Last Call For Audit The Vote

Looks like Jill Stein took her recount money and went home, laughing.

Green Party-backed voters dropped a court case Saturday night that had sought to force a statewide recount of Pennsylvania’s Nov. 8 presidential election, won by Republican Donald Trump, in what Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein had framed as an effort to explore whether voting machines and systems had been hacked and the election result manipulated.

The decision came two days before a court hearing was scheduled in the case. Saturday’s court filing to withdraw the case said the Green Party-backed voters who filed the case “are regular citizens of ordinary means” and cannot afford the $1 million bond ordered by the court by 5 p.m. Monday. However, Green Party-backed efforts to force recounts and analyze election software in scattered precincts were continuing.

Stein planned to make an announcement about the Pennsylvania recount Monday outside the Trump Tower in New York.

The court case had been part of an effort spearheaded by Stein to force recounts in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, three states with a history of backing Democrats for president that were narrowly and unexpectedly won by Trump over Democrat Hillary Clinton.

A recount began Thursday in Wisconsin, while a recount could begin next week in Michigan. Trump’s victory in Pennsylvania was particularly stunning: the state’s fifth-most electoral votes are a key stepping stone to the White House, and no Republican presidential candidate had captured the state since 1988.

So unless a miracle actually finds malfeasance in Wisconsin and Michigan quickly enough to force a recount in Pennsylvania, it's over.  And even then it will be far too late.

Most — including Hillary Clinton’s campaign — expected Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein’s recount efforts in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin not to change the result in any of those states. The reality, however, was that the election results would not have changed unless the recounts shifted the states to Clinton in all of those states.

With Pennsylvania off the table, even a flip in the Michigan and Wisconsin results would still leave Trump at 280 electoral votes — 10 above the 270 necessary to become the next president.

Lawyers for the Green Party told the Associated Press that they would not be able to meet the Monday deadline for a $1 million bond that the Pennsylvania court had ordered in the case. Additionally, on Dec. 2, the court had issued an ordersuggesting skepticism as to whether the Green Party’s complaint seeking a statewide recount would succeed. That order came in the wake of the Trump campaign’s motion to dismiss the complaint.

On Saturday, the Green Party filed a motion to withdraw their statewide recount request — which the court granted in an order later Saturday — although individual precinct-based recount requests will continue, in an attempt to force an automatic statewide recount, and a lawyer familiar with ongoing efforts noted that an appeal seeking a forensic audit of the Philadelphia voting machines remains pending.

The Trump ear is inevitable, and at this point we must find a way to resist, as I said earlier today.

On Resistance In The Trump Era

Author and essayist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie gives us this essential piece in the New Yorker about what it truly means to resist the normalization of the Trump era and what we must immediately start doing in order to not only fight back, but to survive the next four years.

America has always been aspirational to me. Even when I chafed at its hypocrisies, it somehow always seemed sure, a nation that knew what it was doing, refreshingly free of that anything-can-happen existential uncertainty so familiar to developing nations. But no longer. The election of Donald Trump has flattened the poetry in America’s founding philosophy: the country born from an idea of freedom is to be governed by an unstable, stubbornly uninformed, authoritarian demagogue. And in response to this there are people living in visceral fear, people anxiously trying to discern policy from bluster, and people kowtowing as though to a new king. Things that were recently pushed to the corners of America’s political space—overt racism, glaring misogyny, anti-intellectualism—are once again creeping to the center.

Now is the time to resist the slightest extension in the boundaries of what is right and just. Now is the time to speak up and to wear as a badge of honor the opprobrium of bigots. Now is the time to confront the weak core at the heart of America’s addiction to optimism; it allows too little room for resilience, and too much for fragility. Hazy visions of “healing” and “not becoming the hate we hate” sound dangerously like appeasement. The responsibility to forge unity belongs not to the denigrated but to the denigrators. The premise for empathy has to be equal humanity; it is an injustice to demand that the maligned identify with those who question their humanity.

