the DON JONES INDEX…
		GAINS POSTED in GREEN LOSSES POSTED in RED 1/16/25... 14,895.89 1/9/25... 14,898.28
	6/27/13… 15,000.00
(THE DOW JONES INDEX: 1/16/25... 43,170.47; 1/9/25... 42,544.22; 6/27/13… 15,000.00)

LESSON for JANUARY SIXTEENTH, 2025 “GOODBYE, JOE!”

In five more days, the Biden Years will shudder to a close in a freezing Washington D.C. amidst wildfires to the west of them, wars to the east, the border south and Greenland north. They will give way to a Great Restoration as Donald Trump assumes the Chief Executivity for the second time, the only repeat, fail, repeat President since Garfield. (not the cat) Joe takes with him his supporting cast... the ever-failing SecState Anthony Blinken (profiled on Sunday’s “Meet the Press” as a good man who tried to do well in a world of Republicans, Russians and Islamists, Vice Unavenged Kamala – condemned to give the oath of office to her conqueror and the rest, stranded now and checking out job opportunities.

Even many dedicated Democrats will be glad to see them go.

Let it be said that the Biden Years were not as bad as they could have been. The Covid Plague is a manageable inconvenience, now, due to vaxxing that some refused to take (and often died, as a result). Kyev and Tel Aviv have not fallen. NATO and the EU have also survived, despite a sharp turn to the right; the border is strained, but not broken; unemployment and inflation are down from the height of the pandemic and average wages (as in last week’s Debt Clock indices) took a sharp, upward jump.

Even partisanship is (temporarily) recessive... all five Presidents attended the funeral of (very) Ol’ 39 – Jimmy Carter, who died at the age of one hundred and was buried with all of the trappings of the office. Even Trump attended and was seen sharing remarks with Barack Obama - he has expressed resentment at having the flags remain at half mast on Inauguration Day as symbolic of... something... but the Boogaloo Boys didn’t storm the service, overturn the coffin and start dancing to YMCA.

Don Jones, red or blue, can’t help but sense that decency is headed to the boneyard. Peter (of Paul and Mary) also died this week and the volubly liberal Left Coast burned up, even the homes of left wing actors and the memorial to Will Rogers. The world is a meaner, if not yet leaner, place and... given the enmity of Putin and Xi and the rest of the bad actors of the moment, a little confrontation might be in order, along with a lot of deal making. Of course, Glad Vlad and Djonald UnChained might not turn out to be best bros, once the cards are played, and the planet will disappear in a nuclear fireball but... hey, that’s politics.

So Goodbye Joe, me gotta go, down on the Bayou, as also on, in and around and out of the mountains and the deserts and fruited plains... frozen coast to burning coast. Back to Delaware! And for the woke as consign Hank Williams to the Devil’s ashtray, there’s always Laura Nyro.

Last night, President Biden gifted America with his Farewell Address (text, Attachment One) in which he claimed that a hostage deal has been reached by Israel and Hamas (prematurely, as it turned out and still dangles) and compared America to the Statue of Liberty... “an enduring symbol of the soul of our nation, a soul shaped by forces that bring us together and by forces that pull us apart.”

Vigorously defending not only his own four years, but the doomed Harris campain, President Joe claimed victories at home and abroad. But, he warned, danger lurks in concentration of power in the hands of a very few ultrawealthy people, and the dangerous consequences if their abuse of power is left unchecked. “Today, an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead. We see the consequences all across America. And we’ve seen it before.”

Americans are being “buried under an avalanche of misinformation and disinformation enabling the abuse of power. The free press is crumbling. Editors are disappearing. Social media is giving up on fact-checking. The truth is smothered by lies told for power and for profit. We must hold the social platforms accountable to protect our children, our families and our very democracy from the abuse of power.” Meanwhile, artificial intelligence... “the most consequential technology of our time, perhaps of all time,” Biden said, “offers more profound possibilities and risks for our economy, and our security, our society. For humanity.”

Will it end cancer... or end liberty?

Without naming names, he proposed amending the Constitution to make clear “that no president, no president is immune from crimes that he or she commits while in office. The president’s power is not limit — it is not absolute. And it shouldn’t be.”

And in perhaps an unwittingly ominous finale, he called on Americans to “be the keeper of the flame.”

In a furious last week of initiatives, Biden has promoted spending more money on aid to Ukraine and more Social Security bennies for public employees like first responders and teachers, to wildfire protection and forgiving student and medical debt; pardoned prisoners, commuted death-row sentences, banning offshore drilling and Tik Tok, blocking U.S. Steel from being taken over by the Japanese and heaving proposals into the winds of time.

“My Administration is leaving the next Administration with a very strong hand to play,” Biden said on Monday in the first of two farewell speeches to the nation. (The second was on Wednesday, above.)

Republicans denounced most of the speeches and are trying to kill off as many of the ventures and adventures as they can.

Sometimes their explanations don’t merely verge upon but slide into the gut of the ridiculous.

The New York Post (Attachment Three, Jan. 9) even contended that the woke ideology and all of its components... racial, sexual and gender minorities who offended God and caused the California wildfires to flare up – even as He punished the wicked for spurning His messenger... not Jesus nor the apostles, but guess who?

I don’t mean to suggest that Angelenos somehow deserve the catastrophe that has befallen them,” Postie Liel Leibovitz opined; “to do so would be not only misguided but unforgivably cruel.

“But as we’re reeling from one of the greatest disasters ever to befall an American city, we must be brutally honest, especially if we want to prevent this kind of calamity from happening again.”

How?

By electing Karen Bass as Mayor and Gavin Newsome as Governor to “coddle” the homeless and criminals, denounce the “patriarchy” and... in a sop to history... attack the Jews.

“It’s time we reject — completely, utterly, vehemently — not only the servants of this bad religion, but the bad religion itself,” Mr. Liebovitz proclaimed.

In Biden’s last days, vigorous... perhaps not ultimately successful, given Monday’s inauguration, but vigorous, nonetheless, proposals and even some legislation arose on topics of interes to Don Jones.

CLIMATE CHANGE (and the L.A. wildfires)

On the other side of the divide, the internally divided but still liberal Huffington Post praised President Joe’s designation of 850,000 acres of “ecologically and culturally significant land in the Golden State from new drilling, mining and other development,” just as the fires were breaking out.

Naming names, the Huffpost’s Chris D'Angelo and Roque Planas state that PPE (President/President-Elect) Trump “has a record of chipping away at protected landscapes and is pledging to prioritize fossil fuel drilling and other industrial development across the country.”

“The stunning canyons and winding paths of the Chuckwalla National Monument represent a true unmatched beauty,” Interior Secretary Deb Haaland said in a statement. “President Biden’s action today will protect important spiritual and cultural values tied to the land and wildlife.”

But, Huff also gave space to the further left; climate and deserty activists who denounced Biden’s initiative as too weak.

Three days after Christmas, Chris D’Angelo called the forestry snatch a red stocking full of goodies for the loggers and President Joe “stands to exit office having failed to get nationwide protections for America’s most ancient trees across the finish line,” before Saw, Baby, Saw takes office next Monday.

“It is very disappointing to see it end with kind of nothing,” said Jerry Franklin, a retired forest ecologist and professor who spent decades at the Forest Service and became known as the “guru of old-growth forests.”

Susan Jane Brown, an environmental attorney and president of Oregon-based Silvix Resources, a nonprofit law firm, shares Franklin’s frustration.

