An elementary school in Centerville, Pennsylvania, decided not to put on a fifth-grade production of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol this year, for the first time in at least two decades, primarily blaming the 20 hours of classroom rehearsal and preparation time plus new state education standards that don't allow that kind of space for extracurricular activity. Things got out of control pretty fast, like a madcap game of telephone for the internet era.

On Dec. 15, local TV station WHTM reported that "many parents believe" the play was canceled because "two parents" complained about the line "God bless us, every one." Two days later, Fox News columnist Todd Stearns publicized the story as part of the purported "War on Christmas," and by Thursday, Lancaster Online reported that "a Jewish family has fled the county in fear because it's being blamed for the cancelation," noting incitement from the Stearns column and an article in Breitbart. The fleeing Jewish family story went viral, and on Thursday night, the Anti-Defamation League stood athwart the clickwave, yelling "Stop."

"News reports alleging that a Jewish family has 'fled' Lancaster County are untrue and damaging," Nancy Baron-Baer, the ADL regional director in Philadelphia, said in a statement. "We spoke with the family, who explained that they went on a previously planned vacation for the holidays. Stories like this can sow fear in the Jewish community and beyond, and it is important to stop the spread of misinformation."

The school district clarified on Wednesday that the decision to cancel the play "had nothing to do with a religious concern" and "was not influenced by parents." Which is not to say the family wasn't falsely accused of killing the play — Rabbi Jack Paskoff of Congregation Shaarai Shomayim in Lancaster told JTA that he spoke with the family and they confirmed that their son has been harassed at school over the Christmas Carol cancelation. But it doesn't take much to create conflagrations out of sparks these days, and hysteria's a bipartisan affliction.

President-elect Donald Trump is reportedly having trouble lining up big names to perform at his inauguration — though The Beach Boys (or what's left of them) are mulling over Trump's invitation to perform, so there's hope yet. Whatever: On Thursday night, Trump announced on Twitter that he's done with all that.

As long as "the PEOPLE" don't want to see "so-called 'A' list celebrities" ring in the new administration, Trump should be just fine. He will, after all, be the main attraction.

In case you're wondering what sort-of-disgraced-but-not golfer Tiger Woods is up to this Christmas:

Woods has been fighting nagging back injuries, and earlier this month placed 15th out of 17 golfers at the Hero World Challenge in Albany, New York. But through all the grueling rehab and the struggle to regain his erstwhile dominance in the golf world, at least he found time to bleach his goatee.

Never mind that the best quote of 2016 contains the dismissal "whatever" — the word is universally abhorred for the eighth year running, a new poll released by the Marist Institute for Public Opinion reveals.

Thirty-eight percent of Americans this year reported that the word "whatever" annoys them more than any other word or phrase commonly used in conversation, with 20 percent despising "no offense but," 14 percent disliking "ya know, right?" and "I can't even," and 8 percent saying they can't take the word "huge."

"Like" and "no worries," which made the list last year, did not appear on 2016's list. "Huge" saw a 3 percent increase in irking people — though why that is, of course, remains a mystery.

President-elect Donald Trump announced his senior communications team Thursday and it is 75 percent male and 100 percent white. While that might at first seem like a coincidence rather than outright discrimination, the four-person team is actually far more diverse than many of Trump's other teams:

White men head all four of the most powerful departments — defense, justice, treasury, and state — for the first time in 24 years. Yahoo News writes that even as "the population of the United States is more diverse than ever," with white Americans set to be the minority in just a few short decades, "[Trump's] proposed administration looks poised to become one of the whitest White Houses in recent history."

Newt Gingrich has sounded the alarm, stressing to the transition team that "there has to be more Hispanics in the administration." No Cabinet position so far has gone to a Latino, the first time that's happened since before 1988. Hispanics are the nation's largest minority group.

So far, Trump's Cabinet is 23 percent female and 18 percent people of color. Nationwide, many states are already majority people of color; women make up 50.8 percent of the U.S. population.

Three Cabinet positions have yet to be filled.

President-elect Donald Trump named his senior communications team on Thursday, appointing Sean Spicer, the Republican National Committee communications director and chief strategist, to be his press secretary. Hope Hicks, who served as Trump's press secretary during his campaign, will be director of strategic communications, while Trump spokesman Jason Miller will be the director of communications, and Dan Scavino, a veteran of the Trump campaign's social media operation, will be the director of social media in Trump's White House.

Trump on Thursday also named his former campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway, to serve as counselor to the president, and on Wednesday named activist investor Carl Icahn as an adviser on regulatory issues. Trump also chose strident China critic Peter Navarro to head a new White House advisory council on trade and industrial policy.

France now has its very first solar road, but by the sounds of things, it might not be all it was chalked up to be. The road was opened yesterday in the village of Tourouvre-au-Perche by French Ecology Minister Ségolène Royal, and it consists of 30,000 square feet of solar panels, stretching the length of a kilometer. The road generates enough energy to power ... well, streetlights.

"That might not sound very impressive," The Verge writes, and "it kind of isn't, especially for its $5.2 million price tag." Flat solar panels simply don't work as well as angled ones, like you the ones you find on roofs. In fact, "each kilowatt-peak — the unit of measure for solar energy — generated by Wattway currently costs 17 euros, compared with 1.30 euros for a major rooftop installation," Phys.org explains.

Royal, though, is optimistic about Wattway, writing in a statement: "This new use of solar energy takes advantage of large swathes of road infrastructure already in use ... to produce electricity without taking up new real estate." The company that installed the road has 100 other similar projects in progress.

Chance the Rapper and Jeremih collaborated on a surprise holiday mixtape that was quietly released in the early hours of Thursday morning, Billboard reports. It's the second release of the year for both rappers; Chance released Coloring Book in May, while Jeremih released Late Nights: Europe in August. The nine-track album is titled Merry Christmas Lil' Mama and features original songs like "Chi Town Christmas" and "I'm Your Santa."

"Christmas isn't the same for everyone, even as everyone is touched by the holiday," the Chicago Tribune writes in its review of the album. "This is a compendium of styles, a pop music smorgasbord adapted for a single purpose — grins. And it works. It's also really good music, rather than the typically awful holiday throwaways from pop stars."

The artists dedicated the release to their shared hometown of Chicago. You can listen to Merry Christmas Lil' Mama on Soundcloud, here.

Kellyanne Conway addressed the eternally baffling question of how one can be both a mother and have a job (confusing!) in an interview on Fox Business on Thursday morning. Her explanation? "I don't play golf and I don't have a mistress, so I have a lot of time that these other men don't."

Conway has four young children, and formerly served as Trump's 2016 campaign manager. It was announced Thursday morning that she will join Trump in the White House as counselor to the president.

"I see people on the weekend spending an awful lot of time on their golf games and that's their right, but the kids will be with me, we live in the same house, and they come first," Conway said. "Everyone has to do what's best for their family, and it's why I didn't jump immediately on a position that was offered to me early in the transition, because there's a lot to weigh and my children are 12, 12, 8, and 7."

Conway added, "I certainly hope too that we continue the conversation about the balance that many men and women face."

President-elect Donald Trump tweeted Thursday morning that "the United States must greatly strengthen and expand its nuclear capability until such time as the world comes to its senses regarding nukes." Nine countries in the world possess 15,375 nuclear weapons, with the United States and Russia accounting for 93 percent of them, the anti-war grant-making foundation Ploughshares Fund reports.

Russian President Vladimir Putin on Thursday also called for his country to "strengthen the military potential of strategic nuclear forces, especially with missile complexes that can reliably penetrate any existing and prospective missile defense systems."

Donald Trump has confirmed that the chant to "lock up" Hillary Clinton was nothing more than a slogan on the campaign trail and not to be taken literally. Now it looks like his promise to "drain the swamp" might also have been nothing more than a phrase with a nice ring to it.

Trump's former campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, told the hosts of Fox & Friends on Thursday morning that draining the swamp "is probably somewhere down the bottom" of Trump's to-do list. "I think at the end of the day, it's about the economy," Lewandowski went on. "It's about creating jobs, fixing the bad trade deals. So draining the swamp is a larger narrative, but what it's really about is putting people back to work."

It is perhaps an unsurprising about-face from Lewandowski. "Draining the swamp" is a term that "is not just about lobbying and politicians [but] also about consultants," as another former Trump campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway, put it. Lewandowski announced Wednesday that he is launching a government relations and political consulting firm with former Donald Trump adviser Barry Bennet.

But former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who is serving as an adviser to the president-elect, told NPR on Wednesday that he's been informed Trump "just disclaims" the swamp slogan. "He now says it was cute, but he doesn't want to use it anymore," Gingrich said.

Update 11:44 a.m.:

The Obama administration on Thursday submitted a rule change to be published in the federal registry Friday to shut down the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System (NSEERS), the post-9/11 registry of visitors to the United States from 25 nations with terrorist activity. All but one of the 25 nations were majority-Muslim. The move comes after the outgoing president was urged to eliminate NSEERS before President-elect Donald Trump could use it as a basis for the "Muslim registry" he and his surrogates have proposed in varying iterations.

