EVERYTHING’S PROBLEMATICAL: Liberals Upset That Gary Sinise Has Been Chosen as the Rose Parade Grand Marshal.
Archive for 2017
November 2, 2017
REASSURING DOUBTFUL FOLLOWERS: “They’re evil, we’re the good guys” state Sen @BarbaraFavola on Virginia Republicans to a packed hall of Arlington Democrats.
I wonder if some of her followers have been asking, “Are we the baddies?”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hn1VxaMEjRU
ANN ALTHOUSE ON DONNA BRAZILE’S “BLAME-SHIFTING:” “Brazile presents herself as a very passive, inert member of the committee. Why didn’t she exercise responsibility (or quit the committee if the chair is preventing her from taking responsibility)?”
Plus: “I’d like a neutral outsider, a respected prosecutor, to investigate whether this was criminal. I’m not accepting Brazile’s self-interested assertion. It was bad, really bad, she keeps saying, but — magically — it was not criminal. My impression of campaign finance law — and I’m not an expert — is that many things that don’t even seem wrong have been criminalized. Brazile has it the other way around.”
THE CAR OF THE FUTURE, FOR NOW: Elon Musk’s goals appear less realistic as Tesla again downshifts plans for its Model 3, reveals slowdown in older models.
Tesla burned through a record amount of cash during the period—some $1.4 billion. That is disconcerting, but investors’ emphasis has been on the future with this company. Developments during the quarter make CEO Elon Musk’s vision look more and more like a pipe dream. For starters, Tesla said it would build 10% fewer Model S and X vehicles in the fourth quarter than the third quarter—a worrying sign on future demand for its more expensive, higher margin products.
The outlook is even worse for the Model 3, the mass-market model that Tesla has struggled to build. It now expects to produce 5,000 a week by the first quarter of next year, another slippage in its timeline. And Tesla seemed to hint that key equipment to produce even more Model 3s hasn’t yet been installed, noting “it has always been our intention to implement that capacity addition after we have achieved a 5,000 per week run rate.” Its ultimate target is twice as many. Given Tesla’s long history of questionable forecasts, investors should take a dim view of even these lowered expectations.
As of August, more than 10% of Model 3 preorders had been cancelled. And that was before the new car’s manufacturing delays had come to light. Eventually the company is going to have to start delivering cars or refunding many more $1,000 deposits.
Reportedly, even the refund process is experiencing serious delays.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: University cancels play accused of criticizing Black Lives Matter. “The play, a work of fiction, chronicles the pushback stemming from a student’s plan to perform a controversial comedy bit on the Brandeis campus. It was written by famous playwright and Brandeis alumnus Michael Weller. The playwright researched and drafted the play’s script during a residency appointment at Brandeis in 2016.”
PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS:
● Shot: UK weather latest: Britain to face coldest winter in five years, say meteorologists.
—Headline, the London Independent, Tuesday.
● Chaser: Snowfalls are now just a thing of the past.
—Headline, the London Independent, March 20, 2000.
SOCIAL JUSTICE MEDIA: Twitter Buried #DNCLeak, #PodestaEmails Tweets In Last Two Months Of Campaign.
Twitter’s systems hid 48 percent of tweets using the #DNCLeak hashtag and 25 percent of tweets using #PodestaEmails, Twitter general counsel Sean Edgett said in his written testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday.
“Approximately one quarter (25%) of [#PodestaEmails tweets] received internal tags from our automation detection systems that hid them from searches,” Edgett said.
He added that “our systems detected and hid just under half (48%) of the Tweets relating to variants of another notable hashtag, #DNCLeak, which concerned the disclosure of leaked emails from the Democratic National Committee.”
Just two percent of the tweets using the #DNCLeak hashtag came from “potentially Russian-linked accounts,” according to Edgett.
Just think of them as Democratic operatives with LOLcats and it all makes sense.
COLUMBIA: College Republicans under investigation for ‘thought crime.’ “They want to silence the speech of anyone who’s Christian, conservative, who believes in free market values.”
