The December 29, 2016 Thread

A new Economist/YouGov survey finds that nearly half of all Donald Trump voters believe a widely debunked conspiracy theory claiming that Hillary Clinton is involved in a child sex ring run out of a popular Washington, D.C. pizzeria.

Partisanship is a helluva drug.

Philippines Duterte: I threw suspect from helicopter https://t.co/7of49lyJTu

— BBC News (World) (@BBCWorld) December 29, 2016

President-elect Donald Trump distanced himself “from the Obama administration’s plans to punish Russia for its alleged interference in the 2016 presidential election,” the Washington Post reports.

Said Trump: “I think we ought to get on with our lives. I think that computers have complicated lives very greatly. The whole age of the computer has made it where nobody knows exactly what’s going on. We have speed, we have a lot of other things, but I’m not sure we have the kind of security we need.”

This guy makes George W. Bush look like a genius.

Labor Secretary Tom Perez said that it was unlawful for the Trump transition team to request the names of individual staffers employed at government agencies like the Energy Department, CBS News reported Tuesday. “Those questions have no place in a transition,” Perez said, according to CBS. “That is illegal.”

“Will dedicated career people be targeted because they were doing the right work?” he added. Perez is one of the main candidates for the DNC Chair, along with Congressman Keith Ellison.

Secretary of State John Kerry accused Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel “of thwarting peace in the Middle East, speaking with a clarity and harshness almost never heard from American diplomats when discussing one of their closest and strongest allies,” the New York Times reports.

“With only 23 days left in his four-year turn as secretary of state, during which he made the search for peace in the Middle East one of his driving missions, Mr. Kerry said the Israeli government was undermining any hope of a two-state solution to its decades-long conflict with the Palestinians.”

Wall Street Journal: “Mr. Kerry’s decision to deliver a broad, hard-hitting speech on the Middle East just three weeks before leaving office reflected the frustration many in the administration say they feel about the failure of peace efforts and the accusation by Israel and some of its Washington allies that President Barack Obama hasn’t been a loyal friend.”

Israel has made the two state solution now realistically impossible due to the illegal settlements in the West Bank. Thus there can only be a one state solution: Israel with both Jewish Israelis, Arab Israelis and Palestinians as residents and citizens. If Israel denies the full rights of citizenship (including voting rights) to the Palestinians and Arab citizens residing within its borders (now including the whole of the West Bank), that means it is a discriminatory Apartheid state that must be opposed by the whole world. Good job Israelis.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi accused Republicans of attempting a “power grab” to snuff out free speech on the House floor with their controversial new rules package, Politico reports.

“Democrats say the proposed fines, a response to their gun control sit-in over the summer, is an unprecedented breach of decorum. And some experts have questioned the constitutionality of such a move, which House members are expected to approve as part of a broader rules package in early January.”

Politico further says the Ryan Rules Package may be unconstitutional: “Paul Ryan’s new crackdown against protests on the House floor — a direct response to the Democrats’ gun-control ‘sit-in’ last summer — is prompting questions from experts in both parties about its constitutionality. As part of a House rules package members will vote to approve in early January, House GOP leaders want to empower the sergeant-at-arms to fine lawmakers up to $2,500 for shooting video or taking photos on the chamber floor. But experts say Ryan’s proposal may run afoul of Article 1 of the Constitution, which says ‘each House may … punish its Members for disorderly behavior.’

“For more than 200 years that has been interpreted to mean any contested sanctions against lawmakers must be approved by the full House with a floor vote, attorneys steeped in congressional legal matters say.”

So Trump's team hears "hatred," "tribalism," "demonize those who are different," and they think, 'that's us!" https://t.co/9fdp3Nc0RA pic.twitter.com/ixrRRaVbRB

— Jonathan Chait (@jonathanchait) December 29, 2016

Politico says Obama is getting under Trump’s skin: “Donald Trump can’t decide whether he thinks the transition of power is going well or not. But he knows he doesn’t like how much attention Barack Obama is getting and is also bothered by what Trump and his closest advisers see as an active effort to poke the president-elect and undermine the incoming administration with last-minute policy changes on his way out of office, according to two people close to the transition.”

