Republican News

This post was originally published on this site

Ghastly. Absolutely ghastly. In a violation of the current cease-fire and hostage-for-prisoner exchanges, Israeli investigators discovered that the body of Shiri Bibas was not returned as Hamas claimed. The casket contained an unknown person, not any of the known hostages:

However, the third body at the Abu Kabir Forensic Institute was not that of their mother, Shiri Bibas, says the Israel Defense Forces. Specialists at Abu Kabir were not able to identify the body.

The authorities, using forensic evidence and intelligence, assess that the two young boys were ‘”brutally murdered” by terrorists in November 2023, says the IDF. Ariel was 4-years-old and Kfir was 10-months-old when they were murdered.

“This is a very serious violation by the Hamas terrorist organization, which is required by the agreement to return four dead hostages,” says the IDF. “We demand that Hamas return Shiri home along with all of our hostages.”

That’s not all the Israelis found in the caskets, either:

I can’t believe I’m about to type these words:

When Israeli officials opened the caskets containing the remains of the four murdered hostages, they found propaganda materials that had been placed there by Hamas and other terrorist groups in Gaza.

— Avi Mayer אבי מאיר (@AviMayer) February 20, 2025

Technically, these acts would be considered perfidy, a deliberate and cruel violation of an agreement between belligerents. In every other sense, these are considered as inhumane and evil as, well … the same terrorist group that everyone else in the world wants to keep engaging and create a state for them to control.

Meanwhile, it appears that Hamas or one of its affiliates bombed several buses in central Israel, including Tel Aviv. They all turned out to be empty at the time, which may be more about incompetence than humanitarianism:

Several buses exploded in various locations across central Israel on Thursday evening in a planned mass terror bombing attempt by Hamas-affiliated terrorists in the West Bank.

At least three bombs exploded buses in the area of Bat Yam, Israel Police said. …

Explosives weighing four to five kilograms were found, intending to explode on Friday morning in order to kill hundreds of civilians, the Tel Aviv Police District Commander Asst.-Ch. Haim Sargaroff updated late on Thursday evening.

And not too long afterward, a Hamas affiliate in the West Bank claimed credit for the attacks:

Security officials later established that those responsible for planting the explosive devices came from “terrorist infrastructure” in West Bank refugee camps.

“The revenge of the martyrs will not be forgotten as long as the occupier is present on our land. This is a jihad of victory or martyrdom,” Hamas’s Tulkarm battalion published in a statement, hinting at responsibility for the explosions.

Benjamin Netanyahu didn’t waste any time ordering the IDF into action:

Following the attempted string of bus bombings, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has instructed the IDF to embark on a massive operation in the West Bank against terrorist hubs, according to his office.

He also instructs the police and Shin Bet to “increase preventative activities” in Israel’s cities to prevent further attacks.

So … is it safe to say that the cease-fire is over? Secretary of State Marco Rubio certainly says so:

On October 7, 2023, terrorists in Gaza abducted a mother, her child, her infant son, and an 83 year old man and murdered them. More than 500 days later, Hamas returned them to Israel in coffins. We extend our deepest sympathies for the victims’ families who have suffered the…

— Secretary Marco Rubio (@SecRubio) February 20, 2025

We extend our deepest sympathies for the victims’ families who have suffered the unimaginable.

Hamas is evil – pure evil – and must be eradicated. ALL hostages must come home NOW.

It’s time to deal finally and forcefully with Hamas’ billionaire boys club in Doha. No more ‘safe zones,’ and no more cheap talk. These people run the Iranian proxy army that killed dozens of Americans on October 7 and kidnaped several more, using them as leverage against Israel and the US. The only message Hamas and all of the other Iranian toadies will understand is utter destruction. So let’s quit pussyfooting around and give them a demonstration that they will never forget. 

This post was originally published on this site

We all know that there is ferocious resistance to Trump’s policies within the federal bureaucracy. 

But that doesn’t mean that there isn’t a lot of support for Trump’s goals as well. It’s just that the people who control the levers of power are in a position to squelch the support of those who do. 

Leland Dudek learned that lesson the hard way: he decided to work with DOGE despite his boss’s opposition, and he was suspended for doing so. But a funny thing happened in Trump’s federal government: Dudek wound up with the top job while the bosses who were impeding him were shown the door. 

“I confess. I asked where the fat was in our contracts so we can make the right tough choices.”

Dudek is an example of how there are some fiscally conscious career feds, and how DOGE can maximize impact through people who know where the bodies are buriedhttps://t.co/O3Duk3yKgV

— Luke Rosiak (@lukerosiak) February 19, 2025

It doesn’t usually work this way. Nice guys finish last. The bad guy gets the girl. Backstabbers climb the ladder fastest. 

You know the story as it usually happens. But not this time. 

Leland Dudek was an obscure bureaucrat at the Social Security Administration who dedicated his career to stopping fraud. But when he worked with the Department of Government Efficiency to do just that, he came close to being fired.

“At 4:30pm EST, my boss called me to tell me I had been placed on administrative leave pending an Investigation,” Dudek wrote on LinkedIn. “They want to fire me for cooperating with DOGE,” he wrote in a now-deleted post obtained by The Daily Wire.

Then, a stunning reversal occurred. It was Acting Social Security Commissioner Michelle King who was out of a job. And Dudek was reinstated with a big promotion — taking her job leading the massive agency on an interim basis.

The Washington Post reported that King exited the agency after refusing to let DOGE access agency data and was replaced by Dudek. But it has not been reported that managers at the agency had moved to punish Dudek as he cooperated with the efficiency czars.

The LinkedIn post said “I confess. I helped DOGE understand SSA. I mailed myself publicly accessible documents and explained them to DOGE. I confess. I moved contractor money around to add data science resources to my anti-fraud team. I confess. I asked where the fat was and is in our contracts so we can make the right tough choices.”

“I confess. I bullied agency executives, shared executive contact information, and circumvented the chain of command to connect DOGE with the people who get stuff done,” it continued. “Everything I have ever done is in service to our country, our beneficiaries, and our agency.”

