Patton Oswalt yesterday:

This fucking election. Fucking Trump.

These newest revelations, that Russia hacked the election. Piles of evidence, teetering up to the sky. That Russia ALSO hacked the RNC and are holding them over a barrel because of what they know. Which would be hilarious if it wasn’t so frightening.

And the boiling chaos that’s resulting from it. I’ve got conservative friends actually DEFENDING Russia on this. I’ve got progressive friends gloating that we’ve finally had done to us what we’ve done to other countries. That Hillary somehow deserves this. That WE somehow deserve this. That infuriating cliche about, “It’s actually GOOD ifTrump destroys everything it’ll start a revolution BLAH BLAH BLAH FUCKING BLAH…”

And in the middle of it all is Trump — bloated, grinning, oblivious, wearing his cheap baseball cap and ruining people’s lives with his Twitter. While all around him — smarter, better, exhausted people scramble around, trying to sweep up a china shop he keeps stumbling through, laughing the whole time at these stupid nerds picking up the broken pieces on the ground. Losers. Weak.

Trump doesn’t spread evil. He doesn’t even spread chaos. Evil and chaos are beyond his abilities.

He spreads MEDIOCRITY. And anyone who gets near him gets dragged into the same sloppy, tossed-off, first-draft shitscape he lives in.

Except this time, it’s the entire country who got too close to him. We’re about to become, as a nation, as garish and pathetic as one of his hotel suites. Balsa wood under gold spray paint. A chandelier over a toilet. Knock-off Haviland and Parlon china on which to serve a Big Mac. And the people MAKING the Big Macs getting screwed, stripped and exploited while the predators high-five on their private jets.

In nine days the electors make their choice. Let’s hope they choose to save us from our grope-y, racist uncle who just won $50,000 playing scratch-offs.

Furthermore, the relationship between Donnie from Queens and the intelligence professionals is tanking. That could be a problem.

The simmering distrust between Donald Trump and U.S. intelligence agencies escalated into open antagonism Saturday after the president-elect mocked a CIA report that Russian operatives had intervened in the U.S. presidential election to help him win.

The growing tensions set up a potential showdown between Trump and the nation’s top intelligence officials during what some of those officials describe as the most complex threat environment in decades.

…

Trump’s reaction will probably deepen an existing rift between Trump and the agencies and raised questions about how the government’s 16 spying agencies will function in his administration on matters such as counterterrorism and cyberwarfare. On Friday, members of Trump’s transition team dismissed the CIA’s assessments about Iraq’s stockpile of weapons of mass destruction.

“Given his proclivity for revenge combined with his notorious thin skin, this threatens to result in a lasting relationship of distrust and ill will between the president and the intelligence community,” said Paul Pillar, former deputy director of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center.

Oh well. It’s not as if we need accurate intelligence on who is stockpiling what kinds of weapons.

U.S. intelligence officials described mounting concern and confusion about how to proceed in an administration so openly hostile to their function and role. “I don’t know what the end game is here,” a senior U.S. intelligence official said. “After Jan. 20,” the official said, referring to Inauguration Day, “we’re in uncharted territory.”

Pillar added: “Everything Trump has indicated with regard to his character and tendencies for vindictiveness might be worse” than former president Richard Nixon, who also had a dysfunctional relationship with the intelligence community.

He’s almost certain to be worse. He has Nixon’s flaws along with a lot of flaws of his own. He’s more nakedly aggressive, more entitled, more conceited, more used to getting his own way and trampling on everyone else – more ignorant, more stupid, more unwilling to learn anything.

Intelligence agencies are tracking Russia’s military interventions in Syria and Ukraine, Iran’s compliance with the nuclear deal, North Korea’s nuclear weapons testing and China’s maritime challenges in Asia and theft of trade secrets. The CIA is operating a covert program to arm and train moderate rebels in Syria to overcome the brutal rule of President Bashar al-Assad, even as Trump has praised Russia’s approach to backing Assad.

Since his electoral triumph last month, Trump has attended only a limited number of intelligence briefings, and he appointed as his national security adviser retired Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, who was forced out of his job as head of the Defense Intelligence Agency by Obama administration officials.

Mavericks! They’re all a buncha mavericks, fixing the intelligence agencies by getting all mavericky up in there.

Or, to put it another way, this isn’t going to go well.

It’s disconcerting for the Republicans to have Trump jeering at the intelligence agencies.

Though Mr. Trump has wasted no time in antagonizing the agencies, to carry out priorities like combating terrorism and deterring cyberattacks he will have to rely on them for the sort of espionage activities and analysis that they spend more than $70 billion a year to perform.

At this point in a transition, a president-elect is usually delving into intelligence he has never before seen and learning about C.I.A. and National Security Agency abilities. But Mr. Trump, who has taken intelligence briefings only sporadically, is questioning not only analytic conclusions, but also their underlying facts.

“To have the president-elect of the United States simply reject the fact-based narrative that the intelligence community puts together because it conflicts with his a priori assumptions — wow,” said Michael V. Hayden, who was the director of the N.S.A. and later the C.I.A. under President George W. Bush.

