Venezuelan Socialism Out-Grinches Itself

December 26th, 2016

The ongoing failure of socialism in Venezuela is one of those continuing stories that always threaten to turn post-worthy. This week’s Christmas season hook: the government’s Grinch-like seizure of toys:

Caracas, Venezuela (CNN)Venezuelan officials have confiscated nearly 4 million toys from a toy distributor, accusing the company of planning to sell them at inflated prices during the Christmas season.

On Saturday, the government initially said it had confiscated 4.8 million toys. It revised the figure Sunday, putting it at 3.821 million.

Critics say the consumer protection agency, which targeted the toy warehouse this week, has become “the Grinch that stole Christmas” because many families won’t be able to buy the confiscated toys for the holiday.

Agency head William Contreras disputed that, saying executives at toy distributor Kreisel-Venezuela, the largest of its kind in the country, “don’t care about our children’s right to have a merry Christmas.”

Lack of toys are not the biggest problem for children in Venezuela. Thanks to the Magic Power of Socialism™, a child’s scrapped knee can mean death. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

Last month’s death of Cuba’s communist dictator Fidel Castro shouldn’t eclipse the ongoing collapse of Venezuela, Latin America’s other failed socialist state:

Except for Nicaragua in the 1980s, Venezuela has more wholly adopted Castro’s economic and ideological model than any other Latin American nation. The late Hugo Chávez took his cues from Castro on everything from his fondness for army fatigues to his 10-hour speeches. Chávez also adopted the Castro model of seizing private property, suppressing the independent media, hounding political opponents and making cause with rogues in Damascus and Tehran.

For a while Venezuela escaped some of the inevitable consequences thanks to a flood of petrodollars. That’s over. Inflation is forecast to reach 1,640% next year. Caracas is the world’s most violent city. Hospitals have run out of basic medicines, including antibiotics, leading to skyrocketing infant mortality. There are chronic and severe shortages of electricity, food and water, as well as ordinary consumer goods like diapers or beer. Nicolás Maduro, Chávez’s handpicked successor, has put his leading political opponents in jail.

And there’s hunger. An estimated 120,000 Venezuelans flooded into neighboring Colombia to buy food when Mr. Maduro briefly opened the border in July. Desperate Venezuelans are trekking through the Amazon hinterlands to make it to Brazil. And, like Cubans, they are taking to boats, risking their lives to make it to the nearby Dutch colony of Curaçao. Where there’s socialism there are boat people.

Zero Hedge has been keeping track of the twists and turns of Venezuela’s ongoing hyperinflation:

  • First Maduro’s idiot socialist government threw in the towel and announced they were printing currency with denominations 200x larger than the previous currency.
  • The results were swift: The bolivar crashed 22% in one week.
  • Then, following the moronic lead of Narendra Modi’s India, Venezuela announced that they were pulling 100 boliver notes from circulation, ahead of larger bills being available.
  • Then they closed the borders to prevent “currency smuggling.”
  • And yet, despite all this, despite children starving to death in the street, opposition parties cannot get their act together to oppose Maduro’s socialists. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)

    As long as the government keeps failed socialist policies and printing money, the economic nightmare plaguing the people of Venezuela will continue.

    A Quarter-Century Ago Today: The Collapse of the Soviet Union

    December 25th, 2016

    Legal Insurrection reminds of an event that the entire world has to be thankful for: The collapse of the Soviet Union.

    Merry Christmas, everyone!

    Just How Badly Democrats Have Done Under Obama

    December 24th, 2016

    You’ve read examples of this piece before, but Deroy Murdock offers up a particularly tasty example of the genre:

    As Obama concludes his reign of error, his party is smaller, weaker, and more rickety than it has been since at least the 1940s. Behold the tremendous power that Democrats have frittered away — from January 2009 through the aftermath of Election Day 2016 — thanks to Obama and his ideas:

    Democrats surrendered the White House to political neophyte Donald J. Trump.

    U.S. Senate seats slipped from 55 to 46, down 16 percent.

    U.S. House seats slid from 256 to 194, down 24 percent.

    Democrats ran the U.S. Senate and House in 2009. Next year, they will control neither.

    Governorships fell from 28 to 16, down 43 percent.

    State legislatures (both chambers) plunged from 27 to 14, down 48 percent.

    Trifectas (states with Democratic governors and both legislative chambers) cratered from 17 to 6, down 65 percent.

