Here’s a striking fact:

The 17 people who US president-elect Donald Trump has selected for his cabinet or for posts with cabinet rank have well over $9.5 billion in combined wealth, with several positions still unfilled. This collection of wealth is greater than that of the 43 million least wealthy American households combined—over one third of the 126 million households total in the US.

Affluence of this magnitude in a US presidential cabinet is unprecedented.

Well that’ll show the coastal elites in their bubble a thing or two.

The Hill reports that Ivanka Trump is going to have an office in the White House that’s usually kept for “the First Lady.” Julia Ioffe, a political journalist who writes for Foreign Policy and until yesterday wrote for Politico, tweeted about the hint of skeeviness in the story:

Either Trump is fucking his daughter or he’s shirking nepotism laws. Which is worse?

Crude, but then it’s impossible to write honestly about Trump without crudity. Trump himself oozes crude from every pore, and that means that putting his words and actions into more genteel language is likely to misrepresent them. He is crude, he is a pig, he does see the world in such contemptuous and libidinous terms. He did, after all, agree with Howard Stern that his daughter is “a piece of ass,” on live radio. So yeah, we’re not going out of our way to be crude if we say maybe he’s fucking her, because maybe he is, and if he is that’s how he would put it.

Remember the Access Hollywood tape? It started with his failed attempt to fuck – his word – a married woman.

Donald J. Trump: You know and …

Unknown: She used to be great. She’s still very beautiful.

Trump: I moved on her, actually. You know, she was down on Palm Beach. I moved on her, and I failed. I’ll admit it.

Unknown: Whoa.

Trump: I did try and fuck her. She was married.

Unknown: That’s huge news.

That’s Trump. That’s who he is. He doesn’t have sex with women, he fucks them.

In my view, that’s why Ioffe worded her tweet that way – because it’s Trump she was talking about.

But Politico doesn’t see it that way.

The respected political journalist Julia Ioffe’s tenure at Politico has come to an endafter she posted an unfortunate — and straight-up vulgar — tweet about Donald Trump and his daughter Ivanka. Ioffe was already wrapping up her time as a contributor to Politico and moving to a new job at The Atlantic when she posted the ill-advised tweet, but now Politico is accelerating the process, bringing her contract to a premature close.

…

The political news organization promptly ended Ioffe’s contract, sending a textbook strongly worded letter — which of course leaked — from editor-in-chief John Harris and editor Carrie Budoff Brown to its employees:

“Gratuitous opinion has no place, anywhere, at any time – not on your Facebook feed, your Twitter feed or anyplace else. It has absolutely zero value for our readers and should have zero place in  our work” – but it wasn’t gratuitous. It was pointed, and it had the kind of value that pointed opinion can have.

I think Politico is dead wrong about this, especially since she said it on Twitter, not in a piece for them that somehow no editor saw before publication.

Ioffe has long been a favorite target of the less-reputable segments of Trump supporters — if you have a high tolerance for poorly Photoshopped, stomach-churning anti-Semitic memes, just give her name a Google image search.

Since Ioffe was already on her way out at Politico the censure doesn’t really count as a firing, per se.

But it’s a censure, and a mistaken one.

The bubble talks back.

This column is for Bernard Gibson, a good man from the state of Indiana. Late last month, NPR went out to Vigo County there to explain why it flipped from voting for Barack Obama in 2012 to Donald Trump in 2016. Gibson was one of those interviewed, and here is what he said: “These are real people here. These are not New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles. You know, these are real people that live every day from hand to hand, just have to work to make a living and everything else.”

Oh.

Richard Cohen adduces some facts about his background – not privileged – and says life in the bubble wasn’t just handed to him (unlike a certain son of a certain Queens owner of apartment houses). He says he’s tired of being told he’s not real because he didn’t vote for Trump or because he lives on a coast.

Same here. It’s not the case that everybody who lives in a coastal city (and I guess Chicago counts as a coastal city because of the lake – which means so do Buffalo and Cleveland and Gary and Milwaukee) is unreal because upper class and effete. Cities have a lot of people in them, which means they have a lot of bus drivers and nurses and teachers and truck drivers in them. They have a lot of people who work their asses off and can’t afford to live near their jobs. It’s not all latte-wearing cashmere-sipping millionaires.

