Townie Elite

I considered composing my own annotation of Donald J. Trump's inauguration diatribe, but instead will defer to this excellent piece from Vox.  http://www.vox.com/a/president-trump-inauguration-speech-transcript-annotations

A scene from "The Sweet Hereafter" (1997). A school bus rides along an open country road in winter. The children are laughing and jostling, the two in back waving at the man in a pickup following behind. Suddenly, the driver loses control. She tries to straighten the vehicle, but instead swerves off the edge and trundles down an embankment. The man in the pickup pulls over and rushes over to see the bus fishtail out to the middle of frozen lake. It comes to a stop, then slowly sinks as the ice beneath it gives way. This is the horrific central event in Atom Egoyan's 1997 film "The Sweet Hereafter." There are no special effects or explosions. Just the sickening vantage point from the road as the vehicle slowly submerges. When the witness rushes to the scene, we can hear the screams of children. Fourteen of them perish. "It is typical of (Egoyan's) approach that 'The Sweet Hereafter' neither begins nor ends with the bus falling through the...

Until this week, it would have been hard to imagine how the words of Trump and his spokespeople could become any more Kafka-esque. But Kellyanne Conway managed it. On Monday, the incoming president's chief counsel told an American TV audience that the media should stop listening to what Trump says and look instead into his heart. The subject was Trump's unambiguous mockery of a disabled reporter during the election campaign — a shameful event revisited by actor Meryl Streep in a short speech at Sunday's Golden Globe Awards. Trump mimicked the reporter's jerky movements during a rally as supporters cheered him on. Conway, of course, has for several months proven herself unparalleled in her ability to dodge questions. Even Paul Calandra's antics in Canada's Parliament seem amateur in comparison. On Monday, however, Conway outdid herself. “Why don’t you believe him? Why isn’t it taken at face value?” Conway told CNN's Chris Cuomo, when asked why Tr...

Saying Russian hacking had nothing to do with the outcome of the U.S. election is like saying sexting other women had nothing to do with Anthony Wiener's political career. The former New York congressman may well have botched things all on his own, but revelations about penile postings — including messages allegedly sent to a minor — certainly put the nail in the coffin. Most rational U.S. politicians — and there are scant few — realize the Kremlin's interference in the 2016 election is frighteningly unprecedented. Yet Donald Trump's apologists seem more intent on digressing from the central point — none more than Trump himself .  That Russian president Vladimir Putin's meddling was intentional and far reaching is unassailable, as anyone who's read the intelligence report released Jan. 6 would know. Perhaps the most ironic section of the report, however, are the pages dealing with Russian TV, abbreviated as RT. This international service is not simply fun...