This morning, CIA director nominee and Kansas representative Mike Pompeo testified in front of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. And Senator Kamala Harris, a Democrat from California, used her time to question Pompeo about his positions on gay marriage and climate change.

Here is the video:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=P2Ix-oUuSMc

“Your voting record and stated position on gay marriage and the importance of having a traditional family structure for raising children is pretty clear,” Harris said. “Can you commit to me that your personal views on this issue will remain your personal views and will not impact internal policies that you put in place at the CIA?”

Arizona senator Jeff Flake released his annual 200-page catalogue of egregious government spending today, shedding light on 50 unnecessary taxpayer-funded projects from 2016.

Flake’s “Wastebook: PORKémon Go” calls into question multiple research projects conducted by the National Science Foundation (and other government entities), including one in which the NSF and National Eye Institute spent $300,000 of public funds to study boys and girls playing with Barbie dolls. “Researchers were literally playing with dolls to prove what every child already knows — girls are more likely to play with Barbie dolls than boys,” Flake’s report stated.

The NSF also spent $450,000 to research whether dinosaurs could sing and $1.5 million to analyze what happens to fish if they find themselves on a treadmill. In a joint program between the NSF and the Department of Defense, researchers spent $460,000 to have computers binge watch the television show Desperate Housewives in an attempt to predict and understand human behavior. But after the computers “watched” the shows, they failed to have an accuracy rate close to that of humans. “Human subjects correctly predicted the action 71 percent of the time, while existing algorithms scored an accuracy rate of 36 percent,” the report said.

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In April 2014, community-college student Elliot Rodger went on a killing spree throughout Isla Vista, a small college town bordering the University of California, Santa Barbara. Rodger stabbed, shot, and ran over his victims, taking the lives of six people and wounding 14 more. One of the victims, Christopher Michael-Martinez, was shot and killed. His father, Richard Martinez, has since become a gun-control advocate, blaming “craven, irresponsible politicians and the NRA” for Rodger’s attack.

The Isla Vista massacre was horrific, just as all mass shootings are. But it’s clear that Americans are not in agreement with politicians who have responded to cries from advocates such as Richard Martinez by passing arbitrary gun-control legislation. Indeed, as state and federal politicians have proposed such legislation, an unintended consequence has reared its head: Americans have purchased more guns than ever before.

In July, California’s Democratic governor, Jerry Brown, signed six gun-control bills into law, including one that bans rifles with “bullet buttons,” which allow for the removal and replacement of a magazine and had hitherto been the feature that made semi-automatic rifles compliant with California’s firearms laws. The Press Democrat reported that the new bills also added to California’s list of prohibited items “a protruding or forward pistol grip, a thumbhole stock, [and] a folding stock or a flash suppressor.” As of the January 1, 2017 enactment date, so-called assault weapons that were previously legal, such as the AR-15, have been taken off the shelves in California gun stores.

The result of the laws’ passage was predictable. Between July 2016, when Brown signed the bills into law, and December 2016, Californians rushed to gun stores to purchase the firearms that would be deemed illegal come the New Year. An astonishing 257,895 semi-automatic rifles were sold in the span of six months statewide. To put that into perspective, the entirety of 2016 saw 364,643 sales of semi-automatic rifles in California, and 2015 saw a mere 153,931.

The spree was not limited to semi-automatic rifles, either. In 2016, 1.3 million guns were sold in California, a dramatic increase from the 700,000 that were sold in 2015. “California has seen between 800,000 and 960,000 gun sales during each of the prior four years,” the Sacramento Bee reported. “By comparison, a decade ago, between 2002 and 2005, the state never saw more than 345,000 gun sales in a single year.”

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It may not be easy for President-elect Donald Trump to cut egregious spending across the entire federal government, but he can certainly target the executive branch, which has been wasting billions of dollars under President Obama.

Last month, Washington Post reporters obtained confidential memos from the Department of Defense detailing an internal study from January 2015, which found $125 billion in administrative waste. (Senator Jeff Flake’s Wastebook, an annual catalogue of absurd federal spending, recently revealed one particularly egregious example: The DOD spent $2 million to teach robots how to play jazz.) And yet officials chose to bury the study and ignore its recommendations, said the Post, “amid fears Congress would use the findings as an excuse to slash the defense budget.” Trump would be wise to revisit the report’s findings and implement the reforms it suggested, which are designed to reallocate funding to troops and weapons.

Wasteful spending is rampant in other cabinet agencies as well, of course. In 2014, the Department of Health and Human Services spent nearly $950 billion; its inspector general classified $21 billion of that total as waste. “Waste and fraud at HHS was more than 2.5 times greater than the entire budget for the Commerce Department,” the Washington Examiner noted. HHS’s mismanagement of Medicare and Medicaid funds would be an easy target for reform under Trump.

