Like Maria Said Paz: 2024-12-29

Wednesday, January 01, 2025

Good for WICKED

Universal’s Wicked has overtaken the studio’s own Mamma Mia! to become the biggest stage musical adaptation of all time worldwide. The global cume through Sunday is an estimated $634.4M, of which $424.2M is from domestic and $210.2M from the international box office.

Overseas, the current weekend brought in another $13.7M from 81 markets. The Jon M Chu-directed Wicked is also the top stage musical adaptation ever in 46 of those. It had earlier become the biggest Broadway adaptation of all time domestically.

The current offshore performance is ahead of Mamma Mia 2, Maleficent, The Little Mermaid and The Greatest Showman (excluding China) at the same point in release.

That's great. WICKED is a great film. It's also now on streaming, My youngest child (my child with Mike), she loves WICKED. She saw it like four times at the theater (maybe more) and we purchased the streaming yesterday via AMAZON and she's probably watched it three times already. So four times at the theaters and three times at home. I loved the movie too. It's a great film.

Okay, this:

2024 end of the year pieces: Rebecca's "sexiest men of 2024," Ann's "2024 in film (Ann and Stan)" and Stan's "2024 in film (Ann & Stan)," Mike's "Idiot of the Year," Ruth's "Ruth's Media Report 2024." "2024 in books (Martha & Shirley)," Kat's "Kat's Korner: 2024 in music" and our "2024: The Year of Betrayal From Inside The Left."

C.I. does that each year -- the paragraph noting all the year end pieces that go up in the community. So I thought I'd get online to note that. Rebecca made some interesting choices. Ann and Stan picked WICKED as the best film of the year (I agree with them). Ruth noted the very sad reality that the year's over and so many hopes are as well. Kat picked the ten best albums for 2024 and I was especially thrilled by her pick for the second best album -- one I've been listening to for months now. Martha and Shirley's book poll of the community is always my favorite read to see what books made the list. Of course, C.I. did the year-in-review that she's now done for 20 years in a row.

I'm at her place. She always throws a big party for New Year's Eve and tries to sneak away and work on her year-in-review. That rarely happens so it's often midnight before she gets the time to start. This year, it's over 11,000 words. It's incredible and she's making a ton of strong points about those who betrayed us -- and let's be clear, she's exactly right.

She's also especially right when it comes to Rashida Tlaib's refusal to support and campaign for Kamala. Both are supposed to be Democrats so Rashida doesn't get to reject Kamala. But she did and, as C.I. notes -- something no one else has pointed out -- Rashida voted twice to impeach Donald Trump. Twice. Twice, she said he was guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors but she worked to re-elect him, she refused to support and campaign for his Democratic Party opponent.

How do you reconcile that?

You don't.

Amy Goodman and the other whores tried to create a special class of boo-hoo titty babies who didn't have to vote in America's best interests because wah-wah-wah they had relatives dying in Palestine. The whores may have told that lie but it was still a lie. If you're in the United States, you vote what your country needs. People like the horrid Rashida Tlaib should have been held accountable for their actions and if you're a member of the US Congress and you vote to impeach someone even once -- forget twice -- you don't turn around and refuse to do everything you can to stop them from getting back in the White House.

Rashida should be run out of Congress. With her big mouth, she'll create multiple problems for herself over the next four years. Watch as those who used to try to support her now take the attitude of FAFO.

"Iraq snapshot" (THE COMMON ILLS):

Tuesday, December 31, 2024. Look what left outlet is trying to say Kamala and Joe were as bad on immigration as Trump's about to be (and here's the kicker, they're doing that crap while begging you to give them money), MAGA's war with Chump continues, and so much more.

THE NEW REPUBLIC notes MAGA's war with Donald The Chump continues as Laura Loomer joined Steve Bannon to dish that Elon Musk is "a welfare queen." Stephen Collinson (CNN) reports:

Donald Trump’s siding with Elon Musk over visas for high-tech workers is the most significant example yet of the president-elect favoring powerful elements in his new MAGA coalition over his base’s anti-immigrant DNA that he twice tapped in his rise to power.

