Beet L. Jooz

Media freakout insinuates it's apparently not okay to be White.

'The old bait and switch'

Twitter Inc deleted more than 10,000 automated accounts posting messages that discouraged people from voting in Tuesday's U.S. election and wrongly appeared to be from Democrats, after the party flagged the misleading tweets to the social media company.

The Wall Street Journal's Kim Strassel is at it again. In a Thursday Op-Ed, she describes how Democrats, over the course of six weeks, turned a "blue wave" of momentum into an absurd circus over Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh - tainting all of the 2020 Democratic presidential hopefuls except Joe Biden. 

"Democrats obliterated their own breaker in the space of two weeks with the ambush of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh," Strassel writes, displaying some of the "vilest political tactics ever seen in Washington, with no regard for who or what they damaged or destroyed along the way." 

And despite support for insurgent Democratic candidates such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Andrew Gillum sweeping voters off their feet during primaries, Democrats have been running "candidates with conservative credentials," or "candidates who can't run fast enough from liberal positions." 

And at the end of the day, no matter how midterms turn out - "save for Joe Biden, every current leading contender for the Democratic nomination either was a ringleader of the Kavanaugh spectacle (Sens. Cory “Spartacus” Booker and Kamala Harris) or is a progressive icon (Ms. Warren, Mr. Sanders, Kirsten Gillibrand)."

Via the Wall Street Journal: 

In a few days the U.S. will have its midterm results, and the Beltway press corps will lecture us on the lessons. Don’t expect to hear much about the one takeaway that is already obvious: that today’s preferred progressive politics—of character assassination, mob rule, intimidation and wacky policies—is an electoral bust. It is not what is winning Democrats anything. It is what is losing the party the bigger prize.

Six weeks ago, Democrats were expecting a blue wave to rival the Republican victory of 2010, when the GOP picked up 63 House seats. Everything was in their favor. History—the party in power almost always loses seats. Money—Democrats continue to outraise Republicans by staggering amounts. The opposition—some 41 GOP House members retired, most from vulnerable districts where Donald Trump’s favorability is low. Democrats were even positioned to take over the Senate, despite defending 10 Trump-state seats.

Democrats obliterated their own breaker in the space of two weeks with the ambush of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. The left, its protesters and its media allies demonstrated some of the vilest political tactics ever seen in Washington, with no regard for who or what they damaged or destroyed along the way—Christine Blasey Ford, committee rules, civility, Justice Kavanaugh himself, the Constitution. An uncharacteristically disgusted Sen. Lindsey Graham railed: “Boy, y’all want power. God, I hope you never get it!”

A lot of voters suddenly agreed with that sentiment. The enormous enthusiasm gap closed almost overnight as conservative voters rallied to #JobsNotMobs. Even liberal prognosticators today forecast that Republicans will keep the Senate and Democrats will manage only a narrow majority in the House, if that. It’s always possible the polls are off, or that there is a last-minute bombshell. But it remains the case that the ascendant progressive movement blew an easy victory for Democrats.

Meanwhile, to the extent Democrats are winning, it has been in large part due to party leaders’ quiet but laborious efforts to sequester that movement. Yes, talk-show hosts have made a darling of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the progressive activist who defeated incumbent Rep. Joe Crowley in a New York primary. And liberal pundits are already claiming a victory by left-wing Tallahassee Mayor Andrew Gillum in Florida’s gubernatorial race will prove America aches for Medicare for All.

But on the ground, Mr. Gillum and Ms. Ocasio-Cortez are the anomalies of this cycle. The far bigger if less covered story is the extent to which Democrats have run candidates with conservative credentials, or candidates who can’t run fast enough from liberal positions.

