“Say anything you want about this president – I get it, he can be vulgar, he can be crude, he can be undignified at times. I don’t care. I can’t spare this man. He fights.”
Remember the multi-million dollar corruption scandal involving UAW officials? Apparently, it was even more corrupt than previously reported. While the UAW-Chrysler National Training Center is suing both Fiat Chrysler and the union members involved, recent developments point to the money scheme being greenlit by former UAW President Dennis Williams.
As part of a plea agreement filed this week, ex-labor official Nancy Adams Johnson told investigators that Williams specifically directed union members to use funds from Detroit’s automakers, funneled through training centers, to pay for union travel, meals, entertainment, and more. If true, the accusation not only implicates the UAW of corruption at the highest level but also the potential involvement of staff from both Ford and General Motors — something the FBI is already looking into.
I believe the official industry term for something like this is a “shit show.”
Alt-right protestors call black police officers “f**king n****r” in Portland protest. Oh, wait, did I say “alt-right”? I meant “anti-ICE.” (Hat tip: Derek Hunter on Twitter.)
Retired Sgt. Maj. John Canley received a phone call from President Donald Trump telling him he was receiving the Medal of Honor for his heroism in the Battle of Hue in 1968.
Masculine fathers raise strong daughters. Plus this: “A glance at the public figures felled in the #MeToo purges—not to mention Bill Clinton —should cure us of the idea that progressive politics incline men to better treatment of women.”
“Sexual inequality makes marriage work.” Marriages work better when the husband earns more. Also: “The more traditional the division of labor, meaning the greater the husband’s share of masculine chores compared with feminine ones, the greater his wife’s reported sexual satisfaction.”
UK father who raped and fathered three children with his own daughter sentenced to only four years in jail. Guess the ethnicity of the rapist. (Hat tip: The Other McCain.)
American semiconductor company Qualcomm’s merger with Dutch company NXP collapses after regulatory approval withheld…by China. Earlier this year, Qualcomm’s attempted merger with Broadcomm was blocked by the Trump Administration.
Facebook just lost $120 billion in market cap. How about they stop worrying about censoring the news and stop switching the view from “Most Recent” to “Top Stories”?
Allegations of vote fraud in Mission mayoral runoff in Hidalgo County.
When President Donald Trump announced that he was raising tariffs in an attempt to force other countries to lower trade barriers to American goods, All The Best People scoffed. That simply wasn’t the way the trade game was played, old bean. Other countries wouldn’t lower tariffs, they’d raise them on American goods and start a trade war, plunging the world into recession.
President Trump announced during a Wednesday press conference that his meeting with European officials yielded key trade concessions, including an increase in American soybean and liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports to Europe, and a commitment to work toward eliminating non-auto tariffs entirely.
“We have agreed today to work toward zero tariffs, zero tariff barriers and zero subsidies on non-auto industrial goods,” Trump said, reciting a joint statement crafted with European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker. “We will also work to reduce barriers and increase trade in services, chemicals, pharmaceuticals, medical products, as well as soybeans. The European Union is going to start almost immediately to but a lot of soybeans, they’re a tremendous market, to buy a lot of soybeans from our famers in the midwest primarily.”
“The European Union wants to import more liquefied natural gas from the United States and they’re going to be a very big buyer. We’re going to make it much easier for them but they will be massive buyers, so that they will be able to diversify their energy supply,” he added.
Trump pledged to “not go against the spirit” of ongoing negotiations, presumably by refraining from implementing further tariffs, and said he would “resolve” existing “retaliatory tariffs.”
Juncker also vowed to work toward reducing existing tariffs, which were first implemented last month in tit-for-tat fashion after the Trump administration slapped 10 and 25 percent tariffs on steel and aluminum respectively and the EU retaliated by placing tariffs on just over $3 billion in American goods. The E.U. trade chief also confirmed that he had in fact committed to importing more soy-beans and natural gas from the U.S.
