Yair Rosenberg/The Atlantic:
Trump Doesn’t Believe Anything. That’s Why He Wins.
Transactionalism is Trump’s secret weapon.
It might seem bizarre for an executive to employ someone they consider at odds with their agenda. But there is a design behind this seeming dysfunction, and it reflects one of Trump’s strengths: He is a nakedly transactional coalition leader with few, if any, core beliefs. This enables him to balance the demands of opposing constituencies without alienating them. Because Trump has few real commitments, he can take contradictory positions and appease rival factions—in this case, hiring a member of the GOP establishment that he has assailed as “freaks,” “warmongers,” and “neocons”—without paying a price for inconsistency. On the contrary, Trump’s unapologetic amorality is a proven electoral asset that allows him to do things other politicians cannot.
Wall Street Journal:
Wall Street is really worried about bonds. It might be time to buy some.
On Friday, a jobs report that blew past expectations pushed yields on 10-year Treasurys to 4.772%, the highest close since Nov. 1, 2023, and those on 30-year paper to 4.962%.
What is spooking markets, however, is that much of the recent rise in yields doesn’t appear to reflect expectations of stronger economic growth. Rather, it might be the result of investors applying a higher discount or “term premium” to hold long-term bonds, estimates by the Federal Reserve suggest. Some analysts attribute this to the possibility of Donald Trump’s promised tariffs derailing the global economy and leading to a jump in inflation, while his tax cuts bloat budget deficits further.
Eugene Robinson/Washington Post:
Time caught up with Biden. It will also prove him right.
Biden inherited a mess. He leaves the U.S. in far better shape, at home and abroad.
Why, then, does Biden have an approval rating that struggles to reach 40 percent? Why did he have to end his campaign for reelection, abandoning a race he still thinks he could have won? What was his unforgivable sin?
Actually, there were two. One sin was political: Biden failed to address the crisis at the southern border — failed, even, to recognize it as a crisis — until far too late. By the time he finally took executive action that calmed the chaos, the immigration issue had become a millstone he could never remove.
The other sin was actuarial: Biden got old. Worse, he showed his age, reaching the point where he walked and talked unsteadily. None of that said anything about his thinking, but no matter. Voters had the right to decide he looked and sounded too feeble to be president for four more years.
Dan Pfeiffer/The Message Box:
Why Trump Paid No Price Whatsoever for His Criminal Conviction
The Judge - and America - let Trump off the hook
The polling did show that the mere fact of a conviction would give a segment of voters pause. A CNN poll conducted last spring found nearly a quarter of Trump supporters said a conviction in any of the cases might cause them to reconsider voting for Trump. What’s particularly interesting is the demographics of these voters. According to CNN:
They tend to be younger than other Trump supporters (64% are younger than 50 compared with 37% of those who would not reconsider), are less likely to be White (49% are people of color compared with 17% of those who would not reconsider), are more apt to report being Biden voters in 2020 (20% of them say they backed Biden in 2020 vs. 6% of those who would not reconsider) and are likelier to acknowledge that Biden legitimately won enough votes to win the presidency four years ago (63% vs. 22% among those who would not reconsider). They are also more apt to be political independents (49% vs. 31%) and ideologically moderate (50% vs. 38%).
These are the exact voters I focused on throughout the campaign. They are the voters who, in previous cycles, would have been Democrats, but were supporting Trump this time around. In the end, these voters never abandoned Trump. Here are a few reasons why:
Four listed factors, including fading from memory, and prices being more salient, combined for a perfect storm.
Lauren Harper Pope/Welcome Stack:
The Morality of Moderation
Abraham Lincoln showed how moderation can be moral.
Centrists understand that in order to make progress - to have the impact implied by your moral standing - you must be committed first and foremost to the values of liberal democracy, which in itself beholds a respect for tension and nuance among perspectives.
The idea that centrism is necessarily immoral or amoral is belied by one of America’s greatest Presidents. As John Avlon exhibited in his biography Lincoln And The Fight For Peace, Abraham Lincoln was a “soulful centrist,” who believed “public opinion is everything” when making social change.
Avlon notes of Lincoln that, “He did not demonize people he disagreed with, understanding that empathy is a pathway to persuasion. He was uncommonly honest and tried to depolarize bitter debates by using humor, logic, and scripture. Balancing moral courage with moderation, Lincoln believed that decency could be the most practical form of politics.”
x
Whole immediate family now lives in LA. Mom has been fielding calls from folks back home (east coast) all week asking if it’s true that:
- the entire city has evacuated
- all the water is gone
- Newsom is prepared to resign
- the LAFD chief is trans
- the Hollywood sign is gone
- Elon is helping
— Nick (derogatory) ✨ (@slothropsmap.bsky.social) 2025-01-11T16:35:55.832Z
ABC News:
Why the California wildfires were nearly impossible to contain
Ensuring the immediate safety of the residents is the priority, experts say.
In a typical fire management scenario, containing the fire by setting up a perimeter and trying to keep it from spreading further is often the first line of defense for firefighters to get the blaze under control, according to Lenya Quinn-Davidson, director of the University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources' team of experts on fire research in California.
But a confluence of events -- hurricane-force winds, low humidity levels and dry conditions -- allowed the fires to explode after the initial spark, Rachel Cleetus, policy director for the Climate and Energy Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, told ABC News.
Jonathan V Last/The Bulwark:
The Insurance Apocalypse
Fire, money, and who gets burned.
When California is finally able to start rebuilding from this disaster, it will probably require a wholesale reinvention of its current approach to property insurance. Here’s Noah Smith explaining the state’s recent evolution:
In 1988, California voters passed a ballot proposition called Proposition 103, which says that if insurers want to raise their premiums, they have to get the raise approved by the government first. This means that if premiums go up, California voters will blame the insurance commissioner, who is democratically elected. So naturally, the commissioner tries to keep voters happy by forbidding insurance companies from charging higher premiums. In recent years, insurance companies have been begging California Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara to let them charge higher premiums in order to account for the increased risk of large fires, and for the reinsurance premiums they now have to pay. But Lara forbid them from doing so.
What happened? Predictably, the insurance companies couldn’t afford to insure a lot of the people they used to insure. So insurers like State Farm started dropping tons of people in high-risk areas, including lots of the people who lived in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles—which just burned to the ground.
California’s solution to this problem was to cover uninsurable people with a state plan called FAIR. FAIR can pay for big claims—like the ones about to come out of the L.A. fires—by charging insurance companies a surcharge based on their market share in the state of California. But this creates an incentive for insurers to just leave California entirely—or shrink their coverage in the state by a lot—in order to avoid getting charged by FAIR when there’s a huge disaster. So California homes are becoming increasingly uninsurable.
This fire is going to stress-test FAIR. In order for the program to pass the test, it will have to (a) raise enough money to pay for the claims and (b) not burden insurance companies to such a degree that more of them leave the state. Because every time an insurer pulls out, it makes FAIR more vulnerable down the line.
Cliff Schecter with a human interest story, an interview with a California witness to the fires: