Don’t worry, you didn't miss it. Donald Trump didn't suddenly do a press conference—which means that his last press conference of the year will most likely also be the one in which he invited Russia to hack Hillary Clinton's emails and make them public.
Here's some clips from that July 27, 2016, press conference.
It's almost over. It's fourth and goal with seconds on the clock. 2016 is about to become an ex-year. Thank the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
Among the bright spots in the fourth quarter: President Obama designates Bears Ears (pictured) in Utah and Gold Butte in Nevada as national monuments.
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Below the fold is the thrilling conclusion---October through five seconds ago---of the psychotic 366 days (I blame all our problems on that damn leap day) we’re finally at the end of, in our year-end series 2016: Well, That Kinda Sucked. Included: fascinating stats, more of Pete Souza’s White House pics, the best late-night barbs and, believe it or not, a lot of things that didn’t actually suck.
As we await tomorrow night’s descent of the giant ball (HuhHuhHuh…I said giant ball) in Times Square, all the writers, editors, gaffers, key grips, fuzzy critters and catheter sales reps at C&J wish you a festive New Year's Eve and a 2017 full of good health, constructive rebelling, Trump impeachment, and two additional toppings of your choice for only $9.99.
Oh, and one more thing before 2017 arrives and I get shipped off to my ex-gay re-education camp in one of the GOP’s Freedom Railcars: fuck you, Trump. And your little Pence, too.
Your wormhole to the past opens up one last time below the fold... [Swoosh!!] Right now! [Gong!!]
Six years into recovery from the great recession, not everything is recovering like it should be. Take part-time work. Actually, you might have to take it, given the number of people involuntarily working part-time out there. And according to a recent report from the Economic Policy Institute, the high level of involuntary part-time work isn’t cyclical, created by a lagging economy. It’s becoming structural—something employers are doing on purpose even though they don’t have to. A few fun facts:
The share of people working part-time involuntarily remains at recessionary levels. In 2015, there were 6.4 million workers who wanted to work full time but were working part time, accounting for 4.4 percent of those at work; this is roughly 2.0 million more involuntary part-time workers, or a 1.3 percentage-point increase in the rate of involuntary part-time employment prior to the recession. In fact, data from 2007 to 2015 show that involuntary part-time work is increasing almost five times faster than part-time work and about 18 times faster than all work. [...]
Involuntary part-time work and its growth are concentrated in several industries that more intensively use part-time work, specifically, retail and leisure and hospitality. Retail trade (stores and car dealers, etc.) and leisure and hospitality (hotels, restaurants, and the like) contributed well over half (63.2 percent) of the growth of all part-time employment since 2007, and 54.3 percent of the growth of involuntary part-time employment. These two industries, together with educational and health services and professional and business services, account for the entire growth of part-time employment and 85.0 percent of the growth of involuntary part-time employment from 2007 to 2015.
One thing it’s not: the Affordable Care Act’s fee for employers who don’t provide health coverage for employees working 30 or more hours a week. One thing it is, in practice: racist.
Hispanic and black workers have been hardest hit by the structural shift toward involuntary part-time work. Hispanics and blacks are relatively much more likely to be involuntarily part-time (6.8 percent and 6.3 percent respectively) than whites, of whom just 3.7 percent work part time involuntarily. And blacks and Hispanics are disproportionate shares of involuntary part-time workers: together they constitute just 27.9 percent of those “at work,” they represent 41.1 percent of all involuntary part-time workers. The greater amount of involuntary part-time employment among blacks and Hispanics is due to their both having a greater inability to find full-time work and facing more slack work conditions. Black and Hispanic women (and women of “other race/ethnicity”) are the groups most likely to experience involuntary part-time employment and represented 21.1 percent of all involuntary part-time workers in 2015.
Anyone want to place any bets on this getting better under Donald Trump?
As President Obama's White House works to make its final days as impactful as possible, The Hill takes a look at five regulations the president might still issue before Donald Trump takes the helm. The new regs could result in new labor rules, consumer protections, energy efficiency standards and humane treatment of animals. Lydia Wheeler reports:
Occupational safety
The Labor Department's Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OSHA) is planning to release a rule that would reduce by 10 times the amount of beryllium that workers can be exposed to on the job. [...]
