California Democrats were lambasted at a series of town halls over the past week, with constituents demanding the party do more to stand up to billionaire Musk’s cuts to government services.
“I want to know why in the world the Democratic Party hasn’t fought yet?” asked one resident at a town hall Rep. Ro Khanna hosted in the Inland Empire on Sunday. Khanna, whose district includes Sunnyvale, Cupertino and Milpitas, hosted events in three Republican-held districts in the Central Valley and Orange County over the weekend. At each one, Politico said, Democrats “were unambiguously being put on blast.”
At a separate town hall in Orange County, hosted by freshman Democrat Rep. David Min on Thursday, over 1,000 people attended, including one resident who said it seemed like Democrats were “quietly sitting and doing nothing,” according to the OC Register. Min told the crowd that he feels “the same anxiety, fear and anger that so many of you expressed to me.”
Democratic Rep. Gil Cisneros made a similar comment during a fiery town hall in Los Angeles last week, telling his audience, “I’m on your side.” One resident had told Cisneros, “I just wish that the Democrats would match my anger and my fear,” the Los Angeles Times reported.
SFGate frames DOGE as cutting “services” instead of waste and graft, of course. But the big takeaway is that California Democrat voters have yet to hit bottom.
The plan includes a new $5.8bn steel plant in the southern state of Louisiana.
Hyundai also said it will expand its American vehicle production and invest billions of dollars in new technology including autonomous driving and artificial intelligence (AI).
“This investment is a clear demonstration that tariffs very strongly work,” Trump said during the event at the White House on Monday.
He added that more tariffs on vehicle imports are likely to be announced this week.
Hyundai said the new steelmaking facility will produce more than 2.7 million metric tons of steel a year and create more than 1,400 jobs.
It is expected to make steel for Hyundai’s plants in Alabama and Georgia.
The announcement also included plans to invest $9bn to boost the firm’s production in the US to 1.2 million vehicles a year by 2028.
Hyundai also said it had earmarked $6bn to expand partnerships with US firms to develop technologies including self-driving vehicles, robotics and AI.
On Wednesday, Hyundai Motor is set to hold an opening ceremony for a new $7.59bn car and battery factory in Georgia.
It already has a manufacturing facility in Alabama and its affiliate Kia has a factory in Georgia.
When fully operational, the three plants will have capacity to make a million vehicles a year, the company said.
I had been told tariffs wouldn’t work.
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: I’m Waiting for the Jasmine Crockett/AOC Congressional Dumb-Off. “The Idiotic Loudmouth of the Democratic Party crown has been resting on the empty head of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for the past six years. She can’t be happy that Crockett is getting all the press these days. Remember, most Dems are as shameless as Crockett and don’t think that the attention she’s getting is bad. I keep waiting for a Congressional catfight to break out between Squeaky and The Maw. Maybe the Democrats can win back some of the youth vote by staging it in an octagon and selling tickets.”
JoAnn Smotherman, a former math teacher at Durango High School, took the teen, one of her students, into her Durango home in December when the girl left home after a fight with her mother. JoAnn is married to Vivian Smotherman, a trans-identifying man who ran for Colorado State Senate as a Democrat last year.
The teen’s mother, Cynthia Stein, has gone to the Smothermans’ home and attempted, unsuccessfully, to take back her daughter. She called in the police, but the officers who responded to the scene said they would not force the teen to go home, according to the police report and body cam footage of the incident obtained by The Daily Wire.
The situation is the culmination of months of outside influences on the vulnerable teen, her mother told The Daily Wire.
The 17-year-old girl has identified as a boy since the fall and now uses a unisex name. She has been diagnosed with autism, ADHD, an eating disorder, depression, and anxiety, according to medical records provided by her mother. At school, the teen was seeing a counselor, without her mother’s knowledge, who advised the girl to terminate parental notification and encouraged her to participate in LGBT support groups, her mother said.
ANOTHER UPDATE: This includes stories about Elon Musk:
So the FT, which is supposedly one of the premiere traditional financial news media outlets, has a writer who doesn't understand accrual method of accounting?
On Aug. 12, 2024, three days after Rachel Zegler hit the stage at Disney’s D23 fan event to introduce the first official trailer of “Snow White,” she thanked supporters effusively in an X post for driving the teaser to 120 million views in 24 hours. One minute later, she added an afterthought in the same thread: “and always remember, free palestine.”
That addendum, which amassed 8.8 million views, nearly four times the number for the initial post, quickly made the rounds, with many inside the studio expressing shock that the “Snow White” star would commingle the promotion of its $270 million tentpole with any kind of political statement. A Disney executive raised the studio’s concerns with Zegler’s team, while the film’s producer Marc Platt flew to New York to speak directly with her. But the actress, whose relationship with the studio began to unravel in 2022 during a contentious “West Side Story” awards season campaign and continued as she trashed the beloved original “Snow White,” stood her ground, and the post remained. Behind the scenes, death threats toward Zegler’s co-star Gal Gadot, who is Israeli, spiked, and Disney had to pay for additional security for the mother of four.
