"Alt-right (sic) Founder Questions Whether Jews Are People," says a CNN chyron. For the record, the members of the subsequent panel do, in fact, think Jews are people, which will only impress you if you feel you don't hear "water is wet" enough on the news. Meanwhile, Mr. Trump "dresses down" reporters at Trump Tower, while those same reporters are all trying to ask how they're going to get access to a Trump Administration! If CNN reporters want "access" to news, I imagine that more than a few Standing Rock protestors who wouldn't mind talking to them. Folks, this is why we need a la carte cable -- because cable news networks will never not suck until all their sucking starts hurting their pocketbooks.
And of course while the "liberal" media wastes valuable time analyzing some racist dirtbag's utterings, they're also totally bollocksing up their headlines when covering the police attack on Standing Rock protestors from Sunday night. It's no good trying to tell me people shouldn't just read the headlines, when one would more properly castigate news organs for writing misleading headlines -- just as one should avoid complaining that foreclosed-upon homeowners should have known what they were getting into, without blaming banksters for misleading those homeowners. Certain people are awfully blind to corporate evil these days. I wonder why.
Panel of three federal judges rules that Wisconsin's 2011 redistricting is an "unconstitutional political gerrymander, finding that it "was intended to burden the representational rights of Democratic voters throughout the decennial period by impeding their ability to translate their votes into legislative seats." You probably already suspected that, if you noticed that votes for Democratic and Republican state legislature candidates in Wisconsin were fairly even, yet Republicans got a 65-33 majority in the lower house and a 20-13 majority in the Senate. The decision establishes a method with which one could theoretically test whether a particular redistricting effort is too partisan; the Supreme Court has resisted hearing gerrymandering cases before, and if it doesn't take this one, the ruling will stand (and Wisconsin will have to redistrict again prior to the 2018 elections), but if the Court takes it, the ruling might still stand, as Justice Kennedy has expressed openness to establishing a partisan gerrymandering test. And if it does, a lot more redistricting, all over America, will occur before 2018.
Mr. Trump's nominee for CIA Director, Rep. Mike Pompeo (R-Koch Brothers), says "use of strong encryption in personal communications may itself be a red flag," i.e., it might tell the CIA you're a terrorist. How strange, that Mr. Pompeo appears not to understand that some people use encryption to keep their governments from finding them and killing them -- and some journalists use encryption to protect their sources from discovery. I don't suspect that anyone can actually tell him these things -- I suspect that, like his boss, he's just happy swinging his dick around.
Mark Joseph Stern at Slate describes how North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory -- who appears to have lost his re-election bid to Democratic Attorney General Roy Cooper by less than 7,500 votes -- is trying to "steal" the election anyway. Here's how that would work: Mr. McCrory would file lawsuit after lawsuit in an attempt to delay Mr. Cooper from being certified the winner -- which would essentially throw the election to the Republican-dominated legislature, which would then, of course, declare Mr. McCrory the winner. You'd hope that all the bad PR from this plan would give a man pause, but Mr. McCrory is, shall we say, a special case. You'd also hope that a man who charges as much voter fraud as he's done would not want to open that particular Pandora's Box in North Carolina, where reports of bad actors suppressing putative Democrat votes are considerably more believable than the "evidence" from the McCrory camp that even Republican-controlled county election boards have rejected.
Finally, you've no doubt heard about the multitudinous conflicts of interest Mr. Trump will have once he takes office, but here's one that really captures the emptiness of his soul: he apparently encouraged British politician/fellow white supremacist Nigel Farage to oppose offshore wind farms that would "mar" the view from Mr. Trump's Scottish golf resorts. A man who stands in the way of progress because it might cost him money (or, perhaps more precisely, pride) -- I'd say "congratulations, Trump supporters, that's what you really voted for," but for all I know they'd respond "hell yeah!"
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