YOU DON’T SAY: The Media Has a Very Different Attitude Toward Donald Trump’s Health Than Hillary Clinton’s.
Devastating video put together by the Free Beacon’s Andrew Kugle, who tweeted, “I had 6 minutes of extra clips that I had to cut from this.”. I believe that’s known as riches of embarrassment.
Also at the link, video of MSNBC’s “incredibly defensive” coverage of Clinton’s campaign fainting spell.
BLUE STATE BLUES: People flocking to low-tax states could swing future elections.
The new 2017 Census estimates can be used to give us a year-over-year change from 2016 or, alternatively, estimates can be based on a longer-trend line. The data gives a nice summary of estimates for congressional seat changes after the 2020 Census.
The state with the largest downside risk appears to be Illinois, which will lose one congressional seat in 2020 and is in danger of being the only state in the U.S. to lose two seats.
Illinois suffered the largest net population loss of any state in the past year, and due to that loss, it was overtaken by Pennsylvania this year as the fifth-largest state in the country. Major tax increases passed in 2017 will certainly not help this downward economic spiral.
The 2017 Census estimates also contain some troubling news for the nation’s largest state, California. While the 2010 Census was the first in state history to not add an additional congressional seat, 2020 could be worse for the Golden State.
Some current projections show high-tax California is on the bubble to actually lose a congressional seat in 2020 — a shocking development for a state that gained seven seats between 1980 and 1990 alone.
For history buffs, it is possible that high-tax Rhode Island will lose one of its two congressional seats in 2020. That will be the first time since 1789 that Rhode Island only has one congressional seat.
Meanwhile, another state with extremely high tax burdens, New York, is set to lose yet another seat in 2020, the eighth census in a row that the Empire State has forfeited seats.
They’d rather rule over the ruins than reform.
THE ONLY WORSE POSSIBLE OUTCOME IS IF THEY SUCCEED: Merkel’s Coalition Partner: Failure of CDU, SPD Talks Will Be ‘Catastrophe’ for Germany.
WINNING: Apple Gives Employees $2,500 Bonuses After New Tax Law.
The iPhone maker will begin issuing stock grants to most employees worldwide in the coming months, said the people, who asked not to be identified because they weren’t authorized to speak publicly. The move comes on the same day Apple said it would bring back most of its cash from overseas and spend $30 billion in the U.S. over the next five years, funding an additional technical support campus, data centers and 20,000 new employees.
Apple confirmed the bonuses in response to a Bloomberg inquiry Wednesday. The Cupertino, California-based company joins a growing list of American businesses that have celebrated the introduction of corporate-friendly tax law with one-time bonuses for staff. AT&T Inc., Comcast Corp., JetBlue Airways Corp. and Wal-Mart Stores Inc. also said they were giving bonuses.
I can’t imagine many of the people in these boardrooms being exactly happy about making a Republican tax law look so good, but the economics of it are undeniable.
MATTHEW CONTINETTI: Team Obama still hasn’t learned the lesson of 2016.
Never does [Samantha] Power give any indication that the policies and character of the administration she served for eight years might have had some role in the outcome of the election. Weak economic growth, capricious and stultifying and often-unconstitutional regulation, a rejection of military deterrence in favor of negotiation and accommodation with undemocratic great powers and their proxies, the removal of troops from Iraq and the supercilious reference to ISIS as the “JV team,” the constant tweaking and trolling of conservatives and Republicans to make them batty, and all enacted with an omnipresent and choking air of moral and intellectual superiority and pride—none of this factors in her analysis. So convinced is Power of the righteousness of her positions and stature and the inevitable course of History and Progress that Trump appears to her almost as an apparition, a figure from a different dimension, far removed from any universe in which she and her boss lived and acted. Another Obama mistake.
I don’t mean to single out Power. This distended mentality of merit and awesome lack of self-awareness was an Obama administration specialty.
Read the whole thing, needless to say.
LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Fusion GPS Unleashed, Shutdown Countdown and Much, Much More.
NANCY PELOSI: ‘We Must Fight Even Harder Against Trump’s Authoritarian Impulses Now That We’ve Voted To Enable Them.’
Not really — that headline is from The Onion. On the other hand, genuinely funny comedy always contains at least a germ of truth.
CHANGE: The U.S. Air Force Is Quietly Cutting A-10s.
No doubt the A-10 is a great ground-pounder, but those airframes are getting old and expensive to maintain. Worse, they won’t be survivable in the surface-to-air missile-infested environment we’ll find against near-peer foes.