The boiling holiday feud over H-1B visas exposed new fissures across Trump’s broadened support base and reflected the contradictions between his populist ideology and the self-interests of many of the key players in his refashioned inner circle.

After several days of silence over the controversy, the president-elect stepped in, making clear he supported Musk’s argument for recruitment flexibility for the tech industry.

Musk, the richest man in the world, made his case in a series of outspoken posts on X. “The reason I’m in America along with so many critical people who built SpaceX, Tesla and hundreds of other companies that made America strong is because of H1B,” he wrote to one critic on the platform that he owns. “I will go to war on this issue the likes of which you cannot possibly comprehend.”

The visa issue erupted into a full-blown storm following comments by Vivek Ramaswamy, Musk’s co-chair of the Department of Government Efficiency, which Trump has set up to slash the size of federal operations. The former GOP presidential candidate criticized American culture, education standards and children’s TV that he said “venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long.” The comments came perilously close to an elitist’s disdain for millions of Americans and their culture that Republicans have long accused Democrats of promoting.

Last night on MSNBC, Chris Hayes addressed this ongoing war.

This is not making for a cheerful lead up to inauguration. Add to that, the fact that we're in the F**k Around and Find Out Stage, as people slowly begin to realize just how stupid they were.

For examples, workers who thought the Chump would rescue them.

Four years? It's going to be like serving time and those of us who got our votes right in 20204 have every reason to laugh during the next awful years at the idiots who didn't know how to save themselves and stupidly thought that a convicted felon with no accomplishments to brag about after his first term would suddenly develop skill and wisdom. Nope, The Convicted Felon didn't change, some voters just got more stupid. Erik De La Garza (RAW STORY) reports:

President-elect Donald Trump’s long-held promise to pardon his supporters who participated in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol is drawing fresh scrutiny from a government ethics group.

The Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, or CREW, issued a terse statement Monday calling out Trump and his repeated signals that he is willing to grant clemency to those who breached the Capitol as Congress worked to certify Joe Biden’s 2020 election win.

“Some things are fights worth having,” CREW wrote in a social media post on X. “Not allowing Donald Trump to pardon January 6th insurrectionists is one of those things. Two-thirds of the country is with us on this.”

And groups like Latinos for Chump who thought they were the good ones and would be spared.

As we noted repeatedly last year, to target immigrants, you have to target potential immigrants. You have to racially profile. That means, for example, since the US shares a southern border with Mexico, those seen as Latino -- immigrants, citizens, what have you -- would be harassed and stopped more often than those people who appear to be White European. So to those Latinos for Trump, you were always idiots to support the man planning to depot immigrants.

You may have thought you were one with Trump's Anglo White supporters but you were a deeply stupid fool. Edward Helmore (GUARDIAN) reports:

Law enforcement officials in Lincoln county, Oregon, have condemned an anonymous letter encouraging residents to track down and report “brown people” in the Pacific coast community, particularly those believed to be undocumented.

The letter, titled brown round-up part 1, told recipients to write down the license plate numbers of cars driven by people of color in order to identify people who might not have permanent legal status, the New York Times reported. It instructed readers to send that information to the Department of Homeland Security after Donald Trump’s inauguration.

“This type of behavior is harmful, divisive, and inconsistent with the values we uphold as public servants and community members,” Curtis Landers said in a statement about the letter. “Targeting individuals in this manner erodes trust and undermines the sense of safety and inclusion that we strive to maintain in Lincoln County.”

[. . .]

The letter comes as Trump has vowed an unprecedented crackdown on illegal immigration, including “the largest deportation operation in American history”.

Trump’s “border czar”, Tom Homan, said last week he projects needing at least 100,000 beds in immigration detention centers.

“I’m telling you, at the minimum we need 100,000 beds because we’ve got a big population to look for ... 700,000 criminals alone,” Homan told CNN. Homan said the deportation plans will require help from around the government, including the Department of Defense.