Previously suspended in 2011, NSEERS registered some 85,000 people and removed about 13,000 immigrants, most of them Muslim, from the United States. Despite that volume of surveillance, the defunct program never produced a single terrorism-related prosecution.

Criticized by civil libertarians for its invasiveness and ineffectiveness, NSEERS was largely forgotten until Trump's registry idea, which the president-elect revived this week following Monday's terrorist attack at a Christmas market in Germany.

When it comes to Hillary Clinton's loss, there is plenty of blame to go around. Some observers have a new target, though, that takes some of the heat off FBI Director James Comey: his boss, Attorney General Loretta Lynch.

The Washington Post reports that Lynch could have demanded Comey not send his fateful letter to Congress that informed the lawmakers — and the nation — of a renewed look into Clinton's emails after messages were discovered on a laptop belonging to former Rep. Anthony Weiner, the estranged husband of top Clinton aide Huma Abedin. "If [Lynch] thought [the letter] violated department policy or was otherwise a bad idea, she could have ordered him not to send the letter," said Harvard Law School professor Jack Goldsmith. "It was an astonishing failure of leadership and eschewal of responsibility, especially if Lynch really thought what Comey did was wrong."

Justice officials reportedly concluded that neither Lynch nor her deputy should tell Comey to withhold the letter, in part because they weren't sure how Comey would react and also because they were concerned about the optics of a potential leak. "Lynch and her advisers were nervous about how it would look if people found out that she, a Democratic presidential appointee, told Comey to keep secret from Congress a new development in the Clinton investigation," The Washington Post writes. "Instead, they tried to convince Comey that he had never promised to update Congress at every turn. He had merely said he would 'look at' any new information in the case."

It didn't work. But while Comey came to bear the brunt of the blame of Clinton supporters — as well as of Clinton herself — Lynch has mostly made it out unscathed. Read more about her decision not to intervene at The Washington Post.

When Bill Clinton was elected president in 1992, he waited nine days to give a press conference, the longest any president-elect had waited since 1976 — until Donald Trump. The incoming president is now 44 days past Election Day without a press conference and a whopping 148 days since his last traditional audience with the media.

But once he's in office, the press will be able to talk to the president-elect every day, promised newly-minted Trump counselor Kellyanne Conway on Thursday. "This will be a traditional White House in the sense you will have a great deal of press availability on a daily basis and you'll have a president who continues to be engaged with the press," she said, a pledge Americans might be forgiven for greeting with skepticism after eight years of the "most transparent administration" ever.

Watch Conway's remarks in context below.

Donald Trump's inauguration organizers are reportedly having a bit of trouble locking down musical performers for the big day. So far, Andrea Bocelli, Elton John, Garth Brooks, and Céline Dion are all rumored to have turned down the honor. To add insult to injury, concert promoter Mark Ross is reportedly "in the process of putting together a large-scale concert called 'We the People' to directly complete with Donald Trump's inauguration," Politico reports.

Ross doesn't have any performers announced yet, although a person familiar with the planning leaked that "the talent is banging on our doors to do this." Then again, the communications director for the Presidential Inaugural Committee, Boris Epshteyn, also bragged that "first class entertainers are eager to participate in the inaugural events," and we all know how that's going.

Still, Ross' competing concert is salt in the wound for a team that can't even get Céline Dion to commit. The counter-concert will reportedly be held in Miami, with Ross now seeking to secure funding.

President-elect Donald Trump's global businesses and lack of transparency about his taxes and financial entanglements are already setting up unprecedented conflicts of interest and opportunities for self-enrichment, Rachel Maddow told Seth Meyers on Wednesday's Late Night. "I think that, to a certain extent, we're going to have to get used to the fact that Donald Trump fans like that he's a businessman and they like that he's made himself very rich, so maybe they're expecting him to take decisions that are going to enrich himself further as president," she said. But this is a real problem, and to try to illustrate it she talked about Trump's obsessive hatred of windmills, which Meyers had lampooned earlier in the show.

"That's hilarious if you think of it as just his phobia," she began, "but now that he's going to be president, I mean, this seems weird, but Scotland could come to him, the U.K. could come to him and say, 'You know, listen Donald, we know you really care about the windmills and you think that's a very important thing for your business. We'll get rid of the windmills if you do this thing for our country' — which the United States doesn't want to do, it's not good for the country — 'but we want that from you as president, and we'll give you this private benefit instead.' That kind of transactional stuff is already a problem."

Similarly, Turkey just arrested an executive at the company that's building new Trump Towers in Istanbul, and now Ankara can come to Trump with a prisoner-for-policy exchange offer, Maddow said. "It puts him in a position of choosing himself over the interests of the United States of America, and whether or not you care that he's going to get rich off of all of our backs, the fact that he's gonna be in a position where people can leverage the country against his own interests is not good." Watch below.

There is not exactly a formal process in place if you want to secure a meeting with President-elect Donald Trump. All it might take, in fact, is knowing the right people. Namely, Trump's security guard, Keith Schiller.

Carl Paladino, the upstate New York developer and local political gadfly, was interested in catching up with Donald Trump in early December, so he rang up the president-elect's private security guard. The next day, on Dec. 5, Paladino found himself high in Trump Tower, recounting favorite moments from the campaign and gossiping about local politics with the president-elect for 45 minutes. [Politico]

Since winning the presidency, Trump has met with everyone from potential political appointees to celebrities. Sometimes the meetings are unexpected: New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio was recently summoned to Trump Tower for a 62-minute conversation. "No one knew why the meeting went that long," a person close to de Blasio told Politico. In another case, Rev. Al Sharpton hung up the phone on Trump's secretary when he received a call asking him to visit the Tower because he didn't think it was real.

"It's going to be more challenging if that's brought to the White House," said Craig Fuller, who served as former President George H.W. Bush's chief of staff. "There is a high demand of issues to bring to the White House. You can't just shoot from the hip, shall we say."

Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg left a meeting with President-elect Donald Trump on Wednesday promising that his company would build the new Air Force One for less than $4 billion following criticism from Trump over the cost. "We're going to get it done for less than that, and we're committed to working together to make sure that happens," Muilenburg said as he left Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida. Trump said he was "looking to cut a tremendous amount of money off the price" of the presidential jet as well as Lockheed Martin's new F-35 fighter jet. Lockheed's Marillyn Hewson left a meeting with Trump without commenting, and Trump did not say whether he had won any concessions from her.

2.

Sales of existing U.S. homes unexpectedly rose in November to their highest level in nearly 10 years, the National Association of Realtors reported Wednesday. In the third straight increase, existing home sales rose by 0.7 percent from a downwardly revised annual pace of 5.57 million in October. "The strength in home sales, if it holds, will provide a big boost for consumer spending in 2017 and makes us more confident about our outlook for stronger growth next year," said Chris Rupkey, chief economist at MUFG Union Bank in New York. A possible wrinkle is a rise in mortgage rates, with fixed 30-year home loan rates rising about 60 basis points to an average 4.16 percent since the November election.

3.

President-elect Donald Trump has picked Peter Navarro, a staunch China trade critic and key trade-policy adviser during his campaign, to head a new White House trade council. Navarro, a University of California-Irvine economics and public policy professor, helped Trump craft trade policies that are "defensive" but "not protectionist," the transition office said. Navarro is the author of several books, and created a documentary called DEATH BY CHINA: How America Lost Its Manufacturing Base. Trump also named activist investor Carl Icahn as an adviser on regulatory issues.

4.

Oil futures dropped by about 1.7 percent on Wednesday after Libya said it planned to increase production in the next few months. A rise in U.S. crude inventories last week also weighed on prices, which had risen recently on hope that an output-cut deal between OPEC and non-OPEC nations would help to ease a global glut. "The big question is what will OPEC do about the Libyan increase. With Libya excluded from the production cut agreement, I anticipate the Saudis will unilaterally balance the Libyan crude," said James Williams, president of energy consultant WTRG Economics in Arkansas.

5.

Uber on Wednesday pulled its self-driving cars off of California roads after state regulators said they were revoking the vehicles' registrations. The move came a week after Uber launched service with the vehicles in San Francisco. Regulators say Uber's cars need the same special permit that 20 other companies testing self-driving technology have acquired. Uber says it shouldn't have to get a permit because its technology does not let the cars continuously operate on their own, even though it bills them as self-driving.

North Carolina lawmakers rejected a deal to repeal the state's controversial bathroom law on Wednesday, with the state Senate voting it down and the state House adjourning without a vote. The law, which requires transgender people to use public restrooms that match the gender on their birth certificates, has prompted statewide boycotts by entertainers and sports organizations. The repeal's failure came even though the city of Charlotte upheld its part of the bargain by repealing a local anti-discrimination ordinance that the state law was intended to block. The Senate's Republican leader, Phil Berger, accused Governor-elect Roy Cooper of sabotaging the proposal. Cooper and other Democrats said Republicans sank the deal by tacking on a six-month moratorium against new local anti-discrimination ordinances.

