spaceghoti

So far, 16 members of Congress—eight Democrats and eight Republicans—have announced they are retiring from public office before the next election. And there could be more as retirements tend to spike after the holidays.

While much of the retirement attention has been on the Democrats, who lost their only chance of holding on to a Senate seat in solidly red West Virginia, and a handful of House members who had success in swing districts, political experts say that the surge of retirements could spell bad news for Republicans.

When the public asks, “How did we get here?” after each mass shooting, the answer goes beyond National Rifle Association lobbyists and Second Amendment zealots. It lies in large measure with the strategies of firearms executives like [Richard E.] Dyke. Long before his competitors, the mercurial showman saw the profits in a product that tapped into Americans’ primal fears, and he pulled the mundane levers of American business and politics to get what he wanted.

Dyke brought the AR-15 semi-automatic rifle, which had been considered taboo to market to civilians, into general circulation, and helped keep it there. A folksy turnaround artist who spun all manner of companies into gold, he bought a failing gun maker for $241,000 and built it over more than a quarter-century into a $76 million business producing 9,000 guns a month. Bushmaster, which operated out of a facility just 30 miles from the Lewiston massacre, was the nation’s leading seller of AR-15s for nearly a decade. It also made Dyke rich. He owned at least four homes, a $315,000 Rolls Royce and a helicopter, in which he enjoyed landing on the lawn of his alma mater, Husson University.

The average long-term U.S. mortgage rate fell for the fourth time in as many weeks, more positive news for prospective homebuyers who have been held back by sharply higher borrowing costs and heightened competition for relatively few homes for sale.

The latest decline brought the average rate on a 30-year mortgage down to 7.29% from 7.44% last week, mortgage buyer Freddie Mac said Wednesday. A year ago, the rate averaged 6.58%.

This Thanksgiving, with wars overseas and fears heightening over the potential return to office of a would-be autocrat, it may feel as if there’s not much to be thankful for on the political front. However, President Joe Biden and the U.S. Senate deserve gratitude for a major success of his first three years in office: judicial appointments. Indeed, one of Biden’s greatest domestic successes has been to revitalize and improve smooth, fair processes to nominate and confirm well-qualified, mainstream judicial candidates who are diverse in terms of ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, ideology, and experience. When campaigning for president and governing since the election, Biden pledged to enhance selection by restoring and improving certain nomination and confirmation rules and customs that former President Donald Trump and two GOP Senate majorities had severely undercut. Biden also promised to counter his predecessor’s appointment of three extremely ideologically conservative justices, 54 similar circuit judges, and 178 comparatively analogous district jurists, even as Trump left 50 district vacancies, by confirming a diverse set of nominees. The president has honored these vows since January 2021.

The Fifth Circuit’s decision in Jarkesy isn’t particularly surprising. Indeed, it’s typical of a court that routinely hands down dubiously reasoned decisions that attempt to sabotage core functions of the federal government. We are less than two months into the Supreme Court’s current term, and it’s already heard two similar cases arising out of the Fifth Circuit — one of which declared a different agency, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, unconstitutional, and another which held that domestic abusers have a constitutional right to own a gun — neither of which the Supreme Court seems likely to affirm.

Jarkesy, however, could potentially end differently. None of the three rationales the Fifth Circuit offered for neutering the SEC are especially persuasive, but one of them is grounded in a pet project of the conservative Federalist Society known as the “unitary executive” — a project for which the current Court’s GOP-appointed majority has shown a great deal of sympathy.

In the 2020 presidential election cycle, more than $14bn went to federal candidates, party committees, and Super Pacs – double the $7bn doled out in the 2016 cycle. Total giving in 2024 is bound to be much higher.

That money is not supporting US democracy. If anything, that money is contributing to rising Trumpism and neofascism.

Monday’s oral argument in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit on the validity of Judge Tanya Chutkan’s limited ban of defendant Donald Trump’s pretrial free speech rights underscores the uniquely problematic nature of the most important criminal prosecution in the nation’s history.

While Chutkan’s pretrial gag order was narrowly drawn to preclude only gangsterlike attacks on prosecutors, court staff, and trial witnesses—a much narrower ban than the government had sought—the former president’s lawyers argued that absent their client’s remarks having crossed any criminal lines, the First Amendment precludes imposition of the gag order. After a notably long 2½-hour debate about where such lines can and should be drawn, and the level of threat to witnesses that must be established before a gag order can be issued, the court adjourned to consider the matter.

"A fiscal commission is direly needed," Republican Senator Mike Braun, a Budget Committee member, said in an interview.

Braun said deficits and debt could become an important issue in the 2024 elections, especially as "the heavy weight of paying interest will start crowding out all the other things," referring to the cost of federal programs ranging from defense to homeland security.

Somehow he fails to mention how this ballooning debt was precipitated by the tax cuts he and his ilk passed under Trump, followed by the constant threat of shutdown and defaulting on debts by his party.

Expect nothing but nonsense from Republican leadership on this issue.

Federal Reserve officials concluded earlier this month that inflation was steadily falling and agreed to closely monitor incoming data to ensure that the pace of price increases would continue slowing toward their 2% target, according to the minutes of their meeting released Tuesday.

As a result, the policymakers decided to leave their key benchmark rate unchanged but to keep it elevated for an extended period. Speaking at a news conference after the meeting, Fed Chair Jerome Powell kept the door open for another rate hike, though most economists say they think the central bank is done raising rates.

Mailed ballots that arrive on time but in envelopes without dates handwritten by Pennsylvania voters should be counted, a federal judge ruled Tuesday in a case that's likely to end up before the U.S. Supreme Court.

The ruling by U.S. District Judge Susan Paradise Baxter is expected to be appealed to the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals before it ultimately reaches the high court, whose final word on what are often referred to as "undated ballots" may help determine the outcome of the 2024 presidential race and other key upcoming elections in the swing state.

Gordon said there's also a ton of uncertainty surrounding the Social Security program itself. Because of this, there will likely be reduced benefits in the future to keep the program solvent.

Couples who wait until the higher earning spouses max their benefits at age 70 face additional issues.

I can't help but note that Newsweek didn't even attempt to discuss the prospect of increasing payments to Social Security from upper income earners or requiring Congress to payback the "loans" they took from it to pay for military expenditures.

Members of the United Auto Workers have overwhelmingly approved a contract that will deliver higher wages, assure them of a role in the EV transition, and possibly lead toward greater unionization of the auto sector. With all of the benefits the pact provides, tens of thousands of people will immediately see their pay rise more than 40 percent, the union said.

The union’s ratification of the pact, by a margin of 64 percent, with Ford, General Motors, and Stellantis followed a two-month strike. Though the electric vehicle transition was never an explicit part of bargaining, it ran as a simultaneously tense and hopeful undercurrent through the walkouts, pickets, and negotiations. This contract, analysts say, will allow the union’s 150,000 members to maintain their quality of life as the nation decarbonizes the transportation sector.