Prices rose 0.3% month-over-month in November after 0.2% increases each month from July to October, the Labor Department reports, for an annual Consumer Price Index of 2.7%, up from a 2.6% rate in October. Shelter was up 0.3% in November, to account for nearly 40% of increases, and food was up 0.4%. [Bureau of Labor Statistics chart]
FRIDAY 12/13/24
Give America Polio Again? – As much fear as there is in many political corners of the potential effect on the nation of mass immigrant deportation, or across-the-board tariffs under the incoming Trump administration, the appointment of two ex-Democrats maybe triggering the most angst.
There’s Tulsi Gabbard, with whom Senate Democrats refused to meet earlier this week to discuss her nomination to be Trump’s director of national intelligence, according to Real Clear Politics. Gabbard quit her House seat as a Democrat from Hawaii in 2022 and called her former party “an elitist cabal of warmongers.” She previously had met twice with Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad in 2017, three years before her unsuccessful run for the Democratic presidential nomination.
Then there’s Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s attorney, Aaron Siri, who is helping the Health and Human Services secretary nominee to choose federal officers. The New York Times reports that Siri has petitioned the government to revoke its approval of the polio vaccine, which has been saving lives since 1955, as well as 13 other vaccines. Siri has also challenged, and in some cases killed COVID mandates across the US, sued federal agencies to disclose vaccine approval research and subjected prominent vaccine scientists to “grueling” videotaped depositions.
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Dem Antipathy for Sinema, Manchin – Senate Democrats are “livid” over the votes of Krysten Sinema (I-AZ) and Joe Manchin (D-WV) that sunk President Biden’s renomination of Lauren McFarren to the National Relations Labor Board, The Hill reports. Blocking McFarren’s re-appointment and handing Republicans the five-member NLRB’s majority was described by Democrats as “pathetic” and “disappointing.” Had either senator, who had regularly caucused with the Democrats, voted “yes” to McFarren, her re-appointment would have likely passed 50 to 49.
“I think people are not sorry to see them go,” one anonymous Democratic senator told The Hill, of Sinema and Manchin.
“Millions of working people across the country will pay the price for their actions,” said Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA).
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Sixty-Three More Fed Judges – President Biden is threatening to veto a bill the House passed Wednesday that would create 63 new federal judgeships, the first expansion in decades, between 2025 and 2035, in order to ease a backlog in the federal court system, CQ Roll Call reports. The House passed the bill 236-173, with 29 Democrats joining 209 Republicans this week, after the Senate approved the measure by unanimous consent in August.
Obviously, the incoming Trump administration would get the first serious shot at nominating new federal judges, with at least two-years support from the GOP Senate majority.
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Lake for VoA? – President-elect Trump’s naming on Truth Social of twice-failed Arizona MAGA candidate Kari Lake to lead the Voice of America may not go very far. Lake, a former television news anchor herself, has vowed to be reporters’ “worst nightmare,” according to Vanity Fair. But the incoming Trump administration’s apparent plan to turn VoA into its own international propaganda arm runs into a 2020 rule issued to prevent the head of the US Agency for Global Media from hiring or firing a VoA chief without approval by the International Broadcasting Advisory Board, according to The New Republic.
--TL
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THURSDAY 12/12/24
Timing is Key – President-elect Trump rang the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange Thursday morning (per NPR), something he never got to do when he was 45th president. Seems to be a sign of how the business and finance world has eased into an obvious embrace of Donald J. Trump’s specific brand of anti-regulation, populist Republicanism.
Meanwhile … Trump is Time’s 2024 Person of the Year; “For marshalling a comeback of historic proportions, for driving a once-in-a-generation political realignment, for reshaping the American presidency and altering America’s role in the world… ”
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Biden Clemencies – Described as the largest-single act of clemency in modern history, President Biden has commuted about 1,500 people while also issuing 39 more presidential pardons. The commutations release US citizens convicted of non-violent crimes, mostly drug charges who have shown “successful rehabilitation,” according to The Independent.
The Biden White House promised to continue reviewing clemency petitions to “advance equal justice” and “provide meaningful second chances” before January 20.
“America was built on the promise of possibility of second chances,” Biden said in a White House statement.
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Wray Down and Out – He certainly is no J. Edgar Hoover, who founded the FBI in 1935 and served as its director up to his death in 1972. Christopher Wray will even fall short as director of the FBI, of matching the life of Quinn Martin’s original, The FBI, which brought real cases to television from 1965 to 1974.
Christopher Wray announced he is stepping down as FBI director ahead of President-elect Trump’s inauguration next month, seven years into his 10-year term, to make way for Kash Patel.
“After weeks of careful thought, I’ve decided the right thing for the bureau is for me to serve until the end of the current administration in January and then step down,” Wray told colleagues Wednesday at FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C. (per Politico).
Then-first term President Trump appointed Wray to be FBI director in 2017, but the two quickly got sideways. That culminated in the FBI’s search of Mar-a-Lago for classified documents Trump kept after he left office. (The search, on August 8, 2022, coincidentally was the 48th anniversary of President Nixon’s resignation over Watergate.)
“The resignation of Christopher Wray is a great day for America,” Trump wrote on Truth Social with his signature capitalization, “as it will end the Weaponization of what has become known as the United States Department of Injustice. I just don’t know what happened to him.”
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Meta Million for Trump – Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago after the November 5 election almost recalls the visit in February 2021 by then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), which began to flip then-ex-President Trump’s post-January 6th political fortunes. Zuckerberg and Meta’s Facebook had never been connected with the Trump camp – until now. With Elon Musk leading a cadre of Silicon Valley billionaires toward MAGA, Zuckerberg’s Meta confirmed to various news outlets Wednesday it has donated $1 million to President-elect Trump’s inaugural fund, Forbes reports.
--Compiled and edited by Todd Lassa