Toddler Alert

A five year old is handcuffed and detained at Dulles for trying to enter the country legally. Trump spokesman Sean Spicer says he was a security threat.

The Independent reports on the handcuffed five year-old and the threat alert from the excitable White House spokesman.

Maybe this is what Trump is warning us all about. It’s actually true that toddlers kill more Americans than terrorists do. (I realize a five year-old isn't a toddler, but a fully grown president isn't supposed to be one either and he is.)

Reported in The Guardian

Fact-checked by Snopes

Not since Herod has a national leader been so afraid of small children.

Picture Men In White Hoods

The talk about the Alt Right is long overdue, but we shouldn’t flatter them with this hip new label. It makes them sound like a music trend from Seattle. They are white supremacists. They are bigots. They are anti-semites. They believe women should be subservient and silent. Their methods are hate and ridicule and intimidation. They are unAmerican. Millions who voted for this new team thought they were voting for the old team, the Republican team. It is no longer the Republican Party. It is the White Male Party. It is a clear and present danger to our democracy, our nation, and the world.

Story in the Guardian

The Southern Poverty Law Center calls out the outright racism in the Trump White House team

This Salon/Alternet article looks into the white minority anger that swept Trump into office

They are a group organized around anger and disruption led by a corrupt billionaire. They are not likely to govern honestly or competently. They will probably earn a profit.

The Vandals in the White House discussed by Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo

(Marshall discusses White House corruption by invoking Grant and Truman. I am familiar with the corruption charges thrown at Truman. I believe some of the pettier ones but think most of them were part of the witch-hunting fervor of that time. Truman’s foibles were trivial compared to Trump’s long history of self-dealing. It was Truman, after all, who doggedly investigated the war profiteers of WW2. This was one big reason he had enemies after the war.)

We suddenly have a president elect who is completely unequal to the difficult tasks, and the people he is bringing in to guide him are partisan fighters and outright bigots. Steve Bannon once described himself as like Lenin, bent on destroying the system. He is in an excellent position to do that. Where are the people who’ve worked their whole lives building this system and trying to make it work? Too many have been displaced by lobbyists who seek to make the system work only for themselves and their clients.

From the New Republic, Obama's calm, measured words about this transition do not deny the serious risks we face.

An interview with Noam Chomsky about president-elect Trump

If we survive, if our democratic institutions survive, the next four years, the Supreme Court is where Trump can do more permanent damage.

Dahlia Lithwick discusses the dire SCOTUS implications. Sadly, complex longterm dangers like this were not enough to get millions on board to elect Hillary.

We need hope right now because misdirected and unfocused anger will do us no good at all. It may lose us the longer argument. We need to be angry, but focused and non-violent. Pull what hope you can from this:

Politico urges us to be hopeful. Whether it's rational, we won't win through without it. (Think Churchill in 1940.)

Our friends are worried about us. Our enemies are delighted. It’s surprising how many enemies there are among us. People who were willing to cheer the interference of an enemy power as long as it helped their team win the Big Game. As Andy Borowitz said “I’m nostalgic for when the FBI and the Russians were on opposite sides.” Amen to that. Will the words Fifth Column and Quisling be used more in coming months and years? Whose side are these new “Republicans” on?

From Der Spiegel. If Europe lived next door they would be on the phone with the police and social services right now.

The Electoral College Needs To Do Its Job By Rejecting Trump

I signed a petition asking the Electoral College to act in its constitutional role by electing the choice of the most voters, Hillary Clinton, and rejecting Donald Trump.

Here is the petition.

This was what I wrote.

…...

For the past year our most important public conversation was hijacked by a more profitable "reality show" version.

On reality shows the people choose who to expel from their society and we find the betrayals entertaining, because it's not real at all. But this is really happening. This isn’t a fake reality show. A reality show performer has channeled our uglier, hateful, selfish, irresponsible side and won the electoral college vote––while losing the popular vote.

The Electoral College was created by the Founders to prevent this sort of dangerous mob mentality. And it was mob mentality that “won” this election even though rejected by the majority of people, both those who voted and those who did not.

The public conversation, mediated by our news media (our irresponsible and profit motivated media) hid Trump's many many corruptions and failures and focused instead on a minor "scandal" about Hillary Clinton's email. This was foolish and irresponsible and very profitable. It was calculated how Trump was good for audience numbers and juiced profits. The media promoted him and gave him free air time and ignored the dangerous poison in his message and the violence expressed by his most fanatical backers.

Trump is on the verge of turning the United States into a capricious, cruel, self-dealing, destructive reality show.

If the Electors of the Electoral College do not act to prevent this happening, the Electoral College will have proven itself pointless. Our democracy is at stake here. Rejecting this minority “winner” would not be an insult to democracy. It might save it from a dangerous reckless step. We don’t know what a President Trump might and might not do. He’s promised to do great evil in defiance of our American traditions. During the campaign he said so many contradictory things. Look at the fact checking pages and see how Trump exceeded all previous candidates in his lying, lying more often than telling the truth, telling enormous lies more often than small ones. Making dangerous promises to violate our treaties and break down our institutions. He has encouraged violence against people who he dislikes, people who disagree with him or criticize him. Trump has explicitly and repeatedly promised to become a tyrant. He is a dangerous man.

We have an instrument in our Constitution to prevent Trump taking power and driving us recklessly into uncertainty and irreparable harm. If there was a time when we needed our Constitutional protections this is it. Many say the Electoral College is irrelevant. If it fails to prevent this dangerous, undemocratic and unAmerican wrong from unfolding it will prove that it is irrelevant. If it acts to prevent this wrong, it may be exercising the most useful purpose in its history. The Electoral College must not validate the election of Donald Trump when a majority of voters rejected him and instead elected Hillary Clinton.

.....

There are important things hanging in the balance. Paul Ryan has announced plans to privatize Medicare and other beloved institutions he hates. Via New York Magazine

Meanwhile the Klan is on the march. They love President Trump and Trump speaks to their ideas. Via the Daily Telegraph, the UK's conservative newspaper...even conservatives are appalled by what America has done.

What else can we do? EJDionne in the Washington Post

How we feel. Via the New Yorker

What we fear. The deep fears felt by our minorities reported in VOX

Newt Gingrich, one of Trump’s posse, wants to bring back McCarthyism. He wants a new UnAmerican Activities Committee to begin trying opponents of their radical right wing plans. Reported by CNN

Stephen Colbert discussed something alarming on his show last night. View it at the Daily Beast. One of Trump’s surrogates expressed in very clear terms that one of Trump’s top agenda items is to make sure everyone, EVERYONE, who ever opposed or criticized him is forced to bow down to President Trump, the most powerful man in the universe. (Her words.) Are we concerned yet?