President Biden is considering commuting the sentences of most, if not all, of the 40 men on the federal government’s death row, people familiar with the matter said, a move that would frustrate President-elect Donald Trump’s ability to resume the rapid pace of executions that marked his first term.
A broad coalition of religious and civil-rights groups has been pressing Biden to take the step, and the effort gained momentum earlier this month after Pope Francis, in his weekly address, prayed for the commutation of America’s condemned inmates. If their death sentences were commuted, the prisoners, all convicted of murder, would serve life without parole. Biden, a devout Catholic, spoke with Francis on Thursday and is scheduled to meet with him at the Vatican next month, the White House said.
A decision from the president could come by Christmas, some of the people said. A principal question is whether the president should issue a blanket commutation of all the condemned men, or whether death sentences should remain for the most heinous convicts, these people said.
A White House spokesman said that no final decision had been made.
Attorney General Merrick Garland, who oversees federal prisons, has recommended that Biden commute all but a handful of the sentences, the people familiar with the matter said, excepting a few terrorism and hate-crimes cases. The Justice Department had no immediate comment.
Possible exceptions could include Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, convicted in the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing that killed three and wounded more than 250 others, Robert Bowers, who killed 11 people in the 2018 attack on the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, and Dylann Roof, who in 2015 killed nine at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C.
On his way out of office Trump executed a whole bunch of federal prisoners within just a couple of weeks. It was one of the most grotesque parting shots he made and that’s saying something when you consider the Big Lie and January 6th. Biden needs to save the rest of them.
I actually think he should give clemency to all of them, even those hideous mass murderers. The reason is that the death penalty is immoral and it is immoral for the state to execute those murderous sociopaths who cannot be allowed to walk among us.
Biden is a very committed Catholic and he is close to meeting his maker. He will never run for anything and he has no offspring or other family that is set to follow in his footsteps. He has no reason to care about the political ramifications. This is purely a matter of principle and he needs to save those people from the bloodthirsty Trump regardless of the criticism he will almost certainly get from the right (and probably establishment Democrats who are desperate for Real American credit.)
Thank you once again for your support for this old blog this year. I am so very grateful for all my readers and truly appreciate those of you who are able to put a few bucks in the kitty. It means everything, especially in tough times like these.
So they managed to avoid a shutdown at the last minute and everybody got to go home for Christmas. But their hiccup at the end exposed the glaring fact that the Republican legislative majority is going to be an even worse shitshow than we might have thought.
We knew they’d be incompetent and extreme. But I don’t think any of us understood that Elon Musk would be the new leader of the party and would take to his massive platform to threaten Republicans with his massive fortune. But it was entirely predictable that the Freedom Caucus weirdos would just say no. They always do.
Apparently, they were finally able to appease President Musk and his assistant Donald Trump with a promise to raise the debt ceiling while simultaneously making massive cuts to the safety net:
House Republicans have a new plan for their agenda next year — one that might even satisfy tech billionaire Elon Musk. They claim they’re going to cut $2.5 trillion in government spending, in return for raising the debt ceiling.
Specifically, this handshake deal — part of Speaker Mike Johnson’s plan to avert a government shutdown — is to cut mandatory spending, which includes major social safety net programs like Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps and veterans benefits.
It would satisfy far-right lawmakers who have been pining for cuts for years. The only problem? Figuring out how to do that with a barely there majority.
I hope they aren’t counting on Democratic votes to do it. (Of course, you never know….) You have to love this, though:
Members are aware they’re on tricky political ground, with many Americans opposing cuts to most entitlement programs. Some lawmakers suggested they aren’t talking only about cuts — but really savings.
“There’s lots of places over 10 years that you can find opportunities,” Rep. G.T. Thompson of Pennsylvania said. “There are places where you can reduce spending and, quite frankly, things that we can do to increase economic activity, which brings in additional revenue.”
They’re going to slash the safety net and give massive tax cuts to the wealthy but they somehow think that (as well as tariffs and deportations) will result in additional revenue? I’ll have what he’s smoking.
