Not Learning the Lessons of Cuba

What a surprise, our policy of sanctions against Russia does not hurt Putin's political standing among Russian citizens.

If anything, it improves his political positions, because hardships can be blamed on an aggressively overbearing United States.

Seriously, this sh%$ kept the Castros in power for 60 years (and counting) in Russia, why should we expect anything different this time?

Headline of the Day

Amber Rudd stumbles toward total ineptitude over Windrush

—The Guardian

Amber Rudd is in a no win situation, of course.

This cock-up was created by her predecessor at Home Secretary, probably deliberately, but seeing as how the prior Home Secretary is one Theresa May, now Prime Minister, and as such is Rudd's boss, (for a while, at least), she is precluded from pointing at the person who created the problem in the first place.

Hopefully, this takes both Rudd and May down.

I Guess that they Don't Need to Put a Contractor in Every Congressional District Now

Because of escalating costs, the Pentagon is looking at aggressively competing the contracts for the parts suppliers for the F-35.

Early in the process, the goal was to spread work around to as many Congressional districts as possible, but now that the proram is too big to fail, they are looking for people who can actually do the work competently for a reasonable price:

The Pentagon is embarking on a comprehensive effort to examine the entire F-35 supply chain from top to bottom for opportunities to compete components and repair work, a top Defense Department official says.

The move is aimed at incentivizing suppliers to reduce cost and increase efficiencies, as the F-35 enterprise faces severe parts shortages and a skyrocketing sustainment bill (AW&ST April 9-22, p. 40).

The department’s efforts to inject competition into the supply chain comes as the F-35 program faces challenges on the production line. The rate of mistakes by suppliers or skilled workers during the manufacturing process is too high, according to F-35 Program Executive Officer Mat Winter.

………

As the government and Lockheed work to get support costs under control, competition and alternative parts sourcing could be key, Robert McMahon, assistant secretary of defense for logistics and materiel readiness, said during Aviation Week’s MRO Americas conference in Orlando, Florida, April 11. The F-35 operations and sustainment bill has been pegged at more than $1 trillion over the life of the program.

The current structure was driven by politics, not competence or efficiency, and it is a remarkably wasteful way to create jobs.

To quote Ike, "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed."

1 Part Ayn Rand, 1 Part Fredo Corleone

Tesla Model 3 production isn't just behind schedule, Tesla Model 3 production has been shut down:

Tesla Inc. is temporarily suspending production of the Model 3 sedan for at least the second time in roughly two months, just after Elon Musk admitted to mistakes that hindered his most important car.

The company informed employees that the pause will last four to five days, Buzzfeed reported. A Tesla spokesman referred back to a statement provided last month, when Bloomberg News first reported that Model 3 production was idled from Feb. 20 to 24. The carmaker said then that it planned periods of downtime at both its vehicle and battery factories to improve automation and address bottlenecks.

The hiatus is another setback for the first model Musk has tried to mass-manufacture. In addition to trying to bring electric vehicles to the mainstream, the chief executive officer had sought to build a competitive advantage over established automakers by installing more robots to quickly produce vehicles. Last week, he acknowledged “excessive” automation at Tesla was a mistake.

It's more than the lure of automation that has done the damage.

It is the fact that they hold assembly workers in contempt, and this has driven the excessive automation.

Another artifact of this disdain is the fact that it has been concealing assembly line injuries from regulators as well:

Inside Tesla’s electric car factory, giant red robots – some named for X-Men characters – heave car parts in the air, while workers wearing black toil on aluminum car bodies. Forklifts and tuggers zip by on gray-painted floors, differentiated from pedestrian walkways by another shade of gray.

There’s one color, though, that some of Tesla’s former safety experts wanted to see more of: yellow – the traditional hue of caution used to mark hazards.

Concerned about bone-crunching collisions and the lack of clearly marked pedestrian lanes at the Fremont, California, plant, the general assembly line’s then-lead safety professional went to her boss, who she said told her, “Elon does not like the color yellow.”

