Clinton aides kept tabs on anti-Trump elector gambit

Hillary Clinton’s top advisers never publicly backed an effort by Democrats on the Electoral College to block Donald Trump’s election. When it failed on Monday, one aide mocked it as an unserious “coup” attempt.

But a batch of correspondence obtained by POLITICO shows members of Clinton’s inner circle — including senior aides Jake Sullivan and Jennifer Palmieri — were in touch for weeks with one of the effort’s organizers as they mounted their ill-fated strategy. And despite repeated requests for guidance, Clinton’s team did not wave them off.

Call logs, emails and text messages reveal a Clinton campaign walking a tightrope — never fully endorsing the effort, but intentionally declining to stamp it out. The approach was comparable, one former campaign official said, to the campaign’s passive-but-not-dismissive response to long-shot recounts in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania.

White House rebuffed pre-election plan to combat Russian influence

The White House opposed a Republican-led push earlier this year to create an executive-branch task force to battle Russia’s covert information operations, according to a document obtained by POLITICO.

Sen. Tom Cotton, a leading GOP defense hawk who has long urged President Barack Obama to take a harder line on Russia, sought to force the White House to create a panel with representatives from a number of government agencies to counter Russian efforts “to exert covert influence,” including by exposing Russian “falsehoods, agents of influence, corruption, human rights abuses, terrorism, and assassinations.”

But the administration rejected the call, saying in a letter to Congress that hasn’t been released publicly that the panel would duplicate existing efforts to battle Russian influence operations — an argument Cotton rejects.

His proposed task force drew bipartisan support as part of a larger intelligence authorization bill that passed the House but never got a floor vote in the Senate. The panel would not have been set up in time to have had an impact on Russia’s role in last month’s presidential election — even if the intelligence bill had become law. But the Arkansas senator said in an interview the White House’s dismissal of his proposal is symptomatic of the administration’s lax pre-election attitude toward Russia.

Some Dems resist new Russia select committee

The bipartisan push for a special congressional committee to investigate Russian meddling in the election is running into a new hurdle: Senate Democrats.

Several members of the party, particularly those on the Intelligence Committee, are noncommittal about setting up a new select committee specifically devoted to cybersecurity that would also investigate Russian influence on the presidential election. Instead, some Democrats will wait to see whether Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr (R-N.C.) will follow through on his pledge to “expeditiously” investigate the electronic break-ins and preside over public hearings about the matter.

Democrats are also protecting their turf. Intelligence Committee members have little to gain right now by breaking with Burr, because they already have access to intelligence briefings that other members are hoping to get access to as part of a broader special panel. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Sens. Jack Reed of Rhode Island, John McCain of Arizona and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina are making a bipartisan push for a special select committee to tackle the Russia hacking — and cybersecurity more broadly.

That panel would, under one proposal, take key members from across the various committees with jurisdiction over cybersecurity and create one central clearinghouse for oversight over the Russia hackings as well as cyberthreats from other countries like North Korea and Iran. Schumer, Reed and McCain will all have access to the Intelligence Committee briefings regardless; Reed and McCain are “ex-officio” members of the committee and Schumer will get new intelligence briefings because he is leader of the Democrats.

Alaska lawmakers mull legislation to block Obama drilling ban

Congressional Republicans and their oil industry allies are gearing up to fight President Obama’s new bans on oil drilling in parts of the Arctic and Atlantic oceans.

Two Alaska lawmakers are exploring whether they should propose legislation to overturn Obama’s actions.

Spokesmen for Sen. Dan Sullivan and Rep. Don Young, both Alaska Republicans, said the lawmakers would consider proposing legislation to help President-elect Donald Trump overturn the bans if necessary.

The legislation could either authorize the president to undo any prior offshore protections, or simply overturn the specific bans from Obama.

