COMING SOON: The Trump Victory Tour? “Pre-inaugural rallies are probably the best thing he could do to get the public on his side before he takes office. There are always interviews, but he can’t control the message in an interview as totally as he can at a rally. And interviews have none of the energy that a rally does. If you want wary Americans to feel better about Trump, have him give a few conciliatory speeches carried live on cable news about how he hopes to be a president for all Americans in front of an audience that adores him. And for cripes sake, don’t just do it in red states and swing states. Drive home the point about outreach to Democrats by giving speeches in California and Chicago. Trump is usually magnanimous after a big win and he’ll never have a bigger win than he just had. This is a chance for him to show off the magnanimity. If nothing else, it’ll remind skeptics in blue enclaves that a lot of people across the country love him. That’s a weird thing to say for a guy who just won a national election, but between the tone of the media coverage to come and the fact that he lost the popular vote, an occasional reminder might be useful.”
Archive for 2016
November 18, 2016
CLASH OF THE TITANS: Susan Sarandon vs. Debra Messing on who’s responsible for Hillary’s loss.
I HAVE A NEW SHORT PIECE ON THE SECOND AMENDMENT: Permissible Negligence and Campaigns to Suppress Rights. It’s about the effort to suppress gun rights via lawsuits, and the legislative response. Download it early and often!
WHY ARE TRUMP OPPONENTS SO RACIST? Kanye West shocker: I felt ‘persecuted as black man’ supporting Trump.
BUT THAT WOULD INTERFERE WITH THE SMUGNESS: Bernie Sanders calls on Democratic Party to recognize despair of people in the working, middle classes.
JEFF GOLDSTEIN:
I suggest a Twitter and media search today of "Sessions + 'deemed too racist.'" I bet it yields a trove of individual thoughts!
— Mulder's Shroom Ride (@proteinwisdom) November 18, 2016
This could be fun, and a game you can play for as long as it takes to staff Trump’s cabinet — and beyond!
STATE DEPT ‘NOW IN CONTACT’ WITH TRUMP’S TEAM: This is good news. For eight years The State Dept’s senior leadership has been out of contact with reality and with the rule of law. The State Dept is another swamp in desperate need of draining.
JAMES ROBBINS: Let Trump Be Trump. “Only a week after Donald Trump’s election victory, the same pundits who said he could never win are making it sound like his presidency has already failed.”
Actually, from what I’m hearing it’s going more smoothly than I expected.
PERSONNEL IS POLICY: Jeff Sessions Said to Be Trump’s Pick for Attorney General.
It wasn’t immediately clear if Trump has formally offered the job to Sessions, a lawyer who was an early and ardent Trump backer, but the people familiar said Trump wants Sessions in the role.
A Trump aide on Thursday night called Texas Senator Ted Cruz, a one-time Trump rival who was under serious consideration for the role, to tell him the job was instead going to Sessions, one of the people familiar said. The people asked not to be named because the decision has not yet been made public.
Earlier Thursday, Trump telegraphed his decision by praising Sessions’ work as Alabama Attorney General after meeting with Sessions, who also had been under consideration for defense secretary.
Cruz’s talents would be wasted as A.G. Put him up for the Supreme Court instead, and then get ready for the biggest nomination circus since Clarence Thomas.
The GOP Senate might even consider taking Harry Reid’s advice, and using the “nuclear option” to approve their nominees by a bare majority.
THEY DON’T CARE ABOUT YOU: Inspector General: IRS Exposed 28 Million Taxpayers To Identity Theft By Sending Unencrypted Email.
TRANSITION: School choice advocate Betsy DeVos to front for Education secretary. “Betsy DeVos is also a big mover in the school choice and charter school movement. She is chair of the influential school choice lobbying group American Federation for Children, backed by the Walmart family. The group backed 121 school choice candidates in the election, winning 89 percent. . . . Also reported to be in the mix for Trump’s education secretary is former D.C. schools chief Michelle Rhee, another school choice advocate.”
Whoever gets the job, it’s important that they put someone good — like Robert Shibley of FIRE or K.C. Johnson — in charge of the Office of Civil Rights, so that the “guidance” that has led to campus PC nonsense can be undone and replaced with a guarantee of free speech and due process for all students.
WHY WON’T HILLARY AND OBAMA DENOUNCE THIS CLIMATE OF HATE AND VIOLENCE? Ohio Man Charged With Threatening Trump’s Life on Twitter.
WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: Obama’s Never-Ending Lecture Tour.
President Obama, who has done less for Europe than any American president since Calvin Coolidge, cannot stop telling Europeans what to do. As he sets out on his final European tour as president, with his political party back home in a state of near collapse, and with Putin inflicting yet another painful humiliation on the least successful American president in the history of the modern Middle East, nothing seems able to shake President Obama’s serene confidence that he knows more than other people, sees farther than they do, and that other people are eager to gather up his pearls of insight.