AT AMAZON, Hot New Releases, Updated Hourly.
Plus, new Kindle Daily Deals.
WHEN DEMS GET FOUR PINOCCHIOS FROM THE WAPO, IT’S GOT TO BE REALLY, REALLY BAD: Democrats are lying about Republican tax plan, says Washington Post fact-checker.
LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Terrorist Attack Update, See the RUSSIAN ‘Election’ Ads and Much, Much More.
I had promised Bernie when I took the helm of the Democratic National Committee after the convention that I would get to the bottom of whether Hillary Clinton’s team had rigged the nomination process, as a cache of emails stolen by Russian hackers and posted online had suggested. I’d had my suspicions from the moment I walked in the door of the DNC a month or so earlier, based on the leaked emails. But who knew if some of them might have been forged? I needed to have solid proof, and so did Bernie.
So I followed the money. My predecessor, Florida Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, had not been the most active chair in fundraising at a time when President Barack Obama’s neglect had left the party in significant debt. As Hillary’s campaign gained momentum, she resolved the party’s debt and put it on a starvation diet. It had become dependent on her campaign for survival, for which she expected to wield control of its operations.
Debbie was not a good manager. She hadn’t been very interested in controlling the party—she let Clinton’s headquarters in Brooklyn do as it desired so she didn’t have to inform the party officers how bad the situation was. How much control Brooklyn had and for how long was still something I had been trying to uncover for the last few weeks.
By September 7, the day I called Bernie, I had found my proof and it broke my heart.
Read the whole thing.
Brazile has been nothing if not a Clinton loyalist, so there must be a heavy change in the winds for her to have written this piece. And for Politico, no less, which is basically the DNC’s unofficial house organ.
SEE ALSO: The previous post on the Democratic Civil War.
STRATEGERY: Michelle Obama starts blazing Dems’ 2020 trail by letting men know they’re a REAL disappointment.
She needs to stay in her lane, instead of womansplaining how men should act and feel. She has no idea what it’s like to be a man and never will. To even suggest that a woman can tell men how to be men is insulting and bigoted.
There, am I doing that right?
“JOURNALISTIC ETHICS.” Byron York: Manafort, FBI Investigations, And The Evolving News Media.
Byron York, chief political correspondent at the Washington Examiner, joins Federalist Radio to explain the indictment of Paul Manafort and the continued dossier buzz. He discusses the differences between today’s journalism work to the pre-twitter world.
York was the first to report last week that the Washington Free Beacon initially paid Fusion GPS for what would eventually become the infamous dossier. “There’s two angles to it. There’s the anti-Trump intrigue angle, then there’s the journalistic ethics angle.”
Indeed.
GETTING? The Democratic Civil War Is Getting Nasty, Even if No One Is Paying Attention.
Clinton was guilty of “malpractice” in how she conducted her 2016 Presidential campaign, Greenberg told me. Even worse, he said, Democrats were repeating the same political mistakes a year later. “Look at Virginia right now,” Greenberg said, as soon as we sat down in his second-floor office. “We have a candidate”—Ralph Northam, the Democratic gubernatorial nominee—“running as Hillary Clinton. He is running on the same kind of issues, and has the same kind of view of the world. It’s the Republicans who talk about the economy, not the Democrats.” This was the approach that doomed Clinton against Trump. The electorate was angry in 2016 and remains angry now, Greenberg said, and Northam, a Norfolk doctor, didn’t get it. Neither did Clinton and the team of Obama veterans who staffed her Brooklyn headquarters. “If you live in the metro areas with the élites, you don’t wake up angry about what’s happening in people’s lives,” Greenberg said.
His rant was notable for a variety of reasons, not least because Greenberg was the pollster who helped Bill Clinton win the White House in 1992, and he has been a participant in every Democratic nominee’s Presidential campaign since, including Hillary Clinton’s. His criticism illuminates an urgent question for the Democratic Party, not just in next week’s governor’s race in Virginia but in the midterm elections of 2018 and beyond. Could Trump, as deeply polarizing and unpopular as he is, even be reëlected?
