From the Washington Post:

Alarmed that decades of crucial climate measurements could vanish under a hostile Trump administration, scientists have begun a feverish attempt to copy reams of government data onto independent servers in hopes of safeguarding it from any political interference.

….“Something that seemed a little paranoid to me before all of a sudden seems potentially realistic, or at least something you’d want to hedge against,” said Nick Santos, an environmental researcher at the University of California at Davis, who over the weekend began copying government climate data onto a nongovernment server, where it will remain available to the public. “Doing this can only be a good thing. Hopefully they leave everything in place. But if not, we’re planning for that.”

I doubt this will happen. I’m not even sure how it could happen. But it’s chilling that a bunch of working scientists think there’s even a 5 percent chance that it might happen.

This is the real danger of a Trump presidency. I figure there’s a 95 percent chance that it ends up being a garden variety Republican administration—which is bad enough, of course. But there’s a 5 percent chance of something truly catastrophic happening. I don’t know what, and I don’t know when, but it’s a real possibility.

Back during the campaign, I was vaguely aware that the Russians had hacked not just the DNC, but the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee as well. For some reason, though, I never put two and two together long enough to think about what this hack might mean. In my defense, no one else seems to have given it much thought either—despite the fact that hacked documents were showing up in local races all over the country:

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 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 Florida, Guccifer 2.0’s most important partner was an obscure political website run by an anonymous blogger called HelloFLA!, run by a former Florida legislative aide turned Republican lobbyist. The blogger sent direct messages via Twitter to Guccifer 2.0 asking for copies of any additional Florida documents. “I can send you some docs via email,” Guccifer 2.0 replied on Aug. 22….“I don’t think you realize what you gave me,” the blogger said, looking at the costly internal D.C.C.C. political research that he had just been provided. “This is probably worth millions of dollars.”

The hacked documents played a big role in a Florida congressional primary between Annette Taddeo and Joe Garcia:

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.

….After the first political advertisement appeared using the hacked material, [DCCC chair Ben Ray] Luján wrote a letter to his Republican counterpart at the National Republican Congressional Committee urging him to not use this stolen material in the 2016 campaign….Ms. Pelosi sent a similar letter in early September to Mr. Ryan. 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.

The basic story here is simple: the Russians hacked, the media gave the revelations big play, and Republicans gleefully made use of the Russian agitprop. Altogether, the Russians released hacked documents from four different sources:

• DNC
• DCCC
• The Clinton Foundation
• John Podesta

But nothing was ever released from any Republican sources—despite the fact that, according to the New York Times, the Russians had hacked the RNC and possibly other Republican accounts as well. If I had to guess, I’d say there’s a good chance they hacked a few people at the Trump Organization too. So here’s where we are:

• The Russians ran a very sophisticated operation designed to hack into both US government servers and the servers of US political organizations.
• They released only hacked documents from Democratic organizations. Republicans were left alone.
• The intelligence community told high-ranking leaders of both parties what was going on, but Republicans flatly opposed any public acknowledgment of what was happening.
• Republicans cheerfully made use of all the hacked material, even though they knew exactly where it came from.

At this point, you need to be willfully blind to pretend this was anything other than what it was: a ratfucking operation on an epic scale aimed squarely at Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party. And while it was happening, Republicans were happy to play along.

It’s inevitable that more details are going to emerge about all this—about both the hacking itself and Republican complicity in making use of the Russian material. This is not something that can be forgiven quickly or easily. Republicans may or may not care about this, but they’re going to have live with a smoldering, bitter anger from their Democratic colleagues for a very long time.

Hold the presses! Cathy McMorris Rodgers will not be our next Secretary of the Interior. Instead, it will be Rep. Ryan Zinke (R–Mont.). The Washington Post explains what happened:

While Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.) was a leading contender for the Interior post in recent days, Zinke hit it off with Trump’s oldest son, Don Jr., an avid hunter, and met personally with the president-elect on Monday in New York City.

Okey doke.

Alexei Druzhinin/Sputnik via AP

Over lunch I read today’s big New York Times story about the Russian cyberattacks aimed at disrupting the US election. It was mesmerizing even though I already knew a lot of it, and it was also depressing as hell. By the time I finished, I was pretty close to thinking that the right response would be a couple dozen cruise missiles aimed straight at Putin’s lone remaining aircraft carrier. I guess we’re all lucky I’m not the president.

There are a dozen depressing things I could highlight, but somehow I found this the most depressing of all:

By last summer, Democrats watched in helpless fury as their private emails and confidential documents appeared online day after day—procured by Russian intelligence agents, posted on WikiLeaks and other websites, then eagerly reported on by the American media, including The Times…Every major publication, including The Times, published multiple stories citing the D.N.C. and Podesta emails posted by WikiLeaks, becoming a de facto instrument of Russian intelligence.

I know: News is news. Somehow, though, that doesn’t seem sufficient. I’m still not entirely sure what the right response is to leaks like this, but simply publishing everything no matter where it came from or what its motivation no longer seems tenable. There has to be something more to editorial judgment than that.

