Just two days after the bills were introduced, controversial and stricter voter identification laws moved quickly out of a House of Representatives committee Thursday afternoon.

State Rep. Lisa Lyons, R-Alto, a term-limited state representative who won election Nov. 8 as the next Kent County Clerk, said she believes the integrity of elections needs to be strengthened, even though there have been only a handful of voter fraud cases brought in Michigan in the last several decades, according to the Secretary of State.

Her bills would require that legally registered voters who forget their photo identification on election day to vote a provisional ballot. That ballot would be set aside and not counted until the person provided their identification within 10 days after an election at their local clerk's office. Currently, a legally registered voter who forgets their ID signs an affidavit swearing that they are who they say they are and their vote is counted on election day. More than 18,000 people who forgot their ID signed affidavits and voted on Nov. 8.

A last-minute fight over a “Buy America” provision has erupted in the final negotiations over a waterways bill.

At issue is language included in the Senate-passed version of the Water Resources Development Act (WRDA) that would require American iron and steel products be used in projects assisted by the Drinking Water State Revolving Fund.

Sources familiar with the negotiations say Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) is actively pushing to strip the provision from the bill.

Supporters of the provision say Ryan's push is at odds with President-elect Donald Trump’s promise to support American manufacturers and create jobs for the middle class.

“From our end it’s a little baffling,” said Roy Houseman, a legislative representative for the United Steelworkers. “It’s been a program that’s been really successful, and it has bipartisan support. We’re just very confused by the Speaker, who’s not listening to the rest of his caucus.”

That success is coming back to haunt the hedge fund manager and Hollywood producer who is Trump’s choice for Treasury secretary. OneWest, a bank Mnuchin and his partners established during the collapse, has taken steady fire from regulators and consumer advocates for myriad failures ever since.


In Florida, the company foreclosed on a 90-year-old woman after a 27-cent payment error. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo singled out the lender for squeezing Superstorm Sandy victims. Last month, the company’s successor, CIT Bank, was accused of discriminating against minority borrowers.

“We’re just coming out of a foreclosure crisis and a serious economic downturn. It’s not the time to appoint someone who sided with corporate America over real people,” said Alys Cohen, an attorney with the National Consumer Law Center. “Mr. Mnuchin comes from Wall Street and has served monied interests over homeowners.”

Rep. Tom Price (R-GA), President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for Health and Human Services Secretary, already has a plan for how to abolish Obamacare.

The Washington Post reported late Monday that Trump intends to announce Price, who currently serves as House Budget Chair, to lead the federal agency overseeing Medicare, Medicaid, and the Affordable Care Act.

Price will arrive with at HHS with a clear blueprint for what comes next: he is the author of the Empowering Patients First Act, one of the most thorough and detailed proposals to repeal and replace Obamacare. He’s the HHS Secretary you’d pick if you were dead serious about dismantling the law.

Americans stand on the edge of a precipice. Now is the time to stand up and be counted, says famed journalist Dan Rather. His inspiring message warns that people cannot afford to remain silent now, and Rather’s moving words of hope and action went viral.
The journalist whose show, Dan Rather’s America is on Sirius XM, says the problem goes beyond party or policy and reaches down to the fundamentals of our democracy:
"History will demand to know which side were you on. This is not a question of politics or party or even policy. This is a question about the very fundamentals of our beautiful experiment in a pluralistic democracy ruled by law."
"When I see neo-Nazis raise their hands in terrifying solute, in public, in our nation’s capital, I shudder in horror. When I see that action mildly rebuked by a boilerplate statement from the President-elect whom these bigots have praised, the anger in me grows. And when I see some in a pliant press turn that mild statement into what they call a denunciation I cannot hold back any longer."
"We set up institutions like a free press and an independent court system to protect our fragile rights. We have survived through bloody spasms of a Civil War and a Civil Rights Movement to extend more of these rights to more of our citizens. But the direction of our ship of state has not always been one of progress."
"We are a great nation. We have survived deep challenges in our past. We can and will do so again. But we cannot be afraid to speak and act to ensure the future we want for our children and grandchildren."

The team, which reportedly includes civil rights lawyer John Bonifaz and University of Michigan computer science professor Alex Halderman, says they’ve discovered evidence that votes were hacked or manipulated in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, according to New York Magazine’s report. In Wisconsin, Clinton appears to have received a lower percentage of votes in counties that relied solely on electronic voting machines – a discrepancy that could have cost her as many as 30,000 votes, and the state itself.
Without more detail, it’s impossible to judge the team’s claims. But one thing is clear: Halderman is credible and trusted among his peers.
“Halderman is very credible, and if he says there are anomalies that deserve investigation, they should be investigated,” wrote Rick Hasen, a professor of Law and Political Science at UC Irvine, on his Election Law Blog.
“While no system is 100 percent hack-proof, elections in this country are secure – perhaps as secure as they’ve ever been,” said David Becker, executive director of the nonprofit Center for Election Innovation & Research, said at a House hearing in September. “To manipulate election results on a state or national scale would require a conspiracy of literally hundreds of thousands, and for that massive conspiracy to go undetected.”

Halderman disagrees. “Becker is wrong,” he told me in an email earlier this month. “Even though the machines aren’t connected to the Internet, their software can potentially be attacked through a stuxnet-style attack that spreads via the memory cards that are used to load the ballot design.”