WHY NOT JUST USE THE NEW FEINSTEIN STANDARD AND RELEASE THEM AT WHIM? GOP Reps Demand Immediate Release of ‘Shocking,’ ‘Troubling’ Memo on FISA Abuses.
HERE WE GO AGAIN: Congress hurtles toward shutdown.
Though House Republicans voted Thursday night to keep the government open, the real drama is in the closely divided Senate, where it’s unclear what, if anything, can clear the chamber’s supermajority threshold. The Senate couldn’t even agree on holding a vote on Thursday night, adjourning after Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell spurned Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s request to hold a vote and, assuming it failed, restart bipartisan negotiations on immigration and government spending levels.
Senators said they expected a vote on Friday, but had little idea what would come next.
“These are hard issues, there’s a lot of disagreement. Not just on substance but how to proceed to it. And everybody’s trying to gain leverage,” said Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.)., the No. 3 GOP leader.
The real sticking point is DACA, or as Mark Steyn put it last night, “the Democrats’ ever more explicit preference for illegal immigrants over American citizens.”
UH-HUH: Today Show Executive Producer Steps Down To Spend More Time With His Children. “Don Nash, the executive producer of NBC’s Today Show for the past five years, is stepping down to spend more time with his family. At least that’s what the official word inside NBC News is claiming is the reason. CNN suggests people inside NBC aren’t buying it.”
EYE IN THE SKY: Six Chinese Ships Covertly Aided North Korea. The U.S. Was Watching.
The effort identified the ships by name and tracked their movements. The ships either entered ports in North Korea and transported what U.S. officials concluded was illicit cargo to Russia and Vietnam or made ship-to-ship transfers at sea.
According to the U.S., which presented the information to a U.N. sanctions committee, the ships also made extensive maneuvers designed to disguise their violations of the U.N. sanctions. In August, the U.N. banned North Korean exports of coal, iron ore, lead and seafood, which have generated an estimated $1 billion a year in hard currency for North Korea.
A review by The Wall Street Journal of corporate records and shipping databases shows that the six vessels identified by the U.S. are owned or managed by Chinese companies or firms that are registered in Hong Kong and have shareholders who are Chinese nationals and have used addresses in mainland China.
In December, the U.S. asked the sanctions committee to formally designate the six ships as sanctions violators. China resisted that request but allowed four other vessels with no apparent links to Chinese companies to be blacklisted. The names of the four blacklisted ships were announced by the U.N., but the other six weren’t.
Let’s name names. And if China is so determined to kill nuclear non-proliferation in East Asia, perhaps it’s time we encouraged South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan to deploy nukes of their own.
Strictly for self-protection from local tyrants, of course, whom we do not have to name.
BETSY DEVOS: Common Core is dead.
WHAT COULD GO WRONG? Fallen out of love with your roommate? Find your next one Tinder-style.
THREE OF AMAZON’S TOP 20 SITES FOR ITS NEW HEADQUARTERS ARE IN OR AROUND WASHINGTON, DC and Michael Walsh has a theory why.
BLUE STATE BLUES: New Englanders Have Only Themselves to Blame for Energy Price Spikes.
Both prices and demand for domestic natural gas have surged as people have started plugging in their space heaters. Gas consumption set a new record for daily use on January 1, surpassing the previous record set in January 2014 in the midst of the “Polar Vortex.” Energy prices in most of the country increased 20–30 percent to account for the strong demand before quickly returning to previous levels. But in parts of New England prices spiked more than 400 percent.
Why? New England — including Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island — is the only part of the country that has constrained supplies of natural gas. This constraint is largely self-induced by “above-ground” political issues. Local and state opposition have blocked a number of natural gas pipelines in recent years, with the result that the region hasn’t benefited from the gas production growth in the Marcellus shale formation in nearby Pennsylvania.
Unexpectedly.
NEWS YOU CAN USE? Al-Qaeda Bomb Instructions are a Free Download at Barnes & Noble.
This report is from Bridget Johnson, whose unexplained and unacknowledged Twitter banishment remains unexplained and unacknowledged by Twitter management.
AN INCONVENIENT STUDY: New Study Just Threw Cold Water On Worst-Case Global Warming Scenarios.
ALL THESE MOONS ARE YOURS: NASA’s Cassini spacecraft found a remarkable similarity between Earth and Saturn’s moon Titan.
SHOCKINGLY, NONE OF THEM ARE IMPRISONED IN TRUMP’S AMERIKKKA: In a time of ‘Fake News Awards,’ here are 11 real, imprisoned journalists.
BUGS: Google Chrome extensions with 500,000 downloads found to be malicious. “Google removes four extensions that used infected computers in click fraud scheme.”
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