1) Lee Drutman and Mark Schmitt on the need to fight Trump on norms:
But Trump is no mere Tammany Hall hack. The norms and constitutional provisions he has either violated or is on track to violate go far beyond “honest graft.” His approach is not mere greasing the wheels — it’s puncturing and slashing the tires. Trump’s rewriting of the rules — refusing to acknowledge that he must divest from his businesses, continuing to keep his tax returns secret, tweeting nuclear arms policy, publicly rejecting the findings of the intelligence community on Russian campaign hacking — is so vast that it has swamped his presidency before he has even taken the oath of office.
In this context, challenging Trump primarily on “normal politics” — legislative fights over safety net programs and taxes — is like ignoring a cancer diagnosis and instead devoting all your time to going to your chiropractor because in the past, he’s succeeded at getting rid of your sore back. [emphasis mine]
Defending basic democratic norms and maintaining a strong focus on corruption is the right strategy. Not only is it more likely to work but it is likely to leave our politics in a better place in the end.
First, making the fight about entitlements and taxes is only going to reinforce existing partisan divides, at a time when Democrats and Republicans need to figure out how to build alliances to minimize the damage Trump can do to basic norms, rather than reinforcing the divide that Trump exploited in the general election.
The only chance of checking Trump’s likely excesses and recklessness is if Republicans step in, as Sens. John McCain and Lindsey Graham have done in response to Russia’s interference in the election and Trump’s apparent willingness to lift sanctions. Other conservative Republicans, outside Congress, have expressed deep misgivings about Trump’s refusal to even acknowledge conflicts of interest or his failure to hold press conferences. The potential for cross-partisan alliances on protecting democratic norms and civil liberties, and preventing corruption, is much broader than on programs.
Second, it can be hard to hit Trump on policy because he’s made a long game of being ideologically elusive.
2) Charles Feeney is “the James Bond of philanthropy” and basically the anti-Trump when it comes to giving (i.e., he uses his own money and doesn’t make a big show).
3) Really good piece in the Chronicle of Higher Ed on how implicit bias is probably not all it’s made out to be:
That’s essentially Blanton’s argument as well. Public discussion about implicit bias has been based largely on the results from one particular test, and that test, in his view, has been falsely sold as solid science. “They have engaged the public in a way that has wrapped the feeling of science and weight around a lot of ‘cans’ and ‘maybes,’” Blanton says. “Most of your score on this test is noise, and what signal there is, we don’t know what it is or what it means.”
Blanton is not saying there’s no such thing as unconscious bias, nor is he arguing that racial discrimination isn’t a deep and abiding problem in American life (though at least one white-supremacist-friendly website has mentioned his research in an attempt to make that case — illustrating how such discussions can be misconstrued). He just thinks that scientists don’t know how to measure implicit bias with any confidence and that they shouldn’t pretend otherwise. “It is such an important problem that it deserves a stronger science,” he says.
3) Andrew Gelman undermines the claim that North Carolina isn’t really a democracy. Among other things, 11 other states actually perform worse.
4) Florida’s stand your ground law associated with an increase in homicides:
Results Prior to the stand your ground law, the mean monthly homicide rate in Florida was 0.49 deaths per 100 000 (mean monthly count, 81.93), and the rate of homicide by firearm was 0.29 deaths per 100 000 (mean monthly count, 49.06). Both rates had an underlying trend of 0.1% decrease per month. After accounting for underlying trends, these results estimate that after the law took effect there was an abrupt and sustained increase in the monthly homicide rate of 24.4% (relative risk [RR], 1.24; 95%CI, 1.16-1.33) and in the rate of homicide by firearm of 31.6% (RR, 1.32; 95% CI, 1.21-1.44). No evidence of change was found in the analyses of comparison states for either homicide (RR, 1.06; 95% CI, 0.98-1.13) or homicide by firearm (RR, 1.08; 95% CI, 0.99-1.17). Furthermore, no changes were observed in control outcomes such as suicide (RR, 0.99; 95% CI, 0.94-1.05) and suicide by firearm (RR, 0.98; 95% CI, 0.91-1.06) in Florida between 2005 and 2014.
Conclusions and Relevance The implementation of Florida’s stand your ground self-defense law was associated with a significant increase in homicides and homicides by firearm but no change in rates of suicide or suicide by firearm.
5) Political Scientist/Economist/noted libertarian Mike Munger takes to the NYT Op-Ed to argue that football need to be more like rugby to be safer.
6) Drum says Democrats need a “show us the replacement” mantra regarding Republicans and Obamacare.
