This pile of gibberish is excerpted from the transcript of The New York Times interview with President-Elect Donald Trump. The president-elect of the United States. Let me repeat: This is from the PRESIDENT-ELECT, the guy who in less than two months will be holding court in the Oval Office, Ivanka at his side:

THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN [opinion columnist]: But it’s really important to me, and I think to a lot of our readers, to know where you’re going to go with this. I don’t think anyone objects to, you know, doing all forms of energy. But are you going to take America out of the world’s lead of confronting climate change?

DONALD J. TRUMP: I’m looking at it very closely, Tom. I’ll tell you what. I have an open mind to it. We’re going to look very carefully. It’s one issue that’s interesting because there are few things where there’s more division than climate change. You don’t tend to hear this, but there are people on the other side of that issue who are, think, don’t even …

ARTHUR SULZBERGER JR. [NYT publisher]: We do hear it.

FRIEDMAN: I was on ‘Squawk Box’ with Joe Kernen this morning, so I got an earful of it.

[laughter]

TRUMP: Joe is one of them. But a lot of smart people disagree with you. I have a very open mind. And I’m going to study a lot of the things that happened on it and we’re going to look at it very carefully. But I have an open mind.

SULZBERGER: Well, since we’re living on an island, sir, I want to thank you for having an open mind. We saw what these storms are now doing, right? We’ve seen it personally. Straight up.

FRIEDMAN: But you have an open mind on this?

TRUMP: I do have an open mind. And we’ve had storms always, Arthur.

SULZBERGER: Not like this.

TRUMP: You know the hottest day ever was in 1890-something, 98. You know, you can make lots of cases for different views. I have a totally open mind.

My uncle was for 35 years a professor at M.I.T. He was a great engineer, scientist. He was a great guy. And he was … a long time ago, he had feelings — this was a long time ago — he had feelings on this subject. It’s a very complex subject. I’m not sure anybody is ever going to really know. I know we have, they say they have science on one side but then they also have those horrible emails that were sent between the scientists. Where was that, in Geneva or wherever five years ago? Terrible. Where they got caught, you know, so you see that and you say, what’s this all about. I absolutely have an open mind. I will tell you this: Clean air is vitally important. Clean water, crystal clean water is vitally important. Safety is vitally important.

And you know, you mentioned a lot of the courses. I have some great, great, very successful golf courses. I’ve received so many environmental awards for the way I’ve done, you know. I’ve done a tremendous amount of work where I’ve received tremendous numbers. Sometimes I’ll say I’m actually an environmentalist and people will smile in some cases and other people that know me understand that’s true. Open mind.

JAMES BENNET, editorial page editor: When you say an open mind, you mean you’re just not sure whether human activity causes climate change? Do you think human activity is or isn’t connected?

TRUMP: I think right now … well, I think there is some connectivity. There is some, something. It depends on how much. It also depends on how much it’s going to cost our companies. You have to understand, our companies are noncompetitive right now.

That’s the president-elect speaking. 

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At Daily Kos on this date in 2010—Incoming GOP House not interested in jobs:

Atrios made this point a week ago:

During exchanges on the twitter, it occurred to me that even Republican challengers didn't for the most part run on the bad economy/unemployment. They ran on issues more separate from peoples' lives (stimulus spending, deficit) and on being the great defenders of Medicare.

It was a surprising point, but one that rings true nonetheless. Republicans might argue that all the deficit hysteria was job-related, but only insofar as they've transferred blame for Wall Street's excesses onto the government for obvious ideological reasons. It turns out that Republicans really didn't run on creating jobs, but on demonizing government efforts to stimulate job growth (the stimulus, auto industry bailouts, TARP, etc). And by the time the votes were cast, even TARP—a Bush initiative—belonged to Obama.

On today’s Kagro in the Morning show: More of what you’ll need to know for T-Day. Armando joins in discussing what’s up with those hacking claims out of Wisconsin. There’s much more to that Argentina story. Are we in Schrödinger’s Dictatorship? And more shady pay deals surround Bannon. 

