DEAR WASHINGTON POST: YOU KNOW THIS HEADLINE IS PRO-TRUMP PROPAGANDA, RIGHT?

The Washington Post has done a pretty good job dealing with Donald Trump -- certainly better than The New York Times or CNN -- but this headline suggests that even at the Post there's been some sipping of the Trump Kool-Aid:

After meeting with Trump, Boeing CEO relents on cost of Air Force One

Did that actually happen? Let's look at the story:

“Cancel [the] order!” Donald Trump, the incoming president of the United States, tweeted ominously about a contract with Boeing to build Air Force One, the state-of-the-art airplanes he and future presidents will rely on.

It took a matter of hours for Boeing chief executive Dennis Muilenburg to get on the phone with the president-elect and smooth things over. On Wednesday, two weeks after the kerfuffle, he made his way south to Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida to meet face to face.

Trump had slapped a $4 billion price tag on the program to build two more of the next generation of planes and he had pronounced it a waste.

Analysts said that while the Air Force had budgeted $2.7 billion for the Air Force One program, the costs would likely grow to about $4 billion after the planes were actually manufactured. The planes are expected to be operational by the mid-2020s.

Actually, Trump's December 6 tweet projected the cost as more than $4 billion. PolitiFact came up with an estimate of $3.73 billion.

The Air Force has published a budgetary document that says research, development, testing and evaluation of the new Air Force Ones -- officially known as the Presidential Aircraft Recapitalization -- will cost $2.87 billion between fiscal years 2015 and 2021. However, the project is expected to extend beyond 2021, and experts told PolitiFact it would likely require another $1 billion in subsequent years to finish the job. The Teal Group has estimated that the project will require an additional $858 million between fiscal years 2022 and 2026.

That adds up to a grand total of $3.73 billion over 12 years. That’s not "more than $4 billion," as Trump said....

So back to the Post story. Was there actually any relenting on Boeing's part?

... after his meeting with Trump on Wednesday, Muilenburg faced the media, hat in hand, so to speak.

“We’re all focused on the same thing here, we’re going to make sure that we give our war fighters the best capability in the world and that we do it in a way that is affordable for our taxpayers,” Muilenburg said. “And his business head set around that is excellent. It was a terrific conversation. Got a lot of respect for him. He’s a good man. And he’s doing the right thing.”

As for that $4 billion price tag, Muilenburg promised taxpayers would get a break -- though by the time the contract is finished and the planes are flying, Trump is not likely to be still in office.

“We’re going to get it done for less than that, and we’re committed to working together to make sure that happens,” he said. “And I was able to give the president-elect my personal commitment on behalf of the Boeing Company.”

So let's sum up: No one at Boeing ever said the cost would be $4 billion. The budget is $2.7 billion. Experts have persuaded PolitiFact that the cost will be just under $4 billion. And Muilenberg has promised that the cost will be ... under $4 billion.

So for all we know, Muilenberg's promise is merely to deliver the plane for about what it was always expected to cost. What's more, all we (and the president-elect) have is his word. There's nothing binding.

But the media loves this narrative: Trump tweets and large corporations tremble! With 140-character bursts of rage, Hero Trump rescues jobs and saves taxpayers billions! The problem is, there's exactly zero evidence that Trump saved us a dime in the case of Boeing.

But hey, Washington Post, you just print the legend if that's what makes you happy.

METALLICA'S JAMES HETFIELD DEFINES "ELITIST" THE SAME WAY TRUMP VOTERS DO

James Hetfield of Metallica is tired of the "elitist" Bay Area:

James Hetfield, the co-founder and lead singer for the successful heavy metal band Metallica, left his home in the San Francisco Bay Area because of an 'elitist' attitude.

In an interview Friday with radio talk show host Joe Rogan, Hetfield says that after decades of living in Northern California, he grew tired of the negative reaction from locals who did not look kindly upon his political views and lifestyle choices....

Hetfield says that in the Bay Area, 'there was an elitist attitude there -- that if you weren't their way politically, their way environmentally, all of that, that you were looked down upon.'

Can you be more specific, James?

'They talk about how diverse they are, and things like that, and it's fine if you're diverse like them. But showing up with a deer on the bumper doesn't fly in Marin County.'

Hetfield is a hunter and a member of the NRA. When Metallica was scheduled to perform at England's Glastonbury Festival in 2014, there were calls to remove the band from the festival's lineup because Hetfield hunts Kodiak bears. (Metallica performed as scheduled.)

So what non-elitist place did Hetfield find more accommodating?

Hetfield instead decided to relocate to 'super quiet' Vail, Colorado, with his wife, Francesca.

Ahh, yes, non-elitist Vail, Colorado, which Barron's magazine described a few years ago as one of the best places to buy a high-end second home:

5. VAIL, COLORADO

For those who want the high life rather than the quiet life: After skiing knee-deep powder on Vail's incomparable back bowls, a woman with a diamond ring the size of Pike's Peak hands her skis to the valet. Prada sunglasses shade her tired eyes from the sun. The skier, the wife of a Mexico City industrialist, enters the Arrabelle Club, an après-ski hangout where gold-medal Olympic skier and cover girl Lindsey Vonn keeps her locker. The Mexican jet-setter is handed a glass of Veuve Clicquot Brut....

Median Price 2010: $1.8 million

Median Price 2011: $1.6 million

Yeah, there's nothing elitist about Vail:

While Aspen is one of the top celebrity hot-spots in the Rockies, its reputation might just be second to Vail, according to professional celebrity trackers. In just the past year, eyewitness sightings have positively identified a large range of celebrities, including George Clinton, Jay-Z, Donald Trump, Katy Perry, and Al Gore -- as well as Justin Timberlake and Cameron Diaz popping into Los Amigos for some Mexican food...

And when Michelle Obama went to Vail with the kids in 2011, right-wingers were livid. The expense!

But Hetfield is defining "elitist" just the way Trump voters do: Being wealthy or high-status doesn't make you an elitist -- you're an elitist if you have some money (it doesn't even have to be a lot) and you challenge right-wingers' preferences. I know the Bay Area is full of wealthy people, but even a moderately comfortable middle-class person from Oakland who objects to Hetfield's hunting is more of an elitist than a billionaire who'll happily share his venison.

That's why the Trumpers don't mind that Trump's Cabinet is full of plutocrats -- none of these Cabinet appointees are telling the Trump base to get a background check at a gun show or press "1" for English, so they're not elitists. Instead, we're the elitists for objecting to those people.

****

(And for the record, I'm not against hunters. Except Ted Nugent -- that guy's a dick.)

THE PRO-PUTIN NEW WORLD ORDER

This is chilling:

The leader of the Austrian far-right Freedom Party has signed what he called a cooperation agreement with Russia’s ruling party and recently met with Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, the designated national security adviser to President-elect Donald J. Trump of the United States.

Word of the agreement with Russia was the latest sign that the Kremlin is forging bonds with political parties across Europe in what some European leaders suspect is a coordinated attempt to meddle in their affairs and potentially weaken Western democracies....

The Freedom Party leader, Heinz-Christian Strache, reported the signing of the agreement with United Russia, Mr. Putin’s party, on Monday on his Facebook page, where he also disclosed that he had visited General Flynn a few weeks ago in Trump Tower in New York....

The Freedom Party, founded in the 1950s by ex-Nazis, surged this year to nearly capture the largely ceremonial presidency of Austria in May, but was defeated in a final runoff on Dec. 4.

A little more about Strache:

Strache ... has himself been accused of anti-Semitism in the past.

In 2012, he was vilified over a cartoon posted on his Facebook page that depicted a fat banker with a hooked nose and six-pointed star buttons on his sleeve. The banker was gorging himself at the expense of a thin man representing "the people".

More:

In 2012, Austria’s then-president canceled plans to give Strache an award after the Freedom Party leader was overheard claiming that he and his allies were the “new Jews” and that the fearsome heckling they received on their way into a gala at Vienna’s Hofburg Palace was “like Kristallnacht,” the night in 1938 when Austrian and German civilians, with the aid of Nazi paramilitaries, murdered Jews, destroyed Jewish-owned stores, burned hundreds of synagogues and sent tens of thousands of Jews to concentration camps to die.

