🚨 CNBC on latest jobs numbers: "A big miss on the ADP payrolls. The private payroll company saying private payrolls shed 32,000 workers in November. That's the fourth negative number in the past six months. The estimate was for plus 40,000, so the street was off on this one …… pic.twitter.com/KaQw8P36K8
US private employers lost 32,000 positions in November, with job creation seemingly locked in a standstill, according to the private payroll processor ADP.
The firm’s revised data showed a gain of 47,000 jobs in October, coming off losses in September and August. Job creation has essentially been flat in the second half of this year, ADP said, and small businesses in particular appeared to struggle in November.
“Hiring has been choppy of late as employers weather cautious consumers and an uncertain macroeconomic environment,” ADP chief economist Nela Richardson said in a statement. “And while November’s slowdown was broad-based, it was led by a pullback among small businesses.”
About 46% of all US employees work for small businesses, according to government data.
Marcy Wheeler (emptywheel) takes up the Pete Hegseth war crime story with this observation:
Twenty-eight paragraphs into the story that first focused attention on the murder Pete Hegseth ordered back in September (though as it notes, Nick Turse first revealed the second shot just days after the attack) is this revelation: it took four strikes to kill first the people then destroy any debris from the targeted boats.
The boat in the first strike was hit a total of four times, twice to kill the crew and twice more to sink it, four people familiar with the operation said.
It took the most powerful military in the history of the world four shots the get the job done.
The first strike meant to destroy the boat and kill the crew. The second was intended to murder survivors in the water. The last two were supposed to send remaining evidence to the bottom of the sea.
Hegseth also clarified his earlier comments about watching the attack live.
“As you can imagine, the Department of War, we got a lot of things to do. So I didn’t stick around for the hour and two hours, whatever, where all the sensitive site exploitation digitally occurs,” he said. “So I moved on to my next meeting. A couple of hours later, I learned that the commander had made the — which he had the complete authority to do.”
“Admiral Bradley made the correct decision to ultimately sink the boat and eliminate the threat. He sunk the boat, sunk the boat, and eliminated the threat. And it was the right call. We have his back,” Hegseth added.
I suggested yesterday that if one were to conceive a plan for reducing the world’s last superpower and guarantor of world peace to a laughingstock, it would not look any different from Trump 2.0.
Play stupid games, win stupid prizes
Wheeler writes this morning about the idiocracy those four shots reveal:
That fact lies at the core of a whole bunch of other senselessness about Trump’s feckless rule. There’s Trump’s release of Juan Orlando Hernández, a proven high-level threat, even as forces that normally prevent turbulence in the Middle East gather off of Venezuela’s oil fields. There’s the many ways, starting with the destruction of USAID and definitely including Trump’s trade war, that has added to global instability. There’s the cost involved in drone-striking small boats. There’s the neutering of legal advisors who might have saved Admiral Frank Bradley from being underbussed by the guy who promoted him. There’s the pretend press corps filled with nutballs and cranks that ensures that Whiskey Pete will never be challenged with actual knowledge.
But at root, you’ve got Pete Hegseth sitting atop that most powerful military boom boom boom boom, treating it like a children’s game.
CNN with a useful timeline of all the bullshit Trump and his minions have said abt the September 2 strike.edition.cnn.com/2025/12/03/p…
Democrat Aftyn Behn did not upset Republican Matt Van Epps in Tennessee’s 7th district special election on Tuesday. That does not mean Republicans won’t be upset. Donald Trump won the deep-red district in 2024 by 22 points. Epps held it by only nine even after his party and its leaders spent and campaigned heavily. A 13-point slide.
Ed Kilgore writes that Democrats weighed in for Behn as well:
Democrats heavily backed Behn financially as well. What distinguished this progressive activist from the usual red-district Democrat is that she didn’t have the usual protective coloration of cultural traditionalism or ideological moderation. She campaigned in this southern-fried district with AOC and DNC chairman Ken Martin, and Kamala Harris made her first post-2024 campaign appearance at a GOTV event aimed at helping the candidate. Even Al Gore pitched in. But reputation aside, Behn ran on the same affordability themes that progressive and centrists alike have been embracing, in yet another trial heat for the 2026 midterms. She probably benefited somewhat from frigid election day weather; Democrats were more likely than Republicans to vote early. Overall turnout was exceptionally high for an off-year special election.
