STEVE SCALISE IS BACK IN ICU, CNN IS BACK TO PLAYING THE VICTIM CARD, AND SOUTH PARK IS GOING BACK TO ITS ROOTS: All that and more in Liz Sheld’s morning brief.
Author Archive: Stephen Green
July 6, 2017
U.S. GENERAL WARNS NORTH KOREA: ‘Self-restraint’ only thing keeping us from war.
This might be a good time for President Trump to play to his loose cannon reputation — a milder version of Frank Fleming’s “Nuke the Moon” strategy.
UPDATE: Never mind?
HMM: Tesla Sales Fall Flat, Clouding Outlook for Musk’s Bold Targets.
The maker of Model S sedans and Model X sport utility vehicles has reported quarter-by-quarter shipment declines for the second time in the past year. In addition to stoking fear about whether demand has peaked, these figures cast doubt on whether Musk can pull off a steep production ramp for his most ambitious offering yet, the cheaper Model 3 sedan.
“Tesla’s Q2 production and deliveries report raised more questions than answers, particularly about Model S and X demand,” Toni Sacconaghi, a Sanford C. Bernstein analyst, wrote in a report Wednesday. “The Tesla investment thesis hinges on the success of Model 3, and the ability for the company to ramp production, make the car profitably and deliver good initial build quality.”
Musk blamed the flat quarter not on weak demand, but on battery supply issues. But Tesla can’t afford supply issues on their most critical component at boutique volumes if they’re going to make the promised leap to mass manufacturing.
VIDEO: Paul Ryan’s Dem Challenger Says He Might Raise Taxes by $32 Trillion.
The global total of gross domestic product was about $77 trillion last year, so there’s a chance that something not too far from $32 trillion was raised in 2016 by all governments at all levels.
Clearly, the smart way to pay for expanding our domestic programs is to start taxing foreign governments.
July 5, 2017
ANALYSIS: TRUE. Hollywood Has a Bad-Movie Problem.
LOOKS LIKE SOMEBODY GOT A GOOD TALKING TO FROM HIS LAWYERS: CNN’s Cuomo Deletes Tweet Threatening Reddit User Who Posted Trump Video.
And BuzzFeed might be getting into another kind of hot water.
STEP ON THE GAS: Volvo is first major carmaker to forgo traditional engines.
LAYERS OF EDITORS AND FACT-CHECKERS: I just caught the Least Trusted Name in News in another sloppy, Google-induced error.
RETAIL BLUES: I Am a Millennial Who Just Went to Kmart for the First Time Ever and Couldn’t Believe This Place.
Most of the report is a clickthru set of ever-more-depressing photos from her journey through a K-Mart, but the real story of K-Mart’s (and parent Sears’) woes might be that Millennials won’t go in one unless their job requires it.
TOP HOUSE ARMED SERVICES COMMITTEE DEMOCRAT: Russia, China ‘Spectacularly Disingenuous’ on North Korea.
Armed Services Committee Ranking Member Adam Smith (D-Wash.) doubted that Tillerson’s vow would put pressure on North Korea.
“If there is an idea floating around out there for how we can remove that threat, I’m open to it. But we have been circling around this discussion of what we want China to do and what we want sanctions to do and all these other different pieces,” Smith said. “The bottom line is, what we need against North Korea, we need to put the best economic sanctions we can. I think it’s perfectly appropriate for the secretary of state to try to put pressure on other nations to do the same. But the most important thing we need is a credible military deterrent, so that whatever North Korea does in terms of building a missile, they know that if they act against South Korea or against Japan or against us, we will obliterate them.”
“That’s why THAAD [missile defense system] is important. That is why our alliance with South Korea and Japan is important, to have that credible military force, because what’s been proven — and all of the options have been discussed with your previous guests — is that North Korea is going to do it. They want to build nuclear weapons. They want to develop an intercontinental ballistic missile. And short of an all-out war on the Korean Peninsula, we don’t really have an option for stopping them.”
China and Russia issued a joint statement calling Pyongyang’s ICBM test “unacceptable.”
Of the two, China could, if they so desired, apply enough pressure to rein in Li’l Kim’s nuclear ambitions.
If they so desired.
I HATE TO PILE ON, BUT THIS REALLY IS CNN:
For what it’s worth, a quick look at Stelter’s Twitter timeline shows he hasn’t publicly engaged much at all today, which seems wise.