    Since Franklin Delano Roosevelt, eight U.S. presidents have served at least two terms or bowed to their vice-presidents due to death or resignation. Among them, Obama ranks eighth in total state legislative seats that his party preserved during his tenure. Obama has supervised the net loss of 959 such Democratic positions, down 23.5 percent, according to Ballotpedia, which generated most of the data cited here. This far outpaces the 843 net seats that Republicans yielded under President Dwight David Eisenhower.

    By this measure, Ronald Reagan is No. 1. While he was president, Republicans gained six statehouse seats.

    In terms of boosting his party’s state-level strength, Obama is the worst president since World War II. Reagan is the best.

    For even more shocking proof of Obama’s political toxicity across his entire tenure, compare the Democrats’ eight-year net loss of 959 statehouse seats (one post higher than in the graph above, thanks to a subsequently called race) with the Republicans’ net gain of 934 seats. Democrats can chant the soothing lie that this wholesale, multi-level rejection of their party stems from “structural racism,” the legacy of Jim Crow, the immortal tentacles of slavery, or whatever other analgesic excuse they can scrounge up. The same nation that they claim cannot outgrow its bigotry somehow elected and then reelected Obama, quite comfortably. Hillary Clinton is many things, but she is not black. “Racism” does not explain her defeat.

    This deep-rooted repudiation is not of Obama himself, but of Obamaism, today’s Democratic gospel.

    At home, Obamaism features economic stagnation, morbidly obese and equally dysfunctional government, racial and identity fetishism, and rampant political correctness. Overseas: Shame at American preeminence fuels flaccid “leadership from behind.”

    All told, 1,043 federal and state-level Democrats lost or were denied power under Obama, largely because Americans grew disgusted by such outrages as a non-stimulating $831 billion “stimulus,” eight consecutive years of economic growth below 3 percent, an 88 percent increase in the national debt, the revocation of America’s triple-A bond rating, and Obamacare’s epic flop ($2.3 trillion to finance widespread insurance-policy cancellations, 20 bankruptcies among 24 state co-ops, early retirements for experienced but exasperated doctors, and much more). Also nauseating: federal nano-management of everything from dishwashers to third-grade lunches to a national school-shower policy.

    Read the whole thing.

    LinkSwarm for December 23, 2016

    December 23rd, 2016

    I hope everyone has plans for the Christmas weekend, even if they’re only “eat as much food and watch as much football as humanly possible.”

    Enjoy a Friday LinkSwarm:

  • Suspect in Berlin jihad truck attack shot dead. I was going to do one of my increasingly irregular jihad updates, but Stuff and Things got in the way.
  • One possible benefit of a Trump presidency: a restoration of federalism:

    America owes President Barack Obama an enormous debt of gratitude for showing how truly dangerous the federal government can be when our Constitution’s checks and balances start failing. With the active collusion of congressional Democrats, President Obama’s presidency has been one long series of body blows to the separation of powers that has protected our democracy since the Founding.

    The results have been stark. Never has a president trampled so much on the prerogatives of Congress. Obama’s executive orders, suspending parts of our immigration laws and even his own prized Obamacare, have been sheer usurpations, going far beyond even the breathtaking delegations of legislative authority granted by the brief Democratic supermajority in Congress in 2009–10.

    Sad to say, Obama’s trampling on the prerogatives of state governments has been even more unprecedented, and potentially far more damaging. His agencies’ “Dear Colleague” letters, addressing such sensitive issues as local school districts’ bathroom policies and the standards by which institutions of higher education review claims of sexual assault, have wrested away the core functions of state leaders, local boards, and even administrators.

    The separation of state and federal authority is one of the most essential principles of our Constitution. It explains the Constitution’s structural allocation of powers as much as the division between legislative, executive, and judicial functions. If we lose the separate and independent existence of state governments, we will lose our Constitution.

    And Wisconsin governor Scott Walker is walking point on the issue.