Wow, yes, but it’s what he’s done all along. He’s a liar and a denialist. He makes up his own facts, and disparages other people’s evidence-based fact claims. That’s Trump epistemology in a nutshell.

Mr. Trump’s team lashed out at the agencies after The Washington Post reported that the C.I.A. believed that Russia had intervened to undercut Mrs. Clinton and lift Mr. Trump, and The New York Times reported that Russia had broken into Republican National Committee computer networks just as they had broken into Democratic ones, but had released documents only on the Democrats.

What to do? Blow smoke.

Mr. Trump casts the issue as an unknowable mystery. “It could be Russia,” he recently told Time magazine. “And it could be China. And it could be some guy in his home in New Jersey.”

That’s what he said in that debate – it was some guy in a basement. Jersey, basement – it’s all the same thing.

Even one of Mr. Trump’s most enthusiastic supporters, Representative Devin Nunes, a California Republican, said on Friday that he had no doubt about Russia’s culpability. His complaint was with the intelligence agencies, which he said had “repeatedly” failed “to anticipate Putin’s hostile actions,” and with the Obama administration’s lack of a punitive response.

Mr. Nunes, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said that the intelligence agencies had “ignored pleas by numerous Intelligence Committee members to take more forceful action against the Kremlin’s aggression.” He added that the Obama administration had “suddenly awoken to the threat.”

Like many Republicans, Mr. Nunes is threading a needle. His statement puts him in opposition to the position taken by Mr. Trump and his incoming national security adviser, Michael Flynn, who has traveled to Russia as a private citizen for RT, the state-controlled news operation, and attended a dinner with Mr. Putin.

Now that that pesky communism is dead, they like Russian authoritarianism. I bet they wish they had some Cossacks too.

So, yeah, apparently it is the case that we have this rampaging idiot monster preparing to destroy everything because Putin put his elbow on the scale.

American intelligence agencies have concluded with “high confidence” that Russia acted covertly in the latter stages of the presidential campaign to harm Hillary Clinton’s chances and promote Donald J. Trump, according to senior administration officials.

They based that conclusion, in part, on another finding — which they say was also reached with high confidence — that the Russians hacked the Republican National Committee’s computer systems in addition to their attacks on Democratic organizations, but did not release whatever information they gleaned from the Republican networks.

In the months before the election, it was largely documents from Democratic Party systems that were leaked to the public. Intelligence agencies have concluded that the Russians gave the Democrats’ documents to WikiLeaks.

I remember that. I remember it vividly. Especially after the “grab them by the pussy” video came out – it looked as if that had cooked his goose to charcoal, then along came WikiLeaks, drip drip drip.

Mr. Trump’s transition office issued a statement Friday evening reflecting the deep divisions that emerged between his campaign and the intelligence agencies over Russian meddling in the election. “These are the same people that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction,” the statement said. “The election ended a long time ago in one of the biggest Electoral College victories in history. It’s now time to move on and ‘Make America Great Again.’”

The election didn’t end “a long time ago.” November 8 is not “a long time ago.” It wasn’t one of the biggest EC victories in history. It’s not “time to move on” if Russia interfered with the election. What Trump is doing is not going to make America great, again or for the first time or at all.

One senior government official, who had been briefed on an F.B.I. investigation into the matter, said that while there were attempts to penetrate the Republican committee’s systems, they were not successful.

But the intelligence agencies’ conclusions that the hacking efforts were successful, which have been presented to President Obama and other senior officials, add a complex wrinkle to the question of what the Kremlin’s evolving objectives were in intervening in the American presidential election.

What could the objectives possibly have been? To weaken a rival power, obviously. To make a rival power a laughingstock to the world. To render the US basically irrelevant for at least four years.

It is unclear how many files were stolen from the Republican committee; in some cases, investigators never get a clear picture. It is also far from clear that Russia’s original intent was to support Mr. Trump, and many intelligence officials — and former officials in Mrs. Clinton’s campaign — believe that the primary motive of the Russians was to simply disrupt the campaign and undercut confidence in the integrity of the vote.

The Russians were as surprised as everyone else at Mr. Trump’s victory, intelligence officials said. Had Mrs. Clinton won, they believe, emails stolen from the Democratic committee and from senior members of her campaign could have been used to undercut her legitimacy. The intelligence agencies’ conclusion that Russia tried to help Mr. Trump was first reported by The Washington Post.

I suppose we could view it as the revenge of Mossadegh and Allende and quite a few others.

Intelligence officials and private cybersecurity companies believe that the Democratic National Committee was hacked by two different Russian cyberunits. One, called “Cozy Bear” or “A.P.T. 29” by some Western security experts, is believed to have spent months inside the D.N.C. computer network, as well as other government and political institutions, but never made public any of the documents it took. (A.P.T. stands for “Advanced Persistent Threat,” which usually describes a sophisticated state-sponsored cyberintruder.)

The other, the G.R.U.-controlled unit known as “Fancy Bear,” or “A.P.T. 28,” is believed to have created two outlets on the internet, Guccifer 2.0 and DCLeaks, to make Democratic documents public. Many of the documents were also provided to WikiLeaks, which released them over many weeks before the Nov. 8 election.

Make America great again.

