EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW: Despite Lost Gigs, Pat Boone Has ‘No Regrets’ as Conservative in Hollywood.
Author Archive: Stephen Green
June 26, 2017
CHANGE? 58% of Democrats Say Their Party Needs New Leadership.
Related: Democrats Finally Face the Pelosi Question.
My advice? Don’t swap asses midstream!
DAVID HARSANYI: The GOP Senate Health Care Bill Isn’t Great, But It’s Better Than Obamacare.
Republicans should ask themselves what the alternative looks like. Listen, I wish Mike Lee were writing a market-based Obamacare repeal bill and that we had a president who was interested in reforming welfare, but at some point conservatives are going to have to take a page from Democrats and occasionally embrace incrementalism. Idealism is empowering and necessary. Yet pragmatism can’t always be treated as a transgression. You’re going to see the bill change — provisions in the bill might need to be altered once we get a Congressional Budget Office score and the parliamentarian vets it — but you’re not going to see a market-based iteration of reform. It’s going to have to be achieved piecemeal.
If the House couldn’t cobble together a genuine repeal, there is little chance that senators who have to go home to statewide electorates would be in a position to do so. In fact, it’s surprisingly “conservative.” For one thing, voters like parts of Obamacare—forcing coverage of preexisting conditions, for instance—that make a full repeal impossible. For another, some senators simply won’t sign on to immediate Medicaid rollbacks.
The Obamacare debate was also an intramural affair, crafted to allay the concerns of moderate Democrats, not Republicans. What Democrats correctly understood was that they were engaged in a war of attrition. Even the Affordable Care Act (ACA), until very recently the most unpopular major reform in American history, is astoundingly difficult to repeal.
So it is what it is.
Most of the complaints I’m reading from Senate Republicans have so far been about the bill’s timing (Medicaid expansion rollback) and expense (keeping the ObamaCare exchanges afloat for a while longer). There have been far fewer worries expressed about the bill’s structure. That might give McConnell the wiggle room to pass what it is, with just a few changes.
Or, as Harsanyi suggests, the whole thing might be legislative kabuki and designed to fail.
V.A. SECRETARY: Agency Should be ‘Open’ to Medical Marijuana to Help Vets.
THAT’S ENTERTAINMENT! Feds Spend $20,000 on Musical About Illegal Immigrant Lesbian.
The San Francisco Mime Troupe, a self-described socialist theater group, received the funding in the first round of grants awarded under the Trump administration. Jane Chu is the current chairman of the NEA, who was appointed by former president Barack Obama in 2014.
The musical is entitled “WALLS!” and stars a “bad hombre,” mocking a phrase used by Trump to describe criminal illegal aliens during a presidential debate.
The musical does not only address issues of immigration, but a host of other liberal and political topics.
“Using the Mime Troupe’s signature style of broad, physical theater, the work will explore immigration, gun violence, the opioid epidemic, depression, the public education system, and racial tensions, and how they relate to societal health,” according to the grant for the project. “Portions of the work will be developed through playmaking workshops in California’s Central Valley with low-income youth, inmates, and migrant workers.”
“WALLS asks the question: How can a nation of immigrants declare war on immigration? The answer: FEAR!” the San Francisco Mime Troupe states on their website.
Mimes performing in a musical?
YA THINK? Seattle’s Minimum Wage Hike May Have Gone Too Far.
In January 2016, Seattle’s minimum wage jumped from $11 an hour to $13 for large employers, the second big increase in less than a year. New research released Monday by a team of economists at the University of Washington suggests the wage hike may have come at a significant cost: The increase led to steep declines in employment for low-wage workers, and a drop in hours for those who kept their jobs. Crucially, the negative impact of lost jobs and hours more than offset the benefits of higher wages — on average, low-wage workers earned $125 per month less because of the higher wage, a small but significant decline.
$125 a month — or $1,500 a year — is not a “small” decline for someone making minimum wage.