“It’s a huge disappointment. I think that we were close; we were almost there,” said Brown, whose legal work primarily focuses on forest law and policy. “Many of us have been urging the [Forest Service] to take steps like these for decades, and they had a golden opportunity over the past four years and got distracted by other things that I think the agency thought was more important.”

Trump is likely to boost logging across the nation, with little if any consideration for the climate and ecological ramifications. On the campaign trail and in the weeks since his election victory in November, Trump has pledged to unravel Biden’s climate and environmental policies. During his first term in office, 2017 to 2021, Trump signed an executive order to increase commercial logging in the carbon-rich forests of the Pacific Northwest. He also gutted protections for Alaska’s Tongass National Forest, the world’s largest intact temperate rainforest, lifting logging restrictions from the Bill Clinton era across 9.3 million acres and reclassifying 168,000 acres of old-growth timber as suitable for harvest.

Under Biden’s watch (and ahead of the Palisades, Eaton and other conflagrations , federal agencies have advanced more than two dozen logging projects targeting tens of thousands of acres of mature and old-growth trees — often under the umbrella of wildfire mitigation and resilience.

“These are popping up all over the country, from New England to Tennessee to West Virginia, Georgia, Montana, Washington, Oregon, California,” said Jim Furnish, a former deputy chief of the Forest Service in the Bill Clinton administration.

Furnish and several others whom HuffPost spoke to for this article — Talbert; Steve Pedery, conservation director at the environmental organization Oregon Wild; and Chad Hanson, forest ecologist at the John Muir Project’s Earth Island Institute — said they’d prefer to see the Biden administration shelve the proposal altogether.

“Given the likelihood that if you do finish it, Congress will kill it or the Trump administration will kill it, just don’t give them the opportunity,” Furnish said. “Just let it die.”

“It would be better to get nothing today rather than a weak rule that would restrict our ability to advocate for mature and old-growth in the future,” said Pedery, referring to the possibility that a rollback under the Congressional Review Act (CRA) would likely complicate future efforts to secure lasting safeguards.

The Forest Service maintains that harvesting trees, via “thinning” and “fuel reduction,” is key to combating the growing threat of wildland fire and protecting older stands — a position that some forest ecologists reject. In its statement, the agency swung back at critics that it says “believe that no timber harvest ― anywhere ― is the answer for our national forest system.”

“What we know from listening to scientists across the country as well as Indigenous knowledge holders is that some active management in old and mature forests is likely required, including some areas where biomass must be removed before returning fire to the landscape,” an (anonymous) spokesperson said.

Forest scientists, such as Beverly Law, a professor emeritus at Oregon State and an expert on the forest carbon cycle, and Dominick DellaSala, chief scientist at forest advocacy group Wild Heritage, have accused the Forest Service of cherry-picking science that supports increased logging while ignoring a growing body of research showing old-growth forests’ resistance to fire and capacity for storing carbon.

“They’re not using the current and robust science,” Law said.

In her comments on the draft EIS, Law challenged a recent Forest Service analysis that found “wildfire, exacerbated by climate change and fire exclusion, is the leading threat to mature and old-growth forests, followed by insects and disease” and that “tree cutting (any removal of trees) is currently a relatively minor threat.”

Oops!

For Pedery, the proposed overhaul feels like the Forest Service attempting to unshackle itself from a management plan that stripped it of its discretionary authority to manage forests however it sees fit. Furnish called it “red meat” for the incoming Trump administration.

Well, broiled meat, at least.

The wildfires drove a final nail into the old growth coffin, D’Angelo reported on Wednesday, Jan. 8^th (Attachment Six), after the Biden administration on Tuesday “withdrew a proposal that would have protected the nation’s oldest, most carbon-rich forests from future logging.”

And now, all that carbon is going into the air as monoxides and dioxides – making the Los Angeles air quality index meta-unhealthy.

The agency’s initial proposal, unveiled in December 2013, called for amending the management plans for all 128 national forests and grasslands across the country to better protect and restore old-growth stands, including restricting commercial logging — but not entirely banning it — across the 25 million acres of old-growth timber that the Forest Service manages. It stopped short of limiting timber harvest in younger “mature” stands of trees.

Responding to the Forest Service’s decision to jettison the proposal, Pedery, conservation director at the environmental organization Oregon Wild (above), argued that “if the Forest Service were in charge of managing America’s coasts, we’d still have commercial whale hunts.”

“Now folks on the ground can get back to managing our forests rather than getting bogged down with needless paperwork,” said Forest Service Chief Randy Moore.

Debt, Spending, Tariffs and Taxes

Reason, the Libertarian (pro-corporate, pro-pot), medium, castigated the Bidenauts back in October (10/10 Attachment Seven) as a “Tragedy of Epic Proportion”... and that before outgoing SecTreas Yellin informed Joe and his team that the can kick on the debt ceiling, as was supposed to last until March, will instead expire at the end of January – just in time for the PPE to wrap his greasy, fat fingers around America’s e-con-me.

When Joe and Kamalala entered the White House, the budget deficit was a pandemic-influenced $2.3 trillion, and it was set to fall to $905 billion by 2024. It's now twice what it was supposed to be.

According to brand-new Congressional Budget Office (CBO) numbers, the 2024 budget deficit is around $1.8 trillion. It's heading to $2.8 trillion in 10 years, assuming a very rosy scenario. Worrisome too is that interest payments on government debt will eat up over 20 percent of revenue in 2025. As the Hoover Institution's Joshua Rauh noted, if you remove the revenue earmarked for the Social Security Old Age and Disability Insurance program, that number jumps to 27.9 percent and rising.

“The federal government's debt is now over $28 trillion by one measurement.,” according to Reason’s Veronique deRugy. That's $2 trillion more than last year and $6 trillion more than when the Biden-Harris team entered the White House. This debt stands at 100 percent of America's gross domestic product (GDP), which, other than a one-year exception at the end of World War II, is the highest ratio we've ever had. Unlike in 1946, today's debt is only going to grow. Indeed, debt-to-GDP took a nearly 30-year dive to reach 23 percent in 1974. Today, federal debt is projected—again, under the rosiest scenarios—to rise to 166 percent in 30 years.

Being compiled and published before the election, Reason’s reasonable people were only slightly less hard on the PPE. As Brian Riedl of the Manhattan Institute wrote recently, "Trump had already signed legislation and executive orders adding $4 trillion to 10-year deficits before the bipartisan pandemic response added $4 trillion more." That's serious red ink.

Particulars include “$1.4 trillion in new spending in omnibus appropriations bills, $620 billion in student loan bailouts, $520 billion for new veterans' benefits, a $440 billion infrastructure law, a semiconductor bill, and $360 billion in new [Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program] and health spending forced through by executive order."

Now that Harris is running (ran, that is, unsuccessfully) for the top job, she shows no signs of slowing the spending down. She wants trillions in tax credits for many different special interest groups, from first-time homeowners to parents to favored industries, and she continues to push through student loan forgiveness. Trump, with his expensive brand of populism, is only slightly better.

“No matter who wins the election, that person will inherit a gigantic deficit and major interest payments that will only go up, thanks to an entitlement-spending explosion no politician wants to acknowledge. Good luck to the next president, and heaven help the rest of us.”

The Kitchen Table

CNN (12/21/24, Attachment Eight) wrote that the poorest of the poor Americans are already struggling for survival... and, when Trump takes over, it’ll be worse.

The cost of living crisis in the US has eased somewhat, but low-income Americans are still struggling after years of high inflation and elevated interest rates. Their situation could worsen if President-elect Donald Trump keeps his promise of slapping hefty tariffs on America’s three biggest trading partners, which could reignite inflation, economists say.