John Glenn didn’t agree with Trump on the flag:

John Glenn played a key role in the U.S. Senate helping to defeat an amendment making the "descrecration" of the American flag a crime. pic.twitter.com/rgcyNH4Ayz

— ACLU National (@ACLU) December 9, 2016

News in Trump from the Times:

Rex W. Tillerson, the president and chief executive of Exxon Mobil, is the leading candidate to be Mr. Trump’s secretary of state, according to a person with direct knowledge of the search process.

Mr. Tillerson went to Trump Tower in New York on Tuesday to meet with Mr. Trump, who is said to be close to making a decision. Mr. Tillerson has been strongly recommended by a number of business leaders.

What does running an oil company have to do with being the country’s foreign minister?

And then there’s this questionnaire.

President-elect Trump’s transition team has circulated an unusual 74-point questionnaire that requests the names of all employees and contractors who have attended domestic or international climate change policy conferences, as well as emails associated with the conferences.

The questionnaire appears targeted at climate science research and clean energy programs.

What’s he going to do, take them out back and shoot them?

Energy Department employees, who shared the questionnaire with The New York Times and spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly, described the questionnaire as unprecedented and worrying.

“These questions don’t just indicate an attack on civil servants here in Washington,” said an Energy Department employee. “They amount to a witch hunt in D.O.E.’s 17 national labs, where scientists have the independence to do their work — yet here are questions that are reminiscent of an inquisition rather than actual curiosity about how the labs work.”

The questionnaire asks for lists of employees involved in key climate change programs, including all those who have attended United Nations climate change conferences. It also asks for lists of employees involved in designing a metric known as the Social Cost of Carbon, a figure used by the Obama administration to measure the economic impact of carbon dioxide pollution, and to justify the economic cost of climate regulations.

It specifically asks which Energy Department programs are essential to meeting the goals of President Obama’s climate change agenda, which Mr. Trump has vowed to roll back.

We’re going to be living in the Burned-over District.

Giuliani has taken his name out of the secretary of state contest.

Some in Mr. Trump’s circle were concerned about the potential for a messy confirmation hearing over Mr. Giuliani’s tangle of foreign business ties and paid speeches.

Oh yeah? What a pity there is no confirmation hearing for Trump.

Cathy McMorris Rodgers is likely choice for interior secretary.

Ms. McMorris Rodgers, the highest-ranking woman in the House Republican leadership, is expected to be announced as Mr. Trump’s secretary of the interior as early as Friday, two people close to the transition efforts said. Ms. McMorris Rodgers comes from Washington, a state with large federal land reserves, and she was also critical of Mr. Trump at various points during the presidential campaign.

Peter Walker said this on Facebook:

Rodgers was the co-sponsor with Utah’s Rep. Nathan Chaffetz of legislation to sell off 3 million acres of public land to private interests, as well as a leading advocate for gas and oil development on public lands.

And, at his triumph of the will rally in Louisiana today, he went back to the “punish people who are rude to the flag” dream.

He also suggested that he would make broader cultural changes, arguing that desecrating the American flag should be outlawed or bring a penalty.

“I think it’s a disgrace, O.K.?” Mr. Trump said of burning or stamping on the United States flag. “I’m a big believer in free speech, but maybe we’re going to be putting something in” to address the issue, he said. “I think we’re going to have to do something about that.”

The Supreme Court ruled in 1989 that flag burning was a form of free speech protected under the First Amendment.

He still thinks he’s going to be a dictator.

Goldman Sachs. Clinton’s $200k fees for chatting to them over dinner probably cost her a good few votes, and certainly gave Donnie from Queens useful talking points, but now…well now is now, and all is transformed.

President-elect Donald Trump is expected to name a top Goldman Sachs executive, Gary Cohn, to lead the National Economic Council, handing the Wall Street veteran significant sway over his administration’s economic policy.

The council includes the heads of various departments and agencies and works within the administration to coordinate economic policy. As director, Cohn would be in position to advise Trump as he attempts to fulfill some of his chief campaign promises, including lowering corporate taxes and rethinking U.S. trade policy.

And generally making life better for rich people and worse for poor people. Yay populism!

In Cohn, Trump would once again be picking a veteran of a New York investment bank that he repeatedly denounced during the campaign. During the campaign Trump argued that Goldman held “total control” over both Democrat Hillary Clinton and GOP rival Ted Cruz and he even released a television ad that flashed an image of Goldman Sachs Chief Executive Lloyd Blankfein and warned of a “global power structure” that was robbing American workers.

That was the ad that was packed with anti-Semitic tropes; it flashed an image of Blankfein along with images of a lot of other Jews, because Jews. But now is now, and all is transformed.

But Trump has relied on several Goldman alums for key positions, so far. Steven Mnuchin, a 17-year veteran of the bank, is nominated to be the next Treasury secretary, and Steve Bannon, Trump’s chief strategist, worked on mergers and acquisition deals for Goldman Sachs. Hedge fund manger Anthony Scaramucci began his career at the New York bank and has emerged as one of Trump’s closest advisers on his presidential transition.

We loves the bankers, precious. We just doesn’t say so during the campaign.