THAT MEANS IT’S WORKING: 41% of US Counties Could Have Only One Obamacare Insurer Next Year.
PLASTICS: The Shale Revolution’s Staggering Impact in Just One Word.
That boom in drilling has expanded the output of oil and gas in the U.S. more than 57% in the past decade, lowering prices for the primary ingredients Dow Chemical Co. uses to make tiny plastic pellets. Some of the pellets are exported to Brazil, where they are reshaped into the plastic pouches filled with puréed fruits and vegetables.
Tons more will be shipping soon as Dow completes $8 billion in new and expanded U.S. petrochemical facilities mostly along the Gulf of Mexico over the next year, part of the industry’s largest transformation in a generation.
The scale of the sector’s investment is staggering: $185 billion in new U.S. petrochemical projects are in construction or planning, according to the American Chemistry Council. Last year, expenditures on chemical plants alone accounted for half of all capital investment in U.S. manufacturing, up from less than 20% in 2009, according to the Census Bureau.
Integrated oil firms including Exxon Mobil Corp. and Royal Dutch Shell PLC are racing to take advantage of the cheap byproducts of the oil and gas being unlocked by shale drilling. The companies are expanding petrochemical units that produce the materials eventually used to fashion car fenders, smartphones, shampoo bottles and other plastic stuff being bought more and more by the world’s burgeoning middle classes.
“It’s a tectonic shift in the hemispherical balance of who makes what to essentially feed the manufacturing sector,” said Dow Chief Executive Andrew Liveris, referring to the growth of production in the U.S. His company now plans to double down on its U.S. expansion with a $4 billion investment in a handful of projects over the next five years.
That feels like winning.
BYRON YORK: On Russia, a senator’s deception, and a timeline of Trump frustration.
Given all the breathless reporting of the previous months, a listener might reasonably infer that Trump was under investigation — a contention the leaders of Congress knew at the time to be false.
Some were upset at the impression Comey left. The same day Comey testified, March 20, Grassley tweeted, “FBI Dir Comey needs to be transparent + tell the public what he told me about whether he is or is not investigating @POTUS.” And what Comey told Grassley, of course, was that Trump was not under investigation.
But then the next day, March 21, Schumer, who had been briefed by Comey on March 9 that the president was not under investigation, took to the floor of the Senate. He called on lawmakers to delay the confirmation of Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch until the Russia matter was resolved. Republicans held up President Obama’s Court choice for nearly a year, Schumer said, but “are now rushing to fill the seat for a president whose campaign is under investigation by the FBI.”
Schumer appeared to be speaking carefully; he said Trump’s campaign was under investigation. But then he became much less careful with his words. “You can bet if the shoe were on the other foot and a Democratic president was under investigation by the FBI, the Republicans would be howling at the moon about filling a Supreme Court seat in such circumstances,” Schumer said.
“After all, they stopped the president who was not under investigation from filling a set with nearly a year left in his presidency,” Schumer continued. “It is unseemly to be moving forward so fast on confirming a Supreme Court Justice with a lifetime appointment while this ‘big gray cloud’ of an FBI investigation hangs over the presidency.”
Schumer’s point was entirely clear: President Trump was under investigation. Of course, Comey told Schumer less than two weeks earlier that was not the case.
York has put everything in one place, so read the whole thing.
THE CNN CRACKDOWN, HILLARY’S RUSSIA CONNECTION, AND MORE: All on Liz Sheld’s morning brief.
TOLERANCE: Professor Fired For Saying Otto Warmbier ‘Got Exactly What He Deserved’
“The University of Delaware has announced that Katherine Dettwyler, who last taught in the spring as an adjunct faculty member, will not be rehired to teach at the University in the future,” school officials said in a statement sent to The Daily Caller on Sunday.
Dettwyler made her comments on Wednesday on Facebook and in the comments section of a National Review article. At some point on Friday, she later removed or otherwise concealed the comments.
