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Without much fanfare, President Joe Biden signed 50 bills into law on his last Christmas Eve in the Oval Office – ranging from establishing the first federal anti-hazing college campus standard, to making the Bald Eagle the country’s first official bird, to preventing federal agencies from issuing “useless reports” (by who’s standard?).

The bills also named federal buildings and post offices, a law to hold youth treatment and care centers more accountable, and a law which precludes members of Congress from collecting pensions if convicted of crimes.

The Epoch Times has more detail on some of the bills:

SB 4610 designates the bald eagle as the national bird, clearing up what has been assumed but not codified for nearly 250 years.

The bill, co-sponsored by Sens. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyo.), Markwayne Mullen (R-Okla.), and Tina Smith (D-Minn.), was passed by the Senate in July and by the House Dec. 16.

It states “bald eagles are a historical symbol of the United States representing independence, strength, and freedom; the bald eagle is unique to North America; the bald eagle image remains the leading insignia for all branches of the United States military.”

It notes that on June 20, 1782, the bald eagle was adopted as the Coat of Arms for the United States Great Seal but there was never any formal language encoded to designate it as the national bird.

The new law remedies that by amending Chapter 3 of Title 36, United States Code to state, “The bald eagle (Haliaeetus leucocephalus) is the national bird.”

Senate Bill 1351, the “Stop Institutional Child Abuse Act,” creates a federal work group on youth residential programs to oversee the health, safety, care, treatment, and placement of minors in rehab and other programs.

The bill had 24 bipartisan cosponsors and was adopted in the House, 373-33, on Dec. 18, after the Senate passed the bill by unanimous consent.

The bill was notable for the personal involvement of socialite and activist Paris Hilton, who testified before the House Ways & Means Committee in July about mistreatment and abuse she claims to have experienced in treatment centers.

House Bill 5646, the “Stop Campus Hazing Act,” co-filed by Reps. Lucy McBath (D-Ga.) and Jeff Duncan (R-S.C.) and 57 co-sponsors, passed both chambers in unchallenged voice votes.

The act, spurred by a North Carolina State University report that hazing is rampant on many college campuses, requires federally funded higher education institutions to disclose hazing incidents reported to campus or local police authorities in their annual security reports beginning Jan. 1, 2025.

The president also signed SB 932, the “No CORRUPTION Act,” co-sponsored by Sens. Jacky Rosen (D-Nev.), Rick Scott (R-Fla.), and Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), which disqualifies a member of Congress “convicted of crimes related to public corruption” from receiving their retirement payments.

The bill—in long form, the “No Congressionally Obligated Recurring Revenue Used As Pensions To Incarcerated Officials Act”—was adopted in the Senate in July and by the House on Dec. 16.

It eliminates a loophole that allowed members to continue receiving checks while exhausting appeals, an exploitable oversight exposed by the investigation into Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.). Menendez was found guilty in July of accepting bribes in exchange for using his political influence

HB 5301, the “Eliminate Useless Reports Act,” seeks to streamline federal reporting processes by requiring federal agencies to file a list of outdated or duplicative plans or reports in their annual budget justifications.

The bill was introduced in 2023 by Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.) with support from co-sponsors Reps. Glenn Grothman (R-Wis.) and Chuck Edwards (R-N.C.), adopted by the House in November, the Senate on Dec. 11.

The president signed a slate of bills renaming local postal offices in Texas and California. A San Francisco post office will be renamed in honor of the late Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who passed away in September 2023.

The final coupon auction of 2024 is now the history books and on the day yields blew out to 6 months highs and just shy of the highest level of 2024, it is probably not a surprise that demand was stellar.

Stopping at a high yield of 4.532, this was – not surprisingly after the Fed’s hawkish pivot – the highest yield since May. It also stopped through the When Issued 4.532 by 2.1bps, the biggest stop through since January 2023. It was also the 4th consecutive stop for the 7 year tenor, the longest such stretch on record.

The bid to cover was also remarkable: surging to 2.758 from 2.709 in November, this was the highest bid to cover since March 2020, aka the depth of the covid crisis when everyone was fleeing into TSYs.

