Good morning.
Thursday in this small Midwestern city will be unseasonably mild, with a high of sixty-nine under partly cloudy skies. Sunrise is 6:50 AM and sunset 4:29 PM, for 9h 38m 12s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 87.7% of its visible disk illuminated.
Worth reading in full —
Leonid Ragozin contends that The ‘us and them’ divide worked for Putin and it will work for Trump: “I can see how Trump can appeal to African-Americans, Jews and Hispanics. I met members of these communities at Trump rallies while driving through the midwest swing states the week before the election, and I am now writing from Brighton Beach, a Russian-speaking Jewish district of New York that is overwhelmingly and vehemently pro-Trump. The local residents, mostly ageing Soviet-era immigrants who have switched from voting Democrat to Republican in the past 10 years, love the new president-elect for the same reason their former compatriots in Russia love Putin: he makes them feel great and important again, while legitimising their hatred towards liberals. The likes of Putin and Trump don’t create ethnic movements, they create gangs in which the only criterion that really matters is whether you are “with us” or “against us”, whether you are ready to insult or hurt the “others” no matter who they are and what you used to feel about them. They are mob artists, they are majoritarians or – translating the latter term into Russian – Bolsheviks. Their advantage is that they are not bound by logic or intellectual decency.”
Graham Vyse believes that Libertarians and Democrats Need to Fall in Love Again: “American liberty faces unprecedented peril. President-elect Donald Trump is so indifferent to the Constitution, when he’s not openly hostile to it, that there’s reasonable discussion of liberal democracy collapsing during his tenure. Democrats need all the allies they can find to fight him, and many Americans with genuinely libertarian values could be part of an opposition coalition….[Cato Institute Vice President Brink] Lindsey’s dream of a permanent fusion between liberalism and libertarianism may be impossible, but this is another moment when issue-based cooperation between these two factions is vital. If they unite where they agree—organizing together and pressuring Washington—it could help to neutralize some of the worse of Trump’s authoritarian agenda.”
Senate Democrats have other ideas, including a Surprising Strategy: Trying to Align With Trump: “On infrastructure spending, child tax credits, paid maternity leave and dismantling trade agreements, Democrats are looking for ways they can work with Mr. Trump and force Republican leaders to choose between their new president and their small-government, free-market principles. Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, elected Wednesday as the new Democratic minority leader, has spoken with Mr. Trump several times, and Democrats in coming weeks plan to announce populist economic and ethics initiatives they think Mr. Trump might like.”
Local governmemts aren’t a refuge from closed-government policies, but often these Local governments hide public records, face few consequences: “But when residents asked for those documents, they hit a wall: Montgomery County [Maryland] government officials said they could not find many emails, letters and calendars related to their search. This seemed preposterous, so the residents took the only route available to them — they went to court. A skeptical county judge urged the government to look anew for missing documents. Officials soon managed to find most of what the residents had sought. The details weren’t pretty. Documents showed that County Executive Isiah Leggett, a Democrat less than a year from his next election, had been pushing behind closed doors for the private soccer club to take over the site and attempting to pressure a reluctant school board, even though in theory he had no power over school system decisions. The Maryland Open Meetings Compliance Board also found that the school board had violated the state’s open meetings law by discussing the lease deal in closed session.”
How big are big things? Here’s some perspective: