December 7, 2016
December 6, 2016
Carson as HUD Pick Is New Sign Trump Plans to Govern From the Right
Carson gets the nod as housing secretary
Donald Trump’s transition team announced on Monday that former presidential candidate Ben Carson had been nominated as housing secretary. “Ben shares my optimism about the future of our country and is part of ensuring that this is a presidency representing all Americans,” the president-elect said in the statement. Carson had previously removed himself from the running for a cabinet position after his spokesperson said that he did not feel qualified to run a federal agency.
NY TIMES
TRUMP CHALLENGES CHINA WITH CALL TO TAIWAN
Trump aides: of course he knows about ‘one China’ policy
Aides and surrogates of President-elect Donald Trump were in damage control mode on Sunday as they attempted to calm nerves over a rift with China due to Trump’s unprecedented call with Taiwan’s president. Trump’s call was the first from a president or president-elect since 1979, when America adopted its so-called one-China policy. Vice President-elect Mike Pence downplayed the incident on several television shows on Sunday, while Kellyanne Conway told Fox that Trump was well aware of the one-China policy. On Sunday, Trump railed against China on Twitter: “Did China ask us if it was OK to devalue their currency (making it hard for our companies to compete), heavily tax our products going into their country (the US doesn’t tax them) or to build a massive military complex in the middle of the South China Sea?” he tweeted. “I don’t think so!”
WASHINGTON POST
December 5, 2016
December 4, 2016
Trump over performed the most in counties with the highest drug, alcohol and suicide mortality rates
WASHINGTON POST
A new study from Penn State University suggests a relationship between the opioid epidemic and support for Donald Trump.
The president-elect performed better than Mitt Romney in many places, but he fared best compared to the Republican nominee four years ago in the counties with the highest drug, alcohol and suicide mortality rates.
Shannon M. Monnat, an assistant professor of rural sociology and demography, created a data set with numbers from 3,106 counties. She found this trend to be true nationally but especially so in two regions: In the industrial Midwest, which is how academics refer to the Rust Belt, Trump ran ahead of Romney by an average of 16.7 percent in the quarter of counties with the highest mortality, compared to 8.1 percent in the lowest quartile. In New England, Trump did worse than Romney by an average of 3.1 percent in the lowest mortality counties but better than the former Massachusetts governor by an average of 10 percent in the highest mortality counties.
-- Overdoses, alcoholism and suicide are known by experts collectively as “the diseases of despair.” People often (but not always) turn to pills, syringes, the bottle and other self-destructive behaviors when they lose hope, when they don’t have the means to live comfortably or when they don’t get the dignity that comes from work.
It is intuitive that the least economically distressed counties also tend to have the lowest mortality rates, and vice versa. In this way, alcoholism, overdoses and suicide are symptoms of the deeper social decay that was caused by deindustrialization. This decay led to the fears and anxieties which Trump so effectively capitalized on.
-- This really ought to be one of the biggest storylines that everyone takes away from 2016. One big reason that elites along the Acela Corridor were so caught off guard by Trump’s victory is that they’re so insulated from the stomach-churning scourge of addiction and cycle of brokenness. Washington has never been richer or further removed from the pain of everyday Americans, as Hillary Clinton called them in the video announcing her candidacy. Trump’s solutions may not actually help the “the forgotten man” that he talked so much about on the stump. In fact, his administration may very well push policies that ultimately only add to their pain. The tax cuts he wants will disproportionately benefit the most affluent people in the bluest states, for example. But the system has failed them. Trump promised to blow it up; Clinton represented more of the same.
December 2, 2016
TRUMP'S LATEST APPT'S & SIMILARITY W/BERLUSCONI IN ITALY.
- At a rally in Ohio, Donald J. Trump announced his selection of James N. Mattis to be secretary of defense, calling him “the closest thing we have to Gen. George Patton.”
- General Mattis once led the U.S. Central Command, but his tour was cut short by the Obama administration, which believed he was too hawkish on Iran.
Trump’s Potential Conflicts Have a Precedent: Berlusconi’s Italy
By JAMES B. STEWART
As prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi kept majority ownership in his businesses. Scandals ensued as those businesses profited and his fortune grew.
With Wednesday’s nomination of Steven Mnuchin, a Goldman trader turned hedge fund manager and Hollywood financier, to be Treasury secretary, a new economic leadership is taking shape in Washington.
Mr. Mnuchin will join Wilbur L. Ross Jr., a billionaire investor in distressed assets, who has been chosen to run the Commerce Department, and Todd Ricketts, owner of the Chicago Cubs, who has been picked to be deputy commerce secretary. All are superwealthy and to be overseen by the first billionaire president in United States history.
That two investors — Mr. Mnuchin and Mr. Ross — will occupy two major economic positions in the new administration is the most powerful signal yet that Mr. Trump plans to emphasize policies friendly to Wall Street, like tax cuts and a relaxation of regulation, in the early days of his administration.
