Page 6 - Florida Sentinel 12-20-16 Online Edition

President/White House News
President Obama On
Trump’s Advisers Fighting Already
Life After White House:
Donald Trump’s top ad- visers are jousting over con- trol of the new political group they are forming to help press the president-elect’s agenda, as rival camps have formed with repercussions for who ends up as senior staff.
Brad Parscale, Trump’s digital adviser, is the only senior Trump aide
who is definitely headed to the nonprofit. And four peo- ple familiar with the discus- sions about the group said that Parscale had been specifically empowered by Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and one of his closest counselors, to take charge of the new organiza- tion.
‘I Want To Help Rebuild
Democratic Party’
With his days as POTUS numbered, Pres. Barack Obama has begun to con- sider the role he will play in rebuilding the Democratic Party after last month’s elec- tion left it nearly shattered following Donald Trump’s Presidential win.
Speaking to NPR in an in- terview recorded last week, The President accepted some responsibility for his party’s failure to retain some of the rural and rust belt vot- ers that supported him in 2008 and 2012, but voted for Trump last month. He said Democrats are by nature more attracted to addressing nationwide and international issues, a tendency that has al- lowed Republicans in recent years to build “from the ground up” in small, local races.
One of the big suggestions that I have for Democrats as I leave, and something that, you know, I have some ideas about is, how do we do more of that ground up building?’’
Electors Gathered In Every State To Formally Elect Donald Trump
President-elect Donald Trump should support a probe of foreign interference in the presidential election, Pres- ident Obama said Friday, ar- guing that his successor will have "a different set of respon- sibilities and considerations" once he's sworn in next month.
The President laid the hacking operation — which ex- posed internal emails from the Democratic National Commit- tee and the Hillary Clinton campaign to web sites and daily headlines — at the doorstep of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
"I will confirm that this hap- pened at the highest levels of the Russian government," President Obama said. "And I will let you make that deter- mination as to whether there are high-level Russian officials who go off rogue and decide to tamper with the U.S. election process without Vladimir Putin knowing about it."
Questions about the Russian President's involvement in the hacking that roiled the U.S. presidential election domi- nated the President’s marathon end-of-year press conference on Friday.
In an often reflective tone, he suggested some national soul- searching about the role of "hyper-partisanship" in the de- bate about intelligence. "What is it about our political system
Donald Trump's ‘Unpresidented’ Tweet Is A Clear Example That He's Overestimating His Intelligence
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA
The President reiterated that has he ‘promised Michelle a nice vacation” and that he plans to take some time to spend with his family once leaving office, but said he sees a role for himself in rebuilding the party he led from the White House for 8 years. The President also said he expects to take an ad- visory role that will shape up as some combination of talent scout, friend and coach.
WASHINGTON - - Electors are set to gather in every state on Monday to formally elect Donald Trump president even as anti-Trump forces try one last time to deny him the White House.
Protests are planned for state capitals, but they are un- likely to persuade the Elec- toral College to dump Trump.
Republican electors say they have been deluged with emails, phone calls and letters urging them not to support Trump. Many of the emails are part of coordinated cam- paigns.
Wirt A. Yerger Jr., a Re- publican elector in Missis- sippi, said, "I have gotten several thousand emails ask- ing me not to vote for Trump. I threw them all away."
A joint session of Congress is scheduled for Jan. 6 to cer- tify the results of the Electoral College vote, with Vice Presi- dent Joe Biden presiding as
president of the Senate. Once the result is certified, the win- ner - likely Trump - will be sworn in on Jan. 20.
The Electoral College was devised at the Constitutional Convention in 1787. It was a compromise between those who wanted popular elections for president and those who wanted no public input.
The Electoral College has 538 members, with the num- ber allocated to each state based on how many represen- tatives it has in the House plus one for each senator. The Dis- trict of Columbia gets three, despite the fact that the home to Congress has no vote in Congress.
To be elected president, the winner must get at least half plus one - or 270 electoral votes. Most states give all their electoral votes to whichever candidate wins that state's popular vote. Maine and Ne- braska award them by con- gressional district.
Some Democrats have ar- gued that the Electoral College is undemocratic because it gives more weight to less pop- ulated states. That is how Hillary Clinton, who got more than 2.6 million more votes nationwide, lost the elec- tion to Trump. Some have also tried to dissuade Trump voters by arguing that he is unsuited to the job. Others cite the CIA's assessment that Russia engaged in computer hacking to sway the election in favor of the Republican.
But despite the national group therapy session being conducted by some Democ- rats, only one Republican elec- tor told the AP that he will not vote for Trump.
There is no constitutional provision or federal law that requires electors to vote for the candidate who won their state.
Still, some anti-Trump ac- tivists have been getting cre- ative in trying to persuade electors to dump Trump.
President Says Russian Hack Will Be Dealt With
President at press conference on Friday.
that made us vulnerable to these kinds of potential manip- ulations?" he asked.
The President said it seems some Republicans would rather believe Russia and its president, Vladimir Putin, than American officials who they see as somehow favoring the Democrats. He cited a poll that said 37% of Republican voters approve of Putin, a for- mer KGB official.
But President Obama said the United States can still con- front Russia from a position of strength. "They are a smaller country. They are a weaker country. Their economy does- n’t produce anything that any- body wants to buy, except oil and gas and arms. They don’t innovate. But they can impact us if we lose track of who we are."
Donald Trump took to Twitter to comment on China's capture of an underwater U.S. Navy drone, and somehow he misspelled "unprecedented" as "unpresidented." The tweet was deleted and replaced with a corrected version an hour and a half later, but by then Twitter had already seized on the blunder and the hashtag #unpresidented became a trending topic. Other than call- ing for him to be "unpresi- dented," most posts reacting to Trump's error questioned how smart the businessman really is. As it (predictably) turns out, this recent spelling
DONALD TRUMP
goof might be another piece of evidence proving that Trump is probably overestimating how bright he is.
You may remember that he
recently implied that he's too smart to need daily intelligence briefings. "I'm, like, a smart person," he said to Chris Wallace in a Fox News Sun- day interview. "I don't have to be told the same thing in the same words every single day for the next eight years. Could be eight years — but eight years. I don't need that."
This is not the first time Trump has boasted about his intelligence. He once tweeted, "Sorry losers and haters, but my I.Q. is one of the highest - and you all know it! Please don't feel so stupid or insecure, it's not your fault."
PAGE 6 FLORIDA SENTINEL BULLETIN PUBLISHED EVERY TUESDAY AND FRIDAY TUESDAY, DECEMBER 20, 2016