For all the talk of the “year of the woman,” it is equally the year of the Democratic “veteran.” In battleground after battleground district, Democrats recruited former service members as their candidates: Amy McGrath in Kentucky, Richard Ojeda in West Virginia, Jason Crow in Colorado, Jared Golden in Maine, Conor Lamb in Pennsylvania, Mikie Sherrill in New Jersey, Max Rose in New York. By at least one count, more than half the veterans who’ve run in 2018 are Democrats—a huge shift, and a reason some traditionally GOP districts are competitive.

Senate races, meanwhile, have been entirely defined by the extent to which Democratic candidates have positioned themselves as “moderates.” Arizona’s Kyrsten Sinema, a self-described “Prada socialist” and onetime antiwar activist, now insists she would be an “independent” voice in favor of bipartisanship. Nevada’s Jacky Rosen was one of three House Democrats who voted in September to make the Trump individual tax cuts permanent. Missouri incumbent Claire McCaskill is running a radio ad boasting she “is not one of those crazy Democrats.” Asked on Fox News about her Senate colleagues, she took a swipe at Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders.

All of this is reminiscent of 2006 and 2008, when Democrats won Congress by running moderates and then the White House by nominating a candidate who promised to unite the nation. Only after the party jerked left did the GOP win its 2010 blowout.

Will it be different this time? The moment the polls close on Tuesday, it will be wheels up for the 2020 presidential campaign. And save for Joe Biden, every current leading contender for the Democratic nomination either was a ringleader of the Kavanaugh spectacle (Sens. Cory “Spartacus” Booker and Kamala Harris) or is a progressive icon (Ms. Warren, Mr. Sanders, Kirsten Gillibrand).

If Democrats win Tuesday, it will be despite this crowd, not because of it. They’d be wise to remember that a vote to rebuke President Trump’s inflammatory politics isn’t the same as an embrace of a progressive agenda or its candidates. The Democrats’ own recent history and campaign strategy prove it.

Write to kim@wsj.com.

Eight priests who spent time in Baton Rouge-area parishes were named in a ground-breaking list released by the Archdiocese of New Orleans on Friday of clergy who have been accused of sexual abuse and removed from ministry.

Design intentionally inhibits decision-making

Watch chaos take place on Halloween night.

It's bad enough to be a Republican campaign ad in disguise.

'Give me a voice to say how I feel'

Recode's much awaited podcast with Kara Swisher interviewing Elon Musk has finally been published; it was recorded on Halloween evening at Tesla headquarters in Palo Alto and it covered a broad scope of topics: all of Elon Musk's companies, Saudi Arabia, a normal Musk work week at Tesla, a look back at 2018 and Musk's distaste for the press - to name a few.

Musk's tone during the interview was is in contrast with the spaced-out demeanor during the Joe Rogan podcast. He comes off as relatively confident, somewhat reserved and generally in a better mood. Despite this, Musk wasn't able to make it through the podcast without attacking both journalists and short sellers, despite being "optimistic" about Tesla's future. 

In the interview, Musk admits that he still tweets "without a filter" simply because he "finds things entertaining". He said in the interview that he only spends about 10 to 15 minutes a day on Twitter. When asked about whether or not he was under strict orders not to Tweet or whether he would have to change his Twitter behavior as a result of the SEC settlement, Musk replied "not really".

The "genius" followed up by giving the impression he didn't understand (or care to understand) his SEC settlement or the pertinent securities laws surrounding what got him in trouble in the first place. 

"I think it’s mostly just if it’s something that might cause a substantial movement in the stock during trading hours. That’s about it," Musk told Swisher. 

When asked about the press, Musk said that his "regard for the press has dropped quite dramatically." When asked further about it, he brought up the Wall Street Journal’s most recent article about the FBI investigation into Tesla intensifying and said about the Wall Street Journal "Like, why are they even journalists? They’re terrible. Terrible people."

He continued on journalists, explaining why he thought there was so much negative press about Tesla. Of course, his explanation did not include anything about missing production targets or burning through cash. Instead, Musk said: "There are good journalists and there are bad ones, and unfortunately the feedback loop for good versus bad is inverted, so the more salacious that an article is, the more salacious the headline is, the more clicks it’s gonna get. Then somebody is not a journalist, they are an ad salesman."