And while this metric was remarkable, the internals were absolutely off the charts, with indirects exploding higher to 87.9% from 64.1%, the highest on record by a long shot. This left virtually nothing for Directs who took down just 2.85%, a record low, while Dealers were awarded 9.3%, the lowest since October.

Overall, it is somewhat fitting that in this upside down market, where “investors” are dumping value energy names trading at single digit PEs to buy megashoter, garbage “AI story” stonks which will never not survive more than a year or two, let alone make a profit, that the final auction of the year would also be the best 7Y auction on record.

It is also not a surprise that with the market positioned extremely bearishly, that there was another round of short covering which sent 10Y yields from day highs of 4.64% around noon to just around 4.57% after today’s blowout auction as the name of the game in this “market” is just to squeeze as many shorts as possible.

Authored by Naveen Athrappully via The Epoch Times,

Brendan Carr, a commissioner at the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), has raised concerns about the impact of TV network ABC’s ongoing broadcast agreement negotiations with local TV stations.

“My understanding is that ABC is attempting to extract onerous financial and operational concessions from local broadcast TV stations under the threat of terminating long-held affiliations,” Carr wrote in a Dec. 21 letter to Disney CEO Bob Iger, first obtained by CNN. Disney owns ABC.

This could “result in blackouts and other harms to local consumers of broadcast news and content,” Carr said.

Carr was recently nominated by President-elect Donald Trump to assume the post of FCC chair in the incoming administration.

When local broadcast TV stations air ABC’s content, they have to financially compensate the network. The payment as well as other aspects related to airing the content are covered in the affiliate agreements signed between ABC and the stations. ABC is currently negotiating these agreements.

“Reporting indicates that certain of ABC’s affiliate agreements are set to expire at the end of this year, unless ABC and the local broadcast TV stations reach new agreements,” Carr wrote.

“The approach that ABC is apparently taking in these negotiations concerns me.”

Local broadcast TV stations are mandated by federal law to operate while keeping the public interest in mind. This includes a requirement that the stations “serve the needs of their local communities.”

Local TV stations receive payments from cable TV or satellite service providers to allow these services to carry their channels, called “retransmission consent fees.” Meanwhile, national broadcast networks like ABC take a cut of this revenue from local TV stations, known as “reverse retrans” fees.

ABC is attempting to use the “reverse retrans” fees to “siphon more and more money away from local broadcast TV stations,” Carr wrote, adding that in some cases, such fees can be more than the retransmission fees earned by the stations.

He alleged that ABC was doing this for “underwriting investment” in the network’s online streaming services.

“This is not how Congress envisioned the retransmission consent process working.” The retransmission consent fees are aimed at ensuring the “continued viability of local broadcast TV stations.”

Such fees offer the stations “an important revenue source for programming that serves the local community.”

It is “antithetical to the will of Congress” that ABC is encroaching on these fees and imposing financial burdens on local TV stations.

Carr added that Americans “no longer trust the national media” while largely holding “positive views of their local media outlets.” He cited a Gallup survey showing that 31 percent of Americans had a “fair amount” or “great deal” of trust in mass media.

“The fact that a massive trust divide has emerged between local news outlets and national programmers like ABC only increases the importance of retransmission consent revenues remaining available for local broadcast TV stations to invest in their local news operations and content that serves their communities,” the letter said.

Carr said he plans to monitor the ongoing negotiations between ABC and TV stations to ensure that the local entities are able to serve the local needs. “A fair agreement would do just that.”

The Epoch Times has reached out to ABC and Disney for comments, but didn’t receive a response by publication time.

Trump Defamation Settlement

In the letter, Carr highlighted a recent settlement signed by ABC with Trump.

“ABC News recently agreed to pay $15 million to President Trump’s future presidential foundation and museum and an additional $1 million in attorney fees to settle a defamation case,” he wrote.

The settlement agreement was filed on Dec. 14 and stems from a March 10 ABC interview in which anchor George Stephanopoulos said the former president was “found liable for rape” by a federal jury.

Stephanopoulos’s statement was made in the context of author E. Jean Carroll’s lawsuit against Trump, in which she accused the former president of rape. However, the jury had rejected Carroll’s rape claims.