“Strache mocked the victims of the Holocaust by comparing himself and his fellow extremists to Jews and invoking Kristallnacht to complain about the anti-fascist protests,” Abraham H. Foxman, the national director of the Anti-Defamation League and a Holocaust survivor, said at the time. “This trivialization is outrageous, but not surprising from Strache and his ilk.”

Yet Strache visited Israel earlier this year -- at the invitation of a member of Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud Party:

The leader of Austria's far-right Freedom Party, Heinz-Christian Strache, visited the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem on Tuesday, laying a wreath under the engraved names of towns in Austria from where Jews were expelled by the Nazis....

"For us, it's important to act against anti-Semitism and also against Islamism and terrorism and to discuss the issues we have in common," he told Reuters by telephone. "Anti-Semitism often emerges anew from Islamism and from the left."

...Strache said he was invited by Likud, the right-wing party led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

"We have a lot in common," Strache said of Likud. "I always say, if one defines the Judeo-Christian West, then Israel represents a kind of border. If Israel fails, Europe fails. And if Europe fails, Israel fails."

Michael Kleiner, a Likud party member and a former lawmaker, confirmed to Israel's Army Radio that Strache had been invited by his party and said he was a friend of Israel.

This is the new world order -- anti-Muslim white-supremacist parties in Europe and now America, plus Putin and Likud. As Newsweek noted last summer, Netanyahu and Putin are becoming fast friends:

Russian President Vladimir Putin and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu were all smiles when they shook hands for the fourth time in a year Tuesday.

Netanyahu is in Moscow for the third time since fall 2015 to mark the 25th anniversary of Russia and Israel’s diplomatic relationship....

Israeli newspaper Haaretz declared that “ties between Israel and Russia have never been better” on the eve of the meeting....

“This relationship between the two countries is nothing mysterious. Russia elbowed itself into the region last year,” [Stephen Sestanovich of the Council on Foreign Relations] says. “The Israelis are interested in minimizing the risk of clashes with their military operations in the region. Look at what happened with Turkey shooting down the Russian jet. The Israelis don’t want that to happen to their jets.”

“For Tel Aviv, relations with Moscow provide a means of influencing the behavior of Syria and Iran, Russia’s regional partners,” Daragh McDowell, principal analyst, Europe and Central Asia at Verisk Maplecroft, says.

Apart from China and the ever-weakening EU, who stands in opposition to this alliance? Justin Trudeau? Jerry Brown?

GOP CONGRESSMAN: WE USE THE HEALTHCARE SYSTEM TOO FREELY, AND BY "WE" I MEAN "THOSE PEOPLE"

Talking Points Memo reports on a Republican congressman's object lesson in responsible use of the healthcare system:

The example Rep. Bill Huizenga (R-MI) gave in an interview with MLive.com was from his own experience when he waited until the morning after to take his youngest son to the doctor with an injured arm, because he did not want to waste money on an expensive emergency room visit. The arm, it turned out, was broken.

"We weren't sure what was going on. It was in the evening, so I splinted it up and we wrapped it up, and the decision was, okay, do we go to the ER? We thought it was a sprain, but weren't sure," Huizenga said, adding that he and his wife "took every precaution and decided to go in the next morning."

"When it [comes to] those type of things, do you keep your child home from school and take him the next morning to the doctor because of a cold or a flu, versus take him into the emergency room? If you don't have a cost difference, you'll make different decisions," he said.

Did this really happen? I have no idea. It's possible that Huizenga, who's no millionaire but isn't exactly poor, is the kind of guy who would pinch pennies even when his child's physical health is at stake. My guess, though, is that this is merely a fable. Huizenga is giving us a preview of GOP scapegoating after his party replaces the Affordable Care Act with a woefully inadequate substitute.

I've assumed that Republicans would somehow find a way to blame the high cost, inadequate coverage, and (for plenty of people) lack of availability of Trump/Ryan/McConnellcare on Democrats. But maybe that's too much to expect from Republicans, despite their mastery of propaganda and message discipline.

So who'll be at fault when the T/R/Mcare sucks? Well, it'll be those damn spendthrifts who overuse the system, at great cost to True Patriots who would never do such a thing. And what constitutes overuse? Rushing your kid to the emergency room at night when he might have a broken arm!

Okay, maybe this particular example will fail to persuade even conservative heartlanders. But the GOP will continue to pursue this approach, and the talking points will be more carefully honed in the future. If Republicans' healthcare plan is awful, they'll never admit that it's their fault. It'll have to be the fault of Those People who abuse the system.

And I don't mean that they're just going to scapegoat non-white people, although they'll do plenty of that. It was noted during the campaign that many Trump voters were whites weren't struggling financially, but who saw white neighbors falling through the cracks -- and were angry that so many of those neighbors were on disability. Republicans will be scapegoating those whites, too. They'll persuade Middle American voters that the country is full of parasites, and that's why T/R/Mcare sucks. Because Republicans will never take responsibility for failing America.

FOR TRUMP VOTERS, THERE WOULD NEVER HAVE BEEN A DEAL-BREAKER

I want to talk about this, even thought it's not exactly the most important story of the day:

While visiting with KIRO Radio’s Dori Monson on Friday to talk about his upcoming performance in Seattle, comedian Tom Arnold revealed a bombshell: He has the infamous unreleased outtakes of Donald Trump using inflammatory language on “The Apprentice.”

“I have the outtakes to ‘The Apprentice’ where he says every bad thing ever, every offensive, racist thing ever,” Arnold said. “I have that.”

Here's Arnold's description of the tape:

It was sort of a Christmas video they put together. He wasn’t going to be President of the United States. It was him sitting in that chair saying the N-word, saying the C-word, calling his son a retard, just being so mean to his own children. Oh, this is so funny, this is this guy.

Arnold was asked to release it before the election, but he didn't want to do so, because he believed that the people who put the tape together would have been at risk:

I said, ‘Well, now these people -- two editors and an associate producer -- are scared to death. They’re scared of his people, they’re scared of they’ll never work again, there’s a $5 million confidentiality agreement.’

So it never came out. And now there's a disagreement about whether the release of the tape would have made a difference:

Monson said he’s sure those recordings would have sunk Trump’s campaign, but Arnold disagreed.

“I don’t think so,” Arnold said. “I think if the people that like him saw him saying the N-word, he’s sitting matter of factly in front of, there has to be 30 people there, and he’s matter of factly saying all of this stuff. So I think they would have liked him more, the people, for being politically incorrect.”

I think a lot of Trump voters would have enjoyed the tape. Others would have said that it was no big deal. But they're not the ones who infuriate me. I imagine there are quite a few people who voted for Trump who would have said that this tape was way over the line -- you know, the way they did when he attacked John McCain, or mocked Serge Kovaleski's disability, or said Megyn Kelly had "blood coming out of her wherever," or attack the Khan family, or was heard on the Access Hollywood tape joking about sexual assault.

I sincerely believe that many Trump voters thought most or all of those things were disturbing. I think they would have felt the same way if they'd heard him use the N-word or call his son a retard. And then they would have voted for him anyway. To these voters, there was nothing he could say or do that would make them believe he was worse than Hillary Clinton.

Nothing? I keep trying to figure out whether that's really accurate. If we saw him violently assaulting someone on video? Or smoking crack? Or wearing a swastika and praising Hitler? What would it have taken? At what point would Trump voters, even the ones who seemed to have consciences, stop making excuses for him?

Certainly nothing on this tape would have crossed their line. I don't think it would have lost him a single vote.

UNDER TRUMP, WILL AMERICA TURN INTO POLAND? NAHHH -- AMERICA WILL BE WORSE.

In The Washington Post, Anthony Faiola describes what's happening in Poland, and strongly suggests that America under Donald Trump could be very similar:

In the land of [the] Law and Justice [Party], anti-intellectualism is king. Polish scientists are aghast at proposed curriculum changes in a new education bill that would downplay evolution theory and climate change and add hours for “patriotic” history lessons. In a Facebook chat, a top equal rights official mused that Polish hotels should not be forced to provide service to black or gay customers. After the official stepped down for unrelated reasons, his successor rejected an international convention to combat violence against women because it appeared to argue against traditional gender roles....

