It's already become a transition cliche that Donald Trump is turning the US into a banana republic.  We've got the situational diplomacy, the crony appointments and the massive conflicts of interest as the president-elect clings to his global real estate and branding business even as he is about to take power.

I got the scoop for you.

In case you were wondering.

I'm reading today that people are shocked, just shocked, that Donald Trump would seemingly allow Paul Ryan to privatize Medicare when Trump explicitly promised his supporters that he would protect their entitlements during the campaign.  Surely, say the shocked, people will now see through the man's lies.

As far as "you said one thing and did another," this is a pretty open and shut case, right?

I don't watch a lot of cable news anymore but I obviously did last night and tonight I tuned into Anderson Cooper 360 and whatever Don Lemon's show is called, for coverage of the protests that have sprung up in New York, Chicago, Seattle, Austin, and other major cities.  The message of tonight's coverage echoes the message of Hillary Clinton's concession speech.  All they are saying is give Trump a chance.

No way to be nice about this.  If you voted for Trump, I don't want to hear it.  You're a moron.  I retain a smidge fo sympathy for third party voters but if you voted Trump, you're dumb and will reap the results.

But I am also mad at some other stupid idiots out there.

We have to start with the Clinton campaign, which begged me for a dollar, every day since the start of the primaries, and then blew an easy lay-up.

Then we have the national media, especially NBC, which created and nurtured Donald Trump and turned him into an uncontrollable force.

This is a dumb election.  It's not because the opponents are the same and it's definitely not Hillary Clinton's fault. It's a dumb election because Donald Trump suffers from the insane delusion that years of high ratings playing a celebrity billionaire villain on reality TV shows means that people like and respect him and so he tried to turn the election into one about the likability of his persona versus the likability of his opponent.

I've been an Edward Snowden fan because I believe, without much doubt at this point, that anything he's done that his critics call out as "bad' such as releasing information about legitimate U.S. intelligence operations against overseas targets or seeking refuge with Vladimir Putin are either forgivable or understandable within the context of him giving the American people the knowledge they needed in order to give consent to their own government.

Trump who?

Seriously, there is no other substance to this post other than this.

President Obama had vetoed a bill passed by Congress that allows U.S. citizens who are victims of state sponsored terrorism to sue the governments who sponsor that terrorism in U.S. courts. This has sparked some outrage overseas even as it gives families of 9/11 victims some shot at holding the Saudi Royal family accountable in U.S. courts, if the families can prove their case (and if they get that far). Obama opposed the law on the grounds of sovereign immunity, which generally immunizes recognized states from civil lawsuits or criminal prosecution.

On September 17th of 1981 the greatest of all time, the Nature Boy Ric Flair, put hard times on rival Dusty Rhodes, to win his first world heavyweight wrestling championships.  He is now (sadly) retired but his 16 world championship reigns remain a record, destined to be matched or exceeded by (shudder) John Cena.

Well, here it was, his first belt:

Today, Richard Cohen visits Hazard, Kentucky to profile Trump supporters.  The long and short of it seems to be that eight years of Obama's Environmental Protection Agency pushing the country away from coal asn an energy source has destroyed Eastern Kentucky's economy.  No doubt that, along with low oil and natural gas prices, have taken their toll on the region.

On a slow news Friday in August both Slate and New York ran thumb suckers calling on the Clintons to shut down their foundation.  This is in response to a Clinton promise that the foundation would take no foreign donations during a Clinton presidency. Look, I get it.

Slate has run with a thought experiment that serves as a kind of counter to calls by people like President Obama for Republicans to repudiate their own nominee, for the good of the country.  The idea here is that if populist Democrats had somehow handed the nomination to somebody like Sean Penn, people left of center would not take kindly to being told to vote for Ted Cruz in the name of apple pie and American values.

Please reserve space in the comments below for Hal to make fun of me if Hillary Clinton picks Tim Kaine as her running mate this afternoon.

The rest of you do not have to wait, though, and can make fun of me now.

Happy Friday!

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg issued some mildly opinionated statements questioning Donald Trump's fitness to be president and now the idiot wing of lefty America has stirred to admonish her for... saying what any reasonable person would expect her to believe about Donal Trump any way.

You don't need me to recount the week of police-violence and resulant lone wolf terrorism, so let's just stipulate that you all read and watch the news.  In New York Magazine, Johnathan Chait assures us "It Is Not 1968." It's a well done essay but somehow when Chait says something declarative, I suspect it just isn't entirely true.

Quick thought here --

On the merits, were I a UK citizen, I believe I'd have voted to stay with the EU.

However, that would have been in spite of a lot of preaching and hectoring by the elites who brought the Uk into the EU in the first place.  As an outsider, I kind of hoped for an "exit" outcome if only to see, for once, a referendum pushing back against what we've all been assured is "the right thing to do," by people who seem immune to the falling wages and abdications of democracy that seem the result of the new capitalist global order.

My liberal Twitter and Facebook feeds are all abuzz with anger at the NRA over the terrorist attack in Orlando. That's fine.  There are plenty of reasons to be angry at the NRA.  Our lack of reasonable gun control is a problem. I'm with you.  But let's not miss the point here.

A man shot at hundreds of people, killing more than twenty and wounding more than forty, because he was angry that he saw two men kissing in public.  The man reportedly has connections to Islamic extremists.  Gun or not, his motive was to export his intolerance, specifically his hatred of homosexuality.