This is Sean Spicer, President Trump's press secretary. He did not take questions from the media journalists at this, the first of President Trump's press conferences. Mind you this comes off the last press conference, which was from President Trump himself, when he called CNN a fake news outlet.

At times like this it’s common to speak of shared purpose and national unity. If that’s what you’re looking for, there are plenty of other voices you can listen to.

It would be wonderful if national unity were possible, but it isn’t. Perhaps Donald Trump will surprise us all and turn out to be a temperate, careful, and wise president. If that should happen, I’ll join with conservatives to give him the praise he deserves. But he hasn’t earned it yet, not by a mile.

Please, don’t tell us liberals that when we criticize Trump we’re doing terrible damage to the convivial spirit that would otherwise prevail were we not so rude. We’ve heard that baloney before, and it’s pretty rich coming from people who spent the last eight years saying that Barack Obama was a foreign socialist tyrant carrying out a secret plan to destroy America.

So spare us your hypocritical talk of unity, because your champion sure doesn’t believe it. We’ve seen it clearly since the election: once he goes off his teleprompter, we get not even the pretense of unity from Donald Trump. Quite the contrary; he communicates again and again that he has nothing but contempt for those who don’t pay him proper tribute. After a campaign that was built on hatred and resentment from its very first moment, he couldn’t bring himself to reach out to the majority of Americans who didn’t vote for him, mounting a “thank you tour” only of states he won (think what you would have said if Hillary Clinton had been the victor and done that) and lashing out on Twitter like a cranky toddler at anyone who criticized him.

Being elected to the presidency wasn’t enough to grant him an iota of generosity or magnanimity. He may be the most powerful person on earth, but he’s still a tiny, petty, insecure, vengeful man whose only measure of any human being’s worth is whether they’ve praised him recently.

It will be a long time before the contrast in the character of these two presidents ceases to bring us pain. We won’t forget how Trump treated Barack Obama, a man who despite every rancid personal attack you threw at him conducted himself in office with an uncommon level of grace and class. And now he has handed the keys to the White House to a man who launched his political career with a despicable campaign to question to question Obama’s birthplace, and who in every way is his opposite: impulsive where Obama is thoughtful, ignorant where Obama is informed, disrespectful where Obama is polite, vindictive where Obama is generous, a walking collection of character flaws where Obama is a role model.

I created this myself by the way. No copy and paste bullshit for me. More like crop the picture, read and listen to the speech, then manifest my own gestalt (look up that awesome word) in my own words.

Thank you Jake Tapper.

Paul Krugman is awesome. Here is his brief and cogent explanation of why the insurance market for health care is problematic.

...providing health care to those previously denied it is, necessarily, a matter of redistributing from the lucky to the unlucky. And, of course, reversing a policy that expanded health care is redistribution in reverse. You can’t make this reality go away.

Left to its own devices, a market economy won’t care for the sick unless they can pay for it; insurance can help up to a point, but insurance companies have no interest in covering people they suspect will get sick. So unfettered markets mean that health care goes only to those who are wealthy and/or healthy enough that they won’t need it often, and hence can get insurance.

If that’s a state of affairs you’re comfortable with, so be it. But the public doesn’t share your sentiments. Health care is an issue on which most people are natural Rawlsians: they can easily imagine themselves in the position of those who, through no fault of their own, experience expensive medical problems, and feel that society should protect people like themselves from such straits.

The thing is, however, that guaranteeing health care comes with a cost. You can tell insurance companies that they can’t discriminate based on medical history, but that means higher premiums for the healthy — and you also create an incentive to stay uninsured until or unless you get sick, which pushes premiums even higher. So you have to regulate individuals as well as insurers, requiring that everyone sign up — the mandate, And since some people won’t be able to obey such a mandate, you need subsidies, which must be paid for out of taxes.

[SOURCE: Paul Krugman | New York Times | 18 January 2017]

So you fools who think repealing the Affordable Care Act is going to automatically launch free-market nirvana need to throw up the cool-aid immediately. When people think of free markets, they act like all interactions between professionals, citizens, customers, and people are the exact same. They treat every business and economic sector like a flea market or restaurant industry: everyone is freely interacting with the same access to customers and citizens based upon the same criteria, so those that use their resources more efficiently or perform the best services will inherently succeed. In this model, hard work will accrue profit and customers will benefit.

Which is fine, but health care is not a flea market or a restaurant. You can choose if you want to shop and dine, where you want to shop and dine, AND even whether you want to shop and dine. When you get sick or have health issues, ignoring the problem is not an option. It's also not beneficial to society at large because people with contagious diseases or chronic disorders that forego treatment affect everyone as a result and turn a bad situation worse, thereby increasing the necessary health costs. When costs increase on those who cannot afford such costs, when costs increase because of delayed or decreased treatment options, these costs spread out over those who can pay, namely those who do buy insurance. This is why health insurance costs increased every year in the decades preceding president Obama.

