Delaware Liberal

The December 19, 2016 Thread

Delaware Dem

Washington Post: “The White House may be the nation’s time-honored symbol of power, but Trump is establishing his 58-story colossus at 725 Fifth Avenue as a stage for his new role, potentially nipping at Washington’s reputation as the center of American authority and the stature of its most famous address, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.”

“On most days, crowds of tourists, rank-and-file New Yorkers and candidates seeking jobs with the new administration endure a maze of checkpoints, barricades and police command posts on the traffic-choked streets that bound Trump Tower.”

Peter Weber says Senate Dems should just say no: “Democrats in the House will have very little power, but Senate Democrats will have a chance to block Trump’s more outrageous proposals — at least as long as the filibuster stands — and a handful of Republicans skeptical of various aspects of the Trump agenda (see: Russia) will wield a lot of clout. More to the point, these senators will have every right to block Trump, if they see fit. After all, America has elected its senators by popular vote since the 17th Amendment took effect in 1913 — unlike Trump, all 100 of these Senate members won more votes than their opponents.”

“Republicans did not assent in 2009 after Obama won 365 electoral votes, 52.9 percent of the popular vote, and nearly 10 million more votes than his Republican opponent. If Democrats, and even a few Republicans, don’t buy this 46 percenter’s claim to a mandate, that seems more like common sense than fighting dirty.”

CNN discovers Clinton voters exist. I think this is the first segment on the opinions of Clinton voters that aired in the entire last 24 months.

Leaked documents show that Rex Tillerson, the businessman nominated by Donald Trump to be the next secretary of state, is the long-time director of a US-Russian oil firm based in the tax haven of the Bahamas, The Guardian reports.

“The leaked 2001 document comes from the corporate registry in the Bahamas. It was one of 1.3m files given to the Germany newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung by an anonymous source. The registry is public but details of individual directors are typically incomplete or missing entirely.”

If there are Trump nominees that may fail, it is Tillerson and his deputy, John Bolton, and perhaps the knuckledragger picked to lead the EPA.

A tweetstorm by David Frum. Read them all.

DNC chair Donna Brazile said Russian hackers persisted in trying to break into the organization’s computers “daily, hourly” until after the election — contradicting President Obama’s assertion that the hacking stopped in September after he warned Russian President Vladimir Putin to “cut it out,” ABC News reports.

Said Brazile: “They came after us absolutely every day until the end of the election. They tried to hack into our system repeatedly.”

Meanwhile, Clinton campaign chair John Podesta refused on NBC News to say it was a free and fair election: “I think it was distorted by the Russian intervention.”

“Presidents often are tested early, by unexpected crises or provocations by foreign adversaries. President-elect Donald Trump’s first test has come even before he is sworn in, and so far, he has responded with denial, equivocation and deflection,” the Washington Post reports.

“The test has come over Russia’s brazen intrusion into the U.S. election process through its hacking of the servers at the Democratic National Committee and the email account of John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager.”

“Contrary to what Trump said last week, the Russian intrusion was known long before the election. The Washington Post’s Ellen Nakashima reported in June that the Russians had penetrated the DNC network. Then on Oct. 7, intelligence officials publicly stated that the hacking had occurred, that the Russians were behind it and that ‘only Russia’s senior-most officials could have authorized these activities.’ That was an obvious reference to Russian President Vladimir Putin.”

The Post says pressure is growing on Electors: “Pressure on members of the electoral college to select someone other than Donald Trump has grown dramatically — and noisily — in recent weeks, causing some to waver but yielding little evidence that Trump will fall short when electors convene in most state capitals Monday to cast their votes. Carole Joyce of Arizona expected her role as a GOP elector to be pretty simple… But then came the mail and the emails and the phone calls — first hundreds, then thousands of voters worrying that Trump’s impulsive nature would lead the country into another war.”

Politico says Electors under siege. LOL. Guys, these electors are almost certainly party stalwarts from the central committee. They are voting Trump.

If this guy ended up dead somewhere, I would be pleased.

George Lakoff on how Democrats help Trump: “Without knowing it, many Democrats, progressives and members of the news media help Donald Trump every day. The way they help him is simple: they spread his message.”

“Think about it: every time Trump issues a mean tweet or utters a shocking statement, millions of people begin to obsess over his words. Reporters make it the top headline. Cable TV panels talk about it for hours. Horrified Democrats and progressives share the stories online, making sure to repeat the nastiest statements in order to refute them. While this response is understandable, it works in favor of Trump.”

“When you repeat Trump, you help Trump. You do this by spreading his message wide and far.”

Paul Waldman on whether the GOP Coup in North Carolina is a sign of things to come: “This isn’t just hardball politics. This is a fundamentally anti-democratic approach to government, one that says that when we win, we get to implement our agenda, and when you win, you don’t.”

“To put this in context, perhaps nowhere in the country have Republicans moved more aggressively to solidify power by disenfranchising their opponents as they have in North Carolina.”

Rich Lowry on whether the GOP is stepping into an Obamacare trap: “Let me stipulate that I’m grateful for anything Republicans can do on Obamacare and we are light years away from where we would have been if Trump hadn’t won. But there are a couple of worries here: 1) the GOP is thinking of the Obamacare partial-repeal as a way to get an “early win,” but it may play very differently in political terms; 2) there will presumably be a score pointing out that the partial-repeal will cost millions of people their insurance and we have no idea how Trump will react to it–it’s possible that he distances himself from what Republicans are doing the first time he’s asked about it in an interview; 3) the root of the problem here is that Republicans don’t have 60 votes for a full repeal and replace.”

“A Republican senator told me the other day that he believes the difficulties that the party will have grappling with Obamacare will force the GOP to reconsider the filibuster altogether, although it’s hard to see senate Republicans getting a consensus among themselves for that.”

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