The former president, who has always denied the allegations, filed a lawsuit against ABC and Stephanopoulos on March 18.

The settlement also requires ABC News and Stephanopoulos to publish an apology statement at the bottom of a March 10 online article.

Meanwhile, the former president recently filed another lawsuit, this time against the Des Moines Register newspaper and a pollster, alleging the publication of misleading poll numbers.

The poll found that 47 percent of respondents supported Vice President Kamala Harris, three points more than Trump’s 44 percent. This garnered attention at the time because Iowa usually votes Republican. Other polls showed the Republican candidate in the lead.

The lawsuit called the poll “brazen election interference” and accused the pollster of using the survey to influence elections in favor of Democrats.

“The Harris Poll was deceptive and misleading, unfair, and the result of concealment, suppression, and omission of material facts about the true respective positions of President Trump and Harris in the Presidential race, all of which were known to Defendants and should have been disclosed to the public,” the lawsuit said.

Moscow is claiming that its forces have downed a US-made F-16 aircraft given to Ukraine just as the warplane was preparing to launch a missile strike from over a southeast region of the country.

“The F-16 aircraft was in position to launch a missile strike on the region, and it was shot down,” TASS reports Thursday. The alleged downing has not been acknowledged by Ukraine, the Pentagon, or any outside entity.

State-run RT has also described that “One of the F-16 jets donated to Ukraine by NATO has reportedly been downed while attempting to launch missiles at Russia’s Zaporozhye Region.”

“Preliminary information from the front line was reported on Thursday by Vladimir Rogov, the co-chair of Russia’s Coordinating Council for the Integration of New Regions,” the same report adds.

Despite these big claims being made in Russian media, the story has been slow to appear in Western mainstream press accounts as of Thursday afternoon. 

If true it would be the second US-donated F-16 to go down over Ukraine during the war, after a reported incident last August.

The August downing had come only days following an initial delivery of the fighter jets to Kiev, and was the result of a ‘friendly fire’ incident, based on the description of the crash by a Ukrainian member of parliament at the time.

“The pilot, Oleksiy Mes, died while helping to repel a massive Russian missile attack on Monday, the officials said,” WSJ wrote of that first downing. “Initial reports indicate the jet wasn’t shot down by enemy fire, U.S. officials said.” Accounts have remained conflicting.

As for this purported second downing, little details have been revealed. Ukraine is expected to keep mum about it even if the claims of a shootdown are accurate. If Russia starts shooting down Western-provided warplanes out of the skies at a higher rate, this would certainly help dissuade Ukraine’s allies from sending more.

The Zelensky government has been complaining about a slow-down and delays in arrivals of major weapons systems, including jets, from Western partners.

Some European countries have meanwhile been reluctant to commit too much military hardware at a time Ukraine forces are being bested by Russia along the frontlines in the east.

Authored by Jackson Richman via The Epoch Times,

Entrepreneur Elon Musk suggested there should be cognitive tests for elected officials following news of a congresswoman spending six months in an assisted living facility.

“Maybe we should have some basic cognitive test for elected officials? This is getting crazy,” posted Musk on X, on Dec. 21.

Musk was responding to a report that Rep. Kay Granger (R-Texas) had been absent from Congress for six months as she was in a senior living center in Fort Worth, Texas, as she has been “having some dementia issues late in the year,” her son told The Dallas Morning News.

Granger, 81, returned to Washington last month after having last cast her vote on July 24.

“As many of my family, friends, and colleagues have known, I have been navigating some unforeseen health challenges over the past year,” said Granger in a statement from her office, according to The Dallas Morning News.

Granger, who has been in Congress since January 1997, announced last year she would not run for reelection after 14 terms.

“Serving my community has been the greatest honor, and I have always fought to improve the lives of my constituents,” she said in a statement at the time.

“As I announce my decision to not seek reelection, I am encouraged by the next generation of leaders in my district,” she said.

“It’s time for the next generation to step up and take the mantle and be a strong and fierce representative for the people.”

Granger, who was the first Republican female elected to Congress from Texas, stepped down as chairwoman of the powerful House Appropriations Committee in April.

