Bun Flyer Of The Vanities

Republicans are just really, really bad at this whole ethics thing, which is why they wanted the House's independent ethics investigator watchdog gone in the first place.

Rep. Duncan Hunter used campaign funds to pay for $600 of airline fees to fly a family rabbit, one of the more colorful expenses to surface in an ongoing review of his practices. 

Hunter’s staff told the Press-Enterprise newspaper that the House Office of Congressional Ethics questioned the pet expenses — offered as an example of over-reach by the agency. 

The ethics office’s independence was nearly clipped this week as one of the first orders of business for the GOP-controlled House, until President-elect Donald Trump and others questioned the move. 

Critics saw the proposal as weakening an important check on legislative abuses of power. Hunter spokesman Joe Kasper defended the proposed procedural changes, according to the Press-Enterprise. 

“The concerns are strong enough that it nearly prompted a significant structural change,” Kasper said. 

The ethics office last year conducted a review of Hunter’s campaign expenses. Release of the report, and any follow-up action by the House Ethics Committee, was recently postponed pending swearing-in of the new Congress. 

Hunter, R-Alpine, has reimbursed his campaign about $62,000 in campaign expenses that were personal in nature or lacked proper documentation, including oral surgery, a garage door, video games, resort stays and a jewelry purchase in Italy. 

The expenses came to light after inquiries by the Federal Election Commission and The San Diego Union-Tribune, and Hunter then hired a law firm to conduct a review that has not been made public.

They wanted the office neutered because it actually raised questions about how our lawmakers enrich themselves on lobbyist cash on a daily basis.  Embezzling tens of thousands is chump change for these guys and it would be so much easier if the office just went away, you know.

Oh, but keep in mind our incoming President is doing the same thing, only with several more zeroes at the end.

Trump Cards, Con't

Apparently running into the buzzsaw of annoyed constituents with too much time on their hands to call their Represenatative, House Republicans have shelved their plans for declawing the House Ethics Office for now.  For some reason, everyone assumes Trump caused this, because he invented oxygen or something. Simon Maloy:

The House GOP kicked off the new session of Congress in politically baffling fashion by holding a closed-door vote to approve a rules change that will hollow out the Office of Congressional Ethics (OCE). That office was formed in 2008 as a response to the congressional ethics scandals that helped precipitate the 2006 Democratic midterm wave, and it functions as an independent, non-partisan ethics watchdog for the House of Representatives. Republicans in the House moved to strip OCE of some of its powers and place it under the oversight of the House Ethics Committee.

As far as political own-goals go, this was a fairly inexplicable one. Republicans met in the dead of night to cast a secret vote to hollow out an agency charged with maintaining ethical behavior in Congress. They were handing every Democrat in every congressional district across the country a pre-fabricated talking point to use against them — after all, who doesn’t like ethics in Congress? And they did so in the immediate aftermath of an election cycle that was shot through with allegations of corruption of promises to “drain the swamp” in Washington. 

Speaking of “drain the swamp,” the candidate who popularized that phrase, the fantastically corrupt president-elect Donald Trump, weighed in on the House GOP’s planned attack on OCE this morning via his medium of choice: Twitter. 

Trump’s position on this was clear. He didn’t have a problem with Republicans going after the “unfair” OCE, he just mildly suggested that maybe it shouldn’t have been the first thing on the agenda. (That critique doesn’t actually make much sense, given that it was part of the rules package that the House typically passes as its first order of business.) One of Trump’s senior advisers went on television to defend the House GOP’s proposed change as part of its electoral “mandate.”

But once this Twitter statement was sent, the political media tripped all over themselves to be the first to inaccurately report that Trump and the House GOP were at odds over ethics.

Everyone from the AP to CNN to FOX decided Trump was personally responsible for stopping the GOP on this. Greg Sargent is even more blunt on this media collusion:

Last week, I hectored you with my idea for a proposed rule of thumb for headline writing, one that would allow us to avoid the pitfall of allowing Trump to claim credit for things without alerting readers that his claim is open to doubt or dubious. 