As I said, it’s going to be a shitshow. Trump is weak. He let Musk outflank him by successfully strong arming the GOP into rejecting the negotiated bipartisan CR and knee-capping Speaker Johnson. That made Johnson look very bad and spawned the “President Musk” meme that’s going to haunt old Donald. But that’s not all:
On Thursday, in coordination with Trump, the House GOP unveiled a new funding bill, one shorn of all Democratic priorities. Over social media, the president-elect instructed his party to “vote ‘YES’ for this Bill, TONIGHT!” Then, 38 House Republicans voted against the legislation, which was more than enough to sink it amid nearly unified Democratic opposition.
House conservatives’ defiance of Trump is partly attributable to ideological differences. The president-elect’s objections to Wednesday’s bipartisan agreement were distinct from those of his donor Elon Musk or the House GOP’s hardliners. The latter disdained the spending bill’s page count and fiscal cost. Trump, by contrast, appeared more preoccupied with the legislation’s failure to increase — or eliminate — the debt limit. [,,,]
It is not surprising that some House Republicans would prize conservative purity above fealty to Trump. That nearly 40 of them would harbor such priorities is a revelation, however. During the 2024 campaign, Trump demonstrated a remarkable capacity to dictate ideological terms to his party, officially forswearing a national abortion ban without provoking any sustained attacks from his right. Combined with his apparent success in revising conservative orthodoxy on trade, entitlement spending, and US-Russia policy, Trump’s pivot on abortion raised the possibility that the modern right was a personality cult first and an ideological movement second.
It’s now clear that for a substantial portion of House Republicans, this is not the case. And that is going to raise serious challenges to Trump’s agenda next year.[…]
It is worth recalling that Trump is a 78-year-old lame duck. If you are an up-and-coming conservative House member with aspirations to run for higher office a decade from now, a reputation for conservative ideological purity might eventually prove more useful than a record of perfect fealty to an elderly man whose interest in the Republican Party is liable to evaporate the moment he forfeits the presidency.
The article doesn’t mention that Elon Musk is the new leader of that rump faction and he wields a mighty checkbook.
By making Musk the face of fiscal austerity, Trump anointed his successor as leader of the Republican Party. I doubt he realized he was doing that and he certainly didn’t realize that he would be taking over before Trump even took office. It was a YUGE mistake.
They’re making Google eyes at each other publicly for now.
Fergawdsakes. But you know Trump has got to be fuming…
This is going to be a crazy year, folks, wilder than I think we could have anticipated just a month ago. So I hope you’ll check in over here from time to time. Tom and I and other occasional contributors will be watching all this very closely and trying to make some sense of it as best we can. (It’s a dirty job but somebody’s gotta do it.) Anything you can spare to help in that task is much appreciated.
That came after his earlier endorsement and a flood of criticism.
Then the VP-elect also endorsed German neo-fascists and threatened a woman who works for a think tank called The Foundation for Defense of Democracies. He may think his sarcasm masks the fascism but he’s wrong.
This is unamerican, obviously.
These are the people who will be running our country for the next four years openly aligning with Nazis and deploying Nazi tactics.
By the way, the man who ran his car into that crowd in Germany is a big fan of Elon Musk:
Taleb A. apparently shared the resentment of conspiracy ideologists and agitators such as the US podcaster Alex Jones or the British right-wing activist Tommy Robinson. The entrepreneur Elon Musk, who has increasingly openly expressed his sympathies for right-wing parties, was also one of his role models: “If you listen to someone like Tommy Robinson or even Elon Musk, and even if you are ignorant of the process of Islamization, you will think that they are both conspiracy theorists,” said A. in an interview. “But I can say from experience that everything Robinson says, what Musk says, what Alex Jones says, or anyone who is described by the mainstream media as a radical or right-wing extremist – they are telling the truth.”
The old, red-brick Memorial Auditorium where the spouse as a tween saw The Monkees is long gone. Its replacement sports a plaza in front, a modern, electronic marquee, and a name that expires with its corporate sponsorship. Before pyrotechnics, before Vince McMahon made professional wrestling professional and a media empire, the old joint is where Monday Night Wrestling was as much local culture as ambulances and cop cars outside west-end beer joints on Saturday nights. What the hell, I thought. A friend and I went out for pizza and beer, then took in the show once. Once.
