MIKE HUCKABEE: GOP Bed-Wetters Abandoning Trump.
Archive for 2016
October 11, 2016
FIRE BAD: Samsung to Permanently Discontinue Galaxy Note 7 Smartphone.
“Taking our customer’s safety as our highest priority, we have decided to halt sales and production of the Galaxy Note 7,” the company said.
The move comes on a day when investors wiped off about $17 billion from Samsung Electronic Co.’s market capitalization, as investors digested the possibility that the South Korean smartphone giant could discontinue the entire Galaxy Note series, more than a month after it launched its initial recall of the smartphone.
Samsung shares tumbled 8%, its biggest one-day decline in eight years, far outpacing the broader South Korean market’s 1.2% pullback, after Samsung told Galaxy Note 7 users world-wide to immediately switch off their devices Tuesday.
U.S. carriers are accepting trade-ins of Note 7s for other smartphones.
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CIVIL RIGHTS UPDATE: How This Nashville Tech Company Challenged a State Regulatory Board and Won.
Project Belle connects beauty professionals and prospective clients, who can schedule appointments directly with cosmetologists, massage therapists, manicurists, hair stylists, fashion stylists, and chiropractors for the place of their choosing.
It’s Uber, but for beauty professionals, as the Nashville Business Journal put it.
But in July, the Tennessee Board of Cosmetology and Barber Examiners sent Lauzon and Project Belle a cease-and-desist letter after receiving a complaint from an established Nashville salon owner.
Lauzon, with the help of a lawyer, Daniel Horwitz, fought back on the grounds that Project Belle isn’t a cosmetology shop, but rather a technology company.
And on Monday, the regulatory board dropped its complaint, allowing the company to continue operating.
It’s an incomplete victory, but a real one.
TIME FOR MY REVOLVING-DOOR SURTAX: Evan Bayh’s extremely lucrative post-Senate career. “How lucrative is it to be a former member of Congress? Just ask Indiana Democratic Senate candidate Evan Bayh, who in just six years after leaving the Senate in 2011 built as much as $40 million in wealth — mostly from K Street lobbying firms and corporate board positions he never would have had except that he’s a former senator and governor.”
DAN MARKEL UPDATE: Hit Man Implicates Wendi Adelson In Dan Markel’s Murder.
GANGSTER GOVERNMENT: More Evidence Reveals Obama Influenced Clinton’s FBI Investigation.
In an interview with Fox News this past April, President Obama asserted that he did not put pressure on the FBI’s criminal investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private email server. “I guarantee that there is no political influence in any investigation conducted by the Justice Department, or the FBI—not just in this case but in any case,” he said. There is now mounting evidence suggesting Obama’s claim was false.
“Newly disclosed emails show top Obama Administration officials were in close contact with Hillary Clinton’s nascent presidential campaign in early 2015 about the potential fallout from revelations that the former secretary of state used a private email server,” reported Bryon Tau for The Wall Street Journal on October 7. The emails were obtained by the Republican National Committee through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit requesting those records.
A few months before White House Communications Director Jennifer Palmieri went to work for her campaign, emails show her in damage control for Clinton as early as 2015, when news first broke that Clinton’s private server existed. In one chain of emails between Palmieri and State Department spokeswoman Jennifer Psaki, Palmieri asked Psaki to ensure that Secretary of State John Kerry wasn’t asked about Clinton’s private email server during an upcoming CBS interview. “Good to go on killing CBS idea,” Psaki responded back to Palmieri, according to the Journal, adding, “going to hold on any other TV options just given the swirl of crap out there.”
In March 2015, The New York Times reported that Obama said he didn’t know Clinton was using a private email address. That turned out to be false, as the second FBI report on their investigation into Clinton’s private server revealed that the president used a pseudonym in email communications with her. “How is this not classified?” Clinton aide Huma Abedin asked the FBI during their interview.
Laws are for the little people.
WILL AMERICANS EVER TRUST THEIR GOVERNMENT AGAIN?
It wasn’t always this way. In 1958, when the American National Election Study first asked Americans to gauge their trust in government, a healthy 73 percent said they could trust the government just about always or most of the time. The slide began under Lyndon Baines Johnson, hit a brief peak during the Ronald Reagan years, and has been falling ever since.
