WHOA: Mueller Might Have Committed Perjury In Congressional Testimony. “Did Robert Mueller lie to Congress and mislead them about his intent in holding a May press conference? Under normal circumstances, the answer to this question would be no. Using the standards applied by the special counsel himself to several individuals charged with making false statements to investigators, however, Robert Mueller might have found himself in serious legal jeopardy.”
More from Ed Morrissey at the link.
I’D VOTE FOR TAMMY: Tammy Bruce Says ‘We Will Have a Woman President, and She Will Be Conservative’
UNEXPECTEDLY: Automakers Need to Start Worrying About the Batteries Lurking in Older EVs. “A number of electric vehicles in the United States are about to celebrate their 10th birthday. A bunch of them are Nissan Leafs, the first mainstream BEV made widely available in the U.S. market.”
More:
“A refurb program is needed to help owners who were affected by Gen 1 vehicles,” Kan-ade said. “I believe that these early battery failures are part of a learning curve that was passed on to the consumer. Nissan offered a battery replacement program for $5,500, but unfortunately they quietly raised the price to $8,500.”
Despite Nissan being among the first automakers to confront these issues, it is not the only one that has to confront them. Other automakers are facing similar problems stemming from hybrid cars, and we’re just a few years away from a glut of all-electric Teslas coping with an identical plight — followed swiftly by every other automaker that decided to build BEVs at scale.
Among the biggest concerns is resale value. With no refurb solution, owners will essentially be forced to throw a car onto the secondhand market needing thousands in repairs. Sure, they could foot the bill themselves, but why bother replacing the most expensive component in your vehicle just to sell it? Likewise, why would the average used-car buyer choose to spend the cash when they’re already in search of a bargain?
These are questions a lot of us have been asking for a long time, because once battery capacity is diminished far enough, what’s left of an EV is basically disposable.
My modest proposal: A recycling fee in excess of whatever tax incentives EV owners might have received.
CHRISTIAN TOTO: Are Deplorables the Good Guys in ‘The Hunt?’
DANA LOESCH: Why Red Flag Laws Are Not A Good Solution To Mass Shootings.
The murderers in Parkland, Florida and Dayton, Ohio, are two recent examples. These two monsters were walking red flags with access to firearms and yet, with all of the laws available to adjudicate them ineligible to carry or purchase guns, they continued unabated until the unthinkable. They weren’t stopped.
In fact, the Parkland murderer was coddled by a school district that pretended a refusal to report crime (thereby suppressing their criminal statistics) was the same thing as reducing crime, and they received federal dollars for it. That murderer’s violent behavior (beating his adoptive mother, sending death threats to fellow students, and putting a gun to another person’s head, to list a few offenses) was so well known, teachers had a backup plan in case he decided to become threatening, and he was searched every morning after arriving at school.
We didn’t need red flag laws to get either of these individuals before they committed their crimes. According to numerous local reports, had the previous Broward County sheriff performed his duties, case number 18-1958 would not have been able to legally purchase the rifle he used to carry out his evil. From everything reported on the Dayton murderer, it seems barring him from legal purchase or possession of firearms by adjudicating him mentally unfit was entirely possible.
The point of red flag laws isn’t to protect the innocent, but to cast suspicion on anyone exercising their Second Amendment rights.
THAT’S DIFFERENT BECAUSE SHUT UP: 11 Shot Dead, 63 Wounded in Chicago Over the Weekend. America Yawns.
SMALL WARS JOURNAL: The New China Lobby. “We are the national security thinkers and military leaders who have seen enough bullies and read enough history to see through the CCP’s lies of benevolence.”
Since the Great Recession, Beijing has begun to seize its opportunities. It has made new territory from nothing in the South China Sea so as to seize control of one of the world’s most vital bottlenecks and to project its power throughout the Indo-Pacific. At home Xi Jinping has reinforced commitments to Maoist doctrine under Xi Jinping thought, his own brand of red Kool-Aid. The CCP has constructed new surveillance apparati to control its population from mass visual surveillance to a social credit system meant to regulate and score every action. In Xinjiang, there is cultural genocide and internment of the Uighur population on a scale measuring in the millions. The PLA has grown and modernized rapidly since the 1990s, stealing technology from around the world to boost itself to compete with the US. It uses mockups of US targets during anti-ship missiles tests and threatens its neighbors around the Pacific through grey zone tactics and outright belligerency. The fact is that the CCP is not just America’s, but the whole freedom-loving world’s main enemy.
Enter the new China lobby.
Read the whole thing.
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: Ana Navarro Puts Down Her Sandwich and Tweets Stuff.
I am especially grateful for Liz imbuing the Morning Briefing with her acerbic wit and irreverence for what we are told are supposed to be sacred cows. I won’t have to turn this thing on its head to have fun with it because she already made it fun.
I promise to keep the reasons everyone likes reading the Briefing going but I will also be experimenting with a few changes here and there. They will be rolled out slowly and input from all of you will be greatly valued.
As you all well know, we are under siege in media on this side of the political aisle. Few are more aware of that than I. I’ve been blogging about conservative politics since before we were calling it blogging. While I am most serious about battling the runaway disinformation train of the Left, I like to try and make the fight fun for the readers. Let the leftists be pinched, constipated, and miserable all the time.