Greenberg and other prominent Democrats still furious about last year’s Clinton campaign think it’s entirely possible, unless the Party figures out, and fast, a way to tackle the problem that sealed Clinton’s fate in 2016: how to appeal to the disaffected white working-class voters who provided Trump’s unlikely win a year ago.
Too late. The deplorable bitter clingers have caught on.
THE KURDISH GOVERNMENT sends out a warning.
GREGG JARRETT: Still no evidence of Trump-Russia ‘collusion’ – but Hillary is a different matter.
George Papadopoulos pled guilty to a single charge of making a false statement to the FBI. He was not charged with so-called “collusion” because no such crime exists in American statutory law, except in anti-trust matters. It has no application to elections and political campaigns.
It is not a crime to talk to a Russian. Not that the media would ever understand that. They have never managed to point to a single statute that makes “colluding” with a foreign government in a political campaign a crime, likely because it does not exist in the criminal codes.
But that did not stop them from accusing Donald Trump, Jr., of illegally conspiring with the Russians when he met with a Russian lawyer to obtain information on Hillary Clinton. What law did he break? None. The Federal Election Commission has made it clear that it is perfectly lawful for foreign nationals to be involved in campaigns, as long as they are not paid and do not donate money. Which brings us to Hillary Clinton.
It is against the law for the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee to funnel millions of dollars to a British spy and to Russian sources in order to obtain the infamous and discredited Trump “dossier.” The Federal Election Campaign Act (52 USC 30101) prohibits foreign nationals and governments from giving or receiving money in U.S. campaigns. It also prohibits the filing of false or misleading campaign reports to hide the true purpose of the money (52 USC 30121). This is what Clinton and the DNC appear to have done.
Read the whole thing.
DEMOCRATS HATE THAT TRUMP FIGHTS LIKE A DEMOCRAT INSTEAD OF LIKE A REPUBLICAN: Schumer Responds: Trump Always Seems to Politicize and Divide America After National Tragedy. After what was done to Sarah Palin post-Tucson, etc., they can go to Hell.
JAYVEE: New York City Terrorist Was Following ISIS Instructions, Law Enforcement Reveal.
If Obama had ordered the military to act as vigorously against ISIS in 2014 as Trump did in his first months as POTUS, instead of dismissing the threat, we might have been spared some of these stories.
HEY, WHAT CHANGED THIS TIME AROUND?
● Shot: Obama: Mass shootings are ‘something we should politicize.’
—The Hill, October 1st, 2015.
● Chaser: Democrats Suddenly Find Politicizing Death Uncouth.
Noah Rothman, Commentary, yesterday.
PROCUREMENT BLUES: F-35 Repairs 6 Years Behind Schedule.
The GAO found that the DoD’s capabilities to repair F-35 parts at military depots are six years behind schedule.
Other challenges affecting the fighter aircraft’s readiness include spare parts shortages, undefined technical data needs, unfunded intermediate-level maintenance capabilities and delays in autonomic logistics information system (ALIS) development and uncertain funding.
From January to 7 August, the F-35 aircraft were unable to fly more than 22% of the time due to parts shortages.
The DoD has not defined all of the technical data it needs from the prime contractor.
The ALIS is a complex system that has been designed to support operations and maintenance that is key to F-35 sustainment.
Planned updates to ALIS will likely be delayed and requirements for the system development are not fully funded, according to GAO.
It’s difficult to determine whether it’s our procurement process or our maintenance systems that’s in the most dire condition.
NONSENSE. WHEN YOU HAVE A Y CHROMOSOME, NOTHING YOU DO IS INNOCENT: Laura Bush calls George HW Bush’s groping incidents ‘very innocent.’ It certainly doesn’t compare to Harvey Weinstein or Mark Halperin or Kevin Spacey, all of whom he’s compared to in this article.
WE MUSTN’T OFFEND OUR MURDERERS, DEAR: Stop Dancing Around It And Call Evil By Its Name.