When Swisher asked Musk if perhaps he was just too sensitive, Musk replied "No. Of course not. I have a strong interest in the truth. Much more than journalists do."

Asked about 2018, Musk stated more than once that it was "excruciating" and reiterated the obvious: that it is "incredibly difficult" to survive as a car company - a point he reiterated more than five times in just several sentences: 

"It’s been a very difficult year. We had the Model 3 production ramp, which was excruciatingly difficult. It is incredibly difficult to survive as a car company. Incredibly difficult. People have no idea how much pain people at Tesla went through, including myself. It was excruciating. 

Pretty sure I burnt out a bunch of neurons during this process. Running both SpaceX and Tesla is an incredibly difficult ... You realize we’re fighting the incredibly competitive car companies. They make very good cars. They’ve been doing this for a long time. They are entrenched. Mercedes, Audi, BMW, Lexus, you name it. All those car brands. And the history of car companies in America is terrible. The only ones that haven’t gone bankrupt are Tesla and Ford. That’s it. Everyone else has gone bankrupt."

He followed up by saying it was "absurd" that Tesla was even alive:

"Making a car company successful is monumentally difficult. There have been many attempts to create a car company and they have all failed, even the ones that have had a strong base of customers, thousands of dealers, thousands of service centers, they’ve already spent the capital for the factories, like GM and Chrysler, still went bankrupt in the last recession. Ford and Tesla made it barely through the last recession. There’s a good chance Ford doesn’t make it in the next recession. So, as a startup, a car company, it is far more difficult to be successful than if you’re an established, entrenched brand. It is absurd that Tesla is alive. Absurd! Absurd."

Later in the podcast, he described 2018 by saying: "This year felt like five years of aging, frankly. The worst year of my entire career. Insanely painful."

Then, hilariously when asked about Tesla's fundamental mission, Musk - who has been known to fly around in his Gulfstream G650 private jet - said he found it "outrageous" when social justice warriors drive around in diesel cars.

"It’s very important for the future of the world. It’s very important for all life on Earth. This supersedes political parties, race, creed, religion, it doesn’t matter. If we do not solve the environment, we’re all damned. Yes. It sort of blows my mind, all these social justice warriors driving around in diesel cars. It’s outrageous."

He also spoke about self inflicted wounds and sleep deprivation, revealing to Swisher that his brother once said to him: "“Look, if you do a self-inflicted wound, can you at least not twist the knife afterwards?” You stabbed yourself in the leg. You don’t really need to twist it in your leg. Why do that?"

Acknowledging that he is under pressure, Musk admitted to simply "making mistakes". "It’s not intentional. Sometimes you’re just under a lot of pressure, and you’re not getting much sleep, you’re under massive pressure, and you make mistakes," he said. 

Swisher told Musk that he looked good and rested for the interview, and Musk noted he was down to 80 to 90 hour work weeks, versus the 120 he claimed he had been working prior. Swisher also asked about Musk's Ambien usage, which Musk again acknowledged. He stated: "...if you’re super-stressed, you can’t go to sleep. You either have a choice of, like, okay, I’ll have zero sleep and then my brain won’t work tomorrow, or you’re gonna take some kind of sleep medication to fall asleep."

With regard to Tesla's position as a company, Musk stated he felt like the company was no longer "staring death in the face" like it was in Q3. He also said that he thought Tesla was "over the hump" in terms of Model 3 production. Whether or not this is commentary on how the Model 3's backlog looks remains to be seen. 

Despite Musk's earlier soliloquy regarding how hard it was to function as a car company, when he was later asked about competitors to Tesla, he responded by stating: "I don’t really think that much about competitors." When pressed about self-driving, he conceded that he thought Google/Waymo was the closest to Tesla.

