitol Hill are already beginning to fret over how they’ll lift the debt ceiling in the age of Donald Trump. Here’s how top Republicans are thinking of things. In the past, fiscal conservatives have insisted on cutting spending to match any increase of the debt ceiling . If they hold fast on that this time around, they’ll have to go after entitlements — which Trump has been cool to. GOP leadership will spend much of the first part of 2017 passing an infrastructure bill, working on tax reform and repealing the health care law — and that will take a lot of political capital.”

“There has been some discussion about lifting the debt ceiling — which has to be done by late summer — as part of a larger deal, but there are mixed feelings about going down that path. Rank-and-file Republicans have relished fights over the debt ceiling, so with the White House in GOP hands, they might not be so eager to get in line. That Republicans are already thinking — and strategizing — about this shows how big of a deal it will be.”

Excellent again! And filibuster Sessions.

“Republicans see the same ethically challenged complications lurking in Donald Trump’s business portfolio that Democrats are squawking about. They just think Americans don’t care about these entanglements anymore,” Politico reports. “Indeed, the GOP is so easily dismissing Democratic threats of investigations and ethicists’ calls for divestment out of a belief that the political landscape has shifted.”

President-elect Donald Trump “is widening the circle of candidates for secretary of state and will interview more prospects this week, transition officials said, a sign that after multiple meetings with high-profile hopefuls he still isn’t sold on whom he wants as the nation’s top diplomat,” the Wall Street Journal reports. “Though Mr. Trump’s transition team said last week that the search had narrowed to four finalists, new candidates have emerged, including Rex Tillerson, chairman and chief executive of Exxon Mobil Corp., one transition adviser said.”

Associated Press: “According to two people close to the transition, Trump is moving away from two of the front-runners for the job, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney, the 2012 GOP nominee. Giuliani’s international business ties and public campaigning for the job are said to have rankled Trump. And while Trump has met twice with Romney, he’s said to be aware of the risks of angering his supporters by tapping a Republican who was among his fiercest critics.”

“Former CIA director David Petraeus is still in the mix, though both people close to the transition said Trump’s prolonged decision-making process has left the door open to other options.”

“One of the sources said Trump was open to expanding his short list of secretary of State prospects. Among the possibilities: Jon Huntsman, a former Republican Utah governor who also served as the ambassador to China and speaks Mandarin.”

Jeffrey Toobin: “Stein’s demands for a recount reflect the same narcissism as her candidacy, whose primary function was to help Trump win. (Her roughly one per cent of the national vote included more than enough votes to swing two of the three states to Clinton.) Now she has exploited legitimate questions about interference by Russia, which, it seems, organized or backed a hacking operation that involved the theft of e-mails from the Democratic National Committee and from Clinton’s campaign chair, John Podesta. This drew a curiously passive response from the Obama Administration, but there remains no evidence that Russia or any other outside force systematically intervened or altered the result in any state. The recounts will only give Trump an opportunity to claim victory again.”

“More important, they have turned attention away from the real voting-rights scandal of 2016. This was the first Presidential election since the Supreme Court’s notorious Shelby County v. Holder decision, which gutted the Voting Rights Act. Several Republican-controlled states took the Court’s decision as an invitation to rewrite their election laws, purportedly to address the (nonexistent) problem of voter fraud but in fact to limit the opportunities for Democrats and minorities (overlapping groups, of course) to cast their ballots.”

Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook told CNN that the media’s predictions that Hillary Clinton would easily win the presidency hurt her by not motivating her supporters to actually vote. And when those forecasts are wrong due to bad polling and data, that is even worse. Goodbye Nate Silver. We hardly knew thee.

“More than 20 million Americans could lose health insurance from the repeal of Obamacare. But not everybody would suffer. And among those who stand to gain are the richest people in America,” the Huffington Post reports.

“That’s because Obamacare didn’t just change insurance arrangements. It also raised taxes on corporations and individuals. Repealing the law would mean repealing those taxes, with significant benefits going to millionaires and multimillionaires. President-elect Donald Trump might even be one of them.”

Of course Trump was watching and tweeted: “Just tried watching Saturday Night Live – unwatchable! Totally biased, not funny and the Baldwin impersonation just can’t get any worse. Sad!”

The Hill: Alec Baldwin promises to stop Trump impersonation if he releases his tax returns.

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