Stay focused. Diversionary tactics are in play.


RESIST. Call - (202) 224-3121 to reach your congressional members:



Hearings for Tillerson, DeVos, Chao, Pompeo set for today:
1. tell them you are unequivocally opposed to confirmation of Rex Tillerson for Secretary of State, Betsy DeVos for Secretary of Education, Elaine Chao for Secretary of Transportation, and Rep. Mike Pompeo for CIA Director. Tell them that you expect that to vote against confirmation of these folks.
2. tell them that you are unequivocally opposed to repeal of Dodd-Frank and demand that they reject repeal. This is critical. Dodd-Frank limits the ability of banks to gamble with our money and repeat of the financial mess of 2008.

Marine Le Pen, an alarming person who would like to lead France into far-right nationalism and xenophobia, is in New York. She is in Trump Tower. But her aides say she’s not planning to meet with Donald Trump or his transition team staff, good heavens no. She’s just using her “private visit” to New York to have coffee in the charming, slightly damp environs of the Trump Tower basement, they told Bloomberg. As one does!

Le Pen is running for president in France; she’s the leader of the country’s National Front and the daughter of Jean-Marie Le Pen, an elderly racist and anti-Semite. Le Pen essentially expelled her father from the party in 2015, and has been trying to give the National Front a more humane, less overtly Nazi-ish makeover. But she’s still making Islamophobia and opposition to immigration a cornerstone of the party’s belief system, supports a ban on letting Muslim women wear headscarves, and wants to leave the European Union to promote what she has called “a grand return of nationalism.” She was spotted in Trump Tower on Thursday morning, according to Bloomberg, where she had very little interest in clarifying what she was doing there:


http://theslot.jezebel.com/far-right-french-pol-marine-le-pen-just-casually-droppe-1791120897?utm_campaign=socialflow_jezebel_facebook&utm_source=jezebel_facebook&utm_medium=socialflow

The president-elect’s attacks on his eyes and ears around the globe could prove to be self-defeating.

SNIP:

“I WON”. It is hard to overstate the psychological weight carried by those two words, offered by President-elect Donald Trump as evidence that “the American public” does not care that he has not released his tax returns. The defiant words were flung out near the start of a rowdy press conference in the marble and brass lobby of Trump Tower in Manhattan—the businessman’s first formal question-and-answer session with reporters in half a year.

Many mainstream Republicans, including members of Congress or business types excited by the chance to advance a conservative agenda of tax cuts and deregulation once they control the White House and both chambers of Congress, had hoped that by this moment, nine days from his inauguration, victory might make Mr Trump more magnanimous.

Snip: A man constantly in campaign mode will struggle to make America great again.

LINK:http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2017/01/not-magnanimous-yet?cid1=cust/ddnew/n/n/n/20170111n/owned/n/n/nwl/n/n/NA/email

Racism has the power to transform both right and left.
In 1992, a magnetic young Democrat swept aside twelve years of unbroken Republican rule by campaigning on a platform that seemed to cross the old left-right divide. Arkansas governor Bill Clinton, the first Democratic president elected after the Cold War, was the great prophet of the Third Way, a seemingly post-ideological marriage of “pro-growth” economic thinking and moderate social liberalism.

SNIP:
It would be tempting to argue that Trump’s full-on embrace of white identity politics makes him an aberration among Republican officials. But it’s more likely that he is leading the party toward a destination it was already headed for.
That’s the view of political scientist Lee Drutman, a senior fellow at New America. In an August piece for Vox, Drutman described Trump’s ascension as “the logical culmination of Republicans’ 50-year ‘Southern strategy’ to make politics primarily about race and identity instead of economics.”
Trumpism speaks directly to white identity and white fear.

SNIP:
And 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton — identified as a candidate of the Third Way mainly because her husband is Bill Clinton — put forward a policy agenda that would have distributed significant amounts of wealth to the entire working class, white people included.
MORE https://thinkprogress.org/the-center-has-fallen-and-white-nationalism-is-filling-the-vacuum-beb0611dfe94#.ben2y7fkh

Joe gets up at 6 a.m. and fills his coffeepot with water to prepare his morning coffee. The water is clean and good because some tree-hugging liberal fought for minimum water-quality standards.

With his first swallow of water, he takes his daily medication. His medications are safe to take because some stupid commie liberal fought to ensure their safety and that they work as advertised.

All but $10 of his medications are paid for by his employer's medical plan because some liberal union workers fought their employers for paid medical insurance - now Joe gets it too.

He prepares his morning breakfast, bacon and eggs. Joe's bacon is safe to eat because some girly-man liberal fought for laws to regulate the meat packing industry.

In the morning shower, Joe reaches for his shampoo. His bottle is properly labeled with each ingredient and its amount in the total contents because some crybaby liberal fought for his right to know what he was putting on his body and how much it contained.

MORE:
http://www.gbpotus.com/single-post/2017/01/02/A-Day-in-the-Life-of-Joe-Republican

While it’s important to watch the president-elect closely, we also must be mindful of our own response to him.