Dudek isn’t going to stay in the top job forever. Trump has a nominee to fill the role, but he jumped over dozens of more senior figures who toed the line against working with the president’s DOGE team. 

According to people familiar with his employment, Dudek was a senior General Schedule employee at SSA, a status that is below the agency’s Senior Executive Service—meaning he bypassed dozens of members of the agency’s leadership when he was appointed acting commissioner.

One person familiar with Dudek described him as someone who could be unconventional or willing to skirt the rules to get results, but was passionate about the work of fighting fraud.

Dudek told staff in an email Monday night that he will lead the agency “in an open and transparent manner,” saying his first call went to the SSA’s Inspector General’s office. “Transparency is at the heart of good government,” he said in the email reviewed by the Journal.

Since Dudek’s ascension, DOGE officials have had access to the agency’s Enterprise Data Warehouse, according to people familiar with the matter. The EDW is a centralized database that includes records on individuals who have been issued a Social Security number or have applied for or received Social Security benefits, including wage, tax and bank account information.

Bureaucrats tend to view their fiefdoms as inviolable. If a man’s home is his castle, a bureaucrat’s bureau is his kingdom. When the Inspector General for the Social Security Administration warned that millions of people on the books clearly didn’t or no longer lived, the agency waved the problem away as insignificant. 

Nobody could tell the bureaucrats to clean up the books!

MSNBC: The Social Security Administration made ~$72 billion in improper payments over an eight-year period, according to an Inspector General audit.@jdbalart: “$72 billion — and that’s without a comprehensive search! I mean, that’s significant.” pic.twitter.com/9D621F29Zf

— Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) February 18, 2025

Do we have any idea how much goes out the door fraudulently? Only in vague terms. It could be as little as $10 billion/year, or as much as … the sky is the limit, because the data is so bad. 

We could save one trillion dollars a year, yet the Democrats are fighting it! Democrats hate America! pic.twitter.com/zLixng3J0M

— Kelly (@kellytx2) February 12, 2025

As I wrote earlier in the week, Washington bureaucrats are terrified. Searches of criminal defense attorneys on Google have skyrocketed in DC by 4-500%, making the city the epicenter for such searches in the country. 

Does that imply mens rea? It sure IMPLIES that people think they did something wrong, but perhaps these people are just being cautious. After all, going after your political opponents is what the Democrats did…

This post was originally published on this site

Love him, hate him, fear him — Republicans and Democrats alike could not afford to look past him. Mitch McConnell finally stepped down from his Senate leadership role last year after it became clear that the years were catching up to him, and perhaps that his party had shifted in a new direction. 

At the time, it was largely understood that the seven-term Senator from Kentucky had essentially started his valedictory lap in Washington DC. Today, on his birthday, McConnell made it official, announcing his intention to retire at the end of his term next year:

BREAKING: Longtime Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell, who turns 83 today, has announced he won’t seek reelection after his term ends in 2027.

“Seven times my fellow Kentuckians have sent me to the Senate … I will not seek this honor an eighth time.” https://t.co/bcK6MyRd23 pic.twitter.com/ufUeQPkdub

— ABC News (@ABC) February 20, 2025

“I figured my birthday would be as good a day as any to share with our colleagues the decision I made last year,” McConnell said on the day he turned 83. “Representing our commonwealth has been the honor of a lifetime. I will not seek this honor an eighth time.”

McConnell, who was first elected to the Senate in 1984, announced his plans to step down from Republican leadership nearly a year ago. Throughout his decades in the chamber, McConnell played a key role in steering the Supreme Court to its current conservative tilt and has maintained a traditional Republican view of foreign relations as others in the party shifted toward a more populist view in the Donald Trump era.

McConnell has publicly battled health issues in recent years, including a fall outside the Senate chamber earlier this month, which a spokesperson attributed to the “lingering effects of polio,” which he overcame as a child.

Just a quick note on that point: it’s almost certainly true. The few people I have known who recovered from polio in their youth had troubles later in life with the effects. The more concerning medical episodes had to do with the disturbing freezes that took place in front of the press on a couple of occasions. McConnell has demonstrated that he retained the capacity for office, but also that his frailties suggested that he might not be able to keep up for much longer — as opposed to Chuck Grassley, who’s almost a decade older but still robust enough to handle the job.

McConnell may have outlasted his welcome in recent years, too. He appeared ready to work with Donald Trump and the populist faction of the GOP at the start of the first term, but grew increasingly distant from them since. The White House seethed over McConnell’s opposition to Robert Kennedy and Tulsi Gabbard this year, but that rift has been widening for a few years now. McConnell’s institutionalism became too much of a hurdle to Trump’s clear intent to reorder the Beltway by any means necessary.

That has understandably angered many people in and out of the GOP, and fair play on that. At the same time, we should appreciate all the battles that McConnell fought and won for the GOP and conservatives during the Obama and Biden administrations. McConnell made Harry Reid, Chuck Schumer, and Dick Durbin pay over and over again for the 2013 “nuclear option” — which is why RFK, Gabbard, and Pete Hegseth got confirmed at all, and why Kash Patel will now take over the FBI. McConnell fought hard to hold the Supreme Court seat open after Antonin Scalia’s untimely death, which gave us Justice Neil Gorsuch rather than Justice Merrick Garland. And McConnell then double-tempoed Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation after the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg too, although that was somewhat easier. 

McConnell did all of that, and with a sense of humor, too. When a crank Senate candidate tried to smear McConnell and his wife over a 2014 drug bust by calling him “Cocaine Mitch,” McConnell leaned into it rather than vent:

Thanks for playing, @DonBlankenship. #WVSen pic.twitter.com/TV1ETgQdmu

— Team Mitch (Text MITCH to 47137) (@Team_Mitch) May 9, 2018

How can anyone not appreciate that?

Anyway, McConnell gets to leave on his own terms, and Republicans in Kentucky can look to the future. This adds an open seat to the midterms in which the GOP already faced a numerical disadvantage, and Kentucky isn’t necessarily a slam-dunk in statewide elections for Republicans. The GOP has a five-point registration advantage as of last month (47/42), and Trump won the state last November by a far wider margin, 65/34. Rand Paul also handily won re-election to the Senate in 2022 by a 62/38 margin, but Democrats keep managing to win the gubernatorial elections there. Andy Beshear won in 2023 by five points over Daniel Cameron, who might be tempted to run for McConnell’s open seat next year. 

