- NUTHIN'!
BUSINESS:
- Trump sold all shares in companies in June, spokesman says (WaPo) "The sell-off could help address conflict-of-interest worries about his stock portfolio, a sizable part of Trump’s financial life that was worth roughly as much as $40 million as of December 2015, a May disclosure filing shows. Trump’s campaign had given no indication of the sale in the five months since it apparently took place in June. As president, Trump will be subject to the STOCK Act, a law passed in 2012 that requires elected officials, including the president, to publicly disclose any stock transactions worth at least $1,000 within 45 days." and When It Comes To Wealthy Leaders, World Abounds With Cautionary Tales (NPR) "'Most of the time, they win, and for exactly the same reason that Trump did, which is [that] people like business people. They think they know how to create jobs and run the economy. It's a kind of white-knight phenomenon,' West says. Many of these politicians succeed by assembling unconventional coalitions and displaying a willingness to think outside the box, West says. But in some cases, their immense wealth can become a problem. 'Over time, people notice that they're not separating their personal businesses from the government,' West says. 'There is corruption. Their friends are getting rich. And by the end, they almost always suffer a big fall in popularity.'"
- High court rules on Apple-Samsung dispute, insider trading case (WaPo)
HEALTH:
- Life in Obamacare’s Dead Zone (NYT) "How these dead zones formed is a matter of unanticipated consequences. The A.C.A.’s architects did not predict that the Supreme Court would rule in 2012 that it was up to each state whether to expand Medicaid eligibility, which is how they imagined Americans with the most modest incomes would receive coverage. Even though the federal government would have helped fund the expansion, 19 states opted for ideological reasons not to do so, arguing that they are pushing back against government bloat and the fostering of dependency. A result was that the residents with the lowest incomes in those 19 states were now caught between two nonoptions: They made too much to qualify for Medicaid, or didn’t qualify at all, but they also made too little for publicly subsidized insurance on the exchanges, their income not high enough to trigger the refundable tax credits and cost-sharing that could make the possibility remotely affordable to someone making just a few dollars above the federal poverty level."
NEWS:
- Pentagon buries evidence of $125 billion in bureaucratic waste (WaPo) "But some Pentagon leaders said they fretted that by spotlighting so much waste, the study would undermine their repeated public assertions that years of budget austerity had left the armed forces starved of funds. Instead of providing more money, they said, they worried Congress and the White House might decide to cut deeper. Arnold Punaro, a retired Marine general and former staff director for the Senate Armed Services Committee, said lawmakers block even modest attempts to downsize the Pentagon’s workforce because they do not want to lose jobs in their districts.
- Bob Dole Worked Behind the Scenes on Trump-Taiwan Call (NYT) "Mr. Dole, a lobbyist with the Washington law firm Alston & Bird, coordinated with Mr. Trump’s campaign and the transition team to set up a series of meetings between Mr. Trump’s advisers and officials in Taiwan, according to disclosure documents filed last week with the Justice Department. Mr. Dole also assisted in Taiwan’s successful efforts to include language favorable to it in the Republican Party platform, according to the documents. Mr. Dole’s firm received $140,000 from May to October for the work, according to the documents. The documents suggest that President-elect Trump’s decision to take a telephone call from the president of Taiwan, Tsai Ing-wen, was less a ham-handed diplomatic gaffe and more the result of a well-orchestrated plan by Taiwan, one that sought to use the election of a new president to deepen its relationship with the United States — with an assist from a seasoned lobbyist well versed in the machinery of Washington."
- Trump Fires Adviser’s Son From Transition for Spreading Fake News (NYT) "Hours after the episode, the younger Mr. Flynn, 33, went on Twitter to say that until 'Pizzagate' was proved false, it remained a story. On Tuesday morning, after the post had attracted national attention and it was reported that Mr. Flynn had a transition team email address, Vice President-elect Mike Pence denied that Mr. Flynn had ever worked for the team, saying on MSNBC’s 'Morning Joe' that he had 'no involvement in the transition whatsoever.' But later in the morning, Jason Miller, a transition spokesman, tacitly acknowledged that Mr. Flynn had worked for the transition, saying in a conference call that Mr. Flynn was now no longer involved."
- Trump pledges to pull back in Middle East, lean in against ISIS (Politico) "Trump said he would oversee a full modernization and expansion of military equipment. 'All men and women in uniform will have the supplies, support, equipment, training, service, medical care and resources they need to get the job done incredibly well and perfectly. You watch,' the president-elect said, adding, 'We don’t want to have a depleted military because we’re all over the place fighting in areas that just we shouldn’t be fighting in. We’re gonna have such a strong, powerful military. It’s not gonna be depleted any longer.'"
