"CNN dropped commentator Marc Lamont Hill on Thursday after he made remarks in support of Palestinian rights that some interpreted as calling for the elimination of Israel.

"'Marc Lamont Hill is no longer under contract with CNN,' a network spokesperson told POLITICO.

"Speaking at a meeting at the United Nations on Wednesday, Hill called for a 'free Palestine from the river to the sea.' The statement, which many say refers to the boundaries of the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, is a rallying cry by several Palestinian groups, including Hamas, and is viewed by some as calling for the elimination of Israel, which currently occupies those boundaries."

"General Motors just shared some very bad news: It is closing five factories in the United States and Canada, eliminating 15 percent of its work force (and 25 percent of its executives), and getting out of the passenger-car business almost entirely to focus on SUVs and trucks. President Donald Trump threw a fit, but GM shrugged him off. The facts are the facts.

"What did U.S. taxpayers get for their $11.2 billion bailout of GM? About ten years of business-as-usual, and one very expensive lesson.

"Bailouts don't work.

"Never mind the moral hazard, the rent-seeking, the cronyism and the favoritism, and all of the inevitable corruption that inevitably accompanies multibillion-dollar sweetheart deals between Big Business and Big Government. Set aside the ethical questions entirely and focus on the mechanics: Businesses such as GM get into trouble not because of one-time events in the wider economic environment, but because they are so weak as businesses that they cannot weather one-time events in the wider economic environment. GM's sedan business is weak because GM's sedans are weak: Virtually all of the best-selling sedans in the United States are made by Toyota, Honda, and Nissan. The lower and middle sections of the market are dominated by Asia, and the high end of the market by Europe: Mercedes, Audi, BMW. GM can't compete with the Honda Civic at its price point or with the Audi A7 at its price point. Consumers like what they like, and they aren't buying what GM is selling. It isn't winning in the dino-juice-powered market, in the electric-car market, or in the hybrid market, either: GM is not exactly what you would call a nimble corporation."

Read entire article here

"President Donald Trump and China's Xi Jinping will meet over dinner Saturday evening in Buenos Aires marking a pivotal moment in the escalating trade war between the world's two largest economies.

"Trump is hopeful for a breakthrough with Xi but is ready to impose more tariffs if the upcoming talks don't yield progress, Larry Kudlow, Trump's top economic adviser, told reporters Tuesday during a briefing ahead of the Group of 20 meeting in Argentina.

"The president believes 'there is a good possibility that we can make a deal' and he 'is open to it,' Kudlow said later Tuesday.

"Washington and Beijing remain at odds on key issues such as U.S. accusations of intellectual property theft and forced technology transfer, he said."

"A climate change report published Friday contains cherry-picked data that appear designed to warn of the consequences if steps are not taken to mitigate global warming, according to one climate expert.

"The scientists who wrote the National Climate Assessment (NCA) used unreliable information that exaggerates the risks global warming poses, University of Colorado Prof. Roger Pielke Jr. noted in a series of tweets. He fears the report will make it easier for critics to dismiss future climate studies.

"'By presenting cherrypicked science, at odds w/ NCA Vol,1 & IPCC AR5, the authors of NCA Vol.2 have given a big fat gift to anyone who wants to dismiss climate science and policy,' Pielke Jr. wrote in a tweet Friday shortly after the White House released the report. 'Embarrassing.'

"'People are not dumb. Clim chg is real & deserves policy response, but not like this,' he said, referring to volume two of the NCA, a federal report the administration is required by law to submit. Volume one was published in 2017 and 'played things straight on the science of extremes,' added Pielke Jr., who has criticized media reporting on similar reports in the past."

"The documentary The Creepy Line takes its name from a shockingly unguarded remark by the former Google CEO Eric Schmidt. He is smiling and relaxed in a conference as he explains that Google has (had?) a nickname for excessive invasiveness. 'Google policy on a lot of these things,' Schmidt says, 'is to get right up to the creepy line and not cross it.'

"How is that going so far? The Creepy Line, a terrifying and important 80-minute documentary now streaming on Amazon Prime, is an attempt to answer that question.

"The film delves into some of the troubling habits of our two Internet masters, Facebook and especially Google. An early segment of the film, produced and partly narrated by the journalist Peter Schweizer, illustrates how your search history gives Google an enormous, permanent cache of information about you, everything from what things you like to buy to what you like in bed. Naturally Google uses the data mainly to fine-tune ad sales. But what else might they do with it? Who knows?