The good news is that Kentucky Republicans had to be anticipating this, and hopefully have already started working on developing candidates for the 2026 midterms. It will bear watching, though, and no small amount of hard work and investment. 

This post was originally published on this site

We’ve actually known this was coming for a week now. Last Thursday Bloomberg reported that both Coca-Cola and Pepsi were planning to comply with President Trump’s executive orders on DEI.

Coca-Cola Co. and PepsiCo Inc., both government contractors, are preparing to comply with President Donald Trump’s executive order banning diversity, equity and inclusion programs, according to people familiar with the matter.

Coca-Cola, which provides beverages on military bases and in other government facilities, will adhere to the administration’s directive, according to a person familiar with the matter who wasn’t authorized to speak publicly. The company is likely to disclose any changes in forthcoming filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the person said.

Today, Robby Starbuck revealed the contents of a memo sent to employees by email. Here’s his bullet point summary of what is changing:

• @PepsiCo will no longer have a DEI Officer.
• PepsiCo will no longer have a DEI team.
• PepsiCo will END DEI representation goals.
• PepsiCo will no longer participate in the woke @HRC CEI social credit system survey. Woke trans agenda activists at the HRC are losing influence and power by the day.
• They will END ALL DEI trainings.
• ALL PepsiCo sponsorships must align with their business going forward.
• Instead of supplier diversity, PepsiCo is now focused on growing their small business supplier base.
• There will now be centralized management of ALL employee groups to ensure that their activities align with the core business.
• Going forward their strategy will be about GROWTH and how they drive growth to the business.

He adds that Pepsi owns a number of major brands that go beyond soft drinks.

Keep in mind, this doesn’t just affect Pepsi. PepsiCo owns the following brands: Gatorade, Quaker Oatmeal/Cereal, Chewy Bars, Starbuck’s coffees in glass that’s sold at grocery stores, AMP Energy, Rockstar Energy, MUG Root Beer, Mountain Dew, SoBe, Cap’n Crunch Cereal, King Vitamin Cereal,  Sabra Hummus, Aunt Jemima, Tropicana, Rice-a-Roni, Cheetos, Doritos, Lays, Ruffles, Tostitos, Chesters, Cracker Jack, Frito-Lay, FunYuns, Grandma’s Cookies, Miss Vickies, Rold Gold, Stacy’s Pita, Sun Chips, Mist Twist, Crush, Lipton Teas, Aquafina, Propel Zero and more.

PepsiCo has 318,000+ employees and a market cap of more than $200 BILLION dollars. Those employees will now have a neutral workplace without feeling that divisive issues are being injected and this corporate neutrality will also extend to their many suppliers who will no longer feel pressure to endorse these policies.

Here’s his post on X which includes images of the actual memo plus a graphic showing some of their brands. Starbuck usually makes a video describing the details of these DEI walkbacks but in this case he says he won’t be doing that because he’s sick.

MASSIVE news: I contacted PepsiCo to let them know that I planned on doing a story about their woke policies. When I contacted them, they were ready to make some BIG changes. I can now exclusively tell you what’s changing:

• @PepsiCo will no longer have a DEI Officer.

•… pic.twitter.com/RnjhVuPnVR

— Robby Starbuck (@robbystarbuck) February 20, 2025

Coca-Cola hasn’t made a public announcement yet possibly because it was already being targeted by the left over false claims that it turned over a group of employees to ICE for deportation. A coke and ice do go together but in this case those claims, which circulated on social media a week ago, were false.

An Instagram post showed a man saying that the beverage company called its employees who were illegally in the U.S. into a room for a meeting and then they were “all cornered by ICE.”…

Other videos in Spanish also claimed that the company’s directors had apologized to its employees affected by the supposed deportations. 

However, we found no reports in the news database, Nexis, on The Coca-Cola Co.’s social media, nor statements of apology on the company’s official website…

We also did not find any reports of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids at Coca-Cola factories in recent history.

This was all BS but it just happened to coincide with an attempt by activists to target Coke (and other companies) who have announced plans to step back from DEI:

A growing backlash against national retailers that have started eliminating or rolling back Diversity, Equity and Inclusion programs now includes Latino leaders calling for a boycott of those big stores.

The movement, known as the Latino Freeze, includes activists like civil rights leader Dolores Huerta heading the charge.

“If you don’t respect our community, then you shouldn’t have our dollars,” Huerta said.

You can see the full list of the companies being boycotted here. Will this effort work? I sort of doubt it. Amazon, Target, Walmart, Coke, Pepsi, Home Depot, Ace Hardware, Ford, Toyota and McDonalds are all on the list. Targeting just one of these companies would be a big goal. Targeting all of them at once seems unlikely to make much of an impact. 

That’s especially true because, as the last election showed us, the Hispanic community is not monolithic. Trump won a majority of Hispanic men. I don’t think it’s likely that a big majority of those same voters are going to go all in for DEI. But I guess we’ll see. In the meantime, if you feel inclined to undermine the pro-DEI boycott, order a Pepsi or a Coke. Better yet, pick them up at Target or WalMart.

This post was originally published on this site

Jason Furman is a left-leaning economist who currently works at Harvard but who previously served as chair of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Obama. So his recent takedown of Bidenomics is coming from an ally of the party not an outsider. 

Furman’s analysis starts with the fact that voters rejected Biden and Harris because in their view Bidenomics was not a rousing success. If you had to point to a single cause for widespread dissatisfaction with Biden’s tenure, it would probably be inflation.

Although there are many explanations for Donald Trump’s victory in the 2024 U.S. presidential election, voters’ views of the U.S. economy may have been decisive. In polling shortly before the election, more than 60 percent of voters in swing states agreed with the idea that the economy was on the wrong track, and even higher numbers registered concern about the cost of living. In exit polls, 75 percent of voters agreed that inflation was a “hardship.”

