KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Georgia Trump Haters Are Getting Their Fani Handed to Them. “The people who are most vehement about keeping Trump off the 2024 ballot because it’s the ‘right’ thing to do have long struck me as a collection of bottom-feeders who would sell their mothers for beer money. Until now, New York County District Attorney Alvin Bragg has seemed like the biggest reprobate of the bunch. He may yet prove me right but, for the moment, there is a new lowlife champ in town.”

WOEING: Workers at Boeing Subcontractor Told to Falsify Records, New Investigation Finds. “Less than a month before a door plug on a Boeing aircraft blew off midflight, employees at Spirit AeroSystems, a subcontractor for Boeing, had tried to warn corporate officials about serious safety problems with parts for 737 MAX jets. But those warnings went unheeded, and the employees were told to falsify records, according to a new investigation by The Lever on a federal complaint filed by workers at Spirit.”

LEFTISM IS A DEATH CULT: Far-Left Journalists Caught on Hot Mic Joking About What They Really Want for Trump.

XI’S GOTTA HAVE IT: Xi’s solution for China’s economy risks triggering new trade war.

As China’s property sector declines, President Xi Jinping needs to reshape the nation’s economic model to drive growth over the next decade. His government’s solution risks igniting a new wave of trade tensions across the globe.

China’s leaders are pouring money into manufacturing as property-related activity, which once spurred about a fifth of the economy’s expansion, turned into a drag on growth in 2022. Part of that focus is what they call the “new three” growth drivers of electric vehicles (EVs), batteries and renewable energy, aiding the world’s decarbonisation push and fuelling demand for commodities such as copper and lithium.

So far, the strategy is helping China avoid the recessions that hit Japan in the 1990s and the United States in 2008 when their housing markets melted down. The world’s second-biggest economy is now growing at about 5 per cent a year. Yet it is also fuelling imbalances that are setting the stage for renewed global trade tensions between China and the developed world, as well as emerging economies that are pushing to reach the lower rungs of the industrialisation ladder.

Seems like a great reason to stop mandating and subsidizing electric vehicles.

IMPARTIALITY: Trump Shows Up in Federal Court and Witnesses Major Case of TDS by Judges.

WHAT WILL THEY THINK OF NEXT? ‘Plant-Based Peanut Butter’ Is a Thing People Buy, and I Can’t Stop Laughing.

HMM: Looks Like the Georgia RICO Case Against Trump Just Imploded.

ANALYSIS: TRUE. Biden’s Campaign Doesn’t ‘Brief’ The Media, It Colludes With Them.

AN ENTIRELY PREDICTABLE SUDDEN DISASTER 30 YEARS IN THE MAKING: Yep, Groupthink Has Doomed California, Just Like I Said It Would.

EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: 56 million Americans have been in credit card debt for at least a year. ‘We are seeing pockets of trouble,’ expert says.A

ltogether, card balances now total $1.08 trillion, according to the latest quarterly report from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, a new record.

“Over the past two years, Americans’ credit card balances have skyrocketed 40%,” said Ted Rossman, senior industry analyst at Bankrate.

“While Americans are managing their credit card debt pretty well, all things considered, we are seeing pockets of trouble at the household level,” Rossman said.

More cardholders are carrying debt from month to month and fewer are able to pay off their balances in full, according to a separate report by Bankrate.com.

They keep telling me the economy is booming but all I see is mountains of debt.

MILT HARRIS: Tearing Down Hatred Where Hatred Doesn’t Exist.

MARKET SHARE: U.S. crude oil falls 4% as Saudi price cut heightens global demand worries.

The sell-off comes after Saudi Aramco on Sunday sharply lowered the price of Arab Light Crude to Asian customers by $2 per barrel.

The Saudi price cut comes amid persistent market weakness due in large part to record U.S. crude production and softening demand in China. OPEC and its allies are cutting their production by 2.2 million barrels per day this quarter in an effort to balance the market.

