Thank you for everything. My last ask is the same as my first. I'm asking you to believe—not in my ability to create change, but in yours.
This week's featured posts are "Farewell, Mr. President" and "Trump's Toothless Plan to Avoid Conflicts of Interest". In honor of Martin Luther King's birthday, I want to point to an older Sift post "MLK: Sanitized for Their Protection", where I attempt to recapture the often-suppressed radical side of King.
This week everybody was talking about the Trump dossier
Part of Trump's briefing from the intelligence services included a two-page summary of a longer document (neither of which was endorsed as true by the intel people) listing alleged dirt that the Russians have on Trump. Buzzfeed somehow got hold of that longer document and published it, filling the airwaves with vague allusions to sexual practices you can't talk about on TV.
Nobody who has commented (other than Trump himself, of course) actually knows whether any of this is true, and the major media outlets, in my judgment, are doing a good job of saying that at regular intervals.
I would feel sorry for any person this happened to, if he or she had maintained any standards of decorum in talking about others. But these are exactly the kinds of unsupported rumors Trump has been trafficking in for years. So this is more a case of what-goes-around-comes-around or they-that-touch-pitch-will-be-defiled.
That said, the claims aren't well-supported enough to figure in my thinking, and probably shouldn't figure in yours either. The proper use of them, at this point, is in jokes that needle Trump and his supporters. If they complain, you might remind them what it was like to listen to years of jokes about Obama and Kenya, or to see "humorous" images of the Obamas as monkeys.
The point of including the summary in the briefing, I suspect, is that Trump publicly resists the conclusion that the Russians were trying to help him win. But it's hard to avoid that conclusion if the Russians had dirt on both candidates and only released what they had on Hillary. (He continues to deny that. Wednesday he said: "I think, frankly, had they broken into the Republican National Committee, I think they would’ve released it just like they did about Hillary.") If Trump recognized anything in the document as true, the point was made.
and his plan to deal with conflicts of interest
I broke that out into its own article.
and Obama's farewell speech
Also its own article, part of my retrospective on the Obama years.
and Senate hearings on the cabinet nominees
Like everybody else, I'm not paying the kind of attention to the nominees that they deserve. I didn't eight years ago, either, but that was different. My whole response to Steven Chu was something like: "A Nobel winner as secretary of energy. Cool." But Jeff Sessions' history on race, or Exxon-Mobil's takeover of the State Department -- these seem to deserve more thought.
The Christian Science Monitor bends over backwards not to condemn Sessions, but there's still plenty there to set your teeth on edge. It quotes an SMU professor saying, "But he’s not evidently a mean-spirited guy. He has a narrow view, but not necessarily a mean view." That's a pretty low bar for an attorney general: He may not protect minority rights, but at least he won't be screwing them out of spite.
And Tillerson will be making decisions about sanctions against Russia that have cost his former company more than $1 billion, by some reports.
And Ben Carson, well, we already know he's a loon. I stand by my judgment in 2015 that he would be an even scarier president than Trump. In his confirmation hearings, he used the phrase "extra rights" when asked about LGBT rights in public housing. In 2014, he used that same phrase about same-sex marriage: Gay people don't get the "extra right" to redefine marriage.
I'm sure I'll have the occasion to say this many times, but I might as well start now: It's invariably conservatives who are claiming "extra rights" or "special rights". Same-sex marriage is a great example of that: Until recently, marrying the person you love was something only straight people could do. That's a special right. Carson is complaining because gay people got the same rights he has. He exemplifies the right-wing-Christian sense of entitlement; they view their own rights as natural, and everybody else's as "special".
and ObamaCare
The Senate approved a budget blueprint that would be the first step towards repealing ObamaCare through a filibuster-proof process called "reconciliation". Several Republican senators have expressed reservations about repealing ObamaCare without even having a replacement proposal written, but only Rand Paul abstained from the final vote. If the rest are going to buck the leadership on this, they'll have to do it at a later stage. For now, they're staying in line.
