Odds and Ends — 12 December 2024

@preparedwombat 77

10 days ago

oddsandends

Cryptocurrency, Investing, Money, Economy, Business, and Debt:

Vancouver Votes to Study Bitcoin Strategy Despite Provincial Pushback

Bitcoin 15% futures basis 'insane' as BTC price sees record daily close

Politics:

You Should Be More Worried About Trump's Planned Military Purge

Trump wants officers loyal to him, not the constitution…
In the short run, we should be very worried about what Trump will do with a military repurposed to serve him, and not the constitution. In the long run, the politicization of the American military will undermine its capacity.
What happens if every new President distrusts the generals in place because they were selected via a politicized process? They then choose their own, adding to the instability in leadership. Under such circumstances, expect a Putinification of the military, where officers are afraid to tell the President the truth.

Christopher Wray Forced a Confirmation for His Successor

By stepping down now, as the conservative writer Erick Erickson observed, Wray has created a ‘legal obstacle to Trump trying to bypass the Senate confirmation process.’
Here’s why. According to the Vacancies Reform Act, if a vacancy occurs in a Senate-confirmed position, the president can temporarily replace that appointee (such as the F.B.I. director) only with a person who has already received Senate confirmation or with a person who’s served in a senior capacity in the agency (at the GS-15 pay scale) for at least 90 days in the year before the resignation.
Kash Patel, Donald Trump’s chosen successor at the F.B.I., meets neither of these criteria. He’s not in a Senate-confirmed position, and he’s not been a senior federal employee in the Department of Justice in the last year. That means he can’t walk into the job on Day 1.

A Scandalous Resignation

Now Trump, preparing for his second term as president, has decided to replace the FBI director again. The figure he picked to replace Comey—the lifelong Republican Christopher Wray—proved unable to meet Trump’s expectations for the position, which are (1) to permit Trump and his allies to violate the law with impunity, and (2) to investigate anybody who interferes with (1). Wray, wrestling with the problem of Trump’s desire to separate him from a job he apparently liked, chose to step down on his own. This raises the likelihood that the media will treat the replacement of Wray as normal administrative turnover rather than as a scandal.
But a scandal it most certainly is. By tradition, FBI directors serve 10-year terms, a norm designed to insulate the FBI from pressure to serve the president’s whims. Trump supporters have two philosophical rationalizations for his demand to violate that tradition. The lowbrow, populist version favored by Trump cultists is that Trump is beset by a ‘deep state’ conspiracy that has kneecapped him at every turn because it is loyal to globalists, neoconservatives, or some other corrupt network. The highbrow version, preferred by conservative-movement elites, is that presidents possess an inherent right to control the executive branch from top to bottom, and all norms designed to prevent the president from abusing that power are an affront to the Constitution.
Neither theory can explain why Trump continues to go to war with people he appointed himself… The problem that keeps arising is that there is no way to remain in Trump’s favor while following the law.

https://twitter.com/RachelBitecofer/status/1866899060453675437

We Can’t Just Tune Out Donald Trump

We are a country that stands on the precipice, just six weeks away from swearing in, for the second time, a wannabe ‘dictator’ with ambitions to wildly reshape our democracy. There is a desire to tune out.
I get it. And while, as a member of the media, I feel a little sheepish making the case to keep reading columns (like this one!), watching the news, and listening to podcasts, it’s a perilous moment for America, and it only serves Donald Trump and his allies to look the other way.

https://twitter.com/RonFilipkowski/status/1866651569833513476

Republican lawmakers invite a Jan. 6 felon to Trump’s inauguration

Russell Taylor spent weeks planning for chaos on Jan. 6, 2021. He recruited anti-government activists to join him in Washington, and, when he arrived, surged to the U.S. Capitol with a knife and a tactical vest as a mob of Donald Trump’s supporters overran police lines.”
Now Republican members of Congress are inviting him back to the Capitol to attend Trump’s second inauguration, an invite that could bring him face to face with the lawmakers and Capitol Police officers who fled the melee he helped unleash that day.

A Weakened Vladimir Putin Is Waging a Secret War Against the West

Russia’s ally Syria has fallen to rebel forces. Its war in Ukraine has claimed 1 million casualties. On the defensive, the nation has resorted to a shadow war of saboteurs and spies, hoping to destabilize its neighbors.

https://twitter.com/NormEisen/status/1866545588084355124

Manchin, Sinema block Democratic control of NLRB

The Senate on Wednesday blocked Lauren McFerran’s renomination to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), opening the door for Republican control of the board starting next year under President-elect Trump.
Senators voted 49 to 50 against a five-year term for McFerran, the NLRB’s chair, with Sens. Kyrsten Sinema (I-Ariz.) and Joe Manchin (I-W.Va.) voting with almost every Senate Republican to block it.

https://twitter.com/krassenstein/status/1866955908254941380

Nancy Mace’s Account of ‘Pro-Trans’ Assault Challenged by Eyewitnesses