Last Call For Flights Of Fancy

Ol' Perfessor Glenn Reynolds is quite perplexed in his USA Today column this week as to why liberals haven't simply all moved to Canada or dashed themselves on the jagged rocks below or something, and he's having a hard time with this notion of "resisting" America's rightful God-Emperor Trump.

When people feel their place in the world is threatened, they tend to lash out. And after all, the gentry liberals were promised by no less a figure than Clinton Labor secretary and former Harvard professor Robert Reich that the symbolic analysts like them would own the future. 

But my favorite example came much more recently, in the form of a New Yorker cartoon showing an airline passenger (seated in Economy, of course) standing up and asking his fellow passengers: “These smug pilots have lost touch with regular passengers like us. Who thinks I should fly the plane?” 

In this view, ordinary people are just carried along for the ride, while the country is run by experts with vast experience and credentials. Letting ordinary people take charge would surely result in a disastrous crash. If the pilots are “smug” it’s because they have abilities that ordinary people lack. 

This is nice, if you see yourself as one of the pilots, possessed of those special abilities. If you think of yourself as one of the smart people, the ones who should be guiding the airplane of state (we used to talk about the “ship of state,” but hey, this is the 21st century), then the suggestion that the passengers might want to take over the controls is both insulting and frightening. 

But, of course, being a member of the governing class doesn’t involve anything like the specialized skills that flying an airplane does. And just as passengers on an airplane actually do get to choose their destination — they’re paying customers, after all — so the voters get to choose things, too. (And if you look at recent history, the “pilots” tend to crash the plane a lot, but then walk away unscathed, unlike those passengers in the back. Peggy Noonan calls these political elites the “protected class” and she’s not far wrong: “The protected make public policy. The unprotected live in it.”) 

And now that Trump has won, people are, in fact, a lot less respectful of the traditional academic and media and political elites. Trump didn’t just beat them, after all. He also humiliated them, as they repeatedly assured everyone (and each other) that he had no chance. It’s a huge blow to the self-importance of a lot of people. No wonder they’re still lashing out.

This would be funny if it wasn't for two things: First, Clinton won the popular vote by 2.8 million or so, and second, Trump and his "pilots" are the least-experienced group in modern times to try to run America's "airplane of state".  It's one thing for the passengers on the plane to try to fly one, it's another for the airline to actually employ people who have not only never flown a plane as pilots but who don't believe planes can fly because the "scientific debate on aeronautics isn't settled" or that their "religious beliefs are being impinged upon by the people who think man should take to the skies" or that they've taken large amounts of money to lobby against airplanes, airports, and the FAA even existing.

Trump airlines hires literally the least capable people to fly an airliner, guys.  But the problem is liberals who maybe don't want to crash into the sea, right?

Climate Of Hostility, Con't

Remember last month when I talked about the Trump transition team being very, very interested in the identities of any Department of Energy employees that helped shape the Obama administration's climate change policies?

When I said that the Trump administration's official position on climate change is that it's a best bad science to be eliminated and at worst a dangerous hoax, either way Trump was going to claim that Obama cost the nation billions and that this "government waste" was always going to be purged.

The problem for Trump and the GOP was that they couldn't just blanket fire people.  Civil service has long-standing legal protections against political pogroms like this.  But it seems Republicans in Congress may have just found the solution they've been waiting for.

House Republicans this week reinstated an arcane procedural rule that enables lawmakers to reach deep into the budget and slash the pay of an individual federal worker — down to a $1 — a move that threatens to upend the 130-year-old civil service. 

The Holman Rule, named after an Indiana congressman who devised it in 1876, empowers any member of Congress to offer an amendment to an appropriations bill that targets a specific government employee or program. 

A majority of the House and the Senate would still have to approve any such amendment, but opponents and supporters agree that it puts agencies and the public on notice that their work is now vulnerable to the whims of elected officials. 

Democrats and federal employee unions say the provision, which one called the “Armageddon Rule,” could prove disastrous to the federal workforce, when combined with president-elect Donald Trump’s criticism of the Washington bureaucracy, his call for a freeze on government hiring and his nomination of Cabinet secretaries who seem to be at odds with the mission of the agencies they would lead. 