The agreement comes after a series of reports Wednesday morning that indicated Trump is advocating the implementation of 25 percent tariffs on foreign-made cars, against the advice of his trade advisers. The specifics regarding auto tariffs were reportedly still being developed as Trump’s meeting with Juncker came to a close.
As always with trade agreements, the devil is in the details. If the EU does drop all the tariffs Juncker has promised, then this will be a big win for President Trump’s unorthodox negotiating style. His immediate presidential predecessors seemed to mostly leave the issue of achieving lower trade barriers to underlings negotiating multilateral agreements like TPP or GATT. President Trump is the first to pursue a policy of personally negotiating from strength to lower trade barriers to American commerce. This was a risky strategy that most (myself included) believed would not work. But right now it appears to be working.
There’s no doubt that if President Trump’s trade strategy does work, those decrying it now will still sniff at Trump “winning the wrong way” by “alienating allies…”
In dissecting a Washington Post piece ostensibly on why people like President Donald Trump, but actually yet another “how dare those flyover country rubes pick that jackass Trump over our obviously superior magnificence?” piece, Ann Althouse hits the nail on the head:
WaPo’s Richard Cohen seems to be asking the right question, according to the headline, “Why people like Trump.”
But very little of the column even attempts to tell us why people like Trump. Nearly all of it is about all the things that seemingly should have already made everyone loathe Trump — he said “shithole countries,” he probably committed adultery, he failed to show faith in our intelligence community— and the confounding persistence of support for Trump.
A more accurate headline would be a question, “Why do people like Trump?,” not what looks like a promise to answer that question. Elite media people like Cohen should finally come around to asking the question humbly, confessing to their abject failure even to admit that they’ve needed to ask it and rejecting their imperious concentration on telling people what they should think. Look at all these reasons to loathe Trump. Come on, you idiots, you’re embarrassing yourselves by not loathing him yet. It hasn’t worked, and yet you continue to do it.
Cohen has exactly one sentence that tries to say why people like Trump, and it’s incredibly weak:
My guess is that it’s a low-boil rage against a vague and threatening liberalism — urbane, educated, affluent, secular, diverse and sexually tolerant.
Yes, yes, I know. You’re so sure you and your friends are the good people. Your unshakeable love for yourself and your friends is glaringly evident, as usual.
Our ruling elites seem unable to come to grips not only with President Trump pantsing them at every turn, but that their own smug sense of superiority and entitlement is what led to his rise in the first place. They don’t do “humble.”
Their smug sense of superiority shines through in every imperious announcement and self-satisfied Facebook post. That smug is the reason ordinary Americans love watching President Trump humiliate the media. What I said a year ago still applies:
While Trump does many things with his tweets, the latest controversy displays his masterful exploitation of the vast gulf between the borderline delusional self-regard of the media in general (and CNN in specific) and the public’s low opinion of same. It’s like watching Groucho Marx humiliate Margaret Dumont every morning. Normal people are laughing their asses off, while other stuffed shirt media pundits are aghast. “How dare he keep insulting that old rich lady!”
And here it is, a year and half or later, CNN is still declaring “Well, I never!” and wondering why everyone is laughing at them. Trump’s attacks are effective because average Americans hate the news media more, and trust them less, than they do Trump. And they feel that way because of the CNN and the media’s own self-inflicted wounds, and for obvious left-wing bias visible to pretty much any non-liberal observer.
The media keeps falling into Trump’s Twitter traps because their delusional self-love keeps leading them straight in. “Why surely fiend Trump’s latest attack on America’s sacred media outlets will finally rouse the populace to outrage!” Like Margaret Dumont’s characters, the media’s moral outrage never lets them realize they’re the butt of the joke.
Which, of course, always makes the joke that much funnier…
And here it is two and a half years later, and they’re still displaying the same arrogance and making the same stupid mistakes. Nothing can shake their faith in their own smug sense of superiority. And so, instead of reporting actual news, they continue to pimp Russian conspiracy theories and Stormy Daniels and wonder why we’ve tuned them out.