Many Americans are still in a tough spot: Nearly 30% of all US households this year said they spend more than 95% of their disposable income on necessities such as housing costs, groceries and utility bills, according to a Bank of America Institute report, up from 2019 levels. That share is higher, at around 35%, for households making less than $50,000 a year.

Bottom of Form

“Lower-income households are always going to be the ones that feel the brunt of high inflation and high interest rates,” said Elizabeth Renter (!), senior economist at NerdWallet.

CNN’s Bryan Mena, soliciting economists at the Yale Budget Lab, stated that, “if Trump proceeds with imposing 25% tariffs on imported goods from Canada and Mexico and an additional 10% duty on Chinese goods, prices could increase next year by 0.75%” which would “equal a loss of about $1,200 in annual purchasing power per household, in 2023 dollars, according to the estimate.”

This time, Americans won’t have support from savings they accumulated during the coronavirus pandemic and benefits from pandemic-era programs that have now expired, such as an extension to the child tax credit and free school lunches.

“Households are not in as good a shape as they were coming immediately out of the pandemic, but we’re talking about a different inflation scenario,” said Shannon Grein, an economist at Wells Fargo. “You can think of tariffs as these as one-time price adjustments. Companies aren’t going to keep increasing their prices month after month because of new tariffs versus the supply and demand imbalances during the pandemic.”

See the Peanut Gallery responses below at Att. 8. “For all of the low income voters who voted for Trump you are about to get what you deserve,” PH opined. “Huge cuts to all government assistance programs that you depend on. The billionaires will be eating the best food while you will be eating dog food.”

Foreign Affairs

Biden’s midnight rambles included a reversal of the Trump-sponsored designation of Cuba as a “state sponsor of terrorism”, reportedly “part of a Catholic Church-sponsored deal to free political prisoners in Cuba.” (Fox, Jan. 14^th, Attachment Nine)

In a certification that Biden issued a week ago, yesterday afternoon, he claimed that the Cuban government "has not provided any support for international terrorism during the preceding 6-month period," as well as "provided assurances that it will not support acts of international terrorism in the future."

"The United States maintains as the core objective of our policy the need for more freedom and democracy, improved respect for human rights, and increased free enterprise in Cuba.," a national security memo issued by the White House read. "Achieving these goals will require practical engagement with Cuba and the Cuban people beyond what is outlined in NSPM-5 [National Security Presidential Memorandum 5], and that takes into account recent developments in Cuba and the changing regional and global context."

"Accordingly, I hereby revoke NSPM-5."

Fox, being Fox, looked for and found a discouraging word... in fact, a few... from the mouth of Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tx) who said: "The terrorism advanced by the Cuban regime has not ceased," Cruz said in a statement. "I will work with President Trump and my colleagues to immediately reverse and limit the damage from the decision."

While, over there (East) and there (West), “Brave New Europe” addressed the Chinese takeover of high, low and consumer tech by freezing chip exports to slow down the pace of President Xi’s lying and spying minions, as well as imposing restrictions upon a secondary tier of countries that would face caps on their access to U.S. chips; and an outer tier of U.S. adversaries (most importantly China but also Russia, Iran, and a handful of others) that would face the most severe restrictions on shipments, according to BNE’s Karthik Sankaran. (Attachment Ten, Jan. 14)

The decision has led to howls of protest from single companies, including NVIDIA, widely considered the key manufacturer of the most advanced chips, which said a “last-minute rule restricting exports to most of the world would be a major shift in policy that would not reduce the risk of misuse but would threaten economic growth and U.S. leadership.”

And that’s just the beginning. The tech offensive will be resented the most across the Global South. For one thing, the limitation of the highest tier of “chip-worthiness” to historic U.S. security allies, all of which are already relatively advanced economies, will likely be seen as an effort to restrict development opportunities for middle powers, and could be interpreted as having racial overtones... BNE citing Singapore, Saudi Arabia and India as being opposed to the venture.

The effort to Derail China is now seeking to press-gang Global South countries by preemptively (and presumptively) denying them access to advanced products and technologies. This is ostensibly driven by the fear that these countries might “leak.”

WAR, STRENGTH and the BORDER

Cyberwarfare is the tactic of the moment, inasmuch as President Xi and the ChiComs are loathe to blow up the world (Putin, less loatherly), so a strong Tech Force makes for a strong nation, and President Joe believes he is handing PPE Trump a strong nation.

“America is more capable, and I would argue better prepared than we’ve been in a long, long time,” Biden said. (Politico, Jan, 13, Attachment Eleven) “While our competitors and adversaries are facing stiff headwinds, and we have the wind at our back.

“New challenges will certainly emerge in the months and years ahead,” Biden said. “But even so, it’s clear my administration is leaving the next administration with a very strong hand to play.”

Politico’s Eli Stokols contends that Biden leaves office with U.S.-China relations in a far more stable, less confrontational place as the result of serious and sustained bilateral communications, and with the countries’ two economies headed in opposite directions. Further, he has aligned European allies behind the U.S. approach to China and seen scant criticism from Republicans on his approach.

“It’s more effective to deal with China alongside our partners than going it alone,” Biden said. “But even while we compete vigorously, we’ve managed our relationship with China responsibly so it’s never tipped over into conflict.”

The strongest evidence of Biden’s commitment to alliances is NATO’s cohesion, expansion and deepened resolve in response to Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Stokols opines. “Not only did the organization ratify the accession of Finland and Sweden, it is far closer to the goal — agreed on in 2014 — that member nations spend 2 percent of GDP on defense, a benchmark 23 of 32 countries now meet.”

From deep in left field, the World Socialist Website agrees that Biden has increased American military power... but that’s not a good thing.

In his final foreign policy speech as US president, Joe Biden declared that his administration “significantly strengthened the defense industrial base, investing almost $1.3 trillion in procurement and research and development in real dollars.” He added, “It’s going to ensure that we’re fully equipped to fight and win wars.”

If President John F. Kennedy is remembered for falsely promising “not merely peace for Americans, but peace for all men and women,” WSW’s Andre Damon says Biden “can at least be given credit for openly stating that the central focus of his administration has been global domination.”

Russia is no longer Communist, nor even Socialist, but Damon contends that Joe leaves office after having played the leading role in provoking, then preventing any diplomatic resolution to the Russia-Ukraine war, and having funded, armed and enabled the Gaza genocide.

In September, the Wall Street Journal estimated that as many as 1 million Ukrainians and Russians had been either killed or wounded in the Ukraine war. An entire generation of young people has been wiped out or maimed.

Biden also boasted of his military policy in the Middle East, whose central pillar is the Gaza genocide. He did not mention the death toll in Gaza, which currently stands officially at 46,000, with the vast majority of the dead being women and children. Rather, he boasted that “Israel did plenty of damage to Iran and its proxies,” and that as far as the United States was concerned, “Our actions contributed significantly.”

He declared:

Now Iran’s air defenses are in shambles. The main proxy, Hezbollah, is badly wounded. … All told, Iran is weaker than it’s been in decades. And if you want more evidence, if it was seriously weak in Iran and Russia, just take a look at Syria. President Assad was both countries’ closest ally in the Middle East. Neither could keep him in power.

Biden declared, “I’ve said many times, we’re at an inflection point. The post-Cold War period is over. A new era has begun in these four years,” in which there is “a fierce competition underway for the future of the global economy.”

This “fierce competition” will be continued in the second Trump administration. Biden added, “So as a new administration begins, the United States is in a fundamentally stronger position. … It’s clear my administration is leaving the next administration with a very strong hand to play.”