“The landing teams have just started working with the agencies and departments. We’ll be gathering information, a lot of information in the next couple weeks, which will help me in my planning process,” Homan said.

On this issue of targeting people, Jessica Corbett (COMMON DREAMS) adds:

Tom Homan, who served as acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement during Trump's first term, said that ICE "will look to hold parents with children in 'soft-sided' tent structures similar to those used by U.S. border officials to handle immigration surges," the Post summarized. "The government will not hesitate to deport parents who are in the country illegally, even if they have young U.S.-born children, he added, leaving it to those families to decide whether to exit together or be split up."

Since Trump beat Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris last month, migrant rights advocates have reiterated concerns about the Republican's first-term policies—such as forced separation of families—and his 2024 campaign pledges, from mass deportations to attempting to end birthright citizenship, despite the guarantees of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Homan—who oversaw the so-called "zero tolerance" policy that separated thousands of migrant kids from their parents—said: "Here's the issue... You knew you were in the country illegally and chose to have a child. So you put your family in that position."

Chump and Tom Homan are a threat to American families. Some are only now beginning to realize that. Some still can't face reality -- but will have to in 2025. Some opinions on BLUESKY.

Last night, Mike noted

When Convicted Felon Donald Trump got re-elected last month, did he announce that for all his appointees "ONLY CROOKS NEED APPLY"? It certainly seems that way Naomi LaChance (ROLLING STONE) reports:

Donald Trump's incoming "border czar" Tom Homan has led a consulting firm that openly brags about helping private companies secure federal contracts. Asked about this work, Homan says he has recused himself "from any involvement, discussion, input, or decision of any future government contracts."

Homan, who previously directed U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) during the first Trump administration, has also led a conservative nonprofit group, Border911, alongside an executive for a major federal contractor.

Homan is notorious for orchestrating the first Trump administration's family separation policy, when migrant children and parents were torn apart at the border. According to a Department of Homeland Security report, as of April 2024, there were still about 1,400 children who were not confirmed to have been reunited with their families.

Last week, Homan made headlines for once again publicly pitching the idea of family separation - this time, with a twist. Homan said he would present families with children born in the U.S. with an impossible choice: separate, or leave America together.

We didn't spend a lot of time on it -- maybe a day and a half -- but we did learn about Teapot Dome in high school. Did those people just go along with it? Because it seems like Chump's setting up something far worse and people are just going along with it.

And Ruth noted Theron Mohamed (BUSINESS INSIDER) reporting on what economists are saying regardin Chump's plan to deport:

. Paul Krugman, a Nobel Memorial Prize laureate and economics professor at CUNY's Graduate Center, in a Substack post

"For the most part, immigrants are complements, not substitutes, for native-born workers."
"So original MAGA is wrong to claim that immigration is impoverishing 'real Americans' in general. But tech-bro MAGA is wrong as well as offensive in saying that we need foreign workers because Americans are stupid or lazy. Furthermore, the availability of less expensive foreign tech workers does reduce the incentive of tech firms to train a home-grown work force and undermines the political incentive to improve our education system.
I'd still argue that something like H-1B makes America richer and stronger, especially given the spillovers generated by a successful technology sector. But Muskaswamy and friends aren't helping their case by insulting Americans' culture and intelligence."
2. Robert Reich, a former US labor secretary and member of President Bill Clinton's National Economic Council, in a Substack post
"Allowing many more skilled workers into the United States reduces any incentives on American business to invest in the American workforce.
Allowing many more skilled workers into the US also reduces the bargaining power of skilled workers already in America — and thereby reduces any incentive operating on other Americans to gain the skills for such jobs.
And opening America to skilled workers also reduces the incentive on foreign nations to educate and nurture their own skilled workforces. Why should they, when their own skilled workers can easily migrate to America?
The major beneficiaries in the US of opening the nation to skilled workers from abroad are CEOs and venture capitalists like Musk and [David Sacks], whose profits and wealth would be even higher if they could siphon off cheaper skilled workers from abroad."