If any of you live in places like Maine (Susan Collins) or Tennessee (Lamar Alexander and Bob Corker) or Ohio (Rob Portman), you might want to give your wavering senator a call. They're in a difficult political situation, and pressure either way might make a difference. On the one hand, they don't want a primary opponent to say, "Senator X kept us from repealing ObamaCare." On the other, they don't want a general election opponent to say, "Senator X took your health care away." But it's shaping up to be one or the other.
In a 60 Minutes interview shortly after the election, Trump said this about ObamaCare.
Stahl: And there’s going to be a period if you repeal it and before you replace it, when millions of people could lose -– no?
Trump: No, we’re going to do it simultaneously. It’ll be just fine. We’re not going to have, like, a two-day period and we’re not going to have a two-year period where there’s nothing. It will be repealed and replaced. And we’ll know. And it’ll be great healthcare for much less money. So it’ll be better healthcare, much better, for less money. Not a bad combination.
It's worth noting that as Congress moves towards repealing (and not replacing) ObamaCare, he still hasn't said anything more substantive or constructive: Provide better healthcare, great healthcare, for less money. Do it immediately. At his press conference Wednesday, Trump did what he so often does: promised something in the future that there's no reason he couldn't deliver now, if he had it.
As soon as [HHS Secretary Tom Price] is approved and gets into the office, we’ll be filing a plan.
I don't know what is going to happen, but I guarantee you it won't be better healthcare for less money, immediately. And Trump will blame Congress, rather than take any responsibility for not offering a plan of his own. I continue to wonder whether Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell understand what they've gotten themselves into.
and you might also be interested in
Part of the ongoing project to understand Trump voters: Read "We have always been at war with Eastasia" by Michael Arnovitz. He's addressing the way that conservative voters' opinions can turn on a dime when the partisan winds shift: Putin and WikiLeaks are popular now. Protectionism is suddenly a good thing. There's no need to drain the swamp, and we'll see if anybody still cares about deficits when Trump runs one.
Arnovitz postulates that liberals and conservatives frame the partisan battle differently. Liberals believe that we're contesting with conservatives over policy: The winner gets to decide whether we get national health care or free college, which are the really important things.
But conservatives view policy arguments as battles in the larger war against liberals. This is essentially a religious battle for the soul of America, and Russia or taxes or deficits are secondary.
BTW: In case it's been a long time since you read 1984, the title refers to the moment when Oceania suddenly shifts its alliance from Eastasia to Eurasia. Eastasia, the former ally, is now the enemy -- but no one is allowed to point that out. Instead of explaining the change, Oceania just alters history to claim that it was always at war with Eastasia.
On the Moyers & Company site, Neal Gabler writes about progressives going through the stages of grief about Trump's election. I kind of get his point: You start out saying "This isn't happening", then get angry, and so on from there. But then he makes it clear that he doesn't really understand the stages of grief:
The last stage of grief is acceptance, and one thing I do know: It is imperative that anyone who thinks of Trump’s election as perhaps the single greatest catastrophe in American political history must never reach that stage.
No, actually it's imperative that we do get to acceptance. Acceptance isn't an aw-fukkit attitude. It's not resignation. It just means that you stop arguing that the world isn't the way it is, or that the world owes you something for being the way it is. If you don't get there, your actions have a brittleness or desperation that undermines your effectiveness.
Resignation means not just that you accept the present, but that you're not going to try to change to future either. That's where you should never let yourself get. (I talked about this at length recently.)
Trump will become president Friday. That's bad, but the badness of it doesn't change the fact. We've got work to do if we want to the future to be better.
and let's close with a modern sorcerer's apprentice moment
So Amazon's Alexa personal assistant is default-set to allow you to voice-order products from Amazon. But what if it misinterprets something you say as an order, or recognizes somebody else's voice -- maybe a voice on the TV -- as yours?
Channel 6 in San Diego admits that happened. Its news anchors were talking about an incident where a little girl ordered a dollhouse and four pounds of cookies, when one of them said:
I love the little girl, saying "Alexa ordered me a dollhouse."
All over San Diego, Amazon devices heard somebody say "Alexa, order me a dollhouse".
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