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It's costing New York City taxpayers a bloody fortune to host their new president-elect. Specifically? "More than $1 million a day."

And those costs won't necessarily drop significantly once he moves to the White House.

That's because Melania Trump and their 10-year old son Barron expect to stay at their home at Trump Tower in midtown Manhattan, at least until the end of the school year. And Donald Trump has indicated he plans to return home regularly, especially while they're still here.

The problem is that Trump lives in the middle of the city, and his adult kids also are getting Secret Service protection and also live in the city, and the logistics of establishing a safe zone in one of the most densely populated neighborhoods in America is proving to be a genuine Trump-fueled clustertrump.

The police have set up barricades around Trump Tower at 56th Street and 5th Avenue, smack in the middle of the city. While a block of 56th street has basically been closed to traffic, 5th Avenue remains open, although the traffic flow on that major thoroughfare has been affected.

And as Trump moves through the city, police need to close streets accordingly. For example, the Lincoln Tunnel was closed to traffic on Friday afternoon during rush hour when Trump traveled to New Jersey.

You know he's enjoying the hell out of this. I give it even odds he's making impromptu trips out to city fast-food joints just to watch the havoc wrought on commuters as he tools around.

Amid all the crying and handwringing and finger pointing over the election results, certainly there's been a few things for Democrats and progressives to find pleasure in. I'm going to list three and invite readers to add their own silver linings in the comments below.

1. Chris Christie's exit from the national stage, at least for now, brought to us by Gail Collins

If you want to look on the bright side, remember that however horrific you feel about what’s happening in Washington, Chris Christie feels worse.

Farewell, Chris Christie, farewell. We’ve said goodbye to his political career so many times — Bridgegate, the ever-plummeting New Jersey credit rating, the time he chased a heckler down the boardwalk waving an ice cream cone. The doomed presidential race. The humiliating stint standing behind Trump at press conferences, looking as if he’d been hit on the head with a mallet. Then he was exiled to the Trump transition when nobody actually imagined there was going to be one. Now it’s here, and he’s toast. 

2. Bathroom guv Pat McCrory's desperation

The outcome of North Carolina's gubernatorial was still unclear at the time of this writing, but nothing has been more enjoyable than watching Pat McCrory—who signed legislation specifically designed to suppress black voters and hailed the repugnant HB2 law in his re-election bid—sweating bullets to deny the ostensible outcome of the election.

Really, no one is more deserving of his just desserts than McCrory. And nothing would be sweeter than watching him lose in a state that Donald Trump won by four points. Even lackluster campaigner GOP Sen. Richard Burr retained his seat in the Tar Heel State. McCrory's defeat amid Republicans' massive state gains nationally would be a stunning rebuke of his leadership after he specifically targeted people of color and transgender individuals for discrimination. 

3. Alec Baldwin's four-year slot on Saturday Night Live

I wish it weren't so, but if we have to have Trump as president, we may as well have Alec Baldwin flaying him over the next four years. Baldwin couldn't be better as Trump, rivaling Tina Fey's brilliant portrayal of Sarah Palin in 2008. Also, love Kate McKinnon’s Kellyanne.

Welcome to the post-truth era, brought to you by Some Random Guy who knows what Trump supporters want to see and can play them like a fiddle.

He types at the bottom, “Comment ‘DOWN WITH THE GLOBALISTS!’ below if you love this country,” publishes the story to his website, [redacted because they make money off their ads].com, and then pulls up the Facebook page he uses to promote the site, which in six months has collected 805,000 followers and brought in tens of millions of page views. “WE CANNOT LET THIS HAPPEN!” he writes, posting the article. “#SHARE this 1 million times, patriots!”

In this case, Some Random Guy is an ex-restaurant worker who discovered that posting fake news for stupid people is thr new American gold rush. He and his business partner are now making money hand over fist. A studio setup may be in the works, one that will allow them to take their fake news to the next level.

Wade turns the television to Alex Jones, a conspiracy theorist with nearly 1.4 million followers on Facebook, who is the opportunist they would most like to become.