In September 2016, the inspector general at the Department of Justice released an audit of the Drug Enforcement Agency. The audit found wasteful spending in the Confidential Source Program, which paid 9,000 informants a total of $237 million between 2010 and 2015. The inspector general described numerous instances of wasteful spending in the program, but two cases stand out. In one, “the DEA paid two Amtrak employees more than $860,000 for information that was available at no cost to the government,” and in the other, the agency reactivated sources after they had provided false testimony at trial.

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On Tuesday, former presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton announced that they will attend the 58th presidential-inauguration ceremony on January 20.

According to a statement released by Bush’s office, the 43^rd president and his wife are “pleased to be able to witness the peaceful transfer of power — a hallmark of American democracy — and swearing-in of President Trump and Vice President Pence.”

Soon after Bush’s announcement, a Clinton aide told NPR’s Tamara Keith that both Clinton and his wife will be attending as well. There had been speculation that the couple would decline the invitation after the nasty presidential race between President-elect Trump and Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.

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In the aftermath of Donald Trump winning the presidency, law-enforcement officials have seen an influx of reported hate crimes. But investigations have revealed that some of these hate crimes are fabrications. (Last week, for example, police confirmed that a Baruch College student had made up a story about a hate crime that supposedly occurred on a New York City subway.)

Last month, a University of Michigan student claimed that she was walking near the university when a drunken man threatened to set her on fire unless she removed her hijab; she said that she quickly removed her religious head covering and was unharmed.

But yesterday, police found that the student never appeared on surveillance tapes in the area, and determined that the incident didn’t happen. Ann Arbor police lieutenant Matthew Lige told Fox 2 Detroit that the student could be charged with filing a false police report once the prosecutor’s office reviews the case.

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Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton officially beat Donald Trump in the popular vote by 2,864,974, an unprecedented margin of victory for any nominee who lost the Electoral College.

According to the Cook Political Report, the election results of all 50 states and the District of Columbia were certified on Tuesday. At final count, 65.8 million people (48.2 percent) cast their vote for Clinton, 62.9 million (46.1 percent) for Republican candidate Donald Trump, and 7.8 million (5.7 percent) for other candidates (Green party candidate Jill Stein, Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson, independent candidate Evan McMullin, and write-ins).

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The Obama administration has sought to eliminate legal arbitration, the means by which private parties resolve disputes outside of the courts. As one would expect, the beneficiaries of this shift away from arbitration are trial lawyers, not consumers.

Prior to Republicans’ gaining control of the House in 2010, Congress played a critical role in creating an influx of litigation costs. “Lawyers and law firms have been the largest special-interest political contributors to Congress in each electoral cycle in the 21st century, with such donations concentrated among Democrats,” explains James Copland, the director of legal policy at the Manhattan Institute, in “Trial Lawyer Inc: Arbitration,” a report published on Thursday.

Copland concludes in his report that the Obama administration made significant strides toward eliminating arbitration in disputes involving labor law, consumer finance, and nursing homes — and that it did so despite Republican control of Congress.

In January of 2012, for example, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), a federal agency that enforces labor laws, ruled that arbitration clauses prohibiting class-action wage-and-hour lawsuits would not be enforced. By deeming arbitration illegitimate in this area, the NLRB’s decision will cause a surge in litigation that could be resolved in a far less costly, and more prompt, manner. (An appeal is pending before the U.S. Supreme Court.)

Similarly, in May of 2016 the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, another federal agency, wrote a proposal prohibiting the insertion of arbitration clauses; this time, arbitration clauses were forbidden in consumer-finance contracts.

The Obama administration’s intent to eliminate arbitration stretches to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which created a rule in July of 2015 to forbid nursing-home contracts to require arbitration in the event of legal disputes. (In November, a federal judge blocked the rule, but this is subject to change.)

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On December 1, Baruch College student Yasmin Seweid filed a police report, detailing a horrific hate crime she experienced on the New York City subway. Three drunk white men, she claimed, hollered “Donald Trump,” “Get the hell out of the country,” and attempted to rip off her hijab — all while her fellow New Yorkers turned a blind eye.

On Wednesday, however, Seweid admitted to fabricating the entire incident to avoid being punished for missing her curfew. She sought to “throw off her parents,” a source told the New York Daily News, because they disliked her Christian boyfriend.

The Daily News first reported on the hate crime Seweid supposedly experienced on December 3, and rightfully, the newspaper condemned her blatant lies.

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