Anyway, Putin won this round. He didn’t do it all by himself—he had plenty of help from the FBI and the media—but in the end, he got his pet game show host elected president of the United States. I hope we all live through it.

Was Rex Tillerson a good CEO at Exxon? Over at Bloomberg, Vincent Piazza says Tillerson has two big claims to fame:

Number one, it’s the relationship with Russia and the expanding relationship there as well. But also the recent acquisition of XTO back in 2010. That was a major bet on natural gas that did not pan out—a $35 billion bet on natural gas that seemed to turn the other way on them.

So…a lousy acquisition and, um, Russia. The Wall Street Journal goes into more detail on that:

“I have a very close relationship with [Mr. Putin],” Mr. Tillerson told students at the University of Texas, his alma mater, in February….He was successful, in part because he negotiated with Mr. Putin, who became Russian prime minister in 1999 and has run the country, either as president or prime minister, ever since. Mr. Tillerson’s ties helped him catapult past other executives to lead the company in 2006.

….At a June 2012 meeting with Mr. Putin, Mr. Tillerson said Exxon’s Arctic deal enhanced U.S.-Russian ties. “I agree, as you point out, that nothing strengthens relationships between countries better than business enterprise,” a Kremlin transcript quoted him as saying. The next year, Mr. Putin awarded him Russia’s Order of Friendship for his work.

Well, OK then. He’s chummy with Vladimir Putin and he blew $35 billion on a bad acquisition. But at least he’s a great businessman, right? Here is ExxonMobil’s performance over the past decade:

But at least they paid dividends regularly! Sounds like Secretary of State material to me.

Sarah Kliff recently returned from a trip to Corbin, Kentucky, where she talked to a bunch of Trump voters about Obamacare. Her full story is here. I just want to excerpt a few comments from three of the interviews that Kliff conducted. First up is Kathy Oller:

Kliff: Trump campaigned on repealing Obamacare. Do you think he’s going to repeal all these programs that you’ve been signing people up for?

Oller: The funny thing is, my husband said, “You know, he’s going to eliminate health care.” But he really can’t totally take it out, because everybody has to have health care. You can’t go backward….

Kliff: Did you hear him talking about repealing Obamacare in the campaign?

Oller: Yeah, he was going to get rid of it. But I found out with Trump … he says a lot of stuff. [laughs] I just think all politicians promise you everything and then we’ll see.

Next we have Debbie Mills:

Mills: The insurance we had before, we ended up paying about $1,200 a month for a family of five….For the past two years, we had the Healthcare.gov. It’s made it affordable….It’s been great to have health insurance, because I couldn’t imagine what it would be like to not have it with all the treatments and things that [my husband] had to have done.

Kliff: Do you think if it does go away, you’ll regret your vote in any way?

Mills: I don’t know. I guess I thought that, you know, he would not do this….I was thinking that once it was made into a law that it could not be changed, but I guess it can? Yes?

Kliff: It can be changed….

Mills: I don’t know. I guess the next four years is going to be different. I don’t know what to look for. You’re scaring me now, on the insurance part. ’Cause I have been in a panic, so I’m afraid now that the insurance is going to go away and we’re going to be up a creek.

Finally we have Ruby Atkins:

Atkins: I don’t see how they can call it affordable care. I was paying two, three hundred dollars on my own when we did have insurance….And we had no deductible, we had … 100 percent coverage. [We had a] $5 copay to the doctor, $10 copay to the doctor; 100 percent if you go to the hospital [Kevin note: This is pretty obviously insurance she had while she worked for the local school district.]….

Kliff: Do you think Trump is gonna fix this?

Atkins: I think it’s got out of hand; there’s no way he’s gonna fix it. I think the whole thing, they’re going to have to go back to ground zero and start again….I don’t see no end in sight in all this. This is like … gas prices a few years ago. It’s just going to keep going up.

So we have two people who figured Trump was just blathering because, come on, what kind of person would take away people’s insurance? And we have one person who is upset because her Obamacare insurance costs more than the insurance she got when she worked for the public school system. We can complain about this all we want, but that’s the reality out there.

It’s funny. I was thinking about the hack gap the other day in a different context, but Obamacare is an example too. Obamacare has several smallish problems, but its only big problem is that it’s underfunded. The subsidies should be bigger, the policies should be more generous, and the individual mandate penalty should be heftier. Done right, maybe it would cost $2 trillion over ten years instead of $1 trillion.

Republicans wouldn’t have cared. If this were a real goal—like, say, cutting taxes on the rich—they’d just go ahead and do it. If the taxes didn’t pay for it all, they’d make up a story about how it would pay for itself. And if you’re Donald Trump, you just loudly insist that,somehow, you’re going to cover everybody and it’s going to be great.