………

What she and some of her colleagues found, they said, was a chaotic factory floor where style and speed trumped safety. Musk’s name often was invoked to justify shortcuts and shoot down concerns, they said.

Under fire for mounting injuries, Tesla recently touted a sharp drop in its injury rate for 2017, which it says came down to meet the auto industry average of about 6.2 injuries per 100 workers.

But things are not always as they seem at Tesla. An investigation by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting found that Tesla has failed to report some of its serious injuries on legally mandated reports, making the company’s injury numbers look better than they actually are.

………

Instead, company officials labeled the injuries personal medical issues or minor incidents requiring only first aid, according to internal company records obtained by Reveal.

Undercounting injuries is one symptom of a more fundamental problem at Tesla: The company has put its manufacturing of electric cars above safety concerns, according to five former members of its environment, health and safety team who left the company last year. That, they said, has put workers unnecessarily in harm’s way.

Tesla may be the future of electric cars, but it it is, it means that the future of electric cars sounds a lot like Walmart.

Tweet of the Day

Just received my ticket for the State of the Union. Looks like @BetsyDeVosEd was in charge of spell checking... #SOTUniom pic.twitter.com/ZgFTGtTkzv

— Raul M. Grijalva (@RepRaulGrijalva) January 29, 2018

I've verified this on Snopes, it is true.

I swear, the Trump administration couldn't organize a piss-up in a brewery, but this is probably a good thing, because it makes them less effective at prosecuting their agenda.

Someone on the inside Is Sabotaging These Prosecutions

It appears that I conflated a 4 month old news story with what happened today.

No acquittal today, the charges against the Malheur terrorists was dismissed because of gross prosecutorial misconduct:

A federal judge in Las Vegas dismissed charges against Cliven Bundy and his sons, Ammon and Ryan, on Monday.

Judge Gloria M. Navarro of Federal District Court, in a ruling from the bench, said that the government’s missteps in withholding evidence against the three Bundy family members and a supporter, Ryan W. Payne, were so grave that the indictment against them would be dismissed.

The decision could be appealed by prosecutors. But they would only be able to bring charges again if they won the appeal and the ruling was reversed — and they then got a new indictment from a new grand jury.

Judge Navarro declared a mistrial last month in the case, stemming from an armed standoff at the Bundy ranch in 2014 that had arisen over land-grazing fees. She said then that prosecutors had erred in failing to turn over important evidence to the defense, including video taken surreptitiously within the ranch during the standoff, and evidence that F.B.I. agents were involved in the incident.

My original thesis stands, "Either the prosecutors are too stupid to cut their own meat, or someone on the inside was sabotaging the prosecution."

Original article after the break.


Seriously, I'm not sure how they could have could have screwed up their prosecution of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge occupiers:

A federal jury on Thursday found Ammon Bundy, his brother Ryan Bundy and five co-defendants not guilty of conspiring to prevent federal employees from doing their jobs through intimidation, threat or force during the 41-day occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge.

The Bundy brothers and occupiers Jeff Banta and David Fry also were found not guilty of having guns in a federal facility. Kenneth Medenbach was found not guilty of stealing government property, and a hung jury was declared on Ryan Bundy's charge of theft of FBI surveillance cameras.

Either the prosecutors are too stupid to cut their own meat, or someone on the inside was sabotaging the prosecution.

My money is on the latter.

You Run the Most Incompetent Campaign in History, You Change Nothing, and You Want My Money

The same incompetent people are running the same organizations, and are allowed to continue to be paid without anything even vaguely resembling adult supervision, but they are surprised when it proves difficult to convince people to throw good money after bad:

Democrats aim to win back control of Congress and build up their presence in state capitals during next year’s elections, but they begin this ambitious mission with precious little cash to finance it.

The Democratic National Committee had $6.3 million in the bank on Dec. 1, while the Republican National Committee had six times as much, at $40 million, according to documents the parties filed with the Federal Election Commission. In November, the DNC posted its worst fundraising amount for the month in a decade.