“When my colleagues made me the first Republican woman to Chair the Appropriations Committee, my goal was to pass conservative bills out of the Committee, get them to the floor, and get them signed into law,” she wrote in a letter to House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) in March.

“Despite Republicans having a very slim majority, today marks the completion in the House of the second spending agreement this month that prioritizes our nation’s security and represents the first overall cut to non-defense, non-veterans spending, in almost a decade.”

Musk is not the only public figure to call for cognitive tests for elected officials.

Former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations and South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, during her unsuccessful presidential campaign, called for mental competency tests for politicians age 75 and older.

The struggling Oklahoma-based electric van startup Canoo appears to have reached the end of the road.

According to an internal email obtained by TechCrunch, the startup has placed employees on a “mandatory unpaid break” through the end of the year.

The email said that just a few days before Christmas, the company locked employees out of Canoo’s systems. 

As of mid-November, the startup had $700k in cash or cash equivalents as it rounded out a very turbulent year amid an ongoing EV downturn. 

“It recently closed the Los Angeles office that used to serve as its headquarters. It has lost a lot of executives, including its chief technology officer, chief financial officer, and general counsel,” TechCrunch noted. 

Auto blog Jalopnik provided more color on Canoo’s struggles, including how “the company spent twice as much on a private jet for its CEO than it had earned for the entire year of 2023. It burned through capital and now seems unable to wrap up the year.” 

“Canoo was supposed to bring automotive manufacturing back to the state of Oklahoma, and the company received taxpayer-funded, performance-based incentives totaling $100 million spaced out over 10 years to do exactly that,” Jalopnik said, adding, “But the way things are going right now, it’s questionable whether Canoo will last long enough to bring those promised steady jobs to the Sooner State.” 

A former employee provided Oklahoma news outlet KFOR with deeper insight into the startup, alleging that it has produced nothing… 

“They have tons of equipment,” the former employee said. “It looks great. They have literally everything to run an entire assembly line for cars.”

Last December, Canoo proudly announced it had built its first three vehicles in the Oklahoma City plant, before selling them to the state.

The former employee told News 4 that “made in Oklahoma” announcement gave him a good laugh.

“I can tell you, those did not come off our assembly line,” the former employee said. “If you talk to any Canoo employee, they’ll tell you those do not come off the assembly line.”

He says Canoo never paid the company that provided the software that the machines use to operate.

The former employee also says the company only ran the machines when showing them off to media or investors.

“The majority of those folks that were employed there, especially those hourly people, were just standing around twiddling their thumbs,” the former employee said.

The company has boasted about partnerships with Walmart, DoD, and the USPS over the years…

Shares (GOEV) plunged into the abyss since it SPAC’d in late 2020. 

What a giant waste of money. 

Authored by Melanie Sun via The Epoch Times,

President Joe Biden on Christmas Day said he has directed the Pentagon to continue its “surge of weapons deliveries to Ukraine,” following a wave of Russian air attacks on Ukrainian cities and energy infrastructure early Christmas morning.

“The purpose of this outrageous attack was to cut off the Ukrainian people’s access to heat and electricity during winter and to jeopardize the safety of its grid,” Biden said in a statement.

“Let me be clear: the Ukrainian people deserve to live in peace and safety, and the United States and the international community must continue to stand with Ukraine until it triumphs over Russia’s aggression.”

The president said that the United States will “continue to work tirelessly” to back Ukraine against Russian forces in the ongoing war.

Ukraine’s air force said that the early morning attack by Russia using 78 air and ground missiles and 106 Shahed drones damaged critical equipment in Ukraine’s power grid, causing outages on Christmas Day.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy decried the deliberate attack on Christmas day as “inhumane.”

Ukraine shot down “more than 50 missiles and a significant number of drones” and was still hit as there are power outages in a number of regions as engineers are trying to restore power, Zelenskyy said.

“Russian evil will not break Ukraine and will not spoil Christmas,” Zelenskyy said.

The strikes wounded at least six people in the northeastern city of Kharkiv and killed one in the region of Dnipropetrovsk, the governors there said.

