Gas prices will probably be significantly cheaper overall next year. Yet the national average could still climb back above the $4-a-gallon threshold as soon as May, according to GasBuddy projections shared exclusively with CNN.

The good news is that GasBuddy, an app that tracks fuel prices, doesn’t expect a repeat of this year’s wild swings that at one point sent gas prices above $5 a gallon for the first time ever. That spike set off recession alarm bells, worsened inflation and crushed consumer confidence.

The national average for regular gas, a metric closely watched by Wall Street, Main Street and even the White House, is expected to drop to $3.49 a gallon in 2023, down roughly 50 cents from the average this year, according to GasBuddy.

That cooldown could prove significant, translating to families spending an average of $277 less on fuel for the year. If that holds true, total US gasoline spending would drop by about $55 billion, according to the forecast.

Even as some driving bans were lifted Monday as road conditions slowly improved and power was restored to more homes, the tone among Erie County, Buffalo and state officials stayed somber as the blizzard's devastating toll took its place in Western New York history.

At least 28 people have died in Erie and Niagara counties due to the blizzard, including 20 in the City of Buffalo, officials from across Western New York have confirmed.

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As of Monday evening, driving bans were still in effect for the cities of Buffalo and Lackawanna as well as Cheektowaga. Poloncarz said late Monday that the Buffalo ban would continue through Tuesday but the edicts for Lackawanna and Cheektowaga would be reexamined Tuesday morning.

The ban was lifted for the rest of Erie County's municipalities, replaced instead with driving advisories. The Amherst driving ban was set to expire at 7 p.m. Monday.

PHILADELPHIA — Democrats in Pennsylvania won the majority of seats in the state House this fall, powered by voter backlash to the fall of Roe v. Wade.

But come next year, it’s anybody’s guess which party will actually hold the speaker’s gavel.

A razor-thin victory by Democrats, combined with a handful of vacancies and the hardball political culture in the state capitol, has kicked off a high-stakes battle for control of the House.

At the heart of the matter is a disagreement over which party has the right to set the special elections to fill seats that became empty because two Democratic state House members resigned for higher office and another died. Democrats want to hold the contests — which they are expected to win — right away, allowing them to claim their majority next year. GOP legislators, meanwhile, hope to push back the date for three more months, in the process keeping their majority intact. One Republican has even announced a bid for Speaker herself, hoping to take advantage of the likely small window in which the partisan balance of power is tilted her party’s way.

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Check out our new addition below: A curated repository of deposition transcripts from the House Select Committee.

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https://www.justsecurity.org/77022/january-6-clearinghouse/

NEW ORLEANS — For the last two years, Democrats in battleground states have played defense against Republican efforts to curtail voting access and amplify doubts about the legitimacy of the nation’s elections.

Now it is Democrats, who retained all but one of the governor’s offices they hold and won control of state legislatures in Michigan and Minnesota, who are ready to go on offense in 2023. They are putting forward a long list of proposals that include creating automatic voter registration systems, preregistering teenagers to vote before they turn 18, returning the franchise to felons released from prison and criminalizing election misinformation.

Since 2020, Republicans inspired by former President Donald J. Trump’s election lies sought to make voting more difficult for anyone not casting a ballot in person on Election Day. But in the midterm elections, voters across the country rejected the most prominent Republican candidates who embraced false claims about American elections and promised to bend the rules to their party’s advantage.

Democrats who won re-election or will soon take office have interpreted their victories as a mandate to make voting easier and more accessible.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis just restarted his Google and Facebook ads, targeting a national audience ahead of a state legislative session he believes will highlight causes that will help him in a presidential primary, according to a Republican consultant familiar with his operation.
Former secretary of state Mike Pompeo’s team has reached out to potential staff in early primary states. Former vice president Mike Pence is looking to add fundraising aides. And Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson is talking with donors and gauging his ability to fund a campaign through an “endurance race.”

