monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

“It’s the worst thing in the history of our environment!” Isaacs exclaimed when I spoke to him on Wednesday. “We are in danger. The whole country is in danger. Our kids are in danger. People have got to do something about the Citizens United decision that is turning our country into an oligarchy, run by oil-and-gas interests,” he said.

Next week, the American Geophysical Union will hold its annual conference in San Francisco. The A.G.U. meeting is one of the world’s première scientific gatherings—last fall, some twenty-four thousand experts in fields ranging from astronomy to volcanology attended. This year, in addition to the usual papers and journals, a new publication will be available to participants. It’s called “Handling Political Harassment and Legal Intimidation: A Pocket Guide for Scientists.”

The guide is the creation of a group called the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund. One of the group’s founders, Joshua Wolfe, and its executive director, Lauren Kurtz, made the decision to write it on the day after the election. “There is a lot of fear among scientists that they will become targets of people who are interested in science as politics, rather than progress,” Wolfe told me in an e-mail.

With each passing day, that fear appears to be more well founded. The one quality that all of Trump’s picks for his cabinet and his transition team seem to share is an expertise in the dark art of disinformation.

Consider, for example, Scott Pruitt, who is reportedly Trump’s nominee to head the Environmental Protection Agency.

Best go hug some trees while ya can, Blathy. As soon as all trees on our massive federal lands are chopped down, we're comin to Canada to get yours.

None of the 96 LLCs examined by the Journal appear to regularly release audited financial statements. That opacity — compounded by Mr. Trump’s decision to break with decades of precedent by declining to release his tax returns — makes it impossible to gauge the full extent of potential conflicts between his business interests and presidential role.

The scope and complexity of Mr. Trump’s private business holdings is unprecedented for incoming presidents, said Norman Eisen, President Barack Obama’s former White House ethics lawyer. “We’ve never seen anything like this,” he said.

It’s not clear how much Mr. Trump’s businesses would benefit from his proposal to cut business tax rates.…

Mr. Trump’s wealth is impossible to measure with precision. His financial disclosure form isn’t externally audited and — following government rules — often uses bands, such as more than $50 million, rather than exact amounts to report assets and revenue or income. Only a handful of the hundreds of entities listed in Mr. Trump’s financial disclosure publish audited financial statements — and those figures don’t necessarily illuminate Mr. Trump’s financial situation.

When U.S. intelligence agencies concluded that a foreign government deliberately intervened in a national American election, intending to change the outcome for its preferred candidate, it put a spotlight on what is probably one of the most important controversies in decades.

American policymakers – even the most die-hard Trump followers who are delighted that Russia’s efforts paid dividends – should care about crimes of this magnitude. We are, after all, talking about the integrity of the American democracy. Federal policymakers should be outraged by any attempt from a foreign state to interfere with our elections for its own purposes, much less a successful operation.

The point would be to investigate what a foreign rival did, what the United States should do in response, and what steps can be taken to prevent similar crimes in the future.

What could possibly justify indifference? Before the election, even Mike Pence said Russia should face “severe” and “serious” consequences if it compromised the security of the United States. So why not have an investigation to determine Russia’s culpability?

Postscript: I can appreciate why some on the right, driven solely by partisan concerns, may worry about this undermining the legitimacy of Trump’s presidency. After all, it obviously doesn’t look great that agents of Vladimir Putin allegedly took steps to manipulate Americans in the hopes of electing the Republican amateur. But given that the president-elect received nearly 3 million fewer votes than his opponent, the legitimacy problem probably can’t get much worse, so policymakers of both parties should at least try to learn what exactly happened.

"When George W. Bush assembled his first Cabinet in 2001, news reports dubbed them a team of millionaires, and government watchdogs questioned whether they were out of touch with most Americans' problems. Combined, that group had an inflation-adjusted net worth of about $250 million -- which is roughly one-tenth the wealth of Donald Trump's nominee for commerce secretary alone."

the legitimacy problem probably can’t get much worse, so policymakers of both parties should at least try to learn what exactly happened.

"When George W. Bush assembled his first Cabinet in 2001, news reports dubbed them a team of millionaires, and government watchdogs questioned whether they were out of touch with most Americans' problems. Combined, that group had an inflation-adjusted net worth of about $250 million -- which is roughly one-tenth the wealth of Donald Trump's nominee for commerce secretary alone."

Ari Berman ‏@AriBerman 23h23 hours ago
Trump cabinet picks:
EPA against science
AG against justice
Ed against public education
Hud against fair housing
HHS against healthcare