After the election, I was repeatedly told that I live in something called a “bubble” and, because of that, I know nothing about my fellow Americans. Well, in the first place, my bubble is bigger than theirs — size ought to matter in this instance — and in the second place, I know plenty. Among the things I know is that Trump voters were played for suckers. After lambasting Clinton as a tool of Wall Street, Trump has so far named four Wall Street figures to his administration — three from Goldman Sachs alone — and an oilman is under consideration. And for the Labor Department, Trump has chosen Andrew Puzder, a fast-food magnate (Hardee’s and Carl’s Jr.) who is opposed to a decent minimum wage. This is fast shaping up as a Cabinet of billionaires and, just for leveling, the occasional millionaire.

We always get this. People are repeatedly tricked by the style into ignoring the substance. Trump is a vulgar malevolent asshole, so gullible people somehow decide that means he’s a working stiff, and the fact that he’s made millions by cheating and lying is somehow irrelevant.

Things suck for workers, but that doesn’t mean Trump is going to make them unsuck.

I will not concede that a greater wisdom exists in what is known as “flyover country.” It has voted for a charlatan, a blinged ignoramus who has promised the past as the future. Trump, who lives in a gilded bubble of his own, cannot reverse automation, replace robots with people or blunt American businesses’ compulsive search for the cheapest workforce.

Gibson is one thing. I understand. What I cannot understand is fellow bubble dwellers who tell me, with an air of impeccable condescension, that a vote for Trump was such proof of their own superior wisdom that it eclipsed all doubts about his qualifications, his temperament, his honesty in business and his veracity in speech. These people live in a bubble of their own. It is one that excludes the lesson of history and the demands of common sense. It will burst.

I hope sooner rather than later.

It wasn’t just the presidential election that Russia hacked. It wasn’t just the Democratic candidate for president that Russia sabotaged. It was also Democratic candidates for Congress. We’re in for a reactionary shitstorm thanks to Russian hacking.

In south Florida for instance

a handful of Democratic House candidates became targets of a Russian influence operation that made thousands of pages of documents stolen by hackers from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in Washington available to Florida reporters and bloggers.

“It was like I was standing out there naked,” said Annette Taddeo, a Democrat who lost her primary race after secret campaign documents were made public. “I just can’t describe it any other way. Our entire internal strategy plan was made public, and suddenly all this material was out there and could be used against me.”

The impact of the information released by the hackers on candidates like Ms. Taddeo in Florida and others in nearly a dozen House races around the country was largely lost in the focus on the hacking attacks against the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. But this untold story underscores the effect the Russian operation had on the American electoral system.

Oh well. It’s only health care, the environment, national parks, workers’ rights, women’s rights, immigration, prisons, diplomacy…

The intrusions in House races in states including Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Ohio, Illinois, New Mexico and North Carolina can be traced to tens of thousands of pages of documents taken from the D.C.C.C., which shares a Capitol Hill office building with the Democratic National Committee.

The document dump’s effectiveness was due in part to a de facto alliance that formed between the Russian hackers and political bloggers and newspapers across the United States. The hackers, working under the made-up name of Guccifer 2.0, used social media tools to invite individual reporters to request specific caches of documents, handing them out the way political operatives distribute scoops. It was an arrangement that proved irresistible to many news outlets — and amplified the consequences of the cyberattack.

“Look what we’ve got!”

Cybersecurity consultants believe the hacking of the D.C.C.C. took place around March or April of 2016 after a staffer clicked on a so-called phishing email. The D.C.C.C. shut down its computer system for a week — from the moment it learned of the attack in June. But it was already too late to close the door. The consequences started to become clear in August when the hackers released the home addresses, cellphone numbers and personal email addresses of Democratic House members.

“As you are aware, the D.C.C.C. and other Democratic Party entities have been the target of cybersecurity intrusions — an electronic Watergate break-in,” the House minority leader, Nancy Pelosi, wrote in an email the day after the personal information was released. The email continued, “It has been widely reported that this cybersecurity incident is part of a Russian cyberattack which appears to be an attempt to interfere with our elections. We take this troubling situation very seriously and have notified the appropriate authorities, including the F.B.I. and Sergeant-at-Arms.”

Who – let me guess – did nothing.

Guccifer 2.0 followed up on the release of lawmakers’ personal data with large caches of internal party documents, starting with some documents related to House races in Florida, including Ms. Taddeo’s contest.

