Trump's cabinet picks, Senate Repubs go into hurry-up offense

This week's confirmation hearings on Trump's cabinet nominees are crowded all together, ethically non-compliant, and will be bulldozed quickly through.

The Republican-controlled U.S. Senate plans to rush forward this week with confirmation hearings for many of Donald Trump’s nominees for cabinet and other key executive positions. Though many of the picks have not yet completed the customarily required ethics clearances and background checks, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has shown no willingness to delay.

“They’ve made pretty clear they intend to slow down and resist and that doesn’t provide a lot of incentive or demonstrate good faith to negotiate changes. So I think we’re going to just be plowing ahead,” his deputy, Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn (R-TX) told Politico.

Sometimes the hubris can still amaze.

Senate Republicans have heard the Democrats’ demands for a deliberate confirmation process for Donald Trump’s nominees. But they don’t care.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s conference has scheduled six Cabinet-level confirmations hearings for next Wednesday, Jan. 11, the same day the chamber will likely slog through an all-night vote-a-rama on a budget and the president-elect will give his first press conference in six months.

One hearing -- Homeland Security-designate John Kelly's -- has been moved, and Trump has already postponed his long-awaited first presser as president-elect.  Here's the updated schedule, and more of the "everything you want to know" variety.  There's simply no precedent for this kind of cram-through -- not even Obama's own, eight years ago, compares -- and for them to shoot the finger at proper financial disclosures... well, that's a thousand miles away from 'draining the swamp'.

In fact, it reminds me of how pipelines get laid in North Dakota.  Like Mexico building the wall, another campaign promise bites the dust.  Does any Republican want to give a damn?

The Trump team’s failures could be the result of disorganization — or a lack of familiarity with the rules. Trump himself has not set an inspiring example. The ethics office is reportedly working with his lawyers to encourage him to do what the law demands of his cabinet: divest and enter office free of conflicts. He is the only incoming president in modern history who has refused to do so.

For his nominees to do the same would be a serious violation of the public trust, and would potentially violate the law.

Over/under on Trump Tweeting something akin to "I am the law" is one week from today.

Senators on multiple committees running between Capitol conference rooms to make a portion of a hearing, the hamstrung, intimidated corporate media stretched too thin to cover the developments, conservative dogs and liberal cats living in sin together ... it's our colicky-baby-government in action.  Create as much chaos as possible in order to get your way, no matter what laws or ethical standards or protocol it violates.  "Shake up Washington", even if that means a war with China or a North Korean nuclear missile attack.

Disruption is a family affair.

The Weekly Wrangle

The Texas Progressive Alliance is firmly bracing itself for the mostly white, male, and middle-aged Texas legislators to work their will on the rest of us in the biennial 85th session, which begins tomorrow in Austin.

Off the Kuff looked ahead to the upcoming Houston elections for 2017.

Libby Shaw at Daily Kos understands that if pain and suffering have to be inflicted on the American people, the cruelest party for the job is the Texas Republican Party. Yes, they are coming after Social Security. Worse: the hatchet man is a Texas Republican.

With January 20 just two weeks away, Socratic Gadfly takes an initial snapshot look at President Obama's legacy from the left. Updated Presidential rankings to follow.

CouldBeTrue of South Texas Chisme remembers the greedy corporate interests fighting the white nationalists in the 2000s. The white nationalists won that one. We're at it again with today's Texas Legislature.

Texas Leftist piles on the Lord of the Lavatory, Lite Guv Dan Patrick, and his petty, potty politics.

The top environmental stories affecting Lewisville were summarized by the Texan Journal.

Dos Centavos has a few thoughts on the HISD board vacancy.

The latest -- and hopefully the last -- on "русские сделали это" was posted by PDiddie at Brains and Eggs.

Txsharon at Bluedaze is not as Trump as you drink she is.

After many years toiling away for the liberal cause in Amarillo, Ted at jobsanger announces his relocation to Austin.

DemBlogNews surveys the playing field in the contest to be the next DNC chair.