THE HILL: Cruz plan could be key to unlocking healthcare votes.
The Texas Republican is pushing for a provision that would allow insurers to sell plans that do not comply with ObamaCare insurance regulations, so long as they also sell plans that comply with those rules. Cruz says giving insurers a path around the regulations should allow them to offer some plans at a lower cost.
It’s unclear whether the amendment will be added to the Senate bill, known as the Better Care Reconciliation Act, or even whether it will pass muster under budgetary rules.
But the amendment could be the key to ensuring that the legislation passes both the House and the Senate.
House Freedom Caucus Chairman Mark Meadows (R-N.C.) indicated he could support the Senate bill if the Cruz amendment is included. That’s different from a little more than a week ago, when Meadows said the Senate’s legislation lacked enough conservative support to pass the House.
“If the Cruz consumer choice amendment gets there, yes I can support it without the MacArthur amendment in there because I think it gives everybody some options,” Meadows told reporters late last week.
It’s a radical idea, allowing insurers to sell plans that people want to buy — but it just might work!
CLAUDIA ROSETT: North Korea’s Fireworks.
Enough, already. There is no safe way to end the North Korean menace, but the threats from Kim Jong Un’s regime are amplifying at a clip that suggests it is even more dangerous to allow the Kim regime to carry on. While the world has watched, for years — and while the United Nations Security Council has passed one sanctions resolution after another — North Korea has not only been carrying out ballistic missile and nuclear tests, but enriching uranium and reprocessing plutonium to amass ever more bomb fuel. As the Journal editorial also notes, North Korea by now “has an estimated 20 nuclear warheads as well as chemical and biological weapons.”
The threat is not solely that North Korea — well versed in shakedown rackets — could target the U.S. with nuclear-tipped ICBMs, or that North Korea can add nuclear weapons to the massive arsenal with which it has long threatened Seoul.
A further danger is that North Korea could proliferate its advancing nuclear missile technology, or even the weapons themselves, to other rogue states, such as Iran — with which Pyongyang has trafficked and cooperated for decades in missile development, and according to some press accounts (please see my discussion of reporting by Douglas Frantz), in nuclear weapons development as well.
Enough, already, indeed.
MORE THAN A NAME CHANGE: Bring Back the Carrier Battle Group.
Why? Because the strike group is a concept designed for safe seas, where U.S. Navy forces can venture close to land with little fear of encountering opposition. Such hospitable surroundings prevailed for ten, maybe fifteen years after the Soviet Union’s fall in 1991. No more. The world’s oceans and seas are less and less hospitable by the day, as “peer competitors” build up imposing navies and back them with shore-based missiles and aircraft. As its moniker implies, the battle group is a concept fitting for the embattled age now taking form. And martial sages—the Niccolò Machiavellis and John Boyds of the world—remind us how crucial it is to keep pace with changing times.
Fail to keep up, and you court defeat and disaster.
Think about what a carrier strike group is, and does. Relative to brawny Cold War battle groups, it’s a lean, lightly defended force that operates from waterways where antagonists pose a nuisance at best. Fewer escorts accompany it. The carrier air wing, or aircraft complement, falls far short of the flattop’s carrying capacity. Nowadays the air wing numbers about sixty warplanes, while the ship’s flight and hangar decks, maintenance shops and other infrastructure can accommodate over eighty. Fewer warbirds and escort ships, less firepower. Less firepower, less capacity to duel a peer fleet for mastery of the waves.
The Carrier Strike Group also signals a lack of serious commitment to freedom of the seas, which only further encourages bad actors.
LATE-STAGE SOCIALISM: Pro-Maduro groups burst into Venezuela congress.
Rowdy groups of government supporters burst into Venezuela’s opposition-controlled National Assembly on Wednesday, injuring several lawmakers and journalists, witnesses said.
The fracas came after an assembly session to mark Independence Day at the building in downtown Caracas. Various small explosions were heard, possibly from fireworks thrown into the legislative compound, witnesses said.
Television images from the scene showed two opposition lawmakers with blood running down their faces.
This is the same opposition-held Congress which President Maduro has been trying to shut down or constitutionally circumvent.
SNL’S CHE: Trump’s Right, Media Make Sh** Up.