“But the relatively tight margin in such a deep-red district nonetheless represents a warning shot about the party’s vulnerabilities heading into the 2026 midterm elections,” The New York Times observes regarding a district drawn to elect Republicans.
A 13-point shift may seem extraordinary or jaw-dropping. For Republicans this year, it’s simply the norm. Heading into Tuesday night, Republicans had underperformed Mr. Trump’s showing by an average of 13 points across dozens of state and federal special elections. And while the Republican Party’s problem in special elections is particularly pronounced — in part because Democrats enjoy a major advantage among the most motivated voters — this basic story isn’t new. It has played out for every president over the last two decades.
Cohn observes that the winning presidential candidate’s party has gone on to lose “each of the next five midterms — and four of the next five presidential elections.” Trump’s slide, Cohn believes, is because “like other recent presidents” he has pushed “too far in pursuit of an ideological agenda.” But considering Barack Obama and Joe Biden spent much of their presidencies cleaning up economic messes left over from the prior Republican administrations, it’s not clear what immoderate ideologoical agendas Cohn sees behind Democratic losses during their midterms.
The always upbeat Simon Rosenberg sees the narrowed gap in TN-07 as portending good things for Democrats in 2026:
It is clear now that the national playing field has tilted significantly towards the Dems. We’ve seen it in special elections across the country this year; in the blowout November elections; and now tonight in deep red TN-7. There are 40 House seats held by Republicans who won by 12 points or less, and a double digit point shift in the national map would make the AK, IA, OH and TX Senate races competitive and put the Senate in play.
2026 is clearly shaping up to be a year of opportunity for us and for the pro-democracy movement.
the avg special swing for special elections in the 2026 cycle is 13 points to the left, according to The Downballot — so we are seeing an above average shift here in TN-07, even with Trump's late intervention docs.google.com/spreadsheets…
Affordability continues to be a buzzword candidates and the press use as shorthand for the anxiety Americans feel in an economy wracked by a widening gulf between the elite and the rest. I wish Democrats would drop it. “Affordability” speaks to people’s heads when what people feel is more important. The term lacks — What was it Bruce Lee said to his student in Enter the Dragon? — emotional content.
“Don’t think. FEEL! It is like a finger pointing away to the moon.”
Let Trump rail about affordability. It means he’s losing.
Trump: "There's this fake narrative that the Democrats talk about — 'affordability.' They just say the word. It doesn't mean anything to anybody. They just say it. 'Affordability.' I inherited the worst inflation in history … the word 'affordability' is a con job by the Democrats"
President Donald Trump argued Tuesday that former special counsel Jack Smith’s final report — chronicling the criminal case against him for hoarding classified documents at Mar-a-Lago — should never be made public.
Trump urged U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon in a new court filing to extend her 11-month-old order blocking the Justice Department from releasing the full report, which Smith submitted shortly before Trump’s second inauguration.
Anything less, his attorney Kendra Wharton wrote, would “perpetuate Jack Smith’s unlawful criminal investigations and proceedings.”
Trump’s request is a break from the Justice Department’s handling of all special counsel reports in recent decades. Typically, those reports are provided to Congress and made public, even when they have included damaging findings about the incumbent administration. DOJ released another report Smith compiled detailing his findings about Trump’s bid to subvert the 2020 election shortly before President Joe Biden left office.
Trump’s effort could complicate efforts by congressional Republicans to grill Smith about the substance of his investigation. Cannon’s order bars the Justice Department from disseminating the results of its investigation to outsiders, including Congress. While Smith’s final classified documents report remains under seal, he may not have authority to discuss its findings with lawmakers.
I’m quite confident that Cannon will keep those files under wraps. She has Supreme Court stars in her eyes.
This is yet another cover-up, just like Epstein. Trump knows what he did and he knows that if people are reminded of the details they will see him for the criminal he is. I don’t know if they can just destroy the files but if they can they will. I’ll be shocked if we ever see this report.