If he believed that Djonald owed him gratitude for this bequest, he was mistaken.

White House spokesperson Karine Jean-Pierre in October 2024, that Donald Trump is a “fascist” who would be a “dictator on day one.”

But now, the outgoing president is boasting that he is leaving this would-be dictator with a “strong hand to play.” Biden, characteristically, made no mention of the fact that Trump has threatened to use American military power to annex Canada, Greenland and Panama.

These invasions and conquests may be just the consequences of a silly old man blowing off steam, but the Incoming has always believed (and, during his first term, sometimes even accomplished) a Mordor on the border – even if he never did finish building the “beautiful wall.”

Now, he gets another chance.

Trump, MAGA, most Republicans and more than a few Democrats believe that our borders... the southern one, at least... are out of control, even though Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officials reported that the Biden administration is poised to end its term without an expected bump in illegal border crossings in anticipation of Act II.

In December, they reported 47,300 illegal border crossings — a slight elevation from November, when it reported 46,612, approaching the lowest level since July 2020.

The first two weeks of January also indicate activity has dropped, with about 45% fewer crossings than in December, according to senior CBP officials who spoke with reporters during a virtual press conference Tuesday.

Nearly 936,500 people have used the CBP One app to schedule appointments since its introduction in January 2023. Although President-elect Donald J. Trump said in September that he planned to end CBP One appointments, a senior CBP official told reporters that they are still being scheduled.

Overall, the number of crossings demonstrate a downward trend from the high mark set under the Biden administration in December 2023, when arrests reached nearly 250,000. Outgoing Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas credited the Biden administration’s June 2024 proclamation that temporarily suspends asylum processing at the border when U.S. officials deem they are overwhelmed.

Newsweek’s Dan Gooding, however, called Biden’s claim that crossing were down “false”. (Jan. 14, Attachment Fourteen)

On Monday, Biden also made a similar claim while speaking to reporters ahead of his speech on foreign policy.

"Let's get something in mind about the border. When I became president, the numbers came way down," he said.

That is false.

Biden expanded Temporary Protected Status, which allows migrants from certain nations to remain in the country without fear of deportation, pending immigration hearings.

Gooding also said that the President had expanded humanitarian parole for those from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela – known as CHNV for short. That allowed 531,670 people from those four countries alone to enter the U.S., having been screened at home, for a set period of time while they apply for more permanent status.

In his last few days in office, Biden extended the parole for those from a handful of countries, including Venezuela.

Anti-immigrant protesters have expressed outrage and denial.

Federation for American Immigration Reform, on X: "Biden's open-borders policies invited the largest wave of illegal immigration in U.S. history with nearly 11 million illegal crossings and 2 million gotaways."

Michelle Mittelstadt, from the Migration Police Institute, told Newsweek: "If you take the 'when I became president' literally, yes, encounters in January 2021 were lower than the three preceding months. If you take the statement to mean the entire presidency, encounters have been declining since January 2024 from record highs seen earlier in the administration. And November 2024 marked the lowest point in encounters of the entire Biden administration."

Trump’s prospective ICEman Tom Homan says that deportations will begin Tuesday, starting in Chicago.

Congress, meanwhile, is already pushing forward legislation relating to detaining illegal immigrants accused of theft or burglary offenses, and to introduce DNA testing of asylum seekers at the border.

PUBLIC HEALTH, ABORTION and the CULTURE WARS

On New Years’ Eve, Forbes reviewed the outgoing administration’s record on health, and reporter Steve Brozak... an investment banker and Big Pharma mouthpiece, claimed that Biden's election was due, in large part, to his guarantees of a return to normalcy from the COVID-19 pandemic. (Attachment Fifteen)

In 2020, Biden’s promises of healthcare improvement swayed a sufficient number of the electorate to secure his move into the White House. Unfortunately, his goals of expanding and strengthening the Affordable Care Act, enhancing coverage and affordability, addressing rural and mental health, and lowering prescription drug costs proved difficult. In short, Brozak asked, “what will we remember?” He listed ten of President Joe’s most consequential healthcare issues and awarded him an “F” on every one of these... ranging from the raiding of public health to subsidize his Green New Deal, on the right, to “unwinding” poor people off Medicaid, especially children, and “deeply ingrained inequalities” on the left.

Biden has also been accused of wavering on abortion. When asked about whether he would direct the FDA to revoke mifepristone’s approval, Trump has been unclear about medication abortions and perhaps sympathetic to some of the most extreme anti-abortion activists also want the new administration to revive an 1873 anti-vice law known as the Comstock Act, which prohibits the mailing of materials that can be “used or applied for producing abortion, or for any indecent or immoral purpose.” “There’s no world in which I think he’s not going to do anything.” said Greer Donley, a law professor at the University of Pittsburgh. (From the 19^th News, Attachment Sixteen) Critics say Biden did not support the pro-lifers until polls told him it was safe to do so… more than a few Trump voters also oppose the cancellation of Roe v. Wade

The usually-liberal Nation accused Biden’s stance on health... in fact, the “gerontocracy” of himself and key aides... for Trump’s election.

“As in all elections, there were many factors that fed into the ultimate results, but Joe Biden’s fateful decision to run again at age 81—making him the oldest presidential candidate in American history—looms large,” reported Nation-al coroner Jeet Heer (Dec. 20^th, Attachment Seventeen) citing the “disastrous” June debate with Trump that made Biden’s aging painfully visible for the all the world to see.

Tooting his own horn as a soothsayer, the Jeetster looked back to 2020, when he tweeted that “having the 77-year-old Biden competing against the 74-year-old Trump for the senior vote … reinforces the feeling that America is becoming a gerontocracy: no country for young people but like the USSR of the 1970s dominated by an aging cadre stuck in the past.” This February I worried that, “If Donald Trump wins the presidency this year, Biden’s decision to seek a second term will be seen as one of the greatest blunders in American history.”

Now that Trump has in fact won again, the scale and culpability of Biden’s blunder has to be measured. That culpability belongs not just to Biden alone but also to the larger Democratic establishment and the enablers on Biden’s staff, “all of whom were essential in the sickening farce of a frail, failing, and flailing man clinging to the most powerful position in the world.” Heer specifically named James Clyburn, the Democratic “kingmaker” desperate to defeat the threat of (an equally aging) Bernie Sanders and cited a Wall Street Journal report on how Old Sick Joe’s staff “managed” his limitations.

“Would a more alert and intellectually agile president really have allowed the wars between Ukraine/Russia and Israel/Palestine to continue for as long as Biden did? Or would a president with full executive function and will have pushed harder for diplomacy, given how these wars were harming the world?” Jeet opined. Certainly, Biden’s team of foreign policy hawks (national security advisor Jake Sullivan, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, and advisor Brett H. McGurk) “were given free rein to carry out dangerously escalatory policies.”

Concluding that Biden was surrounded by “a bodyguard of liars, a pretorian guard of deceivers (including lefty journalist Bob Woodward... above... and even Morning Joe) who fooled both the president and the American public. This was a massive betrayal of democracy. There is a reason the Constitution has provisions for removing an impaired chief executive (the 25th Amendment).

“The party’s deep commitment to gerontocracy flared up again earlier this week when the position of ranking member of the House Oversight Committee was given to Gerry Connolly, who is 74 and suffers from cancer, rather than Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

“Ultimately, Democrats will have to decide whether they are a political party that is serious about winning power—or are just an employment agency for the superannuated.”

BIDEN’S DEFENDERS

Some of the invalid’s bodyguard are guarding Biden’s bodies (the physical and legislative) up until and, likely, after Monday’s bitter end.