"Google, noticing that people would leave the search engine to roam the Internet, came up with a browser, Chrome. Now everything you do online through Chrome is logged by Google. But Google wants to know what you're doing even when you're not online. Hence: Android. As soon as you log on, Android uploads a complete picture of everywhere your phone has been that day. 'These are all free services but obviously they're not,' notes professor Jordan Peterson, another talking head in the doc. It's a surveillance business model. Google Maps, Google Docs, Gmail . . . Google knows more about you than your spouse does. It even has drafts of emails you didn't send. Oh, and they have the power to block information from reaching you too. Just by bumping undesirable stuff to the second page of search, Google can more or less make it disappear. Hey, good thing Google doesn't have any overt political or cultural preferences you might not agree with, right? Peterson says Google shut off access to his Gmail and his YouTube channel when the corporation decided it didn't like what he was saying. Ten minutes into the movie, you'll pause it and switch all of your devices to non-Google search engines. (Try DuckDuckGo, which vows not to track you and also promises unbiased search results.)"

Read entire article here.

From our table to yours, we wish everyone a Happy Thanksgiving!

"A forged signature swapped for $1 -- or sometimes a cigarette.

"The crude exchange played out hundreds of times on L.A.'s skid row during the 2016 election cycle and again this year, prosecutors said Tuesday as they announced criminal charges against nine people accused in a fraud scheme.

"Using cash and cigarettes as lures, the defendants approached homeless people on skid row and asked them to forge signatures on state ballot measure petitions and voter registration forms, the district attorney's office said. The defendants -- some of whom were scheduled to be arraigned Tuesday -- face several criminal charges, including circulating a petition with fake names, voter fraud and registering a fictitious person.

"The charges, which were filed three weeks ago but made public Tuesday, followed a Los Angeles Police Department crackdown on suspected election fraud on skid row earlier in the year."

"There is a fight now for the soul of the Democratic Party.

"That fight runs through the contest for the next speaker of the House, between former speaker and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi of California and the former chairwoman of the Congressional Black Caucus, Rep. Marcia Fudge of Ohio.

"While only as many as 20 incoming and incumbent House Democrats have said that they will oppose Pelosi, this maneuvering within the party does raise the possibility, under the arcane voting rules by which representatives can vote for a candidate or simply vote as present, that Pelosi may be denied the votes necessary to reclaim the speaker's gavel.

"I would argue, though, that the very fact Pelosi is being contested, despite her raising more than $100 million for the party committee this cycle, speaks volumes about the divisions within the Democratic Party.

"Indeed, the RealClear Politics Average puts Pelosi's national favorability rating at a lowly 28.5 percent, and a recent post-election Gallup poll found that an astounding 56 percent of Democrats do not want Pelosi to be the next speaker.

"Put simply, the numbers make it clear that Democrats should move on."

"If liberals should fear the great contradiction between the Constitution's text and their elevation of an unenumerated right to privacy ... conservatives must confront the same challenge with gun ownership. Despite the text of the Second Amendment, supporters of a right to bear arms have rooted their arguments in a murky pre-constitutional right to self-defense. As a result, the Supreme Court has shied away from halting the spread of federal and state schemes for gun control, for which the cries will only rise higher after the recent mass shootings. Unless the new conservative majority on the Court, solidified by Justice Brett Kavanaugh's arrival, places the right to bear arms on a par with the rest of the Bill of Rights, the coming blue wave of gun-control proposals may swamp what the Framers considered a core constitutional right. ...

"Far too often for far too long, the Second Amendment has been a second-class right, banished to the back of our constitutional bus. Perhaps the day will come when the people will determine that the best way to curb gun violence is to cull the Second Amendment from the Constitution. Until then, the Court's constitutional duty is to keep enforcing the right to bear arms just as it would any other constitutional right. Constitutional rights are legal equals. They should be treated as such."

Read entire article here.

"Reporting the news is difficult and expensive. Grandstanding is more fun and everyone has an opinion. That's why reporters were once taught, often by a stern taskmaster, to leave opining to the columnists and the editorial page, and save their opinions for after work in the bar across the street. This particular affliction -- grandstanding rather than reporting, advocacy rather than observing and distilling those observations before passing them on to press and tube, is the affliction of the modern media. And why not? Talking is cheaper than reporting.

"The symptoms have exacted a considerable long-term cost. The Pew Research Center finds that a mere 21 percent of Americans have 'a lot of trust' in the national newspapers and television networks, 49 percent have only 'some trust' and 29 have 'not too much' or 'none at all.' A startling 68 percent say the national media reports the news with a bias."

Read entire article here.