.... but I watched the whole thing this morning, and one thing became clear: He's a defeated man. That was the most dispassionate plea I've ever seen. The one thing he has been good at is revving up his base, but last night it was more or less.........

https://m.

.... where the mom walks past the kids' room? She knows she shouldn't open the door but she does, and sees ghoulish creepy things floating around. ......
That's how I felt tuning in to Trump's address.

FLORIDA MAN DISCOVERS FATHER HELPED BIRTH HIM, ATTACKS HIM WITH PIZZA

(Newsweek) A Florida man was arrested Thursday after attacking his father with a slice of pizza after discovering that he had helped birth him.

Deputies with the Pasco County Sheriff’s Office in a statement cited by Fox 13 said that they arrested 33-year-old Robert Houston on a domestic battery charge.

The suspect’s father told them he had arrived home after walking his dog and his son had grabbed him, held him down in a chair, and shoved pizza in his face while yelling. ........(more)

https://www.newsweek.com/florida-man-attacks-father-pizza-after-discovering-he-helped-birth-him-1280754?amp=1&__twitter_impression=true

By Thom Hartmann


Get ready to see it on your TV. The GOP is about to kick back into Two Santa Clauses mode and restart the scam they’ve been running since Reagan.

It’ll predictably begin in the first week or two of January, probably first on “Meet the Press” and other Sunday shows that feature “serious thinkers” and only rarely challenge Republicans. It’ll simultaneously roll out on Fox, on right-wing hate radio, and in the conservative media.

And there are more than a few “Third Way” Democrats eager to go along with it.

At its core, the strategy is simple and elegant: When Republicans are in power, run up as much debt as possible, mostly by borrowing and giving that cash to the Republican donor class through tax cuts and corporate subsidies; when Democrats have political power, Republicans suddenly become hysterical about the debt and demand that Dems keep taxes low while cutting social spending. .........(more)

https://www.truthdig.com/articles/thom-hartmann-the-gop-is-reviving-one-of-its-favorite-scams/

..... and we've had nothing more than a dusting of snow so far in Southeast Michigan (or at least where I am in downtown Detroit) and almost no frigid days. Highs this weekend approaching 50 degrees. ... Wild.

(Bloomberg) All of a sudden, the fundamentals aren’t looking as strong.

First it was Apple Inc.’s $5 billion revenue miss, hints of which lopped 30 percent from its stock over three months. Now it’s a closely watched gauge of U.S. factory activity, which dropped to a two-year low and missed every estimate in a Bloomberg survey.

What’s going on? Over and over in the fourth quarter, as the S&P 500 plunged 19.8 percent to the brink of a bear market, investors heard the same refrain: don’t panic, the economy, and corporate earnings, look strong.

In the last 24 hours, confidence in those assurances has taken a hit. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell more than 600 points, or 2.6 percent, Thursday morning, while losses in the Nasdaq 100 spiraled toward 3 percent.


“The market is the wisdom of all investors -- it was discounting this type of news-flow with the sharp and violent sell-off we got in December,” Alec Young, managing director of global markets research at FTSE Russell, said in a phone interview. “When it makes a big move, up or down, it’s telling you positive or negative things about future developments. The extreme move down was telling you we’d get this type of news-flow.”

All the bad news has put an abrupt halt to what had been the equity market’s best five-day run since 2011, a surge in the S&P 500 that reached 7.2 percent at yesterday’s high point. It’s reprising anxiety that left stocks within points of a bear market on Christmas Eve. ...... (more)

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-01-03/bad-stuff-the-stock-market-worried-about-is-starting-to-happen?srnd=premium

from the Miami Herald:



SNOWSHOE, W.Va.

For many people the holidays signal the start of a joyous time — snow season. It means strapping on skis or hopping onto a sled to tear into soft, fluffy powder.

That's the case for Greg Corio, who for almost two decades has been an avid ice climber.

"The only way to describe it is it's magical," said Corio. "There's so many features, and so many details and little knobs and little pieces and dripping water as you're climbing up it. It's like climbing up the side of Magic Kingdom's castle."

Ice climbing is a fickle sport. Prolonged bouts of cool temperatures are required in order for ice to form into thick enough layers to support climbing. In temperate West Virginia, there has traditionally been just a small window of time where climbers can get out on the ice. Enthusiasts are ready to drop everything when the opportunity presents itself, Corio said.

But in recent years, as temperatures have warmed, Corio said the window for ice climbing seems to be shrinking. ...........(more)

https://www.miamiherald.com/news/business/article223425840.html

(Truthout) Prison reform is now in vogue, but police power remains as brutal as ever. Policing in the US continues to include the power to cage as well as the power to kill — a reality that is spectacularly evident at the southern US border. By all accounts, 2019 promises to be another brutal year in the arena of prisons and policing.

President Trump signed the First Step Act in late December, while threatening a government shutdown to secure funding for a border wall. The act makes it easier for some federal prisoners to seek early release, widens federal judicial discretion in some low-level sentencing issues and limits some mandatory minimum sentences in federal cases.

It is a limited reform program, less because federal prisoners account for just over 10 percent of the prison system and more because the crafters of the bill had such limited ambitions. The Koch-backed act defines reform through expanded “e-carceration,” the use of surveillance technologies like ankle monitors that turn people’s homes into their prisons.

.....(snip).....

Radical critics of the prison system, including abolitionists and grassroots organizers in and out of prison, have a difficult—but familiar—task in 2019. It involves at least three simultaneous efforts. First, we need to advance our own policy platforms that can supplant the narrowness of the current prison reform agenda with an emphasis on mass decarceration, community reinvestment, full civil and human rights for currently and formerly incarcerated people, and non-punitive approaches to harm. Doing so means growing across movements as well as bringing new people into the fold.

Second, we need to expose and exploit the fault lines within the extreme center in the hopes of channeling sincere efforts into transformative change and undermining the cynical and failed policies of right-wing prison reform. That requires monitoring and challenging the contemporary reform agenda. ................(more)

https://truthout.org/articles/prison-reform-is-not-enough-in-2019-lets-fight-for-decarceration/

Donald Trump Gets Busted Boasting About Positive News Coverage Written By Own Aides
Trump proudly declared a Washington Examiner list to be “True!” – but conveniently forgot to mention it was written by the White House.


(HuffPost) President Donald Trump proudly boasted on Twitter on Tuesday that some positive coverage from the Washington Examiner, a conservative news website, was “True!”

Trump promoted the site’s “MAGA list” of 205 “historic results” that could help him win re-election in 2020, published Monday.

However, the content of the list that Trump bragged about was actually pieced together by his own White House aides. As evidenced in the third paragraph:



.....(snip).....

Twitter users noticed, and called Trump out over his claim:

Great moments in media: Trump’s team gives the Washington Examiner an “exclusive” list of 205 supposed “historic” accomplishments he will campaign on; the Examiner just publishes it in full; Trump tweets about it as if it came from the Examiner. pic.twitter.com/4xa1t9Gt6l
— Daniel Dale (@ddale8) January 1, 2019

The Washington Examiner (laughable enough) was given a list to print, by you. That’s not reporting, that’s propaganda.
— cj (@markergirl1) January 2, 2019

............(more)

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/donald-trump-washington-examiner-boast-tweet_us_5c2c71bae4b05c88b703eca0