You're trying hard not to show it

I just accidentally found out that James Garner's daughter paints, and some of them are pretty neat: Flow Art by Gigi Garner. I think this one is called "Child's Play". (All the proceeds go to the animal rescue charity she set up in honor of her father.)

First, there was an end to guessing about the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau when they finally replaced Chopra and then filled the spot with an architect of Project 2025, and "Vought Stops CFPB From Functioning With Illegal Order: The budget director and acting head of the CFPB also tried to defund the agency, but found it was already funded through the fiscal year." But then, "Vought Restores CFPB Procedure That Sustains Mortgage Markets: The situation reveals that sometimes, even arsonists need the building they’re burning down to stay upright. There's an old saying about the dog that caught the car: They don't know what to do next. Let me tell you the case of the dog that caught the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Russ Vought is an own-the-libs kind of guy, an ideological warrior who delights in watching the world burn. Shutting down the CFPB is his idea of paradise; now the rugged capitalists can get back to work making America great again without interference from meddling bureaucrats determined to punish success. Then he heard about the APOR tables. APOR stands for the 'average prime offer rate,' and it's a little tool that keeps the mortgage market running. It involves public servants, every week, going in and calculating it. Those staffers work at the CFPB, and if they're locked out, you have no APOR tables. And over time, if you have no APOR tables, you have no mortgage market, or at least an uncertain and economically damaging mess. In the face of this, tough guy Vought blinked, and in so doing revealed why even the most John Galt-ian banker needs the government every now and again." It turns out that "Government by Malicious Autopilot" doesn't work very well.

From Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern at Slate, "Elon Musk's Power Grab Is Lawless, Dangerous, and—Yes—a Coup: The federal government is currently under relentless and unlawful assault by a man no one elected to lead it. With Donald Trump's blessing and enabling, Elon Musk and his confederates have laid siege to the executive branch in an onslaught whose appalling and far-reaching consequences have barely begun to be reported, much less understood. Musk's team is tearing through federal agencies at a shocking clip, gaining access to classified material, private personal information, and payment systems that distribute trillions of dollars every year, all in alleged breach of the law. The richest person in the world, who works for no recognizable government entity and answers to nobody, apparently believes he has unilateral authority to withhold duly appropriated funds, violate basic security protocols protecting state secrets, and abolish a global agency in direct contravention of Congress' explicit command. He is reportedly leading a purge of the federal workforce, persecuting life-saving charities, and pushing out principled civil servants who stand in the way of his rampage. What we are witnessing is an unconstitutional seizure of power unfolding so rapidly that, by design, the public and media cannot keep up. Musk, who spent nearly $300 million to get Trump elected, is now attempting to restructure the government around his own whims, vendettas, and obsessions. He is, in effect, serving as co-president without winning a single vote, as the actual president looks on from the sidelines. Musk seems to reject basic aspects of the nation's constitutional democracy, replacing the separation of powers with the rule of an autocrat. Many of his offensives appear to reject the legitimacy of any legal limitations that stand in his way, treating federal statutes and precedents as mere suggestions he can take or leave at will."

All the ways Elon Musk is breaking the law, explained by a law professor: There are a lot of them."

From Haaretz, "Trump and Netanyahu Have Devised the Crime of the Century: Israel's war aimed to make Gaza uninhabitable and find a place for evacuees, as many in the government and military have stated. Last week, U.S. President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu presented an imperialist horror show. An American and an Israeli, each with his own criminal indictments, decided to determine the future of the Palestinian people. The plan for evacuating the residents of the Gaza Strip to other countries is a war crime, and it being introduced by the president of the United States is a death sentence for international law. It's the crime of the century. Trump talks about Gaza like a capitalist who wants to develop real estate. He called it a demolition zone, as it has always been, and invented plans for building a city of the future without its original residents."

Hamilton Nolan interviews "Stephanie Kelton on the Disastrous Republican Economic Agenda," and she sees a frightening imposition of austerity and Democrats who are deluded about the danger. "They definitely appear to be floundering. Are floundering. I'm almost at a loss to find anything that looks like a battle plan to counter in any significant way what we're facing. To sort of sit back and say 'Well, the Republicans are gonna burn it all down. So we'll count on, two years from now, getting the House back and picking up seats, and maybe then we can put forward an alternative plan.' We don't have two years. You won't be able to pick up the pieces. And if your message is, 'We'll pick up the pieces and assemble them the way before'—people didn't like the way the system was structured before. That's why, in part, Donald Trump won in the first place. You have to offer people a different vision if you want to actually win. If your message is, 'Put us back in charge, and we'll give you back the economy we had before they destroyed it,' I don't think that's where Democrats should be right now."

I don't know if you can see this if you're not subscribed to The Lever, but this is from the newsletter on "The Lost Memos That Predicted This Era: THE PLUTONOMY MEMOS: As we welcome in 2025, it's worth noting that this year is the 20th anniversary of the release of the so-called Plutonomy Memos — a series of Nostradamus-like reports that predicted much of the world we live in today. The memos written in 2005 and 2006 came from Citigroup, and they effectively admit that Wall Street and its neoliberal political allies were creating a feudal American economy. These documents — which you can find here, here, and here — survive on economist Brad DeLong's blog and in a few old media mentions, book references, and tweets but barely exist on the internet (Citigroup reportedly worked to get them memory-holed off the Internet). 'There are rich consumers, few in number, but disproportionate in the gigantic slice of income and consumption they take,' the Citigroup analysts wrote. 'There are the rest, the 'non-rich,' the multitudinous many, but only accounting for surprisingly small bites of the national pie.' Underscoring the accuracy of these predictions, a new UBS report finds that billionaires' total wealth has more than doubled over the past ten years to $14 trillion."

Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism, "The Bogus Justification for AI Uptake and the Real Reason for the Scam: Your humble blogger has been reluctant to dignify AI, even in the face of technologists we know and respect saying that it is truly revolutionary. But then the question becomes 'Revolutionary for what?' The enthusiasm for AI, aside from investors in its realm and various professional hangers-on, comes from businesses out of the prospect of cost savings due to productivity increases. And most are unabashed in saying that this means replacing workers. But as we will soon show, AI mainly decreases rather than increases productivity. So if that is the case, why has the fanfare continued at a fever pitch? It is not hard to discern that, irrespective of actual performance, AI is yet another tool to discipline labor, here the sort of white collar and professional laborers that management would tend to view as uppity, particularly those that push back over corners-cutting and rules-breaking. In this it falls in the proud tradition of other labor-bargaining-power-reducing yet overhyped gimmicks like outsourcing and offshoring." Yves backs that part up, too.

Doctorow, "All bets are off: When unions are outlawed, only outlaws will have unions. Unions don't owe their existence to labor laws that protect organizing activities. Rather, labor laws exist because once-illegal unions were formed in the teeth of violent suppression, and those unions demanded — and got — labor law. Bosses have hated unions since the start, and they've really hated laws protecting workers. Dress this up in whatever self-serving rationale you want — "the freedom to contract," or "meritocracy" — it all cashes out to this: when workers bargain collectively, value that would otherwise go to investors and executives goes to the workers. I'm not just talking about wages here, either. If an employer is forced — by a union, or by a labor law that only exists because of union militancy — to operate a safe workplace, they have to spend money on things like fire suppression, PPE, and paid breaks to avoid repetitive strain injuries. In the absence of some force that corrals bosses into providing these safety measures, they can use that money to pay themselves, and externalize the cost of on-the-job injuries to their workers. The cost and price of a good or service is the tangible expression of power. It is a matter of politics, not economics. If consumer protection agencies demand that companies provide safe, well-manufactured goods, if there are prohibitions on price-fixing and profiteering, then value shifts from the corporation to its customers."

You know how on CSI cops are always doing bullet matches to figure out if the bullet came from that gun? Well, there's no science backing up the idea that anyone can reliably do that. A judge held a hearing on the usefulness of such testing and ruled it out for a case — a landmark ruling that meant a real advance in how expert testimony could be treated. But then, "A Chicago judge just erased her predecessor's historic ruling on forensic firearms analysis: The courts continue to think that legitimacy comes not from correcting their mistakes, but insisting that they never make them. [...] But as of last month, Hooks's ruling is no longer valid in Illinois. After a bizarre series of events, which began with an allegation of racism against Hooks and resulted in his retirement, the judge who replaced him then vacated the opinion, effectively erasing it from Illinois case law. Just like that, a small bombshell and long overdue win for science-based forensics was taken off the books."

