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Donald Trump attacked a local union leader on Twitter, fulfilling his campaign promise to save American jobs, even for all the losers and haters out there. Trump named the CEO of Hardee’s as his Labor Secretary, presumably only after the Chick-fil-A cows all turned down the job. Harry Reid bid farewell to the Senate and now will return to Searchlight, where he will force residents to listen to long-winded speeches about his hometown of Washington, D.C.. This is HUFFPOST HILL for Thursday, December 8, 2016:
TRUMP ORDERS UP MEANBURGER WITH A SIDE OF MISOGYNY - Carl’s Sr. must be so proud. Dave Jamieson: “In a rebuke to President Barack Obama’s work on the labor front, President-elect Donald Trump is expected to choose a fast-food executive to be the nation’s next labor secretary, tasked with enforcing workplace safety and wage laws on behalf of U.S. workers. Andrew Puzder, who advised Trump during his presidential campaign, is the chief executive of CKE Restaurants, which includes the burger chains Hardee’s and Carl’s Jr. among its brands…. Like Trump, he argues that the federal government has made regulations too burdensome on businesses, stifling job growth. Two of the major regulations he has criticized ― the minimum wage and overtime ― are ones he would be tasked with enforcing…. Puzder helmed Hardee’s and Carl’s Jr. at a time the chains became famous for their controversial TV ads. They showed the likes of Paris Hilton and Kate Upton, scantily clad, eating cheeseburgers in a surprisingly sexualized manner.” [HuffPost]
RIP JOHN GLENN - Combat veteran. Test pilot. Astronaut. Senator. That’s one hell of a life. Joe Hallett: “His legend is other-worldly and now, in his 95th year, that’s where John Glenn has gone. An authentic hero and genuine American icon, Glenn died this afternoon surrounded by family at the Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center in Columbus after a remarkably healthy life spent almost from the cradle with Annie, his beloved wife of 73 years, who survives.” [Columbus Dispatch]
AMERICA NOT A BIG FAN OF THE MAN IT JUST ELECTED PRESIDENT - More people think he’ll be “poor or terrible” than “good.” Noam Scheiber and Maggie Haberman: “Nearly a month after Mr. Trump’s election as president, he still has a long way to go to win the confidence of the nation. A Pew Research Center poll of 1,502 adults found that 35 percent of Americans thought Mr. Trump would be a good or great president; 18 percent said he would be average; while 38 percent said he would be poor or terrible. That is better than in October, when just 25 percent of the public said Mr. Trump would make a good or great president, while 57 percent said he would be poor or terrible.” [NYT]
HARRY REID SAYS GOODBYE TO SENATE - He also sort of said goodbye to American democracy. Michael McAuliff: “Retiring Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) bade farewell Thursday, citing the words of George Orwell, Leonard Cohen and the Pope to caution America against falling under the sway of plutocrats…. ‘We’re entering a new Gilded Age. It has never been more important to be able to distinguish between what’s real and what is fake,’ Reid said. ‘We have lawmakers pushing for tax cuts for billionaires and calling it populism. We have media outlets pushing conspiracy theories disguised as news. Separating real from fake has never been more important.’” [HuffPost]
Reid is chill about Senate rule changes that will now screw Democrats. “What was fair for President Obama is fair for President Trump,” he wrote of eliminating the filibuster for most presidential nominations in a New York Times op-ed.
Case in point: The Republican National Committee will have its Christmas party this year at Trump’s gaudy hotel near the White House. Presumably, simply shoving wads of sweaty cash into his pants pockets instead was deemed impractical.