“This is part of a very chilling theme that federal workers are seeing right now,” said Maureen Gilman, legislative director for the National Treasury Employees Union, which represents 150,000 federal employees.

In other words, Republicans can't fire hundreds of thousands of federal government employees, that's illegal.  But what they can do is reduce their yearly salaries to one dollar and wait for them to quit on their own accord.

But why go through all this trouble?  Very simple: To hurt blue states with lots of federal employees and push them towards being red states.  Places like say, Maryland and Virginia.

The rule is particularly troubling to Virginia and Maryland lawmakers and the District’s nonvoting delegate, who represent large numbers of federal workers in the national capital region. 

The Holman provision was approved Tuesday as part of a larger rules package but received little attention amid the chaos of Republicans’ failed effort to decimate the House ethics office on the first day of the new Congress.

Oh.  Suddenly tens of thousands of Northern Virginia and Maryland federal employees, many unionized, have their salaries arbitrarily cut to $1.  You want to talk about destroying the local economy?  People would flee in droves.  And guess what?  A lot of these workers and their families are 1) people of color and 2) die-hard Democrats.

The Holman rule would obliterate the region, and the GOP knows it.

Would you want to rock the boat when Congress could cut your salary to $1 at any time?  Would you want to stay in your job knowing that?  Would you want to move to the capital region and take a job as a federal employee knowing that?

Oh, and if you think this would only be used against Virginia and Maryland federal employees, remember the state with the most federal employees is of course California.  There's little chance that going after tens of thousands of federal employees in the Golden State would do much to affect voting there, but it certainly would make a difference in Virginia and Maryland.

Trump's GOP will be worse than anyone can imagine, folks.  This will be used to decimate communities and entire government agencies.

Watch.

Home Rule Is No Longer Cool

I'm old enough to remember when Republicans demanded local control over their city and county governments because those knuckleheads in the state capitol and those nasty evil parasites in Dee Cee had no idea how anything worked in Our Heartland Real American Town.

Of course that was before the Kenyan Mooslim was elected and Republicans became those knuckleheads in the state capitol and those nasty evil parasites in Dee Cee after 2010, and now of course we have to stop those liberal enclaves from passing their own laws because who the hell do those people think they are anyway?  We're going to have to put a stop to home rule immediately.

Republican state legislatures are planning so-called preemption laws, which prevent cities and counties from passing new measures governing everything from taxes to environmental regulations and social issues.

Republican legislators around the country say liberal cities and counties vastly overstepped their bounds by implementing new taxes on sodas and sugary beverages, by raising local minimum wages or through strict new environmental regulations.

“What we see is circumventing the process that’s in place,” said Linda Upmeyer, the Republican speaker of the Iowa state House. “I think we will likely look at language on preemption so that the state is making decisions where it ought to, and cities and counties are making decisions where they should.” 

Democrats and city officials, however, see the preemption laws as a power grab aimed at limiting local governance in their party’s last bastions of political power — which have become ground zero in the fight to resist Trump. 

Preemption laws are nothing new in American history. The Supremacy Clause in the U.S. Constitution makes clear that federal law supersedes state law, and similar clauses in state constitutions give state laws precedence over local laws.

In recent decades, tobacco companies have used preemption laws to overcome local smoking bans, and the National Rifle Association turned to preemption to block cities from implementing new gun control measures.

But in the last four years, after Republicans swept to power in legislatures across the country, the number of issues on which states are asserting their rights has skyrocketed, said Mark Pertschuk, director of the Oakland-based Grassroots Change, which keeps close tabs on preemption legislation. 

The tension has grown as cities experiment with measures to raise revenue, keep their citizens healthy or add new protections for workers — and as Republicans have won control of states where Democrats still run large cities. 

“In the past 10 to 15 years, cities have become the laboratories of innovation,” said Brooks Rainwater, director of the Center for City Solutions at the National League of Cities, which opposes local preemption laws. “The discordant views of those at the local level and those at the state level have led to some real challenges.”