Tonight’s Tennessee special election is not expected to go to the Democrat. It’s a Trump +22 district. But judging by the Republican panic, they are terrified that the margin is going to be embarrassing enough that the Democratic roll in these elections will be validated again, and in a deep red state. (If the Democrat actually pulls it off it would be an earthquake.) It calls their redistricting scheme into question as well because they have deliberately lowered their margins in a number of districts in order to eliminate Democratic representation. If there really is a blue wave forming that might not work out so well.
As always, Bolts is the place to go to see what we have in store among the states tonight and for the rest of the month:
Trump passed the buck to Hegseth, saying : “As far as the attack is concerned, I still haven’t gotten a lot of information because I rely on Pete. I didn’t know about the second strike. I wasn’t involved in it.”
Pete came out swinging:
Q: So you didn't see any survivors after that first strike?
HEGSETH: I did not personally see survivors. The thing was on fire. This is called the fog of war. This is what you in the press don't understand. You sit in your air conditioned offices and plant fake stories in the… pic.twitter.com/XjhqWw9GVh
Q: So you didn’t see any survivors after that first strike?
HEGSETH: I did not personally see survivors. The thing was on fire. This is called the fog of war. This is what you in the press don’t understand. You sit in your air conditioned offices and plant fake stories in the Washington Post
Hegseth: "I watched that first strike live. As you can image at the Dept of War, we've got a lot of things to do. So I didn't stick around for the hour to two hours, whatever, where all the sensitive sight exploitation digitally occurs. I moved on to my next meeting. A couple… pic.twitter.com/PuD0kjkLs2
Hegseth’s avoiding responsibility for the second strike and it’s unclear if Trump is going to stick with him or not. He sat next to him and seemed to support him as he went on and on declaring America’s intention to keep killing and killing “putting them at the bottom of the ocean” because Joe Biden handled them with kid gloves but they are real men with huge swinging egos. And Trump himself said they are going to strike on land because “it’s easier.”
I keep wondering … who’s going to stop them?
That circle jerk cabinet meeting was even worse than usual with Kristi Noem even thanking him for stopping hurricanes this season. I’m not kidding. We are so far down the rabbit hole, friends.
Megyn Kelly on alleged war crimes: "I really do kind of not only wanna see them killed in the water, whether they're on the boat or in the water, but I'd really like to see them suffer. I would like Trump and Hegseth to make it last a long time so they lose a limb and bleed out." pic.twitter.com/yvIWczKS5L
They have no idea who those people are. We don’t even know that they really are transporting cocaine (that will end up in Europe, not here) and these twisted sociopaths are fantasizing about inflicting mayhem and torture on them. And there’s Mark Halperin nodding along like it’s perfectly normal to sit there while that fascist cretin gets herself all worked up with excitement over inflicting pain and suffering.
And then there’s this lunacy:
That’s just the tip of the iceberg. He posted something like 160 times in rapid succession last night. Seemed to be have a total meltdown.
President Trump has posted hundreds of times in the last two hours.
Over Thanksgiving weekend, President Donald Trump posted an ominous warning on Truth Social: “To all Airlines, Pilots, Drug Dealers, and Human Traffickers, please consider THE AIRSPACE ABOVE AND SURROUNDING VENEZUELA TO BE CLOSED IN ITS ENTIRETY.” People naturally assumed this might mean that the anticipated direct attack on Venezuela was imminent and braced themselves for the inevitable death and destruction. On Sunday, Trump told the media to not “read anything into it.” That changed again on Monday, when reports emerged that during a phone call he made last week to Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, Trump advised Maduro he had a week to leave the country.
Meanwhile, the administration’s lethal attacks on alleged drug boats in the Caribbean Sea continue unabated and a new scandal has erupted implicating Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and others in potential war crimes for allegedly ordering the executions of unarmed survivors of the first attack on Sept. 2. Trump told the media that Hegseth said he never gave the order but that as president, he would not have wanted it — suggesting that if proof emerges, Hegseth’s rumored departure from the Pentagon is a near certainty.
The reason for all this is Trump’s war on what he says are Venezuelan “narco-terrorists” that are attacking the United States under Maduro’s leadership. (The “cartel” he is alleged to be leading is not actually a cartel, but that’s just an inconvenient detail.) During the first Trump administration in 2020, the Justice Department indicted Maduro and 14 others on charges of narco-terrorism, corruption, drug trafficking and other crimes “expressly intending to flood the United States with cocaine in order to undermine the health and wellbeing of our nation.”