Today, I’d like to ask for your indulgence as I propose another rule of thumb: If a casual reader would come away from your headline persuaded that Trump has adopted a clear stand that he hasn’t really adopted, then the headline is misleading and something is wrong. The threshold question here should be what impression a headline would leave with a reader who is skimming it. If it risks leaving a misleading impression, then it risks misinforming people. Trump often takes extremely slippery positions, making it more important to exercise care to avoid this. 

In this particular case, this is not a narrow, nitpicky criticism. It’s central to understanding the situation. Trump did not criticize the act of weakening ethics oversight, so for that reason alone, the implication that he struck a blow for the cause of good government is itself deeply misleading, particularly at a time when Trump is under intense fire for failing to take his own conflicts of interest seriously. What’s more, it would have been a lot harder for Trump to take the tough stand that these headlines ascribe to him, because if he did, he would be seemingly criticizing Republicans for trying to weaken ethics oversight on themselves. That’s a much more serious charge — and one much more unflattering to Republicans — than what Trump actually did say.

But that's the difference between how Trump is treated and how, say, Obama is treated.

StupidiNews!

• Republicans in Congress are already appearing split on the prospect of repealing Obamacare without a replacement plan ready to go.
• FOX News anchor Megyn Kelly is leaving the network for her own NBC News daytime show, plus a Sunday evening news magazine program.
• Trump Secretary of State pick and current Exxon-Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson will cut all ties with the energy giant ahead of his expected tough confirmation battle.
• Turkish officials have detained five suspects in connection with last weekend's deadly New Year's Eve massacre at an Istanbul nightclub.
• Automaker Ford plans to boost electric vehicle production with a $4.5 billion investment in electric models of its existing fleet over the next four years.

The Shrub And The Schlub

Don't look now, but after eight years of puttering around his ranch and taking up the joys of painting, former President George W. Bush will apparently show up at The Donald's Fascist Cotillion/Roller Derby later this month.

In a statement Tuesday, Bush's office said the couple is “pleased to be able to witness the peaceful transfer of power — a hallmark of American democracy — and swearing-in of President Trump and Vice President Pence.” 

The decision makes Bush the second living president planning to attend Trump's inauguration ceremony. Former President Jimmy Carter said last year that he would attend. 

Former President George H.W. Bush, 92, is not expected to be at the ceremony. His spokesman cited his age in a statement to Politico last month about the president's decision. 

Former President Bill Clinton has not announced whether he will be at the event after Trump’s contentious presidential race against his wife, Hillary Clinton.

President Obama is expected, as is customary, to attend inauguration events at the Capitol before departing.

Ol' Dubya has to be stoked.  Trump instantly gets him off the bottom of the barrel spot of the worst post-Civil War presidents in US history (and hey, I understand that Nixon guy was pretty much a treasonous bastard so that actually might help Junior Birdman here not finish dead last when the next set of history books come out) so he's got that going for him,

I kinda hope Bill Clinton shows up, drops trow and moons Trump on the way out though, I'm not going to lie.

Ethics Are For Suckers

Welcome to the 115th Congress in the era of Trump, where our Republican masters aren't even pretending that rules apply to themselves anymore as the House GOP have decided they no longer need an independent ethics watchdog.

In one of their first moves of the new Congress, House Republicans have voted to gut their own independent ethics watchdog — a huge blow to cheerleaders of congressional oversight and one that dismantles major reforms adopted after the Jack Abramoff scandal.

Despite a warning from Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), House Republicans on Monday adopted a proposal by Judiciary Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) to put the Office of Congressional Ethics under the jurisdiction of the House Ethics Committee.

The office currently has free rein, enabling investigators to pursue allegations and then recommend further action to the House Ethics Committee as they see fit.

Now, the office would be under the thumb of lawmakers themselves. The proposal also appears to limit the scope of the office’s work by barring them from consider anonymous tips against lawmakers. And it would stop the office from disclosing the findings of some of their investigations, as they currently do after the recommendations go to House Ethics.
President-elect Donald Trump ran on a platform of draining the swamp of an often all-too-cozy Washington D.C.