Cheered on by religious conservatives, the new government has defunded public assistance for in vitro fertilization treatments. To draft new sexual-education classes in schools, it tapped a contraceptives opponent who argues that condom use increases the risk of cancer in women. The government is proffering a law that critics say could soon be used to limit opposition protests.

Yet nothing has shocked liberals more than this: After a year in power, Law and Justice is still by far the most popular political party in Poland. It rides atop opinion polls at roughly 36 percent -- more than double the popularity of the ousted Civic Platform party.

Faiola has an explanation for that popularity:

The new government doled out money to families with children. They also slashed Poland’s retirement age -- to as young as 60 for women and 65 for men....

The road to Law and Justice country runs an hour outside cosmopolitan Warsaw, down a dirt path in the hamlet of Krupia Wolka. Once there, pass the front-yard playground of a cream-colored house and meet Pawel and Maria Wiechowski.

High school sweethearts, they married back in 1992. Two-and-a-half decades and 10 children later, they’re still deeply Catholic -- and still struggling financially.

...The new government program for families is the Wiechowskis’ life raft; it offers them a monthly cash payout worth nearly $1,000.

“Right now, that’s 100 percent of our income,” Pawel said. “Some people criticize the child benefit and say it’s a government handout. It’s not. It is support for traditional families.”

I was going to explain how that distinguishes the Law and Justice Party's approach from the likely approach of Trump and the GOP Congress, but Paul Krugman beat me to it:

Well, there’s an important difference -- a bit of American exceptionalism, if you like. Europe’s populist parties are actually populist; they pursue policies that really do help workers, as long as those workers are the right color and ethnicity. As someone put it, they’re selling a herrenvolk welfare state. Law and Justice has raised minimum wages and reduced the retirement age; France’s National Front advocates the same things.

Trump, however, is different. He said lots of things on the campaign trail, but his personnel choices indicate that in practice he’s going to be a standard hard-line economic-right Republican. His Congressional allies are revving up to dismantle Obamacare, privatize Medicare, and raise the retirement age. His pick for Labor Secretary is a fast-food tycoon who loathes minimum wage hikes. And his pick for top economic advisor is the king of trickle-down.

So does this mean the Trump Republicans will be less popular in the U.S. than the Law and Justice Party is in Poland? Don't bet on it. In America, the non-rich voters in the GOP base are used to not getting what they want economically, and are used to voting for people who kick them in the teeth because those pols always persuade them that it's Democrats who are kicking them in the teeth, with all their taxing and spending. (Much of the spending is on Medicare and Social Security, but the voters are never told that.)

The Republicans will have to give their voters something, but it'll be crumbs: Carrier-like moments in which tiny numbers of jobs are (seemingly) saved, accompanied by a loosening of gun laws (know what national concealed-carry reciprocity is? you will soon), tightening of abortion laws, attacks on public-sector unions (we saw how popular that was in Wisconsin), and probably quite a lot of high-profile scapegoating of Mexicans and Muslims. And if all that fails, starting a war is always good for the old approval ratings, at least if the war-starter is a Republican.

So look to Poland for a glimpse of our future, but imagine the Polish government without its selectively benign aspects. That's where we're heading.

YOU COME AT THE CONSTITUTIONALLY DERIVED NORMS, YOU BEST NOT MISS

I think it might have been a strategic mistake for so many opponents of Donald Trump to mount a high-profile campaign to keep him out of the White House by means of "faithless electors" in the Electoral College, if only for one reason:

There’s no evidence of a widespread number of Republican defections -- just one Republican elector from Texas has gone public with plans to break from Trump....

Democratic electors are the ones beating the drums for the revolt, yet they’re largely powerless to change the outcome.

A handful of electors are already planning on uniting around a Republican alternative as a protest, but it’s still unclear how many are willing to join the protest.

How embarrassing will it be if, after all this talk, after the celebrity video pleas and whatnot, more faithless electors reject Clinton than reject Trump? So far, we know of one likely defector from Trump; by contrast, there may be multiple electors planning to vote against Clinton hoping to throw the election into the House of Representatives (another exercise in futility, because Trump would actually win in a landslide there), and there are two Sandersite Democratic electors in Washington State who were talking about rejecting Clinton even before Election Day. If Trump loses one electoral vote and Clinton loses several, the right-wing gloating will never stop.

(UPDATE: And now a Maine elector says he'll vote for Bernie Sanders rather than Hillary Clinton.)

In an op-ed they wrote for The New York Times last week, Dahlia Lithwick and David Cohen were right:

Since the election, top Democrats have been almost absent on the national stage. Rather, they have been involved largely in internecine warfare about how much to work with Mr. Trump....

There’s no shortage of legal theories that could challenge Mr. Trump’s anointment, but they come from outsiders rather than the Democratic Party....

Contrast the Democrats’ do-nothingness to what we know the Republicans would have done. If Mr. Trump had lost the Electoral College while winning the popular vote, an army of Republican lawyers would have descended on the courts and local election officials. The best of the Republican establishment would have been filing lawsuits and infusing every public statement with a clear pronouncement that Donald Trump was the real winner. And they would have started on the morning of Nov. 9, using the rhetoric of patriotism and courage.

How can we be so certain? This is what happened in 2000.

If Clinton had won and Republicans had any reasonable hope of overturning the results, the campaign to do so would have come from the top.

Politico's Kyle Cheney believes that the faithless-elector effort might be the beginning of the end of the Electoral College:

Those rogue electors aren't likely to succeed in preventing Trump's election Monday, but they could succeed at something even more significant: sowing enough distrust of the Electoral College to set in motion a movement to do away with it, to be replaced by popular election of the president.

No. You know what would "set in motion a movement to do away with" the Electoral College? One election in which a Democrat lost the popular vote and won the electoral vote. If this ever happens to Republicans, they will mount a full-on campaign to overturn the Electoral College result, and they'll make it their business to abolish or alter the Electoral College legislatively or constitutionally.

In case you've forgotten, just before the 2000 election, Republicans close to the Bush campaign told us that's they planned to lead a serious fight if Al Gore lost the popular vote and won the Electoral College:



It's good to question Trump's legitimacy. The faithless-elector campaign is successful in that way. But if you want to change the outcome of the election, the fight has to come from the party.

THE NEW YORK TIMES EDITS OUT SOME STUPIDITY -- AFTER A WHILE

In The New York Times, Michael Shear has a pretty good story about Donald Trump's picks for key positions and the ways they're likely to approach their jobs. Shear's headline is "Outsiders Selected by Trump Aim to Unnerve Washington." It's a good story to read if you want to know precisely what you have to worry about in a Trump presidency. A sample:

Some of those chosen -- 17 picks so far for federal agencies and five for the White House -- are among the most radical selections in recent history.... a number of Mr. Trump’s most important selections have no experience in federal government and a great drive to undo it.

Scott Pruitt, the Oklahoma state attorney general who was picked to lead the E.P.A., rejects the established science of human-caused climate change and has built his career on fighting environmental regulations. At the Education Department, Betsy DeVos wants to steer government money away from traditional public schools. Rick Perry was picked to head the Energy Department -- unless he eliminates it, as he once promised.

Representative Mick Mulvaney of South Carolina, the conservative Republican who was chosen as White House budget director, refused to back the 2011 deal to raise the federal debt limit and helped to bring the United States to the brink of default.

But there's one utterly wrong note in this story -- or at least there was:



"They are neither all conservative, nor all liberal"? None of them are liberal. Why did Shear write this sentence? Even as he was describing the radicalism of many of Trump's picks, why did he feel the need to say that they're arrayed across the political spectrum??

Someone at the Times noticed the glaring problem here, or maybe it was pointed out by readers. The paragraph above is from the early edition of the print paper; online now, that sentence reads:

They are neither all hard-right conservatives, nor all mainstream conservatives.

Newsdiffs says that the original version was posted at 12:23 yesterday; the revised version replaced it at 4:19.

Left untouched, however, is an assertion by Shear that "a picture is emerging of an administration with little ideological cohesion." If the Trump administration has an ideological range from mainstream conservative to hard-line conservative, how does that distinguish it from the Reagan administration or the George W. Bush administration -- apart from the fact that this one is more consistently conservative?

