Biden continues to lead the field despite his senior moments, witches boost Williamson, and Harris has become really unpopular…among black voters. It’s your Democratic Presidential clown car update!
Caveat: Between a new job and a cold, this week has been a bear, so the clown car update may seem merely large rather than extra-extra-extra large…
Survey USA (California): Biden 25, Warren 21, Sanders 18, Harris 17, Buttigieg 6, Yang 1, Gabbard 1, Booker 1. So Harris is in fourth place in her own state…
Survey USA (North Carolina): Biden 36, Sanders 15, Warren 13, Harris 8, Buttigieg 5, Gabbard 1, Yang 1, Booker 1, Castro 1.
Let’s look at how different segments of Democratic primary voters are responding to candidates this year.
Start with white college graduates, once a negligible splinter, now about 40 percent of them, according to exit polls. They’re also the Democrats’ leftmost voters on issues, from impeachment to racial reparations. A post-Detroit Quinnipiac poll with subgroup results shows Warren leading Biden 28 to 25 percent in this group, well ahead of Sanders (11 percent) and Harris, who is tied with Buttigieg (8 percent). White college grads are among the best groups for the articulate Harvard Law professor and the articulate Notre Dame professor’s son.
Black voters, solidly Democratic for a half-century, are about 25 percent of Democratic primary voters. MSNBC’s Steve Kornacki’s useful summary of their primary voting history shows how they’ve voted near-unanimously or heavily for one candidate — Jesse Jackson in the 1980s, and Bill Clinton, John Kerry, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton since. Note that each of these since Jackson has won the party’s nomination. Big margins among one-quarter of an electorate can overcome small margins among the other three-quarters.
Black Democrats’ clear choice now is Biden (47 percent in Quinnipiac), with Sanders (16 percent) a very distant second, while the white college grads’ favorite, Warren, lags behind (8 percent). Quinnipiac has black candidates Harris and Booker receiving 1 and zero percent from blacks; they do better in other polls but struggle to hit double digits.
Their left-wing issue stances may not help. Echelon Insights polling shows 13 percent fewer nonwhite Democrats identifying as liberal than white Democrats. That suggests that most blacks may not switch to the strident liberal Booker or flexible liberal Harris, as black voters in early 2008 switched to Barack Obama after he showed he could win the Iowa caucuses.
Some Democratic constituencies seem to have an active aversion to certain candidates. Black voters seem to be repelled by Pete Buttigieg; he gets only 1 percent from them in Quinnipiac and has been getting zero percent in other polls. Black voters have been the Democratic constituency least supportive of same-sex marriage.
And very high-income voters, heavily Democratic these days, nonetheless seem to have little use for Bernie Sanders. Among high-income ($100,000-plus) Democrats polled in Quinnipiac, only 6 percent chose the socialist and admirer of 70 percent income tax rates. Similarly, in 2016, he lost the highest-income suburbs — Greenwich, Connecticut; Winnetka, Illinois; Wellesley, Massachusetts; Bloomfield Hills, Michigan — to Hillary Clinton by roughly 2-1 margins.
Lots of candidates put in an appearance at the Iowa State Fair. CNN has details in a sort of low calorie tracker substitute for a high calorie event.
“Democratic strategist Jennifer Holdsworth predicted Friday that most 2020 presidential hopefuls won’t be dropping out of the race anytime soon, saying those who do will most likely wait until late fall.”
“Forget ‘Lanes.’ The Democratic Primary Is A Whole Freaking Transit System.” Mainly an analysis of who Clinton and Sanders voters in 2016 are supporting this time around.
Montana Governor Steve Bullock: In. Twitter. Facebook. Says “Trump reelection ‘more likely with each passing minute.” Wants to go all in on gun control, which is a great way for Democrats to win back the Midwest. Opposes eliminating private insurance.
South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg: In. Twitter. Facebook. In Austin, he claimed he was a different kind of candidate before uttering a string of platitudes. “At 37, he is barely half the age of former Vice President Joe Biden and U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, among the frontrunners. Buttigieg would be the youngest Democratic nominee since William Jennings Bryan in the first of his three runs just before and after the turn of the 20th century.” And nothing says “success” quite like a comparison to the Democrat who lost Presidential elections more times than Hillary…
Yet Delaney, a former congressman from Maryland who began his career in business, has outpaced the rest of the field in at least one respect. Of all the Democrats vying to challenge Trump, he is the only candidate to have visited each of Iowa’s ninety-nine counties. He has held twice as many events in the state as anyone else, spent more than a million dollars on local television advertisements, and staffed up early, opening his eighth office there before the first debates. (Recently, he hired away a deputy state director from Marianne Williamson’s campaign.) Last week, as Delaney drove across Iowa in a crimson pickup truck that once belonged to his father, completing his thirty-fourth swing through the state, he seemed, for once, to be carrying some momentum. During the twenty-four hours following his showdown with Warren, in the second debate, his campaign received a ten-fold surge in fund-raising. “I have people who are moderates who thought I crushed it,” Delaney told me on Tuesday, as he sipped an iced tea at the counter of a diner in Marshalltown, Iowa. “And people who, you know, really are pretty far to the left, who think I did terribly. No one thinks I did an average job.”
