Archive for 2024

November 9, 2024

WE’VE DESCENDED INTO SOME SORT OF BIZARRE HELL-WORLD IN WHICH PIERS MORGAN IS A VOICE OF SANITY:

Related: How Trump and Musk Could Cut $2 Trillion in Government Spending.

Posted at 2:44 pm by Ed Driscoll on Nov 9th, 2024

FLORIDA TRUMP SUPPORTERS WEARING THEIR SKIRTS TOO HIGH: FEMA Official Ordered Relief Workers To Skip Houses With Trump Signs.

A federal disaster relief official ordered workers to bypass the homes of Donald Trump’s supporters as they surveyed damage caused by Hurricane Milton in Florida, according to internal correspondence obtained by The Daily Wire and confirmed by multiple federal employees.

A FEMA supervisor told workers in a message to “avoid homes advertising Trump” as they canvassed Lake Placid, Florida to identify residents who could qualify for federal aid, internal messages viewed by The Daily Wire reveal. The supervisor, Marn’i Washington, relayed this message both verbally and in a group chat used by the relief team, multiple government employees told The Daily Wire.

The government employees told The Daily Wire that at least 20 homes with Trump signs or flags were skipped from the end of October and into November due to the guidance, meaning they were not given the opportunity to qualify for FEMA assistance. Images shared with The Daily Wire show that houses were skipped over by the workers, who wrote in the government system messages such as: “Trump sign no entry per leadership.”

FEMA has apparently confirmed this incident took place:

“FEMA admits this happened,” Ace writes. “They claim they took ‘extreme actions’ in response. I bet those ‘extreme actions’ consisted of one hour of ‘retraining.’”

Not even that. As the Daily Wire notes, “The employees say that Washington has not been punished for the guidance, but has been shifted to another county in Florida.”

UPDATE Ron DeSantis weighs in:

UPDATE (1:14 PM): Jennifer Rubin weighs in to defend FEMA, then deletes Tweet and vows to leave Twitter for Threads:

UPDATE: FEMA Fires Official Who Told Hurricane Relief Workers to Skip Trump Homes.

Posted at 2:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Nov 9th, 2024

WE LIVE IN HISTORIC TIMES: Space policy is about to get pretty wild, y’all. “So it’s entirely possible that the sitting chief executive of SpaceX could be the nation’s most important adviser on space policy, conflicts be damned. Musk possesses flaws as a leader, but it is difficult to argue against results. His intuitions for the industry, such as pushing hard for reusable launch and broadband Internet from space, have largely been correct. In a vacuum, it is not necessarily bad to have someone like Musk providing a vision for US spaceflight in the 21st century.”

If he were a Democrat advising a Democratic administration, he’d be part of a “Brain Trust” instead of having a conflict of interest.

Posted at 2:00 pm by Glenn Reynolds on Nov 9th, 2024

CHARDONNAY IS A HELLUVA DRUG: Nancy Pelosi blames President Biden for Trump’s victory.

Nancy Pelosi has blamed President Biden for Donald Trump winning the White House as a Democrat blame game intensifies.

The former House speaker, a party grandee who was instrumental in persuading the president to eventually step aside, criticised Biden for not dropping out of the race sooner.

She also said there should have been an internal process to decide on the candidate rather than the coronation of Kamala Harris.

Pelosi, 84, believes Harris would have “done well” in the primary and “been stronger going forward”.

Back in February The Hill was reporting: Pelosi says Biden ‘very sharp’: ‘He’s younger than I am.’

AP reported in July that the Democrats needed Kamala on the ticket to legally (read “easily”) transfer Joe’s war chest:

Vice President Kamala Harris has been one of President Joe Biden’s staunchest defenders following his shaky performance in last week’s debate, but she’s also emerged as a potential option to lead the party herself if Biden opted not to continue his campaign.

One big question is what would happen to the current campaign’s $91 million cash on hand, according to its most recent filings. (Combined with allied Democratic organizations, the reelection effort has access to $240 million cash on hand, the campaign said this week.)