Costs will be increasing very shortly. Bank on it. Health care rationing will also increase, which means micro-management of individual cost decisions will affect decisions about customer health that probably will not be in the best interest of the health of that individual -- but in the best interest of the insurance company. It is precisely these perverse incentives that make health care an economic sector than CANNOT achieve efficiency if it is treated like a free market.

Repealing the ACA was stupid, but you never know, this might precipitate the ground-work for something that will be much better, because the pain of this stupid action will arrive very shortly. Middle class voters everywhere will not be happy when their precious health insurace costs increase by 20% per year or more over the next few years.

Notice the counter-clockwise spinning system over the Pacific ocean between Hawaii and Washington State. The South part of the tail carries all the water. This is partly due to the spinning of the Earth towards the East which induces orthogonal rotational weather systems (orthogonal here means "perpendicular to the surface of the Earth"). The thing is that there are competing spins that meteorologists understand as "High" pressure versus "Low" pressure systems. Low Pressure is due to occupancy of air by water molecules which drops the air due to the weight, inducing the spin cycle. A high pressure has less water occupancy, and might be very dry, which induces moisture to "rush" into the high pressure pocket.

As the Earth spins, Low pressure systems get created in reaction to the spinning of the Earth, which thereby induces reactions from High pressure areas. The interactions between these two regions of air mass largely dictates the seasonal weather patterns over the globe, but there are other factors, such as upper atmosphere pattern (sometimes called the "Jet Stream"), geographical topography (such as Mountain ranges), and even sunspots.

During the past few years of drought here on the West coast, a High pressure system over Northern California and the Pacific ocean a thousand miles off the Oregon Coast blocked the spinning Low weather systems and sent them into Washington State, Oregon, and Canada. In January 2015 California had summer weather conditions in January, and San Francisco had no rain at all during January for the first time in recorded history. This was wierd (see below) because January is the middle of the central distribution of recorded data and is typically the month when rain occurs more often.

Here is the Monthly Precipitation for various Bay Area locales:

[SOURCE: Chelsea Harvey | Business Insider | 30 January 2015]

Yves Smith has a good article on the economic hardship of young adults.

...young adults had a good run in Reagan years before the nasty hangover of the 1990-1991 recession kicked in. From Fortune, summarizing a report by a group called the Young Invincibles, using Fed data:

The report found that millennials—15 to 34-year-olds in 2013—were worth roughly half as much as the boomer generation and are earning about 20% less in comparison to young adults in 1989. While millennials earned $40,581 on average in 2013, members of the boomer generation earned $50,910 annually in 1989.

Meanwhile, young adults with debt and a degree in 2013 earned roughly the same as those who had no degree at all in 1989: $50,000.

The lower number on the paycheck has also materialized in the form of a lower net worth. While Millennials are worth about $10,900, the Boomers were worth $25,035 at the same age.The lower number on the paycheck has also materialized in the form of a lower net worth. While Millennials are worth about $10,900, the Boomers were worth $25,035 at the same age.

...needless to say, one of the factors driving the lackluster post 2007 results is the lousy quality of jobs. 94% of the new jobs created in the Obama era were part-time or temporary.

The lack of a steady job makes it hard to save for a down payment and hard to have enough in the way of steady earnings to qualify for a mortgage. And in our society, where the property rights of tenants are generally poor (unlike some other societies) and landlords can and do raise rents aggressively, owning real estate historically was the way that the middle class accumulated wealth for retirement. The 30 year mortgage matched the typical productive earning years of the (male) head of the household. When he retired, he would own his house rent free and face much lower costs, or could move into a smaller home and free up equity. Housing was a tax-advantaged forced savings vehicle; the traditional model provided a wealth buffer for retirees even when real estate appreciated only at its long-term historical level of a mere 0.5% real price growth per year.

The resolution of the crisis again turned the old model on its ear. Housing before the crisis was at strained valuations in relationship to average incomes and rentals. Yet the priority after the crisis was to restore home prices to their former levels. Now in fact, outcomes have varied considerably, with the top 10% communities that have done well in the “recovery” seeing turbo charged home price gains (which in New York, San Francisco, and increasingly other major cities have been amplified by Russian and Chinese flight capital).

Digby recently put out a post about how it's important to keep a weekly list of events during authoritarian crises so as to not forget how far things evolve, and not become defeated by moving goal posts.

She came up with 36 for week 9, and has lists for the other 8 weeks to boot. Kick ass.

