The guy is probably protecting any severance pay and pensions he can now continually claim… versus… Trump removing all of those along with his job/role, when he takes over the presidency.
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Protection against this sort of thing was one of the Post-Watergate reforms enacted. Directors get 10 years terms to uncouple their appointment, and theoretically their direction, from presidential politics. That leaves them only being able to be terminated for cause. Since this change was brought in only 2 directors have been removed - one by Clinton with overwhelming bipartisan support after he was found to have been using department funds for personal use, and of course Trump famously fired Comey. Everyone knew the stated reason for that firing were laughable (by talking publicly about the Clinton investigation he hurt her prospects in the election), but Dems had already been critical of him over those very issues and so it was not really a firing they could rally against. Wray is different.
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And right on cue, all the MAGA weirdos are dog piling anyone who presents this correctly as a backtrack from his “prices will come down” schtick of the campaign by pointing out that “actually deflation is bad”
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These are people who were imprisoned for either simple possession drug crimes or homosexuality, convictions that either wouldn’t be illegal today or given sentences short enough that they’d have already served their time. Given his role in the drug laws that imprisoned most of these people he had been under pressure from within to take this sort of action. The fact he had not been receptive to those arguments is one of the sources of criticism from within the Dem party over his Hunter pardon. In short, it would have been easier to present it as a righting of a miscarriage of justice had he actually shown concerns for miscarriage of justice prior to that, or along with that.
This is undoubtedly good, but the move coming now, several weeks after the Hunter pardon really reinforces the idea that his pardon was enacted without involvement of his political team, and they are now left running things with Biden largely handwaving his responsibilities over the last week as Trump rapidly transitions from president elect to acting president even before inauguration.
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Anyway, as for Hunter, a reminder that the main source used to push corruption allegations against him and Joe were fabricated, and were done so by a source already flagged as a Russian agent, and this is what caused the Trumpy Special Prosecutor to pull the previously agreed upon and standard plea deal
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This is really interesting from 538
Basically, due to the small state advantage in the Senate, if all seats were up in the same election, it would require a 6 point national vote margin for Dems to win the majority of the seats. It was less than 10 years ago when Harry Reid was still leading the Senate and the focus on politicial gerrymandering had people talking about how the Senate was safely blue but the house was going to be under Republican control for a generation.
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Dual loyalty tropes are a standard form of anti-Semitism when raised against American Jews, but they are now just a standard observation about politically engaged evangelicals - fucking clown shows up to work at the house in IDF uniform
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Who is that?!?
I’m wary of how they’re deciding this, because their whole partisanship lean metric would have favoured Democrats in 2014 (75% of 2012 + 25% of 2008).
They also do weight incumbency into this, which I suspect would have favoured 2014 a lot more than 2024, just based on that alone. That said, the losses were in some states which did have multi-term incumbents (Tester, Brown, and Casey all had 3 terms).
I’m wondering how much of this has to do with increased straight-ticket voting and political polarisation combining with a presidential election. Brown was an economic populist, and I think all 3 of them regularly ran ahead of their presidential candidates in those years where they coincided with the presidential elections? I don’t see how they will be able to retake the Senate next cycle though, they would have to defend Georgia, Michigan, Minnesota, New Mexico, with no obvious pickup opportunities…
I guess what I’m saying is, enjoy being a Russian vassal state.
Brian Mast - the new leader of the House Foreign Affairs committee 
I was just reminded that the rules regarding filling the position are different when the vacancy is from a resignation vs firing. Had Wray held out to force Trump to fire him then the rules over how the vacancy can be filled would be stricter. Trump has now had the door opened for him to install someone “temporarily” who would not get senate confirmation.
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A lot of conversation has been had since the election on how the theory that a big part of the Dems’ problem has been the sway that advocacy groups have within the party who have increasingly become unrepresentative of the groups they claim to represent in terms of priorities and policy objectives (e.g. hispanic groups pushing the use of latinx as a descriptor despite it being rejected by the overwhelming majority of hispanic voters).
This is a conversation about that issue that illustrates just how challenging it is to manage the politics of the immigration/border issues
https://x.com/ReichlinMelnick/status/1866914278436995206
- Atlantic publishes a piece arguing that immigration “groups” drove Biden to making decisions that failed to address the issues he inherited in an attempt to pander to groups the hispanic vote
- It is called out by people raising factual issues with the piece and arguing it fails to deal with the complexities of what the alternatives were
- Smug liberal commentators wade in saying “these were the alternatives that had he done he wouldnt have had a political issue to deal with”
- Actual border/immigration expert then responds pointing out that 1) the things being argued “he shouldn’t have waited to do until recently” were in fact things that couldnt be done until multiple behind the scenes changes were made, and they spent a lot of this time working on those changes, and 2) the policies being advocated for give you something to point to and say “I did x” but have proven to be desperately ineffective in terms of achieving the outcomes we say we want.
It is probably true of lots of policy areas, but it really illustrates that when it comes to the border people prefer showy political theatre that allows you to point to things you’ve done more than they care about the result of said things. It is one thing for Republicans to treat a Democratic party president like this, but it really drives home the challenge when legacy media and even liberal commentators do the same.
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So he is now level with that great democratic leader Josef Stalin as being named twice.
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And that ever honest politician Richard Nixon who was also twice named PoTY
Other great leaders and standing examples of humanity to get this award are George W. Bush, Vladimir Putin, FW De Klerk, Hitler, Ruhollah Khomeini
So it looks like he is in good stead
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Did anyone say TWICE
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This is why criticisms from people about ideologues not being able to find middle ground with Kennedy are so off base
https://x.com/By_CJewett/status/1867549468448506274
The things we can agree on with Kennedy are abstract (Americas are generally unhealthy) and not directly addressable by any single policy, especially not one lead by the head of HHS (most of his ideas are more directly related to the specific workings of agencies under the HHS umbrella who will have their own leader, like the FDA, or related to completely different agencies like EPA or AG). Whereas the specific things he wants to do are dumb, demonstrate an unseriousness about the process of how we actually know stuff (“we just want to ask questions”…about things the various agencies have already asked and answered), and incredibly dangerous.
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So incredibly bad and grifty. Lots of the tech bros in Theil’s bubble are involved in FinTech that is often scam adjacent. They act like banks but arent and so arent protected by the FDIC. Getting rid of the FDIC would eliminate the primary differentiator between these FinTech start ups and traditional banks, with no benefit for anyone else.
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…and set the American financial system back to the regulatory standard of 1929. I don’t even know what it would like for a big American bank to try to comply with the Basel regime without that regulatory structure.
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