POPULATION

MSN -  Texas gained more new people than any other state between July 2023 and July 2024, according to Census data. Texas’s population jumped by 562,941 people. Florida saw the second highest numeric growth with 467,347 new people and California the third with 232,570.

Washington, D.C., and Florida both topped Texas percentage growth, with D.C.’s population increasing by 2.2% and Florida’s increasing by 2%. Texas saw a 1.8% increase in its population.

The latest estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau show that the nation’s population has topped 340 million people and is growing the fastest it has since 2001. The growth is primarily driven by net international migration, defined by the bureau as “any change of residence across U.S. borders.”

Every state saw an increase in international migration. Texas saw the third largest gain after Florida and California, 319,569 people. Texas saw the largest difference between the number of births and deaths, gaining 158,753 new people. Texas also saw the largest uptick in domestic migration, gaining 85,267 people.

COLLEGES & UNIVERSITIES

 CNN - Fear and uncertainty are spreading across many US college campuses ahead of President-elect Donald Trump’s January 20 inauguration, with some schools advising international students to return early from winter break amid promises of another travel ban like the one that stranded students abroad at the start of Trump’s last term.

In a country where more than 1.1 million international students enrolled in US colleges and universities during the 2023-24 academic year, the former president has pledged more hardline immigration policies upon his return to the White House, including an expansion of his previous travel ban on people from predominantly Muslim countries and the revocation of student visas of “radical anti-American and antisemitic foreigners.”  International students generally have nonimmigrant visas that allow them to study in the US but don’t provide a legal pathway to stay in the country.

 

DONALD TRUMP

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Via Adam Kinzinger

 Everything Trump promised to do on day one

MONEY

 Robert Reich -  For three decades after World War II, America created the largest middle class the world had ever seen. During those years, the earnings of the typical American worker doubled, just as the size of the American economy doubled.

Over the last 40 years, by contrast, the size of the economy has more than doubled again, but the earnings of the typical American have barely budged (adjusted for inflation). Most of the gains have gone to the top.

In the 1950s and 1960s, the CEOs of large corporations earned an average of about 20 times the pay of their typical worker. Now they rake in over 300 times the pay of an average worker.In the 1950s and 1960s, the richest 1 percent of Americans took home about 10 percent of the nation’s total income. Today they take home more than the bottom 90 percent put together.

Robert Reich - America has 815 billionaires as of this year. Collectively they have a record $6.7 trillion in wealth.  The bottom 50% of Americans control $3.7 trillion in wealth.

HOLIDAY SEASON

 The Guardian - A burial plot and a toilet seat top the list of the nation’s all-time worst Christmas gifts, according to research that suggests one in five Britons receive an unwanted present in their annual haul.More than 2,000 members of the public were polled by Which? about what they were given at Christmas last year, with 21% saying they had received an unwanted or unsuitable gift.

The consumer champion also asked people to tell them about the “worst present they had ever received”. Among the other duds were the secondhand tumble dryer a 19-year-old received from her boyfriend, roast beef given to a vegetarian and regifted shower gel from the year before.

When asked what people did with unwanted gifts, three in 10 (31%) admitted to getting rid of them: one in eight (12%) took them to a charity shop, one in 10 (10%) gave it to a friend or family member and 5% sold it on an online marketplace such as eBay or Vinted.

 Washington Post -  Between Nov. 1 and Dec. 24, U.S. retail sales rose 3.8% compared with the same period last year, Mastercard said. Online shopping drove the increase, rising 6.7%.What were people buying? Sweaters, smartwatches and skin-care sets, among other things. 

YOUTH

NY Times -   It’s time to talk about pornography and the young, scholars say

 

HEALTH

Nice News -  Previous research has shown that nearly 40% of Alzheimer’s disease and related dementia cases may be preventable or delayed. And last year, a team of U.K. researchers published a world-first study identifying risk factors that specifically apply to young-onset, or early-onset, dementia cases, meaning those diagnosed in people under age 65.

NBC News - When Tracy Pike learned he had Stage 4 stomach cancer, his doctor advised a routinely practiced treatment combining surgery and intensive chemotherapy – but the night before his first procedure, he was told insurance declined to cover the roughly $40,000 treatment after ruling it “not medically necessary.”

His wife, Angie, said the last straw came when she learned that one of the insurer’s physicians who had rejected the treatment was not a cancer doctor at all. He was an obstetrician-gynecologist. In January 2024, Tracy Pike died, leaving behind his wife of 22 years and their three children.

An NBC News investigation found that a cancer diagnosis, already a crushing blow to patients, is often compounded by insurance company denials of treatments and screenings recommended by a patient’s physician —  and it's only getting worse, according to the head of the American Medical Association.