Neil at All People Have Value was out on the streets of Houston calling for kindness, respect, and not giving up. APHV is part of NeilAquino.com.

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More stories from around Texas!

Peggy Fikac at the SAEN sees us all on tenterhooks waiting for the state's revenue estimate from Comptroller Jethro Bodine Glenn Hegar. Update: And the bad news breaks: almost $105 billion, or about $4 billion less than necessary to meet continuing obligations.  Yuuge cuts in state services are in store.  Follow Better Texas Blog for the deep dive.

The Houston Communist Party respectfully requests that the real hackers please stand up.

Grits for Breakfast suggests that if SD-17 Sen. Joan Huffman is serious about busting unions with her recently-filed legislation, she shouldn't leave out the police labor organizations.

John Wright makes five queer predictions for LGBT Texans in 2017, and Ashton Woods at Strength in Numbers says, simply: when people's lives are under assault, the proper response is to fight back.

Paradise in Hell wants the holes in the Texas Freedom of Information Act to be patched.

The TSTA Blog explains how the state abuses school property taxpayers, and the Rivard Report sends home the report card from the state's public school districts on the state education agency's A-F  accountability score.  Their grade?  Incomplete.

The Bloggess submits an application to become a vampire, and It's Not Hou It's Me
gives a hand with your New Year's resolutions with a guide to working out in Houston.

And Pages of Victory had some truck trouble in the cold over the weekend.

Sunday Funnies

Last on the Russians

Hopefully the last, anyway.

If the report had explained how the Russians convinced Hillary Clinton not to campaign in Wisconsin (yes, that's Speaker Ryan with the sickest of burns), that they brainwashed her staff to order those buses of SEIU ground troops headed for Michigan to turn around and go back to Iowa, or show proof that Fancy Bear or Cozy Bear put DNC emails on Anthony Weiner's laptop (which prompted James Comey's letter), then I can be convinced.

But I couldn't find that in the report.  Did I just miss it?

As I blogged on December 13, the Russians did something.  But whatever they did had an indeterminable effect on the 2016 election, because the US intelligence officers who compiled the report did not go there.  The report does say that.

“We did not make an assessment of the impact that Russian activities had on the outcome of the 2016 election,” the report stated.

If you don't want to accept that Clinton did it to herself, if you can't blame the polling that missed the mark, and if you think Comey was not at fault with his reopening and reclosing le' affaire email, then maybe you should just fall back to that old reliable, time-tested yet threadbare excuse: blaming the Green Party and Jill Stein.

House Democrats are calling for an independent investigation into the matter.  I support that.  "The Russians did it" is trying on the wardrobe of the JFK assassination conspiracy, so why not?

Latest on the Russians

-- Obama got his classified report on Russian interference in the 2016 election yesterday; the outgoing president said he needed "no additional evidence" to eject the Russian diplomats from the country last month.  Trump is getting his briefing this morning.

Note the first source I linked to above.  It's the most thorough and comprehensive report I have found, and it's also the same source James Clapper denigrated in his testimony before Congress yesterday.  Read RT's account of Clapper's opinion of RT here, after you read the link in the previous sentence.

-- This is compelling:

US intelligence has identified the go-betweens the Russians used to provide stolen emails to WikiLeaks, according to US officials familiar with the classified intelligence report that was presented to President Barack Obama on Thursday.

And so is this.

Via NBC's William Arkin, Ken Dilanian and Hallie Jackson: "A senior U.S. intelligence official with direct knowledge confirmed to NBC News that the report on Russian hacking delivered to President Obama Thursday says that U.S. intelligence picked up senior Russian officials celebrating Donald Trump's win. The source described the intelligence about the celebration, first reported by the Washington Post, as a minor part of the overall intelligence report, which makes the case that Russia intervened in the election."

More, from the Washington Post's original story: "The ebullient reaction among high-ranking Russian officials — including some who U.S. officials believe had knowledge of the country's cyber campaign to interfere in the U.S. election — contributed to the U.S. intelligence community's assessment that Moscow's efforts were aimed at least in part at helping Trump win the White House. Other key pieces of information gathered by U.S. spy agencies include the identification of "actors" involved in delivering stolen Democratic emails to the WikiLeaks website, and disparities in the levels of effort Russian intelligence entities devoted to penetrating and exploiting sensitive information stored on Democratic and Republican campaign networks."