America loves winners, but victory does not absolve. Victory, especially a slender one decided by a few thousand votes in a handful of states, does not guarantee respect. Nobody automatically deserves deference on ascending to the leadership of any country. American journalists know this only too well when reporting on foreign leaders—their default mode with Africans, for instance, is nearly always barely concealed disdain. President Obama endured disrespect from all quarters. By far the most egregious insult directed toward him, the racist movement tamely termed “birtherism,” was championed by Trump.

Yet, a day after the election, I heard a journalist on the radio speak of the vitriol between Obama and Trump. No, the vitriol was Trump’s. Now is the time to burn false equivalencies forever. Pretending that both sides of an issue are equal when they are not is not “balanced” journalism; it is a fairy tale—and, unlike most fairy tales, a disingenuous one.

Now is the time to refuse the blurring of memory. Each mention of “gridlock” under Obama must be wrought in truth: that “gridlock” was a deliberate and systematic refusal of the Republican Congress to work with him. Now is the time to call things what they actually are, because language can illuminate truth as much as it can obfuscate it. Now is the time to forge new words. “Alt-right” is benign. “White-supremacist right” is more accurate.

Now is the time to talk about what we are actually talking about. “Climate contrarian” obfuscates. “Climate-change denier” does not. And because climate change is scientific fact, not opinion, this matters.

Now is the time to discard that carefulness that too closely resembles a lack of conviction. The election is not a “simple racism story,” because no racism story is ever a “simple” racism story, in which grinning evil people wearing white burn crosses in yards. A racism story is complicated, but it is still a racism story, and it is worth parsing. Now is not the time to tiptoe around historical references. Recalling Nazism is not extreme; it is the astute response of those who know that history gives both context and warning.

Trump's America is not just a kleptocracy that will benefit the elites while the rest of us suffer in silence.  It is, as history has told us again and again, an existential threat to what freedoms we have, and it must be framed as such, we must demand this from the people who are trying to frame it, in our daily conversations, at our jobs, at our places of worship, at our dinner tables.

The act of resistance begins with the thought of resistance, that this is not the way it is supposed to be.  That must be done first and foremost.

As Adichie says, now is the time to remember the truth and to recall the facts as the basis for all resistance going forward.

The Things We Don't See

The advocacy group Sandy Hook Promise has released this PSA entitled "Evan" that initially appears to be about a high school teenager looking for a friend in the school's library.  That's not what the video is about at all, and I guarantee you that like myself, you'll miss the real story the first time through.





It's a very, very powerful message here, and one that we as a country have forgotten.

Trump's Pence-ive Decision, Con't

It's not what Donald Trump said at his rally here in Cincy Thursday night (during rush hour that backed up traffic for 15 miles in any direction, by the way), it's what VP-elect Mike Pence said to reporters in Cincy that should really terrify you.

In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Mr. Pence said President-elect Donald Trump is preparing ambitious 100-day and 200-day plans aimed at fulfilling core campaign promises and jump-starting economic growth. 

Asked what might surprise voters about the Trump White House, Mr. Pence said: “I think the only thing that will surprise them is that Washington, D.C., is going to get an awful lot done in a short period of time.”

Big deal, every incoming administration says that, right?

His comments also suggest that a Trump White House would eschew many of the free-market principles that have guided prior Republican administrations, including injecting itself into the personnel and long-term operating decisions of individual companies. 

The new administration’s first priorities would include curbing illegal immigration, abolishing and then replacing Mr. Obama’s signature health-care system, nominating a justice to fill a vacancy on the Supreme Court, and strengthening the military, said Mr. Pence, whose wife, Karen Pence, sat nearby during the interview. 

By springtime, the Trump administration would work with congressional leaders “to move fundamental tax reform” meant to “free up the pent-up energy in the American economy,” he said. 

Pillars of the tax overhaul would include lowering marginal tax rates, reducing the corporate tax rate “from some of the highest in the industrialized world” to 15%, and repatriating corporate cash held overseas, he said.