“And the relationship is likely to get worse in the three weeks until the inauguration: Obama is scheduled to give a farewell address Jan. 10 that is expected to be a recounting of his successes and an inherent contrast with Trump and the administration is rushing to make public a report on Russian hacking during the election that intelligence officials say was done to help Trump, though the president-elect has disputed that entirely.”

Two of Broadway's best helped us wrap up 2016. Thanks @JennaUshkowitz & @jamesmiglehart for being #AlwaysNewYork pic.twitter.com/5AmZtMdjQe

— Bill de Blasio (@NYCMayor) December 27, 2016

South Carolina Rep. Chris Corley (R), who rebuked his colleagues in a Christmas card for lacking morals when they took down the Confederate flag, is accused of beating his wife and pointing a gun at her, the AP reports.

Officers charged Corley “with a pair of felonies that could send him to prison for up to 15 years after he attacked his wife during an argument over infidelity… The couple’s young children were in the home, and the wife took the family to her mother’s house across the street after Corley threatened to kill her, pointed a gun at her, then said he would kill himself.”

Ehud Barak says majority of Israelis agree with Kerry's speech https://t.co/8oE7RdIRLW

— Peter Beinart (@PeterBeinart) December 29, 2016

Gallup: “Americans are most likely to name President Obama as the man they admire most in 2016. Twenty-two percent mentioned Obama in response to the open-ended question. President-elect Donald Trump was second at 15%. It is Obama’s ninth consecutive win, but the seven-percentage-point margin this year is his narrowest victory yet.”

We should all be spending more time listening to Hungarians https://t.co/9VICEN5Bxd

— Christopher Hayes (@chrislhayes) December 29, 2016

E.J. Dionne Jr. at The Washington Post talks about the good that could come from a Trump presidency:

Gloom is a terrible way to ring out the old, and despair is of no help in trying to imagine the new.

So let us consider what good might come from the political situation in which we will find ourselves in 2017. Doing this does not require denying the dangers posed by a Donald Trump presidency or the demolition of progressive achievements he could oversee. It does mean remembering an important distinction President Obama has made ever since he entered public life: that “hope is not blind optimism.”

“Hope,” he argued, “is that thing inside us that insists, despite all evidence to the contrary, that something better awaits us if we have the courage to reach for it, and to work for it, and to fight for it.”

It is this spirit that began to take hold almost immediately after Trump’s election. Americans in large numbers, particularly the young, quickly realized that the coming months and years will require new and creative forms of political witness and organization.

@tparsi @JayCaruso Inthink Netanyahu just wants to distract from this https://t.co/QDP0SMcxcD

— Todd Holland (@JthollandWingo) December 28, 2016

Jeet Heer at The New Republic says Trump’s Call for a Nuclear Arms Race Isn’t a Warning to Putin. It’s an Invitation:

Much has changed since 1987. The Soviet Union is no more, and its successor state, Russia, is a diminished global power. But Trump’s vision of the world has remained strikingly static. In the ’80s, as now, he sees the U.S. and Russia as status quo powers beset by turbulent upstart nations, and thus, as having essentially similar goals. Writing in Quartz, the journalist Sarah Kendzior argued such a friendship could lead to “the new mutually assured destruction: the two states with the most nuclear weapons in the world, both backed by authoritarian leaders, may be partnering against as-yet unknown shared enemies.”

A U.S.-Russian alliance, with both nations building up their nuclear stockpiles and intimidating emerging powers, has a certain superficial coherence. But in practice, it would be nearly impossible to execute. Putin doesn’t have the same list of major foes as Trump does. In Syria, they do seem to agree about the need to bolster the dictatorship of President Bashar al-Assad to end the civil war there. But on Iran, Putin supports the nuclear deal that Trump and his team seem eager to challenge, if not rip apart.

Since 2014, Putin has worked vigorously to improve Russia’s ties to China, leading to increased trade and military co-operation; Trump is flirting with a trade war with China. While Putin might be happy to work with a more amenable U.S. administration, there’s little reason to think he’s would join an American alliance against China. As a practical matter, Russia’s ambitions are clearly directed towards regaining a sphere of influence in central Europe and the Middle East.