-- Clapper testified that Julian Assange and Wikileaks put American lives at risk, reported by the AP and widely distributed from news gatherers across the nation and the world.  That assertion was disproved three and one-half years ago.

The US counter-intelligence official who led the Pentagon's review into the fallout from the WikiLeaks disclosures of state secrets told the Bradley Manning sentencing hearing on Wednesday (July 13, 2013) that no instances were ever found of any individual killed by enemy forces as a result of having been named in the releases.

Brigadier general Robert Carr, a senior counter-intelligence officer who headed the Information Review Task Force that investigated the impact of WikiLeaks disclosures on behalf of the Defense Department, told a court at Fort Meade, Maryland, that they had uncovered no specific examples of anyone who had lost his or her life in reprisals that followed the publication of the disclosures on the internet. "I don't have a specific example," he said.

So maybe Clapper was talking about Edward Snowden.  The report on that from two years ago has a whole lot of redactions; too many, in fact, to be inferred by the reader that Snowden's disclosures threatened anyone's life, and too many even to be implied by the writers of the report.

The DIA, which provides military intelligence to the DOD, summarized the task force's work in a 39-page report dated December 18, 2013 and titled "DoD Information Review Task Force-2: Initial Assessment, Impacts Resulting from the Compromise of Classified Material by a Former NSA Contractor." (Jason Leopold) obtained a copy of the heavily redacted report last year, which concluded that "the scope of the compromised knowledge related to US intelligence capabilities is staggering."

But explicit details about the alleged damage Snowden caused, identified in the 39-page report as "grave," were omitted from that document as well. In fact, the existence of the DIA's report had been unknown until the White House secretly authorized the declassification of select portions of it so two Republican lawmakers could undercut the media narrative painting Snowden as a heroic whistleblower.

-- The report that Obama received and Trump is getting is to be made public very shortly, maybe even this afternoon, with as much classified information Clapper says can be declassified as possible.

I'll wait for that news before I change my mind about this all being an obsession.  Note that two long-term and highly tenured former employees of the NSA and the CIA asserted yesterday that the DNC emails were leaked and not hacked, and carefully explains the difference.

Hack: When someone in a remote location electronically penetrates operating systems, firewalls or other cyber-protection systems and then extracts data. Our own considerable experience, plus the rich detail revealed by Edward Snowden, persuades us that, with NSA's formidable trace capability, it can identify both sender and recipient of any and all data crossing the network.

Leak: When someone physically takes data out of an organization — on a thumb drive, for example — and gives it to someone else, as Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning did. Leaking is the only way such data can be copied and removed with no electronic trace.

Because NSA can trace exactly where and how any "hacked" emails from the Democratic National Committee or other servers were routed through the network, it is puzzling why NSA cannot produce hard evidence implicating the Russian government and WikiLeaks. Unless we are dealing with a leak from an insider, not a hack, as other reporting suggests. From a technical perspective alone, we are convinced that this is what happened.

Lastly, the CIA is almost totally dependent on NSA for ground truth in this electronic arena. Given Mr. Clapper's checkered record for accuracy in describing NSA activities, it is to be hoped that the director of NSA will join him for the briefing with Mr. Trump.

Former NSA director Mike Rogers is indeed among the four heads of national security briefing Trump this morning.  Look out for a Tweet from Trump today about it.

-- Assuming the Russian/Wikileaks dots are eventually connected, Trump has problems that go beyond being proved mistaken, and having to repair relations with the DHS, NSA, CIA, etc.  Congress is establishing a formal objection to his Twitter criticism of America's spooks and spies, forcing the prez-elect to backtrack slightly.