  • Trump’s election marks the overthrow of the media: “This election didn’t merely expose the failure of six months of campaigning by the Democratic Party. This election exposed the failure of SIX DECADES of leftist propaganda to have any cumulative effect at all.”
  • Ten ways Obama broke the American system. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • “Outside California, Trump outdistanced Hillary by 1.41 million votes, 47.8% to 46.6%. As I have noted before, Hillary’s support was so geographically narrow that she won a popular vote majority in only 13 states (plus DC), the fewest of any major-party candidate since Bob Dole.”
  • Remember how Minnesota congressman Keith Ellison looked like a shoe-in for DNC head after Howard Dean withdraw from the race? Yeah, not so much. Although some of the dirt (like his ties to Louis Farrakhan) are decades old, there’s enough of it that lots of Democrats are getting cold feet about his candidacy:

    Despite the support of the first couple of populist progressivism — Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders — the controversy has emboldened the opposition: Last week, Labor Secretary Tom Perez, a buddy of President Barack Obama (who called him “wicked smart” last week), jumped into the race. The effort to boost Perez, paradoxically and to Ellison’s irritation, is led by operatives allied with the country’s first black president, who view the Minnesotan as too tied to the identity politics they think cost Hillary Clinton the election.

    “We like Keith,” one longtime Obama political ally, who was pushing Perez, told me in November. “But is he really the guy we need right now when we are trying to get all of those disaffected white working-class people to rally around our message of economic equality?”

  • Texas officially removes Planned Parenthood from Medicaid.
  • “Feminism Is a Synonym for ‘Shut Up.’

    A major goal of feminism is to silence opposition. Because their ideology cannot withstand informed and articulate criticism, feminists therefore requires a dishonest vocabulary of jargon that functions to disqualify and discredit their opponents. A man expressing disagreement with a feminist will invariably be accused of “sexism” or “misogyny,” and if he persists in his criticism, he will be accused of “harassment.” What these terms actually mean — other than as pejorative labels, deployed to smear the movement’s enemies — is seldom examined. It is quite often the case that men who ostensibly support feminism engage in abusive behavior toward women (e.g., Jian Ghomeshi), whereas men who oppose the movement are branded “misogynists” for no other reason than their willingness to state their criticism honestly and openly.

  • “New York State Employee Demands Death For Trump Supporters, Still Employed.” Bonus: Openly calling for Republican women to be raped and cheering the death of American soldiers. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • 5 Arrested After Egyptian Police Bust Staged Photo Shoot Of “Wounded Aleppo Children”.
  • Funny how “hate crime” hoaxes are the fake news the media wants to keep reporting:

    n all four cases, there were reasons for the media to doubt the stories. In all four cases, the narrative of white and/or conservative and/or Trump-supporting and/or bigoted “people of privilege” persecuted and/or harassed and/or discriminated against some variation of minority. In all four cases, the hoax was reported before confirmed and later it was revealed by law enforcement or conservative media that we had all been duped.

    Here’s the core of the problem. Mainstream media has a narrative agenda that has failed miserably. They did everything they could to hand the White House and Senate to the Democrats. In the past, that’s all that needed to happen; if the media united behind a cause, they could bend the will of the people. In the case of the 2016 election, their agenda backfired, so they now have two choices. They could learn their lessons and return to a bygone day when reporters actually reported and commentators made absolutely certain their perspectives would not be confused with news.

    Predictably, mainstream media has chosen option two. They’re doubling down. The lesson they think they learned from their mistake is that they can’t allow a sliver of doubt to creep in. They actually think they were too easy on Donald Trump. They think they didn’t push enough of their narrative on Senate races. They think they now need to promote their agenda in full force, working overtime if necessary.

  • The media lies again.
  • Baby Boomers increasingly having their Social Security garnished to cover their student loans.
  • Snow falls in the Saraha.
  • Scott Adams on cognatize blindspots and worst-case-scenarios on global warming.
  • Obama to world: (10,000 word speech all about him.) World: (Ignores him). President Elect Trump: “Hey! Don’t do that! World: “Yes, Mr. Trump.” (Hat Tip: Chuck DeVore on Twitter.)
  • Of course, the entire issue is a final attempt for Obama to stick it to Benjamin Netanyahu out of personal vindictiveness, never mind how badly it might affect U.S. and Israel foreign policy. Because Obama is a spiteful, petty little creep.
  • Know who Obama doesn’t hate? Cocaine dealers. “President Barack Obama has commuted the sentences of 657 cocaine dealers since Aug. 3, a Daily Caller analysis reveals. That represents nearly 80 percent of the commutations the president has given since August.” I’m a “legalize it, regulate it, tax it” sort of guy, but the fact that admitted cocaine user Barack Obama would commute more cocaine dealers over mere mere marijuana users or dealers is more than a little odd. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • “Snopes Co-Founder Accused Of Embezzling Company Money, Spending It On Prostitutes.” And as Fark would say, “the rest he just wasted.” Bonus: Alleged prostitute is now allegedly a Snopes staffer. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Navy decision to use PC titles reversed. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • F4-J retired from flying. From aerial target to ground target. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • This is the sort of story headline writers live for: “Pensioner pleases neighbours with his massive flashing cock.” (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • Cthuloid horror devours the Pope.
  • Merry Christmas, everyone!