Monday night’s moves go in the opposite direction, severely loosening oversight of lawmakers' potential conflicts of interest, use of campaign money and other ethical matters.

Republicans adopted the amendment, 119 to 74, after several lawmakers stood up and talked about being falsely accused by OCE of wrongdoing.

Democrats created the Office of Congressional Ethics in March 2008 after the Abramoff scandal, in which the well-connected GOP lobbyist plead guilty to conspiring to bribe public officials. Abramoff and his clients had used campaign donations and favors to sway members, including former Rep. Bob Ney (R-Ohio), who served 30 months in prison, and a number of staffers.

Their idea was that an outside agency of sorts that could take up a more robust oversight of members. Republicans, however, claim the group has been too aggressive in making referrals.

Since the House, like the Senate, is allowed to govern itself and make its own day-to-day operating rules, the Republicans running the House since 2010 could have done this at any time.  But they're only doing it now.

Also, note that Paul Ryan has zero control over his caucus already.  The full floor vote on the rules package will be this afternoon, so it's possible that enough Republicans may hesitate and this fail, but it's also possible that some Democrats may support the neutering of the ethics watchdog too.  We'll see if Nancy Pelosi can keep her troops in line.

If she can, there's a good chance this vote will fail.

StupidiNews!

• A four-hour outage glitched immigration and customs systems at international airports across the country last night, snarling flight traffic and causing delays.
• A new Gallup poll finds that a majority of Americans have doubts about a Trump presidency's ability to handle crises or scandals.
• At least four people are believed dead after a tornado touched down near Dothan, Alabama last night as strong storms and a half-dozen funnel clouds caused damage across the Southern US.
• The Islamic State is claiming responsibility for a New Year's massacre at an Istanbul nightclub, 39 people were killed and dozens were injured before the gunman escaped.
• After losing a rocket in a fueling accident four months ago, commercial spaceflight company SpaceX plans to return to active flight as early this weekend.

Last Call For Remembering Who The Enemy Is

After eight years of complaining that President Obama didn't care about the black community enough, the Congressional Black Caucus, while not exactly having been the president's ally over the years, suddenly realizes how much of a danger Trump poses. Maybe they're finally going to get off their asses and do something about it.

Leaders of the group told POLITICO they have already begun discussing strategies to deal with Trump and any policies they believe would disenfranchise African-Americans — from public school funding to low-income housing to voting restrictions. Though the president-elect’s supporters call the alarm unwarranted, black lawmakers say Trump’s campaign and his Cabinet picks more than justify their concern.

“The stakes are incredibly high and our community is counting on us as the last line of defense between Donald Trump and the worst of what America could offer,” Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) said.

“This is not the normal incoming president,” added Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-Mo.). “We had no plan for George Bush. I think Charlie Rangel and John Conyers would tell you they didn’t even have a plan for Richard Nixon. But this is not the norm.”

Incoming CBC Chairman Cedric Richmond (D-La.) is expected to outline his priorities for the new administration when he officially takes the reins of the caucus on Tuesday. Some members suggested challenging Trump on his home turf — Twitter — while others advocated nonviolent protests reminiscent of the civil rights movement.

Trump has tried at times to appeal to the African-American community. He talked about “a new deal for black America” on the campaign trail and predicted his plans to revive the economy would pay big dividends for minorities.

But Trump also often showed a deep misunderstanding of the socioeconomic makeup of black America and at times touted wildly inaccurate claims about African-American poverty and employment levels. His appeal to black voters for their support — “What the hell do you have to lose?” he said at one August rally in Michigan — was offensive to many.

Trump proposed blanket policies targeting ethnic and minority groups, like banning Muslims and building a wall to keep out Mexican immigrants. And he was at the forefront of the “birther movement," which CBC members viewed as a racially motivated attempt to delegitimize the nation's first African-American president.