Pew Research (Jan. 9, Attachment Nineteen) noted, appraised and approved his record on diversity (a particular thorn in the MAGApaw) as relates to the American judiciary.

“Biden will end his tenure in the White House having appointed 228 judges to the federal courts. That figure includes record numbers of women and racial or ethnic minorities.

“Biden’s total narrowly eclipses the 226 federal judges Donald Trump appointed during his first term as president. Trump, however, will soon be able to add to his tally as he prepares to take office for a second term, which will start with a Republican Senate majority.”

Of the 228, Pew’s John Gramlich... bolstered by numerous charts and graphs (see here)... broke down the judiciary appointments by sex (Biden appointed 144 women to the Federal bench, Trump 55) amounting to 63% of his total appointments to the courts. “Both in absolute number and as a share of his total, Biden appointed more women to the judiciary than any other president. Barack Obama previously held this record, appointing 134 women judges – or 42% of his total – over eight years in office.”

Also, no president appointed a more racially and ethnically diverse slate of judges than Biden. A 60% majority of the judges appointed by Biden – 136 out of 228 – were Black, Hispanic, Asian or part of another racial or ethnic minority group. “That represents both the highest number and share of any president. During Obama’s two terms in office, he appointed 115 judges who were racial or ethnic minorities, amounting to 36% of his total. Bill Clinton appointed 90 minority judges during his two terms, representing a quarter of his total judicial appointees.”

Trump appointed 37.

Another of Biden’s lockboxes unlikely to be overturned by Team Trump was his clean energy tax credit as follows a basic formula that has applied to wind and solar projects for more than a decade, and extends it to a wider range of low-carbon energy sources, including geothermal, nuclear, advanced batteries, and some kinds of biofuels. “It could pay out more than $250 billion over the next decade, and cause emissions from the US power sector to fall up to 73% below 2022 levels by 2035, which would make it arguably the single most impactful element of Biden’s climate agenda. Independent analyses have also shown the tax credit will reduce household electricity costs by up to 10%. (Semafor, Attachment Twenty, Jan. 9)

“No amount of careful design can fully protect any of Biden’s climate policies from rollback under Trump and his allies in Congress who remain ideologically dead-set against anything resembling a “green new deal...” warned Semafor’s Tim McDonnell. The next four years will be a major test of how far they are willing to take their opposition to climate action “even when doing so undermines job creation and economic growth in core Republican districts. Some policies will inevitably meet the dustbin. But ultimately, Biden’s most important legacy on climate is about more than any one tax credit or regulation. It’s about meaningfully linking climate to the economy, and proving that the energy transition can revitalize US industry, an approach that Trump can’t repeal.

This economic philosophy hasn’t percolated yet into Republicans’ rhetoric; on Tuesday, Trump promised “to have a policy where no windmills are being built,” and House of Representatives Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) promised last week to “pass legislation to eliminate the Green New Deal.” Tax credits for electric vehicles, alongside Environmental Protection Agency regulations on vehicle and power plant emissions, will likely get the axe, as will Biden initiatives supporting environmental justice for marginalized communities. Legislation to streamline the building of energy infrastructure — a crucial obstacle Biden never managed to solve — will probably be written to favor fossil fuels. Further taxpayer support to commercialize nascent low carbon technologies may not be forthcoming. “So the energy transition will probably slow down,” McDonnell acknowledged, but Biden left it “with a good shot at not grinding to a halt.”

And what, if any, influence will Bro Musk have upon the intensity of Djonald UnClean’s uncleansing of the climate... and the economy? Or the foreign devils... like Canadians? The EU and Nato? Even the Chinese... reportedly now working to relese millions of tiny trucks and cars to gnaw at the ears and noses of American automakers like the rats they are.

“Even if Trump takes some regulatory pressure off high-carbon US industries, they will still be under pressure from overseas trading partners. Starting this year US natural gas exporters will need to meet methane emissions standards to have access to the European market,” McDonnell points out

“The lasting legacy of the Biden administration is that clean energy will be inevitable in the United States,” said Costa Samaras, director of Carnegie Mellon University’s Scott Institute for Energy Innovation . “The administration teed up a great opportunity for this country to lead the world. Let’s not mess this up.”

But if Biden’s judges and legislation egregiously offend Trump, MAGA and the billionaire boys’ club to the extent that they are willing to stand alone against the world, the Global Policy Watch has noted some ways they can do so. (Jan. 9, Attachment Twenty)

Bad black and female and liberal judges can be impeached... although King Djonald may have to watch out for swing SCOTOIDS John and Amy.

And control of the White House, plus unified control of Congress by the president’s party, will pave the way for Republicans to deploy the Congressional Review Act (CRA) to overturn a number of regulations issued by the Biden Administration.  When President Trump first took office in 2017, congressional Republicans used the CRA to overturn more than a dozen rules promulgated by the Obama Administration.   

Under the current congressional schedules, Senators may introduce CRA resolutions starting around January 23, 2025, and Representatives may introduce CRA resolutions starting around February 5, 2025.

The George Washington University Regulatory Study Center estimated that approximately 1000 of President Joe’s 1,100 “significant rules” defined in Executive Order 12866, as amended by Executive Order 14094, that are predicted to have an annual impact of $200 million or more on the economy can be overturned.

Some Semafor noted were methane emissions and revocation of tax credits for any manufacturers who do a lot or a little bit of business with China (i.e. an octopoling of Tik Tok provisions as are not likely to get along to go along with the judiciary and Congress... even some Republicans who might oppose Trump closing factories in the districts as use even a smidgen of Chinese wares.

Of course, banning these would essentially be banning democracy in the U.S. but didn’t Djonald Unchained say he might be a dictator on Day One? Or Day Two, if Day One is too cold?

THE POLLS – FULL STEAM AHEAD

But Trump does have an ace up his sleeve... and that ace is Don Jones.

Not only in November, but now, polling still shows that Americans believe that if the Incoming says that immigrants eat dogs and deploy aliens with Jewish space lasers... well that must be so!

RCP, the poll of polls, polled America on whether they stood behind Old Joe on Economy, Foreign Policy, Inflation, Crime, Immigration, the Mideast (but not Ukraine) war and the Direction of the country. (Jan. 9, Attachment Twenty One)

Biden’s record?

Seven topics, twelve polls.

More Americans disagreed with Biden on every issue on every poll. His best showing was a minus nine from Marist; his worst minus thirty two from the Marquette firm.

When Ukraine was added to the mix, the negative spread was only minus five. CBS gave him minus twenty two... essentially laying out the welcome mat for Putin to take over Kyev and then move on to Poland, the Baltics, wherever!

The WashXaminer (Jan. 7, Attachment Twenty Two) predictably graded Biden “worst”... just like (but at least not “worse” than Tricky Dick”)

“Gallup rated Biden’s presidency on Tuesday similarly to that of former President Richard Nixon, who resigned in disgrace during the Watergate scandal.

“Rasmussen Reports brushed Biden off as “one of the worst presidents ever.”

“Both noted it is not just partisans who are dismissing his presidency, but Democrats are joining in, too, telling Gallup that, at best, Biden will be viewed as just an average Joe.”

Rasmussen, traditionally the most far-right of the polling people found that “48% of Likely U.S. Voters think Biden will be remembered as one of the worst presidents in American history. Twenty-one percent (21%) say Biden will be remembered as one of America’s best presidents, while 27% consider his presidency about average.” (Jan. 6^th, Attachment Twenty Three)

Gallup (Attachment Twenty Four, Jan. 7th) found that “Fifty-four percent of U.S. adults believe Biden will be remembered as a “below average” (17%) or “poor” (37%) president, while 19% say he will be evaluated as “outstanding” (6%) or “above average” (13%). Another 26% think he will be regarded as “average.”

