shutterstock_305852213.jpg
danielfela / Shutterstock

President-Elect Donald Trump Fires a Warning Shot:

Get ready to fight back.

Area Liberal No Longer Recognizes Fanciful, Wildly Inaccurate Mental Picture Of Country He Lives In: It's the Onion. And it's reality.

Why Hasn't Democratic National Committee Chair Donna Brazile Resigned? The Huffington Post captured this exchange inside the first post-Trump staff meeting of Democratic Party officials in Washington D.C. In a room of 150 people, as Brazile speechified:

A staffer identified only as Zach stood up with a question.

“Why should we trust you as chair to lead us through this?” he asked, according to two people in the room. “You backed a flawed candidate, and your friend [former DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz] plotted through this to support your own gain and yourself.”

Some DNC staffers started to boo and some told him to sit down. Brazile began to answer, but Zach had more to say.

“You are part of the problem,” he continued, blaming Brazile for clearing the path for Trump’s victory by siding with Clinton early on. “You and your friends will die of old age and I’m going to die from climate change. You and your friends let this happen, which is going to cut 40 years off my life expectancy.”

Brazile, you'll recall, leaked debate questions to the Clinton campaign during the primary, helping to rig the early debates.

Columnist Shaun King Nails It: "The Democratic Party is having an identity crisis," King writes. "While the groundswell of grassroots support in its base is anti-police brutality, pro-environment, pro-immigrant, anti-war, pro-$15 minimum wage, for the legalization of marijuana, and strongly against the Dakota Access Pipeline—the party in general, and Hillary Clinton in particular, lack core convictions on all of these issues and it shows."

Keith Ellison As the New DNC Chair Could Be a Start: He's picked up the endorsements of Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Chuck Schumer. The progressive Congressman warned about the rise of Trump during the Republican primary. The top politics reporter at the New York Times laughed at him like he was a madman:

The Party's Problems Include Obama: In the president's remarks immediately post-election, as he concluded, he summed up his eight years like this:

I've said before, I think of this job as being a relay runner. You take the baton, you run your best race and hopefully by the time you hand it off, you're a little further ahead, you've made a little progress. And I can say that we've done that and I want to make sure that handoff is well executed because ultimately we're all on the same team. [emphasis added]

It's remarkable what a far cry this is from Hope and Change. His rhetoric aside, this truly has been the Obama approach, and look where it has left us. Instead of harnessing populist anger, instead of acting aggressively, instead of pushing for as far-reaching changes as possible, instead of prosecuting Wall Street, instead of bucking the party elites and corporations on free trade, instead of pushing for new federal laws to stop police killings, instead of single-payer healthcare, Obama played it safe. He played it centrist. Everything he did, in the face of Republican obstructionism over the past six of his eight years, was cool, calculated, and relatively risk-free. The president thinks we've made "a little progress." Those bits of positive change are on the chopping block now, as we face down the barrel of a fascist in the White House.

This Could Be "Game Over" For the Earth's Climate: So says climate scientist Michael Mann.

Rules for Autocracy: With their civilized, conciliatory responses to Trump so far, normalizing him, Clinton and Obama are also giving legitimacy to how Trump will respond to those who are going to fight the hardest against him:

Both Clinton’s and Obama’s phrases about the peaceful transfer of power concealed the omission of a call to action. The protesters who took to the streets of New York, Los Angeles, and other American cities on Wednesday night did so not because of Clinton’s speech but in spite of it. One of the falsehoods in the Clinton speech was the implied equivalency between civil resistance and insurgency. This is an autocrat’s favorite con, the explanation for the violent suppression of peaceful protests the world over.

Andre Taylor, of Initiative 873, on the Idea That All Trump Supporters Are Hateful, Rather Than Tacit, Racists: "They don't like Black people. They want Latinos gone... Well, I reject that idea. I'm insulted, really, by that idea, especially from what we might consider white progressives, liberals. It's a dangerous game that you're playing. To just discount millions of people... I know what being overlooked looks like. I know what being disenfranchised looks like... As an African-American male, I'm in a position to recognize it when I see it. What I see is individuals that have given this political process time and have seen over and over again how it has not benefitted them and their families and their children. They would rather blow the whole thing up and start over, and if Trump is that vehicle in which to do that, I believe they feel like we're going to take this chance for change. If we had the numbers as African-Americans, I believe we would try to do the same thing." Watch here.

Let Millenials Lead the Party: As Democratic strategist Symone Sanders writes for the NYT:

For the Democratic Party to move forward and win, young people — some of the party's most vocal critics — cannot be shut out of what will be a rebuilding process. Party leadership must bring millennials into the fold with a focus on the issues. Millennials must be brought to the table as equals, their ideas and sentiments valued and their input turned to action. More than just television and radio ads, the Democratic Party must actively show up in communities from Seattle to Oakland, Denver to Atlanta, Minneapolis to Philadelphia, Miami to Baltimore and everywhere in between to extend an offer of partnership to young voters... With or without the Democratic Party, young people are going to get organized and they are going to act.

Students at Rainier Beach High School in South Seattle Walked Out: "The students marched from the high school to the Rainier Beach Community Center before returning to school," the Seattle Times reports. "West Seattle and Cleveland high school students walked out of class Wednesday."