Month: December 2016

Enlarge (credit: Gage Skidmore)

President-elect Donald Trump selected his secretary for the Department of the Interior today, according to several reports. While Washington Congresswoman Cathy McMorris Rodgers had been a rumored front-runner, it’s Montana Congressman Ryan Zinke that will be getting the nod.

Zinke majored in geology while playing football at the University of Oregon and later earned an MBA and a Masters in Global Leadership at the University of San Diego’s business school. He served 23 years as a Navy SEAL before entering politics in 2008.

Zinke, a Republican, has split with his party on several occasions over the status of public lands. He was involved in writing the GOP platform earlier this year, but he left when he couldn’t agree to language demanding that some portion of federal land be handed over to states.

Enlarge (credit: Getty | Mark Wilson)

On Tuesday, Ohio Gov. John Kasich vetoed the so-called “heartbeat” bill that would ban abortions when a fetal heartbeat is detectable, about 6 weeks into a pregnancy. Heartbeats can easily be detected before a woman even knows she’s pregnant.

The move may seem like a victory for abortion advocates. However, in the same fell swoop, Kasich also signed into a law a bill that bans abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy. And this move is far more threatening to abortion rights in the state and country than the heartbeat legislation. In fact, the law is “nationally designed to be the vehicle to end abortion in America,” according to abortion opponents.

Kasich, who is against abortion rights, vetoed the heartbeat bill because it likely wouldn’t hold up in federal courts. Indeed, the US Supreme Court has long held that states cannot block abortions before a fetus is viable, i.e. able survive outside the womb—which is generally around 24 weeks. The heartbeat bill, essentially a 6-week abortion ban, is clearly at odds with the Constitutional standard. As such, similar heartbeat laws from Arkansas and North Dakota have been struck down in federal courts.

The basement of the Democratic National Committee's Washington, DC, headquarters holds one of the most fitting images to come out of the hacks that dogged Democrats in the 2016 presidential election. On the left: a 1960s era file cabinet that was jimmied open during the 1972 Watergate break-in. On the right: a DNC server that was hacked by what the US intelligence community says were Russian operatives.

That image is from an 8,300-word New York Times article about how two separate Russian government groups hacked the DNC. The hacks first came to light in June, and the rough outline is well known. For months, the intruders had free reign over the DNC's computers. Over time, the Russians extended their reach into the Gmail accounts of Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta, former secretary of State Colin Powell, and others. The series of DNC blunders, bordering on ineptitude, that allowed the attacks to succeed has been well documented. Those blunders are now coming into sharper focus.

Like the feeble filing cabinet, the shortcomings exposed in the New York Times' blow-by-blow account show just how ineffective and doomed the DNCs's defenses were against a much-better organized adversary. Equally important, the report reveals how a "series of missed signals, slow responses, and a continuing underestimation of the seriousness of the cyberattack"—apportioned in almost equal parts by members of the FBI, the DNC, and the Clinton campaign—allowed the hacking drama to play out.