I’M LOOKING FORWARD TO SEEING THIS: Kevin Costner Rehabilitates a True American Hero in ‘The Highwaymen’ — and the Social Justice Warriors are Furious. “The film sets the record straight about famed Texas Ranger Frank Hamer and his hunt for Bonnie and Clyde.”
Author Archive: Stephen Green
April 9, 2019
I WAS AFRAID OF THIS: The robocall crisis will never totally be fixed. “Like spam, we’ll be able to manage it but not eliminate it.”
Even with a constantly-updated spam-blocker installed on my phone, several calls a day still get through. Although it’s always worse around tax season, so I’m hoping for a drop-off in spam over the next couple of weeks.
THE REAL STORY HERE IS THAT THEY FEEL THEY MUST REMAIN ANONYMOUS: Anonymous Chicago Prosecutor Allegedly Questions Foxx’s ‘Ethics’ For Dropping Smollett Charges.
SALENA ZITO: How Pete Buttigieg Could Hurt Trump in the Rust Belt.
He might have an impressive resumé, but this part sticks out like a sore thumb:
He supports abortions into the third trimester out of a belief in “freedom from government,” he said. And he won’t rule out tax hikes. “If the only way I can get all of us paid parental leave, universal health care, dramatically improved child care, better education, good infrastructure and, therefore, longer life expectancy and a healthier economy is to raise revenue, then we should be honest about that,” he said.
Shades of Walter Mondale, who lost every single Rust Belt state to Ronald Reagan.
MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT: Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Israel’s Crazy Election.*
(*But were afraid someone would tell you.)
PUNCH BACK TWICE AS HARD: First Twitter, now The Fresno Bee: Devin Nunes files lawsuit against McClatchy.
PROCUREMENT: U.S. Nuclear-Armed Sub May Cost More Than Navy Says, GAO Warns.
No surprise here. Given the Columbia’s role as the stealthiest and least-vulnerable third of our nuclear deterrent, getting them built in time for the retirement of the Ohio-class SSBNs, while also future-proofing the new boats against future threats, was always going to be an expensive proposition.
SHOCKER: Turkish ruling party seeks rerun in Istanbul.
Ali Ihsan Yavuz, a ruling party deputy chairman, announced the decision on Tuesday after Turkey’s top electoral authority rejected a request for a full recount of votes in the March 31 elections.
Yavuz maintained there were “significant events and situations” that affected the outcome of the vote and said the party would use a right for an “extraordinary appeal.”
Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party, or AKP, suffered a major setback in the elections. Opposition candidates won in Turkey’s capital, Ankara, and squeezed out the ruling party in Istanbul.
What’s the point of free elections if the wrong people are allowed to win?
More evidence for Glenn’s theory that all the RUSSIA! RUSSIA! RUSSIA! stuff is just a smokescreen for China, and the Democrats’ embrace of Beijing going back at least as far as Bill Clinton.
AND I THOUGHT THE GREEN NEW DEAL WAS FANTASY: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Praises the Washington, D.C. Metro. “DC Metro is pretty good…”
FLASHBACK: The Infuriating History of How Metro Got So Bad.
To be fair, she’s never going to sell the country on Mass Transportation for All without lying about it.
WELL, I GUESS YOU’RE GONNA HAVE TO GO WAKE THEM UP NOW, WON’T YOU? Ukrainian Officials Having Trouble Getting the DOJ’s Attention on Ukrainian-Democrat 2016 Collusion Efforts.
I’m still hoping for a more-proactive DOJ with Bob Barr at the helm.
(Classical reference in the headline.)
RUN ALL THE CANDIDATES! Eric Swalwell announces candidacy on Colbert.
The story is from late last week, but the detail about a “signal detector to seek hidden cameras” is new. I wonder if that was something commercially available, or if it’s state-actor level gear.
LET’S GET FRACKING: Fresh violence in Libya could provide new shock to oil markets amid tightening global supply.
Actually, we already are: Exxon Plans for $15 per Barrel Permian Costs.
The scale of Exxon’s drilling means that it can spread its costs over such a big operation that the basin will become competitive with almost anywhere in the world, Staale Gjervik, president of XTO Energy, the supermajor’s shale division, said in an interview.
Development, operating and land acquisition costs will be “in and around $15 a barrel,” he said on the sidelines of the CERAWeek Conference by IHS Markit in Houston. West Texas Intermediate futures traded at almost $59 on Thursday. “The way we are approaching it is very unique compared to most, if not really everybody out there, as far as the scale,” he said.
The shale revolution has made the Permian into the world’s largest shale field, with production topping 4 million barrels a day, almost as much as Iraq, OPEC’s second-biggest member. But the rapid growth has often meant that producers burn cash flow to reinvest in the expansion, prompting investors to call on them to focus more on returns in 2019.
The problem is no longer getting that much shale oil out of the ground, but getting the pipeline infrastructure in place to deliver it to market. But we’re working on that, too.
EVEN BETTER WOULD BE ELIMINATING STATE LICENSES: Arizona Will Be First State to Recognize Out-of-State Occupational Licenses.
LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: AG Barr to Testify Today and Much, Much More. “These people are ridiculous. They all read Barr’s letter and they all know he is going to release as much of the report that he is legally able to. He provided the findings of the report so that people wouldn’t have to wait until the DOJ reviewed it and removed information that is legally prohibited from being released. And also he released the findings so that that weasels in the DOJ couldn’t drip out spun information to trash the president while the review was being completed. True story. Do these idiots think Barr lied about Mueller’s findings while Mueller stays quiet about it while helping Barr review the report? Come on now. This is such a political spectacle.”
It’s all they have.
TRIPLING DOWN ON STUPID: Democrats Will Regret Not Walking Away When They Could. “The Democrats’ continued obsession with opening the pandora’s box of the Mueller report will only make things worse for the get-Trump crowd as the hoax chickens increasingly come home to roost.”
Mueller’s team has played dirty from the start. Contrary to the public narrative that the team was “leak-proof,” the opposite is actually true. As I recently wrote, “It has been three years of innuendo and leaks, leaks, leaks, leaks, and uncountable more examples of leaks dripping poison into the poison-addicted pens of the partisan media. The Mueller team has never had to prove anything involving Trump-Russian collusion to anyone because the special counsel needs no proof to function as a potent political weapon.”
To name two awful examples: the leak of the Cohen/Trump audio recording that appears to have been seized by the feds and the leak of the written questions to the president. Add to that list a new leak reported by the New York Times, “Some of Robert S. Mueller III’s investigators have told associates that Attorney General William P. Barr failed to adequately portray the findings of their inquiry and that they were more troubling for President Trump than Mr. Barr indicated, according to government officials and others familiar with their simmering frustrations.”
Did you get that? Anonymous sources claiming to be familiar with other anonymous sources on the Mueller team are the source for the New York Times article. Double secret hearsay. My editor would laugh in my face if I tried to publish an article with such flimsy of sourcing. But no standard is too low in the pursuit of getting Trump.
So much fake news, so little reporting.
DISEASE IS ANTI-VAX, TOO: Measles cases now reach 465 in the U.S., mostly in kids. “CDC reports the second-largest number of cases in the U.S. since measles was eliminated in 2000.”
The numbers are preliminary. The 2019 tally is already the most since 2014, when 667 were reported. The most before that was 963 cases in 1994.
Cases have been confirmed in 19 states, up from 15 states the week prior. Outbreaks have hit several states, including California, Michigan and New Jersey. New York City accounted for about two-thirds of the U.S. cases reported last week.
Outbreaks have been linked to U.S. communities with pockets of unvaccinated people and travelers who get measles abroad.
Unexpectedly.
THAT WOULD BE NICE: A Growth Surprise Could Shock Markets. “Better economic data suggests expectations of low long-term yields may be overdone.”
Slowdown risks may be fading already, as recent data pointed in a healthier direction for China and the U.S., the dominant forces in the global economy. On Friday, U.S. jobs data for March came in higher than expected. And Chinese manufacturing surveys for March picked up after a rough start to the year.
“A surprise in the second half would be a bigger issue, if it turns out significantly stronger again then the bond market will be in for a real shock,” said Ajay Rajadhyaksha, Head of Macro Research, Barclays .
A healthier U.S. growth picture could be a trigger. The first-quarter was artificially weak and difficult to estimate because of things like the government shutdown, the polar vortex and last year’s boost from tax cuts, said Ralf Preusser, rates strategist at Bank of America . “But the labor market is solid and fiscal policy remains supportive,” he said. He added: “I think there is quite a high chance of a positive GDP surprise, Q2 and Q3 should be above trend.”
Remember, economists have correctly predicted nine out of the previous four recessions, and two others they never saw coming.
KEEP VOTING UNTIL THE DESIRED RESULT IS ACHIEVED: Theresa May Considering Vote On Second Referendum As Brexit Talks Stall.
BOOK REVIEW: The Generals’ War: Operational Level Command on the Western Front in 1918.
It is now popular among most historians to dismiss the idea that leadership at the top can play the crucial role in the outcome of great historical events. With such attitudes, they are only displaying their own ignorance of how the real world works. For better or worse, leadership does matter, and Ząbecki has done a skillful job in laying out how these senior generals determined the outcome of the war. On the German side, Ludendorff, in effect Hindenburg’s chief of staff but also the real author of German military decisions, drove the German conduct of the war to its disastrous end in 1918. In some respects, Ludendorff was a proficient tactician and innovator. In fact, he was one of the few generals in the war to make a coherent and effective attempt to solve the extraordinarily difficult tactical problems the fighting in the Western theater had raised. However, the most perceptive and effective German general in the war, Crown Prince Ruprecht of Bavaria, noted of Ludendorff that he “is certainly a wonderful organizer, but not a great strategist.”[1]
That, in a nutshell, was the heart of the problem with the whole German Army. Brilliant at the sharp end of tactical competence, but incapable of perceiving the strategic consequences of their actions, Ludendorff and the German high command found themselves stuck in a strategic quandary of their own making.
Looks good enough that it just went near the top of my ever-expanding Kindle to-read list. For a look just at Allied operational art during the same timeframe, Hundred Days: The Campaign That Ended World War I is another solid read.
BECAUSE THE INMATES ARE RUNNING THE ASYLUM: Why Are 2020 Democrats Embracing Slavery Reparations? “Reparations aren’t popular with voters.”