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Politico provides an account of a State Department election night “party” in Kabul’s U.S. embassy. The author, May Jeong, describes the State Department employees, "who are officially barred from political activism while living abroad but tend to support Democrats.” As proof she reports, “On the wall hung a Donald Trump piñata.” She reports a change in the party’s attitude when it became clear that Trump was going to win the election. The article explains the role of Scott Guggenheim, “senior adviser” to Afghan President Ashraf Ghani. He describes Guggenheim as, “one of the most powerful people in the country.” Guggenheim...

Lady Gaga is the latest celebrity weighing in on the aftermath of the Las Vegas massacre by blaming lawmakers (aka Republicans) for not passing more gun control. Yoo-hoo Lady G, no law would have prevented the slaughter because the alleged suspect passed all federal laws purchasing his legal guns. Here’s a tip which I give freely (as someone who loathes guns and is not a member of the NRA): if you hear anyone urging Congress to pass more gun controls immediately, consider that person mentally deficient. That advice will be coming from celebrities, the media and politicians who probably all...

James Clapper is evidently concerned Donald Trump is dangerous. The former director of national intelligence questions the president's "fitness for office" and believes he behaves in such an erratic manner that he might bomb North Korea and bring on Armageddon. Further, via Bridget Johnson: Clapper slammed "this behavior and this divisiveness and the complete intellectual, moral and ethical void that the president of the United States exhibits," and wondered "how much longer does the country have to, to borrow a phrase, endure this nightmare." Wow!... Well, Clapper should know something about "ethical voids." He also should have a good idea...

Al Gore was in Australia Thursday promoting his new video, "An Inconvenient Sequel,” the follow-up to Gore’s 2006 “An Inconvenient Truth.” While speaking to attendees of the EcoCity World Summit in Melbourne, the former vice president compared climate change advocates to those who worked to end slavery, promote civil rights and women's suffrage, battled apartheid in South Africa, and worked for gay rights. He said those activists had also experienced "ferocious resistance" to their cause. Global warming advocacy is a movement that stifles dissent from the dominant scientific view, ruins the careers of people who disagree, threatens to throw skeptics...

Mark Zuckerberg has been traveling around the country meeting people while denying he has any intentions of running for office. And yet, here he is making what amounts to policy recommendation for the United States. You could call this the first major plank in his non-platform. From his Facebook post: Priscilla and I spent the weekend around Homer, Alaska as part of the Year of Travel challenge. It’s beautiful here. One thing that stood out to us is how different Alaska’s social safety net programs are in a way that provides some good lessons for the rest of our country....

Barbra Streisand usually talks to her audience, but Saturday night she had a special message for two guests: Bill and Hillary Clinton. Streisand gave former president and former Democratic presidential candidate much more than a shout out at her concert at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, New York, her hometown. She noted that she performed at President Clinton's inauguration and then went on to list his accomplishments, including lowering taxes for some and raising taxes on the rich. "And speaking of taxes, he showed us his tax returns," she said, a dig at Republican President Donald Trump, who has refused...

If you sum up Hillary’s excuse for losing the election it all comes down to voters who were positively going to vote for her until Comey and Putin changed their minds to vote for Trump. If this is the case, as Hillary clearly suggests, then there should be literally thousands of voters who were “scared off” from voting for her who can corroborate that excuse. So where are all those “scared off” voters, and why haven’t any of the alphabet news organizations found even one of them to tell their story of how they were disenfranchised by Comey and Putin...

A gay man who condemned President Donald Trump's immigration order as driven by irrational fear was himself charged with assault for blocking Education Secretary Betsy DeVos from entering a middle school in Washington, D.C., on Friday. The opposition to DeVos has ranged from legitimate criticism to irrational paranoia, which seems to have driven protesters to physically prevent her from doing her job. "Some are afraid that the Syrian or Yemeni or Libyan or Sudanese or Iranian or Iraqi family fleeing conflict or persecution is instead coming to take our jobs or threaten our way of life," 31-year-old protester Bilal Ahmed...

At the top of Friday’s NBC Today, co-host Matt Lauer touted an exclusive: “Caroline Kennedy speaks out in her first interview since stepping down as the U.S. Ambassador to Japan. This morning, her take on the Trump administration's very different approach to foreign policy and her own future. Is she planning a run for office?” In the 7:30 a.m. ET half hour, Lauer began the friendly exchange by wondering if Defense Secretary James Mattis was currently visiting Japan in order to smooth things over after Donald Trump “said some things I know that raised a lot of eyebrows in Japan...