And yes, the Constitution makes it clear that states can pass preemption laws.  But for some odd reason they were never a priority until you had large, diverse, Democratic cities in red states decide that they should start being nice to those people and that Republicans at the state level had managed to gerrymander state legislatures into near permanent control and even majorities large enough to override vetoes by governors.

Now in 2017, suddenly cities deciding local laws for themselves needs to be made illegal as quickly as possible, particularly local minimum wage increases.

As yourselves why that is.

StupidiNews!

• The Trump transition team is floating a plan to build 700 miles of wall along the Texas/Mexico border and funding it through attaching it to must-pass spending legislation later this year.
• The nation may be without ambassadors to critical allies as the Trump camp is demanding all US ambassadors be out of office by the inauguration.
• Sources indicate Trump will choose former Indiana GOP Sen. Dan Coats as Director of National Intelligence as current DNI James Clapper will brief Trump today on Russia.
• For the fifth year in a row, New Jersey tops the list of states Americans are moving out of in United Van Lines' annual national relocation survey, South Dakota has the best inbound rate.
• House Republicans confirm they will strip all Medicaid funding from Planned Parenthood as part of Obamacare repeal, the move could affect more than 50 million women.

Kasich's Bill Comes Due

Understand that Trump and his administration are motivated by greed and petty revenge, and as we get closer to his inauguration, you're going to start seeing those in the GOP who dared to oppose Trump start to pay a higher and higher price for doing so.  Ohio GOP Gov. John Kasich is definitely on the top of that list.

On Friday, President-elect Donald Trump and Gov. John Kasich will face off in their latest proxy battle for the hearts and minds of Ohio Republicans – and the president-elect himself on Thursday entered the fray.

Trump supporter Jane Timken, a Cincinnati native and Walnut Hills High School graduate, is challenging Kasich-backed incumbent Matt Borges for the Ohio Republican Party's top spot.

On Thursday, Trump himself called at least two Southwest Ohioans who have a vote in the race for chairperson, pushing for Timken's election, according to a person close to the situation. Kasich has also made personal calls.

Kasich and his supporters installed Borges as chairman in 2013 after they deposed former leader Kevin DeWine and replaced much of the party's governing body with supporters. But some Republicans, including Trump, aren't thrilled with Borges' tepid support of the president-elect – or with the opposition Trump experienced this fall from Kasich.

Why would a president-elect care about a state GOP chair?  Just to piss off Kasich, of course.

Even before Trump started making phone calls on her behalf, Timken had Trump's support to challenge Borges. "I spoke with President-elect Trump and he agrees that it is time for a leadership change at the ORP," she wrote in an email to the Ohio Republican Party's 66 central committee members.

Kasich is backing Borges. "He has done an outstanding job running a complex organization and has an unparalleled record of winning," the governor said in a statement.

Trump and Kasich waged a war of words throughout the GOP primary campaign, when both were presidential hopefuls, and into November. In July, Trump's then-campaign manager Paul Manafort bashed Kasich before the Republican National Convention in Cleveland. Kasich later refused to endorse Trump or even vote for him.

Borges largely stood by Kasich, speaking out against Trump's policies and demeanor before ultimately backing him in the general election. Many Republicans thought Borges should have kept his mouth shut.

The Trump-Kasich fight continues with this latest round, the battle for control of the Ohio Republican Party. If the state's top Republican is out of step with the nation's top Republican, where will the state party stand?

And they'll have to tread carefully.  Maybe it'll make an opening for Ohio Dems.  Maybe.  We'll see.

The Rhetoric Has Consequences

Since Trump and the GOP have declared war on American Muslims over the last year and change, things have gotten very bad for our friends and neighbors, to the point now where local governments full of Trump-voting bigots are using everything from traffic studies to zoning ordinances to get rid of Islamic centers and places of worship in an effort to NIMBY them out of town.  This is particularly bad in Virginia, where hate is running rampant.

Turns out the Islamic Center of Fredericksburg has been operating in Spotsylvania County for 28 years. And Shalaby’s family has been there for 31. Until last year, they were viewed as neighbors. They were engineers, car salesmen, moms picking up their kids from soccer games or band practice. 