Within the transitioning administration to come, there are serious differences of opinion about the roles of the various agencies.  Remember: NSA-designate Michael Flynn, like Trump, admires the Russkies.  CIA chief-to-be Mike Pompeo is the farthest thing from a friend of the Kremlin, however.  Clinton's CIA director, James Woolsey, abruptly left his role as adviser to the transition team earlier this week, possibly because of this opinion of whatever game it is Trump is playing.  But the new DNI guy overseeing the whole lot is former Indiana Senator Dan Coats, whose own views of Russia have been so critical that Moscow has banned him from traveling there.

So that's all I got for now.  More as it develops.

Update: Michael Dorf posits the various what-ifs, with a great deal of food for thought.  And Juan Cole has the righteous smackdown of everyone.  The following excerpt does not do justice to a full understanding of the matter; read the whole thing and then read it again.

(Chuck) Schumer seems to have been celebrating that we are no longer a democracy, but that even an elected president has to defer to the intelligence establishment in Washington or else must fear that they will play dirty tricks on him and undermine him.

Shouldn’t the Democratic Party senate minority leader be standing for democratic values, not advising the president to shut up if he knows what’s good for him?

So to conclude, this is a sorry spectacle. Yes, Putin is a thug who should not have unilaterally annexed Crimea, and so created a European crisis that has yet to be resolved. But yes, the US has acted thuggishly -- the unprovoked and monstrous invasion of Iraq is a recent example -- and US aggressiveness toward Moscow after the collapse of the Soviet Union bears some of the blame for Russia’s bullying insecurity. And yes, Russia likely engaged in hacking during the US election and hoped to tilt the playing field toward Trump; but they likely failed to have any significant effect on the outcome. And yes, Clapper and other US intelligence officials have hacked everybody and his brother both abroad and inside the US, so they are hardly morally superior to Putin.

Now we have a food fight full of ignorance and hypocrisy or both, in which the Washington Establishment professes itself shocked, shocked that any hacking of one country by another could have gone on. Trump has continued his creepy bromance with the Kremlin and wants to get his information from any source that agrees with his prejudices. The Democrats have taken advantage of the story to paint Trump as a Manchurian candidate, and some of them seem to delight in the idea that Trump may provoke the CIA to do to him what Oliver Stone thinks it did to JFK.

Nobody and nothing here to admire.

The Russians come to the Capitol today

Congress opens hearings on the Russian affair today, indeed as I type.  Here's a few things to pay attention to as they go, and John Brennan says us doubters should not rush to judgement.  While we wait for the truth (a word tenuously defined these days) to be revealed, let's laugh at Hair Furor and the nation's clandestine services, who cannot even agree what day of the week they were supposed to meet for his intelligence briefing on the matter.  Remember that the president-elect said last week that he would have a big reveal for us "on Tuesday or Wednesday" of this week; that didn't happen on time, either.

This is a shit-or-go-blind choice for America.  I find myself in the position of agreeing with Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald -- but uncomfortably alongside Trump and Sarah Palin -- and opposed to Paul Ryan, Lindsey Graham, John McCain, and 97 other senators by Graham's math.  A very strange place to be.

Don't let it be written that I never offered a self-deprecating cartoon.

There remains, to this moment, no conclusive evidence that the Russians gave Julian "Assuage" (Freud would be so pleased with Trump's unpresidented auto-corrections) the DNC emails that either undermined Hillary Clinton's White House bid in drip-drip-drip Chinese water torture-style, or simply revealed the rigged Democratic primary everyone (save a few Hillbots practicing denial in advance) saw happening without the benefit of purloined electronic correspondence.  And we laypeople may never be allowed to know what really happened with Russia and Wikileaks, and partly because even the definition of 'classified' information is now so nebulous, as we know from James Comey's revelations with regard to her email server.

So if I'm wrong about the nefarious Putin and his Manchurian president-elect, I'll own it just as soon as I know it.  Which may be as soon as this morning.  Watch C-Span for the hearings or check your Twitter for what trends (I'm seeing "DNI Clapper" as I hit publish on this post).

Update: DNI James Clapper's testimony revealed essentially nothing this morning (see also the Tweet feed in the top right column).  Maybe when the unclassified report he has promised to release next week is made public, I can be persuaded.