Also still in the story is this paragraph:

There is “no overarching theory,” said Pete Wehner, who was deputy director of speechwriting for Mr. Bush and a fierce critic of Mr. Trump during the campaign. “He’s not being driven by the usual impulses, which would be policy or ideology or political philosophy.”

I think there are two "overarching theories" in the Trump administration:

1. KA-CHING! Money is meant to flow to the plutocracy, especially Trump family members, Putin fans, and other captains of dirty-fuels industries.

2. What do liberals hate? That's what the Trump administration intends to do.

****

Over in the opinion section of the Times, James Mann predicts that Trump's foreign policy team will be unstable, because there are very few people on it who know anything about their jobs, and there are policy disagreements among the principals:

... the Trump team differs not only from that of George W. Bush, but also from the teams of Presidents George H. W. Bush, Ronald Reagan or, for that matter, Gerald Ford, Richard M. Nixon or Dwight D. Eisenhower. Those teams included people with experience at the top or second levels of the cabinet and national-security apparatus in previous administrations. The Trump team has none....

It’s not just their lack of experience that will make for an unstable foreign policy ship. Mr. Trump has, perhaps by design, chosen people who do not know one another, and appear to disagree in personality and worldview....

Strong disagreement seems baked into the team. James N. Mattis, the retired Marine general whom Mr. Trump has chosen as secretary of defense, has voiced support for the Obama administration’s nuclear agreement with Iran, while [national security advisor-designate General Mike] Flynn, Mike Pompeo at the C.I.A. and Mr. Trump himself have attacked it. Mr. Pompeo has been a hawk on Russia, in contrast to several of his colleagues.

A foreign policy team that will struggle with internal conflicts? Intriguing thought. Mann's op-ed is worth reading -- but even he slips into "what on earth could the Trumpers' motivations possibly be?" mode:

Given some of Mr. Trump’s conciliatory statements about Russia, as well as ties between the Kremlin and Mr. Trump and [secretary of state-designate Rex] Tillerson, it seems likely that the White House will seek improved relations with the country, though they have given no clue as to what shape and strategic goals that relationship will take on.

"They have given no clue as to what shape and strategic goals that relationship will take on"? Let me repeat myself:

KA-CHING!

ANOTHER DUPE OF THE DAY: BILL KELLER

Belief in the essential decency of Republicans never dies in the mainstream media. Yesterday's New York Times included a delusional op-ed by former Times executive editor Bill Keller noting that criminal justice reform never happened in D.C. this year, despite a sense that at least some members of both parties were interested in it -- but now that Donald Trump is president, for some reason it might be more likely to pass, according to Keller:

I can think of four reasons the prospects of federal reform are actually better in 2017.

First, it is not an election year. Nothing makes members of Congress squirm like the specter of attack ads portraying them as coddlers of criminals. There is reason to think those Willie Horton-style gotchas have lost some of their potency, but the prospect tends to make members of Congress more risk-averse in even-numbered years....

One could argue that there was bipartisan talk about criminal justice reform this year precisely because it was an election year, and some Republicans, nervous about running for reelection at a time when Democrats were expected to have their "presidential electorate" turning out to vote, wanted to look as if they cared about an issue that was important to people other than angry whites.

Second, President Obama will be gone. Some of the resistance to this year’s sentencing bill was a reluctance to give the president a parting victory....

Well, yes, Bill, but, um, Donald Trump is replacing him.

Third, at least one of the hard-core Senate opponents of sentencing reform will no longer be there. That would be [Jeff] Sessions, the Republican senator from Alabama. True, as attorney general he will be in a position to encourage a presidential veto. But he will not be joining the obstructionists who this year never let a bill come to a vote at all....

Yes, that's right: Sessions won't be in the Senate anymore, but Keller believes a compassionate-on-crime bill he opposed could be signed by the guy who picked him as attorney general.

And then there's my favorite:

And fourth, the Republican leadership will be looking very hard for bipartisan successes to demonstrate that Washington is no longer in a state of ideological paralysis.

"The Republican leadership will be looking very hard for bipartisan successes"? Stop, you're killing me.

Never mentioned in Keller's op-ed is the real reason for most Republicans' interest in criminal justice reform: It was meant as a delivery system for the only kind of justice reform members of the GOP (and their paymasters) care about: reform of the criminal code to make life easier for rich corporations.

Republicans insist there must be reforms to mens rea, Latin for “guilty mind,” the principle that a person must have some level of criminal intent to be found guilty of a crime....

Democrats, however, strongly object to including that proposal. Their opposition stems in part from the belief that it would create a difficult standard for prosecutors and could make it easier for some who commit white-collar or corporate crimes to avoid prosecution.

The Koch brothers, in particular, have made mens rea "reform" a priority. Then again, Keller seems to believe the Kochs are sincere about the overall reform effort: Earlier this year, he interviewed Koch vice president Mark Holden on the subject on behalf of the Marshall Project. The interview was published under the title "Is Charles Koch a Closet Liberal?" (Subtitle: "Not hardly. But he’s for rolling back the war on drugs, ending mass incarceration, and letting former convicts vote.") Gawker's Andy Kush wrote:

Keller challenges [Holden] on some specifics -- such as Koch’s championing of so-called mens rea reforms, which chiefly benefit corporate offenders -- but if you were to read Holden’s statements without any prior context, you might come away with the mistaken impression that the Kochs are primarily known as bleeding hearts.

... much of the Kochs’ reform energy has been focused on protecting those at the top of the two-tier system outlined by Holden, not the bottom. Holden freely admits that Charles Koch became interested in criminal justice after his company was accused of covering up its emissions of benzene, a carcinogen, at a refinery in Texas in the 1990s.

At this point, why would the Kochs bother to pursue a full-spectruim criminal justice reform bill? Why would the Republicans who now control the entire federal government bother? Now it would be easy just to pass a stand-alone mens rea bill tailored to the Kochs' specifications and ditch everything else to do with criminal justice reform.

Keller can still dream, I guess, but we don't have to believe him.

DUPE OF THE DAY: ROBERT H. FRANK

It's easy to be distracted by Donald Trump's tweeting or his demagoguery, but we know that law-making in the Trump years will be the familiar reactionary, turn-the-clock-back, party-first Republicanism we've seen in North Carolina and Wisconsin and Kansas, as well as in the halls of Congress since the 2010 midterms, except cranked up to 11, and with no Democratic counterweight. We know this just from looking at Trump's Cabinet picks, and from his obvious comfort with the GOP's promises to slash the social safety net until there's no net left.

This is clear to you and me -- but clearly not to Robert H. Frank of The New York Times. Frank tries to imagine what's going to happen to Obamacare in Trump's all-GOP Washington, and he preposterously asserts that Trump might want to be Bernie Sanders.

Bad times are looming for health insurance. If Mr. Trump wants to avoid a political buzz saw, what might he do? Unlike Republican congressional leaders, he seems to have no ideological commitment to a largely unregulated, and hence untenable, private health insurance system. And he has already demonstrated that Republican base voters will side with him rather than their congressional leaders.

The upshot is that, unlike President Obama, he may actually have the political power to enact the most sensible system for providing basic universal health coverage: the single-payer approach taken by most other developed countries. Older Americans have been covered under a single-payer system since the 1965 enactment of Medicare, which delivers basic health coverage more cost effectively than private insurance plans can, and which they are of course free to supplement with private insurance.


But having just announced plans to phase out Medicare, Republicans are extremely unlikely to voluntarily embrace a single-payer insurance option for all Americans, and Mr. Trump’s true intentions are, to say the least, unclear.

(Emphasis added.)

Trump has "no ideological commitment" to a for-profit market in health care? Trump's intentions are "unclear"? Has Frank looked at Trump's Cabinet? The plutocrats, the privatizers (Betsy deVos, Ben Carson, Rick Perry), the Ayn Rand fans (Rex Tillerson, Andy Puzder, Mike Pompeo), and, of course, Tom Price, the Obamacare scourge who's going to be health and human services secretary? Is Frank seriously arguing that Trump might put together this Kochite dream team and then say, "Y'know, what I really want is Medicare for All"?