Insurance companies say requiring doctors to justify their recommended treatment saves money. However, physicians argue that industry practices delay or outright prevent patient care, and families are left spending what could become their relative's final days navigating red tape and appealing denials. Read the full story here.

PETE HEGSETH

Who is Pete Hegseth?

httpis://www.aclu.orgm/ne.ws/civil-liberties/who-is-pete-hegseth

NOTE

 Service over the next three days is unpredictable what with your editor’s sons, wives and grandchildren being on the scene until Sunday. 

MINIMUM WAGE

 Marketplace -   Many states, cities and counties have been raising their minimum wages, in some cases well above the federal level. Another wave of hikes will kick in Jan. 1, with 21 states and 48 other jurisdictions boosting their minimum rates. In fact, by next year, about 1 in 3 U.S. workers will live in a place where the minimum wage is at or above $15 an hour. 

HOMELESS

 NPR -  In the six months since the U.S. Supreme Court made it easier for cities to crack down on homelessness, more than a hundred places around the country have banned people from sleeping outside even if they have nowhere else to go. The spike reflects widespread frustration over record-high rates of homelessness, along with drug use and mental breakdowns in public spaces. But advocates for the unhoused warn that more fines and jail time will only make the problem worse.

The new laws are in rural, urban and suburban towns and cities – both Republican-led and Democratic – and span every region, including in places not known for homelessness, like West Virginia, New Hampshire and Wyoming. Many of the bans are in California, home to about half of the nation's quarter of a million people who live outside.

 

DONALD TRUMP

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Data: Axios analysis of Rev.com transcripts. Chart: Erin Davis/Axios Visuals

 

 

The Guardian -  US business leaders are spending big on Donald Trump’s second inaugural fund, which is predicted to exceed even the record-setting $107m raised in 2017.The donations, which are not restricted by campaign finance laws, come as industries and business leaders seek to curry favor with the incoming administration after the president-elect decisively won a second, non-consecutive term in November.

Some of the planned donations reportedly include $1m each from Jeff Bezos’s Amazon, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Facebook parent company Meta, led by Mark Zuckerberg. Hedge-fund manager Ken Griffin has said he plans to donate $1m, Bloomberg reported; Uber and its CEO Dara Khosrowshahi are reported to be chipping in $1m each; and Toyota, Ford and General Motors are each peeling off $1m. Ford is also reportedly coupling its donation with a fleet of vehicles.

 Daily Mail UK -  Donald Trump has made his strongest bid yet to take over Canada, offering the Canadian people a 60 percent tax cut if they agree to join the US and become the 51st US state. The president-elect has in recent days suggested a territorial expansion into Canada, Greenland and Panama, and has mocked prime minister Justin Trudeau by calling him 'governor.' 

On Christmas, Trump escalated his campaigns against the governments of both Panama and Canada. 'Merry Christmas to all, including to the wonderful soldiers of China, who are lovingly, but illegally, operating the Panama Canal (where we lost 38,000 people in its building 110 years ago), always making certain that the United States puts in Billions of Dollars in “repair” money, but will have absolutely nothing to say about “anything,"' Trump wrote on Truth Social on Wednesday.

'Also, to Governor Justin Trudeau of Canada, whose Citizens’ Taxes are far too high, but if Canada was to become our 51st State, their Taxes would be cut by more than 60%, their businesses would immediately double in size, and they would be militarily protected like no other Country anywhere in the World.

'Likewise, to the people of Greenland, which is needed by the United States for National Security purposes and, who want the U.S. to be there, and we will!'

LIBERALS

Via Annie

 

MEDIA

Washington Post - If you had to guess which member of Congress would make light of how few Americans are watching television networks like CNN these days, you probably wouldn’t have picked Dick Durbin (D), the senior senator from Illinois.But that’s what Durbin did on Dec. 18 when parrying a question from CNN correspondent Manu Raju about whether lawmakers deserve a pay raise.

“People look at the performance of Congress and say, ‘Why should we give them more money?’” Raju asked.

“What about the media?” Durbin countered. “Half of your listeners are not there anymore, and you’re still getting the same paycheck. What’s going on?”

Television executives are also wondering what’s going on. The questions are particularly loud at CNN, which has seen a decline in viewership over the past few years, a trend that accelerated after the Nov. 5 election. Since the election, CNN has seen a 45 percent drop in prime-time viewership, down to only 394,000 total viewers. Overall, this year CNN has had its worst-ever performance among viewers in the key demographic.

