Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins was interviewed on CNBC by Andrew Ross Sorkin:
SORKIN: My understanding is the White House said that China was gonna buy 12 million tons of soybeans from the US by January. That’s approaching and they’ve only purchased 332,000. China has not confirmed that pledge.
ROLLINS: Your point is salient. We’ve got a significant way to go.
“In a recent conversation, Vice President JD Vance asked Roger Stone, President Donald Trump’s longtime confidant, for his biggest concern facing the country. Stone later recalled on his radio show that his answer was a technology company Vance now hears about with increasing frequency: Palantir,” CNN reports.
“For years, Democrats have zeroed in on Vance’s relationship with Palantir’s co-founder Peter Thiel, the iconoclastic tech titan who gave Vance one of his first jobs and later put $15 million behind his successful 2022 Ohio Senate bid.”
“But the pressure on Vance is now coming from inside Trump’s coalition. As the administration steers billions of dollars of new work to Palantir, prominent voices have expressed fears that the firm’s powerful data analytics tools could give the government sweeping, almost futuristic surveillance capabilities.”
New York Times: “Mr. Cuomo has managed to keep most details about his podcasting career under wraps. But a review of previously unreported court records and interviews with a dozen people involved show the lengths he was willing to go to restore his name.”
“It began with Quake Media. But when the start-up began unraveling, Mr. Cuomo tried others in the Republican spectrum. He courted a conservative talk radio powerhouse and had a portentous run-in with a Republican rival in a familiar red beret. And, in a bizarre twist, the podcasts he made may soon be owned by a well-known Fox News host.”
“U.S. airlines are predicting another record Thanksgiving holiday travel period and are upbeat now that the travel-snarling government shutdown has ended,” CNBC reports.
“Over the course of decades, House lawmakers had succeeded only a few times in triggering votes on bills the chamber’s leaders refused to call up,” Politico reports.
“Then Mike Johnson became speaker.”
“On the Louisiana Republican’s watch, the “discharge petition” has caught fire. Rank-and-file lawmakers have managed five times since he won his gavel two years ago to circumvent Johnson’s wishes by getting the 218 signatures needed to force votes on legislation he had blocked — more than in the prior 30 years combined.”
Sarah Stillman: “The Trump Administration is deporting people to countries they have no ties to, where many are being detained indefinitely or forcibly returned to the places they fled.”
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) “did not give Speaker Mike Johnson a heads up about her shocking resignation,” NBC News reports.
“Her abrupt departure from Congress in January will make Johnson’s job even more difficult, given the GOP’s already slim margins.”
President Trump warned the Supreme Court in a social media rant that striking down his sweeping tariffs would mean “serving hostile foreign interests.”
Just published: The Age of Extraction: How Tech Platforms Conquered the Economy and Threaten Our Future Prosperity by Tim Wu.
Tech platforms manipulate attention, extract wealth, and deepen inequality.
Wall Street Journal: “The spending points to a solid holiday shopping season, which many retailers count on for a significant portion of their annual sales and profits.”
Bloomberg: “For Europeans, the alarm went off when a new player was introduced to the scene: US Army Secretary Dan Driscoll, a close friend of JD Vance going back to their days at Yale Law School. It was he who told their ambassadors and Ukraine officials in an urgent tone that US President Donald Trump had run out of patience, that Ukraine was in a bad position and that Kyiv had to agree to concede territory.”
“The fact that it was a figure close to the vice president tasked to push the plan during a trip to Kyiv this past week was telling. It was a weighty assignment typically undertaken by high-level diplomats, like Secretary of State Marco Rubio or other foreign diplomats. Vance and Rubio have had different takes on how the war should end, with Vance taking a more isolationist bent and Rubio much warier of being manipulated by Russia.”
Sweden’s top military official warned that political polarization in the west is a “candy shop” for hybrid warfare as Russia seeks to sow division among NATO members through attacks on infrastructure and by hijacking elections, the Financial Times reports.
“A majority of judges on a Brazil Supreme Court panel upheld the arrest of Jair Bolsonaro, voting to keep the former right-wing president behind bars while he awaits the start of a 27-year sentence for plotting a coup attempt,” Bloomberg reports.
The Venezuelan government on Monday rejected what it called a “ridiculous” U.S. plan to designate the “nonexistent” Cartel de los Soles a terrorist organization, the South China Morning Post reports.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) “refuted reports that she’s planning to run for president on Sunday, days after she announced plans to leave Congress amid a break with President Trump,” CBS News reports.
Said Greene: “I’m not running for President and never said I wanted to and have only laughed about it when anyone would mention it.”
“The turbulence that hit stocks tied to artificial intelligence last week highlights a broader risk to the economy. Growth has become so dependent on AI-related investment and wealth that if the boom turns to bust, it could take the broader economy with it,” the Wall Street Journal reports.
Taegan Goddard is the founder of Political Wire, one of the earliest and most influential political web sites. He also runs Political Job Hunt, Electoral Vote Map and the Political Dictionary.
Goddard spent more than a decade as managing director and chief operating officer of a prominent investment firm in New York City. Previously, he was a policy adviser to a U.S. Senator and Governor.
Goddard is also co-author of You Won - Now What? (Scribner, 1998), a political management book hailed by prominent journalists and politicians from both parties. In addition, Goddard's essays on politics and public policy have appeared in dozens of newspapers across the country.
Goddard earned degrees from Vassar College and Harvard University. He lives in New York with his wife and three sons.
Goddard is the owner of Goddard Media LLC.