At least Frank doesn't expect the GOP Congress to magically turn into the reformed Scrooge on Christmas morning, although the way Frank words this -- "Republicans are extremely unlikely to voluntarily embrace a single-payer insurance option for all Americans" -- suggests that he thinks there's a nonzero chance. In fact, there's no chance whatsoever. Jeff Sessions is more likely to lead a Black Lives Matter protest that Republicans are "to voluntarily embrace a single-payer insurance option."

Will media dupes ever stop predicting that Trump might govern as a non-conservative? Trump may throw in a touch of paleoconservatism or "national greatness" conservatism (the infrastructure promises), but that's as eclectic as he's going to get. Mostly, he's going to govern from the rightmost point of the mainstream right. Please stop imagining otherwise.

HARDLINE AMBASSADOR TO ISRAEL? FAN BASE FULL OF ANTI-SEMITES? NO CONTRADICTION FOR TRUMP.

In picking an ambassador to Israel, Donald Trump went hardcore:

President-elect Donald J. Trump on Thursday named David M. Friedman, a bankruptcy lawyer aligned with the Israeli far right, as his nominee for ambassador to Israel, elevating a campaign adviser who has questioned the need for a two-state solution and has likened left-leaning Jews in America to the Jews who aided the Nazis in the Holocaust....

Mr. Friedman, who has no diplomatic experience, has said that he does not believe it would be illegal for Israel to annex the occupied West Bank and he supports building new settlements there, which Washington has long condemned as illegitimate and an obstacle to peace.

Haaretz's Chemi Shalev says that Friedman

is an extreme right-winger. He might find a place in the settler movement or with Naftali Bennett’s Habayit Hayehudi Party, but only on its right-wing fringes. He makes Benjamin Netanyahu seem like a left-wing defeatist. From where Friedman stands, most Israelis, never mind most American Jews, are more or less traitors.

... Friedman’s appointment ... could weaken Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian Authority -- which would please Friedman, as he has often written -- and give rise to more extreme leaders who will try to spark a new and violent intifada.

The Forward notes the Jared Kushner connection:

In recent years, the parents of Jared Kushner -- the son-in-law and trusted confidant of President-elect Donald Trump -- have donated tens of thousands of dollars to organizations and institutions located in the West Bank settlements, according to their tax forms....

Jared Kushner ... sits on the board of his parents’ family foundation....

Among organizations and institutions in the West Bank that receive funding from the Kushner family, the leading beneficiary is American Friends of Beit El Yeshiva. Located in one of the more hard-line, ideological settlements, Beit El Yeshiva received $20,000 from the Kushner family in 2013.

The president of American Friends of Beit El Yeshiva, whose offices are located in Forest Hills, New York, is David Friedman....

But isn't Trump's fan base full of anti-Semites? If you're a Jewish journalist and you write something negative about Trump, aren't you likely to be bombarded with Photoshopped depictions of yourself in the gas chambers, and worse? How do we reconcile these things?

I don't think Trump has deep convictions about Jews or the state of Israel. If he has a deeply held belief, it's that he likes fighting with people -- and in the case of both the pro-settlement hardliners and the anti-Semitic alt-right, he's siding with the angriest, least accommodating people. Such people are always Trump's kind of people.

This also explains why a guy who had moderate or even liberal views on a numbers of issues over the years is now putting together the most conservative Cabinet in American history: Trump likes picking fights, and the right is where you want to go if you think everything in politics should be a zero-sum battle to the death.

In politics, where did Trump find his happy place? He found it watching Fox News, where every ideological disagreement is for massive stakes and on every issue there can be only one winner. Trump mixes traditional Roger Ailes conservatism with Pat Buchanan paleoconservatism and Steve Bannon whatever-it-is-ism -- and being an ultra on Israel works too. Whatever leads to the most combat.

THE FAKENESS OF THE RIGHT'S WAR ON FAKE-NEWS MONITORING

I'm a little late getting to the story of Facebook's attempt to control fake news, but I see the right going all in on showy expressions of phony outrage that are clearly meant to set the terms of the debate over what Facebook is doing. Here's Facebook's plan:

We’re testing several ways to make it easier to report a hoax if you see one on Facebook, which you can do by clicking the upper right hand corner of a post. ...

We’ve started a program to work with third-party fact checking organizations that are signatories of Poynter’s International Fact Checking Code of Principles. We’ll use the reports from our community, along with other signals, to send stories to these organizations. If the fact checking organizations identify a story as fake, it will get flagged as disputed and there will be a link to the corresponding article explaining why. Stories that have been disputed may also appear lower in News Feed....

It will still be possible to share these stories, but you will see a warning that the story has been disputed as you share....

Once a story is flagged, it can’t be made into an ad and promoted, either.

The key argument on the right is that Facebook is using left-wing fact checkers exclusively. You'd expect that argument to be made at Breitbart, and it is, but it's also being made by more "respectable" conservatives:

"Fact-checkers all seem to be from the left," Evan Siegfried, a Republican strategist, wrote on Twitter. "Not good for conservatives." ...

RBPundit, an influential anonymous conservative blogger, published a series of tweets expressing strong concern.

"It's going to be leftists reporting stories they don't like and leftists 'fact-checking' these stories," RBPundit wrote. "It's a fraud." ...

Charles Cooke, editor of National Review Online, the premier conservative news outlet for decades, told Business Insider in an email that he "agreed with everything" RBPundit said.

Mark Hemingway, a senior writer at the Weekly Standard, a conservative magazine, reacted with three blunt words when he saw Facebook's announcement: "OH HELL NO."

"Facebook is bringing in Poynter/PolitiFact to police 'fake news'? They're INCREDIBLY biased," he wrote.

Right -- PolitiFact, which declared President Obama's "If you like your health care plan, you can keep it" its "Lie of the Year" in 2013 and gave that award in 2011 to Democrats' assertions that Republicans voted to end Medicare -- those folks have a liberal bias, according to the right.

To the right, every news organization that isn't conservative has liberal bias, and is itself a peddler of left-leaning "fake news."



Now that the issue has been framed this way, knee-jerk conservatives will never trust what Facebook is doing in this area. Some will quit. Others will mass-report legitimate stories as "fake news." (This could happen, for instance, whenever a news organization reports that some effect of climate change has been observed.)

And The Atlantic's Kaveh Waddell makes a plausible prediction:

There’s a danger that people who are disinclined to trust traditional sources of information will treat Facebook’s warnings as a badge of honor. If fact-checking organizations deem a story questionable, they might be more likely to read and share it, rather than less. There's reason to believe this group might think of itself as a counterculture, and take the position that anything that “the man” rejects must have a grain of subversive truth to it.

My first thought when I read that was that it would be true among the conspiracy-minded -- 9/11 truthers, people who think the Sandy Hook massacre was faked, and so on. But it will probably be true in what's now the right-wing mainstream.

I'm not sure "respectable" rightists such as the staffs of The Weekly Standard and National Review are going to want to challenge Facebook on the labeling of Pizzagate-style stories. But if Facebook flags climate-change denialist stories, for instance, that might be when the entire right-wing media apparatus swoops down on Facebook and challenges this entire program. So it may not end well.

HERE'S THE BOOK I HOPE A FUTURE CIVILIZATION FINDS IN THE SMOKING RUINS OF OURS

The subscription-only newsletter PublishersLunch announces a forthcoming book:

Creator of the Dilbert comic strip, NYT bestselling author, and inadvertent political pundit Scott Adams's THE MASTER PERSUADER, an analysis of why people follow some leaders and not others, to Portfolio, in a major deal....

Portfolio is an imprint of Penguin Books, which is part of the publishing giant Penguin Random House. PublishersLunch says this was "a major deal" -- which means Adams got an advance of at least half a million dollars.

I don't know how many of you paid attention to what Adams wrote about Trump during the course of the campaign. To give him his due, he could see Trump's potential for success as a candidate long before most political pros could. He said from the start that Trump is a "Master Persuader" appealing to voters on a non-rational level:

... when Trump says he is worth $10 billion, which causes his critics to say he is worth far less (but still billions) he is making all of us “think past the sale.” The sale he wants to make is “Remember that Donald Trump is a successful business person managing a vast empire mostly of his own making.” The exact amount of his wealth is irrelevant.