POLITICS:
- Republicans have a double standard when it comes to Trump’s threats of ‘retribution’ (WaPo) "In the thick of his re-election campaign in 2012, President Obama devoted six paragraphs in his State of the Union address to his plans to reverse a flow of factory jobs to foreign countries. He called to end tax breaks for companies that outsource jobs, to cut taxes for domestic manufacturers and to levy a minimum tax on multinational corporations. He implored businesses to 'ask yourselves what you can do to bring jobs back to your country,' and he told Congress 'It is time to stop rewarding businesses that ship jobs overseas, and start rewarding companies that create jobs right here in America. Send me these tax reforms,' Obama said, 'and I will sign them right away.'"
BUSINESS:
- Trump sold all shares in companies in June, spokesman says (WaPo) "The sell-off could help address conflict-of-interest worries about his stock portfolio, a sizable part of Trump’s financial life that was worth roughly as much as $40 million as of December 2015, a May disclosure filing shows. Trump’s campaign had given no indication of the sale in the five months since it apparently took place in June. As president, Trump will be subject to the STOCK Act, a law passed in 2012 that requires elected officials, including the president, to publicly disclose any stock transactions worth at least $1,000 within 45 days." and When It Comes To Wealthy Leaders, World Abounds With Cautionary Tales (NPR) "'Most of the time, they win, and for exactly the same reason that Trump did, which is [that] people like business people. They think they know how to create jobs and run the economy. It's a kind of white-knight phenomenon,' West says. Many of these politicians succeed by assembling unconventional coalitions and displaying a willingness to think outside the box, West says. But in some cases, their immense wealth can become a problem. 'Over time, people notice that they're not separating their personal businesses from the government,' West says. 'There is corruption. Their friends are getting rich. And by the end, they almost always suffer a big fall in popularity.'"
- High court rules on Apple-Samsung dispute, insider trading case (WaPo)
HEALTH:
- Life in Obamacare’s Dead Zone (NYT) "How these dead zones formed is a matter of unanticipated consequences. The A.C.A.’s architects did not predict that the Supreme Court would rule in 2012 that it was up to each state whether to expand Medicaid eligibility, which is how they imagined Americans with the most modest incomes would receive coverage. Even though the federal government would have helped fund the expansion, 19 states opted for ideological reasons not to do so, arguing that they are pushing back against government bloat and the fostering of dependency. A result was that the residents with the lowest incomes in those 19 states were now caught between two nonoptions: They made too much to qualify for Medicaid, or didn’t qualify at all, but they also made too little for publicly subsidized insurance on the exchanges, their income not high enough to trigger the refundable tax credits and cost-sharing that could make the possibility remotely affordable to someone making just a few dollars above the federal poverty level."
NEWS:
- Pentagon buries evidence of $125 billion in bureaucratic waste (WaPo) "But some Pentagon leaders said they fretted that by spotlighting so much waste, the study would undermine their repeated public assertions that years of budget austerity had left the armed forces starved of funds. Instead of providing more money, they said, they worried Congress and the White House might decide to cut deeper. Arnold Punaro, a retired Marine general and former staff director for the Senate Armed Services Committee, said lawmakers block even modest attempts to downsize the Pentagon’s workforce because they do not want to lose jobs in their districts.
- Bob Dole Worked Behind the Scenes on Trump-Taiwan Call (NYT) "Mr. Dole, a lobbyist with the Washington law firm Alston & Bird, coordinated with Mr. Trump’s campaign and the transition team to set up a series of meetings between Mr. Trump’s advisers and officials in Taiwan, according to disclosure documents filed last week with the Justice Department. Mr. Dole also assisted in Taiwan’s successful efforts to include language favorable to it in the Republican Party platform, according to the documents. Mr. Dole’s firm received $140,000 from May to October for the work, according to the documents. The documents suggest that President-elect Trump’s decision to take a telephone call from the president of Taiwan, Tsai Ing-wen, was less a ham-handed diplomatic gaffe and more the result of a well-orchestrated plan by Taiwan, one that sought to use the election of a new president to deepen its relationship with the United States — with an assist from a seasoned lobbyist well versed in the machinery of Washington."
