Zorro
Zorro's JournalDevin Nunes' fundraising is off the charts for 2020. Who's giving to the congressman?
Rep. Devin Nunes revved up his fundraising in the second quarter of this year, hauling in far more money than any other incumbent in a district on the opposing party’s top target list for 2020.
Nunes, R-Tulare, raised nearly $1.9 million for the quarter, bringing his total fundraising so far for the year to more than $3 million.
Freshman Rep. Katie Porter, D-Irvine, raised the second most of candidates in targeted races nationwide, with about $1 million this quarter.
Nunes has about $5.6 million in cash on hand, another number that blows most candidates out of the water.
https://www.fresnobee.com/news/local/article232781592.html
Devin sure is popular outside his district.
Chevy redefines an American icon with the $60,000 2020 C8 Corvette Stingray
General Motors unveiled Chevrolet’s white whale for Corvette enthusiasts on Thursday, a new mid-engine version of the famed American sports car that many have been waiting decades for the automaker to produce.
But the biggest surprise for industry officials wasn’t the car’s 495 horsepower or 0-60 time in under 3 seconds, it was the price. GM President Mark Reuss said the “supercar” will start at under $60,000 — in line with entry-level models of the current, seventh-generation Corvette with the engine mounted up front.
“I was hoping for a starting price of under $80,000, and maybe even under $70,000,” Karl Brauer, executive publisher of Autotrader and Kelley Blue Book said in an email. “For GM to offer the new Corvette for under $60,000 is incredibly impressive given the advanced nature of the new car.”
While some high-performance models are expected to easily top $100,000 — the current track-ready 2019 Corvette ZR1 starts at $123,000 — officials say the entry-level price ensures Corvette will retain its reputation as “obtainable performance” and an “everyman’s sports car.” Executives are hoping the competitive price and high-performance will be enough to lure drivers away from European rivals and boost Corvette’s lagging sales.
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/19/chevy-redefines-an-american-icon-with-the-60000-2020-corvette-stingray.html
The long-anticipated mid-engine Corvette is now on its way. I'm looking forward to its appearance.
Facts straight from Mueller's mouth? They won't put out the gaslighting fire.
From the moment back in March when President Trump declared the Mueller report to be a “Complete and Total EXONERATION ” of him, Democrats and others have tried to counter with what the report actually says: “While this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.” In May, Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon (D-Pa.) and her colleagues decided that widespread ignorance of the report’s contents remained a problem: “If you think there was no obstruction and no collusion,” Scanlon said, “you haven’t read the Mueller report.” So she and her colleagues read it aloud, on the House floor. A few weeks later, Robert Mueller himself finally spoke, if briefly: “If we had had confidence that the president clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said so.”
Now Mueller plans to appear before two congressional committees for public testimony this coming week. Who better to correct the stubborn “alternative facts” about the report than its author?
We’re not optimistic. The aspiration is unimpeachable, but spoon-feeding people the truth does not make them believe it. At best, it’s ineffectual. At worst, it betrays a misunderstanding of the problem. Once people have been the subject of gaslighting, it is difficult — but not impossible — to ungaslight them.
The term has come a long way from its origins in the 1944 movie “Gaslight,” in which a scheming husband tries to drive his puzzled wife mad by convincing her that she is imagining very real things, such as the flickering of a light. Interpersonal gaslighting still works like that: The gaslighted person loses confidence in his ability to see what’s right in front of him. He must have been mistaken, he thinks, and is troubled by this. But today the term more often refers to what happens in the political sphere. There, instead of being convinced that their perceptions are faulty, partisans report being especially confident in their mistaken beliefs.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/facts-straight-from-muellers-mouth-they-wont-put-out-the-gaslighting-fire/2019/07/19/2536529c-a95d-11e9-a3a6-ab670962db05_story.html
Drilling into the DEA's pain pill database
For the first time, a database maintained by the Drug Enforcement Administration that tracks the path of every single pain pill sold in the United States — by manufacturers and distributors to pharmacies in every town and city — has been made public.
The Washington Post sifted through nearly 380 million transactions from 2006 through 2012 that are detailed in the DEA’s database and analyzed shipments of oxycodone and hydrocodone pills, which account for three-quarters of the total opioid pill shipments to pharmacies. The Post is making this data available at the county and state levels in order to help the public understand the impact of years of prescription pill shipments on their communities.
These records provide an unprecedented look at the surge of legal pain pills that fueled the prescription opioid epidemic, which resulted in nearly 100,000 deaths during the seven-year time frame ending in 2012.
A county-level analysis of the cumulative data shows where the most oxycodone and hydrocodone pills were distributed across the country over that time: more than 76 billion in all.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/investigations/dea-pain-pill-database/
Bakersfield, once the butt of jokes, is booming. So are many other inland California cities.
For this pass-through city, long a favorite target for jokes from late-night comedians, the small stuff turns out not to be small at all.
Highway 99 races through almond groves and oil fields here, then bends north toward Fresno and the flat croplands of the Central Valley. This high-speed vantage provides the blurry view of bobbing derricks, fuel storage tanks and fast-food billboards that has defined the city for Californians and tourists traveling between the sunny coast and the Sierra.
There’s a relatively new side-of-the-highway sign that now notifies drivers that maybe, just maybe, there is something more here than the freeway vista offers. It reads, “Bakersfield — Next 13 Exits,” a kind of invitation to a large and growing city once shorthand for a place to avoid.
