You almost have to sympathize with Jennifer Rubin. She ranks somewhere in the mid-range of Top 20 worst pundits, and with her continued pounding of Republicans over their stance on Donald Trump, she’s creating even more foes than she had before. Note: I said “almost.”
Steven W. Thrasher at The Guardian writes—Democrats: don't try to work with Donald Trump. Just say 'no':
All Democrats must say “no” to working with Donald Trump and his lazy, shiftless thugs who want to steal the labor of our bodies, the sanity of our minds, and the beauty of our natural resources. Democrats need to say “no” to him, on everything, with the same forceful confidence Trump displays.
Any collaboration with Trump will yield nothing more than humiliation, anyway. Al Gore met with Ivanka Trump about climate justice only to have a climate denier nominated to helm the EPA, the ExxonMobil CEO named to lead the state department and a witch hunt against any government scientist who has gone to a climate change conference. Similarly, labor leaders who signaled they were interested in working with Trump in repealing Nafta were shown to be chumps when he named a fast-food CEO to oversee the labor department.
But there is a more important reason than salvaging dignity that Democrats shouldn’t do business with the president-elect: every time they say “I hope to find common ground with him,” they are saying that their pet issue is more important than the fact Trump has said Mexicans are rapists, “you can do anything” to women, Muslims should be registered or banned, the exonerated Central Park Five still deserve to be executed, and differently abled people deserve to be mocked. Each time a Democrat says “yes” to Trump’s choices or meetings or policies, they are normalizing his hate, ceding any moral ground they might be able to muster in future fights.
Dahlia Lithwick and Daniel S, Cohen write—Buck Up, Democrats, and Fight Like Republicans:
On Monday, members of the Electoral College will vote in Donald J. Trump as president. Though he lost the election by nearly three million votes and almost daily generates headlines about new scandals, the Democratic Party is doing little to stop him. If you’ve been asking yourself “Where are the Democrats?” you’re not alone.
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. The Hillary Clinton campaign, trying to encourage a peaceful transition, has gone almost completely dark, with her most notable appearances coming in selfies with strangers. Nobody deserves downtime more than Mrs. Clinton, but while she is decompressing, the country is moving toward its biggest electoral mistake in history. [...]
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.
E.J. Dionne Jr. at The Washington Post writes—The electoral college should think hard before handing Trump the presidency:
Memo to Trump’s Republican critics: Your initial instincts about Trump were right. Remember that catering to this man will bring only pain and humiliation.
Memo to those claiming that everyone should give Trump a chance now that the people have spoken: Actually, “the people” didn’t make Trump president. They preferred Hillary Clinton by at least 2.8 million votes. If Trump takes office, it’s the electoral-college system that will do it. And the post-election Trump has been as abusive and self-involved as he was during the campaign. The opposition’s job is to stand up and prevent or mitigate the damage he could do to our country.
Memo to the electoral college that votes next Monday: Our tradition — for good reason — tells you that your job is to ratify the state-by-state outcome of the election. The question is whether Trump, Vladimir Putin and, perhaps, Clinton’s popular-vote advantage give you sufficient reason to blow up the system.
I don’t raise this lightly. The costs of breaking with 188 years of tradition would be very high.
Yochi Drezen and Sam Ellis at Vox write—The US may be aiding war crimes in Yemen:
Syria, though, isn’t the only place in the Middle East where a civil war marked by indiscriminate bombing is exacting an enormous and rapidly growing human toll: Just hundreds of miles away from the front lines of Aleppo, the impoverished country of Yemen is being devastated by a months-long military campaign led by Saudi Arabia that has left thousands dead and hundreds of thousands at risk of starvation.
There’s another notable thing about Yemen, which makes its near-total lack of media attention all the more jarring: Washington is giving direct military support to the Saudi campaign, including providing aerial refueling of the Saudi warplanes that have hit schools, hospitals, and other civilian targets across the country. That’s raising serious questions about whether the US is complicit in potential Saudi war crimes. [...]
The US has condemned the civilian death toll and urged the Saudis to exert more restraint. Washington also plays no role in helping determine which targets the Saudis bomb. Still, there is no question that American support — the US has flown more than 1,600 refueling missions, or roughly two a day, as of late November — has made it easier for Saudi Arabia to bomb the country, and that it has directly contributed to Yemen’s suffering.
Heather Digby Parton at Salon writes—Fountainhead of bad ideas: Ayn Rand’s fanboys take the reins of power:
For a man who ran for president on a supposedly populist platform, Donald Trump sure has appointed a lot of extremely wealthy businesspeople to his administration. He explains to his followers at his ostentatious victory rallies that he’s doing this because he wants people “that made a fortune because now they’re negotiating with you,” adding, “It’s not different than a great baseball player or a great golfer.”
The truth is that nobody really understands why Trump is choosing the people he’s choosing, not even him. Reports indicate that it’s a capricious process, and no one is sure if there’s even a cursory vetting of the choices. Because so many of these people have no government experience there is little sense of the worldviews and philosophies that guide them.
On Tuesday, however, James Hohmann of The Washington Post identified a common thread among the businessmen, including Trump, which should have been obvious from the beginning. They are fanboys of Ayn Rand, the patron saint of selfish adolescents and titans of industry. [...]
Of course, Ayn Rand aficionados are hardly unknown in the high reaches of government. The most powerful one of all was the man who bears much of the responsibility for the 2008 financial crisis and the Great Recession that followed, former Federal Reserve chair Alan Greenspan.
Scott Lemieux at The New Republic writes—It’s Not Looking Good for Roe v. Wade:
Opponents of abortion rights are “emboldened” by the election of Donald Trump. [...]