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MAYBE ALL THIS INFIGHTING WILL KEEP THEM TOO BUSY TO LOOT AMERICA -LOL, j/k. They can still do that. Gabriel Sherman: “As the least experienced, least ideological, and therefore perhaps most malleable president-elect in history prepares to take office, all eyes are on who is influencing his decisions. And so far, Donald Trump’s administration is shaping up to be like his campaign: full of clashing egos and agendas…. ‘In this administration, titles will not matter,’ one transition staffer said. ‘It’s like Game of Thrones.’ And the outcome is not simply about which personality gets pride of place but which worldview determines the Trump White House’s approach to policy: the nationalist-populist agenda of Bannon and other former campaign staffers, or the more traditional Republican governance advocated by Priebus and Vice-President-elect Mike Pence.” [New York Magazine]
TRUMP KEEPS CONNING THE MEDIA - And it works! Ben Walsh: “President-elect Donald Trump is doing exactly what he always said he was going to do with his company, the Trump Organization. But he’s spinning it as a new decision — and the press is buying it. The New York Times, citing unnamed sources, reported Wednesdayevening that Trump won’t sell his stake in his company. His adult sons will run the business, but he won’t transfer ownership to them. And he certainly won’t be doing anything remotely resembling divesting or installing an independent administrator to run the Trump Organization. It’s a plan that does almost nothing to address the massive conflicts of interest inherent in owning a real estate and branding business while serving as president of the United States. It’s also the same thing he’s been promising to do for months.” [HuffPost]
AS USUAL, TRUMP IS NOT PUTTING THE WORK IN - During the campaign it just meant he was unprepared for debates, but now it means the federal government could grind to a halt. Sarah Wheaton: “Donald Trump is beating President Barack Obama on the pace of splashy Cabinet announcements, but the president-elect is lagging his predecessor when it comes to other transition efforts critical to fulfilling his campaign promises. The slower pace applies not only to key appointments throughout his administration, but also to Trump’s lower-profile agency review teams, whose nitty-gritty work with Obama’s career bureaucrats could make or break Trump’s pledge to get his presidency off to a barn-burning start. Obama administration officials assigned to the transition say Trump’s representatives have been AWOL at some agencies, leaving them sitting on binders full of briefing materials that have been amassed since March.” [Politico]
DELANEY DOWNER - Arthur Delaney: “John Feltner was working his shift as a machinist at the Rexnord ball bearings factory in Indianapolis Wednesday night when word spread that President-elect Donald Trump had sent mean tweets about the union’s president. Feltner said workers were upset that Chuck Jones, president of the United Steelworkers Local 1999, had gotten onto Trump’s bad side, since many believe the president-elect is their only hope of not getting fired next year. ‘There was a lot of dissent in the plant that politics are replacing the task at hand as far as saving jobs,’ Feltner said…. Feltner and several other Rexnord workers told The Huffington Post they were stunned last week when Carrier Corporation, which owns a furnace plant about a mile from their bearings factory, announced that Trump had convinced the company not to close the plant and send all its jobs ― roughly 1,400 ― to Mexico. The announcement gave Rexnord workers hope for their own jobs, which the company has also been planning to shift to Mexico next year.” [HuffPost]
Chuck Jones, president of United Steelworkers 1999, the union representing workers at that Carrier plant in Indiana, won’t be intimidated by Trump, the union leader writes in the Washington Post.
TRUMP LOYALIST PREFERS WHITE AUTOCRATS TO ASIAN COMMUNISTS - Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.) ― one of the roughly 950,000 people on Trump’s shortlist for secretary of State ― is thirsty for Putin. Nick Visser: “In a fiery interview with Yahoo News and Finance anchor Bianna Golodryga, Rohrabacher toed a similar line to President-elect Donald Trump when he said it would be better to cooperate with Russia and ‘actually take on real enemies.’ ‘If it’s right for us to join in and cooperate and have a better relationship with Russia in order to defeat radical Islam and to pull China back a bit, well that’s a good thing, and that’s what this is all about,’ said Rohrabacher, whom Politico once called Russian President Vladimir Putin’s ‘favorite congressman.’” [HuffPost]
NOW IT’S THE DEMOCRATS’ TURN TO THREATEN GOVERNMENT SHUTDOWNS -Big Joe Manchin doesn’t mess around when it comes to miners. Kelsey Snell and Mike DeBonis: “Senate Democrats are threatening to force a brief government shutdown this weekend in an effort to pressure Republicans to include more generous medical and pension benefits for retired coal miners and ‘Buy American’ language in year-end legislation moving through Congress. Government funding is set to run out at the end of Friday and lawmakers are currently considering a stopgap spending bill that would keep federal agencies funded through April 28. The angry Democrats are not threatening to block the spending measure, but to delay its passage past the Friday deadline in hopes they can entice Republicans into further negotiations.” [WashPost]
BECAUSE YOU’VE READ THIS FAR - Marvel with the inimitable Brian Grubb of UPROXX at how a guy who walked off with a bucket filled with $1.6 million in gold still hasn’t been caught.
BLACK MAN PATIENTLY EXPLAINS THAT, YES, RACISM EXISTS - This interview would’ve been way more real if Obama had let Key and Peele do it for him. Hayley Miller: “President Barack Obama opened up about racism he faced throughout his presidency in an interview with CNN’s Fareed Zakaria on Wednesday. ‘Are there folks whose primary concern about me has been that I seem foreign ― the other? Are those who champion the birther movement feeding off of bias?’ Obama asked rhetorically. ‘Absolutely.’ … ‘I think there’s a reason attitudes about my presidency among whites in northern states are very different from whites in southern states,’ Obama told Zakaria.” [HuffPost]
COMFORT FOOD
This enormous turtle met some Kiwi boaters and ― wait for it! wait for it! ― really came out of his shell.
We have terrible news for all the preschool drunks out there who love cwaft cocktails.
Nosy scientists dug up some amber with 99-million-year-old dinosaur feathers in it.
TWITTERAMA
@mattyglesias: You’ll know things have normalized when people start pretending to care about the Export-Import Bank again.
@lindsaygoldwert: I like to read about mass extinction events to remind me that in the grand scheme, none of our lives matter 🌈
@meganamram: Imagine Trump getting his caricature drawn
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