When a car salesperson trained in persuasion asks if you prefer the red Honda Civic or the Blue one, that is a trick called making you “think past the sale” and the idea is to make you engage on the question of color as if you have already decided to buy the car. That is Persuasion 101 and I have seen no one in the media point it out when Trump does it.

The $10 billion estimate Trump uses for his own net worth is also an “anchor” in your mind. That’s another classic negotiation/persuasion method. I remember the $10 billion estimate because it is big and round and a bit outrageous. And he keeps repeating it because repetition is persuasion too.

I don’t remember the smaller estimates of Trump’s wealth that critics provided. But I certainly remember the $10 billion estimate from Trump himself. Thanks to this disparity in my memory, my mind automatically floats toward Trump’s anchor of $10 billion being my reality. That is classic persuasion. And I would be amazed if any of this is an accident. Remember, Trump literally wrote the book on this stuff.

I don't know if this is insanity or an accurate assessment of how Trump gulls the gullible. I think Trump has no conscious idea what he's doing, though he's intuited what works. Nevertheless, I think none of it would have worked in a general election without a tremendous amount of backup from an email-obsessed media, an FBI director desperately trying to please Republicans, a Clinton-hating Russian dictator with a pal at Wikileaks, and a Clinton campaign that made many strategic errors, on behalf of a less-than-charismatic candidate who lacked sharp political instincts. It took a lot to get Trump over the line, and I haven't even mentioned Bernie-or-Busters or GOP vote-suppression laws or the Electoral College. But please, Scott, tell us that Trump won because he has us all hypnotized.

When he sits down to write the book, I hope Adams really wallows in his most half-cocked ideas and most florid rhetoric. Y'know, like this:

The idea of the Master Wizard Hypothesis says there are some people in the world, living people, masters of persuasion, they've got a linguistic gift for influencing people. And they are using actual techniques.

What I [see] in Trump is someone who was highly trained. A lot of the things that the media were reporting as sort of random insults and bluster and just Trump being Trump, looked to me like a lot of deep technique that I recognized from the fields of hypnosis and persuasion.

And I hope he goes off on tangents like these, spotted on his blog by Slate's Ben Dolnick:

[Adams] is prone to typing sentences like this: “My language skills activate your sex drive, and you know it.” ...

Here he is explaining that in the event of a Trump victory, he, Adams, “would be a top-ten assassination target.” Here he is lamenting the “humiliation of the American male,” as evidenced by a dishwasher detergent ad. Here he is unforgettably (I’ve tried) attempting to hypnotize his readers into having the best orgasms of their lives (“I want you wet, or hard, and especially obedient …”).

And here Adams is after the election telling us that, while the Pizzagate conspiracy theory appears false to him, there is "a mountain of evidence supporting the allegations" and, hey, it might be true that there are subterranean tunnels in which children are molested under pizzerias, with pedophiles alerted to the molestation opportunities by runic codes on menus and signage:

I want to be totally clear here that I’m not saying Pizzagate is false. I see the mountain of evidence too. And collectively it feels totally persuasive to me. It might even be true. I’m not debating the underlying truth of it. That part I don’t know.

This really might be the book that, more than any other, encapsulates what's truly rotten and decaying in American society. It should survive, just as a warning to future civilizations of how much a society can decline. I guarantee you one thing: It will be a bestseller. You can take that to the bank.

AILES DEFENDER KIMBERLY GUILFOYLE MIGHT BE TRUMP'S PRESS SECRETARY

Politico reported this last night:

Fox News host Kimberly Guilfoyle has emerged as a contender to be Donald Trump’s White House press secretary, and is expected to have a third meeting with his transition team this week, according to two sources familiar with the meetings.

Guilfoyle, a host on Fox News’ “The Five,” was spotted last week at Trump Tower, where she had lunch with top staffers in the transition team. She did not personally meet with Trump, but she’s slated to return this week to the Fifth Avenue building where Trump has paraded his potential appointments.

Here's the spin on this possible pick:

Some in Trump’s inner circle have argued that Guilfoyle, who is half-Puerto Rican, would be a more sympathetic face when flacking some of Trump’s more divisive stances on immigration and pro-life issues.

“Do you want a white male representing the White House when half the country thinks the President is a misogynist?” said a Guilfoyle champion in Trump’s inner circle.

“Who do you want talking about Immigration? A Latino. When you have to make decisions about pro-life justices, do you want a man or a woman?”

Um, Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens, and besides, Guilfoyle was born in San Francisco, which was on the U.S. mainland the last time I looked (though her father is an immigrant -- from Ireland).

Back in July, Guilfoyle defended her then-boss, Roger Ailes, when Gretchen Carlson accused him of sexual harassment:

Her first reaction? “Total disbelief. I’ve known Roger Ailes for 15 years and I have been treated with the utmost professionalism and respect,” said Guilfoyle.... “He’s been a fantastic mentor in television for me.” ...

“This is a man who champions women,” said Guilfoyle....

“Nobody believed this,” said Guilfoyle of the women she talked to at Fox last week, more than 30 she figures. “Nobody that I’ve spoken to said that this was their experience.”

Since then, more women at Fox have backed up Carlson's allegations, Fox has fired Ailes, and a lawsuit filed by another woman allegedly harassed by Ailes, Andrea Tantaros, claims that Ailes called Guilfoyle (though not to her face) a "Puerto Rican whore" and a "Puerto Rican streetfighter," when he wasn't asking whether she and fellow fox host Eric Bolling were sleeping together. If Guilfoyle has since uttered a negative word about Ailes, I'm not aware of it.

Yeah, Fox has been a really supportive environment -- a place where Guilfoyle, a lawyer and former prosecutor, can be asked on the air, "If those legs of yours were a foot shorter, do you think you'd be here?" But I think she'd be an ideal Trump press secretary -- she's suggested killing all the Gitmo detainees, she's erroneously asserted that Barack Obama never visited victims of terrorist attacks, and she's claimed that Obama's relationship with the media has been all sweetness and light apart from his fair, balanced treatment at the hands of her employer:

“President Obama has enjoyed, really, like, a fairy-tale romance with the mainstream media,” Guilfoyle said.... “They very much, they like him personally, they like his politics., his ideology He’s the one that really hasn’t had a full fact-checking and what-not. He’s actually had, I think, quite a relationship, a nice eight years with the press, with the exception of him calling out and having a problem with the Fox News Channel because we’re actually reporting all of the news instead of just select positive stories. You’ve got to talk about actually what’s going on everywhere.”

During the campaign, she said that Trump made controversial statements only because Obama and Hillary Clinton would "bait" him. She said that Trump's repeat references to Elizabeth Warren as "Pocahontas" were "quite complimentary when you think about it." And she so shamelessly promoted Trump on Fox's 2015 New Year's Eve special that even Greg Gutfeld, her colleague on Fox's The Five, said, “I mean it was 'The Trump Show,' let’s face it.... I think you did a great job, Kimberly, you did a great job on 'The Trump Show.'”

So, yes, she'd be a perfect choice.

ONE BATHROOM ACCIDENT COULD BE WHAT SAVED US FROM SECRETARY OF STATE GIULIANI

The prospect of Secretary of State Rex Tillerson doesn't fill my heart with joy, but we might have had Rudy Giuliani instead, and I can't decide which would be worse. A Washington Post story on the process that led to the selection of Tillerson tells us that Giuliani was the top contender, even after former defense secretary (and paid Exxon consultant) Robert Gates recommended Tillerson to President-elect Trump:

Two days after Trump met with Gates, as Sunday talk show guests speculated about Trump’s choice, those closest to the decision had come up with a scorecard.

Giuliani, the former New York mayor, was in first place, [Mitt] Romney was just behind at “1A,” and ­[David] Petraeus was “in the mix.” Tillerson remained a contingency, but his stock was starting to rise.

Giuliani had been one of Trump’s most stalwart defenders during the campaign, and his name was pushed particularly hard by Trump allies such as former House speaker Newt Gingrich.