"The campaign that we saw over the last 12 months is very frightening. And there’s been no effort on his part to even temper his comments since being elected,” said outgoing CBC Chairman G.K. Butterfield (D-N.C.). "It’s going to be very contentious, I suspect, if Mr. Trump even follows through on half of his promises during the campaign."

As I've linked at the start of this post, the CBC has been among President Obama's loudest critics on the left, and have often served to only help the GOP in convincing voters that Obama simply wasn't good enough as the nation's first black president.  My personal opinion of most of these caucus members isn't very high at all. 

Yes, they are products of extremely gerrymandered GOP-drawn districts, but they've been safe districts, and they've done nothing but worry about staying in power rather than helping President Obama when times were tough.  It's precisely because their districts are mostly safe that they felt they could take potshots at the President.

Now however we're in the era of Trump and Cedric Richmond and the CBC have precisely one chance to convince me that they're ready to lead the fight against Trump.  We'll see how they do.

About Six Months Too Late

NPR's Michele Norris lit into Trump's campaign on Sunday, talking to David Frum on CBS's Face The Nation about Trump's screaming racial code speak.

During a Face the Nation panel discussion on resisting Trump’s agenda, conservative columnist David Frum offered a sobering assessment about how the new president would impact the country.

“I am hopeful that Americans will rise to this challenge,” Frum said. “I think the message that they do not need to hear is, ‘Don’t worry, your grandparents rose to the challenge and therefore you can stay on the couch.'”

“I don’t think we do people a service by saying, ‘You know, there have been bad things in the American past before,'” the former speechwriter for George W. Bush continued. “This is our bad thing and it’s about a bad a thing as has happened in any of our lifetimes.”

Norris argued that Trump’s “Make American Great Again” slogan misses the mark for addressing current reality in the United States.

“In the phrase ‘Make America Great Again’ there’s one word that if you are a person of color, that you sort of stumble over, and it’s the word ‘again’.” Norris observed. “Because you’re talking about going back to a time that was not very comfortable for people of color. They did not have opportunities, they were relegated to the back of the line.”

“And this was a country that — to be honest — was built on the promise of white prosperity above everything else,” she added. “And for a lot of people, when they hear that message, ‘Make America Great Again,’ deeply encoded in that message is a return to a time where white Americans can assume a certain amount of prosperity.”

According to Norris, Trump’s win was made possible by white people who feel like they are “not at the front of the line.”

“And Donald Trump was able to tap into a message where people felt a lot of discomfort,” she noted. “That is somewhat retrograde. I mean, fear is not our brand in America. And that is so much sort of the bright vein that ran though the campaign.”

Norris is absolutely right, but where was this revelation in October or July or last January?  The people who pointed this out were shouted down, being accused of everything from being "the real racists" to promoting "white genocide".  They were ignored then.

Now?  Now we have an incoming administration run by white nationalists and a press that seems stunned by this fact.

What did you think voting for Trump meant, folks?  What did you think "Make America Great Again" meant?  By excusing it away as class-based rather than race-based, and pretending that Clinton's platform simply didn't exist at all and that she didn't care about "working-class Americans" when Trump somehow did, people like Frum aided and abetted Trump.

And sixty million plus of your friends and neighbors helped him because they pretended it was about anything other than race too.

Grime And Punishment

If you have any doubts about what Trump intends in three weeks, incoming Mouth of Sauron Sean Spicer put those doubts to rest Sunday.

President-elect Donald Trump's incoming White House press secretary questioned whether President Obama’s actions against Russia for an alleged cyberattack on Democratic political organizations may be out of "proportion."

"I think one of the questions that we have is, 'Why the magnitude of this?' I mean you look at 35 people being expelled, two sites being closed down, the question is, is that response in proportion to the actions taken?" incoming White House press secretary and communications director Sean Spicer said in an exclusive interview on "This Week.”

We're being too hard on Putin apparently, so that will stop very shortly.

Spicer said that President-elect Trump is "going to sit down with the intelligence committee heads next week and get a full briefing on the situation."

He said Trump will determine "whether or not the Obama administration's response was in proportion to the actions taken. Maybe it was, maybe it wasn't. We need to have that briefing first."

