Friday, November 22, 2024

November 22, 2024

Good morning,

Welcome to the news for independent thinkers

Leading the News . . .

Trump picks former Florida AG Pam Bondi as AG nominee after Matt Gaetz withdraws . . . President-elect Donald Trump went from one Floridian to another Thursday, announcing that former Sunshine State Attorney General Pam Bondi would be his new pick to lead the Justice Department, hours after former nominee Matt Gaetz withdrew his name from consideration. "For too long, the partisan Department of Justice has been weaponized against me and other Republicans – Not anymore," Trump, 78, said in a statement on Truth Social. "Pam will refocus the DOJ to its intended purpose of fighting Crime, and Making America Safe Again." New York Post

Politics

Hegseth earns support from GOP senators . . . Republican senators who met with Pete Hegseth, President-elect Donald Trump's pick for Defense secretary, are all in for the former Fox News co-host who is trying to dispel concerns about a 2017 sexual assault complaint that resulted in no charges. Mr. Hegseth, an Army combat veteran, was escorted into the Capitol on Thursday by Vice President-elect J.D. Vance to meet with Republican senators and talk about his nomination. Washington Times

Hegseth says he was exonerated, and no charges were filed.

Project 2025 author rejected for top health position for being to anti-abortion . . . Donald Trump's transition team has rejected a push to install a prominent Project 2025 author in a senior role at the Department of Health and Human Services over concerns that his strident anti-abortion views would prove too controversial. Anti-abortion groups had been lobbying Trump's HHS secretary nominee, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., to select Roger Severino, a longtime anti-abortion stalwart, as the department's deputy secretary. The installation of Severino, director of HHS' Office for Civil Rights during the first Trump administration, was aimed at allaying some of the groups' concerns about Kennedy's abortion record. Politico

Government spending to combat 'misinformation' jumped massively under Biden . . . The Biden administration has spent more than a quarter of a billion dollars to study and police "misinformation," according to a report released Friday. OpenTheBooks, a spending watchdog, said the federal government has spent $267 million since 2021 on contracts and research grants that include the term "misinformation" in the proposals. During the Trump administration, $7 million was spent on grants involving misinformation. Washington Times

Cut to the News has learned exclusively that Harris was planning on creating a new agency, the Department of Orwellian Initiatives.

RFK Jr. weighs major changes to how Medicare pays physicians . . . Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his advisers are considering an overhaul of Medicare's decades-old payment formula, a bid to shift the health system's incentives toward primary care and prevention, said four people who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private deliberations. The discussions are in their early stages, the people said, and have involved a plan to review the thousands of billing codes that determine how much physicians get paid for performing procedures and services. Washington Post

National Security

Putin touts Russia's new missile and delivers a menacing warning to NATO . . . The new ballistic missile fired by Russia struck a military-industrial facility in the central Ukrainian city of Dnipro, but its real mission was delivering a deadly new message to NATO. Hours after Thursday's strike touched off a debate over whether the Ukrainian plant was hit by an intercontinental ballistic missile, President Vladimir Putin made a rare and surprise appearance on Russian television to clear up the mystery. He described it as a new, intermediate-range ballistic missile that raced to its target at 10 times the speed of sound. Associated Press

Censored but not silenced podcast: American and Russia at War!

Admiral says Ukraine aid depleting U.S. missile stocks . . . The supply of advanced U.S. air defense and air-to-air missiles to Ukraine is depleting stockpiles needed for deterring China, the commander of the Indo-Pacific Command said this week. Adm. Sam Paparo said that until recently, deliveries of less valuable arms, such as artillery pieces and short-range weapons, had no impact on the readiness of his forces, which are confronting an increasingly aggressive Chinese military across East Asia. Washington Times

Denver Mayor Warns Trump Of 'Tiananmen Square Moment' If He Rounds Up Illegal Immigrants . . . Denver Democratic Mayor Mike Johnston said there would be mass public resistance if President-elect Donald Trump implemented a mass deportation effort of illegal immigrants from federal forces, likening it to a "Tiananmen Square moment." "About 42,000 migrants have arrived in the Denver metro area since December 2022, about 1,800 of which have now been authorized to work as a result of city-led efforts," Common Sense Institute Colorado reported in May 2024. Daily Wire

The resistance is now threatening to provoke violence.

Top senator calls Salt Typhoon 'worst telecom hack in our nation's history' . . . The Chinese government espionage campaign that has deeply penetrated more than a dozen U.S. telecommunications companies is the "worst telecom hack in our nation's history — by far." The hackers, part of a group dubbed Salt Typhoon, have been able to listen in on audio calls in real time and have in some cases moved from one telecom network to another, exploiting relationships of "trust," said Sen. Mark R. Warner (D-Virginia), chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. Washington Post

International

Kim Jong Un's Message to Trump: We're Not Interested . . . North Korean leader Kim Jong Un appeared to rebuff the prospect of reviving his nuclear diplomacy with President-elect Donald Trump, according to his first public remarks about disarmament talks since the election. North Korea's state media reported Friday that the 40-year-old dictator called the U.S. a superpower that operated by force rather than a will to coexist and belittled the value that previous talks had for his cash-strapped regime. Wall Street Journal

Because Bill Clinton failed to act and allowed Jimmy Carter to strike a deal with Pyongyang, North Korean nukes are here to stay.

Money

Trump Considers Kevin Warsh to Serve as Treasury Secretary—and Then Fed Chair . . . President-elect Donald Trump has floated selecting the financier Kevin Warsh as his Treasury secretary with the understanding that he could later be nominated to lead the Federal Reserve when Jerome Powell's term as chair ends in 2026, according to people familiar with the matter. Trump discussed the potential arrangement with Warsh during a meeting Wednesday at Mar-a-Lago, the president-elect's private club in Florida, some of the people said. Wall Street Journal

COP29 climate summit draft proposes rich countries pay $250 billion per year . . . The COP29 climate summit presidency released a draft finance deal on Friday that would have developed nations take the lead in providing $250 billion per year by 2035 to help poorer nations - a proposal that drew criticism from all sides. World governments represented at the summit in the Azerbaijan capital Baku are tasked with agreeing a sweeping funding plan to tackle climate change, but the talks have been marked by division between wealthy governments resisting a costly outcome and developing nations pushing for more. Reuters

That bill won't go on America's tab with Trump in office.

You should also know

Enslaved on OnlyFans: Women describe lives of isolation, torment and sexual servitude . . . OnlyFans says it empowers content creators, particularly women, to monetize sexually explicit images and videos in a safe online environment. But a Reuters investigation found women who said they had been deceived, drugged, terrorized and sexually enslaved to make money from the site. In one prominent case, influencer Andrew Tate, with millions of followers worldwide on social media, is accused of forcing women in Romania to produce porn for OnlyFans and pocketing the profits. He has denied the charges. Reuters

Guilty Pleasures

House Foreign Affairs Member Calls for State Dept. Briefing Over Post-Election Therapy Sessions . . . Rep. Darrell Issa (R., Calif.), who is in the running to become the committee's next chairman, pressed the State Department to disclose how much it spent on private therapy sessions for employees grappling with Trump's victory. "It is disturbing that ostensibly nonpartisan government officials would suffer a personal meltdown over the results of a free and fair election, something the United States champions around the world," Issa wrote to outgoing Secretary of State Antony Blinken. Washington Free Beacon

Taxpayer money to help authoritarian snowflakes with the problem that we live in a democracy.

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