“While it is possible that the price reduction was to maintain market share in the face of production cuts, the market is taking it as a clear sign that the economy is slowing. Maybe the landing might not be so soft,” Phil Flynn of The Price Futures Group wrote on Monday.

U.S. crude and Brent, the global benchmark, both ended the first week of 2024 more than 2% higher on mounting tensions in the Middle East, but supply and demand concerns have persistently overshadowed geopolitical risks in the market.

“The market seems to feel that geopolitical risk will not impact supply and if it does, demand is weak so it will not matter,” Flynn wrote.

The Saudis are trying to keep market share with lower prices which, in the short run, can hurt American producers with higher production costs. Longer run, the Permian Basin will still be there.

POT, MEET KETTLE: Kamala Harris Accuses Republicans of ‘Trying to Silence’ Voters

DON’T GET COCKY: Top South Carolina Democrat Jim Clyburn says he is ‘very concerned’ as Biden tanks with African-American voters and is not ‘breaking through the MAGA wall.

Rep. James Clyburn, an early Biden supporter who propelled him to victory in South Carolina, now says he is ‘very concerned’ with the president’s standing with the black community.

Clyburn was asked on CNN about President Joe Biden’s African American approval ahead of a Biden trip to Clyburn’s home state on Monday.

‘I’m not worried — I’m very concerned,’ the South Carolina Democrat said.

Biden is set to deliver remarks at the historic Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, the site of the 2015 shooting that left nine African Americans killed by a white supremacist.

Clyburn revealed he has sat down with the president to voice his concerns. He added that he has ‘no problem with the Biden administration and what it has done,’ but worries that the White House is not selling its successes to voters.

Whenever the stated concern about a candidate is that he’s failing to communicate his successes, the real concern is that the candidate doesn’t have any successes worth communicating.

That aside, Clyburn single-handedly saved Biden’s failing 2020 primary effort and presumably knows a thing or two about where Biden stands with his usually most reliable constituents.

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Threats to ‘Democracy’ Abound, but They’re Coming From the Left. “I wholeheartedly agree that the fabric of the Republic — what they call “democracy” — is under siege. Where they and the TDS squish Republicans get it all wrong is that Donald J. Trump is not the existential threat here in 2024. Let’s point a few quick fingers at the people who are actually mucking up the works, update our scorecards, then get on with Taco Tuesday.”

ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Where Now for Nuclear Power?

More and more climate advocates now recognize that renewables alone can’t deliver the zero-carbon power grid they desire. Since wind and solar produce power only about one-third of the time, they require massive amounts of “dispatchable generation”—power that can be produced whenever it’s needed—as backup. In the U.S., that backup power increasingly comes from natural gas. The need for all that redundant generation capacity means that trying to run the grid with mostly wind and solar results in both higher costs and higher emissions than backers typically claim.

Some experts argue that the looming crisis in reliability is a more pressing problem than carbon emissions. They warn that relying on a grid powered mostly by wind, solar, and gas could lead to disaster. Thanks to fracking, the U.S. is blessed with ample gas resources. But as Texas learned during the deadly winter blackouts of 2021, natural-gas supplies often fall short during cold snaps. Grid resilience requires robust power sources that don’t depend on the weather—or on just-in-time fuel deliveries. Coal and nuclear plants store fuel on site, which makes them a vital resource during power emergencies. With coal plants closing, and nuclear failing to expand, the U.S. grid faces a dangerous shortfall in reliable capacity.

Despite these risks, the push to eliminate coal power remains politically potent and seems unlikely to be reversed. That leaves nuclear as our only major power source that is at once dependable, zero-carbon, and capable of significant growth in capacity. If nuclear is ever to become a growing source of electricity, it’s vital to understand what went wrong with the first major effort to build a commercially viable, advanced-reactor power plant.

Read the whole thing.

THAT’S A LOT OF FEDS: Tucker Carlson’s Latest Bombshell About January 6 Might Make You Rethink Everything.