* * * * * * * *

Since their campaign account was registered with the Federal Election Commission in the name of both candidates, Harris could use those funds for her own presidential effort if Biden were to drop out, according to Kenneth Gross, senior political law counsel at Akin Gump and former associate general counsel for the Federal Election Commission.

* * * * * * * * *

What happens to the funds if neither Biden nor Harris is the nominee?

According to Gross, their campaign would have to give all the money back — sort of.

Any donations designated for the primary — which Biden won — would stay with the campaign, Gross said, something that technically could apply to any money taken in by Biden-Harris up until the Democratic National Convention in August.

“All contributions made prior to the August convention are deemed to be for the primary unless the donor designates in writing that the contribution is for general election,” Gross said.

According to Smith, if Biden left the race and Harris didn’t replace him as nominee, their former campaign could only transfer $2,000 of the money that had been collected to a new candidate.

No doubt, that was part of the calculus that led to the Sunday afternoon massacre in late July. About which, Jim Treacher writes:

By the way, we still don’t know why the president of the United States dropped out of the 2024 campaign on Twitter, during Sunday brunch, in the middle of a weeklong disappearance from the public eye. I want to know what happened to him that week, and who helped cover it up.

Maybe that’ll be Bob Woodward’s next book. He has nothing to lose now. The secret’s out.

In the meantime, America’s Newspaper of Record says that Pelosi has her eyes trained towards the horizon:

Posted at 1:44 pm by Ed Driscoll on Nov 9th, 2024

SNOWFALLS ARE NOW JUST A THING OF THE PAST: CNN’s Bill Weir Declares ‘Notorious Climate Denier’ Trump Will Let Earth ‘Go to Hell.’

Making several appearances Thursday on CNN to discuss the aftermath of Donald Trump winning the presidential election, CNN chief climate correspondent Bill Weir fretted over a second Trump administration’s climate policies, and declared that the President-elect is “the most notorious climate denier in history” who will let the climate “go to hell.”

This is the same Bill Weir who famously declared “even the seagulls” were “awed” with Barack Obama’s first inauguration.

Sadly though, the seagulls, along with the rest of us, didn’t survive the era:

Barack Obama has only four years to save the world. That is the stark assessment of Nasa scientist and leading climate expert Jim Hansen who last week warned only urgent action by the new president could halt the devastating climate change that now threatens Earth. Crucially, that action will have to be taken within Obama’s first administration, he added.

— President ‘has four years to save Earth,’ the Grauniad, January 17, 2009.

And alas, we didn’t survive this deadline, either: Al Gore’s January 27, 2016 Prediction is Coming Near: The Earth Will End From Overheating.

—Newsalert, November 21, 2015.

(Classical reference in headline.)

Posted at 12:45 pm by Ed Driscoll on Nov 9th, 2024

OLD AND BUSTED: An Army of Davids.

The New Hotness? An Army of Crybullies! I’m both in stitches, and for the first time somewhat sympathetic to the Kamala campaign, knowing that so many of its staffers are in the vein of this young man:

As Josh Barro wrote in 2022 when the WaPo was going through a de rigueur 202o-style DNC-MSM struggle session:

We have seen in the tech industry what it looks like for a company to rein in a culture of freewheeling, chaotic fighting. Google stopped telling employees to bring their whole selves to work, started telling them not to have bitter fights about politics, and punished those who wouldn’t follow the new rules. “Activist” employees got frustrated and left the company — good.1 Basecamp, a much smaller firm, drew a lot of attention for its declaration that political fights wouldn’t be allowed anymore, leading to much garment-rending and the departure of left-wing employees — something that was for the best, as it was an opportunity for workers and their organizations to be better aligned on values.