You get a gig like that, after all, and you've got the ear of the next president of the United States.

Hamilton County Prosecutor Joe Deters said on Tuesday he will re-try Ray Tensing, the former University of Cincinnati police officer, for the death of motorist Samuel DuBose. A mistrial was declared in the case last week; the jury had been leaning toward a conviction of voluntary manslaughter as opposed to murder. Deters says he will re-try Tensing on both counts.

“It’s my belief that Sam DuBose was murdered. Period,” Deters said. [...]

Tensing testified in his trial that he feared for his life when DuBose tried to drive away.

Deters repeated Tuesday that the shooting wasn’t justified, and that no one should be shot in the head for a traffic stop — DuBose was pulled over near the university campus for a missing front license plate.

“It troubles me deeply that this happened,” Deters said. [...]

Prosecutors said repeatedly during the trial the evidence contradicted Tensing’s story. Deters said after the mistrial the jury was leaning toward a conviction on voluntary manslaughter. [...]

To convict Tensing, now 27, of murder, jurors had to find he purposely killed the 43-year-old DuBose. The charge carries a possible sentence of 15 years to life in prison with conviction. The voluntary manslaughter charge means the killing happened during sudden passion or a fit of rage. That carries a possible sentence of three to 11 years.

The 1790 Census showed 95 percent of the population living in rural America. By 1920, the number of people living in urban areas surpassed those living in rural areas and urban America has continued to grow proportionally larger ever since. Our governmental structures, however, were set up by the founding fathers to purposely give an advantage to agrarian voters over those living in city centers. The greater the disparity in the distribution of our population, the more bias our system is becoming in favor of Americans living in less populous areas. Emily Badger writes:

The Electoral College is just one example of how an increasingly urban country has inherited the political structures of a rural past. Today, states containing just 17 percent of the American population, a historic low, can theoretically elect a Senate majority, Dr. Lee said. The bias also shapes the House of Representatives. [...]

Republican voters are more efficiently distributed across the country than Democrats, who are concentrated in cities. That means that even when Democrats win 50 percent of voters nationwide, they invariably hold fewer than 50 percent of House seats, regardless of partisan gerrymandering.

The Electoral College then allocates votes according to a state’s congressional delegation: Wyoming (with one House representative and two senators) gets three votes; California (53 representatives and two senators) gets 55. Those two senators effectively give Wyoming three times more power in the Electoral College than its population would suggest. Apply the same math to California and it would have 159 Electoral College votes. And the entire state of Wyoming already has fewer residents than the average California congressional district.

But the bias doesn't just play out in representation, it also affects policy and funding structures.

Just in time for Donald Trump’s America comes the Professor Watchlist, launched this week by Turning Point USA. 

It’s no secret that some of America’s college professors are totally out of line.

Everyday I hear stories about professors who attack and target conservatives, promote liberal propaganda, and use their position of power to advance liberal agendas in their classroom.

Turning Point USA is saying enough is enough.  It’s time we expose these professors.

Today, Turning Point USA is proud to announce the launch ofProfessorWatchList.org, a website dedicated to documenting and exposing professors who discriminate against conservative students and promote anti-American, left wing propaganda in the classroom.

Thus saith Charlie Kirk, founder and executive director of the org, who is all of 21 years old. Kirk is hailed as a wunderkind of the conservative movement who racks up accolades and cash from the movement wherever he goes.

 "Standing behind free markets and limited government," Kirk, now 21, told National Journal, [Turning Point USA] is a conservative activist organization bent on drumming up excitement for conservative principles through community-organizing. Since launching Turning Point, Kirk has written op-eds for The Washington Times and Breitbart, appeared frequently on Fox News and CNBC, built a network of thousands of student activists around the country, and been entrusted with, he says, at least $1 million by donors enthralled by his conservative promise. His backers swear he's the future of conservative politics—and he's only just old enough to drink.