He goes on to state the obvious, that Biden’s economic record over his whole term was mixed at best, and not the unqualified success that Democrats tried to claim it was.

The U.S. economy has bounced back much faster than it did after previous recessions, and its post-pandemic performance has also outpaced that of many peer countries in terms of economic growth. But the recovery has been uneven, frustrated by inflation at least partly induced by the administration’s own policies. Inflation, unemployment, interest rates, and government debt were all higher in 2024 than they were in 2019. From 2019 to 2023, inflation-adjusted household income fell, and the poverty rate rose.

The core problem was inflation, and on this point Furman goes into detail to argue Biden entered office with a plan to spend far more money than was needed at the time.

In 2020, toward the end of the first Trump administration, Congress passed $3.4 trillion in fiscal support; in December, $900 billion was authorized to fund $600 stimulus checks for most American adults. Despite the ravages of the pandemic on public health, many households had never been in better financial shape, with overall debt service payments representing the lowest share of disposable income in decades, delinquencies and defaults remaining low, and record amounts of money sitting in checking accounts across the income spectrum. Economists hoped that as the rollout of vaccines proceeded, so would the economic recovery. In fact, when Biden came to office, the $1.5 trillion of excess savings that Americans had accumulated from the federal largess of 2020 and their suppressed spending was waiting to be unleashed by the reopening—perhaps obviating the macroeconomic need for yet another large stimulus bill…

Against these hopeful prognostications by many mainstream economists, however, the incoming Biden administration moved aggressively, proposing a $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan even before coming into office. With U.S. GDP three percent below pre-pandemic forecasts as of the fourth quarter of 2020, an additional $650 billion in stimulus—about a third as much—would have been sufficient to fill the hole in the economy.

…economic ideas also played an important role. Policymakers decided to run the economy “hot”: that is, to support high demand to jump-start the economy even if it meant risking higher inflation. The Biden administration believed that the surfeit of demand this would produce would benefit a broad group of workers by increasing their bargaining power and, by extension, raising their inflation-adjusted wages. The administration dismissed dissenting voices who expressed skepticism about this approach, such as the economist Larry Summers, who warned that it would lead to high inflation.

When you add together high inflation and the denial of economic reality the Biden administration engaged in, you get an unappealing combination that doomed Biden and Harris. Furman doesn’t even mention Biden’s age which was arguably an even bigger drag on Biden in particular, but his argument is effectively that Biden was doomed by his own economic choices, even if he’d been 10 years younger than he was. And that’s partly why Kamala Harris, who didn’t suffer from the same age problem, still couldn’t manage a win.

So why didn’t the Biden administration get this at the time? In an interview at Politico about the piece, Furman said he knew economists who shared some of his concerns but who remained silent for fear of being attacked as traitors to the cause.

There is, in general, too much inhibition in people’s conversations about economic policy. There were a lot more critics of the size of the American Rescue Plan privately than there were publicly, and same thing on student loans. I knew many economists that thought it was terrible what was happening on student loan relief, but they were afraid to be yelled at on Twitter, or didn’t have a platform, or didn’t want to risk a future job in a Democratic administration. And so, people get a mistaken impression of what it is that economists think on any given topic because there is so much self-censorship.

Now, I have the luxurious position of a secure job at Harvard, and I had a great government job in the past, and I’m not trying to pursue my next government job. So in some ways, it’s easier for me to do this.

In other words, no one wanted to speak the truth about some of Biden’s economic plans for the same reason no one wanted to speak the truth about his age. There was no upside to bucking the party and plenty of potential upside to keeping their views to themselves. In some sense, the Biden administration became a victim of it’s own success at silencing critics. Because while the critics held back their real views in many cases, the voters ultimately did not.

This post was originally published on this site

J.D. Vance didn’t need to cast the tie-breaking vote — but it came close. Both Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins voted against confirming Kash Patel as the new director of the FBI, but Mitch McConnell voted in favor, allowing Patel to take office by the narrowest Senate vote thus far for a Donald Trump nominee:

Every Senate Democrat voted against Patel. They were joined by two Republicans, Sens. Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, who said they believed Patel was too overtly political to lead the nation’s top law enforcement agency.

“Mr. Patel’s recent political profile undermines his ability to serve in the apolitical role of Director of the FBI,” Collins said ahead of the 51-49 vote.

Patel’s confirmation marks a tectonic shift at the bureau, as he plans to adjust its focus from terrorism and counterintelligence work back toward its historical mission of fighting violent crime. His priorities, partisan approach and open criticism of the agency he will lead set him apart from most every other director in the bureau’s history.

Given the political nature of the FBI over the past decade — and much of its first 50 years or so — one might think Patel to be a natural fit for the position. It certainly does send a signal that business as usual is over at the FBI, although what form that will take remains to be seen. Adam Schiff, who kept insisting that he’d personally seen evidence of Trump’s collusion with Russia and leaked false information while serving on the House Intelligence Committee, now fulminates in the Senate over [ahem] “trust”:

About a half-dozen Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee gathered outside FBI headquarters earlier Thursday in a last-ditch plea to derail his confirmation.

“This is someone we cannot trust,” said Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.). “This is someone who lacks the character to do this job, someone who lacks the integrity to do this job. We know that, our Republican colleagues know that.”

This is a clear case of projection. Schiff spent two terms in the House channeling Sen. Joe McCarthy and promising to prove that Trump was a Russian asset, while Devin Nunes and Patel exposed his lies and prevarications. For Schiff, this is all about revenge, not public trust.

Nonetheless, Patel does need to demonstrate that he can rise to the occasion and truly take the FBI in a non-partisan direction. He tried to back away from heated partisan rhetoric in the past, but firmly stuck to his plans to reform the bureau and bring it back to a strictly law-enforcement approach:

“I’ve overwhelmingly said multiple times that 98% of the FBI is courageous, apolitical warriors of justice. They just need better leadership,” Patel told senators during the hearing.

He touched only briefly on his desire to protect the country from national security threats, namely Chinese espionage, terrorism and Iranian aggression. But he repeatedly said his goal was to “let good cops be cops,” and spoke of sending more agents from Washington into the field to fight crime.

