21st CENTURY HEADLINES: Rolling Stone Promotes ‘Professional Cuddling’ to ‘Cope’ With Trump.
Archive for 2017
August 5, 2017
CHANGE YOU CAN BELIEVE IN: Saudi Arabia to allow women in bikinis at new beach resort.
IN THE MAIL: Tank: The Definitive Visual History of Armored Vehicles.
Plus, fresh Gold Box and Lightning Deals.
JOURNALISM: “So, BBC asks ‘Why is Trump being criticised?’ That’s just a funny question, isn’t it? Whatever Trump does, he will be criticized. There’s a large sector of media that watches whatever Trump says and does and asks: What’s the best way to say that’s bad?”
Plus:
IN THE COMMENTS: Henry quotes — “The entire West Wing staff is required to vacate the premises in August while the building’s 27-year-old heating, air conditioning and ventilation system is replaced…. Other maintenance includes repairing steps on the side of the executive mansion facing the National Mall as well as painting, replacing carpets and curtains, and fixing, ahem, water leaks in the press office” — and quips:
Wait! So the White House actually is a dump?
You can’t trust the Fake News Media, can you? . . .
VIRGINIA POSTREL: Elon Musk’s Hyperloop Is Doomed for the Worst Reason: Regulations are killing America’s boldest dreams.
When Elon Musk tweeted that he had “verbal govt approval” to build a Hyperloop to carry passengers from New York to Washington in half an hour, everyone with a lick of sense about transportation rolled their eyes. It was obviously delusion, fantasy, and hype — science-fiction nonsense.
In a different era, skeptics would have focused on the technology: a magnetic levitation system shooting passenger pods along through a tunnel that maintains a near-vacuum for hundreds of miles. Gee whiz! That’s impossible!
But nowadays we’re blasé about technological challenges. If geeks can put a supercomputer in everyone’s pocket, we imagine they can build a mag-lev pod transit system. Musk does, after all, have his own space program.
No, what makes Musk’s Hyperloop plan seem like fantasy isn’t the high-tech part. Shooting passengers along at more than 700 miles per hour seems simple — engineers pushed 200 miles-per-hour in a test this week — compared to building a tunnel from New York to Washington. And even digging that enormously long tunnel — twice as long as the longest currently in existence — seems straightforward compared to navigating the necessary regulatory approvals.
We live in a world where atoms are much harder to do anything with than bits — and where atoms that require regulatory permission are the hardest of all. The eye-rolling comes less from the technical challenges than from the bureaucratic ones.
Well, Trump’s cutting regulations, but not nearly fast enough.
ANALYSIS: TRUE. We All Need To Admit That America Has A Tattoo Problem. “And it’s not just that people have tattoos, it’s the tattoos they have.”
I TALK ABOUT ALL SORTS OF THINGS on the Whiskey Politics podcast.
The new mic/preamp setup really makes it sound like I was in the studio, instead of Skyping.
WELL, IT WAS ALL TWADDLE BUILT UP TO EXCUSE A HUMILIATING DEFEAT: Politico: Democrats fear Russia probe blowback. “We need to talk about what people think about when they wake up in the morning, and it’s not Russia. . . . The more we talk about stuff that voters don’t truly care about in their daily lives … it confirms that the Democratic Party’s brain has been eaten by the elites in Washington who have been sitting fat and happy for a lot of years while working Americans have lost their jobs and lost confidence in the future.” Trouble is, the Colbert base won’t let go of the issue.
AIRLIFTER ELEPHANT WALK: C-17s at Joint Base Lewis-McChord.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, KAMPUS KANGAROO KOURT EDITION: Rape case against USC student dismissed after judge sees security video. “In May a USC student named Armann Karim Premjee was charged with rape after a sexual encounter with a female student. This week the charges against Premjee were dismissed after video surfaced showing the woman in question had signaled to her friend that she was going to have sex with him.”
EVERYTHING IS PROBLEMATICAL: ‘Death Wish’ Trailer Already Bringing Howls of Racism, Comparisons to Trayvon.
JOHN HINDERAKER: Comey’s FBI Lied About Lynch-Clinton Meeting. “Several interesting points emerge from the DOJ’s emails, beginning with the fact that the FBI falsely claimed not to have any documents relating to the meeting.”
HEH: The funny thing is, I can almost see Trump doing this, and it would be devastating.
ANALYSIS: TRUE. Michael Barone: Stephen Miller is right: Lazarus’ immigration poem is not US law.
Acosta kept reading and reciting the Emma Lazarus poem written before the Statue of Liberty was erected in 1886 but not inscribed at its base until 1903: “Give us your tired, your poor,” etc. His plain implication was that the United States had an open immigration policy back in the years before World War I.
That implication is flatly false. The early republic did not have a federal immigration policy, but as immigration started rising well after the end of the 1792-1815 world war between Britain and France, the state governments did inspect immigrants alighting from sailing and then steam ships, with a view to excluding those with communicable diseases or unable to support themselves economically and thus likely to become “a public charge.” For more information on this, see Vincent Cannato’s 2010 book American Passage: The History of Ellis Island.
In the 1880s the federal government took over the task of screening immigrants, building the Ellis Island inspection station which opened in 1892 within easy sight of the Statue of Liberty. Ellis Island processed millions between 1892 and 1914, when the outbreak of World War I pretty much cut off overseas immigration, and again from 1919 to 1924, when a sharply restrictive immigration act was passed, barring virtually all immigrants from southern and eastern Europe.