Snip.
Delaney has yet to qualify for the third round of debates, in September, which require candidates to reach two-per-cent support in four approved polls and to attract a hundred and thirty thousand unique donors. Earlier this week, a memo from the D.N.C. informed campaigns that the requirements for the fourth round of debates, in October, will remain the same, extending the window for more candidates to qualify and postponing the long-awaited winnowing of the Democratic field. Delaney told me that he views the third and fourth rounds as “somewhat interchangeable.” It’s important to be in one of them, he clarified, adding that he had a “much better chance” of qualifying in time for the latter. When I caught up with Delaney’s wife, April, after his soapbox speech at the Iowa State Fair, she criticized the voter threshold for working against “a more centrist voice.” “To go online, you actually have to have a more fringe message, because that incites,” she said. “We’ll get there. It’ll just take us a little bit longer to get there, because we’re not going to make these impossible promises.”
Having wounded a presumptive frontrunner backed by nearly $25 million in campaign funds, Gabbard instantly became the subject of a slew of negative leaks, tweets, and press reports. Many of these continued the appalling recent Democratic Party tradition of denouncing anything it doesn’t like as treasonous aid to foreign enemies.
Harris national press chair Ian Sams tweeted, “Yo, you love Assad!”, a reference to Gabbard’s controversial visit with Syrian president Bashar al-Assad in 2017. He then tweeted a link to an insidious February 2 NBC News story, which asserted that Gabbard’s campaign was the beneficiary of Russian bots.
Harris herself meanwhile gave a sneering interview to Anderson Cooper.
“This is going to sound immodest,” she said, but as a “top-tier candidate,” she could “only take what [Gabbard] says and her opinion so seriously.”
She added Gabbard was an “apologist for an individual, Assad, who has murdered the people of his country like cockroaches.”
The New York Times wrote Gabbard believes the United States has “wrought horror on the world,” and that “critics have called her actions un-American.” Politico denounced Gabbard’s “Star Wars bar scene-like following” and hissed that the Daily Stormer was a supporter (Gabbard has repeatedly condemned white nationalism and sworn off their support). On The View, co-host Sunny Hostin called Gabbard a “Trojan Horse,” while Ana Navarro viciously insinuated Gabbard, an Iraq veteran, was part of a foreign column.
New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand: In. Twitter. Facebook. She launched ads in Iowa and new Hampshire in an attempt to get into the third round of debates. Heh: “Kirsten Gillibrand’s son nearly casts ‘vote’ for Elizabeth Warren before mom corrects him.”
That unquestionably is most troublesome for the Harris campaign is the dramatic drop in support from black Democratic voters, down to 1% after reaching 27% in early July:
In today’s results: Biden gets 47 percent of black Democrats, with 16 percent for Sanders, 8 percent for Warren and 1 percent for Harris
Contrast that with the pre-second debate poll from July 29th:
Biden gets 53 percent of black Democrats, with 8 percent for Sanders, 7 percent for Harris and 4 percent for Warren
And also the survey from July 2nd:
Harris also essentially catches Biden among black Democratic voters, a historically strong voting bloc for Biden, with Biden at 31 percent and Harris at 27 percent.
When Quinnipiac asked Democratic voters after the first round of debates who performed the best, 47% said Harris. After her last debate, that number landed at 8%.
Harris’s support among female Democrats has also been in a freefall. She’s at 7% now in comparison to 24% a month ago.
So her support has dropped significantly among two crucial Democratic voting blocs: black people and women.
What went wrong for Harris? I bet Rep. Tulsi Gabbard’s epic takedown of Harris on her record as California attorney general helped escalate the fall in her numbers. Gabbard raised incredibly essential issues to black Democratic voters about Harris’s time as AG on criminal justice reform.
Her ongoing racially-tinged attacks against Joe Biden may not sit well with black voters who remember (and are frequently reminded of) his eight years with President Obama.
Other polls taken after her second debate confirm the genuine drop in support for Harris.
Former Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper: In. Twitter. Facebook. Bad news for Hickenlooper: He’s dead in the water in the Presidential race. Worse news for Hickenlooper: He’s no sure thing in a senate race now. “As we shall not be following up on Hickenlooper’s further and presumptively fruitless activities, we urge citizens to pursue any other avenue of information they deem necessary, which from a practical perspective is, of course, none.”
Miramar, Florida Mayor Wayne Messam: In. Twitter. Facebook. Gets a profile from ABC News. Though typically thin, it’s the most substantial national news coverage he’s received since he announced. I bet his campaign celebrated with a pizza from Domino’s, assuming they could scrounge up a coupon…
Massachusetts Representative Seth Moulton: In. Twitter. Facebook. Moulton reportedly laid off half his staff and skipped a major Iowa dinner to attend a reunion of army buddies. He also says he’s not dropping out. The unvoiced word at the end of that last sentence is “yet.”
