FEEDING HOGS OVER KANSAS: Refueled A-10s fly beneath a KC-135 tanker. Down below is a snow covered Kansas — the photo was taken March 6.

HMM: Is Elon Musk Osborning His Model 3?

First, a little background on The Osborne Effect:

In 1981, Osborne introduced a machine that was, in effect, the first commercially available portable computer, the Osborne 1.

Sales took off, reaching 10,000 units per month. This might not sound like much by our smartphone standards, but thirty years ago it was a truly phenomenal success.

This wasn’t enough for our fearless entrepreneur. In 1983, he told anyone who’d listen: Just you wait! I have two superior models in the works, the Executive and the Vixen.

Customers took his advice. They stopped buying the current model and waited…and waited… In 1985, the company ran out of cash and went bankrupt.

And now back to today:

The parallel with Tesla’s Model Y announcement needs little elaboration. Musk finally announces Tesla’s CUV, a model many will would prefer to the Model 3 sedan. No trouble if both are available simultaneously or in close succession. But the Model Y is promised for the “last quarter” of 2020, and the base model for “early 2021” — past Tesla performance easily explains the skeptical quote marks. First deliveries are 18 months away and manufacturing plans are glowingly vague.

This could be Tesla’s riskiest transition ever.

Musk is rightly known for escaping tight situations, so predictions might be a fool’s game.

PELOSI’S HOUSE TO MODERNIZE BUT FORGET MORE TRANSPARENCY: Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi said voters in November 2018 demanded a Congress that is more “ethical, transparent, unifying, and responsive.” So she created the Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress.

The committee heard from 30 witnesses — all members of Congress — at its recent first hearing but hardly anybody said anything about making the legislative branch more transparent. I know, you aren’t surprised, either, but you won’t believe some of the stuff these guys did suggest.

NANCY WHO? VIDEO: Students say Ocasio-Cortez is face of Democrat party, not Pelosi.

AT AMAZON, Save on Top Rated Products.

Plus, Hot New Releases – Updated Every Hour.

Also, Shop Amazon Outlet – Clearance, Markdowns and Overstock Deals.

Plus, shop Kindle Deals of the Day.

LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: White supremacy alert and much, much more. “CNN/the left wants you to know that Trump did not sufficiently denounce white supremacy following the horrible massacre in New Zealand. I can’t imagine a group of people more ill-suited to address ‘white supremacy’ than the band of jokers who have reduced every person in America to their color, gender and sexual preference while elevating victimhood to the highest virtue. What did they think was going to happen when they insist people are identified primarily by their attributes?”

They thought they’d profit handsomely for it — and they have.

CHANGE: As Stephen Green posted earlier, PJ Media Joins The Townhall Media Family. That doesn’t affect InstaPundit directly. PJ handled my ads, and now Townhall will, but from your perspective the only significant change is likely to be fewer bad ads. InstaPundit is still independent and nobody edits it but me and mine. I do hope, though, that this will get me a chance to swill martinis and smoke cigars at the Trump International Hotel in DC, with Kurt Schlichter. (Bumped).

JUDGE AMY CONEY BARRETT DISSENTS in a case on whether nonviolent felons lose their right to arms. She has the better of it, I think, though the majority cites me, which is always nice.

SORRY NOT SORRY: Sorry AOC, capitalism is not the problem.

Carol Roth has written a nice little defense of capitalism, plus this important reminder:

Despite its trust-violating actions of opening fake accounts and charging fees, Wells Fargo today, according to their most recent 10-K filing, still has $1.9 trillion in assets and services one in three households in the United States. Customers apparently just don’t care enough about their past behaviors to vote with their wallets and take their business elsewhere.

If consumers’ actions matched their words, they would be leveraging the essence of the free market. By not spending their dollars or time with companies that they didn’t value, those companies would be forced to change or be put out of business, if the companies were salvageable at all. The vote of their wallet would instead direct dollars (or time, etc.) towards companies that aligned with the important values of consumers, whether it be privacy or worker conditions or other values.

But, the reality is that consumers don’t care enough.

Like voters, consumers get what they ask for — sometimes good and hard.

IT LOST LEGITIMACY THROUGH OVERREACH: #MeToo movement starts to fade, men ‘desensitized to the issue.’

Overall, 62 percent of adults believe sexual harassment is a “major problem.” That is down from 69 percent in 2017.

Among men, 53 percent see it as a major problem, down from 66 percent in October 2017.

For women, 70 percent call it a major problem, down from 73 percent in 2017.

While still in the minority, more also see that “people in the workplace are too sensitive” to the issue, said Gallup.

For men, 45 percent said people are “too sensitive,” while 46 percent said they aren’t “sensitive enough.” At the height of the movement, 54 percent said people were “not sensitive enough,” versus 33 percent who felt people were “too sensitive.”

I predict that the chief long-term consequence of #MeToo will be less mentoring of female employees by male supervisors.

CORNELL AND HARVARD ENGLISH DEPARTMENTS DROP THE GRE. Quoth Cornell: “Requiring the exam narrows our applicant pool at precisely the moment we should be creating bigger pipelines into higher education. We need the strength of a diverse community in order to pursue the English department’s larger mission: to direct the force of language toward large and small acts of learning, alliance, imagination and justice.”

GOOD LUCK COLLECTING: Venezuela Ordered to Pay ConocoPhillips $8.7B.

