Dec. 11 Open Thread: Plenty of Coal This Christmas

In news that will seem much more important years down the line than it does now, a global climate confab is being held in Poland, the climate-denier capital of Europe, where the U.S. pushed for increased use of coal, to outright laughter from nations without fossil fuels to peddle.

Gabriel Sherman has the scoop on the John Kelly firing/Nick Ayers embarrassment. No surprises: Trump finally had it with Kelly, apparently because Kelly’s bad-mouthing got back to him, and blurted out Kelly’s imminent departure before the i’s were dotted with Ayers. More interesting is the detail that Ayers, who’s in his mid-30s, has made millions of dollars plying his secretive trade, and didn’t like the prospect of the press scrutinizing where it came from.

The media is treating the court documents released last Friday as their own Emancipation Proclamation. Pundits are no longer pulling punches with for the simple reason that they can’t be sued for reporting what’s in court documents. This leaves them unchained to speculate on the end game. Michelle Goldberg points out that Trump will run for re-election like his freedom depends on it, for the simple reason that it probably does. If a president can’t be indicted, and Trump wins re-election, the statute of limitations on his illegal hush-money payouts will run out while he’s in office.

Trump meets today with Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi, purportedly about his border wall. With the midterms behind him, at least he’s begun drawing down the military troops that were being used as campaign props.