Let's note this.

Some people -- like Tabitha -- told you the truth ahead of the election. Some people flat out lied to you. Might be a good time to note COMMON DREAMS. They're fundraising right now. And if you donate to them, you can support both-sides b.s. Yeah, in August, September and the first half of October, they assisted Donald Chump by repeatedly attacking Kamala Harris every day -- multiple times a day. I have given them credit for finally stopping that b.s.

But?

That Jessica Corbett story above? Read after where we cut her off and you'll find that she's a Trumper because only a Trumper -- faced with Donald's planned round ups -- would then try to both sides it by attacking Kamala and Joe on immigration.

That's right, give them your money so that the kind of center-right garbage that you get on the Sunday chat and chews can reign supreme online as well.

The following sites updated:

Sunday, December 29, 2024

BLUESKY weighs in on disgusting Ro Khanna

I never want to be in C.I.'s shoes. It's almost the end of the year which means she has to work on the year-in-review. Writing it? No. She'll write it New Year's Eve around a half hour after midnight. She's been doing her research. It may end up being the main section of the report. She didn't realize it was as bad as it was -- independent media's attacks on Kamala. Please, remember, she was noting this in real time as it happened. But she spent an hour and a half on Tuesday focusing on one outlet, researching it, and realized she had to do some more. She spent four hours Friday and she's spent fours hours Saturday and this is just research for numbers.

I don't have that kind of energy or drive. I was ready to pack this site in two years after I started.

Anyway. I had an e-mail about Ro Khanna. I don't care for him. He's a fake and a sell out. I could briefly take him when he first emerged on the scene because I used to confuse him with Mo Rocca -- the comedian. When Ro's profile got bigger, I saw that he was a big mouth talker who didn't do much of anything. That's not fair. He attacks members of his own party and he attacks his own party. He does do that.

He's another grifter and I have no idea why so many immature minds in this country feel the need to worship politicians.

First guest, Ro Khanna.

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— Tom Watson (@guitarwatson.bsky.social) December 26, 2024 at 3:06 PM

What’s the over/under for Ro Khanna switching to the Republican Party? Exactly who in the incoming Trump administration is trying to make food safer? RFK Junior? Khanna is an idiot.
— John Pierce (@johnspierce.bsky.social) December 29, 2024 at 10:44 AM

can we talk about how weird it is that Ro Khanna is wading into the otherwise exclusively intra-fascist debate on H1B
— local new jersey gremlin (@usspcrichardandson.bsky.social) December 28, 2024 at 8:15 AM

Folks, I see a lot of you dragging Ro Khanna, and I just want to mention: You are all correct, keep dragging him, he's validating the lie that Trump has good ideas about spending cuts because Ro's Silicon Valley buddies want Trump to hand them big government checks while cutting social security.

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— Max Kennerly (@maxkennerly.bsky.social) December 29, 2024 at 10:41 AM

How long until Ro Khanna has his own show on Rumble?

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— Post-Left Watch (@postleftwatch.bsky.social) December 29, 2024 at 11:00 AM

ro khanna exists in the modern era to show us what it was like when a black slave helped the slave masters catch the slaves. he's "one of the good ones."

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— Oliver Willis (@owillis.bsky.social) December 29, 2024 at 10:08 AM

Ro Khanna is a Dem like Glenn Greenwald is a liberal
— NoHomers Diary (@nohomers.bsky.social) December 29, 2024 at 9:52 AM

It’s becoming more and more clear that Ro Khanna (who encouraged RFK Jr to run 3rd party) is going to focus his 2028 campaign on attacking democrats. This is not surprising considering his orders come from David Sirota, the man who led Bernie’s campaign in 2016 and 2020.
— LGBT for Dems (@lgbtqpete.bsky.social) December 26, 2024 at 7:48 AM

"Iraq snapshot" (THE COMMON ILLS):

Friday, December 26, 2024. The Water Cooler Set declares the death of non-FOX "NEWS" cable channels while not understanding the changing media landscape, lived reality is about to hit MAGA hard, and much more.