The incoming White House press secretary added that Russian President Vladimir Putin's decision not to retaliate against the U.S. for the Obama administration's actions shows that "foreign leaders are seeing what we're seeing here in this country -- which is that business as usual is over. President Trump is not only going to put the American worker first, but he's going to restore America's place in the globe."

Restoring America's place in the globe apparently starts with restoring Putin's place in America.  But it also means dealing with Trump's enemies, chief among them the American press itself.

Spicer also addressed Trump's use of Twitter, saying that he will "absolutely" continue to use the social media platform to make policy statements and engage with his followers after he takes office.

"I think it freaks the mainstream media out that he has this following of over 45-plus million people that follow him on social media, that he can have a direct conversation. He doesn't have to have it funnel through the media," Spicer said. "The fact of the matter is when he tweets, he gets results."

Spicer said the Trump administration will also continue the tradition of holding regular White House press briefings and presidential press conferences.

"Some of them will be on camera, some of them will be off," he said. "Absolutely, we'll sit down and make sure that on a daily basis the press is informed."

Spicer is promising the carrot and the stick approach to the media, and they'll play ball in order to keep access, especially off-camera.  When can you recall an administration publicly promising so much off-camera access to a president the way Trump's people have (or publicly promising any off-camera access at all for that matter)?

Ahh, but there's the little issue of dealing with the defeated in order to unite the country, right?

President-elect Donald Trump’s press secretary pick questioned Sunday whether Hillary Clinton will be “punished” for what he said were her attempts to influence the election.

When asked about the U.S. intelligence assessment that Russian hackers tried to influence the presidential election in favor of Trump during a Sunday segment on ABC’s “This Week," Sean Spicer turned the question around.

“When are we going to start talking about the other side of this? Which is: What did Hillary Clinton do to influence the election? Is she being punished in any way?” Spicer asked, referencing the fact the Democratic nominee received debate questions ahead of time during the primary.

Forget sanctions on Putin. When do the sanctions on Clinton and the Democrats start? When do sanctions on people who voted for Clinton and the Democrats start?

Stay tuned!

Last Call For A Bird Brained Move

Ars Technica's 2017 corporate death watch is up, and seeing as how four of the six companies it said wouldn't make it through 2016 are in various stages of the corporate undead right now, it's interesting to see that Ars writer Sam Machkovech believes the biggest impending tech implosion in 2017 will be Twitter, for several reasons:

Twitter isn't going to vaporize by the end of 2017. But rest assured, Twitter as we know it will not last through the year. And we're not talking about some sort of visual overhaul or slight feature tweak like the ones we’ve come to expect from major rivals like Facebook every year or so.

Twitter's continual bleeding of cash will have to come to an end, one way or another. While the company is losing less money than it has in the past ($289 million based on generally accepted accounting practices in the first nine months of 2016, compared to $430 million during the same period last year), Twitter is still hemorrhaging investors' money. And Twitter management's 2016 courtship of a few big potential buyers (including Disney) didn’t just fail—it crashed and burned.

Critics have railed against the platform for its inability to handle harassment and abuse. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has made a lot of public statements about this issue dating back over a year, but real change simply hasn’t come to the platform. As far back as this March’s SXSW Interactive expo, analysts pointed to sensible changes that could transform the platform’s core social-media experience, specifically in terms of curating and filtering personal feeds. Twitter hasn’t come close to implementing any of them.

By the time the company rolled out a “mute specific words” feature, it was too little, too late. The site's “egg” accounts and Pepe frogs have taken over, employing the same tactics used in 4chan-spawned movements to bombard and harass average users through a veil of anonymity and amplified hate speech. The platform’s most talked-about user, President-elect Donald Trump, has relied on the platform to spread misinformation and point his most harassing and abusive followers at specific people he dislikes.

Who the heck wants to buy that kind of site?