There are models for newsrooms where employees behave in a normal and professional manner on social media, in Slack, and in their general communications with and about each other. You don’t see, for instance, Wall Street Journal or Axiosreporters criticizing each other in public or decrying management for failing to run the outlet in exactly the way they would like. You also don’t see them sharing tasteless jokes. There are expectations of professionalism set from the top, and they’re followed. Axios CEO Jim VandeHei explained on a recent episode of the Very Serious podcast how they keep newsroom drama to a minimum — it starts with a clear expectation that reporters won’t “pop off” about their opinions and won’t badmouth each other. And the WSJ is a union shop, so I don’t want to hear about how it’s impossible to develop a culture where reporters stick to their knitting if they are unionized.

It’s ultimately on Post management that they never set the expectations they ended up wanting to enforce. But it’s not too late to start.

I would finally note one thing: Organizations primarily staffed by conservatives have various problems, but they don’t have this one. And this phenomenon extends well outside the media, to liberal-staffed nonprofit and political organizations, where leaders are terrified of their employees’ potential outbursts and are therefore letting them run roughshod over strategic goals — and especially over prudent decision-making that might help win elections but do not meet every checkbox of the left-wing keyboard warriors who could cause so much trouble inside and outside the organization.

Add to the safetyism-obsessed themes of the addled young man in the video above the campaign’s apocalyptic rhetoric about Looming Orange Hitler, and imagine how schizophrenic the young staffers felt when it was all over, and hey, let bygones be bygones, and good luck to the next president!

UPDATE:

Good luck with that.

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Nov 9th, 2024

CHANGE:

Posted at 12:14 pm by Glenn Reynolds on Nov 9th, 2024

WELL, JOY REID:

Posted at 9:04 am by Glenn Reynolds on Nov 9th, 2024

KIMBERLEY STRASSEL: A Landslide Against the Media.

Democrats now face a choice. On one side are party grown-ups who are publicly acknowledging this defeat as a sharp voter rebuke of progressive policies. They are admitting that lawfare was a mistake, that the party is culturally out of touch, that lunatic interest groups are running the asylum. They worry about a growing political realignment that threatens the party’s future. That we are hearing these voices is an improvement over the past eight years.

Yet on the other side are the progressive architects of the mess, already rationalizing away the night as a function of racism, sexism and America’s supposed love affair with “fascism.” They mark the loss down to “tactical” errors—the failure to court pro-Palestinian voters, a misallocation of door-knockers, poor timing in ad buys. The party just needs better “messaging” of its “historic achievements.”

No surprise, the media is already running with this latter narrative, again providing the party a soothing alternative to the blunt reality of its ideological fail. Will Democrats be lulled again? If they really want to reconnect with voters, they will at some point have to break with what is proving to be a debilitating feedback loop.

The media itself was put on sharp notice this cycle, pushed aside by podcasters and influencers whom voters now trust more to provide reality. Nearly 50 million people have listened to Joe Rogan’s interview of Mr. Trump, as it provided a more accurate assessment of the GOP nominee’s positions and the concerns of the country than “news” articles about the “authoritarian” intent on destroying the climate, abortion rights, democracy—choose your obsession.

The DNC-MSM are always shocked when the candidate they went all-in on supporting loses, and invariably spend about ten minutes after the election publicly feigning introspection — and then nothing changes, and their bias and hatred of all politicians with an (R) after their names only gets worse. Why should this election be any different?

Related: Good news: The public has stopped listening to mass media.

Posted at 8:14 am by Ed Driscoll on Nov 9th, 2024

DON SURBER: We won a battle, not the war.

Plus: “The happiest man in the USA this week was Donald Trump. The happiest woman was Jill Biden.”

Posted at 8:02 am by Glenn Reynolds on Nov 9th, 2024

HOW IT STARTED: “Go for the Throat! Why if he wants to transform American politics, Obama must declare war on the Republican Party.”

—John Dickerson, future host of CBS’s Face the Nation, at Slate, one of the remaining media redoubts of the Graham family, the former owners of the WaPo, January 18th, 2023.

How It’s Going:

Posted at 7:45 am by Ed Driscoll on Nov 9th, 2024
« Previous Entries
Next Entries »