The seats that Guccifer 2.0 targeted in the document dumps were hardly random: They were some of the most competitive House races in the country. In Ms. Taddeo’s district, the House seat is held by a Republican, even though the district leans Democratic and Mrs. Clinton won it this year by a large majority.

To prepare for the race, the D.C.C.C. had done candid evaluations of the two candidates vying in the primary for the nomination. Those inside documents, bluntly describing each candidate’s weaknesses, are considered routine research inside political campaigns. But suddenly they were being aired in public.

Another Democrat, Joe Garcia, defeated Taddeo in the primary using the hacked material. You’ll never guess what happened next.

After Mr. Garcia defeated Ms. Taddeo in the primary using the material unearthed in the hacking, the National Republican Campaign Committee and a second Republican group with ties to the House speaker, Paul Ryan, turned to the hacked material to attack him.

Two Democrats, Nancy Pelosi and Ben Ray Luján, wrote to Paul Ryan urging him not to use the hacked material.

Neither received a response. By October, the Congressional Leadership Fund, a “super PAC” tied to Mr. Ryan, had used the stolen material in another advertisement, attacking Mr. Garcia during the general election in Florida.

AshLee Strong, a spokeswoman for Mr. Ryan, said he did not control how the material was used in the ad, although she did not dispute that the material had been stolen as part of an act of Russian espionage. “Speaker Ryan has said for months that foreign intervention in our elections is unacceptable,” she said in a written statement.

But he took advantage of it anyway.

What a sewer.

Everyday Feminism is so reliably absurd. You know how they caption every single image with a tedious description, out of consideration for people who can’t see images? And how mostly it’s annoying because the image is just an illustration, not something crucial to understanding the content of the post? And there’s no point in giving a verbal description of a non-substantive image that is there solely to provide visual interest along with words? So describing it in words is just seriously futile and silly? Or maybe that’s just me. Anyway – here’s one:

A person sitting at a wooden table and chairs, with bookshelves lining the wall behind them. They are holding a sandwich in one hand and licking the fingers of their other hand.

They’re so keen to be helpful that they pointlessly provide verbal descriptions of images that are there just to break up the text as opposed to providing needed information…and yet…

…and yet…

They describe an image of a skinny dainty young woman with “a person” and “they”…thus leaving the people unable to see images in ignorance of what sex the person holding a sandwich is.

On a site that calls itself feminist.

Lordy lordy lordy.

Trump said about Tillerson yesterday:

The thing I like best about Rex Tillerson is that he has vast experience at dealing successfully with all types of foreign governments.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 13, 2016

The thing I like best about Rex Tillerson is that he has vast experience at dealing successfully with all types of foreign governments.

Yeahhhh. The Times explains that Tillerson does that in defiance of the State Department and its goals. Exxon has its own foreign policy and it doesn’t necessarily match that of the State Department.

Struggling to keep Iraq from splintering, American diplomats pushed for a law in 2011 to share the country’s oil wealth among its fractious regions.

Then Exxon Mobil showed up.

Under its chief executive, Rex W. Tillerson, the giant oil company sidestepped Baghdad and Washington, signing a deal directly with the Kurdish administration in the country’s north. The move undermined Iraq’s central government, strengthened Kurdish independence ambitions and contravened the stated goals of the United States.

Mr. Tillerson’s willingness to cut a deal regardless of the political consequences speaks volumes about Exxon Mobil’s influence. In the Iraq case, Mr. Tillerson and his company outmaneuvered the State Department, which he has now been nominated by President-elect Donald J. Trump to lead.

“They are very powerful in the region, and they couldn’t care less about what the State Department wants to do,” Jean-François Seznec, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, a research group in Washington, said of Exxon Mobil’s pursuits in the Middle East.

So…that makes him a very dubious choice for the job, wouldn’t you think? Of course a new administration may well have a foreign policy that differs from that of the previous administration, but that’s not the same thing as having a 40+ year vested interest in a rival foreign policy driven by the drive for profits.

Exxon Mobil, the Times says, in some ways acts like a state.

While Mr. Tillerson has never officially been a diplomat, he has arguably left an American footprint on more countries than any nominee before him — with an agenda overseas that does not always mesh with that of the United States government.