It’s always important to remember that O’Rourke’s only claims to national fame are losing a Senate election and launching an ill-advised presidential campaign that couldn’t have disappeared from prominence more quickly had David Copperfield been managing it.
The media created Beto, then the media forgot Beto, now the media is heartlessly giving the delusional narcissist false hope.
The headline of the article is ” After El Paso Shooting, Will Voters Revisit Beto O’Rourke?”
That’s a little misleading. In terms of this primary race, the voters weren’t really visiting Beto in the first place. They were mostly passing by and saying hi on their way to Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, and Mayor Pete.
The article does correctly note that times are tough for Team Beto right now:
A new Monmouth University poll, conducted Aug. 1-4, found Mr. O’Rourke with less than 1 percent of support from likely Iowa Democratic caucusgoers. He was at 6 percent in the Monmouth poll in April.
His poll numbers have also been weak in New Hampshire and South Carolina, as well as nationally, and his July debate performance and his most recent campaign fund-raising report both fell short of the heightened expectations for his candidacy among some in the party earlier in the year.
Those “heightened expectations” were another thing that the media manufactured out of whole cloth. They were quickly ditched in favor of Mayor Pete, who was to be the MSM’s next hype concoction.
This is the ray of sunshine through all the murders that the Times sees for a Beto bounce-back:
But Mr. O’Rourke’s allies and advisers hope that his impassioned response to the massacre in his hometown, with flashes of raw anger that match the mood of many Democrats, will prompt voters nationally to give him another look. His remarks calling President Trump a white supremacist, and his cussing out of the news media as he urged journalists to “ connect the dots” between the El Paso killings and Mr. Trump’s anti-immigrant language and exploitation of racism, drew praise from both liberals and moderates.
Clarifying: “Mr. O’Rourke’s allies and advisers” (all seven of them!) are pinning their hopes for Beto’s return to whatever relevance he had on him saying and doing the same exact things that every one of his primary opponents have been for the past week.
That illustrates the central problem with Beto, which I wrote about back in May when the MSM first began ignoring him in favor of Mayor Pete: under scrutiny, there is no “there” there.
He isn’t a particularly sharp thinker. What attention he’s gotten recently has come from carefully crafted publicity stunts.
What he is is a guy who spent too much time last year reading and believing the hype being spewed about him in the media.
If gun control was such a surefire winning issue for Democratic candidates, Eric Swalwell wouldn’t have dropped out.
“Bernie Sanders staffers manhandle press at Iowa State Fair.”
Former Pennsylvania Congressman Joe Sestak: In. Twitter. Facebook. Jim Geraghty: “Joe Sestak: The Most Interesting Democrat You Forgot Was Running.” (Sorry, Jim, I have to disagree with both parts of that headline.)
And while Sestak answers questions at length, with streams of consciousness that mix his personal history, tales from his Navy days, and John McCain–style invocations of country over party, he frequently wanders back to his fairly nonpartisan core message, that Americans are grappling with a crisis of unaccountability.
“I think what Americans want today, more than anything else, whether you’re Democrat or Republican, is somebody who they think is accountable to them,” Sestak tells me. “Above party, above ideology, above any special interest, above oneself. I think they need someone who has a breadth and depth of global experience in national security — and by that I mean from trade issues, economic issues, all the way over to military issues, understanding all the elements of our power, including the power from our ideals, and who has experience in that and has learned certain principles in how those are to be used. We need to restore U.S. leadership to a world order that is rules-based in order to protect our American dream here at home.”
“If you have a president who is really trusted, then you can move and advance those policies that actually make the American dream available to everyone. There are too many who have not shared in the benefits of this economy. We can be so much more productive, but how do you move them?”
In a Democratic field with seven senators, three governors, four mayors and four sitting congressman who can easily blur together, Sestak stands out for at least having done significant things in his life outside the realm of politics.
Following in the footsteps of his Slovakian immigrant father, Sestak was accepted to the U.S. Naval Academy, where he graduated second in his class. He earned a master’s degree and Ph.D. from Harvard in 1980 and 1984. He rose through the naval ranks, serving on the U.S.S. Richard E. Byrd, the U.S.S. Hoel, and the U.S.S. Underwood. By 1991, he commanded the guided-missile frigate the U.S.S. Samuel B. Roberts, and by November 1994 he was the director for defense policy on the National Security Council. Three years later, he was commanding the Navy’s Destroyer Squadron 14. (You can watch a snippet of younger Sestak discussing the history of his fleet and duties on the U.S.S. George Washington in this video from 1998.)
After 9/11, Sestak became the first director of the Navy Operations Group (Deep Blue), the Navy’s strategic anti-terrorism unit, and in 2002, Sestak assumed command of the George Washington Aircraft Carrier Battle Group — ten U.S. ships with 10,000 sailors, SEALs, Marines, and 100 aircraft. During a six-month deployment, the George Washington group launched approximately 10,000 sorties, including offensive strike missions, first against the Taliban and al-Qaeda, then enforcing the no-fly zone against Iraq.