Massive corporate tax cuts will mean massive domestic austerity, of course.  Particularly if we're going to be throwing hundreds of billions more at the Pentagon.   And by "massive austerity" I mean goodbye Medicare and Medicaid.

But as long as the Obama coalition suffers first and suffers hardest (and it will) that's okay with Trumpmerica.

Last Call For Swamp Things

He's a dangerous, unconstitutional, racist, mysogynist, authoritarian demagogue... but he's our dangerous, unconstitutional, racist, mysogynist, authoritarian demagogue, dammit!

As a candidate, Donald Trump promised to “drain the swamp” in Washington. Now that he’s been elected and is embracing part of that very establishment, Democrats and many in the media are slamming him as a typical politician who abandoned a principle as soon as it suited him.

But when McClatchy checked in with several dozen voters in central Pennsylvania – one of the swing states that swung the White House to Trump – to see how they defined the swamp, most didn’t really care. Instead, they said it’s fine with them if he uses the expertise of a DC establishment of lobbyists, donors and special interests to to get his way – and their way.

As I've said time and again, the chief motivation of Trump voters remains to brutally eviscerate the Obama coalition and to make sure they remain politically powerless forever.  The goal is to see them, and especially any white folks who dare to support them, rendered utterly broken and completely smashed in such a brutal and bloody fashion that those people never dare to raise their voices again in our country.

And they know exactly who The Enemy is, aiding and abetting those people.

Many – almost half – of central Pennsylvania voters interviewed were reluctant to give their names and expressed a deep distrust of the media, which they said isn’t giving Trump a chance to even get started.

“It’s been what, a few weeks? How do you know he isn’t going to drain the swamp? He is not even president yet, tell me how is he supposed to be doing that?” asked a woman who did not want to give her name to “the lying press” in Philipsburg.

The Germans had a term for "the lying press" in the 1930's: Lügenpresse.  It's gained far more recent usage in Germany's darker corners to boot.

The coronation of Lügenpresse represents a troubling trend. The phrase, which means "lying press" and found most recent use in the Nazi era, has become something of a watchword among Germany's increasingly vociferous anti-immigrant (and largely anti-Muslim) activists. In recent months, these demonstrators have called on the media to "tell the truth" about what immigrants are doing to Germany.

Things are moving pretty quickly now.  But he's our monster, say the Trump voters.  The rest of you are his prey.

Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/politics-government/article118026863.html#storylink=cpy

Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/politics-government/article118026863.html#storylink=cpy

He Blinded Science With Me!

Trump'sadministration continues to crank out all-star cartoon villains, and that brings us to the Orange Snack Product's National Science Advisor.  There are few jobs on Earth I can think of that I would hate more than this, you'd need someone who was highly educated in science fields, but was still ignorant enough to believe Republican Glibertarian junk science nonsense. You know, one of those high-INT low-WIS types, in Dungeons and Dragons terms.  Now, who would I pick for a job like that if I were Trump?  Who do I know that can get away with picking for being "all sciencey" and still not actually know anything about science?

Why, my very own congressman, of course!

U.S. Congressman Thomas Massie, R-Ky., said he would “seriously consider” a position in President-elect Donald Trump’s administration, but hasn’t been approached by his transition team.

In a phone interview with The Daily Independent on Tuesday, Massie responded to rumors claiming he’s under consideration for a top post in the Trump administration.

“If there’s any truth to the rumor, it’s coming from his team, not mine,” said Massie. “[Trump] has assembled a very impressive cabinet so far, and I would seriously consider working in his administration.”

A report by The Liberty Conservative, an online magazine, surfaced Monday stating that the Trump team is considering Massie for director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, a position commonly referred to as Science Advisor to the President.

The author cited a “confidential source on the Trump transition team.”

Austin Petersen, a former candidate for the Libertarian Party’s 2016 nomination for President of the United States, founded the website The Libertarian Republic which also posted a story on Monday linking Massie to consideration for the Science Advisor position.

Petersen told The Daily Independent the source of the story is on the Trump transition team and agreed to speak to the online magazine “only on the condition of anonymity.”