That partly depends on Congress, however. The FBI as a law-enforcement agency makes sense. Having the FBI do counterintelligence at the same time sounds good in theory, but in practice has been a disaster. The best approach would be to divorce those responsibilities from the FBI and to hand them off to another agency that’s less tempted to use the combination of both powers for political purposes. Unless and until Congress acts to do so, however, Patel is stuck with both missions and needs to demonstrate real integrity in keeping a nonpartisan balance. 

Perhaps Patel can start working on a proposal for Congress to address this. That would be a very good step toward real reform and would help build confidence in his leadership. It’s his show now; let’s keep a close eye on how Patel performs. 

This post was originally published on this site

[Beege adds: I know, I KNOW – that’s BMW’s tagline. I was traumatized at the dentist’s first thing this morning. That’s my excuse, and I’m sticking with it.]

It’s been hard times for the auto industry, what with interest rates going up and consumer interest in the once Golden Calf-like electric vehicle sure thing going down.

It’s been especially tough to be a carmaker in Europe, where those EV sales numbers are mandates that come with healthy fines if they aren’t met. And all the while, you can’t sell what you need to sell because no one wants to buy them. To make matters worse, the European Union is about to hammer you financially as the Chinese eat your lunch and steal your cupcake.

If you’re a car company in Germany, you’ve got another set of homegrown problems on top of all that.

And now there’s Trump with a “T,” which is also the first letter in ‘T’ariffs. 

The very thought has set auto manufacturers’ teeth on edge.

Volkswagen, the country’s synonymous vehicle manufacturer, is curling into a fetal ball, trying to avoid any more bad news or body blows. You can probably hear them squeaking, ‘Please don’t hurt me anymore‘ from here if you listen real close.

The entire European auto sector was pronounced to be in an ‘existential crisis’ just last month.

…Mandates and Green dreams still can’t change what people want and are willing to pay for, it seems.

European automotive suppliers are experiencing unprecedented turbulence as electric vehicle market uncertainties trigger a wave of dramatic workforce reductions. Major manufacturers are confronting a perfect storm of economic challenges that threaten the industry’s traditional foundations.

In a stark illustration of the sector’s volatility Robert Bosch, ZF Friedrichshafen, Continental and Schaeffler have collectively announced 54,000 job cuts in 2024. This figure represents a record number of redundancies surpassing those announced during the pandemic years of 2020 and 2021 combined according to the European Association of Automotive Suppliers (CLEPA).

The Grande Dame of German auto engineering, Mercedes Benz, has also had a rough go of it this past year and EVs were a good part of it. The company is warning that 2025 is going to be disappointing.

“Profits at the company’s car division dropped 41 per cent, while net profits fell 28 per cent to €10.4bn last year. Revenues dropped 5 per cent to €146bn.”

Mercedes-Benz warns 2025 profits will be ‘significantly’ lower – https://t.co/wgZXZnep3f

— WP 🇩🇪🇺🇸🇬🇷🇧🇪🇫🇷🇦🇹🇨🇿🇵🇱🇬🇧 (@WPipperger) February 20, 2025

And they are going to cut auto production in Germany. How’s that for an announcement three days before national elections?

Mercedes-Benz Group is cutting production capacity in Germany and moving some output to low-cost countries as it grapples with fierce competition and uneven demand in the global auto market.

The automaker said it plans to cut production costs by 10 percent through 2027 and will also work with suppliers to reduce material costs. Global prices for everything from chemical coatings to metals have risen in recent years.

Mercedes’ operating earnings slumped 30 percent last year, the automaker said on Feb. 20. Its automotive margin dropped to 8.1 percent, below the previous year’s 12.6 percent. The car division had a 40 percent slump in 2024 earnings as sales in the key Chinese and German markets took a battering.

Mercedes expects its automotive margin to drop to as low as 6 percent this year. After pledging to boost margins to a minimum of 8 percent less than three years ago, the new guidance marks a blow to Mercedes’ strategy of shifting upmarket to secure higher returns.

The production cuts are interesting, as they won’t be closing any factories in Germany, which has to come as a relief to the mainstream candidates running. But they will be moving production out of Germany to take advantage of cheaper labor costs and protect themselves from those Trump tariffs if they come to pass. So Hungary will score for their affordable wage structure – the company will save up to 70% in labor costs over the German unions – and another vehicle line will get shifted to the plant in Alabama, US of A. Tariff-proof, although the company denies the potential tariffs played any part in the decision.

OKAY

…Mercedes will reduce the capacity of its German plants to about 900,000 cars from around one million. There are no plans to close plants in Germany but jobs will be cut through natural attrition.

Kallenius would not say how many jobs could be affected in Germany.

Mercedes plans to shift production of one of its compact cars from Germany to its plant in Hungary, where costs are 70 percent lower, CFO Harald Wilhelm said.

It will also outsource areas from finance and human resources to procurement, he said.

To shield itself from tariffs and trade tensions, the carmaker will increase the number of cars produced within the market in which they will be sold from 60 percent to 70 percent globally, with a particular focus on China and the U.S.

The U.S. factory, in Vance, Alabama, is likely to get another “core” model, meaning a C- or E-Class vehicle, Kallenius said. The light truck factory builds the GLE, GLE Coupe and GLS, including EV variants.

According to a supply chain source, Mercedes could begin building GLC crossovers in the U.S. in the second quarter of 2027. The source told Automotive News GLC volumes could hit 50,000 vehicles in the first full manufacturing year.

Tariffs are a serious threat to a shaky European bottom line. At Mercedes, the CEO is saying the Trump tariffs would cost them a billion a year.

🇩🇪 German automakers are about to get hit with the next round of Trump tariffs. Biggest impact is expected on Volkswagen (80% of US sales are imported), Mercedes Benz (63%), BMW (52%). Scope, rates and impact on cars produced under the free trade agreement are unclear pic.twitter.com/kFvkgON2zL

— Nikolay Kolarov, CFA (@libertniko) February 15, 2025

Interestingly enough, that same Vance, AL plant was the scene last year of a fiercely contested labor fight over unionizing the plant, with all sorts of ugly accusations of skullduggery and malfeasance flying back and forth between Shawn Fain’s United Autoworkers (UAW) and Mercedes management.