2.

President-elect Donald Trump on Thursday named his former campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway, to serve as counselor to the president. The position, which hasn't been occupied under President Barack Obama since early 2015, was first created by Richard Nixon and was formerly considered to be cabinet level. "In her position, Conway will continue her role as a close advisor to the president and will work with senior leadership to effectively message and execute the Administration's legislative priorities and actions," the Trump transition team wrote in a statement.

3.

The Syrian army has claimed control of the city of Aleppo, Agence France-Presse reported Thursday. The announcement comes after the final round of evacuations of rebels and civilians from Aleppo began Thursday. Syrian state TV reported the last bus of evacuees had cleared the city on Thursday afternoon, effectively ceding control of the city to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and his regime. More than 4,000 fighters were evacuated overnight from their former stronghold in eastern Aleppo to opposition-controlled areas outside the city, bringing the total number of people evacuated over the past week to nearly 34,000. The deal struck last week between government and opposition forces to let fighters and civilians leave the war-ravaged city has been repeatedly interrupted by clashes between rebels and pro-government forces.

4.

Authorities in Germany and across Europe on Wednesday hunted for the suspect in this week's truck-attack on a Berlin Christmas market that left 12 people dead. German officials identified the suspect as Anis Amri after investigators discovered a wallet with his identity documents in the truck used to mow down shoppers. Amri, 24, was the subject of a terrorism investigation and surveillance earlier this year. He had been deemed a "potential risk" and ordered deported. German authorities circulated his photo and offered a $105,000 reward for information leading to his capture, warning that he "could be violent and armed."

5.

ObamaCare health insurance enrollment rose to a record level this year, even as President-elect Donald Trump enters office with a Republican congressional majority aiming to replace President Obama's signature health reform law. Nearly 6.4 million Americans have signed up through the federal exchange for 2017 health insurance policies coverage, an increase of 400,000 over a year ago. ObamaCare has faced criticism over rising premiums, with the average benchmark silver plan rising by 22 percent in 2017 even as some major insurers pull out of state exchanges. Still, administration officials say the enrollment figures show the marketplace is going strong.

6.

Corey Lewandowski, a former campaign manager to President-elect Donald Trump, announced Wednesday that he plans to launch a political consulting firm. Lewandowski will be partnering with Barry Bennett, former campaign manager for Ben Carson, who ran against Trump in the Republican primaries and has since been nominated by Trump as Housing and Urban Development secretary. The firm will be called Avenue Strategies, and has found office space "just a block from the White House," according to a Wednesday news release. Lewandowski has feuded with Trump's current team but says he still has direct access to the president-elect and remains his "biggest supporter."

7.

The United Nations' high commissioner for human rights, Zeid Ra'ad Al Hussein, said Wednesday that Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte should be investigated for murder after boasting that he once "personally" killed three drug suspects. Since becoming president in July, Duterte has presided over an anti-drug crackdown in which an estimated 6,000 people have been killed, but he said recently he carried out such killings himself while serving as mayor of Davao City to set an example for police. Hussein said it was "unthinkable" not to investigate "when someone has openly admitted being a killer."

8.

Newt Gingrich, a strong supporter of President-elect Donald Trump and a former House speaker, said Wednesday that Trump is abandoning the phrase "drain the swamp" — a central promise in his anti-establishment, anti-Washington campaign message. "I'm told he now just disclaims that. He now says it was cute, but he doesn't want to use it anymore," Gingrich told NPR. Gingrich said Trump had "written what I thought was a very cute tweet about 'the alligators are complaining.'" Critics have ridiculed Trump for appointing Wall Street and Washington veterans to top posts in his administration, including former Goldman Sachs executive Steven Mnuchin as treasury secretary and Sen. Jeff Sessions as attorney general.

9.

Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg left a meeting with President-elect Donald Trump on Wednesday promising that his company would build the new Air Force One for less than $4 billion following criticism from Trump over the cost. "We're going to get it done for less than that, and we're committed to working together to make sure that happens,” Muilenburg said as he left Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida. Trump said he was "looking to cut a tremendous amount of money off the price" of the presidential jet as well as Lockheed Martin's new F-35 fighter jet. Lockheed's Marillyn Hewson left a meeting with Trump without commenting, and Trump did not say whether he had won any concessions from her.

10.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Wednesday that he believed the man who assassinated Russia's ambassador to Turkey belonged to the outlawed Feto organization of Fethullah Gulen, an exiled Erdogan rival accused of orchestrating a failed July coup attempt. The gunman, off-duty policeman Mevlut Mert Altintas, was shown in a video shooting the ambassador, Andrei Karlov, several times and shouting, "Don't forget Aleppo! Don't forget Syria!" He was later shot dead by other police officers. "There is no reason to hide that he's a member of the Feto network," Erdogan said, according to Turkish news media. "All his connections... point to Feto."

YouTube star Adam Saleh accused Delta Airlines of kicking him and a friend off a plane for speaking Arabic on Wednesday, but now the company says the real reason Saleh was removed was because of an attempt to "disrupt the cabin with provocative behavior, including shouting."

"This type of conduct is not welcome on any Delta flight," Delta said in its statement about Saleh and his friend's removal. "While one, according to media reports, is a known prankster who was video recorded and encouraged by his traveling companion, what is paramount to Delta is the safety and comfort of our passengers and employees. It is clear these individuals sought to violate that priority."

Saleh said in a statement Wednesday night "Delta never denied anything in the video … But now that the video is out, they are trying to deny it to save their brand."

Saleh has nearly 4 million combined subscribers to his YouTube channels, which feature a staged video alleging to reveal the NYPD's anti-Muslim bias. Last week, Saleh posted a fake video purporting to show him sneaking into a Tigerair airplane in a suitcase, a hoax that was immediately debunked by the airline.

The deadline for signing up for Jan. 1 health insurance though HealthCare.gov, the federal website for the Affordable Care Act, was Monday, and 400,000 more people have signed up this year than last, the Obama administration said Wednesday. In all, 6.4 million people have signed up for ObamaCare coverage this year — not counting state-run exchanges in California, New York, and other states — and customer still have until Jan. 31 to enroll for 2017 coverage. President-elect Donald Trump, who has promised to repeal ObamaCare, won all of the top five states with the most enrollees on the federal site: Florida (1.3 million), Texas (776,000), North Carolina (369,000), and Pennsylvania (291,000).

"Today's enrollment numbers confirm that doomsday predictions about the marketplace are wrong," said Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Burwell. Some Republicans and ObamaCare critics disagreed. "Initial enrollment numbers for the health law have long been flawed, as they do not account for consumers who actually follow through and pay the premiums," said Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), chairman of the Senate Finance Committee. "A closer look will be needed down the road to determine the final, real enrollment numbers."

Other Senate Republicans and a few GOP governors are more cautious about repealing the health care law that has provided coverage to 20 million people and brought the uninsured rate to record lows. "We want to make it clear that the ACA has provided significant benefits to New Mexico," Gov. Susana Martinez (R) and Insurance Superintendent John Franchini said in a Dec. 12 letter to GOP leaders in Congress. "We compel you during your discussions to make sure that New Mexicans have viable options for affordable health care and that our state does not have the burden of taking on the uncompensated care costs for the under and uninsured."

Burwell said the Obama administration still expects 13.8 million people to sign up or continue their coverage by Jan. 31, and she encouraged people to sign up despite the threats of repeal and eventual replacement. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services says most people can find plans for $75 or less a month on HealthCare.gov, with subsidies.

President-elect Donald Trump named his former campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway, to serve as counselor to the president on Thursday.

The assistant position, which hasn't been occupied under President Barack Obama since early 2015, was first created by former President Richard Nixon and was once considered to be cabinet level. "In her position, Conway will continue her role as a close advisor to the president and will work with senior leadership to effectively message and execute the Administration's legislative priorities and actions," the Trump transition team wrote in a statement.

Like Conway, Steve Bannon also received a major assistant role for his work as chief executive officer of the Trump presidential campaign. He was earlier named to serve as the senior counselor to the president in the White House.

The overwhelming preference among Democrats and independents for the 2020 Democratic presidential nominee is "someone entirely new," according to a new Suffolk University/USA Today poll. Hillary Clinton fares considerably worse, with 23 percent of Democrats and independents saying they would be excited if she ran again and 62 percent saying she shouldn't compete. Vice President Joe Biden, who would be 78, gets the thumbs up from 43 percent of respondents (versus 31 percent who say no), and Sen. Bernie Sanders would excite 44 percent of Democrats and independents (while 38 percent say he shouldn't run).

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) had a 34 percent excited, 27 percent opposed score, while the other potential candidate named, former Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick, excited 10 percent of Democrats and independents, with 15 percent opposed and 53 percent unsure who he is. The poll was conducted Dec. 14-18 with 626 registered voters who self-identified as Democrat or independent, and has a margin of error of ±3.9 percentage points.

