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Archive for 2018
January 4, 2018
GET OVER IT: Washington’s growing obsession: The 25th Amendment.
The conversation about Trump’s fitness to serve is ongoing — and gaining steam after Trump’s tweet this week taunting the leader of North Korea with my-nuclear-button-is-bigger-than-yours bravado.
“Will someone from his depleted and food starved regime please inform him that I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works!” the president wrote online Tuesday night.
The tweet resuscitated the conversation about the president’s mental state and the 25th Amendment, which allows for the removal of the president from office if the vice president and a majority of the Cabinet deem him physically or mentally “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.”
Trump drives Washington crazy, which they then project back onto him.
NATO: Where is the Maritime Suwalki Gap?
The ground and air forces have moved their lines east, but what are we doing on the maritime side of the house to buy space and time against a re-invigorated Russia looking west again?
In the last few years, many have realized that our Cold War barricade to the Atlantic at the GIUK Gap was gone. Jerry Hendrix, as one would expect, in May of last year was at the front re-starting this conversation outside the conference rooms. Jerry is also starting to think beyond once was but lost, but moving our maritime defensive lines east. In this case, discussing what was once a Warsaw Pact asset, Gdansk.
Moves in the right direction have already started. USA is planning to refurbish and return to Keflavik. The Royal Air Force is getting back in to the air-ASW fight again. These are good, but it is just scratching back to a shadow of our old defensive lines. We need to think like our ground and air counterparts.
When you look at the Baltic – not an easy place for any maritime asset in war – work needs to be done. The most effective Baltic maritime capability for NATO in the Baltic – IMAO the small conventional submarine is not in good shape. The Danes no longer have submarines. The German U-boat force – when it can get underway – is in caretaker status. The Poles (now on our team) have the desire, but their submarine force is ancient. Sweden, though not an ally, is struggling like the UK just to defend their home waters.
The West is paying the price for believing that ’90s nonsense about history being over.
21ST CENTURY HEADLINES: Ultrasound Tracks Therapeutic Microbes Deep Inside the Body.
YOU’RE GONNA NEED A BIGGER AWARDS CEREMONY: Trump Announces He’ll Hand Out ‘Most Corrupt and Dishonest’ Media Awards on Monday.
Uncouth? Possibly. But still more entertaining and honest than Jimmy Kimmel hosting the Oscars.
I’VE WRITTEN SEVERAL TIMES ABOUT ZAEVION DOBSON, the heroic Knoxville teen who gave his life saving two girls from a driveway shooting. Now his brother Zack is going to college at MTSU. Zaevion and Zack were very close.
WEIRD, JOURNALISTS ON TWITTER SEEM TO THINK HE’S ABOUT TO BE RUN OUT OF OFFICE: Trump Weekly Job Approval Highest In Months.
VICE PRESIDENT PENCE: This time, we will not be silent on Iran.
In the wake of the demonstrations and the regime’s brutal attempts to suppress them, President Barack Obama repeatedly failed to express America’s solidarity with the Iranian protesters. As a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, I recognized the lack of action for what it was: an abdication of American leadership.
The United States has long stood with those who yearn for freedom and a brighter future, and yet the president declined to stand with a proud people who sought to escape from under the heavy weight of a dictatorship, issuing only a delayed response condemning the regime’s violence. At the same time, the United States was failing to confront the leading state sponsor of terrorism — a mistake that endangered the safety and security of the American people and our allies.
The last administration’s refusal to act ultimately emboldened Iran’s tyrannical rulers to crack down on the dissent. The Green Revolution was ruthlessly put down, and the deadly silence on the streets of Iran matched the deafening silence from the White House. To this day, many Iranians blame the United States for abandoning them in their hour of need.
Today, the Iranian people are once again rising up to demand freedom and opportunity, and under President Trump, the United States is standing with them. This time, we will not be silent.
Good.
1968: IN 50 YEARS WE’LL HAVE FLYING CARS!
WELL I NEVER: Grocery stores pass through all of the cost increases from minimum wage hikes to their customers in price rises. Guess who bears the brunt…
MERDE: Macron proposes new law against fake news.
“When fake news are spread, it will be possible to go to a judge … and if appropriate have content taken down, user accounts deleted and ultimately websites blocked,” Macron said.
“Platforms will have more transparency obligations regarding sponsored content to make public the identity of sponsors and of those who control them, but also limits on the amounts that can be used to sponsor this content.”
Sites that distribute fake news would face punishment and media regulators would have more power to fight them.