Those really are the only things they’re any good at.
ON TO THE FUN.
Yes.
WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW: Navy’s Advanced Aerospace Tech Boss Claims Key ‘UFO’ Patent Is Operable .
We came across documents that seem to suggest, at least by the Navy’s own claims, that two highly peculiar Navy patents, the room temperature superconductor (RTSC) and the high-energy electromagnetic field generator (HEEMFG), may in fact already be in operation in some manner. The inventor of the Navy’s most bizarre patent, the straight-out-of-science fiction-sounding hybrid aerospace/underwater craft, describes that craft as leveraging the same room temperature superconductor technology and high energy electromagnetic fields to enable its unbelievable speed and maneuverability. If those two technologies are already operable as the Navy claims, could this mean the hybrid craft may also already operable or close to operable? Or is this just more evidence that the whole exotic ‘UFO’ patent endeavor on the Navy’s behalf is some sort of ruse or even gross mismanagement of resources?
Much more at the link.
GIVING PEOPLE WHAT THEY’VE EARNED? WE CAN’T HAVE THAT! Prof calls to get rid of grades because they are ‘capitalism in action.’
DECOUPLING: Trump Doubles Down On The China Trade War.
This is from Salvatore Babones at The National Interest:
Trump’s aggressive push on tariffs has thrown the country’s expert class into a tizzy, with pundits predicting a severe shock to the American economy, blaming the trade war for every blip in stock prices, and warning of the potential for runaway inflation as consumers pay the price for Trump’s tariffs.
Meanwhile the economy is employing record numbers of people, inflation is running well below the Fed’s target rate, and stock markets are slightly up since the beginning of the “trade war” in April. The data simply refuses to satisfy the pundits’ appetite for economic carnage.
With the economy refusing to cooperate with their “gloom and doom” narrative, America’s pundits are now arguing that economic pressure is no way to get a trade deal from China. When a Chinese Communist Party newspaper tells them that “China will never give in to pressure,” they believe it.
And who knows? Maybe they’re right. But if China doesn’t give in to pressure, then its manufacturing base will continue moving to Vietnam and India. Less labor-intensive assembly work will move to Mexico, which has now displaced China as America’s top trade partner. China will lose its unique position at the center of global production networks, and with it much of its leverage over global politics.
All of these trends are in America’s national interest. And Trump’s trade war benefits America’s allies, too. In fact, the only country in the world with an interest in China holding all the strings of global value chains is China. If the Chinese don’t realize that, then they’re in for some real surprises as the trade war drags on.
Read the whole thing.
I’d just add that while China does have the ability to hurt us back, the US still holds most of the trump cards, so to speak. And it’s time to stop, if you’ll allow me to paraphrase Lenin, paying China to make the rope they’ll hang us with.
TYLER O’NEIL: SPLC Gets Conservative Crowdfunding Site Shut Down.
CHUTZPAH: Disgraced Former FBI Agent Peter Strzok Sues to Get His Job Back. “Because we live in an age without shame, disgraced former FBI agent Peter Strzok has filed suit to get his job back — including back pay for the time he wasn’t hard at work protecting America from a free and fair election.”
MORE ON THAT NYT HEADLINE SWITCHEROO: New York Times caves to political pressure from Democrats, changes headline on top front page story.
The short version is that they caved to a high-profile Democrat outrage mob. Thomas Lifson has the full version at the link.
UNEXPECTEDLY: New York City Businesses Struggle to Keep Up After Minimum Wage Increase. “Business owners and leaders say labor costs have forced cuts in jobs and work shifts.”
Many business owners said these changes were unintended consequences of the new minimum wage, which took effect at the beginning of the year.
Susannah Koteen, owner of Lido Restaurant in Harlem, said she worries about the impact raising wages could have on her restaurant, where she employs nearly 40 people. She hasn’t had to lay off anyone, but the increase has forced her to cut back on shifts and be more stringent about overtime. She said she changes her menu offerings seasonally and raises prices more often since the wage boost.
“What it really forces you to do is make sure that nobody works more than 40 hours,” Ms. Koteen said. “You can only cut back so many people before the service starts to suffer.”
Ms. Koteen said she shelved plans to move her restaurant to a larger location. That would require her to hire more staff, and she isn’t willing to take the risk with the unpredictability of her business. “You would just have no choice but to cut people at the bottom,” she said.
Plus: “Thomas Grech, president of the Queens Chamber of Commerce, said he has seen an uptick in small-business closures during the past six to nine months, and he attributed it to the minimum-wage legislation.”
If only there were some sort of predictable relationship between price and demand, perhaps one you could plot on an easy-to-understand curve, then politicians wouldn’t keep making this mistake.
UNDERREPORTED STORIES: The Great Baltimore Cleanup. “In the unending barrage of bad news, it’s easy to overlook the good things. Take, for example, this Republican effort to clean up Baltimore.”
To be fair, the press would mostly ignore this no matter what else was going on in the news cycle.
COME SEE THE VIOLENCE INHERENT IN THE LEFTISM: Anti-Gun Agitators Harass Sen. McConnell at His Home: ‘Just Stab the Motherf*cker in the Heart!’
WHEN EVERYTHING IS RACIST, NOTHING IS: Media: Condemning White Supremacy Makes Trump A White Supremacist.
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