The Democratic Party’s political committees dedicated to House and Senate races show more parity with their Republican counterparts, but not enough of an advantage to outweigh the struggles of the DNC. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee ended November with $34.2 million in cash, compared with National Republican Campaign Committee’s $42.3 million, fundraising reports show.

Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, a former DNC chairman who hosted a party fundraiser at his home Dec. 14, is among the Democratic stalwarts stepping in to try to reverse the course. “I have heard a lot of donors say they need to take a break,” said Mr. McAuliffe. “The party’s job is to convince them they can’t.”

The national committee’s lackluster fundraising is at odds with a wave of enthusiasm Democrats have experienced across the country: A new Wall Street Journal/NBC poll found 50% of respondents want Democrats to lead Congress after next year’s elections and 39% said Republicans—a Democratic lead that has widened since an October poll.

Over the last election cycle, the Democratic establishment in Washington DC:

• Systematically eliminated Hillary Clintons's potential opponents in the primaries. (Not just Sanders, but O'Malley, Biden, etc.)
• Studiously ignored reports from the field.
• Strip mined the state and local parties.
• Lost to an orange haired carnival clown who was caught on tape bragging about assaulting women.
• Spent over a BILLION dollars doing all of the above.

People are not donating because they think that the current "Professionals" running the party will just waste the money on stupid sh%$.

Clean house publicly, and send the current lot back home to flip burgers, and the money will return.

Maybe They Can Expand Medicaid Now

In Virginia, a recount of a House of Delegates race has has the Democrat winning the race by one vote, which creates a 50-50 tie in that body:

The balance of power in Virginia’s legislature turned on a single vote in a recount Tuesday that flipped a seat in the House of Delegates from Republican to Democratic, leaving control of the lower chamber evenly split.

The outcome, which reverberated across Virginia, ends 17 years of GOP control of the House and forces Republicans into a rare episode of power sharing with Democrats that will refashion the political landscape in Richmond.

It was the culmination of last month’s Democratic wave that had diminished Republican power in purple Virginia.

Democrat Shelly Simonds emerged from the recount as the apparent winner in the 94th House District, seizing the seat from Republican David Yancey. A three-judge panel still must certify the results, an event scheduled for Wednesday.

Of the 23,215 votes cast in the district on Election Day, Yancey held a lead of just 10 votes going into Tuesday’s recount.

But five hours later, after a painstaking counting overseen by local elections officials and the clerk of court, Yancey’s lead narrowed — and then reversed.

The final tally: 11,608 for Simonds to 11,607 for Yancey.

………

Power sharing in the House of Delegates is an awkward exercise; the last such arrangement was in 1998. Committee chairs have to be negotiated, as does the person who will serve as speaker. With the parties split 50-50, there is no mechanism to break ties, and any legislation short of 51 votes does not advance.

Republicans hold a slight 21-to-19 edge in the state Senate, but with a Democratic lieutenant governor to break ties and a Democratic governor with veto power, Republicans may be forced to advance a more bipartisan agenda.

It’s a dramatic shift that caught even top Democrats by surprise. Republicans have controlled the 100-seat House since 2000; even outgoing Gov. Terry McAuliffe (D), a cheerleader for his party, had thought the Republican edge was insurmountable.

………

The final makeup of the legislature is not settled. Recounts in two additional races are taking place this week: on Wednesday in Richmond’s District 68, where the Democrat leads by 336 votes, and on Thursday in Fredericksburg’s District 28, where the Republican leads by 82 votes. Democrats are seeking a new election in the latter because more than 100 voters were mistakenly given ballots for the wrong legislative district.

My bad, it appears that Ralph Northam, the Governor elect, appears to be determined to kowtow to Republicans as a part of any implementation of Medicaid expansion, despite his promises on the campaign trail.

Snatching defeat from the jaws of victory since 1976: The mainstream Democratic Party.

Must Watch Video

Nomiki Konst talks about the budget process, and the role of consultants.

Rather shocking is the fact that the DNC Executive Committee had no idea what the budget was.

She notes that nearly a billion dollars went to just 5 consulting firms for what was arguably the worst performance of the DNC, and the Democratic Party, in decades.