Despite that florid language, the indictment against Maduro mostly related to money laundering and corruption. In fact, the cocaine drug trade from Venezuela doesn’t even come to America; it’s directed almost entirely at Europe. (And fentanyl, which the Trump administration is ostensibly targeting with these attacks, is almost exclusively smuggled over land from Mexico.)
Nonetheless, what used to be a metaphorical war on drugs is now a real war, with the U.S. military actually blowing stuff up. Sen. Dave McCormick, R-Penn., compared it to Vietnam on Fox News Sunday, saying “we have a war that’s coming through fentanyl, through opioids, through cocaine. It killed 100,000 Americans last year. That’s twice the number of people that died in eight years of Vietnam — 4,000 Pennsylvanians.” His colleague, Sen. Markwayne Mullin, R-Ok., also evoked Vietnam on CNN with histrionic claims that Venezuela is killing hundreds of thousands of Americans each year. (They might want to rethink that talking point; the Vietnam War didn’t exactly end well.) The message is clear: This country is deadly serious about fighting the drug war.
How odd then that Donald Trump, the crusading scourge of drug kingpins everywhere, would announce, seemingly out-of-the-blue, that he will pardon Juan Orlando Hernández, the former president of Honduras, who is currently serving a 45-year sentence in the United States for trafficking more than 500 tons of cocaine into the country. After interfering in yet another Latin American election by promising to shower the country with American largesse if they vote for his chosen right-wing authoritarian leader — or withdrawing all American support if they don’t — Trump dropped the bombshell in the middle of a Truth Social post saying that according to people he greatly respects, Hernández was treated very harshly and unfairly. The whole case, Trump explained, was nothing but a Joe Biden set-up and that you don’t blame a president just because someone in his country is a drug-runner.
Trump might have made a phone call to his former personal lawyer, hand-picked deputy attorney general and now federal judge Emil Bove. He was the prosecutor who took down Hernández’s brother, the former president’s partner-in-crime. Bove stepped down from the Southern District of New York just a month before the Juan Orlando Hernández indictment was handed down, and he doubtless knew all the details.
The New York Times reported that the former Honduran president “once boasted that he would ‘stuff the drugs up the gringos’ noses’ [and] accepted a $1 million bribe from El Chapo to allow cocaine shipments to pass through Honduras. A man was killed in prison to protect him.” Among the evidence, there was even a machine gun with Hernández’s name on it. Contrary to what Trump’s respected friends told him, the prosecution proved Hernández was a key player in a 20-year scheme to traffic drugs into the United States.
But there were a number of well-paid lobbyists working to get Trump to pardon Hernández, and one of his most trusted advisers, Roger Stone, recently began boosting the case by talking up what he called “the relatively obscure charter city experiment known as Próspera [that was] founded in 2017 as an experiment in freedom.” Crucially, it was founded in Honduras by an American company and “funded through venture capital from Silicon Valley luminaries like Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen and Sam Altman.” Stone’s claims that Próspera is a libertarian utopia is not widely held, and Honduras’ current government is hostile to the experiment, which explains why it was so important to persuade Trump to weigh in on the current election. Oh, and there’s also a Bitcoin connection.
Likewise, Bitcoin was involved in Trump’s outrageous pardon of another major drug trafficker: Ross Ulbricht, the owner of Silk Road, a dark web criminal enterprise the president Trump had promised at a crypto conference during the 2024 campaign to free. Uhlbricht was convicted of making more than $200 million, mostly in illegal online sales of cocaine, heroin and fentanyl. But the anti-drug crusading president thought that he, too, had been “treated very unfairly” and deserved a break. (Trump and his entire family are also making billion in the crypto business since he took office so there’s that as well.)
These aren’t the only drug kingpins Trump has pardoned or commuted since he returned to the White House. In fact, the president seems ready to believe that any of them were just victims of deep state persecution as he was, especially if the request comes from celebrities like Kanye West. There are no doubt many people serving excessive sentences for drug crimes in America who are deserving of mercy. But these pardons and commutations from a president who calls for the death penalty for drug dealing are just incoherent.
In the case of Hernández, the former Honduran president, it’s actually a bit clearer. Trump told the New York Times, “They gave him 45 years because he was the President of the Country — you could do this to any President.”
