Odds and Ends — 30 December 2024

@preparedwombat 77

4 months ago

oddsandends

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

Decentralized exchange volume hits record high of $462B in December

Crypto Crystal Ball 2025: How Hard Will Trump Fight for Bitcoin and Crypto?

Coronavirus News, Analysis, and Opinion:

How the Pandemic Increased US Deaths Visualized in Eight Charts

https://twitter.com/broadwaybabyto/status/1873202484489142475

Politics:

Jimmy Carter, nation's longest-living former president, dies at 100

https://twitter.com/nick_field90/status/1873475878673674514
https://twitter.com/WalshFreedom/status/1873488428492570789
https://twitter.com/davidsirota/status/1873486207759622457

An Unlucky President

Jimmy Carter was a very good man — something that seems especially poignant to think about as we enter an age of kakistocracy, in which being a terrible person seems to be a necessary qualification for high office. And he was surely the best ex-president we’ve ever had. But his presidency itself is widely regarded as a failure.
I don’t think that’s fair. Carter wasn’t a Harry Truman, a great president whose greatness only came to be recognized many years later. But was he a bad president? Not in any way I can see. He was just a victim of time and chance… The truth is that luck plays a much bigger role in politics than we like to think.

https://twitter.com/ChrisMurphyCT/status/1873375649609458018

Court Upholds Trump Verdict in E. Jean Carroll Case

A federal appeals court panel on Monday upheld a jury’s verdict finding President-elect Donald Trump liable for sexually abusing advice columnist E. Jean Carroll and ordering him to pay $5 million.

https://twitter.com/Daractenus/status/1873382716038902161
https://twitter.com/acnewsitics/status/1873149903620456683
https://twitter.com/JohannaNyman5/status/1873478526642553178

Immigration Courts Backlog Could Slow Mass Deportation

On the campaign trail, Donald Trump promised to launch the ‘largest deportation’ in American history. But actually getting that done will require billions of dollars to hire thousands of new federal workers and pay for new spaces to hold those waiting to be deported. But perhaps most daunting will be another obstacle: moving through a massive backlog in immigration court cases…
Currently there are 3.6 million cases pending before immigration judges, the largest number of pending cases in the history of the American immigration system. That is a 44% increase from the 2.5 million cases pending the year before. And the problem is only getting bigger, as more people continue to be put into deportation proceedings.

https://twitter.com/JoshEakle/status/1873062139709276680
https://twitter.com/Andie00471/status/1873377918019084701
https://twitter.com/TimothyDSnyder/status/1873396101702894067
https://twitter.com/TheRealDon85/status/1873436539902152885

The Rise of the Union Right

Exit polls indicate that nearly half of union households voted Republican in 2024, up from 43 percent in 2016 and 37 percent in 2000. Other polling shows that Trump commanded a 26-point lead among white voters without a college degree in union homes, up nine points since 2020. Conversely, Democratic support dropped 35 percentage points among Latino voters in union households, and also waned among Black union voters.
These trends are part of a long, slow tectonic electoral realignment. This century, the country has become less polarized in income terms, with Democrats gaining among coastal elites and Republicans among the working class. In the past decade, it has also become less racially polarized, with Black, Asian, and Latino voters shifting red. And education has become a much stronger predictor of a person’s partisanship. Democrats now dominate among the college-educated, and Republicans dominate among white people without a degree.

https://twitter.com/JohnFugelsang/status/1873059751573012632

https://twitter.com/notcapnamerica/status/1873421440357437891

Canada’s Government Melts Down at Worst Possible Moment

The country is girding for the return of Donald Trump, who many here see as an existential threat to Canada’s security. He has threatened to slap 25 percent tariffs on Canadian goods, levies that could crush the economy of a country that sends nearly 80 percent of its exports to its southern neighbor.
And he has taken to mocking embattled Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as the ‘governor’ of the ‘great state of Canada’ in middle-of-the-night social media posts that officials here have sought to cast as lighthearted ribbing but others view as not-so-neighborly and not-so-funny. On Christmas, he said he’d pitched hockey great Wayne Gretzky on becoming Canada’s next prime minister.