I’ve stated before, I have no fear for Donald Trump … my anguish is the close allies and the minority of Americans who voted for him. Shame on the opposition party elite who failed to commit to a policy which would have carried a nominee to the presidency.

Matt Taibbi’s New Book: ‘Insane Clown President’ | Rolling Stones |

Trump is the perfect modern American. He’s a human consumption machine with no attention span, no self-control, no beliefs and no hobbies outside of sex, spending, eating and talking about himself. Nixon at least played the piano and read classics. He was an intellectual with a pig’s heart. Trump is just the pig part.

The distance between the two men represents how far we’ve fallen as a nation in the last 40 or 50 years. Once we were merely rotten and evil on the inside. Now we even lack the depth needed to be two-faced, and our dark underbelly is also our shameless, dumb exterior.

During most of the last two years I thought the Trump campaign would just be an isolated episode of mass insanity on which we would someday be able to look back and laugh. It turned out to be something a lot darker and crazier than that. Insane Clown President is the story of how we got here, to the beginning of our next long national nightmare.

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U.S. Presidency by default to a clown - The Apprentice . Becoming a failed state ...

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, as a new study finds the world’s eight richest men control as much wealth as the poorest half of humanity, six of the eight billionaires are Americans, including Michael Bloomberg, Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and Jeff Bezos. Oxfam said it’s concerned that wealth inequality will continue to grow following the election of Donald Trump, whose Cabinet members have a combined wealth of nearly $11 billion.

AMY GOODMAN: For more, we’re joined by award-winning Rolling Stone journalist Matt Taibbi, who’s been chronicling the rise of Donald Trump during the 2016 election campaign. In his new book, just out today, he writes, “It’s an Alice in Wonderland story, in which a billionaire hedonist jumps down the rabbit hole of American politics and discovers a surreal world where each successive barrier to power collapses before him like magic.” Yes, Matt Taibbi’s book is titled Insane Clown President: Dispatches from the 2016 Circus. As this week, Friday, the inauguration of the 45th president, Donald Trump, is set, your thoughts, Matt Taibbi?

MATT TAIBBI: I mean, it’s unbelievable. I think this is an unprecedented crisis heading into an inauguration week. I think we never could have imagined that some–this last twist, at the end of what was already the craziest election season in history, with this Russia controversy and this sort of unparalleled intelligence crisis, in a way it’s actually kind of the perfect anti-ending to this, you know, incredible tragicomedy of the last couple years.

Continued below the fold …
Profound words from the editorial staff at The Atlantic and a subtle headline!

Against Donald Trump

In october of 1860, James Russell Lowell, the founding editor of The Atlantic, warned in these pages about the perishability of the great American democratic experiment if citizens (at the time, white, male citizens) were to cease taking seriously their franchise:

    “In a society like ours, where every man may transmute his private thought
    into history and destiny by dropping it into the ballot-box, a peculiar
    responsibility rests upon the individual … For, though during its term of office
    the government be practically as independent of the popular will as that
    of Russia, yet every fourth year the people are called upon to pronounce
    upon the conduct of their affairs. Theoretically, at least, to give democracy
    any standing-ground for an argument with despotism or oligarchy,
    a majority of the men composing it should be statesmen and thinkers.”

One of the animating causes of this magazine at its founding, in 1857, was the abolition of slavery, and Lowell argued that the Republican Party, and the man who was its standard-bearer in 1860, represented the only reasonable pathway out of the existential crisis then facing the country. In his endorsement of Abraham Lincoln for president, Lowell wrote, on behalf of the magazine, “It is in a moral aversion to slavery as a great wrong that the chief strength of the Republican party lies.” He went on to declare that Abraham Lincoln “had experience enough in public affairs to make him a statesman, and not enough to make him a politician.”

Perhaps because no subsequent candidate for the presidency was seen as Lincoln’s match, or perhaps because the stakes in ensuing elections were judged to be not quite so high as they were in 1860, it would be 104 years before The Atlantic would again make a presidential endorsement. In October of 1964, Edward Weeks, writing on behalf of the magazine , cited Lowell’s words before making an argument for the election of Lyndon B. Johnson. “We admire the President for the continuity with which he has maintained our foreign policy, a policy which became a worldwide responsibility at the time of the Marshall Plan,” the endorsement read. Johnson, The Atlantic believed, would bring “to the vexed problem of civil rights a power of conciliation which will prevent us from stumbling down the road taken by South Africa.”

○ Diary on influence of Anglo-Saxon protestantism and white-supremacy in America
○ America’s Greatness Ended With the Statue of Liberty

Indians, Slaves, and Mass Murder: The Hidden History

Taínos who resisted the Spanish were set upon by dogs, disemboweled by swords, burned at stakes, trampled by horses–atrocities “to which no chronicle could ever do justice,” wrote Friar Bartolomé de las Casas, a crusader for Indian rights, in 1542. Against the Caribs the Spaniards had a tougher time, fighting pitched battles but capturing hundreds of slaves as well. Columbus sailed home from his second voyage with over a thousand captives bound for slave auctions in Cádiz (many died en route, their bodies tossed overboard). He envisioned a future market for New World gold, spices, cotton, and “as many slaves as Their Majesties order to make, from among those who are idolators,” whose sales might underwrite subsequent expeditions.

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Carl Lumholtz: Tarahumara Woman Being Weighed, Barranca de San Carlos (Sinforosa), Chihuahua, 1892; from Among Unknown Tribes: Rediscovering the Photographs of Explorer Carl Lumholtz. The book includes essays by Bill Broyles, Ann Christine Eek, and others, and is published by the University of Texas Press.

Thus did the discoverer of the New World become its first transatlantic human trafficker–a sideline pursued by most New World conquistadors until, in the mid-seventeenth century, Spain officially opposed slavery. And Columbus’s vision of a “reverse middle passage” crumbled when Spanish customers preferred African domestics. Indians were more expensive to acquire, insufficiently docile, harder to train, unreliable over the years, and susceptible to homesickness, seasickness, and European diseases. Other obstacles included misgivings by the church and royal authorities, which may explain Columbus’s emphasis on “idolators” like the Caribs, whose status as “enemies” and cannibals made them more legally eligible for enslavement.