Forced arbitration
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) is expected to finalize a rule it proposed in May that would prevent credit card companies from mandating that consumers go to arbitration over disputes. Often slipped into the fine print, the arbitration clauses prevent consumers from bringing a suit against a company over fees or practices or from joining a class-action lawsuit. [...]
Incentive-based compensation
Financial regulators are poised to finalize rules that would delay compensation to Wall Street executives that are based on profits made from risky short-term bets. The joint rule coming from six federal agencies is one of the biggest enforceable actions left to implement under the Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform law. [...]
Stoves
The Department of Energy is expected to finalize new energy efficiency standards for residential gas and electric stove tops and ovens that are designed to reduce energy costs and help with climate change.
Organic meat
The Department of Agriculture (USDA) is working on new standards for how animals should be treated before meat is sold as “certified organic.”
To qualify for the label, livestock would have to live in an environment that allows for its natural behaviors and be kept in an appropriate shelter.
Executions dropped to a 25-year low this year, falling from 28 killed in 2015 to 20 this year. And that's "down from a peak of ninety-eight, in 1999" reports the New Yorker:
Even more remarkable, just thirty people were sentenced to death this year, compared with three hundred and fifteen in 1996. Indeed, as the report further notes, “Fewer new death sentences were imposed in the past decade than in the decade preceding the Supreme Court’s invalidation of capital punishment in 1972.” The reduction in death sentences means that the decline in executions is likely to continue as well, because the pipeline of new cases is not as full.
The Wall Street Journalreports that only a few states put inmates to death this year:
Five states put to death inmates this year, with Texas and Georgia together accounting for 80% of executions in 2016. Not since 1983 have so few states carried out at least one death sentence. Since 2015, 85% of executions have taken place in three states: Texas, Georgia and Missouri.
What's more, for the first time in forty years, not a single state sentenced ten or more people to death in 2016. A report by the Death Penalty Information Center notes that Texas almost cut their execution total in half, from thirteen in 2015 to seven this year. From TheWall Street Journal:
The decline in Texas … was mainly the result of Texas appeals judges granting more stays of executions due to prisoner claims related to faulty forensic science and prosecutorial misconduct and other issues. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals has granted 15 stays since 2015, compared to the three it granted between 2012 and 2014.
“The rising number of stays suggests that the Court of Criminal Appeals is registering the concerns about the fairness and accuracy of our state’s capital punishment system,” Texas Defender Service executive director Kathryn Kase said in an earlier statement."
The decline in death sentences is a trend that continues in public opinion as well. As we covered in September, less than half of America currently supports the death penalty, a 40-year low.
Whether the GOP likes it or not, Democrat Roy Cooper is the next Governor of North Carolina
Whether the GOP likes it or not, Democrat Roy Cooper is the next Governor of North Carolina
Republicans in North Carolina introduced a bill that was a shocking and unprecedented power grab, attempting to strip power from incoming Democratic Governor-elect Roy Cooper:
The legislation proposed by Republicans would reduce the number of state government employees Cooper can hire and fire at will from 1,500 to 300, strip the governor of the power to appoint trustees to the University of North Carolina and give it to the General Assembly, and require Senate confirmation for Cabinet appointments. Another proposal would shift control of one state office from the governor to the lieutenant governor — who will still be a Republican next year.
A North Carolina judge is temporarily blocking a new Republican-backed law that strips the incoming Democratic governor of his control over election boards just before he takes office.
Wake County Superior Court Judge Don Stephens ruled Friday that the risk to free and fair elections justified stopping the law from taking effect this weekend until it could be reviewed more closely. Stephens plans to review the law Thursday.
Gov.-elect. Roy Cooper sued on Friday to block the law, passed two weeks ago. It ends the control governors exert over statewide and county election boards. The lawsuit says the Republican-led General Assembly's action is unconstitutional because it violates separation of powers by giving legislators too much control over how election laws are administered.
When Russian President Vladimir Putin didn’t immediately retaliate against U.S. sanctions punishing Russia for its election interference, some people theorized that Putin was doing so to garner further goodwill from Donald Trump. If that was the case, manipulation managed:
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Great move on delay (by V. Putin) - I always knew he was very smart!
