I should have stayed in bed

Last night, I went to bed at 9:30.  I could not keep up with the disasters coming on my news feed.  Mentally, I was not up to absorbing more about the tragedy unfolding in America and by extension the rest of the world, including Ukraine. What Putin got and what Trump gave up in their phone call

So I continued to read "The History of Ukraine", while we still have one, for an hour or so before trying to sleep. Woke up this morning to these headlines, thanks to my niece and other friends:

Trial Balloon for a Coup?

Combining all of these facts, we have a fairly clear picture in play. 

1. Trump was, indeed, perfectly honest during the campaign; he intends to do everything he said, and more. This should not be reassuring to you. 
2. The regime’s main organizational goal right now is to transfer all effective power to a tight inner circle, eliminating any possible checks from either the Federal bureaucracy, Congress, or the Courts. Departments are being reorganized or purged to effect this. 
3. The inner circle is actively probing the means by which they can seize unchallenged power; yesterday’s moves should be read as the first part of that. 
4. The aims of crushing various groups — Muslims, Latinos, the black and trans communities, academics, the press — are very much primary aims of the regime, and are likely to be acted on with much greater speed than was earlier suspected. The secondary aim of personal enrichment is also very much in play, and clever people will find ways to play these two goals off each other.

What “Things Going Wrong” Can Look Like

On a recent post I made about how President Trump marked Holocaust Remembrance Day, one of my readers asked a good, but hard, question: Why did this regime single out some particular groups (e.g., Muslims, Latinos, Black, and Trans people) as their main targets, and not others?

Trump Advisors Aim to Privatize Untapped Oil Reserves on Native American Reservations

Native American reservations cover just 2% of the United States, but they may contain about a fifth of the nation's oil and gas, along with vast coal reserves. Now, a group of advisors to President-elect Donald Trump on Native American issues wants to free those resources from what they call a suffocating federal bureaucracy that holds title to 56 million acres of tribal lands, two chairmen of the coalition told Reuters in exclusive interviews. 

The group proposes to put those lands into private ownership - a politically explosive idea that could upend more than century of policy designed to preserve Indian tribes on U.S.-owned reservations, which are governed by tribal leaders as sovereign nations. The tribes have rights to use the land, but they do not own it. They can drill it and reap the profits, but only under regulations that are far more burdensome than those applied to private property. 

"We should take tribal land away from public treatment," said Markwayne Mullin, a Republican U.S. Representative from Oklahoma and a Cherokee tribe member who is co-chairing Trump's Native American Affairs Coalition. "As long as we can do it without unintended consequences, I think we will have broad support around Indian country."

Donald Trump, the Religious Right’s Trojan Horse

Once Mr. Trump seized the Republican nomination, religious conservatives realized that their only path to federal influence lay in a bargain with this profane, thrice-married Manhattan sybarite. So they got in line, ultimately proving to be Mr. Trump’s most loyal backers. In November, exit polls showed that Mr. Trump won 81 percent of white evangelicals, more than the born-again George W. Bush garnered in either of his races. Mr. Brown, the radio host, remained worried about Mr. Trump’s temperament, but saw the hand of God in his victory. “I believe Trump has been elected president by divine intervention,” he wrote on Nov. 9. Mr. Trump is known for failing to honor his debts, but in this case, he’s fully repaying his Christian conservative supporters. For all his flagrant sinfulness, he’s assembling a near-theocratic administration, his cabinet full of avowed enemies of church-state separation. 

And a couple more books I need to read, having already read 1984 and The Handmaid's Tale:

I should have stayed in bed.