Bureaucrats deciding what people should be allowed to read — what could go wrong?
EVERY VOTE COUNTS: Virginia Official Pulls Republican’s Name From Bowl to Pick Winner of Tied Race.
And with that, the GOP holds its slender majority House of Delegates.
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ROGER SIMON: Iran Protests Expose Mainstream Media as Reactionary, not Liberal.
Read the whole thing. Just think of the media as Democrat operatives with bylines desperate to keep Obama’s Iran deal alive and prevent Trump from having a key international victory occur on his watch (and fearing he’ll take full credit for it), and their de facto working for the mullahs all makes sense.
PAUL KRUGMAN ON ELECTION NIGHT: “If the question is when markets will recover, a first-pass answer is never.”
CNBC just now: Dow breaks above 25,000 for the first time ever after strong jobs data.
BRIDGET JOHNSON: DACA Fix Hinges on Border Security Agreement That Schumer Says Must be ‘Reasonable.’
Meanwhile, Bridget’s unexplained and unacknowledged Twitter banishment remains unexplained and unacknowledged by Twitter management.
WHY ARE PROGRESSIVE CORPORATIONS SUCH CESSPITS OF… WELL… THIS? Alabama newspaper exec accused of spanking female workers.
In reports published in Alabama news outlets, at least three women say H. Brandt Ayers, who became a nationally known voice of Southern liberalism during his tenure as editor and publisher at The Anniston Star, assaulted them in the mid-1970s, once using a metal ruler. The women and other former newsroom employees say Ayers had a reputation for spanking other women.
Ayers — now 82 and chairman of Consolidated Publishing Co., which operates six papers including The Star — issued a statement saying he “did some things I regret” when he was a “very young man with more authority than judgment.”
Exactly how much judgement does it take to know better than to spank your employees with a metal ruler?
In December, doctors at a VA hospital in Oregon decided to admit an 81-year-old patient. He was dehydrated, malnourished, plagued by skin ulcers and broken ribs — in the medical professionals’ opinion, he was unable to care for himself at home. Administrators, however, overruled them.
Was there no bed for this poor man? No, the facility had plenty of beds; in fact, on an average day, more than half of the beds are empty, awaiting patients. Was there no money or medicine to care for him? No, and no. Reporting by the New York Times suggests that Walter Savage was, perversely, turned away because he was too sick. Very sick patients tend to worsen the performance measures by which VA hospitals are judged.
If this had happened in isolation, we could simply gape at the monstrosity that bureaucracies are occasionally capable of.
But such examples abound in health care. For example, in the 1990s, New York and Pennsylvania started publishing mortality data on hospitals and surgeons who did coronary bypasses. The idea was that more informed consumers would steer themselves toward the teams with the better statistics — theoretically good for patients, bad for slacking providers. The reality was less ideal: In those states, surgeons seem to have started doing more operations on healthier patients, while turning away the sickest ones who might otherwise have benefited.
From this we can take a few lessons. The first is one that has been well-known to other sorts of businesses: What you measure is what you get, not necessarily what you want. In fact, if your measurement is badly designed, you may get a great deal of something you don’t want.
Well, one way to deal with this is to have less management. If VA beneficiaries got a card that they could use anywhere to purchase medical services, this wouldn’t be such an issue. But it’s always true, as Donald Rumsfeld said, that what you measure will improve, but mostly in terms of the measurement.
ROLL LEFT AND DIE: NFL Ratings Fall at Faster Pace.
The average audience for a game was 14.9 million this season, down 9.7% compared with 16.5 million viewers for the 2016 regular season, according to Nielsen. That is a steeper decline than the 8% viewership erosion last year.
A variety of potential explanations have been cited for the ratings woes. Some viewers have said they were turned off after some players knelt during the national anthem to protest against social injustice. President Donald Trump has also criticized the protests.
Television executives don’t acknowledge that the protests had a part in the ratings decline, but they say overexposure of NFL programming is the primary cause. The NFL has increased the number of Thursday night games in recent years and added early morning Sunday games played in London.
In an interview earlier this season, CBS Sports Chairman Sean McManus said the new games “diluted the Sunday afternoon packages and affected the ratings.”
Thursday Night Football is generally awful, but the “overexposure” the NFL needs to admit to is of prima donna players who openly disdain their own fans.
DALE AMON’S Space Predictions for 2018.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Students required to pay for own ‘social justice’ training.
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LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Bannon’s Bomb Cyclone and Much, Much More.