The president who could not choose

The U.S., Israel, and many around the world are waiting to see if Hamas will finally accept a ceasefire-hostage deal, but many in Israel are not happy about it. Others are looking at the more practical aspects of the proposed deal. The only barrier to an agreement seems to be Hamas' full and final approval. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, whose term in office will end Monday, stated, "For the past several months, Hamas has played the spoiler. But over the past several weeks, our...

Michelle Obama is done with President-elect Trump, if her decision to skip next week’s inauguration means anything.  The former first lady, who once called on Democrats to go high when Trump’s Republican Party goes low, will not be going to the Capitol to watch Trump take the presidential oath for a second time, leaving her husband, former President Obama, to go it alone. Longtime allies of the former first lady say she is sending a powerful statement by skipping the event....

U.S. national security agencies are warning that President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration will be “an attractive potential target” for violent extremists even as they say there are no specific credible threats. Potential perpetrators, particularly those with “election related grievances,” may see the president-elect’s swearing-in as “their last opportunity to influence the election results through violence,” a group of intelligence and law enforcement agencies wrote in a threat assessment...

Where do progressive politics go from here? Progressivism is reeling from two disasters, of different kinds. The first was the reelection of Donald Trump. The second is the ongoing Los Angeles wildfires. Each, in its own way, has exposed the feeble condition of progressive politics. Contemporary progressivism has been attempting of late to combine two competing projects, one quite old, one more recent. The older is progressivism’s century-old commitment to administration: the impulse...

President-elect Donald Trump said that when he takes office he will “immediately” reverse President Joe Biden’s recent executive action making more than 625 million acres of U.S. coastal waters off limits for new offshore drilling. But Trump’s intent to quickly “unban” any future oil and gas drilling in those areas may not be as simple as he suggests. That’s because Biden issued his ban using authority granted to presidents by the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act, a 1953 law that...

Retiring President Joe Biden said it was the “privilege of my life” to serve in politics as he released his farewell letter — days before President-elect Donald Trump is set to take office. “Four years ago, we stood in a winter of peril and a winter of possibilities. We were in the grip of the worst pandemic in a century, the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, and the worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War,” Biden said. “But we came together as Americans, and...

Mortgage demand started this year stronger than it did last year, even though interest rates are higher. Total mortgage application volume last week was 7% higher than the same week one year ago, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association’s seasonally adjusted index. The average contract interest rate for 30-year fixed-rate mortgages with conforming loan balances ($766,550 or less) increased to 7.09% from 6.99%, with points decreasing to 0.65 from 0.68 (including the origination...

South Korea’s impeached president, Yoon Suk Yeol, has been arrested and is being questioned over his ill-fated declaration of martial law last month, anti-corruption investigators said on Wednesday, bringing to an end an early-morning standoff outside his official residence in Seoul. His detention makes him the first sitting president in the nation’s history to be arrested. Officials from the corruption investigation office (CIO) said Yoon refused to talk during two and a half...

Trying to keep to the status quo. The post The day a gang of rockers tried to break up The Band’s first UK tour with Bob Dylan first appeared on Far Out Magazine.