Stoller on the shut-down of the CFPB, "Monopoly Round-Up: On Ending the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau: In the bargain after the financial crisis, banks got a bailout in return for some mild oversight. They, along with big tech, have now broken that deal. And the consequences will be significant. [...] By shuttering the CFPB, Trump is not just going back to a pre-financial crisis status quo, but to something actually weaker than that. There is essentially no longer any Federal enforcement of consumer protection rules for financial products."

Matt Duss at the Guardian, "Democrats have become the party of war. Americans are tired of it: In defending the militarist status quo, Democrats ceded the anti-war lane to Republicans. As they enter the political wilderness, it's time to reckon with what they got so wrong. The most devastating appraisal of the 2024 Democratic national convention was delivered by the neoconservative doyen Bill Kristol: 'Leon Panetta quoting Ronald Reagan! My kind of Democratic convention.' He meant it as praise. Earlier in the day, rumors had been flying around Chicago about that evening's possible surprise speakers. Who would it be? Beyoncé? Taylor Swift? Close! It turned out to be the 86-year-old former CIA director and secretary of defense who last served in government over a decade ago. In his speech, he cited Ronald Reagan to rail against 'isolationism', telling the assembled crowd: 'Our warriors need a tough, cool-headed commander-in-chief to defend our democracy from tyrants and terrorists,' and declaring that Kamala Harris would be that leader. Trotting out an ageing national security mandarin to reminisce about the 'war on terror' was both tone deaf, and, like the Harris campaign in general, seemed like a huge misread of what voters wanted from prospective commanders-in-chief in 2024." It was like they were trying to copy all of Hillary Clinton's mistakes.

The fact that Trump insisted the 2020 election was rigged is not a reason to shrug off making sure our elections are reliable; on the contrary, it's just one more reason we should make sure all elections are either hand-counted or at least audited. "Why We Should Still Audit the 2024 Election—and Every Election: [...] Unless the electronic vote is cross checked with paper ballots, it would be easy for an attack to go undetected, Duncan Buell Ph.D. told Drop Site News. 'If they were to insert a hack, they would also insert the code that would delete the hack on the way out the door and we would never, ever see it.' he said. Buell, an author on the letter and Chair Emeritus in Computer Science and Engineering at the University of South Carolina, continued: 'I'm thinking of, you know, nation state actors, the Koreans, possibly even a couple of Russian companies that do this kind of thing.'" Not even sure we can trust the (American) owners of the machines, since they are privately held and operated by partisans with their own agendas

"Curing Economics' Addiction to Unreal Theories: A Review of Ricardo's Dream, by Nat Dyer Read almost any recent critique of neoclassical economic theory, and you will find its unreality pointed out. Homo economicus is nothing like flesh-and-blood humans, we are told—again, and again, and again. Remarkably, this critique has been leveled against the precursors of neoclassical economics, all the way back to the origin of the profession. That's what we can learn from a new book titled Ricardo's Dream: How Economists Forgot the Real World and Led Us Astray, by Nat Dyer, an able scholar and entertaining writer on the subject. The title refers to David Ricardo (1772-1823), whose influence was on a par with Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Jeremy Bentham, James Mill, and John Stuart Mill. His dream was to discover economic laws as universal and mathematically tractable as Newton's laws of motion. He became so mesmerized by his models that he gave them priority over the more complicated real world—just like the neoclassical economists of today."

Congressional Dish, where Jennifer Briney reads the bills Congress passes so you won't have to.

"Researchers Create Real-Life "Spider-Man" Web-Slinging Tech"

7:51 minutes of amusing stand-up (in an unfortunately murky video): "Tommy Sledge, PI"

Remember this? Craig Ferguson, The lost Doctor Who cold open — "The triumph of intellect and romance over brute force and cynicism."

A beautiful little Star Trek short: "Unification"

Leonard Nimoy on Carol Burnette

Life in 3D doing an impressive cover of "Unchained Melody"|

It's not like me to pretend

John Atkinson Grimshaw's famous The Old Hall Under Moonlight is just one of innumerable atmospheric oils by this master of moonlight, and I was just in that kind of mood.

I need to post this so I can post some more, I have so many tabs open I can't find anything anymore. There's just so much going on!

It's pretty clear that what Musk and DOGE are really about is that Musk wants to defund the police that police Musk's businesses, and do the same for the other grifters who are using the government for themselves at our expense. Trump's appointments are absolutely a case of putting the foxes to guard the hen houses. David Dayen, of course, has a pretty good run-down with "We Found the $2 Trillion: [...] 'Our budget wouldn't be justified if the DOD did pass this year's audit,' said Julia Gledhill, research associate for the National Security Reform Program at the Stimson Center. 'Contractors continue to be rewarded for not doing their jobs terribly well.'" Or you can get the shorter version from Cory Doctorow, "It's pretty easy to cut $2 trillion from the federal budget, actually: If Elon Musk wants to cut $2t from the US federal budget, there's a pretty straightforward way to get there – just eliminate all the beltway bandits who overcharge Uncle Sucker for everything from pharmaceuticals to roadworks to (of course) rockets, and then make the rich pay their taxes. There is a ton of federal bloat, but it's not coming from useless programs or overpaid federal employees. As David Dayen writes in a long, fact-filled feature in The American Prospect, the bloat comes from the private sector's greedy suckling at the government teat"

I meant to post this story earlier in January but I lost track of all the open tabs. "How Big Companies and the Courts Killed Net Neutrality: The powerful telecom industry did what they always do when the FCC does anything good or important on behalf of consumer: They sued to overturn the rules. [...] I'll spare you the rest. This court's warped decision scraps the common-sense rules the FCC restored in April. The result is that throughout most of the country, the most essential communications service of this century will be operating without any real government oversight, with no one to step in when companies rip you off or slow down your service."

It's usually Consortium News that sounds this alarm, but this is Rob Urie On Being Censored for the Last Four Years at Naked Capitalism, and tells an important story. While it's true that Republicans have generally supported government propaganda and censorship with far more intensity and cohesion than the Democrats, the Biden administration went absolutely overboard in actively suppressing what it termed "disnformation", even when it clearly was nothing of the kind. And it should never, ever be acceptable to argue that the government should be allowed to mandate what the truth is. But, of course, since Google started refusing to list articles that didn't serve the government, you might never have been able to find stories about what was being labeled as "disinfo" among those events where you knew it was the truth. And the right-wing is much better at screaming far and wide when their own material is being suppressed — so much so that a lot of them think they're the only ones it's happening to. "Yves here. This important post fills out the picture of how extensive censorship became under the Biden Administration. I hope you'll circulate his piece widely, since it demonstrates the campaign went well beyond social media and included disappearing disfavored content from Internet searches. What is remarkable is Urie's evidence of a dramatic shift in search results after the dissolution of the Biden State Department censorship program. This indirectly confirms that Google's change in its algos to prefer mainstream sites and the quick reversal was the result of government intervention, and not Google acting out of its own profit motives." But we need to dip further into the past to get to the start of this story, when Donald Trump's executive order created this whole government-in-your-social-media ball rolling.

Paul Krugman explains why he left The New York Times: "Also in 2024, the editing of my regular columns went from light touch to extremely intrusive. I went from one level of editing to three, with an immediate editor and his superior both weighing in on the column, and sometimes doing substantial rewrites before it went to copy. These rewrites almost invariably involved toning down, introducing unnecessary qualifiers, and, as I saw it, false equivalence. I would rewrite the rewrites to restore the essence of my original argument. But as I told Charles Kaiser, I began to feel that I was putting more effort—especially emotional energy—into fixing editorial damage than I was into writing the original articles. And the end result of the back and forth often felt flat and colorless. One more thing: I faced attempts from others to dictate what I could (and could not) write about, usually in the form, 'You've already written about that,' as if it never takes more than one column to effectively cover a subject. If that had been the rule during my earlier tenure, I never would have been able to press the case for Obamacare, or against Social Security privatization, and—most alarmingly—against the Iraq invasion. Moreover, all Times opinion writers were banned from engaging in any kind of media criticism. Hardly the kind of rule that would allow an opinion writer to state, 'we are being lied into war.' I felt that my byline was being used to create a storyline that was no longer mine. So I left."