Simply put, we are in the Era of Mistrust, and there are no exit signs.
It’s an interesting paradox for the left – who see no limitations on the size of the government – and yet, as the above passage illustrates, the bigger and more powerful the scope of the government, the less it’s likely to be trusted. And as Salena Zito goes on to note, while the left launched Watergate to destroy Richard Nixon, the discovery by the American people that, as Victor Lasky accurately noted at the time in his book titled It Didn’t Start With Watergate, did much to make the distrust of government an “unexpectedly” bipartisan affair in the 1970s.
THE HILL: WikiLeaks hack reveals cozy relationship between Clinton campaign, super PAC.
A top attorney for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign sent a memo to campaign aides teaching them how to legally communicate with a pro-Clinton super-PAC, emails released Monday by WikiLeaks show.
While Clinton has claimed her campaign has nothing to do with the super PAC Priorities USA, a leaked email from the personal account of Clinton’s campaign chair John Podesta suggests differently.
In the email, Clinton attorney Marc Elias outlined what amounts to a strategy for steering large campaign donors to the super PAC without breaking the law.
Elias told Clinton campaign officials it would be OK to tell staff at the super PAC: “Donor A works in financial services and has been a long-time contributor. I think she’d be willing to do six figures for Priorities.”
But not recommended, writes Elias, would be for the Clinton campaign official to say to a super PAC official: “I want you to call Donor A and ask for $250,000.”
Super PACs are independent groups that can spend as much as they wish boosting a candidate so long as staffers at the outside group don’t coordinate strategy or messaging with the campaign.
Priorities USA supports Clinton’s presidential bid and raised more than $150 million from donors like the hedge fund billionaire George Soros.
During a PBS debate against Bernie Sanders in February, Clinton claimed she had nothing to do with the group.
Lies.
VULNERABILITY IS FOR THE LITTLE PEOPLE: Noted Strict Gun Law Advocate Kim Kardashian Ramps Up Armed Personal Security.
October 10, 2016
BRUCE WALKER: Only One Way for the FBI to Regain Its Lost Reputation.
Physical evidence is destroyed before anyone can see it, though subpoenaed by Congress and possibly containing classified information. Computer systems with classified documents scrubbed clean by private vendors before federal officers know what has been scrubbed. Suspects sit in on the questioning of other suspects, and suspects are given immunity, it appears, for no good reasons at all.
If this presidential election is fixed by an utterly politicized FBI, then the reputation of that agency will never recover. No serious American, in that case, should ever believe anything the FBI tells us about anything at all. If we cannot trust the FBI when powerful politicians are being investigated, then when can we trust it? If the FBI can be influenced by politicians, then it can be influenced by drug lords or crime bosses or crooked billionaires.
There is only one thing, at this point, that can rehabilitate the reputation of a once honorable organization now up to its neck in the muck of influenced investigations and tampered justice. A number of current FBI agents must publicly condemn Director Comey and deplore the deeply disturbing, very unusual actions taken by the FBI in these investigations. This may cost the agents involved their careers, but agents who care about the agency more than their careers will take that risk. These agents ought to explain exactly how this investigation was utterly wrong and how it deviated from normal practices. . . .
If FBI agents need a model, they might look to the National Border Control Council, which, frustrated by politically correct border enforcement, took the Obama administration to task. These border control agents cared more about America than their careers and used their private association as a vehicle.
There is an FBI Agents Association that represents 12,000 current and retired agents and advocates criminal justice issues to Congress. Members of this private association have 55 different field office representatives in as many cities of the nation. Nothing prevents these field office representatives from signing a letter on behalf of the members in their region condemning the whole structure of this putrid conspiracy against honorable and serious investigation.
Nothing except fear.
TESLA’S AUTOPILOT FACING NEW CRITICISM.
Tesla’s semi-autonomous Autopilot feature has had another rough week following criticism both at home and abroad. Starting in its home state of California, AutoGuide reports that Tesla was issued a cease and desist request regarding how it advertises its features. A new law in the state now forbids car companies from advertising driver assist features using the terms such as “self-driving,” “automated” or “auto-pilot” unless the car is classified as Level 3, 4 or 5 under SAE guidelines.
