[Skye’s Links 12/21/23 gave you a heads up here: This could lead to the most important Supreme Court win in the past century – no kidding.  The case is Loper Bright v Raimondo. SCOTUS arguments start Jan 17 for why at least 5 Justices should overthrow a 1984 Court monstrosity called “Chevron Deference” allowing administrative agencies like ATF to act as lawmakers. They create “rules” and “regulations” based on existing law, then use Chevron to affirm their rule change as “reasonable.”  This is a Very Big Deal!]

On Wednesday (1/17), The Supreme Court’s conservatives appeared inclined to cut back the regulatory power of federal agencies, with several justices during a pair of arguments seeming ready to overrule a legal doctrine that has bolstered agencies’ authority for decades.

Over more than three hours of argument, the justices put the Biden administration’s top Supreme Court lawyer on defense as she sought to preserve Chevron deference, which instructs courts to defer to agencies’ interpretation of federal law if it could have multiple meanings.

Four state and federal prosecutors claim they all came to the same disinterested conclusions that Donald Trump should be indicted for various crimes and put on trial during the campaign season of 2024.

Yet now they are in a doom loop of discovering that the more they seek to rush to judgment before the election and gag Trump from speaking publicly about these star-chamber proceedings, the more he rises in the polls.

In truth, each succeeding cycle of corrupt leftwing lawfare that ends in failure—the Russian collusion hoax, the weaponized impeachments, the pathetic attempt to erase Trump from state ballots, and the unfolding Fani Willis moral debacle—does not return things to zero.

Rather, they serve as force multipliers for each other. Each overreach geometrically increases the dangers to democracy, ever more turns the public off, and ironically cascades sympathy and poll numbers for the very target of their paranoias.

One wonders what it's like to be Jack Smith, Alvin Bragg, Leticia James, or Fani Willis waking up to watch CNN this morning.

Here's CNN: “Former President Donald Trump’s huge win in the Iowa caucuses on Monday enshrines one of the most astonishing comebacks in American political history.”

Astonishing to them, of course.  It sounds like the voters have some unfinished business they'd like to take care of. More to the point, it's a vote of no confidence in our justice system. Everyone can see that the charges against Trump are about politics, not justice.

What we saw in Iowa yesterday (1/15) was the repudiation of what the justice system has become -- politicized, unfair, unjust, and filthy-dirty. That has propelled Trump to his powerful win, because voters can see some unfinished business they need to take care of -- immediately -- in their votes for Trump.

[The most arguably pertinent question to ask of any developing country is: Does this country have time to get rich before it gets old? In China’s case that question has now been answered.  The answer is No.]

China’s total population declined for a second consecutive year in 2023 due to a record-low birth rate and an uptick in Covid-19 deaths. The decline will inevitably deter the economy’s growth potential and continue to strain a nation where the elderly overwhelmingly outnumber the young.

The National Bureau of Statistics, a Chinese government agency, reported that the total number of people in China decreased by 2.08 million in 2023. Overall, the population declined by 0.15 percent, from 1.411 billion to 1.409 billion in 2023. China’s population aged 60 and over reached 296.97 million in 2023, accounting for about 21.1 percent of its total population.

As new births fell 5.7 percent to 9.02 million, the 2023 Chinese birth rate also hit a new record. With only 6.39 births per 1,000 people, the 2023 birth rate was even lower than 2022’s record of 6.77 births per 1,000 people.

The news out of Georgia is getting interesting. According to one of the co-defendants in the case that Fulton County DA Fani Willis brought against Trump and others who challenged election results, Willis’s special prosecutor, Nathan Wade, not only raked in $654,000 but is also Willis’s lover-boyfriend.

That’s shocking corruption on its face. However, things got even more interesting when Wade’s bills showed him having long conferences with the White House in 2022.

Michael Roman is one of the co-defendants in Willis’s case alleging that challenging an election in Georgia (something Stacey Abrams has been doing professionally for years now) is a criminal act when Donald Trump does it. On Monday (1/08), Roman filed an absolutely stunning motion with the trial court alleging that Willis was having an affair with Wade.

Let’s not stop there, though. As the old Ginsu knife commercials used to say… But wait! There’s more! We can add a whole new level of stench to the smell coming out of Fulton County.