When Republicans were included, 39 percent of voters said the think first lady Michelle Obama should run for elected office, despite her saying she won't, versus 53 percent who said she should not. Kellyanne Conway, Donald Trump's campaign manager, got the go-ahead from 14 percent of voters and a thumbs-down from 52 percent. Trump himself was viewed favorably by 40 percent of respondents and unfavorably by 45 percent, while President Obama had a 55 percent favorable, 40 percent unfavorable rating. On Russia's meddling in the U.S. election, 36 percent said they are very concerned, 21 percent said they are concerned, and 22 percent said they are not concerned; voters want Trump and Congress to investigate Russian meddling by a margin of 62 percent to 33 percent. Among all 1,000 respondent, the margin of error was ± 3 points.

My mother, a devout Christian, was born on Dec. 25. For our family, that day rocked every single year. We had the tree, the stockings, and the presents in the morning, the awe-inspiring music in church at noon, and mom's birthday party at night. Boom! A perfect day, always engineered by mom herself.

Until the year she died.

A force of nature, my mother accepted nature's call to the inevitable end in the fall of 2001. Floored by grief, the rest of the family was all there at Christmas that year, but not really. Our hearts and minds were otherwise occupied.

And that's okay.

Grief is a part of life. Loss can be particularly hard during the holidays, when everyone else seems to be so full of happiness. But that's okay. A mourner has opportunities and options to deal with grief in a positive way, even during the holidays.

I asked Clare Rountree, a cognitive behavioral psychologist, to help unpack the grieving process a little, and to offer some advice to those who are mourning a loss this holiday season. Take heart:

1. Accept that this is normal

"We all experience grief and loss," Rountree says. "Everyone does. Around the holidays, everyone is supposed to be 'joyous and merry.' Well … that may not be your state of mind if you are mourning."

"When we experience loss, it's normal to have situational depression. But that is just that; it's environmental. Trust that you will feel better spontaneously, once you have processed your grief," says Rountree.

In other words: We're supposed to be sad when we lose a loved one. Don't fight it. It will get better. But in the meantime, there are practical steps you can take to help you through the holidays.

2. Go out. Do something.

When you're sad, it's tempting to decline all invitations and curl up in your flannel jammies for the entire holiday season. Don't.

"Make some micro-commitments to yourself; tell yourself, 'Today I'm going to …' and then follow through," Rountree says.

"Just go to one thing. Be behaviorally active in some way."

Accept an invitation. Answer an email, a letter, or a text. Forge connections, which are critical to well-being at all times, but especially during periods of grief.

Rountree recommends volunteerism as a great way to forge healing connections. "It's hard to be miserable when you're helping someone else."

3. Start small

"I like to help people break grief down into bite-sized parts," says Rountree.

Was your dad a big football fan? Ask one of his friends to attend a game with you in his honor. Did your sister love to bake? How about asking her kids over to make some cookies, and deliver those to a local shelter.

If you've endured the tragedy of losing a child, think about what made her life impactful … and then act on that, even if the action is small. Attend a school function. A soccer game. Give her skis, her favorite bracelet, or his collection of Lego ™ minifigs to a friend who will use and cherish them.

The fact that your loved one is gone does not negate the life she lived. Use the holidays as an excuse to honor that life.

4. Seek help if you need it

"Don't be afraid to get professional help," says Rountree. "Our culture gets kind of 'freaked out' about death, and I find that a lot of people don't understand the grieving process."

"While forging personal connection is important, sometimes other people won't know what to say or how to offer you comfort. A good therapist is trained to do just that."

In the years since my mother's death, our extended family has grown and established other holiday traditions. They're not all religious; some of us have converted to other faiths, and some now identify as atheists. But we all celebrate this time of year with a very special regard for the woman who helped us become the people we are, even as we raise the next generation of our family.

I look forward to a TV series that finds a redemptive metaphor for our spiritual rot. I truly do. We need it. Ideally, it'll be a bit of philosophical jiu-jitsu so penetrating and dramatically effective that it will neither require the viewer to politely ignore enormous plot holes nor condemn her to reading Reddit threads into the wee hours as she tries to piece together what just happened with other confused and hungry souls.

The OA is not that series.

Brit Marling and Zal Batmanglij's new sci-fi mystery for Netflix follows a traumatized blind woman (played by Marling) who returns home after going missing for seven years able to see. The stories she tells a ragtag group of misfits about what happened to her — and her near death experiences — are riveting. That's in part because they're beautifully shot and carefully told, and seem to be building to something: to an epiphany, a revelation, or a truth about how everything works that we very much want to hear. Then the worrying talk of angels begins, and the even more worrying talk of dimensions. Then came Borges. (I love Borges, but a Borges reference can be a very bad sign in a story that looks like it's lost its way.) Still, Marling musters enough gravitas to keep you watching. Maybe she'll pull this off.

Nope. Instead of completing its story, the series short-circuits in its last chapter. Not only does it dance around its central question, refusing to ground or explain anything, but it also demolishes the delicate system it constructed, which — for all its claims to transcendent depth — was nowhere near robust or substantive enough to inspire anything but frustration. You have to be Borges to make ambiguity for its own sake satisfying. This was not that.

But The OA's specific shortcomings are symptomatic of this particular moment in television — and of the cultural anxieties shaping the current crop of meta, self-analyzing TV shows whose philosophical systems don't quite pan out. I'm not talking about The Americans, which hits its every mark perfectly without pausing to preach to you. I'm talking about Westworld and True Detective and Mr. Robot, about Jessica Jones and Luke Cage. Shows in which characters deliver soliloquys that are supposed to bleed over and impress the viewer with their insight. Genre shows that double as thought experiments. Something is up when virtually every ambitious attempt to wed a philosophical investigation to a fiddly plot crashes in the final act. Those shows have a few things in common, and The OA might not be very good, but it's an interesting synthesis of tropes that cropped up across a bunch of meta dramas this year.

Here's a partial list of what The OA shares with other shows:

• Nosebleed prophet (Stranger Things)
• Die and come back = acquire special abilities? (Westworld, maybe Game of Thrones)
• Magic girl gets group of oddballs to follow her (Stranger Things). Bonus: hilarious montage where boys have to dress girl up in conventional femininity.
• Human hamster cages (Orphan Black, Mr. Robot)
• Family: creepy? (Mr. Robot, Orphan Black)
• Spiritual training makes woman blind and un-blind (mechanics and purpose unclear) (Game of Thrones)
• Evil scientist hunts women (Orphan Black)
• Unreliable narrator with (possible, indeterminate) mental illness (Mr. Robot)
• Woman hunts man across time/dimensions (Outlander)

The OA is like an Urban Dictionary quilt of meta shows about searching and trauma and escape and truth — but while it delivers some lovely moments, it's less than the sum of its parts.

So what's going on with all these meta dramas that are trying so hard? Why aren't they quite working, and what can they tell us despite their shortcomings?

I'm talking, again, about shows that have a project and announce it and obliquely reference it from time to time to tell you how it's all going. When Mr. Robot's Elliot speaks in voiceover, he's also narrating the show's conceit. "A loop," he says of his routine in the Season 2 premiere. "My perfectly constructed loop." He has programmed himself, he is trying to become a robot. Get it? Or when Method Man says in Luke Cage, "You know, there's somethin' powerful about seeing a black man that's bulletproof and unafraid." Or when Teddy explains to the Man in Black what the maze represents in Westworld:

The maze itself is the sum of a man's life. The choices he makes, dreams he hangs onto. And at the center is a legendary man who's been killed over and over again, countless times, but always clawed his way back to life. And returned back to life and vanquished all his oppressors in a tireless fury. Built a house, around that house he built a maze so complicated only he could navigate through it. I reckon he'd seen enough fighting.

These are meta dramas with philosophical aspirations, and they anxiously remind you of their themes in case you missed them (or fell behind on your think-piece reading).

This meta thing isn't unique to dramas, of course. It's all over the place these days, and sometimes it works! In fact, it's instructive to look at meta shows in other genres that are pulling off some of these experiments in ways the dramas aren't.

Bojack Horseman, a meta cartoon about Hollywood starring a washed-up star from the '80s who happens to be a horse, came close to what I'd call epiphanic success in its third season finale. That's partly because it's a cartoon that could underpromise and overdeliver. Netflix's Stranger Things did much the same: By building its world around a game of Dungeons and Dragons (meta!) but committing conceptually to play the way kids do, it tapped into a potent strain of nostalgia and produced dread better than any thought experiment could.

That can work beautifully in comedy too. Crazy Ex-Girlfriend and Jane the Virgin are successful because they're campy parables about crazy ex-girlfriends and virgins that laugh at themselves and deconstruct the categories for which they're named. Their philosophical insights — whether it's Jane's struggle with the virgin/whore dichotomy or Rachel Bloom's canny satire of how love scripts go toxic in the season 2 theme song — work because of how secondary they seem. This is harder to pull off in drama, which has fewer winks available when reconciling plot with philosophy.

What these successful instances share is a.) a lighter tone and b.) a pattern of attending to character and plot before they skew philosophical. Not so in the meta dramas, which suffer under the strain of having to make their plots delivery systems for Big Ideas.