Young users are flocking to Snapchat in droves, which has aggressively bolstered its base experience with more insulated friend-list tools and a clever, video-driven news feed service. Ten seconds of video is the new 140 characters of text—yes, that’s 10 seconds, not 6. Twitter was built for an SMS world, and between the closure of Twitter-owned Vine and the inability of Twitter-owned Periscope to combat Snapchat’s growth, the company doesn’t seem poised to leave SMS behind in a successful way. Meanwhile, Twitter's acquisitions and NFL-related deals have bled more cash than they’ve earned.

It's likely that Twitter will be forced to sell itself at a huge discount (or sell off bits of its intellectual property) just to keep the site afloat through the end of 2017—or until its user base is folded into something else, though what that would be is much harder to predict. Also, expect Twitter to do something drastic as a last gasp to raise its public profile before such a sale closes. (If there’s a way to place a Vegas wager on Twitter deleting the @realDonaldTrump account at some point, put me down for $10.)

I have to agree.  We'll add this to the list of Future Stupidity picks and revisit in 2018, but Twitter as it is right now is 100% unsustainable.  Besides, the Pepes are heading to their own little alt-racist sandbox hell social media platform called Gab to do serious bidness, and like the article says, the kids are all over Snapchat and Instagram these days.

Of course, the counter-argument to this is "Trump uses it so it will remain popular as long as he does" so hey, who knows, right?

We've Been Here Before

A US presidential candidate working with a foreign power to undermine the current president's foreign policy position while thousands are dying and thousands more being displaced as refugees in a prolonged foreign civil war.  A long cold war with the foreign power, heavily invested in the civil war of its proxy, would suddenly see a major shift in positive relations as a result. 

Evidence of this meddling came to light before the election, but the sitting president chose not to reveal it because doing so would destroy the integrity of the voting process. Despite the sitting president's many accomplishments in civil rights and leading the country back into economic prosperity, the candidate of the other party wins the election and defeats the president's increasingly unpopular successor.

No, this isn't 2016 in review again, but 1968. The treacherous candidate was of course Nixon, the sitting president was LBJ, the foreign power was China, the war was Vietnam, and the unpopular successor was Hubert Humphrey.

Richard M. Nixon always denied it: to David Frost, to historians and to Lyndon B. Johnson, who had the strongest suspicions and the most cause for outrage at his successor’s rumored treachery. To them all, Nixon insisted that he had not sabotaged Johnson’s 1968 peace initiative to bring the war in Vietnam to an early conclusion. “My God. I would never do anything to encourage” South Vietnam “not to come to the table,” Nixon told Johnson, in a conversation captured on the White House taping system.

Now we know Nixon lied. A newfound cache of notes left by H. R. Haldeman, his closest aide, shows that Nixon directed his campaign’s efforts to scuttle the peace talks, which he feared could give his opponent, Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey, an edge in the 1968 election. On Oct. 22, 1968, he ordered Haldeman to “monkey wrench” the initiative.
The 37th president has been enjoying a bit of a revival recently, as his achievements in foreign policy and the landmark domestic legislation he signed into law draw favorable comparisons to the presidents (and president-elect) that followed. A new, $15 million face-lift at the Nixon presidential library, while not burying the Watergate scandals, spotlights his considerable record of accomplishments.

Haldeman’s notes return us to the dark side. Amid the reappraisals, we must now weigh apparently criminal behavior that, given the human lives at stake and the decade of carnage that followed in Southeast Asia, may be more reprehensible than anything Nixon did in Watergate.

Nixon sank Johnson's efforts to end the Vietnam War so he could win, full stop. He used Anna Chennault as an intermediary and put pressure on South Vietnam through the Chinese.

When Johnson got word of Nixon’s meddling, he ordered the F.B.I. to track Chennault’s movements. She “contacted Vietnam Ambassador Bui Diem,” one report from the surveillance noted, “and advised him that she had received a message from her boss … to give personally to the ambassador. She said the message was … ‘Hold on. We are gonna win. … Please tell your boss to hold on.’ ”

In a conversation with the Republican senator Everett Dirksen, the minority leader, Johnson lashed out at Nixon. “I’m reading their hand, Everett,” Johnson told his old friend. “This is treason.”

