Catherine Rampell at The Washington Post writes—Americans — especially but not exclusively Trump voters — believe crazy, wrong things:
Many Americans believe a lot of dumb, crazy, destructive, provably wrong stuff. Lately this is especially (though not exclusively) true of Donald Trump voters, according to a new survey.
The survey, from the Economist/YouGov, was conducted in mid-December, and it finds that willingness to believe a given conspiracy theory is (surprise!) strongly related to whether that conspiracy theory supports one’s political preferences. [...]
Conspiracy theories are hardly the only arena in which Americans have proven themselves ill-informed. The same survey also found that, astonishingly, about a third of respondents believe the share of Americans without health insurance has risen in the last five years. Even a sizable chunk of Clinton voters (21 percent) believes this.
John Nichols at The Nation presents The 2016 Progressive Honor Roll: Yes, it’s been an awful year. But the untold story is that grassroots activists have actually frequently prevailed.
Martin Longman at The Washington Monthly writes—The Man in Charge of Our Nuclear Weapons:
For his Energy Secretaries, President Obama chose physicists. Asked if his background in science helped him make decisions as Secretary of Energy, Stephen Chu said “All the time.” That won’t be an option for Donald Trump’s nominee, former Texas governor Rick Perry, whose education is limited to a Bachelors degree in Animal Science from Texas A&M where he received ‘D’s’ in classes as varied as Veterinary Anatomy, Feeds & Feeding, Writing for Professional Men, and “Meats.”
And that could be a problem when it comes time to set policy for our nuclear arsenal.
“There’s no end of mischief they could cause for the stockpile,” Mr. [John] Pike, [the director of the think tank GlobalSecurity.org and one of the most experienced security analysts in the field] said, referring to Mr. Trump and Mr. Perry, and pointing to the confusion and concern that followed the post by the president-elect.
Mr. Pike was withering in his criticism of Mr. Perry’s ability to act as a knowledgeable counterweight to Mr. Trump. “Perry’s got no idea which end the bullet comes out of,” he said. “He’s not somebody who’s going to say no to the president.”
One major concern is that Perry will come under pressure to resume underground testing of our nuclear weapons for the first time since 1992.
E.J. Dionne Jr. at The Washington Post writes—The good that could come from a Trump presidency:
Gloom is a terrible way to ring out the old, and despair is of no help in trying to imagine the new.
So let us consider what good might come from the political situation in which we will find ourselves in 2017. Doing this does not require denying the dangers posed by a Donald Trump presidency or the demolition of progressive achievements he could oversee. It does mean remembering an important distinction President Obama has made ever since he entered public life: that “hope is not blind optimism.”
“Hope,” he argued, “is that thing inside us that insists, despite all evidence to the contrary, that something better awaits us if we have the courage to reach for it, and to work for it, and to fight for it.”
It is this spirit that began to take hold almost immediately after Trump’s election. Americans in large numbers, particularly the young, quickly realized that the coming months and years will require new and creative forms of political witness and organization.
Richard Wolfe at The Guardian writes—Do you care about the truth? Help the Guardian sort fake news from reality:
It’s a world where the peddlers of lies at Breitbart pretend to fact-check the Guardian’s reporting on the US border.
This so-called fact-checking is the same kind of sliming that works so well for Trump himself, who recently tweeted that CNN was reporting “FAKE NEWS!” about his continued role on The Apprentice.
Trump can use as many capital letters as he likes, but CNN was only reporting the facts from his own campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway. If she represents fake news, what does that say about the Trump campaign and presidency? All this from a man who built his political career by denying the facts about Barack Obama’s citizenship.
Lawrence Downes at The New York Times writes—The Honesty of Carrie Fisher:
Read her books. They are works where misery and brilliance commingle with wit, the creations of an actual person who had many layers and is worth getting to know, as opposed to Princess Leia, who has none and is not.
Anyone could have predicted that a little girl whose mom and dad were Ms. Reynolds and Eddie Fisher would grow up with an abundance of, let’s call them issues, and that these might lead to a life involving alcohol and drugs, and detox and rehab. All of which happened to Ms. Fisher, in profusion.
But who would have predicted that this product of Hollywood inbreeding (she called herself that) would have turned celebrity family dysfunction into such memorable writing? Her semi-autobiographical novel “Postcards From the Edge,” and memoirs like “Wishful Drinking” and “Shockaholic,” are hilarious, bluntly beautiful and deserve as much lasting recognition as her contributions to “Star Wars.”
David Dayen at The Nation writes— Trump’s Transition Team Is Stacked With Privatization Enthusiasts:
The traditional media has yearned of late to deem Donald Trump’s White House staff and cabinet a “team of rivals,” with wide disagreements on economic policy. I don’t really see it; despite a few variances here and there, by and large Trump’s advisers all fall in a comfortably snug ideological range, with dedication to doctrinaire conservative economic beliefs about tax cuts and deregulation. And another area of consensus sticks out: the idea that government should outsource public functions to private industry. [...]
But perhaps even more troubling than the cabinet choices are the less visible members of the transition policy and implementation teams. These staffers will play a key role in hiring the thousands of lower-profile policy-makers the president gets to appoint. Seeding the federal bureaucracy with privatization fans at a level closer to policy execution will facilitate the outsourcing of public functions almost as much as a directive from a cabinet official.