    Another Black Eye for Jana Duty

    December 22nd, 2016

    One of the cases outgoing Williamson County District Attorney Jana Duty bragged about was the cold case conviction of Rex Allen Nisbett for the murder of his estranged wife. Indeed, the arrest of Nisbett is one of only three instances for which Duty’s office bothered to post a press release.

    That conviction fell apart this week:

    The state 3rd Court of Appeals has reversed the murder conviction of a man found guilty of killing his wife in 1991 in her Williamson County apartment.

    Rex Nisbett was sentenced to 42 years in prison in 2014 after a jury found him guilty of the murder of 29-year-old Vicki Lynn Nisbett. Her body hasn’t been found.

    The court’s ruling Thursday said prosecutors failed to provide sufficient evidence that Rex Nisbett killed his wife. They were in the process of getting a divorce.

    The 3rd Court of Appeals didn’t make any ruling concerning Nisbett’s innocence, said his lawyer, Keith Lauerman. He said the court simply reversed the murder conviction based on insufficient evidence.

    Lauerman said he believes Rex Nisbett is innocent and was “relieved” by the court’s ruling. He said the jury disregarded the testimony of a witness who said he had seen Vicki Lynn Nisbett alive a few days after she was “allegedly killed.”

    Rex Nisbett could be released from prison if the Williamson County district attorney’s office decides not to appeal the ruling to the Court of Criminal Appeals. The district attorney’s office has 30 days to appeal. In case of appeal, the district attorney’s office can ask a district judge to issue a warrant and have Nisbett sent back to the Williamson County Jail.

    District Attorney Jana Duty said she hadn’t decided Thursday on whether to appeal and was consulting with other district attorneys, county attorneys and the Texas District and County Attorneys Association.

    University of Texas law professor George Dix, a criminal law expert, said it was “quite rare for convictions to be reversed for insufficiency of the evidence given that we trust juries to decide whether the state has met its burden of proof.”

    Duty is out of office come January 1st, so this might be yet another mess she’ll leave to incoming Williamson County District Attorney Shawn Dick…

    How Wisconsin Went Red

    December 21st, 2016

    There’s a nice piece in the Washington Examiner by Salena Zito on how Wisconsin went from a Democratic to a Republican state:

    Eight years ago, Wisconsin Democrats were in the catbird seat; they held the Governor’s office, the majority in both chambers of the state legislature, two U.S. Senate seats, five of the state’s eight congressional seats and handed Barack Obama a rousing victory in the presidential election.

    So it’s no wonder that Wisconsin’s winning election night results for Republican president-elect Trump and U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson were a bit of a jolt to most pundits’ sensibilities; for years they have believed that Wisconsin was a deeply blue state, powered by the public sector unions, that traditionally supports Democrat candidates in a big way.

    It isn’t.

    For the past seven years, beginning with Reince Priebus taking over Wisconsin’s Republican Party in 2009, the state has been anything but trending blue.

    A quick tally shows Republican Gov. Scott Walker has won his seat three times (there was a recall election in between his two outright wins) and Republicans have twice taken the state attorney general’s office, won control of both state legislative chambers (and retained them twice) and won a bruising state Supreme Court race.

    Snip.

    While some experts have chalked up Trump’s win as part of the populist movement that has swept across the country in this cycle, that is only partly true. There is also a deep grassroots conservative movement located in this state. One with a solid infrastructure that has been slowly winning over blue-collar Democrats and independent voters who are at odds with the rigid, radicalized progressives who run the Democratic Party in Wisconsin.

    If you were following this blog back when I was covering the Wisconsin recall, you may recall how I noted that the Wisconsin left’s infantile tantrum tactics were turning off more voters than they attracted, and 2016 saw working class voters defecting to Republicans in droves across the entire Midwest.

    Read the whole thing.

    (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

    Lawrence Lessig Was Talking Out His Ass

    December 20th, 2016

    Let’s take a look at a small sideshow act to this year’s Electoral College circus: Lawrence Lessig’s Amazing Disappearing Faithless Electors.