As we do every four years, Daily Kos Elections is calculating the results of the 2016 presidential election for all 435 congressional districts, and this series of posts explores the most interesting results on a state-by-state basis. You can find our complete data set here, which we’re updating continuously as the precinct-level election returns we need for our calculations become available. You can also click here to learn more about why this data is so difficult to come by.
Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton in Arizona 49-45, a drop from Mitt Romney's 54-45 win there four years ago. Trump took five of Arizona's nine congressional districts, losing one seat that Romney had won: The 2nd District, located in the Tucson area, swung from 50-48 Romney to 50-45 Clinton. But Republican Rep. Martha McSally ran far ahead of the ticket and defeated Democrat Matt Heinz 57-43, two years after unseating Democratic incumbent Ron Barber by just 168 votes. National Democrats spent almost nothing on Heinz, but Clinton's win could encourage them to make this a target in another cycle. However, McSally is a very strong fundraiser, and her decisive win could dissuade local Democrats from challenging her.
Democrats, meanwhile, hold one seat that backed Trump. The gigantic 1st District, which stretches from Arizona's northern border to the Tucson suburbs, supported Trump 48-47, not much different than Romney's 50-48 here. However, Democrat Tom O'Halleran held this open seat for Team Blue, defeating Republican Paul Babeu by a clear 51-44 margin. Babeu's awful past helped keep this seat from flipping. National Democrats ran commercials highlighting the child abuse that happened under Babeu's watch at a Massachusetts school he once ran; Babeu denied that he knew what was happening, but court documents, the testimony of his former students, and Babeu's own words contradicted that. GOP outside groups spent almost nothing to help prop up Babeu, apparently deciding that he was just too weak to be worth their investment.
Clinton decisively took the 3rd, 7th, and 9th Districts, and each seat has a Democratic House member. The 9th, which includes parts of Tempe, Scottsdale, and Mesa, shifted from a 51-47 Obama seat to one Clinton carried by a much wider 55-38. If Democratic Rep. Kyrsten Sinema leaves this seat to run statewide, Team Blue will be happy if they don't need to spend much to defend her district. Trump took the other four seats, and the GOP represents each of them. Rep. David Schweikert's 6th District, which includes some of Phoenix's northern suburbs, did move from 60-39 Romney to 52-42 Trump. That's still quite red, but it could be a hopeful sign for Democrats for the future.
All three major cable news networks had their largest audiences ever, thanks to the drawing power of the nonstop surprises of the 2016 White House campaign that culminated with the election of Donald Trump.
Year-end numbers from Nielsen showed that the 21st Century Fox-owned Fox News Channel was the most-watched network in all of cable with an average of 2.43 million viewers in prime time, up 36% over last year. Only the four major broadcast networks had a larger audience.
Both Fox News competitors finished in the top 10 among ad-supported networks, with Time Warner’s CNN averaging 1.29 million viewers, up 77%, and NBCUniversal’s MSNBC seeing an 88% gain with 1.1 million viewers.
• Obama in his second term used a "thousand small hammers" to shape climate policy: “The first term was essentially lost territory,” says a critic, but the second term was another story. Of the focus on smaller actions, David Victor, director of the Laboratory on International Law and Regulation at University of California, San Diego, said: "Frankly, I think that's probably pretty good news, because there's going to be such an effort to roll it back. Having dozens of things, not all of which are going to be rolled back, is better than having one or two prime targets." As for the largest item—the Clean Power Plan—that right now awaits court action.
Since 'the announcement,' I have spent several sleepless nights and days in turmoil and agony. I have reflected carefully on both sides of the issue, prayed a lot, talked with family and friends, and searched my soul," Jan Chamberlin wrote in a resignation letter to the choir president and choir members. "I've tried to tell myself that by not going to the inauguration, that I would be able to stay in choir for all the other good reasons. I've tried to tell myself that it will be all right and that I can continue in good conscience before God and man.
But she could not do it, Chamberlin said in the letter, she later posted on Facebook. "I could never look myself in the mirror again with self-respect."
The root cause of the extraordinary rise in inequality and the near-stagnant growth of wages for typical workers over most of the past generation is the pay-productivity gap. Before the late 1970s, wages of the vast majority of workers grew in line with productivity. In the late 1970s, typical worker pay growth split from economy-wide productivity growth. Productivity is a measure of how much income is generated in an average hour of work in the economy. While productivity after 1979 grew more slowly relative to previous decades, it did grow steadily, offering the potential for broad-based wage gains. But income gains were not broad-based.