It was nip and tuck and anyone’s guess, but in the end, plant workers voted to sent the UAW packing.

Most grievously affected, @BernieSanders .

— MarkWhittington (@MarkWhittington) May 17, 2024

As far as specific vehicle production plans go, Mercedes is going back to their roots – focusing on internal combustion engines (ICE) and elegant, expensive cars.

…Mercedes also said it will launch more gasoline and diesel cars than battery-electric cars in its new product range in a bid to revive margins.

The company will release 19 new combustion engine models and 17 battery-electric cars by the end of 2027, in a sign of a renewed focus on its combustion engine offering after its BEV sales collapsed by a quarter last year.

Most of the new models will be in its top-end price tier, showing that the carmaker is still committed to its strategy of selling a lower volume of higher-margin vehicles, despite some investors and labor representatives expressing concern in recent months that the strategy had failed.

If I might be so bold, another thing Mercedes could consider is to stop making such ugly, junky-ass cars. Hubs has a 2002 E430 we bought used (that we also desperately need to get back on the road), and he just can’t turn loose of it. 

Why?

It’s a beautiful car. It’s everything the Mercedes you might have dreamt about one day buying and we lucked into it.

Every Mercedes we’ve looked at since has looked more unattractive and cheaper (!) with each new model year, and there are endless complaints about the quality issues. Our experience exactly mirrors what a fellow wrote in a letter about the company’s fall from customer grace in the hands of Swedish-German Mercedes CEO Sten Ola Källenius. He berates them for chasing ‘ostentation’ over the company’s heritage of quality and design.

I just read it, and I’ll bet it’s a good bit of their sales slump.

this letter to the editor summarizes Mercedes’s misery under Källenius:

The letter criticizes the current direction of Mercedes-Benz under Ola Källenius, arguing that it strays from the traditional “Swabian” values of modesty and quality. The author laments the shift toward… pic.twitter.com/PukWuyRfoj

— stekkerauto 🚗⚡️ (@stekkerauto) February 20, 2025

…The letter criticizes the current direction of Mercedes-Benz under Ola Källenius, arguing that it strays from the traditional “Swabian” values of modesty and quality. The author laments the shift toward excessive luxury and ostentation, such as oversized SUVs and overly elaborate designs, which he sees as incompatible with the company’s heritage. He praises the simpler, more functional designs of past eras, like those under designer Bruno Sacco, and calls for a return to a more balanced model lineup focused on quality rather than extravagance. 

Full text: Swabian Gene 

Regarding “Luxury Reloaded” (F.A.Z. from February 15): There is a Swabian gene. If one were to define it, “the Daimler,” as people in Stuttgart call Mercedes-Benz, is part of this gene. It’s a significant part that has ensured prosperity in the region for over a century. The current CEO Ola Källenius is not part of this genetic makeup. He has not understood that hubris is not a Swabian trait. In Sindelfingen, we have always built wonderful and even expensive cars and have impressed and inspired the world with our achievements in Swabian modesty. Then came the boasting with “the best or nothing.” With Källenius came the ostentation. 

Now we get the bill: E-SUVs that look like small trucks, AMG versions with Rambo grilles, an oversized luxury sedan with a weird name, and an S-Class with side windows so slanted and an A-pillar so steeply inclined that only a hunched posture allows entry. Is this luxury? Just now, the highly talented designer Bruno Sacco passed away. If only there were such talents again at Daimler. And a model range that is clear and focuses on the economically significant mid-size segment. That was always Sindelfingen’s hallmark. Luxury could then be afforded when one was asked for it—and it was requested. Delivery times were the secret

Herr Bonz from Böblingen nails what ails them.

The EV situation is an easy excuse, but it’s not the whole shebang. Mercedes has an image problem which is a real problem for a company whose reputation is built on their image. Once upon a time, you saw that symbol, and your brain said ‘German engineering’ or, more hilariously, like the old commercial, ‘qvick and qviet.’

Now, it does look as if they have a good start on the road back to classic. Mercedes designers have already ‘refreshed’ the ‘S’ class, and I have to say, it looks schweet, weird, fuzzy headrest notwithstanding.

More than spectacular: the #SClass.

📷 sebastiankubatz (IG) for #MBcreator#MercedesBenz #MANUFAKTUR pic.twitter.com/TFnGilrSLw

— Mercedes-Benz (@MercedesBenz) February 20, 2025

If they capture more of that timeless quality, get their engineering ducks back in a row, and navigate the EU-mandated EV hump, maybe there will be brighter driving days ahead.

If their impish sense of humor is restored…

…we’ll know things are going well and the confidence level is high.

This post was originally published on this site

The BBC produced and aired a documentary purporting to feature a young child struggling to survive in the Gaza war zone. 

It was, as all such documentaries are, stunning and brave. It tugged your heartstrings. You connected with the vital true story of an innocent child being chased down by genocidal maniac Israeli tyrants. 

The film Gaza: How To Survive a Warzone hit all the high notes, except one: telling the truth. The intrepid narrator of the “independent” film (was it partially funded by USAID?) is the son of the Hamas Minister of Agriculture. 

They happened to leave that detail out. 

Oh dear, this is a major blunder. The BBC admits it did not know that the child protagonist in documentary Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone was the son of Hamas royalty. It blames the independent producer for not sharing this info during editorial checks. https://t.co/0Ypw5yXvCG

— Jake Kanter (@Jake_Kanter) February 19, 2025

Oops. That puts a bit of a different spin on things, doesn’t it?

The BBC has apologized and added a clarification to its Gaza: How To Survive a Warzone documentary that featured the son of a Hamas minister, after nearly 50 entertainment figures sent a letter to the corporation to urge an investigation.

The BBC “had not been informed of this information” by the independent producers behind the doc, the corporation added, following backlash from dozens of senior entertainment figures including former BBC controller Danny Cohen, J.K. Rowling’s agent Neil Blair, agent Anita Land and ex-Got Talent commissioner Claudia Rosencrantz.