“It tells people we’re not just a Jack in the Box,” said David Lyman, a gray-bearded PhD who runs the city’s tourism bureau. “The challenge has never been to get people to come. It’s been to get people to stay.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/bakersfield-once-the-butt-of-jokes-is-booming-so-are-many-other-inland-california-cities/2019/07/19/f6b52a1e-944a-11e9-aadb-74e6b2b46f6a_story.html
The G.O.P. Is Now a Personality Cult
The tragedy of today’s Republican Party lies partly in how far it has tumbled from its heights.
This is the party of Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt. It is the party that built interstate highways, championed family planning, founded the Environmental Protection Agency, opened relations with China, confronted the Soviet Union and managed the collapse of Communism.
It is the party that under Ronald Reagan welcomed refugees. It is the party of men who exemplified decency like George H.W. Bush and adherence to a moral compass like John McCain.
At a rally in 2008, McCain corrected a questioner who called Barack Obama untrustworthy and an “Arab.” “No, ma’am,” McCain told the crowd. “He’s a decent family man, citizen, that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/20/opinion/sunday/republicans-united-states.html
'It's really a new low': In first news conference, deputy attorney general lashes out at Congress
Deputy Attorney General Jeffrey A. Rosen had calmly fended off more than a dozen questions — some of them about the criminal justice reform legislation he had planned to discuss, others on various controversies of the day — and begun to walk away from the stage. His first news conference as the Justice Department’s No. 2 official was nearly behind him.
Then a Fox News reporter asked how he felt about the House of Representatives’ vote this week to hold Rosen’s boss, Attorney General William P. Barr, in contempt for failing to comply with a subpoena related to the administration’s failed effort to include a question about citizenship on the 2020 Census.
Rosen returned to the lectern.
“We’re talking about what is, unfortunately, the crassest form of political theater, and from where I stand, I’m deeply disappointed that the House leadership would proceed in that way, with something that is so obviously beneath the dignity of the offices they hold,” Rosen said. “It’s really a new low for the current House of Representatives.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/its-really-a-new-low-in-first-news-conference-deputy-attorney-general-lashes-out-at-congress/2019/07/19/4481ccdc-aa41-11e9-86dd-d7f0e60391e9_story.html
The complete list of GOP lawmakers reacting to Trump's 'go back' tweet
The vast majority of Republican members of Congress have not said anything publicly about President Trump’s Sunday morning tweet that four Democratic House members should “go back” to the “places from which they came.”
Days after he issued the tweet, 141 members of his party have offered a range of responses: Some flat-out rebuked Trump’s remarks, while others took the opportunity to criticize Democrats at the same time they condemned the president’s words. Others responded by embracing Trump and the sentiments in the tweet.
Read each lawmaker’s initial statements about Trump’s comments below. Four Republicans joined Democrats in approving a resolution condemning Trump’s comments.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/politics/trump-go-back-gop-reactions-list/
The psychological phenomenon that blinds Trump supporters to his racism
President Trump’s tweet proposing that four Democratic congresswomen of color — three of them born in the United States, one a naturalized citizen — “go back” to the “totally broken and crime infested places from which they came” was textbook racism. Yet while some Republicans condemned the statement — Sen. Tim Scott (S.C.), who is black, lamented its “racially offensive language” — others flatly denied that there was a racial component to the salvo. A particularly contorted reaction came from Rep. Andy Harris (Md.), who said, “Clearly, it’s not a racist comment,” adding that the president “could have meant go back to the district they came from, to the neighborhood they came from.” But the president could hardly have made his meaning more clear: He said the four “originally came from countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe.”
“Well, I certainly do not think the president’s a racist,” said Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), who suggested that the tweet was justified by the representatives’ constant criticism “not only [of] the president but also Congress and our country.”
Fear of crossing a president who’s popular with the Republican base surely explains some of the convoluted rationalizations on offer. But a psychological phenomenon called cognitive dissonance may also shed light on some people’s unwillingness to acknowledge the self-evident racism in the tweets.
Cognitive dissonance, first described by the psychologist Leon Festinger in the late 1950s, occurs when conflict emerges between what people want to believe and the reality that threatens those beliefs. The human mind does not like such inconsistencies: They set off alarms that spur the mind to alter some beliefs to make the perceived reality fit with one’s preferred views.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/the-psychological-phenomenon-that-blinds-trump-supporters-to-his-racism/2019/07/18/29789344-a8ac-11e9-ac16-90dd7e5716bc_story.html
Ex-NRA Ad Firm: Um, Wayne LaPierre is Lying
In a new filing against the National Rifle Association, lawyers for ad agency Ackerman McQueen suggest that longtime NRA executive Wayne LaPierre is lying about a critical moment in the gun rights group’s recent leadership shake up.
At issue is multi-million-dollar litigation between the NRA and its ex-ad firm. In court filings of its own, the NRA has alleged that Oliver North, the groups's former president, was ousted in part because he withheld information from the NRA about payments he took from Ackerman McQueen, which had served as the gun rights group’s primary ad contractor until just months ago. The NRA claims North kept the nature of his deal with Ackerman McQueen a secret from LaPierre and the gun group’s leadership.
But in a July 16 filing that was reviewed by The Daily Beast, Ackerman McQueen alleges that LaPierre himself helped negotiate the deal between their firm and North. And they hint that they have documentation to prove it.
In a statement, the NRA denied the suggestions. “The facts are clear – Mr. LaPierre and the NRA had no idea that Col. North was negotiating to become an employee of Ackerman McQueen,” said Andrew Arulanandam, managing director of NRA Public Affairs. “And to the extent Col. North was pushing a contrived narrative about Mr. LaPierre and the NRA, he was conflicted. He was an employee of Ackerman at the time he was allegedly scheming with the agency to unseat Mr. LaPierre.”
https://news.yahoo.com/ex-nra-ad-firm-um-174623697.html
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