Potential Republican rivals to Donald Trump are ramping up their 2024 maneuverings, reflecting a growing sense in the party that the former president is far from the inevitable nominee after a midterm election in which he was blamed for many of the party’s woes. “You never know when that early front-runner is going to stumble,” said Hutchinson, who is urging the party to move on from Trump and said it’s too soon to say who else will catch on.

So far, Trump is the only major candidate who has officially announced his 2024 bid. But both publicly and behind the scenes, major Republican figures are laying the foundations for potential campaigns, according to a review of their activities and interviews with people familiar with the planning, some of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal strategy.
Many operatives said they see benefits to sitting back and methodically preparing while Trump deals with growing problems. The former president faces several investigations; criticism of his associations, including a widely condemned dinner he had with antisemites; and growing calls in the party to go in a new direction.

A ccording to KOA Colorado, authorities are hunting a gunman who reportedly threw a Molotov cocktail into a building with reports of explosive devices.

I t is unclear how many people were injured in the attack, with police confirming they were responding to an incident.

Adams County Sheriff's Office confirmed are responding to a shooting at the Jehovah's Witnesses congregation at 951 Milky Way.

Two days after pro-Donald Trump rioters attacked the Capitol, then-national security adviser Robert O’Brien got a call from Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell and an aide who asked him to look into something he’d been hearing: retired military personnel sympathetic to Donald Trump might be preparing to prevent Joe Biden’s inauguration.

“[H]e was concerned that there were reports that there were retired military personnel who were sympathetic to the president and might be organizing,” O’Brien said in the interview. McConnell’s own national security aide, Robert Karem, was on the call as well and raised similar concerns about Navy SEALs, O’Brien said.

O’Brien described this call in testimony to the Jan. 6 select committee during a newly revealed Aug. 23 interview. He told the panel he had never heard similar concerns from other sources and doubted their accuracy, but he told the two men he would check with John Ratcliffe, then the director of national intelligence. Ultimately, he said, those fears amounted to nothing, and he acknowledged they occurred in a period of massive concern and preparation for the safety of Biden’s inauguration.

“I think we could’ve repelled a Chinese airborne invasion of Washington that day,” he said.

My Fellow Members of the Jan. 6 Committee and I Don’t Want You to Forget About ‘the Republican Congressmen’

On Dec. 27, 2020, more than six weeks after losing re-election, an infuriated President Donald Trump telephoned his acting attorney general, Jeffrey Rosen. Mr. Trump’s former attorney general, Bill Barr, had announced his resignation less than two weeks earlier, after telling the president that the claims of election fraud Mr. Trump had been trumpeting were — as Mr. Barr later bluntly put it in testimony — “bullshit” and publicly affirming that there was no fraud on a scale that would affect the outcome of the election.

With Mr. Rosen’s deputy, Richard Donoghue, also on the line, Mr. Trump launched into the same tired, disproved and discredited allegations he had propagated so often at rallies, during news conferences and on social media. None of it was true, and Mr. Donoghue told him so. According to Mr. Donoghue, Mr. Trump, exasperated that his own handpicked top appointees at the Justice Department would not affirm his baseless allegations, responded: “Just say that the election was corrupt and leave the rest to me and the Republican congressmen.”

It was a remarkable statement, even for a president who had serially abused the powers of his office. Having been told by the very department that had investigated his claims of fraud that they were untrue, Mr. Trump told the acting attorney general and his deputy to lie about it and said he would take it from there.

That Mr. Trump was willing to lie so baldly about a matter at the heart of our democracy — whether the American people can rely on elections to ensure the peaceful transfer of power — now seems self-evident, even unremarkable, when we consider the violent attack on the Capitol he incited days later. But Americans shouldn’t lose sight of how this behavior indicts the former president, and not just the former president but also the Republican members of Congress who he knew would go along with his big lie.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/22/opinion/adam-schiff-jan-6-committee-report-referrals.html