The Ellis Island regime was not, however, the kind of open immigration system Jim Acosta and an increasing number of liberals and Democrats seem to favor. For one thing, the most tired and poor seldom made it to the United States, because they lacked the money or the heartiness to afford or weather even steerage passage on a trans-Atlantic steamship. More importantly, the government excluded those deemed (at their Ellis Island inspection or elsewhere) suffering from communicable diseases, those deemed to be insane or “loathsome” and those “likely to become a public charge.” (Here’s a sample of exclusions for such reasons.)
Thus paupers were not allowed, or elderly people with no assets or relatives; there was even a political test, for “anarchists,” which is not so surprising considering that in the 1890-1901 period anarchist terrorists murdered the president of France, the empress of Austria, and the president of the United States.
Lefties don’t know much about history, because knowing it might interfere with feelings.
WINNING: Toyota Gets on Trump’s Good Side With $1.6 Billion U.S. Factory.
Toyota said it plans to open the factory with Mazda by 2021, with the location yet to be decided. Eventually, the plant will be able to produce 300,000 vehicles and employ 4,000 people, it said.
Half of those vehicles will be a new Mazda crossover. The rest will be Corolla sedans, originally slated to be made at a new Toyota plant in Guanjuato, Mexico. That decision had earned the ire of Mr. Trump, who tweeted in January “no way” to the plant and threatened Toyota with a “big border tax” unless the Corolla was made in the U.S.
Within hours of Friday’s announcement, Mr. Trump tweeted: “A great investment in American manufacturing!”
Toyota is obeying the letter, but not necessarily the spirit, of Mr. Trump’s edict. That is because the auto maker is going ahead with the Mexico plant—it just won’t be making Corollas. Instead, it will make the Tacoma pickup truck, nearly doubling production capacity of the popular model to 400,000 vehicles.
That’s a win-win.
DAMAGING NATIONAL SECURITY, BUT EXPOSING NO ACTUAL SCANDAL: Why is there so little talk about the leaked transcripts of Trump’s phone conversations with the leaders of Mexico and Australia? “Why are we not seeing more? I noticed some stories claiming the transcripts show Trump is an idiot, but every day I see stories saying Trump is an idiot. And from what I’ve read of the transcripts (not every word), I don’t think they show idiocy, and I think they’re going to take careful reading to understand how Trump was trying to work with the 2 leaders. I suspect that Trump-haters who undertook serious study of the language have decided it’s best not to try, that a close examination of the text will only help Trump, and therefore the transcripts have rapidly become a non-story.”
But one that has meant the President can’t have a reliably secret conversation with other world leaders now. And — though this is less appreciated — that future presidents will have the same problem.
SSHH! DON’T TELL! Someone Just Noticed That Trump Is Getting Stuff Done.
PUSHBACK: DOJ warns the media could be targeted in crackdown on leaks.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions on Friday announced a government-wide crackdown on leakers, which will include a review of the Justice Department’s policies on subpoenas for media outlets that publish sensitive information.
At a press conference with Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats, Sessions announced that the Justice Department, FBI and government intelligence agencies will direct more resources into the investigations of government leaks and would prioritize prosecuting those that pass sensitive information along to the press or foreign officials.
Sessions said he had empowered his deputy director Rod Rosenstein and incoming FBI director Christopher Wray to oversee the classified leaks investigations and to monitor the progress of each case.
The national security division of the Justice Department will prioritize cases involving unauthorized disclosures, Sessions said, and the departments “will not hesitate to bring lawful and appropriate criminal charges against those who abuse the public trust.”
Sessions said his Justice Department has already tripled the number of active leak investigations over the previous administration, and that the FBI would create a new counterintelligence unit to manage the cases.
It’s one thing when leaks expose misconduct that otherwise would go unnoticed, but these are just political warfare.
FLASHBACK: If Donald Trump Targets Journalists, Thank Obama.
If Donald J. Trump decides as president to throw a whistle-blower in jail for trying to talk to a reporter, or gets the F.B.I. to spy on a journalist, he will have one man to thank for bequeathing him such expansive power: Barack Obama. . . .
Criticism of Mr. Obama’s stance on press freedom, government transparency and secrecy is hotly disputed by the White House, but many journalism groups say the record is clear. Over the past eight years, the administration has prosecuted nine cases involving whistle-blowers and leakers, compared with only three by all previous administrations combined. It has repeatedly used the Espionage Act, a relic of World War I-era red-baiting, not to prosecute spies but to go after government officials who talked to journalists.
Under Mr. Obama, the Justice Department and the F.B.I. have spied on reporters by monitoring their phone records, labeled one journalist an unindicted co-conspirator in a criminal case for simply doing reporting and issued subpoenas to other reporters to try to force them to reveal their sources and testify in criminal cases. . . .
In a scathing 2013 report for the Committee to Protect Journalists, Leonard Downie, a former executive editor of The Washington Post who now teaches at Arizona State University, said the war on leaks and other efforts to control information was “the most aggressive I’ve seen since the Nixon administration, when I was one of the editors involved in The Washington Post’s investigation of Watergate.”
When Mr. Obama was elected in 2008, press freedom groups had high expectations for the former constitutional law professor, particularly after the press had suffered through eight years of bitter confrontation with the Bush administration. But today, many of those same groups say Mr. Obama’s record of going after both journalists and their sources has set a dangerous precedent that Mr. Trump can easily exploit.
The irresponsibility of the leakers provides him more opportunities. It’s clear that they’re not leaking to expose wrongdoing, but to engage in political warfare.