Nation Realizes: Trump Presidency Illegitimate!!!

It's now pretty damn obvious...

The latest popular vote totals Monday (12-12-16), as reported by nonpartisan election analysis group The Cook Report, show Clinton garnering 65,746,544 votes compared to Trump’s 62,904,682, a difference of more than 2.8 million votes. In percentages, Clinton’s locked down a plurality of 48.2 percent of the vote and Trump 46.2 percent.

Not our president...

"...the result was nonetheless illegitimate in important ways; the victor was rejected by the public, and won the Electoral College only thanks to foreign intervention and grotesquely inappropriate, partisan behavior on the part of domestic law enforcement."

"Did the combination of Russian and F.B.I. intervention swing the election? Yes. Mrs. Clinton lost three states — Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania — by less than a percentage point, and Florida by only slightly more," Krugman wrote.

"If she had won any three of those states, she would be president-elect. Is there any reasonable doubt that Putin/Comey made the difference?"

RECOUNT UPDATE: From the tweets pictured below, you would have thought we were all hoping for an election flip. Not true. Instead, the recount revealed millions didn't vote illegally!!!

Charles Koch beating Harry Reid in Iowa? Moyers on our Slide into Oligarchy.

Bill Moyers' recent focus has been on income inequality and the rise of the oligarchs. Merriam Webster defines oligarch this way: "a person who belongs to a small group of people who govern or control a country, business, etc. "

Just more whining and needless fear mongering from losing liberal Democrats shut out by billionaire contributors? Well, if the picture to the right doesn't worry you at all, than we've got a real problem.

The conservative Washington Free Beacon found Charles Koch had an impressive lead over Sen. Reid in their imaginative matchup:

Iowa voters would back libertarian philanthropist Charles Koch by a hefty margin over Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D., Nev.) in a hypothetical 2016 presidential race, according to a new Washington Free Beacon poll. The results are in keeping with earlier polls showing that Charles and his brother David Koch are more popular than Reid, despite the majority leader’s breathless campaign to portray the libertarian philanthropy barons as “un-American” and “against everything that’s good for America.” Voters may have tired of Reid’s deranged bluster about the Koch brothers trying to “buy our democracy” while his Super PAC raises money from a handful of liberal billionaires.

The Oligarchic point:

A study, to appear in the Fall 2014 issue of the academic journal Perspectives on Politics, finds that the U.S. is no democracy, but instead an oligarchy, meaning profoundly corrupt, so that the answer to the study’s opening question: "Despite the seemingly strong empirical support in previous studies for theories of majoritarian democracy, our analyses suggest that … the preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy." To put it short: The United States is no democracy, but actually an oligarchy.  

But then we kind of had bad feeling about the money pouring into campaigns, didn't we? Here's a much shortened, highlight version of Bill Moyers, with Paul Krugman. See the whole thing here:

Paul Krugman on Paul Ryan: "An expert at sounding as if he knows what he's talking about...It's comical in way."

Finally, someone else is saying what I've been saying for some time now; Ryan is not a wonk, but an articulate partisan Ayn Randian knucklehead.

Paul Krugman said it best in the following Ryan take down:

There are many negative things you can say about Paul Ryan, chairman of the House Budget Committee and the G.O.P.’s de facto intellectual leader. But you have to admit that he’s a very articulate guy, an expert at sounding as if he knows what he’s talking about.  

So it’s comical, in a way, to see Mr. Ryan trying to explain away some recent remarks in which he attributed persistent poverty to a “culture, in our inner cities in particular, of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working.” He was, he says, simply being “inarticulate.” How could anyone suggest that it was a racial dog-whistle? Why, he even cited the work of serious scholars — people like Charles Murray, most famous for arguing that blacks are genetically inferior to whites. Oh, wait. Just to be clear, there’s no evidence that Mr. Ryan is personally a racist … He said what he said because that’s the kind of thing conservatives say to each other all the time. And why do they say such things? Because American conservatism is still, after all these years, largely driven by claims that liberals are taking away your hard-earned money and giving it to Those People. Indeed, race is the Rosetta Stone that makes sense of many otherwise incomprehensible aspects of U.S. politics.

And since conservatives can’t bring themselves to acknowledge the reality of what’s happening to opportunity in America, they’re left with nothing but that old-time dog whistle. Mr. Ryan wasn’t being inarticulate — he said what he said because it’s all that he’s got.

GOP Cliff Jump: Operation Rolling Tantrum and The Full McConnell!!

Just a few clever titles and straightforward facts:

Paul Krugman: Operation Rolling Tantrum: Oh, boy. This isn’t going to end … John Boehner has just declared that he’s going to hold the full faith and credit of the United States hostage every time we hit the debt limit. Nor will it be a case of holding the nation at gunpoint until it meets GOP demands; Republicans are signaling that they don’t intend to make any specific proposals, they’re just going to yell and stamp their feet until Obama soothes them somehow.

If the next two years are one long Republican tantrum, the 2014 election is not going to be a normal midterm. It will instead be a referendum on GOP obstructionism, which may attract a lot more attention — and much higher turnout — than normal.

The Full McConnell: In his interview with the Wall Street Journal, Mitch McConnell finally mentioned a few sort-of specifics about what spending cuts the GOP wants: raising the Medicare age, charging higher premiums to affluent Medicare recipients, and changing the price indexing of Social Security. But how much does all this amount to?

I’ve already noted that the CBO has estimated the fiscal savings from raising the Medicare age at $113 billion over the next decade. A study of health care options (pdf) from a few years ago put the savings from expanded premiums at $20 billion (Option 91) – that number would be somewhat higher now, but still small.

So, we get a bit more than $300 billion. Getting this would impose substantial hardship – seniors would be forced into inferior private insurance, and there are good reasons to believe that the true inflation rate facing seniors is actually higher, not lower, than the CPI. Still, what we’re looking at overall is a saving equal to only about one-fifth of what Obama is proposing to raise by higher taxes.

And that’s it; has anyone heard even a peep from the GOP about what else they’d like to cut?
This is pathetic – and these people are definitely not serious.

Krugman: "Ryan is a Con Man"

I just had to post this reminder for voters that still haven't discovered what the rest of the country discovered; Ryan is not a wonk. He's also something else according to Paul Krugman:

NY Times: A Public Service Reminder: Paul Ryan is a Con Man

So now that the Unperson/Ryan ticket has lost, Republicans are clearly expecting Paul Ryan to move right back into his previous role as Washington’s favorite Serious, Honest Conservative.

He might get away with it; but I hope not.

The fact is that Ryan is and always was a fraud. His plan never added up; it was never, contrary to what people who should know better asserted, “scored” by the CBO. What he actually offered was a plan to hurt the poor and reward the rich, actually increasing the deficit along the way, plus magic asterisks that supposedly reduced the debt by means unspecified.

His genius, if you can all it that, was in realizing that there was a role — as I said, that of Honest, Serious Conservative — that self-proclaimed centrists desperately wanted to see filled, so that they could demonstrate their bipartisanship by lavishing praise on the holder of that position. So Ryan did his best to impersonate a budget wonk. It wasn’t a very good impersonation — in fact, he’s pretty bad at budget math. But the “centrists” saw what they wanted to see.

Ryan can’t be ignored, since his party does retain blocking power, and he chairs an important committee. But if he must be dealt with, it should be with no illusions. Fool me once …

Red State Wisconsin's National Leaders; Reince Priebus, Paul Ryan, Scott Walker,

Wisconsin all of a sudden is what Republicans stand for. We are grooming the next generation of red state leaders. Ours is the national message. It's the Republican Economy now. Rachel Maddow and Paul Krugman break it all down.