While that approach has been cheered by investors (the stocks of Bank of America, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley have been on a tear since the election), it stands in stark contrast to the populist campaign that Mr. Trump ran and the support he received from working-class voters across the country.
So far, none of the nominees who will be shaping economic policy have any significant experience in government.
November 30, 2016
Trump makes jobs deal with Carrier
Carrier Corporation announced on Tuesday that it will keep nearly 1,000 jobs in Indiana that had been set to be moved to Mexico, after it came to a deal with Trump. The air-conditioning company announced on Twitter that it had to an agreement with the president-elect and Vice-President-elect Mike Pence, Indiana’s governor, and they will appear at Carrier’s Indiana factory to announce details of the deal on Thursday. Carrier came under the spotlight in February after a video of the company’s management announcing its plans to shut down two factories that employed 2,100 people and move them to Mexico went viral. Trump made the company a running theme throughout his campaign, which emphasized his promise to fight trade deals and prevent jobs leaving the country.
EXPERTS JOIN RECOUNT SUIT / OPPONENT OF OBAMACARE CHOSEN AS HLTH SEC.
Experts join Stein’s recount suit
Security experts have joined Jill Stein’s effort to force the state of Wisconsin to conduct a recount of the votes in that state by hand. Amid fears that there may have been foreign tampering with electronic voting systems, half a dozen academics and experts joined the suit to testify that recounting by hand would produce a “more correct result and change the outcome of the election,” the suit said.
The Green party presidential candidate has led a campaign, backed by crowdsourced fundraising, to have the votes in the crucial states of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania recounted amid fears that electronic voting may have fallen victim to foreign tampering. Her campaign faced several roadblocks since she filed the first call for a recount in Wisconsin on Friday, as she may have missed the deadline for a recount in several counties in Pennsylvania and the state of Wisconsin is requesting $3.5m, more than the originally estimated $1m, by the end of Tuesday.
Security experts join Jill Stein’s ‘election changing’ recount campaign
Trump picks health secretary
Donald Trump has chosen a prominent critic of Obamacare as his secretary of health and human services, casting fresh doubt over the future of the Affordable Care Act. Congressman Tom Price of Georgia, an orthopedic surgeon who has long been a leading congressional voice in opposition to Barack Obama’s healthcare reform legislation, was confirmed on Tuesday as the president-elect’s pick.
November 29, 2016
November 27, 2016
ON RECOUNTS AND FAKE NEWS
The Green Party's presidential candidate, Jill Stein, is raising an impressive sum to ask for a recount in three states — Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. The $4.6 million she's raised so far is more than a million dollars more than she raised during her entire presidential campaign.
The reasons she wants a recount are kind of unclear; Stein has appeared to suggest the election may have been "hack-friendly."
Don't expect any recount (if it happens) to change who our 45th president is. It is true if Hillary Clinton won Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — and all other results held — she would be our next president. (The electoral vote count would go from 306 Donald Trump-232 Clinton to 278 Clinton-260 Trump.)
WASHINGTON POST
WASHINGTON POST
| By Amber Phillips |
Happy Leftovers Day!
As I write this, all is (relatively*) quiet in the political world. (* Relatively, given that we're still less than three weeks past one of the most epic political upsets in modern memory.) Let's run down the three biggest political news stories right now.
1. A last-ditch recount
Green Patry presidential candidate Jill Stein speaks to pro-Bernie Sanders supporters outside City Hall in Philadelphia in July. (Michael Robinson Chavez/The Washington Post)
The Green Party's presidential candidate, Jill Stein, is raising an impressive sum to ask for a recount in three states — Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. The $4.6 million she's raised so far is more than a million dollars more than she raised during her entire presidential campaign.
The reasons she wants a recount are kind of unclear; Stein has appeared to suggest the election may have been "hack-friendly."
Don't expect any recount (if it happens) to change who our 45th president is. It is true if Hillary Clinton won Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — and all other results held — she would be our next president. (The electoral vote count would go from 306 Donald Trump-232 Clinton to 278 Clinton-260 Trump.)
But there's no guarantee more votes for Clinton is what these recounts would find, because there's no evidence the votes were counted wrong in the first place. As Philip Bump and I explained earlier this year, it's virtually impossible to hack our actual voting system, and that seems to be what Stein is suggesting happened.
It's safe to conclude the support for a Green Party recount effort is less a reflection of support for the Green Party and more a reflection of something much broader — dissatisfaction with who actually won the presidential election. But not even a buzzy recount is likely to change those results.
More disturbing news about fake news. The Post's Craig Timberg reports that the flood of fake news got a boost during the campaign from Russia. Specifically, a Russian propaganda arm created and spread misleading articles online to make Clinton look bad, make Trump look good and generally undermine faith in our democracy.
Timberg:
How widespread was this? An independent research investigation on fake news estimates these Russian-promoted articles were seen on social media more than 213 million times throughout the campaign. (For reference, in The Washington Post's record-breaking October, nearly 100 million visitors came to our site.)
WASHINGTON POST |
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