Orson bashing Hillary already...

[Roger Ryan]

Distressing that Nugent is from my home state. He's only ruining what little rock music legacy he has left. Last week I attended a Grammy foundation tribute/conversation with Don Was and Iggy Pop; the moderator recited a short list of rock legends from the Detroit area and all of them received healthy applause and cheers with the exception of Nugent, who only got boos and hisses.

[Wich2]

“I’m beginning to wonder if it would have been best had the South won the Civil War.”

This is the remark of an idiot.

[Le Chiffre]

Nugent is pretty cartoonish in his political views, kind of like Anne Coulter (and Trump), but he sold out a couple of shows near me recently, so he continues to carve out a small niche for himself in the rock world, particularly during election years. He's like Trump in that his outrageous comments get him publicity, which, in Nugent's case, is probably why he's been sidelined for the most part from Fox news this year (Trump's outrageous mouth is enough), but it's what keeps what's left of his music career alive.

But it's the remark of a racist, for sure, which I suspect applies to a large percentage of Trump's supporters, in addition to misogyny. His support is apparently not overly due to economic panic, according to "The Mythology Of Trump’s ‘Working Class’ Support":
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the ... s-support/

It’s been extremely common for news accounts to portray Donald Trump’s candidacy as a “working-class” rebellion against Republican elites. There are elements of truth in this perspective: Republican voters, especially Trump supporters, are unhappy about the direction of the economy...But as compared with most Americans, Trump’s voters are better off. The median household income of a Trump voter so far in the primaries is about $72,000, based on estimates derived from exit polls. That's well above the national median household income of about $56,000. It’s also higher than the median income for Hillary Clinton supporters, which is about 61,000.

But cartoons like Nugent aren't the scariest part. Here' a statement from a far-right religious talk show host recently:

But I just want the people of Right Wing Watch to know: It’s our God, Jesus Christ, who has turned the tables on you. God’s people are praying and fasting and the rats are being exposed and the rats are running for cover right now. And we’re going to put the rats in prison. I said it weeks ago, when Trump wins, we have to crush the left. It has to be crushed.

Meanwhile, here's a British endorsement of Hillary, with some Trump support in the comments:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... -best-hope

A Trump victory would severely damage US standing almost everywhere. His strongman antics are a liability, not an asset. They are as distressing as they are ridiculous. Believing a man-to-man approach with Vladimir Putin will instantly dissolve Russia’s aggressive revisionism reflects more ignorance than it does bravado.

He is more interested in pandering to dictators than in holding them accountable for crimes. He’s spoken in favour of torture. His approach to trade is in line with his approach to immigration – the building of walls. He has portrayed global warming as a hoax. Mrs Clinton can be trusted with the nuclear button. Mr Trump cannot...His bigotry, his love of weapons, his impulsiveness and his America first-ism are all dangers. His victory would likely lead to more, not less, global confrontation.

[Wellesnet]

Ann Coulter, the vehemently conservative commentator who rose to fame during the George W. Bush era, showed her racist side on Twitter. In a tweet sent on the eve of Election Day, Coulter tweeted her desires to see only white people have the opportunity to vote, saying Trump would win hands-down if casting a ballot was only for third-generation citizens on up.

Coulter seems to be unaware that if this were a de facto rule in American elections, her favored candidate would be unable to cast a vote for himself. As the New Yorker reported earlier this year, Donald Trump’s mother was born in the United Kingdom, while his father immigrated to the United States from Germany (as John Oliver reminded us in February, Trump’s last name was actually “Drumpf” before getting Americanized).

*

LA Times: If Hillary Loses, Blame the Media:
http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la ... story.html

Few presidential candidates have been more fully prepared to assume the duties of the presidency than is Clinton. Yet, her many accomplishments as First Lady, U.S. senator, and Secretary of State barely surfaced in the news coverage of her candidacy at ANY point in the campaign. She may as well have spent those years baking cookies.

Trump was quoted more often about her policies than she was...Trump’s claim that Clinton “created ISIS,” for example, got more news attention than her announcement of how she would handle Islamic State.

Donald J. Trump (final pre-election statement):

Our movement is about replacing a failed and corrupt political establishment with a new government controlled by you, the American people.

The establishment has trillions of dollars at stake in this election.

