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NOVEMBER 29,  2018

SHORT TAKES ON THE DRIFTING WRECKAGE – AT 11:55 P.M. ET:

WE SURE NEED THIS – FROM BREITBART:  During a Q&A hosted by the Washington Post, House Speaker Paul Ryan positioned Mitt Romney as John McCain’s moral successor.  In one of the last interviews Ryan will have given as House Speaker, he praised his long-time friend, former running mate, and Utah senator-elect. “It’s great that he’s coming,” Ryan said. “Mitt believes there’s a role for him … as a standard-bearer for our party.”  McCain was a maverick GOP element in public perception, often resisting his own party’s majority stance on key issues as a matter of principle. Before his death, McCain famously voted against the repeal-and-replace Republican health care bill that would have crippled Obamacare, drawing Trump’s ire.  The animosity between the two culminated in Trump being asked not to attend McCain’s funeral after he died of brain cancer, apparently in alignment with the late senator’s wishes. Romney is a similarly resistant conservative figure, most recently calling out President Donald Trump for his skirmishes with the “fake news” media.  I would not be shocked if Romney challenges Trump for the 2020 nomination.  Why wouldn't he?  He doesn't want to be in the Senate.  He wants the top job, and in 2020 he'll be 73.  Probably his last chance.

CHILLING – FROM DAILY CALLER:   Google employees debated whether to bury conservative media outlets in search results as a response to President Donald Trump’s election in 2016, internal Google communications obtained by The Daily Caller News Foundation reveal.  The Daily Caller and Breitbart were specifically singled out as outlets to potentially bury in search results, the communications reveal.  Trump’s election in 2016 shocked many Google employees, who had been counting on Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton to win.  Communications obtained by The DCNF show that internal Google discussions went beyond expressing remorse over Clinton’s loss to actually discussing ways Google could prevent Trump from winning again.  The idea of manipulating searches goes far beyond any legitimate concept of freedom of the press.  It's the kind of thing that must be stopped, and I'm sure there are Constitutional ways to stop it.

A PARTY OF CHILDREN – FROM CNBC:  Rep. Beto O'Rourke, who became a hero within the Democratic Party while losing a surprisingly tight race against Texas GOP Sen. Ted Cruz, has already been invited to New Hampshire to speak with voters and meet experienced political operators in the key primary state, CNBC has learned.  Since O'Rourke's loss earlier this month, Rob Friedlander, a senior advisor to the Texas Democrat's campaign, has received calls from the New Hampshire Young Democrats requesting that O'Rourke come to the Granite State, according to people familiar with the matter. The goal would be to have O'Rourke tour parts of the state and interact with voters.  The New Hampshire Young Democrats "extended an invitation via email.  Well, the Dems nominated an empty suit named Obama.  Why shouldn't they nominate empty jeans named O'Rourke?

November 29, 2018       Permalink

A FINE MESS – AT 11:18 P.M. ET:  Remember when General Motors was "the general"?  Stale ad agency rhetoric spoke of "saluting the general" when its stock price rose.  No company symbolized American industry more than General Motors. 

That was a while ago.  Today GM is an "old" name, far less glamorous than Apple or Microsoft, and far less sexy among car buyers than Honda or Lexus.  The general has been demoted.   I looked around the five-story garage adjoining our building a few days ago, and saw only a token number of GM vehicles.  Most of the cars were "foreign," although some were probably made in the United States.

GM recently announced major layoffs that made headlines.  IBD assesses the firm's condition:

GM: General Motors' decision to close four U.S. plants and lay off 14,700 workers, 15% of its domestic workforce, is an economic tragedy. And it might have been avoided if GM had listened to the market, rather than the Obama administration.

During and after the financial crisis, GM decided to do the government's bidding in exchange for billions in subsidies. At one point, the federal government owned more than 60% of its shares, costing it more than $50 billion. By the time it sold the shares in 2013, U.S. taxpayers had an $11.2 billion loss.

How's that working out for GM now? Not very well.

GM's CEO Mary Barra, who took over the company in early 2014, reshaped the company's offerings to please the Obama White House's leftist auto czars, as did her predecessor. Barra has bet the company's future on electric cars and other less-popular offerings, instead of what people want.

"The (GM) restructuring reflects changing North American auto markets as manufacturers continue to shift towards SUVs and trucks," Reuters noted. "In October, almost 65% of new vehicles sold in the U.S. were trucks or SUVs. That figure was about 50% cars just five years ago."

So what was GM making? Well, electric cars, for one. But even with a $7,500 subsidy, they don't sell fast enough. Why? As the joke goes, the extension cord isn't long enough. For anyone who has a long commute or wants to take a road trip, an e-car makes no sense. As such, GM's commitment to electric cars is emblematic of its recent market failures.