1. The Office of Government Ethics director publicly lamented, "we seem to have lost contact with the Trump-Pence transition since the election."
2. Three vendors have placed liens on the Trump hotel in DC for unpaid bills of over $5 million, in total.
3. The OGE similarly said they had not completed ethics reviews of Trump's cabinet nominees. Leader McConnell said the Democrats need to "grow up" on Trump's desire for speedy confirmations.
4. Sean Hannity endorsed a tweet which said "Make Russia Great Again" with the word, "Amen." Hannity later deleted his tweet.
5. Meryl Streep used her Golden Globes lifetime of notable work speech to eloquently attack Trump, without mentioning his name.
6. Trump responded via a tweet that Streep is an "over-rated" actress, and denied he had mocked a disabled reporter.
7. Trump took credit for a Fiat Chrysler plant and jobs in MI and OH. Fiat Chrysler responded that Trump had nothing to do with it.
8. Trump appointed Jared Kushner, his son-in-law, to a top WH post, possibly violating the 1967 federal anti-nepotism statute.
9. Trump told the NYT that all the dress shops in DC are sold out for his inauguration. This was a lie.
10. Trump team dismissed the National Nuclear Security Administration and his deputy, responsible for maintaining our nuclear arsenal, as of January 20. Trump also dismissed the commanding general of the DC national guard.
11. Cory Booker became the first US Senator to speak out against a fellow sitting senator at a confirmation hearing (Sessions for AG).
12. CNN reported a bombshell - Intelligence chiefs had briefed Trump that Russia had gathered information to blackmail him (the dossier).
13. Same day, BuzzFeed published contents of the dossier, which apparently had been in the hands of the FBI and some in the media since the summer. Contents included the infamous golden shower.
14. Trump denied having been briefed, and said the contents of the dossier were confirmed by intelligence to be fake. DNI Clapper issued a public statement indicating the dossier's contents are still being verified (not fake), and media reported that Comey met with Trump one-on-one to review the dossier the prior Friday.
15. Trump held his first press conference since July. Trump packed the room with paid employees, who applauded him, and jeered at reporters.
16. At presser, Trump said he had no plans to release his tax returns, or resolve conflicts of interest, saying, "I have no-conflict situation because I'm president."
17. Trump bullied reporters at two news outlets, calling them "fake news," and used other news outlets as evidence.
18. The director of the OGE publicly blasted Trump's non-plan for dealing with conflicts of interest. Next day, Rep Jason Chaffetz threatened to investigate the OGE.
19. Next day, while meeting with CEO of AT&T at Trump Tower (AT&T needs approval for their merger with Time Warner, parent company of CNN) Trump tweeted CNN is "FAKE NEWS" and tanking.
20. Rep Barbara Lee said she would not attend Trump's inauguration. During the week, the list grew to 6 members of Congress.
21. Trump encouraged his followers in a tweet to "buy L.L. Bean," in violation of a WH policy prohibiting the endorsement of products.
22. The Justice Department inspector general opened an investigation into allegations of misconduct by the FBI and Comey, leading up to the election.
23. C-Span's online broadcast was interrupted by Kremlin-backed broadcaster RT, while Rep Maxine Waters was speaking. Waters has said she will not meet with Trump. The broadcast was also interrupted that morning when a Senator discussed Russian hacking.
24. WAPO reported that Michael Flynn, Trump's NSA, spoke to Russia's envoy on Dec 29th, the day Obama announced sanctions on Russia. Trump team initially denied this, then later, said they spoke only once that day. Reuters reports they spoke 5 times that day.
25. Trump continued to deny Russian hacking, and to use quotes around Intelligence in his tweets.
26. Trump appointed Rudy Giuliani to a cybersecurity role - albeit though a private company.
27. Trump appointed a sixth Goldman Sachs (past or present) employees to a major role in his administration.
28. After Congress was briefed by Intelligence chiefs, Rep John Lewis said, "I don't see Trump as a legitimate president."
29. Next morning, Trump tweeted a disparaging attack on Lewis, on MLK weekend, saying he was all talk.
30. Democrats in Congress were furious with FBI director Comey's unwillingness to answer their questions and fully brief them.
31. UK media broke that the former agent who gathered the info in the dossier, had shared his findings with the FBI, starting in the summer, and had become concerned that a cabal within the FBI was compromised and attempting to cover-up information.
32. The Senate announced hearings on possible Russia-Trump ties, and said subpoenas would be used if necessary.
33. The FEC sent Trump a letter listing 247 pages of illegal contributions to his campaign.
34. In the wake of the Trump dossier becoming public, Russia's cybersecurity head is out of a job.
35. Human Rights Watch issued it's annual report of threats to human rights around the world. For the first time in 27 years, the US is listed as a top threat because of the rise of Trump.
36. A Quinnipiac poll showed Trump's favorability ratings continuing to slide to historic lows for modern day presidents: only 37% of Americans view Trump favorably.

Past weeks:
Week 1
Week 2
Week 3
Week 4
Week 5
Week 6
Week 7
Week 8

Disappointed

I wrote this almost 10 years ago. I still cry around the 5:35 ish mark. I'm beginning to think this song meets the criteria of magnum opus (10 years and still tears, right?) One of my personal favorite compositions.

Good Lord if I ever actually recorded all my compositions. Easily two hundred.