“I know,” Dirksen said mournfully.

Johnson’s closest aides urged him to unmask Nixon’s actions. But on a Nov. 4 conference call, they concluded that they could not go public because, among other factors, they lacked the “absolute proof,” as Defense Secretary Clark Clifford put it, of Nixon’s direct involvement.

Nixon was elected president the next day.

The rest, as they say, is history.

Sunday Long Read: Trump v Putin

As Molly McKew points out, Vlad the Dudesplainer has won 2016 hands down and is on the verge of having Russia-friendly governments in France and Germany along with the UK taking the Brexit exit from the EU. The only person at this point who can stand up to him is Donald Trump, and the odds of that actually happening appear to be next to zero.

From Moscow, Vladimir Putin has seized the momentum of this unraveling, exacting critical damage to the underpinnings of the liberal world order in a shockingly short time. As he builds a new system to replace the one we know, attempts by America and its allies to repair the damage have been limited and slow. Even this week, as Barack Obama tries to confront Russia’s open and unprecedented interference in our political process, the outgoing White House is so far responding to 21st century hybrid information warfare with last century’s diplomatic toolkit: the expulsion of spies, targeted sanctions, potential asset seizure. The incoming administration, while promising a new approach, has betrayed a similar lack of vision. Their promised attempt at another “reset” with Russia is a rehash of a policy that has utterly failed the past two American administrations.

What both administrations fail to realize is that the West is already at war, whether it wants to be or not. It may not be a war we recognize, but it is a war. This war seeks, at home and abroad, to erode our values, our democracy, and our institutional strength; to dilute our ability to sort fact from fiction, or moral right from wrong; and to convince us to make decisions against our own best interests.

Those on the Russian frontier, like my friends from Ukraine and Estonia, have already seen the Kremlin’s new toolkit at work. The most visible example may be “green men,” the unlabeled Russian-backed forces that suddenly popped up to seize the Crimean peninsula and occupy eastern Ukraine. But the wider battle is more subtle, a war of subversion rather than domination. The recent interference in the American elections means that these shadow tactics have now been deployed – with surprising effectiveness – not just against American allies, but against America itself. And the only way forward for America and the West is to embrace the spirit of the age that Putin has created, plow through the chaos, and focus on building what comes next.

President-elect Trump has characteristics that can aid him in defining what comes next. He is, first and foremost, a rule-breaker, not quantifiable by metrics we know. In a time of inconceivable change, that can be an incredible asset. He comes across as a straight talker, and he can be blunt with the American people about the threats we face. He is a man of many narratives, and can find a way to sell these decisions to the American people. He believes in strength, and knows hard power is necessary.

So far, Trump seems far more likely than any of his predecessors to accelerate, rather than resist, the unwinding of the postwar order. And that could be a very bad — or an unexpectedly good — thing. So far, he has chosen to act as if the West no longer matters, seemingly blind to the danger that Putin’s Russia presents to American security and American society. The question ahead of us is whether Trump will aid the Kremlin’s goals with his anti-globalist, anti-NATO rhetoric– or whether he’ll clearly see the end of the old order, grasp the nature of the war we are in, and have the vision and the confrontational spirit to win it.

Sure.  It could happen.  Far more likely however is that Trump is so utterly compromised by Putin at this point that we're looking at an active war between America's intelligence community and America's next president, and the fallout will so cripple both that Putin will have no problems consolidating his power in Europe and his growing power in the Middle East.

Between Snowden's intel treasure hoard and Trump's puppet strings, the next four years are going to be a disaster for the United States that will most likely include another 2008-style financial collapse that will finish us off as a global power. That collapse my very well be political as well, and what will emerge from it is anyone's guess, but history tells us that we're looking at a new, highly authoritarian regime when that happens.

Trump is promising "revelations" this week that will clear Russia's name in the allegations of interference in our elections made by the intel community and President Obama. If that's the case, the active war between Trump and the CIA/FBI will be fully on, and I would expect things to get very ugly, very quickly.