If you look at a number of comments, people seem to dismiss the whole budget process as irrelevant to the activities of the party.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

The budget process is all about setting priorities at the most fundamental level, and what Ms. Konst observes is that the first priority of the DNC is to enrich a group of favored, and if the last few years are any indicator, incompetent consultants.

This needs to end:

Lame Major Political Party of the Day

The Democratic Party, of course, because the Republicans are not lame, they are f%$#ing terrifying and insane.

There are lamer parties out there among the small fry **cough** Prohibition Party  **cough**, but they really don't count, because ……… Well, because.

the democrats sent out a cyber monday email trying to get people to buy a t-shirt of the word "democrat" fading into nothing pic.twitter.com/mERoLzSsIM

— 𝕒𝕕𝕒𝕞 🌹☭ (@adamkshuck) November 27, 2017

Brought to you by the guys who gave us the most expensive House of Representatives race ever, to the tune of more than $30 million for which they had a candidate who was determined to stand for nothing.

Seriously. Why to these folks have jobs, and who the hell is wasting their money on their salaries?

Headline of the Day

The DNC Picked a Bunch of Sleazy Lobbyists as Superdelegates, Can't Figure out Why No One Is Donating.

It's an on-point analysis of a rather anodyne story at Politico on DNC fund raising panic, but there is a few gems of unvarnished truth out there:

Party officials involved in fundraising say donors repeatedly turn them away with a "try again next year," especially since it became clear there won't be an official party autopsy from 2016. Democrat Jon Ossoff's loss in his much-hyped special congressional election in Atlanta's suburbs in June has also depressed donor enthusiasm.

………

DNC members themselves have now been asked to give or raise $1,000 each, some said — a request people who've been around the committee for decades say they can't remember being made before.

Not only the party base, but the big donors are demanding reforms.

I don't think that the moneybags wing of the Party are looking to implement a socialist agenda, but I do think that they realize that they spent a huge amount of money on a hapless candidate and a hapless party establishment, and they want to see changes.

I do not expect to see meaningful changes until dissatisfaction reaches a crescendo, because there are simply too many people who earn a living by mismanaging Democratic party operations.

This is Why Obama's Knifing Ellison in the DNC Race Makes a Difference

DNC Chairman Tom Perez has appointed a fierce opponent of the minimum wage to its finance committee, because ……… Hell because the New Dem wing of the Democratic Party needs to accommodate abusive employers, slumlords, Wall Street, and evil people in general, because they want their money to pay for overpriced incompetent consultants:

Various sources have reported that Tom Perez, the Chair of the Democratic National Committee, has appointed Atlanta native Dan Halpern to the finance committee of the party.

Tom Perez just appointed a lobbyist for an anti-minimum wage group in the South as a DNC Finance Chair. I'm not joking.

— spooky neesins🌹 (@LaDemSoc) October 12, 2017

Specifically, he will be part of a squad of deputy national finance chairs. As the Atlanta Business Chronicle reports:

Halpern chaired Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed’s mayoral campaign in 2009 and served as a trustee for then-President-elect Barack Obama’s 2008 inaugural committee. Halpern also is immediate past chairman of the Atlanta Housing Authority Board of Directors and a past chairman of the Georgia Restaurant Association.

In a party that says it’s trying to be progressive, Halpern is a strange direction. As the head of Jackmont Hospitality and the GRA, Halpern has reliably opposed the minimum wage. His record thus far suggests a hostility towards the kind of worker-friendly policies that the Bernie-era Dems are supposedly pursuing. It suggests Perez, and Perez’s backers and friends, have not gotten the memo about economic justice.

In Halpern’s home state of Georgia, according to Politifact “Senate Bill 314 called for raising Georgia’s minimum wage to $10.10 an hour, but it didn’t get so much as a hearing.”