JOE BIDEN

 The American Prospect - Morning Consult had Biden with a 37 percent approval rating, against a 55 percent disapproval rating. That dismal approval number, however, was roughly twice the size of the leaders of France and Germany, and higher than those of all the leaders of the G7 nations save Italy, with whom he was effectively tied. Here, in descending order of approval, are the numbers:

Italy’s Giorgia Meloni: 38 percent approval to 55 percent disapproval

America’s Biden: 37 to 55

The U.K.’s Keir Starmer: 30 to 59

Canada’s Justin Trudeau: 26 to 68

Japan’s Shigeru Ishiba: 24 to 53

Germany’s Olaf Scholz: 19 to 75

France’s Emmanuel Macron: 18 to 75

Most leaders of major democracies that aren’t members of the G7 also came in with a negative balance. Spain’s Pedro Sanchez put up a 32 percent approval rating to 63 percent disapproval; Brazil’s Lula (before his emergency surgery) was at 42/53, and Poland’s Donald Tusk almost broke even, 44/45. It’s important to note the vast ideological spectrum of these leaders, ranging from the democratic socialism of Sanchez and Lula to the right populism of Meloni.

 

WALMART

The Atlantic -  No corporation looms as large over the American economy as Walmart. It is both the country’s biggest private employer, known for low pay, and its biggest retailer, known for low prices. In that sense, its dominance represents the triumph of an idea that has guided much of American policy making over the past half century: that cheap consumer prices are the paramount metric of economic health, more important even than low unemployment and high wages. Indeed, Walmart’s many defenders argue that the company is a boon to poor and middle-class families, who save thousands of dollars every year shopping there.

Two new research papers challenge that view. Using creative new methods, they find that the costs Walmart imposes in the form of not only lower earnings but also higher unemployment in the wider community outweigh the savings it provides for shoppers. On net, they conclude, Walmart makes the places it operates in poorer than they would be if it had never shown up at all. Sometimes consumer prices are an incomplete, even misleading, signal of economic well-being.

 

 

ENVIRONMENT

Prayers and tears mark 20 years since the Indian Ocean tsunami that killed some 230,000 people

Nice News -  In a momentous victory for Indigenous tribes and environmentalists, the nation’s largest-ever dam removal project reached completion this year. The last of the four dams in the Klamath River along the California-Oregon border was demolished on Aug. 28, opening the door for a thriving salmon population.
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“The biggest thing for me, the significance of the dam removal project, is just hope — understanding that change can be made,” Brook Thompson, a member of the Yurok Tribe, told the Los Angeles Times.
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The milestone followed a two-decade-long campaign to save the Klamath River after an estimated 70,000 salmon perished due to toxic algae in 2002. Aside from driving the species to near extinction, this also prevented local Native tribes from engaging in core parts of their culture and fishing traditions.
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But the path to restoration is now in sight as the river can flow freely again, reopening up to 400 miles of salmon spawning and nursery habitats — and reminding youth that progress is possible. “They’re able to see the tribe has made progress, and they see they can be part of solutions,” Thompson told USA Today.

UKRAINE

 NPR - Ukrainian crews are cleaning up this morning after a deadly Christmas Day attack by Russia. Moscow launched around 70 missiles and over 100 drones packed with explosives targeting Ukraine’s energy grid.  Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky says they shot down 50 of the missiles and blocked most of the drones using electronic jammers that can cause them to crash. Zelensky called the timing of the attack “inhumane” and “evil” in a public statement. The strike, which killed at least one person, was the 13th large-scale attack on the energy grid this year alone, NPR’s Brian Mann says. If Russia’s goal is to make Ukrainians so miserable they lose the will to defend their country — there isn’t evidence that’s happening, Mann says, noting that the response he’s heard is one of anger and not fear after the attack. In a remote region of western Ukraine, far from the violent conflict, Ukrainians are facing another battle: preserving their culture. Here’s an intimate look at how they are doing this.

WORD

Via Don Stitt

 

DONALD TRUMP

Axios - "The Wall Street Journal found that this inauguration "is on track to be the most lucrative ever," with at least 13 companies giving $1 million or more so far. Fundraisers say they're on track to surpass the $107 million they brought in for Trump's first inauguration. President Biden's inauguration raised $61 million.

Independent UK -  Though most Americans oppose Donald Trump’s plan to pardon January 6 rioters charged with a crime, more than 4 in 10 said they support the decision, according to a new poll.  President-elect Trump has promised to issue pardons for those charged or convicted of a crime related to their actions on January 6, 2021, on his first day in office — a move that would validate his narrative of the day. Despite the images, videos and convictions that show the tragic results of the attack on the Capitol, 43 percent of Americans said they support Trump’s decision to pardon rioters, according to the CNBC All-America Economic Survey.

Political Wire  -  Just after President Biden commuted the sentences of 37 prisoners on death row, President-elect Donald Trump pledged “to vigorously pursue the death penalty to protect American families and children from violent rapists, murderers, and monsters.”

LGBTQ Nation -  After spending the last several years arguing women’s sports are being ruined by trans swimmers with arms that are “30 feet long” and weightlifters with super-strength, Donald Trump said that what he really wants to do is end women’s boxing. “We’re going to end that one very quickly,” he told the crowd at an event for the far-right organization Turning Point USA this past weekend.