Turning Point USA’s Professor Watchlist is by no means a new idea. As Professor David Perry writes over at The Establishment/Alternet,

Certainly racism, sexism, and overall voter dissatisfaction coursed through this election, but it's hard to look at the graph below without thinking of the sexism it represents. Neither Donald Trump nor Hillary Clinton got great marks from voters for how they conducted themselves during the campaign, but Trump was rated 13 points lower than Clinton, with just 30 percent of voters giving him an A or B grade to Clinton's 43 percent. Trump also had the lowest rating of any winning candidate dating back to 1988 by a total of 19 points.

Pew writes:

But voters’ “grades” for the way Trump conducted himself during the campaign are the lowest for any victorious candidate in 28 years. Just 30% of voters give Trump an A or B, 19% grade him at C, 15% D, while about a third (35%) give Trump a failing grade. Four years ago, most voters (57%) gave Obama an A or B, and after his 2008 election, 75% gave him an A or B.

For the first time in Pew Research Center post-election surveys, voters give the losing candidate higher grades than the winner. About four-in-ten (43%) give Clinton an A or B, which is comparable to the share giving Mitt Romney top letter grades in 2012 (44%) and 13 percentage points higher than Trump’s (30%).

And yet, President Trump, because it didn’t matter how well Clinton acquitted herself or how qualified she was. 

While Kris Kobach makes his plan to reinstate a registry of Muslims and "add extreme vetting questions for high-risk aliens" and further attack voting rights, another prominent Donald Trump supporter is claiming the precedent for all this in the World War II-era Japanese-American internment camps. It's pure serendipity that against this backdrop, Idahoans are reflecting on that very dark chapter and an internment camp here in southern Idaho with an exhibit at the Boise Art Museum. 

A paper sculpture installation titled "The Tag Project," by artist Wendy Maruyama, forces visitors to confront the scale of the mass internment. Ten paper pillars, each made up of masses of paper identification tags corresponding to individuals confined in the camps, hang ghostlike from the ceiling. There are 120,000 tags in all.[…]

Three other artists featured in the show are painters who lived through the incarceration experience. Roger Shimomura, a professor emeritus at the School of Fine Arts at the University of Kansas, was a toddler in the camp. His acrylic paintings and prints are bold and bright, focused on people and accompanied by a personal memory or snippet of relevant history. One of Shimomura's paintings, Furlough No. 2, recounts the history of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team—a unit of Japanese-American soldiers who joined the military while family and friends were interned. The group became the most decorated for its size and duration of service. In the painting, Shimomura presents a man in uniform staring from behind barbed wire—a soldier imprisoned on his home soil.

Artwork from inside the camps is more muted. The paintings of Takuichi Fujii and Kenjiro Nomura are rendered in subtle blue, green and brown hues, drawing on the high desert where the Minidoka camp once stood along Clover Creek.

Nomura's paintings of the camps and barracks frequent clouds that cast heavy shadows on the scene. One of Fujii's paintings, titled Minidoka Montage with Fence and Landmarks, contrasts the camp landscape with inner turmoil: barracks, guard towers, barbed wire and trees tumble into one another as if dislodged by an earthquake.

Nearly 9,400 Japanese Americans were forcibly relocated to this camp, one of 10. Americans. In prison camps as national security risks while many of their sons and brothers were fighting totalitarianism for our country. That's what the Trump team thinks is great precedent for a new bout of institutionalized racism and oppression.

BAM Executive Director Melanie Fales: "We decided that this story needed to be told. … It's so important on a local level—but also on a national level—when we're talking about the domination of one group of people over another. We've all heard that so many times you want to make sure history doesn't repeat itself, and you can only do that if you know what the history was." That's precisely what visitors to the exhibit take out of it, one writing in the log book that it "worries me that it could possibly occur again for other groups. Groups who are surrounded by hatred, just like the Japanese once were."

We know what this history was and we see it happening again. We have no other option but to fight it.