This is an outright lie, one day after Warren complained of the dangers of rhetoric.
Michael Brown was not murdered. Michael Brown was shot by officer Darren Wilson in an act of self-defense. This is why the grand jury declined to indict Wilson for murder or manslaughter, and it was also the conclusion of the Obama administration’s Department of Justice.
“Every police officer in America should be offended by Sen. Warren’s ill-informed, inflammatory tweet today,” Jeff Roorda of the St. Louis Police Officers Association told me via email. “Holding a would-be cop killer out as some sort of victim or worse yet, a hero, does no justice to the truth or to reconciliation. Her careless words disqualify her from fitness to serve impartially as commander-in-chief.”
“Elizabeth Warren just has a gigantic campaign,” said Laura Martin, executive director of the social justice organization Progressive Leadership Alliance of Nevada. “There are counties all over rural areas where some campaigns are just doing tours, but she has staff there. And that was a strategy President Obama had in 2008 when he won Nevada.”
Another Democratic operative put it more bluntly: “Warren has built a monster.”
Among 17 Democratic strategists, activists and experts interviewed by POLITICO for this story, Warren’s campaign was mentioned most often as the most impressive of the field, followed by Harris’.
Williamson floated through the fairgrounds like some sort of celestial being, unbothered by the harsh sun and perpetually surrounded by a throng of sweaty supporters demanding selfies and hoping to soak up some of her good vibes. Speaking at The Des Moines Register’s Political Soapbox, a mini stage where candidates take turns offering truncated stump speeches and fielding questions from curious Iowans, Williamson commanded a much larger crowd than either the entrepreneur Andrew Yang or former Representative John Delaney of Maryland, who had both spoken before her. The Iowans in attendance may well have known about her low polling numbers—and about recent criticism she’s generated with her comments on science and medicine—but they seemed drawn to her nonetheless.
“We have an amoral economic mind-set that has corrupted our government and hijacked our value systems,” she told the audience, standing onstage in wedge heels and a marbled, blue-and-mauve blazer as a quiet drumbeat played ominously from the speakers. The “conventional political establishment” is the problem, she said, to loud applause, and it’s time for the American people to wake up. “While it is true that sometimes Americans are slow to wake up,” she added, “once we do wake up, we slam it like nobody’s business!”
Williamson’s eccentric performances in the first two presidential-primary debates are what put her on the map for many Americans: Hers was the most Googled name in the hours after the first debate, when, speaking in a quasi-Mid-Atlantic accent not unlike Katharine Hepburn’s, Williamson threatened to “harness love” to conquer President Donald Trump. In the second debate, she promised to combat the “dark, psychic force” of hatred in America, and offered a forceful argument for the payment of reparations to descendants of enslaved people in America.
Although Williamson describes herself as a “pretty straight-line progressive Democrat,” she’s taken pains to set herself apart from the other liberal presidential hopefuls. She criticized Elizabeth Warren’s oft-discussed plans in the first primary debate by labeling them “superficial fixes” to the much deeper problems facing the country. “If you think we’re going to beat Donald Trump by just having all these plans, you’ve got another thing coming,” Williamson said, citing America’s so-called sick-care system and the need for improved preventative care. “I’ve had a career not making political plans but harnessing the inspiration and the motivation and the excitement of people, masses of people,” she told the audience.
“‘Witches’ for Marianne Williamson Launch ‘Occult Task Force.'” She hired former Sanders staffer and accused serial groper Robert Becker for her campaign. “I believe in forgiveness. I believe in redemption. I believe in people rising up after they’ve fallen down…I had not read anything or heard anything that made me feel this was a man who never deserved to work again.”
These are people who were formerly in the roundup who have announced they’re not running, for which I’ve seen no recent signs they’re running, or who declared then dropped out:
Losing Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams: Since I see no sign she’s gearing up for a Presidential run, I’ve moved her out of the clown car proper. However, I wouldn’t rule out those early rumors of her becoming a Biden VP pick coming to pass…
I’ve reported on the problems of Tesla Motors before. Elon Musk’s California-based electric car company has a slavishly-devoted fanbase quick to attack critics, but thus far Tesla has produced more hype than profits. “The more cars it sells the more cash it burns.”
Now Coyote Blog has offered an extensive roundup of just how dire the economic straits that Tesla is in are:
The first quarter of 2019 was a disaster, with deliveries down despite initiation of Model 3 sales in Europe. Worse, since the Model 3 seems to be cannibalizing Model S and X sales, Tesla was not only selling fewer cars but its mix shifted to lower priced less profitable cars. It lost an enormous amount of money, and only after the conference call with analysts about first quarter results did Tesla reveal that this loss would have been far worse without a huge sale of government EV credits
Tesla burned a staggering amount of cash in the first quarter, and was forced to pay off nearly a billion dollars in debt when the stock price did not remain high enough for the debt to convert. While Tesla’s cash balance at the end of the quarter looked OK, there were two huge red flags. First, the cash barely covered a huge hole Tesla had in its net working capital. Second, given the large number of vehicles Tesla sold in its end of quarter push in the last 2 weeks of the quarter, it appears that Tesla was nearly out of cash in Mid-March and perhaps days away from a default (analysis below).