7) Thomas Mills on the new governor in town:
What a difference a governor makes! Just a week or so ago, people were asking, “With veto proof majorities in the legislature, what can Roy Cooper do?” Well, yesterday he told us. He can try to expand Medicaid. He can call out Republicans who won’t repeal HB2. He can call on the legislature to raise teacher pay to the national average. In other words, he can set the Democratic agenda and establish the terms of the political debate in a year with special legislative elections. And he can put the GOP on the defensive from the start of his administration…
Cooper is clearly no Pat McCrory. He has a firm grasp of state government and a willingness to push an agenda that McCrory lacked. The legislature has had four years dealing with a push over. They’ll now have to figure out how deal with a governor who clearly plans to make himself a force in Raleigh.
8) Reihan Salam on the policy disaster that would follow from “repeal and delay.”
9) John Cassidy asks if Obamacare can “save the Democrats”
In addition to harming large numbers of Trump voters, repealing most of the A.C.A. would enrage some rich and powerful economic interests that the Republican Party has traditionally courted, such as doctors, hospitals, and insurers. It took the American health-care industry, which is now bigger than the entire economy of France, half a decade to prepare for and implement the law’s provisions. Many working in health care believe it would be folly to destroy the new system before building a proper replacement.
Insurers are warning that a “repeal and delay” plan would create immediate turmoil on the government-run exchanges, many of which are already having trouble attracting more than one or two insurers to participate. Last month, two big trade groups—the American Hospital Association and the Federation of American Hospitals—warned publicly that repealing the A.C.A. could cost hospitals a hundred and sixty-five billion dollars and trigger an “unprecedented public health crisis.” In a letter to Congress on Tuesday, Dr. James Madara, the chief executive of the American Medical Association, said, “We believe that before any action is taken . . . policymakers should lay out for the American people, in reasonable detail, what will replace current policies.” ..
It’s looking more and more like the Republicans are caught in a trap of their own making. Ever since 2008, they and their media outriders, such as Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, have demagogued the health-care issue in an outrageous fashion. Trump, in running for President, employed the same nihilistic strategy. Now they may pay for it. Despite the Republicans’ vague talk of stripping away government bureaucracy and setting up a more “market-based system” to replace Obamacare, there is no quick fix, no cheap way out. In a private health-care market, the only way to guarantee universal, or near universal, coverage is to employ mandates, subsidies, taxes, and legal directives—the very tools employed in the A.C.A. [emphasis mine]
10) Nice summary in Vox of Brian Schaffner’s latest on how racism and sexism drove support for Trump.
11) Jamelle Bouie says that Democrats don’t have a religion problem, they have a white people problem:
First, the facts. Among the most religious groups in the country are black and Latino Americans…
These voters back Democrats, overwhelmingly. In the 2016 election, Hillary Clinton won 67 percent of self-identified Hispanic Catholics and the vast majority of black churchgoers. She also won 71 percent of Jewish voters and 62 percent of voters who belong to other religious faiths and traditions. She suffered a crushing defeat among white evangelicals—losing them 16 percent to Trump’s 81 percent—and she lost white Catholics by an almost 2–1 margin, 37 percent to 60 percent.
Because white Christians are the majority of religious voters, and Clinton lost the majority of white Christians, you could say (as Wear does) that these numbers represent a “religion problem” for Democrats. But then to make that claim, you have to ignore race. You have to ignore that Democrats do extremely well with believers of color, Christian or otherwise. You have to ignore stark social and theological divides between black and white Christians, who historically have not understood politics and the Gospel in the same way. You have to ignore the fact that, in North Carolina, the Democratic Party won the state’s governorship on the strength of a movement rooted in black churches and tied to religious leadership. Most importantly, you have to ignore that Democrats lost the large majority of white voters, continuing a trend that dates back to 1968.
At this point, you have to answer an interpretive question. Are Democrats losing a collection of groups that happen to be white—religious voters, working-class voters, etc.—or are they losing whites specifically, with those subcategories following from that fact? Given the stark racial divides in those categories—Democrats win nonwhite religious voters by the same margins that they win nonwhite voters without college educations—the broad answer is clear: The Democratic Party doesn’t have a religion problem as much as it has a white voter problem. That white voter problem emerged in the aftermath of the civil rights movement as a resentful backlash to perceived disorder and unfairness and has gotten worse with almost every subsequent presidential election. [emphasis mine]
12) Jerome Groopman with the most notable medical findings of 2016.
13) I think I missed this back in November: Alex MacGillis‘ look at poor (white, of course) voters voting against their economic interests.
14) One man’s quest to change the way we die. More power to him because we are awful at this in America.
Fully Myelinated 
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