Archive for 2018
January 2, 2018
LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: The Obama-Iran Twidiot Brigade and Much, Much More.
AND THE NYT RUNS THE STORY ON NEW YEAR’S EVE SUNDAY: Clinton backers David Brock & Susie Tompkins Buell steered a total of $700k to @LisaBloom’s firm to try to bring forward sexual misconduct accusations against Trump before Election Day. (Bumped).
HOW NOT TO FIGHT INFLATION, EXAMPLE #100,000,000,006: Venezuela raises minimum wage by 40% as economic crisis deepens.
President Nicolas Maduro said the new pay level would protect workers against what he called Washington’s “economic war” on socialism.
But most economists say his socialist government is in fact stoking a vicious cycle in a country already wrestling with the world’s fastest inflation.
The new minimum wage will come into force in January, President Maduro announced during a televised end-of-year speech, and follows six previous pay hikes in 2017.
The move is intended to counter quickening inflation coupled with a depreciating bolivar, a situation that has plunged millions of people into poverty in the once-thriving oil-rich nation.
Venezuelans will now earn at least 797,510 bolivars a month, factoring in food tickets – or just over $7 (£5.10) on the widely used black market index. Millions will still be unable to afford three meals a day or basic medicine, while the increase is likely to stoke inflation further.
Maduro’s socialist government is in effect fighting cancer with cigarets.
SHOCKING NEWS FROM THE WORLD OF TELEVISION: Sources: Chris Matthews Runs An Abusive Work Environment.
According to the two producers, whose combined time at the network nearly spans the existence of “Hardball,” Matthews frequently objectified his female guests and staffers, inappropriately commenting on their appearance and clothing. Matthews would allegedly use pet names like “cutie” and “sweetie pie” to refer to female guests and was constantly making uncouth and “boorish” remarks about women.
“He would eye down a woman who walked on set or comment on their features or what they were wearing,” one former producer said, explaining that it looked like Matthews was undressing the women with his eyes. “He would objectify them and interrupt them in a way that he would never do to his male guests. He has a very outdated view of women.”
The other producer likened his behavior to that of a “teenage boy,” alleging that Matthews would rate his female guests on a numerical scale, deciding which guest was the “hottest of the week,” and would talk about how “hot” various women in the office were, including herself.
One host on a CNBC show was allegedly on the receiving end of many of his comments and tried to avoid being around Matthews in the office.
“She didn’t want to be in the same room as him,” the former NBC producer claimed. “She wouldn’t want to get her makeup done if he was in there too.” . . .
In addition to the troubling behavior toward women, all five of the sources who spoke to TheDC about the workplace environment at “Hardball” described Matthews as verbally abusive. They claimed that Matthews’ outbursts went beyond normal or justifiable frustration, and former staffers apparently felt like they had to “walk on eggshells” around their “abusive” boss.
The two former producers independently referred to incidents involved screaming at staffers, throwing objects around, and generally demeaning guests and the people who worked for him.
Maybe they could replace him with someone young and fresh like Cenk Uygur . . . oops.
SICK: After “swatting” death in Kansas, 25-year old arrested in Los Angeles.
Tyler Barriss, a 25-year old from South Los Angeles, was taken into custody Friday night, according to the local ABC News affiliate. (ABC also notes that “Glendale police arrested a 22-year-old man with the same name for making bomb threats to KABC-TV” back in 2015.) NBC News, speaking to unnamed local “sources” in LA, says that Barriss “had been living at a transitional recovery center.”
Barriss is alleged to have a called in a lengthy threat to Wichita police on Thursday night after a Call of Duty game in which two teammates got into an altercation over a $1.50 wager. Screenshots posted to various Twitter accounts show the dispute escalating. Shortly thereafter, the Wichita police received a call alleging that someone at that address had killed his father, taken his family hostage, poured gasoline around the home, and was ready to light it on fire. Cops descended on the area and cordoned it off. When 28-year old Andrew Fitch opened the front door of his home to see why all the lights were flashing outside, he was shot and killed.
More:
What happened next was broken down on Friday by the Wichita police in a press conference, which you can watch online. According to the officer giving the briefing, a threatening call came in to City Hall at around 6:15pm local time. The caller said he had shot his dad in the head and was holding his mother and brother in the closet. He had a black handgun and wanted to kill himself. The call apparently continued for a full 20 minutes, even as police dispatch was looped in and officers headed to the scene.
Once there, police surrounded the Fitch residence. Andrew Fitch opened the door, saw police cars all over the place, and heard a police officer with a drawn weapon begin to shout at him: “Walk this way!” (You can see the whole ghastly incident, as captured on police cameras at the scene, along with the 911 call that began it, on the Wichita Police Facebook page. The camera footage comes at the end.)
Fitch appears confused and drops his hands, then a police spotlight shines on him, and he appears to raise his hands again. In the middle of a police officer shouting, “Walk this way!” a second time, a single shot rings out, killing Fitch.
The call and the video are on Facebook here.
This is next-level doxxing, gaming America’s militarized police departments to try and settle private disputes with deadly effect. Fitch was not even involved in the dispute, and as one Facebook commenter noted, “No one was in any actual danger before the police arrived.”
A BETTER IDEA: GET RID OF LAW CLERKS ENTIRELY. Chief Justice Roberts says courts will examine protections against sexual harassment.
No, seriously. Look, I was a law clerk and loved it and am still close to my judge. But the whole institution is inherently chummy and elitist, with “feeder” professors and “feeder” judges and loops of mutual back-scratching, and there’s not much evidence that judicial decisionmaking, or decision-writing, is better now than it was two centuries ago. If judges (and justices) had to do their own work, opinions would be shorter and clearer. And if they need assistance, let them use permanent staff attorneys who don’t depend on a single judge (or justice) for their careers.
Yeah, it’ll cost some top law school grads an additional credential, and reduce the leverage of some elite law professors, and reduce the pedestalization of federal judges, but that’s not a bug, it’s a feature.
Nor am I alone in this view, as this 2006 piece from Stuart Taylor, Jr. and Benjamin Wittes indicates. Excerpt:
Many lawmakers are keen to push back against a self-regarding Supreme Court, but all of the obvious levers at their disposal involve serious assaults on judicial independence—a cure that’s worse than the disease of judicial unaccountability. The Senate has already politicized the confirmation process beyond redemption, and attacking the federal courts’ jurisdiction, impeaching judges, and squeezing judicial budgets are all bludgeons that legislators have historically avoided, and for good reason.
So what’s an exasperated Congress to do? We have a modest proposal: let’s fire their clerks.
Eliminating the law clerks would force the justices to focus more on legal analysis and, we can hope, less on their own policy agendas. It would leave them little time for silly speeches. It would make them more “independent” than they really want to be, by ending their debilitating reliance on twentysomething law-school graduates. Perhaps best of all, it would effectively shorten their tenure by forcing them to do their own work, making their jobs harder and inducing them to retire before power corrupts absolutely or decrepitude sets in.
No justice worth his or her salt should need a bunch of kids who have never (or barely) practiced law to draft opinions for him or her. Yet that is exactly what the Court now has—four clerks in each chamber to handle the lightest caseload in modern history. The justices—who, unlike lower-court judges, don’t have to hear any case they don’t wish to—have cut their number of full decisions by more than half, from over 160 in 1945 to about 80 today. During the same period they have quadrupled their retinue of clerks.
Read the whole thing.
MICHAEL WALSH: The Left Just Can’t Wait for the 2018 Elections.
ROGER KIMBALL: The Left’s Hostile Takeover of Corporate America.
The problem is the primacy of educated-class virtue-signaling over everything else. As I’ve noted: “Our elites care more about what their peers think of them than about what they’re supposed to be doing. No wonder so many institutions are failing.”
Get woke, go broke.
CHANGE: Playboy Might Kill Magazine to Focus on ‘World of Playboy.’ “Company switches focus to licensing, branding deals in post-Hefner era.”