The Tesla financial statements still include a number of unexplained oddities, including a billion dollars of accounts receivable, or about 20% of quarterly revenues. How does a company that demands payment in advance before delivery have 20% of its quarterly revenues tied up in receivables?
Tesla announced, out of the blue, that it was closing all its retail stores and going online only. Given the drop in demand for the quarter, it was a head-scratcher as to why eliminating the sales force was going to help. The decision seemed to be almost off the cuff, as Tesla seemed surprised that they would still have to continue paying their expensive long-term mall leases. After this was revealed, Tesla partially reversed the closure decision, but no one — including their own retail folks — seems to know what the plan is now.
Tesla constantly fiddled with its prices and model lineup. It cut prices several times, but also announced a small raise as well. It eliminated certain options for cars, added new ones, and then reintroduced eliminated ones. Even long-time Tesla watchers are confused about the model lineup today.
Tesla continued to see an outflow of executive talent, including the exit of their very well-respected new General Counsel after just over one month on the job (Mr. Buttswinkas returned to his old law firm and purged Tesla from his resume). This seemed to parallel the rapid exit of an outside chief accounting officer last year who gave up millions of dollars to exit in just 60 days.
April car deliveries stayed on the same pace as the first quarter — ie, way worse than Tesla’s guidance
Elon Musk continued to get in trouble with the SEC, firing off production and sales guidance on Twitter that was different from Tesla’s official published guidance. Mr. Musk and Tesla are still guiding to a total delivery number for the next year that is well in excess of what most anyone else looking at the first four months believes is possible
Tesla announced a reveal of their Model Y crossover that will not go on sale until at least the end of 2020. Unlike past Tesla reveals, this one seemed hastily set up and the prototypes shown were weird. They looked more like the existing Model 3 with a few modifications than a promised crossover that could incorporate a third row of seats. Tesla asked customers to start making deposits (skeptics will argue that the whole point of the reveal was just to get some free financing from Tesla fanboys) but unlike past reveals, this one fell flat. There was apparently little interest in making deposits, though Tesla (unlike with past products) has not revealed the deposit numbers.
On top of all this, it announced out of the blue that it’s going to be make itself into an “autonomous taxi company”:
Musk has a demonstrated pattern that whenever he needs the stock price to be higher, or he needs to sell stock, or he needs some other kind of favorable financial outcome, he will do a new product demo. It worked for battery swap and the solar shingle and the model 3 and the semi, so it would work again. The model 3 reveal had collected hundreds of millions of dollars of cash in the form of deposits. That’s what he needed now. The problem is, they didn’t have a prototype to show. I believe Musk had the company hastily create a Model Y prototype built on top of a model 3. It did not really have to work, it just had to be something he could talk about. Interestingly, his VP of engineering quit at exactly this time, for reasons unknown — was their some internal dissention about this Y prototype?
Anyway, the Model Y reveal was essentially a flop, and likely garnered few deposits. Certainly not enough to fill in Tesla’s growing cash hole. And by Mid-March, Tesla may have been almost out of cash. Tesla says it delivered half its vehicles for the quarter in the last 10 days of March, so about 31,500 were delivered in those hectic days. At an average price of $50,000 each that would mean Tesla brought in nearly $1.6 billion in cash those last 10 days (this is conservative, may have been more if the average price was higher). But they only had $2.2 billion at the end of the quarter, meaning Tesla was scraping bottom in mid-March, particularly since hundreds of millions of that cash is restricted and not supposed to be spent.
Somewhere in this period of March-April, after his usual product reveal trick with the Y did not work, I think Musk came to the conclusion that the Tesla car business as currently defined was not going to work. Or, more accurately, it was never going to make enough money to support its sky-high stock valuation. I have always said that Tesla would make a fine $10 billion niche car company, but nothing about it justifies a $50 or $60 billion valuation. But at this point Musk can’t accept a $10 billion company, even though that would ostensibly still leave him a very rich man. But like Ken Lay at Enron, Musk has borrowed against at least half his Tesla stock and a falling stock price could lead to financial death by margin call (Musk, for some reason, also mortgaged all his multi-million dollar homes last December). His other investments are also struggling — SpaceX has been unable to attract the capital it needs of late and Musk has poured a lot of money into the Boring company, an absolute embarrassment of a company that helps refute, in my mind, his “smartest guy in the world” rep.