But Democrats didn’t do that. They didn’t oversell Obamacare and they didn’t bust the budget with it. They could have. It would have added to the deficit, but that wouldn’t have hurt them much. Politically, the far better option was to go ahead and run up the deficit in order to create a program of truly affordable care that people really liked.

It’s not just pundits who have a hack gap. It’s the politicians too. And in this case, Democrats are paying the price for their lack of hackery.

Rick Perry is in the house! After his comeback on Dancing With the Stars, Donald Trump has chosen him as his new Secretary of Energy. Why? I suppose it’s because Perry comes from Texas, so, you know, black gold. Texas tea. The guy must know a lot about energy, right? Plus there’s the fact that Perry famously said he wanted to eliminate the Department of Energy but couldn’t remember its name. So that worked in his favor.

We’re getting near the end, here. The only open positions left in Trump’s cabinet are Agriculture and Veterans Affairs.

It looks like Ivanka has been fired:

In a pair of tweets sent after 11 p.m., Trump wrote: “Even though I am not mandated by law to do so, I will be leaving my businesses before January 20th so that I can focus full time on the Presidency. Two of my children, Don and Eric, plus executives, will manage them. No new deals will be done during my term(s) in office.”

…Trump’s tweets omitted reference to daughter Ivanka, who, like her brothers, currently works at the Trump Organization. However, Ivanka is expected to step away from the business to serve in an advisory capacity to her father; her husband Jared is a key and trusted aide.

Then again, maybe she’s been promoted. Which is better: being a co-CEO of a crippled Trump Organization, or being acting first lady because apparently your stepmother doesn’t want the job? That’s a ticklish question. Where’s the chief of protocol when you need him?

The Wall Street Journal has annoyed me again today. See if you can spot how they got my dander up:

A rallying stock market, rising bond yields and the return of inflationary pressures are creating new challenges for the Federal Reserve….Many Fed watchers see the prospect of tax cuts and fiscal spending under Donald Trump, as well as rising oil prices and inflation expectations, pointing to a pickup in the pace of rate increases.

….Many money managers say an upsurge of inflation throughout 2017 ranks among the top risks to a continued advance in U.S. stocks….On the bond market, meanwhile, a gauge of 10-year inflation expectations rose to the highest level in more than two years and edged above the Fed’s 2% inflation target….The fiscal stimulus Mr. Trump has proposed could boost demand and send inflation higher. Expectations of higher inflation have firmed further after the agreement by oil-producing nations boosted crude prices.

Sigh. Here’s a chart of all the commonly used inflation measures:

The ordinary measures of inflation (in red) are rising, but only to the level of two years ago—and well below the Fed’s target of 2 percent. The core measures of inflation (in blue) are pretty steady at well under 2 percent. And the 10-year-breakeven (in brown), which is a measure of inflation expectations, has been on a steady downward march for three years.

The only measure that’s both rising and breaking past the 2 percent target is the 10-year-breakeven—but only if you look at the daily change over just the past five weeks. So which measure does the Journal show in its chart? The daily change of the 10-year-breakeven over the past five weeks.

Inflation is always right around the corner, isn’t it? No matter how you have to twist things to make it come out that way, it’s always right around the corner.

But maybe we should turn the corner first before we panic. After all, 2 percent is a target, not a ceiling. After years of sub-2-percent inflation, surely we can wait until we’ve had at least a few months of 3 percent inflation before we break out the hammer and shatter the punch bowl?

Early this morning Donald Trump launched another one of his famously random tweets:

The F-35 program is pretty famously over budget. I don’t think anyone will argue with Trump about that. But Christopher Bouzy asks an interesting question. Here’s a chart showing Lockheed Martin’s stock price today:

Bouzy wonders if someone profited by knowing about Trump’s tweet a few minutes before it went out. This is a reasonable suspicion if you look at tweeting and trading times down to the minute, but if you look at them down to the second you get a different picture. Trump’s tweet went out at 8:26:13 and there were a flurry of small trades ten seconds later, followed by a second flurry three seconds after that. This caused Lockheed Martin’s price to drop considerably, but only because pre-market trading volume is pretty low and illiquid, so even a smallish trade can send prices down. Most likely, these flurries were day traders who happened to see Trump’s tweet and acted instantly, or perhaps some kind of bot that reacts to Trump tweets.¹

But even if there was no hanky panky, our president-elect still seems to have had an effect: Lockheed Martin stock traded very heavily today and closed down by more than two percent. Coincidence? Or a response to Trump’s tweet?

This revives a question we asked last week after Trump tweeted about Softbank, sending Sprint and T-Mobile stock upward. Do we really want the president of the United States calling out individual corporations and affecting their stock prices? Do we really want to be left wondering if maybe someone had a little advance knowledge of Trump’s tweets? That doesn’t seem to have been the case today, but if you knew a day ahead, for example, your trade would get lost in the noise and no one would ever know.

I assume the answer to these questions is no, isn’t it?

¹Ridiculous? Not at all. I’d be surprised if someone hasn’t done this.