Let's kick things off with Amanda Marcotte (SALON):

In the face of Vice President Kamala Harris losing the presidential election to Donald Trump, the punditry's focus has been almost exclusively on asking how the Democrats couldn't beat a relentless liar with 34 felony convictions and a previous attempted coup under his belt. Everyone has a different theory about Harris' "messaging," with every critic inevitably arguing that if she had just talked more about their pet issue, she would have won.

Another option, however, is to listen to what swing voters who backed Trump said about their decision. That would seem the wisest choice, but to be fair to people who don't want to go there, hearing these people out is a truly miserable experience. What quickly becomes evident about the median voters in an American focus group is how profoundly opposed they are to even the most basic factual information. On the contrary, it's a community with a pathological aversion to reality, where people compulsively react to anything truth-shaped with hostility, running as hard as they can toward disinformation. They are addicted to BS. Of course they voted for Trump, the country's most reliable dealer of their favorite drug.

This may sound ungenerous to these voters, but only if you've been sparing yourself the torture of engaging their actual opinions. If you hold your nose and dive in, it's startling how much the typical swing voter is allergic to facts. It's not just ignorance, but overt hostility to anything that smacks of veracity. Such as the Trump voter who insisted to the New York Times that Democrats are "lying about pregnancies," by conveying factual information about abortion bans. Or the one who falsely believed "so many people just walk right across the border and get free housing, free food." Or the one who was excited that "Trump brings a Robert Kennedy Jr. or a Tulsi Gabbard and Elon Musk." Or the one who said the "Democratic Party [is] going after average people who disagreed on Covid, who disagreed on school boards, who disagreed on boys playing in women’s sports," which is just a way to complain about liberals who criticize him on social media for saying things that aren't true.

Sarah Longwell's "Focus Group" podcast ended the year by interviewing Joe Rogan fans who voted for Trump for the first time this election. It was a smart choice, and not just because Rogan's endorsement likely pushed Trump over the top in a shockingly close election. Rogan's audience perfectly illustrates the way the firehose of disinformation online — his conspiracy theory-hyping podcast has over 16 million followers — has pickled the brains of so many otherwise normal people. Most of the people Longwell interviewed couldn't go two minutes without coughing up a conspiracy theory. Everything is a shadowy plot, from the COVID-19 pandemic to the guy who shot Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania. The straightforward details of the shooting of UnitedHealth CEO Brian Thompson came out after the arrest of Luigi Mangione, and yet these voters refused to believe the banal facts. Some are wallowing in theories that Mangione is a patsy, or that the shooting is a psyop. The truer any information was, the more they rejected it.

MAGA is stupid. There's no reason to pretend otherwise. When we'd get a MAGA uber drive in whatever state we were campaigning in last fall, their ignorance regarding how a tariff works wasn't the only thing that came up. There was so much more stupidity.

We noted on recently and a lot of people e-mailed asking what was I talking about. Roseanne Barr gave a big speech that people on the YOUTUBE left and 'left' mocked -- it did deserve that -- but didn't really seem to understand.

Roseanne, in her speech, was talking about Donald Chump as a savior to children -- I'm blocking the speech -- in my mind -- because it's so painful to watch someone who should know better fall into lies.

And I know Roseanne so I know how she fell in. Things didn't make sense to her, she smokes way too much pot, her sleep is always erratic meaning she's often up all night reading conspiracies on the internet and taking them as truth and praising God that he's seen fit to enlighten her and now it's her job to enlighten others.

While he was in office from 2017 through 2021, she honest believes -- because of lies on the internet -- that governments -- including the US -- are part of some world sex slavery system for children and that Chump fought that. He was the savior of children.

These people have been taken out of the real world and plopped into crazy land.

And if you speak to them -- and we spoke to several nut jobs especially when we were campaigning in South Carolina -- you'll find that they base this on internet liars and on the corporate media system.

Internet liars should be obvious, they're spreading it.

Why did the nut jobs also point to the corporate media.