As Musk looked around for a way to save the stock valuation, the Lyft and Uber IPO’s must have had an influence. Uber is losing as much money as Tesla and folks are talking about it IPO-ing at a market cap of $70 billion. What if Tesla could call itself a ride-sharing company, only better. Wouldn’t that garner Tesla an even higher valuation?
Having not read The Smartest Guys in the Room, I am at something of a disadvantage when it comes to the collapse of Enron, but it seems to me that Enron was a profitable venture before wild over-expansion, shady regulatory arbitrage and outright accounting fraud brought it to bankruptcy. By contrast, Q4 2018 was the first time Telsa ever posted back-to-back profitable quarters.
Tesla could be a profitable company if it concentrated on manufacturing luxury cars and selling them through a traditional dealer network, just like Mercedes and BMW do today. Instead, Musk continues to chase the Next Big Thing in order to keep the overinflated stock prices high. (And it wouldn’t hurt if they did their manufacturing in a state with much saner cost, tax and regulatory structures than California.)
As the author notes: “This is the company that is going to spawn a thousand business school case studies.”
A former political operative for State Rep. Charlie Geren (R–Fort Worth) has now admitted that he made a factually inaccurate and anonymous report to Child Protective Services against Geren’s opponent during a contentious 2016 Republican primary campaign.
As part of a settlement resolving a lawsuit brought by Bo French, David Sorensen has acknowledged he made the anonymous and incorrect election eve report to CPS alleging that French was abusing his children. The former Geren political aide has also acknowledged the report was not accurate, and he has apologized to the French family for submitting it.
“Before and after Geren’s campaign, Sorensen worked as an operative on Democrat political campaigns and for the Democrat Party.” After this confession, Sorensen should never work on the campaign of any candidate for any political party ever again…
Just as Milton’s Satan would rather reign in hell than to serve in heaven, so also neoconservatives would never be part of any movement if they were not acknowledged as the movement’s intellectual leadership. Neoconservatives were content to have John McCain win the GOP nomination and lose to Obama, since this result did not impair the market for what Kristol, et al., were selling — political commentary and policy analysis. What really threatened their racket, however, was when Republican primary voters in 2016 refused to be herded into the camp of any of the neoconservative-approved candidates. Make no mistake, Bill Kristol would have much rather seen Jeb Bush or Chris Christie win the GOP nomination and then lose to Hillary, than to have a Republican president who wouldn’t take advice from Bill Kristol.
Questions of policy — is Bill Kristol in favor of enforcing our immigration laws, or not? — were ultimately less important to the fate of the Weekly Standard than their intellectual pride. Neoconservatives decided in 2015 that Donald Trump should not be the Republican nominee and, when their advice was rejected by GOP primary voters, the neoconservatives doubled-down and decided that Hillary Clinton should be president. When that didn’t happen, they doubled down again, and declared Trump’s presidency illegitimate. At no point, apparently, did it ever occur to them to ask, “What if we’re wrong?” The possibility of error was not something Bill Kristol (Harvard, Class of 1979) was willing to consider.
America is not a kingdom, and a president is not a king, but the pagan power of a dead king’s passage still stirs some part of our ancient souls. These rituals of our civil religion (the lying in state, the transport of the coffin, the missing man flyover) are both objectively a little silly and subjectively profoundly important as part of the social glue that still binds the nation together.
I keep pouring news items into the next Texas vs. California Roundup bucket, but there’s so much in there it’s ceased to be a bucket, zoomed past bathtub, eclipsed swimming pool, and is now looking more like a flood retention pond. Maybe next week, if everything breaks right.
But one of the topics sloshing around there is the travails of Elon Musk’s media-darling electric car company Tesla. And there’s just enough news there to do a Tesla-only roundup:
One reason for the loss? An inability to reliably weld parts. I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that this is a solved problem for most automobile manufacturers…
Tesla has no one who can run the new robotic welders – they are finding it impossible to regulate and apply the right amount of heat to do high-speed welding. He said that while Tesla may have the right robots, making them production ready is a highly specialized skill set and they don’t have it. His company was told to reduce production for the foreseeable future, until further notice, and produce to order, not in high volume.
Seeking Alpha has a lot more information on why many of Tesla plans and projections are mostly pie-in-the-sky dreaming.
And one of their writers goes so far as to say that, structurally, Tesla is doomed to failure. Including this pretty damning sentence: “The more cars it sells the more cash it burns.”
Telsa is facing a lawsuit by over 100 black employees alleging racial discrimination, including a “hostile work environment” and “use of the N-word.” Rent-seeking lawyers looking for an easy score? Probably. But Musk was the one who decided to build his plant in California…
California considers giving Tesla a $3 billion bailout, just as Tesla’s federal rebates are phased out. Because there’s no better use of taxpayer money than subsidies for status symbol cars for rich people.
Tesla employees want to unionize. Well, there goes profitability and flexible manufacturing…
Tesla is also planning to unveil a semi-truck on Thursday. Seeking Alpha thinks this is more a distraction from the Model 3 problems than a real product.
