Bill Moyers on the Donald decision to make Rex Tillerson his Secretary of State:
How Rex met Donald –> In an interview with The Washington Post, former secretary of defense Robert Gates said that when he heard that Donald Trump wasn’t happy with his choices for secretary of state, Gates suggested a meeting with Exxon chief Rex Tillerson. One day earlier, in a meeting with Mike Pence, former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice also suggested Tillerson as a candidate. Coincidence? The two are partners in RiceHadleyGates, a consulting firm that contracts with… ExxonMobil.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The spider’s web of deceit and corruption becomes more complicated and twisted.
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Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Education.
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Trump’s cabinet is an incestuous band of billionaires that reach out to other billionaire buddies that come to kiss the ring of the victor. They want to make sure they can share in the “spoils,” all things public like national parks and education.
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Somebody please remind me who kept Gates on at defense. Never mind it was the same ill equipped fool that appointed Comey. Wont have any mistakes like that in this administration. Got to run to the bathroom again, lunch is coming up.
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I posted this in another blog but will reiterate it here. I found it PROFOUNDLY interesting.
Following is a major portion of a Dec. 13 program on Democracy Now. The whole program can be watched and/or read on line.
Investigative reporter Greg Palast has just returned from Michigan, where he went to probe the state’s closely contested election. Trump won Michigan by fewer than 11,000 votes out of nearly 4.8 million votes cast. Green Party presidential contender Dr. Jill Stein attempted to force Michigan to hold a recount, but a federal judge ordered Michigan’s Board of Elections to stop the state’s electoral recount. One big question remains: Why did 75,335 ballots go uncounted?
GREG PALAST: Officially, Donald Trump won Michigan by 10,704 votes. But a record 75,335 votes were never counted. Most of these votes that went missing were in Detroit and Flint, Michigan, majority-black cities. How could this happen? Did the Russians do it? Nyet. You don’t need Russians to help the Michigan GOP. How exactly do you disappear 75,000 votes? They call them spoiled votes. How do you spoil votes? Not by leaving them out of the fridge. Most are lost because of the bubbles. Thousands of bubbles couldn’t be read by the optical scanning machines.
the man who shut down the recount. Bill Schuette is the Republican attorney general of Michigan. He issued an order saying that no one would be allowed to look at the ballots in over half the precincts, 59 percent, in the Detroit area—the very place that most of the votes had gone missing.
Some of the votes missing resulted when 87 machines, responsible for counting thousands of ballots, broke down. Carlos Garcia is a media specialist at Michigan State University. He witnessed the breakdown.
CARLOS GARCIA: The start of polling at 7:00 a.m., the machine didn’t work. And at 9:15 a.m., they brought in a replacement, and it was replaced by 9:30. The people that didn’t wait, their ballots were in the bottom in the ballot box.
But they weren’t scanned.
CARLOS GARCIA: And so, at the time when they started having anyone who was waiting scan their ballots, those ballots were not taken out of the machine. So, any new scanned ballots were falling in on top of the old ones.
GREG PALAST: They weren’t counted. Activist Anita Belle.
GREG PALAST: And so the recount slogged through, uncovering missing votes and missing voters that could change the presidency. So Republicans rushed in to shut down the recount completely. Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, here in Michigan—we may be way north of the Mason-Dixon Line, but the elections are still run by Jim Crow. For Democracy Now!, this is Greg Palast.
Well, you know, people are looking for Russians, but what we had is a real Jim Crow election. Trump, for example, in Michigan, won by less than 11,000 votes. It looks like we had about 55,000 voters, mostly minorities, removed by this racist system called Crosscheck. In addition, you had a stoppage—even before the courts ordered the complete stop of the vote in Michigan, you had the Republican state officials completely sabotage the recount. They said, in Detroit, where there were 75,335 supposedly blank ballots for president—75,000—they said you can’t count 59 percent of the precincts, where most of the votes were missing. There were 87 machines in Detroit that were—that didn’t function. They were supposed to count about a thousand ballots each. You’re talking about a massive blockade of the black vote in Detroit and Flint, enough votes, undoubtedly, to overturn that election.
And you saw a mirror of this in Wisconsin, where, for example, there were many, many votes, thousands of votes, lost in the Milwaukee area, another African-American-heavy area. And there, instead of allowing that eyeball count of the votes that are supposedly blank, they said, “Oh, we’ll just run them back through the machines.” It’s like betting on an instant replay. It’s the same game. They just put them through the bad machines again. This is not just a bad way to count the ballots; it’s a way to not count African-American ballots.
