Getting Away With Murder

President-elect Donald Trump continues to employ a private security force that is visible working at his rallies, often employing racial profiling and undue force to eject protesters, Ken Vogel reports for Politico. Former Secret Service agents who have worked presidential details tell him this practice is “playing with fire” because “it creates greater confusion and it creates greater risk.” Keith Schiller, the longtime head of Trump’s private security, has his own Twitter account, where he has regularly spread false claims about the election, including the notion that President Obama encouraged undocumented immigrants to vote illegally. As Vogel notes, as long as Trump pays for these rallies privately, he has the right to invite or eject whomever he wishes, but the behavior of his private cops in singling out people of color for expulsion—even when they’re just listening quietly—may also expose him to legal liability for their actions.

Trump’s emerging cabinet is made up of “men and women who disdain the missions of their assigned agencies, oppose public goods, or conflate their own interests with that of the public. It’s less a team for governing the country than a mechanism for dismantling its key institutions.” And as Jamelle Bouie explains in Slate, this isn’t an accident, this is what white populism looks like.

Shane Goldmacher reports for Politico on how key members of Trump’s inner circle are fighting amongst themselves about who will run a political nonprofit they are setting up to support the President-elect’s agenda. The Trump campaign’s digital director Brad Parscale, has already claimed he will be running it, but that is being disputed by other Trump confidants who want data targeting company Cambridge Analytica to have a bigger role and who think Pascale doesn’t have enough political experience.

Writing for the Washington Monthly, Daniel Stid, the director of the Hewlett Foundation’s Madison Initiative, tries to make the case that Congressional Republicans will stop Trump’s worst impulses and abuses of authority.

Co-founder of The American Prospect, Robert Kuttner asks the same basic question—”Can American fascism be stopped?”—and comes to a gloomier conclusion.

“The sickness of American politics didn’t begin with Donald Trump, any more than the sickness of the Roman Republic began with Caesar,” writes Paul Krugman in the New York Times.

52 percent of Republicans (and 29 percent of Americans overall) think Trump won the popular vote in addition to the electoral college, according to a new survey conducted by Qualtrics, as political scientist John Sides reports for the Washington Post. You cannot find a better example of motivated reasoning. It would be interesting to do a similar poll, but to offer respondents money for giving the right answers.

Conservative talk radio host Charlie Sykes dissects what went wrong with efforts by NeverTrumpers like him to stop Trump’s rise during the GOP primaries. Read the whole thing, especially if you are scratching your head about the previous item.

The Big Grift: The Huffington Post’s Paul Blumenthal explains how Trump’s pick for OMB director, Mike Mulvaney, supports legislation regarding the giant Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac funds that, if implemented, will make billions for Trump backer John Paulson and other hedge fund investors. BILLIONS. (Trump never said “the hedge fund guys are getting away with murder,” right? Don’t disturb the memory hole.)

In 2003, Trump donated $10,000 to Beit El, an Israeli settlement in the Palestinian West Bank, Tamar Pileggi reports for the Times of Israel. The donation was made in honor of David Friedman, the man he has now appointed to serve as the US Ambassador to Israel. Friedman serves as the chairman of an American foundation that raises millions a year for Beit El, and writes a regular column for a pro-settlement news site where, among other things, he called Jewish supporters of a two-state solution “far worse than kapos” (the Jews who were forced to work for the Nazis in the death chambers during the Holocaust).

About the vote: There was no evidence of meaningful voter fraud in 2016, Michael Wines reports for the New York Times after surveying all fifty states’ election officials. On the other hand, the imposition of stringent voter ID laws likely reduced African-American turnout in states like Wisconsin, Jawed Kaleem reports for the Los Angeles Times.

Sorry folks: The AP interviewed 330 of 538 Electors and found no evidence of a wave of Republicans planning to defect from voting for Trump today.

This next item is directed to my terrified progressive friends who desperately insist that the Electoral College must violate its historic role of awarding the presidency to the candidate who got the most votes, state by state. Please read this short essay by Noah Rothman in Commentary magazine. Yes, the neoconservative Commentary magazine. You won’t agree with all or even much of it, but Rothman—who says he has seen the conservative movement become “susceptible to hijacking by conspiratorial thinkers,” now warns of the same dynamic occurring on the left. He’s got a point.

Want to actually be useful? In the New Yorker, Charles Bethea writes up “Indivisible,” an online guide to building local power to influence your Members of Congress that was collectively written by about 30 liberal congressional staffers who want to give newly activated people a clear idea of how Congress actually works.

Need some bucking up? “If Trump turns off that satellite, we’re going to launch our own damn satellite! We’re going to collect that data!” That’s California’s Democratic Governor Jerry Brown about midway through a rip-roaring speech to the annual fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union. Here, helpfully annotated by The Atlantic’s James Fallows.

Speaking of open government data, the Sunlight Foundation has announced that it will “endure” with longtime policy director John Wonderlich as its executive director and Alex Howard stepping up in the role of deputy director. Good luck, guys!

Media matters: “What will he do? What won’t he do? This is why you watch.” That’s the text of MSNBC’s new marketing push, which New York magazine contributing editor Joe Hagan correctly slams as “Fascism as ratings spectacle.”

The reporters who stood for a celebratory picture of their off-the-record briefing with President-elect Donald Trump at his Mar-a-Lago reserve should be grateful that veteran Washington D.C. suck-up Mike Allen didn’t use a flash—not only is the lighting bad, the optics are just terrible.

On the other hand, if you want to support quality nonprofit journalism, check out this list of organizations. The Knight Foundation is matching donations to them for the next month.

Also at a much more useful level, the Washington Post has built a browser extension (for Chrome users) that will append factual information to @RealDonaldTrump’s tweets, as Philip Bump reports.

Tech and Trump: Google, Apple, Uber and Facebook now have all joined Twitter in saying they will not help build a Muslim registry, Nitasha Tiku reports for BuzzFeed. Amazon and Oracle have yet to respond, though Oracle’s CEO Safra Catz has joined Trump’s transition team.

A growing list of tech CEOs and civic tech leaders are signing a pledge organized by Delaware Syed of Freshdesk to defend civil liberties, including Civic Hall friends Elana Berkowitz, Catherine Bracy, Robin Chase, Althea Erickson, Natalie Foster, Christie George, Josh Goldstein, Andrew McLaughlin, Jen Pahlka, Alec Ross, Reshma Saujani, and Mark Surman.

This is not civic tech: An automated system used by a Michigan government agency erroneously accused claimants in 93 percent of cases—that is not a typo—of fraudulently seeking unemployment payments, Ryan Felton reports for The Guardian. The system, known as the Michigan Integrated Data Automated System (MIDAS—yes, that was its name!) cost $47 million to implement, replacing costly human claims adjudicators. The state’s Republican-controlled legislature just took $10 million from the unemployment agency’s contingent fund, which is mostly generated from fines from fraud claims, to balance the state budget. To sum up, the state blew tens of millions on a flawed system that falsely victimized tens of thousands of unemployed people and then used the fines collected to avoid raising taxes on people who could afford to pay them. And this is the same state and governor who ignored reports of lead-contaminated water poisoning the people of Flint for more than a year. (h/t Melanie Lavelle)

The Angry Bear blog has more detail on how the MIDAS system generated such a high error rate.

Your moment of zen: Civic Hall member and longtime friend Baratunde Thurston live tweets how his cross-country flight from NYC to LA was diverted to Cincinnati to “replenish our oxygen supply.” Trust me, it’s hilarious.