    The Harvard professor, Creative Commons founder, and all around political gadfly boldly declared a few days before the election that “at least 20 Republican members of the Electoral College may not cast their votes for President-elect Donald Trump.”

    That’s just 18 more than the 2 that actually flipped. One wonders how Lessig arrived at his grossly inflated count, assuming it wasn’t plucked out of thin air or his nether regions.

    Indeed, Lessig spent much of the 2016 election cycle making mystifying moves and puzzling pronouncements. In August 2015, he announced he was running for the Democratic nomination for President, raised $1 million to do so, pledged that if elected, he would pass a campaign finance “reform” (including a basket of liberal activist proposals, including limiting free speech by overturning Citizens United, eliminating Gerrymandering, introducing ranked voting, etc.) and then resign. Two months later he walked back the resignation promise, and shortly after that, after being excluded from the debates and unable to obtain any traction in the race, dropped out entirely.

    So instead of Lessig, Democrats nominated Hillary Clinton, the poster child for the campaign finance abuses and conflicts of interest Lessig railed against. Indeed, Lessig himself mentioned that the Clinton Foundation was why Clinton could never make campaign finance reform central to her campaign, and said that Clinton’s big money was deadly to the cause of reform. Indeed, his criticism of Clinton’s big money ties to lobbyists goes back at least to the 2008 Presidential race. (Note: That piece criticizing Clinton is from the Wayback Machine, as Lessig appears to have scrubbed the piece from his own website.) He also noted that Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Hillary’s hand-picked head of the DNC, did everything she could to keep him out of polls and debates.

    Believe it or not, Lessig was actually enthusiastic when Donald Trump entered the race, and even talked about running on a third-party Presidential ticket with him:

    “Donald Trump is the biggest gift to the movement for reform since the Supreme Court gave us Citizens United,” Lessig told Politico.com, referring to Trump’s boasts that he’s given big sums to candidates in both parties and then called in favors as needed. “What he’s saying is absolutely correct, the absolute truth. He has pulled back the curtain.”

    “I’ll make a promise,” Lessig said in Politico’s report, after stating he would not “rule out a third-party run with Trump” should that offer be made. “If Trump said he was going to do one thing and fix this corrupted system, then go back to life as an entertainment figure, I absolutely would link up with Donald Trump.”

    In light of all that, it’s strange that Lessig would not only throw his full weight behind Hillary Clinton, the embodiment of special interest money in politics, but lie about faithless electors in a last-ditch attempt to deny Donald Trump the presidency.

    Then again, if I were to pick a locale for the most intense cases of Trump Derangement Syndrome, the Harvard University faculty lounge would probably rank near the top of the list…

    Tracking 2016 Electoral College Voting

    December 19th, 2016

    You can track the electoral college voting as it happens today here. So far there have been no faithless electors or other surprises, though one Maine elector has announced he’s voting for Bernie Sanders rather than Hillary Clinton.

    Update: Trump 170, Clinton 83, including Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, as of 12:30 PM CST. No surprises or faithless electors so far.

    Update 2: Trump 251, Clinton 118, no faithless electors in Maine. Evidently the faithless elector’s attempt to cast a vote for Bernie Sanders was ruled out of order and he voted for Clinton instead.

    Also, a Minnesota elector who refused to vote for Clinton was replaced. Likewise another one in Colorado who also refused to vote for Clinton.

    Update 3: Four faithless Washington State electors vote against Hillary Clinton. “Three of the faithless electors voted for former Secretary of State Colin Powell, with one voting for Faith Spotted Eagle.” Faith Spotted Eagle is evidently one of the Keystone pipeline protest lunatics.

    So far the only person to have lost electoral college votes in 2016 thanks to leftist shenanigans is Hillary Clinton.

    Update 4: Texas 38 electors puts Donald Trump over the top, making him the 45th president of the United States of America. More later…

    Update 5: There were two faithless Texas electors, “one for Paul Ryan and one for John Kasich.”

    Update 6: Correction: One of the faithless Texas electors voted for Ron Paul, not Paul Ryan as earlier reports had it.

    Update 7: One more faithless elector: One elector from Hawaii voted for Bernie Sanders. That puts the final vote at 304 electoral college votes for Trump, 227 for Clinton, three for Colin Powell, one for Ron Paul, one for John Kasich, one for Bernie Sanders, and one for Throat Warbler Mangrove Faith Spotted Eagle.