As Will Saletan pointed out at the Bulwark, Trump has made a habit of publicly threatening countries if they don’t let far-right politicians — including Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, France’s Marine Le Pen and Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu — off the hook. Donald Trump identifies with them — and he admits it freely.
So it’s really not much more complicated than this: It’s all about him. It’s always all about him.
Axios reported in late October that despite bead “vibes” about the economy, “Consumers are buying higher-priced drinks, pickup trucks and more — a signal from corporate America that the economy appears to be chugging along just fine.” But who are the consumers out buying higher-priced items and propping up spending?
Axios reports that “… Coca-Cola warned that higher-income consumers might be helping hold the line on spending as lower-income shoppers pull back — a months-long economic trend that could be worsening.”
A Facebook post alerted me to the other side of the story. The Los Angeles Times story from mid-November paints a different story. Here are the leading bullets:
McDonald’s prices have risen so high at the iconic fast food chain that traffic from one of its core customer bases, low-income households, has dropped by double digits.
The low-income customers at McDonald’s are quickly being replaced by higher-earners, according to company officials.
The change demonstrates the pressure facing low-income consumers who are being squeezed by higher housing, clothes and child-care costs.
The Times continues:
McDonald’s executives say the higher costs of restaurant essentials, such as beef and salaries, have pushed food prices up and driven away lower-income customers who are already being squeezed by the rising cost of groceries, clothes, rent and child care.
With prices for everything rising, consumer companies concerned about the pressures on low-income Americans include food, automotive and airline businesses, among others, said analyst Adam Josephson. “The list goes on and on,” he said.
“Happy Meals at McDonald’s are prohibitively expensive for some people, because there’s been so much inflation,” Josephson said.
It’s not just fast food.
A recent earnings report from Delta offers yet another illustration. While Delta’s main cabin revenue fell 5% for the June quarter compared to a year ago, premium ticket sales rose 5%, highlighting the divide between affluent customers and those forced to be more economical.
At hotel chains, luxury brands are holding up better than low budget options. Revenue at brands including Four Seasons, Ritz-Carlton and St. Regis is up 2.9% so far this year, while economy hotels saw a 3.1% decline for the same period, according to industry tracker CoStar.
This is why the “K-shaped” economy is making news. HIgher-income Americans are seeing their incomes and wealth increase while “lower-income households struggling with weaker income gains and steep prices,” the Associated Press reported on Monday:
Growth appears solid, yet hiring is sluggish and the unemployment rate has ticked up. Overall consumer spending is still rising, but Americans are less confident. AI-related data center construction is soaring while factories are laying off workers and home sales are weak. And the stock market still hovers near record highs even as wage growth is slowing.
Donald Trump and Mar-a-Lago billionaires are holding lavish, Great Gatsby-themed costume parties and dining on “beef filet, truffle dauphinoise, pan-seared scallops and a trio of desserts including ‘Trump chocolate cake’” while the peasants seeing “Trump cuts” to their SNAP benefits cannot afford a Happy Meal. That is, when they are not fleeing deportation by masked Trump-Noem-Miller immigration raiders.
The Times adds:
A report released this year by researchers with Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University found that half of all renters, 22.6 million people, were cost-burdened in 2023, meaning they spent more than 30% of their income on housing and utilities, up 3.2 percentage points since 2019 and 9 percentage points since 2001. Twenty-seven percent of renters are severely burdened, spending more than 50% of their income on housing.
As rents have grown, the amount families have left over after paying for housing and utilities has fallen to record lows. In 2023, renters with annual household incomes under $30,000 had a median of just $250 per month in residual income to spend on other needs, an amount that’s fallen 55% since 2001, with the steepest declines since the pandemic, according to the Harvard study.
“This is not an income gap. It is a widening fault line,” posted a social media manager on Facebook:
The McDonald’s warning is not a blip. It is a symptom of a society that has drained its middle class to keep its upper class afloat. It is a sign of a country running on the last reserve tank of its promise. And it is a sign of what happens when generations are told to work harder for less while being blamed for struggling inside a system designed to keep them there.
If the most affordable food in the country is slipping out of reach, the question is no longer whether the economy is in danger. The question is how much longer the center can hold before it gives way entirely.