Worse, it's based on a kind of environmental fraud. Electric cars aren't "zero emission," as we're constantly told.

For one, building an electric car produces more CO2 than building a regular car. For another, if the car's batteries get their charge from electricity generated by a coal-fired plant, that makes an "electric car" really a coal-fired car.

And...

Lest you think we're being too harsh on GM, it's not alone. Once-dominant GE's shares have plunged nearly 60% this year. There's a common theme here: GE's long slide from grace began when Jeffrey Immelt, GE's former CEO, began spending more time at the Obama White House than running his company.

There's a lesson in this for other companies, summed up in Instapundit Glenn Reynolds' catchphrase:

"Get woke, go broke." Immelt already learned that bitter lesson; Barra is learning it now.

Sadly, GM is just another once-great American company that went wrong trying please a government master, and not the customer. We can only hope other companies will learn from GM's error.

COMMENT:   Well said.  Read the whole thing.  It's worth it.

November 29, 2018        Permalink

NASA IS BACK – AND INSPIRING AS EVER – AT 1:30 P.M. ET:    After years of being virtually ignored by an Obama administration, NASA is roaring back to its position as America's official agency of dreams.  From Fox: 

NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine says the U.S. is within 10 years of having a continuous manned presence on the moon, which will lay the groundwork for expanding space exploration to Mars.

“Right now we’re building a space station, we call it ‘Gateway,’ that’s going to be in orbit around the moon — think of it as a reusable command module where we can have human presence in orbit around the moon. From there we want reusable landers that go back and forth to the surface of the moon,” Bridenstine told Hill.TV’s Jamal Simmons and Buck Sexton on “Rising.”

“We think we can achieve this in about 10 years, the idea being prove the capability, retire the risk, prove the human physiology and then go on to Mars,” he continued.

Bridenstine joined “Rising” to detail NASA’s plans to partner with nine U.S. companies to travel to the moon, a key component of NASA’s plan to extend human space exploration.

The administrator said he hopes to drive innovation by creating a commercial marketplace called the Commercial Lunar Payload Services Program (CLIPS).

Through the CLIPS program, Bridenstine hopes to develop technology that will eventually establish a continuous Moon presence.

“At the end of the day, what we’re doing is we’re going to buy services where we’re going to have multiple companies competing on cost and innovation to deliver payloads to the surface of the moon — right now we’re just talking about scientific instruments, not large payloads, but building the capability that then feeds forward to larger landers that would include humans,” he said.

The move is part of President Trump’s Space Policy Directive, which calls for revisiting Moon exploration.

COMMENT:   I love it.  I hope I last long enough to see Nancy Pelosi sent to Mars.

November 29, 2018       Permalink 

DONALD STIFFS BORIS – READ ALL ABOUT IT – AT 12:32 P.M. ET:  President Trump has scrubbed a meeting with Russian leader Putin over Ukraine.  From Fox: 

President Trump announced he is nixing a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin at the G20 summit in Argentina on Saturday, in the wake of the seizure of Ukrainian ships and crews in the Black Sea by Russia.

"Based on the fact that the ships and sailors have not been returned to Ukraine from Russia, I have decided it would be best for all parties concerned to cancel my previously scheduled meeting in Argentina with President Vladimir Putin,” he tweeted Thursday.

“I look forward to a meaningful Summit again as soon as this situation is resolved!” he added.

Trump had told The Washington Post Tuesday that he may not meet with Putin in Buenos Aires after Russian forces fired on Ukrainian naval vessels and seized their crews as they were sailing through the Kerch Strait, near Crimea.

“I am getting a report on that tonight and that will determine what happens at the meeting,” Trump said. “I’m getting a full report on that tonight. That will be very determinative. Maybe I won’t have the meeting. Maybe I won’t even have the meeting. We’re going to see, depending on what comes out tonight.”

He later told the Post that “I don’t like that aggression.”

COMMENT:  The right move.  There will be speculation that Trump is doing this to counter some of the potentially negative developments in the Mueller adventure, but I have to take him at his word.  He's actually been pretty tough on Putin, despite Democratic claims to the contrary.

