October 1, 1924 – December 29, 2024, the 39th president (D) of the United States, 1977 – 1981. Awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, 2002. (Photo: The Carter Center)
HOLIDAY 12/23/24 -- 1/1/25
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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Why Gaetz Won’t be AG – Eponymous host of The Matt Gaetz Show on One America (ahem) News Network and former nominee to be attorney general by President-elect Trump regularly paid women for sex, including with a 17-year-old girl, between the time he joined Congress in 2017, and 2020, according to a 37-page House Ethics Committee report released Monday, The Wall Street Journal reports. The committee report, which the former Republican representative from Florida had asked a federal judge to block from release, also says Gaetz accepted impermissible gifts, including lodging and transportation for a 2018 trip to the Bahamas.
Gaetz is suing the House Ethics Committee for defamation.
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Biden Commutes 37 Sentences – President Biden commuted sentences for 37 of 40 men on federal death row, The New York Times reports. All 37 had been convicted on murder charges and will continue to serve life sentences after the commutations. The three federal prisoners who still face execution are Robert D. Bowers, 52, who in 2018 killed 11 worshipers at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh; Dylan Roof, 30, the white supremacist who killed nine Black parishioners in a 2015 shooting at a Charleston, South Carolina church; and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 31, who with his brother killed three and maimed more than a dozen in the 2013 bombing of the Boston Marathon.
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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