In their minds, the corporate media proved that this lie was true. How so? We would be told that back in 2016 when Hillary Clinton and others were accused of running a children's slave trade out a pizza place in DC, the media was all over that and calling it a lie and blah blah blah.

But, we would be told, notice how they don't say a word about the slave trade Trump is fighting!!!!!

That's proof that it's real!!!!

The media doesn't have the time to respond to every nut job on RUMBLE. But they need to start responding.

It's no fun. I get that. In the last four years, I think we've noted four liars on RUMBLE. They're disgusting people and life is frankly too short for me. But the media needs to be covering it regularly. When they do not call it out, it leads already deluded people to become even more irrational and more delusional.

I spoke about this in a post-election analysis and one person noted that if outlets have time to assign journalists to the Taylor Swift beat and the Beyonce beat, they certainly have time -- and money -- to cover the underbelly of the internet that spreads one lie after another and never gets challenged.

I'm not in the mood to sugar coat. MAGA lives pathetic lives. There's the economy, yes. But it's so much more than that. They are pathetic. And they need to whine and scapegoat. So they target women and people of color who are not their enemies but whom they see as getting ahead while they're sinking. And the resentment builds and they need some unifying theory to explain why this is going on. So they latch on to conspiracy theories while looking for a con artist to rescue them.

"He's a convicted felon!" doesn't matter to them when they're embracing the lie that governments -- including our own -- are participants in global sex trafficking of children and only Donald Chump can save us!!!

They delude themselves and if the lies aren't being addressed by the corporate media, they read that as an admission that the lies are true.

We're probably all doomed, to be honest. Even MSNBC is bringing on crack pots to normalize Chump. We almost posted an MSNBC segment -- I don't know who the host was, some woman -- due to the title but I paused and thought, stream it first. I did. I then deleted it -- I do the evening and overnight posts here at least four hours in advance. I studied poli sci -- undergraduate and graduate. I am well aware of the hypothesis that a madman can bring security to a multi-polar system in some ways. Their Republican guest was trying to make that argument but didn't know that argument.

Chump's lunatic statements about grabbing this country or that? That's now how even a madman brings security. Those statements only inflame international relations. And lead to no options are off the table assertions from other crazy leaders of other countries.

But that's what we got on MSNBC.

Instead of doing what they should be doing -- exposing lies and taking on crackpot notions -- they are bending to him.

And it's stupid for democracy but it's also stupid for business.

The ratings are in free fall!

This is what those pushing changes at CNN and MNSBC insist.

Historically, this is the month when ratings go into free fall. Why? Few care about politics in the holiday season. Interest tapers off following a general election.

There is a lesson to learn and that was provided by MORNING JOE which, post-election, began fawning over Chump and saw their ratings drop significantly. The smartest thing MSNBC could do would be ditch that program. The fawning broke the trust the viewers had for the hosts and then the hosts screaming and yelling at viewers about how people are too stupid to understand what they -- Joe and Mika -- were doing and all that other garbage. It's really the most harmful program the network has.

Ratings keep being mentioned. Ratings aren't everything or the only thing. MORNING JOE is also down on streaming -- which, let's remember, is where everything's headed. Like it or not, that's where it's headed and it's how news and public affairs programs are increasingly consumed.

Take out THE FIVE and FOX "NEWS" is not doing well in streaming. MSNBC is doing much better and has many segments that go over 70,000 views -- some well over that. Take out THE FIVE and you're not seeing a lot of hit clips on YOUTUBE for FOX when it comes to streaming in the last 24 hours. You're dealing with a lot of 14 thousand and 40 thousands. Their biggest streamer in the last 24 hours is 135K for the story about how Russia might have shot down a plane. MSNBC has three videos on that topic and the one with the largest streams is at 221K. CNN covered that as well and their YOUTUBE clip is at 459K.

FOX "NEWS" will from this day forward most likely always have higher viewers because their viewers are older and are youngsters who hit old age early (there's a reason it's called conservativism). But, so sorry all you idiots who keep insisting that these are the worst times for cable 'news' that's not FOX, that is not accurate.