HMM: Did Israel Just Declare Victory Over Hamas? “No one questioned the IDF’s ability to ability to dismantle Hamas. Israel has one of the most modern, disciplined, technically savvy and motivated armed forces in the world. (Having enemies who literally call for the complete extermination of the Jewish race is a powerful motivator.) Hamas, on the other hand, is a terrorist organization whose main skills seem to be raping and murdering civilians and building tunnels. The only question was whether the the feckless, Iran-dealing Biden Administration and it’s Obama foreign policy retreads would be able to pressure Israel into halting before the job was done. That appears not to be the case.”

NOW IT’S A CRIME JUST TO SHOW UP AND PEACEABLY ASSEMBLE OUTDOORS: U.S. District Attorney Announces He Will Target People on the Lawn on Jan. 6.

ARE YOU UP ON THE LATEST PANICMONGERING? ZOMG You’re Going to Die Three Times from the Tripledemic. “What’s a government gotta do to scare people into submission these days?”

EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: Offices Around America Hit a New Vacancy Record. “A staggering 19.6% of office space in major U.S. cities wasn’t leased as of the fourth quarter, according to Moody’s Analytics, up from 18.8% a year earlier. That is slightly above the previous records of 19.3% set in 1986 and 1991 and the highest number since at least 1979, which is as far back as Moody’s data go.”

Jimmy Carter always was the best-case scenario.

MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT [VIP]: Read the Dem Script for Why Biden Shouldn’t Debate Trump. “Democrats had the weekend to assess the damage done by Presidentish Joe Biden’s Jan. 6 speech on Friday and, judging by a new report in The Hill today, the consensus is ‘Oh, crap.'”

CHANGE: Jeff Bezos–backed AI search startup’s CEO says ‘Google is going to be viewed as something that’s legacy and old.’

Founded in August 2022, the startup known as Perplexity aims to challenge Google by offering an AI-based search engine that is “part chatbot and part search engine, offering real-time information and footnotes showing the sources of its answers,” according to its website.

When deciding to invest, Bezos was no doubt looking at the numbers, as he did in the 1990s. Perplexity, while still not profitable, has quickly grown to 10 million monthly active users while almost entirely skipping traditional marketing, according to the company. It further claims that more than a million people have installed its mobile apps on the iOS and Android platforms, and it served over half a billion queries last year.

On Thursday, San Francisco–based Perplexity announced that it has raised $73.6 million from a group of investors led by venture capital firm IVP and including Bezos, the $1.2 trillion AI chip giant Nvidia, and Shopify cofounder Tobias Lütke.

Perplexity is “one of the few consumer AI products to reach this major milestone of 10 million MAUs,” said Jonathan Cohen, VP of Applied Research at Nvidia, in the announcement. AI will “transform how we access information,” he believes.

Not until they solve the problem of LLMs just making stuff up, plus the perhaps more intractable problem of generative AIs generating garbage-out that gets used as garbage-in for generative AIs generating even stinkier garbage.

JUSTICE: Biden Administration Improperly Tried Ex-Congressman, Conviction Tossed.

BIDENOMICS: Americans are racking up more ‘phantom debt’ — why that’s a problem.

Some types of debt can haunt you.

“Buy now, pay later” loans, especially, can be hard to track, making it easier for more consumers to get in over their heads, some experts say — even more than credit cards, which are simpler to account for, despite sky-high interest rates.

Over the holidays, the use of installment payments hit an all-time high, up 14% year over year, according to Adobe’s latest online shopping data.

Buy now, pay later is now one of the fastest-growing categories in consumer finance, according to a separate report by Wells Fargo.

“Because no central repository exists for monitoring it, growth of this ‘phantom debt’ could imply total household debt levels are actually higher than traditional measures,” said Tim Quinlan, senior economist at Wells Fargo and co-author of the report.

They keep telling me the economy is booming but all I see is mountains of debt — private and public.