IT’S ONLY BAD FOR OUR DEMOCRACY WHEN REPUBLICANS DO IT: Democratic Superstars Get Away with Questioning the Integrity of Elections.

Andrew Gillum and Stacey Abrams were 2018 runner-up candidates for governor in the country’s third- and ninth-largest states, are considered “rising stars” in the Democratic Party, and are engaging in “horrifying,” “shocking” rhetoric that is “threatening our democracy.”

That’s according to Hillary Clinton and Tim Kaine. That’s what they said about Donald Trump, after all, for questioning the results an election that hadn’t even happened yet. Surely they must feel the same about Gillum and Abrams doing the same.

Gillum and Abrams have, to varying degrees, openly impugned the integrity of their governor’s race losses in Florida and Georgia, to the sound of crickets in mainstream and liberal media.

Clinton, Kaine, Democrats, and the media were understandably vexed when Trump infamously said he would keep us all “in suspense” about accepting the results of the 2016 election. Even now, cable news talkers wonder in hushed tones if Trump would refuse to accept a 2020 defeat and leave the White House, or something.

Yet Abrams and Gillum continue to get away with irresponsible self-pity and delusion.

Rules are for the little people. And Republicans.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Google Quietly Adds Search Engine Privacy Option To Chrome – Here’s How To Enable It.

Apple’s Safari has good privacy protections built in, but it’s also clearly not everyone’s cup of tea. But I also use Brave, which is built on the same code foundation as Chrome, but with privacy features even stronger than Safari’s built right in. And you can use most Chrome extensions with it.

THERE’S NOTHING TO BUY ANYWAY: US sanctions could shut MasterCard and Visa out of Venezuela.

GOOD ADVICE: Don’t Read The Constitution The Way Robert Bork Did.

I discussed this very subject in this piece.

NOT ALL EXTINCTIONS ARE BAD: Nasty, 3ft-long parasitic worms are on the cusp of being wiped from the planet.

IS THAT A LOT? THAT SOUNDS LIKE A LOT. The Democrats’ $100 trillion agenda.

Start with “Medicare for All,” the new health care anthem of the left. It is touted as a way to make medical services “free” for everyone. The cost to taxpayers? By some estimates $32 trillion over the next decade, according to a study by the Mercatus Center. Medicare, just for the seniors it was designed to cover, is already projected to run deficits in the tens of trillions of dollars over the next four decades, according to the program’s own Trustees.

Then there is Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s “Green New Deal,” which is supposed to turn America into an eco-friendly paradise and avert the apocalypse that AOC claims will occur in just over a decade. Four presidential candidates have endorsed some or all of that agenda.

Of course, the politicians pushing these plans remain suspiciously quiet whenever they’re asked to explain exactly how much their pet projects will cost U.S. taxpayers and whether they’re worth the investment. But thanks to public-policy watchdog groups, we have some preliminary estimates. According to one recent study by the American Action Forum, the “Low-carbon Electricity Grid” proposed in the Green New Deal will cost taxpayers $5.4 trillion over 10 years, or $39,000 per household.

Similarly, a “Net Zero Emissions Transportation System,” another part of the environmental proposal, will require up to $2.7 trillion, or $20,000 per household, while guaranteed “Green Housing” would cost an additional $4.2 trillion.

The Democrat-backed welfare programs in the Green New Deal are even more daunting — according to the study, “guaranteed jobs” and “universal health care” would together cost each American family $582,000, or $80.6 trillion in total.

Then there is the loss of as many as 10 million jobs in the oil, gas and coal industries, which would add to welfare and unemployment benefit costs, let alone the severe financial hardship this would impose on millions of middle-class families whom Democrats once said they care about.

There’s more — much more, good Lord — at the link.

ROBBIE SOAVE: Time to Put the College Admissions System on a Rocket and Shoot It Into the Sun.

Related: The Biggest Higher Education Scam Isn’t Hollywood Fraud, It’s Academia Itself: The justifications for propping up universities, which often act as little more than elite sorting mechanisms as well as left-wing indoctrination centers, are growing thin.

IT’S ALMOST LIKE THEY’RE ALL USING THE SAME WELL-FUNDED PLAYBOOK: NYT Writer Links Trump to Mosque Shooter Via ‘George Soros White Supremacist Conspiracy Theory.’

RICHARD VEDDER: The Four Unspoken Rules for Getting Into College. “The recent college admissions scandal is spectacular in its size and scope, but hardly surprising. Let me make four major points.”

21ST CENTURY PARENTING: Kids aren’t growing up: Shocking new poll says parents are killing kids’ life skills.

By the time kids are old enough for college and way beyond the point they should have graduated, parents — whether wealthy or not — are still doing things children can do for themselves. Such as:

76 percent reminded their adult children of deadlines they need to meet, including for schoolwork
74 percent made appointments for them, including doctor’s appointments
15 percent of parents with children in college had texted or called them to wake them up so they didn’t sleep through a class or test.

One of the most egregious findings of the poll is that 11 percent of parents with adult children will call their child’s employer if he or she had an issue at work.

I guess it shouldn’t be that surprising in that 8 percent of parents said they had contacted a college professor or administrator about their child’s grades or a problem they were having.

And yet at the same time we’re told that 16 year olds should be able to vote.

AND AGAIN I SAY UNTO THEE… WAIT, WHAT?  Scientists Played Music to Cheese as It Aged. Hip-Hop Produced the Funkiest Flavor.