So we should be concerned about people like Martin Whitmer, the point person for the transportation and infrastructure policy staff. A lobbyist and former Bush transportation official, Whitmer previously ran the “public-private ventures division” at the American Road & Transportation Builders Association. Shirley Ybarra, leading the Department of Transportation transition, literally wrote the Virginia Public-Private Transportation Act of 1995 while deputy secretary of transportation of the commonwealth. Jim Carafano, a Heritage Foundation vice president working on the State Department transition, has advocated similar public-private projects for homeland-security operations.
Magda Hughes at The Guardian writes—Want to know what it's like to be a woman in a boy's club? Ask any waitress:
At law school, lecturers love to remind their students that they will be entering a boys’ club. In parliament, it’s the same story: watch five minutes of question time and you’ll see it. So maybe we shouldn’t have been so shocked last year when Caroline Tan brought the “boys’ club” of the medical profession to everyone’s attention. Or this year, when Erin Riley experienced backlash after calling out sexism in sport. Yet another conglomerate of educated, middle-class white men were forming a boys’ club, to the detriment of women.
Where else are women being repeatedly pushed around and pushed away in their workplace? The answer is close to home for anyone who’s bought a coffee or beer, or eaten at a restaurant. Hospitality is one of the worst boys’ clubs of all.
Raise the topic of chefs with almost any 20-something female who’s worked with one and she will shudder, haunted by memories of overly entitled, aggressive men. [...]
Sure, chefs throw their weight around regardless of who they’re working with. The occasional man who finds himself taking orders from, or working with, kitchens might be on the receiving end of swearing and name calling. The difference is that women are more likely to experience a special kind of bullying from chefs: unwanted conduct of a sexual nature, including jokes, comments and the sharing of images.
Theo Anderson at In These Times writes—Income Inequality Is off the Charts. Can Local Policies Make a Difference?
The income gap between the classes is growing at a startling pace in the United States. In 1980, the top 1 percent earned on average 27 times more than workers in the bottom 50 percent. Today, they earn 81 times more.
The widening gap is “due to a boom in capital income,” according to research by French economist Thomas Piketty. That means the rich are living off of their wealth rather than investing it in businesses that create jobs, as Republican, supply-side economics predicts they would do.
Piketty played a pivotal role in pushing income inequality to the center of public discussions in 2013 with his book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century. In a new working paper, he and his co-authors report that the average national income per adult grew by 61 percent in the United States between 1980 and 2014. But only the highest earners benefited from that growth.
For those in the top 1 percent, income rose 205 percent. Meanwhile, the average pre-tax income of the bottom 50 percent of workers was basically unchanged, stagnating “at about $16,000 per adult after adjusting for inflation,” the paper reads.
Jeet Heer at The New Republic writes—Trump’s Call for a Nuclear Arms Race Isn’t a Warning to Putin. It’s an Invitation:
Much has changed since 1987. The Soviet Union is no more, and its successor state, Russia, is a diminished global power. But Trump’s vision of the world has remained strikingly static. In the ’80s, as now, he sees the U.S. and Russia as status quo powers beset by turbulent upstart nations, and thus, as having essentially similar goals. Writing in Quartz, the journalist Sarah Kendzior argued such a friendship could lead to “the new mutually assured destruction: the two states with the most nuclear weapons in the world, both backed by authoritarian leaders, may be partnering against as-yet unknown shared enemies.”
A U.S.-Russian alliance, with both nations building up their nuclear stockpiles and intimidating emerging powers, has a certain superficial coherence. But in practice, it would be nearly impossible to execute. Putin doesn’t have the same list of major foes as Trump does. In Syria, they do seem to agree about the need to bolster the dictatorship of President Bashar al-Assad to end the civil war there. But on Iran, Putin supports the nuclear deal that Trump and his team seem eager to challenge, if not rip apart.
Since 2014, Putin has worked vigorously to improve Russia’s ties to China, leading to increased trade and military co-operation; Trump is flirting with a trade war with China. While Putin might be happy to work with a more amenable U.S. administration, there’s little reason to think he’s would join an American alliance against China. As a practical matter, Russia’s ambitions are clearly directed towards regaining a sphere of influence in central Europe and the Middle East.
Olga Khazan at The Atlantic writes—How Trump Could Slow Medical Progress:
Embryonic stem-cells are now being tested as possible treatments for juvenile diabetes, Parkinson’s disease, and macular degeneration, among other ailments. Fetal tissue, meanwhile, has been used for studies on the Zika virus and other pathogens. Fetal research, too, has stoked controversy: In the past year several states passed laws—including one Mike Pence signed in Indiana—prohibiting the donation of fetal tissue for research. South Dakota’s law made research on fetal tissue a felony.
To Paul S. Knoepfler, a professor of biology at the Institute for Regenerative Cures at the University of California, today feels like “2006 all over again. Obama opened the door, and now we’re wondering, is the door going to be closed?”
If he is confirmed as HHS secretary, [Tom] Price would oversee the National Institutes of Health, which gives grants to researchers working on embryonic stem cells and fetal tissue, along with other research areas. Price could decide to cease funding these projects, or Trump could issue an executive order reversing Obama’s policy.
As a congressman, Price repeatedly voted against expanding embryonic stem-cell research, and when Obama lifted the ban in 2009, Price released a statement saying, “Human embryos are the most vulnerable forms of life, yet the Obama administration is creating taxpayer-funded incentives for their destruction.”