Donald Trump is on Twitter this morning complaining about people talking about his losing the popular vote in the 2016 election.
Michael Gerrard is the director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, an Andrew Sabin Professor of Professional Practice at Columbia Law School and a member of The Earth Institute. He’ll be dropping by the Hive on Thursday to discuss what the presidency means for climate change and the environment, as well as to take your questions on climate change law. Drop them in here at or before 2 p.m. ET on Thursday, Nov. 17th, and see you then! If you want to participate but aren’t a Prime member, sign up here.
The last thing I was thinking about after last week’s shattering election results was Prime signups. But in the aftermath of the election, lots of readers started signing up for Prime. Not quite a gusher but a lot. Since Wednesday we’ve had 705 new signups which, to give you some perspective, is out of a total membership of 16,908. Going by the emails and messages we’ve gotten, people are signing up because they see our role in the news ecosystem as newly important. That is the kind of thing I would be chary of saying myself but is very heartening to hear from readers. We appreciate the confidence. We will do our best to live up to that confidence. If you find value in what we do and believe it will be even more valuable in the coming year, there’s never been a better time to subscribe and support it. Just click right here.
If you’ve been listening to my new podcast I think you’ll like this one. You won’t want to miss it. My former colleague Josh Green of Bloomberg Businessweek has been reporting on Steve Bannon for several years and had a lot of access into the Trump campaign and particularly their analytics and data team down in San Antonio. In this episode we talk about how Trump won, why no one – including the Trump campaign – saw it coming and the hints the Trump team got in late October about newly activated white rural voters. Fascinating stuff. Along with other information I gleaned from within the Clinton campaign it helped me finally get a clearer picture of just what happened. I hope you enjoy. Click here.
CNN is reporting that Donald Trump wants security clearances for his children and son-in-law. Unclear from the report whether this includes Barron.
A number of TPM Readers have written in having called their Reps and Senators about Paul Ryan’s Medicare Phaseout Plan. Not surprisingly, most readers are hearing that the people on the phone say they don’t know anything about it, that the Rep or Senator doesn’t have a position, or that they refuse to disclose what their position is.
I noted yesterday that Paul Ryan has signaled he plans to phase out Medicare next year and replace it with private health care insurance for which the federal government will provide seniors vouchers. There are numerous dimensions to this story. And we’re working with our team this morning to prep for covering it. But one key part of the equation we need your help with. DC journalists tend to think this kind of story evolves in DC. And there’s plenty to follow in Washington. But the real action happens in the states and congressional districts where members of Congress have to sell getting rid of Medicare to their constituents. And that is going to come out in local media, constituent letters, public appearances and so forth. So let us know what you are seeing where you live. In the local paper, on TV, something you hear directly from a representative or senator. Find out where your representative or senator stands on this issue. We want to know. How to contact us? Easy. There’s an email link right below the logo up at the upper left of every page.
If you missed it over the weekend, TPM turned 16 over the weekend. Here are a few details about that and our pledge to going forward during this uncertain period.
With all the other things we’ve discussed so far today, I wanted to return to one critical one. It’s not about mights or maybes or fears of what’s to come. It’s about what’s coming just after President-Elect Trump’s inauguration. Paul Ryan has been pushing to phase out Medicare and replace it with private insurance for several years. But now it’s real with unified Republican government. He just said he will try to rush it through early next year while repealing Obamacare.
Below is a transcript of what Ryan said on Fox’s Special Report, along with a flat out false statement suggesting that Obamacare has weakened Medicare’s finances.
Today TPM turns 16.
These are not at all the circumstances in which I expected to mark this day. A week ago I expected a profoundly different result. But here we are. And here we’ve been.
I wrote the first post for TPM in the early evening of November 13th, 2000. It was about the unfolding Florida recount and George Bush’s decision to hire Ted Olson as his top recount lawyer. Olson had just come off years as a key player on something called the ‘Arkansas Project’, pouring money into digging up dirt or anything that might pass as dirt on Bill Clinton in his home state. Since then Olson lost his wife on 9/11 and went on be one of the two lawyers who argued for the decision which eventually made marriage equality the law of the land. Things change. About twenty minutes later I wrote a second post. And about an hour after that I wrote a third one.