SNIP:
The word Gleichschaltung is often translated from the German as “coordination” and refers to the process of ― politically speaking ― getting in line. It often appears in books about the Nazi era. German Jewish philologist Victor Klemperer and German journalist Joachim Fest wrote about the personal cost of coordinating in their respective memoirs. German author Sebastian Haffner and Americans including journalist William Shirer wrote about the propaganda and politics of coordination.

MORE:
While on the campaign trail in February, Trump urged followers to “knock the hell” out of protesters, promising to pay their legal bills if they were arrested and charged. That same February in Fort Worth, he promised a crowd that he would “open up our libel laws” so that news outlets can be sued for writing “false” or “purposely negative” articles. In July, he urged Russia to interfere in the election on his behalf, later saying he was joking. In September, he urged still other supporters to “monitor” polling stations. In October, he promised when victorious to throw his rival, Hillary Clinton, in jail. And just recently he advocated revoking the citizenship of Americans who burn flags.

So, in the last year, Trump has flirted with or, maybe more his style, groped and pawed at totalitarianism, yet the advice from many is to “give him a chance” ― or to coordinate.

This make sense:

We should not waste our time or imaginations trying to reconfigure Trumpism to explain why all of the “good people” supported him. It is more important to see it for what it is and resist. Hopefully, they will join us. If not, it will not be necessary to call them names, they will have named themselves.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/donald-trump-nazi-propaganda-coordinate_us_58583b6fe4b08debb78a7d5c

Snip:
Now that Donald Trump, a man who’s been publicly accused of sexually assaulting over a dozen women, will be the next president of the United States, Ortega is ready to take action.

For Ortega, that personal call to action meant creating a photo campaign featuring seven WSU students, including herself, who are all survivors of sexual assault. In the coming weeks, the images (shot by local photographer Cynthya Porter) will be turned into posters that will be hung around WSU’s campus. Each poster will feature a photo of a survivor and information about online resources for victims.

Ortega hopes that the campaign, which she created for her Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies minor, will foster conversations surrounding sexual assault on WSU’s campus.

More:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/7-survivors-on-what-it-means-to-have-a-man-accused-of-sexual-assault-in-the-white-house_us_583c7163e4b01ba68ac5732a

Make no mistake, there is a real campaign to control the media going on here.
1. Berate the media. Last week, Trump summoned two-dozen TV news anchors and executives to the twenty-fifth floor of Trump Tower to berate them for their reporting about him during the election. For twenty minutes he railed at what he called their “outrageous” and “dishonest” coverage. According to an attendee, “Trump kept saying, ‘we’re in a room of liars, the deceitful dishonest media who got it all wrong,’” and he called CNN a “network of liars.” He accused NBC of using unflattering pictures of him, demanding to know why they didn’t use “nicer” pictures.

Another person who attended the meeting said Trump “truly doesn’t seem to understand the First Amendment. He thinks we are supposed to say what he says and that’s it.”

2. Blacklist critical media. During the campaign, Trump blacklisted news outlets whose coverage he didn’t approve of. In June he pulled The Washington Post’s credentials. “Based on the incredibly inaccurate coverage and reporting of the record setting Trump campaign, we are hereby revoking the press credentials of the phony and dishonest Washington Post,” read a post on Trump’s Facebook page.

After the election Trump agreed to meet with the New York Times and then suddenly cancelled the meeting when he didn’t like the terms, tweeting “Perhaps a new meeting will be set up with the @nytimes. In the meantime they continue to cover me inaccurately and with a nasty tone!” (He then reversed himself again and met with the Times.)

Snip: 3. Turn the public against the media. Trump refers to journalists as “lying,” “dishonest,” “disgusting” and “scum.”

http://www.alternet.org/media/robert-reich-uncovers-trumps-7-techniques-control-media

SNIP:

"Tony Schwartz, Trump’s ghostwriter for his Art of the Deal best-seller that was the basis for his reality TV show “The Apprentice,” answered Trump’s Sunday tweets with: “Trump loses it whenever he feels vulnerable, which is often. Must recognize reality: We have a president-elect who is mentally unbalanced.”

And Evan McMullin, a Republican who ran as an independent candidate, responded to Trump’s “millions” of illegal votes tweet with the warning: “It should not go unrecognized that @realDonaldTrump’s effort to inflate his election performance without cause is typical of autocrats.”


http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/trump-false-tweets_us_583b97c4e4b000af95eeaf53

Kellyanne Conway, former campaign manager to President-elect Donald Trump, refused to say Sunday if Trump is turning away daily intelligence briefings, claiming that he is receiving information “from a number of sources.”

Last week, the Washington Post reported that Trump has only received two intelligence briefings in the two and a half weeks since his election. His predecessors typically received the briefings on a daily basis.

Snip:Traditionally, the State Department coordinates the president-elect’s contact with world leaders and provides briefings before he speaks to them.

Trump’s eschewing of protocol is a concerning sign, given his utter lack of foreign policy knowledge and experience. His foreign policy proposals during the campaign included a “secret plan to fight ISIS” and an insistence that the U.S. should “take the oil” in Iraq.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/trump-intelligence-briefings_us_583b0526e4b000af95ee829a