But then Donald Trump began running for president, pledging to ban Muslims from entering the country and establish a registry for Muslim Americans. 

It was amid that heated and ugly rhetoric that the center announced its expansion plans — and promptly ran into a wall of opposition. And now, a year later, the Islamic center is still tied up in traffic-pattern objections and subdivision squabbles. 

In Culpeper, about 40 miles away, local officials rubber stamped pump-and-haul permits to handle sewage for businesses or houses of worship. The county board approved 26 of them since 1992, including nine for churches. 

But when the Islamic Center of Culpeper bought a parcel of land and proposed a small mosque, a local Republican activist whipped the community in a frenzy over the sewage permit, which became a sneaky way to block the entire project. 

“I understand the Islamic Center of Culpeper wishes to rehabilitate the existing home and use it on a weekly basis as a place of prayer. . . . Hmmmmmmmmm,” he wrote. And right after that — just like Fredericksburg — there was a raucous community meeting with abnormally high attendance, there was grandstanding and a round of applause after the board broke its quarter-century streak of issuing permits and denied that one. 

Its decision was so ham-handed that the Justice Department hit Culpeper County with a lawsuit last month based on the Religious Land Use act. Justice has plenty of ammo on this case, from the emails sent out before the meeting to the communications that other board members got from folks opposing the mosque — emails that mentioned terrorists, not sewage.

This is the other real problem.  Does anyone believe for a moment that a Trump administration would ever direct a Department of Justice headed by Jeff Sessions to go after a city denying permits to an Islamic center?  What happens to the lawsuit against Culpeper County after January 20? How much do you want to bet that the lawsuit quietly vanishes?

And now we’ve got Nokesville. 

About 200 Muslims who hold their prayers in rented hotel space in Manassas want to build their own space. It would be the Nokesville branch of the All Dulles Area Muslim ­Society (ADAMS), one of the country’s largest and most prominent mosques. ADAMS has 11 chapters around Northern Virginia and the District. 

They’ve been working with county officials for two years now on the building’s height, lighting and parking on the parcel of land they bought. But that cooperation hasn’t been enough for some opponents. 

“No more suburban sprawl!” they say. And they’re pushing their leaders to deny connection to the public sewage system the mosque would need. 

Two churches recently got this very same approval. Churches. 

Rizwan Jaka, chairman of the ADAMS board, told The Washington Post’s Tara Bahrampour that the concern over sewage is a red herring and something he’s seeing across the country. 

“With over 30 mosques being prevented from being built based off of anti-Muslim bigotry or implicit bias wrapped in land-use arguments, that gives us some concern,” he said.

It's this bad now before these local governments start having the DoJ weigh in to help them persecute Muslims, as will most certainly happen.  Why would anyone think a President who has openly advocated rounding up Muslims would ever start enforcing their religious freedoms?  That only applies to Christianity (and remember who is in the Trump camp these days, the First Amendment's application to America's Jewish population would be selective at best.)

But this is the new reality, folks.  Expect a lot more of this in the months to come.

All Over The Place On The ACA

Yesterday was a bad day for the GOP on Obamacare repeal, judging from the headlines at Talking Points Memo.

First, that's NC Republican Walter "Freedom Fries" Jones in a state of near-panic over the lack of a replacement for the ACA, even though Republicans have been working on one for more than six year.

Rep. Walter Jones (R-NC) on Wednesday joined a growing, if not extremely vocal, chorus of Republicans warning that the GOP should not move forward with its longtime goal of repealing the Affordable Care Act until it has a replacement plan ready to go.

“You cannot repeal and not replace,” Jones told MSNBC’s Peter Alexander. “You have to replace.”

Asked to elaborate on what a replacement would look like, Jones acknowledged that he and his fellow GOP lawmakers have yet to see a proposed bill in writing.

Second, Wyoming GOP Sen. John Barrasso doesn't think anyone's actually getting insurance through the ACA because it's all a big lie or something.

Sen. John Barrasso (R-WY) accused leading Democrats, including President Obama, of making up the number of people insured under Obamacare.