But Trump became increasingly concerned about the 72-year-old Giuliani’s fitness for the job. Trump confided to friends that he thought that Giuliani, two decades removed from his heyday running New York, was past his prime and might not have the stamina or discipline to travel the globe and negotiate delicate matters.

“He was hearing a lot of concerns about Rudy,” one Trump friend said, speaking on the condition of anonymity.

Stamina! You'll recall that Trump said Hillary Clinton lacked "stamina" five times in less than a minute in their first debate:



We know it's been a longtime obsession of Trump's:

In his 2009 book “Think Like a Champion,” he called “positive stamina” a “necessary ingredient for success.” His Twitter feed is, accordingly, a constant stamina-evaluation zone: He has rated the vitality not only of Clinton (“zero imagination and even less stamina”) but also of Joan Rivers (“truly amazing stamina”), the world’s “many losers and haters” (“never have the brains or stamina to become truly successful”) and, of course, himself (“one of my greatest assets”).

So is this a reference to anything specific in Giuliani's case? The New York Daily News has a theory:

... the former mayor, who aggressively campaigned for and defended Trump throughout the tumultuous 2016 race, did indeed face a handful of embarrassing incidents over the course of the trail indicating he might have lost a step.

In August, he appeared on ABC's "This Week" program with a giant bump on his forehead as he rambled on about Hillary Clinton's shortcomings.

He didn't address the wound during the interview but later told the Daily News that he had fallen in the shower after getting a cramp in his leg.

A rep for Giuliani later told The News that he'd hurt himself when he "got up in the middle of the night to use facilities and banged into bathroom door."

Here's some video of that appearance:

Rudy Giuliani to @ThisWeekABC: "Everyone should calm down" about Trump's poll numbers. #ThisWeek https://t.co/2PpWOeS1ln

— ABC News (@ABC) August 7, 2016

That's a nasty bump, Rudy. And you got it from ... falling in the shower after getting a leg cramp? Banging into a bathroom door at night? Which was it?

We're told later in the Post story that Giuliani's fall from grace in Trump World was partly the result of his refusal to take a job other than secretary of state -- homeland security secretary, say, or attorney general.

“He got out too far in front of Trump,” [a] Trump associate said. “He became the star. Trump doesn’t like more than one star. . . . When you give an ultimatum that ‘I will only take one position,’ it doesn’t work.”

But ... stamina. That was apparently why he lost the State job. If it weren't for that one slip in the loo, we could have had this guy as America's top diplomat:

NO, IBM'S HIRING IS NOT THE RESULT OF A "TRUMP EFFECT"

Right-wingers are giving Donald Trump credit for this:

US technology giant IBM has said it will hire 25,000 people in the United States over the next four years, ahead of a meeting between President-elect Donald Trump and tech industry leaders.

About 6,000 of those appointments will be made in 2017, IBM chief executive Ginni Rometty wrote in opinion article published in USA Today....

Rometty is a member of Trump's Strategic and Policy Forum, a group of US business leaders focused on boosting economic growth and jobs.

Anyone looking to credit this to a "Trump effect" apparently missed headlines from May such as "Looking for a Job? IBM Has 20,000 Openings." That story, from CNN, cited a report in The Wall Street Journal that said IBM was looking to fill "more than 20,000 open positions."

The leap from "more than 20,000 open positions" in May, when very few people thought Donald Trump would be president, to 25,000 open position today is not a massive one. It sure looks as if IBM is trying to flatter Trump by allowing him to take credit for hiring the company was planning to do anyway.

IBM was looking to hire back in May even as it was firing people, according to the Journal, all because of a shift in business strategy:

International Business Machines Corp. this week quietly laid off employees, continuing a wave of job cuts the company announced in April.

IBM declined to say how many jobs would be cut overall. The total layoffs could affect more than 14,000 jobs, according to an estimate by Sanford Bernstein analyst Toni Sacconaghi.

The job cuts come after four straight years of declining revenues as the rise of cloud computing threatens the company’s software and services business. IBM has said it would restructure its workforce to retool for cloud services and data analysis, and could hire an equal number of new employees by the end of the year.

The company said on Friday it had more than 20,000 open positions.

So (a) most of not all of the hiring was in the works months ago and (b) it's going to take years before the number hired at IBM equals the number fired this year. Winning!

HOW WE USED TO ESTABLISH THE TRUTH BEFORE THE POST-FACT ERA

Can I prove that Russians hacked the U.S. election in order to help Donald Trump and harm Hillary Clinton? No, but I can point to stories like the big one posted by The New York Times yesterday, which persuasively gathers together detailed assertions that suggest a clear pattern. This is how it's supposed to work -- the press, when it's doing its job, presents us with a large set of theoretically falsifiable claims. If critics can't disprove them, the story deserves to stand.

The story describes the nature of the controversy, but doesn't get it quite right:

... the Russian attack is increasingly understood across the political spectrum as an ominous historic landmark -- with one notable exception: Mr. Trump has rejected the findings of the intelligence agencies he will soon oversee as “ridiculous,” insisting that the hacker may be American, or Chinese, but that “they have no idea.”

There isn't just one "notable exception" to the view that that this was a serious attack on our democracy by the Russians. It's not just Trump. Much of his base is also skeptical, and it's picking up that skepticism from right-wing media -- see, for instance, Breitbart's post "10 Ways the CIA’s ‘Russian Hacking’ Story is Left-Wing ‘Fake News.’" And the liberal-hating left is also skeptical -- see, for instance, Jeremy Scahill and Jon Schwarz at the Intercept:

The current discourse on this issue is plagued by partisan gibberish -- there is a disturbing trend emerging that dictates that if you don’t believe Russia hacked the election or if you simply demand evidence for this tremendously significant allegation, you must be a Trump apologist or a Soviet agent.

So should we believe the Times story, in the absence of a detailed release of information by the intelligence agencies? Well, here's some of what the Times tells us:

When Special Agent Adrian Hawkins of the Federal Bureau of Investigation called the Democratic National Committee in September 2015 to pass along some troubling news about its computer network, he was transferred, naturally, to the help desk.

His message was brief, if alarming. At least one computer system belonging to the D.N.C. had been compromised by hackers federal investigators had named “the Dukes,” a cyberespionage team linked to the Russian government.

... in an internal memo about his contacts with the F.B.I. [Tameene] added that “the Special Agent told me to look for a specific type of malware dubbed ‘Dukes’ by the U.S. intelligence community and in cybersecurity circles.”

... In November, Special Agent Hawkins called with more ominous news. A D.N.C. computer was “calling home, where home meant Russia,” Mr. Tamene’s memo says, referring to software sending information to Moscow. “SA Hawkins added that the F.B.I. thinks that this calling home behavior could be the result of a state-sponsored attack.”

And after a subsequent hack in April:

The D.N.C. immediately hired CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity firm, to scan its computers, identify the intruders and build a new computer and telephone system from scratch. Within a day, CrowdStrike confirmed that the intrusion had originated in Russia, Mr. Sussmann said.

... CrowdStrike investigators recognized the distinctive handiwork of Cozy Bear and Fancy Bear.

Those are CrowdStrike’s nicknames for the two Russian hacking groups that the firm found at work inside the D.N.C. network. Cozy Bear -- the group also known as the Dukes or A.P.T. 29, for “advanced persistent threat” -- may or may not be associated with the F.S.B., the main successor to the Soviet-era K.G.B., but it is widely believed to be a Russian government operation. It made its first appearance in 2014, said Dmitri Alperovitch, CrowdStrike’s co-founder and chief technology officer.

It was Cozy Bear, CrowdStrike concluded, that first penetrated the D.N.C. in the summer of 2015....

Only in March 2016 did Fancy Bear show up -- first penetrating the computers of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and then jumping to the D.N.C., investigators believe. Fancy Bear, sometimes called A.P.T. 28 and believed to be directed by the G.R.U., Russia’s military intelligence agency, is an older outfit, tracked by Western investigators for nearly a decade....

Attribution, as the skill of identifying a cyberattacker is known, is more art than science. It is often impossible to name an attacker with absolute certainty. But over time, by accumulating a reference library of hacking techniques and targets, it is possible to spot repeat offenders. Fancy Bear, for instance, has gone after military and political targets in Ukraine and Georgia, and at NATO installations.

