Prime
10.24.22 | 1:37 pm
Heads Up

I’ve got a lot of stories I’m following at the moment. But I want to make sure you’re paying attention to the voter harassment situation in Arizona. I’m sure this is playing out in other states too. It simply may be more aggressive in Arizona or just as likely there’s better local press coverage. The reporting I’m following is from Nicole Grigg and Garrett Archer of ABC15 in Phoenix. Here’s Grigg’s report from Friday.

The gist of what’s happening is this.

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10.24.22 | 10:31 am
Tim Ryan Prime Badge

These are anxious days for the Democrats’ electoral prospects. But I wanted to focus your attention on the Senate race in Ohio. I still think JD Vance is the likely winner of this race simply because there appears to be a late Republican tide in this cycle and because Ohio is just a Republican state. If it’s basically tied you have to imagine it is more likely than not that the substantial number of undecided voters break in the GOP direction. But that said, it is remarkable how close this race remains. Even as other Senate races have seen sizable Democratic margins drop to tiny leads or tied races, this one really has barely budged. Just over the last 24 hours there are two premium polls out from Marist and Siena which have the race at Vance +1 and tied, respectively.

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10.24.22 | 10:10 am
History’s Long Grasp

Rishi Sunak will now be the next leader of the Conservative Party in the UK and the next Prime Minister, starting in just a few days. In a way, I guess it’s a positive that this has gotten so relatively little mention. But I cannot not note the history his ascension brings with it. I saw one reference this morning to Sunak’s being the first “person of color” to be the British Prime Minister. But this somewhat understates the matter.

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10.22.22 | 10:15 am
Sacheen Littlefeather

If you’re of a certain age you likely remember the Sacheen Littlefeather, the Native American actress who Marlon Brando chose to receive and ultimately refuse on his behalf the Oscar he won for his appearance in The Godfather. She died earlier this month at age 75. Her appearance at the Oscars in 1973 was the scene of immense controversy at the time and the Academy actually issued a formal apology to her shortly before her death. This morning I read this column in The San Francisco Chronicle which claims that her entire life story of Native American ancestry (specifically White Mountain Apache and Yaqui) was fabricated.

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10.21.22 | 6:51 pm
Who’s Footing Elon’s Bill? Prime Badge

It’s quite difficult to see from the business press whether Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter is about to go through or not. But if it does it will be critical to look closely at the identities of the foreign and sovereign wealth fund investors who are behind his purchase.

There are good arguments that Musk is purchasing it at as much as four times its actual value. Before he expressed interest in the purchase it was trading at little more than half the agreed purchase price. Put it yet another way, Musk is buying Twitter for almost 50x EBITDA. That happens in the hockey stick world of tech sometimes. But Twitter is not an early stage company.

Yesterday it was reported that Musk plans to cut some 75% of the workforce and radically scale back content moderation. That may be music to some people’s ears for ideological reasons. And it certainly may cut costs. But it won’t be good news at all for any plausible path toward making Twitter profitable or growing its value in a way that makes a successful exit possible.

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10.21.22 | 12:21 pm
What Trump Had Stashed at the Villa Prime Badge

We’ve got a lot going on today. But I want to be sure you see this report from the Post. Many of the documents retrieved from Trump’s personal residence at his villa and in public storage areas contained highly, highly classified documents about Iran’s ballistic missile program as well reports from intelligence programs about China. It’s hard to overstate just how sensitive and highly guarded these documents are.

The Post notes that “many of the more sensitive documents Trump or his aides apparently took to Mar-a-Lago after he left the White House are top-level analysis papers that do not contain sources’ names.” But a foreign intelligence service can often infer based on the nature and findings of an intelligence effort who was talking or which vulnerabilities were being exploited.

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10.21.22 | 10:45 am
Are We Doing Worse than the Shambolic UK? Prime Badge

I’ve been dunking wildly on the on-going implosion of the British political system. I am going to continue to do so — both because I enjoy it and because “implosion” is an accurate representation of what has happened. But there’s one uncomfortable reality I need to address. Liz Truss came into power on the votes of a minuscule slice of the population which is traditionalist but marginal to the current UK — 70k or 80k mostly older white conservative men from Southern England. She pledged to defy reality with old school British tenacity. Everything blew up in her face and now after six weeks she’s out on her ass as the shortest tenured British PM in history. (Some say in three hundred years but people before 300 years ago weren’t PMs.)

Here’s my saying “hahahaha.” But let’s be clear that this is a political system working. Yes, shambolically and after years of dysfunction. But this is a political system working and one working in ways ours seems increasingly unable to.

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10.21.22 | 8:58 am
About Time—US Considers National Security Reviews on Musk’s Deals Prime Badge

Bloomberg reports that administration officials are for the first time considering national security reviews of Elon Musk’s increasingly international-man-of-mystery business deals stretching from Silicon Valley to Crimea. The specifics turn on the effort to buy Twitter, now with what appears to be an opaque group of foreign investors as well as his on-again, off-again hints that he might block access to his StarLink telecommunications system over Ukraine.

Of course all of this is playing out with the backdrop of his increasingly pro-Russian comments about the war in Ukraine.

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10.21.22 | 7:32 am
Expect a Lot of This Prime Badge

Last night the ABC affiliate in Phoenix reported this incident of what appears to be harassment of a voter at a ballot drop off box. The parking lot is crawling with “activists” who are the legally prescribed number of feet from the ballot box. But one guy drives up in a car and allegedly accuses the voter of being a “mule.” Here’s video the ABC15 posted last night on Twitter.

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10.20.22 | 12:53 pm
Britain Enters Receivership Prime Badge

I’ve been laughing at and really endlessly entertained by Liz Truss’s momentary pratfall Prime Ministership. There’s much discussion of the UK’s now apparently chronic political instability. There will soon have been five Tory Prime Ministers in the last seven years. In the 31 years between 1979 and 2010 the country had four Prime Ministers. Having “reclaimed its sovereignty” in 2016 with Brexit, the country is now firmly shackled to the judgment of the bond markets. I laugh at this chaos; you may laugh. It’s funny. But any laughter should come in the realization that all of this is the impact and inevitable collateral damage of the Brexit vote in 2015 in which the UK simply decided to light itself on fire for no reason at all.

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