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.

Mark Reinstein/ ZUMA Wire

Donald Trump has a question:

Unless you catch “hackers” in the act, it is very hard to determine who was doing the hacking. Why wasn’t this brought up before election?

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 12, 2016

Hmmm. That’s a chin scratcher for sure. Why didn’t anyone bring this up before the election? Like, say, in the first debate:

Or the second debate:

Or the third debate:

Or from 17 agencies of the US intelligence community:

Or from the mainstream media, like, say, the New York Times:

U.S. Says Russia Directed Hacks to Influence Elections

The Obama administration on Friday formally accused the Russian government of stealing and disclosing emails from the Democratic National Committee and a range of other institutions and prominent individuals….In a statement from the director of national intelligence, James R. Clapper Jr., and the Department of Homeland Security, the government said the leaked emails that have appeared on a variety of websites “are intended to interfere with the U.S. election process.”

Yep. It’s a real chin scratcher. How is it that no one brought this up before the election?

The Kaiser Family Foundation estimates that 52 million Americans have pre-existing conditions. How many of these are in the individual insurance market? “In 2015, about 8% of the non-elderly population had individual market insurance. Over a several-year period, however, a much larger share may seek individual market coverage.”

So let’s say 10 percent as a conservative round number. That’s 5 million people. Since Obamacare requires insurers to cover these people—and this is something Republicans can’t repeal—they will still have access to coverage even if other parts of Obamacare are repealed. However, there will be no subsidies, and the price of insurance will likely be high since this population skews older. At a rough guess, probably around 3 million of these people will be unable to afford insurance.

The full disaster of an Obamacare repeal goes far beyond this, of course, but it’s worth keeping this tidbit in mind. Once Obamacare’s subsidies are repealed, it’s likely that 3 million people with expensive pre-existing conditions will be instantly tossed out of the health care system, unable to get insurance and unable to afford proper care. And that’s just the beginning.

Here’s the latest from the New York Times correspondent in Moscow:

U.S. government might have deliberately orchestrated cyberattacks to make it look as though they were coming from Russia, Carter Page says.

— Ivan Nechepurenko (@INechepurenko) December 12, 2016

Carter Page, you may recall, was the guy who was a Trump advisor, and then he wasn’t, and then maybe he was. Or maybe not. It all seemed to depend on whether he was in Trump’s good graces at the time. In any case, he’s now the second Trump supporter to suggest that the hacks of Democratic Party emails were actually part of a false flag operation. And he goes even further than John Bolton, suggesting that the CIA orchestrated the whole thing.

So…is this about to become a standard talking point on the right? Is “false flag operation” going to be the new Benghazi? Stay tuned.

Here is the New York Times last week:

Former Senator Bob Dole, acting as a foreign agent for the government of Taiwan, worked behind the scenes over the past six months to establish high-level contact between Taiwanese officials and President-elect Donald J. Trump’s staff, an outreach effort that culminated last week in an unorthodox telephone call between Mr. Trump and Taiwan’s president.

Here is Donald Trump yesterday on Fox News:

I took a call. I heard the call was coming probably an hour or two before. I fully understand the One-China policy. But I don’t know why we have to be bound by a One-China policy unless we make a deal with China having to do with other things, including trade.

Knowing Trump, I think we can assume that “an hour or two” was more like 15 minutes. We can also assume that he had never heard of the One-China policy before that, since he typically defends himself only when he’s lying.

So: the China hawks on the Trump team worked on this for months; dumped it on Trump a few minutes ahead of the call; and counted on Trump having no idea what he was getting himself into. Plus one other thing: whenever Trump gets caught making a mistake, he doubles down and becomes more committed to his mistake with every passing day. They were probably counting on that too.

It’s Trump 101. This is how you handle the guy. I expect we’re going to see a lot more skullduggery like this in the White House over the next four years.

Sam Wang has crunched the data from polls released in October to judge the effect of FBI Director James Comey’s letter on the election:

From opinion data alone, it is possible to estimate when a change occurred. This can test between alternative explanations, which include not only the Comey letter (October 28th) but preceding events such as the announcement of a hike in Affordable Care Act premiums (October 24th).

I calculated a day-by-day margin using polling data from the Huffington Post…After the Affordable Care Act premium hike announcement, opinion did not move for days…However, the big change does coincide well with the release of the Comey letter. Opinion swung toward Trump by 4 percentage points, and about half of this was a lasting change.

Naturally there’s a chart to go along with this. Here it is:

Hillary Clinton lost 4 points when the letter was released. She eventually gained back some of that, but it looks like 2 points were permanent. This jibes well with Nate Silver’s estimate that the Comey letter cost Clinton 2 points.

It is traditional at this point to acknowledge that lots of things affected the election: bad campaign strategy, rural blue-collar whites, etc. This is what you’ll read about in all the post-election thumbsuckers, but this kind of stuff happens to all campaigns. The Trump campaign certainly made lots of mistakes too, though no one talks about them anymore. The difference here is that things like the Comey letter don’t happen to all campaigns. This was an egregious intervention in the campaign by the director of the FBI, who was motivated at least partly by his fear of a rogue group of agents who were dedicated to Clinton’s defeat.

This is decidedly not normal. Comey knew exactly what he was doing. He was warned that it would be an unprecedented act of interference in an election. But he went ahead anyway, and went ahead in a manner perfectly calculated to do the maximum damage. The press played along and the rest is history.

Without Comey’s letter, Clinton likely would have won the popular vote by 4 points and the Electoral College by 300 votes or more. Who knows about the Senate? Maybe Democrats would have won that too. Eliminate the Russian ratfucking and Clinton would have won in a landslide. Instead, a game show host is about to be sworn in as president of the United States and everyone is convinced that the Democratic Party is practically on its last legs.

This. Is. Not. Normal.

Andrea Mitchell reports on who will be working with Rex Tillerson at the State Department:

He will also be paired with former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton as his deputy secretary of state, one of the sources added, with Bolton handling day-to-day management of the department.

John Bolton? This is hardly unexpected, but holy shit. Bolton is a lunatic. Here he is on Fox News today:

Bolton is seriously suggesting that the hacks into Democratic Party computers might have been false flag operations, presumably with the goal of making it look like Russia supported Donald Trump. This would ruin Trump’s reputation and guarantee a win for Hillary Clinton.

This is completely nuts. It’s deranged. It’s unhinged. And it doesn’t even make sense on its own terms. No campaign in its right mind would do this, and certainly not a campaign desperately trying to keep the word “email” in any form out of the public discourse.

Dark insinuations of false flag operations are a favorite among conspiracy theorists. They think it makes them sound sophisticated and worldly. This means that either Bolton is a conspiracy theorist or else he doesn’t mind sounding like one if that’s what it take to defend his side. And soon he’ll be the #2 guy at State, the person really running things while Tillerson provides the public face. God help us.