- Trump Fires Adviser’s Son From Transition for Spreading Fake News (NYT) "Hours after the episode, the younger Mr. Flynn, 33, went on Twitter to say that until 'Pizzagate' was proved false, it remained a story. On Tuesday morning, after the post had attracted national attention and it was reported that Mr. Flynn had a transition team email address, Vice President-elect Mike Pence denied that Mr. Flynn had ever worked for the team, saying on MSNBC’s 'Morning Joe' that he had 'no involvement in the transition whatsoever.' But later in the morning, Jason Miller, a transition spokesman, tacitly acknowledged that Mr. Flynn had worked for the transition, saying in a conference call that Mr. Flynn was now no longer involved."
- Trump pledges to pull back in Middle East, lean in against ISIS (Politico) "Trump said he would oversee a full modernization and expansion of military equipment. 'All men and women in uniform will have the supplies, support, equipment, training, service, medical care and resources they need to get the job done incredibly well and perfectly. You watch,' the president-elect said, adding, 'We don’t want to have a depleted military because we’re all over the place fighting in areas that just we shouldn’t be fighting in. We’re gonna have such a strong, powerful military. It’s not gonna be depleted any longer.'"
POLITICS:
- Republicans have a double standard when it comes to Trump’s threats of ‘retribution’ (WaPo) "In the thick of his re-election campaign in 2012, President Obama devoted six paragraphs in his State of the Union address to his plans to reverse a flow of factory jobs to foreign countries. He called to end tax breaks for companies that outsource jobs, to cut taxes for domestic manufacturers and to levy a minimum tax on multinational corporations. He implored businesses to 'ask yourselves what you can do to bring jobs back to your country,' and he told Congress 'It is time to stop rewarding businesses that ship jobs overseas, and start rewarding companies that create jobs right here in America. Send me these tax reforms,' Obama said, 'and I will sign them right away.'"
- House G.O.P. Signals Break With Trump Over Tariff Threat (NYT) "House Republican leaders — in a major policy break with President-elect Donald J. Trump — signaled on Monday that they would not support his threat to impose a heavy tax on companies that move jobs overseas, the first significant confrontation over conservative economic orthodoxy that Mr. Trump relishes trampling.
SCIENCE:
- News Report on Global Temperatures Is Wrong, Scientists Say (NYT) "The report, which first appeared in the British tabloid The Daily Mail and was summarized in Breitbart News, the right-wing opinion and news site, cited incomplete data and drew incorrect conclusions, the scientists said. Scientists said the news media reports were also faulty in that they cited only temperatures over land, which account for about 30 percent of the earth’s surface. Temperatures over land are much more variable than those over water because land stores relatively little heat. 'If you’re going to be making global-scale assessments,' Dr. Arndt said, 'you need to be looking at global-scale data.'"
TECHNOLOGY:
- Facebook and Other Tech Companies Seek to Curb Flow of Terrorist Content (NYT) "The group plans to create a kind of shared digital database, “fingerprinting” all of the terrorist content that is flagged. By collectively tracking that information, the companies said they could make sure a video posted on Twitter, for instance, did not appear later on Facebook." and Europe Presses American Tech Companies to Tackle Hate Speech (NYT)
BOTTOM OF THE NEWS:
- The Pessimist’s Guide to 2017 (Bloomberg)
- How Many Crimes Would Santa Be Guilty of if He Were Real? (Ozy)
Sign up for email distribution of the Day's Most Compelling News below or by visiting Top of the News
SCIENCE:
- News Report on Global Temperatures Is Wrong, Scientists Say (NYT) "The report, which first appeared in the British tabloid The Daily Mail and was summarized in Breitbart News, the right-wing opinion and news site, cited incomplete data and drew incorrect conclusions, the scientists said. Scientists said the news media reports were also faulty in that they cited only temperatures over land, which account for about 30 percent of the earth’s surface. Temperatures over land are much more variable than those over water because land stores relatively little heat. 'If you’re going to be making global-scale assessments,' Dr. Arndt said, 'you need to be looking at global-scale data.'"
TECHNOLOGY:
- Facebook and Other Tech Companies Seek to Curb Flow of Terrorist Content (NYT) "The group plans to create a kind of shared digital database, “fingerprinting” all of the terrorist content that is flagged. By collectively tracking that information, the companies said they could make sure a video posted on Twitter, for instance, did not appear later on Facebook." and Europe Presses American Tech Companies to Tackle Hate Speech (NYT)
BOTTOM OF THE NEWS:
- The Pessimist’s Guide to 2017 (Bloomberg)
- How Many Crimes Would Santa Be Guilty of if He Were Real? (Ozy)
Sign up for email distribution of the Day's Most Compelling News below or by visiting Top of the News
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