The letter was sent to Director General Tim Davie, content chief Charlotte Moore and BBC News boss Deborah Turness earlier today, urging an investigation after the documentary about children in Gaza that failed to declare that the lead contributor was the son of Hamas royalty.

Before the airing, lots of critics were raising the alarm that the “documentary” would be pure propaganda, but the BBC assured everyone that all the appropriate editorial standards were met. It was “independent,” but used BBC standards. I suppose that is true in the sense that the BBC is itself a propaganda outlet. 

Now the BBC is going the other direction. “It’s not our fault. They never told us this minor fact.”

Here’s a statement from Danny Cohen, the former BBC television chief turned BBC interrogator-in-chief, who has been consistently raising concerns about anti-Israeli bias in Gaza crisis coverage. pic.twitter.com/rHqpH0KrIC

— Jake Kanter (@Jake_Kanter) February 19, 2025

Not that they care. They will continue to air the documentary, simply appending a note that the child is related to a Hamas minister. 

In a statement in the past few minutes, the BBC said that since the transmission of the doc three days ago it had “become aware of the family connections of the film’s narrator, a child called Abdullah.” “We’ve promised our audiences the highest standards of transparency, so it is only right that as a result of this new information, we add some more detail to the film before its retransmission,” the statement added. “We apologise for the omission of that detail from the original film.”

For future repeats and on iPlayer, the film will now clarify: “The narrator of this film is 13 year old Abdullah. His father has worked as a deputy agriculture minister for the Hamas-run government in Gaza. The production team had full editorial control of filming with Abdullah.” The statement has been added to the BBC’s Corrections and Clarifications page and the BBC said it will also respond to the letter directly.

The BBC went on to say that it followed the usual compliance procedures in making the film and “had not been informed of this information by the independent producers when we complied and then broadcast the finished film.” Gaza: How To Survive a Warzone was produced by Hoyo Films, the independent producer run by the doc’s director Jamie Roberts, and it was commissioned through the BBC’s current affairs team, which sits under Turness.

The BBC commissioned the film. They had editorial control over it, by their own admission. They aired it without informing people about the most basic fact in the world: the narrator was a Hamas member. And now they will continue to air it as a documentary, not as an example of a modern-day Triumph of the Will. 

British taxpayers paid for this. It is likely that USAID contributed to it through our funding of BBC’s “charity” funding of “independent” journalists. 

The BBC’s initial statement issued yesterday about the narrator’s links to Hamas appears to try and put distance between Abdullah Al-Yazouri and his father, stating: “The film told the children’s own stories, showing viewers their direct experiences of living through a war, and the children’s parents did not have any editorial input.” But the letter flags the BBC’s international safeguarding policy rules and regulator Ofcom’s broadcasting rules, asking questions including: “What role did Abdullah Al-Yazouri’s parents play in the supervision of the filming of the child and the BBC’s duty of care obligations in filming with under-18s?”

“Given that the terrorist group Hamas remain in de facto control of Gaza, it is reasonable to presume that the documentary could only be made with their permission or authorisation,” it adds. “Was this the case? If so, why was this not disclosed to audiences?”

The BBC expects us to buy the argument that a documentary featuring a Hamas minister’s child, in Hamas-held and ruled Gaza, in the midst of a Hamas-Israeli war, was not influenced by Hamas?

Yes, yes they do. Because if you can’t trust the BBC, who can you trust?

This post was originally published on this site

Last month, Bryan Kohberger’s attorneys attempted to have all of the evidence against him in his murder trial thrown out on the grounds that he was identified thanks to genetic genealogy techniques which were used without proper warrants.

DNA was found at the scene on the sheath of a knife which was discovered under one of the victim’s bodies. The FBI took that DNA and compared it to DNA on some publicly available database and found a familial match which directed them to Kohberger. Subsequently, they tracked his movements as he drove to his families home in Pennsylvania where they took trash from outside the family home and ran the trace DNA to find a match for the father of the suspect. Kohberger’s attorneys argue both searches required a warrant and because authorities never had one all of the evidence that resulted from the identification of Kohberger should be tossed out. Today the judge in the case rejected this fairly bizarre view of privacy.

A DNA technique that prosecutors said first identified Bryan Kohberger as the suspect in the University of Idaho student homicides did not jeopardize the investigation, and its use by the FBI does not justify suppressing any evidence collected after that, the judge in the high-profile murder case ruled Wednesday…

“In sum, defendant’s argument finds no support under the law,” Hippler wrote. “Any privacy interest he can claim in this DNA was abandoned along with the sheath, to which he claims no ownership or knowledge. Even if no such abandonment occurred, defendant has not demonstrated it is reasonable to recognize a privacy interest in DNA left at a crime scene.”…

“The court concludes that the search warrants are not invalid based on the omission of defendant’s identification through IGG because that information would have only bolstered probable cause for the searches,” Hippler wrote. “As to the remaining challenges, the court finds defendant has failed to carry his preliminary burden under Franks and, therefore, denies his motion.”

Kohberger’s attorneys were arguing that he maintained a privacy interest in DNA left at a crime scene and that therefore a search warrant was needed. Judge Hippler, in his decision, pointed out that a search warrant is not needed at a crime scene and that Kohberger had denied any ownership or connection to the knife sheath where his DNA was found. His attorneys could only point to one concurring decision in a single case to support their claim about the DNA. The details of that claim seem equally fantastic. It involved DNA left on the body of a woman who had been raped and murdered.

In support of his argument, Defendant relies exclusively on concurring opinion in State v. Carbo, which is factually similar to this case. In Carbo, the evidence at issue was semen deposited inside the deceased crime victim and skin scrapings from underneath her fingernails. In an attempt to identify suspect, law enforcement contracted with lab to conduct genetic analysis of the DNA extracted from this evidence. Like here, the lab created SNP profile from the DNA and utilized commercial genealogical databases to determine potential source. It also generated report that provided information about the suspect’s physical traits and ancestral origin. /d. This information ultimately led law enforcement to the defendant. Law enforcement then created DNA profile from trash discarded by the defendant, which matched the DNA profile from the crime scene. Subsequently, the defendant provided voluntary DNA sample, which matched the profile from the crime scene and the garbage.