Donald Trump Jr. was reportedly already scheming with Russian sympathizers last month about ways to end the war in Syria. Jay Solomon writes:

Donald Trump ’s eldest son, emerging as a potential envoy for the president-elect, held private discussions with diplomats, businessmen and politicians in Paris last month that focused in part on finding a way to cooperate with Russia to end the war in Syria, according to people who took part in the meetings.

Thirty people, including Donald Trump Jr., attended the Oct. 11 event at the Ritz Paris, which was hosted by a French think tank. The founder of the think tank, Fabien Baussart, and his wife, Randa Kassis, have worked closely with Russia to try to end the conflict.

Ms. Kassis, who was born in Syria, is a leader of a Syrian group endorsed by the Kremlin. The group wants a political transition in Syria—but in cooperation with President Bashar al-Assad, Moscow’s close ally. 

So it appears the Trump-Putin alliance had already begun, pre-election. In some ways, this is just confirmation of what seemed plainly obvious during the campaign. What's perhaps most frightening about this is the fact that Donald Trump will be like putty in Putin's hands. God only knows what our nation will be tricked into by Trump's feebleminded admiration of Putin. 

When the story came out a few days ago that Donald Trump may or may not have mentioned a little set of issues he had with his building interests in Buenos Aires while on the phone with Argentine President Mauricio Macri, everyone was quick to push back on the weak sources and deny anything untoward had taken place. The strange term used by the TV Journalist who originally reported the claim was that he was “half joking, half serious.” Well, in what is probably only an amazing coincidence, possibly a hilarious one, it’s now being reported that some of these Trump-connected building projects are moving right along after being stalled for years. 

Three days after the phone call between Trump and Macri on Nov.14, Trump’s associates at Buenos Aires firm YY Development Group announced that the construction project would go ahead, in an interview with La Nación (link in Spanish). The tower’s construction had reportedly been held up for years, for various reasons, with YY Development actively restarting construction permit requests when pro-business Macri took over from statist former president Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner in Jan. 2016.

There’s nothing substantive to confirm that the phone call and construction announcement are linked, but local news media have reported that the call itself was arranged in very unusual fashion. Macri, who is son of one of Latin America’s richest men and has reportedly known Trump since beating him at golf in the 1980s, had backed the wrong horse at the election, openly supporting Hillary Clinton. Accordingly, a crisis meeting was called to work out how to put relations on the right track (Spanish language) with Trump’s administration.

It must be a Thanksgiving miracle.

A new study in Oregon highlights the problems with the state's death penalty statute, which has been in a state of limbo for five years now. Former Governor John Kitzhaber implemented a moratorium on the death penalty in 2011, stating that he would not permit the state to execute anyone during his tenure. At the time, many hoped it was the beginning of the end for Oregon's death penalty. “The decision immediately halted the impending execution of death-row inmate Gary Haugen, who had waived his legal appeals to protest the justice system,” stated an editorial this week in The Oregonian. “But it was also meant to kick-start a statewide conversation about the legitimacy of the death penalty in Oregon.”

Such a conversation never happened, though, and the death penalty has remained technically legal, though on pause. In October, after much consideration, Governor Kate Brown promised to continue the moratorium if she were re-elected to office. From last month’s piece in The Oregonian:

Reasons for her decision include the "uncertainty of Oregon's ability to acquire the necessary execution drugs required by statute," [her spokesman] Bryan Hockaday said by email. "Looking nationally, America is on the verge of a sea change both by legislation and, more profoundly, through court decisions. The past few years have already seen a major shift in the landscape on capital punishment law, and Gov. Brown expects more changes are on the horizon."

Oregon voters approved the death penalty in 1984, and the state and U.S. Supreme Courts have repeatedly upheld its legality.

Oregon's death row has 34 prisoners, all of whom stay in their cells 23 hours a day. 

Brown won her re-election earlier this month, and the execution moratorium continues.

But meanwhile, prosecutors continue to seek death penalty convictions. "[T]he death-penalty machinery continues to run, with prosecutors seeking death sentences, juries granting them and the state spending millions in legal challenges," The Oregonian reports, "fighting for the right to execute someone who most likely will never be executed."