At Pro Publica, "The Militia and the Mole," a story from someone who spent two years of his life undercover with the right-wing militias to uncover what they were really up to, and sent it to the media, only to have the story ignored until he sent it to Joshua Kaplan, who took the time to check it out.

"It's Simple! Concentrated Wealth and Inequality Crushes Economic Growth: More billionaire dollars, slower growth. Full stop. Like it or not, if countries want to join the 'rich-country club,' they need to redistribute wealth. What has not been studied much — at least partially because the data is hard to come by — is the distribution of wealth within countries, and how that relates to economic growth. Is wealth concentration a symptom of what Peter Turchin has called 'elite overproduction'? My devoted readers will undoubtedly remember my 2008 research into rich countries' wealth inequality and economic growth. (In case you haven't heard, wealth inequality utterly dwarfs income inequality.)" The trouble is it's easier (though certainly not easy) to prevent this overabundance in fewer hands than it is to deal with it once it occurs. You could say that the 91% top marginal rate we enjoyed back in the 1950s was a Prevention of Excessive Wealth tax, and it worked marvelously, until it got lowered to 70% in the '60s, which started the avalanche because it made it easier to build dynastic wealth and start doing the things that lead to capturing government, which ultimately led to the 1980s when the TMR went as low as 28% under Reagan. And that led to a whole lot of other evils, of which Citizens United is only one. That Elon Musk can personally threaten every member of Congress with heavily funded primary challenges as well as heavily-funded election campaigns against them is a just plain disaster. Absolutely no one should have that kind of wealth. But go ahead and convince members of Congress to vote for a 91% top marginal rate, let alone a significant wealth tax that actually removes those millions and billions from them, when those billionaires could easily retaliate by making sure you can never work again, or, if you do what they want, conceivably reward you with your very own millions of dollars.

A video worth watching: "Why Oligarchy Falls (And How to Speed It Up)" — 18 minutes of what Aristotle observed about how oligarchic tyrannies crack, if the right people get their timing right.

Cory Doctorow, "The first days of Boss Politics Antitrust: 'Boss politics' are a feature of corrupt societies. When a society is dominated by self-dealing, corrupt institutions, strongman leaders can seize control by appealing to the public's fury and desperation. Then, the boss can selectively punish corrupt entities that oppose him, and since everyone is corrupt, these will be valid prosecutions. In other words, it's possible to corruptly enforce the law against the guilty. This is just a matter of enforcement priorities: in a legitimate state, enforcers prioritize the wrongdoers who are harming the public the most. Under boss politics, priority is given to the corrupt entities that challenge the boss's power, without regard to whether these lawbreakers are the worst offenders. Meanwhile, worse wrongdoers walk free, provided that they line up behind the boss. [...] Trump is a classic boss politician – that's what people mean when they call him 'transactional': he doesn't act out of principle, he acts out of self interest. The people who give him the most get the most back from him. This means that Biden's brightest legacy – militant antitrust enforcement of a type not seen in generations – is now going to become 'boss antitrust,' where genuine monopolists are attacked under antitrust law, but only if they oppose Trump" On the bright side, Rohit Chopra, head of the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau (CFPB), is still in place, at least for a while, because no one else seems to want the job.

I am in awe of Hamilton Nolan. "On Having a Maximum Wealth: The single most ridiculous aspect of human history is how much of it has been driven by the goal of allowing a tiny portion of a large population to live in luxury. This is a theme found, to varying degrees, in society after society across the world: A lot of people with a low standard of living working in service of the goal of raising the standard of living for some sort of ruler or supreme leader and his family and allies. I understand that this is not some sort of revelation. 'You've discovered class,' you are now saying in a mocking tone. Beyond the social and political and economic dynamics underlying this process, though—things that make up magisterial fields of inquiry—I think that every once in a while it is well worth taking a moment to gape at the basic ludicrousness of this fact. As societal goals go, an honest reading tells us that we are often not aiming for 'better technology' or 'philosophical progress.' No, the reality is that, thousands of years and around the globe, the primary purpose of all the work that everyone is doing is 'allowing a few jerks and their unbearable kids to live lavishly.' Countless millions through millennia have suffered, dragging stones to build pyramids and losing fingers in dirty factories and getting black lung so that Some Guy Somewhere can sit on a soft pillow and enjoy delicacies. What an absurd, idiotic goal to organize human society around. Wow!"

The Beatles, on the BBC, "I'll Get You"

There is no freedom in a land where fear and hate prevail

"St Michael's Tower on Glastonbury Tor peeping out of it's silky blanket of mist. Taken about 45 minutes before sunrise." Michelle Cowbourne lives around Glastonbury and takes lots of pictures there. I recommend the slideshow at her Visions of Somerset website.

I wish I had written this: "The Land of Greater Fools: Watching Trump launch a crypto coin days before his own inauguration that instantly made him billions of dollars richer is kind of impressive, in the way that you might be impressed by watching the planes strike the twin towers on 9/11. People said this was bad, yes. But do you understand the level of corruption that is on full display here? This is—I don't want to be hyperbolic here—a level of public corruption that is, let's conservatively say, one thousand times worse than the Watergate scandal. That was just an instance of a paranoid president trying to steal secrets from his political opponents and then covering it up. This, on the other hand, is the president-elect of the United States of America putting out a big bucket that says 'BRIBE ME' right before he takes office. Anyone can now buy an imaginary 'coin' and the money will go directly into the pockets of the Trump family, as they run the United States government. That is what happened here. Donald Trump's net worth went up by tens of billions of dollars in one day. In one day! The day before his inauguration! [...] The problem with this impulse is that inherent in the hope of working with this guy is the accompanying understanding that you must not try as hard as you can to smash the guy at the same time. You can't say 'Donald Trump is a loathsome fascist' and then say in the next breath 'We look forward to crafting a worker-friendly trade policy with you, sir.' Yet, hey, guess who the people are who, collectively, are nurturing all of these disparate hopes of winning on their pet issues? They are the opposition. We are entering an age of gangster style fascism. We are going to need all of the opposition that we can get. If most of the opposition is busy flattering itself that they can soften Trump on this or that, they are not doing their most important work: Trying to destroy his entire political project. That political project is, I remind you, one of destroying the rest of us. An opposition that can't dedicate itself to being the opposition is a weak opposition, indeed. And Trump has always enjoyed a weak opposition." There's a lot more, go read the rest.

The American Prospect has been doing a daily round-up of what the new Trump administration is up to. On Day One they introduced it this way: "Donald Trump is president, and he wants you to know that on his first day, he got things done. A lot of things. Almost 100 things, or maybe 200 things; whatever number it takes to give the appearance of forward motion. This was a key insight that Joe Biden, now a private citizen, never bothered to learn: In a 24/7, post-by-post information environment, presidents making it clear that they are 'doing things' matters a lot more than the substance, at least in short-term public perception. Let's speak the truth, a rare commodity over the next four years: The federal government takes action 200 times on a slow day. Like, that's a day-after-Christmas level of workload. And many of these 'actions' are just plans to make plans, or plans to write reports, many of which in Trump's first term were not completed (I know, I tracked them all). Others are really important, though sometimes not in the way you think. Others are asking for legal challenge so deeply that there's already litigation in place. What this moment calls for is clarity: to contextualize and explain, clearly and succinctly, what Trump is doing and who really benefits. So that's what we're going to do today. Below, you will find a rolling tally of the most important executive orders and their meaning, compiled by our staff. Keep checking back for updates." Obviously, they can't hit everything, but you'll still learn a lot more from them than you'll get from any other news source.

"Biden commutes life sentence of Indigenous activist Leonard Peltier, 80: [...] Peltier has maintained his innocence since he was arrested in connection with the deaths and had for decades been supported by advocates for his release by Coretta Scott King, Nelson Mandela and Pope Francis. James H Reynolds, the US attorney who handled the prosecution and appeal of Peltier's case, publicly apologized, calling the prosecution and incarceration of Peltier 'unjust' and has called for his immediate release." This should have happened a long time ago, but Biden left it for the last minute, and then Trump became president and pardoned the J6 gang.

Dday in The American Prospect, "The Essential Incoherence of the End of the Biden Presidency: One reason the president goes out with low approval ratings is that his agenda was internally contradictory. [...] The Biden White House has been active, too, in these final days. And some of their announcements help unlock the key to why, despite a generally populist economic agenda, voters were so frustrated with the president, sending him out the door with the lowest approval ratings of his entire term. Too often the White House would operate at cross-purposes to its more populist agencies, sometimes contradicting the very arguments the president himself was making in public. This dichotomy between values and actions grates on people, alienates potential allies, and gives voters little sense of a coherent agenda."