Scattershooting DC, the EC, and the inauguration

-- Some folks are still in denial.

More than 50 Electoral College members who voted for Donald Trump were ineligible to serve as presidential electors because they did not live in the congressional districts they represented or held elective office in states legally barring dual officeholders.

That stunning finding is among the conclusions of an extensive 1,000-plus page legal briefing prepared by a bipartisan nationwide legal team for members of Congress who are being urged to object to certifying the 2016 Electoral College results on Friday.

“Trump’s ascension to the presidency is completely illegitimate,” said Ryan Clayton of Americans Take Action, who is promoting the effort. “It’s not just Russians hacking our democracy. It’s not just voter suppression at unprecedented levels. It is also [that] there are Republicans illegally casting ballots in the Electoral College, and in a sufficient number that the results of the Electoral College proceedings are illegitimate as well.”

With the College's vote set to be affirmed by Congress tomorrow -- Wisconsin still hasn't finished -- I don't see this changing the result any more than I did the recount (speaking of that, read this).

Update: Still one more last-gasp attempt to stop Trump.

Protests in the nation's capital can be a high good time, but if you're planning on going this year, you'll have to face off with the very worst of the MAGAmericans, like these dudes, who are warming up by fighting among themselves.

-- Anti-Inauguration Day protests, mostly of the quieter and more passive-aggressive variety and held in or close to your city, are IMO a much more effective way in this post-truth era we've entered to demonstrate non-compliance with the Trump World Order.  Charles Blow helps out with some suggestions.  He smartly advises against mere resistance.

Exclaiming your resistance, while necessary, is insufficient. Resistance is a negative position. While negativity in the face of this menace is justified and admirable, negativity alone is a fractional response. As with most things in a fully articulated life, balance is required. You need to augment your outrage with actions that are affirming, behaviors that reinforce principles and values.

When politics seem out of your control, remember that community and culture are very much in your control. We help shape the world we inhabit every day. A life is a collection of thousands of decisions, large and small, made every day. Make those decisions with purpose and conviction, especially for Jan. 20.

The point is not necessarily to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power, but rather to deprive it of oxygen and eyeballs; to plant a flag of resistance firmly at the opening gate. This doesn’t mean that people won’t attend or watch. They will. But every station that carries it, as many will, should feel the impact of your absence.

Start by taking, or arranging to take, the day off and attend something that lets you avoid the broadcast of the inaugural and get creative from there.  As referenced previously, a general strike on January 20th would be an excellent idea.

-- Black Lives Matter has worked.  (Pay attention, but give no credence to, conservative trending topics this morning.  These daily eruptions, stoked by the likes of Breitbart and Daily Caller, are only intended to keep the hate fires burning.)

The number of unarmed black men shot and killed by police in the U.S. last year was less than half the total for 2015, according to one database, suggesting that due to nationwide protests, better training or other factors, what the media has called “a national crisis” could be abating.

Police used fatal force on 16 unarmed black men in 2016, according to a Washington Post database. That is down from the 36 unarmed black men police had killed in 2015. Police used fatal force on one unarmed black woman in 2016 and two in 2015.

Separating the real news from the fake outrage is going to be tougher in 2017; resolve to to make the effort anyway.

Some affirmation of Democrats as 'Brainiacs'

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

A 2017 Wrangle of 2016 progressive Texan news

Democrats are going to need a better plan than this toon represents.  The week's blog post roundup gathers the best from last week to start your 2017 off on the right (left) foot.

Off the Kuff pointed to Brazoria County as a potential and necessary opportunity for Greater Houston Democrats going forward.

Socratic Gadfly takes a look at Cozy Bear, Fancy Bear, et al, and while rejecting Trump's flippancy, expresses skepticism toward the mainstream narrative.

Texas Republicans expose themselves by making the lives of women, children, and prisoners as miserable as possible. CouldBeTrue of South Texas Chisme sees Donald Trump is not the only white nationalist.

The Brainiacs of 2016, formerly the TPA's Texan of the Year and awarded solely by PDiddie at Brains and Eggs, are The Democrats.