“The Congressman believes this decision can be overturned by the incoming Administration and will be encouraging President Trump to do so. In addition, Congressman Young will also pursue legislation to overturn this decision,” said Matt Shuckerow, Young’s spokesman, told The Hill.

Trump wants appointments to ‘look the part’: report

President-elect Donald Trump is taking appearances into consideration as he crafts his administration, according to a new report.

Trump’s aides have accepted he may rule out candidates who do not satisfy his image of what represents particular roles, The Washington Post reported Wednesday.

“That’s the language he speaks,” said a source familiar with the Trump transition team’s internal deliberations. “He’s very aesthetic. You can come with somebody who is very much qualified for the job, but if they don’t look the part, they’re not going anywhere.”

A Trump transition spokesman said the president-elect considers how officials representing his administration will appear in public.
“Presentation is very important because you’re representing America not only on the national stage, but also the international stage depending on the position,” Jason Miller said.

..

Trump reportedly ruled out John Bolton for secretary of State in part due to the former United Nations ambassador’s distinctive white mustache.

“Donald was not going to like that mustache,” an anonymous Trump associate told the paper. “I can’t think of anyone that’s really close to Donald that has a beard that he likes.”

‘Brutal, amoral, ruthless, cheating’: how Trump’s new trade tsar sees China

The Chinese government is a despicable, parasitic, brutal, brass-knuckled, crass, callous, amoral, ruthless and totally totalitarian imperialist power that reigns over the world’s leading cancer factory, its most prolific propaganda mill and the biggest police state and prison on the face of the earth.

That is the view of Peter Navarro, the man chosen by Donald Trump to lead a new presidential office for US trade and industrial policy, a move likely to add to Beijing’s anxieties over the billionaire’s plans for US-China relations.

China’s rulers initially appeared to embrace the possibility that improved ties with Washington could be negotiated with the deal-making US president-elect.

“We must welcome him,” said one prominent foreign policy expert.

But that enthusiasm has dimmed after Trump angered Beijing with a succession of controversial interventions on sensitive issues including Taiwan and the South China Sea.

The appointment of Navarro, a University of California, Irvine business professor, to run the White House’s newly created national trade council, represents a further blow to those hopes.

Oracle executive publicly resigns after CEO joins Trump’s transition team

A senior executive at Oracle has publicly resigned after the technology company’s co-CEO Safra Catz joined the Trump transition team and expressed support for the president-elect.

Catz had attended last week’s meeting of tech leaders at Trump Tower in New York before accepting the position. Prior to the meeting, Catz said:

“I plan to tell the president-elect that we are with him and will help in any way we can. If he can reform the tax code, reduce regulation and negotiate better trade deals, the US technology industry will be stronger and more competitive than ever.”

George Polisner, 57, who had worked at Oracle on and off since 1993, posted his resignation letter to LinkedIn, outlining concerns over Trump’s choice of cabinet, tax and environmental policies as well as the stoking of fear and hatred towards minorities.

“I am not with President-elect Trump and I am not here to help him in any way,” he said in the post, which has been read more than 150,000 times. “In fact when his policies border on the unconstitutional, the criminal and the morally unjust I am here to oppose him in every possible and legal way. Therefore I must resign from this once great company.”

‘Mad Alex’: Donald Trump letters abuse Scottish ex-first minister

Donald Trump harangued the former first minister of Scotland as “Mad Alex” and accused him of being on a “march to oblivion” in a series of increasingly angry and eccentric letters about windfarms he claimed were blighting his Scottish golf courses.

The correspondence with Alex Salmond, revealed by the Huffington Post after a freedom of information request, demonstrated that Trump’s tone swung wildly between coaxing and threatening as he grew increasingly frustrated with his former ally’s refusal to change his policy on renewable energy.

Trump warned Salmond that his dream of Scottish independence would be “gone with the wind” if he continued to support windfarm developments, accusing the then leader of the Scottish National party of being “hellbent” on damaging Scotland’s coastline.

In 16 published letters, only one of which Salmond replied to, Trump went on to insist that his own motives were to “save Scotland” and “honour my mother”, who was born on the Isle of Lewis before emigrating to the US in her early 20s.

Referring to windfarms as “monsters”, the series of letters suggests Salmond “let them ruin the coastline of Sweden first”, declaring that “wind power doesn’t work” and warning him that “your economy will become a third world wasteland that investors will avoid”.

The Clintons turned the Democratic party over to donors. Can it recover?

Holy Rage: Lessons from Standing Rock

The snow-scoured hills and buttes of the Missouri Breaks are dotted with isolated houses, until the sudden appearance of the Oceti Sakowin encampment on the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation. The presence of so many people catches at the heart. Snow-dusted tepees, neon pup tents, dark-olive military tents, brightly painted metal campers, and round solid yurts shelter hundreds on the floodplain where the Cannonball River meets the Missouri. Flags of Native Nations whip in the cutting wind, each speaking of solidarity with the Standing Rock tribe’s opposition to the Dakota Access Pipeline, or D.A.P.L., owned by Energy Transfer Partners and Sunoco Logistics. This pipeline would pass beneath the Missouri River and imperil drinking water not only for the tribe but for farmers, ranchers, and townspeople all along the river’s course.

Oceti Sakowin, or Seven Fires, refers to the seven divisions of the Lakota, Dakota, and Nakota, people who are perhaps best known for their resistance to colonization (Little Big Horn, 1876), their suffering (Wounded Knee, 1890), and their activism (Wounded Knee, 1973). One of their most famous leaders, Sitting Bull, was murdered in the town that is now their tribal headquarters, Fort Yates. Down the road from Fort Yates is the town of Cannonball, named for the large round stones polished by the whirlpool that marked the convergence of the two rivers, just outside the Oceti Sakowin camp. The round stones disappeared when the Army Corps of Engineers dammed the Missouri, in a giant project that lasted from 1948 to 1962. The result of that project, Lake Oahe, flooded Standing Rock’s most life-giving land. The Lakota were forced onto the harshly exposed grazing uplands, and they haven’t forgotten that, or much else. History is a living force in the Lakota way of life. Each of the great events in their common destiny includes the direct experience of ancestors, whose names live on in their descendants. It is impossible to speak of what is now happening at Standing Rock without taking into account the history, as well as the intense spirituality, that underlies Seven Fires resistance.

Taking a stand at Standing Rock

As Gary Fergus rounded the bend on North Dakota Highway 1806, the teepees, flags and protest banners at Camp Oceti Sakowin came into view. Floodlights on the hill beyond the camp, shining through a darkening sky, gave him a chill. “It was a terrible feeling,” Fergus says. “Intimidating. Ominous.”

Fergus, a 12-year veteran of the Portland Fire & Rescue bureau, had driven across five states to deliver supplies and to work in support of those protesting the Dakota Access Pipeline, which was slated to cross the Missouri River near the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation. I spoke with Fergus around the wood stove in Rose’s Kitchen, a mess tent and popular gathering spot at the camp where we both stayed recently.

To Fergus, the floodlights and military vehicles brought to the site expressed a clear intent to intimidate those assembled. They were an enduring symbol of the expansive resources Energy Transfer Partners and law enforcement agencies would deploy to continue building the Dallas, Texas company’s Dakota Access Pipeline, in spite of growing concerns about the local water supply and the impact on Standing Rock’s sacred burial grounds.

Twenty years ago, Fergus picked up a Navajo hitchhiker. Their conversation brought the brutality of centuries of oppression into sharp focus for Fergus. When he asked the hitchhiker what he, a nonindigenous person, could do to make amends, the answer was somewhat dissatisfying. The hitchhiker encouraged Fergus to build his own awareness and understanding, and to avoid perpetuating oppressive behavior. But he felt that fighting oppression was a struggle primarily for American Indians. For two decades, Fergus felt there wasn’t much he could do.

