…meanwhile…

Our Holiday Break: We are taking off for Festivus (Monday, the 23rd), Christmas, Hanukkah and Kwanza and will return after New Years, on Thursday, January 2. Happy Holidays to all.

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Bully Tariffs – President-elect Trump wants to take back the Panama Canal over – irony alert – tariffs of 50 cents to $300,000 the country charges US ships crossing the canal to get between the Atlantic and the Pacific oceans. 

“It was given to Panama and to the people of Panama, but it has provisions, you gotta treat us fairly and they haven’t treated us fairly,” Trump told Turning Point’s “American Fest” Sunday, according to The Hill.

“Take it back,” an audience member shouted. 

“That’s a good idea,” Trump replied. 

The US handed it over to Panama in 1999, in an agreement forged during the Carter administration. 

How much in control … is the incoming Trump administration? We saw last week when a continuing resolution that would have suspended the debt ceiling so that Trump & Co. (World’s Richest Man Elon Musk) could quickly begin cutting corporate taxes at-will that its power is not as absolute as his “mandate” with an under-50% popular vote win might suggest. Hard-line Freedom Caucus House Republicans (who basically are Obama-era Tea Partiers gone full-MAGA) voted down that CR, despite a threat by Musk to use a small chunk of his estimated $400 billion to primary Republicans who don’t fall into line.

After they didn’t fall into line, Musk dropped the threat. 

--Compiled and edited by Todd Lassa