America's Last Journalist, Greg Palast, informs us that the state of Michigan shut down its Presidential recount without counting over 75,000 ballots, mostly from Flint and Detroit. Mr. Trump's margin of victory there, naturally, was under 11,000 votes, and though poor optical scanners seem to be a major culprit, the state still wants you to believe that tens of thousands of folks waited in line all day to vote for everyone but President -- particularly in a year without a gubernatorial or Senatorial race in Michigan! This is what we get when we only get a choice between rabid Republicans and weak Democrats. It's well past time to make this choice moot, of course, by incessantly communicating our will to our Representatives regardless of their party (and this document, which we'll discuss further in the near future, provides some good advice on how to do that).
President Obama informs Senate Intelligence Committee Vice Chair Sen. Feinstein that he'll include the Senate torture report among his Presidential records, but won't declassify it so the public can see it. Thus it'll take a dozen more years for the report to become public, though the pro-torture Donald Trump becomes President in a little over a month, and will, we presume, be out of office by the time this torture report becomes public, at which point the Senate may have done an entirely new investigation into torture committed by a Trump Administration. Don't worry, though: by that time, Senate Democrats, however many of them are left, will still be preaching caution and patience.
Lisa Graves at PR Watch informs us that Exxon CEO/Secretary of State nominee Rex Tillerson has been actively engaged in misleading the public about the ill effects of climate change. None of it will surprise you, and if you're hoping against hope that the incoming administration will embrace an "all-of-the-above" energy policy, note well that Mr. Tillerson blocked a shareholder resolution expressing a desire to expand Exxon's investment in alternative energy sources. You'd think a big corporation like Exxon could help us move toward a renewable energy grid a lot faster, given all its money. I guess they don't because solar and wind power don't translate as easily to absurdly high executive pay as oil and coal do.
Uh oh: a 2010 military investigation found that then-Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, Mr. Trump's nominee for National Security Advisor, "inappropriately shared" classified info with foreign military personnel in Afghanistan -- after telling the world at the Republican convention that if he did "a tenth" of what Hillary Clinton did, he'd be "in jail." He appears to have done at least a tenth of it, but with the Fuck-You-I-Won Administration about to take power, even those Republicans inclined to complain about Mr. Flynn's mistakes will likely be silent.
The Hill notes the many relatively inflexible deadlines Republicans will face as they take complete control of our federal government early next year. All of which will be, for Republicans, "opportunities" to ram through their extraordinarily backward and unpopular agenda -- starting with the national debt limit on March 16. And it's absurd to think "Republicans having to negotiate with Donald Trump this time" will be a factor, since they're not going to be negotiating so much as they're collaborating. Still, go ahead and read the article; just don't be tempted to try to game everything out -- CHIP reauthorization, for example, should happen because it's a good program that does good things and because good Americans demand it, not because it fits neatly into someone's 13-dimensional chess game.
Finally, Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas advises us to "Be Happy for Coal Miners Losing Their Health Insurance" because "That's Exactly What They Voted For." This is cruel for many, many reasons, which Jim Naureckas at FAIR dutifully tabulates, but there's one other thing: voting is not the end-all-be-all of democracy -- in a democracy, those who voted for Mr. Trump are perfectly free to call and write their Reps and express their will that their health care not get cut off, and they are also free to organize and agitate toward ensuring their representatives (and their President) do their will. That Mr. Moulitsas doesn't think of it that way makes me think he's become part of the "liberal" media establishment or something.
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