They, at least, admitted that Trump did not fare either... “John Kennedy is rated best by Americans – with a net rating of +68, while Ronald Reagan (+38) and Barack Obama (+21) also (got) substantially favorable reviews.”

They did, however, note that “past presidents who finished challenging terms, including Carter, George W. Bush and Trump, have seen the harsh ratings they received at the time they left the White House soften considerably over time.”

So maybe Trump will attend Joe’s funeral, when and if.

AP/NORC contributed more charts and graphs as said about the same thing... (Attachment Twenty Five)

They did, however, take note of “deep partisan differences”... Democrats expressing more positivity about the four years of a Biden administration than Republicans or independents, both for themselves and the country overall. A majority of Republicans feel their household and the country as a whole are worse off since Biden took office.

And locally, the solid blue Boston Herald (Jan. 10, Attachment Twenty Six) also turned thumbs down on Wicked Joe.

“I’m not going to sound like ‘Star Wars,’ that he went over to the dark side and everything that might be implied there,” John Cressey, a 79-year-old Democrat who lives in the Los Angeles area and does background work for films and movies, said of Biden. “But I think he just lost the pulse of the nation and that’s why Trump won.”

Cressey said he saw the 82-year-old Biden declining physically and believes the president was increasingly controlled by aides. He says Biden let the situation on the U.S.-Mexico border deteriorate into “a mess.” And Cressey summed up his chagrin with Biden’s handling of the economy by saying, “Go buy a carton of eggs.”

Disappointment was especially palpable among Black and Hispanic Americans, who have traditionally leaned Democratic but shifted in larger numbers toward Trump in 2024.

The contrast with Obama was especially striking among Black Americans. About 6 in 10 said Obama, the nation’s only Black president, had kept his promises at the end of his term, compared with around 3 in 10 who said the same for Biden. Similarly, about 7 in 10 Black Americans said they and their family were better off at the end of Obama’s presidency while only about a third said that about Biden.

“I feel as though the economy hasn’t progressed in a positive way since he’s been in office,” said Evonte Terrell, 30, a sales manager at a telecommunications company from Detroit who described himself as a “waning Democrat.”

Waned donkey Bob (Nixon Killer) Woodward even allegedly told Rep. James Comer (R-Ky), chair of the powerful US House oversight committee, claims that in a private conversation the Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward told him “everyone in DC knew” Joe Biden was financially corrupt.

“Woodward explained that everyone in DC knew that Joe allowed his family to sell access to him, but as far as he was aware, that was not illegal,” Comer writes. “He added that it should be, but it wasn’t,” according to the backslinging liberal Guardian U.K. (Jan 10^th, Attachment Twenty Eight)

Paraphrasing Woodward’s own seminal book, Comer is publishing “All the President’s Money: Investigating the Secret Foreign Schemes That Made the Biden Family Rich.”

Comer says Bob Costa of CBS also attended the “quiet homemade dinner prepared by Woodward’s wife”, because the two reporters were “doing a book on Joe Biden’s presidency and wanted to interview me because they thought my investigation might have an impact”.

Costa co-wrote Peril, Woodward’s third book on Trump’s presidency, published in September 2021.

Comer says he gave Woodward and Costa their interview, “then asked Woodward what he thought about my investigation. He replied that he thought Biden had obviously worked the system his entire political career, and that his son and both brothers had a troubled financial history. He predicted that my investigation ‘would either be bigger than Watergate or it would end up being a big nothing burger’.

“The receipts had to show the money flowed all the way to the top.”

And the proles and the polls alike were contributory to the hard-right New York Post’s editorial board terminology of Biden as “deluded” (Jan. 8^th, Attachent Twenty Eight)

We’re within throwing distance of President-elect Trump’s inauguration after he delivered a historic whupping to Democrats, and Biden has not let a single ray of reality slip through the cracks of the self-flattering myth he’s built for himself.

“His legacy will be leaving his party, his country and the world worse off than he found them.”

Biden’s told many fibs over his political career, but possibly none have been more far-fetched than the one he’s told himself — that he was a good president.

The voters were wrong.

The polls were wrong.

Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer and Barack Obama were wrong.

“In Biden’s mind, he wasn’t appreciated in his time, but history will see him as the second coming of FDR.

“He’s bought that fantasy hook, line and sinker.

“As the sun sets on his term as president, it seems he’s the only one who did.”

Dylan Matthews of Vox adjudicated President Joe as “(t)he president who could not choose” adding that where Joe Biden’s presidency went wrong, when his administration stopped looking like Barack Obama’s and started looking like Jimmy Carter’s, (RIP) “you could start with the failure of Build Back Better. (Attachment Twenty Nine)

“Build Back Better was a sweeping agenda of economic reform on the scale of the New Deal, meant to solidify its author as the “FDR-sized” president he wanted to be.

“Dusting the text off now, you can feel that ambition. Across two bills — the American Jobs Plan and the American Families Plan — it sought to spend over $4 trillion across a decade on transportation, manufacturing and science, home care, clean energy, an expanded child tax credit, tuition-free community college, child care, and much more. It would have been an epochal expansion of government spending and ambition, on par with Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal or Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society.

“Little of this became law, of course.”

Biden’s domestic record is characterized by a refusal to prioritize, a paralyzing fear of pissing off any Democratic faction that too often wound up winning nothing for any of them.

Multiple causes, including his advanced age, conspired to make him “the weakest chief executive America has had in decades”, in the view of Vox.

The result was a failed presidency that left Biden without much of an enduring domestic policy legacy and made what accomplishments he can claim immensely vulnerable to the Republican trifecta taking over the government he led (see above).

Build Back Bungled

Vox blames Chuck Schumer for inflation and the debt, noting that it helped him keep the Senatein 2024, but was less a coherent agenda than a hodgepodge of different priorities with their own congressional champions. There was the child tax credit expansion from the American Rescue Plan, which advocates like Sen. Michael Bennet (D-CO) and Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) wanted to make permanent; there was universal pre-K, paid leave, and child care, which Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA) championed; there were clean energy credits, which climate advocates like Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) prioritized; and much more. None of them, in other words, were specifically Biden’s signature issues.

It was obvious from the start that not all of this could pass. Democrats never had a majority for this full agenda, and their majority was dependent on moderate Sens. Joe Manchin (WV) and Kyrsten Sinema (AZ) — then both Democrats, today both independents. These two had to be wooed for any measure to earn majority support in Congress.

“There’s a tendency among left-leaning observers to see Manchin and Sinema as hopelessly unpredictable, or even bad-faith negotiators, but both of them were clear throughout the process about what they wanted. Frustratingly for the administration, the two senators’ desires were at cross purposes. Manchin was open to tax hikes on the rich but skeptical of the child tax credit and other “handouts,” while Sinema was open to those programs but hostile to tax hikes,” Vox opined.

“This failure to make a choice, to decide what to prioritize and make the centerpiece of Build Back Better, was Biden’s greatest legislative mistake as president.”

It represented a profound failure of leadership.

The best gambit the Progressive Caucus had was a threat to vote against an infrastructure bill that Manchin wanted, but the gambit failed. Even if they had held the line, the likely outcome would have been neither an infrastructure bill nor a Build Back Better. It was all pointless theater.

The obvious Shakespearean reference for Biden is Lear, an aging and vain king who is losing his wits and is tormented by his children. But ultimately his downfall was more Hamlet. Biden led America at a pivotal moment that called for strong decisions. He just could not make them.