THIS IS NOT THE 21ST CENTURY I WAS PROMISED: Smartphones blamed for spreading HEAD LICE among children.
THE CAN HAS RUN OUT OF ROAD: U.S. Calls Emergency Meeting of UN Security Council Over NorK ICBM.
SALENA ZITO: Don’t Remove History’s Lessons.
Not all of America’s original Colonists supported independence when the document was adopted here; Pennsylvania’s own John Dickinson refused to sign. “I had rather forfeit popularity forever, than vote away the blood and happiness of my countrymen,” he declared.
Nonetheless, he soon joined the Continental Army to fight the British.
William Franklin, Benjamin’s son and New Jersey’s governor in 1776, remained a loyalist to the British crown; the tension of differing political views created a rift between father and son that never healed.
Support for the ideals of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness shared by two of the signers — John Adams of Massachusetts, Thomas Jefferson of Virginia — in time led to deep division between the two men over how to achieve those ideals; it escalated to the point, as politics often does, of turning them into bitter adversaries.
When they challenged each other for the presidency, the campaign was vicious and personal and would make today’s politicians blush. Not until old age did they reconcile through correspondence.
On his deathbed on July 4, 1826, 50 years after he pushed Jefferson to draft the Declaration of Independence, Adams’ reported last words were: “Thomas Jefferson survives.”
He was wrong: The Virginian, 82, former president and patriot, died five hours earlier at his beloved Monticello.
We all have differences. Most of us have the capacity to forgive when those differences get heated.
Yet none of us should forget the history — all of it — that made us who we are in this country.
Indeed.
MICHELLE CRETELLA: I’m a Pediatrician. How Transgender Ideology Has Infiltrated My Field and Produced Large-Scale Child Abuse.
Two leading pediatric associations—the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Pediatric Endocrine Society—have followed in lockstep, endorsing the transition affirmation approach even as the latter organization concedes within its own guidelines that the transition-affirming protocol is based on low evidence.
They even admit that the only strong evidence regarding this approach is its potential health risks to children.
The transition-affirming view holds that children who “consistently and persistently insist” that they are not the gender associated with their biological sex are innately transgender.
(The fact that in normal life and in psychiatry, anyone who “consistently and persistently insists” on anything else contrary to physical reality is considered either confused or delusional is conveniently ignored.)
The transition-affirming protocol tells parents to treat their children as the gender they desire, and to place them on puberty blockers around age 11 or 12 if they are gender dysphoric.
If by age 16, the children still insist that they are trapped in the wrong body, they are placed on cross-sex hormones, and biological girls may obtain a double mastectomy.
I don’t know what to call this, other than surgical child abuse.
SAYING WHAT EVERYONE ELSE IS THINKING: After North Korea missile test, Trump tweets: ‘So much for China working with us.’
UPDATE: A Year Later, Oregon’s Foster Care System Is Still a Horror Show.
The new data cover a period from November 18 through June 1, and were compiled by a University of Oregon law student. What the data reveal for this time period is:
•More than 130 foster children were housed in hotel rooms or office buildings
•Foster children lodged in such temporary housing are often supervised by unlicensed volunteer caretakers
•One 5-year-old stayed in a hotel for 55 days
•Many of the children in such temporary housing were 5 or younger
•One girl tried to throw herself out of a hotel window; another boy locked himself in the hotel room away from caretakers
•The average stay in temporary housing was 20 days
•The longest stays ranged from 48 to 85 days
This is the latest in a series of devastating examinations of the broken foster care system in Oregon.
Read the whole thing — which in these cases seems less like foster care and more like child abuse.
SCENES FROM RAHM EMANUEL’S CHICAGO: 6 Killed, 53 Wounded In Fourth Of July Weekend Shootings In Chicago.
At least 59 people were shot across Chicago, six of them fatally, by Tuesday morning of the Fourth of July weekend.
Last year’s Independence Day weekend ended with 66 people shot — a total that actually stoked cautious optimism with the lowest death toll for the July 4 weekend in nearly a decade.
On Saturday, Chicago Police touted a 14 percent decline in shootings this year compared to the first six months of 2016, and they hoped to tamp down the holiday weekend violence with the help of a new gun violence strike force that includes ATF agents.
At least 1,799 people have been shot in the city this year, 314 of them fatally, according to data maintained by the Chicago Sun-Times.
Progress, I suppose.