US Ambassador to the UN Samantha Power on Friday warned that cutting US funding to the United Nations would be “extremely detrimental” to American interests, one week before Donald Trump’s administration takes office. Addressing her final news conference, Power told reporters that “countries like Russia and China” would benefit from Washington’s reduced standing at the United Nations if funding were withdrawn. “We lead the world, in part, by leading at the UN,” said Power, who is stepping down next week after four years as President Barack Obama’s ambassador to the United Nations.

Brittany Packnett has visited the White House several times and President Barack Obama recently praised her. She also thinks President-elect Donald Trump is a fascist and that we’re in a “white supremacy renaissance.” Packnett was heavily involved in the Ferguson protests and is part of the Black Lives Matter movement. She gained prominence out of this role and helped launch Campaign Zero, which aims to reduce police violence. Her endorsement of Hillary Clinton was revealed in Elle and she has visited the White House more than a dozen times, including at least five times with President Obama.

California Gov. Jerry Brown has suggested that the State of California could bypass the administration of President Donald J. Trump and work directly with foreign governments in advancing the cause of climate change, the New York Times reports. Last May, Gov. Brown signed a climate change deal between twelve regional and provincial governments in seven countries, committing to reduce the “greenhouse gases” that trap heat in the earth’s atmosphere and are thought to drive global warming. The aim was to show that California was committed to tackling the issue, even if Congress and the courts were not prepared to rubber-stamp...

Canada’s prime minister tells the Guardian why, in a world where populism, divisiveness and fear are on the rise, he’s taking the opposite approach

Lady Gaga’s new album includes a track paying tribute to Trayvon Martin, the African-American teen whose 2012 death launched th Black Lives Matter movement. MTV News described “Angel Down”, the track in question, as “one of the most moving songs” on the new album. Lady Gaga characterized the song as a protest against “the epidemic of young African-Americans being murdered in this country.” In an interview with Zane Lowe on Beats 1 radio show, Gaga said that the “chaos in America” this year, especially due to the tumultuous political situation, was the source of a lot of her inspiration for...

It’s easy to be an American liberal. All that is required are hypocrisy and ignorance. Ignorance is an absolute must, but especially ignorance of three things: economics, human nature and all of recorded history. One has to be truly economically illiterate to believe that high taxes encourages productivity, that union-imposed labor regulations don't dis-incentivize hiring, that energy regulations don't raise prices on the poor and working class. Likewise, to be a liberal you must pretend that men and women are exactly alike in every respect and that communism produces the most happiness for the most people. Of course you can...

Liberal CNN anchor Christiane Amanpour suffered an epic meltdown on Thursday night as it became clear that Britain was asserting its national sovereignty and voting to leave the European Union. The sneering Amanpour repeatedly derided it as an example of “xenophobia” and “white identity” politics. Early in the evening, with the result still in doubt, Amanpour told Anderson Cooper: “A lot of the Leave movements are led by the hard-right, very, very xenophobic, anti-immigrant, very populist, nationalist, white identity politics.” Later, as reality set in, the journalist referenced the current issue of The Economist and raged, “This marks a victory...

Bill Nye, former host of the PBS children’s series “The Science Guy,” in a recent interview and YouTube video. Global warming skeptics should be jailed by the federal government because “this extreme doubt about climate change is affecting my quality of life as a public citizen,” science activist Bill Nye said in a video published Wednesday on YouTube. “Was it appropriate to jail the guys from Enron?” Nye, former host of the PBS children’s series “The Science Guy,” asked an interviewer from the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, The Daily Caller reports. Nye’s comments will be featured in an upcoming...

George Clooney just made himself the personification of Hollywood hypocrisy by denouncing big money in politics in quick succession after having exacerbated the “problem” he identified. Does the man have self-awareness at all? Has playing fantasy characters in the movies destroyed all hold on reality in his mind? Or is he signaling that he really supports Bernie Sanders and is only running fundraisers for Hillary out of a sense of obligation (or fear?). Was this statement, delivered on today’s Meet the Press the equivalent of US prisoners in North Korea blinking SOS in Morse Code?

As the Obama administration tries to find countries for mostly Yemeni Guantanamo inmates cleared for release, Secretary of State John Kerry issued a special shout-out today to Senegal for agreeing to take a couple of Libyans. About three dozen detainees are scheduled for transfer by this summer as the administration screens potential homes for the detainees. Kerry said the U.S. "is very grateful to our partner, the Republic of Senegal, for offering humanitarian resettlement to two individuals formerly in Department of Defense custody at the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba detention facility." The Department of Defense today announced the transfer of Salem...

Perhaps it is nostalgia for the heady days of the past, when the media could be counted upon to publish photos of Barack Obama with a halo surrounding his head (Google Obama+Halo for countless examples), and journalists called him a “lightworker” and “like a god.”