As a result, Biden's presidency was full of major accomplishments. “His legacy won't reflect that.” wrote Sara Pequeño in USA Today (Attachment Thirty).

President Joe Biden has been a busy man, trying to squeeze in parts of his agenda right before Donald Trump retakes the Oval Office. It's too bad he wasn't this active during his presidency.

In the past five days, Biden has made multiple moves to cement his legacy. He blocked the merger of U.S. Steel and Japan’s Nippon Steel. He banned offshore oil and gas drilling on more than 625 million federal acres and is poised to create two new national monuments in California that will preserve 848,000 acres.

He signed the Social Security Fairness Act, which will increase benefits for nearly 3 million people, and on Tuesday, his administration banned medical debt from affecting credit reports.

If you look back just a few weeks, the accomplishments grow to include more student loan debt relief, commuting the sentences of nearly every person on federal death row and enacting the nation’s first anti-hazing law.

“This is the fervor with which Biden should have acted throughout the past four years. This is the man who is willing to implement new ideas that will curtail climate change and benefit Americans in tangible ways. Biden’s legacy could have been monumental had he kept that same energy all four years and through the reelection campaign.

“Instead, Biden’s legacy may be remembered as little more than an intermission between the first and second terms of Trump.”

“The unforgiving American public has already made it clear they no longer back Biden, as witness the polls

Biden will be remembered as the old man who handed the country over to Trump instead of the transitory president he claimed he would be.”

He admitted as much to the liberal MSNBC (Jan. 14, Attachment Thirty One), albeit making the excuse that he was most disappointed in his administration’s failure to combat the rise of misinformation – telling USA that he’d failed to effectively counter misinformation, including that from Trump. “He said that challenge reflects the revolution in how Americans get their news, and whom they trust to tell it. ‘Because of the way, nature, the nature of the way information is shared now, there are no editors out there to say “That’s simply not true,”’ Biden said. (See also here)

If there is any hope for the future of America and for democracy, MSNBC dreams,” it’s been promising to hear candidates for the new Democratic National Committee chair position —and in particular, Wisconsin activist Ben Wikler — talk about the need for the party to understand and grapple with the misinformation and political propaganda that is rife within the current information ecosystem. And Mark Zuckerberg’s sharp MAGA turn on content moderation ought to be a wake-up call to those Democrats who have failed to take the issue more seriously. 

Ultimately, Biden’s assessment seems fair to me. His and the Democratic Party’s failures to address misinformation adequately may prove to be the most consequential shortcoming of his presidency. But there are at least some signs the party is doing some necessary course correction.

What, then, will be his legacy. Like Nixon’s? Like Carter’s?

Maybe we should ask a foreigner! Or a dead songwriter...

Six weeks before Trump’s blowout win, Biden shared his future plans with Ana Navarro on the View (Hindustan Times, 8/26/ Attachment Thirty Two) and said that he will continue to work on both domestic and global policy matters after departing from the office via the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement in Washington, D.C., and the Biden Institute at the University of Delaware and the soon-be-ex added: “I'm less concerned about what my legacy is. And although I'm leaving, you're stuck with me, I'm not going away.”

But now he is. As Nyro wrote (above): “Time is full of changes, and now you've got to go... goodbye Joe (goodbye, Joe).”