More:
Playboy Enterprises Inc.’s controlling shareholder—private-equity firm Rizvi Traverse—is in talks to acquire the 35% stake Mr. Hefner left in trust to his heirs, a person familiar with the matter said. At the same time, the company says it is doubling down on efforts to make money from brand partnerships and licensing deals built around the Playboy name, ethos and bunny logo, with increasingly less focus on its editorial roots.
“We want to focus on what we call the ‘World of Playboy’ which is so much larger than a small, legacy print publication,” said Ben Kohn, a managing partner at Rizvi who took over as Playboy Enterprises’ chief executive in May 2016. “We plan to spend 2018 transitioning it from a media business to a brand-management company.”
Mr. Hefner’s death will hasten that transition. Rizvi, which helped him take Playboy private in 2011 in return for control of nearly two-thirds of the company, had agreed to continue publishing its flagship magazine while he remained alive. The deal also granted Mr. Hefner some ability to approve or block certain deals, people familiar with the arrangement said. Those rights don’t pass to his heirs.
It’s something of a miracle that there’s a Playboy magazine left to be shut down.
NICK FURY COULD NOT BE REACHED FOR COMMENT: Air Force Could Test “Flying Aircraft Carriers” as Early as Next Year.
We’ve been watching this particular hush-hush DARPA project for more than two years now. In a nutshell, it calls for the creation of a new class of small, reusable drones that can be launched midair from a C-130 air transport, disperse to surveil (or, depending on the payload, attack) targets as much as 300 miles away, then return to their flying airbase to dock for refueling and rearming.
Basically, Gremlins will be flying, warlike Roombas, but supersized — big enough to carry 60 pounds of payload each.
According to our friends at Scout Warrior, who’ve also been following this project closely, one key objective of the Gremlins is to extend the range at which U.S. air forces can operate in a contested environment characterized by an adversary employing A2/AD (anti-access/aerial-denial) tactics. These include the use of cruise missiles to keep aircraft carriers at bay, forcing airplanes to fly long distances to reach their targets, and surface-to-air missiles, which make it hazardous for nonstealthy aircraft to get too close to hostile territory by air.
Obviously, nonstealthy C-130 air transports aren’t the best way to penetrate such defenses. After Phase 3 of the Gremlins project is complete, the Air Force will probably want to order up a stealthy “mothership” to take over the role of “flying aircraft carrier.” Such a mothership — perhaps a modified version of Northrop Grumman’s new B-21 bomber, or the yet-to-be revealed carrier-launched MQ-25 Stingray, could fulfill this role.
One of the Air Force’s early requirements for the new B-21 is that it be able to perform its missions manned or unmanned. If it does take on the “mothership” role, we could have drones flying drones.
IN THE HILL, JONATHAN TURLEY ON “COLLUSION:” A year later, an investigation in search of a crime.
HMM: Trump’s Initial Outreach to North Korea Backfired.
The Associated Press reported early Saturday that in the first month of U.S. President Donald Trump’s term in office, he sent “an American scholar” to meet with North Korean officials and to relay a message.
The message was that the new administration was appreciative of a nearly four-month freeze of the North’s nuclear and ballistic missile tests – and thought it “might just offer a ray of hope,” the news agency said in its account.
However, the AP reported North Korean officials said the lack of testing wasn’t a sign of conciliation and insisted Kim Jong Un would order tests whenever he wanted. Two days later, the North launched a new medium-range missile, ushering in a year of escalating tensions.
This new report hardly jibes with the handwringing early last year that the new Trump Administration’s loudmouth antics would cause us to stumble into war with North Korea.
KIMBERLEY STRASSEL: A BIG, BEAUTIFUL TRUMP 2018 ISSUE: CIVIL SERVICE REFORM.
President Trump is on the hunt for a 2018 issue—a strong follow-up to his tax-cut victory that will motivate voters and gain bipartisan support. Democrats are pushing for an infrastructure bill, inviting the president to spend with them. House GOP leaders are mulling entitlement reform—a noble goal, if unlikely in a midterm cycle.