"Baltimore homicides and shootings fall to lowest levels since 2015: Baltimore finished 2024 with a second consecutive year of historic decreases in gun violence unlike the city has seen since the 1970s. The decrease in gun violence from last year has brought needed optimism to a city that has long struggled to bring down its homicide rate, which still remains well above the national average. Police say 201 people were killed, with more than 400 people shot and wounded. Experts in gun violence prevention, city officials and anti-violence workers attributed the decline to a variety of factors: statewide and national efforts to fight 'ghost guns,' political stability in City Hall, and the maturation of the mayor's approach to pairing policing with services and support." Homicides were 342 in 2015, 263 in 2023, and 201 in 2024.

"'Crushing Blow to the Labor Agenda' as Manchin, Sinema Block Biden NLRB Nominee: In a move likely fraught with major implications for worker rights during the impending second administration of Republican President-elect Donald Trump, Democratic-turned-Independent U.S. Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema on Wednesday blocked Democrat Lauren McFerran's bid for a second term on the National Labor Relations Board. With every Republican senator except Sen. Roger Marshall of Kansas voting against President Joe Biden's nomination of McFerran for a new five-year term, the fate of the woman who has led the agency since 2021 was up to Manchin and Sinema—who, as More Perfect Union founder and executive director Faiz Shakir put it on social media, "consistently spoiled the story of 'what could have been'" by years of fighting to thwart their own former party's agenda. Sinema struck first, her "no" vote on McFerran grinding the confirmation tally to a 49-49 tie. Manchin, who showed up later, cast the decisive vote, negating speculation that Vice President Kamala Harris, the Senate president who lost the presidential contest to Trump last month, would break the stalemate." The even more infuriating thing is that if Kamala Harris had been on time, she could have cast the deciding vote before Manchin got there to gum up the works. Just absolutely useless.

"Israeli prosecutor says state has no rape cases against Palestinians from 7/10 raid: Regime representative admits what UN and others already said – but still wants to murder Palestinians. Israeli media outlet Ynet has published an interview with Moran Gaz, until recently, the head of the security cases division at the Southern District Prosecutor's Office in Israel and a member of 'Team 7.10,' which responsible for cases involving captured Palestinians in connection with the October 7th attacks. Gaz has admitted that, despite having over fourteen months to investigate the Israeli regime's claims of 'mass' and 'systematic' rape on 7 October 2023, her department has no evidence of any rapes or sexual assaults and is filing no cases for prosecution." That doesn't mean she isn't every bit as venomous against Palestinians, though.

"Judge threatens to break the UK's wall of secrecy around Assange's persecution: For years, the UK and Sweden stymied Freedom of Information requests to hide why prosecutors under Keir Starmer pursued the Wikileaks founder. Finally the game may be up. After nine years of legal battles, a British judge has finally challenged the wall of secrecy erected by British and Swedish authorities around the legal abuse of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. Judge Foss, sitting at the London First-Tier Tribunal, has ruled that the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) must explain how it came to destroy key files that would have shed light on why it pursued Assange for 14 years. The CPS appears to have done so in breach of its own procedures. [...] A few CPS emails from that time were not destroyed and have been released under Freedom of Information rules. They show that it was the UK authorities pushing reluctant Swedish prosecutors to pursue the case against Assange. Eventually, Swedish prosecutors dropped the case after running it into the ground. In other words, the few documents that have come to light show that it was the CPS – led at that time by Keir Starmer, later knighted and now Britain's prime minister – that waged what appears to have been a campaign of political persecution against Assange, rather than one based on proper legal considerations."

"'Don't Be Fooled': Laken Riley Act Not About Crime by Migrants—It's a Right-Wing Power Grab: With the U.S. Senate poised to vote on the Laken Riley Act on Friday, immigrant rights advocates are warning that—despite claims from proponents that the bill is aimed at protecting American communities from violent crime—supporters of the legislation are actually advancing a dangerous "Trojan horse" and securing a power grab for xenophobic right-wing authorities. [...] Immigration attorney Ben Winograd of the Immigrant & Refugee Appellate Center offered a hypothetical scenario under the bill: 'Imagine a man who is a U.S. citizen marries a woman who entered the country illegally. He abuses her constantly, and after learning that she intends to leave him, he calls the police and (falsely) claims that she stole some of his property.' 'If the police arrest the woman, she would be subject to mandatory detention while in removal proceedings—even if the police determined that the accusation was bogus,' said Winograd. 'The Laken Riley Act would allow any person with a grudge against an undocumented immigrant to make them subject to indefinite mandatory detention simply by leveling a false accusation of theft.'"

Jack Smith spills the beans: "In the newly released report, Smith detailed how Trump and his allies tried to 'induce state officials to ignore true vote counts,' manufactured 'fraudulent slates of presidential electors in seven states that he had lost,' directed 'an angry mob to the United States Capitol to obstruct the congressional certification of the presidential election,' and leveraged 'rioters' violence to further delay it.' 'In service of these efforts, Mr. Trump worked with other people to achieve a common plan: to overturn the election results and perpetuate himself in office,' the report added."

RIP: "Peter Yarrow of folk trio Peter, Paul and Mary dies aged 86: a vocalist with the US folk trio Peter, Paul and Mary, has died aged 86. The cause was bladder cancer, which Yarrow had been diagnosed with four years ago. Yarrow took lead vocals on Puff, the Magic Dragon, The Great Mandella and Day Is Done, songs he either wrote or co-wrote with Noel Paul Stookey. Stookey is the last surviving member of the group, as Mary Travers died in 2009." You probably had to be there, but they were an incredible influence.

RIP: "Sam Moore of Sam & Dave, at 89. "That tells you a great deal about the esteem Sam & Dave were held in by their fellow musicians, but, in truth, it is only scratching the surface: their songs were covered by everyone from the Temptations and Tom Jones to Eurythmics and Elvis Costello. At the height of their 60s success, they were called 'the greatest live act of all time' by Otis Redding's manager, whose own charge was hardly a slouch on stage. Nevertheless, after co-headlining with them on the 1967 Stax/Volt tour, Redding declined to share a bill with the duo nicknamed Double Dynamite again: he felt he had been thoroughly upstaged." (There's a great video of Sam & Dave doing "Hold On, I'm Comin'" on that page.) Their most famous track, of course, was "Soul Man."

RIP: "Garth Hudson, founder member of the Band and Bob Dylan collaborator, dies aged 87: Hudson was the last remaining member of the folk-rock group, releasing 10 studio albums with them and touring with Dylan in his newfound electric period. The multi-instrumentalist, who played keyboards and saxophone for the bestselling 1960s folk-rockers as well as Bob Dylan, died peacefully in his sleep at the Woodstock nursing home he lived in, the executor of his estate confirmed to the Toronto Star. Hudson's variously spirited and melancholy organ lines were a key part of the Band's sound – including his psychedelically vamping intro to "Chest Fever" – and he was also an accordionist, including on the Dylan-penned When I Paint My Masterpiece. Hudson was also responsible for recording and archiving the sessions that became The Basement Tapes, with the Band and Dylan playing ad-hoc songs in a house in upstate New York."

RIP: "Jules Feiffer, award-winning political cartoonist and writer, dies at 95: Feiffer was known for his weekly comic strip in the Village Voice called Feiffer. It was a fixture throughout the late 1950s until 1997 and syndication meant it appeared in publications such as the New Yorker, Esquire and the Observer." Gosh, it really feels like it's the end of some eras.

Marc Andreessen has been running around telling a bunch of stories meant to make CEOs look like innocent bystanders being attacked by the likes of the CPFB, and he also seems to think Hillary Clinton was president: "Marc Andreessen, the billionaire tech investor who co-founded Netscape, has recently been making the rounds on various podcasts to talk about how the Democrats were so very mean to him and forced him to become a supporter of Donald Trump. Andreessen's obnoxious whining wouldn't otherwise be notable, given how many guys in the tech industry have blamed backlash against 'wokeness' to explain their support of the MAGA movement. But a new interview released by the New York Times on Friday is interesting, if only because the Times cleaned up its own transcript to make Andreessen sound like less of an idiot."