The landscape changed some time ago -- long enough for MODERN FAMILY to have done a joke about it and have Hayley explain that her generation gets their news watching a video at the gas pump -- and all the media observers this month and last acting as though FOX "NEWS" is the big success and the business model of the future? That's just not true.

That should have been in Ava and my piece. In "Raison d'être (Ava and C.I.)," we noted the liars. We didn't note the lazy. Lazy people do no research and run with conventional wisdom and that harms us all.

And while this nonsense has gone on, no one's really challenged it. The Water Cooler Set is what Ava and I have long called these lazy idiots. Many have print experience. You're seeing the impact the internet is having on broadcast and cable and not one of these conventional wisdom idiots can think back to how the internet changed the figures for newspapers? How the audience shifted to outlets websites and not printed page. The consumers want to consume when they want to. They don't want to be dictated to or tied to a schedule they didn't make.

But instead of talking about how consumers are taking in public affairs programs and news stories, we're getting garbage that among the oldy crowd (elderly and those born old), FOX "NEWS" is a success!!! When in fact the streaming on YOUTUBE says otherwise. And you pull segments from THE FIVE out of the mix and FOX "NEWS" is an embarrassment in terms of streams.

By the way, here's the CNN video on Russia that beat MSNBC and FOX "NEWS."

Travis Gettys (RAW STORY) reports:

Donald Trump has promised to cut energy costs, but an expert said some of his policies might end up hurting his own supporters.

The price of natural gas looks likely to jump despite record-high production, which could undermine the president-elect's campaign pledge, and political analyst Leah Wright Rigueur told CNN that energy costs are largely outside the government's control.

"I think, you know, the secretary of the interior, I think the secretary of energy both understand that or the newly appointed, the nominated secretaries understand that," said Rigueur, an assistant professor of public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. "What is more interesting, I think right now is the fact that under [president Joe] Biden, these kind of energy policies, particularly under the Inflation Reduction Act, have actually been deeply beneficial to red states and blue states, but in particular red states, in some cases rescuing manufacturing, rescuing energy production, rescuing all kinds of industry, and so there is a push amongst Republicans, particularly Republican congressmen, to keep those acts and to keep those things in place."

As much as the press actually doing their job could help educate voters, the reality is that lived experience is about to educate a lot of people over the next four years.

Jessica Corbett (COMMON DREAMS) notes:

Adding to alarm over U.S. President-elect Donald Trump's immigration plans, his "border czar" toldThe Washington Post in an interview published Thursday that the administration plans to return to detaining migrant families with children.

Tom Homan, who served as acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement during Trump's first term, said that ICE "will look to hold parents with children in 'soft-sided' tent structures similar to those used by U.S. border officials to handle immigration surges," the Post summarized. "The government will not hesitate to deport parents who are in the country illegally, even if they have young U.S.-born children, he added, leaving it to those families to decide whether to exit together or be split up."
Since Trump beat Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris last month, migrant rights advocates have reiterated concerns about the Republican's first-term policies—such as forced separation of families—and his 2024 campaign pledges, from mass deportations to attempting to end birthright citizenship, despite the guarantees of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Homan—who oversaw the so-called "zero tolerance" policy that separated thousands of migrant kids from their parents—said: "Here's the issue... You knew you were in the country illegally and chose to have a child. So you put your family in that position."

And then there's Elon and other idiots.

Their statements are outraging even MAGA. Educating MAGA now in the way that the media failed to do in the lead up to the election. Charlie Nash (MEDIAITE) notes:

Former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy received heavy backlash on Thursday after he suggested that Americans were not being hired because they were mediocre.

After Ramaswamy and billionaire Elon Musk came under fire from prominent Trump supporters on X, formerly Twitter, for supporting H-1B visas over the training and hiring of American workers, Ramaswamy defended his position in a post which accused the United States of suffering from a culture of “mediocrity.”

The following sites updated: