* It’s amazing to me that we are seeing a whole string of stories like this AFTER the election. One can only assume that a lot of media outlets thought that voters only cared about emails and sexual assaults prior to the election and now all of the sudden are really interested in policy discussions.
Trump’s transition team pledges to dismantle Dodd-Frank Act https://t.co/YK1nhHE3f4 pic.twitter.com/yxxsIaDxGj
— Bloomberg (@business) November 10, 2016
* Yesterday in “Quick Takes” I wondered if Trump supporters would ever figure out that they’d gotten played. Evidence of that reality continues to pile up.
Mr. Trump was swept to power in large part by white working-class voters who responded to his vow to restore the voices of forgotten people, ones drowned out by big business and Wall Street. But in his transition to power, some of the most prominent voices will be those of advisers who come from the same industries for which they are being asked to help set the regulatory groundwork…
“This whole idea that he was an outsider and going to destroy the political establishment and drain the swamp were the lines of a con man, and guess what — he is being exposed as just that,” said Peter Wehner, who served in the administrations of Ronald Reagan and George Bush before becoming a speechwriter for George W. Bush. “He is failing the first test, and he should be held accountable for it.”
* If you still have a functioning irony meter, don’t count on that lasting for long.
The transition team of the candidate who refused to release his taxes is demanding financial disclosures from staffhttps://t.co/bNNH92lhZA
— amna (@IAmAmnaNawaz) November 11, 2016
* Did someone say “con man?”
Donald Trump’s vast business holdings will be placed into a blind trust with his oldest three children in charge, according to the president-elect’s attorney…
…while his lawyer Thursday used the term “blind trust” when discussing the family’s upcoming financial arrangement, putting Trump’s children in charge of a set of assets that their father is aware of does not constitute a blind trust. Under the legal definition of a blind trust, a public official places his finances under the management of an independent party. The official would have no knowledge of what is in the trust or how it is managed.
* Ed Kilgore discusses a topic that is getting a lot of attention because of the fact that Clinton won the popular vote but lost the electoral college.
…the candidate who is now being questioned and denounced in many quarters as a disastrous loser is also the sixth of the last seven Democratic presidential nominees to win a popular-vote plurality.
That’s right: Clinton seems poised to join Al Gore (along with two 19th-century Democrats) as candidates who were robbed of the presidency by the continuation of that quaint and usually irrelevant institution the Electoral College.
As realization of this fact sinks in, calls for abolishing this archaic institution are sure to spread.
Allow me to once again recommend Zachary Roth’s book, “The Great Suppression,” which provides a big picture look at how our founding father’s feared equality. For an overview, I reviewed the book here at Washington Monthly.
* A lot of liberals are engaged in a discussion about whether or not Bernie Sanders could have performed better against Donald Trump. It’s an endless loop because there is no evidence to support either side and so the disagreement becomes mired in our own projections. But here is an interesting piece of data on an issue that was central to his campaign.
Colorado could have become the first U.S. state to make universal single-payer health care a reality. But it won’t…
It’s a disappointment for U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, who made single-payer a focal point of his presidential run and campaigned for the Colorado measure.
* Finally, this performance combines two of the very best – lyricist Leonard Cohen and vocalist k.d. Lang. Rest in peace Leonard. Your bountiful gifts live on.