 Trump wants to purchase Greenland. How would that actually work?

Donald Trump bullies boxer Imane Khelif as she begs the world to stop

Transphobes have been falsely saying that she was assigned male at birth and Trump joined in.

Women’s boxing made international headlines this past summer when Algerian boxer Imane Khelif became the subject of online rumors – which Trump helped spread – that she is transgender, even though no evidence that she is was ever made public and her family insisted that she is cisgender.

 

HISTORY

VIA David_Charts

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Published September 19, 2023

 NY Times - History Shows Big Changes in ‘Big Government’ Are Hard to Achieve

 

HOLIDAY

Newsweek - A new survey by Talker Research, conducted on behalf of Newsweek, has found that employees in Generation Z (born between 1997 and 2006) are most likely to be working on Christmas Day. The survey of 1,000 participants across various age groups revealed that while most people avoid working on December 25, more than half (52 percent) of Gen Z respondents reported working on the holiday at least occasionally. In contrast, only 14 percent of Baby Boomers (born 1946-1964) said the same.

First Christmas card's mixed reaction

HEALTH

Arstechnica -  Flu season is ramping up across the US, but Louisiana—the state that has reportedly barred its health department from promoting flu shots, as well as COVID-19 and mpox vaccines—is leading the country with an early and strong surge. Louisiana's flu activity has reached the "Very High" category set by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, according to the latest data. The 13-category scale is based on the percentage of doctor's visits that were for influenza-like illnesses (ILIs) in the previous week. Louisiana is at the first of three "Very High" levels. Oregon is the only other state to have reached this level. The rest of the country spans the scale, with 13 jurisdictions at "High," including New York City and Washington, DC. There are 11 at "Moderate," 10 at "Low," and 19 at "Minimal."

JOE BIDEN

CBS News -  President Biden signed 50 bills into law on Christmas Eve, as the year and his time in office draw to a close. The bills Mr. Biden signed include socialite and activist Paris Hilton's bill to protect teenagers living in residential treatment facilities, a bill setting anti-hazing standards on college campuses, and a bill preventing members of Congress from collecting pensions if convicted of certain crimes. 

Hilton is the force behind the Stop Institutional Child Abuse Act, which passed the House and Senate last week. The legislation creates a federal work group on youth residential programs to oversee the health, safety, care, treatment and placement of minors in rehab and other facilities. The new law is personal for Hilton, who has testified before Congress that she faced abuse in such facilities as a teen. 

Another measure the president signed, S. 932, prohibits members of Congress convicted of crimes related to public corruption from receiving their retirement payments. Previous law allowed members to continue to receive checks only after the exhaustion of all appeals. The new bipartisan law comes after Sen. Bob Menendez of New Jersey was found guilty this year of using his political influence to benefit businessmen and foreign governments in return for bribes.

The Stop Campus Hazing Act requires higher education institutions to disclose hazing incidents reported to campus or local police authorities in their annual security reports. The new law also requires schools to teach students about the dangers of hazing, among other things.

ALTERNATIVE SEX & GENDER

 Matthew Sheffield -  NCAA president Charlie Baker says there are "less than 10" trans athletes out of 510,000 college athletes

CONGRESS

  Ballot Access - On December 12, three U.S. Senators introduced SJRes 121, a proposed constitutional amendment to abolish the electoral college. One of the sponsors, U.S. Senator Dick Durbin (D-Il.) is chair of the Judiciary Committee, although he won’t be chair in the new congress. Here is the Committee’s press release about the amendment.Here is the text. The other co-sponsors are Peter Welch of Vermont and Brian Schatz of Hawaii.

HEALTH

 Whooping cough cases in the U.S. hit their highest level in a decade. 32,000+ cases have been recorded this year so far — more than six times the total last mid-December.

CARS

What's News - Sales of smaller cars and compact SUVs have been on the rise this year. Amid high vehicle costs and interest rates, shoppers are prioritizing affordability over size. The average price for a small SUV in 2024 was about $29,000 as opposed to $48,000 for a midsize SUV and $76,000 for a large one, according to car-shopping website Edmunds.

TRAVEL

 USA Facts

SCOTT TURNER

 ProPublica - As Donald Trump’s nominee to run the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, Scott Turner may soon oversee the nation’s efforts to build affordable apartments, protect poor tenants and aid the homeless. As a lawmaker in the Texas House of Representatives, Turner voted against those very initiatives.

Turner supported a bill ensuring landlords could refuse apartments to applicants because they received federal housing assistance. He opposed a bill to expand affordable rental housing. He voted against funding public-private partnerships to support the homeless and against two bills that called merely to study homelessness among young people and veterans