    Russian Ambassador to Turkey Shot Dead

    December 19th, 2016

    This could be what people call “a pretty big deal“:

    The Russian ambassador to Turkey, Andrey Karlov, has been badly wounded in an armed assault in Ankara according to Turkish press. According to CNN Turk man opened fire in the air then fired twice at the ambassador, who was shot in the back. It is reported that police is still exchanging fire with the attacker.

    The attack took place at the opening of the “Russia through Turks’ eyes” photo exhibition, Turkish NTV news channel reports, and adds that there is information that three other people are injured.

    Karlov was immediately rushed to a hospital after the assault, according to Turkish media. The ambassador is reported to be in a critical state.

    Russian Embassy in Ankara has not issued an official statement concerning the assault yet. However, soon after the news emerged, Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said that Russian Foreign Ministry would soon issue a statement. The attack comes just a day before Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu’s planned visit to Moscow for Syria talks with his Russian and Iranian counterparts.

    No word yet on who is responsible for the attack. The Islamic State’s a good candidate, but if the Turkish government announces the PKK was behind it, there’s a 99% chance it’s a false flag operation.

    Let’s hope it’s not a “Gavrilo Princip in Sarajevo” big deal…

    Update: The attacker evidently shouted “Allah Akbar” during the attack which is far more Islamic State than PKK.

    Karlov was several minutes into a speech at the embassy-sponsored photo exhibition in the capital when a man wearing a suit and tie shouted “Allahu Akbar” and fired at least eight shots, according to an AP photographer in the audience. The attacker also said some words in Russian and smashed several of the photos hung for the exhibition.

    CNN Turk reported that the gunman entered the gallery with a police ID and opened fire on the ambassador as he made a speech. CNN Turk is reporting that a brief hostage situation has ended after special forces entered the building, adding that Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu is at the scene.

    Haaretz also offers this photo of the attacker:

    More Russian looking than Middle Eastern, and a bit on the light-skinned side for a Chechen.

    Update 2: The Russian ambassador has died. Not the sort of things those cheerful, forgiving, happy-go-lucky sorts in the Kremlin are inclined to sweep under the rug…

    Update 3: “Turkish security officials identified the attacker as Mert Altıntas, who had graduated from İzmir Rüştü Ünsal Police Academy in 2014.” Also: “He said something about ‘Aleppo’ and ‘revenge’.”

    Update 4: Holy fark! Footage of the shooting:

    Update 5: Evidently assassin Mert Altıntas has himself been slain. Graphic-ish pics in Tweet that follows:

    Update 6: Turkey’s Foreign minister is flying to Moscow of Syria talks. Meanwhile, Russian capo Vladimir Putin isn’t sounding overly belligerent over the assassinations. “This murder is clearly a provocation aimed at undermining the improvement and normalization of Russian-Turkish relations, as well as undermining the peace process in Syria promoted by Russia, Turkey, Iran and other countries interested in settling the conflict in Syria.” Notably absent from Putin’s statement: the phrases “Casus belli,” “glass parking lot” and “sew the earth with salt.”

    Tanks For the Memories

    December 18th, 2016

    Reading up on The Battle of the Bulge brought research on just how quickly the Detroit Arsenal Tank Plant (where a quarter of all American tanks were built) was assembled.

    Here’s a video on how the the Detroit Arsenal Tank Plant was built. If you can look past the Chrysler rah rah tone, there’s a lot of information on how quickly it was built and what went into building it (including 51,000 tons of concrete, and 13,000,000 pounds of steel).

    Skip ahead to 13:40 to see the first tank off the assembly line drive through a house.

    Evidently they started producing sample tanks six months after groundbreaking and before the entire building was finished. There were giants in the earth in those days…

    Here’s a video of the plant producing and testing M3 Lee/Grant tanks.

    The Grant/Lee tanks were well armed and armored when deployed by the British to North Africa, but the exceptionally high silhouette and extremely limited traversal range for the main gun meant they were quickly outgunned when German Panzer IV’s with their own 75mm main guns mounted in full 360 turrets hit the battlefield, and were quickly replaced by the M4 Sherman tank for European battlefield roles. (M3s continued to be used in the Pacific theater with great success, since it was superior to any tank the Japanese fielded outside the home islands before the end of the war.)