The Apache oil company's "generosity" and speaking with forked tongue caught up with them in regard to their fracking plans in Balmorhea, as detailed by Txsharon at Bluedaze.

In a welcome relief from charting polls and stockpiling objections to Trump, jobsanger posts a survey of the most dangerous drivers in the United States, and finds Texas is tied for first -- or worst -- with Louisiana.

Neil at All People Have Value took a picture of train tracks at a Houston light rail station.  APHV is part of NeilAquino.com.

Dos Centavos listed his top-trafficked posts for the year.

And in Lewisville, vandals shot through a homeowner's windows and knocked the head off of his front-yard Santa Claus, reports the Texan-Journal.

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More of the best of the left of Texas from the end of last year!

Leah Binkovitz at the Urban Edge has a rundown of the bills that have been filed to date for the coming legislative session (opening on January 10).  And Ross Ramsey at the Texas Tribune perceives that Austin and Washington out of sync in the early transitioning.

The Houston Press follows up on the Blue Bell ice cream company's continuing troubles with listeria, speaking with a food safety litigator who suggests the company is foolishly requesting of federal authorities that they be allowed to abandon the stringent -- and expensive -- poisonous bacteria testing imposed after previous tragedies.

Grits for Breakfast says the top criminal justice story in Texas -- and possibly the United States -- from last year is easy to spot, but the rest are more obscure.

The Hearne city attorney abruptly resigned last week, and Lawflog says 'good riddance'.

Members of Austin Jewish Voice for Peace held an ecumenical Chanukah vigil at the Capitol, and the The Rag Blog has the photos and story.

The Bloggess eulogized Carrie Fisher as an inspiration to people who struggle with mental illness.

Lone Star Ma urged people to email the Chemical Safety Board.

The Great God Pan Is Dead highlighted the art that moved him in the past year.

Swamplot presented its annual awards for real estate in Houston.

And 2016 was the year that Pages of Victory decided had weaned him off the Democrats.

New Year's Day Funnies

New Year's Eve Funnies

2016 Brainiacs: The Democrats

I sort of telegraphed it, yes?

The cartoonists really get what the Hillbots still don't.  Beginning early in this presidential cycle -- actually in the summer of 2015, when I made my most accurate prediction -- the establishment Donkeys stubbornly refused self-examination of their move to crown Hillary Clinton, beginning in the early primaries and debates.  Democrats laughed and mocked the GOP as the Pachyderms' bizarre primary slowly produced Donald Trump as nominee.  Even as DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz was finally forced out, resigning ahead of the party's convention after hacked emails revealed the committee had indeed been favoring Hillary over Bernie Sanders, they refused to think in any terms except their own inevitability.  DWS moved right over to honorary chair of the Clinton campaign, and her successor, Donna Brazile, was later revealed to have shared town hall questions with her pals inside the camp.

They also denigrated Sandernistas for saying the primary was "rigged".  This would come back to haunt them in November with their festering Russian obsession, a derangement syndrome showing no sign of playing itself out until late January at the earliest.  And maybe longer than that ...

Besides being a lousy establishment candidate running in a 'change' election cycle, the presumptive Madam President made unforced errors: failing to hold a press conference for more than nine months, attending an Adele concert two weeks before the election, but never managing to visit Wisconsin even once.  She made a severe miscalculation late, demanding SEIU activists stay in Iowa and not go to Michigan, a state she lost twice, the first time in a foreboding upset -- a polling one -- to Sanders.  This might have been the loudest alarm bell they never heard.

But if any external factor could be blamed for her defeat, it would have to be FBI director James Comey, who first cleared Clinton in the summer following a probe into her use of a private email server, then -- 11 days before the election -- wrote a letter to Congress that he had new information that led him to revisit that decision.  The "new information" was DNC emails on the personal computer of disgraced former Congressman Anthony Weiner, the now ex-husband of Hillary's closest advisor, Huma Abedin.  Two days before voters went to the polls, Comey re-cleared Clinton.