Science Advisor to the President is considered the closest position to a cabinet-level role in science and technology. The appointee would spearhead nationwide initiatives related to science and tech, have increased access to Trump and work almost exclusively in the White House complex with the Office of Science and Technology Policy staff.

Massie believes he'd be qualified for the position if considered, but hadn't given it much thought previously.

The libertarian-leaning conservative said he’s even more intrigued by the idea of serving in the cabinet as secretary of energy.

I can't think of a better Trumpie for the job than an MIT-educated engineering award winner who thinks thousands of climatologists are all wrong. But you might want to hold off on those Energey Secretary plans there though Tommy.  Seems that's going to go to the ultimate climate change denier troll.

President-elect Donald Trump's transition team is considering Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia for the energy secretary job, according to three sources close to the discussions.

The conservative Democrat “is being considered to show the coal people how serious Trump is about coal,” one source said.

Manchin told POLITICO Thursday afternoon that he and his staff haven’t been contacted by Trump’s transition team and he didn't have any trips to New York City on his calendar. But Manchin, who is up for reelection in 2018 in a state that has become increasingly more Republican over the past decade, also didn’t dismiss the notion of taking DOE’s top job in the Trump administration.

“If I can do anything that would help my state of West Virginia, and my country, I would be happy to talk to anybody,” he told POLITICO. “Other than that, I haven’t heard anything ... I have nothing scheduled.”

Just last month, Manchin was named the vice chair of the Senate Democratic Policy and Communications Committee.

The lone coal country Democrat left in these parts who then joined Chuck Schumer's leadership team, now bailing on the Dems ahead of an almost certain loss in 2018?

Like I said, almost cartoon villainy stuff here.

That Poll-Asked Look, Con't

Nate Silver crunches the numbers and finds out that America's pollsters failed miserably in their likely voter models, not in the direction that I anticipated (underestimating voters of color) but in badly underestimating the number of white voters without college degrees that showed up for Trump.

Let’s take two fairly obvious data-driven conclusions from the 2016 election and see if there’s any link between them. 

The first conclusion: Education was almost everything in explaining the results of the race. Donald Trump substantially improved on Mitt Romney’s performance among voters without college degrees — especially white voters without college degrees. Hillary Clinton somewhat improved on President Obama’s performance with college-educated voters. The link between education levels and the shift in the vote is robust, even when controlling for other factors, such as income levels. 

The second conclusion: The polling was bad. Actually, let me amend that: The polling wasn’t that bad. (Reporters and analysts should have been more prepared for the possibility that Trump might win. We’re going to keep being really annoying about this.) 

With Clinton’s lead in the popular vote still expanding, the national polls are going to wind up having been pretty good (they showed her winning by 3 to 4 percentage points, and she’ll eventually win by about 2 points). The state polls? Not so hot. What matters, though, is not only the magnitude of the error in the state polls but the direction of it. The errors were correlated from state to state, and Clinton underperformed in a trio of states in the Rust Belt — Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania — that were supposed to have been part of her firewall; that underperformance cost her the Electoral College.
So, are these two things connected? Did Trump beat his polls in states with large numbers of white voters without college degrees? 

The short answer is “yes.”

And the data is pretty convincing: there are 19 states that have a majority of white voters without college degrees.  Donald Trump beat the averages of state polls in 18 of those 19 states (all but Oregon) and he beat them by an average of 7.6 points.  He beat Ohio's and Wisconsin's state polls by 6 points,, Michigan's by 4, Pennsylvania's by 5, NC's by 4, and Florida's by 2.  He won all of those states.

In blood red states like Kentucky, he beat his state polling average by 11 points and by 14 in WV..

In other words, where national polling was correct (Clinton will end up winning the national popular vote by 2.5%-3% or so, where the polls had her) state polling in 2016 was 100% useless.

The same thing that happened in Kentucky in 2015 with Matt Bevin versus Jack Conway, the poll that was off by 13 points?  In 2016 it was national, and every single polling outfit messed up at the state level.