November 29,  2018     Permalink

NOVEMBER 28,  2018

SHORT TAKES ON THE DRIFTING WRECKAGE – AT 11:55 P.M. ET:

GREAT ADVANCE IN PUBLIC SAFETY – FROM COLLEGE FIX:   A university in Michigan is taking a novel approach to the threat of school shooters, outfitting its faculty with hockey pucks in order to protect against potential mass murderers armed with firearms.  The weaponized pucks at Oakland University are “a ‘last resort’ precaution to throw at any active shooters on campus,” The Detroit News reports.
According to the university’s police chief, the program stemmed from an idea raised during an active shooter training session, in which “one attendee asked what staff and students could bring to prepare themselves for a fight.”  The chief “recalled once being struck in the head with a puck and said it ’caused a fair amount of damage to me’.”  The “spur-of-the-moment” decision “had merit to it and kind of caught on,” the chief said. The faculty union at the university went on to spend $2,500 on the pucks and are distributing them to faculty members, as well as students, for free.  According to one professor, “My first reaction was: You are talking about facing an assault weapon and asking us to fight back with hockey pucks? It sounded silly. Then I went through the training session, and it all made sense. None of us want to face an armed assailant. Students will look to us for leadership in a situation like that.”  Yes, I'm sure students will look to postmodern leftist professors in a situation like that.  The fantasy world of colleges never ceases to amaze.

FASCINATING – FROM THE WASHINGTON TIMES:  White liberals present themselves as less competent when addressing minorities, while conservatives use the same vocabulary no matter what the race of their audience, according to a newly released study.  Yale and Princeton researchers found that both white Democratic presidential candidates and self-identified liberals played down their competence when speaking to minorities, using fewer words that conveyed accomplishment and more words that expressed warmth.  On the other hand, there were no significant differences in how white conservatives, including Republican presidential candidates, spoke to white versus minority audiences.  “White liberals self-present less competence to minorities than to other Whites—that is, they patronize minorities stereotyped as lower status and less competent,” according to the study’s abstract.  Cydney Dupree, Yale School of Management assistant professor of organizational behavior, said she was surprised by the findings of the study, which sought to discover how “well-intentioned whites” interact with minorities.  There it is – what we've always suspected.  Liberals patronize minorities, whereas conservatives treat minorities with dignity.  We've always known it.

RETURN OF A WARSHIP – FROM ABC NEWS:   Fifteen months after a deadly collision that killed 10 U.S. sailors, the Navy destroyer USS John McCain is floating again, leaving its dry dock and mooring pier side in Yokosuka, Japan on Tuesday.  On August 21, 2017, 10 sailors were killed when the destroyer collided with an oil tanker as it entered the busy waterway into the port of Singapore, leaving a gaping hole in the port side of the ship. The incident occurred two months after seven sailors were killed when the destroyer USS Fitzgerald collided with a container ship off the coast of Japan.  The McCain has been undergoing repairs for nearly a year with final repairs expected to be completed in late 2019, the Navy's 7th Fleet said in a press release on Tuesday. But the ship's move from dry dock to water was marked as a "major milestone" in the ongoing effort to repair and restore the destroyer.  Given the amount of time required for repair, the damage must have been enormous.  The ship, originally named for the late Senator McCain's father and grandfather, was rededicated earlier this year to include the senator.

November 28,  2018     Permalink

AN ABSOLUTE WINNER OF A STORY – YOU MEAN, MINORITIES ARE ALLOWED TO THINK FOR THEMSELVES? – AT 10:45 P.M. ET:   A shocking report from Florida.  Did a mini-revolt among African-American women cost Andrew Gillum the governorship?  It appears to be the case.  From Daily Signal:   

Conservative Republican Ron DeSantis and progressive Democrat Andrew Gillum presented voters with starkly different choices on an array of issues, none more distinctively polar than their plans for charter schools.

In short, DeSantis proposed expanding them while Gillum espoused “siphoning them off” as drains on the public school system.

That distinction—rather than the personalities and ideologies involved—may have compelled about 100,000 African-American women, the vast majority registered Democrats, to vote for DeSantis over Gillum on Nov. 6, according to William Mattox, director of the Marshall Center for Educational Options at the James Madison Institute, a Tallahassee-based conservative think tank.

According to a CNN exit poll, of the roughly 650,000 black women who voted in Florida, 18 percent chose DeSantis over Gillum—an unexpected wedge of support by “school-choice moms” that was the difference in the race, concludes Mattox in a Wall Street Journal analysis of Florida’s midterm elections.

“While 18 percent of the black female vote in Florida is equal to less than 2 percent of the total electorate, in an election decided by fewer than [32,463] votes, these 100,000 black women proved decisive,” Mattox writes.

More than 290,000 students are enrolled in the state’s 650 charter schools. In addition, about 108,000 low-income students participate in the Step Up For Students program, which grants tax-credit funded scholarships to attend private schools.

According to Mattox, most Step Up students are minorities whose mothers are registered Democrats.