I still think it's almost impossible to find a verdict for who has been the worst president of my lifetime, which is longer than Mehdi Hasan's, but I can't help nodding at a lot of this: "Joe Biden had one job. And he failed. [...] Joe Biden had one job. Not getting bills passed or executive orders signed. Not fighting foreign wars or securing the border. No. It was defeating Donald Trump. Denying him the presidency. Ending the threat he posed to our democracy. That was Biden's one job. He said so himself. From the moment he announced his (third) campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2019, he made clear that he wanted to lead us to victory 'in the battle for the soul of this nation'. When he formally accepted his party's nomination at the Democratic national convention in the summer of 2020, he said he was running to 'save our democracy' and to ensure the United States became 'a light to the world once again'. This was a battle, he declaimed, 'that we, together, will win'." Well, that didn't happen, and if he'd really wanted to do that, he should have done the things Mehdi mentions in this column once he was in office. But he never should have been in office. The best thing he could have done was drop out of the race and endorse the front-runner.

"Sony Video Chief Admits Strategic Mistakes," or how DRM killed the Walkman.

"Kamala Harris Paid the Price for Not Breaking With Biden on Gaza, New Poll Shows: Twenty-nine percent of non-voters who supported Biden in 2020 said U.S. support for the genocide was the top reason they sat the 2024 election, according to a survey by YouGov. [...] Of course, diverging from Biden on Gaza risked losing voters who supported his policy. But a close look at the survey suggests that risk was low compared to the potential reward. Voters who were with Biden in 2020 and stuck with Harris in 2024 were asked if breaking with him on Gaza would make them more or less enthusiastic about voting for Harris. By a 35 to 5 margin, they said doing so would have made them more enthusiastic to vote for her, with the remainder saying it would have made no difference. Meanwhile, Democrats' unshakable commitment to the war also blended with concerns that the party was not focused on issues that mattered to Americans, as I argued previously. The survey showed that the issue of Gaza was most salient among white voters, 34 percent of whom said it was the top reason they didn't vote for Harris, and Hispanic voters (27 percent), while less so with black voters (just 9 percent)."

Peter, Paul & Mary, "Wasn't That A Time" live, 1967.

And folks dressed up like Eskimos

I don't seem to have the sense of timing I used to have, so let's do this before the last night of Christmas on the 6th. Here we are with the traditional Christmas links:
• Mark Evanier's wonderful Mel Tormé story, and here's the man himself in duet with Judy Garland.
• Joshua Held's Christmas card, with a little help from Clyde McPhatter and the Drifters.
• Brian Brink's tour-de-force performance of "The Carol of the Bells"
• "Merry Christmas from Chiron Beta Prime."
• Ron Tiner's one-page cartoon version of A Christmas Carol

Ann Telneas quit The Washington Post after they killed one of her cartoons. "Why I'm quitting the Washington Post: I've worked for the Washington Post since 2008 as an editorial cartoonist. I have had editorial feedback and productive conversations—and some differences—about cartoons I have submitted for publication, but in all that time I've never had a cartoon killed because of who or what I chose to aim my pen at. Until now."

The problem I was complaining about 20 years ago has not gone away, and I still have no way to know whether the 2016 election, the 2020 election, or the 2024 election were actually hacked. The machines still aren't being audited and without real hand-counts, we don't actually know how the voters actually voted. I still have no reason in the world to think E&S, in particular, is not hacking elections—I mean, they practically bragged about it once upon a time. And I don't know anything about Rachel Donald and whether the story is pure conjecture, but she says, "Cyber-Security Experts Warn Election Was Hacked," and for all I know it could be true.

"Pentagon Repatriates Guantánamo Detainee Held Without Charge for Over Two Decades: The move came as the Biden administration faced pressure to clear the notorious military prison of all uncharged detainees before Donald Trump takes office. The man, 59-year-old Ridah bin Saleh al-Yazidi, had been held at Guantánamo since the day former U.S. President George W. Bush opened the prison camp in 2002. The Pentagon said in a statement Monday that al-Yazidi has been repatriated to the government of Tunisia. With al-Yazidi's transfer, there are now 26 detainees remaining at Guantánamo, the majority of whom have never been charged with a crime and have been approved for release from the prison, which United Nations experts have said is "defined by the systematic use of torture and other cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment." More detainees have died at Guantánamo than have been convicted of a crime, according to the human rights group Reprieve."

"How 'more reason for alarm' is hitting Dems after Harris loss: report [...] Per the report, Three "focus groups — held immediately after the 2024 election and conducted by GBAO, a Democratic polling firm — featured three kinds of voters: young men in battleground states who voted for Biden in 2020 and Trump in 2024; voters in battleground states who voted for Biden in 2020 but didn't vote at all in 2024; and voters in blue states who had previously voted for Democrats, a third party candidate or didn't vote in 2020 but voted for Trump in 2024." Navigator Research's director of polling and analytics, Rachael Russell, told Politico that "the focus groups offer 'a pretty scathing rebuke' of the Democratic Party." Some ex-Democratic voters call the party "weak" and say its "overly focused on diversity and elites," according to the news outlet. Furthermore, "When asked to compare the Democratic Party to an animal, one participant compared the party to an ostrich because 'they've got their heads in the sand and are absolutely committed to their own ideas, even when they're failing,'" Politico notes, while "Another likened them to koalas, who 'are complacent and lazy about getting policy wins that we really need.'" Russell emphasized, "This weakness they see, [Democrats] not getting things done, not being able to actually fight for people — is something that needs to be figured out." She added, "It might not be the message, it might be the policy. It might be something a little bit deeper that has to be addressed by the party.""

From Normal Island News, "Media deeply confused after discovering Germany terror suspect is a Zionist: In an event that was as confusing as it was horrific, a Zionist has committed an act of terrorism in Germany. Mainstream journalists quickly condemned this brutality because we assumed the suspect was an Islamist, but now we know the truth, we don't want to talk about it anymore. This is because we have no idea if we are supposed to support or condemn this guy. He is kind of like our Luigi Mangione..."

Also from Normal Island News, "Israel destroys Syrian navy due to concerns of underwater tunnels: Israel says it has destroyed every vessel in the Syrian navy, due to worrying reports of tunnels under the water. It has also bombed targets in Damascus, Homs, Tartus, Latakia and Palmyr, but it's unclear if it has blown up the schools and hospitals. Excitingly, the Israeli military raised its flag over the town of al-Khadr in a move that looked nothing like settler-colonialism. Israel decided to invade Syria the moment the Assad regime fell because it never misses an opportunity to attack a neighbour. It's kind of like seeing someone you don't like passed out in the street and kicking them in the head, several hundred times, in self-defence. Israel explained it has destroyed 80% of Syria's military capacity to stop it becoming a 'future military threat', a label it could apply to any country on earth. Obviously, most countries aren't as defenceless as Syria, but Israel has nukes so consider this a warning... Pre-emptively attacking a country has no basis in international law, but the British government has reassured the public: 'We will always support Israel's right to defend itself and make itself secure'. You would support Israel too, if Mossad had embarrassing tapes of you..."

"The 'Blob' Is Furious About Gaza. But That's Not Enough.: The foreign policy proletariat needs to stop filtering its dissent through official channels and start taking more radical action. Public resignations. Repeated leaks to the press. A torrent of desperate dissent cables. Government institutions in internal revolt against a president taking US policy off the rails. No, this is not about the forthcoming Trump administration. It's about Joe Biden, Antony Blinken, and the US foreign policy apparatus they oversee. Over the past year, a series of sanctioned and unsanctioned revolts has erupted among foreign policy and intelligence agencies in protest of the Biden administration's complicity in the Gaza genocide."

RIP: "Jimmy Carter, longest-lived US president, dies aged 100" What can I say? He wasn't a good president, he started the deregulation and austerity, he only seemed to wake up after the hostage crisis in Tehran and it was too late, and the corporations —and therefore the media—instantly turned on him after his too-long speech talking about what we needed to do. But it seems like he spent the rest of his life trying to make up for it.