It's worth thinking about.  The reality however?

So Clinton lost Michigan by ~0.2%, Wisconsin by ~0.7%, Pennsylvania by ~0.8%. https://t.co/wbnGFEmcen

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) December 1, 2016

With this update:
WI: Hillary down 22,177
MI: Hillary down 10,704
PA: Hillary down 46,435
Total: 79,316 https://t.co/pcOqvSQlNz

— Charles Gaba (@charles_gaba) December 1, 2016

All less than Jill Stein's total in each state.

This is why Trump will be President in January.

Never forget.

StupidiNews!

• Donald Trump's "Thank You" rally in Cincinnati last night continued his campaign themes of attacking a "lying media", restricting immigration and building a Mexican border wall.
• Indiana state officials say they have agreed to $7 million in tax breaks in order to get Carrier International to keep 1,000 jobs in VP-elect Mike Pence's state.
• Donald Trump's pick for Defense Secretary is retired Marine Gen. James "Mad Dog" Mattis, who would need a waiver from Congress to serve as the DoD's civilian head.
• Senate Democrats say Donald Trump's cabinet choices could meet stiff resistance in confirmation hearings, but ultimately Democrats can't stop them without GOP help.
• Finnish cell phone maker Nokia is back after years of being overrun by the Apple/Android smartphone revolution, the brand will introduce Android smartphones in 2017.

Last Call For The Great Preet-Ender

Donald Trump summoned US Attorney Preet Bharara to Trump Tower on Wednesday, raising all kinds of conflict of interest questions.

Donald Trump met with U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara on Wednesday at Trump Tower, a senior law enforcement official told NBC News.

Bharara, whom many regard as the Justice Department's most powerful prosecutor, told reporters that he agreed to remain the U.S. attorney in the Southern District of New York after a "good meeting" with the president-elect. He added that Sen. Jeff Sessions, Trump's attorney general pick, previously reached out to him, asking him to stay as well.

Bharara and his office are known for their successful prosecutions of Wall Street figures, such as securing the guilty plea of Bernie Madoff's brother, Peter, for his role in the infamous Ponzi scheme.

The federal prosecutor also created two units focusing on financial fraud, including the Civil Frauds Unit, which has collected multimillion dollar settlements from financial institutions.

In other words, Trump only bothered to personally talk to precisely one US Attorney: the one who would be dealing with any Trump Organization cases, as NYC-based Trump would be in Bharara's Southern NY district.

You know who else Bharara would be dealing with in a federal prosecution?

The Clinton Foundation.

You do the math. I have, and two plus two equals authoritarian.

White Out In The Senate Dems

I understand the fact that 99% of the time, activist and NY Daily News columnist Shaun King is in it solely for the benefit of one Shaun King rather than the racial justice issues he advocates for, but this is part of the 1% of the time that he actually has a valid point: Senate Democrats have a major, major lack of diversity on their staffs and it's pretty appalling as he talks to a Senate staffer about it.

“Do you know how many black Chiefs of Staff exist in the Senate? The whole Senate? One. Out of one hundred chances they had to hire a black chiefs of staff, they hired just one African-American,” the staffer said in disgust. 

“But hold up, hold up,” the staffer continued. “I haven’t even given you the punchline yet. Guess who the one black Chief of Staff works for?” 

“Who?” I asked — having no idea what the answer was. 

“Tim Scott,” the staffer replied. “The lone black chief of staff in the entire United States Senate works for South Carolina Republican, Tim Scott. His office may be the most diverse in the entire Senate.” 

It was like a punch to the gut. It’s one thing for the elected officials in one of the most important halls of government in our nation to be just 2% black — that could be blamed on voters or demographics or fundraising, but the fact that only one U.S. Senator has hired a black chief of staff, and that senator is a Republican, is an indefensible choice. 

According to a recent study from the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, of the 336 senior staff positions in the U.S. Senate, 0.9% of them are held by African-Americans. That’s three people. 

This is inexcusable and it has a devastating impact on the positions and priorities taken by senators themselves. 

“When Philando Castile and Alton Sterling were shot and killed by police in Minnesota and Louisiana, I practically begged my boss to issue a statement. My request fell on deaf ears,” the staffer said, 

It’s no wonder the Senate has done so little of substance on issues that truly matter to black folk. 

The lack of diversity in the U.S. Senate is so severe that it was called “one of the world’s whitest workplaces” in a scathing critique authored by The Atlantic’s Russell Berman. Berman also highlighted how the online magazine, Diversity Inc., “the nation’s worst employer for diversity.” 

The NBC News4 I-Team in Washington, D.C. actually discovered that Congress isn’t even following its own rules and laws on diversity. As Congress attempts to hold tens of thousands of employers feet to the fire on diversity all over the country, they aren’t even doing it themselves by tracking and reporting the most basic data on their hiring practices and records for women and people of color.

 It's pretty awful, and King is right.  It really is indefensible that fewer than 1% of Democratic staffers are black, when black voters make up more than 25% of the party as a whole.

Fix this, Democrats.

More than ever, heading into 2017?

Fix this.

Welcome To 2007, Suckers

"Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard." - H. L. Mencken

After campaigning with lots of populist and anti-Wall Street rhetoric, Donald Trump is seriously considering a veteran Wall Street financier, Steve Mnuchin, to be his Treasury secretary.

Mnuchin spent 17 years at Goldman Sachs, ultimately as a partner at the investment bank. More recently, he's headed a privately owned hedge fund, Dune Capital Management. Last April he became Trump's chief fundraiser, and he's now a member of the president-elect's transition team. 

But Mnuchin's resume also includes a stint as chairman and CEO of a California bank that's been called a foreclosure machine. 

During the depths of the financial crisis, Mnuchin was looking to make profits from the ruins of the housing bust. In 2009, he put together a group of billionaire investors and bought a failed California-based bank, IndyMac. It had been taken over by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. after its sketchy mortgage loans went bad.

The next housing bubble and economic meltdown is probably not going to be remotely recoverable. Not with Trump's team of crooks at the helm.  It's going to be brutal when it goes.

And it's the fault of idiot voters like Rex and Rose Schaffer.

Rex Schaffer, 86, and his wife Rose were among those who lost their homes, in a OneWest foreclosure. After living nearly 50 years in their home in La Puente, Calif., the Schaffers took a home equity loan but struggled to make the payments. They say they qualified three times for a government assisted modification, but OneWest failed to modify the loan.

"It was a disaster dealing with those people," Rex Shaffer says. "We'd have a different person every time we called in." He counted 33 OneWest employees, in all, and each one would give him "a different story." 

Facing threats that their home would be auctioned off, the Schaffers finally got through to a OneWest vice president. According to Rex Shaffer, the VP said, "I'm going to get you a 60-day extension on the sale date, so we can work this thing out." That was on Feb. 17, 2011. But the next day, the Schaffers' house was sold without their knowledge. "We didn't even know it — didn't have the faintest idea," Rex Shaffer says. 

They voted for Donald Trump, but Rose Schaffer says they're praying he doesn't choose Mnuchin as his Treasury secretary. "If he can't run his own little bank," she asks, "how can he handle a large thing for the United States?"

Spoilers: he can't.  But hey, the Schaffers are in their 80's.  They're not going to have to spend 50 years dealing with the next economic collapse, and they live in California, where their vote for Trump wasn't directly responsible for his election.

Guys like me, well,  It was nice knowing all of you.

StupidNews!

• A group of 20 stamping factory workers in Tennessee are among America's newest millionaires, they'll split a $420 million Powerball jackpot won on Sunday.
• A coalition of abortion rights groups are banding together to legally challenge 20-week abortion bans in three states in anticipation of coming national GOP legislative restrictions.
• The death toll in this week's wildfires in the Southeast has risen to seven as firefighters continue to battle blazes across Tennessee, North Carolina, Virginia and West Virginia.
• The Trump era has spelled the worst bond market in decades for US treasuries as November saw a $1.7 trillion loss as investors dropped debt to head into stocks.
• A critical flaw in Mozilla's Firefox and Tor web browsers could be used to unmask anonymous web users as experts are asking users to update those programs now.