Fortunately for the president, there’s a better idea out there that’s already a Trump theme. It’s also a sure winner with the public, so Republicans ought to be able to pressure Democrats to join.
Let 2018 be the year of civil-service reform—a root-and-branch overhaul of the government itself. Call it Operation Drain the Swamp.
When Candidate Trump first referred to “the swamp,” he was talking about the bog of Beltway lobbyists and “establishment” politicians. But President Trump’s first year in office has revealed that the real swamp is the unchecked power of those who actually run Washington: the two million members of the federal bureaucracy. That civil-servant corps was turbocharged by the Obama administration’s rule-making binge, and it now has more power—and more media enablers—than ever. We live in an administrative state, run by a left-leaning, self-interested governing class that is actively hostile to any president with a deregulatory or reform agenda.
It’s Lois Lerner, the IRS official who used her powers to silence conservative nonprofits. It’s the “anonymous” officials who leak national-security secrets daily. It’s the General Services Administration officials who turned over Trump transition emails to Special Counsel Robert Mueller in the absence of a warrant. It’s the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s Leandra English, who tried to stage an agency coup. It’s the EPA’s “Scientific Integrity Official” who has taken it upon herself to investigate whether Scott Pruitt is fit to serve in the office to which he was duly appointed. It’s the thousands of staffers across the federal government who continue to pump out reports on global warming and banking regulations that undermine administration policy.
More broadly, it is a federal workforce whose pay and benefits are completely out of whack with the private sector. A 2011 American Enterprise Institute study found federal employees receive wages 14% higher than what similar workers in the private sector earn. Factor in benefits and the compensation premium leaps to 61%. Nice, huh?
These huge payouts are the result of automatic increases, bonuses, seniority rules and gold-plated pensions that are all but extinct in the private sector. The federal workforce is also shielded by rules that make it practically impossible to fire or discipline bad employees, to relocate talent, or to reassign duties. These protections embolden bureaucrats to violate rules. Why was Ms. Lerner allowed to retire with full benefits? Because denying them would have cost far more—and required years of effort.
It’s been nearly 40 years since the last civil-service overhaul. Trump appointees are doing valiant work to shift the bureaucracy by canceling programs and using buyouts to cut staff. White House Counsel Don McGahn —a veteran at battling the federal career elite—is recruiting a generation of judicial nominees who are experts in administrative law. And Mick Mulvaney, director of the Office of Management and Budget, tapped another administrative-law genius, Neomi Rao, to head the deregulatory effort.
Even so, Trump officials spend most of their days fighting rearguard actions against their own employees when they should be implementing the president’s broad vision across the executive branch. Since congressional Republicans refuse to slash agencies, the least they can do is make oversight a priority.
The slashing is good, too. Plus: “If Democrats insist on engaging in class warfare, Republicans should take on the governing class. Washington is now home to a bureaucratic elite, fantastically paid and protected, divorced from economic reality, and self-invested in thwarting conservative policy efforts. Let’s drain the swamp, or at least make it smaller.”
CLUTCH ‘EM IF YOU GOT ‘EM: A year to re-member: 2017 in penises.
AND THE SAME MIGHT HAPPEN IF YOU DON’T: If you like gin and tonic you might be a psychopath.
FINALLY, LOWEST COMMON DENOMINATOR FOUND! Why poop toys for kids are flying off the shelves.
I BET IT WAS HARD TO CUT THE LIST DOWN TO THESE: So Much Fun: Top Feminist Fails of 2017.
CONSIDERING THE RATE OF KEEPING NEW YEAR’S RESOLUTIONS, I WOULDN’T BRAG ABOUT THAT: Men don’t care about improving themselves quite like women do.
I’M VERY BAD. I LOLED: Five Tweets That Did Not Age Well In 2017.
THAT WILL CURB CHURCH SHOOTINGS: Praise the Lord, Pass the Ammunition? Texas AG Says It’s OK to Pack Heat in Pews.