DEMOCRAT SENATOR JOE MANCHIN: Trump open to reviewing ‘Gang of Eight’ immigration bill.
ADMINISTRATION: White House denies report Trump is ‘open’ to ‘Gang of Eight’ immigration bill.
What game does Manchin think he’s playing here?
This might be a good time to remind you of Steve’s Corollary to the George Costanza Rule of Lying: It’s also not a lie if you don’t expect anyone else will believe it.
TWITTER WENT FULL SJW. NEVER GO FULL SJW. Since @Jack Put SJWs in Charge, @Twitter Has Lost $457 Million.
AFTER EIGHT YEARS OF HOPE AND CHANGE: Re-Education For “Racist” Toddlers.
AT AMAZON, Hot New Releases – Updated Every Hour.
Also, shop today’s Kindle Daily Deals.
Plus, today’s Digital Deals.
And don’t miss today’s deals in Grocery and Gourmet Food.
MICHAEL MOORE: No Country ‘Sh*ts On Their Own’ Like United States.
This from the man who wants to treat Americans to Cuban health care.
WELL, GOOD: Android privacy assistant seeks to stop unwanted data collection.
“It’s very clear that a large percentage of people are not willing to give their data to any random app,” said CMU professor Norman Sadeh. “They want to be more selective with their data, so this assistant will help them do that.”
Their Privacy Assistant is designed to automatically modify your phone’s privacy settings for you, based on your views about certain types of data collection.
For instance, when the app first starts up, it’ll ask you three to five questions to gauge your privacy preferences. How do you feel about your social media accessing your camera? Or what about game apps pulling your location data?
From those answers, the app will recommend a particular set of privacy settings you should consider. Users can then approve the recommendations or alter them, accordingly.
The assistant may sound enticing, but it comes with a catch. The software works only with Android 5.x and 6.x phones that have been rooted — which most Android users haven’t done.
Rooting your phone also leaves it more susceptible to malware, viruses, and scammers, as well as voiding your warranty. In other words, Privacy Assistant comes with risks of its own.
FUNDAMENTALLY TRANSFORMED: Americans don’t trust anymore, and that’s a big problem.
For more than 100 years trains have battled the steep grade from Washington, D.C., to all points west in the country as they cross the summit of the Allegheny Mountain range at this small hamlet just east of Meyersdale.
Last week as the Capitol Express was once again making its way from Chicago to its final destination in Washington D.C., a homemade sign, barely visible in the freshly fallen snow, reading “In God We Trust” caught the glare of the lights of the train.
It also caught the eye of a lone woman peering out the window of the glass domed sightseer car.
“Trust, something lost and rarely found in this country,” she said out loud to no one in particular as she braced herself in the observation car as it chugged the precipitous hills and curves.
The woman’s chance glimpse of a sign unknowingly answered the increasing problem facing our culture and society: Whom do we trust? The answer, it appears, is no one.
Well, that’s not entirely true. We trust our military, and in fact that trust has grown, said Richard Edelman, CEO of one of the world’s largest public relations consultancies. “Outside of that we are in such a crisis with trust that our faith and connection with the integral parts of our society is in collapse,” he said.
This is relevant to my paper on military coups.
NOW THIS IS FAKE NEWS: You can’t make this stuff up. Well, maybe you can.
Michael Isikoff had a story recently about a website calling itself the “Center for Global Strategic Monitoring,” which runs opinion pieces – often ostensibly from well-known former government officials. The kicker is that the people whose names are attached to the articles – never wrote them. According to Yahoo News, counterfeit Op-Eds have been published in the names of people like former CIA officials Bruce Riedel and Paul Pillar, and ex-FBI counterterrorism analyst Matthew Levitt. We found a few other prominent names on the CGS website that strike us as unlikely contributors to the faux website – like former National Security Advisor Tom Donilon and former Deputy Secretary of State Bill Burns. So who is making up this stuff and why? Isikoff says some of the legit articles on the site are lifted from Russian propaganda sites — RT and Sputnik News – and some folks note that the bogus pieces look like they might have been translated from Russian.
