1) Over 97% of House Incumbents Won in 2024 

Kay Granger was first elected to Congress nearly 30 years ago. She served as chair of the powerful House Appropriations Committee until she stepped down in March of this year. This week, her family admits she has "some dementia issues" and has lived in an assisted-care facility for the last six months. The last time she voted on the House floor was in July, and she has missed over 300 votes since then.
 

The average age of Senators in the incoming Congress will be 64-years-old.  In the House (meant to be "the people's chamber") the average age is 59. A majority of the Supreme Court is above or near retirement age.
 

Because of all the advantages of incumbency, over 97% (379 wins and just 11 losses) of House members running for reelection won their races this year.  That percentage hasn't changed much due to the huge money-raising advantages of incumbency and gerrymandered districts.
 

We desperately need a three or four-term limit for House members and a two-term (of six years each) limit on the Senate. As our co-founder, Steve Forbes has always said: "A pond needs constant fresh water or it develops algae."
 

2) Another Half-Million Jobs Were Phantom Jobs Under Biden

We've highlighted many times the overestimate of job creation under Biden by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Here we go again. The Philly Fed has estimated that job growth in Q2 of this year was actually negative and all job growth for those three months will be revised away in the annual benchmarking process for 2025. This is in addition to a downward revision of about 800,000 jobs from the previous annual benchmark, which will be incorporated into the nonfarm payroll data with January's report early next year.
 

Speaking of jobs, the latest state-level employment data was released yesterday - the usual red states sit atop the list. Utah and Idaho are neck and neck for the top spot.

When will blue state "progressives" FINALLY get it: they must change or die. They are starting to resemble the dormant economies of socialist Europe.
 

Apple is one of the most successful and profitable companies in world history - so naturally politicians want to destroy it. 

The European Union's Digital Markets Act (DMA) is a bureaucratic overreach that is targeting Apple (an American company) under the guise of "interoperability" - whatever that means. 

The EU is demanding that Apple redesign its iOS architecture to allow rival companies unrestricted access to core functions - completely compromising the security and reliability of Apple devices.

This great X thread explains what a disaster in the making this is:
 

Colorado is a fairly blue state, but voters at the local level are leading the charge for school choice and defanging the teachers union. Last year, the largest school district in Colorado Springs elected a reform school board, and it has now voted 6 to 1 to end the collective bargaining agreement with the Colorado Education Association.
 

Board members noted the teachers union is a private corporation that effectively controls a public institution.  It also effectively muzzles the 40 percent of district teachers who aren't members of the union, which facilitates the union's extreme ideology of rejecting any accountability or parental control. 

Here's an example of the radical agenda of the the Colorado Education Association: last year it passed a resolution saying "capitalism inherently exploits children, public schools, land, labor and resources. Capitalism is in opposition to fully addressing systemic racism (the school to prison pipeline), climate change, patriarchy (gender and LGBTQ disparities), education inequality and income inequality."

The Colorado Springs Gazette hailed the decision and urged it be taken up as a model by other districts:  "Finally, we have an elected board -- not a private club -- running the city's central school district," it noted. "Let's hope it starts a coast-to-coast trend of making children's outcomes the highest order of public education."

Yes, this is one of our Christmas wishes.

We might not have put it quite like this, but you get the drift:
 

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