Last Call For Trumped At The Pump

After 8 years of dealing with President Obama and an America that was going away from oil, OPEC suddenly has Trump and now knows it can leverage oil production to start turning the screws on US consumers.

OPEC clinched a deal to curtail oil supply, confounding skeptics as the need to clear a record global crude glut -- and prove the group’s credibility -- brought about its first cuts in eight years. 

OPEC will reduce production by 1.2 million barrels a day to 32.5 million a day, two delegates said Wednesday during a ministerial meeting in Vienna, asking not to be identified as the decision isn’t yet public. Benchmark Brent crude rose 8 percent to $50.07 a barrel in London at 1:37 p.m. local time. 

After weeks of often tense negotiations, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries’ three biggest producers -- Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Iran -- resolved differences over sharing the burden of cuts. Notably, it appears the Saudis accepted that Iran, as a special case, can raise production to about 3.9 million barrels a day. The agreement is also likely to include an additional reduction of about 600,000 barrels a day by non-OPEC countries. 

“This should be a wake-up call for skeptics who have argued the death of OPEC,” said Amrita Sen, chief oil analyst at Energy Aspects Ltd. “The group wants to push inventories down.” 

The deal promises to revive the tattered finances of countries from Venezuela to Libya and restore flagging confidence in the producer bloc that controls 40 percent of the world’s oil. But the consequences will reverberate far beyond OPEC, giving a boost to U.S. shale drillers crippled by a two-year price rout and oil giants such as Royal Dutch Shell Plc, which have cut spending to the bone to weather the prolonged downturn.

So the countries Trump has repeatedly criticized during his campaign like Iran, Venezuela and Libya stand to benefit the most from a new, more muscular OPEC.  Like it or not, the global energy trade war that Trump all but promised is on, and rising oil and gas prices are just the first step.

Trump will of course look to retaliate by wrecking the environment to put new drilling and fracking everywhere in the US in order to try to boost production instead of beating OPEC at their own game as Obama has and lowering demand through alternative energy. He played hardball.

Trump on the other hand just helped his Saudi buddies make billions off of US consumers, and then there's the biggest non-OPEC economic winner when the price of oil goes up: Russia.  It's almost like there's a pattern here, guys.

So we'll have an oil price war AND global warming accelerating.  Won't that be fun?

Oversight Is Over And Out

House GOP Oversight Committee chair Rep. Jason Chaffetz, robbed of spending four years of persecution of Hillary Clinton by a Trump win, has no plans whatsoever to even lift a finger to look at The Donald's actual conflicts of interest and open boasts of kleptocracy.

Back in October, Representative Jason Chaffetz, chair of the House Oversight Committee, had big plans for 2017. After leading the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private email server, he positioned himself to be President Clinton’s greatest foe in Congress, bragging to the Washington Post that he would spend the next four years probing her alleged misdeeds. 

“It’s a target-rich environment,” Chaffetz said. “Even before we get to Day One, we’ve got two years’ worth of material already lined up. She has four years of history at the State Department, and it ain’t good.” 

Even after the election, Chaffetz said he had a “duty and obligation” to continue investigating the former secretary of State. However, he claimed his committee would investigate President-elect Trump with equal fervor. “I am optimistic that a Trump administration would actually be cooperative,” Chaffetz said. “The Obama administration has given us the stiff arm every single step of the way. I think a new administration would actually work with us to quickly get to the truth, learn what we need to learn and then fix it.” 

It’s unclear why Chaffetz thinks the candidate who refused Chaffetz’s call to release his tax returns will be more responsive as president, but so far the Utah congressman isn’t even asking for a response.

Amid staggering evidence of Trump’s conflicts of interest — from letting the manager of his blind trust sit in on meetings with foreign dignitaries to allowing his D.C. hotel to court foreign diplomats — Chaffetz has ignored calls to launch an investigation into the president-elect.

