Zorro
Zorro's JournalPro-Trump Californians hope his victory can fuel a GOP revival in the Golden State
Hundreds of Donald Trump’s California supporters gathered Saturday to celebrate his impending inauguration — and to try to funnel the energy that propelled him to the White House into turning their cobalt-blue home state red.
“If we can get Donald J. Trump to be president of the United States, certainly we can get Californians registered to be Republicans,” longtime conservative activist Johnnie Morgan said to applause. “With the energy we have now, with the momentum we have now, with the inspiration we have now, with the committed people we have now, we can do this. It will spread like wildfire.”
It’s a tall order. Voter registration in the GOP is at a historic low in the state, no Republican has been elected statewide in more than a decade, and Democrats dominate the state’s congressional delegation and Legislature. Trump supporters hope this could be dislodged by the coalition the Republicans stitched together to win the presidency, although most acknowledge the hurdles they face.
“We’re not being heard right now because the numbers are against us and that’s OK. We know the realities,” said Rachel Gunther, the leader of the newly formed Make California Great Again nonprofit that had its inaugural meeting in a Cambodian community center in Long Beach on Saturday. “We’re not going to change the landscape in one year or two years or even four years. We just want our voices heard. We want to show the political elite that we exist and that we are not happy with some of their legislation and they can’t just ramrod things like that without considering us.”
http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-pol-ca-donald-trump-california-supporters-20170108-story.html
Tesla Flips the Switch on the Gigafactory
The Gigafactory has been activated.
Hidden in the scrubland east of Reno, Nev., where cowboys gamble and wild horses still roam—a diamond-shaped factory of outlandish proportions is emerging from the sweat and promises of Tesla CEO Elon Musk. It’s known as the Gigafactory, and today its first battery cells are rolling off production lines to power the company’s energy storage products and, before long, the Model 3 electric car. 1
The start of mass production 2 is a huge milestone in Tesla’s quest to electrify transportation, and it brings to America a manufacturing industry—battery cells—that’s long been dominated by China, Japan, and South Korea. More than 2,900 people are already working at the 4.9 million square-foot facility, 3 and more than 4,000 jobs (including temporary construction work) will be added this year through the partnership between Tesla and Panasonic. 4
By 2018, the Gigafactory, which is less than a third complete, will double the world’s production capacity for lithium-ion batteries and employ 6,500 full-time Reno-based workers, according to a new hiring forecast from Tesla. The company’s shares, having touched their highest point since August, closed up $10 at $226.99 in New York trading.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-01-04/tesla-flips-the-switch-on-the-gigafactory
Trump Gives Intelligence Agencies Their Daily Briefing
NEW YORK—Sitting down with top officials from the CIA, FBI, and Defense Intelligence Agency in a Trump Tower conference room, President-elect Donald Trump reportedly gave U.S. intelligence agencies their daily briefing Tuesday morning.
“With the inauguration just weeks away, the president-elect held a meeting today to bring leaders of the intelligence community up to speed on critical information that will affect his diplomatic and defense decisions as the nation’s commander-in-chief,” said Reince Priebus, Trump’s chief of staff, noting that the president-elect was planning to give briefings to intelligence officials every morning during his presidency in order to keep them closely apprised of the greatest areas of concern and latest threats to the nation.
“There’s a considerable amount of secret and highly sensitive intel about military operations and diplomatic affairs that only Mr. Trump has the expertise to provide, and it’s imperative that he convey these findings to our nation’s intelligence directors. This is an invaluable service provided by Mr. Trump, and these meetings will be as frequent and as thorough as necessary to ensure the urgent information that Mr. Trump has gathered reaches those in our intelligence community.”
Priebus added that the specifics covered during the briefings would be kept classified, as much of it would be incredibly shocking to the American populace.
http://www.theonion.com/article/trump-gives-intelligence-agencies-their-daily-brie-54961
The Missouri Auto Dealers Association Hates You, Tesla & America
America is under attack, but it’s not the Russians we need to be worried about. It’s car dealers. Not all car dealers are bad, but even the good ones are protected by bad laws, and all of them are protected by dealer associations, who are like ISIS, the IRS and cancer rolled into one.
All four horsemen of the American economic apocalypse — cronyism, cowardice, hypocrisy and protectionism — are represented by dealer associations. The worst of the lot, those of Texas, Michigan and Virginia, are now joined by Missouri’s MADA, whose legal victory over Tesla may deprive them of the right to sell cars in that state.
We need a new House on Un-American Activities Commission, this one focused on the anti-competitive forces that are the real Communists among us.
Competition is at the heart of American economic strength. The opposite of competition is Communism, central planning and failure. Competition is how the United States won the Cold War. It’s how and why species, technologies and business evolve and grow. It’s why homo sapiens are the dominant biped, the World Wide Web crushed the Minitel, and Google eclipsed AltaVista. It’s why everyone is scrambling to catch up to Tesla by embracing the technologies they’ve pioneered.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/missouri-auto-dealers-association-hates-235253820.html
China says it will shut down ivory trade by end of 2017
Source: AP
China says it plans to shut down its ivory trade by the end of 2017 in a move designed to curb the mass slaughter of African elephants.
The Chinese government will end the processing and selling of ivory and ivory products by the end of March as it phases out the legal trade, according to a statement released on Friday.
China had previously announced it planned to shut down the commercial trade, which conservationists described as significant because China's vast, increasingly affluent consumer market drives much of the elephant poaching across Africa.
"This is a game changer for Africa's elephants," said Aili Kang, the Asia director for the New York-based Wildlife Conservation Society.
Read more: https://www.yahoo.com/news/china-says-shut-down-ivory-trade-end-2017-171154298.html
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