Stick with the site you can trust: Instapundit.
THE END OF KEMAL’S TURKEY: With Erdogan’s nod, Turkey set for April vote on stronger presidency.
Erdogan’s supporters see the plans to replace Turkey’s parliamentary democracy with an all-powerful presidency as a guarantee of stability at a time of turmoil. Opponents fear a lurch towards authoritarianism in a country which has seen tens of thousands of people, from journalists to military, detained since a failed coup last July.
A brief statement on the presidency web site said the bill – which would enable the president to issue decrees, declare emergency rule, appoint ministers and top state officials and dissolve parliament – had been sent to the prime minister’s office to be published and submitted to a referendum.
“With the president’s approval, eyes are now on the YSK (High Election Board). The YSK will probably announce that April 16 is the appropriate date for a referendum,” Deputy Prime Minister Numan Kurtulmus told reporters.
“One man, one vote, one time” is poised to come to Turkey.
Really though, all this constitutional change would accomplish is to codify the powers Erdogan has already seized since last summer’s “failed coup.”
REMINDER: It wasn’t a failed coup, it’s a successful purge.
FUNDAMENTAL TRANSFORMATION: 2017 is right-to-work’s watershed year.
Workers should have the right to decide for themselves whether or not they want to join or fund a union without fear of losing their jobs. With the recent adoption of a right-to-work law in Missouri, 28 states now protect that freedom.
Though lawmakers in Missouri moved quickly to accomplish this, Kentucky lawmakers already edged them out for the distinction of being the first state to adopt a right-to-work law in 2017. These achievements come on the heels of West Virginia, which adopted a right-to-work law in 2016. Over the past several years, states once considered to be union strongholds such as Michigan, Wisconsin and Indiana have all adopted their own right-to-work laws and states like New Hampshire are actively considering it.
This is the right-to-work watershed.
To most observers, this should be relatively unsurprising. A 2014 Gallup survey found that 71 percent of Americans support right to work, while just 22 percent oppose it. In a separate survey conducted by National Employee Freedom Week in 2016, nearly 30 percent of current union members said that they would opt-out of union membership if it were possible to do so without losing their job or any other sort of penalty.
Even some union leaders occasionally support right-to-work.
Stay tuned.
THIS IS NOT IN THE FORM OF A QUESTION: What to Do About George Soros.
WELL, YES: Obamacare Exchanges Were in Big Trouble Before Trump.
As many readers will recall, 2016 brought hefty premium hikes to make up for years of losses on the exchanges. Going into this year’s open enrollment period, there seemed to be a significant risk that we’d see what economists call “adverse selection”: People who were getting good value out of their insurance (because they used a lot of services) would keep paying the premiums, even if they grumbled a bit, but people who didn’t use a lot of health care would decide that at those prices, they might as well go uninsured. When those people exited the market, the average cost to cover each person remaining in the pool would be higher … and insurers still wouldn’t make money, forcing them to raise premiums again next year. This process is known as the “adverse selection death spiral.”
December’s numbers seemed to indicate that people were still willing to buy insurance at the new, higher prices. January’s numbers suggest that maybe they aren’t. Most worryingly, young people, who don’t worry that much about the health insurance they rarely use, tend to sign up fairly late in the game, so a rise in December and a decline in January means that the pool could end up substantially older and sicker than last year’s.
That has been the trend from the start.
And:
You can argue that the problem was not the advertising, but the fact that the Trump administration was obviously against Obamacare. And I suppose that’s possible — except that Trump won in November, so how come people only reacted in late January? It’s not as if it was exactly a secret that Republicans wanted to repeal the thing. Nor do I find it plausible that potential customers were following the play-by-play of fiddling changes to health care policy during the last 10 days of the month — in part because the news was completely dominated by other things, but mostly because I’ve never seen evidence that these consumers were following this sort of deep-in-the-weeds wonkplay at any time in the history of the program.