Under Mr. Tillerson, Exxon Mobil has struck lucrative deals with repressive governments in Africa, clashed with China and befriended Vietnam over disputed territory in the South China Sea, learned from hard experience in Venezuela, and built a close rapport with Russia at a time of deepening mistrust between the Kremlin and the West.

So in a way he’s a member of a foreign government invited to take the top foreign policy job in this government.

Exxon Mobil executives said Mr. Tillerson was not available for an interview. But they argued that he and Mr. Putin are not friends, countering criticism in the United States that Mr. Tillerson is too close to Russia to take a strong stance against it. Mr. Putin awarded Mr. Tillerson a medal of friendship for concluding corporate deals in Russia.

Not long after, the United States imposed sanctions on Russia’s oil industry in 2014 over Moscow’s deadly intervention in Ukraine, leading American foreign policy and the company’s investment goals to diverge. Exxon Mobil now has billions of dollars in deals that will move forward only if the sanctions are lifted.

Some officials and executives argue that Mr. Tillerson’s business-minded approach to Russia could ease tensions, a view questioned by many diplomats, rights groups and advocates of disarmament.

Oddly enough, the drive for profits isn’t the solution to all problems.

In West Africa, Exxon Mobil has made lucrative deals with the government of Equatorial Guinea, which arbitrarily detains and tortures critics, disregards elections, and has faced international prosecution for using oil profits to enrich the president’s family.

…

But under Mr. Tillerson, Exxon Mobil has also been criticized for a lack of transparency in dealings with the Nigerian government. The country’s Economic and Financial Crimes Commission is investigating a 2009 license renewal deal for Exxon Mobil, after allegations that the company was significantly outbid by a Chinese competitor. Critics contend that the deal was done illegally.

“They were running a very corrupt and opaque renewal process,” Olanrewaju Suraju, the chairman of the Civil Society Network Against Corruption in Nigeria, said of the Nigerian government in power at the time.

Some analysts said that Exxon Mobil had a singular goal overseas.

“The one clear trend that runs through Exxon’s foreign policy is that they are really all about business and doing what is best for shareholders,” said Ben Van Heuvelen, the managing editor of Iraq Oil Report. “They are willing to look the other way in the face of a whole host of problems.”

Being all about business isn’t some magical path to perfection, to put it mildly.

Oklahoma really doesn’t like women.

Back in June, Oklahoma passed the Humanity of the Unborn Child Act, which includes a provision that requires public restrooms — for instance, those in restaurants, public schools, and hospitals — to feature anti-abortion signs that urge pregnant women to carry their fetus to term.

Along with a link to the Oklahoma Health Department’s website, the signs would read:

“There are many public and private agencies willing and able to help you carry your child to term and assist you and your child after your child is born, whether you choose to keep your child or to place him or her for adoption. The State of Oklahoma strongly urges you to contact them if you are pregnant.”

The state of Oklahoma really has no business telling women who happen to need to pee what to do about their pregnancies. There’s such a thing as “none of your fucking business,” and pregnancy is one example of that thing.

Also, of course, it’s a damn lie that there are many agencies willing and able to help you and your child after your child is born. If that were true, there would be dramatically less poverty in this country.

Also why should needing to pee be an invitation for a state to lecture women? And would the state do this to men? Has it ever? Or is it only women who are talked to as if they were children? I know what my guess is.

Kellyanne Conway talked to Anderson Cooper last night, and one thing she said was quite clarifying to me, even though it’s not anything I didn’t know.

As we know, it’s a very unconventional situation, normally we have politicians moving from political job to political job – in this case we have a very successful businessman, who’s brilliant and a billionaire, who has assets and holdings all over the globe, and that needs to have a transfer of power through the proper channels to his adult children…

See it?

…normally we have politicians moving from political job to political job – in this case we have a very successful businessman…

This is their story, and in this story it totally makes sense that they’re putting corporate CEOs in jobs like State and Labor (Labor!) and the Treasury. It’s all part of Doing Everything Differently; of draining the swamp; of tearing it all up and starting over; of I alone can fix it. In this story, “politicians” are warped creatures drinking the blood of the people, going from bloodsucking political job to bloodsucking political job, getting nothing useful done and getting in the way of brilliant genius billionaires.

In this story politicians don’t know anything and can’t do anything; they’re just empty parasites. In this story it’s businessmen who build everything and create all the jobs and know how to fix all problems. In this story foxes are the only ones who know how to guard the chicken-coop.