BOEING IS LOOKING WORSE AND WORSE: WSJ: Boeing turned off malfunction alerts on 737 Max — and didn’t tell airlines or FAA.

JUST FYI: If you buy through an Amazon display ad, we don’t get a dime. We only get a commission if you click on the text links on the blog.

WORST RACIST, AUTHORITARIAN PRESIDENT EVER: Report: U.S. Incarceration Falls to 20-Year Low; States locking up fewer black offenders, more violent offenders.

CHANGE: The Great Brazilian Foreign Policy Realignment.

Israel was Bolsonaro’s first stop outside the Americas. The visit was staunchly criticized by Lula da Silva’s former ally in the region: Hamas. If Bolsonaro seems chummy with Netanyahu, then keep in mind that the prime minister was the first Israeli leader to attend a Brazilian presidential inauguration. Lula da Silva had very different connections in the region; he infamously called Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi his “brother, mentor, and teacher.”

The other pivot Brazil’s foreign policy has taken lies closer to home. On a recent visit to Chile, South America’s most open and liberalized economy, Bolsonaro’s meeting with Chilean president Sebastián Piñera served to further cement a free-trade agreement between both countries, which is yet to be ratified by each nation’s congress. Bolsonaro and Piñera also unveiled the founding of Prosul (Prosur in Spanish), a convening of South American nations dedicated to expanding much-needed free trade within the continent. Paulo Guedes, Brazil’s newly minted minister of the economy and a University of Chicago graduate, is pushing for greater trade liberalization, one of Bolsonaro’s key campaign promises. This visit also served to put an end to Brazil’s involvement in the Union of South American Nations, which was largely viewed in Brazil as an attempt by Venezuela to spread its influence around the continent.

Plus: “All in all, the move towards free trade, closer ties with the world’s democracies, and regional cooperation unburned by Venezuela’s petro-dollars and ‘twenty-first century socialism’ seem like a net positive for Brazil.”

Indeed.

I SAY THIS VERY THING IN MY FORTHCOMING BOOK ON SOCIAL MEDIA PRETTY MUCH: The Problem Isn’t Twitter. It’s That You Care About Twitter: Political leaders believe that the views they encounter online are representative of the “general public.” They’re not.

In my book, I remark: “One reason why social media has the impact it has is because the people who run big organizations grant it more power than it really possesses. Lots of journalists are on Twitter and write about it (after all, writing about what happens on Twitter doesn’t even require you to leave your office or make a phone call, and the quotes are already online, ready to cut and paste). With that coverage, what happens on social media seems important. And at every big organization, whether it’s a corporation, a government agency, or a university, there’s now some sort of social-media specialist. Almost always, the organization’s reaction is channeled through social media specialists, and social media specialists are the very last people who are going to tell their bosses that it’s safe to ignore social media. But, in fact, it usually is.”

Twitter sentiment is a styrofoam iceberg. You may think 9/10 of it is underwater, but actually, 9/10 of it is visible. (Bumped).

SHE’S RIGHT.

The book is right here. And if Salena Zito recommends it. . . .

AGAIN: Hezbollah Terror Tunnels Discovered in Israel.

ENDGAME? Venezuela’s Guaido calls for military uprising while flanked by soldiers at Caracas airbase: ‘The moment is now.’

Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaido has called for a military uprising, saying he has begun the “final phase” of his plan to oust embattled President Nicolas Maduro.

In a three-minute video posted on his Twitter account, the 35-year-old lawmaker said soldiers who took the streets would be acting to protect Venezuela’s constitution.

Minutes after the video was shared, the Venezuelan government said it would be putting down a small coup attempt by military “traitors” working with the opposition.

Communications Minister Jorge Rodriguez on Twitter called on Venezuelan citizens to remain on high alert, alongside the “glorious Bolivarian National armed forces, to defeat the coup attempt and preserve the peace.”

“We will win,” he wrote in Spanish.

Moments later, tear gas was fired at a highway overpass near the Caracas air base where Guaidó and several heavily armed soldiers with blue bands wrapped around their forearms had been standing guard.

More to come…

JOHN HINDERAKER: The Press Has Learned Nothing.

It’s wrong to think of them as an industry, or even as an institution. They’re a middle-school style clique, whose members’ chief goal is to perform for the approval of other clique members.

GRAY LADY GETS VAPORS OVER — CHECKING NOTES — DESEGREGATION: The South Park Reactionaries at the New York Times.

White people are moving into previously black neighborhoods in the cities. Many urban blacks are moving into white suburbs. There is a word for this process: desegregation. Desegregation is a good thing, no? Yet the New York Times is rolling out its customary Very Worried Tone as it looks at what’s happening to real estate near downtown Raleigh, North Carolina.

A lengthy piece with interactive color-coded maps and charts uses the South Park neighborhood, previously inhabited almost entirely by blacks, to illustrate nationwide trends. Between 2000 and 2012, the white population rose to 17 percent in South Park. Since then, nearly nine in ten new mortgages have gone to whites. South Park is one of many indications that white and black Americans are venturing out of their long-held enclaves and mixing more.