For those who control the levers of power in Washington and for the global special interests, they partner with these people that don’t have your good in mind. The political establishment that is trying to stop us is the same group responsible for our disastrous trade deals, massive illegal immigration and economic and foreign policies that have bled our country dry.

The political establishment has brought about the destruction of our factories and our jobs as they flee to Mexico, China and other countries all around the world. It’s a global power structure that is responsible for the economic decisions that have robbed our working class, stripped our country of its wealth and put that money into the pockets of a handful of large corporations and political entities.

The only thing that can stop this corrupt machine is you. The only force strong enough to save our country is us. The only people brave enough to vote out this corrupt establishment is you, the American people.

I’m doing this for the people and the movement and we will take back this country for you and we will make America great again.

[Le Chiffre]

Heard Gloria Steinem, who hosted a showing of Mr. Arkadin on TCM recently, on NPR, talking about the election of Donald Trump this past Tuesday. She had an interesting line, something like, "Tuesday's election of Trump was an attack by white males on the future. But the future's going to come anyway."

BBC on populist disillusionment with neo-liberal globalism.
"America: The People's Rage":
http://www.bbc.com/news/election-us-2016-37975092

Trump's core slogan was "Make America great again", but this was not about re-establishing the "city upon a hill" or burnishing American exceptionalism or welcoming the "huddled masses".
It was much more about raising the drawbridge, of circling the wagons against the outsider, the different, the other.

VP Joe Biden on why Hillary lost:
http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/ ... ailsignout

Biden pointed to questions that came even from members of Clinton's inner circle, revealed in emails made public by WikiLeaks, about whether the Democratic front-runner had figured out why she was running.

"I don't think she ever really figured it out," Biden said. "And by the way, I think it was really hard for her to decide to run."...He saw her decision to run as ultimately stemming from a sense of duty and her belief that her victory "would have opened up a whole range of new vistas to women" in a similar way that Obama's had for African-Americans.

"She thought she had no choice but to run. That, as the first woman who had an opportunity to win the presidency, I think it was a real burden on her," he said.

[Wich2]

No fan of Trump here...

But then, not a big one of Steinem, either.

One of the most nauseating things I ever read was a long Op Ed from her during the first Clinton crisis. There, this self-proclaimed pillar of feminism wrote basically (only lightly paraphrasing here):

"Yes, we've always stood against powerful men abusing less powerful women. But Bill Clinton's politics are so essential, that we're giving him a pass."

(*retching*)

[Le Chiffre]

Yeah, pretty hypocritical, but then I suppose picking which battles are worth fighting can be a complex and contradictory process sometimes.

Thomas Friedman, author of THE WORLD IS FLAT (one of the most famous and essential books on Globalization), made a comment on Bill Maher's latest show that seemed somewhat related to Stienem's. Globalization, he said, is accelerating so fast that it has unmoored a lot of people. It has disoriented them. Many of Trump’s supporters were motivated by racism and bigotry for sure, but many others were motivated by the fact that this change has come too fast for them. The globalist Hillary Clinton did not talk to these people, while the more nationalist Trump connected with them on a visceral level. This reminds me of the late Alvin Toffler's FUTURE SHOCK, which Orson Welles hosted a TV special of in 1971.

From Future Shock (Orson Welles narration):

“In the course of my work, which has taken me to just about every corner of the globe, I see many aspects of a phenomenon which I’m just beginning to understand,” he says. “Our modern technologies have changed the degree of sophistication beyond our wildest dreams. But this technology has exacted a pretty heavy price. We live in an age of anxiety and time of stress. And with all our sophistication, we are in fact the victims of our own technological strengths –- we are the victims of shock… a future shock.”

“Future shock is a sickness which comes from too much change in too short a time; a feeling that nothing is permanent anymore; it’s the reaction to changes that happen so fast that we can’t absorb them, it’s the premature arrival of the future. For those who are unprepared its effects can be pretty devastating.”

Orson Welles on King Lear and old age:

"(Lear) became senile by giving power away. The only thing that keeps people alive in their old age is power...But take power from DeGaulle or Churchill or Tito, or Mao or Ho, or any of these old men who run the world - in this world that belongs only to young people - and you'll see a babbling, slippered pantaloon."

"Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac" - Henry Kissinger

"Globalists are giant owl worshippers" - Al T. Kubrick

"Globalism is the death knell of the American worker." - James Woods

[Le Chiffre]

"President Obama Warns Against ‘Crude Nationalism’:

Obama was asked about whether he believes Trump’s victory or the Brexit movement are related. He said that it was a sign people’s lives have disrupted by dislocation, globalization, and inequality. He also believed Americans voted for Trump because they were ready for a change in the state of politics in Washington, D.C.

“Globalization combined with technology combined with social media and constant information have disrupted people’s lives, sometimes in very concrete ways,” Obama said, reported the New York Times. “A manufacturing plant closes, and suddenly an entire town no longer has what was the primary source of employment.”

“When you see a Donald Trump and a Bernie Sanders, very unconventional candidates, having considerable success, then obviously there is something there that is being tapped into,” Obama added. “A suspicion of globalization. A desire to rein in its excesses.”

Why Breitbart News Will Be the Closest Thing to a State-Owned Media Entity:
http://fortune.com/2016/11/15/breitbart-trump-media/

Before Donald Trump became a contender for the Republican presidential nomination, most people had probably never even heard of Breitbart, the site Bannon took charge of in 2012. Others probably dismissed it as a haven for right-wing conspiracy theorists, like Alex Jones’ InfoWars.

Now, however, Bannon has been named chief strategist for the incoming president. And the rise of Trump, a candidate who Breitbart promoted unceasingly during the campaign, has lent a legitimacy to the site that the company is busy capitalizing on at breakneck speed. It recently announced plans to expand its operations both in the U.S. and in Europe.

A former Breitbart spokesman who left the company earlier this year said that the site “will be as close as we are ever going to have — hopefully — to a state-run media enterprise.”

This may seem like hyperbole, but there is no precedent for the publisher and chief architect of a media outlet like Breitbart having as much influence on a sitting president as Bannon will arguably have on Trump.

And this isn’t just any media outlet, but one that has been criticized for promoting outright racism. A former editor at Breitbart said that the site’s founder (Andrew Breitbart, who died of a heart attack in 2012) hated racists, but that since he took over, Bannon had “openly embraced the white supremacist alt-right.”

In Italy, "Citizen Kane" is referred to as "Quarto Potere", which translates as "The Fourth Estate" (The Media), no doubt a reference to the fact that Italian Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini started out in the media, as an editor and journalist for a socialist newspaper.

Another one of Alvin Toffler's books, "The Third Wave", seems to have inspired the term "3rd Wave Media", which refers to social media on the Internet, like Facebook and Twitter. Many pundits agree that Trump's use of Twitter, despite being ridiculed for it, was one of the things that allowed him connect so directly and on such a visceral level with his supporters.

Salar Kamangar, CEO of YouTube, believes that we are in a third wave of media. At an event in California this week Kamangar said, “The first wave was the broadcast networks. The second wave was cable networks. Now, it’s about giving people exactly what they want to watch today.”

[Le Chiffre]

Ted Nugent: "To all the red states out there, God bless ya'. To all the blue states out there, we're coming to get ya' baby, because bloodsucking is not a job description."

No, Bernie Sanders would not have won:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2 ... mberg.html

Right-populism has two targets: the elites and the scapegoats.

In left-populism, there is just one target: the elites. They are the ones Sanders identified, the people above—Wall Street, the big banks, the piggy billionaires. There are no scapegoats below. This speaks well of left-populism. It doesn’t traffic in race-baiting. In fact, it does much the opposite—it demands of white working-class people that they see what they have in common with their brown and black brothers and sisters and think and act in solidarity with them. That is noble. But it is impossible. A critical mass of working-class white people will just never do that.

Trump gets psychoanalyzed:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_FsbL1Z9Z4

"Lions kill for food, but people kill for sport." - Donald Trump

[Wellesnet]

Jonathon Rosenbaum on Trump and Citizen Kane:
https://www.jonathanrosenbaum.net/2016/ ... d-be-king/

The peculiar place occupied by Citizen Kane in the American imagination...resembles the prestige enjoyed by the Godfather trilogy. In both cases, one finds an apologia for and even a celebration for the impudence and exhilaration found in the ruthless exercise of power. The tragic overtones offer a kind of moral escape clause that for many spectators ultimately validates the exhilaration — an ambivalence perfectly if ingenuously expressed by Donald Trump when he told Morris, “There was a great ride in Citizen Kane and a modest fall.”

[Wich2]

>Donald Trump when he told Morris, “There was a great ride in Citizen Kane and a modest fall.”<

"Modest fall"?

