IT’S A RIDDLE WRAPPED IN A MYSTERY INSIDE AN ENIGMA: Why is everything late, over-budget, and broken in San Francisco?
San Francisco’s last Republican mayor left office at the beginning of 1964.
Archive for 2019
August 13, 2019
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Dozens of public university presidents make more than the U.S. president: Report. People talk about capping CEO pay, but never about capping the pay of administrators at taxpayer-subsidized institutions. Weird.
ANALYSIS: TRUE.
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: Fredo Lives! “My favorite part of the meltdown vid is when Cuomo says, ‘I’m an anchor on CNN,’ as if that gives him some sort of tough guy street cred. I know that if I am ever in a dangerous situation in a dark alley at night I hope a cable news guy will materialize at my side.”
LIFE IN DE BLASIO’S PARADISE: Three Men Attacked On Their Way to Synagogue, As Renewed Spate of Assaults Targets Orthodox Jews in Brooklyn.
IT’S CNN, SO YOU KNOW SOMEBODY’S ABOUT TO GET DOXXED: Chris Cuomo Threatens Violence After Man Calls Him ‘Fredo’: ‘I’ll F*cking Throw You Down These Stairs!’
“Punk-ass b*tches on the right call me Fredo! My name is Chris Cuomo. I’m an anchor on CNN,” Cuomo explained angrily.
“Fredo was on The Godfather. He was the weak brother. And they use it as an Italian aspersion,” he added.
Cuomo said if you are Italian, being called “Fredo” is “a f*cking insult to your people.”
“It’s like the n-word for us,” he explained heatedly.
It was perfectly acceptable, just last year at the Atlantic, which ran a piece from David Frum with a photo atop it of actor John Cazale from the Godfather, and the headline, “Donald Trump Goes Full Fredo,” plus the Google-bot friendly meta title, “Donald Trump Is a Real-Life Fredo Corleone.”
Why didn’t Frum, his editor (the legendarily unflappable Jeffrey Goldberg…), and whoever wrote the post’s meta title catch this equivalent of the N-word before letting Frum expose himself as a stone cold racist?
And while it’s understandable that Cuomo can’t police the Atlantic, why didn’t he send harshly worded memos to his fellow newsreaders at CNN to inform them of just how racially insensitive they were being in recent months?
As James Hasson, formerly of the Washington Examiner tweets, “The funniest part of the Cuomo freakout is that if he’d just said ‘get a life, I’m out with my family,’ then people would have sympathized with him. But because he took it to 11 and compared ‘fredo’ to the n-word—and CNN PR doubled down on it—everyone will now call him Fredo.”
I HOPE I’M WRONG, BUT I DON’T SEE THIS ENDING WELL: Hong Kong protests continue as pictures show extent of violence.
According to Michael Yon, the protesters didn’t “block” anything, the government used them as an excuse to close the airport: “Fake Drama at Hong Kong Airport as China calls peaceful Hong Kongers ‘terrorists’ There was no need to cancel any flights. I was there as were probably a hundred journalists. It was very safe. I live streamed video right here on Facebook. Remember: China says the Dalai Lama, and Falun Gong, are terrorists.”
He’s constantly posting new pics and video at his page.
REMEMBER, ONLY GOVERNMENT EMPLOYEES ARE RESPONSIBLE ENOUGH TO BE TRUSTED WITH GUNS: Questions swirl around Epstein’s monitoring before suicide. “Epstein’s death is the latest black eye for the Bureau of Prisons, which was already was under fire over the October beating death of Boston gangster James ‘Whitey’ Bulger at a federal prison in West Virginia.”
DECOUPLING: The Trade War Hits China Where It Hurts.
The Chinese Communist Party’s policies created tremendous economic imbalances, saddled China with debt, and bred suspicion and disillusionment among trading partners. Even before 2016, many observers believed China was headed toward stagnation.
It’s against this context that the Trump trade policy has put such pressure on Beijing. The first wave of U.S. trade actions was announced in March 2018, and included strategic tariffs on Chinese products, restrictions on investment in several key industries, and a World Trade Organization case challenging Beijing’s institutionalized theft of technology and intellectual property.
When Beijing refused to meet U.S. demands, the White House increased the countertariffs, dealing another major blow to the Chinese economy. While trade talks will continue, Mr. Trump has now announced that the U.S. will impose a 10% tariff on an additional $300 billion in Chinese goods beginning Sept. 1.
The tariffs are working. Big tech companies are taking their manufacturing out of China; retailers are pulling out as well. The Chinese National Bureau of Statistics reports that in July Chinese factory activity declined for the third month in a row. That means fewer jobs. The South China Morning Post recently reported that economists at China International Capital Corp. , an investment bank, say China’s industrial sector has lost five million jobs in the past year, nearly two million of them because of the trade war with the U.S.
Exports so far this year have increased only 0.6% while imports, an indicator of domestic economic strength, fell at a 5.6% annual rate in July, according to China’s General Administration of Customs office. The U.S. Census Bureau reported last week that China dropped from being the top U.S. trading partner to third behind Mexico and Canada for the first half of 2019.