“Is it wrong of me to think that Otto Warmbier got exactly what he deserved?” the no-longer-employed professor wondered on Facebook. “He went to North Korea, for fuck’s sake, and then acted like a spoiled, naive, arrogant, US college student who had never had to face the consequences of his actions.”
The 62-year-old anthropology professor — an expert on breastfeeding (according to a now-deleted curriculum vitae) — was even more critical of Warmbier in her National Review comments.
White men deserve whatever happens to them, because justice.
HORSE, BARN DOOR? CNN changing Russia reporting procedures after retraction.
BuzzFeed obtained an email sent to CNN employees Saturday morning that stated no one at the network can publish “any content involving Russia without coming” to Rich Barbieri, the CNNMoney executive, or a CNN vice president.
Barbieri wrote, “This applied to social, video, editorial, and MoneyStream. No exceptions. I will lay out a workflow Monday.”
The story CNN published Thursday alleged a member of President Trump’s transition team had met with the chief executive of a Russian investment firm worth $10 billion just days before the inauguration. The story had one single, unnamed source and claimed the Senate Intelligence Committee was looking into the meeting.
The story was retracted and deleted on Friday and there’s an internal investigation going on that reaches up to the highest parts of the company, according to the BuzzFeed report.
Who is this source CNN fell over itself to believe?
CHUTZPAH: North Korea claims it is ‘biggest victim’ in Otto Warmbier’s death, vows to get tough with the U.S.
“The fact that Warmbier died suddenly in less than a week just after his return to the U.S., is a mystery to us as well,” the statement continues, noting that his health indicators were “normal” at the time of release.
Warmbier died June 19, just days after being returned to the U.S. in a coma after having been detained in North Korea in early 2016 on allegations of stealing a propaganda poster. U.S. doctors noted that Warmbier had suffered extensive brain damage, but could not determine the cause. He was laid to rest on Thursday, but no autopsy was performed, due to his family’s wishes.
North Korea officials claimed the 22-year-old, who is believed to have been in a comatose state for more than a year, contracted botulism and fell into a coma after being given a sleeping bill. However, doctors have rejected such an explanation and his parents also have refuted those claims – instead vowing that their son was “brutalized and terrorized” while imprisoned.
June 24, 2017
RAHM EMANUEL: ‘I’d Rather be a Democrat Today Going Into 2018 Than a Republican’
The odds of getting shot at certainly seem lower.
MAKE ARMS SALES GREAT AGAIN: More Countries May Buy V-22 Osprey as Japan, US Navy Get Aircraft.
The Osprey’s development cost too much and took too long, and was derided by critics as a gold-plated techno-boondoggle. But once the kinks were worked out, nobody could get enough of them — if that seems at all familiar.
HANDS UP, DON’T… DO THAT: ACLU Sues D.C. Police Over ‘Unjustified Manual Rectal Probing’ on Inauguration Day.
Why are blue city police departments such cesspits of… that?
I’M NOT TOTALLY CONVINCED: Yes, We Still Need White House Press Briefings.
TWO PEOPLE CAN KEEP A SECRET, PROVIDED ONE OF THEM IS DEAD AND NEITHER OF THEM WERE ONLINE: Espionage suspect totally thought messages to Chinese intel were deleted.
On June 22, Kevin Patrick Mallory was brought before a US federal judge for his first hearing on charges that he sold highly classified documents to a Chinese intelligence agent. These documents, which are considered “National Defense Information,” included at least one Top Secret document and three classified as Secret and were found on a phone Mallory had been provided by his Chinese contacts. Mallory, a 60-year-old former Central Intelligence Agency employee living in Leesburg, Virginia, had thought the documents were in messages that had been deleted automatically from the device. Mallory faces life in prison if convicted.
The country’s in the very best of hands.
BECAUSE HANGING WAS TOO GOOD FOR HIM? Scammer who made 96 million robocalls should pay $120M fine, FCC says.
WHAT A WASTE: California Mosque Suffers Bacon Hate Crime, Perp Gets Stiff Sentence.
Bacon is love.