Wrasslin’ wasn’t the spectacle it is now. It wasn’t even mildly entertaining. But for fans it was a weekly morality play of “The Drunkard” sort. Clean-cut heroes. Snidely Whiplash villains (heels) to hiss, and The Foreign Menace. Like McMahon’s empire, Donald Trump’s MAGA show offers obvious heroes and dastardly, America-hating villains. It’s more mildly threatening than mildly entertaining. But it’s a kind of theater with similar morality-play charm for a similar audience. As my high school journalism teacher said of supermarket tabloids, at least people are reading.
David Kurz of TPM sees the wrestling parallels in the just-averted budget showdown:
This week’s debacle is not your grandpappy’s horse-trading in a smoke-filled room or LBJ dishing out the Johnson Treatment. The only arm-twisting going on is the kind you see in pro wrestling, which is probably the best parallel for what the GOP’s performative politics amounts to. Spending bills, speakership elections, and other real and pressing matters of government put the GOP’s kayfabe under extreme duress. When that happens, we get eruptions like this one that periodically pull the curtain back on what is really up.
We’re more than a decade now into the GOP’s performative politics of destruction. It gains power by touting its aim to break stuff and then runs into a brick wall when it’s forced to make the hard choices that come with holding power. Any GOP effort to govern at least temporarily is susceptible to being undermined by its many bombthrowers, who can exert leverage by striking a purer “blow it all up” posture.
Performatively breaking “the rules” is part of the show in the wrasslin’ world. The bad guys become good guys and vice versa, just to keep things interesting. Performers getting even for “done me wrongs” sells tickets to the next event.
The financially struggling news media hasn’t caught on to that. Kurz provides examples of anodyne headlines from media outlets that while “literally true … fail to capture the true dynamic.” I’m not arguing that headlines should be as sensational as the tabloids, but if you want to sell papers and draw public attention to events that impact people’s for-real lives, perhaps a little more showmanship is in order. Republicans are hanging truck nuts on America’s trailer hitch fergawdsakes. MAGAs in Congress are coal-rolling Trump’s enemies. Maybe say so.
When is revenge not revenge?
The Bulwark’s Tim Miller spoke with recently incarcerated Steve Bannon, “Trump’s on-again-off-again adviser,” about plans for not-revenge against Trump’s enemies (and Kash Patel’s). The law firm of Bannon, Patel, Musk, and Trump will instead attempt “cleansing of institutions that Trump and the MAGA movement believe are fundamentally broken,” Miller explains, and break them some more. There will be a heavy focus on the January 6 “fedsurrection” plot by the FBI to pin the Capitol assault on MAGA “patriots“:
“I think there will be a massive investigation. The vast criminal conspiracy, including the media’s—what was it, Andrew Weissmann and all those FBI guys that work on MSNBC—I think there will be big investigations into all these people, I just do. I think there is going to be a huge investigation, I believe, into 2020. I think it’s going to be a huge investigation on January 6th, the fedsurrection, I think it’s going to be a huge investigation about the vast criminal conspiracy against President Trump.”
The facts won’t matter. The play’s the thing that will catch the attention of the MAGA king and his rabid fans. They want a show. He’ll give them the circuses if not the bread. The press will dish up bland.
Our oligarch overlords have long treated the land of the free as the home of the knave. Now that President Musk, our first non-native-born chief of state is calling the shots, that state of affairs is even more apparent, if less publicized.
“Why is corporate media not covering this more?” asks Dean Obeidallah. Mediaite:
Democratic Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) accused Elon Musk of working to kill Speaker Mike Johnson’s (R-LA) initial bipartisan spending proposal because it would have regulated his investments in China.
DeLauro said in a statement Friday she “sent a letter to congressional leadership raising concerns that Elon Musk may have upended the government funding process to remove a provision that would regulate U.S. investments in China.” Her statement added:
“The four corners of the Appropriations Committee and Congressional leadership reached a government funding deal earlier this week that included a key provision that would screen U.S. investments in critical sectors in China,” said DeLauro. “Musk’s investments in China and his ties with the Chinese Community Party have only grown over the last few years with Tesla’s Shanghai plant producing about 50 percent of Tesla’s global automobile output. It is no surprise ‘President’ Musk does not want to see a funding deal containing this provision be signed into law.”