In the short term, the status quo—in which states are given extensive, but not unlimited, leeway to regulate pre-viability abortions—will prevail. But in the longer term, there is a high probability that a Trump administration will spell the end of Roe, with no immediate prospects for recovering a Supreme Court majority willing to protect the reproductive rights of women. [...]
The real potential danger lies down the road. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is an 83-year-old cancer survivor, Justice Stephen Breyer is 78, and Kennedy himself is 80. Ginsburg and Breyer will almost certainly stay on the Court as long as they’re physically able to serve, but four years is a long time. And it’s possible that Kennedy could resign to be replaced by a Republican successor, although he might be the kind of nearly extinct moderate Republican who disdains Trump. Democrats will face the odd situation of doing their damnedest to keep Kennedy on the court for four more years.
But if Trump is able to get one more nominee confirmed after replacing Scalia, that will make Chief Justice John Roberts the median vote on the Court. What happens then? At that point, the only question is whether Roe is quickly executed or slowly strangled to death.
Claire Lampen at News.Mic writes—Obama just took an important stand for reproductive rights:
Reproductive rights are more imperiled than they have been in over 40 years, which makes President Barack Obama's move to indefinitely protect Title X funding for Planned Parenthood and its ilk particularly meaningful.
Unfortunately, because nothing the Obama administration does is sacred under Donald Trump, meaningful is about all his action can be.
On Wednesday, the Department of Health and Human Services finalized regulations to the Title X Project Grants for Family Planning Services, an amendment it had originally proposed in September. The rule will be effective 30 days from its publication in the federal register on Dec. 19, and stipulates that Title X funds cannot be denied to a health care provider "for reasons other than its ability to provide Title X services."
The Editorial Board of the Toledo Blade weighs in on Ohio’s forced-birther bills, one just signed by Gov. John Kasich, the other vetoed—Abortion bills’ huge overreach:
In 1992’s Planned Parenthood vs. Casey, the U.S. Supreme Court drew a line at viability and said that any law that sought to “place a substantial obstacle” on abortions before a pregnancy reached that point was unconstitutional. But state Rep. Bob Cupp (R., Lima) argues that with the advance of medicine, the point of viability is changing.
A constitutional right to abortion has been established by the Supreme Court of the United States, so the Heartbeat Bill, which clearly prohibited previability abortions, would not have been viable in federal court. And the 20-week bill probably won’t survive a court test either.
So these bills look like cynical political postures rather than bona fide attempts to protect life.
But even if they are meant as good-faith challenges to the Supreme Court’s abortion precedents, these bills intrude where the law should not go.
Abortion is a difficult, sad decision: It involves giving up on one’s own potential child. But pregnancy and abortion are physically and emotionally intimate matters, and having a child is life-altering. The decision should be made by the woman who is pregnant, in consultation with those loved ones and medical advisers she chooses.
The General Assembly should cease its meddling in this deeply personal matter.
Moshe Z. Marvit at The Nation writes—A Lesson on How to Unite Across Race and Class From… the Teamsters:
A few weeks ago, a major election was held in the United States, where working-class whites, in alliance with black and Latino voters, rallied around a progressive populist platform—and won. No, this is neither revisionist history nor some kind of collective blue-state fantasy, in which the Electoral College has been abolished and the popular vote prevailed. Rather, it concerns the largely ignored national election of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters—one of the nation’s largest industrial unions—which in many ways serves as a microcosm of our political environment, and may provide lessons for Democrats as they move forward. Prime among them are that before the Democratic Party abandons populism or gives up on working-class whites as unwinnable, it would do well to look to look at how Teamsters have been able to win Rust Belt voters with a campaign that should be familiar to Democrats. [...]
The narrative that most have settled on for why Hillary Clinton lost the election was that working-class whites abandoned her and the Democratic Party for a reactionary populist message. But Ken Paff, a former truck driver from Cleveland, now an organizer for Teamsters for a Democratic Union in Detroit, explains, “The same people lost to Democrats and won over by Trump were won by our movement. But where Trump benefited from blue collar desertion, we were the beneficiary of blue collar militancy.” By campaigning on a progressive populist platform that centered on fighting for workers’ rights, stronger health and pension benefits, and inclusion and diversity, the insurgent group of Teamsters was able to win in the United States.
Bob Dreyfuss at The Nation writes—Trump’s Foreign-Policy Appointees Are Set to Provoke War With Iran:
The trio of generals who have so far joined Donald Trump’s national security team—Mike Flynn as national security adviser, James Mattis as secretary of defense, and John Kelly as secretary of homeland security—along with Representative Mike Pompeo as director of the CIA, have unnerved official Washington and leaders around the world. From North Korea to the South China Sea, from the Mexican border to Syria, they’re a cohort likely both to facilitate and to encourage Trump’s instinct for confrontation and bellicosity, and their out-of-the-mainstream approach, even extremism, in military and intelligence affairs is unprecedented in recent US history.
And it’s likely that the first target of Trump’s generals and the CIA will be Iran. “Ingredients are falling, tragically, into place for a possible war with Iran,” wrote Paul Pillar, a former CIA analyst who retired in 2005 as chief of the National Intelligence Council’s Near East section, in The National Interest.
Just as the administration of George W. Bush came into office fixated on Iraq—which was the subject of the very first meeting of W.’s National Security Council on January 21, 2001—the Trump administration is likely to direct its fire against Iran. At the very least, its animosity toward Iran could lead to an escalating military confrontation and an aggressive push for regime change, while at worst it could trigger a shooting war between the two countries that could dwarf the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in both scope and intensity.