Tribal Chairman George Gillette, second from left, breaks into tears during the 1948 in signing ceremony that forced his people in North Dakota to give up 156,000 of land for a dam. "With a few scratches of the pen, we will sell the best part of our reservation.” he said. “Right now the future doesn't look too good to us."
• Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nation recover some land the government took for a dam impound in 1940-50s:The federal government flooded 156,000 acres of the tribe's reservation in North Dakota. About 80 percent of the tribal membership, more than 300 families, were forced to move so the Garrison Dam could be built on the Missouri River. The best parts of the reservation were lost in this forced sale. Tribal Chairman George Gillette can be seen crying in this photo of the 1948 signing of the coerced “agreement.” The displacement exacerbated loss of language and culture and caused a decline in health when the community hospital was shuttered and not replaced until 2011, more than 60 years later. Now, the Obama administration plans to return 25,000 acres around Lake Sakakawea.
Contributing to this inequality is the fact that while more Americans are working than at any time since August 2007, more people are working part time, erratic and unpredictable schedules—without full-time, steady employment. Since 2007, the number of Americans involuntarily working part time has increased by nearly 45 percent. More Americans than before are part of what’s considered the contingent workforce, working on-call or on-demand, and as independent contractors or self-employed freelancers, often with earnings that vary dramatically month to month.
• On today’s Kagro in the Morning show: #GunFAIL news. Russia sanctions. Anti-China rhetoric aside, Trump’s after a deal there. For himself, naturally. Trump Tower’s own “prosperity gospel” preacher to pray at inauguration. Brian Munroe notes the politics of health care are different in Canada.
How closely does the Trump team identify their cause with that of Vladimir Putin? This closely.
“I will tell you that even those who are sympathetic to President Obama on most issues are saying that part of the reason he did this today was to quote ‘box in’ President-elect Trump,” incoming counselor to the president Kellyanne Conway said Thursday night on CNN. …
Rudy Giuliani, the former New York mayor and prominent Trump supporter, said Friday that Obama’s decision to impose sanctions late in his second term was “extraordinary” and added that he has “never seen a president try to create more problems for a future president.”
The aligning interests between Russian President Vladimir Putin, Russia’s choice for U.S. president (Donald Trump), and Big Oil represents the gravest threat to humanity (and democracy) since the rise of the Axis powers in the 1930s.
Trump press hack Sean Spicer, who continues to prove he got his job by being the most comically reliable toady in his benefactor's gilded little swamp, continues to ratchet down expectations as to whether our next (cough) president will bother to speak to the nation's press at all. Trump's a low-energy guy, after all, he just doesn't have the stamina to answer questions. He doesn't even have the stamina to make press hack Sean Spicer answer questions.
"Yeah, that’s a good question, because I think the thing that you’ve seen with Donald Trump is that he doesn’t, he doesn’t look to the past and say I’ve got to conform to these precedents. He figures out what’s the best way. And so maybe we do, you know, a series of press conferences, but maybe we do some town hall, you know, Facebook town halls. Maybe we go out and solicit input from Twitter. I don’t, I mean, the answer is we’re looking at a lot of things."
Yes, that's how to really turn any tough situation around: solicit input from Twitter. Who the hell needs to answer basic questions about what the policies or actions of the new administration when, alternatively, you could not answer those and instead host a series of Facebook town halls or Twitter idea-tossing with users like WhiteGenocide or guys with cartoon frogs as avatars.
But no, Sean then declared, "business as usual is over." The media-obsessed Trump doesn't need the "liberal" media anymore. Sean also says his boss is "not afraid of anybody" in media, which is an odd thing to say about the man who hasn't had a press conference since last July. Trump seems to be afraid of everybody in the media who doesn't have their own Fox News show. He gets completely unhinged by tough questioning. His response to the debates was to melt down at the first moderator to ask him a question he didn't like, a meltdown which continued throughout the rest of the campaign.
So Sean will be protecting his boss from the scary media, lest our Pumpkinführer melt down entirely. Maybe he'll give interviews to a few Russian outlets and call it done?