Remember Tesla’s ill-advised purchase of Solar City, another Elon Musk company? Well, guess who’s also having layoffs? Between Tesla and Solar City, apparently over 1,200 employees have been let go.
It seems fairly clear at this juncture that Tesla was founded on more green energy hype than a solid business model, and that Musk probably should have focused on making one ambitious, capital-intensive startup profitable, not the (four? five? six? seven?) he’s founded since cashing out of PayPal. (In addition to Tesla and Solar City, there’s also Space X, Hyperloop, The Boring Company, Neuralink, and the (non-profit) OpenAI. Of course, right now, all Musk’s current ventures are “non-profit”…)
Musk is one of those classic boy-makes-good American stories you want to root for, but in splitting his focus, and not realizing how very much harder and more capital-intensive hardware development is than software development, Musk’s story looks a lot more like an even older story: hubris clobbered by nemesis.
We’re in the home stretch of hammering out the Texas biannual state budget, which has to be completed by May 29. Until then, enjoy another Texas vs. California roundup:
In this era of anti-Trump resistance, many progressives see California as a model of enlightenment. The Golden State’s post-2010 recovery has won plaudits in the progressive press from the New York Times’s Paul Krugman, among others. Yet if one looks at the effects of the state’s policies on key Democratic constituencies— millennials, minorities, and the poor—the picture is dismal. A recent United Way study found that close to one-third of state residents can barely pay their bills, largely due to housing costs. When adjusted for these costs, California leads all states—even historically poor Mississippi—in the percentage of its people living in poverty.
California is home to 77 of the country’s 297 most “economically challenged” cities, based on poverty and unemployment levels. The population of these cities totals more than 12 million. In his new book on the nation’s urban crisis, author Richard Florida ranks three California metropolitan areas—Los Angeles, San Francisco, and San Diego— among the five most unequal in the nation. California, with housing prices 230 percent above the national average, is home to many of the nation’s most unaffordable urban areas, including not only the predictably expensive large metros but also smaller cities such as Santa Cruz, Santa Barbara, and San Luis Obispo. Unsurprisingly, the state’s middle class is disappearing the fastest of any state.
California’s young population is particularly challenged. As we spell out in our new report from Chapman University and the California Association of Realtors, California has the third-lowest percentage of people aged 25 to 34 who own their own homes—only New York and Hawaii’s are lower. In San Francisco, Los Angeles, and San Diego, the 25-to-34 homeownership rates range from 19.6 percent to 22.6 percent—40 percent or more below the national average.
California continues to slouch toward socialized medicine. “California’s current system relies in large part on employer-sponsored insurance, which is still the source of health care coverage for tens of millions of people. That coverage would disappear under SB 562. Instead of receiving coverage financed by their employers, working Californians would see a tax increase of well over $10,000 per year for many middle-income families.” (Hat tip: Legal Insurrection.)
“Congratulations, California. You keep electing these same Democrats over and over again. and then you act surprised when they make you one of the most heavily taxed populations in the country. And when you finally raise your voices to protest the out of control taxation and spending, the state party’s titular leader is brazen enough to come straight out and tell you what he really thinks of you.”
One lawmaker is the target of a recall petition over the tax hike: “Perceived as the most vulnerable of the legislative Democrats who passed Gov. Jerry Brown’s gas and vehicle tax package by a razor-thin margin, freshman state Sen. Josh Newman, D-Fullerton, faced an intensifying campaign to turn him out of office, potentially depriving his party of the two-thirds majority that allowed them to pass Brown’s infrastructure bill in the first place.”
Vance Ginn’s monthly summary of Texas economic data. Lot’s of data, including the fact that all major Texas cities created jobs in 2016 except Houston, which was down just a smidge.
40-60 “youth” flash mob robs passengers on Oakland BART train. The complete absence of descriptions or pictures cues the astute modern American reader in to the ethnic makeup of the mob. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
“Gov. Jerry Brown and state Treasurer John Chiang have a plan to help cover the state’s soaring pension payments: Borrow money at low interest rates and invest it to make a profit. What could go wrong?” I can see it now: “Come on seven! Baby needs a new High Speed Rail!” Also this: “The problem was exacerbated because Brown’s so-called pension “reform” of 2012 failed to significantly rein in retirement costs. Statewide pension debt has increased 36 percent since his changes took effect.” (Hat tip: Pension Tsunami.)
“Riverside utilities dispatcher triples salary to nearly $400,000 with state’s 10th largest overtime payout.” (Hat tip: Pension Tsunami.)
The time cards Oakland city worker Kenny Lau turned in last year paint a stunning, if not improbable, picture of one man’s work ethic.
Lau, a civil engineer, often started his days at 10 a.m. and clocked out at 4 a.m., only to get back to work at 10 a.m. for another marathon day. He never took a sick day. He worked every weekend and took no vacation days.
He worked every holiday, including the most popular ones that shut down much of the nation’s businesses: 12 hours on Thanksgiving and eight hours on Christmas.