Musk also stated that he didn't think Ford would make it through the next recession. “There’s a good chance that Ford doesn’t make it in the next recession,” Musk told Swisher. He didn't mention anything about Tesla in the same type of recession scenario.

And those intimating that Tesla may have a cozy relationship with Apple also appear to be wrong, as Musk took a potshot at Apple's innovation, as well. 

"Apple used to really bring out products that would blow people’s minds. They still make great products, but there’s less of that. Like, I don’t think people are necessarily running to the store for the iPhone 11."

Finally, Musk was asked about the "funding secured" and going private debacles. When asked about the Saudi's stock they reportedly bought, he told Swisher, "They might have sold it, I don’t know." Musk also reiterated financial guidance when he stated: "I think we will be cash-flow positive for all quarters going forward."

Then, Musk, who said he did not want to "harp on those short sellers" spent time harping on short sellers. He also apparently has changed his view on short sellers from just being "smartish" to being "quite smart":

"Yeah, you know, not to harp on those short-sellers, because people think I have this obsession with them, but I spent like 1 percent [or] less of time thinking about them —

Less than 1 percent of my tweets have anything to do with short-sellers. But the issue is that there’s a group of people who are quite smart, very mean, and have a strong financial interest in Tesla’s downfall.

And what that results in is a constant attack on the Tesla brand, on me personally, on the executive team, on our cars. You know, every mistake we make is amplified.

Going private would definitely result in some short-term drama. Let’s say we’re private, and then we went public five years from now. Then the area under the curve of brand damage by short-sellers would be probably less than the short-term difficulty of going private in the first place. That was the approximate calculus."

Musk spent the rest of the interview talking about voting, the political environment, the Tesla semi, pickup truck, hovercrafts, dying on Mars and other figments of his imagination. 

When asked whether he would take Saudi money in light of the Khashoggi murder (which Musk described as sounding "pretty bad"), Musk responded "I think we probably would not, yes."

Then, about an hour after attacking the Wall Street Journal, Musk was asked what he would have done differently in 2018.

His response:

"It’s fair to say I would probably not have tweeted some of the things I tweeted, that was probably unwise. And probably not gotten into some of the online fights that I got into."

He finished up: "I probably shouldn’t have attacked journalists, probably shouldn’t have done that."

Investigators spent months recovering and identifying the remains, which were found in planters and a ravine near the home.

Body for Wednesday morning has not yet been identified

Apparently, we're not the only ones who believe the circumstance surrounding Whitey Bulger's jailhouse slaying are suspect in the extreme. First, that federal authorities would abruptly move an 89-year-old inmate in ill health to a new maximum security prison seemingly on a whim seemed odd. But the fact that Bulger was placed in general population instead of protective custody was either an act of staggering incompetence, or, more likely, an intentional 'oversight'. And now, an ex-con-turned-journalist told the New York Post in an interview that he also believes the killing was a set-up probably planned by federal authorities to get rid of a problem witness.

As Richard Stratton told the Post, the guards at Hazelton prison almost certainly looked the other way as a trio of inmates purportedly led by New England mafia enforcer Freddy Geas fatally beat Bulger to death in a secluded corner of the prison. His attackers then tried to gouge out his eyes and cut out his tongue - an old-school marking that the victim was a 'rat'. High ranking federal officials probably sent Bulger there "to get rid of him," Stratton said.

"It just seems impossible to me that this could have happened without awareness, not only at the level of the guards on the tier," writer and producer Richard Stratton said.

Stratton said the notion that Bulger wasn't in protective custody is baffling considering that two inmates had recently been killed at the prison.

"He’s going to be exposed in a way where he can easily be killed, and then one day later he’s murdered," Stratton said.

Stratton, who helped produce an HBO documentary about prison murders, pointed out that Bulger had been transferred from an Arizona facility in 2014 after having an "improper relationship" with a prison psychologist.