Rarely do both sides of that project — plot and philosophy — succeed. Some shows, like Luke Cage, do fine with their plots but lose track of their metaphors. Jessica Jones, on the other hand, stuck the landing philosophically — the concepts of rape and consent and trauma were handled pretty well — but the plot details didn't add up.

True Detective was a failure at philosophy and plot alike: The "solution" to the mystery was — at a simple genre level — laughably unconvincing, and its message of transcendence was worse than useless. Westworld seemed poised to succeed where that show failed, but then it slid past the exciting spectacle of a rigid and ugly system sliding into chaos into an explanation that doesn't work. Mr. Robot, like Westworld, got so interested in paranoid reading and surprising us with twists that it neglected to let us watch characters develop — everything you see at any time can be fake, which means you're too busy looking for clues to let it affect you.

And we've been trained into eager bad faith: The executives and actors for Game of Thrones broke a longstanding contract with fans by lying about Jon Snow's resurrection. Now fans of every show are busily analyzing every frame for signs that there's something else going on — something different from what the show says, and from what we can see. When it comes to television, we've fully entered the age of conspiracies.

That these shows don't nail what they were going for doesn't make them uninteresting; quite the contrary.

The OA crystallized two things for me: First, how obsessed we are with those shared tropes; and second, how hard we're trying to resolve them into redemptive suffering as we understand it. We're trying to make the pain okay, to make it matter, to turn it into something positive.

Why are we awash in shows about damaged children who grow into strange adults capable of hacking systems and dimensions? Why are we flooded with unreliable narrators? Why are we fascinated with what dying multiple times might do for you? With people imprisoned for their abilities? And why aren't we able to push those stories far enough forward so that they make some redemptive kind of sense?

The answer may be that our philosophical hopes are still a little too bright for the plots to which we try and set them. There are thought experiments for which there will be no sunny angle that feels true. Black Mirror works as well as it does because it doesn't strain for optimism. It sustains the thought experiment for a single episode and lets it go, leaving a devastated audience in its wake. That's not a particularly American mode of storytelling. (Our version of The Office is brighter and several times longer than the British original.) But Rogue One suggests that Americans might finally be ready to let a darker mode exist.

May 2017 bring us better meta dramas, some that don't lean quite so desperately on transcendence and instead let their premises come true.

Donald Trump promised on the campaign trail that as president he would hire "the best people." Reporters enjoyed snarking about what that might mean, exactly. But as Trump picks his Cabinet, we are starting to get one message loud and clear: Trump's best people are not in the political class. It is decidedly short of the journalists, wonks, consultants, lobbyists, think-tankers, and politicians that normally staff the executive branch's top tiers.

We shouldn't be so surprised. In many ways, Trump's victory was a victory won over the political class itself. Practically everyone in Washington, D.C., detested him. And Trump was also opposed by almost the entirety of the conservative wing of the political class: the conservative journalists, columnists, and policy experts. One of the Trump campaign's underlying themes was that D.C. was filled with idiots who messed everything up. They're to blame for the financial collapse, and the Iraq War, and the terrible rollout of ObamaCare.

In response, the political class all laughed at Trump's strategy of holding rallies and letting Clinton spend twice as much as him. After the victory, the band of outsiders that got aboard the Trump Train early are laughing now.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) looked at the Cabinet and declared it full of "Goldman, Generals, and Gazillionaires." Hedge fund manager Ray Dalio quantified just how much private sector experience Trump's picks have: a cumulative 83 years in the private sector vs. 55 years in either government or military (mostly military). By contrast, Obama's first Cabinet had achieved a cumulative of five years in the private sector vs. 122 years in the government or military (mostly government) before joining his incoming administration. Trump's Cabinet is tilted more toward the private sector than any administration in history, and Dalio predicts this may inject into the economy the "animal spirits" that spurred so much growth in the 1980s.

We could write off Dalio's comments merely as one of affinity. Trump has put people like Dalio in charge. It's not just Goldman Sachs executives, like Steve Mnuchin at treasury, or financial titans, like Wilber Ross at commerce. Linda McMahon, co-founder of the Stamford-based World Wrestling Entertainment, was tapped to run the Small Business Administration. For labor secretary, Trump's choice is Andrew Puzder, CEO of the company that runs Carl's Junior, Hardee's, and other fast food chains. Unsurprisingly, Puzder has been a proponent of low-skilled immigration, although he has indicated his commitment to serve Trump's vision of greater control over the border. And in the prime position, ExxonMobile CEO Rex Tillerson is Trump's pick for secretary of state.

One potential problem is that Trump's Cabinet will find their duties running a giant public bureaucracy boring and unremunerative, leading to a higher than usual rate of turnover. It's not easy to change the culture at a corporate agency where executives can fire people by the thousands. It will be much harder at federal agencies.

On foreign policy, Trump has drawn especially from the ranks of the military. Retired Lt. General Michael Flynn will be national security advisor. John F. Kelly, a four star Marine general, is to head homeland security. And another Marine Corps general, James Mattis, has been tapped to lead defense. This also isn't a surprise. Much of the foreign policy community publicly rejected Trump during the campaign. That probably suits Trump, who doesn't see the world order the way they do, as based on ideological affinity and the stability of long-term security arrangements. Instead, he sees it as transactional and potentially dangerous. Of course he would draw on men who know how to create some danger on our behalf.

The exile of the political class from the top jobs of the Trump administration may partly explain the emotional resonance of the Russian hacking story. In a great many of his appointments, Trump is effecting something like a coup. Official Washington looks up and simply doesn't recognize the new set of bosses.

Some fear that this new set of corporate and military personnel will likely turn the government into one big scheme to feather their own nests. It's a cute bit of self-flattery to imagine that Washington, D.C., is a place where self-interest is a newcomer.

Donald Trump vows to stop American firms from offshoring jobs to Mexico and Asia. "Companies are not going to leave the United States anymore without consequences," the president-elect said after striking his recent deal with Carrier. "It's not gonna happen."

But what if the destination of choice isn't Monterrey or Shenzen but Robot City? Indeed, that's how the Carrier story is unfolding. The company is investing millions to automate its Indianapolis furnace plant, with machines eventually replacing some workers whose jobs were just saved.

No surprise here. Most of the multi-decade decline in factory jobs has been due to higher productivity from automation, not trade. But Trump, oddly, seems unconcerned. When asked whether he was worried that his policies would accelerate the rise of the robots, the president-elect offered a hand-waved "We'll make the robots, too."

Yet the economic logic — such as it is — of Trumpism seems to be that government should prioritize protecting a worker's current job over preparing him for today's volatile, churning labor market. Trump, however, doesn't seem to differentiate between globalization and automation.

Other populist politicians might. Imagine: What if technological progress gobbles up existing jobs as never before? Some of the scarier estimates — which I approach with some skepticism — show that most jobs will be threatened by automation over the next 20 years.

It's not hard to imagine an automation backlash. There's no rule that a society has to accept technological progress and all its accompanying disruption. Now a neo-Luddite scenario where politicians stir up or take advantage of automation fears may seem far-fetched. And it's certainly unlikely we smash the robots or erase the algorithms. But there could be pushback just the same.

There already is, and not just by the anti-GMO, anti-vaccine crowd. Efforts by incumbent taxi and hotel companies to rein in Uber and Airbnb are one form of technology backlash. Great Britain is experiencing its biggest railway strike in a generation as workers fear a move to get rid of train conductors will eventually result in trains being entirely automated. Liberal groups were aghast when fast-food CEO Andy Puzder, Trump's pick for U.S. labor secretary, professed his love of automation. A New York Times op-ed asks, "Google Wants Driverless Cars, but Do We?" Many truck drivers might be thinking the same thing.

There are also less direct ways to say no to tech progress. Maybe the backlash isn't against the machines, but the people who most visibly benefit from them. In San Francisco, highly paid knowledge workers have been blamed for higher rents and rising living costs, their billionaire bosses for worsening America's income and wealth inequality. Sure, Silicon Valley's innovation may drive economic growth, but what if most people don't benefit? Break up Google and Apple! As Bernie Sanders said during the campaign:

Where we've got to move is not growth for the sake of growth, but we've got to move to a society that provides a high quality of life for all of our people. In other words, if people have health care as a right, as do the people of every other major country, then there's less worry about growth.

Anti-trade arguments could easily morph into anti-technology arguments, or at least more generalized skepticism over faster economic growth.

In response, policymakers must make the pro-progress argument in favor of dynamism over the illusory security of stasis. Then they need to back that up with policies that help create an ecology for growth that is both rapid and widely shared. And, along with that, they must modernize the safety net so it provides a support system — portable health-care benefits, relocation subsidies, expanded workplace training programs. The Obama White House just released a big report, "Artificial Intelligence, Automation, and the Economy," that makes this point. Workers should not merely survive the inherent chaos of competitive capitalism — including both globalization and automation — but thrive from it.

Read more on this story.