Broken, unloved, and alone?

[Le Chiffre]

Trump probably considers that trivial next to the power and wealth. He may get broken somewhere along the line, but as long as he has himself he'll never be alone or unloved.

The Daily Beast on "How Glenn Beck Laid the Tracks For the Trump Train":
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2 ... train.html

Beck before he became tolerable to the NPRs of the world...may be the best predictor of what Trump voters admire and tolerate: showmanship, explosiveness that can be interpreted as authenticity, paranoia, conspiracy, a deep hatred of “the media,” and a deep-seated fear of the future. None of this is news, but it is a reminder that we’ve seen this show before.

"It is better to be feared than loved, if you cannot be both." - Niccolo Machiavelli

F FOR FAKE Dept-
"Fake News and the Need to Resolve the Post Truth Crisis":
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ ... et-digital

The appetite for populism is not a new problem. In the ferocious newspaper battles of 1890s New York, the emerging sensational style of journalism in Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World and William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal was dubbed “yellow journalism” by those concerned with maintaining standards, adherence to accuracy and an informed public debate. We now have the same problem with online misinformation.

Likewise, the appetite for shallow gossip, pleasant lies and reassuring falsehoods has always been significant. The difference is that the internet allows that appetite to be fed a bottomless supply of semantic junk...

These kinds of digital, ethical problems represent a defining challenge of the 21st century. They include breaches of privacy, of security and safety, of ownership and intellectual property rights, of trust, of fundamental human rights, as well as the possibility of exploitation, discrimination, inequality, manipulation, propaganda, populism, racism, violence and hate speech. How should we even begin to weigh the human cost of these problems?

Oxford 2016 word of the year: Posttruth
Relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.

"Posttruth: It no longer matters which side of an argument is the most accurate. What matters is which side is the most entertaining."
- Anonymous

“I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness...

"The dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance”

-- From "The Demon-Haunted World:
Science as a Candle in the Dark"
by Carl Sagan (1995)

[tonyw]

"Whenever I feel alone,
I twitter a happy tune,
I piss off whoever I choose,
Ao I never feel alone again."

[Le Chiffre]

Some are comparing Trump's Twittering to FDR's Fireside chats, although FDR never used a fireside chat to whine about personal vendettas:
http://www.rollcall.com/news/opinion/tr ... eside-chat

In recent days, Trump has used the platform to attack the cast of “Hamilton” (a move some see as a devious diversion from other news, including legal settlements over Trump University).

As the late author Neil Postman observed, it is incorrect to think of television as an extension of an old medium, just as it would be foolish to think of the automobile as a horseless carriage. Yet, the fact that films with sound were originally referred to as “talkies” betrays the fact that we almost always see technological advancements through the prism of an old template.

This happens until someone with creativity and vision (and necessity!) discovers that each technology is inherently different. In the case of radio, FDR was the first president to fully grasp its potential to humanize politics. in the case of television, JFK (vs. Nixon) — and later, Ronald Reagan — deftly harnessed its ability to glamorize politics with images.

Which brings us to President-elect Donald Trump. Barack Obama’s image is younger and hipper,...but there was still a mediator between the president and the public. Trump seems to have grasped that social media — Twitter, specifically — lends itself to being a more intimate and unfiltered medium.

[Wellesnet]

"How Democrats Can Weaponize Hillary Clinton's Popular Vote Victory":
http://theweek.com/articles/667256/how- ... te-victory

So here's why it matters that Trump lost a crushing popular defeat to Clinton: It is a license to say no.

Democrats in the House will have very little power, but Senate Democrats will have a chance to block Trump's more outrageous proposals — at least as long as the filibuster stands — and a handful of Republicans skeptical of various aspects of the Trump agenda (see: Russia) will wield a lot of clout. More to the point, these senators will have every right to block Trump if they see fit. After all, America has elected its senators by popular vote since the 17th Amendment took effect in 1913 — unlike Trump, all 100 of these Senate members won more votes than their opponents.

"Mandates are ephemeral and ultimately require the assent of the defeated party," Schlesinger notes. Republicans did not assent in 2009 after Obama won 365 electoral votes, 52.9 percent of the popular vote, and nearly 10 million more votes than his Republican opponent. If Democrats, and even a few Republicans, don't buy this 46 percenter's claim to a mandate, that seems more like common sense than fighting dirty.