In fact, his time cards show he worked all 366 days of the leap year, at times putting in 90-plus-hour workweeks. He worked so much that he quadrupled his salary. His regular compensation and overtime pay — including benefits, $485,275 — made him the city’s highest-paid worker and the fourth-highest overtime earner of California public employees in 2016.
The Los Angeles Unified School District has decided it can break federal immigration laws at will. “No immigration officers will be allowed on campus without clearance from the superintendent of schools, who will consult with district lawyers. Until that happens, they won’t be let in, even if they arrive with a legally valid subpoena.” There’s no way such a genius decision could possibly backfire on them… (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
An auditor funds the University of California President’s office of Janet Napolitano had a secret slush fund:
The Office of the President has accumulated more than $175 million in undisclosed restricted and discretionary reserves;
as of fiscal year 2015–16, it had $83 million in its restricted reserve and $92 million in its discretionary reserve.
More than one-third of its discretionary reserve, or $32 million, came from unspent funds from the campus assessment—an annual charge that the Office of the President levies on campuses to fund the majority of its discretionary operations.
In certain years, the Office of the President requested and received approval from the Board of Regents (regents) to
increase the campus assessment even though it had not spent all of the funds it received from campuses in prior years.
The Office of the President did not disclose the reserves it had accumulated, nor did it inform the regents of the annual undisclosed budget that it created to spend some of those funds. The undisclosed budget ranged from $77 million to
$114 million during the four years we reviewed.
The Office of the President was unable to provide a complete listing of the systemwide initiatives, their costs, or an assessment of their continued benefit to the university.
While it appears that the Office of the President’s administrative spending increased by 28 percent, or $80 million, from fiscal years 2012–13 through 2015–16, the Office of the President continues to lack consistent definitions of and methods for tracking the university’s administrative expenses.
An Ex-Obama Administration official with a secret slush fund? What are the odds?
Tesla survives on the back of hefty subsidies paid for by hard-working Americans just barely getting by so that a select few can drive flashy, expensive electric sports cars. These subsidies were originally scheduled to expire later this year, and Tesla is lobbying hard to make sure that taxpayers continue to pay $7,500 per car or more to fund their business model. Tesla even tried to force taxpayers to pay for charging stations that would primarily benefit their business. That is not what Musk’s high priced image managers will tell you, but it’s the truth.
SpaceX is even worse — its business model isn’t to invest its money developing competing space products that meet the same safety and reliability standards as the rest of the industry. Instead, its business model is to get billions in taxpayer money and push, bend, and demand regulatory special favors. Then, it produces a rocket that is more known for failed launches, long delays, and consistently missed deadlines.
“Bay Area bookseller Bill Petrocelli is filing a lawsuit against the state of California, hoping to force a repeal of the state’s controversial ‘Autograph Law.’ The law, booksellers claim, threatens to bury bookstore author signings under red tape and potential liabilities. Petrocelli, co-owner of Book Passage, filed Passage v. Becerra in U.S. District Court for the North District of California, pitting the bookstore against California State Attorney General Xavier Becerra.” As a bookseller on the side, I can tell you that California’s law is particularly asinine and is completely ignorant of the signed book trade.
“It’s telling that so many city leaders hate their state or national governments, but love supra-national governments like the EU. This shows that their real desire isn’t to go it alone in the marketplace, but to create replacement governance structures that are more amenable to their way of thinking, that constitutionally enshrine their preferences, and are insulated from democratic accountability.”
An obvious observation, which hardly anyone seems to make, is that blacks suffer less from racism than from poor education. Harvard does not reject black applicants because it dislikes blacks but because they are badly prepared. Blacks do not fail the federal entrance examination because it is rigged to exclude them but because they don’t know the answers. Equality of opportunity without equality of education is a cruel joke: giving an illiterate the right to apply to Yale isn’t giving him much.
The intelligent policy is to educate black children, something that the public schools of Washington manage, at great expense, not to do. In fact the prevailing (if unspoken) view seems to be that black children cannot be educated, an idea whose only defect is that it is wrong: the Catholic schools of Washington have been educating black children for years. The Catholic system has 12,170 students in the District, of whom 7,884, or 65 percent, are black.
Trump takes lead over Clinton according to that notorious right-wing propaganda organ, the Los Angeles Times. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ, who notes “it certainly looks bad for the Beefy Elderly Drunken Crazylady.”)
Michael Moore thinks Trump is going to win. I pay very little heed to Mr. Moore’s opinions, but I admit the possibility that he may have more insight into the day-to-day outlook of blue collar, rust belt Americans than I do.
“Sexual violence in Germany has skyrocketed since Angela Merkel allowed more than one million mostly male migrants from Africa, Asia and the Middle East into the country. The crimes are being downplayed by the authorities, apparently to avoid fueling anti-immigration sentiments.”
Remembering the glory of The Poor Man’s James Bond. What red-blooded American teenage boy wouldn’t want to make his own anti-tank missile? (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