Why? Halpern’s people—the Georgia Restaurant Association—claimed that there would be a potential loss of 21,000 jobs, ignoring the increased possibility for consumer spending, for new jobs, for giving hungry people a hand up. Everything must benefit the boardroom, you see, or it’s not worth doing. As Politifact helpfully reminds us, “Georgia’s minimum wage is technically $5.15 an hour (Georgia Code 34-4-3) and has been since 2001. But the vast majority of Georgia employers (some say more than 99 percent) must comply with the federal Fair Labor Standards Act, which means they have to pay their employees the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour.” If given god-like sway over the business, Halpern and his GRA would probably prefer to keep this amount even lower.

Hardly surprising. When a guy is described by the Atlanta Journal Constitution as a “Georgia Democratic moneyman,” it’s safe bet he couldn’t give two hoots in hell for a single mother making minimum wage at McDonald’s.

Is it any wonder that the Democratic Party brand is in the sewer?

This sort of crap is toxic.

Once Again, Let Me Say, "Do Not Give to the American Red Cross"

This time, it's the Red Cross screwing the pooch after hurricane Harvey hit Texas:

The Red Cross’ anemic response to Hurricane Harvey left officials in several Texas counties seething, emails obtained by ProPublica show. In some cases, the Red Cross simply failed to show up as it promised it would.

In DeWitt, a county of 20,000 where Harvey ripped apart the roof of a hotel, Emergency Management Coordinator Cyndi Smith upbraided a Red Cross official in a Sept. 9 email:

“Red Cross was not there as they were suppose[d] to be with the shelter and again no communication to what this is actually about and that you have been in DeWitt County doing anything.”

With fewer than 24 hours’ notice, Micah Dyer, a school superintendent in DeWitt County, was forced to run a shelter on his own in an unused district building that would eventually house 400 people. For the first three days the shelter was opened, only two Red Cross volunteers were there — neither had any experience running a shelter, Dyer said in an interview.

“Every hot meal came from us,” Dyer said. “[School district employees] had to go to our pantries and walk-in coolers and get whatever we could get so people would have food.” Dyer says the Red Cross didn’t appear with supplies until the fourth day of the storm, and didn’t bring enough cots or food for those housed in the shelter, he said. A significant portion of the Meals-Ready-to-Eat the charity did bring had gone bad, he said.

The charity contested his account, saying in a statement that it maintained two shelters in DeWitt County — including the one Dyer ran — “and recorded a total of 1,599 overnight stays.”

We have only a partial picture of the Red Cross’ response to the massive storm. ProPublica received emails through public records requests from several counties, large and small. But they don’t cover the full swath of the state affected by the storm.

Still, the frustration many authorities felt with the Red Cross was striking. Officials in Jefferson County, which contains Beaumont, were so fed up with the Red Cross that they kicked out a charity employee assigned to work with government officials from the headquarters for the storm response.
………

Many others singled out the Red Cross for criticism. At a public meeting earlier this month, Houston City Councilman Dave Martin let loose on the charity for being the “most inept, unorganized organization I've ever experienced.”

………

In an interview with ProPublica, Martin said he ran into Gail McGovern, the charity’s CEO, in a parking lot several days after Harvey hit. When he raised his concerns to her, Martin said she responded: “Do you know how much we raised with Katrina? $2 billion. We won’t even raise hundreds of millions here.’ I just thought, ‘Really, Gail? That’s your response to me?’”

It's clear that Ms. McGovern, a former senior executive at AT&T and Fidelity, wants to run the charity like a business.

She wants to burn it down for the insurance money.

This is the Most Disasterous Performance in Tory Politics Since………*

Highlights (Lowlights?) of the speech

At the 2017 Conservative Party conference in the UK, Prime Minister Theresa May delivered an absolute train wreck.

First, was a comedian pranking by delivering a "P-45" form (pink slip to Yanks) from Boris Johnson, then she spent something like 15 minutes largely unsuccessfully battling a cough and a frog in her throat, and finally, the theme logo for the conference began to drop letters off the backdrop.

It’s hard to imagine a more excruciating hour. One that was meant to re-establish the prime minister’s authority over her party ended in pity from an audience who could scarcely bring themselves to look her in the eye. Open ridicule would almost have been a kinder reaction.