The same people love to conflate contempt for their biased selves into contempt for the freedom of the press and the First Amendment. This is patently false. Ordinary Americans love the First Amendment. It’s the current smug, biased, dishonest incarnation of the MSM that we hate.
Look in the mirror. We don’t hate the free press. We hate you. Personally. And our loathing for you smug pricks dates back to long before Donald Trump ever threw his hat into the ring…
What does following every far-left Democratic Party/Social Justice Warrior fad get you?
You can turn one of the wealthiest cities in the world into a literal shithole:
Warning the First: You might not want to watch that before a meal.
Warning the Second: Produced by Paul Joseph Watson of Infowars. But ignoring the goofy product flacking at the very end, there’s almost nothing in here you wouldn’t have seen covered (in somewhat less graphic form) in one of the regular Texas Vs. California updates.
Once again the “specialness” of Travis County Officials costs taxpayers money. This time it was Travis County Sheriff Sally Hernandez refusal to follow state and local immigration law that was the culprit.
Gov. Greg Abbott approved a $23 million grant to give rifle resistant vests to police departments across the state. Roughly 33,000 vests were purchased for more than 450 departments.
Travis County, however, refused to apply for the grant. Travis County Sheriff Sally Hernandez declined to apply because the Governor made it a condition that law enforcement agencies receiving state equipment cooperate in the enforcement of state and national immigration laws.
For instance, local police departments would be required to detain illegal aliens identified by federal immigration authorities for deportation. Hernandez called the requirement “arbitrary and capricious,” and sought an alternate way to fund vests for Travis County officers.
Sheriff Hernandez decided that the needs of “undocumented Democrats” outweighed free life-saving protection for her officers.
In March, the sheriff’s office approached the county commissioners court with a proposal. “The TCSO has identified one time internal resources to provide 574 vests at $500 each for a total cost of $287,000,” wrote Alan Miller, assistant budget director for the county’s planning and budget office.
Hernandez echoed that amount in her own memo. “The vest that my staff has agreed on costs approximately $500 each, including carrier, plates, ID panel, and pouches… at this price, the overall cost to Travis County to equip all appropriate TCSO staff and including the number of vests requested by other county departments during grant preparations will total about $287,000.”
Texas Scorecard requested records related to the purchase and discovered the sheriff’s office spent almost $200,000 more than what they had publicly stated. The vests turned out to cost upwards of $800 each, not the $500 that was quoted.
This story seems emblematic of the modern Democratic Party, with elected officials choosing illegal aliens over police and taxpayers…
I assume I annoyed someone and they complained, but there's no way of telling. I filled out the form to file an appeal, which I'm sure will be a speedy process. So if you were wondering, that's all I know. pic.twitter.com/uSvmlcpg63
Job interviews and book-related work have taken up the majority of my waking hours this week. Also, The Burning Time has fully arrived here in central Texas. It’s supposed to hit 108° on Monday…
There are plenty of risks with President Donald Trump’s trade strategy in China, but China faces risks of its own:
The smartest short-term decision Beijing can make is simply to absorb the next round of blows and hold its punches. For instance, if Washington moves ahead to impose 25% tariffs on $16 billion of Chinese imports, Beijing would withhold fire, in the hope of enticing Washington into a ceasefire, which in turn could create an opportunity to negotiate a face-saving way to avoid further and much more costly escalations.
The most compelling rationale behind this strategy of quick capitulation is to protect China’s centrality in the global manufacturing supply chain. About 43% of Chinese merchandise trade in 2017 (totaling $4.3 trillion) is, according to the Chinese Ministry of Commerce, “processing trade” (which involves importing intermediate goods and assembling the products in China). What China gains from processing trade is the utilization of its low-cost labor force, factories, and some technological spillover. Processing trade generates low value-added and profitability. For example, Foxconn, the Taiwanese company that assembles iPhones in China, had an operating margin of only 5.8% last year.