"84% Of Americans Want Tougher Online Privacy Laws, But Congress Is Too Corrupt To Follow Through: Americans are, apparently, tired of having every last shred of personal data over-collected, hyper monetized, then improperly secured by a rotating crop of ethics-optional corporations and lazy executives. [...] As is the norm for U.S. journalism, the outlet frames our failure to pass an internet privacy law over the last 30 years as something that just kind of happened without meaningful cause. The 'question' of whether to have even baseline public privacy protections has been left unanswered due to some sort of ambiguous externality. Just blame that pesky, ambiguous gridlock. In reality, Congress hasn't passed a privacy law because it's blisteringly, grotesquely corrupt. U.S. policymakers have decided, time and time and time again, that making gobs of money is more important than consumer welfare, public safety, market health, or even national security (see: our obsession with TikTok, while ignoring the national security risks of unregulated data brokers). The federal government is also disincentivized from passing a nationwide privacy law for the internet era because they've found that buying consumer data from data brokers is a wonderful way to avoid having to get a traditional warrant."

"On Chief Justice Roberts' 2024 Year-End Report: Challenging Critics & Invoking Heroic Civil Rights-Era Judges To Insulate An Imperial Court [...] Civil rights lawyers were perpetually foiled by judges who were openly prejudiced or who simply refused to compel southern jurisdictions to comply with the Supreme Court's decision in Brown. And when they filed cases before Judge Justice or Judge Waring, the claims were matters related directly to the forum where those judges sat. This is not what is happening with judge shopping cases in the northern district of Texas. That is why the history of Judges Justice and Waring cannot justify the decision by conservative lawyers to repeatedly file cases before one extremely conservative district court judge, even when their claims bear no relationship to the forum in Texas where that judge sits. The Chief closed his report with a point that demanded greater narrative attention. Indeed I regard it as the most important passage in the essay: '[t]he federal courts must do their part to preserve the public's confidence in our institutions.' Yes. There's the rub. What of the responsibility of courts to earn and maintain the public's confidence? The Chief might have acknowledged – however briefly - that some critiques of the Supreme Court's practices have actually led to positive changes. And he might have stated his intention in the New Year to encourage his fellow colleagues and judges across the federal system to redouble their efforts to ensure that their conduct promotes the public's confidence in the judicial system (timely and thorough financial disclosure reporting might be a start). Such a statement at the end of his essay would have done more to improve the federal courts' standing with the public, than the repeated and heated denials from judges whose conduct has garnered scrutiny."

Ian Welsh saying what I'm still afraid to say: "Thompson's assassination will cause more execs and CEOs to bodyguard up, but that doesn't matter much. Modern IEDs and drones are very very effective and getting cheaper all the time, though civilian drones are extremely restricted in the US, which has led to China being the world leader. I suspect they're restricted in part to make assassinations harder. Guns are nice, drones are better. Chinese leaders make the lives of most Chinese much better, not worse, so they aren't scared of assassination."

This one is for those of us who think Frank Miller ruined the DC universe.

From now on our troubles will be out of sight

I don't care if he's doing it for the wrong reason. If Trump gets rid of the debt ceiling, it will be good, because, as Dday says, "The Debt Limit Should Absolutely Be Eliminated: Trump is offering the deal of a lifetime. We've gotten a preview of the next four years in the space of a few hours on Wednesday. Elon Musk provided the shock troops to topple an end-of-year spending deal, and Donald Trump provided the final blow. To say the commotion was based on rumor and myth would be an insult to rumor and myth; even now, Trump is calling for a 'clean' funding bill while keeping the $100 billion in disaster funding and $30 billion for farmers, which comprises virtually all of the additions from a monetary standpoint. But Trump also added an entirely new demand: take the debt limit off the table, rather than forcing him to deal with it next year. And he doesn't just want the debt limit raised; he explicitly wants it eliminated. 'The Democrats have said they want to get rid of it. If they want to get rid of it, I would lead the charge,' Trump told NBC News. Let's not overthink this. Regardless of who suggested it, any day we can say goodbye to the stupidest element of our political structure is a good day."

The suspected assassin of the United CEO, turned into a folk hero instantly, appears to be someone called Luigi Mangione from Maryland, and he even had a sort of "manifesto" handy. Or what some people would term a "note". The major media has copies but for some unexplained reason have refused to publish it. So Ken Klippenstein got hold of it and posted it on Substack. "To the Feds, I'll keep this short, because I do respect what you do for our country. To save you a lengthy investigation, I state plainly that I wasn't working with anyone. This was fairly trivial: some elementary social engineering, basic CAD, a lot of patience. The spiral notebook, if present, has some straggling notes and To Do lists that illuminate the gist of it. My tech is pretty locked down because I work in engineering so probably not much info there. I do apologize for any strife of traumas but it had to be done. Frankly, these parasites simply had it coming. A reminder: the US has the #1 most expensive healthcare system in the world, yet we rank roughly #42 in life expectancy. United is the [indecipherable] largest company in the US by market cap, behind only Apple, Google, Walmart. It has grown and grown, but as our life expectancy? No the reality is, these [indecipherable] have simply gotten too powerful, and they continue to abuse our country for immense profit because the American public has allwed them to get away with it. Obviously the problem is more complex, but I do not have space, and frankly I do not pretend to be the most qualified person to lay out the full argument. But many have illuminated the corruption and greed (e.g.: Rosenthal, Moore), decades ago and the problems simply remain. It is not an issue of awareness at this point, but clearly power games at play. Evidently I am the first to face it with such brutal honesty." The Unibomber's manifesto was much longer and the WaPo and NYT had no trouble publishing that. They don't want to use photos that show his face, either. (Thomas Neuberger thinks he knows why.)

"Supreme court agrees to hear TikTok challenge to law ending its US operations: The US supreme court said on Wednesday that it would hear TikTok's challenge to a law that could make the company's popular video app disappear from the US. In its order on Wednesday, the supreme court said it would set aside two hours for oral arguments on 10 January to consider TikTok's lawsuit against the justice department and the attorney general, Merrick Garland. TikTok issued a statement in response to the court agreeing to take up its case: 'We're pleased with today's supreme court order. We believe the court will find the TikTok ban unconstitutional so the over 170 million Americans on our platform can continue to exercise their free speech rights.' The law that will either ban TikTok or force the sale of the app is set to go into effect on 19 January. A federal appeals court in Washington DC rejected ByteDance's argument earlier this month that the law violated the free speech provision of the US constitution's first amendment. The ruling allows the law, passed in April, to remain in place."

There's a lot of mush going around that purports to explain that it's not the insurance companies' fault, but Matt Stoller puts it right, "It's Time to Break Up Big Medicine: UnitedHealth Group is not an insurer, it's a platform. And it's in the crosshairs as Elizabeth Warren and Josh Hawley propose breaking it apart, severing its pharmacy arm from the rest of the business [...] These kinds of discussions are always done in bad faith, since people who make a lot of money from killing people with spreadsheets like to pretend to be very offended when anyone points out health care is a matter of life and death. That said, moral hypocrisy isn't the primary reason our health care system is so problematic. A more important objection to reform is from a certain dominant strain of thinking among economists and health care wonks, who question whether the health insurers are really that bad. [...] It turns out the reason health care costs kept going up despite the reforms meant to reverse the trendline is because policymakers misdiagnosed the underlying problem. The Dartmouth work was just wrong on overuse of medicine. Higher medical costs in America were result of, you guessed it, monopoly power."

"Coalition of Missouri businesses attempting to override new minimum wage, paid sick leave laws: Almost immediately after voters in Missouri signed onto Proposition A, a referendum that would state-wide increase of the minimum wage and mandatory paid sick leave, a collection of business associations announced they would explore ways to subvert the November results. The coalition is crying election fraud despite an overwhelming 58% of voters approving the measure."

I wasn't bothered when Biden pardoned his son, because, let's face it, he never would have been charged in the first place if he hadn't been a Democratic president's son. But this really does go beyond the pale: "Victims of 'kids-for-cash' judge outraged by Biden pardon: 'What about all of us?' Victims of a former Pennsylvania judge convicted in the so-called kids-for-cash scandal are outraged by Joe Biden's decision to grant him clemency. In 2011, Michael Conahan was sentenced to more than 17 years in prison after he and another judge, Mark Ciavarella, were found guilty of accepting $2.8m in illegal payments in exchange for sending more than 2,300 children – including some as young as eight years old – to private juvenile detention centers. Conahan was released from prison in 2020 due to Covid-19 and placed on house arrest, which had been scheduled to end in 2026. Conahan's sentence was one of about 1,500 the US president commuted – or shortened – on Thursday while also pardoning 39 Americans who had been convicted of non-violent crimes." I actually find it hard to see that as a non-violent crime.

