IT’S FAIR TO ASK IF THE BIG GUY AT LEAST GOT HIS TEN PERCENT: It Turns Out That Biden Never Considered the ‘Specifics’ of the 1500 Clemency Cases He Commuted.

THE FIFTEEN MILLION DOLLAR MAN:

ABC TOOK AWAY HIS SOCIAL MEDIA PRIVILEGES LMAAAAOOOOOOO https://t.co/wYQKy6V1k5

— Oilfield Rando (@Oilfield_Rando) December 15, 2024

Neither ABC nor Stephanopoulos said anything but this speaks volumes: ABC News settles defamation suit with Trump for $15 million.

ABC News will pay $15 million to a “presidential foundation and museum” in a settlement reached with President-elect Donald Trump in his defamation suit against the network and anchor George Stephanopoulos.

The settlement, which was filed publicly Saturday, reveals the network will also pay $1 million in Trump’s attorneys’ fees and will issue an apology.

ABC News will issue the following statement as an editor’s note on the online article at the center of the suit: “ABC News and George Stephanopoulos regret statements regarding President Donald J. Trump made during an interview by George Stephanopoulos with Rep. Nancy Mace on ABC’s This Week on March 10, 2024.”

“We are pleased that the parties have reached an agreement to dismiss the lawsuit on the terms in the court filing,” an ABC News spokesperson wrote in a statement.

Trump filed the lawsuit in Florida federal court earlier this year, arguing that Stephanopoulos and ABC News defamed him when the anchor said 10 times during a contentious on-air interview with South Carolina GOP Rep. Nancy Mace in March that a jury found Trump had “raped” E. Jean Carroll.

Trump will be pleased every time he remembers his future presidential foundation was funded in part by ABC.

HMM: Why Hasn’t Trump Said Anything About All the Drones? Weird, No?

UPDATE: You ask, Trump answers. “Can this really be happening without our government’s knowledge. I don’t think so! Let the public know, and now. Otherwise, shoot them down!!!”

FLORIDA MAN FRIDAY [VIP]: Stole a Rolls, Made His Own Drive-Thru. “It’s time for your much-needed break from the serious news, and this week, we have the man who really missed the Checkers drive-thru, how not to order sex on the beach, and Virginia Man shoplifting in front of 50 cops.”

BEST. CITY NAME. EVER.

SpaceX HQ will now officially be in the city of Starbase, Texas! https://t.co/zpN4t3mJQT

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 13, 2024

Please get this done, Judge Treviño.

IT’S TIME FOR VICTORIA TAFT’S West Coast, Messed Coast™ — Oh, Geez, Now It’s Happening in Oregon. “We’ve been wondering about those drones in New Jersey, but now Oregon has just said: Hold my IPA.”

OUCH: YouTube TV Raises Price 14%, to $83 per Month, Citing ‘Rising Cost of Content.’

YouTube TV is getting more expensive — outpacing the rate of inflation — with a 14% price increase for the streaming pay-TV package going into effect for new customers immediately.

The cost of a new YouTube TV base plan subscription is increasing from $72.99 to $82.99, starting Dec. 12, 2024, for new users, the company said in a message to customers Thursday. The new price will go into effect Jan. 13, 2025, for most existing users, while those on existing trials and promotional rates “will not be affected.” The increase is “due to the rising cost of content,” according to YouTube.

With the higher fee, YouTube TV has now more than doubled in price in just under five years, from $40/month as of March 2018 to $83/month.

Has the value of the content doubled?

COME SEE THE VIOLENCE INHERENT IN THE LEFTISM: ‘Understandable’ Violence and the Left. “Anger is natural. A desire to peacefully bring about change through the democratic process is natural. Wishing murder on civilians because of your own pathological immaturity is not natural.”

It certainly seems to be becoming habitual in some corners.

SYRIA GOES OUT OF THE FRYING PAN…

Female judges now excluded from courts in Syria.

The first step taken by Syria's new justice minister, Shadi Alwaisi, is to decree that female judges will be banned from courts that are now reserved exclusively for men. All pending cases handled by women will have to be… pic.twitter.com/D0VAZxmcGn

— Daniel Pawłowski (@pavvlovvsky13) December 12, 2024

…and into the sharia fire.

BLUE ON BLUE: It’s AOC vs. The Wicked Witch of the West in Oversight Committee Slugfest.

VIDEO: Diversity != Strength. “The ritual cliche invoked by the social justice left is that ‘diversity is strength.’ But as the Irish mother in the video notes, importing waves of unassimilated foreigners into local communities doesn’t strengthen them at all.”

NEVER CHANGE, ATLANTIC: Political Violence Is Kinda Mainstream, Ackshully.

K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: ‘Multilevel classes’ aren’t equitable or excellent, say teachers.

Mixing high-achieving, average and low-achieving students in the same class was a noble experiment, writes Ryan Normandin, a high school math and physics teacher in Newton, Massachusetts. But it’s not working in math, science and foreign language classes. Everyone learns less, he writes. The students who need the most support are doing the worst.