One of the greatest risks China faces in a prolonged trade war with the U.S. is the loss of its processing trade. Even a modest increase in American tariffs can make it uneconomical to base processing in China. Should the U.S.-China trade war escalate, many foreign companies manufacturing in China would be forced to relocate their supply chains. China could face the loss of millions of jobs, tens of thousands of shuttered factories, and a key driver of growth.
However, capitulating to a “trade bully,” as the Chinese media calls Trump, is hard for Xi, a strongman in his own right. Worse still, it is unclear what Trump wants or how China can appease him. The terms his negotiators presented to Beijing in early May were so harsh that it is inconceivable that Xi could accept them without being seen as selling out China.
Even if the trade war with the U.S. could be de-escalated with Chinese concessions, Beijing faces another painful decision. The trade war in general, and in particular the forced shutdown of the Chinese telecom equipment maker ZTE after Washington banned the company from using American-made parts have highlighted China’s strategic vulnerability from its economic interdependence with the U.S. Before the two countries became geopolitical adversaries, economic interdependence was a valuable asset for China. It could take advantage of this relationship to build up its strength while the mutual economic benefits cushioned their geopolitical conflict.
But with the overall U.S.-China relationship turning adversarial, economic interdependence is not only hard to sustain (as shown by the trade war), but also is rapidly becoming a serious strategic liability. As the economically-weaker party, China is particularly affected. In the technological arena, China now finds itself at the mercy of Washington in terms of access to vital parts (such as semiconductors) and critical technologies (operating systems such as Android and Windows). Should the U.S. decide to cut off Chinese access for whatever reason, a wide swathe of Chinese economy could face disruption.
China’s somewhat vulnerable on semiconductors, but it’s severely vulnerable on semiconductor equipment.
Democratic U.S. House candidate and socialist darling Alexandria Ocasio Cortez: “We need to occupy every airport.” Yeah. I can’t possibly see that backfiring. Sayeth Powerline’s John Hindraker:
Yes, please! Please go straight to LaGuardia and shut it down. But don’t stop there! “Every airport” needs to be occupied and shut down by Democrats. Between now and the midterm elections, Democrats should do all they can to make air travel inconvenient, and preferably impossible.
This actually happened not too long ago, in the fall of 2001. Ocasio-Cortez may be too young to remember it clearly, but all of America’s airports were closed for a few days as a result of al Qaeda’s terrorist attacks. Ocasio-Cortez is more ambitious, of course. She doesn’t just want to shut down “every airport” for a few days, she wants to make it long-term. Terrific, I say! Led by Ocasio-Cortez, the Democratic Party could be as popular as al Qaeda by November.
Congress breaks record confirming trump picks. Also, check out this from Sen. Dianna Feinstein (D-CA): Oldham’s record “could not be more extreme and overtly political.” Really? Did he order kittens to be slaughtered in his chamber so he could bath in their blood while invoking Satan? No? In that case, I’d say he his a lot of headroom on the “more extreme” front… (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
The most difficult times I faced during my years with the LAPD were during the years Bernard Parks served as its chief. Parks, in an overreaction to the Rampart scandal (which, though a genuine scandal, was confined to a handful of officers at a single police station), had disbanded the LAPD’s gang units and instituted a disciplinary system that placed a penalty on proactive police work. It was under Chief Parks that I attended a supervisors’ meeting after a week in which my patrol division had seen four murders and a wave of lesser crimes. Despite these grim statistics, not a single word at this meeting touched on the subject of crime. What did we talk about? Citizen complaints. And even at that we didn’t discuss them in terms of the corrosive effect they were having on officer morale. Instead, we talked about the processing of the paperwork and the minutia of formatting the reports. Fighting crime, it seemed, had taken a back seat to dealing with citizen complaints, even the most frivolous of which required hours and hours of a supervisor’s time to investigate and complete the required reports.
As one might have expected, officers reacted to these disincentives by practicing “drive-and-wave” policing. Yes, they responded to radio calls as ever, but it became all but impossible to coax them out of their cars to investigate suspicious activity when they came upon it. As one might also have expected, the crime numbers reflected this change in police attitudes. Violent crime, which had been falling for seven years, began to increase and continued to increase until Bernard Parks was let go and replaced by William Bratton.
