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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BLAST FROM THE PAST
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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