Christmas in Ukraine, where most of its people are Christian Orthodox, used to be celebrated on Jan. 7, as is the case in Russia, but that changed in 2023 to Dec. 25, the date used in Western countries.

Nearly three years into the war, Washington has committed $175 billion in aid for Ukraine.

President-elect Donald Trump, who will take office on Jan. 20, has said he wants to bring the war to a swift end.

Trump’s choice for special envoy to Ukraine and Russia, retired Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg, has condemned the Christmas Day attack.

“Christmas should be a time of peace, yet Ukraine was brutally attacked on Christmas Day,” Kellogg wrote on the social platform X.

“Launching large-scale missile and drone attacks on the day of the Lord’s birth is wrong. The world is closely watching actions on both sides. The U.S. is more resolved than ever to bring peace to the region.”

The shadow fleet of liquefied natural gas carriers transporting blacklisted Russian LNG has encountered a major setback, with at least one ship’s cargo traveling around the world, finding no buyers as the cargo was deemed too risky. 

Bloomberg reports that an LNG carrier called “Pioneer,” carrying a sanctioned shipment of Russian LNG, circumnavigated the world for four months, failing to find a buyer willing to breach US restrictions.

“This vessel (called Pioneer) was spotted on satellite images picking up the first shipment from the Arctic LNG 2 facility in early August — despite camouflaging the move with misleading location information — but then spent well over four months hunting for a customer,” Bloomberg’s Stephen Stapczynski wrote on X. 

This vessel (called Pioneer) was spotted on satellite images picking up the first shipment from the Arctic LNG 2 facility in early August — despite camouflaging the move with misleading location information — but then spent well over four months hunting for a customer pic.twitter.com/qIGcK4v1yr

— Stephen Stapczynski (@SStapczynski) December 26, 2024

According to ship-tracking data, Pioneer arrived at the Koryak floating storage unit in Kamchatka on Thursday after four months on the seas.

“The gas is likely to be held there until a customer can be found,” Bloomberg noted.

Most of Russia’s dark fleet consists of oil tankers. However, the West has increasingly targeted LNG carriers as Washington and Brussels race to sever Russian energy flows to Europe. 

Regarding global LNG trading – buyers, sellers, charterers, financing banks, and insurers must be extra vigilant when running compliance checks to ensure their ships do not engage in Western-sanctioned activities, and this is likely why Pioneer could not find a buyer. 

Authored by Mike Shedlock via MishTalk.com,

An energy policy battle is brewing and I believe Trump will win on day one.

Pulling the Plug on EV Mandates

The Wall Street Journal reports Trump Can Pull the Plug on EV Mandates

Overly stringent emissions targets ignore American consumers’ preferences and block economic growth. They’re also restrictive, costly and unachievable for U.S. manufacturers based on current market trends.

The Environmental Protection Agency’s electric-vehicle mandate also must go. The mandate would effectively require automakers to shift at least 54% of production to EVs and 16% hybrids to meet the 2032 requirements, an unrealistic target.

The Trump administration also should rein in California’s regulatory excesses. The Biden EPA last week greenlighted California’s aggressive electric-vehicle mandate by granting the state a waiver allowing it to set stricter environmental regulations than the federal government’s. The Trump administration should move immediately to revoke this waiver, an action likely to be challenged in court.

This matters for Americans across the U.S. That’s because other states are allowed to adopt California’s climate policies and impose those regulations on residents. New York, Maryland and Virginia are among several states that have adopted California’s zero-emission mandate.

We need a course correction. America doesn’t have access to the volume of critical minerals needed to produce that many EV batteries. It also doesn’t have the necessary electricity generation capacity or charging infrastructure.

America can and should lead the world in automotive innovation, but domestic automakers won’t survive if California-style, zero-emission vehicle mandates become the rules of the road.

The author of the above post is  Andrew Wheeler.

He served as administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, 2018-21 and is currently a partner and head of federal affairs at Holland & Hart.

Time to “un-California” US Energy Policy Is Now

The Journal says Trump “can” change energy policy. I am confident Trump “will” do so.

And whereas I think Trump will get some things wrong, energy policy isn’t one of them. I can’t think of anything Harris would have gotten right.

