Comment on Playback: The Bush problem

Fidelity mutual funds marked up the value of their X Holdings shares by 32.37% in October, the largest monthly increase since helping Elon Musk buy the company in 2022, Axios reports.

The author of an email critical of Fox News host-turned-Trump Defense Secretary pick Pete Hegseth threatened New Yorker writer Jane Mayer that “if you print that, I will deny I wrote it,” and when Mayer reminded him “that it had been sent from the same personal e-mail account that he still uses,” the author wrote, “I don’t care.

Julia Preston: “Even on my first day, I sensed dissonance between the campaign’s celebrity-inflected exuberance and the raw divisions I saw in the streets.”

Alexander Burns: “President Joe Biden’s decision to pardon his son Hunter almost looks like a fiendish prank on Washington — a Sunday night ambush designed to embarrass and shock.” “That was presumably not Biden’s aim. But however unintentionally, the pardon is a kind of sabotage.” “It is a rich gift to those who want to blow up the justice system as we know it, and who claim the government is a self-dealing club for hypocritical elites.

Ron Brownstein: “The analysis of the race from Harris’s senior team won’t satisfy the shell-shocked Democratic critics who believe that the campaign’s tactical choices and the vice president’s occasional missteps as a candidate contributed materially to her defeat. They described what critics consider her most obvious blunders as largely irrelevant to the outcome.”

“A conservative Russian tycoon and Kremlin confidant said he believes Moscow will turn down any Ukraine ceasefire offer brokered by incoming President Donald Trump,” Bloomberg reports.