Those last three levels of automation all describe vehicles that can be operated fully autonomously and unsupervised in at least some, if not all, conditions. California currently classifies Autopilot-equipped Teslas as Level 2, which describes cars that still require human supervision while operating autonomously. As a result, Tesla may have to rename the Autopilot function, at least for California.
Well, it’ll be level 3 soon.
ADVENTURES IN MASS HYSTERIA: Clownpocalypse 2016 update: This is getting weird. “And if that isn’t ridiculous enough, there is now a Clown Lives Matter Facebook Page, and there is a group planning a Clown Lives Matter March.”
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THE WAGES OF WRONGTHINK: Clinton suggests intervention for protester wearing Bill Clinton ‘rape’ shirt.
Hillary Clinton encouraged supporters Monday to follow and stage an intervention for a protester who was removed by security after he interrupted her rally in Detroit.
“You know,” Clinton said after the demonstrator was forcibly removed from her campaign event, “I do hope somebody follows that gentleman out and stages an intervention.”
The demonstrator, an African-American man, was wearing a shirt featuring a likeness of Bill Clinton with the word “RAPE” printed across the front.
Because you must be crazy to think Bill Clinton might have molested a woman.
RESOLVING THE TROLLEY PROBLEM IN FAVOR OF THE TROLLEY’S OWNER: Self-Driving Mercedes Will Prioritize Occupant Safety over Pedestrians.
The world’s oldest carmaker no longer sees the problem, similar to the question from 1967 known as the Trolley Problem, as unanswerable. Rather than tying itself into moral and ethical knots in a crisis, Mercedes-Benz simply intends to program its self-driving cars to save the people inside the car. Every time.
All of Mercedes-Benz’s future Level 4 and Level 5 autonomous cars will prioritize saving the people they carry, according to Christoph von Hugo, the automaker’s manager of driver assistance systems and active safety.
“If you know you can save at least one person, at least save that one. Save the one in the car,” Hugo said in an interview at the Paris auto show. “If all you know for sure is that one death can be prevented, then that’s your first priority.” . . .
“You could sacrifice the car. You could, but then the people you’ve saved initially, you don’t know what happens to them after that in situations that are often very complex, so you save the ones you know you can save,” he argued. In other words, if the car swerves to avoid kids running into the road and instead crashes into something else, it risks the lives of those in the car and cannot predict with certainty what other side effects may follow. Perhaps the car bounces off a pole and hits the kids anyway, or the pole falls over on them, or there’s a secondary collision with a loaded school bus coming the other way.
Well, the customer is always right. Plus: “This moral question of whom to save: 99 percent of our engineering work is to prevent these situations from happening at all. We are working so our cars don’t drive into situations where that could happen and [will] drive away from potential situations where those decisions have to be made.”
HMM: The RNC Has Called A Meeting Tonight With Having Given No Agenda, Or Reason.
Brandon Morse says that “apparently the call is to last only 30 minutes,” which does sound “more like an announcement then a conference.”
The call should be going on right now.
UPDATE:
Per sources, Reince main message on RNC call: "We are full in coordination with the Trump camp and nothing has changed in our relationship"
— Steve Peoples (@sppeoples) October 10, 2016
IT’S JUST GOING TO KEEP SPREADING UNTIL WE GET A VACCINE, ISN’T IT? WHO sees further rise of Zika cases in Asia-Pacific region.
RUTH BADER GINSBURG: NFL National Anthem Protesters Are “Dumb.”
BREAKING: Reports of Gunfire, Explosion at San Diego Navy Hospital.
UPDATE: Electrical fire, no gunshots.
SAYING NOTO TOFU: Google releases open source font Noto to eliminate the tofu problem.
You may not have heard of the tofu problem, but you have almost certainly experienced it. If you visit a website or open a document that can’t display a particular character, you’ll see a white box symbol resembling a cube of tofu. Now Google has a solution.
The Noto font project (it’s a mashup of ‘NO more TOfu’) has been something of a labor of love, taking five years to reach its conclusion. But the result is an open source Noto font family which Google says includes “every symbol in the Unicode standard, covering more than 800 languages and 110,000 characters”.
It’s an ambitious project, cleverly executed, and if you’re interested at all in fonts and typefaces you’ll want to read the whole thing.
You can download the Noto font here, free of charge.