This year, when the indigenous owner of Bison Coffeehouse in Northeast Portland told him about the standoff at Standing Rock, Fergus knew the time to act finally had arrived.

“The attack dogs, the rubber bullets, the water cannons, they brought the confrontation to another level,” Fergus says.

11 Charts That Show Income Inequality Isn’t Getting Better Anytime Soon

It’s no secret that the United States has a glaring—and growing—problem with inequality. The Great Recession made things worse, and the recent economic recovery remains uneven, and unevenly distributed. Families in the bottom 99 percent of households have recovered just 60 percent of their income losses from the economic slump, according to a recent analysis of tax data by University of California-Berkeley economist Emmanuel Saez.

Meanwhile, the superrich keep getting richer: The average family in the top 1 percent of earners makes 40 times more than the average family in the bottom 90 percent of households. Families in the top 0.01 percent—the 1 percent of the 1 percent—make, on average, a whopping 198 times more than those in the bottom 90 percent, according to Saez and fellow economist Thomas Piketty’s data.

It’s no wonder, then, that despite millions of jobs being added under President Barack Obama and an economy that looks good on paper, many voters who felt left out of the recovery turned out for Donald Trump. “An economy that fails to deliver growth for half of its people for an entire generation is bound to generate discontent with the status quo and a rejection of establishment politics,” Saez, Piketty, and fellow economist Gabriel Zucman recently wrote in a post for the Washington Center for Equitable Growth. Trump tapped into that discontent—now we’ll see if he and his billionaire-packed Cabinet can recover those decades of lost prosperity for most Americans.

Here’s a closer look at the current state of income and wealth inequality:

How Liberals Can Use the Tea Party Playbook to Stop Trump

Since the election, progressives have been huddling on social media to plan ways to stymie, if not stop, President-elect Donald Trump. Last week, new inspiration came in the form of a link leading to a 23-page Google document titled “Indivisible: A Practical Guide for Resisting the Trump Agenda.” In clear, confident prose, it lays out a well-reasoned, step-by-step strategy for building a grassroots movement to challenge Trump and his Republican allies in Congress. And it openly acknowledges that its playbook is cribbed from a surprising source: the tea party.

The guide was put together as a side project of a largely anonymous group of former Democratic congressional staffers who sought to help fellow progressives do something more constructive than signing online petitions. “Hill staffers don’t have a lot of skills—that’s why so many become lobbyists,” explains 31-year-old Ezra Levin, the collaboration’s unofficial spokesman, whose day job is at an anti-poverty think tank. “The one thing that we have is knowledge of how Congress works.”

Some of that knowledge was earned the hard way. “We know what worked when we were in Congress. We saw the tea party adopt a very effective strategy that effectively slowed down Congress and defeated many progressive priorities,” says Levin, who previously worked as deputy policy director for Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-Texas). “Indivisible” explains how the tea party did it, and how progressives can do the same—without the vitriol. (“The Tea Party’s ideas were wrong and their behavior was often horrible,” it states. “We are better than this.”) The guide explains how to effectively pressure lawmakers—exploiting their political self-interest to get them to do the right thing—or at least not do the wrong thing.

 Why the Green Party Continues to Demand Presidential Recounts

P residential recounts are not about changing election results. At least, that is not their primary purpose. At their core, recounts are about ensuring confidence in the integrity of the voting system.

ADVERTISING

ADVERTISING

It is unfortunate, if not all that surprising, that the two largest corporate-controlled political parties have chosen to stand in the way of these grassroots-demanded recounts—in the case of Republicans, actively blocking them in the courts; in the case of Democrats, capitulating in their refusal to push for them. In an election marked by so many irregularities, public distrust and outright evidence of hacking, Americans deserve to know now more than ever that the election was accurate and secure.

That is the ultimate goal of this and every recount: to restore confidence in our elections and trust in our democracy.