Just a few weeks to go before election day, Donald Trump hit on a new catchphrase to explain how he'd bring change to Washington: "Drain the swamp." Playing off the myth that the nation's capital was built on a swamp, it described the sweeping transformation he would bring. All those smarmy influence-peddlers and selfish elitists would gasp for air before expiring, to be shoved aside and replaced by a government that finally had the best interests of the American people at heart.

What a difference a couple of months make. Now he's not going to be talking about it anymore. "I'm told he now just disclaims that," said Trump adviser Newt Gingrich earlier this week. "He now says it was cute, but he doesn't want to use it anymore."

Well, okay — it's just a catchphrase, right? Sure, the crowds at his rallies cheered their hearts out when he said it, but they chanted "Lock her up! Lock her up!" too, and then at a post-election rally Trump said, "That plays great before the election — now we don't care, right?"

Even Trump himself admitted it was just a gimmick. "Funny how that term caught on, isn't it?" he said after the election. "I tell everyone: I hated it! Somebody said, 'Drain the swamp.' I said, 'Oh, that's so hokey. That is so terrible.' I said, 'All right. I'll try it.' So like a month ago, I said, 'Drain the swamp.' The place went crazy. I said, 'Whoa. Watch this.' Then I said it again. Then I started saying it like I meant it, right?"

What's actually happening now is that Trump is making the swamp about a hundred times swampier. You thought Washington was corrupt before? Well just you wait. Trump has appointed a cabinet full of multimillionaires and billionaires (and guys from Goldman Sachs), his D.C. hotel is strongly encouraging (wink, wink) foreign dignitaries to stay there, he's holding on to a web of businesses that will allow people to keep putting money in his pocket as long as he's president, his sons tried to sell access to him and themselves for $1 million a pop, and his inaugural committee is still selling access to policymakers — just to mention a few of the ways the swamp seems remarkably intact. Washington's lobbyists aren't scared — in fact, they're positively giddy at the thought of all the new opportunities for exercising influence in a Washington completely controlled by Republicans.

So why aren't Republicans more upset? A couple of reasons.

For many party loyalists, all that rabble-rousing at rallies was just for the rubes, something Trump would tell the common folk so they'd get out to vote. The savvy ones know that no president is going to come in and truly change the character of institutions and arrangements that have persisted for decade upon decade. After all, Barack Obama said he was going to clean up Washington (not to mention bring about an era of bipartisan comity), and so did George W. Bush before him, and so did Bill Clinton before him. It didn't happen with any of them, and won't with Trump either. As long as he delivers tax cuts for the wealthy and a rollback of regulations on corporations, those old-line Republicans are happy to have him talk all he wants about reform that'll never happen.

The truth is that most Republicans don't want the swamp drained. They don't want to reduce the role of money in politics (just the opposite, in fact), and they don't want to restrict corporate lobbyists. They don't mind insiders having all the influence, as long as it's the right insiders.

And for the truly devoted Trump supporters, the "Drain the swamp!" idea was much more affective and emotional than it was substantive. It didn't have to do with a particular package of political reforms, which might be judged on whether or not they actually worked. Instead it was about making a statement, expressing a feeling. It was about giving a big middle finger to a system they believed had failed them, to say to Washington, "To hell with you, and our champion is coming to destroy you." Whether or not he actually followed through was secondary or even irrelevant.

And the election of Donald Trump — whom that "establishment" feared and hated so much — is nearly enough of a statement to satisfy them that the swamp has been, if not drained, then severely roiled. His vulgarian ways will be an ongoing offense to civilized Washington, and his subversion of norms will keep some in the media upset.

And that will be more than enough to keep them happy, swamp or no swamp.

When Donald Trump introduced his running mate, Mike Pence, in July, he explained that Pence's record as governor of Indiana was "the primary reason I wanted Mike — other than that he looks very good." He was apparently serious. If Trump's parading of potential Cabinet picks in front of the cameras at the Trump Tower elevator banks "has the feel of a casting call," say Philip Rucker and Karen Tumulty at The Washington Post, that's probably not a coincidence: Trump wants the visible members of his government to look the part.

"That's the language he speaks. He's very aesthetic," one person "familiar with the transition team's internal deliberations" told The Washington Post. "You can come with somebody who is very much qualified for the job, but if they don't look the part, they're not going anywhere." Trump advisers spoke on the record, too. "Don't forget, he's a showbiz guy," said Newsmax Media CEO Chris Ruddy, a longtime Trump friend. Trump, he explained, wants people "who present themselves very well," especially on TV.

Mitt Romney was a finalist for secretary of state, despite his stinging criticism of Trump, because he has a "central casting" quality for secretary of state, like Trump's actual pick, ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson, according to several Trump associates, who tell The Post that Trump uses that phrase frequently in private deliberations. And looks cut both ways, The Post notes:

Trump's closest aides have come to accept that he is likely to rule out candidates if they are not attractive or not do not match his image of the type of person who should hold a certain job.... Several of Trump's associates said they thought that John R. Bolton's brush-like mustache was one of the factors that handicapped the bombastic former United Nations ambassador in the sweepstakes for secretary of state. "Donald was not going to like that mustache," said one associate, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak frankly. "I can't think of anyone that's really close to Donald that has a beard that he likes." [The Washington Post]

"Given Trump's own background as a master brander and showman who ran beauty pageants as a sideline, it was probably inevitable that he would be looking beyond their résumés for a certain aesthetic in his supporting players," Rucker and Tumlty write. Read the rest of their look at Trump's "central casting" government at The Washington Post.

The last of the rebels fighting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad left Aleppo on Wednesday night, giving Assad control of the entire city for the first time since his crackdown on protesters sparked an uprising starting in 2011. Aleppo, once Syria's largest city and bustling commercial and industrial center, had been split between rebel control in eastern Aleppo and government control in the west until a recent push by Assad's forces, backed by Russia and Iranian militias, forced the rebels to surrender control last week.

The four years of civil war — and especially the final, brutal Russia-backed siege starting in mid-2016 — took its toll on the ancient city. The BBC found photos of the same landmarks before and after the long battle, and in the video below, you can get a sense of the city Assad just won back.

Anyone hoping that Donald Trump would moderate his opposition to fighting climate change once in office is bound to be disappointed, based on his Cabinet picks, Seth Meyers said on Wednesday's Late Night. If 2016 turns out to be the hottest year in known history, as expected, that will make 16 out of the last 17 years the hottest ever recorded. You add in Trump's surprise victory and the Cubs winning the World Series, "I'm pretty sure that's three out of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse right there," Meyers said. "If Dirty Grandpa wins Best Picture at the Oscars, we done for."

After Trump won, daughter "Ivanka's interest in climate change gave people a glimmer of hope, but of course, Trump's team moved quickly to snuff out that glimmer by reassuring everyone that Trump still thinks climate change is totally made up," Meyers said. Then Trump scoured the country "to find the worst possible choice" to lead the EPA, landing on Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt, and tapped former Texas Gov. Rick Perry as energy secretary. Perry has argued that climate scientists are pushing climate change for grant money. "You think climate scientists are getting rich off this stuff?" Meyers asked. "Have you seen how they dress?"

Add Trump's Cabinet picks to his obsessive "hatred of windmills," and you should probably brace for an anti-environment White House, he said. But "maybe the worst thing about the Trump administration's climate agenda is that they'll have a compliant Republican Congress ready and willing to kowtow to the oil and gas lobby." After noting a controversy involving House Republicans, Brietbart, and The Weather Channel, he wrapped up: "So the climate situation may well be dire under a Trump administration, which is why we need to keep bringing attention to it — it's literally life or death." And if that sounds gloomy, Meyers lightened things up with an odd recurring joke about a penguin. Watch below.

Buying Christmas presents is hard enough in normal years, "but somehow this year it's gotten even worse," correspondent Ronny Chieng said to kick off his Daily Show holiday gift guide. The reason? Donald Trump — or, rather, the dueling boycotts pushed by opponents and supporters of the president-elect. "Holidays used to be about joy, and love, and trampling each other to death at Best Buy, and now we've got to worry about politics?" Chieng asked. "Come on. I can't just buy my brother-in-law a toaster anymore — now it has to be a toaster that supported Bernie in the primaries?"

He ran through some of the boycott campaigns, noting their obvious flaws. "Look, not everything has to be political," he said, dwelling on the (apparently fruitless) calls for boycotting Rogue One. "Star Wars is about an evil, power-hungry man and his family trying to undermine democracy, all right? It's just a movie!" Chieng said. "Look, obviously this is a tense, politically charged holiday season, and there's a lot of passion and anger on both sides," he concluded. "So, I think the best gift everyone will be happy to receive is the gift of understanding... that noise-canceling headphones are the only f—ing way we're going to make it to New Year's." There is NSFW language. Watch below.