That largely rules out cybercriminals and most countries, Mr. Alperovitch said. “There’s no plausible actor that has an interest in all those victims other than Russia,” he said. Another clue: The Russian hacking groups tended to be active during working hours in the Moscow time zone.

Okay, haters: Can you cast doubt on this account? Are the descriptions of Cozy Bear and Fancy Bear plausible? Is there reason to doubt what's said here about their links to the Russian security apparatus? Are there holes in the case for blaming the specific hackers? The Times has enough confidence in this story to publish those details and dare critics to show their work and explain why we shouldn't trust the story.

That's how it's supposed to work. And yes, the system sometimes fails. It failed when the press accepted the notion that Saddam Hussein still had WMDs. But the White House at the time was pressuring the media and the public to accept that story, and the opposition was weak. In this case, the story is backed by the government, but it's an outgoing government, and the incoming one is on the side of the skeptics.

But the way it works now is that a story like this doesn't face challenges on the details so much as it's subjected to a rousing chorus of LA LA LA I CAN'T HEAR YOU, especially from the right -- very much including the new administration.

The Times story is the press is doing its job. But these days we're arguing ideological affinities, not facts. And on that basis, the way to discredit a story is just to say you refuse to believe it. If there are enough of you and you're aggressive enough, you win.

IS ROGER AILES GETTING A TRUMP JOB? SERIOUSLY?

Joe Cunningham at RedState spotted this tweet from an Al Jazeera journalist:

BREAKING: State Department source tells me Trump considering disgraced ex-Fox News boss Roger Ailes for Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy

— Mehdi Hasan (@mehdirhasan) December 13, 2016

Is this legit? Cunningham notes that the position is a real one -- and one that requires Senate confirmation. Here's the State Department's description of the job:

The mission of American public diplomacy is to support the achievement of U.S. foreign policy goals and objectives, advance national interests, and enhance national security by informing and influencing foreign publics and by expanding and strengthening the relationship between the people and Government of the United States and citizens of the rest of the world.

[The] Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs leads America's public diplomacy outreach, which includes messaging to counter terrorism and violent extremism. The Under Secretary oversees the bureaus of Educational and Cultural Affairs, Public Affairs, and International Information Programs, as well as the Global Engagement Center, and participates in foreign policy development.

So the guy who built a TV network that regularly tells us all terrorists are Muslims, Europe is a socialist hellhole, and many large cities in the West are full of "no-go zones" where non-Muslims can't go is under consideration to be in charge of international outreach and communications programs run by the U.S. government? Not to mention in charge of the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, which oversees not only Fulbright scholarships and an exchange program for foreign high school students but a global women's empowerment initiative?

Ailes, if appointed, would be the fifth man in the Trump administration to be accused of assaulting women:

Shortly after [the] announcement that Donald Trump would nominate Carl's Jr./Hardee's CEO Andy Puzder to lead the Labor Department, St. Louis' Riverfront Times noted that Puzder's now-ex-wife Lisa Henning had accused him, in a 1980s divorce filing, of physically abusing her on two occasions....

Puzder ... is not the only member of Trump's inner circle to have been accused of assaulting one or more women. Adviser and former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski was charged, though not ultimately prosecuted, for grabbing and pulling reporter Michelle Fields' arm after a March press conference.... Top White House adviser Steve Bannon ... was charged with misdemeanor domestic violence against his now-ex-wife in 1996 after police responded to an incident in which she alleged that he grabbed her roughly and tried to pull her into a car. An officer wrote at the time that he had observed "red marks on [Bannon's wife's] left wrist and the right side of her neck." The charge was later dropped when the woman declined to testify in court.

And, of course, Donald Trump himself has been accused of sexually assaulting at least 14 women.

It was announced just today that Ailes is facing yet another sexual harassment lawsuit:

On Tuesday, Lidia Curanaj, now a Fox 5 reporter whose legal name is Lidija Ujkic, filed a 28-page discrimination and hostile work environment suit against the network’s parent company, in which she said Mr. Ailes harassed her when she was applying for a job at Fox News....

Ms. Curanaj believed that she did not “receive the position at F.N.C. because Ailes determined that she would not submit to him sexually,” the suit states....

The allegations in the suit echo claims by several other current and former Fox News employees suggest sexual harassment was a persistent problem in the workplace. In July, Gretchen Carlson, a former Fox News anchor, filed suit against Mr. Ailes, saying that she was forced out of the network after she refused his sexual advances. A subsequent internal investigation found more than 20 claims of inappropriate behavior involving him, including that he offered to help advance women’s careers in exchange for sexual favors.

Was this job rumor floated as a favor to Ailes, on a day when we learned he's being sued again? If so, even that is obnoxious -- anyone who feels sorry for Ailes and thinks it would be a nice gesture to give him some good publicity at this time is feeling sorry for a disgusting human being.

And if this is a legitimate story and Trump intends to go through with the appointment, then shame on any senator who votes to approve Ailes. At that point, we'll know there are no limits. Though with Trump as president-elect, I guess we already know that.

****

UPDATE: Via Mediaite, Hasan followed up:

Snr State Dept official to me: Trump "testing the waters to see how these appointments go" before releasing Roger Ailes name for a State job

— Mehdi Hasan (@mehdirhasan) December 13, 2016

However:

Hope Hicks on whether there's any truth to report that Roger Ailes is under consideration for State Dept. post: "Not a shred"

— ErikWemple (@ErikWemple) December 13, 2016

Trump spox says Roger Ailes is not being considered for Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy.

— Michael Calderone (@mlcalderone) December 13, 2016

I guess that settles that -- unless the story changes.

IF IT'S A CHOICE BETWEEN YOU AND KLEPTOCRACY, TRUMP WON'T PICK YOU, RELIGIOUS CONSERVATIVES

Tony Perkins and his Family Research Council are outraged that Donald Trump chose ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson to be his secretary of state:

To hear that Donald Trump may be appointing a man who not only led the charge to open the Boy Scouts to gay troop leaders but whose company directly gives to Planned Parenthood is upsetting at best.... Unfortunately, the BSA, under Tillerson, ultimately caved to the pressure of the far-Left, irreparably splitting the Scouts and destroying a proud and honorable American tradition. Under his chairmanship, ExxonMobil's score on the Human Rights Campaign's Corporate "Equality" Index has also skyrocketed to 87 percent. Still, Trump calls Rex a "world class player and dealmaker," but if these are the kinds of deals Tillerson makes ... then who knows what sort of "diplomacy" he would champion at DOS?

... The agency already has an image problem after almost a decade of failing to respect the traditions and beliefs of other countries. The last thing Americans need is a leader who would continue to advocate (however subtly) the leftist social policy of the Obama years.

Poor Perkins. He endorsed Ted Cruz in the Republican primaries, but announced his support for Trump on the last night of the Republican convention, saying, “Donald Trump has committed to upholding and protecting the first freedom and therefore our ability as citizens to unite our nation once again under God. Let us go forth from here and do that work.” When Trump's Access Hollywood tape was broadcast in October, Perkins reaffirmed his support for Trump, explaining to Fox News why he was OK with a genital-grabbing president:

"We don't share the same type of values. We don't see the world the same way, although we do have some shared concerns," Perkins said....

"I can guarantee you what we'll have under Hillary Clinton, it will not be a government that evangelicals and other Americans who love their freedom will enjoy or prosper under."

Trump has claimed to be concerned about keeping the Supreme Court conservative, and about the horrific oppression experienced by Americans who say "Merry Christmas." He and Perkins are in sync that way. But the sharing of concerns goes only so far.

Perkins and his fellow social cons will still get the judges they want -- judges who'll restrict abortion and curtail LGBT rights. But that's only because those judges are the ones likely to rule in favor of wealthy plutocrats and Republicans attempting to restrict voting rights. If Trump's judges are going to deviate from right-wing orthodoxy, it's going to be on social issues, not on comforting the materially comfortable or improving the GOP's electoral chances.

Sorry, Tony. You made a deal with the devil. I don't think there's anyone left in the Senate who'll stand with you on this, despite all the noise Republicans made about Planned Partenthood when there were elections to win. Too bad you got used.