Comment on ‘Twas the night before the fiscal cliff

By LINLEY SANDERS and NICHOLAS RICCARDI WASHINGTON (AP) — A majority of Republicans say they are confident in the 2024 vote count after Donald Trump’s win, according to a new poll that finds a sharp turnaround from GOP voters’ skepticism about U. S. elections after the president-elect spent four years lying about his loss to President Joe Biden. About 6 in 10 Republicans said they have “a great deal” or “quite a bit” of confidence that the votes in last year’s presidential election were counted correctly nationwide, according to the poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.

A statewide task force on Friday called for a sweeping overhaul of Colorado’s system for reporting suspected child abuse and neglect, proposing myriad reforms aimed at clarifying the oft-misunderstood and sometimes misused process. Colorado lawmakers created the task force in 2022 to examine the state’s mandatory reporting laws following a Denver Post investigation into the 2017 death of 7-year-old Olivia Gant, a long-term patient at Children’s Hospital Colorado. Before Olivia died, some of her caregivers at the hospital suspected Olivia’s mother may have been medically abusing her, but the hospital did not alert any outside authorities to their suspicions until after Olivia’s death, despite the state’s mandatory reporting laws, which require some professionals to “immediately” report suspected child abuse or neglect to state authorities. Instead, the hospital investigated the concerns internally, through its own child protection team and in a series of ethics meetings, relying in part on false information provided by Olivia’s mother to conclude there was no reason to alert outside authorities to the potential abuse. A doctor at the hospital eventually raised the alarm more than a year after Olivia died, when Olivia’s mother brought in Olivia’s sister for similar false medical concerns.

By LISA MASCARO, AP Congressional Correspondent WASHINGTON (AP) — The old Congress closed Friday and the new Congress is about to convene with one major task at hand — the election of the House speaker. But current Speaker Mike Johnson’s weak grip on the gavel threatens not only his own survival but President-elect Donald Trump’s ambitious agenda of tax cuts and mass deportations as Republicans sweep to power in Washington. With opposition from his own GOP colleagues, Johnson arrived with outward confidence after working late into the night at the Capitol to sway hardline holdouts.

John Ellis: “The key to the future of global power is mastery of artificial intelligence. The nation that masters AI first will be the most powerful nation on earth. The nation that masters AI and quantum computing first will be the most powerful nation in the history of mankind. Each of those three sentences is true.” “It’s noteworthy that, in the main, Trump voters don’t like H-1B visas and/or express unhappiness about Elon Musk’s influence on the president-elect and/or agree with Steve Bannon that the rise of Elon is a betrayal of the base.

By revealing facts to the British people, he may be responsible for bringing down the Labour Party and making Nigel Farage the UK’s new Prime Minister.

Biden's weakness invited the terrorists in.