On Wednesday, President-elect Donald Trump named activist investor Carl Icahn as an adviser on regulatory issues, and picked strident China critic Peter Navarro to head a new White House advisory council on trade and industrial policy. Icahn, a top donor to Trump's campaign, will draw no salary, but the position will give the billionaire investor a large say over how his own industry is regulated, leading securities lawyer Andrew Stoltmann to call the appointment "a little like asking the fox to guard the hen house." "Carl was with me from the beginning, and with his being one of the world's great businessmen, that was something I truly appreciated," Trump said in a statement. "His help on the strangling regulations that our country is faced with will be invaluable."

Icahn, 80, will help Trump pick a new Securities and Exchange Commission chairman, a position with a direct impact on Icahn's form of shareholder activism, and he was a key adviser as Trump was deciding on his selection to head the Environmental Protection Agency. One of the regulations Icahn has been vocal about scrapping would save an oil refinery he controls, CVR Energy Inc., more than $200 million this year, The Wall Street Journal reports, and the 67 percent rise in CVR Energy's shares since Trump's election has boosted the value of Icahn's investment by more than $600 million. He has rejected suggestions that he is advising Trump to advance his own economic interests.

Navarro, 67, is a professor at UC Irvine and the only PhD economist in Trump's inner circle. He has argued, including in a 2012 documentary called Death by China, that China is beating the U.S. in an economic war by subsidizing its exports and restricting U.S. imports. In a statement, Trump called Navarro "a visionary economist" who will "develop trade policies that shrink our trade deficit, expand our growth, and help stop the exodus of jobs from our shores." Most economists say that Trump's policies to bring about those changes would damage the U.S. economy and raise prices for American consumers, noting that the big driver behind shrinking factory jobs is mechanization not trade.

Both houses of the North Carolina General Assembly met Wednesday in a one-day special session called by outgoing Gov. Pat McCrory (R) to repeal HB2, the law passed in March that prohibits local governments from enacting protections for LGBT residents and orders people in the state to use the bathroom that matches their birth sex, not their gender identity. Both houses, each with a large Republican majority, adjourned for the year on Wednesday night after the State Senate voted down the bill, amid accusations of bad faith and broken promises.

HB2 has cost the state hundreds of jobs and millions of dollars as businesses scrapped expansion plans and the NCAA moved games elsewhere, and it is seen as a major reason McCrory narrowly lost his re-election bid to Democrat Roy Cooper. In the State Senate, Republicans accused Charlotte of not repealing its entire LGBT-protecting city ordinance that prompted HB2, as agreed beforehand. After the Charlotte City Council met in a second emergency session and repealed the entire ordinance Wednesday morning, Democrats balked at a Republican "cooling down period" amendment that would have prevented cities and counties from passing any "ordinance regulating employment practices or regulating public accommodations or access to restrooms, showers, or changing facilities" for six months.

In the State House, Republicans spent much of the day huddling behind closed doors to decide if they would support any effort to repeal HB2. When the Senate failed to send over a bill, the House voted to adjourn. Social conservatives in and outside the legislature celebrated the repeal's defeat. "This has been a long and ultimately frustrating day," said Senate leader Phil Berger (R) after the session. "The legislature had a chance to do the right thing for North Carolina, and they failed," Cooper said. "This was our best chance. It cannot be our last chance."

The legislature isn't scheduled to meet again until January, and it promises to be an acrimonious 2017. Last week, the General Assembly passed, and McCrory signed, legislation stripping Cooper of many of his powers. With supermajorities in both houses, Republicans didn't need any Democratic support to pass those laws.

If you want to spend the night in a Gjöra or Hasselvika bed, you're going to have to buy it yourself.

Ikea is warning people who think it might be a good idea to have an unauthorized sleepover in one of their stores that they will be considered trespassers, and the authorities will be called. Ikea spokeswoman Johanna Iritz told The Associated Press Ikea takes the situation seriously because the company "can't guarantee safety." In August, two teenagers posted a video to YouTube showing their after hours antics in a Belgium store; they hid in wardrobes when the store was open and went undetected until they emerged later.

Iritz said Ikea has recorded 10 incidents worldwide of shoppers staying overnight, and this weekend in Jönköping, Sweden, two 14-year-old girls were caught trying to sleepover in a store. Iritz said the idea of spending the night in an Ikea store is "overrated," while another spokesman told Aftonbladet the company does "not see what is fun about it."

Two weeks after demanding the cancelation of Boeing's contract to build the next Air Force One, Donald Trump met with the company's CEO in Florida, who promised to get the cost of the plane down.

The Air Force has budgeted $2.7 million for the Air Force One program, but analysts believe that by the time the plane is finished in the mid-2020s, the cost will swell to $4 billion, The Washington Post reports. After Trump tweeted about the potential $4 billion price tag, Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg called him to smooth things over, and they met face to face Wednesday. "We're all focused on the same thing here, we're going to make sure that we give our war fighters the best capability in the world and that we do it in a way that is affordable for our taxpayers," Muilenburg told reporters. "And his business head set around that is excellent. It was a terrific conversation. Got a lot of respect for him. He's a good man. And he's doing the right thing."

Muilenburg didn't say if the cost would be $4 billion, but promised Boeing would "get it done for less than that, and we're committed to working together to make sure that happens. And I was able to give the president-elect my personal commitment on behalf of the Boeing Company."

In a wide-ranging interview with The Atlantic's Ta-Nehisi Coates, President Obama discussed everything from closing the inequality gap to civil rights to not believing his own hype.

Coates spoke with Obama several times in October, and their second interview was published Wednesday. The president revealed that one of the things he's learned is that "as powerful as this office is, you have limited bandwidth. And the time goes by really quickly, and you're constantly making choices, and there are pressures on you from all different directions — pressures on your attention, not just pressures from different constituencies." The focus has to be on where you can have the "biggest, quickest impact," he said, and because of that, Obama always tells his staff, "'Better is good.' I'll take better every time, because better is hard. Better may not be as good as the best, but better is surprisingly hard to obtain."

Coates also asked Obama how he reconciles his admiration for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. with the fact that as commander in chief, he has had to authorize killing. "When you take on the position of president, you are committing yourself to, first and foremost, protecting the American people," Obama said. "You are accepting an institutional role that requires you to make hard decisions and hard choices, and as a consequence you have to take your moral sense and not put it aside, but rather take that moral sense and apply it to the particulars of a job that is going to test those ethical and moral precepts differently than if you're a professor, or a business person, or a dad. And if I were not comfortable with the judicious use of our military to protect the American people, then I shouldn't have run for president."

Read the entire interview, featuring Obama's thoughts on the attention he received in 2008 and words of advice he's passed along to daughters Malia and Sasha, at The Atlantic.

President-elect Donald Trump has not exactly been clear about if he wants to ban Muslims from the U.S. or put them in a registry or if the whole controversy has just been one giant "suggestion," kind of like "draining the swamp" and "locking up" Hillary Clinton. Nevertheless, following the terrorist attack at a Christmas market in Berlin on Monday, Trump told reporters that in regards to creating a Muslim ban or registry, "you know my plans," even though no one really does.

"All along, I've been proven right," Trump went on. "One hundred percent correct. What's happening is disgraceful." Trump added that he talked to President Obama two days ago, but not since the attack in Berlin.

Trump has flip-flopped on his proposed ban in the past, both doubling down on it and walking it back. His team has also denied that Trump would create a registry for Muslims, and major tech companies such as Facebook and Twitter have said they would not participate in creating one, even if asked to do so. But as late as July, Trump's policy director Stephen Miller insisted "the best way to prevent continued radicalization from developing inside America is to suspend temporarily immigration from regions that have been a major source for terrorists and their supporters coming to the U.S."

Then again, who can say? "I don't know that [Trump] knows himself [what his policy is] because it's a minute-by-minute thing based on who is asking the question," spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations Ibrahim Hooper told The Wall Street Journal.

After a year of pushing for negotiations, workers at Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas have finally reached a union contract with management.

The hospitality workers union Unite Here called for a boycott of all Trump properties in September, as workers spent months after they voted for unionization without a contract. Unite Here's affiliate in Las Vegas, the Culinary Workers Union Local 226, represents more than 500 housekeepers and food and beverage workers at the hotel, and Culinary Union spokeswoman Bethany Khan said negotiations took place last week, with employees unanimously voting Saturday to ratify the contract.

With the new contract taking effect on Jan. 1, 2017, workers can expect pay raises and health benefits and pensions comparable to other hotels and casinos on the Las Vegas Strip, Khan told The Associated Press. Before the election, workers outraged over not having discussions held protests outside the Trump International Hotel, and they mobilized against him at the polls; Hillary Clinton won the swing state of Nevada in November. Also Wednesday, management at Trump's hotel in Washington, D.C., agreed to allow a campaign to establish a union for workers, with Trump Hotels CEO Eric Danziger saying it shares "mutual goals" with the Las Vegas hotel union.

Video game developer Brianna Wu will run for a seat in the House of Representatives in 2018, she announced on Facebook on Wednesday. Wu, 39, is perhaps best known for heading the indie game studio Giant Spacekat as well as for being an outspoken critic — and target — of the GamerGate movement and the harassment women face online.