Theresa May had always intended her speech to be personal; she just had no idea it was going to get this personal. She began by trying to rid herself of her Maybot image. Her election campaign had been too presidential. Too scripted. She said, reading awkwardly from a script. Even when she is trying to be engaging, sentences don’t come naturally to her.

“The British. Dream. That. Is what I am. In politics. For,” she repeated leadenly time and again as she tried to reinvent herself as a three-dimensional entity. But each time she said it, she only sounded more automated. Emotional intelligence is even harder to master than artificial intelligence.

Then the British Dream turned into a nightmare. First the comedian Simon Brodkin, dressed as a conference delegate, wandered up to the stage. “Boris asked me to give this to you,” he said, handing her a P45. Which Theresa gratefully accepted. Because in her heart of hearts, this was what she had always really wanted. Being PM just wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. It was too stressful. No fun.

………

It rapidly got worse. Once Brodkin was escorted out the hall, it was the turn of Theresa’s voice to make its own protest. By going awol. This time she knew what words she wanted to say, she just couldn’t get them out as her voice had its own psychosomatic, narcissistic, breakdown. She tried to clear her throat. She drank water. Still nothing came out. Eventually the chancellor handed her a cough sweet which temporarily did the trick.

“The British. Dream. That is. What I. Am in Poli. Tics for,” she croaked in a barely audible whisper. By now almost everyone in the audience was feeling almost as uncomfortable as her. People started muttering and staring at the floor. Opera heroines have died a less public, less agonising death.

………

As she reached her final appeal for the party to stop squabbling – a bit rich after she had spent the previous three days saying how united the cabinet was – the frog got the upper hand again. This time it didn’t limit itself to obstructing her throat, it also hopped across the stage and started knocking letters off the slogan, Building a country that works for everyone, on the screen behind her. First the f of for disappeared. Then the last e of everyone fell to the ground. Theresa’s world was literally falling apart around her. 

Seriously, this absurdity would have deemed a step too far by Monty Python in the day.

She could have bitten off the head of a kitten during the speech and done better.

^*Since all but about 8 years of Winston Churchill's political career.^†
†Seriously. Aside from 1939-45, this guy was a f%$#ing horror show.

Quote of the Day

That said, if all it takes to neutralize a billion plus in Clinton campaign contributions is $100K in Russian Facebook ads and some Twitterbots, then then political class has a lot to answer for in terms of its ROI.

—Lambert Strether

For the non-financial types, ROI=Return On Investment.

The Democratic Party consult class really is hopelessly incompetent.

Business as Usual

Yesterday, I wrote about how to check if your records were a part of the Equifax breach.

Today I observe that in the interval between when the credit reporting firm discovered the breach and when the news became public, senior executives dumped stocks in what appears to be an attempt to to trade on insider information:

The sale of nearly $2 million in corporate stock by high-level Equifax executives shortly after the company learned of a major data breach has sparked public outrage that could turn into another hurdle for the credit rating agency.

The sales all occurred before the company publicly reported the breach, a disclosure that quickly sent its stock tumbling. The timing of the sales could attract federal scrutiny, legal experts say, though proving insider trading would be difficult. A company spokeswoman said the executives did not know about the breach when they sold their shares.

………

Equifax, a major consumer credit reporting agency, disclosed Thursday that hackers had obtained sensitive information, including Social Security numbers and dates of birth, for 143 million people. The breach began in May and was discovered by the company on July 29. Shortly afterward, three company executives — Chief Financial Officer John W. Gamble; Joseph M. Loughran III, the president of U.S. information solutions; and Rodolfo O. Ploder, the president of workforce solutions — sold large amounts of their shares of Equifax stock.

Yeah, sure, "The executives did not know about the breach when they sold their shares."

I believe that.

You Ever Notice What Happens When the Silicon Valley Mindset Meets the Real World?

First Theranos, and now Juicero.

In all fairness, Theranos has a harder job, they were actually in the healthcare business, which involved deceiving regulators, which is hard, while Juicero was just a f%$#ing juice machine:

It sounds like America’s favorite $400 juice machine will be no longer.