In the letter she wrote, “ It is particularly disturbing that Musk may have sought to upend this critical negotiated agreement to remove a bipartisan provision regulating U.S. investments in China in order to protect his wallet and the Chinese Communist Party at the expense of American workers, innovators, and businesses.”
Disturbing? Yes. Surprising? No.
Why is corporate media not covering this more? "House Dem Accuses Musk of Killing Initial Spending Deal to Protect His Investments In China." No debate that the second GOP budget bill took out the ban out on China investments and China is Musk's second biggest market www.mediaite.com/politics/hou…
Musk responded to DeLauro’s accusation by ridiculing the 81-year-old lawmaker’s appearance. Musk posted an AI-generated image of DeLauro as a kind of monster and wrote, “Turns out that Washington DC swamp creatures are real.”
That didn’t work out any better than letting Trump off the hook for staging a coup and sending him into exile at Mar-a-Lago. I guess the fascist heart wants what the fascist heart wants.
Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and a close adviser to President-elect Donald J. Trump, on Friday endorsed Germany’s far-right party, a group with ties to neo-Nazis whose youth wing has been classified as “confirmed extremist” by German domestic intelligence.
“Only the AfD can save Germany,” Mr. Musk posted to X, referring to the anti-immigrant party, the Alternative for Germany, by its German initials.
In doing so, he is wading into German politics at a moment of turmoil, and at the very same time that he has wielded his influence in Washington to help blow up a bipartisan spending deal that was meant to avoid a government shutdown over Christmas. The German government recently collapsed, resulting in early elections, which are planned for next year.
Mr. Musk’s post was in response to an English-language video by a 24-year-old German far-right influencer, Naomi Seibt. She harshly criticized Friedrich Merz, whom polls show leading the race, for dismissing a rival’s suggestion that Germany look to Mr. Musk and another firebrand, President Javier Milei of Argentina, for ideas about reforming the country.
What a huge liar.
The AfD policies are identical to those of the US Democratic Party when Obama took office! I don’t think there is a single difference. https://t.co/b6daIRijPH
The AfD is controversial even among other European far-right parties because many of its leaders are not shy about expressing Nazi sympathies. In May, France’s far-right party led by Marine Le Pen split from the AfD in its European Parliament coalition after the German party’s top candidate, Maximilian Krah, said that a person was “not automatically a criminal” just because they had been a member of the SS, Adolph Hitlter’s paramilitary organization.
Reports that AfD members held a covert meeting regarding the mass deportation plan led to protests earlier this year, but despite this, the party is polling in second place at 19 percent —behind Merz’s CDU/CSU political alliance at 31 percent—in the lead-up to Germany’s snap election in February 2025.
Right. The party that’s too Nazi for Marine LePen is just like Democratic Party in the US. That’s so dumb I can’t even believe I’m typing it.
We have a huge problem with billionaires and this billionaire in particular. I don’t know where it’s going but I have a sneaking suspicion he sees himself as this guy:
A group of high-level managers at the Louisiana Department of Health walked into a Nov. 14 meeting in Baton Rouge expecting to talk about outreach and community events.
Instead, they were told by an assistant secretary in the department and another official that department leadership had a new policy: Advertising or otherwise promoting the COVID, influenza or mpox vaccines, an established practice there — and at most other public health entities in the U.S. — must stop.
NPR has confirmed the policy was discussed at this meeting, and at two other meetings held within the department’s Office of Public Health, on Oct. 3 and Nov. 21, through interviews with four employees at the Department of Health, which employs more than 6,500 people and is the state’s largest agency.
According to the employees, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they fear losing their jobs or other forms of retaliation, the policy would be implemented quietly and would not be put in writing.
Staffers were also told that it applies to every aspect of the health department’s work: Employees could not send out press releases, give interviews, hold vaccine events, give presentations or create social media posts encouraging the public to get the vaccines. They also could not put up signs at the department’s clinics that COVID, flu or mpox vaccines were available on site.
That just makes me sad. There’s no sense in any of it. It’s all a result of propaganda, conspiracy theories and a political party led by a demagogue who exploits it for power.