COMMENT:  Obviously, Gillum was tone deaf on this issue.  He did the standard leftist thing – arguing that charter schools are an evil, when in fact minority parents love them.  If there's any issue more important than group loyalty, it's children.  Have leftist Democrats heard of children?  Do they approve?

November 28, 2018       Permalink

THERE WILL BE WIND, RAIN, FLOODS, STORMS – OR MAYBE NOT – AT 10:21 A.M. ET:  I immediately declare that I am not an expert on climate change, or global warming, or the end of the world, or any of the predictions made in government reports.  But I am surprised that even the most reckless "reports" are believed in full by the liberal flock, despite serious, informed doubts.  From IBD: 

Global Warming: A new White House report, issued just last Friday, makes alarming projections about future global warming. Not only will it cost billions and billions in lost economic output, that report says, but thousands of lives as well. Time for mass panic? Nope. Just more fake science.

The new National Climate Assessment (NCA) report, the fourth since 2000, seems to suggest a coming climate disaster, to paraphrase the film comedy "Ghost Busters," of "epic, even biblical proportions." But its forecasts and models border on the absurd. At some point, the scientific malpractice in these global warming scare reports has to end.

Some of the projections sound like something kicked around in a Hollywood brainstorming session for a science fiction thriller, and not like the results of sober scientific reasoning and balanced statistical modeling techniques. We shouldn't be surprised, however. The three reports that preceded this one were equally bad.

By the way, that's not us speaking,  but actual climate scientists. They say the latest government climate change report does a disservice to Americans by once again politicizing science and ignoring both real data and history.

The report's conclusions are so extreme as to be laughable. For one, it predicts that use of coal and other fossil fuels will destroy 10% of U.S. GDP by the end of the century. Those are nice projections, since none of those who made them will be alive to see them proven totally false.

The fact is, access to fossil fuels has been the key driver of global economic success since the industrial age began. Cheap, plentiful fossil fuels during the last 175 years led to the greatest economic surge in human history. Carbon-based fuels moved literally billions of people around the world out of lives of grinding poverty and hard physical labor and into unparalleled wealth and comfort.

And...

The entire global warming "reporting" process is so heavily politicized, it doesn't qualify as science. The group responsible for the report, the U.S. Global Change Research Program, is largely a creation of the Obama administration. Global warming true believers are its backbone. Indeed, parts of the report just released were written during the Obama years.

The point is, there are no real skeptics on board for this report and the three dating back to 2000 that preceded it. Just true believers. And the worst, least believable part of the White House report is based on research by organizations funded in part by  global warming extremists and billionaires Tom Steyer and Michael Bloomberg.

COMMENT:  Read the whole thing.  It's very well argued.  What we need is a neutral presidential commission, like the Challenger commission, to examine the entire field of climate change.  What do we know?  What don't we know?  What must we know to make sound decisions?

We should remember that millions are being made in the "climate change" industry.  We should recall President Eisenhower's warning about the impact of federal grants on scientific results.  We are being asked to spend trillions to counter the effects of "climate change," but the science is under serious question.

Don't depend on the media for solutions.  They're on board with the liberal agenda, regardless of facts.

November 28, 2018      Permalink 

AMERICAN OPTIMISM RETURING – AT 9:31 A.M. Many pollsters see the right track/wrong track survey as key to understanding where America is politically.  It measures whether Americans think the country is on the right track or wrong track, and the judgments are often tough.  From Rasmussen: 

Forty-four percent (44%) of Likely U.S. Voters think the country is heading in the right direction, according to a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey for the week ending November 21.

This week’s finding is up three points from last week and is the highest level of optimism since early September. This finding has been running in the 40s for most weeks this year after being in the mid- to upper 20s for much of 2016, President Obama's last full year in office.

COMMENT:  It's remarkable how the mainstream press keeps referring to Trump as unpopular, a label it never applied to Obama.  And yet, polling places Trump equal to or above Obama at this point in their presidencies. 

The president is actually reasonably popular.  He is on a fairly stable path to re-election.

However, there are danger signs.  I am starting to see a certain weariness, even among his supporters, over Mr. Trump's awkward statements, his unnecessary harshness, and his refusal to give detailed, thoughtful explanations for his policies.  Even Victor Davis Hanson, one of the president's strongest supports in the academic world and on the internet, has expressed frustration.  Mr. Trump has a self-destructive streak.  And his ego often overwhelms him.

So far, the president has survived his own personal faults.  But in the face of a personally attractive Democratic candidate in 2020, that may change.

Mr. Trump can start by delivering a presidential address to the nation, from the Oval Office, on the subject of immigration.  No insults.  No personal attacks.  Thoroughly presidential.  It will help him, and help his cause.

November 28,  2018     Permalink