	Our Lesson: January 9 through January 15, 2025
Thursday, January 9 , 2025 Dow: Closed for President Jimmy Carter’s funeral	Garth Brooks sings “Imagine”, dignitaries gather and five Presidents pay tribute to Ol; 38... even Donald Trump, seem exchanging gabble with Barack Hussein Obama. At 100, Carter was the oldest, if not the best of America’s Chief Executives; his legacy depending more on his post-Presidential life than his administration. Wildfires return to Hollywood and the wells and hydrants run dry. Santa Ana winds calming, but red flag warnings return later in the day and throughout the week. Only five are ded in the sixmajor blazes but looting spreads, celebrities like Paris Hilton and Billy Crystal lose their homes and closure include schools, businesses, the Jimmy Kimmel and “Price is Right” shows and the Rams v. Vikings game is moved to Arizona, On the east coat, record low temperatures and blizzards assail Americans from Dallas to DC and down to the Gulf Coast. Criswell (FEMA director Deanna, not the psychic in our last Lessons) predicts more winds, more fires and more drought and says “listen to your officials.” Charities and the Red Cross mobilize and Flo and Emu and the Rock of Gibraltar promise “Help is coming from your insurance company!” Hah!! Insurance companies have been dropping policies for the last three years in anticipation of today, so many will lose everything. Not anticipating... those officials and anger begins bubbling up under the grief.
Friday, January 10, 2025 Dow: 41,938.45	It’s National Quitters’ Day for all the Joneses tired of their unpleasant Resolutions and all the guilt and shame attendant. The Western wildfires and Eastern freeze show no signs of quitting. A new Kenneth Fire is being blamed on an arsonist or, perhaps, the power company. Five thousand structures and twenty thousand acres are burned in the Palisades Fire while the death toll climbs to ten. Famous stores and homes are burning or gon for mile after mile on Sunset Boulevard as homeowners save their properties with garden hoses (one dying in the attempt) and the TV weatherpeople call 2024 the warmest year since 1850. Not in the East, however, a state of emergency declared in Atlanta blizzard as snow falls from the Gulf up to New York and temperatures drop to nine debees in Texas, In other news, bargain JC Penny’s merges with Ritzy Macy’s and both are closing stores. Notre Dame defeats Penn State on final play of Orange Bowl; Marcus Freeman becomes the first black (Irish) coast to play Ohio State in the finals on January 20^th, which is also Inauguration Day. Ten days from taking office, PPE (President/President-elect) Trump is sentenced to... nothing!... for his Stormy weather; Special Counsel Jack Smith immediately resigns under threats to lock him up. (Well, as a convicted felon, Djonald UnArmed will be prohibited from carrying a gun into his future meetings with foreigners and Congress.) And his own Justice Amy betrays him by greenlighting the release of documents... perhaps forgetting that Trump can hire willing minions to take his retvenge and retributions.
Saturday, January 11 , 2025 Dow: Closed	Burned-out Angelenos slide and glide past police to see what’s left of their homes with the saved praising their various Lords, the damned searching through rubble for mementoes like photographs and wedding rings. The new homeless are being put up in tents hastily erected in the Rose Bowl without a single cry of “lock them up”’ charities, celebrities and Americans donate food, clothing and toys for the kids as investigators investigate claims of arson, PG&E incompetence and reservoirs that ran dry at the height of the plight and Santa Anas will escalate back to 75 mph by Sunday, Jimmy Carter takes his last trip home to Plains, driven throught the White Post-Christmas snows of Memphis and Atlanta to be buried beside Roslyn. In a now-ancient tragedy, cops and FBI reveal videos of Bourbon Street terrorist Jabbar shooting it out with the police and his truckload of IEDs he was killed before he could detonate. SoKo crash investigators mystified by the stoppage of black boxes four minutes before fatal crash and America gets a smidgen of comic relief watching an Australian arsonist set his pants on fire trying to burn down a store. Crikey!!
Sunday, January 12 , 2025 Dow: Closed	It’s the beginning of Girl Scout Cookie season and, also, Talkshow Sunday – divided into thirds between the weather, the Inauguration of one President and memorial to another. With fire deaths up to 16, police with cadaver dogs are searching the ruins. “All of the landmarks... gone!” says sparkling new Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Ca) who calls out Gov. Newsom for refusing active duty military. 40K acres now burned in six fires as are 11% contained... damaged estimated at $150B, second only to Hurricane Katrina as looters, price-gougers and insurance canceleers add to the misery that so many other Good Samaritans try to relieve. Criswell (above) predicts that FEMA rescue, relief and recovery funds sill have to compete with flood expenses; partisans wonder if President Trump will punish Newsom and the people of California for their bad attitudes. Desperate L.A. recruiting prisoners and Mexicans to fight the blazes, causing Steve Bannon and Hard MAGA to overheat themselves. New House Majority Whip Tom Emmer (R-Mn) warns against anticipating Federal relief because “we’re gonna get the Trump agenda in place”... that being cultural issues, the border (which may also be burning by Inauguration Day) and the debt ceilinghe calls “a false number”. NSA nominee Mike (not Tim) Waltz adds another expnse: more funding for the military as Ukraine faces a World War One style meat grinder with WW3 consequences and calls on Zelensky to lower the draft age from 26 to 18 before committing more aid. The ABC roundtable exhumes Election 2024 with former RNC chair Reince Priebus mocking Old Sick Joe’s belief that he would have won had he stayed in... “Trump would have smoked him,” while former DNC chair Donna Brazile admits there’s “nothing wrong” with donkeys like John Fetterman and DC Mayor Muriel Bowser meeting with The (New) Boxx Trump’s new pocket monkeys Rachel Bade (who says Biden didn’t accept his likely loss until too late) and Rich Klein agree that all his nominees except Pete Hegseth and (maybe) Tulei Gabbard will be easily confirmed after Djonald slapped down Joni Ernst. As Antony Blinkey makes his last trip from the G-7 meeting in Brussels with no Uke or Mideast peace deal, Bob Woodward’s new book “War” credits or debits him with convincing Biden to “walk away, Joe”. FTN’s Margaret Brennan says there’s “no doubt” that the freeze and fires were a cause of climate change and wonders how the Incoming will handle that. And in other news... as a Wisconsin judge relases the Slender Man stabber Morgan Geyser from Arkham after seven years, the Girl Scouts’ Number One Cookie is, again, the Thin Mints. Yummy!
Monday, January 13 , 2025 Dow: 42,179.43	Wildfire death toll rises to 24 as local, prison and Mexican firefighters (many on 24 hour shifts) take advantage of calming winds (which will power up to 70 mph tomorrow), investigators hunt causes of water shortage and possible arson or PG&E compliance, local police hunt looters using drones or disguised as firefighters and try to deter residents from returning to ruins, Internat guardians warn of repair scams in the making, The majority of Good Joneses help by continuing to contribute food, blankes and other essentials. The deep freeze hangs on in the East as ABC weathergirl Ginger Zee compares temperature now and for at least aweek to come as “like Siberia”; it’s minus 22 in Minneapolis and headed down to minus 30. Toxic smoke, heat, cold and vaxxing denialists all contribut to the rise in what is now a Quademic: flu, Covid, RSV and Norovirus. Ten states blame AI apps for increases in rents and evictions as (leagal) black hat hackers calculate and kick out thousands of renters as the largest landlords collude in gouging schemes that have raised rents in Atlanta this year (although some incomes are rising). But hundreds of lucky passengers can thank an AI warning system for alerting pilots coming in to Phoenix airport that they were only 875 feet (not the recommended mile) away from crashing.
Tuesday, January 14 , 2025 Dow: 42,538.36	The California National Guard is finally called in as hydrants run dry. The winds are calm now, but slated to pick up tomorrow and the L.A. fire chief says the biggest danger is to Brentwood. Kids reportedly getting PTSD from their schools being destroyed; with red flag warning extending south to the Mexican border, Speaker Mike says that there will be “conditions” attached to relief. Jack Smith, now a civilian and facing his own prosecution, releases the report on Trump’s One Six actions, saying: “No man is above the law.” He’s wrong, but is betrayed by Justice Comer in the release as his Defense nominee begins Senate Armed Services grilling and denies all accusations. In criminal news, a dirty old man is arrested for stalking WNBA’s Caitlin Clark while thieves posing as Amazon workers invade, beat and rob a clean (now bloody) old man, Starbucks says that anbody who tries to use their rest rooms before buying anything will be arrested – the matter is likely to take care of itself.
Wednesday, January 15 , 2025 Dow: 43,170.47	It’s National Bagel Day. President Joe gives his farewell address (see above)... and announces a tentative hostages for cease-fire deal in the MidEast (brokered by Qatar). Seven Americans are still held, but only three are presumed alive. The deal still has to be approved by Israel but, Netanyahu willing, will take place on President Joe’s last day to give him a boost. The Dow soared... whether because of the deal or because the rich folk were glad to be rid of Biden and hungering over Trump’s tax cuts – everybody and nobody knows. Joni Ernst knows and she believes Pete Hegseth where the DoD nominee says h’s a changed man, he’s no longer an alcoholic and he believes women can join the military. This makes him an odds-on favourite for confirmation, along with the rest of Team Trump. With the Santa Ana winds dying down (for a few days) authorities warn Angelenos not to be “complacent” after eight days of wildfires, with the Palisades 18% contained and newer blazes being quashed. The death toll now stands at 25.
Busy, busy Biden prancing and pardoning – but Don Jones wonders if any of his big plans will come to pass or, if they do, be overturned by the Incoming – now only days away. The Dow has been rising – on the premise that the Fed won’t go bananas, but as for the California fires? Meh! The rising Dow was wiped away by equally rising gas price, leading to a watchful, waitful week until the Day One fun begins.

THE DON JONES INDEX

CHART of CATEGORIES w/VALUE ADDED to EQUAL BASELINE of 15,000

(REFLECTING… approximately… DOW JONES INDEX of June 27, 2013)

Gains in indices as improved are noted in GREEN. Negative/harmful indices in RED as are their designation. (Note – some of the indices where the total went up created a realm where their value went down... and vice versa.) See a further explanation of categories HERE

ECONOMIC INDICES		(60%)
CATEGORY	VALUE	BASE	RESULTS by PERCENTAGE			SCORE		OUR SOURCES and COMMENTS
INCOME	(24%)	6/17/13 revised 1/1/22	LAST	CHANGE	NEXT	LAST WEEK	THIS WEEK	THE WEEK’S CLOSING STATS...
Wages (hrly. Per cap)	9%	1350 points	12/2/24	+0.16%	1/25	1,545.00	1,547.53	https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/wages 30.57 .62
Median Inc. (yearly)	4%	600	12/23/24	-0.56%	1/9/25	741.00	736.83	http://www.usdebtclock.org/   40,231 43,527 3,282
Unempl. (BLS – in mi)	4%	600	12/9/24	+2.44%	1/25	543.13	556.38	http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS14000000/  4.2 4.1
Official (DC – in mi)	2%	300	12/23/24	+0.24%	1/9/25	229.70	229.14	http://www.usdebtclock.org/      7,001 019 036
Unofficl. (DC – in mi)	2%	300	12/23/24	+0.26%	1/9/25	262.18	261.50	http://www.usdebtclock.org/     12,177 211 243
Workforce Participation Number Percent	2%	300	12/23/24	-0.009% -0.013%	1/9/25	299.26	299.22	In 161,198 183 1,169 Out 101,061 091 1,119 Total: 262,159 74 88 61.489 479 471
WP % (ycharts)*	1%	150	12/2/24	-0.16%	1/25	150.95	150.95	https://ycharts.com/indicators/labor_force_participation_rate 62.60 .50
OUTGO	(15%)