The defendant moved to suppress evidence of his genetic information left behind at the crime scene. He argued, as Defendant does here, that although he may have abandoned his privacy interests in his semen and skin cells, it did not equate to an abandonment of the “vast troves” of genetic information that biological material contained. Making short work of this argument, the Minnesota Supreme Court found that by voluntarily leaving his semen and skin at the crime scene, he abandoned any subjective privacy interest in his genetic information contained therein.

In the concurring opinion relied upon by Defendant, one justice disagreed with the majority on this issue because, given the sensitive genetic information revealed by SNP testing, he would have required warrant before allowing such testing. He further opined that the concept of abandonment which requires voluntariness is an “ill fit” for genetic information because it is virtually impossible for humans to prevent leaving personal genetic information everywhere they go.

In the case the defense lawyers cited, the majority of judges disagreed and said there was no right to privacy on DNA left at a crime scene, just as there would be no right to privacy for fingerprints left at a crime scene. 

It’s a fairly surreal argument. The suspect in each case is claiming that they have a right to something like a HIPAA privacy claim to their DNA left behind at a murder scene. This argument might even carry some weight if the FBI were using the DNA to create a complete medical profile of the suspect. But Judge Hippler pointed out that the DNA gathered in this case was not searched for medical information but only for identity information.

This was probably Kohberger’s last hope to avoid a conviction in this case. With all of the evidence now allowed in to the case by this decision, he will somehow have to come up with an alternate explanation to create reasonable doubt about his guilt. As I pointed out before, the amount of evidence against Kohberger is simply overwhelming and he has never provide an alibi except to claim he was out driving alone in the middle of the night when the crime happened.

The trial is set to begin in August. If convicted he is facing the possibility of the death penalty. Given the number of victims and the premeditated, cold-blooded nature of the crime that seems to be a likely outcome in this case.

This post was originally published on this site

I don’t share the antipathy that many people feel for President Zelenskyy, but he sure isn’t doing himself any favors by continuing to pick fights with Donald Trump. 

Trump and Zelenskyy are in the midst of a war of words over Ukraine policy, and as an outside observer, I have to say I don’t like what either of them has been saying. I support Trump’s policy choice to wrap up the Ukraine war and think that a lot of the rhetoric used to justify continuing the fighting is complete BS. I don’t think Trump is right to say that Zelenskyy is a tyrant who started the war. 

Zelenskyy, on the other hand, seems determined to act as if he has a right to an unlimited war budget from the American people and has seems to be deluded into believing that he and Europe have a prayer of defeating Russia without help from the United States. He doesn’t even have a prayer of winning the war WITH the help of Europe and the United States. 

How do I know that? In 3 years and after hundreds of billions of dollars of aid, the war is in a stalemate. The body bags keep piling up, but the front lines move only meters one way or another, and nobody has a plan to change that, and certainly no plan to return to the status quo ante 2014, which is Zelenskyy’s war aim. 

In that light, we are 10 years into a forever war, with something over a million people killed or wounded so far. The war started under Obama, who allowed Putin to take Crimea and occupy other parts of Ukraine. It was a stalemate under Trump. Restarted under Biden, during whose term about a million people died or were severely wounded, and now Trump wants to stop the killing. 

BREAKING — Zelensky govt reportedly blocks Trump’s Truth Social network across Ukraine pic.twitter.com/QVbGSqe9fk

— Election Wizard (@ElectionWiz) February 20, 2025

Trump is right that this phase of the war wouldn’t have started except for his defeat in 2020. And he is right that Biden and Zelenskyy should have negotiated a cease-fire when Russia was willing in 2022-23. But that doesn’t make Zelenskyy the aggressor, and Trump shouldn’t have said otherwise. 

But this is Trump, and Zelenskyy is wrong to antagonize him. Zelenskyy is hardly in a position of strength, either morally or practically speaking. He was antagonistic to Trump and did what little he could to defeat him during the campaign, and he certainly has been part of the great money laundering scheme that the war has become. 

On Trump’s claim about money disappearing in Ukraine: We wrote last year about how corruption is still a big issue in Ukraine, and how the Pentagon at the time had only TWO inspector general staffers physically in Ukraine to oversee billions of $$.https://t.co/Vx83PAU8fs pic.twitter.com/k6ATBt8tvR

— Sarah Bedford (@sarahcbedford) February 20, 2025

Zelenskyy is playing a losing hand and should fold. Instead he is upping the ante both rhetorically and by shutting down Truth Social in Ukraine. 

Trump’s rhetorical excesses–“mean tweets,” as it were–shock the sensibilities of many who are used to the diplomat-speak and quiet backstabbing that are the normal way of doing political business. But Trump can do that because he is Donald Trump, and holds almost all the cards. 

Trump isn’t interested in being fair; he wants to win, and because winning for him is almost always the same thing as winning for the American people, that works out well most of the time. 

If people are analyzing the Ukraine war as a great struggle between good and evil, then Trump’s moves look like a great betrayal. But the fact is that the Ukraine war is a conflict between a corrupt transnational elite skimming off the top and an oligarchical mafia state run by an ex-KGB thug. Nobody has clean hands. 

USAID funded the vast majority of ‘independent’ media in Ukraine. What American taxpayers don’t realize is that their money went to suppressing the truth.

Wild reporting here by @TanyaLukyanova_ in @thefp:https://t.co/7zp7WQguWE

— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) February 19, 2025

We see this war through Cold War lenses because USAID-funded “independent media” has been paid to portray it that way. If you see it as what it is–an excuse to pillage European and American pocketbooks for the benefit of the transnational elite–you come to very different conclusions. 

One very good thing is coming out of all of this: European countries are concluding that they can’t keep grifting off of the US taxpayer forever. For all the talk about the US being an “unreliable ally,” the Europeans complaint may lead to something useful–them picking up the bill for their own defense. 

European countries have been able to subsidize their welfare states by having the US pick up the tab for their collective defense. If they are determined to go to war with Russia, the least they can do is pay for it.