And I want to emphasize that, Amy, which is that when we use the term “recount,” we’re actually talking about ballots that were never counted in the first place—way over 75,000 in Michigan. There are enough ballots uncounted that if you looked at them with the human eye, because the machines—these are terrible machines which can’t read your little bubble marks next to the candidate’s name on the piece of paper. If the human eye looks at these things, it’s easy to tell that someone voted for a presidential candidate. A lot of the machines said that they voted for two candidates. Not many people do that. The human eye could do that.
But the question is: Where are these ballots not counted? They are not counted in African-American areas, in Dearborn, where there’s a heavy Arab-American community, in Latino communities. So, while we’re discussing hacking the machines, a lot of this was old-fashioned Jim Crow tactics, you know, from way back. And by the way, a lot of this is the result of the destruction and the gutting of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which this is the first election post the Voting Rights Act. So, we saw—and Jill Stein said it correct—she expected to see a lot of hacking. What she found was, as she said, a Jim Crow election.
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There are so many irreglarities in the ballots and voting in the Democratic controlled and run city that they legally cannot recount them. Read their local paper http://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/politics/2016/12/12/records-many-votes-detroits-precincts/95363314/
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The extra ballots may be for Trump who received over 220,000 votes in Wayne County — the place you say is heavily democratic. Maybe there was pro-Republican machine hacking. Which begs the question of why not just recount the ballots by hand? But I understand that the Republicans in Michigan are terrified of that. Why? It reminds me of how scared they were of a Florida recount and had to go to the Supreme Court to make the worst decision ever that will go down in infamy as the Court thwarting democracy. Now we see desperate Republicans terrified of recounts. I’d sure be suspicious if it was Democrats fighting them. But seems as if it is only the Republicans who fight them. hmmm…..
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^^I should have said that the extra “votes” were just as likely for Trump since he received an unusually high 220,000+ votes in Wayne county. If somehow an extra 20,000 votes were credited to him, that would be bad. But an examination by hand of the ballots would tell the story so why are the Republicans so desperate to stop that?
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“RiceHadleyGates”
It was just appalling to see all these former “public servants” lobbying for their new employer- Exxon.
They’re just shameless.
Trump has cut out the middleman. Instead of politicians lobbying for corporations and wealthy people we now just get the corporations and wealthy people AS government.
Exxon won’t need to hire lobbyists. They’re running the government. Corporation = United States. It’s sad in a way. It effectively ends any “public sector”- there’s just the private sector now. The only thing “public” about it is the funding.
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“Tillerson Put Exxon Priorities Ahead of American Policy”
Of course he did. That’s what he was paid to do. That’s what Gates and Rice are paid to do now, too. A lot. They’re paid a lot.
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Special Interest.
Trump above establishment politics? Far worse. Out of frying pan, into the top of the flame.
Pick after pick, people in cabinet to dismantle their own departments.
Not maverick, mindless rogue.
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Just read this in Harper’s Magazine Week in Review email: “The Presidential Inaugural Committee advertised two tickets to an “intimate policy discussion” with Cabinet members for between $100,000 and $249,000, and, for more than a million dollars, eight tickets to a “candlelight” dinner with an appearance by the president-elect.”
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It’s repulsive the way they pander to the wealthy. Democracy is for sale. Members of Silicon Valley are meeting with Trump today. They want to see how receptive he is to “innovation.” They want assurances that they can get on the corporate welfare list.
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Michael Moore: Trump is Gonna Get Us Killed
https://www.google.com/amp/m.huffpost.com/us/entry/us_5851501be4b0ee009eb47dae/amp?client=safari
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Sorry, slightly off topic, is there an unseen opportunity here with the Donald-Elect to abandon support for Common Core and more importantly, with it end federally mandated, annual, standardized testing? Would Lamar Alexander be ready to act differently with a new administration signing or vetoing?
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We will see how that plays out. The law would have to be changed, the one that mandates annual testing, ESSA.
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While privatization has been the primary goal of deformers, from my perspective on the ground, testing has been the more invasive part of their dastardly plan. Would that I could start planting seeds in Alexander’s head — states’ rights seeds — about ending federal control over curriculum. It’s not that I mean to be opportunistic, well, yeah, it’s that I mean to be opportunistic.
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personally…..I was more disturbed about Bill Gates telling trump he could be the next jfk.
Even though he is not as rich as Gates, and therefore not as smart, Gates might be surprised when he does not respond as willingly as Obama did……Instincts will rule the day…..something about DeVos will go terribly wrong….not sure how that triangle might play out.
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Protecting the kids in Trump’s America, Betty Rosa
https://www.google.com/amp/www.nydailynews.com/amp/opinion/protecting-kids-trump-america-article-1.2910983?client=safari
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