Robert Kuttner at The American Prospect says it's looking good, "The Face of the Democratic Party: The next DNC chair will have a higher profile than usual. The two leading candidates, Ken Martin of Minnesota and Ben Wikler of Wisconsin, are both terrific. It's hard to think of a time when the Democratic Party was more bereft of real leaders. As the losing presidential candidate, Kamala Harris is not held in warm regard, and her continuing fundraising efforts have added to the irritation. Joe Biden, who accomplished more than his critics give him credit for, is going out on a low note. Usually, the chair of the Democratic National Committee is a technocrat and not the face of the party. But this time could be different. A number of names have been mentioned in the press coverage and in self-promotion, but it's clear that the two finalists will be Ken Martin, 51, Minnesota party chair, and his neighbor, Ben Wikler, 43, who chairs the Wisconsin state party. Both are excellent party-builders, both are substantive progressives, and both have earned wide respect. The election is set for February 1." On the other hand, One other party leadership post is open, and here the news is terrible. Michigan Sen. Gary Peters is stepping down as chair of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC), the fundraising arm of the Senate Democratic caucus. The only declared candidate for the job is New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand. Gillibrand, in contrast to Martin and Wikler, represents all that is corrupt and opportunistic in the Democratic Party. She is very close to the crypto industry, which dumped scads of dark money into late campaign ads to defeat progressives such as Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio. Gillibrand also is widely loathed for leading the campaign to hound Sen. Al Franken out of office on charges of sexual harassment. Gillibrand will get the job mainly because nobody else wants it."

On the other hand, the Free Speech Warriors are still remarkably silent on "The Coming Threats to Press Freedom: Watch out for massive libel suits, efforts to repeal Times v. Sullivan, and an attempt to create an official secrets act—as Trump and MAGA flood the First Amendment zone. As the house optimist, I keep finding intact democratic guardrails and weaknesses in Trump's attempt to impose a dictatorship. But this is the one that really keeps me up at night. Traditional press freedom is already at risk because of the travesty of what so much of the media has become. It's not clear what sort of First Amendment protections the shabbier forms of social media even deserve. But with the second coming of Trump, it's the mainstream fact-based media that's in the crosshairs. What's gotten the most attention lately are Trump's own threats to sue for libel and a few actual suits. These are mostly outlandish, but sufficiently serious to have caused legacy media to pay protection money."

Krugman leaves The New York Times and starts his own Substack, Krugman wonks out, which is currently free to read. "The Fraudulence of 'Waste, Fraud and Abuse': Once upon a time a Republican president, sure that large parts of federal spending were worthless, appointed a commission led by a wealthy businessman to bring a business sensibility to the budget, going through it line by line to identify inefficiency and waste. The commission initially made a big splash, and there were desperate attempts to spin its work as a success. But in the end few people were fooled. Ronald Reagan's venture, the President's Private Sector Survey on Cost Control — the so-called 'Grace commission,' headed by J. Peter Grace — was a flop, making no visible dent in spending." I wonder if we'll see any change from Krugman now that he doesn't have a boss.

"The Far-right Activist Who Sparked an Imaginary Pogrom in Stockholm [...] The online news site Mako reported that Jews were attacked 'in Stockholm, the capital of Sweden, during a ceremony commemorating the Kristallnacht pogrom.' It said anti-Israel demonstrators yelled derogatory names at the ceremony's participants, snatched their Israeli flags, tore them up and threw them into the river. [...] In the real world, what happened in Stockholm is indeed troubling, but for different reasons. First, no ceremony commemorating Kristallnacht took place there. Second, no Jews were attacked. Third, this false information was disseminated by people who counted on the media to spread the lie, thereby providing them with free political propaganda. And they were right. The Swedish media refused to buy the goods, but the Israeli media sure did (I might add, for the benefit of Mako's investigative reporters, that Stockholm doesn't have a river)."

Also from Haaretz, "It's Time for Israel to Grant the Black Hebrew Israelite Community the Full Rights It Deserves: The Hebrew Israelite community marked an unfortunate milestone last week, when it lost its first member in combat, Elishai Young, a 19-year-old conscript from Dimona. He was buried last Monday. Some at the funeral expressed the irony that while Elishai was born in Israel and died defending the country, he was not eligible to be an Israeli citizen. That's because Hebrew Israelis are still engaged in a struggle for full recognition that began with the first arrivals in 1969."

"Eviction and Voter Turnout: The Political Consequences of Housing Instability: In recent years, housing costs have outpaced incomes in the United States, resulting in millions of eviction filings each year. Yet no study has examined the link between eviction and voting. Drawing on a novel data set that combines tens of millions of eviction and voting records, this article finds that residential eviction rates negatively impacted voter turnout during the 2016 presidential election. Results from a generalized additive model show eviction's effect on voter turnout to be strongest in neighborhoods with relatively low rates of displacement. To address endogeneity bias and estimate the causal effect of eviction on voting, the analysis treats commercial evictions as an instrument for residential evictions, finding that increases in neighborhood eviction rates led to substantial declines in voter turnout. This study demonstrates that the impact of eviction reverberates far beyond housing loss, affecting democratic participation."

More Perfect Union's survey on "Taking on Corporate Power" sure seems to indicate that Americans want to see corporate power reduced.

"Police are not primarily crime fighters, according to the data: (Reuters) - A new report adds to a growing line of research showing that police departments don't solve serious or violent crimes with any regularity, and in fact, spend very little time on crime control, in contrast to popular narratives."

"There's Nothing More Corrupting Than Flying Private: Want to understand the motives of our mercenary elite? Take a trip on a private plane, writes Tina Brown."

Speaking of corruption, there are now 11 episodes of Master Plan and you really shouldn't miss this historical rollercoaster ride through the plot for the rich mob to take over the country.

An artist I recently noticed, Richard Savoie (Canadian, 1959), might be fun to investigate, although I wish his own website had a more comprehensive gallery display.

I ran into this YouTube economist called Unlearning Economics because Nathan Robinson interviewed him about his video "Thomas Sowell Is Worse Than I thought," which sounded pretty irresistible so I watched it, and now I'm watching "Free Stuff Is Good, Actually."

A couple of decades back I posted a clip of one of my favorite scenes from the original film of Bedazzled, but it was during that period when the remake was in release so they got YouTube to take it down. But later on, someone else posted it, so enjoy a few minutes of Peter Cook (as the Devil, aka George Spigot) explaining to Dudley Moore (a burger-flipper) why he got kicked out of Heaven.

I'm not sure whether I approve of this version, but "Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas," with John Legend and Esperanza Spalding.

That is their song

Sorry I missed Advent, but your traditional Advent music is yet another version of "Carol of the Bells". Celebrate the season in warmth and light.

The last few days have seen a flurry of international events that I haven't really been able to process yet. Assad is out of Syria, apparently to be replaced by an Al Quaeda leader once declared a terrorist enemy by the United States—but some say the US is responsible for what was not a natural, organic "revolution". For many, this is just a part of Israel's expansionist policies. Bashar al Assad is reported now to be taking refuge in Moscow.

South Korean president Yoon Suk Yeol declared martial law for no apparent reason, but it was over by morning. Some say that was thanks to the call of strikes from unions, but in any case the parliament managed to get inside to reverse him. Although that vote had cross-party support, the calls for impeachment did not and so far he has managed to avoid it, although everyone outside of his own party seems to be demanding impeachment or resignation. Much of the world was surprised to find out just how unpopular this guy is.

Meanwhile in France, Macron's antidemocratic decision to put a right-wing "centrist" in the prime ministership to defeat the left seems to have backfired, and now he's left with the choice of continuing his arrogance or doing what he should have done in the first place: "A more durable, and ethical, solution would be for Mr Macron to finally demonstrate the humility he should have shown after the chastening outcome of his summer gamble. The July snap poll was narrowly, but indubitably, won by the New Popular Front (NPF) – a leftwing alliance including the Socialist party and Jean-Luc Mélenchon's France Unbowed. Fearing that an NPF-led government would attempt to reverse parts of his legacy, including deeply unpopular plans to raise the retirement age, Mr Macron found reasons not to appoint a prime minister from the broad left." People are holding their breath to see if he will finally do it.