Also note, Trump Backs Down From Strong Sweeping Deportation Promise

With that change, Trump is highly likely to get deportation policy right, but Congress will have to approve.

I am so waiting for day one! We can’t get rid of Biden soon enough.

President Joe Biden has been criticized by judicial leaders for vetoing a bill that would have added more judges to the federal bench amid a heavy volume of pending cases.

Biden on Dec. 23 vetoed the Judicial Understaffing Delays Getting Emergencies Solved Act of 2024, or JUDGES Act, which would have added 66 new district court judgeships nationwide.

As Jackson Richman reports for The Epoch Times, Judge Robert Conrad Jr., the director of the Administrative Office of the United States Courts, said Biden’s decision was disappointing.

“Providing additional judgeships is essential to improving access to the courts and necessary for the efficient and effective administration of justice,” he said in a Dec. 24 statement.

Biden cited numerous reasons for declining to sign the bill into law, which passed the Senate in August and the House this month.

Biden said in a statement that the legislation “seeks to hastily add judgeships with just a few weeks left” in the current 119th Congress. The White House had previously warned that Biden would veto the bill before President-elect Donald Trump takes office.

Trump would have had the power to nominate judges to the federal judiciary. The GOP will control the Senate, which confirms nominees.

According to the president, the bill also “fails to resolve key questions in the legislation, especially regarding how the new judgeships are allocated, and neither the House of Representatives nor the Senate explored fully how the work of senior status judges and magistrate judges affects the need for new judgeships.”

The bill “would create new judgeships in States where Senators have sought to hold open existing judicial vacancies,” Biden said.

“Those efforts to hold open vacancies suggest that concerns about [the] judicial economy and caseload are not the true motivating force behind passage of this bill now.”

In a Dec. 16 letter to Biden, Conrad explained the need for expanding the number of federal district judges.

Contrary to Biden’s assertion, the bill was years in the making through “study, analysis, and congressional review” and “would address the need for additional district court judgeships, spreading them out over the next three presidential administrations.”

The number of cases before the district bench has spiked 30 percent since 1990, according to Conrad. This, in turn, has led to longer wait times over litigating criminal and civil cases, he said.

Gabe Roth, the executive director of Fix the Court, which calls for reforms to the federal bench, called the veto “an embarrassing end to what has otherwise been, from many court-watchers’ point of a view, a productive four years of reshaping of the judiciary.”

Alliance for Justice, a left-wing judicial advocacy group, expressed support for Biden’s veto.

“Every chance to protect our courts over the next four years must be taken,” the group’s interim president, Keith Thirion, said in a Dec. 10 statement in response to the White House saying Biden would veto the bill. “It’s true our courts are overdue for expansion, but it is a disservice to the public servants committed to equal justice to so blatantly weaponize this process.”

The bill would have allowed Trump to fill some of those vacancies, though the timeline to fill them would have stretched into 2035 as the new judgeships would have been created in two-year waves during that period.

As of Dec. 25, there are 32 vacancies at the district level.

Jonathan Turley goes further, calling the move by Biden , ‘a disgrace’.

Our courts are overwhelmed by dockets that leave parties without any resolution for years. In 2004, the number of cases in district court pending for more than three years was 18,280. This year, there are 81,617.

If justice delayed is justice denied, our court system is becoming a tar pit of injustice, with litigants left without verdicts or relief for years.

Every responsible and independent group in the area supported this bill as essential to supporting and maintaining our legal system. The White House did not oppose the bill until Democrats lost the election. (Some Republicans also withheld their support until after the election).

Before the election, both Democrats and Republicans supported the bill in an all-too-rare moment of bipartisanship. Biden then vetoed it because he did not want a Republican to appoint new judges (even though the new judgeships would be added over a ten-year period).

In vetoing the act, Biden once again shredded any claim to being a president who could put the public interest ahead of petty political interests. It ends his presidency on a cynical, obstructionist note.

Nevertheless, Ryan and others on the far left are applauding the act as just what they want to see in a president.

It is one thing to discard any sense of integrity or responsibility, but do us a favor: leave the Founders out of it.