…
Not everything Obama is recommending to Europe is bad, but his words no longer have a significant impact from a continent battered first by his failures in foreign policy and now by the collapse of his legacy at home.
He’s the lamest of ducks and the world still keeps letting him down.
HMM: Trump taps Sessions for attorney general, Pompeo for CIA: transition official. “U.S. President-elect Donald Trump has tapped three senior leaders of his national security and law enforcement teams, choosing Senator Jeff Sessions for attorney general, Representative Mike Pompeo as CIA director and General Mike Flynn as national security adviser, a transition official said on Friday. The transition official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the announcements would be made formally on Friday. All three men have accepted Trump’s offer, the official said.”
Well, stay tuned.
CHANGE: Donald Trump Offers Michael Flynn Role as National Security Adviser.
His arrival at the White House would follow a military career and post-military life marked by periods of controversy.
In statements and writings, Gen. Flynn has said the U.S. needs to appreciate the scope of the threat from radical Islamists who want to destroy the country. “We’re in a world war,” he wrote in a book published this summer. “But very few Americans recognize it, and fewer still have any idea how to win it.”
During his 33-year career in the U.S. armed forces, Gen. Flynn made his name as a widely respected Army officer known for his candor and unorthodox sensibilities about intelligence and military operations. The 57-year-old retired general served in top roles across the military, including as director of intelligence for the Joint Chiefs of Staff and intelligence adviser to Gen. Stanley McChrystal in Iraq and Afghanistan.
By the end of his military tenure, he had become a maverick within the ranks of the normally deferential and apolitical corps of “general officers,” the military’s top-ranking officials.
Flynn is going to rankle all the right people — in Washington and around the world.
FLASHBACK: Joel Kotkin: The New Culture War Dividing America: Underpinning the progressive elite’s snobbery is a vicious class antagonism. “There are good reasons for the new cognitive class to like the progressive status quo. Along with the corporate aristocracy who fund the Democratic Party, the hyper-educated have thrived under Obama. In contrast, the bulk of the working and middle class have seen their incomes stagnate or decline. The new class has little stake in the traditional economy – agribusiness, energy, manufacturing, suburban home-building – that has traditionally provided decent employment to the working and middle classes. Some among them, notably the environmental zealots, even decry rising living standards for ordinary Americans as the primary threat to the environment.”
THE HILL: Obama won’t call off anti-Trump protesters.
President Obama won’t try to call off protests against Donald Trump, he said Thursday, ignoring pleas from the president-elect’s advisers to denounce the nationwide demonstrations.
“I would not advise people who feel strongly or are concerned about some of the issues that have been raised over the course of the campaign, I would not advise them to be silent,” Obama said during a joint news conference with German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
Obama said protests are just something Trump would have to get used to as the leader of the free world.
“I’ve been the subject of protests during the course of my eight years,” he said. “And I suspect that there’s not a president in our history that hasn’t been subject to these protests.”
Yeah, if the streets had filled with — often rioting — protesters denouncing Obama’s legitimacy right after the election in 2008, he wouldn’t have said a thing. And if George W. Bush had refused to denounce them, the press wouldn’t have soft-pedaled it at all. . .
But I’m sure Trump’s fine with it, as it’s just helping build his mandate. If they keep this up for four years, he’ll be re-elected in a landslide.
CHANGE: How America decided, at the last moment, to elect Donald Trump.
Some of the polls were wrong to a degree, yes, but there was also something at work in the final days of the election: People who decided late broke strongly for Donald Trump in the states that mattered, according to exit polls. And without this apparent late surge, Hillary Clinton would be our president-elect — not Trump.
In fact, if you look at the four closest states where Clinton lost — or, in the case of Michigan, where she’s expected to lose — exit polls show late-deciding voters in each of them went strongly for Trump in the final days. In Florida and Pennsylvania, late-deciders favored Trump by 17 points. In Michigan, they went for Trump by 11 points. In Wisconsin, they broke for Trump by a whopping 29 points, 59-30.
There’s a simpler explanation. Voters found Trump’s “Make America Great Again” more inspiring and relatable than Clinton’s “It’s My Turn to Rule You Idiots.”
RICHMOND TIMES-DISPATCH: P.C. SILLINESS AT U.VA:
Donald Trump’s victory has so delighted the U.Va. community that several hundred of its members have already begun working to get him re-elected. The other day 469 faculty members and students sent a letter to university president Teresa Sullivan rebuking her for quoting Thomas Jefferson, the university’s founder.
This paroxysm of political correctness was described by the psychology professor who drafted the letter as an attempt “to start a conversation with our administration regarding ways to be more inclusive.” In the modern university, being inclusive generally means silencing any voice that does not swallow the canon of liberal identity politics whole. Trump’s election was in no small part a reaction against such nonsense.
Indeed.
WHY ARE DEMOCRAT-RUN CITIES SUCH CESSPITS OF CALLOUS INCOMPETENCE? No-show cops and dysfunctional courts keep Cook County Jail inmates waiting years for a trial.