Though it's worth noting that Stratton might be conflicted in his assessment: Bulger once helped him quash a life-threatening beef when he was running drugs in Massachusetts back in the day.

Stratton, a former drug smuggler who served eight years in federal prison, said he once sought help from Bulger when the Mafia tried to muscle in on a scam in which he was sneaking hashish from Lebanon through Boston’s Logan Airport.

After refusing to cough up $1 million and half of whatever drugs he brought into the US, "I heard they put out a contract on me," said Stratton, who also recounted the episode in his 2016 memoir, "Smuggler’s Blues: A True Story of the Hippie Mafia."

"I went to Whitey and Whitey squashed the whole thing," he said.

"Then I had to move a load of pot for him."

Still, Stratton's not the only one who suspects that federal authorities at least tacitly condoned Bulger's killing. The Daily Mail suggested that Bulger may have been on the verge of cooperating with the staff of a Massachusetts Congressman hoping to expose abuses from inside the FBI.

A Baton Rouge man accused of killing another man during an argument in Holden last November was sentenced to 35 years in prison, said Livingston Parish District Attorney Scott Perrilloux.

(Astronomy) Scientists have finally confirmed that the massive object at the heart of our galaxy is, in fact, a supermassive black hole.

Researchers used the European Southern Observatory’s sensitive GRAVITY instrument on the Very Large Telescope (VLT) to observe infrared radiation flares coming from the accretion disc around Sagittarius A* — the massive object at the center of our galaxy. Scientists think that most galaxies have a supermassive black hole at their center, but they’d never before had the data and observations to prove it.

To measure the effects of gravity near to a black hole, scientists needed to observe an object actually traveling close to it. They found their mark in a small star called S2 whose orbit takes it deep within Sagittarius A*’s gravity well every 16 years.

Following reports of migrants from a Central American caravan attacking Mexican forces, President Trump said that the US military currently amassing at the Southern border will treat rock throwers as gunmen. 

"I hope there won't be that, but I will tell you this – anybody throwing rocks... we will consider that a firearm, because there's not much difference," said Trump. 

On whether the military at southern border might fire on migrants, Pres Trump says "I hope not."

"I hope there won't be that, but I will tell you this – anybody throwing rocks... we will consider that a firearm, because there's not much difference." https://t.co/fyk1ncmiwj pic.twitter.com/OGbFHFhB3A

— ABC News (@ABC) November 1, 2018

Trump's comments come on the heels of several clips featuring violent migrants, including this one of rocks being thrown at Mexican security forces on the Guatemalan border. 

Here is video of the migrant caravan throwing rocks & molotov cocktails at Mexican security forces on the Guatemalan border.

I reached out to the man who took this video.

He confirms it's authenticity.

Watch it.

The caravan is violent. pic.twitter.com/WqnffoH6yH

— Benny (@bennyjohnson) November 1, 2018

Area near Alexandria Mall and Cabrini school as well as Washboard Road in Pineville scenes of possible tornado damage

Friends of Candace Rose Stevens, 31, are sharing memories of their friend, whose death is so far a mystery. 

Mediaite founder and ABC News chief legal analyst Dan Abrams called out Fox News’ Geraldo Rivera for his insistence last week — which he later retracted — that the mail bomb scare may just be an “elaborate hoax.”

On his show on SiriusXM’s P.O.T.U.S. channel Thursday, Abrams pressed Rivera about the reasoning behind his remarks. Noting it was “not on the list of thing you want to talk about,” Abrams started by playing a clip of Rivera’s claims.

Speaking to Fox Business anchor Trish Regan last week, Rivera said in that clip played that “at the risk of sounding like a far right wing lunatic” he believes “this whole thing was an elaborate hoax.”

Then, Abrams followed it up by reading this tweet sent by Rivera on October 25:

Put aside hatred of @POTUS & ask, with 12 days until a critical mid-term election-would a rabid fan/crazed supporter of @realDonaldTrump really pick this time to kill off the president’s enemies in a way guaranteed to make him look complicit in mass murder on the world stage?