“This is more complicated than attacking an online voting system that is directly connected to the Internet,” he added. “But it’s within the capabilities of nation-state attackers, and it would not require a large conspiracy.”

New York Magazine’s report comes shortly after Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham called on Congress to investigate whether Russia interfered with this year’s presidential contest through a cyberattack on the Democratic National Committee’s email servers.

“We cannot sit on the sidelines as a party and let allegations against a foreign government interfering in our election process go unanswered because it may have been beneficial to our cause,” Graham said.

And those costs won't necessarily drop significantly once he moves to the White House.
That's because Melania Trump and their 10-year old son Barron expect to stay at their home at Trump Tower in midtown Manhattan, at least until the end of the school year. And Donald Trump has indicated he plans to return home regularly, especially while they're still here.
Adding to the expense is the cost of police assigned to Trump's adult children and his grandchildren, who are also receiving Secret Service protection, John Miller, NYPD's deputy commissioner of intelligence & counterterrorism, told WCBS Monday. All of them live in the city, and all are entitled to receive Secret Service protection.
"The number one imperative here is safety and security. We owe that to the president elect, his family and his team," said New York Mayor Bill de Blasio at a press conference on Friday. But he added the city will need help with those costs, particularly police overtime.

I remember the first time I heard about Gamergate. A random follower on Twitter asked me if I had been following the story, which he said was “about ethics in games journalism.” No, I had not been following the story. In all innocence, I clicked on the link he sent me and tried to make sense of what I read. I failed. The events it described were impenetrable to me. (Disclosure: I am not a gamer.)

Eventually I learned what Gamergate really was. The more I learned, the more depressed I felt. The people who promoted Gamergate said they were concerned about journalism ethics. As a professor of journalism with a social media bent, I felt obligated to examine their claims. When I did I discovered nasty troll behavior with a hard edge of misogyny. “It’s about ethics in games journalism” became an internet joke. Deservedly so.

But that is not the end of the story.

Recently Ben Smith, the editor-in-chief of Buzzfeed’s news operation, wrote: “The big story of 2014 was Gamergate, the misogynistic movement championed by Breitbart and covered primarily by new media. That turned out to be a better predictor of the presidential election than any rubber chicken dinner in Iowa (or poll by a once-reputable pollster).”

Ben is right. The Gamergate model in press relations posits that high-risk tactics should not be ruled out of consideration. It says that rejection and ridicule by the mainstream media can be a massive plus, because these events activate — and motivate — your most committed supporters: your trolls. The Gamergate model proposes that transgressing the norms of American democracy is not some crippling defect, as previously believed, but a distinct advantage because the excitement around the transgression recruits new players to the fight, and guarantees the spread of your content.

The Gamergate model anticipates that the mainstream press will freak out. Full stop. And it tries to profit from this (over) reaction. What the traditional press considers negative publicity is, from the Gamergate point of view, a kind of gift. Trump and his advisors have absorbed these lessons. Gamergate is thus one possible template for the future of White House-press corps relations. Those who have not studied it carefully will be at a distinct disadvantage.

Hillary Clinton is being urged by a group of prominent computer scientists and election lawyers to call for a recount in three swing states won by Donald Trump, New York has learned. The group, which includes voting-rights attorney John Bonifaz and J. Alex Halderman, the director of the University of Michigan Center for Computer Security and Society, believes they’ve found persuasive evidence that results in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania may have been manipulated or hacked. The group is so far not speaking on the record about their findings and is focused on lobbying the Clinton team in private.

Last Thursday, the activists held a conference call with Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta and campaign general counsel Marc Elias to make their case, according to a source briefed on the call. The academics presented findings showing that in Wisconsin, Clinton received 7 percent fewer votes in counties that relied on electronic-voting machines compared with counties that used optical scanners and paper ballots. Based on this statistical analysis, Clinton may have been denied as many as 30,000 votes; she lost Wisconsin by 27,000. While it’s important to note the group has not found proof of hacking or manipulation, they are arguing to the campaign that the suspicious pattern merits an independent review — especially in light of the fact that the Obama White House has accused the Russian government of hacking the Democratic National Committee.

Government employees have shared serious concerns about working under Donald Trump. None of them are more concerned than the active duty members of the U.S. military who wrote to us.

Last week, we asked for government employees to share their thoughts with us about the prospect of working for a Trump administration. These are responses that we received from soldiers. They are well worth reading.

I have lost that trust. Are people in the military going to die needlessly for this man? I can’t stop wondering, are we going to find ourselves in the military on the hook for fighting a conventional war as the result of a needless trade war or the result of an uncontrollable ego? I imagine as examples China balking at aggressive American trade negotiations and Trump responding with force in the South China Sea, or an aggressive foreign leader offending him and he responding impulsively with force. Only a few weeks ago, a Russian fighter and American fighter nearly collided during nighttime combat operations over Syria. How will he respond to such an event—or even worse—how will he respond if Russian anti-air defenses mistakenly shoot down an American jet? Will he have the fortitude and thoughtful demeanor to avoid a major conflict in such a case? I am left only to hope that despite his public demeanor and knee-jerk responses to feeling as though he has been attacked, he will suddenly stop acting impulsively now that he has at his disposal the might of the US military to right any slight against him. Anyone else feel good at that prospect? I don’t.