Which brings us back to Baltimore, where, USA Today informs us, 342 people were murdered in 2017, bringing its murder rate to an all-time high and making it the deadliest large city in America. (Baltimore’s population last year was about 611,000. In Los Angeles, by comparison, with a population of about 3.8 million, there were 293 murders last year.)
The Baltimore crime wave can be traced, almost to the very day in April 2015, that Freddie Gray, a small-time drug dealer and petty criminal, died in police custody. When Baltimore State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby made the ill-considered decision to charge six officers in Gray’s death, she sent a clear message to the rest of the city’s police officers: concerns about crime and disorder will be subordinated to the quest for social justice.
As was the case in Los Angeles years ago, the result was entirely predictable. Officers disengaged from proactive police work, minimizing their risk of being the next cop to be seated in the defendant’s chair in some Marilyn Mosby show trial. The prevailing thought among Baltimore’s cops was something like this: They can make me come to work, they can make me handle my calls and take my reports, but they can’t make me chase the next hoodlum with a gun I come across, because if I chase him I might catch him, and if I catch him I might have to hit him or, heaven forbid, shoot him. And if that happens and Marilyn Mosby comes to the opinion that I transgressed in any way . . . well, forget it. Let the bodies fall where they may, and I’ll be happy to put up the crime-scene tape and wait for the detectives and the coroner to show up.
Andrew Cuomo fundraising tidbits. Cuomo has $31.1 million cash on hand and spent more on TV advertising ($1.5 million) than Cynthia Nixon has raised in total. Bonuses: Low-level shenanigans (one guy gave 69 donations totally $77) and Winklevoss twins!
Defeated Republican state representative Jason Villalba calls for President Trump’s impeachment. Thanks for reminding Republican primary voters, yet again, why they dumped you for Lisa Luby Ryan.
“Kicking, screaming, biting Kansas councilwoman finally taken down with Taser, arrested.” Bonus 1: She later bite a deputy’s thumb so hard she broke a bone. Bonus 2: She was elected to the Huron (population: 73) city council with a grand total of 2 votes.
According to this Gallup poll, immigration is now the top national issue, probably because Democrats took a temporary break from their Russian collusion fantasy to splash “OMG! Look at these heart-rending pictures of illegal alien children!” across the nightly news for a month.
The 22% of Americans in July who say immigration is the top problem is up from 14% in June and is the highest percentage naming that issue in Gallup’s history of asking the “most important problem” question. The previous high had been 19%.
There’s just on tiny little problem for Democrats:
The YouGov poll shows that registered votes prefer stricter immigration policies by roughly two-to-one. Forty-seven percent of the registered voters in the poll of 1,000 adults said they want stricter policies, while only 25 percent said they want less strict policies.
Seventy-three percent of GOP-identified adults want stricter policies, as do 45 percent of independents, and 19 percent of Democrats. Thirty-one percent of Hispanics want stricter policies, while 30 percent want looser policies, said the poll.
So they spent a month hyping an issue that plays directly into President Donald Trump’s hands.
Also note that there’s no guarantee that a majority of that minority of 25% believe in the most extreme open borders position of abolishing ICE.
I see no sign that their chants of “No ban. No wall. No borders at all.” have even the tiniest shred of popularity with American voters at large. Border Control is President Trump’s signature issue, one that pries far more voters from the Democrat’s coalition (blue collar works, blacks, etc.) than it does from Republicans.
If the Democrats keep letting the lunatic nutroots tail wag the rest of the party, expect them to experience the same electoral joy they enjoyed in 2010, 2014 and 2016.
Clicking on @Godfrey_Elfwick brings up the generic “Account Suspended” page. Supposedly “permanently,” though I don’t know where the poster is getting that information from:
Godfrey Elfwick, the best satirical account on Twitter, has now been suspended permanently.