Tracking isn’t perfect, he writes. It can be hard for students to move up a level. Students tend to segregate by achievement and by race and ethnicity: Black, Hispanic and low-income students disproportionately take lower-level classes.

Multilevel classes in English and history had some success, writes Normandin. Students opted in. Teachers got support. Then administrators expanded the model to math, science and world languages, subjects that build on previous learning.

After three years, nearly all teachers at Newton South High, where he chairs the Faculty Council, say the model is failing students and exhausting teachers.

The only people who seem truly surprised by outcomes like this one are the experts.

BIDENFLATION:

🚨 INFLATION IS BACK UP 🚨

Wonder why?

The Fed has worked to quietly pump another $650 billion newly created dollars into the market over the last year.

This artificially gave the economy a buzz before the election, but now comes the inflation hangover.

As the money supply… pic.twitter.com/EzYuswALvL

— Richard A. Stern (@RichAStern) December 13, 2024

Plus this gem from Peter St. Onge in response: “The more the Fed prints, the greedier the grocers get.”

Flashback: Joe Biden, Milton Friedman, and the Tyranny of Tiny Minds.

Of all the stupid, petty, bigoted things Presidentish Biden ever sputtered, none bothers me so much as “Milton Friedman isn’t running the show anymore.”

In April of last year, when Biden’s $5 trillion “Build Back Better” scheme was first percolating in the dark, shriveled mass that was once his frontal lobe, the then-candidate told POLITICO he wanted “a new stimulus ‘a hell of a lot bigger’ than $2 trillion.”

“Milton Friedman isn’t running the show anymore,” a reportedly “fiery” Biden told POLITICO’s Michael Grunwald.

It wasn’t Biden’s first run-in with the libertarian-leaning, Nobel Prize-winning economist.

That was 2021. Biden spent his entire term butting heads with the late Friedman — and losing.

Blame it on the grocers, kulaks, hoarders, or the Jews, but in the end, “Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon.”

IT MIGHT BE THE ONLY CARD THEY HAVE LEFT TO PLAY: Iran’s Next Move Is Playing the Nuclear Card.

PAYBACK: Top Russian Cruise Missile Engineer Gunned Down Near Moscow.

Mikhail Shatsky was found dead in the Kuzminki forest park in the suburb of Kotelniki southeast of Moscow this week.

Shatsky was deputy chief of design and head of software at the Moscow Experimental Design Bureau Mars, which develops automatic control and navigation systems for satellites and unmanned aerial vehicles. Mars is part of Russia’s state nuclear corporation Rosatom.

Exiled opposition journalist Alexander Nevzorov, who first broke the news of the assassination, said Shatsky also oversaw upgrades of Kh-59 missiles into the low-flying subsonic Kh-69 versions.

The upgrades must be going well enough or Putin might have had him thrown out a window.

NAH, BUT HE’D HAVE GOTTEN A GREAT JOKE OUT OF IT: Ronald Reagan Is Spinning in His Grave Over This. “The Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation & Institute recently announced its recipients for the prestigious ‘Peace Through Strength Award,’ and the choices are raising eyebrows. This year’s honorees are Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and, for some reason that I cannot comprehend, President Biden’s Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin.”

EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: Goldman Delivers Grim Outlook For Prospective Homebuyers.

Given the latest inflation data, a largely in-line CPI report followed by a ‘red hot’ PPI print in November, this data suggests that longer-term yields are to stay higher over the medium- to longer-term, according to Bloomberg’s Simon White.

In other words, White suggests that this inflation data squashes the dovish party. As of late Thursday, the market is pricing in only two rate cuts for next year.

Goldman analysts noted that without interest rate relief and the general leanness of housing inventory, home prices are forecasted to increase by 3% YoY.

“Said differently, we estimate the mortgage payment on a median-priced single-family home is 35% of the median household income. Although this is down from 39% a year ago, it remains well above the 30% threshold for most lenders,” they explained.

They’ll turn us all into renters ’cause they’re easier to please.

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Great — Biden Just Let All of Hunter’s Friends Out of Jail. “Biden is cranky and vindictive, but the people who have been running his brain for the last four years have their downright evil moments. They’re the ones who drew up the list for Biden’s clemency frenzy. There were bound to be some unsavory characters on it.”

CHINA IS ASSHOE, EXHIBIT #1,000,006:

China is depleting the world's oceans of fish. Estimates are between 200,000 – 800,000 fishing vessels, going as far as Argentina.

They account for ~half of the worlds fishing catch and do not respect stewardship protocols to preserve ecosystems.

This is power projection. pic.twitter.com/6lGTm0oqPK

— Andrew Côté (@Andercot) December 11, 2024

Bullies push until they’re pushed back.

MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT [VIP]: Gray Swans, Regime Collapse, and the Kremlin.

Last week, 50-plus years of the Assad family’s Ba’ath Party rule ended after an 11-day lightning campaign by rebel forces that nobody saw coming. Could Vladimir Putin’s regime suffer a similar fate? Authoritarian regimes appear strong, invincible even, right up until the moment they disappear in a gray swan event.

In a Substack essay this week, Charles Hugh Smith defined a gray swan event as “an event that is known and possible to happen, but which is assumed to be unlikely to occur.” The most recent example is the fall of the Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria last weekend. People are right to marvel at how quickly it came undone but only after nearly 14 years of civil war. And there had been very little movement since March 2020.

Nevertheless, a gray swan appeared from nowhere two weeks ago, and 11 days later, Assad was history.

VIP members asked for longer essays and I’ve been happy to oblige.

MICHAEL LIND: The Re-Skilling of America.

What explains the large-scale miscredentialing of the American workforce? The endless greed of tuition-hungry universities is one factor. But the main cause is the insistence of many American employers, including federal, state, and local government, that new hires have college diplomas—even for jobs that are currently filled by workers without four-year degrees.

Like other forms of inflation, degree inflation reduces the inflated unit of currency. Today a worker earning between $40,000 and $60,000 in inflation-adjusted 2022 dollars is as likely to have a bachelor’s degree as a worker in 2006 who earned between $60,000 and $80,000, when there were fewer college graduates as a share of the workforce. According to the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity (FREOPP): “Between 1990 and 2021, all occupational categories except one—teachers and librarians—experienced degree inflation, meaning the proportion of prime-age workers with a bachelor’s degree increased.”

There is no reason to believe that receptionists and bank tellers with B.A.s in popular majors like communications or business, to say nothing of gender studies, are more productive and skilled than their non-college-educated predecessors who had high school educations plus on-the-job training. According to a survey of employers by Bloomberg, college diplomas are most often used as a screening device for entry-level job applicants, rather than as evidence that the potential hires have job-relevant skills: “For more than half of employers surveyed (60 percent), a college diploma was seen as a stand-in for work ethic, personal skills and mental capacity, as opposed to the actual skills associated with the job.”

I think Glenn might have had a thing or two to say about this topic a while back.

SARAH HOYT’S SHOCKED FACE WAS LAST SEEN WITH A BOTTLE OF XANAX: The FBI Paid People to Go to the J6 Riot. “The corporate media is ballyhooing one of the highlighted findings of the Inspector General (IG) as being proof that the FBI had nothing to do with the riot on Jan. 6, 2021. Nothing could be further from the truth. There were scores of federal and local assets from not only the FBI at the protest and riot that day but plenty of other three-letter federal and local agencies. Metropolitan Police had active agents provocateur on the ground. DHS, ATF, and other Beltway three letter agencies were on site that day.”

KRUISER: Just Sayin’ — I Never Asked to Be Pardoned for Crimes I Haven’t Committed.

The people being mentioned as being in need of “Get Out of Jail Free” cards in the next month haven’t been publicly lobbying for themselves, but it’s an almost certain bet that they’re jumping up and down screaming, “Me next!” behind the scenes.

As Scott wrote last week, Adam Schiff, Liz “I’m Just Like Lincoln” Cheney, and alleged physician Anthony Fauci headline the group of people most in need of an assist from President LOLEightyonemillion.

Schiff and Cheney are sweating bullets because they were members of the J6 House Soviet Select Committee on Daddy Issues, a pathetic un-American charade that only succeeded in wasting the taxpayers’ money.

Anthony Fauci is on the list for being Pol Pot, M.D. during the pandemic, of course. Four years later, we’re still waiting to see if he told the truth about anything other than the spelling of his name in 2020.

Read the whole thing — and I might have to steal “Pol Pot, M.D.”

WHOSE EMOTIONAL SUPPORT ROBOT FOR KIDS IS IT, ANYWAY? Startup will brick $800 emotional support robot for kids without refunds.

Embodied blamed its closure on a failed “critical funding round.”
…
The company didn’t provide further details about the pulled funding. Embodied’s previous backers have included Intel Capital, Toyota AI Ventures, Amazon Alexa Fund, Sony Innovation Fund, and Vulcan Capital, but we don’t know who the lead investor mentioned above is.

When it first announced Moxie in April 2020, Embodied described the robot as a “safe and engaging animate companion for children designed to help promote social, emotional, and cognitive development.” It advertised play built around “best practices in child development and early childhood education”; changing weekly themes, like empathy, friendship, and respect; and activities like meditation, reading, and drawing with the bot.

But soon, none of those features will be available, making the pricey children’s toy virtually useless. According to Embodied, Moxie can’t perform core functionality without cloud connectivity. Worse, owners apparently have an uncertain and limited amount of time until the devices are bricked.

Teach your kids the value of on-device functionality before you buy them a cloud-enabled emotional support robot.

Either that or tell them to play in the yard with the dog.