We used to be a culture that, for all its faults, looked to the future and embraced scientific progress. It looks like those days are gone.
I mean, this is where we are these days. It’s 2025, people.
And yet he’ll probably die being hated because he was old
Those numbers are the envy of the world. The US under Joe Biden and the Democrats engineered a soft landing from a global economic catastrophe. I wonder if anyone will ever take the chance again. Doing the right thing turned out to be politically suicidal.
The U.S. economy grew at a 3.1% annualized pace in the third quarter — stronger than previously thought, the Commerce Department said on Thursday.
The revision suggests 2024 was yet another shocker year in which the U.S. economy surprised to the upside, as other major nations grappled with sluggish growth.
The revision is an upgrade from the initial estimate of 2.8% growth in the July-Sept. period.
It largely reflects stronger exports and better consumer spending, offsetting a bigger-than-estimated drag from inventory investment.
The third quarter grew at a slightly quicker pace than the prior quarter, which expanded at a 3% annualized rate.
A tool developed by the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta estimates the economy might be even stronger in the current quarter, with 3.2% growth.
The Fed cut borrowing costs for the third time on Wednesday, but signaled fewer cuts ahead in 2025. One reason: the economy is hanging on while progress on slowing inflation has come to a halt.
“What we see happening in the economy again is most forecasters have been calling for a slowdown in growth for a very long time, and it keeps not happening,” Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell told reporters at a press conference on Wednesday.
President-elect Trump will inherit a strong economy. Still unclear is how his proposed policies on immigration, taxes and tariffs will shape growth in the months to come.
Just as he did last time and he’ll seize credit for it. If you ever thought life was fair, think again.
By the way, Democrats are gloomy about the economy, and Republicans are optimistic. I don’t think it’s just pure partisanship on the Dems part. They’re worried about the tariffs, tax cuts and deportation which isn’t irrational. If Trump carries out his plan the risk of killing this economy is very, very high. Of course, he’ll just blame the Democrats so…
Here’s his latest:
If there is going to be a shutdown of government, let it begin now, under the Biden Administration, not after January 20th, under “TRUMP.” This is a Biden problem to solve, but if Republicans can help solve it, they will!
Donald Trump Truth Social 07:52 AM EST 12/20/24
— Donald J. Trump Posts From His Truth Social (@TrumpDailyPosts) December 20, 2024
Biden is a ghost and the Democrats are nowhere to be found. Everyone knows it’s a GOP shitshow show. Let’s hope most people see the truth.
Our new president is a different kind of MAGAmaniac
Back in 2016, the whole country was left in shock when celebrity businessman Donald Trump managed to take over the Republican Party and win the presidential election. At the time there was quite a bit of resistance within the GOP establishment due to the fact that Trump had not run as an ordinary conservative but rather as a populist demagogue and they had no idea that their voters were so hungry for his message. Gone were all the usual paeans to small government and family values and even his strong advocacy for expanding the military was coupled with a discordant isolationist stance that harkened back to the pre-WWII America First movement. (Trump had no idea about that history — he thought he came up with it himself.)
However he was all for tax cuts for the wealthy, which is the lifeblood of the Republican party. And he was reflexively hostile to anything his predecessor Barack Obama ever did which meant that he was willing to reverse much of the progress that had been made in the previous eight years, pleasing Republicans to no end.
The activist base that had recently fashioned itself as the Tea Party after Obama’s election in 2008, quietly reinvented itself as the MAGA movement and lost all interest in fiscal austerity the minute Trump came on the scene. But there has always been some restiveness among the right wing ideologues in the House and Senate who really want to massively cut discretionary spending and the so-called entitlements to the bone. They’re true believers in the idea that government should not help people, period. They were relegated to the back bench during Trump’s first term and spent most of their time tilting at windmills because Trump was happily spending like the treasury was his own credit line at Deutsche bank.
He had no appetite for big spending cuts that might hurt his chances for re-election. After all, he didn’t run as a budget cutting deficit hawk. He always claimed that he didn’t need to drastically cut spending because the debt would disappear with tariffs and unprecedented growth. He said the same thing during the 2024 campaign, insisting that it would even pay for government funded child care, the worst of all possible worlds.