New Year, New Rules

I've made some changes around here this morning as we get to work here in 2017.

1) No more guest commenting.  Get a Disqus account if you want to join the discussion, which should motivate people to behave around here.

2) Be excellent to each other.  I'm going to be much, much less tolerant of personal insults around here.  Discuss the topic, go off topic, but personal attacks I'll put an end to.

Happy New Year.

And 2017 Starts Off Just As Bad

I know we're still in 2017 can't be as bad as 2016 mode, but let's put that to bed. January is only the beginning of "much worse" in America and the suffering will strike most at those least able to resist it.

A federal judge in Texas on Saturday issued a nationwide injunction halting enforcement of Obama administration protections for transgender and abortion-related healthcare services just one day before they were due to go into effect.

The lawsuit — brought by Texas, a handful of other states, and some religiously affiliated nonprofit medical groups — challenges a regulation implementing the sex nondiscrimination requirement found in the Affordable Care Act (ACA).

The Health and Human Services (HHS) regulation “forbids discriminating on the basis of ‘gender identity’ and ‘termination of pregnancy’” under Obamacare, as US District Court Judge Reed O’Connor wrote in his opinion halting enforcement of those provisions in the rule.

Explaining the lawsuit, O’Connor wrote, “Plaintiffs claim the Rule’s interpretation of sex discrimination pressures doctors to deliver healthcare in a manner that violates their religious freedom and thwarts their independent medical judgment and will require burdensome changes to their health insurance plans on January 1, 2017.”

The states and nonprofits in the healthcare lawsuit allege that the regulation violates the Administrative Procedure Act (APA) — which sets the rules for federal government rule-making — and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA).

O’Connor found that the plaintiffs had standing to bring the lawsuit because they “have presented concrete evidence to support their fears that they will be subject to enforcement under the Rule.”

Spokespersons from the Justice and Health and Human Services departments did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The next steps from the administration could include seeking to appeal the injunction or asking O’Connor to limit his order to the plaintiffs in the case, although it was not clear — with 20 days left in the Obama administration — what the government would choose to do.

In other words, trans folks can't be allowed to exist because it pisses off imaginary sky dude.  If this sounds insane, understand that we have laws that are broadly used to allow discrimination against trans folks because not discriminating against them violates "religious freedom"  What would have been a solid Supreme Court showdown with a Clinton-appointed justice to replace Scalia is now almost certainly going to end in federal law demanding that people be given special dispensation to deny housing, employment, good and services, and pretty much anything else to LGBTQ folks in America, and that's probably going to happen within the next couple of years.

In other words, all those state protections in places like California and New York and other blue states are likely going to be stripped, including, I would think, a challenge to Obergfell and same-sex marriage on RFRA grounds.  It will be the same avenue used to end legal abortion services in the US as well.

Expect this, and be ready to fight it.

Last Call For Looking Back At 2016

White House photographer Pete Souza gives us his final year in pictures as he shared his best shots from 2016.

For the eighth and final time, I am presenting my annual Year in Photographs.

All of them were taken either by me or a White House photographer on my staff. For many of the images, I’ve included the backstory behind the image to provide further context or to share why that image was particularly important to me.

As always, the editing for this project is both subjective and personal. Yes, there are some historic moments included but mostly I was looking for behind-the-scenes moments that give people a more personal look at the President and First Lady. And I’ve included a few that I thought were just cool photos.

I hope you enjoy this final Year in Photographs of the Obama administration. It’s been the honor of a lifetime to be a witness to history these past eight years.

— Pete Souza, Chief White House Photographer

Make sure you have a look.  Here's my favorite of the year:



This is the Barack Obama I want to remember, a president who inspired generations over his eight years.  We will not see his like again in our lifetimes, and America will be a poorer place for it.

And yet that little boy's face is full of hope and joy.  That too is what this president gave us, genuine moments of real hope and true joy.  We will need those memories as we move ahead in 2017. Perhaps in this child's lifetime we will see someone as great in the White House again. I have to hope we do.

Don't lose that hope.