And he will continue to ignore them, and he will be rewarded with easy reelection in a Utah district that he won by 46 points just three weeks ago, and he will remain House Oversight Committee chair.

And nobody will care.  Anyone who thought for a moment that Chaffetz was ever going to investigate Trump is nearly as much of a problem with our political system as Chaffetz himself is.  The next four years will be brutal, blood-soaked payback against the Obama coalition in an effrot to make sure Democrats never hold power again.

Jason Chaffetz won't even begin to interfere with that.

America's Coming Labor Pains

Politico is reporting that Pennsylvania Republican Rep. Lou Barletta is up for Labor Secretary, and judging from his record he'll be no friend of America's workers.

According to a transition pool report, Barletta said that he and President-elect Donald Trump “talked about the secretary of labor.” When asked whether he was interested in the position, Barletta said, “I’m going to consider what we talked about.”

Barletta is a member of the House Education and the Workforce Committee and would likely roll back key Obama administration regulations. In September, he backed a proposal to delay the Labor Department’s final overtime rule by six months, calling it ‘“ill-considered." (A Texas judge issued a preliminary injunction against the rule last week.)

In addition, Barletta opposed the Labor Department’s fiduciary rule, which requires broker-dealers to consider only their clients’ best interest when providing retirement advice. In April, Barletta voted to block the rule under the Congressional Review Act. (The measure did not pass.)

Barletta is vocal on immigration issues. He was a signatory to an amicus brief in the Supreme Court case challenging President Barack Obama’s 2014 executive actions extending deferred action to undocumented parents of U.S. citizens and expanded deferred action for undocumented children. Barletta also supported legislation passed by the Pennsylvania House of Representatives that penalized so-called sanctuary cities that did not comply with federal law enforcement.

“Sanctuary cities provide refuge for illegal immigrants, drain local resources, and contribute to an increase in crime,” he said in a statement. “ This bill says that sanctuary cities can no longer operate with impunity and holds them accountable for their own actions and the behavior of the illegal immigrants they are sheltering.”

Ragerdless of who's in charge of the department, I'd expect whoever it is to rail against immigrants, Obamacare, and the minimum wage.  Barletta, coming from coal country in the Keystone State, seems like the perfect front man for Trump's coming deregulatory push that will almost certainly reverse worker protections under the Obama administration.

Barletta entered politics in 1999, when he became Mayor of Hazelton, Pennsylvania. He held the office until 2010. Barletta, who was born there, became nationally known as one of the toughest politicians on illegal immigration, a reputation that must have impressed Trump. He even vowed to make the city “one of the toughest places in the United States” for illegal immigrants.

In 2006, Barletta and the Hazelton City Council made it illegal for all illegal immigrants in the city to rent homes or work there. As the the Washington Post notes, the act also made English the city’s official language and banned employees from translating documents without authorization.

“I see illegal immigrants picking up and leaving — some Mexican restaurants say business is off 75 percent,” Barletta told the Post in 2006. “The message is out there.”

In July 2007, a Federal District court Judge struck down the ordinance, ruling that it interfered with federal laws on immigration and the due process of employers.

“Whatever frustrations officials of the City of Hazleton may feel about the current state of immigration enforcement, the nature of the political system in the United States prohibits the city from enacting ordinances that disrupt a carefully drawn federal statutory scheme,” Judge James M. Munley wrote in his ruling, reports the New York Times.

“I will not sit back because the federal government has refused to do its job,” Baretta vowed after the ruling. However, the ruling was upheld in 2010 by the U.S. Court of Appeals.

So yeah, a loud and virulent critic of "illegals" will almost certainly be offered the job of Labor Secretary.  His job will almost certainly be to justify measures to "clean up" the workforce.  Whether or not Trump and Barletta decide to take aim at employers who make billions every year by knowingly hiring undocumented workers and not paying taxes on them, well I wouldn't hold your breath on that.