JIMMY CARTER: Accolades never granted to the late President Jimmy Carter while he was in office are flowing. Number one is what a kind and decent man he was whose accomplishments in office were masked by runaway inflation and the Iran hostage crisis.

  Among other things, Carter brought deregulation of air travel, leading to cheap flights, and de-regulation of telecommunications, resulting in lower prices and paving the way for the free flow of information in the internet age.  

  Carter’s body will lie in state in the Capitol Rotunda starting January 7^th, followed by a state funeral on January 9^th.

VERDICT STANDS: A federal appeals court upheld a jury finding by a civil jury that Donald Trump sexually abused newspaper columnist E. Jean Carroll in the dressing room at the Bergdorf Goodman department in the mid-1990s and later defamed her. 

  The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the $5 million award granted to Carroll for defamation and sexual abuse. The former and future president skipped the trial while repeatedly denying the attack ever happened. 

  Trump then testified at a follow-up defamation trial earlier this year that resulted in an additional $83.3 million award. The second lawsuit was filed against Trump after comments he made in 2019 when Carroll first published the accusations in a memoir.

  Trump’s lawyers unsuccessfully argued in appealing the first case that the trial court made a mistake allowing two women to testify that Trump had also sexually assaulted them. The lawyers also argued that the court should not have allowed Carroll’s lawyers to play the infamous “Access Hollywood” tape in which Trump bragged about grabbing women “by the pussy.”

  Steven Cheung, the human flamethrower who is in line to be White House communications director, said Trump was re-elected with an “overwhelming mandate,” and that the American people “demand an immediate end to the political weaponization of our justice system and a swift dismissal of all of the witch hunts, including the Democrat-funded Carroll hoax, which will continue to be appealed.”

ORANGE ALERT !!: Donald Trump gave a ringing endorsement to Speaker Mike Johnson to continue in the office with a Truth Social post that was 80-percent about the president-elect’s victory, his “flawless campaign,” voter fraud in California, wasted money in the Democratic presidential campaign and “DOJ & FBI WEAPONIZATION.” 

  Somewhere toward the bottom Trump said; “The American people need IMMEDIATE relief from all of the destructive policies of the last Administration. Speaker Mike Johnson is a good, hard working, religious man. He will do the right thing, and we will continue to WIN. Mike has my Complete & Total Endorsement. MAGA!!!”

  There had been some doubt about whether Trump would stick with Johnson. Only two weeks ago he undermined the Speaker by killing a spending bill backed by both parties. The Republicans need to elect a speaker on Friday so they have one in place for certification of the Electoral College vote on Monday.

CHINA SYNDROME: A state-sponsored operator in China hacked the US Treasury Department, accessing workstations of government employees and unclassified documents, the Biden administration announced. The Treasury Department said that it was notified of the breach by the software service company, BeyondTrust.

  The announcement comes after revelations in recent months that China had already penetrated telecommunications systems, gaining access to the phone conversations and text messages of US officials and others.

  “Based on available indicators, the incident has been attributed to a China state-sponsored Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) actor,” according to an administration letter to Congress. “In accordance with Treasury policy, intrusions attributable to an APT are considered a major cybersecurity incident.”

THE OBIT PAGE: Michel del Castillo, a Franco-Spanish writer whose fictionalized account of childhood spent in World War II concentration camps was one of the great books about the Holocaust written in the years following the war, died earlier this month in Sens, a town in northern Burgundy. He was 91.

  One reviewer said Del Castillo’s debut novel “Tanguy” published in 1957  “begins where Anne Frank’s diary ended.” The book was “a singular novelty: a painting of hell by a child whose physical and moral survival through these tortures is already miraculous,” Émile Henriot of the Académie Française wrote in a review for Le Monde in 1957.

  The writer first lived with the sounds of bombs in Madrid during the Spanish Civil War. Because his family were among the defeated Republicans, he and his mother were swept into a prison camp in France. 

  Del Castillo’s mother escaped, leaving him alone at age 9. He said in a 1984 interview; “The next five or six years, I have the impression of having been among the living dead. I was taken to Germany, stateless. There were millions of us. There were concentration camps. There were barracks. It was a kind of apocalyptic atmosphere.” 

THE SPIN RACK: Five people were indicted in the death of One Direction pop star Liam Payne, who in October fell from a hotel balcony in Buenos Aires.  Two defendants are accused of supplying the singer with drugs and three others with negligence related to the fall. — The 43-year-old son of North Dakota Republican Sen. Kevin Cramer was sentenced to 28 years in prison Monday in connection with a wild car chase ending in a crash that killed a sheriff’s deputy. 

BELOW THE FOLD: In one of the biggest moves in chess since the Ruy Lopez, top-ranked chess player Magnus Carlsen will be allowed into the World Blitz Championship on Monday after its governing body agreed to loosen a dress code that got him fined and denied a late-round game in a previous tournament because he was wearing jeans.

  International Chess Federation President Arkady Dvorkovich said in a statement that he’d let World Blitz officials consider allowing “appropriate jeans” with a jacket, and other “elegant minor deviations” from the dress code.

  Check and mate for Carlsen. 

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