In other news, Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price has resigned. He left a safe seat in Congress so he could oversee the end of Obamacare, but all he got was a lousy t-shirt.
Meanwhile, Congress is leaving town for the weekend without reauthorizing the Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP). Funding for the program will expire tomorrow night and some states are already preparing for the worst.
Finally, White House chief of staff John Kelly has reportedly reassigned economic adviser Peter Navarro to the National Economic Council. This may be significant because Navarro is the last jackass in the White House still pretending we're going to start a trade war.
Navarro has operated largely as a one-man trade warrior within the West Wing, arguing vehemently for aggressive tariffs. He’s operated with a rare degree of independence – though he often works closely with senior policy adviser Stephen Miller, an ideological ally.
Kelly’s decision to have Navarro report to Cohn, who has pushed behind the scenes to temper Trump’s hardline instincts, could further isolate the former economics professor. Cohn is Navarro’s “nemesis,” according to an associate of Navarro’s. The two men have sometimes yelled at each other during White House trade meetings, and Cohn has often been dismissive of Navarro’s policy proposals.
I was going to write a post about Facebook this week, but each time I began to do so yet another story popped up and further complicated what I was going to say. I'm sure I'll have more complete thoughts on it in the future once we learn more.
Here are the stories I didn't get to:
Russia's professional trolls use Facebook to promote Jill Stein and Bernie Sanders.
Russians also impersonated real American Muslims to create division by making American Muslims look bad.
And Russians also created fake black activist accounts for the same reason.
The Blacktivist accounts provide further evidence that Russian-linked social media accounts saw racial tensions as something to be exploited in order to achieve the broader Russian goal of dividing Americans and creating chaos in U.S. politics during a campaign in which race repeatedly became an issue.
The Facebook account had 360,000 likes, more than the verified Black Lives Matter account on Facebook, which currently has just over 301,000.
In each of these cases, the Russians actually paid money to promote the groups on Facebook. They didn't spread organically like the genuine groups have.