Speaking in front of the Senate Armed Services Committee yesterday, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said he was highly confident that Russia had interfered in the presidential election.

Yesterday on Capitol Hill Vice President Elect Mike Pence reassured Republicans that repealing Obamacare will be "first order of business for the incoming Trump administration".

But as Senate Minority leader Chuck Schumer pointed out in a press conference yesterday, Republicans simply have no idea what they're going to replace Obamacare with.

For decades a staple of the far-right has been the story that the news media in the United States is unreliable, doesn't tell the true story, and even promulgates outright lies. There was the "absolute reality" that the moonshot was faked, that the government is filled with communists, that whites are the superior race, or that both 9/11 and the Newtown massacres were false flag government psychological operations. Conspiracy theorist and right-wingers have long pointed the finger of doubt or damnation at the corporate news agencies in our country.

Newt Gingrich openly bragged recently at the Heritage Foundation that the Trump administration and Republicans in Congress were going to "break out of the Franklin Delano Roosevelt model." That "model," of course, created what we today refer to as "the middle class."

Here in Washington, DC, the Environmental Protection Agency - EPA - has reversed course on fracking.

Initially, the agency had concluded in a draft report that released last year that fracking had no "widespread, systemic impact" on drinking water.

That conclusion outraged environmentalists as well factions of scientists within the EPA itself.

The Republican Party's worship of so-called local democracy and states' rights is a scam - and John Kasich just proved it.

On Monday, while most of the world was busy watching twin tragedies unfold in Berlin and Ankara, the Ohio governor signed a bill that effectively killed local democracy in his state's biggest city - Cleveland.

Yesterday President Obama added to his environmental legacy by banning offshore drilling in the US Arctic and along the East Coast.

The move, which will protect marine wildlife and stop oil spills, is significant in large part because it's effectively permanent.

You need to know this....

The Electoral College voted yesterday, and despite a last minute push to get some electors to switch their votes, Donald Trump secured the minimum 270 votes he needs to win.

It's now official: he will be our next President.

Needless to say, some big, big changes are now on the way.

You need to know this... Donald Trump is setting up a cabinet of plutocrats.

Republicans tried virtually everything to steal the governor's election in North Carolina.

They used Kris Kobach's Interstate Crosscheck system to throw hundreds of thousands of people off the voter rolls.

They passed the harshest voter suppression ID law in the nation.

They closed polling places.

They cut early voting.

If you thought Donald Trump was going to protect Medicare, well, you've been had.

Everything Trump has done since the election suggests that he's ready to either sit back and let Republicans privatize the program or lead the charge himself.

"No new deals" might be the new mantra in Trumpland - but the problem is still the same: Donald Trump's entire presidency is going to be one big conflict of interest.

For months now, Trump has been pressed to explain just how he'll divest from his massive business empire once he takes office.

Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi officially resigned last week following a crushing and - some would say self-inflicted - defeat at the polls.

Like British Prime Minister David Cameron before him, Renzi had staked the future of his political career to a referendum, in this a case a referendum on amending Italy's constitution.