Archive for 2024

July 22, 2024

WOEING: More bad news for Boeing defense on the horizon.

Boeing’s defense business will take a fresh charge on the Air Force One program this quarter as the company works through major challenges while building the presidential jets, the division’s head said on Sunday.

Expect continued bleeding when Boeing reports its financial standing in its second-quarter earnings call next week as it goes “through some more challenges on the fixed-price development programs,” Ted Colbert, CEO of Boeing Defense, Space & Security, told reporters during a briefing in London ahead of the Farnborough Air Show.

Colbert said the second-quarter results will resemble those of last year’s third quarter—when the defense division took nearly $1 billion in losses. The second-quarter charges will be from a mix of Boeing’s big fixed-price development programs and “continued operational challenges,” he said.

Those third-quarter losses included $482 million from the much-delayed effort to produce two VC-25B presidential jets, which so far has cost the company more than $2 billion. Their delivery date has slipped from this year to at least 2027 and 2028.

Also: Boeing and NASA engineers have wrapped up ground tests on the Starliner thruster. “Engineers from Boeing and NASA have spent much of the last month running ground tests on a Starliner Reaction Control System (RCS) thruster to get a better idea of what went wrong during the active Starliner’s flight in early June, and they finally wrapped up this past week. In its latest update, Boeing said the teams were able to replicate the thrust degradation Starliner experienced and are now reviewing all the data. But the date of astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams’ return is still uncertain — NASA and Boeing said only that they’ll be making the trip ‘in the coming weeks.'”

Wilmore and Williams are on Day 46 of their planned weeklong stay on the ISS.

Posted at 12:42 pm by Stephen Green on Jul 22nd, 2024

IT’S OFFICIAL: Nobody Wants to Run Against Trump. “Privately, Hochul, Newsom, et al., must be fuming. If Biden had dropped out last summer, as the semi-invalid should have, there could have been a real primary. Instead, the Cabal rigged the game for Biden, and now they’re stuck with Harris.”

Posted at 12:11 pm by Stephen Green on Jul 22nd, 2024

MARK JUDGE: Are Republicans ready for Kamala Harris, the queen of opposition research? “At some point in the next 100 days, something awful and potentially career-ending is going to come out about Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), former President Donald Trump’s vice presidential pick. It might involve a sexual scandal. The accusations will not be true, but that won’t matter.”

Posted at 12:03 pm by Glenn Reynolds on Jul 22nd, 2024

I DON’T WANT TO LIVE IN A LARRY CORREIA NOVEL:

Related:

Posted at 11:58 am by Glenn Reynolds on Jul 22nd, 2024

SAY, where’s Joe Biden? In Rehoboth, still under the impression he’s running for a second term. Nobody’s told him he withdrew . . .

Hey, these days it’s totally believable.

Plus, a friend writes: “One note on the rhetoric here: there is tremendous pushback online from the left and Bulwark types — but I repeat myself — against the use of ‘coup d’état’ to describe events. This is a tell, and ought to signal that we should use it often. We should use it because it implies a series of things they wish to avoid, the top two being that the plotters ought to face public accountability, and the President unfit to run is therefore unfit to remain in office. And there is one other reason to use it: because it is true.”

UPDATE:

Posted at 11:51 am by Glenn Reynolds on Jul 22nd, 2024

THE JOKES KEEP COMING, EVEN THOUGH IT’S NOT REALLY FUNNY:

Posted at 11:49 am by Glenn Reynolds on Jul 22nd, 2024

MIKE LEE:

That’s a funny way to protect democracy.

Posted at 11:40 am by Stephen Green on Jul 22nd, 2024

THE TRUTH HURTS:

Related:

I’m so old, I remember when Joe Biden was going to restore our precious norms. Instead, he helped usher in a world where “Black Swan event” has lost all meaning.

Posted at 10:38 am by Stephen Green on Jul 22nd, 2024

MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT: Introducing President Whatevs. “It’s President Kamala Harris or bust for Democrats so let’s take a look at the Woman Who Would Be POTUS… if only she could be bothered.”

Posted at 10:07 am by Stephen Green on Jul 22nd, 2024

CHANGE: Tech broligarchs are lining up to court Trump. And Vance is one more link in the chain.

It’s some lesser-known figures in Silicon Valley who last week boarded the Trump bandwagon who are perhaps even more telling. Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, who own one of the most storied and influential venture capital (VC) firms in Silicon Valley, have declared they’re all in for Trump alongside a host of lesser-known but important names who have either followed suit or who beat them to the punch, including the Winklevoss twins and investors and podcast hosts Chamath Palihapitiya and David Sacks.

Back in 2016, Peter Thiel was the voice in the wilderness. And in that meeting in Trump Tower, it was Thiel’s hand that Trump picked up and stroked. (And whose data mining firm, Palantir, picked up billions of dollars in contracts from Trump’s Department of Defense, and, most controversially, Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, where it profiled and surveilled migrants.)

The principle that underpins Silicon Valley investing is to bet early and bet big. It worked for Thiel with Facebook. It worked for Thiel with Trump. And last week another of his bets paid off, though few could ever have predicted how spectacularly.

This is a scare-piece from The Guardian so it isn’t of much value aside from this excerpt. But the story is worth noting because as things are shaping up, the GOP might reach tech parity with the Democrats in a presidential race for the first time since 2004.

Posted at 9:36 am by Stephen Green on Jul 22nd, 2024

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Once Again, Joe Biden Makes Everything Weird. “I am beyond trying to figure out how any of this will play out. I’ve seen everyone but the ghost of Teddy Kennedy on the list of her potential running mates. There is really no one on the Dem bench who feels like a game-changer.”

Posted at 9:05 am by Stephen Green on Jul 22nd, 2024

FUN: Trump Demands Reparations Over Biden Dropping Out. “The GOP in general and specifically the Trump campaign have flushed countless millions of dollars into campaigning against Joe Biden, who continued to insist that he would be running for a second term. After he finally announced yesterday that he would be leaving the race, the entire picture changed. This led Donald Trump to take to his Truth Social media platform and posit a question. Should the GOP seek reimbursement for fraud after spending all of that money focusing on someone who clearly was not going to be serving a second term?”

Posted at 8:56 am by Glenn Reynolds on Jul 22nd, 2024

WHEN WILL THE PRESS TELL US THAT DEMOCRATS “ASSERT, WITHOUT EVIDENCE” THAT BIDEN HAS WITHDRAWN? “So, yeah, what evidence do we have that Joe Biden knows he has given up his candidacy and released the delegates pledged to him? We haven’t seen him. He’s been sick with Covid. When last we heard from him in person he was defiantly clinging to the candidacy, apparently still believing that he is the one person who can save the world from Donald Trump. We were simply handed written statements.”

Plus: “Perhaps his people won’t tell him he has withdrawn. How would we know? I’ve read articles about caregivers for persons with dementia that advise us to go along with the errors and not correct all the mistaken beliefs. He shouldn’t be President though, of course, if things are this bad. Couldn’t they keep him in Rehoboth and call him Mr. President?”

Posted at 8:53 am by Glenn Reynolds on Jul 22nd, 2024

REMINDER: THIS IS THE MOMENT HARRIS’S 2020 PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN DIED.

Posted at 8:34 am by Stephen Green on Jul 22nd, 2024
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