Nate Silver said on the same day, November 6, that this cost Clinton 2-4 percentage points in the national polling, and since the aggregate of polls were in error by a similar margin, he evaluated in December that the Comey letter had the greatest effect on the presidential race.  Indeed, late-deciding voters in swing states broke heavily for Trump (here's your fake news on that) and in one of the more stunning reveals in post-2016 election analysis, more Republicans stayed true to their man than Democrats did their woman.  There was simply a vast overestimate of her popularity among voters -- perhaps also described as overstating the unpopularity of Trump -- and it was most clearly seen in the electoral crumbling of the Great Lakes states presumed to be her firewall: Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania.  Her popular vote victory of nearly three million votes over Trump exposed the superfluous waste of concentrated support in states like New York and California, and even urban cities and counties in blood-red states (like Houston and Harris County, which she carried by 12 percentage points).

Here's the lesson, repeated: nationally surveyed two-horse race polls do not pick presidents, and neither does the sum of all votes across the country.  Clinton and her supporters acted both arrogant and lackadaisical about her electoral strength due to the faulty polling, and continue to trumpet the popular vote after it as an excuse to refuse to accept reality.  As long as they remain stuck in this position, they won't be able to organize for 2018, a year with even greater electoral warning flags.

Against this backdrop, the DNC moves toward electing a new chair, which looks like a repeat of the primary battle: likely either US Rep. Keith Ellison, an African American Muslim and Sanders acolyte, or Obama's labor secretary Tomas Perez, the Clinton (or is it Obama?) faction's choice who was exposed in the hacked/leaked emails as a man willing to play the race card against Sanders in the primary.  The schism shows no sign of healing.  Update: The latest on Perez's shortcomings, essentially the same as Clinton's.

Beyond that course, the strategy for the neoliberals seems to be to TeaBag Trump right out of the gate, as the Tea Pees did to Obama in 2009.  That didn't work out so well for the Baggers in 2012, so they went harder right, morphing into the alt-right white nationalists who propelled Trump to victory in the boondocks ... and thus the nation.

The Sanders Democrats, for their part, responsibly declined to jump ship after his defeat and ongoing disrespect, as the vote tallies for the minor party candidates revealed.  There was much less leakage of votes away from Clinton than there was perceived there would be (although the polls got the numbers for the third parties mostly correct).  When the Greens' Jill Stein established a fund to pay for election recounts in the Midwestern states, it was primarily Democrats who opened their wallets and forked over millions of dollars for a last-ditch hope of changing the outcome.  The system batted away that challenge like a badminton shuttlecock.

So Sanders, via Ellison, tries again to take over a broken Democratic machine that relies on the Republican model in terms of money and corporate support, but without the ability to either fight in the trenches or appeal to the working class voters who were their base for decades.  And when they lose, they'll stay loyal, attempting to overhaul a calcified political party from within instead of moving a little to the left and doing something different.  The definition of insanity, part 937.

But an olive branch in this scathing rebuke is extended to congratulate the Harris County Democrats, who succeeded where virtually all other Democratic parties across the country failed in 2016: switch Republican voters over, turn out the vote among Latin@s, and otherwise grind out a big win in a formerly purple, 50-50 county.  They did what the national organization couldn't, and maybe they have some wisdom to share going forward.  Who they pick to replace Lane Lewis as county chair will make a lot of difference as to whether they can sustain the gains in 2018 and, in the big picture, help eject the Cheeto Tweeter from the Oval Office in 2020.

Democracy is counting on a knee-capped, divided, somewhat bitter and mostly clueless bunch of elitist Democrats who favored a strong defense and big banks at the expense of working men and women, and nobody ought to hold their breath waiting for them to figure out how to win in two years.  Four years from now ought to be easier, but that's an eon away in political terms.

I'm going to continue to help organize something outside this shell of an allegedly liberal political party, but kudos to those who still think there's a rebellion to win within it.  Those folks will eventually be allies to those of us outside the castle walls, and how long it takes for them to come to their senses is the only remaining question.

Update: Down with Tyranny has a harsher evaluation.