Back in the New York, the CEO of America's most rapacious health insurers was assasinated, and the lack of opprobrium from the public seems to be the real story here. "Brian Thompson's killing inspired rage – against the healthcare industry: The killing appeared so well-planned that at first glance many assumed it was a professional hit. The gunman who shot dead Brian Thompson, head of one of the US's largest health insurance companies, on a New York street before dawn lay in wait with a weapon fitted with a silencer, kept his cool as his gun jammed and made a nimble escape after ensuring that his victim had been fatally struck. However, within hours, an intense police manhunt turned up a trail of clues and possible mistakes, suggesting that while the killer had taken care to cover his tracks, he also made amateurish missteps that may yet lead to his identification and capture. But millions of Americans were less interested in the mechanics of what New York's new police commissioner, Jessica Tisch, called “a premeditated, pre-planned, targeted attack” than the possible motive. Despite the fact the killer's motive remains completely unknown, the death of UnitedHealthcare's CEO unleashed an eruption of anger from people mistreated, or untreated, by the US's rapacious medical industry and even a grim schadenfreude from some at Thompson's death."

"US House passes bill to punish non-profits deemed to support 'terrorism'." Well, we knew this was going to happen, but I still haven't seen the Free Speech Warriors speaking out against it.

Two unfortunate facts: One is that Bill Clinton signed some odious Republican legislation into law, and one of them allows the next president to overturn rules made in the last 60 days of his predecessor's term. The other is that Joe Biden did some rule-making in the last 60 days of his term that he really should have gotten to earlier. "The Biden Reforms That Will Be First To Go: Thanks to Republican deregulatory frenzy and Democratic gambles, many key consumer-protection initiatives could soon be wiped away. [...] The CRA's 'lookback period' only allows the law to be used to rescind rules established in the last 60 working 'pro forma' days of a lawmaking session and the subsequent remaining days of a president's term. Goldbeck said that the exact date is 'kind of a moving target,' but most experts agree that once Trump assumes office on Jan. 20, 2025, the CRA could be used to revoke any rules passed after Aug. 1, 2024."

"The War on Consortium News: From PayPal to Global News to anonymous hackers, there are forces that prefer you don't read Consortium News. In an age of growing censorship and suppression of news, Consortium News is not exaggerating when it says it has abundant evidence of efforts to marginalize or silence us."

Good news from Wisconsin! "Act 10 Overturned." This is Scott Walker's anti-union legislation from back in 2003. Everyone was horrified, but it has taken this long to get it to court, and the court said Act 10 didn't pass muster.

Stiglitz in the Guardian, "The message to Democrats is clear: you must dump neoliberal economics: As the shock of Donald Trump's victory sinks in, pundits and politicians are mulling what it means for the future of the US and global politics. Understanding why such a divisive, unqualified figure won again is crucial for the Democrats. Did they go too far left and lose the moderate Americans who make up a majority? Or did centrist neoliberalism – pursued by Democratic presidents since Bill Clinton – fail to deliver, thus creating a demand for change? To me, the answer is clear: 40 years of neoliberalism have left the US with unprecedented inequality, stagnation in the middle of the income spectrum (and worse for those below), and declining average life expectancy (highlighted by mounting “deaths of despair”). The American Dream is being killed, and although President Joe Biden and Vice-President Kamala Harris distanced themselves from neoliberalism with their embrace of industrial policies, as representatives of the mainstream establishment, they remained associated with its legacy."

With handy stats and graphs: "Analysis: Kamala Harris Turned Away From Economic Populism: Pressed by influential corporate advisors, Kamala Harris ran away from a winning economic populist message and ended up losing a campaign. We have the proof. [...] The vice president's bid was premised on the risky bet that catering to moderate, college-educated voters would win more support than it would lose in working-class defections. That gamble backfired massively. Instead of expanding the Democratic coalition to bring in a larger share of the working-class vote in critical swing states where working-class voters make up a large majority of the electorate, Kamala Harris saw her only gains among college-educated white voters, and for the first time, Democrats received a higher share of votes from high- compared to low-income Americans. [...] Over the course of the whole campaign, Harris spoke less about economic issues and progressive economic policy priorities than Joe Biden had in 2020, and far less than Sanders had in the Democratic primaries that year. In this cycle, Trump addressed perhaps the most important issue for voters — prices and the cost of living — more than twice as often as Harris. "

RIP: Alice Brock - "The real Alice of Arlo Guthrie's 'Alice's Restaurant' dies at 83: The hippie-era icon who inspired folk singer Arlo Guthrie's epic, anti-establishment song “Alice's Restaurant” has died. Alice Brock suffered from health issues, including chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and passed away at a hospice home in Wellfleet on Thursday. She was 83. Brock's longtime close friend Viki Merrick was with her when she died. Merrick said up until the end Brock remained poetic, hilariously funny, and full of puns. 'That's the way Alice has always been.' The timing of Brock's passing is poignant. It's long been a Thanksgiving tradition for radio stations across the country to broadcast Guthrie's 18-minute spoken word ramble that made 'Alice' famous."

Doctorow, "The far right grows through 'disaster fantasies': The core of the prepper fantasy: 'What if the world ended in the precise way that made me the most important person?' The ultra-rich fantasize about emerging from luxury bunkers with an army of mercs and thumbdrives full of bitcoin to a world in ruins that they restructure using their 'leadership skills.' The ethnographer Rich Miller spent his career embedding with preppers, eventually writing the canonical book of the fantasies that power their obsessions, Dancing at Armageddon: Survivalism and Chaos in Modern Times. Miller recounts how the disasters that preppers prepare for are the disasters that will call upon their skills, like the water chemist who's devoted his life to preparing to help his community recover from a terrorist attack on its water supply; and who, when pressed, has no theory as to why any terrorist would stage such an attack. Prepping is what happens when you are consumed by the fantasy of a terrible omnicrisis that you can solve, personally. It's an individualistic fantasy, and that makes it inherently neoliberal. Neoliberalism's mind-zap is to convince us all that our only role in society is as an individual ('There is no such thing as society' – M. Thatcher)."

In These Times, "Democratic Elites Blame Everyone But Themselves for Historic Collapse: Understandably, the blame game for who was responsible for this collapse is quickly underway. But, just like with the post 2016 recriminations, the very same people driving the narrative of who is responsible are themselves largely responsible—or at least in and of the same media and political class as those who are. As a result, with rare exception, those being blamed are not Democratic Party elites, liberal media institutions, or the corporate consulting world they operate in—but outside economic forces, transgender people, immigrants, and a host of either powerless minority groups or vague-to-the-point-of-meaningless generalities."

Matt Stoller at The Lever, "How Democrats Learned To Love Losing: The Democratic Party has embraced a cult of powerlessness — and now they're taking down hugely popular antitrust policy along with it. For the last few weeks, I've been mulling over a question that I think will bedevil all of us in the antimonopoly space for years, perhaps decades. Antimonopoly policy is immensely popular, and there hasn't been an administration as aggressive on antitrust in our lifetimes as there was under Joe Biden. Yet, voters soundly rejected his successor, Kamala Harris, and thrashed the party in power. And while antimonopoly politics sits uneasily in the Democratic Party, that is where it sits. Lina Khan, Rohit Chopra, and Jonathan Kanter will be out of power soon. So what happened? And why did Democrats lose so badly? I don't think the answer is simple, nor is it right to characterize the problem as solely one involving the Democratic Party. In 2006, 2008, 2010, 2014, 2016, 2018, 2020, 2022, and 2024, voters have voted against the incumbent party. If you look at the recriminations among Democrats, they reveal, unwittingly, a broad theme that I've noticed with roots that go back to the middle of the 20th century. And while these observations are focused on Democrats, people on the right will recognize in their institutions a similar set of challenges."

"U.S. officials who hated 'woke' investing won't stop buying Israel Bonds: Budget-strapped states and municipalities have accrued $1.7 billion dollars-worth of these dubious securities" They insisted it would be irresponsible to get involved with "woke" investments because they owed it to their constituents to make money for them, but that went out the window when they decided Israel was a deserving needy party.

Even the Cato Institute admits it, "Trump's Immigration Policies Made America Less Safe. Here's the Data."

Gratifying take-down of Yggy in Current Affairs, "Matt Yglesias Is Confidently Wrong About Everything: The Biden administration's favorite centrist pundit produces smug pseudo-analysis that cannot be considered serious thought. He ought to be permanently disregarded."

"Wildlife photographer of the year 2024 winners – in pictures"