I love foreign trade, but not so much when it’s with thieves with imperial ambitions.
WINNOWING: Candidates scramble to qualify for third debate as deadline nears.
Nine candidates have already qualified for the fall debates and two others are getting close, an analysis of fundraising and polling data by The Hill found.
But for the other 13, the prospects appear increasingly dim. None have met the 130,000-donor benchmark set by the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and only three have at least one qualifying poll to their name.
The candidates have until Aug. 28 to qualify. And with less than three weeks to go, those who haven’t are scrambling for a spot on stage, acutely aware of the risks that failing to make the debate will run.
To qualify for the third and fourth debates this fall, candidates have to amass the support of 130,000 donors and register at least 2 percent support in four DNC-approved polls.
My liver is indebted to the DNC if they can get these debates back down to one night each.
DIVERSITY IS OUR STRENGTH: Blood-soaked man ‘shouting Allahu Akbar’ in Sydney’s CBD attempts to stab multiple people – with one woman rushed to hospital and another found dead with her throat slit in a nearby building. He was “known to the police.”
THEY TOLD ME IF DONALD TRUMP WERE ELECTED PRESIDENT, OPEN RACISM AND SEXISM WOULD FLOURISH WITH IMPUNITY. AND THEY WERE RIGHT! Federal Judge Dismisses Lawsuit Accusing Harvard Law Review Of Discrimination Against White Men.
RICHARD FERNANDEZ: The China Challenge. “Part of the problem with ongoing events in China and especially the protests in Hong Kong is that much of the crisis is internal to that country. The West, even the United States, has limited control over events. Complicating matters is that the US is wracked by its own internal conflicts. The legitimacy of American political institutions is in doubt as never before.”
A successful ruling class must be self-disciplined, and willing to sacrifice its short-term advantage for the long-term benefit of the nation. Neither the United States nor China has one of those.
DOUBLING DOWN ON THUGGERY: Castro: My Brother Was Right to Expose Donors of Trump’s ‘Campaign of Hate.’
THEY CAN’T ALL COMMIT SUICIDE UNDER QUESTIONABLE CIRCUMSTANCES: William Barr Has A Message For Jeffrey Epstein’s Co-Conspirators.
TO BE FAIR, MANY OF THEM WERE ALREADY THERE OR QUITE CLOSE: The Get Trump Mob Has Failed — So They’ve Gone Berserk.
THE SCIENCE IS SETTLED: I used to think gun control was the answer. My research told me otherwise.
Leah Libresco is a statistician and former newswriter at FiveThirtyEight, a data journalism site. She is the author of “Arriving at Amen.”
Before I started researching gun deaths, gun-control policy used to frustrate me. I wished the National Rifle Association would stop blocking common-sense gun-control reforms such as banning assault weapons, restricting silencers, shrinking magazine sizes and all the other measures that could make guns less deadly.
Then, my colleagues and I at FiveThirtyEight spent three months analyzing all 33,000 lives ended by guns each year in the United States, and I wound up frustrated in a whole new way. We looked at what interventions might have saved those people, and the case for the policies I’d lobbied for crumbled when I examined the evidence. The best ideas left standing were narrowly tailored interventions to protect subtypes of potential victims, not broad attempts to limit the lethality of guns.
I researched the strictly tightened gun laws in Britain and Australia and concluded that they didn’t prove much about what America’s policy should be. Neither nation experienced drops in mass shootings or other gun related-crime that could be attributed to their buybacks and bans. Mass shootings were too rare in Australia for their absence after the buyback program to be clear evidence of progress. And in both Australia and Britain, the gun restrictions had an ambiguous effect on other gun-related crimes or deaths.
When I looked at the other oft-praised policies, I found out that no gunowner walks into the store to buy an “assault weapon.” It’s an invented classification that includes any semi-automatic that has two or more features, such as a bayonet mount, arocket-propelled grenade-launcher mount, a folding stock or a pistol grip. But guns are modular, and any hobbyist can easily add these features at home, just as if they were snapping together Legos.
As for silencers — they deserve that name only in movies, where they reduce gunfire to a soft puick puick. In real life, silencers limit hearing damage for shooters but don’t make gunfire dangerously quiet. An AR-15 with a silencer is about as loud as a jackhammer. Magazine limits were a little more promising, but a practiced shooter could still change magazines so fast as to make the limit meaningless.
The thing to understand is that gun control isn’t about saving lives. It’s about humiliating the deplorables and keeping them in their place. It’s culture war of the crassest kind.
CLEARLY THESE ILLEGAL PURCHASES AREN’T ILLEGAL ENOUGH: Friend of Dayton Shooter Charged with Illegally Purchasing Some of the Equipment Used in Massacre.
THIS TIME IT’S SURE TO WORK: How Democrats plan to use gun control to beat Trump: Democratic candidates are drawing a direct line between the president and violent white supremacists.
So basically they plan to lie. As usual.
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