Three months later, following the presidential election, Zegler posted “Fuck Donald Trump” and “May Trump supporters … never know peace” on Instagram. Disney had had enough, given that the star was signaling to half the potential audience of an already troubled film plagued by costly reshoots to stay home. Platt made the case again to Zegler. After a back and forth, she began working with a social media guru paid for by Disney* to vet any posts before the film’s March 21 bow**. Disney declined comment. Zegler did not respond to a request for comment.
Now that the film’s dismal opening weekend — $87 million worldwide — is in the rearview mirror, Burbank brass are evaluating what went wrong. To put “Snow White’s” global box office haul into perspective, it’s about $34 million less than Warner Bros.’ “Joker: Folie à Deux” in October but with a bigger budget by $70 million.
The comments section below the Variety article is a minefield of knee-jerk anti-Israel and anti-Hamas posts, with each side believing the casting of the other actress is what tanked the movie. But it isn’t just the two actresses, of course. When Alissa Heinerscheid imploded Bud Light in 2023 by trashing the brand’s (now former) customers and creating a can celebrating Dylan Mulvaney, Ed Morrissey wrote:
Years from now, business schools will teach the case of Bud Light as a cautionary tale. Suggested course titles: How to Destroy Your Brand Without Really Trying, or Five Ways to Lose Customers by Picking ‘Influencers.’
Similarly, film students will studying Disney’s Snow White remake as an example where everything that could wrong with a movie did go wrong.
Remember the good old days, not just when there were only three national TV networks and one or two national newspapers, but when Hollywood studios could virtually completely control the image surrounding their contract players like halos on a saint’s shoulders? Those days are over, Baby Jane.
A few stars still know that they old ways are best. In his video critique of the Snow White debacle, Ben Shapiro noted:
The star Rachel Zegler is unbelievably charmless in public. Studios really need to go back to what they originally did, which was tell your stars to shut up and not say things, because no one is to hear your star say offensive things off the screen.
It’s quite foolish, which is one area, by the way, where Tom Cruise has got it exactly right. One of the reasons he’s still America’s most iconic movie star well into his 60s, is because Tom Cruise you just don’t see him anymore when he is not on the big screen. He’s just that character on the big screen, which means that you can just take him or leave him on the big screen. That that is the smart way to approach this stuff; Hollywood needs to go back to it.
Before it’s too late — and it’s getting increasingly late for the beleaguered industry.
** Apparently, all bets are now off on Disney’s social media guru vetting Zegler’s posts:
Cryptocurrency billionaire Jed McCaleb is spearheading an ambitious effort to build the world’s first privately developed space station and send it into Earth’s orbit. The story—he is prepared to risk $1 billion of his fortune to fund the mission.
McCaleb’s California-based aerospace startup Vast is at the center of the mission, closely collaborating with Elon Musk’s SpaceX on the expedition to replace NASA’s International Space Station, which is scheduled to be decommissioned by 2030.
Vast is assembling the module, just big enough to fit four people, using SpaceX-developed components, the report stated. Moreover, the company has booked SpaceX rockets to take its hardware into space and transfer its crew to the station.
Haven-1, the company’s space station, is tentatively scheduled to launch aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket in May 2026, after being pushed back from an original goal of August 2025.
They’d have more options for mass and circumferance if they waited for Starship to become available — but who wants to wait when you can have your private space station sooner rather than later?
Or, and hear me out here, Goldberg is a sniveling proven liar who doesn’t have what he says he has – and refuses to release because he doesn’t have it. https://t.co/WqRMniSeVV
It is the artificiality of her attempts to spark outrage that makes them fall so weirdly flat. Her attempt to catfight on the floor of Congress with Representative Marjorie Taylor-Greene (R., Ga.) last May was strangely unsuccessful — she started out with the moral upper hand, no less — precisely because MTG is a moron to the manner born, a natural talent unrestrained in her impulses by qualms of intellect or conscience. Crockett is blocked from any real path to advancement in office by both geography (Texas may yet one day turn blue, but not for a former BLM activist) and work ethic (she isn’t exactly leadership material). Publicity — and its hopefully attendant financial rewards — is the best she can hope for.
Yesterday’s soundbite — designed quite intentionally to get people like me writing huffy pieces about her — instead leaves me feeling the same way I do about Mace: Stop trying so hard to elbow your way into a picture you don’t belong in. But I ultimately feel quite differently about the two: When Mace does something embarrassing, I cringe because we are on the same team. When Crockett does this, I can only applaud and happily encourage her to carry on. Let’s go, Jasmine! It’s time to escalate! Let’s see how you can top this one — and I hope every voter in America is watching when you do.
I wasn’t thinking about the governor’s condition—I was thinking about the planes, trains, and automobiles he used to transfer migrants into communities led by Black mayors, deliberately stoking tension and fear among the most vulnerable.
Literally, the next line I said was that he was a “Hot A** Mess,” referencing his terrible policies. At no point did I mention or allude to his condition. So, I’m even more appalled that the very people who unequivocally support Trump—a man known for racially insensitive nicknames and mocking those with disabilities—are now outraged.