"When I started speaking out about harassment, I thought something would change. But it hasn't — every single system failed us," Wu said Wednesday. "We're getting diminishing returns on writing and speaking out about harassment. I think the next step is running for office and passing laws."

Wu is Boston-based, but clarified she would "never" run against Rep. Katherine Clark, a fellow Democrat from Massachusetts. Wu plans to work to unite supporters of Hillary Clinton and Clinton's primary opponent, Sen. Bernie Sanders: "I didn't personally support Sanders in the primary, but he tapped into a very powerful disconnect between our party's leadership and our base," Wu told VentureBeat. "We want leaders that will fight for us, and all too often the Democrats don't stand up to the fringe extreme of the Republican Party."

Wu added that her main agenda is economic, and that she plans to serve on the House technology subcommittee if she is elected. "Here in Massachusetts, taxpayers spend an amazing amount on subsidizing education — particularly with infrastructure. But then students and entrepreneurs take that investment by our state to San Francisco or Austin," she said. Citing the game industry, Wu added, "I think we can do a much better job keeping startups here in our state."

As President-elect Donald Trump fills his last remaining Cabinet positions, analysts are turning to his ambassador appointments as the next signal to how the president-elect will run his government. While Trump has already named South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad, and conservative hard-liner David Friedman as the ambassadors to the U.N., China, and Israel, respectively, the remaining posts could indicate whether Trump plans to stick to a more traditional ambassador team or whether he will buck the norm.

Trump is reportedly considering former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman for ambassador to Japan, a choice that would appease the party establishment as Huntsman is an experienced diplomat in East Asia, but the president-elect is also said to be considering less traditional figures like New York Jets owner Woody Johnson and New York developer Peter Kalilow. As Maggie Haberman writes in The New York Times:

President-elect Donald J. Trump feels he owes little to the Republican establishment donor set, a majority of whom opposed him. He also ran a campaign that challenged longstanding shibboleths of American diplomacy. Mr. Trump's choice of ambassadors could be a sign of how serious he is about both those stances. But as his transition team begins sifting through possible choices for a dozen major embassies, the signals are unclear. [The New York Times]

Trump will also have to contend with competing opinions, as his closest advisers are split on whether the president-elect would be smart to use his ambassadorships to reward donors and supporters he might need down the line, or whether he should try to bring outsiders on-board with his campaign with the posts. Read more at The New York Times.

Three terminals at Los Angeles International Airport were evacuated Wednesday morning after police received reports of suspicious packages.

At about 9:30 a.m. local time, a police dog sniffed out a suspect bag underneath a ticketing booth, prompting the evacuation of Terminal 6. Minutes later, Terminal 7 was evacuated when an unattended bag was discovered under a pedestrian bridge. As the LAPD bomb squad headed to Terminal 7, a third report came in of another unattended bag in a men's bathroom in Terminal 5, triggering an evacuation there.

LAX spokeswoman Mary Grady told the Los Angeles Times that while airport operations were briefly shut down, police have cleared the terminals and passengers have returned.

This all happened on the airport's busiest day of the year, with Grady saying close to 239,000 passengers are expected to fly out of LAX by the end of the day.

In the Siberian city of Irkutsk, 62 people have died after drinking a bath lotion that contained methanol and antifreeze.

More than 30 people are seriously ill and in the hospital, and Irkutsk's health minister Oleg Yaroshenko said nearly half of those being treated are not expected to survive. Analysts say it's believed that 12 million Russians drink cheap alternatives to alcohol, and the country has a problem with alcoholic products not meant for ingestion being sold in vending machines. Many are labeled as cosmetics or medicine, the BBC reports, and in Irkutsk, the people who died or are sick drank a hawthorn-scented bath lotion. The bottle states that its contents are not meant for drinking, but the label also said the product contained ethanol, not methanol, which can cause blindness and death.

Over the course of the investigation in Irkutsk, 12 people have been arrested, 1,500 buildings and homes searched, and thousands of bottles of alcohol confiscated. In the wake of the mass poisoning, Russian President Vladimir Putin has ordered the government to create and submit new legislation by July to crack down on the sales of such products. He also wants stricter penalties for bootleggers and better labeling of products that contain more than 25 percent alcohol.

The Chronicle of Higher Education crunched 50 years of data to better understand who is going to college — and the findings might surprise those who assume universities are liberal hotbeds. "The perception that four-year colleges are only for liberal students may partly be a vestige of the Vietnam era," the Chronicle explains. "Beginning in the late 1970s, similar percentages of freshmen identified as liberal or conservative, with more than half describing themselves as 'middle of the road.'"

In a chart of the findings, which can be found here, just over 20 percent of college freshmen today are conservative or far-right while just over 30 percent are liberal or far-left. Just under 50 percent are "middle of the road."

Students' interest in politics has been on the decline, although freshmen have trended more liberal recently, "perhaps returning to a dichotomy similar to that of the 1960s and '70s," the Chronicle writes. Explore all of the findings and peruse graphics of the data here.

Germany's strict privacy laws prevent the widespread usage of surveillance cameras, but the coalition government on Wednesday approved regulation that could change things.

While the proposed laws will still give Germany's states and city states the final say on whether to allow or ban CCTV cameras in public areas, they will "force data protection commissioners to give greater weight than before to 'the protection of life, health, and freedom' when deciding whether to permit video surveillance," The Guardian reports. The initiative is not a result of Monday's attack against a Christmas market in Berlin, but rather the attempted suicide bombing in Ansbach and a mass shooting in Munich this past July.

In Berlin, there are 15,000 CCTV cameras installed on vehicles, with more than 3,000 capable of being switched to live transmission, but police cannot install cameras in public spaces that transmit live images due to data privacy regulations. Bodo Pfalzgraf of the German police union told The Guardian that "better and more intelligence surveillance" is needed in public places, especially after Monday's deadly attack. "We would know a lot more about the perpetrator by now if we had been allowed to install video cameras on Breitscheidplatz square," he said. "We couldn't have prevented the attack, but our investigation would be more advanced by now. CCTV can save lives." Critics of surveillance say this statement is merely hypothetical, and it's more important to have additional police officers on the streets.

In their first conversation after the election, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Donald Trump discussed the proposed Keystone XL pipeline, which was rejected by the Obama administration last year.

The pipeline would carry oil sands crude from Alberta to the U.S. Midwest, at a rate of 830,000 barrels per day. Trudeau said Wednesday in Calgary that Trump was the one who brought the pipeline up, and he "indicated that he was very supportive of it." Trudeau also said he will "work with the new administration when it gets sworn in … I'm confident that the right decisions will be taken."

Trudeau is in favor of the pipeline, but said if the U.S. and Canada work together to fight climate change, there will be "extraordinary opportunities" for green businesses that embrace new environmental policies. Trump has said he would approve the pipeline, but thinks there could be a "better deal" for the U.S.

After a delay of more than 24 hours, evacuations resumed in Aleppo, Syria, on Wednesday.

Last week, an agreement was reached between the government and opposition forces that lets fighters and civilians leave besieged neighborhoods in eastern Aleppo, but it has not been a smooth process, with clashes between the rebels and the regime. The Associated Press reports that four buses that left the last opposition-held stronghold have arrived in the western Aleppo countryside, and the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group said 60 buses are expected to transport 3,000 fighters and civilians later in the day.

Fighting has raged in Aleppo between government forces and their allies and rebel groups since 2012, and after the evacuations are over, the regime is expected to declare it has full control of the city.

Corey Lewandowski announced Wednesday that he is launching a government relations and political consulting firm with former Donald Trump adviser Barry Bennett. Lewandowski was Trump's first campaign manager and later served as a CNN commentator, though he left his job at CNN just three days after the election amid rumors that he might take a role in the Trump administration.

"I will always be President-elect Trump's biggest supporter," Lewandowski said in a statement. "After considering multiple opportunities within the administration, I informed him and his team I think I can best help him outside the formal structure of government." The firm, Avenue Strategies, is reportedly located just a block from the White House:

Trump made "draining the swamp" a central message to his political campaign, a term that "is not just about lobbying and politicians [but] also about consultants," as explained by another former Trump campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway.

Fans of Donald Trump who have his oft-shouted catchphrase "drain the swamp!" in their Twitter bios should probably consider making an edit.

Trump promised voters on the campaign trail he would "drain the swamp" in Washington by kicking out insiders and bringing in fresh blood. Newt Gingrich, the Republican former speaker of the House and an adviser to the president-elect, told NPR Wednesday that he's been told Trump "just disclaims" the slogan (which was arguably already made clear by his Cabinet choices thus far). "He now says it was cute, but he doesn't want to use it anymore," Gingrich said.

While Gingrich says he has a "sense of humor" and enjoys the "alligator and swamp language," it's possible that Trump feels "as the next president of the United States, that he should be marginally more dignified than taking about alligators in swamps." It doesn't matter what makes Gingrich giggle, though — as he told NPR, Trump is "my leader and if he decides to drop the swamp and the alligator, I will drop the swamp and the alligator."