Dazed and Confused: President Trump lashed out at Barack Obama via Twitter yesterday, accusing the former president of failing to act when told of Russian meddling in the election. “Since the Obama Administration was told way before the 2016 Election that the Russians were meddling, why no action? Focus on them, not T!” the current president posted on his account.

This is interesting in a variety of ways, one of which is that Trump has dismissed accounts of Russian hacking, saying at one time that it could have been anyone, including a fat kid on the sofa, and even saying earlier this week that it’s “all a big Dem HOAX.”

One theory has it that Obama thought Hillary Clinton would win the election, so he chose not to take more dramatic action.

In a lengthy article, the Washington Post reports that President Obama struggled with what to do about the Russian hacking, settling ultimately on largely symbolic gestures and leaving the problem to the next administration, which so far has done nothing.

The Post reports that over five months, “the Obama administration secretly debated dozens of options for deterring or punishing Russia, including cyberattacks on Russian infrastructure, the release of CIA-gathered material that might embarrass Putin and sanctions that officials said could ‘crater’ the Russian economy.”

In the end, they expelled 35 Russian diplomats. One former Obama official told the Post, “I feel like we sort of choked.”

World: An overturned oil tanker burst into flames in Pakistan today, killing 148 people who had rushed to the scene to collect leaking fuel. Fifty people are in critical condition.

One and Done: College freshmen were the first five picks in the NBA draft this year. A record 16 freshmen were drafted in the first round, giving a whole new meaning to the slogan, “one and done.” In recent years the hottest college freshman basketball players have been giving school what amounts to a head fake before going pro.

The NBA has a rule that draftees have to put in a year in college. The university coaches are getting irritated about being raided, and the pro coaches aren’t so happy about having to compete for players who really are not developed for the professional game.

Sunday Books: Timothy Snyder’s short book “On Tyranny” arrived just in time to observe and reflect on what is going on in the White House these days. He writes about skepticism, obedience, the importance of a free press, truth, and more. Some samples:

– “Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked.”

– “Institutions do not protect themselves. They fall one after the other unless each is defended from the beginning.”

– “You submit to tyranny when you renounce the difference between what you want to hear and what is actually the case. This renunciation of reality can feel natural and pleasant, but the result is your demise as an individual — and thus the collapse of any political system that depends on individualism.”

You Must Be Joking: Former tennis champion John McEnroe, who won the event’s Grand Slam seven times and fame for arguing with the judges, complains in a new biography that he could never get into the legendary nightclub Studio 54 and that the artist Andy Warhol ruined his sex life hanging around parties with his Polaroid camera.  McEnroe writes that in the small hours when you could “loosen your collar and try to find a good-looking model or whatever,” the artist “always seemed to be up in everyone’s face with his camera, being a pain in the ass.”

Then he married Tatum O’Neal and probably longed for the days when his biggest problem was Andy Warhol.

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