"It’s interesting the numbers because the president uses one number. Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi came out with a much higher number. I think they're making them up," Barrasso told reporters Wednesday on Capitol Hill when asked about whether the GOP plans to maintain Obamacare's coverage levels. "We've done a lot of research into what the numbers truly are."

Which brings us to Kellyanne Mouth of Sauron Conway, who says "If you like your Obamacare plan, you can keep it!"

Donald Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway says that the Trump administration doesn't want anyone who currently has health insurance to lose it due to Republican efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act.

“We don't want anyone who currently has insurance to not have insurance,” Conway said Tuesday morning on MSNBC's "Morning Joe."

Conway was responding to co-host Joe Scarborough, who asked if Americans who “have healthcare today under the Affordable Care Act” would be covered under the Republican replacement plan for the healthcare law.

Conway didn’t present any details on what a replacement for Obamacare would look like in the interview. She said it would be "the ideal situation" if Republicans had a replacement plan for the ACA immediately available upon repeal, but said “some experts say that it could take years to actually complete the process.”

I'd laugh at this upcoming disaster, except for the fact that millions of Americans are going to suffer because these assholes hate the fact a black president did more for America than these idiots ever will, and all the people who voted for him will have to be punished.

Never forget that's the plan.

StupidiNews!

• President-elect Donald Trump is continuing his fight with America's spies over Russia as he is reportedly looking into plans to reorganize the CIA, DIA and DNI's office.
• A bipartisan team of legal experts are suggesting that as many as 50 electors may have violated state rules involving holding public office, awarding the presidency to Trump illegally.
• House Republicans have voted to invalidate six months' worth of Obama regulations under the Congressional Review Act, but the measure faces a near-certain Senate Democratic filibuster.
• China is warning the incoming Trump administration that Beijing has "big sticks" available to it if America seeks to impose tariffs and other trade sanctions.
• NASA is planning two asteroid exploration missions early next decade, but will shelve plans to visit Venus.

Last Call For Dispatches From Bevinstan, Con't

Kentucky Republicans gaveled this year's General Assembly session into order on Tuesday, and now that House Dems and Speaker Greg Stumbo are gone and they have control of the legislature for the first time in 98 years, the GOP has a lot of catching up to do so the state can be as awful to women, black people, brown people, the LGBTQ community and schoolkids as the rest of the Republican-ruled South is.  First up on the docket: unconstitutional abortion bans!

Women would not be allowed to get an abortion in Kentucky if they are more than 20 weeks pregnant under a controversial bill filed Tuesday on the first day of the state’s 2017 law-making session. 

The bill appears to be on a fast track now that Republicans control the House, Senate and governor’s office. Most proposals in recent years to limit abortion have died in the Democratic-controlled House, but Republicans won a 64-36 super majority in November. 

Senate President Robert Stivers, R-Manchester, said Senate Bill 5 will be heard by a Senate committee Wednesday and could get a vote on the Senate floor this week.
Once approved by the Senate, the measure would go to the House, where newly elected Speaker Jeff Hoover, R-Jamestown, said there would be “overwhelming support” for the bill. 

The proposal is the first considered by the Kentucky legislature that would ban abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy. Stivers said a similar measure has been approved by a federal appellate court but has not been considered by the U.S. Supreme Court. 

Under the bill, which is sponsored by Republican Sen. Brandon Smith of Hazard, exceptions would be made in cases of rape and incest and when the mother’s life is in danger. Smith said his bill would require fines and suspensions for doctors who commit abortions after 20 weeks. 

Kate Miller, advocacy director for the state ACLU, questioned the constitutionality of the proposal and said decisions about abortions should not be made by politicians.

Get used to that whole "GOP super-majority" thing.  Kentucky requires a 3/5ths majority for most major changes to state law (particularly taxation and revenue legislation) which is why most Republican tea party nonsense died screaming in the House up until now.  They had the numbers in the State Senate, but never the House.

That all changed in November.

The rapid descent of Bevinstan into a Kansas-style economic disaster is almost assured at this point, but first up it's time to punish the Obama coalition, starting with women.

Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/news/politics-government/article124313689.html#storylink=cpy

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.