Lawfare

• Merchan sentences Trump: The U.S. Supreme Court rejected Donald Trump’s emergency petition to block Manhattan Judge Juan Merchan from issuing his sentencing against the president-elect over the dubious hush-money conviction. As a result, Merchan followed through on his decision to sentence Trump today and, as anticipated, has given him a sentence of unconditional discharge. Trump will be released without restrictions and faces no jail time, but the sentence means the Democrats who engaged in their lawfare campaign against Trump get to officially call him a felon. The remaining question is for how long, given the likelihood that Trump will prevail in his appeal.

• Federal appeals court allows Justice Department to release Jack Smith report (Just the News)

Economy

• Jobs report: There’s good news on the labor front as 256,000 jobs were added in December, coming in well above the forecasted 155,000 jobs. Furthermore, the headline unemployment rate dropped slightly down to 4.1% from November’s 4.2%. Hourly wages increased by 0.3% from November and are up 3.9% from last year, but were slightly less than economists forecast. Thomas Simons, chief U.S. economist at Jefferies, said, “It is hard to say anything negative about the details of this report.” The inflationary growth rate slowed to 2.7% in November but is still off from the Federal Reserve’s target of 2%. With only 10 days until Donald Trump resumes the presidency, the economy is primed to come out of its Joe Biden-induced funk.

• BlackRock leaves major climate group amid Wall Street exodus (Bloomberg)

Government & Politics

• Imagine if some of us had better taste in music: John Lennon’s nakedly communist anthem “Imagine” was reportedly Jimmy Carter’s favorite song — indeed, the favorite song of the man who, in the decades after he left the White House, taught Sunday school at Maranatha Baptist Church back in Plains, Georgia. So it shouldn’t have surprised us that the husband-and-wife duo of Garth Brooks and Trisha Yearwood, herself a Georgian, played the song at Carter’s funeral yesterday at Washington National Cathedral. But still. We wonder if Carter, who, along with George W. Bush, was the most outwardly religious of all modern presidents, ever really contemplated the lyrics of that anti-Christian song. Lennon released it in 1971, a year after the Beatles broke up. “Imagine there’s no heaven,” it begins, “it’s easy if you try.” And later, “Nothing to kill or die for, and no religion too.” Lennon seemed to believe that religious faith is what ails us and that a purely secular world would be an earthly paradise. He must not have heard about the 100 million or so who died during the middle of the 20th century at the hands of atheistic communist regimes.

• Humor: Awkward: Mourners at Jimmy Carter funeral place flowers on Biden (Babylon Bee)

• Trump and Obama “like” each other? During the funeral service for Jimmy Carter at the National Cathedral on Thursday, Donald Trump was seated next to Barack Obama. Observers noted how the two interacted with each other, as they clearly engaged in a conversation during which Obama was seen laughing multiple times at comments Trump was making to him. If people didn’t know better, it would appear that the two were old friends. When questioned about the interchange later, Trump responded, “It did look very friendly, I must say. I didn’t realize how friendly it looked. I saw it on [Fox News], just a little while ago before I came in, and I said, ‘Boy, they look like two people that like each other,’ and we probably do.” He then added, “We have little different philosophies, but we probably do. We just got along, but I got along with just about everybody.”

• Federal judge slaps down Biden’s Title IX perversion: Are we now in the early stages of a Great Transgender Walk-Back? It’s hard to say, but a ruling yesterday by a U.S. district judge in Kentucky is bad news for the cultists who cheered the Biden administration’s effort to redefine the two sexes in the nation’s Title IX statute. Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti, who took the fight to Team Biden, made matters clear in a statement: “This is a huge win for Tennessee, for common sense, and for women and girls across America. The court’s ruling is yet another repudiation of the Biden administration’s relentless push to impose a radical gender ideology through unconstitutional and illegal rulemaking. Because the Biden rule is vacated altogether, President Trump will be free to take a fresh look at our Title IX regulations when he returns to office.” In light of this ruling and of the electoral trouncing that occurred last November 5, is it any wonder that the Democrats have grown increasingly squeamish about their support for the T in LGBT?

• TikTok is on the clock at the Supreme Court: Oral arguments began at 10 ET this morning at the Supreme Court in the case to determine the fate of the Communist Chinese spyware application known as TikTok. Or, as the TikTok apologists at ABC News described the app, “a wildly popular digital platform that roughly half the people in the United States use for entertainment and information.” While the latter might be true, it certainly doesn’t render false the former. At stake is the Supreme Court’s ruling on the constitutionality of shutting down the social media site in the U.S. if its Chinese owners don’t agree to sell it to an American-owned entity. A three-judge panel had previously rejected TikTok’s First Amendment argument, and the company says it plans to shut itself down in the U.S. by January 19 unless the High Court rules in its favor. One possible purchaser? According to Morning Brew, “Billionaire Frank McCourt’s nonprofit, Project Liberty, made a proposal to buy TikTok from ByteDance yesterday, calling it ‘The People’s Bid for TikTok’ and pledging to prioritize digital safety on a US-owned version of the app.”

• ATF due to be reined in under Trump: You likely haven’t heard of Bryan Malinowski, but his killing in March of last year by agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives should send a chill up the spine of every law-abiding, liberty-loving American citizen. “It was an unwarranted and indefensible killing of a kind that should never, ever happen in a free country like the United States,” attorney and firearms industry executive Ryan Cleckner wrote in a recent issue of Imprimis. “Because we have a media that no longer serves in its traditional role as a government watchdog, this incident was not widely reported. Because too many members of Congress no longer take seriously their responsibility to protect the rights of those who elect them, the ATF has suffered no repercussions.” The Malinowski case is, as Cleckner argues, just one in a series of overreaches by “our out-of-control federal law enforcement agencies.” Beginning January 20, however, we’ll likely see a more measured and judicious ATF because the agency’s current director, Steven Dettelbach, has said he plans to resign before President-elect Donald Trump takes office.

Good News

• Climate alarmist Mann ordered to pay up: In 2012, climate scientist Michael Mann filed defamation lawsuits against both Mark Steyn and National Review for criticizing his infamous hockey stick global temperature graph. In early 2021, Mann’s case against NR was thrown out by the DC Superior Court on First Amendment grounds. However, it wasn’t until this week that the case against NR was finally resolved, as the court ordered Mann to pay NR’s legal fees, which totaled $530,820.21. Mann has 30 days to pay up. NR prevailed against Mann because it was found during the discovery that his motivation for the lawsuit was to “ruin National Review.” NR noted that the payout only accounts for a fraction of the legal fees it had incurred over the eight years of Mann’s malicious and meritless lawsuit. Mann is a man who evidently can’t take criticism, and rather than seek to defend his scientific claims with evidence, he instead sought to silence and punish critics via lawfare.

Misc.

• Senator John Fetterman to meet with Trump at Mar-a-Lago (AP)

• Byron Donalds hires pollster as Florida’s 2026 gubernatorial speculation grows (Washington Examiner)

• Appeals court temporarily blocks controversial 9/11 plea deal (Just the News)

• Financial tracking of Ohio gun buyers banned (Center Square)

• Media’s latest Alito conspiracy theory is particularly ridiculous (The Federalist)

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