This happened on Tuesday to the United States' first Somali-American lawmaker.

"Donald Trump insulted a union leader on Twitter. Then the phone started to ring.

Megyn Kelly: Donald Trump and Steve Bannon clearly empowered the white nationalist movement

The Red Menace

Michael Flynn Jr sacked over Pizzagate claims that led to shots being fired at Comet Ping Pong

The son of Donald Trump’s pick for national security adviser, Michael Flynn, has lost his job in the president-elect’s transition team after he spread a false conspiracy theory about Hillary Clinton that led to shots being fired in pizza restaurant.

While working for his father, Michael Flynn Jr tweeted an erroneous theory that Clinton’s allies had been running a paedophile ring in the Comet Ping Pong pizza parlour in Washington.

Even after a man on Sunday fired a rifle in the restaurant, in an incident apparently sparked by the conspiracy theory, Flynn said on Twitter that the fake news would “remain a story” until proven false.

MORE:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/dec/07/trump-adviser-son-michael-flynn-sacked-pizzagate-comet-ping-pong-restaurant

The Weather Channel gives Breitbart a much-needed lesson in climate science.

Here’s where both articles went wrong:

CLAIM: "Global land temperatures have plummeted by one degree Celsius since the middle of this year – the biggest and steepest fall on record."

TRUTH: This number comes from one satellite-based estimate of temperatures above land areas in the lower atmosphere. Data from the other two groups that regularly publish satellite-based temperature estimates show smaller drops, more typical of the decline one would expect after a strong El Niño event.

Temperatures over land give an incomplete picture of global-scale temperature. Most of the planet – about 70 percent – is covered by water, and the land surface warms and cools more quickly than the ocean. Land-plus-ocean data from the other two satellite groups, released after the Breitbart article, show that Earth’s lower atmosphere actually set a record high in November 2016.

CLAIM: "It can be argued that without the El Niño (and the so-called "Pacific Blob&quot 2014-2016 would not have been record warm years." (David Whitehouse, Global Warming Policy Foundation, quoted by Breitbart)

TRUTH: NOAA data show that the 2014-16 El Niño did not even begin until October 2014. It was a borderline event until mid-2015, barely above the El Niño threshold. El Niño clearly added to the strength of the record global warmth observed since late 2015. However, if the El Niño spike is removed, 2016 is still the warmest year on record and 2015 the second warmest, according to climate scientist Zeke Hausfather (Berkeley Earth).

President of Carrier employees union about Trump: He 'lied his ass off'

CEO of United Technologies just let slip an unintended consequence of the Trump-Carrier jobs deal

Republicans: Election proves America wants to let Trump & family enrich themselves through power.

There are many countries in the world that are governed by men who use their office to enrich themselves and their families. Before now, or at least for the last 200 years (since Andrew Jackson secretly profited off his own land grabs) the United States of America has not been a country like this. The modern American tradition has required political leaders to renounce any financial interest that might bias their decision. Donald Trump has abruptly demolished this tradition. And the Republican Party is happy to oblige.

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Trump himself seems to be gravitating toward this “I’m rich, get over it” defense. Trump owns stock in the company building the Dakota Access Pipeline, and has endorsed completion of the project. Trump’s official explanation is that his support for the pipeline “has nothing to do with his personal investments and everything to do with promoting policies that benefit all Americans.” It is probably true that, in this case, Trump’s agenda happens to line up with his personal financial interest. But consider the breadth of this defense. Trump is claiming the right to make decisions in office that enrich himself, and simply insisting that he would have made those decisions regardless because he is incorruptible by definition.

A straightforward bribe involves a quid pro quo transaction between public officials and a private interest. Since Trump refuses to disclose his tax returns, the public cannot know the quid. And his administration insists that any decision he makes must have the public’s best interest in mind, which could rationalize any quo. There is literally no mechanism whatsoever standing between Trump and massive Putinesque corruption.

Perhaps the most chilling defense is one by Gingrich that goes beyond even asserting an unlimited right to undisclosed presidential self-dealing. “The American people,” he tells Samuelson, “knowingly voted for a businessman whose name is inextricably tied to his fortune. In reality, of course, “the American people” voted for Hillary Clinton. Trump was chosen by the Electoral College. What’s striking here is the notion that Trump’s victory inherently moots any concerns about his conduct in office. Accountability is not an ongoing process but a matter settled once and for all in November. Any restraint on his abuse of power is inapplicable, since the election is presumed to have handed Trump the right to use his power as he sees fit. If Trump can so quickly demolish decades of precedent against presidential self-enrichment, what other norms will he destroy?



http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/12/how-republicans-justify-unlimited-trump-corruption.html

How quickly we forget what America was like when Obama entered office...