Comment on House passes $649B defense spending bill

“After five years of uncertainty and turmoil, the U. S. economy is ending 2024 in arguably its most stable condition since the start of the coronavirus pandemic,” the New York Times reports. “Inflation has cooled. Unemployment is low. The Federal Reserve is cutting interest rates. The recession that many forecasters once warned was inevitable hasn’t materialized.” “Yet the economic outlook for 2025 is as murky as ever, for one major reason: President-elect Donald Trump.”

America’s political divide is likely to get even wider thanks to a new real-estate app that lets potential buyers see the political affiliations of their future neighbors, The Guardian reports.

Kamala Harris campaign staffers asked Apple for help a week before the election to inquire about whether their phones had been hacked, but Apple declined to assist, Forbes reports.

Wall Street Journal: “Many in Trump’s inner circle believed that Pompeo, who served as secretary of state during Trump’s first term, was the clear front-runner to be the next defense secretary. The day before the election, Trump praised Pompeo during a campaign rally, marveling at his recent weight loss and twice calling him handsome.” “But to Carlson—the former Fox News host who continues to have deep influence in conservative circles—Pompeo was a risky pick.

“Add Uber Technologies and its CEO, Dara Khosrowshahi, to the list of tech companies pouring money into President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration fund,” the Wall Street Journal reports. “Uber and Khosrowshahi don’t have the historical antipathy with Trump that made donations by Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta Platforms and Jeff Bezos’s Amazon.com so notable, but the company’s chief legal officer, Tony West, is Vice President Kamala Harris’s brother-in-law and took a leave of absence to volunteer for her presidential campaign.

An California judge barred a former boyfriend of Rep. Katie Porter (D-CA) from contacting her or her children for the next five years and said he had committed domestic abuse by sending the congresswoman hundreds of threatening and harassing messages, the Los Angeles Times reports.