The 24 Seven: Frantic Start
2025 starts with two automotive attacks and a rapid return to Washington
Programming: Tune in at 4p ET tomorrow for a 24sight Livestream on the Substack App — live from Congress at the start of the 119th Session. Lawmakers are set to vote on the next speaker, be it Speaker Mike Johnson or someone else. We may or may not have an answer on that by 4p.
New episode of The Ground Game Pod coming next week, if you haven’t yet, catch some of the shorts over at YouTube highlighting recent episodes with top guests including,
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1. Unrelated attacks
Local and federal authorities investigating a pair of New Year’s attacks are saying both perpetrators were military, but beyond that have found no connection between the two incidents. (You can watch the Las Vegas police briefing on the Tesla/Trump Hotel carbombing in the YouTube linked at the top of this email.)
Fifteen people, including suspect veteran Shamsud-Din Jabbar, died in New Orleans Wednesday when he drove his truck through a crowd of revelers on Bourbon Street. Authorities are investigating it as an “act of terrorism”, but — at this moment — do not see it related to the Tesla/Trump Hotel bombing. (Police now believe the Las Vegas attack, by a U.S. Army Green Beret, was a suicide.)
New year timing aside, this follows just a little more than a month after a Baltimore prep school and ivy league graduate, Luigi Mangione, achieved national notoriety after allegedly murdering United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson on the street in Manhattan.
2. Washington Returns
Congress is back in session Friday (not long after bringing the government to the brink of a shutdown on government funding, again, just before Christmas.) The opening of the 119th Session is already tense with much posturing and chest-beating over plans to deny House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Louisiana Republican recently endorsed by President-elect Donald Trump, a return to power.
An important change in the rules governing the House of Representatives could make it slightly harder to remove whoever the next speaker is. Needing a majority of the body, 218 votes, and having a slim majority with 220 House Republicans, Johnson can only afford to lose two protest votes before his speakership is in jeopardy.
The fun kicks off at noon tomorrow. I’ll be there.
The cloud hanging over the return remains the January 6th insurrection. Heavy-duty black fencing has been erected around the Capitol campus. It’s impossible to miss (when I was down there Tuesday, I overheard a number of tourists puzzling over whether it was ok to go in and tour the Capitol.) And the Department of Homeland Security has declared the formal certification of of the electoral votes, the first since pro-Trump rioters attempting to overturn his 2020 election loss attacked the Capitol, a national special security event, on the request of the D.C. mayor.
(Look for more on the fourth anniversary of January 6th in Monday’s edition of The 24 Seven.)
3. Virginia and NJ
The election is over, welcome to the next election.
Virginia’s Lt. Gov. Winsome Sears appears to be in the strongest position to win the Republican nomination, set for June 17. And Rep. Abigail Spanberger, is the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination.
But former Rep. Denver Riggleman, who like many former Republicans broke with the party over its embrace of Trump, shook up the race floating a run as an independent candidate in the Virginia race.
And in New Jersey, the Democratic primary is just six months away — The Bergen Record has a good review of the six declared candidates here, a panoply of the modern Democratic party from union-connected top officials to inside-Washington stars. (New Jersey could be a very good barometer of the party’s current leanings, especially as it rebuilds and re-tools for 2028.)
Races in Virginia and New Jersey have traditionally been seen as bellwethers of national voter attitudes immediately following a presidential election. (Almost immediately following the 2020 election, a culture war in suburban Washington’s Loudon County, Virginia, ultimately paved the way for current governor Glenn Youngkin to edge out former Democratic Gov. Terry McAuliffe’s attempt to reclaim the office — Virginia governors are barred from serving consecutive terms, a limit dating all the way back to 1776.)
Of course, tradition and recent precedent has not been the greatest anticipator in recent years of results and voter sentiment.
4. Media Moves
One of the biggest stories post-election continues to be the massive restructuring of how Americans get their information, revealed at length in the election results but really set in motion many, many years earlier.
CNN’s Brian Stelter has a good run-through here. As does former CNN media reporter turned independent newsletter author Oliver Darcy over at Status News.
24sight friend
also has this very good look at those who wisely predicted the “long tail” of media consumption many years ago.I’ve also been reading a lot of
recently, his critiques of the new media dynamic have been sharp and revelatory.(That question is what happens when you spend decades covering politicians. I feel like I learned a lifetime’s worth of material in that one Wikipedia entry. I’m also resisting every urge to recommend some basic journalistic edits to the page, like explaining industry jargon.)
And the Hallmark-Channel-style explosion remains the headbanger of a New York Times investigation revealing “It Ends With Us” star and creator Justin Baldoni’s use of slick and aggressive PR operatives to tear down co-star Blake Lively after she complained about behavior on the set of the movie. Baldoni filed a defamation suit against the New York Times seeking $250 million in damages for the reported piece.
And, of course, the incoming president himself is still engaged in a lawsuit against The Des Moines Register and longtime pollster J. Ann Selzer for a poll before the election which badly missed the mark on Election Day.
(Speaking of defamation claims, wild attacks, scandal et al, that set me googling “defamation on Twitter” which pulled up this interesting find from when Canadian Billionaire Frank Giustra sued Twitter for defamation for spreading the Pizzagate conspiracy theory alleging Democrats ran a child sex trafficking ring out of a Washington pizza restaurant.)
5. Back to Work?
Will this year be the end of the pandemic-fueled remote work, or like many other things in society — heavy YouTube consumption, increased in rage in public, broader use of facemasks — is it now a permanent fixture?
A number of major employers have been pushing for more than a year to end remote work, citing in part a hope to restore in-person collaboration (but also apparently spurred by hefty office leases on unused spaces.)
Howver, shipping logistics and digital behemoth Amazon seems to have kicked things up a notch with its return to the office start today. More from NPR here. (In a similar vein, Trump has said he would like to fire any federal workers who don’t return to work at the office five days a week, per CBS News here.)
The issue largely strikes more at the white collar and “knowledge” industries, than retail and service workers — many of whom suffered through the pandemic helping to serve the white-collar workforce. (Interestingly, the Bureau of Labor Statistics found that the number who reported “teleworking” actually increased from roughly 18 percent in October 2022 to almost 24 percent in October last year.)
Tangentially, I’ve been transfixed by the incredible reporting ProPublica has been doing recently on what the homeless experience in America. Reporter Nicole Santa Cruz and more on the ProPublica team spent a year speaking with people who had their lives ripped from them, in one case a 61-year-old widow’s ashes of her departed husband. (The surge of homeless recently, in part due to housing shortages and high home prices, became one of many issues that President-elect Trump campaigned on extensively.) Unlike most reporting on homelessness, the ProPublica team talked with those living it, moving beyond statistics to find the human story.
6. Writing Music
I’m still crashing through this “Blue Giant Momentum” playlist on Spotify, it’s good and works well on shuffle.
7. Advertise with 24sight News
New year, new media universe.
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Nice that Trump wants to require federal employees to work five days a week … at Trump hours? 11:00 am to 4:00 pm … unless tee times intervene.