DDD EXECUTIVE SUMMARY FOR JAN/20/2017

THE MAIN EVENT

• A massive avalanche in the Italian Alps buried a three-storey hotel on Wednesday. Two bodies have been recovered and thirty tourists are still missing.
• Meanwhile, in Tehran, thirty Iranian firefighters perished while combating a fire in a historic high-rise building. It collapsed unexpectedly on Wednesday, burying the men under flaming debris. 
• Forgive me if this sounds like a broken record about broken records, but for the third time in as many years, scientists have declared 2016 to be the hottest ever year since records have been kept.
• In other disaster news, Trump is being inaugurated today. A group of "bikers for Trump" have already arrived in Washington DC, providing a Nixonian frisson to the proceedings by pledging to "protect" the inauguration events from protesters, and to do so with violence if need be. Despite having offered to do so in the past, Trump has yet to say whether he will pay any legal fees incurred by these fine citizens in the course of fulfilling their duties.

A DEEPER DIVE

• Roasting Trump's pick for heading up Education, Betsy DeVos, alive; tanning would-be Attorney General Senator Jefferson Beauregard Bedford Forrest Sessions III's hide; exposing wannabe Health and Human Services Chief Tom Price's Big Tobacco ties; I think it's safe to say that Minnesota Senator Al Franken has been rocking the shit out of these Senate confirmation hearings. But perhaps his finest moment came during the Price hearing, after Price and Senator Rand Paul yakked up some insurance industry nonsense about how "association health plans" would help create "bigger risk pools" to "spread the risk", to which Franken devastatingly quipped: "I tell you how we get a really big risk pool. It'd be called Medicare for Everyone. That'd be the biggest risk pool." You've really got to watch it to get a sense of Franken's pitch-perfect timing on this. It makes Texas Governor Rick Perry's couch gag and subsequent SNL quip look like a big bag of amateurish poop by comparison.
• Today is the fourth and final day of the World Economic Forum, held annually in Davos, Switzerland. If you're interested in what a wide cross-section of the world's moneyed elites hope to accomplish in the coming year, you need to start educating yourself on these folks. This year's theme? "Responsive and Responsible Leadership."
• On the eve of President Obama's final day in office, the CIA released 13 MILLION pages of formerly classified documents to the public. Included among these records are extensive documentation of the "Stargate" psychic super-soldier program, information about tests on "remote viewing", and numerous reports on UFO sightings. In other words... a load of hooey.

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SUGGESTED READINGS

1. Once you're done watching this, the 23rd installment of our old pal Keith Olbermann's "The Resistance" vlog series for Esquire, you'll be able to start making sense of the graphic at the bottom of today's edition of the DDD Executive Summary. That graphic is from early 2005, and you'll be able to own a printed copy of it--and the story that it illustrated--when I finish putting together my long-gestating "Best of the Daily Dirt" collection, which will be available to you later this year! I'll keep you posted with updates!

2. You have got to read Seth Abramson's article, entitled The Domestic Conspiracy that Gave Trump the Election is in Plain Sight, which begins...

Information presently public and available confirms that Erik Prince, Rudy Giuliani, and Donald Trump conspired to intimidate FBI Director James Comey into interfering in, and thus directly affecting, the 2016 presidential election. This conspiracy was made possible with the assistance of officers in the New York Police Department and agents within the New York field office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. All of the major actors in the conspiracy have already confessed to its particulars either in word or in deed; moreover, all of the major actors have publicly exhibited consciousness of guilt after the fact. This assessment has already been the subject of articles in news outlets on both sides of the political spectrum, but has not yet received substantial investigation by major media.

This is life-and-death stuff, involving some of the darkest actors in the current US realpolitik milieu. It is every American's duty to learn, and help spread, this information, and all subsequent revelations relating to this information. It's the only way to stop it.

3. As America says goodbye to President Barack Obama and says hello to President Electoral Traitor Trump, I'm going to give the last word on that to the "Liberal Redneck" Trae Crowder...

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QUOTE OF THE DAY

"The guy who ran for president on his ability to make and close deals could not successfully book a Bruce Springsteen cover band."

- Chase Mitchell, on Twitter, cracks wise. And he's handling the resulting death threats with great aplomb, as well!

DDD EXTRAS

• If you want to learn about some cool and/or weird things that happened on the 20th, 21st, or 22nd day of January, check out our sister-site, Useless Eater Blog, where you will find out about such crazy stuff as Bud Dwyer's deeply disturbing live to air suicide.

THE TAKEAWAY

Our old pal SixX is trying to help me come up with something fun to do to "celebrate" this blessed event with y'all. Whether that takes the form of a day-long live blog, or a running Periscope of Facebook Live video feed of some sort, we're not quite sure yet. In any event, keep checking this space for updates!

GANNON/GUCKERT circa 2005