— Geraldo Rivera (@GeraldoRivera) October 26, 2018

Abrams then pointedly asked his guest: “Now you’ve apologized, but you know, what are you doing??”

“Why did I do it at all?” Rivera said with a laugh before comparing the remarks to his famous topless selfie moment.

“Usually, that’s what I do when I’m late at night, that’s when I did the topless selfie. It was late at night I was drinking tequila by myself.”

“You know I have apologized,” Rivera continued on, adding “talk about hubris.”

He then explained that when he first heard about the mail bomb scare, he wondered why a Trump supporter would do it because it was so “cartoonish.”

But then, Rivera stressed, indeed the “perp” was cartoonish — making him eat his words.

“When you saw the perp, a steroid-raged Trump lunatic with Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama’s picture on his van with the crosshairs through it. He was a lunatic. It was exactly as the mainstream media thought it was,” Rivera explained. “I embarrassed myself. I should have kept my mouth shut. I had pretty good luck with my opinions, generally speaking, but this was so fanciful, it was such a stretch.”

“Really, I apologize for it,” Rivera added. “It was my Al Capone’s vault of the 21st century.”

Then, Abrams pressed him on whether he thought he had an obligation as a public figure to be careful with his words before making such a bold claim.

Rivera agreed he did.

“That is why I am appalled,” Rivera admitted. “I should have just kept to myself.”

Listen above via The Dan Abrams Show.

[image via screengrab]

The man credited with inventing the World Wide Web says that dominant tech giants such as Facebook and Google may need to be broken up unless viable challengers emerge, or shifting preferences result in people gravitating away from dominant names. 

London-born computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee told Reuters that he is disappointed with the evolution of the internet, which he invented in 1989 while working at Europe's physics research center CERN - branding his "Mesh" network the "World Wide Web" in 1990. He is currently a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Oxford. 

"What naturally happens is you end up with one company dominating the field so through history there is no alternative to really coming in and breaking things up," said the 63-year-old Berners-Lee, adding that "There is a danger of concentration." 

They may not need to be broken up, however, if user preferences change and disruptive new technologies emerge. 

"Before breaking them up, we should see whether they are not just disrupted by a small player beating them out of the market, but by the market shifting, by the interest going somewhere else," he said. 

That said, Berners-Lee says that monopolies have sapped enthusiasm from innovators - and he was particularly disappointed when the Cambridge Analytica scandal came to light in which Facebook was found to have granted access to companies which then harvested vast quantities of private user data for various purposes. 

"I am disappointed with the current state of the Web," he said. "We have lost the feeling of individual empowerment and to a certain extent also I think the optimism has cracked."

He also wonders if Twitter is designed to fuel controversy, saying "If you put a drop of love into Twitter it seems to decay but if you put in a drop of hatred you feel it actually propagates much more strongly. And you wonder: ‘Well is that because of the way that Twitter as a medium has been built?’" 

 

Tonight President Donald J. Trump is holding a MAGA campaign rally at Columbia Regional Airport Hangar 350 in Columbia, MO.  President Trump is in Missouri campaigning for Republican Josh Hawley, who hopes to unseat Democratic incumbent Senator Claire McCaskill.  Anticipated … Continue reading →

‘Once they arrive, the Democrat Party’s vision is to offer them free health care, free welfare, free education, and the right to vote’

U.S. Senator Joe Manchin was notified his social media accounts had been hacked, his office said on Thursday, amid U.S. government warnings of attempts to interfere in next week's congressional elections.

The secret to plausible deniability is right there in the beginning of the short phrase. Anyone can deny anything. The key is to make the denial plausible.

Carolyn Kerr says she is a former police officer and a domestic violence survivor herself

While it is not yet clear what charges they are facing, the foreign ministry noted Saudi laws bar unattached men and women being seen together in public