“After selling over a million Produce Packs, we must let you know that we are suspending the sale of the Juicero Press and Produce Packs immediately,” reads the company blog post.

Juicero will also be giving people money back. “For the next 90 days, we are offering refunds for your purchase of the Juicero Press,” according to the note.

Founded by Doug Evans, San Francisco-based Juicero had raised more than $118 million in funding from prominent VCs like Google Ventures and Kleiner Perkins. Carmelo Anthony also invested through his Melo7 Tech venture fund. Even The Campbell Soup Company threw money at it. Juicero started raising funding in 2013 and launched 16 months ago.

The company was subject to mockery, particularly after a Bloomberg piece showed that the juice packets could be squeezed by hand and did not require a fancy machine.

The emperor has no clothes.

If regulators and prosecutors did a deep dive on Silicon Valley, those that weren't in prison would be asking, "Do you want fries with that?"

You Cannot Blame the Deplorables or the Russians for This

The Pew Research Center just did a study, and it showed that black voter's turnout fell in 2016.

A record 137.5 million Americans voted in the 2016 presidential election, according to new data from the U.S. Census Bureau. Overall voter turnout – defined as the share of adult U.S. citizens who cast ballots – was 61.4% in 2016, a share similar to 2012 but below the 63.6% who say they voted in 2008.

This wasn't Russian hacking. This wasn't, as Lamberth Strether sarcastically noted, "Black voters are racist, sexist bros," this was an incompetent, arrogant, and, uninspiring candidate with a history of winking and nodding to racism. ("They are often the kinds of kids that are called superpredators — no conscience, no empathy. We can talk about why they ended up that way, but first, we have to bring them to heel.")

This was a candidate who promulgated a Lord of the Flies management style in her campaign which created an incompetent, arrogant, and uninspiring campaign.

And the Democratic party establishment, the incompetent, arrogant, and, uninspiring Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the incompetent, arrogant, and, uninspiring DNC, and the legions of incompetent, arrogant, and, uninspiring consultants pulled out all the stops to fix the primary process for her.

Running against the most racist major Presidential candidate since Woodrow Wilson, somehow, she, and the entire Democratic Party establishment, could not get black voters to turn out.

These are not the people who should be running the Democratic Party. 

These are not consultants who candidates should pay to run their campaigns. 

These are not people who should hold elective office.

They need to go away.

Snark of the Day

Pelosi And The DCCC Prepare To Lose Again-- Their Specialty And Only Competence

—DownWithTyranny!

It might sound unfair, but it's, well, you know, true.

Zuckerberg hires former Clinton pollster Joel Benenson - POLITICO

My first though upon hearing that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg hired former Clinton pollster and political advisor Joel Benenson, oh my God, this dirt-bag is going to run for President.

My second thought was that I didn't have to worry, because if he is going to be relying on the incompetents who managed to lose an election to an inverted traffic cone, then he has a snowball's chance in hell of actually winning anything:

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, have hired Democratic pollster Joel Benenson, a former top adviser to President Barack Obama and the chief strategist for Hillary Clinton’s failed 2016 presidential campaign, as a consultant, according to a person familiar with the hire.

Benenson’s company, Benenson Strategy Group, will be conducting research for the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the couple’s philanthropy. The organization — whose mission statement, according to its website, is “advancing human potential and promoting equality” — is endowed with the couple’s Facebook fortune.

Zuckerberg and Chan have vowed to give away 99 percent of their Facebook shares, worth an estimated $45 billion, to charity. Bringing on Benenson is the latest sign that they’re pushing their philanthropic work more heavily into the political and policy world.

In January, the couple hired David Plouffe, campaign manager for Obama’s 2008 presidential run, as president of policy and advocacy. Plouffe had previously worked at Uber. Ken Mehlman, who ran President George W. Bush’s 2004 reelection campaign, also sits on the board.

Yes, Mark Zuckerberg is seriously considering a Presidential run, and he is availing himself of the most incompetent people available, so it's going to be a clown show.

There is nothing to worry about.

Then again, that's what they said about Donald Trump.