He pays lip service to cutting spending but he doesn’t really care about it. He’s told people he’s not worried about a US debt crisis as he’ll be out of office by then. And he’s got stuff he wants to spend a lot of money on, like deporting millions of immigrants!
That’s never been clearer than this week when Speaker Mike Johnson presented the bipartisan Continuing Resolution to fund the government until March and all hell broke loose in the House. Those rascally, back bench Tea Party/Freedom Caucus ideologues finally got the leader they’ve been waiting for and his name is Elon Musk, the richest man in the world.
It was a given that the Freedom Caucus gang would not vote for the bill. They vote no on everything. It had been negotiated by the bipartisan negotiators in both houses with the knowledge that the Senate was still in Democratic hands and the tiny GOP majority in the House requiring a bipartisan compromise.
Everyone knew that the screamers in the House would have a fit and call for Mike Johnson’s head (which is why they changed the rule raising the threshold from one member to nine.) . And since the Speaker knows better than to go to the john without getting Trump’s permission, you can be sure that Trump was kept informed of all of this. They all agreed that they would get rid of this hot potato, adjourn quickly and go home for the holidays.
That didn’t work out the way they planned it. Trump thought he had cleverly boxed Elon Musk out of real power by creating a powerless “commission” for him and his sidekick Vivek Ramaswamy to come up with enormous spending cuts to reduce the federal government by as much as a third, which knows won’t happen. But Trump has essentially empowered Musk to speak for him by having him by his side every minute in the last three months. And seeing as he’s the richest man in the world who owns a major social media platform, he has plenty of power all on his own.
Apparently, Musk decided that it was time to show the world who’s really in charge. As the anointed budget cutter in chief he took great umbrage that anyone would think of passing legislation that didn’t pass muster with him personally and he took to his social media platform to demand that the Republicans refuse to pass the bill, ordering a government shutdown until Trump takes office.
The bill quickly fell apart prompting Donald Trump, who clearly had no idea what was going on, to rush out with a statement that it was he who ordered that the bill be scrapped:
“As soon as President Trump released his official stance on the CR [continuing resolution], Republicans on Capitol Hill echoed his point of view. President Trump is the leader of the Republican Party. Full stop,”
Trump then came up with what he thought was a clever idea to take control by demanding that they only pass a bill if it also delayed or eliminated the debt ceiling, which just showed how out of touch he is with the dynamic in the House. (As I said, Trump has a lot of spending to do and he doesn’t want the debt ceiling hanging over his head.) But if President Elon’s accomplices in the Freedom Caucus are on a crusade against more government spending, why in the world would they agree to eliminate the debt ceiling?
Trump no doubt thought the Democrats would bail him out because they have often done so in the past and they always wanted to get rid of that silly contrivance. Sadly for him, they said “hell no” and refused to vote for the pared down bill Johnson and the Republicans proposed without Democratic input. 38 Republicans also voted against it because of the debt ceiling demand Trump has inserted which is a full slap in the face of Dear Leader.
It’s Elon Musk’s House now. In fact, a bunch of Republicans are proposing that they fire Johnson and make him Speaker instead.
GOP Sen. Mike Lee: Speaker Mike Johnson is a friend but he lost control of the House. He can't remain in power. Elon Musk or Vivek Ramaswamy should be Speaker
Musk is now furiously trying to mend fences with Trump by threatening to primary Democrats, blaming them for what he actually did. It’s highly probable that his demand for a government shutdown over Christmas, which Trump knows will be blamed on the Republicans because they are always the ones who cause these things, has killed Trump’s honeymoon.
What we are seeing is an emerging crack in the GOP coalition between the MAGA populists like Trump and JD Vance who want big government for their own ends and the fiscal hawks like Musk and Ramaswamy who want to burn the whole place down. There are many overlapping interests within the two camps but it’s clearly starting to come apart largely because Trump made himself a much lamer duck than he needed to be.
Trump wanted the richest man in the world by his side, for both the glamour and the lucre he brings with him, and it’s blowing up in his face. How’s Trump going to get rid of Musk now that he’s shown he has more clout with the base than he does? Who owns the MAGA brand now?