You might be value-neutral on this trend (since people should be judged as individuals, it doesn’t matter what demographic boxes your neighbors check) or you might read it as a positive (assuming various cultures are linked to race and ethnicity, being exposed to difference might make you a better or more well-rounded person). But it takes a crabbed and ungenerous soul to find the trend alarming, as the Times does. The paper wonders whether “the area’s sudden reinvention will erase the last remaining signs of its history,” but cites no examples of anything of historic importance being removed from the South Park landscape. What seems to be happening is that run-down buildings and empty lots are giving way to chic modern homes. To the naked eye, this looks a lot like improvement.

Of course. But the ghost of Woodrow Wilson and other original “Progressives” is strong at the Times.

OUTBID: Beto O’Rourke’s ‘Ambitious Climate Plan’ Is Even Worse Than the Green New Deal. “He called it “the most ambitious climate change plan in the history of the United States.” The plan champions red tape, extensive government hand-outs, an unrealistic timetable for energy transformation, and a revamping of relief efforts to address the climate disasters that even this ‘ambitious’ plan considers unavoidable.”

MICHAEL TRACEY: The madness of the Democratic impeachment crusade: Can Pelosi withstand the pressure from collusion truthers to her left?

Since the release of the Mueller report, with each passing day comes a new and increasingly strident demand to impeach Donald Trump. The New York Times, Washington Post, and various prestige magazines are cluttered with such demands, casting impeachment as an imperative for the survival of American democracy. Mueller might have affirmatively concluded that no conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia ever came close to being established, but that hasn’t stopped Democrats and their journalist allies from barreling full-steam ahead down this rabbit hole.

In a healthy media environment, the key finding from the report ought to have been that the ‘collusion’ hypothesis which dominated American political consciousness for nearly three years was exhaustively and resolutely debunked – but instead there has been a concerted move to deflect and change the subject.

One tactic employed to this end by Democrats and likeminded pundits has been to re-focus collective attention on Attorney General William Barr, whom they insist maliciously misrepresented Mueller’s findings in order to protect Trump. But their criticisms on this score never made any sense. Barr was clearly obliged to expeditiously relay the top-line findings of the report once it was submitted on March 22. And so by March 24, Barr issued a letter stating, accurately, that Mueller had not established ‘conspiracy or coordination’ between the Trump campaign and the Russian government, i.e. the core crux of the entire ‘collusion’ narrative. Hence the New York Times’s blaring front-page headline the following day, which also proved 100 percent accurate: MUELLER FINDS NO TRUMP-RUSSIA CONSPIRACY.

Neither did Barr materially misrepresent Mueller’s findings on obstruction. As the report lays out in comprehensive detail, Mueller weighed competing facts and legal arguments in relation to all the allegedly obstructive acts committed by Trump and made no definitive determinations about the prosecutability of any of them. That is exactly what Barr said in the March 24 letter, in which he wrote that ‘while this report does not conclude that the president committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.’

But whipping up an ancillary and specious controversy about Barr, Democrats are merely attempting to prolong the fantasy that Mueller somehow indicted Trump, rather than meticulously examined every conceivable aspect of the purported Trump-Russia conspiracy, and rendered as affirmative a judgment as any prosecutor in Mueller’s position could ever proffer: that there was no such conspiracy. It’s game over.

Our political class is prone to mass hysteria and wilful self-deception. As well, of course, as outright lying.

BETO NODS: Mayor de Blasio’s response to NYPD car crash cover-up: I don’t know my security detail’s ‘protocols.’

HE’S NOT WRONG: Israeli ambassador calls NYT ‘cesspool of hostility.’

Richard Fernandez explains what’s going on.

HYPOCRISY: If Democratic men really want a woman president, why not drop out? “The offensiveness of promising a gender-split ticket would be obvious if the female candidates were asked if they’d promise to pick a male for VP.”

Related: Joe Biden Launches Presidential Bid With Fundraiser Filled With Corporate Lobbyists and GOP Donors.

IT’S LIKE A WHOLE ‘NOTHER COUNTRY: Texas exports, boosted by oil, rise 3 times faster than the US increase, outshining California.

CHANGE: Rod Rosenstein Resigns From Justice Department Post.

OPEN THREAD: Talk about things you find important.

CHOOSE THE FORM OF YOUR DESTRUCTOR: Trump’s Destruction of the White House Correspondents’ Dinner Is Complete.

THINK OF THEM AS DEMOCRATIC OPERATIVES WITH BYLINES AND YOU WON’T GO FAR WRONG:

More here.

THE 21ST CENTURY ISN’T TURNING OUT AS I’D HOPED: LA universities quarantine students, staff over measles outbreak.

A SMALL BLOW AGAINST GOVERNMENTAL IMMUNITY: TVA Can Be Sued When It Acts Like a Business, Supreme Court Rule. Personally, I don’t think that governments should ever be immune. There’s nothing about that in the Constitution; it’s a judge-made rule that elevates the government over its citizenry.

RIP: Boyz n the Hood Director John Singleton Dead at 51. “For his iconic work, not only was Singleton the first black person to ever receive an Oscar nomination for Best Director, he was also the youngest. His screenplay was similarly nominated (in both cases he lost to Silence of the Lambs).”

EMBARRASSING: BROADCAST NETWORKS IGNORE ANTI-SEMITIC NYT CARTOON.

As with Tom Brokaw and Peter Jennings defending Dan Rather in the wake of RatherGate, the guild always protects its own.