Besides, there’s another mechanism that’s just as plausible: Young and healthy people tend to sign up late, and young and healthy people are the ones who are most likely to have balked at higher premiums.
The ObamaCare exchanges are a great deal for people too old or sick to be insurable anywhere else. For everyone else, not even the certainty of paying a penalty (“It’s a tax!”) and the risk of going without insurance makes them a good deal.
The failure was baked in at the start.
OUT ON A LIMB: The Obama Presidency Was Bad.
We’re already caught up in how terrible the Trump presidency is, but over the next four years, it will be important to remember just how bad the Obama presidency was. When overcome with frustration at the current administration, I would urge readers to come back to this post and remember that the last president was also quite terrible. In his farewell speech, Obama tried to make the argument for his presidency’s accomplishments, but many of them were simply court cases that were decided while he was president, or decisions that were nice but had little real policy impact.
There have been plenty of reflections on the Obama presidency, but I think a high level overview of everything Obama did would put in perspective just how awful he’s been, especially as we experience the incompetency and horrible policy decisions of the current administration.
Read the whole thing.
DISEASE: With 404 cases, Washington mumps outbreak continues to grow.
Approximately 25% of the total infections occurred among people within the 14 to 18 age group, 22% in the 10 to 13 age group, 14% in the 5 to 9 age group, 5% in the 19 to 24 age group and 3% in the infant to 4 age group. People over 25 made up the remaining reported infections. No deaths have been reported.
“It’s been a continuous upwards track of new cases. However, until we reach a point where no more vulnerable people are exposed, it may continue to grow,” said Dave Johnson, a spokesman for the Washington State Department of Health.
…
Each year, the number of mumps cases fluctuates within a range of a couple hundred to a couple thousand cases, according to Dr. Manisha Patel, a medical officer at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. During 2016, a “high” year, 46 states and the District of Columbia reported 5,311 total cases but only a handful of states pushed the numbers above average. Arkansas, Iowa, Oklahoma, New York and Illinois each confirmed more than 300 cases.
…
Though he doesn’t have a crystal ball, Haselow said, “based on the way the epidemic curve is going down, if it continues on that trend, we may be lucky enough to be out of this in a couple of months.” A mumps outbreak is over, he explained, when a state has a period of a full 26 days without any cases, the longest potential incubation period.“This is the second-largest outbreak of mumps in the US in the last 25 years, and it is by far the most diverse outbreak,” he said.
There is no proven causation between getting the mumps vaccine and autism, but there is a proven causation between not getting the mumps vaccine and getting the mumps.
CONTINUITY: Trump Tells Xi Jinping U.S. Will Honor ‘One China’ Policy.
In a statement, the White House said Mr. Trump and Mr. Xi “discussed numerous topics, and President Trump agreed, at the request of President Xi, to honor our One China policy.” It described the call as “extremely cordial” and said the leaders had invited each other to visit.
The concession was clearly designed to put an end to an extended chill in the relationship between China and the United States. Mr. Xi, stung by Mr. Trump’s unorthodox telephone call with the president of Taiwan in December and his subsequent assertion that the United States might no longer abide by the One China policy, had not spoken to Mr. Trump since Nov. 14, the week after he was elected.
“One China” is one of those impossible, but polite fictions which make it easier to keep the peace.
I THINK THIS IS A REVERSE-PSYCHOLOGY PLOY DESIGNED TO SINK HIS CANDIDACY: Harvard Law Faculty Have Nice Things To Say About Neil Gorsuch. Larry Tribe: “He’s a brilliant, terrific guy who would do the court’s work with distinction.”
FINALLY, LE MOT JUST: Has anyone…
MAKE THE MOVE: Rival @GetOnGab Has Twitter Shaking.
ABOUT THAT IMMIGRATION THING: And Marry Our Fortunes Together.
THE TRUTH MIGHT NOT BE PRECISELY AS ADVERTISED: No, That Meme About Female Computing Pioneers Is Not Correct.
InstaPundit is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com.
